REVIEW: There’s No Such Thing as a Free Speech.

As 2018 gutters out, sputtering down to its dim end, it might be worth looking back at one of the few genuinely new lights of the past year—the Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger’s underappreciated Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech.

Perhaps the book received less attention than it deserved because of its subtitle, there being a general rule in the publishing world that books with parenthesed paragraph numbers of IRS code in their name aren’t destined for wide notice. Call a book Trojan Horses, and you might do all right. Add the subtitle 26 CFR 20.7520-3 and the Taxation of Gifts, and you’re headed for the remainder bin.

But Philip Hamburger has always gone his own way, and in Liberal Suppression he intends what his subtitle asserts: The constitutional idea of free speech has weakened over the past century, and one of the most powerful devices diminishing freedom of speech is the treatment of nonprofit organizations in the tax code.

Phil is doing great work. I also recommend his The Administrative Threat, about runaway administrative agencies.