| >I'm going to skip over defamation for now Would child porn, trademarks, advertising regulation, nutrition labels, and threatening letters be more interesting examples? > But because power corrupts, we cannot afford to give out the power to prevent speech because it is too easily abused. Why can the same argument not be made for, say, food regulation? Or in most countries, for some weapons regulation. All of these could be easily abused to some very powerful, political ends, yet they very rarely, if ever, are. Most abuse of such laws actually comes from companies skirting them. >the power to jail you for speaking counter to what it believes is right. Nobody is arguing for that - that the government should be an arbiter of truth. Instead, the argument is that the principle of an absolute right - which cannot ever be overridden - is insufficiently justified. I have some scholarly work from philosophers of law cited in this comment if you're interested in this point of view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136757 Ultimately, I do agree with you - but not on the basis that free speech should supercede all other rights, but because the (capitalist) state cannot be trusted, and has a worse track record with censorship over other kinds of regulation. This is because I do not have faith in the populace to decide such regulation. |