While we’re all shooting off our guns in celebration of good Supreme Court news, Roger has reported the blow to liberty dealt by the Court’s lower-profile CLS v. Martinez decision. I won’t elaborate on whether the Court made the right decision — on that I stand with Roger (and Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas). I just want to add one thing about the root problem in the CLS case: You can’t have both taxpayer funding of higher education and full freedom. As Ilya Shapiro and I wrote in an April op-ed about the case:

It is impossible to reconcile free speech with governmentally compelled support of speech. Just as public colleges cannot choose both which student groups to fund and avoid discrimination, they cannot pay a professor without privileging his speech over that of the taxpayers who pay his bills.

Quite simply, when public universities decide which groups do or do not get taxpayer funds, and which professors are or are not hired, government is deciding those things, and that is ultimately incompatible with both free inquiry and, more importantly, a free society.