Disney Tax Status Revoke is Violation of Free Speech
I appreciate that it might be somewhat difficult to get emotionally invested in the tax status of a behemoth like Disneyland, but hear me out because it has important implications.
The TLDR is, the Florida state senate revoked a special tax situation Disney had (that allowed it to function more like a municipality) at the urging of governor Ron DeSantis. This was because Disney objected to the passing of the “don’t say gay” law, and said it would not give donations to Republican politicians who supported the law (the full story is here.)
Now, the comments on the YouTube video where I first saw this reveal something fairly disturbing; while many people objected to the revocation and called it out as violation of free speech, many other people said things like this:
“its not just an ,”opposition” to the bill such as an outspoken statement. they actually planned on lobbying hard throwing lots of money against the bill. the bill which many are confused about is to ban teaching kids up to 3rd grade on gender identity or in a manner that is not suitable for their age. kindergarten 5–6, 1st grade 6–7, 2nd 7–8, 3rd 8–9.”
“We have the best governor in the country and I Couldn’t be happier that this bill went through. It’s about time a company suffered consequences for being disingenuous and flat out lying about about a bill that the overwhelming majority of people in the state support.”
“Florida is right to want teachers NOT to have discussions about sexuality with students that the students’ parents are not privy to. Too many teachers have had criminal sexual relationships with their students. Also, many students are talked into irreversible transgender medical procedures by their teachers, with the students later rejecting the changes but being unable to reverse what has been done to their bodies. Protecting Florida’s children should come before diversifying the tax base.”
Ok. So. Putting aside what any individual might actually think about the “don’t say gay” bill (summarized here) it is extremely disturbing that a private company could be financially penalized by the government for voicing objection to a bill. One of the YouTube commenters effectively said that “Disney wasn’t just speaking out against it, they were going to lobby hard with money against the bill.”
So… do you think that conservative companies with money are lobbying for the bill? Because I do. Look, I am not a fan of money in government, but if you stop allowing liberal companies to lobby while allowing conservative companies to lobby, you do not have any semblance of democracy anymore. And, the fact that people are ok with this because they support the bill means they don’t see the larger picture of what’s at stake.
Flip this around; what if California started dropping tax penalties on any company that had donated to a pro-life politician, how outrageous would that be? How up in arms would conservatives be about that?
Because that is equivalent to this. Individuals and corporations have a right to free speech, including a right to donate to politicians and organizations that support their political interests. If we want to stop large companies making large political donations (and, I’m not necessarily opposed to that idea) we need to stop it across the board. If we start penalizing companies that hold particular views, we’ve now entered the realm of autocracy.
So, what should we do?
Well, one thing about autocrats is they usually fuck themselves over in the end. The most top of mind example is Putin, who inhaled so many of his own farts that he convinced himself he could steamroll Ukraine, but Xi Jinping has also demonstrated self destructive tendencies by decimating China’s tech industry. Tencent and Alibaba, two of China’s biggest companies, have lost 1 Trillion dollars of value after Xi cracked down on them with a series of forced restructurings, fines and regulations about a year ago.
Why did Xi do that?
Well, simply stated, the tech sector was getting too powerful, so he wanted to hobble them so he could be sure to maintain a monopoly on power for himself/his party. However, if this type of behavior continues, it will likely weaken China’s ability to compete on a global level. I think it’s likely that Alibaba could eventually have grown to become more valuable than Amazon, for example, but if it continues to be damaged by its own government this will almost certainly not happen.
Despite how autocrats may portray themselves, it’s actually fairly standard for them to harm their own economies. The #1 priority of an autocrat is to maintain control of their own power at any cost, and this is often a goal at odds with economic growth. Large economic growth produces rich people, and rich people end up with power that can begin to rival the power of the autocrat himself. So, hobble the growth, hobble the rich people who pose a risk to your power.
Anyway. Going back to Disney; what exactly has DeSantis done here? Well, one thing he has likely done is cost the Florida Taxpayer a lot of money. I don’t understand the details exactly, but its seems like — effectively — the initial tax break was to some degree mutually beneficial. Disney got a break, but it also had to provide its own services (fire inspections, garbage collection, road paving, things like that.) If the government revokes its status, it now must provide Disney with all the services it used to provide itself, not to mention there’s apparently some sort of issue with debt Disney had concerning this self regulation that the government would theoretically take on.
And, in a way, it’s expected that it’s going to be a cluster-fuck. Because this was a punitive measure, and often when you care about being punitive, you decide to hurt yourself by making the calculation that you’re going to hurt your opponent more. Autocrats, and tyrants, and the type of people who wish to hold on to power by subverting democratic means are punitive people because they know they can’t win fair, so the only way they can hold on to power is to punish the opposition.
Now, of course, the temptation on the left will be to start violating the free speech of conservatives, but they shouldn’t do that. (Many people will say “the woke liberals already violate free speech” but this isn’t the same — a private individual or corporation “cancelling” someone is a different order of magnitude than government retaliation. Not that I love or support “cancelling,” but what’s happening in Florida is a whole different ballgame.)
The reason liberal government shouldn’t start violating the free speech of conservatives… is sometimes conservatives say intelligent things. Really. Thing is, we’re all trapped in our own bubbles blinded by our own perspectives; our “opposition” often gives us the (frequently unwelcome) gift of seeing our own blindspots. If you start shutting down your opposition, you stop getting accurate information about reality.
Then, you start behaving like Putin, or Xi Jinping, etc. and you start doing things that will ultimately hurt your causes in the long run. So, I think, the best thing to do is to wait it out. Biden is getting trounced in the polls, so we’re almost certainly going to end up with a Republican sweep of the house and senate, followed by a Republican president in 2024.
I know, if you’re a liberal like me, that may seem grim. However, there is one thing I am eternally grateful for, and that is that we had Biden in the Whitehouse right now, and not Trump. Honestly, I think Biden is going to go down as a Jimmy Carter — seen as a failure in his own time, but vindicated in the decades to come. Frankly, if Trump had been in the white house we’d probably have been sending the Javelin missiles to Russia instead of Ukraine.
In 2024 a long, cold winter is coming (but not literally because Republicans don’t believe in global warming.) The best we can do is create bastions of sanity and free speech, and just wait for the autocrats to destroy themselves. We just have to find ways to not let them strip us of our right to govern ourselves in the meantime, like they did to Disney.
