• Tag Archives free speech

  • California Entrepreneur Who Was Fined $1000 for Drawing Informal Maps without a License Takes Regulatory Board to Court

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Ryan Crownholm is a self-described “serial entrepreneur” and the founder of a California-based business called MySitePlan.com. Founded in 2013, the business creates unofficial “site plans” for various clients using publicly available imagery. Hotels and resorts will sometimes use the plans as maps for their guests. Homeowners and contractors often use the plans in their permit applications when they are preparing to make minor changes to a property, such as building a shed or removing a tree.

    Over the years, MySitePlan.com has built a strong reputation for itself, and customers are consistently impressed with the quality of the work and the short turn-around times (often within 24 hours).

    “I had the first draft within 8 hours and they made changes to accommodate what the city needed. Good service!” writes one recent reviewer. “Amazing service! So incredibly quick! I will recommend this company to anyone in need of a site plan,” writes another.

    Crownholm and his customers are certainly happy the business has been successful, but it seems not everyone feels this way. In December 2021, Crownholm was given a citation from the California Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists. The order demanded that he “cease and desist from violating” the law and pay a fine of $1,000.

    What was Crownholm’s crime? According to the Board, Crownholm and his company were illegally practicing land surveying without a license. In the Board’s view, “preparing site plans which depict the location of property lines, fixed works, and the geographical relationship thereto falls within the definition of land surveying,” and thus requires a license.

    It’s worth noting that MySitePlan.com never claimed to create official land surveys by licensed surveyors. In fact, a banner at the top of their website plainly states, “This is not a legal survey, nor is it intended to be or replace one.”

    Now, it’s tempting to say Crownholm should just get a license and move on, but it’s not that simple. Obtaining a land surveying license is an arduous process. In the state of California it requires six years of higher education and practical experience, passing four exams, and earning references from four existing licensees.

    So rather than getting a license or shutting down his business, Crownholm has chosen to take the Board to court. On September 29, Crownholm joined with the Institute for Justice to file a federal lawsuit against the Board, claiming that the regulation violates his First Amendment right to free speech.

    “California regulators are strangling entrepreneurs, like me, with red tape even though customers are pleased with the valuable services we provide,” Crownholm said. “Prosecuting my company hurts homeowners, contractors, landscapers, farmers, wedding venues and others who depend on my service.”

    “California’s regulations go far beyond what other surveying regulators think is appropriate,” said Institute for Justice Attorney Mike Greenberg. “This is yet another example of an established industry using the government to shut down popular, innovative competition. If read literally, California’s laws could harm services everyday people use such as Uber and Google Maps. It would even criminalize drawing a makeshift map on a napkin to help a lost tourist find the way to their destination.”

    The question on everyone’s mind, of course, is why? Why would this regulatory board go after an entrepreneur when he’s clearly not in the business of official land surveying?

    The simplest explanation is that they’re just really eager to enforce the law to the letter. That seems to be the argument they’re going with. But if that’s the case, why don’t they also crack down on the homeowners and contractors who regularly make identical site plan drawings? As the Institute for Justice press release notes, “California’s own building departments teach [unlicensed] homeowners and contractors how to make the exact same drawings Ryan makes.”

    So if litigiousness is the goal, why single out MySitePlan.com?

    Perhaps they think he’s taking safety shortcuts, but that makes no sense. There’s nothing dangerous about what he’s doing. Maybe they’re concerned he’s a fraud, and that the quality of his product doesn’t match what he promises? It’s possible, but a quick glance at his glowing reviews ought to set the record straight on that. Maybe they think he’s misrepresenting himself, pretending to have a license when he really doesn’t? Again, that makes no sense. He’s very explicit on the website that he doesn’t do official land surveys.

    Perhaps they just think it’s unfair that everyone else has to go through an arduous licensing process while he gets to avoid it despite doing very similar work. That would be understandable, but if it was really just about fairness, wouldn’t it make more sense to push for scrapping the burdens on everyone else rather than imposing those burdens on him?

    None of these motives make much sense.

    There’s another possible motive, however, and that’s the malicious one. Perhaps the regulators were simply looking to protect licensed surveyors from competition. After all, less competition means higher prices and more business for those who have jumped through the hoops. I’m sure many licensed surveyors weren’t particularly happy to see MySitePlan.com taking away potential clients.

    Even assuming the absolute best of intentions, one must admit the decreased competition would be at the very least a convenient side-benefit for the established special-interests.

    Oh, and did I mention that the the guy who issued the citation—Richard B. Moore, the Board’s Executive Officer—is himself a licensed land surveyor?

    This isn’t the first time entrepreneurs have been impeded by these kinds of regulations. Occupational licensing requirements like this are ubiquitous, not just for doctors and engineers, but also for jobs that have little to do with safety like hair braiding.

    Every industry has a similar story. Decades ago there was an accident, maybe a series of accidents, or some fraudulent practitioner. As a result, people pressured the government to “do something,” and the government responded by creating a licensing scheme.

    The thinking is pretty straightforward. We make it illegal for someone to practice a trade unless they have a government-approved license, and the government only gives licenses to people who can prove they are trustworthy and capable. Ostensibly, the system protects consumers. But that’s just the official narrative.

    Whether by design or by accident, licensing laws also have the effect of limiting competition, resulting in higher prices and fewer options for consumers.

    I say “by design or by accident” because it isn’t always clear what the intentions were of the people who promoted these schemes. Though it’s nice to think they were all motivated by an altruistic desire to help consumers, it’s more realistic to see this as a classic “Bootlegger and Baptist” alliance—a phrase that was coined by economist Bruce Yandle in a 1983 paper in reference to the Prohibition era.

    The “Baptists” are the true believers. They are motivated, in their desire for government regulation, by genuine—though often misguided—concern for consumers. The “Bootleggers” are the special-interest groups who stand to benefit should these laws pass. The strategy of the Bootlegger is simple and surprisingly effective: simply paint yourself as a Baptist and push for the regulations with altruistic arguments, even though your real goal is to hurt your competitors.

    “A carefully constructed regulation can accomplish all kinds of anticompetitive goals,” Yandle wrote, “while giving the citizenry the impression that the only goal is to serve the public interest.”

    In 2014, Yandle expanded on his theory in a book titled Bootleggers and Baptists that he co-authored with his grandson Adam Smith (not to be confused with the original Adam Smith). In a review of the book, economist Art Carden summarized the theory rather succinctly.

    “Public policies…emerge because a moral constituency (the Baptists) and a financial constituency (the bootleggers) come together in support of the same policies,” Carden wrote.

    Quoting the book, Carden notes that special interests looking to pass anti-competitive regulations often seek out “a respectable public-spirited group seeking the same result [in order to] wrap a self-interested lobbying effort in a cloak of respectability.”

    Carden goes on to identify occupational licensing in particular as a good example of the Bootleggers and Baptists theory playing out in real life.

    While the drawbacks of occupational licensing laws are difficult to deny, some may still have reservations about abolishing them. If we let just anyone practice these professions, wouldn’t there be a proliferation of fraudulent and dangerous practitioners? Isn’t that why these laws were needed in the first place, to protect us from the evidently disastrous results of free markets?

    This is a common line of argumentation, but it’s missing some key nuances. First, it’s important to keep in mind that the mental picture many have of the pre-license market is likely distorted. The special-interest groups pushing for these laws have a strong incentive to exaggerate how bad things used to be; it would be naive to simply take them at their word.

    Further, it’s important to remember that people were much poorer back when these laws were first introduced, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the general standard of living—including the quality and safety of services available on the market—was far lower than it is today. The fact that “things used to be bad” is much more a reflection of our ancestors’ relative poverty than an indictment of unregulated markets.

    For another point, clearly it’s tragic when people get injured or killed because of incompetent workers, but there is always a trade-off between cost and safety. Sometimes people prefer slightly less safe options (such as workers with less training) because those options are cheaper. And if that’s a risk they want to take, we’re only making them worse-off by taking that option away.

    The other thing to consider is that businesses that are downright dangerous or fraudulent get weeded out very quickly. As a business owner, if you don’t provide a reasonable level of quality and safety in your products, you’ll be out of business in no time. Since entrepreneurs know this, they have a strong incentive to avoid hiring dangerous and fraudulent workers. Economists call this the discipline of continuous dealings. This, not licensing, is the reason we can trust most of the businesses we patronize.

    Besides, there are plenty of ways to ensure product safety and quality that don’t involve licensing laws. Workers can get voluntary certifications and consumers can look at reviews to help them decide who they can trust. Just think about MySitePlan.com and their reviews we saw earlier. Did you really need them to have a license to know they were a trustworthy business?

    Though government licensing may seem like a good way to protect consumers, the reality is that these schemes unnecessarily restrict competition, with fewer options and higher prices being the inevitable result. In other words, they mostly end up hurting the very consumers they were supposed to help.

    The best way to help consumers is to give them lots of choices and a rigorously competitive market. And the way to achieve that is not by protecting established special interests from new players. It’s by letting the Ryan Crownholms of the world compete.

    This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.


    Patrick Carroll

    Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Canada to Ban “Downplaying” the Holocaust in Major Blow to Free Speech

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Canada will be outlawing Holocaust denial in an attempt to crack down on white-supremacism and antisemitism in the country, documents show. The change to the Criminal Code will come as part of a bill enacting the budget (yes, seriously).

    “The federal government is set to make it a criminal offence to make a statement denying the Holocaust took place or condoning or downplaying the killing of Jews by the Nazi regime, except in a private conversation,” The Globe and Mail reports. “Canada will join a string of European countries, including Germany, Greece, France, Belgium and the Czech Republic, which have already prohibited Holocaust denial.”

    “There is no place for antisemitism and Holocaust denial in Canada,” said Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino regarding the move. “The Holocaust was one of the darkest chapters in human history. We must preserve its memory, combat contemporary antisemitism and be unequivocal when we say: never again.”

    Aside from the clear free speech problems, the broad wording of the bill is particular cause for concern. For instance, what exactly constitutes “denying, condoning, or downplaying” the Holocaust? These are relatively ambiguous terms that are open to interpretation, and it’s by no means obvious where the legal line will be drawn.

    A good illustration of this issue can be found in the Globe piece itself. Consider the following quote from Irwin Cotler, the prime minister’s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism.

    “Holocaust denial and distortion constitute a cruel assault on memory, truth, and justice – an antisemitic libel to cover up the worst crime in history – and thereby a cruel and mocking rebuke to Holocaust survivors and their legacy.”

    According to Cotler, presumably one of the architects of this law, the Holocaust was “the worst crime in history.” Now here’s a question. If someone said the Holocaust was not the worst crime in history, would that constitute “downplaying” the Holocaust? Would that statement be punishable under this law?

    Inquiring minds would like to know.

    Now, it’s tempting to think that a law like this is more about making a statement than actually handing out fines and throwing people in jail. But these are not empty threats. Just a couple weeks ago, a Berlin court sentenced a 93-year-old German woman to 12 months in prison for denying the Holocaust. If the Canadian government is copying this German law, there’s no reason to believe they won’t also copy German-style enforcement.

    The possibility of fines or even jail time puts this law into perspective, and it’s a sobering reminder about what it really means to outlaw something. The cold truth is that all laws are ultimately enforced with threats of violence. To ban or prohibit an action is to threaten violence against those who do it. Of course, a fine in itself is not a violent act. But if you ignore the fine and all subsequent demands (that is, if you peacefully mind your own business), sooner or later someone will show up to your house with a gun and threaten you with physical force.

    Given this reality, the question we need to ask about this law is not whether the Holocaust was good or bad, real or fake, egregious or minor. The simple question is, would you use a gun to stop someone from saying things about the Holocaust that you disagree with? Is this something that warrants the threat and use of physical force?

    Now, if you’re tempted to say yes, you’re not alone. After all, allowing people to speak freely means some people will probably say wrong or hateful things. But we need to be careful here. If we don’t allow hateful people to say hateful things, if we justify using the gun, then we have abandoned the principle of liberty and opened the door to tyranny.

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

    As tempting as it is to make an exception to free speech in the case of Holocaust denial, this sets a dangerous precedent. If we do not speak up now when they are going after Holocaust deniers, what’s to stop them from going after “climate deniers,” “election deniers,” or “war propaganda deniers”? Once this kind of law gets passed, it becomes very easy to go further, outlawing any speech deemed offensive, false, or otherwise inappropriate.

    The point is, the moment we make exceptions is the moment we lose the principle. “If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise,” said Noam Chomsky, “we don’t believe in it at all.”

    This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.


    Patrick Carroll

    Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Without Free Speech, All Speech Becomes Government Speech

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    When I viewed this video, I wondered if it was a hoax. I thought it must be a group of actors trying to make a point about how far restrictions on speech have gone. Unfortunately, the video captures reality in Scotland in 2019.

    The video picks up an exchange between a Scottish high school teacher and a student. The class was asked to sign up for a website, and according to the student, the teacher commented on how old fashioned the website was for listing only two sexes. The student, Murray, remarked, “But sir there’s only two genders,” and the teacher insisted they continue the discussion outside the classroom.

    Murray recorded the encounter on his phone. Here are some of the lowlights of the recorded dialogue:

    Murray: “Why did you kick me out of class? It’s not very inclusive of you.”

    Teacher: “I’m sorry, but what you were saying is not very inclusive, and this is an inclusive school.”

    Murray: (referring to the teacher’s viewpoint that there are more than two genders): “That’s your opinion.”

    Teacher: “That is my opinion, and that is an opinion which is acceptable in this school.”

    Teacher: “Will you please keep that opinion [referring to Murray’s view that there are two genders] to your own house, not in this room?”

    Murray: “So you got to put your opinion out in class, but my opinion has to stay inside my house?”

    Teacher: “I am not putting my opinion out. I am stating what is national school authority policy.”

    Teacher: “I know what you think, and I know what the authority thinks.”

    Following the UK “national school authority policy” on the number of genders, children are taught there are 100 “gender identities.”

    Murray wasn’t sent to a reeducation camp, but the school suspended him for several weeks.

    As for the teacher, he’s trying to be a proper government functionary. Perhaps he’s dreaming of retirement or at least the day when students like Murray will no longer dare to challenge him.

    If you’re sure this sort of incident couldn’t happen in America, think again.

    A new survey conducted in the United States by the Campaign for Free Speech found 51 percent of Americans agreed with this statement: “The First Amendment goes too far in allowing hate speech in modern America and should be updated to reflect the cultural norms of today.” 48 percent thought, and a majority of millennials agreed, “hate speech” should be outlawed. An astonishing 54 percent of millennials thought jail time should be the consequence penalty for hate speech. Hate speech was not defined in the survey.

    57 percent of Americans are ready to have government “take action against newspapers and TV stations that publish content that is biased, inflammatory, or false.”

    These findings are not out-of-line with earlier surveys such as a Cato Institute 2017 Free Speech and Tolerance Survey, which found that 40 percent of Americans think the government should prevent hate speech.

    Recently, Richard Stengel, a former editor of Time, called for limits on the 1st Amendment. In a Washington Post op-ed, Stengel wrote “the intellectual underpinning of the First Amendment was engineered for a simpler era,” and without defining hate, he called for laws prohibiting “speech that incites hate.” For Stengel it’s a bad thing, not a strength of America, that our “First Amendment standard is an outlier.”

    If you thought anti-free speech sentiment is limited to college campuses, you would be wrong.

    Perhaps there are flaws in the survey design by the Campaign for Free Speech, yet the findings warn of waning support for our constitutional rights.

    There is fundamental confusion on the source of our right to free speech. The right to free speech codified in the 1st Amendment is not a grant of the right of free speech; it is a prohibition against government interfering with an inherent right of Americans:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.…

    When the first amendments to the Constitution—the Bill of Rights—were being debated, Madison and other Founders initially feared enumerating rights would later be interpreted to mean only rights named in the Constitution would be protected.

    Madison addressed those fears with the 9th Amendment to the Constitution:

    The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

    Madison was adamant on the absolute nature of the 1st amendment even when the results displease some or many:

    Our First Amendment freedoms give us the right to think what we like and say what we please. And if we the people are to govern ourselves, we must have these rights, even if they are misused by a minority.

    Just as you can’t be half-pregnant, there is no such thing as government regulated free speech. If government is the arbiter of what is acceptable speech, you are on the road to a dystopian nightmare. The Founders were clear: fallible individuals, limited in knowledge, were not be trusted with power to infringe on our rights.

    Nor, Madison believed, would a democratic vote offer any protection for free speech. In Federalist Paper No. 10, Madison explains that democracy offers no protection against the passion of a faction opposed to liberty:

    When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government…enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion…both the public good and the rights of other citizens.

    Masaji Ishikawa was born in 1947 in Japan to a Korean father and a Japanese mother. His father was a violent alcoholic. In 1960, Ishikawa’s family, mired in poverty, moved to North Korea as part of a mass repatriation movement that included almost 100,000 Koreans, lured by promises of a “paradise on earth,” a “land of milk and honey.”

    In his book A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea, Ishikawa learned that as a fish doesn’t understand water, he didn’t understand the freedoms he had in Japan:

    When I lived in Japan, I never really pondered my life… I became obsessed with all the things I had taken for granted before, and all the hardships that marked my life now. But that didn’t last long. I soon learned that thought was not free in North Korea. A free thought could get you killed if it slipped out. If you were lucky, you might get sent to some remote mountainous region to do hard labor. Or you might get sent to a concentration camp for political prisoners because you were deemed a “liberal” or a “capitalist” with “bad habits.” And bad habits needed to be stamped out. By means of a jackboot to the genitals. Or then again, you might simply be executed.

    Ishikawa’s family was a potential source of ideas dangerous to the North Korean police state:

    We were constantly monitored by the goons of the State Security of North Korea and the secret police. I guess we posed a double threat. We’d brought some dangerous items with us from Japan when we moved—things like bicycles and electrical appliances and half-decent clothes. What if the local villagers came to realize that their standard of living was pitiful? Worse still, what would happen if they got wind of the concept of free thought from us? They might question the wisdom of Kim Il-sung. And that was verboten.

    Education in North Korea consists mostly of studying the collected works of the despots Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il’s “revolutionary thought.” Their doctrine of Juche is the backbone of North Korean society. In his book, The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future, Victor Cha explains the indoctrination:

    Juche was seared into the minds of every North Korean every day through repetitive indoctrination sessions. There was almost a biological and anatomical rationalization for loyalty that went along with the spiritual. Juche’s writings taught that the Great Leader (Suryŏng) Kim Il-sung was the brain, the party was the nerves, and the people were the arms, legs, muscle, and bone of the state. Two messages of obedience emerged: (1) without the brain, the rest does not function; therefore, there must be complete loyalty; and (2) independent thinking was not needed, since this was handled by the brain. The only critical thinking that was allowed was self-criticism based on guilt for not serving the leader well.

    In North Korea, speaking your mind is incomprehensible.

    Reading my essay, you might think I’m overwrought. Surely, those who want to restrict hate speech don’t want “complete loyalty” to a future presidency of, let’s say, Elizabeth Warren. They don’t want Americans to memorize her speeches or study her ponderings in school.

    If you believe my worries are unfounded, read again the exchange with the Scottish teacher and Murray. The teacher thinks he is innocent in stifling dissent. He is merely spreading “national school authority policy.” The teacher knows what Murray thinks and he “knows what the authority thinks.” The view of the “authority’s” trumps the student’s opinions.

    In a future democratic socialist administration mired in economic collapse, is it a stretch to predict that protection of free speech will continue to wane making criticism of government policies verboten?

    If disagreement over the number of genders can’t be tolerated, surely disagreements on a debt jubilee or a wealth tax wouldn’t be tolerated either.

    Ishikawa didn’t understand the freedoms he had in Japan until he lost freedom in North Korea. Like Ishikawa in Japan, today’s Americans don’t know we are swimming in the warm waters of liberty, with the freedom to speak our mind.

    In degree, America is far removed from the world of North Korea. But when government is given the power to determine what is acceptable speech, we are operating out of the same totalitarian mindset that leads to dystopian hell. If totalitarianism comes to America, we will have no one to blame.


    Barry Brownstein

    Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry’s essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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