This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 24, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court is now considering a case of whether or not Confederate flags should be allowed on license plates in Texas.

So it's worth considering just what value does offensive speech deliver to a free society. Trevor Burris is a research fellow at the Cato Institute, he comments.

Well, I think if you think about some of the movies where you see a sanitized future,

such as demolition man or even in the account in

Aldous Huxley's brave new world, you think of the idea of imagine the world where no one is

offending anyone, where no one is

pushing the boundaries of what can be said and what should what should be

said or even not even even hurting people's feelings that world is is

often dystopic right and so we're having a debate right now on college campuses with the

Oklahoma fraternity video and we're also having a debate today in the Supreme Court

about when offensive speech can be protected or should be protected by the First Amendment.

And my position is that offensive speech is the sign of a healthy free society because it actually

helps advance important causes of a free society.

In many ways, without any law whatsoever by eliciting certain ideas or by stating certain ideas,

the social sanction is extremely powerful.

Exactly.

And it's probably, depending on various situations, but it's often better than government.

Now of course of government is going to shoot everyone for saying offensive things

then social sanction is not as harsh but we don't want that but in the way the

government tries to root out offensive speech it doesn't it's not very effective and

...