Another Exciting Chapter of 18th Century Fights Waged in the 21st Century!

So hot on the heels of a big blowup about whether or not you have the right to build a church wherever you want (you do) and whether or not you can burn a book or not (you can) we now get the faux controversy of whether or not you should be able to sell a book that the vast majority of people find objectionable (you do).

I'm talking, of course, about this. I struggle with how much to write about this because (much like religion) to those that agree with me there's not really anything I can say that they haven't already thought of and those who don't agree with me will not be swayed by any type of logical argument.

So I'll try to take a slightly different tack on this. All but the most extreme individuals aren't saying that the author doesn't have the right to publish this book. It seems to more come down to whether or not Amazon should be selling it. Personally, I view stores (whether online or brick and mortar) as markets, and the consumer wins when the selection is as unlimited as possible. Even though it's not what often happens, I want supply and demand to be the only things dictating the price and availability of a product. For Amazon or any other business to spend time, money, and energy in deciding what is appropriate for the consumer to purchase just hinders my ability to get a commodity at the lowest price possible. When deciding whether or not to sell something like a digital book (which carries $0 procurement and production cost) the only relevant question for Amazon to ask is "is it legal?".

So now Amazon has removed the book from their website, and I don't really know why. Those leading the boycott charge are certainly not (and weren't going to be) satisfied with just this. A lot of them have lists of other books they also want to see removed, and this "success" just eggs them on further. So in the last 24 hours they've managed to outrage the religious and moral right-wingers by selling it and now they've pissed off the left-wingers by caving and taking it down. That's kind of impressive when you think about it. I guess they are counting on the American public having an extremely short attention span. And they couldn't be more wrong about . . . SQUIRREL!