Stifling of free speech remains in full force in Great Britain and attempts continue by the worst power-hungry leaders in Europe to extend their self-serving censorship here.

Last Monday, Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the EU internal market, warned Elon Musk that the planned Musk-Trump interview could run afoul of the EU’s overreaching online censorship laws. Musk ignored the warning of Mr. Thierry, a man who is the very avatar of “Eurotrash.” (Musk has been threatened by a variety of autocrats around the world for refusing to bow to their censorship dictates.)

1. Censorship King: Thierry is pushing for draconian internet censorship laws under the guise of "protecting public discourse," while silencing dissenting voices. 2. Tax Evasion Mastermind: He is perfecting the art of dodging European taxes by acquiring Senegalese citizenship, all while collecting a hefty salary funded by EU taxpayers. 3. Globalist Puppet: He is acting as a key enforcer of the globalist agenda, stripping European nations of their sovereignty in favor of centralized EU control. 4. Woke Enforcer: He is forcing the EU to adopt increasingly radical woke policies, even when they contradict traditional European values or public opinion. 5. Election Meddling Architect: Last but not least, he is trying to influence elections in other countries by censoring inconvenient truths and shaping public opinion through controlled narratives, all while claiming to "defend democracy." This guy is a total joke, and he’s not even trying to hide it anymore -- he wants to censor the truth in the EU using the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA is just a weapon to coerce and blackmail Big Tech into shutting down anything he doesn’t want people to hear. Speaking the truth is ALWAYS a threat to tyranny -- and no matter how hard they try to silence it, the truth isn't going anywhere. 

A day later the European Commission’s president Ursula von Leyen publicly disavowed Breton’s threat indicating “The timing and the wording of the letter were neither co-ordinated or agreed with…” Shows you what’s possible if you dig in your heels and just say "no.”

It’s not as though there is no push for such censorship here, most peculiarly by members of the press. Notably in a presser this week, Cleve Wootson of the Washington Post was eager for presidential intervention to stop the Musk interview. 

David Burge, the great “Iowahawk” went at it:

It's nice to see that journalists remain steadfast in their support of free speech rights for all people who are fully screened, trained, and licensed at an accredited journalism institution.

Legacy media are like the local cops of a podunk speed trap town, still bitching about the bad drivers on the new bypass superhighway. 
It was a mistake to let you stupid Eurotrash garbage people have internet in the first place.

And as Professor Jonathan Turley reminds us, we have been the victims of censorship by our own government, not yet, happily, as draconian as that in Europe or Great Britain. Congressional investigations “disclosed a massive censorship system run in part with federal funding and with coordination with federal officials.”

The Biden administration 

…has now created an anti-free speech record that is only rivaled by the Adams Administration which used the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest political opponents, Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is an example of how speech controls and censorship have become mainstream.  Her agency was created to work on our critical infrastructure, but Easterly declared that the mandate would now include policing “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes combating “malinformation,” or information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

I have testified for years about the censorship system. For much of that time, Democrats insisted that there was no proof of any coordination or funding from the government. Such evidence did indeed exist, but Democrats worked to block any investigation to confirm what we already knew about government officials targeting individuals and groups for throttling, bans, and blacklisting. 

Then Elon Musk bought Twitter. The release of the Twitter Files destroyed any plausible deniability of the government’s role in this censorship system. Various agencies had employees working with social media companies to target those with opposing or disfavored views. At the same time, we learned of grants from the federal government supporting blacklisting and targeting operations. 

That includes efforts to quietly choke off revenue from disfavored sites by pressured advertisers and donors. 

While companies like Facebook have continued to fight to conceal their coordination with the government, the Twitter Files pulled back the curtain to expose the system. Indeed, Democrats largely abandoned their denials and turned to full-throated defenses of censorship, even calling free speech advocates “Putin-lovers” and “insurrectionist sympathizers.” 

Despite these threats and a substantial DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) by actors yet unknown, the interview took place, and for about 2 hours  listeners could hear two centrists thoughtfully discussing the nation’s current challenges and their ideas of how best to meet them. Interestingly, among the topics they discussed was a need for a commission to work on downsizing the federal government and Musk was asked  and agreed to serve on it.

Musk has consistently offered the same opportunity to Kamala Harris, who is unlikely to agree to such an unscripted, unrehearsed, freewheeling discussion.

She has finally set forth her agenda (until now it has been a secret with not even a hint of it on her website). It appears to have been written by slovenly kids who spent their college years in the student union advocating for “the masses.” 

It is an agenda utterly ignorant of economics -- which is to say, reality. The worst of it is price controls to deal with what she mysteriously said was “price gauging.” (Apparently even reading prepared remarks presents a challenge for her.)

Iowahawk, as you might expect, had some thoughts on the agenda:

“There are 7 remaining people in the world who actually understand economics, we all live in a monastery in the Himalayas hand carving our knowledge onto granite tablets for the benefit of any possible survivors of the coming dark ages.”

Even some of the predictably left-wing publications took issue with it. Surprisingly, that includes the Washington Post, where Catherine Rampell, under the header “When your opponent calls you a ‘communist’ maybe don’t propose price controls.”

The most likely template for Harris’s proposal is a recent bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). (Harris co-sponsored similar legislation with Warren in 2020, when Harris was a senator.) Warren’s bill would ban any “grossly excessive price” during any “atypical disruption” of a market. Alas, no definition was provided for these terms, either; rather, the bill would empower the Federal Trade Commission to enforce bans using any metric it deems appropriate.

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat. (There’s a reason narrower “price gouging” laws that exist in some U.S. states are rarely invoked.) At worst, it might accidentally raise prices.

That’s because, among other things, the legislation would ban companies from offering lower prices to a big customer such as Costco than to Joe’s Corner Store, which means quantity discounts are in trouble. Worse, it would require public companies to publish detailed internal data about costs, margins, contracts and their future pricing strategies. Posting cost and pricing plans publicly is a fantastic way for companies to collude to keep prices higher -- all facilitated by the government.

The author notes that price fixing is already illegal, grocers’ profit margins are already very thin, and greed is not what drove up prices.

Super strong consumer demand plus major supply disruptions (the coronavirus pandemic, bird flu, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc.) pushed prices and profits up. Once those shocks abated and consumers started spending down their pandemic savings, price growth cooled.

These are the kinds of facts the Harris campaign should be explaining to consumers, not exploiting for demagogic gain because push-polling suggests people are mad about “greed.”

Others have shredded her proposal for housing subsidies to the tune of $25 thousand for first-time home purchasers, including illegal aliens, and rent control, inter alia.

One strange effect of the talk of price controls now is to incentivize landlords to raise rents now before new controls come into effect after the inauguration. This is perhaps why we are starting to see rental contracts with lower per-month rents at 7 months rather than 12 months. Presumably starting next year, residential rent cannot be increased more than 5 percent per year. On average over the last 4 years, rents have gone up by 8.5 percent, which means that the difference has to come from somewhere. 

In the short run, it can come from dramatic increases now in rents. In the long run, the difference will come in the form of reduced amenities, repairs, and services of all sorts. When the equipment at the gym breaks or the pool closes for cleaning, you could be waiting a very long time for it to be repaired if ever. The experience in New York City -- or for that matter, under Emperor Diocletian in ancient Rome -- shows precisely what results: shortages, property and service depreciation, and business closures. 

What’s deeply troubling about the Nixon presidency is that he knew it was wrong and did it anyway. What’s even more troubling about the Kamala Harris case is that it is unclear whether she even knows it is wrong. Perhaps that should not shock those of us who have lived through times when the health officials acted like natural immunity doesn’t exist, that we didn’t have therapies for respiratory infections, that masks work, and that two weeks of comprehensive closures could ever be constrained to that time period. 

We seemed doomed to watch the same old errors unfold before our eyes, in a natural trajectory of folly from money printing to inflation to price controls, just as from universal quarantines to growing ill-health, education losses, and population demoralization. May the gods save us from more rounds of the same before it is too late.

We won’t be doomed to watch these follies and their consequences if we elect her opponent who does, in fact, have something the Democratic ticket doesn’t have, candidates who spent time operating outside the public tit, and have some real-world economic experience.

Correction: The length of he Trump-Musk interview corrected from 40 minutes to about 2 hours.