The Campaign To Break the Internet
It's shoddy governance.
This author appeared this week in National Review, arguing that Congress ought to reject a pair of so-called “kids online safety” proposals — known for short as KOSA and COPPA 2.0 — now before it. The piece outlines the bills’ dubious constitutionality and the burdensome compliance costs they would foist on online platforms. Yet these tech issues further implicate elemental questions of good governance.
Smart government requires lawmakers to balance competing goods: liberty and order, privacy and security, fiscal responsibility and necessary spending, among many others. Two such goods are child welfare and parental prerogatives. Government, at all levels in America, has traditionally allowed parents wide latitude, interfering only in cases of glaring and severe abuse.
When regulating the digital world, many policy-makers and pundits have determined that America’s legal and societal norms ought not apply. This is true for issues of free speech, economics, privacy, and, now, parental rights. This new coalition seeks to impose on families its own conception of responsible online behavior. As the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia wrote regarding a similar effort to regulate video games in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association (2011), while this agenda “may indeed be in support of what some parents . . . actually want, its entire effect is only in support of what the State thinks parents ought to want.”
Hyperregulating children’s online lives, as with most government intrusions into matters best left to individual families and the market broadly, will inevitably lead to hordes of unintended consequences.
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Too many view the internet as an accessory to “real life,” and policy-makers may strip users of their basic economic or civil liberties. They seemingly argue that in the digital world, neither constitutional constraints nor knowledge problems apply. These misapprehensions become increasingly untenable as “real life” increasingly migrates online.
When regulating the digital world, Congress must seek balance in prioritizing children’s safety, civil liberties, and parental rights. Parents must do more to protect their children’s safety, and the law should support, not preempt, their efforts. Such work requires more time, hard work, and consideration but will yield results far better than the ill-conceived KOSA and COPPA 2.0.
Some Wisdom
James Madison envisioned a decentralized republic. In Federalist No. 39, he discusses the distinction between “national” and “federal” systems of government.
The idea of a national government involves in it, not only an authority over the individual citizens, but an indefinite supremacy over all persons and things, so far as they are objects of lawful government. Among a people consolidated into one nation, this supremacy is completely vested in the national legislature. Among communities united for particular purposes, it is vested partly in the general and partly in the municipal legislatures. In the former case, all local authorities are subordinate to the supreme; and may be controlled, directed, or abolished by it at pleasure. In the latter, the local or municipal authorities form distinct and independent portions of the supremacy, no more subject, within their respective spheres, to the general authority, than the general authority is subject to them, within its own sphere. In this relation, then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a NATIONAL one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects.
The Tenth Amendment confirms all this: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Constitution intends Congress keep largely within the borders of Article I, Section 8. But our lawmakers have escaped and are on the loose.
Some Beauty
For a recent magazine issue, National Review’s Jay Nordlinger asked readers what books most influenced them. One reader wrote the following of preeminent author of westerns, Louis L’Amour.
I know many people belittle his work…but I truly owe so much of who I am to Louis. I suppose that is why some small part of my heart still longs to be a cowboy. But far bigger are the things his characters taught me. I learned to crave education, to work hard, to punch hard and first if I have to. But the best gift Louis gave me was the knowledge of the kind of woman I wanted to spend my life with — a smart, strong woman who would walk beside me, not behind me. And I found her — a woman “to ride the river” with. Thank you to Louis L’Amour.
The classic L’Amour protagonist distills the essence of Americanism. He is individualistic, daring, strong, and unafraid to dissent from the crowd. He works harder than his peers and eschews conflict until it is morally necessary — then he fights like hell. And he is good.
Some Levity
Per Plutarch, the Athenian politician and general Themistocles had a wit.
Of two who made love to his daughter, he preferred the man of worth to the one who was rich, saying he desired a man without riches, rather than riches without a man.
When the Seriphian told him that he had not obtained this honor by himself, but by the greatness of his city, he replied, “You speak truth; I should never have been famous if I had been of Seriphus; nor you, had you been of Athens.”
These quips are reminiscent of a golden saying of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.
When a young man was boasting in the theater and saying, “I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,” Epictetus said, “I also have conversed with many rich men, but I am not rich.”
The ancients had some zingers.
Sundry Links, &c.
Townhall: “Europe’s Investigation of Microsoft Continues Its Anti-Tech Trajectory”
Bill Clinton had a saxophone. Vivek, on the other hand…
Max Scherzer is a great American.