Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Economics of Speech, In Short

 0. [Free as in beer] vs. [free as in speech]: not different. Price = $0. Subsidized beer & subsidized speech.


1. Free speech => inexpensive speech => cheap speech. (You get what you pay for.)

2. Price of speech is fixed. Glut of speech.

3. Gresham's law. Bad speech drives out good speech.

C: Free speech is bad speech. 


Bad speech can be precisely defined: speech that is worth less than what you pay for it. Speech that makes you poorer to hear. Free speech is worse than silence.

Corollary: Expensive speech is driven off the market. Price fixing means selling price below production cost. No valuable speech to be had at any price.


Alt:

0. Speech = $0.
1. Any scheme where a good is given away for free is communism.
C: Free speech is communist speech. Loyalty to the party, brother.
Corollary: free speech is death cult speech.


Alt 2:

0. Free speech is subsidized speech.
1. Public choice theorem.
C: Free speech is bad speech.


Caveat: [giving stuff away] where the expectation is to create more prospective customers can work out to buying customers rather than giving away wealth. Also, charity is not impossible, but most aren't charitable and it should not be a normal custom.


Alt 3:
Free speech => everyone-is-a-charity-case speech. Who watches...no, who pays? Where does this buck stop? 


Notes.

American "censorship" is to stop subsidizing your speech. Clever, no? Pushes everything one step further way, generally getting the important consequences beyond the inferential horizon. Causes reality to become counter-intuitive. Forms dependence, very deliberately. The peasants can tell when they get their drug supply cut off though, regardless of where things are on the horizon.

Worse than silence: a free-speech domain is dominated by those who are dumping automatically generated speech, not by strategic speakers, investing speakers, etc. Big ol' trash fire or speech sewer. 

Why is all TV bad? The customer is the advertiser. The viewer is the product. Are you trying to be sold? The time you put into TV must be worth more than what the TV puts in, or they would go out of business. (Why is Facebook bad? Why is everyone Twitter doesn't suppress a bad tweeter? Why is 4chan a sewer?) 

Free beer isn't free. Someone is paying for it. Free speech isn't free. Someone is paying for it. In general if you can't tell who is paying for it, it's the government. It's government-subsidized speech. (Or beer.) Paid your 4chan subscription lately?
The peasants instinctively know that free speech is government-subsidized speech. More precisely, the instinctively expect the head chief to take his fist to anyone saying stupid shit, and thus anyone who speaks and isn't fisted is chief-endorsed. (They don't have a chief, but this news is only 10,000 years old or so and the peasants haven't heard yet.) Any "free" speech that isn't suppressed the peasants count as government-endorsed, which makes a bad/death speech regime that much worse again. This is why Transgressives freak out when masculine Fascists speak. They're hijacking the system to force Transgressives to implicitly endorse masculine Fascism, and, as feminine Fascists, they really hate that. 


Solution: quit digging.

Don't subsidize speech. Internalize the externalized costs.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Stated as a law, it would be "publishers/platforms should not externalize distribution costs" -> is this good enough?

Alrenous said...

I like it.

Publishing is not free and there's an iron law making publishers responsible for the ideas they publish. E.g. nobody tried to sue every Napster user, they just sued Napster.

Of course Transgressives punish you for publishing good ideas, and reward you for publishing bad ideas.

BSRK Aditya said...

So, the flow of content is like this: author -> publisher -> distributor -> customer/advertiser.

The flow of money is like this: customer/advertiser -> distributor -> publisher -> author.

The government can be any of the four (c/ad, d, p & au).

BSRK Aditya said...

(Normal speech)

Content flow: Author -> Publisher -> Distributor -> Customer
Money flow: Customer -> Distributor -> Publisher -> Author.


(Ad speech)

Content flow: Ad Author -> Ad Publisher -> Ad Distributor -> Ad Customer
Money flow: Customer -> Advertiser -> {Ad Author, Ad Publisher, Ad Distributor}

It appears to me, that once we trace the money back, we arrive at those who purchase after seeing ads.

So.. counter ad speech?

Content Flow: Counter Ad Author -> Counter Ad Publisher -> Counter Ad Distributor -> Customer
Money Flow: Counter Ad Ideologue -> Counter Ad Non-profit -> {Ad Author, Ad Publisher, Ad Distributor}