Like all sensible libertarian-minded people, I don’t think the government should be regulating pornography.
There are obvious exceptions for things like child porn, of course, and I’d even throw animal cruelty into the mix of things that can be banned.
But leave run-of-the-mill adult pornography alone. Yes, some people can take it too far and become obsessed. And I certainly can understand why a wife/girlfriend could see excessive fixation on porn as a deal-breaker in a relationship.
But those factors surely don’t require government involvement.
Now that I’ve burnished my libertarian bona fides, let me state that there is a giant difference between letting porn be legal, both for libertarian and constitutional reasons. and having the government subsidize it.
Yet that’s just what New York City is doing in its public libraries. Here’s an excerpt from a CBS report.
It’s the last thing you’d expect to find at New York City’s public libraries. But find it you will. Pornography. CBS 2’s Scott Rapoport has more on the A-B-Cs behind the XXX at the library. “It’s a little shocking,” one public library patron said. “Wow. I didn’t know that. I had no idea,” added another. Yep, electronic porn too graphic for CBS 2 to show on television is available on-line for adults — on publicly used computers at the city’s 200 library branches. …Richard Reyes-Gavilan of the Brooklyn Public Library said that’s the policy — that even pornography is protected by the first amendment and recognized as free speech.
The comment by Mr Reyes-Gavilan is a perfect example of the statist mindset. If they don’t like something, they want to ban it or heavily tax it. If they do like something, they want it to be subsidized.
Why is it so difficult for some people to accept a world where people can make their own decisions with their own money, so long as their not infringing on the life, liberty, and property of others?
[…] And even when I’ve touched on the intersection of porn and public policy (here, here, and here), everything is […]
I hate to be the wrench thrown in your gears… but I think you’re missing the point from a technical perspective.
The libertarian objection here isn’t government subsidized porn, it’s government subsidized “equal internet access to everyone.” That’s maybe a fine point, but from a cost perspective, the porn access isn’t a “subsidy.”
A computer with internet access and a computer with internet porn access have no cost difference. HOWEVER, a computer with internet access and a computer that has porn filters on it DOES have a cost difference. It actually costs more money for “no porn” than it does for “porn”.
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There’s nothing new or shocking about that report; it’s been true for years. I work in a university library, and we were told long ago that we could not keep users from looking at porn on the public computers (other than for kiddie porn) because of First Amendment issues. It’s not that the liberal statists who run this place are particularly supportive of porn or concerned about freedom of speech (far from it, with our campus speech codes), but they’re afraid of being sued. I imagine it’s the same in the NYC public libraries’ case.
In fact, they’re so afraid of being sued, we stop a user from looking at porn even if another user complains. We can stop them only if the porn aficionado is “enjoying it too openly.”
I wouldn’t call it statist so much a simple bureaucratic cowardice.