Academic freedom

I don't often feel inspired to praise Harvard - a chip on your shoulder about Harvard comes free with graduate degrees at Chicago - but today I will, for apparently talking the talk and, more surprisingly, walking the walk on academic freedom.

The cynic in me, of course, thinks that they merely wanted to avoid detailed scrutiny of the published views of other members of their faculty who lie in different parts of the political topology.

Via Marginal Revolution

Mark Steyn on Lindsey Graham on free speech.

Steyn is right on target as usual.

It is amazing how much free speech the people retain. We have the Supreme Court to thank for that (however bad they are on many other issues) rather than our elected politicians, who always seem to be chomping on the bit to limit speech for whatever non-crisis the prestige press is freaking out about on a given day.

On the virtues of America

The Angry Professor summarizes perfectly what makes America great.

John McCain

I was approached at one point by an economist friend about playing a small role in the McCain presidential campaign. This summarizes in a handy way the primary reason why I could not do it.

There really is nothing more important than free speech.

Free Speech in Canada

Canada's National Post prints a letter from the University of Ottawa to soon-to-visit Ann Coulter.

One can think about this in two ways:

The first is just that Canadians value politeness relatively much more than Americans do. This is absolutely true and has nothing in particular to do with politics. It applies to every area of life. Recall the (hilarious because it rings true) scene in the movie Canadian Bacon in which John Candy pushes through a crowd of Canadians, each of whom apologizes to him after being pushed.

More darkly, the soft left in Canada, when it has the power to do so, does sometimes use the speech rules as a tool of control over what passes for conservatism in Canada.

The letter to Ann Coulter combines both ways of thinking about Canadian speech restrictions. It would be interesting to get a student group at Ottawa to invite some relatively incendiary speaker from the left to campus and then observe whether he or she receives the same letter. I expect not, but you never know, as the siren calls of bureaucratic consistency and legal ass-covering typically resonate loudly in the minds of academic functionaries.

Hat tip: reason

Freedom of religion and Texas republicans

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken

The Houston outpost of a national anti-scientology group has convinced the Texas republican party to support stripping scientology of its tax-exemption, effectively declaring it a non-religion.

I am no defender of scientology, but that is in some sense precisely the point. In a free society, being a mature adult, or perhaps just being an adult, means accepting that other people will believe things that seem to you deeply stupid, evil or misguided. There are two productive ways to deal with such people: one is to simply ignore them and go on with your life. In most cases, what they believe is problematic enough that few will be attracted to it. The alternative is to engage the beliefs intellectually. Simply outlawing the beliefs, or in this case attempting to tax them, is the lazy person's alternative to the second choice.

Houston Anonymous should stop trying to advance their views through the state power and should instead stick to the marketplace of ideas. Otherwise one might infer that they prefer the state to the marketplace because they think they would lose out in the marketplace.