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"FIRE Statement on Free Speech and Online Payment Processors"
Seems quite sound to me; here's the introduction and some examples, but read the whole thing:
- The issue: Online payment processors like Venmo and PayPal often deny Americans access to these vital services based on their speech or viewpoints.
- The concern: When these companies appoint themselves the arbiters of what speech and views are acceptable, shutting people and organizations out of the online financial ecosystem for wrongthink, they seriously undermine our culture of free expression.
Imagine you could no longer use PayPal, Venmo, or another online payment processor because you run an organization that defends free speech for controversial speakers, operate an independent media outlet that challenges mainstream narratives, sell erotic fiction or "occult" materials, or … tried to submit an article about Syrian refugees into a newspaper awards competition.
These are not hypotheticals. They're real, and they illustrate why online payment service providers should stay out of the business of policing their users' speech and views.
Access to online payment systems is crucial for the innumerable individuals and organizations that rely on financial support for their expressive activity. It's essential to content creators' ability to earn a living, to websites' and other businesses' ability to raise revenue, to fundraising by political candidates and nonprofit organizations, and to everyday Americans' ability to consume content and support causes they believe in. When payment processing services act as political hall monitors or moral arbiters deciding what speech and viewpoints are out of bounds, they present a grave threat to free expression.
A small number of companies dominate the space, allowing them to wield significant control over the speech environment by denying service to users who express disfavored views or wade into controversial subject matter. PayPal (which owns Venmo), for instance, has 325 million active users. Merchants and individuals put on payment processors' blacklists may find themselves in a financially precarious situation….
Consider these examples:
- In September 2022, PayPal shut down Toby Young's personal account and the accounts of two organizations he founded — the Free Speech Union, a UK-based free speech organization, and the Daily Sceptic, which publishes articles skeptical of Covid restrictions and other controversial topics. A PayPal spokesman told the press, "Achieving the balance between protecting the ideals of tolerance, diversity and respect for people of all backgrounds and upholding the values of free expression and open dialogue can be difficult, but we do our best to achieve it." After significant public pushback, PayPal reinstated the accounts.
- Earlier this year, PayPal suspended the accounts of independent media outlets Consortium News and MintPress, both of which have been a source of skeptical reporting about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
- Also in 2022, PayPal booted writer Colin Wright shortly after Etsy banned him for selling merchandise that "promotes, supports, or glorifies hatred or violence towards protected groups." Wright is a critic of transgender activism, and his merchandise included text like "Reality's Last Stand" (the name of his Substack) and "Defender of Reality." PayPal told him "there was a change in your business model or your business was considered risky." After Wright sought a more detailed explanation, PayPal told him he would need to "submit a legal subpoena." …
- Venmo flagged and restricted a Muslim woman's payment to a friend with the note "al-aqsa" to pay her back for a meal at Al-Aqsa Restaurant in the Bronx. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is one of the holiest sites in Islam. Venmo also flagged the account of a user who paid friends for dinner at a Persian restaurant in Manhattan because of keywords related to Iran, which is subject to U.S. sanction laws limiting transactions between the countries.
- PayPal froze the account of a Canadian media association after it tried to pay for entry of an article about Syrian refugees into an awards competition….
- In 2010, WikiLeaks began disclosing the contents of diplomatic cables, leading government officials to criticize credit card companies for allowing people to donate to the organization. Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal soon suspended WikiLeaks' accounts. This case illustrates the danger of government jawboning, even if the pressure doesn't rise to the level of a First Amendment violation….
- In 2017, EFF reported that Fetlife, an adult social network centered around BDSM, lost credit card processing privileges, with justifications including "complaints about 'blood, needles, and vampirism'" and "illegal or immoral reasons." …
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10 years ago the Democrats were all like Occupy Wallstreet, now they can’t stop locking Wallstreets boots.
Wait ’til these guys hear about Hobby Lobby, Chick-fil-A, and just about every conservative-controlled campus in the United States . . .
If Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A or Ye olde Religion Backwater School suddenly found themselves in a monopolistic position, you might have a point.
Which is the monopolist in this context — PayPal, Venmo, Square, Fetlife, Stripe, Amazon Pay, Skrill, Due, Dwolla, Payoneer, 2Checkout, Payza, Apple Pay, Google Wallet, We Pay, Intuit GoPayment . . . or another processor?
Early warning flag. You figured this out already. Good job!
This is news to use. The monopolist in payment processing would be a fine investment.
And likely would be located, as Thornton Mellon put it, in Fantasyland.
Just like when a sandwich shop denies service to a customer because he’s black. Not a problem since there are always plenty of other places to eat, right??
What customers have Hobby Lobby or Chick-fil-A denied service to?
Hobby Lobby denies its employees standard health care benefits.
Chick fil A denies service on Sundays (even in airports and other limited-option environments).
Conservative-controlled campuses are ruthless imposers of viewpoint-based discrimination in essentially every facet of academic and campus life.
Rev, closing your business on Sunday is discrimination? You’re an idiot.
Chick-fil-A still, I believe, forbids franchisees to operate on Sundays. Even in locations such as airports, where spots are scarce and customers greatly inconvenienced.
You must be puzzled by the way in which guys like me have kicked the ever-lovin’ shit out of guys like you in the culture war.
That’s not discrimination based on speech or anything else.
Equating being closed on Sunday with anti-free speech actions trivializes such discrimination.
Just continues to show your intellectual dishonesty.
Chick-fil-A doesn’t want to do business with people who wish to eat on Sunday, because nonsense.
Facebook and Twitter don’t want to do business with people who are bigots and delusional liars, because decency.
Conservative colleges enforce rigorous censorship — firing, expelling, refusing to hire or admit, disciplining — because, again, nonsense.
Twitter and Facebook enforce far less severe censorship — declining to host material that flatters racists, insurrectionists, gay-bashers and other conservative low-lifes — because, again, decency.
Our vestigial bigots are welcome to push as hard as they like, but they tide of the culture war — and the superiority of reason, education, science, modernity, inclusiveness over Republican preferences at the marketplace of ideas — dooms them in modern, improving-against their-wishes America.
To be fair, Chick-fil-A requires franchisees of any religion (e.g. Jewish, Muslim) to operate on Saturdays and Fridays. I’m not arguing that the franchisor is forbidden from those choices, but let’s acknowledge the burden that franchisor places on other franchisees’ religious practices in the name of promoting its own.
People are entitled to sell bigot chicken and buy Jesus chicken.
Although it may be the MSG as much as anything that attracts the customers.
In my experience, whether people agree with that statement tends to depends a lot on whether it’s Christians being burdened. Can you imagine the Jewish franchisor that requires all the Christian store owners to close on Saturdays and open at 8am on Sundays? The gnashing of teeth!! The burden on their religious liberties!
Think about just how many businesses are open on Sunday, and think about that.
Brett: My point is they aren’t being forced to close on Saturdays, and thereby losing a day of sales. I agree that the vast majority of folks are more interested in commerce than pseudo-religious melodrama.
But as you may know, the Jews lost this particular argument when they were forced by the Government to close on Sunday for a “common day of rest.” McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, 81 S.Ct. 1101, 6 L.Ed.2d 393 (1961); Soon Hing v. Crowley, 113 U.S. 703, 5 S. Ct. 730. 28 L.Ed. 1145 (1885)
Why do you people think someone else should pay for your trivial and routine healthcare?
It’s the dumbest thing in the world, besides believing some committee of Federals should govern your life that is.
“Why do you people think someone else should pay for your trivial and routine healthcare?”
Because it turns out we live in a society that has some empathy for people and won’t just let the poors die when they show up really sick at hospitals. So it turns out to be smarter to collectively pay for preventative care so we don’t have to collectively pay as much for emergency care.
Somehow “empathy” always seems to involve ordering other people to fund your own charitable activities. Funny how that works.
I’m actually not arguing for or against the proposition that we shouldn’t just let poor people die when they get sick and go to the hospital, I’m saying that since that’s where we’ve arrived as a society it is pretty dumb to not also fund preventative care.
But not food and shelter? Just stuff like the Pill?
So we collectively do not pay for food and shelter but we have empathy to collectively pay for the Plan B pills.
Sincerely,
Smart People on the Left
Almost as dumb as sending Midwestern tax dollars to rebuild coastal Florida, amirite?
Or.. and hear me out here… making us all pay for trivial and routine sacraments by subsidizing churches via tax exemptions?
You think contraception is equivalent to a hurricane?
Do you think that because you don’t know much about things and such?
Probably depends on whether you’re the woman facing massive and irreparable damage to her life, career, and body from an unwelcome pregnancy.
Why didn’t that occur to you? Maybe you know about too many things and such to care about actual people.
Gee, Rev.
Just when I thing you’ve reached “Peak Stupid”, like a dog jumping at a bone you rise to the challenge!!!
I guess I’ll never meet the standards of people who figure Regent, Liberty, Ave Maria, and South Texas College Of Law Houston are very fine schools (and that Yale, Berkeley, NYU, and Harvard are lousy, reprehensible institutions).
Let’s see who wins the culture war.
[applauds masterwork argument]
We are all awed by your incisive reasoning, sir.
I can’t defend most of the decisions above but the Venmo example is misplaced. OFAC (the Office of Foreign Asset Control) requires financial services companies to stop payments to anyone on their block list. The OFAC block list is poorly formatted, poorly maintained and triggers many, many thousands of false positives. The description above (and the linked articles) make clear that this is a problem with OFAC’s list, not a discretionary policy choice by the financial institution.
I’ll take you at your word but that really doesn’t sound reasonable. A single “key” word can flag a transaction?
Yes. And at that point the companies can pay someone to dig into it… or they can just mindlessly block, and only address it further if enough pressure is put on them.
It’s not reasonable. It is nevertheless true. The OFAC rules are an unmanageable mess yet companies are threatened with draconian penalties for the slightest failure to comply. To David’s point below, companies do pay someone to dig in and manually clear the false positive – that is also required by the law. And those humans still make mistakes all the time. It’s inevitable when they have so many false positives to process.
Run the numbers. If a company handles ten million transactions (probably a slow day for Venmo), it has to compare each transaction to the OFAC list. If that comparison generates one false-positive per 10,000 records (a generous assumption – my company’s experience with the OFAC list is somewhat worse), that’s 1000 payees to be manually researched and released. A researcher who is 99.9% accurate will still make one mistake like the example above per day. And again, the government has stacked the deck. Allowing a prohibited payment through is far worse in their eyes and far more severely punished than denying a false positive.
Paypal will now not only block you from service but has given itself the option of fining you 2500 bucks a pop for wrongthink. So they’re now going even further and taking your money for being a naughty boy.
https://www.paypalobjects.com/marketing/ua/pdf/US/en/acceptableuse-full-110322.pdf
I question the genuineness of a link to a non PayPal website that claims it was “last updated” a month from now.
paypalobjects as far as I can tell is owned by paypal. This is being discussed in other nonMSM venues and there is no indication that it is phony.
https://www.whois.com/whois/paypalobjects.com
there is such a thing as impending policy changes. If you check the main site. You will find similar language minus increased emphasis on punishing wrongthink.
https://www.paypal.com/hk/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full
I know it’s not sexy, but you can call something a planned or draft policy and not pretend it’s an utter fact.
Yeah an entity which controls half of all payment processing on the internet getting to the point of considering becoming a unilateral global moral police force capable of confiscating your money whenever it feels like it like some medieval bandit in the days of yore is totally not a big deal. On par with funny videos of cats playing the flute.
So do you just read every comment as ‘for me’ or ‘against me’ and then respond accordingly? Because what you are responding to is nothing like what I posted.
There’s also such a thing as typos. But I notice the document you’re questioning has a link to a document at the paypal site, which reads in part,
“If you are a seller and receive funds for transactions that violate the Acceptable Use Policy, then in addition to being subject to the above actions you will be liable to PayPal for the amount of PayPal’s damages caused by your violation of the Acceptable Use Policy. You acknowledge and agree that $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation of the Acceptable Use Policy is presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages – including, but not limited to, internal administrative costs incurred by PayPal to monitor and track violations, damage to PayPal’s brand and reputation, and penalties imposed upon PayPal by its business partners resulting from a user’s violation – considering all currently existing circumstances, including the relationship of the sum to the range of harm to PayPal that reasonably could be anticipated because, due to the nature of the violations of the Acceptable Use Policy, actual damages would be impractical or extremely difficult to calculate. PayPal may deduct such damages directly from any existing balance in any PayPal account you control.”
That’s current policy, and it permits them to confiscate the money of sellers as a penalty for some fairly vague violations, including activities that are nothing but free speech.
“involve the sales of products or services identified by government agencies to have a high likelihood of being fraudulent.”
That’s the Operation Choke Point clause.
I question the genuineness of a link to a non PayPal website that claims it was “last updated” a month from now.
All you had to do was hover over the several links near the top of the document to see that they all lead to resources at paypal.com. Then, had you taken a minute to actually follow one or two of them rather than jumping to post multiple responses focusing on a date error….
What ever happened to anti-trust law?
Paypal owns Venmo, Facebook owns Instagram, Google owns Youtube. Really reduces a person options.
A hundred years ago, it was about blocking companies so you could get rich kicking them in the nuts slightly less hard than you otherwise would.
Now, it’s a sword of Damoclese held over their heads for other purposes. Giving backdoors, censorship, and of course still blocking to get rich.
No argument here.
If conservative hostility to big tech leads to more muscular antitrust policy, I’m all in!
“What ever happened to anti-trust law?”
Republicans gutted it.
FWIW, one of these things is not like the other.
Google owning YouTube certainly makes Google a bigger company with broader reach, but the video hosting site wouldn’t meaningfully compete with the search engine if you separated them unlike the other examples.
PayPal believes that the way to achieve “the ideals of tolerance, diversity, and respect for people of all backgrounds” is to avoid practicing any of those things themselves.
This is another part of the world progressives want to create for us. No free choice in anything, ever. Even your thoughts. I mean I guess they’re fine with free choice as it relates to abortion, but that’s the limit.
Nope, not even for abortion. The only acceptable choice is for abortion. You must pay for abortion clinics as a taxpayer, not express the ‘wrong’ prolife pov as a provider, and be denied access to providers expressing the ‘wrong’ pov as a pregnant woman ‘for your own good’.
Conservatives used to believe that private sector companies could run their business as they see fit, as long as they weren’t breaking any laws.
Restrictions on monopolies have been uncontroversial since the 1800s on both sides of the aisle let alone ones that integrate near complete power over multiple critical functions such as communication and finance.
OTOH progs have been for far more onerous business restrictions in every facet of society except this specific instance. Gee I wonder who is more hypocritical?
Every facet but this one!!!!!!
I’m not complaining. Let’s get regulatin’! Don’t complain to me when your Supreme Court voids it because of the major decisions doctrine.
“…your Supreme Court voids it”.
Interesting possessive you’ve got there. What or who is “your” Supreme Court?
Things can be both “yours” and “mine.” Don’t be so selfish.
“I look on the money. Valid “for all debts public and private.”
It should be noted that point of sale retail transactions are not debts under the law that defines this.
Fascism at work.
Welcome to the thirties.
By the time the 30’s roll around, you’ll look back at the 20’s in nostalgia for how free we were.
Actually he’s talking about the 1930’s, when black people were free to carry around a book that let them know which restaurants and hotels would allow them service.
Yeah, I knew which 30’s he was talking about. Still true, though. There’s stuff that’s already baked into today’s facts that will make things hugely worse in just a few years. All the feeders for the institutions we rely on for every day life have already started rolling out DEI, and in a few years we’ll all be reliant on banks and such that are becoming dominated by people indoctrinated with it.
You think things are bad now? This is just the leading edge of it. It’s going to get far, far worse before we can turn this ship around, if even we can.
Actually I don’t think things are bad now, but I take your point.
I wonder what the rates of intact black families were or black on black crime was back then?
Conservative bigots pining for illusory “good old days” are among my favorite culture war casualties.
And no problem replacement is not already solving.
Stats and facts are bigoted!
Sincerely,
Rev. Aurther “White Savior of the Blacks” Kirkland
I see the same principles involved in recent discussions about making Internet providers be treated like common carriers. Both involve universal service, and the content of speech. Ditto for bakeries and gay marriages. Ditto for Camping World that had a CEO announcing, “Trump Supporters Not Welcome.”
That suggests that we need some umbrella legislation about service versus speech that covers all industries, all states. Either we learn how to get along with each other, or we start a new bloody civil war.
Just bring back dueling.
” Either we learn how to get along with each other, or we start a new bloody civil war. ”
Nah, just like Vinny at the Pool and Chicken Hall I’m going with option B . . .continue to win the culture war regardless of the casualties’ preferences and impose even more progress on the vestigial clingers.
(Don’t miss the drumstick denouement about 20 seconds in)
More from Vinny and Judge Chamberlain Haller (who should have joined Ms. Mona Lisa Vito on the Oscar stage)
For the just-starting law students who follow or stumble upon this blog, a dozen movies for your consideration:
1. And Justice For All . . . featuring perhaps the greatest performance not awarded as Oscar (if I may say so myself)
2. The Verdict . . . Paul Newman, Jack Warden (his second time on this list, already), James Mason, and director Sidney Lumet deliver a great script deftly, illuminating all sorts of lawyering
3. My Cousin Vinny . . . Marisa Tomei got the Oscar; Fred Gwynne should have, too
4. 12 Angry Men . . . black and white, another from Lumet, not to be missed by anyone who wants to be a lawyer
5. Animal House . . . you should watch the entire thing (you’ll use the quotes throughout your career), but here is the core
6. Philadelphia . . . Tom Hanks gets the Oscar
7. Erin Brockovich . . . based on a heartbreaking story, plenty of Oscar nominations
8. Judgment at Nuremberg . . . black and white again, featuring Capt. Kirk (the OG Kirk)
9. A Few Good Men . . . just watch it
10. The Paper Chase . . . a movie about law school
11. Scent of a Woman . . . Pacino for the defense, again
12. Roman J. Israel, Esq. . . . an idiosyncratic depiction of a lawyer that will help prepare you for some of the people you will meet in practice
These are not offered as the best movies with a legal component. I typed this in five minutes. Each is worth watching and each will teach you something worth learning during law school. Watching all of them would make you a better lawyer. Good luck!
One of my favorite movie lawyers was Tony Shalhoub in the Coen Brothers “The Man Who Wasn’t There.”
Witness for the Prosecution, with Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, Marlene Dietrich, and Elsa Lanchester. Be sure to catch the ethical problem at the end.
Inherit the Wind … Excellent performances by Spencer Tracey and Frederic March. Fun to see Dick York in his pre-Bewitched days as well.
Hard to make any list of legal dramas without including Anatomy of a Murder.
It was relatively easy.
13. A Civil Action . . . Realism, heartbreak, and a cautionary tale.
A worthwhile movie, although I find John Travolta distractingly creepy these days.
There are plenty of good legal movies out there. After policing, lawyering might be the most commonly covered profession in movies and television.
My list was intended as nothing beyond ‘here are some worthwhile movies for law students to watch during their weekly three-hour Saturday night breaks from studying.’
Here’s another idea: Have a regular watch party with some of your classmates. The network you start to build now will be invaluable for the rest of your life. Some of your classmates will, for various reasons, never have that network; don’t be one of them.
We need a hard and fast line between common carriers and companies that are free to decide who they’ll serve, and it needs to be clear enough that you know in advance which you’re dealing with, which you’re running, and the line can’t be gamed or shifted. No leading people to think you’re a common carrier, and then springing discrimination on them. No taking a company that never meant to be a common carrier, and forcing it on them.
Maybe draw the line at family businesses and single proprietorships, and when you issue stock, that’s it, common carrier, no going back. But some sharp dividing line that can’t be gamed.
But not making every mom and pop shop into a common carrier, you need to leave some space for a free economy, too.
OR we need a much better justice system which doesn’t take years and $millions to force a company to honor their own terms of service and marketing claims. When they brag about being universal, hold them to it, and do it within days.
If they delete messages or accounts, they should be ready to defend their action immediately as regards their terms of service and marketing, or else they have admitted their action was taken in haste without regards to their terms of service and marketing.
Not all that surprising that when the topic is actions by private companies that conservatives disagree with, suddenly some are in favor of more regulation and more laws. Note that the FIRE article very carefully avoids ANY recommendations along these lines, it just calls for businesses to change their practices in certain ways.
One side being principled while the other side plays to win isn’t a formula for success.
You already know that which is why you keep saying the other side should be principled.
Well, you know, when conservatives were opposed to regulation, it was tacitly assumed that businesses were motivated purely by the profit motive, which would drive them to do a good job for the customer. No sane businessman was going to leave money on the table just because they didn’t like you.
And the regulations were often getting in the way of the market functioning as a market.
It wasn’t expected that you’d get massive corporations deliberately turning away customers or giving them inferior service, even at the cost of revenue, for totally non-business motivations. And even coordinating in this sort of anti-market activity, to the detriment of large segments of the law abiding community.
A sort of privately enforced Jim Crow, only on the basis of religion, exercise of frowned on civil rights, or politics, not race. Well, I suppose the original Jim Crow did give Democrats a lot of practice in pulling this sort of thing off, so it shouldn’t be all that shocking if they apply old tools to new tasks.
Yet again, big business has not chosen leftism over profits. But even if it did, that is not an excuse to abandon your principle of small government.
Like, I’m all for breaking up these companies, being a liberal I’m skeptical of private institutions. But your reasoning is paranoia that leftists are in control, and then deciding to go after them and mandate they not be leftists.
It’s not a very good look.
Yet again, they HAVE chosen leftism over profits. You can see major corporations like Disney or Netflix that have tanking sales on account of going “woke”, and pumping out crap their customers hate. You’ve got companies like PayPal deliberately turning away customers. FB and Twitter deliberately alienating half the political spectrum.
What do you suppose caused Universal pictures to invest millions on “Bros”? The obvious huge market for gay promiscuity romance movies?
Disney inserted same sex romance into a Toy Story franchise movie, Lightyear, because that’s the sort of thing that causes parents to take their children to movies?
It’s a principle/agent problem, basically. The people taking these companies left are professional management without significant stake in whether the company profits. So why shouldn’t they use the companies up and throw them away to advance their favorite causes?
A rom com that ends in a couple getting together is not really promiscuity.
Not kowtowing to your hateful stereotypes is not some woke move, it is something being made that isn’t for you. You sound like every old grump ever talking about movies these days except you blame it on leftism.
Based on the box office it wasn’t for anybody.
Again, the viewership of these movies is demonstrably tanking. The only kowtowing going on is to the left, producing products people demonstrably aren’t interested in buying.
No sane person thought that instituting a quota for a minimum number of ‘queer’ characters in children’s films was going to help viewership. They’re not doing it for business reasons, they’re doing it in spite of business reasons.
Your causality is dodgy – plenty of structural reasons why film viewership is down.
Your linked twitter about some corporate person saying what they personally want is not policy, nor anything like policy.
You are really reaching here.
Uh, wasn’t she like some VP? How do you think policy gets created? By some VP like person stating it.
Not everything a VP says becomes policy, as you and Brett both know.
Deal with real policy, not what your persecution-craving psyche wishes were real policy.
Yes, but when the VP says they’re instituting a quota for queer characters at the same time increasing numbers of queer characters are suddenly showing up in children’s entertainment it’s pretty fatuous to claim it’s not an actual statement of policy.
But Brett, she just said there was quota, mere words, and then they just instituted a quota, mere actions based upon those mere words, but that doesn’t mean there is an official policy!
Official policy only happens when some middling beuracrat signs the paperwork and publishes it in the Official Policy Handbook, not when a corporate officer with authority states it!
It’s like how Presidential declassification works. It’s only declassified if some GS8 signs the paperwork, not when the person with ultimate authority states so!
No, Brett, there is not a secret quota for queerness in Disney movies that happened to be referenced in this random video and nowhere else.
Nobody is claiming it’s secret, Sarcastro.
Brett, it’s not a written policy. It’s not referenced that I can see other than in this twitter post you found.
It’s not just not secret; it’s not real.
Why would you think people in private institutions are bad, but people in public institutions are good?
Have you never read a history book?
Neither are bad; they just have different incentives and should be limited in different ways.
Haven’t you read a political science book?
I don’t really understand your argument, can you be more concrete? What incentives? What limits? Examples?
You said “being a liberal I’m skeptical of private institutions. ” and the inference is what follows is “but not of public institutions”. What is it about being a liberal means you blindly trust the State?
One is into markets, the other is into their specific mission, as well as accountability to the voters/administration. Both can get too big for their britches, in different directions. Each is fit for certain purposes, and should be used for that as well as reigned in by the other.
Private institutions of a certain size act like government, with power to distort markets and even their own regulatory policies. But with the growth for growth’s sake incentive. That gets bad, and that’s where my skepticism comes in.
90% incumbency rates means no elected official is really accountable to voters. And we have countless examples where civil servants aren’t accountable.
Power without accountability is not available outside of government or without the complicity of government.
Or it could mean that elected officials satisfy their constituents –for example, with bigotry, backwardness, and superstition in Republican communities, and with education, progress, and science in Democratic communities.
People getting reelected a lot can be interpreted a lot of ways. The government being unaccountable is a pretty broad reach to draw from that fact.
Power without accountability is not available outside of government.
Utter nonsense. The rich and powerful outside of government are always accountable?
The really well to do get away with literal murder in our justice system!
How accountable is Jack from twitter in your partisan eyes?
Whose not holding those people to account? The people in government who have the authority too. And why aren’t these perfect demigods doing so?
Kirkland, our elected leaders have a sub 20% popularity rating but a 90% incumbency rate.
That’s because they’ve spent 200 years rigging the system so they stay in power, we even have seats of Congress being handed to wives as if they were hereditary title (See Dingle)
Now we’re getting somewhere! So every billionaire is a policy failure?
“Every billionaire is a policy failure” is your hot take from this thread?
lol come.on.
Is the reason Epsteins clients aren’t being arrested a policy failure?
Yes, keep going!
So the problem is that rich people can use their economic power to distort the playing field in their favor in all sorts of arenas, eh?
So the solution is to start being skeptical of rich people and hold them more accountable!
Notice how you can’t bring yourself to fault the government agents for having power and being corrupt with it.
You assign all fault to the citizens for having freedom and wealth to influence those agents.
It’s a really sick and dangerous worldview you have. The people in government are corrupt, so in order to cure that you want to take away wealth and freedom from the citizen so they have nothing to tempt the corrupt government with.
You people make me sick.
Oh, I can fault both! I’m not someone who holds either private business nor government is always corrupt. Government has it’s issues, and one of them is absolutely capture by private industry and being too permissive thereby.
Your extreme point of view that everything is the fault of the omni-corrupt government is the one that is hard to stick with.
I just saw a news item about protestors at a supermarket. They are protesting conditions at the dairy farms that the supermarket purchases products from.
The issue is not censorship. The issue is attempting to link politics to every corner of commerce.
In order to have a functional society that is also diverse in opinion, we must build a firewall between business and politics. The actions cited in this blog post all act to make it dysfunctional for people with the wrong opinions. It is not far-fetched to compare that to China’s Cultural Revolution.
I would say it is a complete inability to separate politics and public life from private life. After a generation of indoctrinating people in believing they are political agents ALL THE TIME, it is finally sticking in some segments of society.
It is sort of funny to see the flip because the talking point used to be you had no right to tell someone what to do in their private life (i.e. homosexuality, drug use, morality, etc.) Now you not only have a right to tell them what to do, it is a requirement that comes with the very real possibility of punishment for non-compliance.
Leftists are not only under the bed, but also in your fridge, and checking out your bank account statement.
Government meddles with so much of daily life that it is literally more profitable to sic government on others before they sic government on your, than to mind your own business.
” Leftists are not only under the bed, but also in your fridge, and checking out your bank account statement. ”
What do you think about the delusional jerks and gullible authoritarians who jammed “God” into our Pledge of Allegiance?
Or the pathetic culture war casualties who place a silly “God” on our national currency?
Better Americans will get around to removing those remnants of a lesser time, but the lesson about type of the assholes who did it should not be forgotten.
I would rather worship God then other humans im government like you people do.
” Seems quite sound to me ”
This blog will never know how Artie Ray Lee Wayne Jim-Bob Kirkland views it, because his access to this site was squelched based on “speech and viewpoint” by an “arbiter[] of what speech and views are acceptable.”
Carry on, clingers. Whining, disaffected hypocrites have rights, too.
I sold a few generic things on a popular platform recently. Basically, if you really work the customizations and opt-out you technically do not have use Paypal but it is darn near impossible not to do so. Then a few payments started to roll in only to get a notice that my money was being frozen at a request of the platform since I was a new(er) seller. The hold stuck for 30-35 days presumably under the impicit auspices that if the transactions went south they could just use the TOS to “chargeback” the balance. Nothing happened so the money ended up getting released, and fortunately I did not need it, but made me wonder.
Some sellers, who it appeared were in the primary business of online commerce, reported having money frozen for up to 6 months. How does a private entity legally hold your money, when they have a de facto monopoly on the flow of it, for so long for no reason other than essentially their CYA and convenience? Liberals of yester-year would shudder at giving a private corporation so much power, let alone the ability to essentially force businesses out of the marketplace. These power hungry leftists though, not so much.
Don’t forget the egregious financial confiscation of funds raised to support the Canadian truckers.
And when the institutions that took that money basically said, “don’t worry we are keeping it but WE will decide who gets it.”
What you do with your money is merely a suggestion to most leftists.
Some dumbass Leftist was on the blog the other day claiming you having money causes inflation. These people are demented.
Tax cuts are inflationary, you blinkered idiot.
People having money and not giving it to the people in government causes inflation!!! If they only would give their money to the spendthrifts in government, we wouldn’t have inflation!!
Sincerely,
Moron0
Do you see how Brett managed more than an appeal to incredulity below? That’s a lot more fun for everyone involved – be more like that.
Your axioms are garbage and are only worth ridicule.
The fact that you think the problem with inflation is people not giving their money to the people in government instead of the people in government spending money they don’t have doesn’t deserve serious consideration.
It’s just a symptom of your screwed up worshipping of government. Which you demonstrate time and time again.
The fact that you don’t know thing one about macroeconomics but want to argue about it is very silly.
People keeping more of their own money causes spending, thus its inflationary.
People giving more of their own money to the people in government who then spends it is not inflationary.
The people in government giving people stimulus checks to cause them to spend is also some how not inflationary.
TrUst ThE mAcRoEcOniMiCs
As noted below, coupling tax rates with government spending rates went out with the opening of the 20th century.
Yes, stimulus is inflationary. But the cost outweighs the benefits.
You’re too reactionary to allow anything you like has any costs, or anything you don’t like has any benefits, so you can’t really make that argument.
The people in government giving wealth to citizens to spend is inflationary is worth it and the benefits outweigh the costs.
The people in government not taking wealth from citizens is also inflationary but is not worth and the benefits do not outweigh the costs.
What an utterly bizarre way to view the world.
The cost-benefit analysis depends on the current state of the economy when the tax cuts in question are passed.
It should also include costs beyond only inflation.
And you didn’t even discuss benefits.
No, not every government program is worth the costs, despite the words you put in my mouth.
No, tax cuts aren’t inflationary. Continuing to spend the foregone revenue anyway is inflationary. If you cut taxes and spending by the same amount, rather than just assuming that government spending going down is unthinkable, you’re not going to get increased inflation.
So…tax cuts are inflationary, but if you do another policy move at the same time the net is not.
Come on, man.
No, it’s the spending that causes the inflation, not the refraining from taxing. Again, you’re assuming the spending is going to happen regardless.
GDP=CIG+X-M.
Each of these going up heats up the economy.
C is the lion’s share of our GDP today (like 2/3), and that’s the private spending part. The part that tax cuts stimulate.
Apart from the assumption of continuing to spend money you didn’t bring in, it’s just a change of where the spending happens, not an increase in spending. Building that assumption into an equation doesn’t change that.
Apart from the assumption of continuing to spend money you didn’t bring in,.
Which you *must assume* since deficit spending is a thing in real life. Sovereign debt is not a credit card, and even if it were there is a reason why you don’t conflate future obligations with present cash on a balance sheet – now is not the same as later.
You simply cannot aggregate consumer spending and government spending; they are different. Like it or not, taxing and spending are not direct policy corollaries, and pretending they are leads to economically illiterate conclusions.
This is hardly shocking, PayPal went after the 2nd amendment years ago, that’s why I canceled my account with them. Once a financial services company decides they’re entitled to tell you what you can spend your own money on, they’ve abandoned proper business ethics, and they’re only going to get worse over time.
It’s SOP on the left to work your way into positions of leverage, and then subvert the organization you’re in away from its own purposes to supporting the cause, instead. The left has been “marching through the institutions” for decades now, and if they’re more in your face about it now, it’s because they think they’ve gotten control of enough of the levers of power that they don’t have to hide what they’re doing anymore. That it’s too late for us to resist.
Pray they’re wrong about that.
You pray on it a spell, Mr. Bellmore. Maybe toss in a request for deliverance of Obama’s birth certificate while you’re at it. Let us know how all of that works out.
You have to hold the record for the most repetitive comments which say and add nothing to the conversation.
Or, as Prof V has commented low signal to noise ratio. I think he was being far too generous.
But if I use a vile racial slur a few times . . .
Carry on, clingers. We’ll let you know how far and how long, and you will comply.
Some jug eared Kenyan slurs actual Americans and you repeat it faithfully for years as if it were his nuts in your mouth instead of his words.
Guess who sets policy in what porn is produced and how?
Credit card companies. Their brand management divisions. As requirements sent to their payment processors.
Somebody should start looking into this stuff.
Jeffrey Toobin is on top of that one! Or he will be in just a few minutes once he is done with some, current pressing matter.
The Jews?
Prof. Bernstein will give you a pass this time, BCD, just like Darnell Hayes with Doug on Black Jeopardy, ’cause you ‘seem all right’ to clingers.
Ah yes the Jewish stereotype of the brand manager.
Performative bigotry is just so sad.
If it wasn’t for the right-wing bigotry of various shapes and flavors, there wouldn’t be much left of this white, male conservative blog.
And then the clingers would have nowhere to go to huddle together for warmth as the world passes them by, and some of us wouldn’t have such easy targets to mock and deride.
“then the clingers would have nowhere to go”
Have you checked out Althouse lately? or Power Line?
Whose talking about brands? We’re talking about porn and banks, two industries overwhelmingly dominated by Jews.
The fuck? Porn is not dominated by Jews. And this isn’t banks writ large, it’s brand managers within credit card companies.
“The fuck? Porn is not dominated by Jews.”
Perhaps BCD has been counting foreskins.
Newcomers to this blog might wonder, ‘why does the Volokh Conspiracy seem to attract such a remarkable concentration of bigots?’
The answer is that this white, male, conservative blog courts bigots, aiming low and consistently hitting its target.
(It appears none of the Conspirators — as usual — will have anything to say about this bigoted content. Some may not object; the others are just taking another one for the cause.)
OTOH, blocking payments to websites that may facilitate child pornography makes a lot of sense.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/08/04/visa-suspends-card-payments-for-ad-purchases-on-pornhub-and-mindgeek-amid-controversy.html
This isn’t a hard case, since child pornography is clearly illegal.
A more difficult case would be very violent but probably legal pornography depicting what most people would consider to be abuse.
No, it doesn’t, because of that “may”. It wouldn’t be a hard case if they’d been convicted of doing it deliberately and shut down.
As it is that’s financial vigilantism, despite all the weasel words.
Venmo and other such companies are private. They have the free speech rights to not associate with people or organizations that espouse views they disagree with. If those organizations do not like it, make their own payment processing system. They have the right to say what they want but a company has the right to deny business based on what they say.
GM is a private company. They have the free speech rights to not associate with people or organizations that espouse views that GM doesn’t agree with. If those people and organizations don’t like it they can manufacture their own cars.
Is that how it works?
yes, assuming the thing they disagree with it not an immutable characteristic such as race, sex, age, etc.
Why is “immutability” the sacred quality?
So, only those with approved opinions can participate in society. Everyone else can fuck off.
That’s how it’s gonna be?
People who said the the vaccines did not prevent transmission would have been kicked out into the cold, even though ultimately they turned out to be right. How do we do give backs in this unithink society? Do we now punish those that said they would? Retroactively?
This is ridiculous.
The question you posed: Does GM get to discriminate against those who are not protected by some legislation or the other. The answer is, and this should be obvious even to a Lumberjack, Yes. If GM decides to discriminate in the favor of veterans, that’s ok — or service members, or USAA members, or people who do not own pug dogs (and why wouldn’t they?) or people who are not Chicago Cubs fans.
I admit feeling bad about the pug dogs. It’s not their fault.
Doesn’t the Citizen’s United case have some implications over this sort of thing???
You’re mixing up is and ought, bevis.
Why is it that when it’s things your side desires, you have the moral right to implement it with the power of the state behind you, but not when it’s things we desire?
The answer is that you’re wrong and dumb, as usual. From your posting history it looks like this is because you’re not too bright and mistake anger for correctness.
StellaLink_the dog is clearly talking about what the law is, not what they think the law ought to be. Whatever else you read into it is on you.
Right, and from your standpoint, the law is not what stands to reason or natural law, but whatever Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan or other foul mouthed Jews think it is.
You are a law school graduate and you think that the law is “what stands to reason or natural law?”
“Venmo and other such companies are private. They have the free speech rights to not associate with people or organizations that espouse views they disagree with.”
This certainly isn’t the current state of the law. They don’t have the right to refuse to associate with Jews or Muslims, for example, or Veterans.
Right, because of legislation. How about on other bases? How about radical Islamists (whoever they are), for example? How about Wagnerian mercenaries?
So your argument against a statute prohibiting a form of discrimination is that the other prohibitions against different forms of discrimination are merely statutory?
Either private corporations have rights of association and thus all non-discrimination laws are unconstitutional or they don’t have a right of association in which case bills proposing to block this form of discrimination are equally defensible.
Not at all. It’s perfectly legitimate to tell a baker he has to make a cake to celebrate the “marriage” of two men whose idea of “consummation” is unprotected sodomy but not to tell PayPal and UPS that they can’t choke off conservative businesses.
Perhaps I missed it. Did he argue against a statute prohibiting this particular form of discrimination? Or is he just saying that absent such a statute, discriminating is legal?
One can also make the argument that “undermining the culture of free expression” entails telling a company they have to serve people the company does not agree with. If companies have free speech rights in other areas such as political expression, why not this one?
That is the argument for a business’ right to discriminate, an argument that has been made for ages, but was disposed of decades ago by the courts of this country. Choosing which customers to serve is minimally “expressive”, if at all, and the government’s authority to pass anti-discrimination statutes is seen as a regulation of conduct, not protected expressive “speech”.
It’s not about choosing the customers. It’s about having your own brand placed on screen alongside Alex Jones’s repellent crapola. You know what wouldn’t make sense as a way to fix that? A requirement that companies pay Alex Jones, but then keep his stuff away from income producing brands. See the paradox? There is no way out of it. That is why FIRE’s advocacy is utopian. Nobody can make that work in the real world, absent a government willing to take on and sponsor Alex Jones.
But only people who WANT to see Alex Jones’ repellent crapola will be seeing Alex Jones’ repellent crapola, and presumably since they WANTED to see it, this does not bias them against your own brand. Thus there’s no business case against doing business with him.
You’re building in the assumption that this is some kind of broadcast, that allowing somebody to use a platform means everybody sees them. But, generally, the only reason anybody on these platforms sees anything they didn’t seek out is because the platform itself made a point of pushing it to them. Usually much to their annoyance!
So to the extent it’s a problem at all, it’s a self created problem for the platform.
For the umpteenth time, those people you mention, who want to see Alex Jones? Their attention is the product. In their case, the rotten, stinky, contaminated part of the product—the part that the more-valuable customers want to shun.
Thus, the parties who care what those people want to see, are the publisher and its advertisers. It is not just the publisher’s brand which is at stake, it is the customers’ brands too. The publisher has a brand to build, the would-be advertisers have brands to protect.
The publisher wants to be sure it can say honestly to its customers—the would-be advertisers—”When you spend your money with us, you can be sure your brand will not appear alongside cranks, frauds, and libelers. We never permit that. Alex Jones hasn’t got a chance here, because in our exclusion algorithm we have our own sub-program to track his online antics. We are very proud of that. It is one of the things which sets us apart in the market.”
The other party who does not want your people to see Alex Jones is the customer—an advertiser with his own brand to protect. When the customer finds out its brand is going up alongside Alex Jones, it calls its advertising agency and says, “Why the F did you idiots put me on that platform? If word got out that my brand supports Alex Jones, I could be boycotted out of business. Get my brand off there now! And never do it again or you’re toast!”
I suppose you might argue that not all advertisers would react that way. Which is the reason you have to leave the publisher free to make the decision at pleasure about what content to carry, and what content to reject. The publisher will almost always be the best judge of that, but even if he is not, it is his enterprise which is at stake.
You may not like it Bellmore, but a viable internet publishing policy must take account of that commercial reality, or it will fail. Which is why advocacy to ignore that reality, and to make the internet better by doing it, is utopian. You can’t sensibly advocate policies predicated, however heedlessly, on a premise that no one has to pay the bills.
Your normal business, selling paste, is utterly indifferent to whether you plan to use it gluing together a brilliant business plan, or you plan to eat it. They care whether you’ll pay them. It’s pathological for businesses to be concerned about their customers’ ideology, religion, crazy ideas. The function of a free market actually relies on this indifference.
Once businesses care if you’re a Christian or atheist, Republican or Democrat, inny or outy, markets balkanize, you lose the efficiencies of scale, and worse: You end up with a new information problem: Not just determining the best product or price, but also figuring out if the business is going to wait until you become reliant on it, and then deliberately screw you over. Is your law firm going to deliberately abandon you in the middle of litigation? Is your IT security firm going to drop you as a customer and covertly notify a hacking group to hit you before you can replace them? Is your email provider secretly scanning your emails to compile a target list for your enemies?
It generates inefficiency and paranoia. Justified paranoia.
And, again, Brand X should not CARE if they end up on the same platform as Alex Jones, or Louis Farrakhan. These platforms aren’t broadcasting, like NBC. The only people who are going to see Brand X next to Louis Farrakhan are people who approve of Louis Farrakhan, and would see the association as a positive.
The only reason Brand X cares at all if they’re seen next to David Duke or Al Sharpton is if they’re infected with a pathological animus against part of their potential customer base!
But, let’s be real, this is just an excuse you’re whipping up to pretend that the platform’s own animus is a legitimate business concern. Nothing more. Because if they really cared, they’d be in as much of a hurry to deplatform loons on the left as the right, and they never have been.
Well said. Let’s be honest though. They don’t really care about some principles. They are an outcomes based ideology. Ends justify the means.
It’s how they’ve manages to mass murder hundreds of millions of people and have no remorse. The ends justify the means. If 59 million kulaks have to be murdered by Communist Jews, then so what? Let’s erase the holodomor from the history books. If 100 million Chinese have to be murdered by the Chinese communists, so what? It’s a small price to pay for utopia. If the American Marxists have to slaughter millions of White Christians to save the planet from Global Warming? So what they need their yachts and mansions.
And, again, Brand X should not CARE if they end up on the same platform as Alex Jones, or Louis Farrakhan. These platforms aren’t broadcasting, like NBC. The only people who are going to see Brand X next to Louis Farrakhan are people who approve of Louis Farrakhan, and would see the association as a positive.
Bellmore, that last sentence is untrue. What precedes it is one of the most peculiar assertions about commercial behavior I have ever seen. It is no wonder you cannot understand how publishing works.
But, let’s be real, this is just an excuse you’re whipping up to pretend that the platform’s own animus is a legitimate business concern. Nothing more. Because if they really cared, they’d be in as much of a hurry to deplatform loons on the left as the right, and they never have been.
Have you ever heard of Rupert Murdoch? Have you ever heard of Fox News? No doubt their content decisions are more to your taste. Why doesn’t that even dent your paranoia? If you explained your theory of publishing to Murdoch, he would laugh you out of his office just as fast as Mark Zuckerberg would, and for the same reasons.
And by the way, what kind of mental mis-wiring would lead anyone to assert press freedom is, “a platform’s own animus.” No, Bellmore. In this nation, publishers are entitled to expressive points of view. They are permitted to found publications based on their points of view, and—to speak in a metaphorical way—to develop a preferred point of view as a business model. Government does not get to interfere with that. If it listens to people like you, and decides to give interference a try, everything will get worse.
Your utopian blindness is attributable to your benighted focus—a focus selectively narrowed to the least critical part of the internet publishing phenomenon—which is what a person like you can see from his keyboard. You will not get your way, because no one has power to give it to you. You—and a lot of folks with similar views—are destined for continued frustration. The only question is for how long, and whether when you give up you will simply quit the field, or join with others who demand actually workable solutions.
This will not please the Lochner libertarians none too much, some prominent co-bloggers on this site. They are eternally concerned for the inviolable “rights” of businesses, and, in their world, the customers and employees of said businesses seem to have few, if any, right themselves. They are an afterthought, if they are thought of at all.
Additionally, it would appear that the Left has fully come around to the concept of corporate “rights”. We’ve come a long way from the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth that consumed them after Citizens United all of twelve years ago. In this era of Democrat-corporate Gleichschaltung, the decision has been an incredible boon for the Left.
Big rights vs. “rights” game here. Can’t tell what it takes to be a right not a “right” but that may be the point.
In general, I suggest that Republicans and conservatives focus on finding a way to make backwardness, religion, and bigotry more popular (in educated circles, less reviled). Otherwise, soon enough, there won’t be enough clingers left to take advantage of ‘must carry bigot’ rules.
In general, I suggest that you and your husband stop grooming the kids you creepily invite into your house with store bought cookies.
These are your fans and followers, Volokh Conspirators.
Ouch.
Very ouch.
I hope you and your “husband” use PrEP appropriately.
I don’t PReP costs us normal people $1000/mo/homosexual.
Why we have to pay for gay party drugs is beyond me.
It would be a lot cheaper to pay for a dose of Zyklon B.
“store bought cookies.”
Jeez, Art, can’t you bake your own cookies?
Suddenly lefties are stalwart defenders of private property and free association when big corporations are in their pocket.
Not so much when a baker wants to decline to make a cake for Kirkland and his “husband.”
You and several others above (including BCD in the first comment), think that Leftists have changed their position.
That’s wrong.
Previously, the Lefties viewed corporations as simply greedy, faceless, monoliths intent on making money at all costs.
However, I’d say in the past two decades, Corporate America has decidedly turned to the left on social issues (corporate citizenship, SSM and LGBTQ issues, equality/diversity, environmental responsibility, etc.).
The Left have accepted these changes and can now partner with Corporate America to help advance their policies.
But the main change came from Corporate America – not the Lefties.
One example, here’s General Motors recent environmental policy:
I. Purpose
General Motors (GM) Company is proud of its long-standing commitment to protect human health and the environment. As a responsible corporate citizen, we continually assess the Environmental impacts of our activities, products and services as a basis for our Global Environmental Policy and are committed to
reducing or eliminating wherever practicable these impacts through the establishment of appropriate objectives and targets. This policy establishes a globally consistent standard intended to protect the environment by establishing sound practices that support compliance while minimizing negative environmental impacts.
II. Principles and Values
The foundation of this policy is a set of core principles and values that have been in place for more than 20 years.
Here’s Lockheed Martin’s diversity policy:
Corporate Commitment
By building an inclusive work environment, we help ensure that Lockheed Martin is able to attract, develop and retain a diverse workforce that has the opportunity to showcase and develop their skills and abilities. We believe that all employees should have a safe and inclusive work environment – one in which everyone is treated fairly, with the highest standards of professionalism, ethical conduct and full compliance with the law. From the CEO down, we are actively committed to promoting diversity and inclusion throughout our corporation.
It’s the old agent/principle problem in business. Once you separate management and ownership, how do you assure that the management manage the company in the interest of the owners, rather than themselves? How do you enforce fiduciary responsibilities? Because the whole function of private enterprise is premised on the notion that business is pursuing financial rewards, and ONLY financial rewards:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” Adam Smith
Because professional management divorces “their advantages” from the financial health of the corporation, suddenly the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker matters, because they don’t actually mind making financially disastrous decisions on the basis of their personal opinions, those decisions don’t cost them anything, and they get what they want from them.
This, of course, doesn’t explain why corporate management is left-wing rather than right-wing, just why it now matters, given the almost complete prevalence of professional management and remote ownership.
Conquest’s Second law of politics; “Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.” But, why?
Because right-wingers tend to regard politics as something you do in your spare time, while left-wingers tend to view it as central to their lives. So right-wingers working in an organization pursue the organization’s goals, and do their politics on the side with their own resources. But left-wingers working in an organization regard it was wholly appropriate to advance political goals in managing the organization. Hiring on the basis of politics, spending corporate resources on politics, making political decisions that cost the bottom line but advance the cause.
Once you’ve got some left-wingers in a position to influence hiring, they make a point of hiring fellow left-wingers, and eventually end up with a controlling majority of management, and can do as they like. That’s why Conquest’s 2nd law actually works out that way.
Additionally, leftists aren’t constrained by any sense of morality, as they are generally amoral creatures. Power for its own sake is their central belief. So it’s easier for leftists in positions of power to advance their sick ideology in a corporate setting.
It’s actually worse than that.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” C.S.Lewis
Leftists do have a morality, but it’s the morality of people who think the end justifies the means, and that morality dictates that everyone be forced to pursue their ends whether they want to or not.
As usual, amazing telepathy.
Who needs telepathy when you can read what people are saying?
Yeah, Brett, all the leftsts saying they don’t have morality. You know, if you read them properly like you do.
I guess you could use some telepathy, since you ARE incapable of reading. I didn’t say leftists were saying they don’t have morality. I said that they DO have morality, but it’s an end justifies the means sort of morality, that tells them if they’re doing good, or fighting ‘evil’, anything goes.
Which is more stuff leftists don’t say.
Unless you just mean idiots on twitter?
What about 85 IQ retarded simian Maxine Waters? She is a thug, who openly admitted that the moratorium on evictions was illegal, but wanted it anyway, because it helps her freeloading “brothers” and “sisters.”
“This, of course, doesn’t explain why corporate management is left-wing rather than right-wing. . . .”
I don’t think corp. mang. is left or right wing.
They’re just making business decisions based on stakeholders (not just stockholders)- who think it’s good business to be “woke.”
I thought they had a primary responsibility to the stockholders.
They do, but only to maximize profits based on their own business judgement.
They might have decided that because leftists are rabid and angry, and will boycott, vandalize, and do other antisocial things to businesses that won’t comply, while conservatives are too busy working and raising their families.
“They might have decided that because leftists are rabid and angry, and will boycott, vandalize, and do other antisocial things to businesses that won’t comply”
Yeah, when they’re not too busy going to the store to buy cookies or buggering each other.
Exactly.
Claiming to be doing that, but the actual performance says otherwise.
The right keeps saying ‘get woke, go broke’ about some commercial that pisses them off or some such retrograde white fragility bullshit. And the companies generally do fine after, so they move on to the next version, and then crow at the few times they’re right.
That’s you. You know who is not an expert in business performance?
You.
Have a modicum of humility.
I will note that a lack of expertise has yet to keep you from commenting, and if humility is something you admire, you would demonstrate it.
Brett’s the one claiming expertise to suss out secret liberal agendas behind CEO decision-making.
I claim no such expertise, except in Brett being certain about things he’s not an expert in. I’m well experienced in that.
This, of course, doesn’t explain why corporate management is left-wing rather than right-wing, just why it now matters, given the almost complete prevalence of professional management and remote ownership.
Corporate management remains right-wing, and opportunistic. Decades ago a frightened Democratic Party offered the right wing a deal: Yield to our pressure to get corporations behind identity politics, and we will throw overboard the economic progressives and unions. We can campaign and win if we claim we forced corporate America to give up key advantages for growing minority groups, thought the Democrats.
Corporate America was delighted to take that deal. It enabled huge PR advantages, while leaving entirely in their own hands the control of how much to invest, and how far to take a policy of minority hires and promotions. Not too far, of course. As a bonus, the deal offered a great fit for the new push toward globalism. Best of all, the deal rid Corporate America once and for all of organized labor, its most capable adversary.
It proved a stupid deal for Democrats. It has done far too little for blacks especially, which makes Democrats look bad. And it cut the Democrats off from the part of their base that already was well organized and energetic. Decades of close-fought struggle and incremental decline have been Democrats’ reward for that blunder. Probably shortly, Republicans will start picking up a larger share of electoral credit for affirmative action, and Democrats will be left wondering what hit them.
That, of course, assumes Republicans can bring themselves to stop trying to peddle crazy nationwide.
It might have started that way, but for decades now indoctrinated leftists have been working their way up the corporate hierarchy, and they HAVE taken over.
A notable part of that burnt insulation smell which emanates so continuously from right-wing critiques, is the part which insists folks who back identity politics are leftists. Identity politics backers include aggrieved members of protected classes. They include opportunists. They include corporatists in droves. They include virtue signalers. They include conformists in Democrat-inflected institutions like NPR. They include most Democratic Party officeholders. They do not include many leftists.
Bernie Sanders has famously resisted open support of identity politics. Real leftists are more embittered by the Democratic Party’s betrayal of any and all economic agendas for working people, than they are supportive of the piddling ameliorative efforts which corporate-managed identity politics have delivered. Leftisim and identity politics are not only not in league with each other, they are practically at each others’ throats. Not that you could get any inkling of that by listening to right wingers.
Before the proliferation of online money moving sources a local politician got blocked by her bank for having the name Khan. That’s a terrorist name, you see.
After the Eugenics Wars, sure.
Online payment processors have a free speech right to refuse to be associated with people whose speech they disagree with.
The government cannot punish online payment processors for exercising that right.
Online payment processors decision to refuse to associate with people on the basis of their speech is a net negative for society and broader principles of free speech.
None of those positions are contradictory.
They’re not contradictory, I also posit that quasi-monopolies can and should be regulated as common carriers. If you don’t like McDonald’s, you can go to Burger King or 100 others. When there are 2-5 players in a market, that generally act in lockstep, what are you supposed to do?
Let’s suppose that online payment processors DO have a free speech right to refuse to be associated with people whose speech they disagree with. Let’s just suppose that.
Whose right is it? The “online payment processor” isn’t a single person, after all. It’s corporation. Whose disagreement counts here? The janitors’? The accountants’? The IT department? Upper management?
How about, the stockholders? Does “the corporation”‘s free speech right trump the management’s fiduciary responsibility to the owners of the corporation, the stock holders? I would argue not.
The right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment has been twisted into a pretzel to justify actions no one would have ever thought were related to “speech”.
Paypal is free to say whatever it wants to on any subject but it should not be able to use its position to deny a transaction between willing users because it opposes somones assumed point of view on any matter.
I doubt you have such a cavalier attitude to the free exercise clause nor 2A
isn’t a single person, after all. It’s corporation. Whose disagreement counts here? The janitors’? The accountants’? The IT department? Upper management?
You sound like the ignorant left talking about Citizens United.
What do you mean? There wasn’t any internal disagreement in the CU case, and rather than having stockholders who could be denied their rightful profits, CU was a non-profit which had donors.
It was just the government declaring it was entitled to tell CU to STFU.
1) There are plenty of cases about shareholders trying to argue that this policy or that would maximize their profits. It’s a losing case – stockholders’ business judgement is not in charge. Stockholders are not the ones who speak and act when a corporation speaks and acts.
2) The idea that a corporation doesn’t have well defined speech because ‘who speaks’ is absolutely the take unthinking leftists take on the case.
Does “the corporation”‘s free speech right trump the management’s fiduciary responsibility to the owners of the corporation, the stock holders? I would argue not.
Interesting point. If the company loses money because it denies transactions to those whose message the management disagrees with, do the shareholders have a beef against the management?
“The business judgment rule is a presumption that in making a business decision, the directors of a corporation acted on an informed basis, in good faith and in the honest belief that the action taken was in the best interests of the company. Thus, the party attacking a board decision as uninformed must rebut the presumption that its business judgment was an informed one.” Further, rebuttal typically requires a showing that the defendants violated duty of care or loyalty (with courts assuming director’s good faith otherwise).”
That’s a high bar. And not one anyone here has made in this thread I’ve seen.
That’s right, the bar has been set so high in practice that management gets to treat the corporation as though it was their own property. Fiduciary responsibility has become a mirage, the agent/principle problem has become endemic, it is basically impossible to prove a violation outside the grossest, most clear cut cases, so management no longer feels bound by that duty.
That’s a problem, IMO. You’ve separated ownership and control, so that the people in control don’t have to care if they hurt the corporation’s value with their decisions, it doesn’t hurt THEIR bottom line, so they’re free to make bad economic decisions to advance personal causes.
Free market capitalism theory assumes that the decision makers and the owners are the same people, so that the decision makers are financially motivated to make economically sensible decisions. It breaks down if the decision makers have no economic incentive to do the profitable thing.
I think professional management is killing capitalism.
We’re pretty extremely capitalist.
Your idea to weaken the business judgement rule and let courts tell businesses if they’re doing it wrong is…fascism.
What ism is completely shutting large numbers of people out of the economy over wrongthink? Because that’s the logical endpoint of this garbage.
No, I’d instead propose a rule that all, and only, companies with publicly trades stock be common carriers. Closely held companies, family businesses, sole proprietorships, would all retain the power to reject customers on any basis they felt like.
But once you separate ownership and management, the rules change.
all, and only, companies with publicly trades stock be common carriers.
Calling for heavy reg of a lot of the economy.
You know, for freedom.
I’m fine with breaking these companies up if they’re too big. I’m against this broad straitjacket you want. I’m all for regulation, but this is ridiculous!
But publicly traded corporations are in conflict with capitalism, don’t you know. What a bunch of fatuous crap.
See, they’re making choices Brett is sure area anti-profit. Since Brett’s the decider, the Constitution doesn’t matter and it’s time for the government to fix what Brett’s sure is broke.
bevis – completely shutting large numbers of people out of the economy over wrongthink is not currently happening, but in they hypo it’s private action it would just be shitty, not an ism.
You know, like Jim Crow wasn’t an ism.
Hope this helps!
You missed the endpoint part. If this keeps happening that’s where we go.
Nice to know you support something comparable to Jim Crow. As long as it’s people who have bad thoughts, Jim Crow is an acceptable treatment.
I think Brett’s heavy regulatory hand is a solution searching for a problem.
But I think Bevis is right that you’re effectively endorsing Jim Crow.
When I point out that Jim Crow was legally enforced discrimination, and we never stopped to see what people would do if left free, your stock reply is that Jim Crow was at least as much a culture of discrimination privately supported and enforced, and lifting the law wouldn’t have done much, it had to be actively prohibited.
Well, here we are discussing a culture of discrimination, privately supported and enforced, and you’re objecting to actively prohibiting it. What’s the difference? Just that you aren’t terribly sympathetic towards the designated victims this time?
Maybe you never had any principled objection Jim Crow, you just thought they were picking on the wrong group.
But I think Bevis is right that you’re effectively endorsing Jim Crow.
You’re wrong about me and about Jim Crow. I mentioned it to make the semantic point that not all private ills are an ‘ism’ that’s it.
Conservatives saying they’re just like black people in the Jim Crow South is just your ignorance about racial issues coupled with your persecution complex.
What about wedding cake bakers?
Then should your bank have the right to close your accounts or freeze your assets because you believe the 2020 election was stolen?
How about if it’s because you are black, gay, or a Muslim or a Jew?
A vibrant culture of free expression depends on Americans’ ability to speak their minds without losing access to services that are integral to life in modern society. FIRE will continue to advocate for reforms that make this possible.
That will never become possible on the basis of FIRE’s style of advocacy. It is a utopian demand.
I should say a bit more about internet utopianism. I use that term to refer to policies which if followed would paradoxically defeat the objectives they were chosen to further.
The classic example is advocacy for a universal right for everyone to access any online publisher to accomplish cost-free world-wide publishing of contributions, with neither prior editing nor post-publication take downs. Advocates who think about nothing except users’ demands for service cannot imagine why thus extravagantly empowering everyone might prove impractical.
It is impractical (actually, impossible) for two reasons. First, because doing it that way will predictably destroy the business models which fund online publishing and permit it to continue without drawing on the public treasury. Second, because doing it that way will so undermine political support for expressive freedom that burgeoning demands for government censorship will be heeded, and put a stop to online publishing except on the basis of prior government approval.
FIRE’s advocacy ignores the freedom of the private parties who actually do the publishing to walk away from the deal. FIRE apparently supposes businesses will stick around even if doing so actually harms their interests. FIRE ignores that the public will not stand for business models to fund actually destructive and damaging publications—including libels—as a policy-supported and approved activity. FIRE ignores that an alternative to do such publishing at public expense, or as some kind of public utility, cannot be accomplished without a catastrophic government takeover of the means of public expression.
Heedlessness of all these factors is what makes the would-be FIRE policy utopian.
Lathrop, if I ever get power you’re the first guy I’m shuttin’ down.
Kirkland will be next.
If I ever get power I’ll shut down a whole bunch of fascist motherfuckers. But among those, you will be way down on the list. Indeed, you, like the other pismires, will be so far down the list that you have little to fear from me.
One should remember that censorship comes in all forms, high and low tech.
Just came across this:
Chinese Censors Ban Printing Of Hasidic Woman’s Memoir Due To ‘Anti-Communist’ Content
https://vinnews.com/2022/10/03/chinese-censors-ban-printing-of-hasidic-womans-memoir-due-to-anti-communist-content/
This woman grew up in the Soviet Union, and her father was arrested for religious activities. She later fled to the U.S. and established a home here. She then wrote her memoirs, in English, intended for distribution in North America and other English-speaking areas.
The printing is done in China, and the Chinese censors did not allow it. So outsourcing printing to China leads to censorship. That’s crazy.
Can someone please call the free market champions to jump in here? Surely market competition will quickly fix this detestable situation. /s
This is a real and serious problem; if it seems new to Volokh it is because he doesn’t read conservative forums. And it’s not just online payment processors that shun conservative viewpoints, it’s spread to include big banks such as Chase, and credit/debit card issuers such as Visa, Mastercard, and Discover (all three of which use the same blacklist, maintained by Visa).
What’s worse yet is the growing threat of a Central Bank Digital Currency, which would give official status to that blacklist and thus effectively make dissent illegal, with no due process to those so accused before they are punished by loss of access to their money. That would be cause for revolution.