Just last week I posted on the notion that the price of Liberty is affording that same inalienable right to others around you. This week, I got to experience personal tyranny in a way that I haven’t seen in a few years. Someone who owns a domain and forum pushing his weight around, banning people for disagreeing with him, or objecting to his questionable business tactics. It became a lesson in the concept of Public. If he owns a place where people are invited to gather and talk, share ideas, etc., does he have the ethical right to expel them from that online society if he doesn’t like the person?
At first glance, it may seem like a “My house, my rules” situation. On further inspection, though, one finds that it isn’t his house. By inviting the general public into the forum, he made it a public place. As such, speech which poses no threat or actual libel should be free. That you don’t LIKE someone isn’t cause to ban that person. If he starts trashing you there on your own forum, that may be seen as tacky, but even then, the libertarian option is that the opposing view gets a voice as well; you can disagree with him and present your side, but it’s still not okay to just toss someone out for disagreeing or thinking poorly of you.
What someone says either does or does not possess merit, no matter who owns the soil (virtual or otherwise) that one stands upon. While some may take offense to being spoken to disconcertingly within their “castle,” the place has no bearing on the statement. If it would be true in a public park, the statement remains just as valid in someone’s basement or living room. Those who cherish Liberty know this and would readily agree. Those who cherish Power over others will try to justify their dominion through some tilting of reason. I don’t know that the superior rationale can be taught. Those who grasp the differences in the two mutually exclusive concepts will recognize them immediately. The power-mongers either will not or can not see that they are imposing upon others’ rights by attempting to stifle their expression with the thin excuse of property ownership.
What ownership of the property DOES entitle one to is to require that the person leave — for most any cause — if the property in question has not been allocated as open to the public. If others are generally welcome without exclusive caveat, though, then all must be welcome, regardless of subjective criteria. You may be entitled to ask someone with blue hair to leave your home, but you can’t require that they leave an otherwise public place on the same basis. Land and property ownership are not absolute in the strictest sense of the word. One “owns” land for one’s lifetime (abduction by taxes notwithstanding) and that Right can be passed on to another, but we are never truly the owners of anything corporeal, because we can’t take it with us. We’re simply borrowing it for a while, as it was loaned to us by the generations that came before us. What was once someone’s field is now several people’s high-rise, and may temporarily belong to that landlord’s tenants, for so long as they rent those apartments. The same place, yet it is not an absolute ownership.
What IS sovereign is one’s self. One’s thoughts are sacred. One’s expression in reasonable fashion (not through a megaphone so that everyone else MUST tolerate it, as that would be an initiation of force,) is likewise a right which must not be abridged. But to think that we can hold on to corporeal goods as an absolute right is to deny our mortality, and acceptance of that condition is essential to our sane existence.
What, then, is the daily price of freedom? That we not only afford the same rights to others, but that we willingly oppose those who would deny that liberty to any other. As has been said, we are none free unless we all be free. In an odd manner of speaking, then, the price of freedom is freedom for everyone.
Tags: 1st Amendment, freedom, libertarian, liberty