Elizabeth Nolan Brown makes a point about how the market worked in the firing of Matt Lauer.

The obvious take here is that the chairman of NBC News, Andrew Lack, made a cold economic calculation: Mr. Lauer might have been a rainmaker for the network, but keeping him on was no longer worth it in the face of potential lawsuits, damage to the brand and lower ratings.

Or as the title of her op-ed explains, NBC didn’t fire Lauer. “We did.” The “moral suasion” of public outrage made Lack act. It’s not that NBC wasn’t well aware of Lauer’s actions before, but that it did nothing about it until it went viral. This is a good argument in favor of market forces, and one terrible argument against law.

But that doesn’t mean women won’t tap the extant outrage for the purpose of pushing change into the law, shaming lawmakers (who are certainly as exposed to shame for their own sexual improprieties as the dreaded homosexuals in the State Department were to communist blackmail in the 50s) into rewriting law to align with their outrage. 

Amanda Taub claims to seize upon criminal law to distinguish degrees of wrongfulness.

Many of those accused have lost their jobs, but for the most part, they are not facing legal consequences. Yet principles borrowed from criminal law can help us analyze whether our response to their actions is just and fair.

Criminal punishment tends to rest on two broad principles: the seriousness of the wrongdoing, and the perpetrator’s intent in committing the crime.

This isn’t entirely incorrect, but begs the question to the extent I felt compelled to find out whether Taub got her law degree from Twitter Law School. In criminal law, the “wrongdoing” is defined. It has elements. It is not whatever someone decides is wrong based on feelings of victimhood. Taub skips over that part.

Women are often told to grow a “thicker skin” and become less sensitive to harassment. But the eggshell plaintiff rule suggests a different conclusion: that the harassers should bear the costs of the harm they impose, even on “thin-skinned” victims.

There is a rule called the eggshell plaintiff rule, though it’s primarily a tort concept relating to the extent of damage done by unlawful conduct, not what constitutes the unlawful conduct itself. Taub, however, conflates the rule. Conduct does not become unlawful because the victim is “thin-skinned.”

Or more to the point, some women will find cause to be offended everywhere, whether because they’re so fragile or are finely attuned to finding reason to be offended. That doesn’t make it wrongful conduct. In criminal law, the Constitution requires that illegal conduct be sufficiently described so that a person knows that his conduct violates the law. If not, the statute would be unconstitutionally vague.

If the criterion for making conduct criminal was the feelings of the putative victim, no one would have a clue whether conduct was illegal. No one knows how another person will feel about something. One person’s funny office banter could be another person’s outrageous sexual harassment. The simplistic “just don’t harass” solution doesn’t work at all when harass means whatever the recipient wants it to mean.

People worry that we are sliding down a slippery slope to neo-puritanism, or in the throes of a witch hunt for sexual impropriety. Perhaps it will turn out that we are. But social science research suggests that this discomfort is a natural consequence of shifting social norms, not necessarily a sign that the changes are going too far.

Whether this is a sign of shifting social norms or yet another social panic where, for the moment at least, businesses that rely on, or seek to tap into, the woke market as peculiarly exposed to the mob and thus willing to throw their cash cows under the bus has yet to be seen. For the women indulged, dredging up every historic offense whether serious or trivial, real or imagined, actionable or laughable, they’re having a moment. They would say it’s their due, and perhaps it is.

Meanwhile, the old norms of gender roles and hierarchies have not disappeared, and may conflict with new demands for accountability. There is no safe harbor of conformity to be had.

It would be convenient if doing the right thing were easy. But bringing long-hidden harms to the surface cannot help disturbing the status quo. Accounting for years of wrongdoing is costly, and dismantling hierarchies that fostered harm can lead, in the short term, to chaos. Now society must decide how many of those costs it is willing to bear.

Chaos is right. For the moment, we’re under mob rule, and the mob has gone nuts. Seventy-five-year-old Garrison Keillor* will be disappeared by Minnesota Public Radio? Taub attempts to bring proportionality into the mix, while being an apologist for culpability based on anything that offends a woman, and thus flagrantly distorting law while pretending to apply it,  But the mob doesn’t care. The mob doesn’t think. The mob has no conscience. Just blind, irrational fury and outrage.

Nolan’s point about open markets is what allows the worst, the stupidest, the least principled, to have its day. When the mob speaks with its feet and pocketbooks, business will listen. They won’t wait until allegations are proven. They won’t be concerned about due process, substantive or procedural. They won’t question whether the accusations are real or fabricated, based on conduct that is inherently wrong or wrong only because the most fragile woman felt offended.

Will this result in “dismantling hierarchies” or will rational people tire of mob rule when they realize that the cost of this female catharsis is more than society is willing to pay? The answer will likely be found in how hierarchies came into being in the first place.

The open market may be willing to accommodate the anger of the moment, but eventually, it will return to stability. When that comes, the chaos will be crushed, and with it, so too will the mob.

*What horrifying sexual abuse did Keillor perpetrate?

“I put my hand on a woman’s bare back,” he wrote. “I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness and her shirt was open and my hand went up it about six inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology later and she replied that she had forgiven me and not to think about it.”

Mr. Keillor claimed that they continued to be friends “right up until her lawyer called.”

The animal.