So here we go again: two flavors of statism, dressed up in their respective left and right pantomimes, both grasping for power with the same dirty game—mobilizing the coercive apparatus of the state to crush opponents and control public discourse. Pellmann, the leftist, demands the state punish a rival group for “misleading association” and damages his “personal rights”—an artificial legal concoction created by the state to insulate its favored actors from the robust contest of ideas. His legal team cries for monetary penalties, essentially proposing a state bounty, not just for rectification but for deterrence against undesirable speech. In effect, they would have the state decide who can speak and under what slogans, shackling freedom and emboldening bureaucrats.

Let’s be very clear: the idea that the state should intervene whenever politicians feel their “credibility” threatened is anathema to liberty. Nozick reminds us that rights are “side-constraints,” not permissions, and the greatest threat to actual rights comes from state overreach, not from people chattering at rallies. If you permit the state to police every utterance, to fine and criminalize every act of “misleading” association, you will find yourself in the soft totalitarianism of bureaucratic approval, not in a free society. Hayek would warn that this is the road to serfdom: every curb on speech justified by the “public good” is just one more link in the chain that binds us all to central planners and their courts. Who decides what is “misleading?”—the same sluggish, self-interested, and power-hungry institutions that have stifled enterprise and conscience across all history.

Ayn Rand would have laughed at the absurdity of these actors. “Lower prices—energy and food must be affordable” is just more code for state price controls, inevitably leading to shortages, rationing, and misery. The moment politicians are allowed to use the court to suppress rivals, they do, not to protect the public but to consolidate their own power, fearing the competition of unapproved voices. The answer to bad speech is more speech, not legal muzzle. Voluntary association, voluntary boycott, voluntary rebuttal: this is the marketplace of ideas, not a courtroom of state-sanctioned truth.

That the court in this instance found in favor of the accused is a very feeble victory for liberty—it is heartening only because it resulted from ambiguity, not principle. Libertarians should recoil at the entire spectacle: political parties competing not to convince, but to criminalize and to profit from their imagined “injuries.” No one’s rights are served by expanding the power of the state to police rhetoric. Every such expansion is a blank check in the hands of those who wish to silence dissent, left or right.

Let free people march as they please, shout what they will, and be judged in the court of public opinion—not the kangaroo courts of the state. That’s the only “affordable” principle compatible with civilization.