This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 17th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Europe has much to teach the United States about restricting speech.

Most of those lessons come in how not to protect it.

At a Cato Institute forum Danish lawyer Jacob Mechangama

detailed some of the ways in which European countries good intentions have worked

against free expression.

I should say I don't want to sound like an alarmist.

Western Europe is still a more open and pluralist place

than almost anywhere else in the world

when it comes to free speech.

So I'm not arguing that Western Europe

has turned authoritarian. But what I am concerned about is the mix is the

mid-to-term development of the legal and political culture of free speech in Europe.

And I think my concern can perhaps best

be expressed by traveling back in time

to the very first democracy in the history of mankind,

the Athenian democracy. So in 411 and 404 BC the Athenian democracy was

was twice overthrown by oligarchy coups and the very first victims were

actually the values of free and equal speech that the Athenians priced so highly at least if you were not a slave and if you were a man and so on but still what happened was that democratic

institutions were guarded and and Democrats were killed or exiled I think these two coups actually serve

as history's first confirmation of what Benjamin Franklin

...