The Free Market Will Take Care of Companies – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on August 10, 2018
In a free market, you express your opinion by refusing their services or products. You can boycott them or participate in boycotts. You can criticize them in media. You can patronize competitors. There are competitors right this minute for these censoring companies.
Their names are easy to find
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al who are censoring people and content have a right to do that. Calling them monopolies or public utilities is the wrong way to go. Stressing their “power” is the wrong way to go, by which I mean it contradicts libertarian thinking about products and free markets. Worrying about free speech in the context of their censorship is likewise a losing and flawed argument. Forcing companies to provide a forum of free and/or diverse speech is not compatible with freedom…
These censoring companies do not supply a public good. They are not in business chartered by society to uphold free speech. They are in business to sell a product of their own design. That product does not necessarily fit into what anyone may think of as supplying a marketplace for ideas. There is no social responsibility that they possess to supply a forum that matches up with an open and unbiased forum in which ideas compete. In the same way that a baker can decide what customers to serve or not, in a libertarian world, these kinds of companies can serve whomever they please. They can restrict content to pro-nationalists or to pro-communists or to anti-Trumpists or to neocons or to anti-war proponents or whatever group they please — in a libertarian world, because speech doesn’t involve aggression. These companies are not bound by any libertarian rules that say they must accommodate diverse views. Of course, they may be violating state-made rules or constitutional requirements; but that’s another story. However, libertarians should not be invoking flawed civil rights legislation to justify further flawed state control over these companies…
In a free market, you express your opinion by refusing their services or products. You can boycott them or participate in boycotts. You can criticize them in media. You can patronize competitors. There are competitors right this minute for these censoring companies. Their names are easy to find in comment sections discussing the suspensions of Daniel McAdams, Peter van Buren and Scott Horton or elsewhere.
Be seeing you

And we can tell them how they are supposed to think.


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