The Shape of Days

Hey, you guys remember Michael Moore? He was all over the news for a while there, then sank without a trace once Spider-Man 2 came out and everybody in America remembered what a good movie was like.

Well, he’s back, and he’s a big idiot.

You’ve heard about the Linda Ronstadt flap, I assume. She said some good things about Michael Moore during a show in Vegas and was subsequently fired. Well, Michael Moore is here to remind us that that’s not okay.

What country do you live in? Last time I checked, Las Vegas is still in the United States. And in the United States, we have something called “The First Amendment.” This constitutional right gives everyone here the right to say whatever they want to say.

Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s unintentionally hilarious.

For those of y’all who, like Mr. Moore, slept through high school civics class, here’s what the first amendment says.

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; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That’s the whole thing, from start to finish. It says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. It says that the government does not have the power to limit free speech.

Congress obviously didn’t fire Linda Ronstadt. If they had, they would have been wrong; Congress lacks the power to abridge the freedom of speech, and that includes acting to censure or otherwise punish someone for what she said. So the first amendment is no help there.

What is? The “marketplace of ideas.”

In 1919, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States in which he said,

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.

Hear that? “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.” In a free marketplace, government has severely limited powers to restrict trade, but the people have the ultimate power to decide what they want to buy and sell. In terms of ideas, that means the people have the power to decide what they do and do not want to listen to. In a case like this one, where someone was paying someone else to perform in front of an audience, he absolutely had the right to decide that he didn’t like her show, and fire her for it.

There’s more on Holmes’ seminal decision here, albeit in a different context.

• “Michael Moore Hates America”
• ‘Moral carpet-bombing from 10,000 feet’
• Ron Moore remembers Michael Piller