Inflating the Cost of Free Speech

“Freedom isn’t free” we have been told by the martially inclined. A good idea of what they meant was presented to the world before the saying ever caught on. 1972 was when the AP ran the Nick Ut photo  “Napalmed Girl”. It depicted 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down a rural Vietnamese road naked, molten and sobbing. Her village, where US ordnance had just detonated, incinerated in the background. The picture literalized “collateral damage” for anyone rationalizing in newsy abstractions.

In...