Amerika

We talk about rights the way spoiled kids talk about what Daddy gives them. We have a right to Free Speech. Really? How much does that cost? Events at Cornell University suggest those prices are set by a cartel instead of the Free Market. Details on Cathedral pricing follow below.

“If CUPD decides that a certain speaker has controversial ideas and is likely to spark protests, they will impose higher fees” that student groups may not be able to pay, student Ben Lee wrote for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where he is interning. “The fees serve as financial roadblocks that will prevent students from inviting speakers who may otherwise provide the campus with opportunities for valuable discussion,” Lee said.

Rather than just relying on internet hearsay, here’s the money-shot, so to speak, from an official Cornell Campus PD Policy letter.

Security Costs: predictable and some help from Cornell Now, some good news: security costs have become predictable! Students are sometimes surprised by the need for security, but every good event planner knows this is a critical part of a good event. Having a big crowd? Maybe someone trips and needs medical attention. Having an event that attracts a wide range of people, even if a smaller location? Maybe someone shows up tipsy and gets snarky with another audience member. Or, maybe you know your event has a politician or other type of dignitary and some audience members might be outspoken critics. There are many factors the police consider when assessing security needs: it is up to CUPD (the experts!), not the host of the event, to determine the security needs.

Gotta love it when things get left up to the experts! I’ll bet a whole room full of experts! examined and reviewed those O-Rings on the Space Shuttle Challenger. These experts! — with nary an economist or financier in the room are setting a market price on the “free” expression of ideas. It will work about as well as the mortgage market worked after decades of lobbying for “affordable housing.” It did get a heck of a lot more affordable in Scottsdale, AZ after the foreclosures. Maybe the same will happen at Cornell after the foreclosing on the American Mind. Is Allan Bloom or his prize student, Francis Fukuyama available for comment?

And “free speech” at Cornell seems to run pretty cheap. The Cost of “Free Association” can downright bankrupting.

A female deputy in Clark County, Washington, was fired after a photograph of her wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with a “Proud Boys” logo surfaced on social media:

This is not only stupid, but also tragic. Even Lyndon Johnson was smart enough to know you want them inside the tent pissing out rather than vice versa. We will increasingly reach a day where the blackmail potential of social preference disqualifies anyone who participates in the world and does anything that is vital and necessary. People who are force-mingled and incapable attempt to maintain the engines of a vast societal machine they neither comprehend nor truly care about it. Perhaps the way Romans get run through the wood chipper until they are Italians. Freedom of Association, without deliberate and malicious taxation, is the only true pressure valve to prevent diversity from genocide through outbreeding.

But in the end we should expect all these rights to cost us all something. Freedom isn’t free they tell us every Memorial Day. This is only logical. You have the personal rights you are willing to kill another human being to preserve. You have the societal rights the US Marine Corps can win for you on The Plane of Mars. Life is transactional. You give in order to take and can’t win any game you aren’t willing to put some skin into. Only a demotic socialist would claim you get “free” anything. Threre’s a commandment against it that was handed down to Moses: “Thou Shall Not Steal.”

Thus, the only real freedom we can expect is the opportunity to choose what cost we will pay. Even that comes at a cost. It all has to. Work is done by Force which costs us Energy. The cost of that freedom is often socialized. Then the war tocsin resounds. Then that cost can be found buried in the ground.

Tags: diversity, freedom, outbreeding, rights