Honorable mention goes to Murray N. Rothbard for “Free or Compulsory Speech” :The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression. People rebel against the insight that the disturbing element is to be seen in the malinvestment and the overconsumption of the boom period and that such an artificially induced boom is doomed. ...
...[W]e must call the boom retrogression and the depression progress. The boom squanders through malinvestment scarce factors of production and reduces the stock available through overconsumption; its alleged blessings are paid for by impoverishment. The depression, on the other hand, is the way back to a state of affairs in which all factors of production are employed for the best possible satisfaction of the most urgent needs of the consumers.
...The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. The individual is always ready to ascribe his good luck to his own efficiency and to take it as a well-deserved reward for his talent, application, and probity. But reverses of fortune he always charges to other people, and most of all to the absurdity of social and political institutions. He does not blame the authorities for having fostered the boom. He reviles them for the necessary collapse. In the opinion of the public, more inflation and more credit expansion are the only remedy against the evils that inflation and credit expansion have brought about.
Here, they say, are plants and farms whose capacity to produce is either not used at all or not to their full extent. Here are piles of unsalable commodities and hosts of unemployed workers. But here are also masses of people who would be lucky if they only could satisfy their wants more amply. All that is lacking is credit. Additional credit would enable the entrepreneurs to resume or to expand production. The unemployed would find jobs again and could buy the products. This reasoning seems plausible. Nonetheless it is utterly wrong.
If commodities cannot be sold and workers cannot find jobs, the reason can only be that the prices and wages asked are too high. He who wants to sell his inventories or his capacity to work must reduce his demand until he finds a buyer. Such is the law of the market. Such is the device by means of which the market directs every individual's activities into those lines in which they can best contribute to the satisfaction of the wants of the consumers. ...
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Out of the collapse of the boom there is only one way back to a state of affairs in which progressive accumulation of capital safeguards a steady improvement of material well-being: new saving must accumulate the capital goods needed for a harmonious equipment of all branches of production with the capital required. One must provide the capital goods lacking in those branches that were unduly neglected in the boom. Wage rates must drop; people must restrict their consumption temporarily until the capital wasted by malinvestment is restored. Those who dislike these hardships of the readjustment period must abstain in time from credit expansion.
There is no use in interfering by means of a new credit expansion with the process of readjustment. This would at best only interrupt, disturb, and prolong the curative process of the depression, if not bring about a new boom with all its inevitable consequences.
The process of readjustment, even in the absence of any new credit expansion, is delayed by the psychological effects of disappointment and frustration. People are slow to free themselves from the self-deception of delusive prosperity. Businessmen try to continue unprofitable projects; they shut their eyes to an insight that hurts. The workers delay reducing their claims to the level required by the state of the market; they want, if possible, to avoid lowering their standard of living and changing their occupation and their dwelling place. People are the more discouraged the greater their optimism was in the days of the upswing. They have for the moment lost self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise to such an extent that they even fail to take advantage of good opportunities. But the worst is that people are incorrigible. After a few years they embark anew upon credit expansion, and the old story repeats itself.
Libertarians surely favor freedom of speech, that is, the right to speak without being hampered by the government. But the right to speak implies the right not to speak, the right to remain silent. ...
The Fifth Amendment, as we all know, prohibits the government from forcing a person to testify against himself: "nor shall any person … be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." Excellent. But why should an accused criminal possess a right not also granted to admittedly innocent persons? In short, by what right does a government compel someone to testify against another? Here is a flagrant invasion of liberty, a flagrant abuse against the rights of the individual, and an initiation of force and violence against an innocent person. ...
There is also something peculiarly monstrous and antilibertarian about the way in which courts, i.e., judges, move against such "crimes" as nontestimony. In every other criminal case, whether real or victimless, the defendant is duly charged, indicted, and prosecuted, and is allowed to plead his case before third parties: judges or juries who are not involved in the dispute. Yet with the "crime" of failing to testify, all such procedures and safeguards go by the board. The judge is the prosecutor — charging the defendant with "contempt of court" — and also the decider of the defendant's guilt (in this "crime" against himself). The judge is the plaintiff, prosecutor, judge, and jury all wrapped into one.
What is more, in all other cases of crime, the conviction and the sentence are punishments after the fact, after the crime has been committed. Someone commits a crime, and is then punished. But not so in the case of "contempt of court." In such cases, the judge uses the "punishment" in an attempt to compel action on the part of the "criminal." The punishment is before the fact, an attempt to force the defendant to do something the judge wants him to do. And, in theory at least, the judge can keep the victim in jail for life until he "purges himself of contempt" by performing the required deed. He can keep the defendant in jail until he agrees to bear witness in court, until he performs the required speech.
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The court ruled, however, that in this case the shield law and even the First Amendment were overruled by the Sixth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which guarantees the accused in a criminal trial "compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor." ...
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... What does one do, in general, if one is a Constitutional absolutist and two parts of the Constitution contradict each other, which they do frequently? There is only one way to resolve such contradictions (if one really wants to resolve them, rather than waffle one's way through arbitrary qualifiers piled on each other). And that is to have a noncontradictory set of principles that is held higher than any written document, even one as generally beneficent as the Bill of Rights. Libertarians have such a set of principles, and libertarians therefore are particularly well equipped to point the way out of this First Amendment–Sixth Amendment morass.
For libertarians hold that it is ever and always illegitimate to use force against a nonaggressor, against someone who has not himself used force against someone else. That means that no one, no innocent person, regardless of his occupation — whether he be newspaperman, lawyer, physician, accountant, or just plain citizen — should ever be forced to testify or turn over notes to anyone, whether as witness against himself or for or against anyone else.
In contrast to Bill of Rights absolutism, libertarian absolutism sheds a pure and noncontradictory light on the issue. The Sixth Amendment must be altered to drop the compulsory process clause. The remainder of the Sixth Amendment provides guarantees for defendants against the government; only this clause provides defendants with compulsory powers against innocent people. It must be repealed.
Who then will bear witness in court? Whoever wishes to do so, freely and voluntarily. Conscription of witnesses is no more justified than conscription into the armed forces or into any other service or occupation. Freedom and individual rights must extend to all institutions and all branches of life, even into the judiciary, the heart of State power.
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