John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty"[1] offered one of the most comprehensive defences of free speech (that is as relevant today as it was then).
You do raise a good point re: tradeoffs in a healthy society. Mill anticipated this objection and addressed it directly. He didn't advocate for free speech without consequences but developed a harm principle specifically to establish what limits are acceptable. Acceptable limits on thought and speech should be based on demonstrable harm, rather than alleged offence, discomfort, or the current popular opinion or cultural disapproval.
He recognises the need to set some limits, yet also the dangers of who gets to set them. Historically, those with power to restrict speech have restricted truth as falsehood. The bar for restrictions should be very high, not because free speech should be absolute, but because the dangers of overzealous restrictions far outweigh the cost of permitting speech we might personally find objectionable. Even completely false opinions might have their value as they force defenders of truth to better articulate their position or reasoning, and prevents beliefs from becoming prejudiced, or platitudes.
I thought I'd share since it's relevant and there may be some younger readers here that might not have come across his work. I really recommend reading it, even if it's an LLM summary as an introduction (as seems to be the trend nowadays)
Agreed, and the same goes for most strategic sectors: energy, agriculture, animal husbandry, semiconductors, communications, space, the infrastructure to support all these, education, etc.
It's also worth considering that certain industries (fisheries and agriculture for instance) are subsidised. It's in our national interest to maintain production capacity, so profits are the least of our concerns. Both the UK and the EU's agricultural sectors are heavily subsidised mainly for this reason. It's cheaper to import than to produce locally, especially with our environmental standards and targets, but we need to keep producing. More so in the current geopolitical climate.
And whilst nobody wants to risk being starved to submission, it's also equally important to promote more profitable sectors, and tax accordingly, so that we can support our more strategic sectors. I wouldn't say we're doing a good job at that for what its worth.
As a UK non-citizen resident, my observation is that our economy is pretty much involved with USA (and the global economy more generally).
I just looked up the latest trade and investments factsheet[1] and there are some interesting deets. If you're wondering about direct investment in the US as well as imports:
- Total UK imports from United States amounted to £111.5 billion in the four quarters to the end of Q3 2024 (a decrease of 5.1% or £5.9 billion in current prices, compared to the four quarters to the end of Q3 2023).
- In 2023, the outward stock of foreign direct investment (FDI) from the UK in United States was £494.1 billion accounting for 26.7% of the total UK outward FDI stock.
In addition to direct investment I would also count portfolio investment since we're sort of involved at an individual level through our workplace pensions (and/or personal), savings, stocks and shares ISAs, and so on. A preliminary report[2] foreign holdings of US securities as of June 2024 puts the UK as the top holder at over 3 trillion USD.
I do not speak latin, although I studied it for two years in high school and I'm a native speaker of a romance language, so my understanding of latin is pretty much basic to guesswork.
This is a really cool tool -- I often read latin texts with the original on one page and the translation on the other, just because I think it's interesting to see how they wrote/spoke at the time, but for the most part certain words or declinations throw me off guard. Inline literal translations really help there.
That being said, I noticed whilst reading some of the texts that the inline literal translations are still in latin, e.g. in "Part IV. I Some Barbarous Customs", most of the translated text is just latin. I guess OpenAI won't take all our jobs just yet!
I do have one suggestion for improvement though. Many of these texts have translations that are already in the public domain (older translations). It would be helpful to display the original Latin and a fluent English translation side by side, whilst still being able to toggle the literal translation on or off. This setup would make it easier to compare the original text with a fluent English translation, similar to the format used in some bilingual books.
Speaking of postgrest, it looks like the article links to `www.postgrest.org` which has been "hijacked"? The correct url should be https://postgrest.org
You do raise a good point re: tradeoffs in a healthy society. Mill anticipated this objection and addressed it directly. He didn't advocate for free speech without consequences but developed a harm principle specifically to establish what limits are acceptable. Acceptable limits on thought and speech should be based on demonstrable harm, rather than alleged offence, discomfort, or the current popular opinion or cultural disapproval.
He recognises the need to set some limits, yet also the dangers of who gets to set them. Historically, those with power to restrict speech have restricted truth as falsehood. The bar for restrictions should be very high, not because free speech should be absolute, but because the dangers of overzealous restrictions far outweigh the cost of permitting speech we might personally find objectionable. Even completely false opinions might have their value as they force defenders of truth to better articulate their position or reasoning, and prevents beliefs from becoming prejudiced, or platitudes.
I thought I'd share since it's relevant and there may be some younger readers here that might not have come across his work. I really recommend reading it, even if it's an LLM summary as an introduction (as seems to be the trend nowadays)
Edited to fix a few typos (typing from mobile)
1. https://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlLbty.html#book-reader