The marketplace of ideas can be traced to the writings of John Stuart Mill and John Milton. Fred S. Siebert wrote that “Milton was confident that truth was definite and demonstrable, that it had a unique power of survival when permitted to assert itself in a free and open encounter.”

And he pointed out that John Stuart Mill believed that, “the only way in which a human can know a whole of the subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion.”

In a nutshell, this is the self-righting process, the marketplace of ideas, which is a favorite justification for protecting free speech. It promotes the idea that ultimately, whatever good is desired, is better reached by the free trade of ideas, just as with commodities in the open market. The better good will do well in a healthy competition.

If you have been writing down the number of lies the US president tells per day, you are out of paper by now, but here are two standouts.

In spite of Donald Trump’s administration’s lie that his 2017 crowd size at his inauguration dwarfed Barack’s of 2009, the evidence shows otherwise. The world now knows the country of Mexico will not pay for Donald Trump’s wall on the US southern border. It was a lie. Mexico used expletives to describe the wall.

The fact is, because of the free dissemination of ideas, a process gets created in which the truth competes and eventually wins out over falsehood, even if you choose to call falsehood “alternative fact.” There is no such thing. A lie is a lie. The sooner any administration understands liars are losers because the truth wins, the better it can govern.

The idea of the First Amendment jurisprudence complements this thought that the ultimate good sought is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of the truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the marketplace, which the United States media provide.

Calling the media “the enemy of the people,” does not alter lies about inauguration crowd size or that Americans, not Mexico will have to pony up money for the fulfillment of a campaign promise of a wall, does it? The liar obviously, is the enemy of the people. In this case, the president of these United/Divided States.

There is active competition in the media, with each fighting for high ratings but more attention has obviously been given to ad proceeds and getting the story right is a given for most (excluding Fox News.) The American press comes in many forms with independent ownership.

A true story reduces the public’s difficulty in making the decision about which of what is said and written to agree with and which analyst is deemed the most credible.

How do you tell a true story? If a report says the earth is round, you know it is true because the alternate fact(falsehood) should be, the earth is flat and that’s a lie.

This marketplace can be crazy and incorrect. If so, why should everyone not agree to the same thing? Another burning question is, once the truth is reached, why is there any need to encourage any number of dissenting views? A clear example is hate speech. Why tolerate hate speech when it is so evident that it is wrong?

This could explain why university students make no apologies for shouting down hate speakers and in some cases, outrightly have them disinvited after protests, for views not aligned with the civilized world. Students pay a lot of money to be educated enough to determine which ideas are civil enough to consume.

And some of these speakers not only command six-figure fees, excluding other expenses, but admission cost to the events as in the case of Donald J. Trump Jr’s can be prohibitive for students. Trump’s UNT Kuehne Speaker series event was sold as tables with sponsorship costing between $5000 to $100,000 per table. Poor students.

So, although the marketplace of ideas is a compelling reason for allowing free speech, good reasons may explain attempts to limit free speech as was the case at Florida University where the National Policy Institute’s request for speaking on campus was denied in September 2017 “due to worries about safety following the events in Charlottesville VA.”

What happened in Charlottesville VA, caught up in hateful and destructive ideas show the marketplace did not act to weed out the wrong ideas. This is one of the many marketplace failures in recent times.

These outright failures to ensure that only the truth prevails suggest that the marketplace of ideas has not been successful in protecting our society from bad actors, bad ideas and other harmful events and platforms such as Facebook have exacerbated the problem

The relevance of this marketplace must be called into question given the prevalence of fake news and the proliferation of hate groups. The various social media platforms have complicated matters. Facebook is not a news source and the same applies to Twitter and the rest of them.

However, it is not unlikely that there may be some who rely on some of these reporting tools for their news.

Forbes Magazine issue of December 4, 2017 defends this marketplace of ideas saying, “There is no need to compel speech, the marketplace of ideas is working.” The publication used the decision of the Supreme Court in two cases as justification.

The first involves the owner of a cake shop who refused to bake a wedding cake for a couple saying it is against his religion. He was deemed to have violated Colorado’s civil rights law but the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. He was found to have the right to not bake the cake for the couple who are gays.

The second was regarding an Illinois public employee who had declined to pay union dues because he was not a member. The court ruled in his favor as well. In these two cases, the marketplace of ideas worked only because they went as far as the Supreme Court.

Was it not supposed to work on its own?