Hedonic Adjustment

The Roger Van Zandt subplot in Heat revolved around Bearer Bonds

A million-dollar lottery for getting vaccinated, meaning that in case there's an adverse result?

The way I hear it, all such damage claims have been waived because of the "emergency."

This is a little off topic but it deals with something Jonah talked about in his other solo podcast (which is not distributed by Ricochet anymore to almost nobody’s protest). But he talked about his latest column, “Is ‘banned on Facebook’ the new ‘banned in Boston?” Clearly, the point of the article is to counter the conservative claim that free speech is under assault in America. Since ‘banned in Boston’ wasn’t really serious censorship then such things as ‘banned on Facebook’ are also not really censorship either.

And while taking in all the caveats, just the breadth of exposure shows Jonah’s argument is another one of his failed attempts to pass him off as an intellectual nowadays.

While Boston never has reached a million people in population, as of 2019 about 70% of American adults used Facebook, that is roughly 140 million people. So, to Jonah being ‘banned’ by an entity of 500,000 is roughly the same as being ‘banned’ from an entity of 140 million.

Take a person like Gavin McInnes, who is banned from every social media platform you can think of. He has started his own media entity, Censored.TV, which has roughly 25,000 subscribers (including myself) but would he have more if he was not banned on a platform that literally reaches hundreds of millions of people? He was very popular when he was a guest on Greg Gutfeld’s Red Eye and had one of the most watched interviews with Joe Rogan (which were before what Jonah would call a phony censorship campaign against him). There is a giant market for his personality and views yet you can argue his success has been throttled by the culture of censorship.

A thought experiment; if Joe Rogan had Jonah or McInnes, which interview would get more views? We know the answer to that. Of course, that only would be because Rogan has yet to be cancelled (interestingly, when Rogan moved to Spotify, the powers that be forced him to delete his popular interview with McInnes from his library).

This is Jonah’s contribution to the conversation; censorship is not really a problem, free speech is doing great in America. This might be a reason his relevance is fading.

Interesting how Jonah never misses an opportunity to defend the Biden Administration.

I live for GLOP monetary policy conversations:)