1) Defending Disney's right to control its own municipality on libertarian grounds seems . . . odd. It's fine to be against retaliatory legislation but this is a unique situation that is much more nuanced than anything in Citizens United.
2) We have at least 50 years of data on the results of Goldberg's high-ground strategy, where Republicans don't retaliate like this (but Democrats do). The data are in and the strategy doesn't work. It leads the current situation where we have a progressive-corporatist state and we're forced to put our pronouns in our email signatures or whatever. In theory I agree with Goldberg's position. In practice, it's way past time to admit it doesn't work and to look for something else.
In the Game of Thrones series, there's a good quote from a guy complaining about the fact that ultimately, all of the vows one is forced to take come into conflict:
"So many vows...they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other.”
That's how I see the Disney thing. Free speech is an important principle to protect (and not just the letter of the law, but in the spirit of the law)
But legal equality (which is what you can boil down almost every government giveaway to the preferred groups) is also an incredibly important principle. Giving specific people and groups of people special rights is fundamentally no different than taking away rights from other people and groups.
Ultimately, I'd argue the second principle (legal equality) actually dominates the first (freedom of speech). If we could enforce legal equality between all people and groups, there would be no grounds for government to discriminate on freedom of speech.
That is, if Disney couldn't be rewarded or punished by conferring or denying rights, its freedom of speech would be a wholly non-governmental issue.
Exxon, after DeSantis on Disney, banned flying gay (groomer?) Pride flags and BLM flags.
We American normals, Reps and others, won't get respect from Dem woke elites until they suffer some of what they've been punishing the normals with.
I want cooperation. I want liberty and limited gov't.
We do NOT have as much limited gov't as is optimal, because Dems want more and do not want to cooperate. Using "state capacity" against the intolerant Democrats is part of the only way we'll evolve to have more mutual respect and tolerance among folks who disagree.
This is a particularly good hill to declare cooperation steps of "tit for tat" punishment against an egregious attack against normal age appropriate talk with 6 year olds. (A better hill than Walsh's alt excellent hill about "Disinformation".)
"Don't say Groomer" -- when talking with a six year old, if you're talking about your sex life, you're grooming.
The GOP, Trump, DeSantis, Cruz, and others should be courting the mothers of kids who are unhappy with current Dem groomer friendly practices - and installing state policies to protect the innocence of young kids. Till 9? 11, 12, 13? "Under 12" is a good norm to keep, and probably optimal.
This seems likely to be mostly true about changes in teen age brains:
On point #2: there was a WSJ story today about corporate CEOs now thinking more carefully about making public pronouncements on political issues.
I don’t personally love what DeSantis is doing here (I’m very conflicted as a life-long Disney fan). But it is certainly true that CEOs have been able to parrot nonsense from the progressive left for far too long without having to suffer any negative consequences. If this gets CEOs to shut up about politics and go back to their jobs, it could be a good thing.
I agree. It'd be even better if they just ran their businesses instead of picking political sides. But we can safely say that one way to guarantee that that won't happen is for Republicans to continue taking the high ground as Goldberg suggests.
As others have noted, the main issue is not one of free speech per se, but rather of government granting special privileges.
Every libertarian should be hesitant about the granting of special privileges for precisely this reason: it creates a means to control the beneficiaries. To take an example from my own life, we no longer accept state funds to help pay for homeschooling because the lovely state of California is attempting to use control of the purse strings to dictate the curriculum we teach our children.
I wish to live in a society were all citizens were granted the autonomy that Disney possessed in Florida, but a system in which the law is applied equally is preferable to one in which some are granted special privileges unfairly.
And given that we do live in a society where government-granted privileges can be used as a way to manipulate private actors, I must say I'm glad it is being used against my enemies. That's not just bare partisanship on my part either: I think that a tit-for-tat strategy might actually result in a de-escalation of the culture war. At the very least, it's not obvious that it will result in a escalation.
Just like the development of castles led to the end of viking raids, private actors will develop defensive strategies that will make this form of economic warfare less viable: things like resisting government patronage, diversifying payment providers, self-hosting, etc.
"Every libertarian should be hesitant about the granting of special privileges for precisely this reason: it creates a means to control the beneficiaries."
Excellent point. I know a number of Catholic priests who want the church tax exemption to be eliminated for just that reason.
‘… then seeing the company punished for its political views should make you unhappy, or at least give you pause.‘
First amendement gives the Right to express a political view, but it confers no Right not to suffer the consequences. But in any case, isn’t it normal for people to be punished for their political views? Isn’t that what elections are?
But, was it ‘punished’ for expressing its political views, or its contempt of and attempt to pervert the course of democratic government and stated intention to use corporate resources to do so.
And… anyone who steps into the political arena must expect political rules and sanctions to apply.
Corporate management has no business expressing a ‘corporate’ political view: there is no aggregate politics view of the shareholders to express. Government of Florida - quite rightly -fired a shot across corporate bows: stay out of my territorial waters.
I agree that Disney’s comments were repugnant for several reasons, but can one really say that the “First amendement gives the Right to express a political view, but it confers no Right not to suffer the consequences” when it is the state that is meting out the consequences? Imagine a scenario where drivers licenses started being revoked for persons found to have made comments offensive to the woke. I’m no expert but I’d think a free speech and/or First Amendment right would be implicated.
Revoking drivers licenses or seizing assets from a corporation for political reasons is off limits.
Withdrawing political favors is not off limits. If Disney wages a legal battle against a law they don't like, it seems reasonable that they might lose political favors that they were getting.
Corporations give money to politicians to buy favors and influence. If they take that money away, the politicians revoke the favors. You might frame that as a punishment, but that's how politics works.
Well yes one can because it is factually correct it does not confer a Right not to suffer consequences of speech.
‘ Imagine a scenario where drivers licenses started being revoked for persons found to have made comments offensive to the woke.’
You mean like the State freezing bank accounts or seizing crowdsourced funds, declaring people with opposing views terrorists, IRS investigations? I think you might be a bit behind with the News.
Exactly. Canada has gone totalitarian, and has no rights to free speech against government action. The right to speech means you don't get punished by the state for your speech.
Let me add another point to support the cancelation of Disney's privilege in Florida. The privilege was granted because Disney was expected to provide entertainment to children (yes, others may claim that it was mainly because of Disney's contribution to overall development of the Orlando area but I bet that if we reviewed Disney's original petition it would claim that attracting families with children would be the basis for its development). Now by changing its own policies about children, Disney has frustrated the purpose of that privilege. Yes, whenever you receive a privilege from government, you are obliged to comply with its purpose. I advise those complaining about the cancelation first to read the original petition and concession of the privilege.
Disney World, like any other business that caters primarily to children, naturally attracts as would-be employees the kind of persons who are not to be trusted around children, and certainly has a greater percentage of them than the general population. Why have we not heard of child abuse cases there? Because so long as Disney has the power to hire and fire the local police, it has the power to make accusations of that sort disappear before the public can ever find out they happened. This is plenty of cause to take that power away from Disney, regardless of its positions on political questions.
You are correct, and maybe it’s a stretch, but one might further argue by continuing the privilege, Florida would be condoning, or an accessory to the sexual abuse of young children. Perhaps not legally, but on a moral plane.
As you say it was a privilege: Disney is not being prevented from exercising its Right of free expression which is protected by Law, but a privilege is in somebody’s gift, not in Law, and there is no Right to it. The general rule is if you abuse the privilege, it is withdrawn. We used to learn that as kids along with the word, No. These days we have a layer of young adults in society, the product of poor parenting and indiscipline in State schools, who have never been told, No, and for whom everything they want is a ‘Right’.
Gov DeSantis stands in loco parents rôle. Good for him.
From what I've read about the provisions that allowed the legislature to create the Reedy Creek Improvement District among others, and especially the provisions for disbanding such a District, it's pretty clear that the legislature at the time was creating a vehicle for funding projects in largely residential areas. I'm sure Orange & Osceola counties were happy to be relieved of the burden of providing services in Disney World prior to the development that happened around it but it's not entirely clear to me how Disney was able to bootstrap that into effectively eliminating the county government oversight.
I don't know the details of Disney's privilege, but in the past 60 years I have had to deal with situations in which a (non U.S.) government decided to exempt a few companies from paying some taxes or "to develop" special areas or "to monopolize" some production or trade. Even authoritarian governments (like the Chinese government) pretended to justify their decisions with the prospect of some great, specific benefits so any change in the company's policy that could lead to the expectation of lower or no benefit could have been enough cause for terminating the privilege. BTW, I'm glad that my mentors and friends Anne Krueger and Gordon Tullock developed the idea of rent-seeking because those privileges were the cases they had in mind that idea. You can argue that those privileges are a minor issue in the U.S. but they were not in the countries in which I worked (and I doubt it's a minor issue in the U.S. because when I was working in Beijing and HK during the 1990s I was often approached by U.S. companies to advise them how to get the privileges).
People should be able to earn a paycheck and have their kids watched during the day without having to worry about political/culture war garbage.
I really don't care what laws or principals are necessary to make that happen, whatever they are I'm for them and whatever is in the way of that I'm against. If your ideology ends in grooming seven year olds its worthless.
I'm going to propose a heuristic that anybody citing Citizens United on corporate speech, especially the claim that it gave corporations expanded 1st Amendment rights, is probably grasping at straws. The specific law in the case criminalized advocacy against candidates prior to primary and general elections, and had been used by the FEC to prohibit many attempts by both liberal and conservative groups to campaign against office holders over the years. It had nothing to do with issue advocacy of the kind Disney decided to practice. That kind of advocacy has never been prohibited so long as it was not coordinated with a political candidate, nor did it overturn other restrictions on corporate political activity that are legal for individual citizens. I also recall at the time many conservatives, likely including Goldberg, made pointed references that *media* corporations like the New York Times, as opposed to non-media companies like Koch Industries, were already largely exempted from this restriction when they spoke through their media outlets.
Invoking Citizens United seems a bit of a stretch: SCOTUS ruled that government prohibition of independent expenditures in service to a political campaign violated the corporation's First Amendment rights - a prior constraint on those rights. Even if you consider Disney Corp's opposition to the Parental Rights in Education act participation in a political campaign, Florida has taken no act to prohibit its speech. Disney acted politically and the Florida legislature acted politically in response: Are political actors now to be protected from political responses? Are all government benefits, individual exemptions bestowed politically particularly, now equivalent to a First Amendment right? Quite amusing to see "libertarians" making that case.
My version of the Null Hypothesis in American education (and I thought it was your's) is that no intervention will result in a scalable, permanent *improvement*. There is no low-hanging or medium-hanging fruit left, and to get the high-hanging fruit would require doing things really differently.
That was my sense as well, that the current system is essentially governed by a n-root diminishing returns function. Getting more out of it at this point is really hard, but you can tank it pretty easily. Conversely, the really bad schools can be improved by dealing with the violence, awful teachers and uninvolved students/parents, but that only gets you to the level of "decent" schools. To get better the only solution within the system is to simply get top end parents/students in the school.
"To get better the only solution within the system is to simply get top end parents/students in the school."
Yes! Sweeny's First Law of Education says, "Good students make good schools; good schools don't make good students." Right now teachers make great efforts to get students more involved, but that is pretty much impossible without making major changes to what is taught and how a student spends the school day.
I know that it is an article of faith among many people that there are lots of awful teachers but I think it is more accurate that most teachers are reasonable competent, often hurt by stupid policies (e.g., not holding disruptive students responsible), and asked to do the impossible. Students are expected to learn way more than they ever will, about things that they often have little interest in and that they will never use outside the school.
Shockingly :), lots of students don't put in much effort and by September have forgotten most of what they "learned" during the previous school year. That's true of high school and, to a lesser extent, middle school. Prior to puberty, young people are more docile and are often information sponges.
Well, lest we be too soft on teachers, there are a lot of very incompetent teachers out there. Which is to say, there are many awful teachers that don't care and are just doing the job because they can't get fired and don't know how to do anything else that pays as well, but there are also lots of teachers that are decent people but don't know how to teach. They were never trained in classroom management, methods of conveying information, what homework is even for, etc. The education school system that produces certified teachers does not produce teachers who have learned the trade of how to teach, and hasn't done so consistently for at least 50 years. The really good teachers in the schools are largely old enough to have actually be taught long ago, self taught, naturally talented, or some combination thereof. My guess is that by now, most of that first group are on the brink of retirement, so we are hoping the last two sets stick it out, but the vast majority of teachers replacing the retirees are unskilled in their trade. Many are probably nice people, but incompetent.
And of course, there is just a massive pile of insane policy getting in the way too. I don't want to undersell that either! The fact that kids come out of school knowing anything at all is as much a testament to how well kids soak up information and learn on their own than it is to decent schooling.
I can assure that just about every teacher in the United States had to take courses dealing with "classroom management, methods of conveying information, what homework is even for, etc." A good deal of it, of course, is b.s. but some isn't, and newbies learn a good deal from experienced teachers about what reality is like. There are, of course, some really bad teachers but my experience (and a little research) is that most teachers are not "nice people, but incompetent". What makes you say that, aside from working backwards, "students don't learn much, so teachers must be incompetent."
But that's as wrong as thinking, "black people do poorly in the United States, so it must be a profoundly racist society, chock full of disabling white privilege."
For a short while during Bush/Obama "education reform", there was an attempt to measure teacher effectiveness in terms of "value added": how much did one class improve compared to another? Did Ms. Smith's class go from a 5th grade reading level to a 6 1/2 while Mr. Jones' went from a 5 to a 5.75? My impression is that value addeds were not terribly consistent from year to year. Last year's good teacher was this year's mediocre teacher.
In any case, value addeds will depend on the intelligence and motivation of the students. Most educators believe, "If we could motivate our students, they would learn so much more." That's true, in the same useless way that "if everybody loved everybody, there would be no war" is useless. There are very substantial limits on how much schools can motivate students. Most of the students are about as motivated as they will ever get.
No matter who teaches the Honors classes, the students learn more, do better on year end tests, than students in the College classes. Switch the teachers and they still do. Some teachers are more interesting; some are more boring. That may make a big difference to how a student feels it doesn't make much difference to how much is learned.
You preface a sentence, "If we don't think that human capacity varies wildly and we think that teaching skills can be taught ..." I think the combination of human capacity and motivation varies very widely. I also think some teaching skills can be taught but that teaching skills have substantial limits. There are no skills that can turn the stupid and unmotivated into high achievers (by which I mean high achievers in school. Some turn into very successful tradespeople or business people). People can be taught how to run skillfully. They cannot be taught to fly.
The most useful part of ed school is student teaching.
I say that from personal experience with teachers when I visit their classrooms, friends who worked in schools and went through those classes in management, two parents who worked in education for 40+ years, spending time with student teachers, as well as my father's long time friend who is an educator trainer and consultant. Not to mention teaching at the college level myself.
The classes exist, but they don't teach the skills needed, or the would be teachers don't absorb it. From what I know of my friends who took them, the courses focus very little on how to teach effectively and much more on... other things.
It also doesn't take much time spent in classrooms to see teachers making pretty basic mistakes with regard to handling the class. Simple things like keeping track of little kids and what they are doing, remaining the center of attention and direction instead of just being background noise, or just planning ahead and having things for kids to do when they get done with the "quiet time work" before their classmates. The skill just isn't there.
When looking at the research, you have no doubt seen the estimates around the difference between the educational output (however that is measured) of the median teachers and the best teachers. If true, that implies that the dispersion of teaching talent is either extremely wide such that the curve is very flat, or that the median teacher just isn't very skilled even if talented. If the dispersion of talent is wide it should probably be noticeable to people outside the classroom, something "special" about the person. We tend to notice that a bit, like people who are very good at coming up with analogies that get to the root of a concept, or just charismatic in a way that makes you want to pay attention to them. Very few teachers, however, seem to come across that way. How many teachers have successful podcasts or YouTube channels where they talk about their subject matter? I can think of a few professors, but very few, and some kid's shows, although it isn't obvious that kid's shows teach as opposed to entertain. That is some evidence that it isn't just piles of raw talent for teaching that is doing a lot of the work, although weak evidence surely. While some good teachers no doubt do get by on raw talent, I have personally had enough workmanlike teachers that, while not brilliant, certainly got the job done to think innate talent is not critical.
If the raw talent issue isn't what is driving the gap, that leaves the skill side. If the median skill level is low regardless of talent, then you can see wide ranges of effectiveness with a more mundane distribution of talent, particularly if the median is low because pretty much everyone is getting the same low level of poor training. If we don't think that human capacity varies wildly and we think that teaching skills can be taught, wide variation in output should be largely a question of those skills being acquired or not.
Now, to be fair, one can argue that being a good teacher can't be taught, and that it is really largely a matter of talent and just figuring out what works for you in your particular domain. Maybe the skills that let you teach 3rd grade English well do not translate at all to 4th grade Social Studies, or even 3rd grade English at another school. I am skeptical of this, but transferability is by no means guaranteed, so I could see that. If that is the case, however, it makes it even more likely that education degrees are a complete waste of time, because you would not be able to impart much at all skill to nascent teachers, especially outside of extremely specific topics. The incompetent teacher story is still true, just that it isn't a lack of training but rather a lack of figuring it out for themselves that almost no one manages to do anyway.
It is very much the same at the collegiate level, by the way. No part of getting a PhD is "how to teach a class." It is just assumed you have been in enough school to pick it up by osmosis, without thinking about what habits you are absorbing. At GMU there was a special class about teaching and research you had to apply to take. Not required, and not guaranteed you could get into it. The best part of that class was the instructor would sit in on the classes you were teaching and take notes and give feed back. That is, of course, if you were already teaching at the college level.
So far as I know from talking with other grads and newly minted PhDs, that class was largely unique.
So, yea, I have a lot of reason to believe that many K-12 teachers are just not well trained. College education departments have been open about the fact they focus on political indoctrination instead of focusing on how to teach. Even the most dedicated teacher is being set up for failure by being required to go through those classes and coming out without any decent idea of how to educate, and a lot of bad ideas for that matter. Then throw them into an entirely dysfunctional public school bureaucracy, with a union more interested in protecting the negative marginal productivity teachers than anything, and is it any wonder that there is such high attrition?
My version too, with "requiring schooling for young kids" as part of the Null Hypothesis, with such schooling to be oriented towards reading, writing, and math, and to be in person.
"No schooling", or even "no in-person schooling" are alternatives which, not surprisingly, mean generally less education. Probably less for 70-80% of the kids, no difference for 5-15%, and maybe 5-10% actually do get a bit more (likely indicating horrible local schools, and getting more out of reading safely at home, or some such story).
Douthat has a nuanced column on the Disney battle and the broader question of GOP’s relationship to corporate America.
“But there is a conservative case for the principle of what he’s doing — a case that while the government can’t single you out for special disfavor for your political speech, what is being withdrawn in Disney’s case is special favor, linked to the bipartisan and indeed above-partisanship position that the House of Mouse has long enjoyed in Florida... I don’t know if this argument is constitutionally convincing when applied to something as crudely retaliatory-seeming as the DeSantis move. But it’s convincing at some level of distance.”
> One or two days a week, small groups would combine for games and social activities.
Schoolchildren at least get recess &c every day/ to play and interact in, and that's little enough. Limiting it to one or two days a week is horrible. I believe that achieving a sufficiently high density of children is an important desideratum for any such newly enabled living arrangement developments.
I see the Disney situation as a sign of the problems with our times, but not in the free speech realm. Rather, I see it more paralleling the removal of SALT deductions in 2016: good governance move that apparently was impossible to do before someone powerful got pissy and wanted to punish someone.
To me, that's a real problem with our political system: Both 'sides' support the status quo of corruption and kickbacks and so obvious good governance moves are elusive; only when someone is willing to kick the hornets' nests do we get improvements, but the motivations for doing the kicking are not good and so are erratic.
"But if you support corporate free speech on principle, then seeing the company punished for its political views should make you unhappy, or at least give you pause."
I agree in principle, but as someone said above: Disney has these weird privileges in Florida that no other corporation has; that makes the situation a little unique. Is there a good reason they should continue to be granted such special privileges by successive gubernatorial administrations when they work to undermine the administration's legislative agenda?
Additionally, if Disney were simply being punished for advocating for its perceived self-interest, I would again have more qualms. Instead, what happened, as far as I can tell, was that the company's leadership team allowed itself to be bullied by a (probably relatively small) group of left wing ideologues it employs into taking sides in a state-level culture war legislative battle that really doesn't concern the company's commercial interests at all. I confess I have little desire to stand up for the rights of Disney when it won't stand up for itself, and instead allows its employees to force it into participating in a partisan food fight that benefits no one. Maybe this makes me some sort of hypocrite, but frankly I'm willing to bite the bullet on that one. I plead apathy.
Rather than comment on Disney, l am going to draw on my experience with virtually schooling last year. We helped our daughter with our granddaughter. That experience makes me question the model of small groups centered on homes. That takes remarkable parents to pull off.
I also worry about the social interactions. Our granddaughter really needs the social stimulus of other children. That requires a larger grouping.
I would like to see the current public-school model broken up, but maybe there's something in between a classroom with 1 teacher and 25 kids and small groups of families that could develop.
These adverse effects may, indeed, “fade out with time,” and they might do so even if what students got during COVID-19 instead of normal schooling were continued indefinitely, normal schooling never being resumed. But if the effects faded out only by age 50, or 40, or even 30, they would still be notably bad.
"If we did not have our stupid, centralized public school system, I think that child care/education for young children would be a home-based business." That could be one result of a proper Child Tax Credit.
"On the substantive issue of whether 7-year-olds should be given a sex-ed curriculum, I have no sympathy with Disney whatsoever." Is that the effect of the bill and only way of effecting that result? Was there an outbreak of 7 year old sex education that could only be thwarted by that text in a ne state law? Or was this just "do something-ism?"
I'd like to hear Kling or others flesh out the principal of Corporate free speech in the Disney case.
First, Disney wasn't engaging in speech, they were engaging in a legal battle to strike down a law that they didn't like. Disney didn't speak to the public about the issue during elections. After the law was passed, the Disney spokesperson said, “Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that,"
Secondly, punishment here is withdrawing of special favors that they weren't entitled to in the first place. Politicians are constantly giving favors to friends, and denying those favors to others. I'm not saying that's good, but I'd like to hear where you draw the line between what is fair game and what is not. Corporations have free speech, but that can never be perfectly free from political consequences.
Lastly, Republicans are pressuring Disney to be neutral and stay out of issues that don't directly affect their business. Democrats are pressuring Disney to endorse their agenda and wage legal battles against Republican opposition. I imagine someone might say, both parties shouldn't pressure Disney in either direction. That's fair, but it's not fair to expect one side to unilaterally disarm and forfeit advantage to their rivals.
Two quibbles with the Disney story:
1) Defending Disney's right to control its own municipality on libertarian grounds seems . . . odd. It's fine to be against retaliatory legislation but this is a unique situation that is much more nuanced than anything in Citizens United.
2) We have at least 50 years of data on the results of Goldberg's high-ground strategy, where Republicans don't retaliate like this (but Democrats do). The data are in and the strategy doesn't work. It leads the current situation where we have a progressive-corporatist state and we're forced to put our pronouns in our email signatures or whatever. In theory I agree with Goldberg's position. In practice, it's way past time to admit it doesn't work and to look for something else.
In the Game of Thrones series, there's a good quote from a guy complaining about the fact that ultimately, all of the vows one is forced to take come into conflict:
"So many vows...they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other.”
That's how I see the Disney thing. Free speech is an important principle to protect (and not just the letter of the law, but in the spirit of the law)
But legal equality (which is what you can boil down almost every government giveaway to the preferred groups) is also an incredibly important principle. Giving specific people and groups of people special rights is fundamentally no different than taking away rights from other people and groups.
Ultimately, I'd argue the second principle (legal equality) actually dominates the first (freedom of speech). If we could enforce legal equality between all people and groups, there would be no grounds for government to discriminate on freedom of speech.
That is, if Disney couldn't be rewarded or punished by conferring or denying rights, its freedom of speech would be a wholly non-governmental issue.
Republicans want cooperation, and therefore we need a LOT more "tit for tat".
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/366821.The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
Exxon, after DeSantis on Disney, banned flying gay (groomer?) Pride flags and BLM flags.
We American normals, Reps and others, won't get respect from Dem woke elites until they suffer some of what they've been punishing the normals with.
I want cooperation. I want liberty and limited gov't.
We do NOT have as much limited gov't as is optimal, because Dems want more and do not want to cooperate. Using "state capacity" against the intolerant Democrats is part of the only way we'll evolve to have more mutual respect and tolerance among folks who disagree.
This is a particularly good hill to declare cooperation steps of "tit for tat" punishment against an egregious attack against normal age appropriate talk with 6 year olds. (A better hill than Walsh's alt excellent hill about "Disinformation".)
"Don't say Groomer" -- when talking with a six year old, if you're talking about your sex life, you're grooming.
The GOP, Trump, DeSantis, Cruz, and others should be courting the mothers of kids who are unhappy with current Dem groomer friendly practices - and installing state policies to protect the innocence of young kids. Till 9? 11, 12, 13? "Under 12" is a good norm to keep, and probably optimal.
This seems likely to be mostly true about changes in teen age brains:
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2022/04/29/teen-brain-mom-voice/3311651253694/
On point #2: there was a WSJ story today about corporate CEOs now thinking more carefully about making public pronouncements on political issues.
I don’t personally love what DeSantis is doing here (I’m very conflicted as a life-long Disney fan). But it is certainly true that CEOs have been able to parrot nonsense from the progressive left for far too long without having to suffer any negative consequences. If this gets CEOs to shut up about politics and go back to their jobs, it could be a good thing.
I agree. It'd be even better if they just ran their businesses instead of picking political sides. But we can safely say that one way to guarantee that that won't happen is for Republicans to continue taking the high ground as Goldberg suggests.
As others have noted, the main issue is not one of free speech per se, but rather of government granting special privileges.
Every libertarian should be hesitant about the granting of special privileges for precisely this reason: it creates a means to control the beneficiaries. To take an example from my own life, we no longer accept state funds to help pay for homeschooling because the lovely state of California is attempting to use control of the purse strings to dictate the curriculum we teach our children.
I wish to live in a society were all citizens were granted the autonomy that Disney possessed in Florida, but a system in which the law is applied equally is preferable to one in which some are granted special privileges unfairly.
And given that we do live in a society where government-granted privileges can be used as a way to manipulate private actors, I must say I'm glad it is being used against my enemies. That's not just bare partisanship on my part either: I think that a tit-for-tat strategy might actually result in a de-escalation of the culture war. At the very least, it's not obvious that it will result in a escalation.
Just like the development of castles led to the end of viking raids, private actors will develop defensive strategies that will make this form of economic warfare less viable: things like resisting government patronage, diversifying payment providers, self-hosting, etc.
"Every libertarian should be hesitant about the granting of special privileges for precisely this reason: it creates a means to control the beneficiaries."
Excellent point. I know a number of Catholic priests who want the church tax exemption to be eliminated for just that reason.
‘… then seeing the company punished for its political views should make you unhappy, or at least give you pause.‘
First amendement gives the Right to express a political view, but it confers no Right not to suffer the consequences. But in any case, isn’t it normal for people to be punished for their political views? Isn’t that what elections are?
But, was it ‘punished’ for expressing its political views, or its contempt of and attempt to pervert the course of democratic government and stated intention to use corporate resources to do so.
And… anyone who steps into the political arena must expect political rules and sanctions to apply.
Corporate management has no business expressing a ‘corporate’ political view: there is no aggregate politics view of the shareholders to express. Government of Florida - quite rightly -fired a shot across corporate bows: stay out of my territorial waters.
I agree that Disney’s comments were repugnant for several reasons, but can one really say that the “First amendement gives the Right to express a political view, but it confers no Right not to suffer the consequences” when it is the state that is meting out the consequences? Imagine a scenario where drivers licenses started being revoked for persons found to have made comments offensive to the woke. I’m no expert but I’d think a free speech and/or First Amendment right would be implicated.
Revoking drivers licenses or seizing assets from a corporation for political reasons is off limits.
Withdrawing political favors is not off limits. If Disney wages a legal battle against a law they don't like, it seems reasonable that they might lose political favors that they were getting.
Corporations give money to politicians to buy favors and influence. If they take that money away, the politicians revoke the favors. You might frame that as a punishment, but that's how politics works.
Well yes one can because it is factually correct it does not confer a Right not to suffer consequences of speech.
‘ Imagine a scenario where drivers licenses started being revoked for persons found to have made comments offensive to the woke.’
You mean like the State freezing bank accounts or seizing crowdsourced funds, declaring people with opposing views terrorists, IRS investigations? I think you might be a bit behind with the News.
No, it's those actions that are out of compliance with the First Amendment.
Exactly. Canada has gone totalitarian, and has no rights to free speech against government action. The right to speech means you don't get punished by the state for your speech.
Let me add another point to support the cancelation of Disney's privilege in Florida. The privilege was granted because Disney was expected to provide entertainment to children (yes, others may claim that it was mainly because of Disney's contribution to overall development of the Orlando area but I bet that if we reviewed Disney's original petition it would claim that attracting families with children would be the basis for its development). Now by changing its own policies about children, Disney has frustrated the purpose of that privilege. Yes, whenever you receive a privilege from government, you are obliged to comply with its purpose. I advise those complaining about the cancelation first to read the original petition and concession of the privilege.
There's a stronger reason than that.
Disney World, like any other business that caters primarily to children, naturally attracts as would-be employees the kind of persons who are not to be trusted around children, and certainly has a greater percentage of them than the general population. Why have we not heard of child abuse cases there? Because so long as Disney has the power to hire and fire the local police, it has the power to make accusations of that sort disappear before the public can ever find out they happened. This is plenty of cause to take that power away from Disney, regardless of its positions on political questions.
There have been a few recent Disney employees accused & arrested for abuse of kids.
You are correct, and maybe it’s a stretch, but one might further argue by continuing the privilege, Florida would be condoning, or an accessory to the sexual abuse of young children. Perhaps not legally, but on a moral plane.
As you say it was a privilege: Disney is not being prevented from exercising its Right of free expression which is protected by Law, but a privilege is in somebody’s gift, not in Law, and there is no Right to it. The general rule is if you abuse the privilege, it is withdrawn. We used to learn that as kids along with the word, No. These days we have a layer of young adults in society, the product of poor parenting and indiscipline in State schools, who have never been told, No, and for whom everything they want is a ‘Right’.
Gov DeSantis stands in loco parents rôle. Good for him.
From what I've read about the provisions that allowed the legislature to create the Reedy Creek Improvement District among others, and especially the provisions for disbanding such a District, it's pretty clear that the legislature at the time was creating a vehicle for funding projects in largely residential areas. I'm sure Orange & Osceola counties were happy to be relieved of the burden of providing services in Disney World prior to the development that happened around it but it's not entirely clear to me how Disney was able to bootstrap that into effectively eliminating the county government oversight.
I don't know the details of Disney's privilege, but in the past 60 years I have had to deal with situations in which a (non U.S.) government decided to exempt a few companies from paying some taxes or "to develop" special areas or "to monopolize" some production or trade. Even authoritarian governments (like the Chinese government) pretended to justify their decisions with the prospect of some great, specific benefits so any change in the company's policy that could lead to the expectation of lower or no benefit could have been enough cause for terminating the privilege. BTW, I'm glad that my mentors and friends Anne Krueger and Gordon Tullock developed the idea of rent-seeking because those privileges were the cases they had in mind that idea. You can argue that those privileges are a minor issue in the U.S. but they were not in the countries in which I worked (and I doubt it's a minor issue in the U.S. because when I was working in Beijing and HK during the 1990s I was often approached by U.S. companies to advise them how to get the privileges).
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/04/28/precedent-supporting-constitutionality-of-florida-legislatures-dissolving-disney-special-government-district/
This is helpful and suggests, at least in the 11th Circuit (covers FL), that there isn’t a 1st Amendment problem.
People should be able to earn a paycheck and have their kids watched during the day without having to worry about political/culture war garbage.
I really don't care what laws or principals are necessary to make that happen, whatever they are I'm for them and whatever is in the way of that I'm against. If your ideology ends in grooming seven year olds its worthless.
This. A very common normal set of views, which the Dems oppose but the Reps don't yet quite support clearly.
I'm going to propose a heuristic that anybody citing Citizens United on corporate speech, especially the claim that it gave corporations expanded 1st Amendment rights, is probably grasping at straws. The specific law in the case criminalized advocacy against candidates prior to primary and general elections, and had been used by the FEC to prohibit many attempts by both liberal and conservative groups to campaign against office holders over the years. It had nothing to do with issue advocacy of the kind Disney decided to practice. That kind of advocacy has never been prohibited so long as it was not coordinated with a political candidate, nor did it overturn other restrictions on corporate political activity that are legal for individual citizens. I also recall at the time many conservatives, likely including Goldberg, made pointed references that *media* corporations like the New York Times, as opposed to non-media companies like Koch Industries, were already largely exempted from this restriction when they spoke through their media outlets.
Invoking Citizens United seems a bit of a stretch: SCOTUS ruled that government prohibition of independent expenditures in service to a political campaign violated the corporation's First Amendment rights - a prior constraint on those rights. Even if you consider Disney Corp's opposition to the Parental Rights in Education act participation in a political campaign, Florida has taken no act to prohibit its speech. Disney acted politically and the Florida legislature acted politically in response: Are political actors now to be protected from political responses? Are all government benefits, individual exemptions bestowed politically particularly, now equivalent to a First Amendment right? Quite amusing to see "libertarians" making that case.
Live by the grift, die by the grift.
My version of the Null Hypothesis in American education (and I thought it was your's) is that no intervention will result in a scalable, permanent *improvement*. There is no low-hanging or medium-hanging fruit left, and to get the high-hanging fruit would require doing things really differently.
But to make things worse? That's easy.
That was my sense as well, that the current system is essentially governed by a n-root diminishing returns function. Getting more out of it at this point is really hard, but you can tank it pretty easily. Conversely, the really bad schools can be improved by dealing with the violence, awful teachers and uninvolved students/parents, but that only gets you to the level of "decent" schools. To get better the only solution within the system is to simply get top end parents/students in the school.
"To get better the only solution within the system is to simply get top end parents/students in the school."
Yes! Sweeny's First Law of Education says, "Good students make good schools; good schools don't make good students." Right now teachers make great efforts to get students more involved, but that is pretty much impossible without making major changes to what is taught and how a student spends the school day.
I know that it is an article of faith among many people that there are lots of awful teachers but I think it is more accurate that most teachers are reasonable competent, often hurt by stupid policies (e.g., not holding disruptive students responsible), and asked to do the impossible. Students are expected to learn way more than they ever will, about things that they often have little interest in and that they will never use outside the school.
Shockingly :), lots of students don't put in much effort and by September have forgotten most of what they "learned" during the previous school year. That's true of high school and, to a lesser extent, middle school. Prior to puberty, young people are more docile and are often information sponges.
Well, lest we be too soft on teachers, there are a lot of very incompetent teachers out there. Which is to say, there are many awful teachers that don't care and are just doing the job because they can't get fired and don't know how to do anything else that pays as well, but there are also lots of teachers that are decent people but don't know how to teach. They were never trained in classroom management, methods of conveying information, what homework is even for, etc. The education school system that produces certified teachers does not produce teachers who have learned the trade of how to teach, and hasn't done so consistently for at least 50 years. The really good teachers in the schools are largely old enough to have actually be taught long ago, self taught, naturally talented, or some combination thereof. My guess is that by now, most of that first group are on the brink of retirement, so we are hoping the last two sets stick it out, but the vast majority of teachers replacing the retirees are unskilled in their trade. Many are probably nice people, but incompetent.
And of course, there is just a massive pile of insane policy getting in the way too. I don't want to undersell that either! The fact that kids come out of school knowing anything at all is as much a testament to how well kids soak up information and learn on their own than it is to decent schooling.
I can assure that just about every teacher in the United States had to take courses dealing with "classroom management, methods of conveying information, what homework is even for, etc." A good deal of it, of course, is b.s. but some isn't, and newbies learn a good deal from experienced teachers about what reality is like. There are, of course, some really bad teachers but my experience (and a little research) is that most teachers are not "nice people, but incompetent". What makes you say that, aside from working backwards, "students don't learn much, so teachers must be incompetent."
But that's as wrong as thinking, "black people do poorly in the United States, so it must be a profoundly racist society, chock full of disabling white privilege."
For a short while during Bush/Obama "education reform", there was an attempt to measure teacher effectiveness in terms of "value added": how much did one class improve compared to another? Did Ms. Smith's class go from a 5th grade reading level to a 6 1/2 while Mr. Jones' went from a 5 to a 5.75? My impression is that value addeds were not terribly consistent from year to year. Last year's good teacher was this year's mediocre teacher.
In any case, value addeds will depend on the intelligence and motivation of the students. Most educators believe, "If we could motivate our students, they would learn so much more." That's true, in the same useless way that "if everybody loved everybody, there would be no war" is useless. There are very substantial limits on how much schools can motivate students. Most of the students are about as motivated as they will ever get.
No matter who teaches the Honors classes, the students learn more, do better on year end tests, than students in the College classes. Switch the teachers and they still do. Some teachers are more interesting; some are more boring. That may make a big difference to how a student feels it doesn't make much difference to how much is learned.
You preface a sentence, "If we don't think that human capacity varies wildly and we think that teaching skills can be taught ..." I think the combination of human capacity and motivation varies very widely. I also think some teaching skills can be taught but that teaching skills have substantial limits. There are no skills that can turn the stupid and unmotivated into high achievers (by which I mean high achievers in school. Some turn into very successful tradespeople or business people). People can be taught how to run skillfully. They cannot be taught to fly.
The most useful part of ed school is student teaching.
I say that from personal experience with teachers when I visit their classrooms, friends who worked in schools and went through those classes in management, two parents who worked in education for 40+ years, spending time with student teachers, as well as my father's long time friend who is an educator trainer and consultant. Not to mention teaching at the college level myself.
The classes exist, but they don't teach the skills needed, or the would be teachers don't absorb it. From what I know of my friends who took them, the courses focus very little on how to teach effectively and much more on... other things.
It also doesn't take much time spent in classrooms to see teachers making pretty basic mistakes with regard to handling the class. Simple things like keeping track of little kids and what they are doing, remaining the center of attention and direction instead of just being background noise, or just planning ahead and having things for kids to do when they get done with the "quiet time work" before their classmates. The skill just isn't there.
When looking at the research, you have no doubt seen the estimates around the difference between the educational output (however that is measured) of the median teachers and the best teachers. If true, that implies that the dispersion of teaching talent is either extremely wide such that the curve is very flat, or that the median teacher just isn't very skilled even if talented. If the dispersion of talent is wide it should probably be noticeable to people outside the classroom, something "special" about the person. We tend to notice that a bit, like people who are very good at coming up with analogies that get to the root of a concept, or just charismatic in a way that makes you want to pay attention to them. Very few teachers, however, seem to come across that way. How many teachers have successful podcasts or YouTube channels where they talk about their subject matter? I can think of a few professors, but very few, and some kid's shows, although it isn't obvious that kid's shows teach as opposed to entertain. That is some evidence that it isn't just piles of raw talent for teaching that is doing a lot of the work, although weak evidence surely. While some good teachers no doubt do get by on raw talent, I have personally had enough workmanlike teachers that, while not brilliant, certainly got the job done to think innate talent is not critical.
If the raw talent issue isn't what is driving the gap, that leaves the skill side. If the median skill level is low regardless of talent, then you can see wide ranges of effectiveness with a more mundane distribution of talent, particularly if the median is low because pretty much everyone is getting the same low level of poor training. If we don't think that human capacity varies wildly and we think that teaching skills can be taught, wide variation in output should be largely a question of those skills being acquired or not.
Now, to be fair, one can argue that being a good teacher can't be taught, and that it is really largely a matter of talent and just figuring out what works for you in your particular domain. Maybe the skills that let you teach 3rd grade English well do not translate at all to 4th grade Social Studies, or even 3rd grade English at another school. I am skeptical of this, but transferability is by no means guaranteed, so I could see that. If that is the case, however, it makes it even more likely that education degrees are a complete waste of time, because you would not be able to impart much at all skill to nascent teachers, especially outside of extremely specific topics. The incompetent teacher story is still true, just that it isn't a lack of training but rather a lack of figuring it out for themselves that almost no one manages to do anyway.
It is very much the same at the collegiate level, by the way. No part of getting a PhD is "how to teach a class." It is just assumed you have been in enough school to pick it up by osmosis, without thinking about what habits you are absorbing. At GMU there was a special class about teaching and research you had to apply to take. Not required, and not guaranteed you could get into it. The best part of that class was the instructor would sit in on the classes you were teaching and take notes and give feed back. That is, of course, if you were already teaching at the college level.
So far as I know from talking with other grads and newly minted PhDs, that class was largely unique.
So, yea, I have a lot of reason to believe that many K-12 teachers are just not well trained. College education departments have been open about the fact they focus on political indoctrination instead of focusing on how to teach. Even the most dedicated teacher is being set up for failure by being required to go through those classes and coming out without any decent idea of how to educate, and a lot of bad ideas for that matter. Then throw them into an entirely dysfunctional public school bureaucracy, with a union more interested in protecting the negative marginal productivity teachers than anything, and is it any wonder that there is such high attrition?
My version too, with "requiring schooling for young kids" as part of the Null Hypothesis, with such schooling to be oriented towards reading, writing, and math, and to be in person.
"No schooling", or even "no in-person schooling" are alternatives which, not surprisingly, mean generally less education. Probably less for 70-80% of the kids, no difference for 5-15%, and maybe 5-10% actually do get a bit more (likely indicating horrible local schools, and getting more out of reading safely at home, or some such story).
Douthat has a nuanced column on the Disney battle and the broader question of GOP’s relationship to corporate America.
“But there is a conservative case for the principle of what he’s doing — a case that while the government can’t single you out for special disfavor for your political speech, what is being withdrawn in Disney’s case is special favor, linked to the bipartisan and indeed above-partisanship position that the House of Mouse has long enjoyed in Florida... I don’t know if this argument is constitutionally convincing when applied to something as crudely retaliatory-seeming as the DeSantis move. But it’s convincing at some level of distance.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/opinion/desantis-musk-disney.html
> One or two days a week, small groups would combine for games and social activities.
Schoolchildren at least get recess &c every day/ to play and interact in, and that's little enough. Limiting it to one or two days a week is horrible. I believe that achieving a sufficiently high density of children is an important desideratum for any such newly enabled living arrangement developments.
I see the Disney situation as a sign of the problems with our times, but not in the free speech realm. Rather, I see it more paralleling the removal of SALT deductions in 2016: good governance move that apparently was impossible to do before someone powerful got pissy and wanted to punish someone.
To me, that's a real problem with our political system: Both 'sides' support the status quo of corruption and kickbacks and so obvious good governance moves are elusive; only when someone is willing to kick the hornets' nests do we get improvements, but the motivations for doing the kicking are not good and so are erratic.
"But if you support corporate free speech on principle, then seeing the company punished for its political views should make you unhappy, or at least give you pause."
I agree in principle, but as someone said above: Disney has these weird privileges in Florida that no other corporation has; that makes the situation a little unique. Is there a good reason they should continue to be granted such special privileges by successive gubernatorial administrations when they work to undermine the administration's legislative agenda?
Additionally, if Disney were simply being punished for advocating for its perceived self-interest, I would again have more qualms. Instead, what happened, as far as I can tell, was that the company's leadership team allowed itself to be bullied by a (probably relatively small) group of left wing ideologues it employs into taking sides in a state-level culture war legislative battle that really doesn't concern the company's commercial interests at all. I confess I have little desire to stand up for the rights of Disney when it won't stand up for itself, and instead allows its employees to force it into participating in a partisan food fight that benefits no one. Maybe this makes me some sort of hypocrite, but frankly I'm willing to bite the bullet on that one. I plead apathy.
Rather than comment on Disney, l am going to draw on my experience with virtually schooling last year. We helped our daughter with our granddaughter. That experience makes me question the model of small groups centered on homes. That takes remarkable parents to pull off.
I also worry about the social interactions. Our granddaughter really needs the social stimulus of other children. That requires a larger grouping.
I would like to see the current public-school model broken up, but maybe there's something in between a classroom with 1 teacher and 25 kids and small groups of families that could develop.
These adverse effects may, indeed, “fade out with time,” and they might do so even if what students got during COVID-19 instead of normal schooling were continued indefinitely, normal schooling never being resumed. But if the effects faded out only by age 50, or 40, or even 30, they would still be notably bad.
"If we did not have our stupid, centralized public school system, I think that child care/education for young children would be a home-based business." That could be one result of a proper Child Tax Credit.
"On the substantive issue of whether 7-year-olds should be given a sex-ed curriculum, I have no sympathy with Disney whatsoever." Is that the effect of the bill and only way of effecting that result? Was there an outbreak of 7 year old sex education that could only be thwarted by that text in a ne state law? Or was this just "do something-ism?"
I'd like to hear Kling or others flesh out the principal of Corporate free speech in the Disney case.
First, Disney wasn't engaging in speech, they were engaging in a legal battle to strike down a law that they didn't like. Disney didn't speak to the public about the issue during elections. After the law was passed, the Disney spokesperson said, “Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that,"
Secondly, punishment here is withdrawing of special favors that they weren't entitled to in the first place. Politicians are constantly giving favors to friends, and denying those favors to others. I'm not saying that's good, but I'd like to hear where you draw the line between what is fair game and what is not. Corporations have free speech, but that can never be perfectly free from political consequences.
Lastly, Republicans are pressuring Disney to be neutral and stay out of issues that don't directly affect their business. Democrats are pressuring Disney to endorse their agenda and wage legal battles against Republican opposition. I imagine someone might say, both parties shouldn't pressure Disney in either direction. That's fair, but it's not fair to expect one side to unilaterally disarm and forfeit advantage to their rivals.