Finance

Russia's Law To Ban Online 'Disrespect' Of Its Government Isn't Just Morally Repugnant, It's Bad For Russian Innovation

It doesn't seem smart to fine and jail people for doing something that would actually improve your country's competitiveness.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

In early March, Russia’s parliament advanced a bill which would prohibit “blatant disrespect” of the Russian state, Russian officials, or Russian society. It was considered alongside a sister measure banning Russians from disseminating “fake news” (apparently non-ironically). If you are reading this column on March 13, the day it came out, right now the Federation Council, Russia’s upper legislative house, is considering both bills. Both are expected to pass and to be signed into law by Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Even though the measure prohibiting “disrespect” of the government appears to enjoy broad support among Russian lawmakers, not surprisingly, it has faced criticisms from Russians and from abroad, with many likening it to Soviet-era measures deployed against political dissidents.

For those of us living in freer societies (so far), it’s easy to viscerally react to this bill as the repugnant disaster that it is sure to be. But the problem with power protectionism like this runs deeper than simply being an affront to freedom for freedom’s sake. In addition to robbing Russians of what should be their right to peacefully express their own viewpoints, there’s quite a good argument that measures like this actually end up harming a society economically and developmentally.

I’m not just talking about the hefty fines associated with the ban, and even those are far from insubstantial. For showing “disrespect” to the trappings of the Russian state, a first-time offender could face a fine of up to 100,000 rubles. While 100,000 rubles is only equivalent to about $1,500, it sure seems like a lot more when you consider that the average monthly wage in Russia is in the neighborhood of 32,000 rubles (it is very difficult to find reliable wage and income information for Russia, and the country has horrendous inflation, so take this as the rough approximation that it is). At more than three times the average monthly wage, that’s a hard-hitting fine. Repeat offenders could face fines totaling up to 300,000 rubles, or even a 15-day jail sentence.

The possible direct economic costs to Russians from this law in fines and lost wages are nothing to sneeze at. But there could be a more systemic economic rot at the heart of laws like this.

Niall Ferguson is a British historian who has done some groundbreaking work over the years. He currently works as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and he has previously taught at both Oxford and Harvard. While he gets some shit for his outspoken views on empire, he takes what really shouldn’t be that surprising of an approach to history: maybe we should try to actually understand why things happened the way they did and apply those lessons to make our future better, instead of just marveling at how much less woke our ancestors were than we are.

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Anyway, Ferguson wrote a very interesting book called “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” in which he identifies six societal features that he collectively credits for the Western dominance that began around the year 1500 and continued for centuries. These societal features — “killer apps,” as he calls them, in an analogy to mobile device technology — can be “downloaded” by any society to help improve its development and increase its accumulation of power. I guess Russia’s parliament hasn’t read the book, because “stomping out political dissent” isn’t on the list.

Internal competition and representative government are on the list, however. According to Ferguson, the lack of political competition, depressed freedom of conscience, dwindling rule of law, and the absence of a free press are important factors in explaining why countries like Russia lag behind countries like the United States in innovative development and capacity.

Isn’t there a bit of appealing elegance to the theory that just maybe our apparent dividedness in the United States doesn’t make us weak; no, it is actually an expression of what makes us so strong? When thoughts are allowed to be expressed, even those panning our current leaders, over the long term it provides a rich evolutionary environment for ideas and ideologies to be tested and tried, the good embraced, the bad left to wither and die.

For now, it seems Russian lawmakers are going to leave the societal advantage of political competition to us. To me, it doesn’t seem smart to fine and jail people for doing something that would actually improve your country’s competitiveness. Russia’s parliament and Putin could better serve their people by making their country more free. Instead, they’ll serve their own egos by making it less so.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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