Should you be allowed to put a “For Sale” sign on your own car?
Most people would say yes, but some local governments say no — and the courts approve this because somehow “commercial speech” is deemed less worthy of protection than political speech. Never mind, of course, that political speech about issues typically involves advocating the use of violence against one’s neighbors, while political speech about candidates is almost always false advertising. Commercial speech, on the other hand, typically involves nothing more than buyers providing potentially valuable information to consumers. (On this, see Mises.)
I comment on this issue, and a recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision that slightly increases protection for commercial speech, in an op-ed in today’s Columbus Dispatch.
For this blog’s readers, I should add the caveat that the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution should not apply to state and local governments. This point is well covered in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution, which I highly recommend. But that issue is probably a lost cause, and in any event is not before the courts right now. The question is whether “free speech” includes, by definition, the right to speak without limitation about goods you want to sell, using your own private property. And the answer — which of course the U.S. Supreme Court is unwilling to understand — is yes.
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Good commentary. However, it and the courts miss the larger issue of “public” property. So long as we have public property, issues such as this can never be satisfactorily resolved.
It’s wrong to let politicians arbitrarily distinguish between speech as “commercial” or “political” speech. If they are allowed to arbitrarily distinguish, they will just as soon arbitrarily define, and somehow sacred “political” speech will end up being defined as “commercial” speech and quickly controlled and regulated.
Consider the rampant abuse by Congress of the Commerce Clause… almost anything and potentially everything has been and could be defined as “commerce” by the Congress, and therefore they gain a power to regulate and control it.
I think it is Clarence Thomas who has been traditionally against the distinction between commercial and non-commercial speech.
Hey, since the right to free speech also includes the right not to speak, can I say filling out tax forms violates my right not to speak?
Moral: instead of putting a “for sale” sign on your car, put a sign on it that says “The local bureaucrats are freaking Nazis because they won’t let me announce that this car is for sale at $3000″
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