Bad ideas are like Zombies, the keep on coming back but you have to behead them. The latest clutch of Bad Ideas come all wrapped up and travelling together.
The Zombie Collective of “Lets Nationalise or Ban X” needs beheading not because the politicians talking about doing so are in anyway serious; the state could neither afford the trillion euro financial cost of compensating X’s shareholders nor the reputational cost of of a ban but because a bad idea repeatedly unanswered pollutes public discussion and becomes, in part, an accepted belief. We should not let anti-freedom rhetoric be normalised.
X is a private property, belonging to its shareholders and neither its size nor their wealth changes their entitlement to own it and retain it. Private property rights are the very basis of a successful economy; nobody invests or works where the fruits of their efforts are likely to be confiscated. Ireland has a successful economy precisely because we have strong private property protection, attracting inward investment (like X) and retaining businesses and wealth in ways countries like South Africa and Russia which have regimes actively hostile to private property cannot.
The 20th Century’s disastrous experiment with Communism proved that the theories of Mises were right in practise; private property allocates resources far better and to every bodies’ ultimate benefit in a way the cloying hands of government and its bureaucrats simple cannot.
The argument for private property is not just an economic case, strong as that is but also, most importantly, a moral one; we have a natural right to be free and that means not to be prevented from owning property as part of our human rights and freedoms. The government, no more than your local mafia coven, is not entitled to steal from you what you have because you are a free human. If the powerful can take what you own then you are a slave. The mafia coven would, at least, be more honest in not pretending their theft was for your own good.
Wrapped up in the Zombie Idea Bouquet is the notion that people politicians do not like can be treated differently, less favourably than than others. Our rights, economic or otherwise, do not and cannot depend on us currying favour with the local Don Corleone despite the recent remarks of a government TD. That would be to reduce the country to Putin’s Russia without the Bolshoi, Baba Yaga or the nukes. Irish politicians dislike of Elon Musk would not make expropriation of X any more moral or legal, merely more palatable to people who think the state is an arm of politics. Law either applies to everyone or it applies not at all, it is not whimsically selective. What happens when you fall afoul of your local party apparatchiks? Are your house or car up for grabs?
Free Speech has become the most traduced of rights, with everyone from university freshman to senior politicians reassuring us that without strict limitations on what can be said we will be drowned in a tsunami of Hate Speech, without ever telling us what Hate Speech is. In the UK police forces & the judiciary have taken this idea more seriously than the of mass gang rape, prosecuting for social media posts with the fervour of a Salem witch-finder smelling sulphur. Free Speech is the underpinning of all other rights but it is its own enemy; its necessary freedom provides its enemies with ammunition. It is the speech that offends that needs protection: nobody comes after the emollient sentence.
Musk’s X has annoyed the censorious not just by denying the Government and GANGOs (government affiliated non-government organisations) the power they had under its former Twitter incarnation to have content that displeased them removed but by allowing speech as free as the laws of individual countries will bear: even helping posters fight the lawfare unleashed upon them when law was not adequate for the silencers. Allowing politicians for any reason to intimate that their taking over or banning X would be in the public interest adds to the dangerous and stupid diminishing of Free Speech in the public forum.
Underpinning much of the noise about X has been the allegations that its AI, Grok, has produced child porn and non consensual nude images of real people. Oddly as a ferocious consumer of X I have never seen such images but the uses to which Large Language Models can be put are many & humans are polymorphously perverse. These things do not require an LLM nor are they legal. The state & the individual is more than well equipped to counter such image manipulation without the nuclear option of confiscating or banning a single company. One might take the complaints from concerned politicians more seriously if any one of them had ever moved to have the derisory sentences for possession child abuse images increased in legislation.
Allowing politicians to bloviate may seem harmless, even a better use of their time than time spent persecuting us – but all to easily anti-freedom sentiment is normalised. Answering bad ideas like the X Confiscation is a vital part of political hygiene in a country where the ideas of the free market has little real support. Head them off at the pass now lest they create a stampede in the future.
Paddy Manning writes from Kilkenny