Sep 09 The Chilling Effect

There has been a great deal of bantering back and forth about the effect Obamanomics is having on the economy.  The Left has argued there have been 30 trillion jobs saved or created and Nancy Pelosi believed over 500 millions jobs a month were disappearing.  Not-withstanding their nonsense, it is important to have a good, solid argument for this being Obama’s recession, completely without reservations.  The so-called Bush recession, which was really the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac recession, is gone.  By now we would have been seeing serious growth in the economy and the jobless rate would be dropping.  But how do we know that?  It’s counterfactual given that Bush’s term ended and Obamanomics is the economic plan foisted upon us, so what evidence can you use?  I believe we can look at the actual cause and effects of Obamanomics and arrive at the conclusion this is his economic model at work, and it ain’t pretty.

Justice Brennan, as interpreted, spoke of the government’s overarching power to regulate free speech through either preventing such speech or punishing it afterward.  He believed that given certain perimeters, government could stop something being delivered in the mail and while that wouldn’t necessarily be preventing a person from speaking freely, it did, in effect, silence that speech.  And, he believed the power of the government over speech could be even more endemic.  He argued that simply by making some speech too difficult or punishing speech if it went too far, the governmental action would have a ‘chilling effect’ on all speech regardless of its expression.  What he was arguing was government could act legitimately within its power but the effect of that action would be the same as if the government actually put a gag in the mouth of the speaker.