Wire Report

Starbucks, Guns, and Property Rights

(Wire/FFF) – The controversy over guns and Starbucks provides us with an opportunity to understand the relationship between gun rights and property rights.

The gun-control crowd is upset with Starbucks because the chain is permitting people to openly carry firearms into its stores. They say that this is carrying the right to keep and bear arms too far.

On the other hand, some gun-rights advocates are claiming that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of people to keep and bear arms in Starbucks.

As a private business, Starbucks has the right to operate its business any way it sees fit. If it wants to permit people to bring weapons into the store, that is its right. That’s what private ownership entails.

By the same token, Starbucks has the right to ban its customers from bringing guns into its stores. That’s what private ownership also entails.

If Starbucks changes its policy to no longer permit people to bring guns into its stores, it hasn’t violated the rights of any gun owner. Instead, it has exercised its right to run its own stores in the manner it sees fit. No one, including gun owners, has a right to impose his views on Starbucks.

Of course, customers have the right to take their business elsewhere if they disagree with Starbucks’ policy.

If the gun-control crowd decides to boycott Starbucks because it is permitting people with guns into the store, the gun-control crowd has not violated anybody’s rights in their boycott decision, including the rights of Starbucks and gun owners.

On the other hand, if Starbucks changes its policy and prohibits guns in its stores, the gun-rights crowd is perfectly free to boycott Starbucks and take its business elsewhere.

Thus, ultimately human rights are rooted in property rights.

Here’s another example. There is a famous line issued by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the case of Schenck v. U.S.: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.”

Actually, however, Holmes’s analysis is misapplied. Issues of free speech, like gun rights, are rooted in property rights.

For example, consider a newspaper that publishes nothing but critiques of socialism. Socialists complain that their free-speech rights are being infringed upon because the newspaper won’t publish their perspectives too. But the socialists are wrong. The newspaper is not violating their rights to free speech by refusing to publish their socialist perspectives. Instead, it is simply exercising its right to run its private business any way it wants. Of course, the socialists are free to boycott the newspaper and also to go out and form their own newspaper.

By the same token, a movie theater has the right to operate its business the way it wants. The reason that a customer isn’t free to falsely cry fire in the theater isn’t because there are “reasonable” limits to free speech, as Holmes implied, but because the policy of the theater owner is to prohibit customers from disturbing the peace of the other customers, which obviously would happen with a fraudulent cry of “Fire!” While customers are free to boycott theaters, they do not have the right to violate the policies of the theater owner.

But suppose, just hypothetically speaking, a theater owner was displaying a raucous type of rock-and-roll movie and announced that during that particular movie, customers could make as much noise as they wanted and scream whatever they wished, no matter how false, including “Fire!” The theater owner would be perfectly within his rights to do so. It’s his theater. If customers didn’t want to attend that particular movie and put up with people screaming, yelling, cutting up, and falsely yelling “Fire!” it would be within their rights to boycott the movie.

Finally, it’s important that we keep in mind that the Bill of Rights consists of restrictions on federal power, not on the use of private property. Thus while the First Amendment prohibits federal officials from enacting laws or engaging in conduct that infringes on such fundamental rights as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press, it does not prevent private owners from using their property the way they want. The same holds true for the right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

© 2010 Future of Freedom Foundation

Jacob G. Hornberger – Founder & President, The Future of Freedom Foundation

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, publisher of The Freeman.In 1989, Mr. Hornberger founded The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a regular writer for The Foundation’s publication, Freedom Daily. Fluent in Spanish and conversant in Italian, he has delivered speeches and engaged in debates and discussions about free-market principles with groups all over the United States, as well as Canada, England, Europe, and Latin America, including Brazil, Cuba, Bolivia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Argentina. He has also advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows. Most recently, he has regularly appeared as a commentator on Fox News’ legal commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Internet-based show Freedom Watch. His editorials have appeared in the Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, La Prensa San Diego, El Nuevo Miami Herald, and many others, both in the United States and in Latin America. He is a co-editor or contributor to the eight books that have been published by the Foundation.

Joseph Marohl

The most crippling aspect of modern democracy is the decline in logical argument.

Logical argument was the invention of the Greeks, along with theatre (once used to bolster the free flow of ideas), philosophy, and Western democracy. All four of these contributions to civilization are posed against the blind acceptance of (or faith in) the dictates of authority and power.

In the first century of the American nation, political debates were actual debates—with set positions argued for and counter-arguments defended against. How great would it be now for seekers of high office to debate a single issue, such as the role of the middle classes in American society or the best policy towards foreign dictators!

At one time, argument permeated the social scene, with party invitations’ commonly instructing invitees to bone up on set topics in preparation for speaking on them with other guests. The middle-brow Circuit Chautauqua, nineteenth-century traveling shows, featured lectures on various topics from prison reform to memory improvement, mixed with band music and Metropolitan Opera singers, followed by question-and-answer sessions involving members of the community.

Much is made of the role of Faith in early American culture, but seldom is Argument credited for promoting progress and establishing America’s character and self-confidence. Ultimately, it was argument, not faith, that abolished slavery, expanded voting rights, and established the 40-hour work week.

By argument, I do not mean shouting people down. I do not see argument in the harangues of Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly. I would not count the glib sarcasm of Stephen Colbert and Al Franken, entertaining and valuable as it is, as argument. Oprah Winfrey, though a goddess of common sense, mainly exhorts and inspires—she rarely, if ever anymore, uses her show as a meeting-place for opposing opinions, as the old Phil Donahue and Dick Cavett shows used to do (and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher still attempts to do).

Argument requires a forum, where differences in opinion are expected, respected, and encouraged in the interest of forming a more complete understanding of the issues under debate.

Argument requires clarification of the dividing lines between opposing positions. It requires a focus on logic and facts as proofs for the rightness of one’s position.

Argument requires that probability, not certainty and not mere possibilities, be put to the test, “proof” meaning, quite simply, the test that an opinion is put to—by speakers and listeners alike.

Today America is full of opinions, but few Americans know how to back them up. Few Americans feel comfortable expressing their opinions, convinced that blithe agreeableness is preferable to taking a position—while others think that bull-headed pontification requires no further explanation or proof.

Things have gotten so bad that to take any position at all more complicated or unusual than what can be fit on a bumper sticker smacks of extremism—or crackpotism.

The old adage forbidding discussion of religion and politics at the dinner table has now morphed into “Let’s just agree to disagree,” a more polite way of saying, “Shut up—I’m not interested in your reasons for disagreeing with me.”

Now that nobody expects anyone to back up anything he or she says in public, all kinds of bullshit pass for intelligent commentary these days. Idiocy is justified on the grounds that idiots sincerely believe in their idiocy.

Sincerity and good intentions are things we cannot evaluate or judge from outside. Facts, logic, and clarity of expression are things we can observe and make judgments on. As long as sincerity counts more than proof, humanity will not see further progress.

The sincerity of your belief and hope for the future is admirable, but what exactly are you saying, and how can you back it up?