The Twitter Is A Private Company Casuistry

Maybe by now you've heard that the Oregon bakery that refused to make a dyke wedding cake has closed for good. Sweet Cakes By Melissa was featured in this space in 2015.

You've got to love the headline in this Oregon Live report. Sweet Cakes was the company that "turned away lesbians." Should leave no doubt where Oregon Live's sympathies rest.

Sweet Cakes was very much a private company, and they were razed to the ground for expressing their constitutional rights. Two such rights were specifically enumerated in the Constitution: the free exercise clause and the free speech clause.

So don't bother defending Twitter when they ban someone for offensive speech. There is no such thing as free association in Weimerica.

Twitter, Inc. pays a 35% tax on their net profits. What is this other than a license fee to do business in America? Thought of another way, America is $20 trillion in debt with another couple hundred trillion in unfunded liabilities. In this regard, the government is allowing Twitter, Inc. to retain 65 percent of their net profit.

The common shares of Twitter, Inc are held by both private individuals and by public employee pension funds. Taxpayers like you pay the salary of the fireman, the teacher, and the policeman. A percentage is withheld and transferred to the pension fund, which then invests in Twitter.

Also, more Twitter employees are about to be laid off. These workers will receive unemployment checks for awhile. State unemployment insurance is a tax levied against employers, and pays out workers who have become "unemployed through no fault of their own."

The tax is funded by the employer, but is administered by the state. The state reserves the right to extend unemployment benefits unto infinity to avoid soup lines.

And another thing. The internet was reclassified as a Title II common carrier. There are hundreds of pages of regulations that every company has to follow to ensure that they act "in the public interest." This is supposed to regulate the behavior of ISPs, but a case can be made that Twitter is an internet service provider.

Either way, the notion that any company is a private club that can associate with whomever it pleases is a relic from a bygone era. Just ask Aaron and Melissa Klein.