The European Union has a censorship addiction, and a desire to inflict the costs of indulging that addiction on the world’s top tech companies.

Vera Jourova, the EU’s Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, complains that Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft respond too slowly to demands that they delete posts deemed “hate speech” from their platforms.

In May, those companies “voluntarily” affirmed a code of conduct committing themselves to 24-hour turnaround on doing Jourova’s dirty work for her. Six months later, she claims the companies are too slow and that the EU may be “forced” to enact laws to punish them for not shutting people up as quickly as she wants them shut up.

All this follows other similar EU nonsense, including an absurd demand that search engines acknowledge a “right to be forgotten,” under which individuals could demand the removal of unflattering or inconvenient (but accurate) information from public view. The industry knuckled under to that in the EU, which quickly came back demanding they implement it worldwide.

Agreeing to the “code of conduct” was far from the tech industry’s first mistake. As Kipling wrote, “once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.” By legitimizing a litany of claimed powers to conscript them as censors, the firms virtually guaranteed that Jourova and her gang would keep coming back with more, and more bizarre, demands.

The EU needs technology more than the world’s tech firms need the EU. At some point, the EU’s constant attempts to shift the costs of (and the public oppobrium aimed at) its ever-increasing police statism onto those firms will make doing business in the EU too expensive to be bothered with.

The world needs more of the “Wild West” atmosphere that censors in the EU and elsewhere attribute to it. A country with decent Internet infrastructure to constitutionally commit itself to non-interference with network traffic and content of all kinds would have a great pitch: “Domicile in our territory. Low taxes, no censorship. Countries that don’t like the traffic can bear the financial and political costs of blocking it.”

If the EU is unwilling to join civilized society and protect, rather than suppress, free speech, it should at least be forced to bear the full costs of its backward authoritarianism until it straightens up.

The tech industry should tell Vera  Jourova to pound sand, and make it stick.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Censorship: Tech Firms Should Abandon the EU to Its Madness,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Platte County, Wyoming Record Times [print only], 12/07/16
• “Censorship: Tech Firms Should Abandon the EU to Its Madness,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 12/09/16
• “Censorship: Tech Firms Should Abandon the EU to Its Madness,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sonoran News [Arizona], 12/09/16
• “Censorship: Tech Firms Should Abandon the EU to Its Madness,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Woonsocket, Rhode Island Call [web and print editions]
• “Censorship: Tech firms should abandon the EU to its madness,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Kingston, Jamaica Observer, 12/16/16

In June, US aerospace company Boeing inked an agreement with Iran Air to produce 109 passenger aircraft. Estimated value: $25 billion. The agreement represents the biggest business interaction between the US and Iran since that country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

On November 17, the US House of Representatives voted 243-174  to block the deal. The Senate seems unlikely to follow suit president Barack Obama would almost certainly veto the bill, but Boeing’s stock took a temporary 2% tumble on the vote.

Why do House Republicans (the vote was pretty much party-line) want to destroy thousands of American jobs and hammer the revenues of a major American manufacturer?

The stock answers:

Iran has an active nuclear weapons program (the US and Israeli intelligence communities say it doesn’t).

Iran is violating the 2015 deal to end the non-existent program (the International Atomic Energy Agency says it isn’t, apart from a few ten thousandths of one percent more heavy water than the deal allows them).

Iran sponsors terrorism (even if that’s true, the US lacks moral credibility to complain about it given its 25-year, 24/7 terror campaign comprising hundreds of thousands of killings across the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa).

Those are the War Party’s talking points. The conventional wisdom among the non-insane population looks more like this:

For nearly 40 years — ever since the Iranian people rose up and overthrew the authoritarian monarchy installed by the US in a 1953 coup  against its democratically elected government — enmity with Iran has been a sacrament of American political class religion. It’s one of those cold war relic feuds that our politicians just don’t quite know how to let go of.

I think that conventional wisdom gives the political class too much credit for morals and too little credit for guile. The truth, in my opinion, is more along these lines:

Boeing builds swords and it builds plowshares. That is, it builds military aircraft and weapons systems on one hand, and civilian passenger aircraft on the other.

When Boeing builds plowshares, the only thing it’s beholden to the political class for is permission. It shouldn’t even have to ask pretty please, but unfortunately does. The politicians don’t hold the purse strings, though. It’s legitimate business.

When Boeing builds swords, on the other hand, it works directly for the politicians. The end user is either the US armed forces or a foreign military approved of, and probably funded by, American politicians. Kiss the ring, Boeing.

The War Party (both Republican and Democratic wings in tag-team fashion), given the opportunity, prefers to forbid Boeing to build plowshares and keep it in the position of begging to build swords.

Not that Boeing is innocent in all this. Since World War II, the primary mission of the US government has been to transfer money from your pockets to the pockets of Boeing and other “defense” contractors.

But Boeing’s 150,000 employees are relatively innocent. Those employees have families and friends. All of them who vote should remember which members of Congress tried to send them to the unemployment line on November 17.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Boeing’s Iran Business: The War Party versus American Jobs,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 12/05/16
• “Boeing’s Iran Business: The War Party versus American Jobs,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 12/06/16
• “Boeing’s Iran Business: The War Party Versus American Jobs,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 12/09/16
• “The War Party versus American jobs,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Newberry, South Carolina Observer, 12/09/16

“Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag,” writes US president-elect Donald Trump in one of his patented incendiary (pun intended) tweets. “[I]f they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

You’ve probably heard all the arguments for and against a flag-burning ban, most of them variations of the maudlin “my ancestor died for that flag” or the obvious (and Supreme Court affirmed) fact that flag-burning is a form of political expression protected by the First Amendment. Let me throw another one at you:

Flags are property.

If someone wants to set fire to a brightly colored piece of cloth, it’s nobody else’s business unless the flag is stolen, the flag-burner is trespassing, or burning the flag endangers other people’s lives or property.

That’s true even if you’ve convinced yourself that your grandfather “died for” that brightly colored piece of cloth (hopefully he died for something more consequential than your favorite rectangular textile pattern).

It’s true even if you profoundly disagree with the point the flag-burner is trying to convey (or, as may well be the case, even if you can’t really tell what that point might be).

It’s true even if you’re Donald J. Trump.

You don’t have to like it. That’s how it is whether you like it or not.

It’s not that I don’t get the sentimental attachment many Americans have to the flag. I do.

In elementary school, one of my duties as a student crossing guard was raising, lowering and folding the flag each day. As a US Marine, I occasionally performed the same duties, and of course saluted the colors as appropriate. My brother still has the 48-star flag which covered the casket of my grandfather, a World War II veteran, and if my family so desires there will be a 50-star flag on my own casket one of these days (I’ll be dead, so I won’t really care, right?).

Even though my own political beliefs tend more toward the black flag of anarchy these days, I still have a soft spot for Old Glory.

But if Trump and the burning-banners get their way, I’ll be among the first to hit the pavement with a kerosene-soaked  American flag and a cigarette lighter. The proper and accepted method of disposal for a desecrated flag is burning it, and Trump’s off-the-cuff attempt to wrap himself in the stars and stripes with a proposed burning ban would, if successful, constitute desecration of the very value most Americans place on it.

Furthermore, neither my free speech rights nor my property rights are negotiable.  The author of The Art of the Deal has nothing to offer for them that I find tempting.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Hey, @RealDonaldTrump, Hands Off My Flag,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 12/01/16
• “Hey, Trump, hands off my flag!,” Winchester, Tennessee, Herald Chronicle
• “Hey, @RealDonaldTrump, Hands Off My Flag,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 12/02/16
• “Hey, @RealDonaldTrump, Hands Off My Flag,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 12/02/16
• “Hey, @RealDonaldTrump, Hands Off My Flag,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 12/02/16
• “Hey, @RealDonaldTrump, Hands Off My Flag,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Hammond, Louisiana Daily Star [print edition], 12/02/16