Legal take: Make Social Media Pay for Censorship
“Anyone who cares about democracy” should worry about social-media censorship, warns First Amendment law prof Jed Rubenfeld at The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a thumb on the scale that could easily tip a tightly contested election,” as it might’ve done when such “platforms famously censored” Post stories off Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. The problem: Platforms can “claim to be First Amendment speakers, constitutionally entitled to discriminate against viewpoints,” yet they don’t “pay the price for that privilege” as they (unlike newspapers and broadcasters) can’t be sued for what’s said on their networks thanks to special legal immunity. Congress shouldn’t remove the immunity but make them “liable if they censor a political campaign or any speech based on its political viewpoint.”
Libertarian: Student-Debt Pause Backfired
“A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that borrowers whose loans were frozen by the moratorium” on student debt “actually ended up in a worse position than they started in,” since they were “borrowing more on credit cards and mortgages and even accruing more student loan debt rather than working to pay off other debt they owe,” reports Reason’s Emma Camp. “By the end of 2021, borrowers who saw their student loan payments paused increased their credit card, mortgage, and car-loan debt by $1,800 on average and even took on an additional $1,500 in student loan debt compared to those whose loan payments were not paused by the moratorium.” So the pause not only “cost taxpayers billions, but it also didn’t even help decrease the debt owed by those whom the pause was supposed to benefit.”
Gadfly: Tim Scott Is Right on Black Optimism
Prez hopeful Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) was “lectured at by the hosts” of TV’s “The View” and “booed by their liberal audience,” notes Adam B. Coleman at Newsweek, merely for arguing “his own personal achievements and those of other Black Americans were not anomalies.” Scott “doesn’t need a lecture about the history of oppression”; he’s “well aware” of it, but “he’s chosen optimism.” “Progressives like [Sonny] Hostin” — “economically privileged and successful” — “see present-day Black Americans only as the descendants of slaves,” with successes due to “the benevolence of white people” or “the charity of government.” But “I see us as the people who overcame, who chose to thrive in spite of, and who are capable of creating our own successes without other people’s pity and handouts.”
From the right: AMLO Backs Trump
“Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador recently weighed in on the upcoming GOP primary in an apparent attempt to help an unlikely ally, Donald Trump,” by telling Hispanics to not give Gov. Ron DeSantis “ ‘one single vote’ ” because he doesn’t “ ‘respect migrants,’ ” observes Dave Seminara at City Journal. This “unlikely bromance” possibly grew when “Trump’s negotiating team” ignored the wishes of Sen. “Chuck Grassley and other Republicans” and left a major worker visa program for Mexico “untouched” while setting up “the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.” But “DeSantis would be wise to advertise AMLO’s non-endorsement of his campaign. Latinos and Americans of all stripes are tired of the dysfunctional status quo on immigration.”
Eye on Albany: Pro-Union Handouts Hike Costs
New York’s declining construction unions are relying on the “time-honored tactic” of “getting state government to stop people from competing with them,” grumbles the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin. Membership in building-trade unions has dropped from 40+% of the field in the mid-’80s to under 25% these last five years, but they still use their power in Albany “to reconfigure state policy to their financial benefit.” Legislation now on the table would boost union-friendly prevailing-wage and project-labor-agreement mandates. Yet support for the unions often comes “at the detriment of the state’s own policy goals,” hiking the “cost of replacing fossil-fuel power plants with solar panels and wind turbines” and of projects in “housing, transit, water quality” and other areas.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
This story originally appeared on NYPost
