The ACLU and The Price of Free Speech

[fabio guillermo rojas]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Robin Hanson wrote:
> But I have often wondered if we could measure willingness to pay
> for various freedoms, perhaps by just directly asking people.

I think we already have one good measure: the amount of donations to
organizations dedicated to free speech such as the ACLU.

There are two kinds of free speech whose price we can measure:
freedom of one's own speech (I should be allowed to say what I want)
and the freedom of others speech (other people should say what they
want even if I don't like it).

The evidence is that a lot of people are willing to pay quite
a bit for their own free speech. Witness the fact that many
are willing to die for the right to express their religion.
In the US, people are willing to pay quite a bit to pursue lawsuits
that allow them to proseletize (sp?) in public or quasi-public
places like parks, airports and malls.

The evidence I think points to the fact that extremely few people
have positive prices for others free speech. The 1st amendment
was joke for most of this country's history.

The ACLU provides an excellent example. For the first two or three
decades, the ACLU defended the speech of leftists (rightfully so, I think)
and then experienced a drop in membership when they started to defend
the rights of neo-nazis to have a parade in Skokie, Illinois. 

It seems to be the case that it relatively easy to fund
an organization that defends one kind of free speech because donors
are supporting their own free speech while it is difficult to 
fund an organization that defends others free spech.

Robin, do you have other examples in mind?
-fabio