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Page 52
Why not take up each case separately and treat it on its own merits? Is this not the counterpart to the usual argument in monetary policy that it is undesirable to bind the hands of the monetary authority in advance; that it should be left free to treat each case on its merits as it comes up? Why is not the argument equally valid for speech? One man wants to stand up on a street corner and advocate birth control; another, communism; a third, vegetarianism, and so on, ad infinitum. Why not enact a law affirming or denying to each the right to spread his particular views? Or, alternatively, why not give the power to decide the issue to an administrative agency? It is immediately clear that if we were to take each case up as it came, a majority would almost surely vote to deny free speech in most cases and perhaps even in every case taken separately. A vote on whether Mr. X should spread birth control propaganda would almost surely yield a majority saying no; and so would one on communism. The vegetarian might perhaps get by though even that is by no means a foregone conclusion.
But now suppose all these cases were grouped together in one bundle, and the populace at large were asked to vote for them as a whole; to vote whether free speech should be denied in all cases or permitted in all alike. It is perfectly conceivable, and I would say, highly probable, that an overwhelming majority would vote for free speech; that, acting on the bundle as a whole, the people would vote exactly the opposite to the way they would have voted on each case separately. Why? One reason is that each person feels much more strongly about being deprived of his right to free speech when he is in a minority than he feels about depriving somebody else of the right to free speech when he is in the majority. In consequence, when he votes on the bundle as a whole, he gives much more weight to the infrequent denial of free speech to himself when he is in the minority than to the frequent denial of free speech to others.
Another reason, and one that is more directly relevant to monetary policy, is that if the bundle is viewed as a whole, it becomes clear that the policy followed has cumulative effects that tend neither to be recognized nor taken into account when

 
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