Our wise founding fathers established a government to protect the rights and property of a free people, who made their own decisions about how to live. They wisely did not create a government to tell us how to live—nor what to believe.
A society whose members don’t know what to believe, with people who spread lies for whatever nefarious reasons, has a serious problem. Living in communities as we all do requires a degree of trust in a common understanding of the facts. But who is to determine what is true and on what basis? In a free society the responsibility of evaluating what to believe rests with each of us individually.
“The American Founders told everyone who would listen (and some who wouldn’t) that the republic could not endure without a virtuous citizenry. They warned that the Constitution was necessary but not sufficient.”[1] The quality of our lives and of the functioning of our communities depends on the choices and behavior of each of us. Our freedom to behave as we choose will only produce a successful community if its members behave virtuously. The maximization of each individual’s utility (happiness) as we economists might put it, depends, in part, on how well our individual preferences fit into the community’s norms and expectations. No man is an Island.
Our specific values might come from our religious and/or philosophical beliefs. These can differ but must include respect for the rights of our neighbors to live by their own lights. But decisions based on incorrect information will be suboptimal or worse. The government might require that firms transparently disclose relevant information about their products (such as content) but should not impose its own judgment about the truth—governments themselves lie too often to be the final orbiters of truth.
Meta CEO Mark “Zuckerberg announced earlier this week that his platforms would part ways with the third-party fact-checking organizations he had employed to police speech on Facebook and Instagram.
“‘The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,’ he said.” “An urgent meeting of the fact check legion-of-doom—Reason” FaceBook posts will continue to allow comments by its users challenging alleged facts. Zuckerberg, who met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Friday, said his company is “going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free _expression_ on our platforms.”
It is up to us to evaluate what to believe and what to pass on. This is not a trivial responsibility, but the market works hard to help. Just as we learn how to successfully do anything else (Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic), we need to learn how to evaluate information we are given and to carefully choose sources that we trust. There are private fact checking organizations we are free to consult or ignore. We are free to choose news sources that we believe adhere to the standards of objective journalism. But if we do not exorcise our judgement wisely, our society will be less “successful” than otherwise.[2] But it would violate the wisdom of our founders and the best interests of a free society to give that responsibility to the government.
[1] Jonathan Rauch, “Cross Purposes, Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy” January 2025
[2] Jonathan Rauch. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021. 280 pp.