KOSA Negates the Government’s Law Enforcement Responsibility

A bill known as the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, passed the U.S. Senate by a 91 - 3 margin. It now [8/3/24] goes to the House of Representatives for consideration.

The bill is not what the title implies. It is much more . . . and much worse.

Reason’s Elizabeth Brown observes: 

The Kids Online Safety Act would have cataclysmic effects on free speech and privacy online.

"Bills like KOSA cynically hide censorship behind the mantle of child protection. Tell Sen. Schumer and other lawmakers to reject KOSA," urged the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

In a New York Times article, Senate Passes Child Online Safety Bill, Sending It to an Uncertain House Fate, Maya Miller reports

The centerpiece of the legislation would create a “duty of care” for social networking platforms that mandates they protect minors against mental health disorders and from abuse, sexual exploitation and other harms. Companies could be held liable for failing to filter out content or limit features that could lead to those adverse impacts. [My emphasis]

What content can anyone say does not fit with "could lead to adverse impacts? What would not  be included is such a vague mandate as “duty of care?”

A second measure included in the package would strengthen privacy protections for anyone under 17 and ban targeted advertising to children and teens. It would create an “eraser button” for parents and children, requiring companies to permit users to delete personal information.

Despite the lop-sided vote margin, the bill has notable critics.

The bill faces strong pushback from technology companies, who argue it would place unacceptable burdens on them to moderate content and verify users’ ages, and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union that contend it would restrict free speech. In the Senate, the measure generated narrow but intense opposition despite several rounds of redrafting to address such concerns.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, recently called the bill “the Pandora’s box of unintended consequences,” arguing it would stifle First Amendment-protected speech. Other critics, such as Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said they were worried that limiting children’s access to certain content on social media could further isolate vulnerable youths, including L.G.B.T.Q. young people who often rely on online communities for a sense of belonging and acceptance.

Count me among the opponents.

The Washington Post also reported on the passage of the bill (Senate passes landmark bills to protect kids online, raising pressure on House).

I posted this WAPO Comment:

Note what the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) does NOT do—hold the people who actually create and post the harmful content accountable. Instead of doing their duty to identify and prosecute the guilty, the politicians are going after the social media companies. If a crime is planned around a dinner in a restaurant; or committed using the Verizon phone network; or committed using the public roads, would it be right to charge that restaurant owner, Verizon, or the government for the wrong-doing? Yet that is the position that the social media companies, which are no different IN KIND, are being forced into with this horrifically misleading bill. 

Yes, KOSA is a threat to free speech and privacy, as the opponents argue. But it is also a massive abnegation by the political class in its primary function to identify criminal activity, make the necessary laws, and enforce the laws against the guilty while protecting the innocent.* In effect, the bill shifts that function from government, where it belongs, to private enterprise. Under the smokescreen of “kids safety,” KOSA is a massive inversion of the purpose of law and of justice: It evades the guilty and targets innocent third parties.

We should demand that the politicians do their jobs; go after the guilty, rather than take the easy, politically expedient course of making technology companies the scapegoats. 

* [I am indebted to Jon Hersey for pointing out this little-discussed aspect of this and similar laws targeting social media companies. Hersey wrote “Many of the bureaucrats and commentators behind these laws and initiatives against social-media companies share essentially the same tactic. They blame social-media companies for not doing what governments are supposed to do—protect individual rights—and then rationalize that this supposed failure is grounds for doing what governments are not supposed to do—violate individual rights.”]

Related Reading:

Social Media and the Future of Civil Society by Jon Hersey for The Objective Standard

Senate To Vote on Web Censorship Bill Disguised as Kids Safety by Elizabeth Brown for Reason

Linda Stamato’s Broad Attack on Our Intellectual Freedom

Censorship-By-Proxy is Real, and it's Here

The End of the Free Internet Is Near: The idea that the internet should enjoy minimal government oversight precisely because it was a technology that enabled open and free speech for everyone has been turned on its head. -- DECLAN MCCULLAGH for Reason

HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen

Review of Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media by Michael Dahlen for The Objective Standard

A Lesson From 1930s Germany: Beware State Control of Social Media By Heidi Tworek for The Atlantic

Trump Joins Biden in War on the Average Person’s Newfound Power to be Heard

Mamaroneck, NY’s Tree Law Smacks of Theocracy: Climatism Has No Place in the Politics of a Free Society

In ‘My Property, My Trees’: New Tree-Cutting Law Divides N.Y. Town, the New York Time’s Hilary Howard reports on a law in Mamaroneck, New York, that regulates tree removal on private property. Requiring property owners, including homeowners, to get a permit to remove a tree is disturbing enough from a pro-liberty standpoint. But what really got my attention were the rationalizations at the forefront of the new law. Howard reports:

When Robert Herbst returned to his hometown about 30 miles north of New York City in 1992, he wanted his children to be immersed in the lush greenery of his childhood. But over the decades, he noticed more trees coming down to make way for bigger houses.

Mr. Herbst, a lawyer, and other like-minded residents of Mamaroneck, N.Y., view the vanishing trees as a serious threat in the era of climate change.

“We should be protecting trees for our own survival,” said Jacob Levitt, a dermatologist who lives in Mamaroneck. “It’s suicidal not to do it.”

But some residents say they should have the right to remove any and all trees on their properties to make way for more sunlight or a home expansion, or simply because they want them gone.

“People want to landscape the way they want to landscape,” said Eve Neuman, a realtor who lives in the area.

Herbst and Levitt are leaders in the war on tree removal. But, what right do these men and their cohorts have to use the coercive power of the state to impose their values on everyone else? None. Enter “climate change.” 

I wrote these comments, which were not published because the comment section of the article was closed before I could get to it. :

“[V]anishing trees [are] a serious threat in the era of climate change. ‘We should be protecting trees for our own survival. It’s suicidal not to do it.’”

How does one answer such Chicken Little hysteria? You can’t, any more than you can rebut “It’s God’s will.” Yet such quasi-religious rhetoric is used to justify trampling people’s sacred property rights, without any evidence that cutting down a tree would violate the rights and/or safety of anyone else.

If you can use climate change—or “the climate crisis”—as a God-like justification for trampling individual rights to cut a tree on one’s own property by law, then what dictatorial scheme can’t be justified by it? On that standard, none of our liberties are safe. Faith is impervious to reason and morality. But that’s the point, isn’t it? “Climate Change” is the newest calling card of totalitarianism. America beat back tyranny in the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWs 1 & 2, and the Cold War—only to give up our freedom to the likes of  “tree advocates?”   

In the Constitution it is written that no law respecting the establishment of religion shall be made. The Founders well understood the threat of theocracy. Yet a new secular religion—Climatism—is exactly what is being established by this law. Totalitarian theocracy is the ultimate goal of anyone who raises climate change as a justification for rights-violating laws. It's a reincarnation of The Divine Right of Kings, and the Separation of Religion and State should apply here. End the madness.

The term “climatism” is not mine. The term was first coined by Robert Bryce, as far as I can tell. Bryce roots the term in economic terms: Environmentalism, Bryce observes, “has morphed into the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex.” That’s true enough. But I see something deeper. I see the tentacles of religious dogma and authoritarianism wound through the entire movement. Climatism fits the bill very nicely, in my view. “Follow the money,” says Bryce in explaining Climatism’s grip on policy. But religion provides something far more consequential—and dangerous—moral firepower. Replace God with Climate Change, and you have a new superior power to submit to. And just as “God’s will” is determined by faith leaders who claim to speak for God, and thus must be unquestioningly obeyed, so we have “climate experts” who claim to speak for “the fight against climate change,” and unquestioningly obeyed. Neither authority requires evidence. Any dissident is heretical, which makes you a sinner—or a climate denier on the moral level of a neo-Nazi. . . a holocaust denier.

Of course, like all manifestations of statist assaults, the best moral and practical defense is individual rights.

Related Reading:

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

New U.N. Study Shows Climate Catastrophists Getting More Open About their Totalitarian Designs

Environmentalism In America Is Dead: It has been replaced by climatism and renewable energy fetishism. by Robert Bryce

Memo to Preston Brashers: There are no innocent socialists.

Defenders of Capitalism never cease to try to “educate” socialists on the glories of Capitalism, as if socialists are merely uninformed. For example, check out What the Socialist Left Fails to Grasp about Wealth and Innovation in America by Preston Brashers of The Heritage Foundation. Writing for FEE, Brashers writes:

“We cannot afford a billionaire class whose greed and corruption have been at war with the working families of this country for 45 years,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) once said. But when you consider the vital economic activities funded by billionaires, it becomes clear that it’s a society without billionaires that we can’t afford.

Not all Americans are rich. But all of them are more prosperous because they live in a society where great entrepreneurs can attain great wealth through their vision, innovation, and industriousness.

Brashers goes on the recount (for the umpteenth time) the great benefits driven by Capitalism’s liberated fortune builders. I agree the economic case for Capitalism is critically important and must be regularly reiterated. But does Brashers really believe that Senator Sanders doesn’t understand the economics of Capitalism, let alone its moral foundation?

Of course socialists understand. That's why they hate it. And want to seize the wealth and kill innovation. They hate the rational self-interest that drives Capitalism. They hate the justified economic inequality that freely flourishes under the freedom of Capitalism due to man's nature. They don't care about the truth. They are totalitarian power-lusters and egalitarian hate-mongers. After 200 years of socialist "experiments" in all its manifestations, from the voluntary socialisms documented by Charles Nordhoff in his The Communistic Societies of the United States; Harmony, Oneida, the Shakers, and Others and John Humphrey Noyes in his History of American Socialisms to the coercive kinds like theSouthern slave "beau ideals of communism" plantations defended by George Fitzhugh in his seminal pro-slavery anti-Capitalist Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society to the bloody 20th Century Nazi and Marxist horrors to today's Venezuela—how can they not grasp the glories of wealth, vision, innovation, and industriousness under the even limited freedom of modern mixed economy Capitalism? 

So here’s a memo to Preston Bashers and his fellow pro-Capitalist socialist apologists:

To be a socialist today, In the face of the history of free market, individualist societies , is an unforgivable sin. Ignorance, to the extent it exists among the useful idiot followers of Sanders, AOC, and their ilk, is no excuse. Mistakes of this size are never made innocently. There are no innocent socialists. The author gives socialists a wholly unwarranted benefit of the doubt. We Capitalists must recognize that socialists are evil, and not be afraid to say so.

Related Reading:

Another Counter-Productive Attempt to Define Capitalism as Something it’s Obviously Not--Unselfish

Capitalism and the Moral High Ground by Craig Biddle

Why Capitalism Needs a Moral Sanction

Socialism's Totalitarian Nature Cannot Be Obscured by 'Democratic Socialism'

The Capitalist Manifesto by Andrew Bernstein 

The Capitalism Tour

Criminal Socialism vs. a Free Society

What is Capitalism? by Ayn Rand

What is Socialism? by Robert Heilbroner

Why Capitalism is Selfish--and Why That’s Good

The Great Enrichment by Deirdre McCloskey

July 4, 1776: 'Words that Will Never Be Erased'

“It is . . . from the perspective of the bloody millennia of mankind's history . . . that I want you to look at the birth of a miracle: the United States of America. If it is ever proper for men to kneel, we should kneel when we read the Declaration of Independence."—Ayn Rand

The Fourth of July is a national holiday that, to me, stands far above all of the others. It represents the greatest political achievement in world history. More than that, the birth of the United States of America represents a towering and unprecedented philosophical achievement. America, born of the Enlightenment, is the first nation founded on the principle that man the individual has a fundamental, inalienable right to his own life, and that government’s responsibility is to protect that right…that the people act by right, while the government acts by permission.

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

So opened the document that marked the legal starting point of the United States of America as a sovereign nation. Above are the most radical words ever written as the foundation for a nation. For the first time in human history, a government was to be the servant of the people, by conscious design and on principle. “The people” were understood to be, not a collective, but a collection of sovereign individuals recognized as possessing unalienable individual rights to his own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. America was the triumph of reason, which was understood to be a faculty of the individual. The government would now be charged with the task of protecting every individual’s freedom to act on his own sovereign, reasoning mind … as a matter of unalienable right.

The birth of America was the culmination of Mankind’s long tortuous philosophical journey that began with Aristotle, and continued through his rebirth via Aquinas, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment. Tribalism was to be swept into the dustbin of history, along with “The Divine Right of Kings” and all manner of omnipotent ruler. Men would be set free from the forcible domination of other men—not be permission of some King, cleric, lord, or tribal chief, but by moral right. Rights don’t come from government, the founders held. Rights precede government; then “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”—“just powers” being understood to be only those powers required to carry out the job of protecting individual rights, not the power to violate rights by redistributing private wealth, regulating our lives, and the like.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence, America’s Founding Fathers, were not conservative in any rational sense. They were radicals in the complete and honorable sense: They represented a concept entirely new to mankind. Standing up against the tide of history, with only the winds of the ideas of John Locke and the Enlightenment thinkers at their backs, this unique group of intellectuals took action. Indeed, the ideological radicalism of the ideas to which they pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor turned to actual armed rebellion. The rest, as is said, is history.

America’s Founding was flawed in many respects - the failure to eradicate the ancient evil of slavery from American soil for some 7 decades after the ratification of the Constitution being the most obvious and most egregious birth defect. The anti-slavery forces simply did not have the strength to defeat that vampire at the outset, and so slavery had to be accepted into the young nation. But the moral groundwork had been laid – that all men are created equal – and the fate of the slave states was sealed. 89 years after the signing of the Declaration, America’s Founding ideals caught up with the slave states. Some have pointed to America’s early acceptance of slavery as proof of its basic depravity. In fact, the final defeat of slavery represented America’s finest hour, and a testament to the formidable power of its ideals. Indeed, those ideals underpinned freedom’s progress in regards to women’s suffrage, the defeat of Jim Crow segregation laws by he mid-20th Century Civil Rights movement, and the end of black voter suppression laws.

America’s Founding was the most monumental political achievement in world history. America is currently backsliding from its Founding ideals, heading in the direction of collectivism and statism. But we have the means to reverse that trend, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, which serve as the philosophic blueprint for our Constitution. As Harvey Milk, one of the early leaders in the “Gay Pride” fight for equal rights for gays, said at a 1978 speech,

In the Declaration of Independence it is written 'All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights . . . .' That’s what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words from the Declaration of Independence.

Indeed, the words of July 4, 1776 have been written. Ratified on July 4, signed on August 2, the Declaration of Independence will never be erased. But its ideals can be forgotten, twisted, evaded, or ignored. We can not let that happen. The Fourth of July reminds us that the fight for freedom is a philosophical fight—fought not on foreign military battlefields but right here at home, on the intellectual battleground of ideas. Freedom can not be won and secured by the sword. It can only be won by the pen. It’s not enough to merely uphold the U.S. Constitution, either in its original form or in its current “living” form. We must remember and reassert “The Conscience of the Constitution,” as one scholar called the Declaration of Independence. It is indispensable intellectual ammunition for those of us fighting to establish the fully free society that the Founders envisioned and came close to achieving.

Proof of the moral and practical power and viability of individual liberty is written across the brief span of the past 245 years. The ideas of reason, individualism, and capitalism have been unleashed. The philosophical foundation for an American rebirth has been laid by a Twentieth Century philosopher/novelist whom I call America's Last Founding Father, and the final rout of statism is tantalizingly close—yet still so far.

“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”

By closing out the Declaration with that pledge, those great men of 1776 declared that they would accept no substitute for the ideals in which they believed. As the world watched, they laid it all on the line—their property, their families, their lives—for those ideals. They would succeed or perish. That utterly uncompromising stand gave us the United States of America. The least we could do, especially in the current climate of rising reactionary tribalism, is pledge to uphold those principles, to roll back the compromises that are undermining them, and to accept no substitute.

Happy Birthday America.

Related Reading:

The Declaration of Independence

If Not for the Fourth of July, We’d Have No Juneteenth.

Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence—Onkar Ghate

America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty – Timothy Sandefur

New Textbook of Americanism edited by Jonathan Hoenig

Argentina's Javier Milei Confirms the Many Evil Faces of Socialism

I have long made the argument that fascism is socialism every bit as much as Communism. We Need a Deeper Understanding of Socialism, I’ve argued, and that A is A, and Socialism by any Other Name... is still socialism. Other theoretical thinkers, such as George Reisman, have said so also. But never, to my knowledge, has any prominent political leader.

Until now.

In a near-perfect pro-Capitalist speech before a world audience at Davos Switzerland, the World Economic Forum, Javier Milei, Argentina’s Radical Capitalist Leader, gave a speech that we rarely hear from the world’s leaders. In it, Milei documents socialism's many, and unavoidable, records of poverty and loss of individual freedom—and the continuing efforts to repeat socialism’s deadly ideas. Then, he explained why this is once again happening right under our noses:

Fortunately, there are more and more of us [“libertarians”] who are daring to make our voices heard, because we see that if we don’t truly and decisively fight against these [statsist] ideas, our fate entails increasing levels of regulation, socialism, and poverty, less freedom, and consequently, a worse quality of life.

The West has unfortunately already started to go along this path. I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism, but it’s only ridiculous if you limit yourself to the traditional economic definition of socialism, which says that it’s an economic system where the state owns the means of production. This definition, in my view, should be updated in the light of current circumstances.

Today, states don’t need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the lives of individuals. With tools such as printing money, debt, subsidies, controlling the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals.

This is how we come to the point where, by using different names or guises, a good deal of the generally accepted ideologies in most Western countries are collectivist variants, whether they proclaim to be communist, fascist, socialist, social democrat, national socialist, Christian democrat, neo-Keynesian, progressive, populist, nationalist, or globalist.

Ultimately, there are no major differences. They all say that the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individuals. They all defend a model contrary to the one [“free market Capitalism”] that led humanity to the most spectacular progress in its history. [my emphasis]

Kudos to Javier Milei for ripping off the veneer of slogans and labels socialists use to deflect us from their true totalitarian socialist designs. 

Related Reading:

A is A, and Socialism by any Other Name...

We Need a Deeper Understanding of Socialism

Sanders' Brand of Socialism is Old Fashioned Fascism

Correcting Michael Coburn: Fascism and Marxian Socialism are Not, Fundamentally, Opposites

QUORA: ‘Is fascism a capitalist ideology?‘

Elizabeth Warren’s ‘Accountable Capitalism Act’ Reprises Benito Mussolini

The Great Reset = Red Fascism

Venezuela: From Stalin to Mussolini

Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism is Totalitarian—George Reisman for the Mises Institu