A Dangerous Trend

A recent report claims that the Kansas City Chiefs have been the beneficiaries of implicit bias from referees. This bias, one of the study’s authors claims, is a result of “regulatory capture.” This is an example of a dangerous trend: equating the actions of private entities with the actions of government.

Regulatory capture, University of Texas-El Paso professor Dr. Spencer Barnes explained, occurs when

the people who are the regulators actually don’t end up doing their job, and the companies that they’re supposed to be regulating end up regulating the regulators. It was one of the big things that led to the ’08 financial crisis, because bond companies like Moody’s Ratings and S&P Global were getting paid by the companies that they were supposed to regulate.

Moody’s and S&P are private companies that rate the creditworthiness of bond issuers. Their ratings are simply advisories. The companies do not and cannot force anyone to act on their ratings.

The edicts of regulators are imposed on the relevant parties and backed by government force. Regulators can and do force individuals and businesses to act as they, the regulators, dictate. Calling Moody’s and S&P regulators equates the voluntary with the coercive, and this is an example of a dangerous trend.

For years, conservatives have claimed that social media companies are guilty of censorship. However, only the government can engage in censorship. Censorship means the prohibition of the expression of certain ideas. Violators are subject to fines, imprisonment, or worse. As Ayn Rand noted, “No private individual or agency can silence a man or suppress a publication; only the government can do so. The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right not to agree, not to listen and not to finance one’s own antagonists.”

Freedom of speech and property rights are inseparable. The right to property protects our freedom to use our property as we choose, and that includes the right to determine the terms and conditions for those using our property. Social media companies have a right to exclude the expression of any ideas they choose. The advocates of those ideas remain free to express their ideas elsewhere.

There is a fundamental difference between being thrown off a platform and being thrown in jail for expressing one’s ideas. Failing to recognize the distinction between private actors and government agents opens the door for actual censorship.