Learning from the free press why we should free commerce
On Saturday, many of you were left without a newspaper because of a small group of smelly hippies clogging up the roads outside of the country’s printworks. They have decided that the media is full of lies and that you must have ‘free speech’ given to you by their beneficence in the form of you not getting your crossword puzzles.
No, I don’t follow their logic either.
Fortunately, neither did anyone else sensible. Beyond a single deleted tweet by Labour MP Dawn Butler in favour of the group’s actions, and Diane Abbott’s botched comparison between them and the Suffragettes, there was widespread condemnation by politicians across the spectrum for a group who wanted to censor newspapers that they dislike.
Of course, if you actually wanted the news on Saturday, while the papers were full of good stuff, in this modern age it was far more likely that you jumped onto BBC News’ website or one of the papers’ own, or switched on the radio, or went on Twitter, or an app. As my boss Eamonn Butler explained, this was an attack as much on the press as it was on the customer of the physical newspaper.
A number of observations sprang to my mind too.
Firstly, Extinction Rebellion are a right noisy nuisance of the worst sorts of ninnies that most people try to spend their lives avoiding. The biggest threat to their aims is how lame they are. Protests of uncoordinated dances, rhythmic drumming, pants that should have been left in goa when they finished their gap decade. It’s all just, well a bit naff. It turns normal people off the topic of climate change and it hardens attitudes against their proposed measures. As the ex Liberal Democrats leader Tim Farron posted: “Feeling righteous and doing good are not always the same thing.”
Secondly, if they actually cared about the environment they might take care to look at some of the amazing advances being made by those getting stuck into inventions and enterprise. From lab grown meat, indoor fish farms, vertical ocean farming, and how urban density and reduced sprawl can reduce a city's environmental impact, to carbon taxes and road pricing. Free markets and neoliberal policies that build on property rights and monetary incentives are the best hope we have of ensuring our planet is one we are all able to live on and one on which we all do want to live — something my colleague Matthew Lesh recently wrote about in his chapter for Green Market Revolution. If you, or any young relatives you have, are concerned about environmental matters, I’d urge a read of that book.
A third observation came to mind that was somewhat left of field. The newspaper is a little wonder. It arrives at addresses across the country 364 days a year bringing news (Christmas is off, even for Scrooge’s staff), fact, opinion from across the globe condensed into a readable and digestible form and plops onto the doormat simply and easily. It is one of the original right-to-your-door deliveries. The word of man, for you to read and argue over and build new ideas and do it all over again the next day.
Just like Amazon, straight to your doorstep, usually using a local newsagent or network to deliver it to you. And yet, I don’t recall any politician saying that your perusal of a national broadsheet undermined the high street pamphlet printer, or that there should be a delivery tax because you didn’t go and pick it up yourself.
Nor do we condemn papers for taking customers out of high street shops when they deliver direct, preferring to use low cost out-of-town printworks and then lorries and vans and bypasses.
Nor do we slam them for using modern efficient methods of production. They’re not condemned for moving from quill to printing press, or even for using adobe indesign over physical type-setting. The days of the ‘Stop press!’ command are over and online headlines can be changed at the quite literal touch of a button.
And, while there were worries about radio, and then tv, and then websites, podcasts, social media, and apps challenging the traditional print media and its product — there has never been a good justification.
Finally, even though they’re one of the chief beneficiaries of generalised education and literacy we don’t demand they and other publishers pay a targeted ‘education tax’ to get them to pay for the spillover benefit that they receive.
Instead we reap the benefit of a free press unencumbered by restrictions or taxes or coercion. What a wonder it might be if we took the same attitude to commerce of all types.