Be careful what you ridicule:

Jack Balkin says, responding to Juan’s and Glen’s posts (paragraph break inserted):

Glen’s assertion that goverments should never be in the business of deciding which ideas are good and which are bad is much too broad. To a very large extent governments are in the business of deciding which ideas are better than others, because that is the basis on which they enact (or should be enacting) public policy. Moreover, governments are always in the business of promoting some ideas over other ideas.

Does Glen seriously want to blow up the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial? To keep children from visiting said memorials on the grounds that they will be unduly influenced to think that Washington and Lincoln were great presidents? Does he think that there is something nefarious in government officials asserting that democracy is good and tyranny is bad?

(Would he object to the creation of a government program designed to promote belief in democratic forms of government over non-democratic forms? Does he believe that President Bush was wrong to give a speech advocating democracy and freedom for the rest of the world? Does he think government should not encourage the populace to engage in healthier habits through reporting the results of government funded health studies?)

Be careful what you ridicule as reductio ad absurdum, though; I, for one, am sympathetic to the reductio. (See my previous post for an intro to my thinking. Note that I’m not talking about any constitutional issue here related to compelled speech or the like; I’m only talking about general moral/political principles, which may be unenforceable through the Constitution.)

Government health studies, I’m definitely unsympathetic to, because I don’t like the idea of government encouraging certain lifestyles over others.

I also don’t like monumental architecture; in fact, it’s the most naked example on the list of government indoctrinating its people with a pro-it ideology. (My views on monumental architecture are similar in this way to my views on the Confederate flag. The controversial nature of the Confederate flag is already well known; and so, thank God for all the radicals, mostly on the left, for reminding us that even the regular U.S. flag should be seen as just as ideological.)

What might possibly save monumental architecture (though definitely not the Confederate flag), and may also save pro-democracy programs and speeches both at home and abroad, is that we can come up a rights-protecting justification for them: yes, it would otherwise be wrong for government to push these ideologies, but it’s using these programs to protect more valuable rights, to the extent we believe that these programs actually promote liberty at home or abroad or protect American lives by undermining hostile regimes, or what have you.

I’m more inclined to believe this story for Voice of America than for the Washington Monument. And “blow up” is such an ugly word. We have plenty of monumental architecture already. Let’s sell them off to professional tourist-attraction management companies, and just not build any more.