WE MUST BREAK UP BIG TECH
opinions with which it disagrees. George Orwell wrote an entire essay worrying more about the dangers of self-censorship than he did of that imposed by the government. Barry Goldwater, whom Reason magazine dubbed “20th-century America’s first libertarian politician” in 1998, exhorted Americans to “make war on all monopolies – whether corporate or union,” calling the enemy of freedom “unrestrained power.” Generations of classical liberal and libertarian- minded thinkers have understood that when left unchecked, both democracy and capitalism can be susceptible to tyranny – the former to tyranny of the majority, the latter to tyranny of monopoly or cartels. Maintaining true freedom, then, requires a delicate balance of power between the state, corporations, and society. In amassing unprecedented power over our speech, information, and free thought, Big Tech represents the greatest private threat to liberty in our modern age. True advocates of freedom stand against government tyranny. It is incumbent upon them to preserve the balance of our liberties in those rare moments when they are threatened by corporate tyranny, as well. Rachel Bovard is the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute and a senior advisor to the Internet Accountability Project. She is a former senior staffer to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).
engage to fix market distortions where and when they arise. Such a posture is not antithetical to libertarian thought. Even Friedrich Hayek, the great advocate of the unfettered market, was hardly a doctrinaire noninterventionist. He did not subscribe to what he called “dogmatic laissez faire.” Rather, over the course of his life, Hayek advocated that certain governmental functions beyond the minimal state were not only justified... but necessary to the functioning of a free- market system – especially when confronting monopolies. Hayek was an unparalleled advocate of the dangers of centralized government control. But his rejection of “freedom as dogma” suggests he intuitively understood the danger of idolizing the concept of freedom in such a way that allows for its slow and intentional re-definition by corporate interests. Blindly and unquestioningly clinging to the cloak of freedom, in other words, can easily allow it to be transformed into a meaningless shroud under which other forms of oppression can hide. Classical liberalism has a long history of skepticism toward concentrations of power, both corporate and government. Indeed, an exclusive focus on the threat to freedom solely from state power is a relatively modern development. Jon Stuart Mill acknowledged that society’s “means of tyrannizing” were not limited to politicians. Alexis de Tocqueville observed the silence a majority can enforce against
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January 2021
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