A Wall Street Dope

You might want to keep away from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, where some of the thinking is done by Kimberly Strassel. I started to read an essay she had written, but I didn’t get far. In the essay Strassel asked her five-year-old to define free speech, and the child said, “Free speech is that you can say what you want—as long as I like it.”

My guess is that the child said nothing of the sort. That's not how children talk. In any case, Strassel went on to claim that this answer showed her child was “a socialist with totalitarian tendencies.”  

Ha ha ha.  

As you probably noticed, there was nothing in what the child said that connected intolerance to capitalism, libertarianism, socialism, Marxism, anarchism or Christian Science. You can, of course, find examples of intolerance in any movement, Strassel apparently doesn’t grasp that, so I tossed the essay and went back to reading a book on the West’s discovery of the Mayas.