Comment by danaris
9 months ago
If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you (which is one of the things that free speech absolutists generally argue for), then you will have no way of knowing if what you buy is going to kill you.
I don't know any "free speech absolutists" who argue that fraud should be legal. Misrepresentation of a product or service you're selling is fraud. We already have laws against that.
Then consider yourself lucky, but I've seen that position argued strenuously right here on HackerNews in the past.
This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.
(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)
> American libertarians
The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.
The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.
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>If megacorporations can lie to you about what they're selling you
But this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Freedom of speech does not in any way cancel out responsibility for fraud.
Then you are not a free speech absolutist, and reasonable people will disagree about where the tipping point is.
Fire in a crowded theatre? CP? Threats of violence? Hate speech?