Texas to Normalize Government-Coerced Speech

If legislation just passed by the Texas Senate is any indication, we can look elsewhere than the GOP for principled opposition to the "vaccine passport" papers the left would have us produce on demand:

PSA: This is the proper way to display a flag any time you are forced to play the national anthem.

The Texas state senate has passed a bill that would make the playing of the national anthem mandatory at all professional sporting events hosted in venues that receive state funding. The measure has already received the support of the state's Lt. Governor, Dan Patrick. [link omitted]

There are so many things wrong with this bill that one is at a loss for where to start. For example, just on matter of improper government, the whole idea of the government being in the business of building or funding stadia is wrong, but such an entrenched practice that nobody bats an eye.

But that's the least of our concerns.

What's news is that since the state is part "owner," the people currently in charge have decided it should start making decisions about what goes on (or doesn't) in such venues.

Since "public property" is a collectivist fiction, since the public as a whole can neither use nor dispose of its "property," that "property" will always be taken over by some political "elite," by a small clique which will then rule the public -- a public of literal, dispossessed proletarians. (Ayn Rand in "The Property Status of the Airwaves," from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p. 128)

This is exactly what is happening here, except that, as Jazz Shaw of Hot Air notes with approval rather than alarm, "[I]f a measure like this can pass anywhere, it's probably Texas, right?"

Few there will object since Texans are generally patriotic, even though this measure (a) further entrenches the fiction of public property, (b) embellishes it with the further fiction that government ought to be calling the shots about what can and can not occur in such places, and -- worst of all -- (c) helps normalize the idea of government-mandated speech -- such as the very domestic "passports" so many Republicans object to.

I detest leftists ostentatiously boycotting the national anthem just as much as I hate seeing them abuse the American flag. But the principles of liberty that make each of these meaningful to me forbid the government forcing any of us to play the former or prohibiting us from burning the latter.

Assuming this bill becomes law, we shall thenceforth have the terrible spectacle of the enforced playing of America's national anthem actually signifying dire and largely unrecognized peril for our republic.

Any flag on display at such a time would properly be hung upside-down.

-- CAV