The riot tax: How Berkeley bills everyone else for its own cowardice

Mario Savio climbed on a police car in Sproul Plaza in December 1964 and told 3,000 Berkeley students to put their bodies on the gears of the university machine until it stopped. The Free Speech Movement he launched that fall forced Berkeley to guarantee students the right to political activity on campus. Berkeley became the symbol.

Sixty years later, the machine still runs, but I know a rigged system when I see one. I spend my working life pricing risk and testifying in court about what fiduciaries owe people who depend on them. Berkeley has built a mechanism a fiduciary would recognize instantly: It prices speech out of existence without banning it, then hands the bill to everyone except the people who ran it up.