“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Benjamin Franklin’s famous words are often quoted because, alas, they are always relevant.

Whether Franklin meant what libertarians take him to have meant has been challenged in recent years. See this disagreement between Benjamin Wittes and Leya Delray. In defense of her interpretation, Delray argues that Franklin shed light on his meaning when he quoted himself 20 years later.

Whoever is right, for Franklin the word liberty on these occasions meant not individual freedom but colonial “self-government” independent of the king of England and those to whom he had granted land in the New World. And for Franklin, the powers of such a government include the power to tax. Franklin thus was defending the collective “freedom” of Americans through their colonial legislatures (that is, majority rule) against undemocratic rule from afar. (Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony granted to the Penn family by the king of England. The family-appointed governor had repeatedly vetoed bills from the legislature that included provisions to tax the family’s proprietary estate to pay for the defense of frontier settlements during the French and Indian War. The family objected but offered instead to pay a lump sum for that defense in return for a legislative renunciation of its power to tax the family land.)

In my view, Delray makes a better case than Wittes, but whatever Franklin had in mind, we as libertarians are free to apply Franklin’s words to the individual rather than the collective. After all, we’re methodological individualists, who realize that no group can possess rights not possessed by its members. So let’s do so. (Another Benjamin — the French-Swiss classical liberal Benjamin Constant — had important insights about the critical difference between individual freedom and so-called collective freedom in his must-read 1819 essay “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns.” Spoiler: Three cheers for modernity!)

Many points could be made about the trade-off allegedly required between liberty and safety, or security. For starters, can they really be traded off? The libertarian philosopher Roderick Long thinks not:

What we want is not to be attacked or coercively interfered with – by anyone, be they our own government, other nations’ governments, or private actors. Would you call that freedom? or would you call it security?

You can’t trade off freedom against security because they’re exactly the same thing.

Consider what’s happening in China. In the name of delivering the impossible — zero COVID-19 — the people have been deprived of all liberty. Are they more secure for this deprivation? The virus is spreading apace anyway, and people are dying and suffering because whatever freedom they had previously has been curtailed. It is inspiring to see so many Chinese protesting their oppression in cities throughout the country. How sad that many other Chinese are willing brutally to police the people who are demanding freedom and justice.

Another way to look at the alleged trade-off between freedom and security is to realize that one doesn’t gain actual security through state limits on freedom but rather a false sense of security. A false sense of security is worse than no sense of security at all.

When the state, even a democratic one, assumes the role as security provider, how do we know it will actually provide security rather than make us less safe? Because politicians and bureaucrats (think Anthony Fauci) say so? Because elected officials will accurately identify and appoint well-meaning and expert bureaucrats? A good deal of faith is expected on the part of the people who will be compelled to obey the resulting decrees. This model of governance also ignores the fact discovering what ought to be done in a given situation requires a decentralized competitive process in which competing hypotheses and theories are freely aired. Centralization in this realm suffers from the same fatal calculation and knowledge problems of central economic planning.

At any rate, what assurance does anyone have that the experts, who are human beings, will not err or act corruptly? We have no assurance at all. Even if a state official gets caught in a blunder or corrupt act, the likelihood that he will be held accountable is minuscule. Good luck suing that person. As for mounting an effort to defeat a politician at the polls, good luck with that too.

The doctrine that a democratic state (as opposed to a society of individual liberty and consensual social cooperation) can deliver security is actually rather peculiar. It’s based on the curious principle that while we are too incompetent to manage our own lives through individual action and voluntary cooperation, we are perfectly competent to pick other people to manage our lives coercively. No one better exposed this contradiction than Frédéric Bastiat, the great 19th-century French classical liberal economist and legal philosopher. In The Law he wrote:

What is the attitude of the democrat when political rights are under discussion? How does he regard the people when a legislator is to be chosen? Ah, then it is claimed that the people have an instinctive wisdom; they are gifted with the finest perception; their will is always right; the general will cannot err; voting cannot be too universal.

When it is time to vote, apparently the voter is not to be asked for any guarantee of his wisdom. His will and capacity to choose wisely are taken for granted. Can the people be mistaken? Are we not living in an age of enlightenment? What! are the people always to be kept on leashes? Have they not won their rights by great effort and sacrifice? Have they not given ample proof of their intelligence and wisdom? Are they not adults? Are they not capable of judging for themselves? Do they not know what is best for themselves? Is there a class or a man who would be so bold as to set himself above the people, and judge and act for them? No, no, the people are and should be free. They desire to manage their own affairs, and they shall do so.

But when the legislator is finally elected — ah! then indeed does the tone of his speech undergo a radical change. The people are returned to passiveness, inertness, and unconsciousness; the legislator enters into omnipotence. Now it is for him to initiate, to direct, to propel, and to organize. Mankind has only to submit; the hour of despotism has struck. We now observe this fatal idea: The people who, during the election, were so wise, so moral, and so perfect, now have no tendencies whatever; or if they have any, they are tendencies that lead downward into degradation.

Any reasonably intelligent person ought to see that it is far easier for us to manage our own lives than to select “the right” social engineers, with their compulsory one-size-fits-all plans, to do it for us.

It is said that neither freedom nor security is free. I agree. But must we pay coercive monopoly prices for inferior services?

Nobody asked but …

Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopaedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.

— Goethe

Can we ever arrive at the “truth?”

Historians lie about the past, since history is written by the victors.  Therefore, history is wishful thinking about perceived accomplishments.

Journalists lie about current affairs for two reasons; 1) if it bleeds, it leads, and 2) it is wishful thinking about how the past will result in “good” consequences only (good for whom?).

Futurists lie about the future because we have not agreed on what is true in either the past or the present.  Nor do we have any verification for that which has not yet happened.

Beyond the above occurrences, everyone else wants to sound authentic.  No one knows what they are talking about.

— Kilgore Forelle

On November 16, the Respect for Marriage Act achieved 62 votes for “cloture” in the US Senate, meaning that it will proceed to floor debate and likely — after reconciliation with the House version, which passed in July — become law.

That’s a good thing, but let’s not make it more than it is. The long title of the bill reveals its true purpose:  “A bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and ensure respect for State regulation of marriage, and for other purposes.”

The bill has two core provisions.

First, it applies the US Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit clause to “marriage between two individuals.” If two people — ONLY two people — get married in Massachusetts then move to Texas, Texas has to recognize them as married.

Second, it requires the federal government to recognize a marriage “if that individual’s marriage is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into.”

Both provisions are all well and good, but “respect for state regulation of marriage” isn’t the same thing as “respect for marriage.”

Actual respect for marriage would involve getting both federal and state governments completely out of the business of deciding who can be, or is, married.  Not just “on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals,” but completely.

Marriage is one or both of two things: A personal commitment (often, but not always, with religious implications) and/or a contract.

The personal commitment side is not and never has been any of government’s business.

As to the contract side, if there’s any role for government at all, it’s in adjudicating disputes between the contract’s parties with respect to the contract’s terms — and the number of parties to that  contract is irrelevant to that governmental role.

If I get in a car, turn the key, and start moving down the road, am I driving? Yes, I am — even if I don’t have a license from the government to drive.

Likewise, if I get married, I’m married whether or not I have a license from the government to be. I’ve been married for 22 years. No government license, and no need for one. It just so happens that I’m married to one other person rather than, say, five other people, but in the latter case I’d still be married, whether government “recognized” that or not.

The only relevant questions, where government is concerned,  surround whether the parties to a contract consented (and were competent to consent) to and complied with its terms.

If truth in advertising laws applied to Congress, the “Respect for Marriage Act” would be called the “Respect for Continued, Slightly Less, Government Meddling in Marriage Act.”

Good start. But let’s take this all the way.

The bankruptcy of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the alleged fraud by co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, which has cost customers millions, is tailor-made for anyone who already wants the power of government to expand, especially in the area of financial privacy. For that reason I think it would be useful to take a 30,000-foot view of the matter. I offer these considerations as someone with no more than a layman’s knowledge of the cryptocurrency phenomenon. (I found this Reason video helpful.)

First, fraud is illegal. If a firm accepts money from clients and uses it in violation of the contractual terms, that is already against the law and the victims have legal recourse. So right off the bat we should be highly doubtful about calls for new laws and regulations or expanded regulatory oversight.

Second, regulation can create a moral hazard. That’s what happens when a sense of security provided by insurance or government regulation unintendedly encourages the very bad thing that one sought to avoid. Think of the massive stock fraud perpetrated by Bernie Madoff. Madoff was a well-connected investment insider who defrauded highly sophisticated individuals and charities. He didn’t prey on naive widows. Madoff had even worked with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Isn’t it plausible that the existence of the regulatory regime worked to Madoff’s advantage? Imagine if no such regime had existed and investors had not been led to rely on an SEC “watchdog,” with all the classic bureaucratic deficiencies, to protect them. Would they have been such easy marks? I think not.

Fraud is always possible no matter the regulatory environment. Thus a false sense of security is worse than none at all.

Critics of markets denigrate the buyer beware principle, but when compared to the alternative — trust state bureaucrats — it looks pretty good. To the extent that regulators weaken buyer beware, they do a disservice to the public while posing as benefactors. Buyer beware is necessary in any legal environment. If you were you’re looking for a new doctor, would you be content simply to throw a dart at a list of government-licensed physicians? Or would you ask around?

Third, the alleged criminality of FTX should not impugn cryptocurrency per se any more than Maddoff’s criminality impugned the stock market per se. If, as appears to be the case, a bad actor harmed a lot of people, he should have to compensate his victims. (Of course, that may not come close to making them whole.) But Bankman-Fried’s wrongdoing must not be used to demonize cryptocurrency as inherently suspect and illegitimate or to drive it out of existence. No reasonable person concluded that we should not have a stock market because Madoff used it to fleece lots of people.

Fourth, some powerful people are out to get cryptocurrency precisely because it can help regular people maintain some privacy. Those with a fetish for government power have pushed and often attained measures designed to abolish financial privacy. For example, through the government’s “Know Your Customer” rules, banks are obliged to inform regulators about their depositors’ behavior even if no evidence of criminality exists. Regulation of the government-cartelized banking industry is so extensive that bureaucrats can make virtually any demand and the unwitting depositors whose privacy is compromised have little or no recourse. In a competitive banking industry with market-based money, banks would perhaps offer different assurances about privacy and consumers would freely decide what level they valued at what price. That’s how it should be.

If people believe that financial privacy matters only to those who have harmful activity to hide, they need to get over it. Financial privacy and privacy in general are simply implications of self-ownership and should matter to everyone. It is obviously important in authoritarian and totalitarian countries, where governments freely confiscate people’s wealth, but it’s also important here. We can’t know exactly what the future holds. Remember what happened to protesting truckers’ bank accounts in Canada? Let’s also not forget PayPal’s threat, since rescinded, to fine customers for spreading alleged misinformation. And the war on drug sellers and users can’t be a good reason for denying financial privacy because the so-called drug war should be abolished.

No one who cares about individual freedom should stand by and let the FTX scandal become a pretext for expanded government power and the destruction or nationalization of cryptocurrency.

As cryptocurrency exchange FTX falls into bankruptcy and its principals seem likely to face various criminal charges over the activities leading to that bankruptcy, it’s time for another round of crowing from opponents (and would-be regulators) of cryptocurrency. Which means it’s time for another round of pointing out where those opponents and would-be regulators are all wet.

It’s too early in the day to even try to untangle what happened with FTX, but what SEEMS to have happened is a “Ponzi scheme.” That is, older investors in FTX and related enterprises such as trading firm Alameda Research seem to have been paid supposed “profits” from incoming investment revenues while the other money all went … well, somewhere.

Lots of money went to lobbyists to game government regulatory efforts. Lots of money went to Democratic and Republican campaigns and politicians. Lots of money went to expensive homes in the Bahamas. And so on and so forth. Maybe all that will come out in the wash. None of it looks very good.

And, believe it or not, none of it has anything whatsoever to do with cryptocurrency — Bitcoin, Ether, etc. — as such.

Yes, the allure of cryptocurrency was used to attract investors and customers.

Yes, cryptocurrency was among the media of exchange used in the alleged scams.

Question 1: How many scams throughout history have been perpetrated using the allure of dollars and using dollars as the medium of exchange?

Question 2: How many times has the dollar itself been blamed for, and tanked in value because of, those scams?

Remember the sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007? How about the Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s-90s? Bernie Madoff? Enron?

A lot of victims have lost a lot of money in a lot of scams.

We rightly blame the scammers for scamming their victims.

If we ARE the victims, we may blame ourselves for getting tricked into doing something stupid.

We also rightly blame government regulators, usually for the wrong reasons. Every time regulation fails to nip a scam in the bud, we’re told that more regulation will solve the problem — until the next time, when the answer is, once again, more regulation.

But we usually don’t blame the money, even when we should.

The Federal Reserve has been scamming you for more than 100 years by inflating/debasing government-issued money at will. That dollar bill in your pocket buys about 1/28th of what it would have bought in 1914.

Bitcoins, on the other hand, are produced algorithmically  at a fixed rate, and once a maximum number (21 million)  have been “mined,” there won’t be any more. That doesn’t mean your Bitcoin will increase or decrease in value, but if it does it won’t be because a government board has the power to magically create more.

The FTX scandal did hit cryptocurrency prices, and maybe it should have. The hit is a market signal to all of us. Message delivered, if we’ll listen: When you hand your money over to shady hucksters on the promise of unrealistic profits, bad things happen.

In August, Congress passed and president Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act, a $280 billion corporate welfare bill for US semiconductor manufacturers.

In October, the Biden administration added new restrictions on  semiconductor exports to China, banning not just sales of semiconductors, but of the tools to make them — including by and to companies located in neither the US nor China.

All of this activity is essentially an extension of Donald “Tariff Man” Trump’s trade war with China, waged for the purpose of “protecting” Big Business from foreign competition at the expense of American consumers.

That’s not how its promoters put it, of course. Advocates of “industrial policy” say they just want to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, reduce American dependence on imports, and of course guard our “national security” from an ever-growing list of Enemies of the Week.

But the two ways of putting it amount to the same thing.

Contrary to what you may have heard from advocates of “industrial policy,” the US manufactures more stuff now than it ever has (apart from the same worldwide dip during the COVID-19 pandemic) — more than half again as much by value than it did 25 years ago.

Yes, there are fewer manufacturing JOBS … but that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.

The less labor required to manufacture a thing, the cheaper it is to make that thing and the more people can afford that thing. More efficient, less labor-intensive manufacturing leaves workers free to put their labor into areas where it offers a greater return — and with historically low unemployment levels, why shouldn’t they?

Instead of welding auto frames or making shoes, more Americans are providing healthcare, information technology services, and other things we need at least as much as cars and shoes.

As for dependence on imports, such dependence promotes peace and friendship between countries. People who need and value each other’s products and services don’t fight, they trade. The recent downturn in US-China military relations is not mere coincidence.

That’s not to say protectionism doesn’t have beneficiaries. It certainly does.

Protectionism’s beneficiaries are politically connected business interests who want to charge you $500 for a laptop computer and so ask the government to keep you from buying a competing Chinese model for $350. And, of course, the politicians who give those business cronies what they want.

American consumers don’t benefit. We pay. Every “new American job” created by protectionist policies costs means that every American consumer — including the workers in those  “new jobs” — pays more for the products or services involved.

Advocates of “industrial policy” want you to believe their ideas make you better off. Unless you’re a large stockholder in a  “protected” corporation, they’re lying to you.

Nobody asked but …

I don’t think you have time to waste not writing

because you are afraid you won’t be good at it.
― Anne Lamott, from Bird by Bird

I recognize writing of human communication as the apex of

developing culture

originating and transmitting ideas

noting the incredible filligree of life

terrorizing the groundlings with the possibilities,

taming then the minds by observing the beauties

Heaven’s gates are opened,

illustrating the wonders,

nuances,

klangoring.

You are lifting the discourse

over the Milky Way and

under the seas of the Universe 

 having eventually to let go,

avenging the slights 

victory over banality, 

every thing must be left on the playing ground,

 the need to connect calls

in all times of your affect

mastering your contribution to the memorium

every morsel you can add to the feast

trading places in posterity,

ordering knowledge. 

Who are you to decide what will be remembered 

 assessing your place in history 

seeing how things will be.

Testing the flexibility of the future

evading facts to be, 

never looking at the likelihoods

of not slipping through the boards

to molder in the dust among the stars.

Why should we write or otherwise be a wordmonger?

Reality sets in. 

Ideally you can be lauded thoughout the Emperion,

taking a place of honor above Shakespeare or Lao Tsu

Instead, astronomically unlikely.

Never coming to light,

getting overlooked in the parade,

being a speck of stardust

except unique nevertheless,

celebrated by no one but essential to every other speck,

as you contributed to the lingua franca of it all.

Universality 

seals your fate 

even if  you were a crib death or an Octogenerian.

You left a lingualist microscopic mark

or erected a masterpiece which will bear a label

under its magnificence, but you

are in fear of being forgotten.

Relax and rest easy.

Everybody’s memory will expire soon,

as much as we may wish otherwise.

Fret not.

Responsibility dissolves in eternity, 

and dissipates in cosmic winds.

I see that to we humans it is temporary.  

Do tardigrades see our travails? 

Youth falls before the force of time,

only our most minute motions will persevere.

untold the story will remain unreadable.

Who will carry on?

Only no one. 

Nevertheless,

The dictates of physics guarantee that

bygones will exact accuracy

each time.

granting to each moment a certainty

overall 

outstanding in its place, but 

doing  well at its connectedness.

actually preserving truth for which there can be no substitute,

trust 

in

truth.

— Kilgore Forelle

Politicians are always promising to do things politicians can’t do. Either they believe they are magic, or they want you to believe they are.

Sometimes they promise things they can’t legally do — things that violate the Constitution — and other times they promise to do things that aren’t possible within the laws of physics in our universe. Do they believe you are gullible enough to fall for it? Probably.

Often they promise to violate economic reality, which is nearly as immutable as the laws of physics.

I’ve seen them promise to cap medication prices. I saw one suggestion that the cap for the price of insulin should be $0. Who did she think would continue to make insulin for free? Who would they enslave to do the work without being paid? Who will they steal the raw ingredients and facility from?

Did she mean everyone except the person getting the insulin will be forced to pay for it? This is usually what politicians mean by “free.”

Economic ignorance is common in politicians, but it’s not the only domain where they fail.

They are never good with scientific reality, as shown by “Save the planet,” “Save the climate,” and “End fossil fuels.”

The Constitution is a frequent target of their delusions of power. Regardless of what the Constitution allows or forbids, they promise to secure the border.

With zero understanding of human nature, they believe legislation and cruel enforcement can end drug abuse.

They promise to ban an imaginary category of firearms: the “assault weapon.” A name they made up so they could put anything they don’t like into the meaningless category. It’s still a lie, and they’ve been corrected enough times to know it by now. If they banned everything they label an “assault weapon” it would increase crime in a very real way. Prohibition always does.

The promises they make never end. Fortunately for us, they rarely get fulfilled. To a politician with ambitions to rule, reality is inconvenient to their goals and gets ignored as much as possible. Politicians can choose to ignore reality, but reality won’t be cheated. The piper will be paid and gravity will pull them back down.

If you keep falling for political promises, you deserve what you get. My hope is that you’ll see through their lies and avoid the pain that comes from trying to cheat reality to get what you want. Magic isn’t real, and politicians are never Dumbledore.

It might surprise you to learn this, but I don’t like change. Well, that’s not completely accurate: I don’t like pointless change.

I have tolerated uncomfortable situations simply to avoid the pain of going through a change I couldn’t see as improving anything.

However, if something is broken and I can see a solution, I want to change it. This is why I try to save people from their addiction to political government and all its various manifestations, such as police, taxation, various prohibitions, and so forth. This would be a useful change.

The kind of change I don’t like is trying to vote yourself free by selecting a different political criminal to replace the previous political criminal. Even if the new boss (who is supposed to be the servant) respects rights that were being violated before, you can be positive he’s going to violate liberty in other ways. The nature of politics is to ratchet up the control.

Swapping out politicians is as useless as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic after it sank.

This kind of pointless change is never a net gain.

However, I agree that sometimes any change can provide temporary relief. If a headache can make you forget about your broken toe for a while, I see how some people might choose the headache. The problem with politics is there will always be those who’d prefer the pain of the broken toe over the headache, so they aren’t going to appreciate your preference being forced on them.

This winner-takes-all approach is why politics is so toxic to society. It’s like voting on which church everyone is required to attend and fund for the next four years. This would cause religious wars, as history demonstrates.

Political government isn’t special. Don’t ignore this effect just so you can govern others the way you want for a while.

To back a change I have to see how it could make things better than they are, or better than they seem to be heading.

The fewer people who take politics seriously, the better. Focus on your life — govern yourself. Don’t try to impose politicians or legislation on others to govern them. No one has the right to do so. Not even if you call it “democracy” or pretend a “right to vote” exists. Growing past this worn-out superstition would be a positive change I could support.

An “experienced analyst” at the National Security Agency ran an illegal surveillance project that involved “unauthorized targeting and collection of private communications of people or organizations in the US.” The agency’s inspector general concluded that the analyst “acted with reckless disregard”  for “numerous rules and possibly the law.”

This happened ten years ago. The inspector general’s report was issued six years ago. But the public is just now learning about it, courtesy of Bloomberg. After some intrepid Freedom of Information Act work, we can now see a highly redacted version of the IG report.

The NSA’s investigation of the analyst began about a month before American hero Edward Snowden’s public disclosures of other illegal activities on the part of the  “intelligence community.”

Snowden’s reward for exposing crime in government? Involuntary exile to Russia under threat of life imprisonment.

Snowden’s comment on the report: “Defenders of broad surveillance authorities always insist that Americans don’t have to worry because our intelligence agencies are tightly constrained by law and policy …. But time and again we’ve seen that when laws are violated and powers are abused, no one is held legally accountable.”

New government offices/officials seldom solve anything, and usually make things worse. But something obviously needs to be done about the “intelligence community’s” lawlessness. How about a single replacement for multiple agency inspectors general?

Let’s call this proposal the “Intelligence Ombudsman Office.” It would presumably need to be created by Congress. They should get to work on that ASAP.

The IOO would replace all US intelligence agencies’ inspectors general and other internal enforcement mechanisms.

It would consist of a small board — with previous “intelligence community” affiliations an absolute disqualification for appointment — and a staff of reasonable size for the job.

The IOO would have complete authority to visit any “intelligence community” site, view any “intelligence community” generated document no matter its level of classification, interview any “intelligence community” employee under oath, and present allegations of “intelligence community” crimes to grand juries.

It would also run (hopefully very secure from “intelligence community” eavesdropping) tip lines via phone, Internet, snail mail, and in person, and it would be a felony to punish or retaliate against any “intelligence community” employee for using them.

The IOO wouldn’t solve the overall problem of America’s “national security” apparatus running amok. Supporters of freedom have been fighting a rearguard action against that apparatus’s encroachments since at least as far back as the 1940s. The only real solution is to disband the NSA, CIA, NRO, et al., and salt the earth where their headquarters once stood.

But if we can’t get rid of these rogue agencies, we should at least give an external board real power to police them.

Nobody asked but …

Who will keep you safe?  Every politician now running for office claims, pretends to guarantee, that he/she will.  I got some election flyers in my mailbox last week.  Half of the requests told me that the opposition was involved in pedophilia.  All I had to do was align myself with a spotless citizen whom was gracious enough to warn me of the alleged perversion.  When I and my contemporaries pick the right horse, we will be safe from this outrage.

In a more general sense, many of the rest promised only to keep me safe from all evil — Senator Jack S. Phogbound will keep [your state] safe from [your favorite terror].

Can you believe it?  Do so at your own risk.  Actually, there is no risk that any politician will protect you from any horror.  He/she will not.  If you are dependent on a politician to provide you with an omnipotent safety blanket, go fish.

— Kilgore Forelle

Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, cites a previous action (Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia Univ.) to this effect:

“A private entity violates the First Amendment ‘if the government coerces or induces it to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint.”

The plaintiffs say “That is exactly what has occurred over the past several years, beginning with express and implied threats from government officials and culminating in the Biden Administration’s open and explicit censorship programs.”

The suit was filed in May, but is only now proceeding to its deposition and discovery phases.  Among those to be deposed: Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The judge in the case notes that “there are compelling reasons that suggest Dr. Fauci has acted through intermediaries, and acted on behalf of others, in procuring the social-media censorship of credible scientific opinions.”

After nearly three years of stamping unjustified  endorsements from “SCIENCE!” on pure, undiluted authoritarian political measures, Fauci will now have to explain himself under oath.

The “under oath” part is important, given Fauci’s recent campaign to shift responsibility for the political implementations of his own statements and actions, throwing others under the bus so as not to call into question his claim: “I represent science.”

Trofim Lysenko, head of the Soviet Union’s Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, imposed a “Marxist-Leninist” line on biological research. He “represented science” in the USSR, and actual scientists who disagreed with him were censored, suppressed, even imprisoned and executed.

Fortunately, we never got to the imprisonment/execution stage with the COVID-19 pandemic. What we did get was suppression of actual science and actual scientists in support of a politically driven line on everything from masking to school closures to vaccine mandates.

From his perch atop NIAID, Fauci set himself up as, effectively, America’s Lysenko.

As the highest-paid (and among the longest tenured) employee of the federal government, he lied to us — and endorsed lies to us — about the efficacy of masking and vaccination, the advisability of school closures, and numerous other issues.

He also willfully participated in efforts to discredit, and even suppress public discussion of, actual science on the subject, as when he endorsed National Institutes of Health director Frances Collins’s call for a  “devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration, in which actual scientists cited actual science on behalf of a “focused protection” strategy versus the  NIAID/NIH/CDC’s rights-violating, economically damaging, non-science-supported “zero COVID” approach. That latter approach still enjoys a (thankfully dwindling) cult following and will likely slow down our return to normalcy for years to come.

Lysenko was eventually removed from his post in disgrace. Fauci hopes to retire with honors.

Hopefully Fauci’s deposition will go a long way toward shifting the stain on science’s reputation to his own reputation and those of his co-conspirators, where it belongs. Lysenkoism is too deadly to leave undiscredited.

“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

Ever since corporate raider Gordon Gekko, the lead character in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), made that declaration, left-wing opponents of the market economy have regarded that one-liner as the only rebuttal required to silence their libertarian adversaries. (Right-wingers like the national conservatives probably find Gekko’s line useful too.)

But Gekko’s scriptwriters, Stone and Stanley Weiser, neglected to have their creature define the word. How interesting, then, that Gekko says, “for lack of a better word.” Is there no better word or phrase than greed for what he might have had in mind? “The peaceful pursuit of one’s interest” or “the pursuit of happiness” works for me.

The lack of a definition, of course, has never stopped anyone from quoting Gekko. It’s as though a real person had finally blown the whistle on the market economy. It’s about greed, and we all know that greed is the worst thing! What more do we need to know?

Bear in mind that the economy that Gekko operated in was not free, especially in banking and corporate finance. The politicians’ and bureaucrats’ hands were and still are all over it.

The video clip of Gekko praising the morality and efficacy of greed is still a staple of the left. So advocates of the market ought to be prepared for the charge. Milton Friedman can help.

Friedman, the late Nobel-Prize-winning economist, market advocate, and classical liberal was second to none when it came to handling questions from critics, and fortunately we can watch him in action as he answers the charge that greed is a moral stain on the marketplace. (YouTube has many videos showing Friedman answering market critics. Each is a superb lesson in how to respond with patience, civility, and clarity. Everyone would benefit from studying those videos.)

In 1979, eight years before Wall Street, Friedman appeared on Phil Donahue’s popular television program. In this short segment of the interview, Donahue asked Friedman, “When you see the greed and the concentration of power, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea to run on?” (Like greed, the ink-blot word capitalism means different things to different people, which it makes it a bad name for a social system. Hence it is often modified with such conflicting adjectives as free-market, crony, laissez-faire, political, and state. That’s only one reason I have for rejecting the word.)

Friedman replied:

Well, first of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? Do you think Russia doesn’t run on greed? Do you think China doesn’t run on greed?

What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fellow who’s greedy.

The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear: that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free-enterprise system.

Donahue isn’t finished, however. “But it seems to reward not virtue as much as the ability to manipulate the system.”

Then Friedman:

And what does reward virtue? You think the communist commissar rewards virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think — excuse me, if you’ll pardon me — you think American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed or on the basis of their political clout?

Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? You know, I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us. I don’t even trust you to do that. [Smiling.]

Without my intending any criticism, Friedman might have asked Donahue what system he thinks some business people try to manipulate in today’s mixed economy. Isn’t it the interventionist political system that free-market advocates object to? Friedman also might have asked what’s unvirtuous about a system that leaves individuals free to peacefully pursue their happiness through production and trade that necessarily makes many other individuals better off too. State-run or state-guided alternatives are all zero-sum, if not negative-sum, systems. One person’s gain is another’s loss. Only the market economy is positive-sum — win-win. John Stossel likes to underscore that buyers and sellers typically thank each other when they complete their transactions. That should tell the Phil Donahues of the world something.

By the way, if you want an actual good movie on the economics of corporate takeovers, check out Other People’s Money (1991), based on the play by Jerry Sterner, screenplay by Alvin Sargent, directed by Norman Jewison, and starring Danny DeVito and Gregory Peck.

Conservative opposition to Big Government has long been overstated. Few conservatives want to cut Social Security, Medicare, public education, or even public universities. Still, in earlier decades, conservatives and libertarians tended to agree that Big Government should not be expanded. Since Trump, though, lots of conservative thinkers have started to rethink their movement’s lack of enthusiasm for Big Government. Instead of stubbornly opposing greater government power, why not use it for conservative ends?

There are two main variants:

1. Using Big Government to fight wokeness. The major social media companies have a clear left-wing bias. They’re much more likely to deplatform people whose ideas they oppose. Most major corporations, similarly, now push not only woke ideology, but racist and sexist hiring in the name of “diversity and inclusion.” Why not use government power to offset these abuses?
2. Using Big Government to revive manufacturing and accelerate technological progress. Manufacturing employment has fallen dramatically in the last thirty years, hurting less-skilled workers – especially non-college males. Governments around the world are subsidizing their tech industries. Why not use industrial policy – tariffs, quotas, and subsidies – to push back?

Libertarians typically make principled arguments against both variants. When conservatives attack Silicon Valley censorship, libertarians retort: “Only government can censor.” When conservatives push for industrial policy, libertarians retort: “Only the free market can decide what’s worth producing.”

Alas, these principled arguments only persuade people who already share these principles! Conservatives asking for Big Government plainly don’t. On reflection, one wonders whether they ever did. Conservatism has long leaned toward pragmatism.

Which brings me to a deeply pragmatic question: If conservatives manage to create a Department of Anti-Wokeness or a Division of Industrial Policy, who will run it? What kind of people will they actually be?

Judging from decades of recent history, we know the answer. Drum roll please…

Leftist politicians will be in command half the time, and leftist bureaucrats will decide day-to-day policy all the time.

How do we know this? In American politics, Democrats and Republicans are almost evenly matched. As a result, power shifts back and forth between them. While the exact timing is pretty random, the long-run breakdown has been damn close to 50/50 for the last century. Looking at current U.S. politics, the idea that either side will decisively prevail is fanciful.

American government bureaucracies, in contrast, have long looked unlike the rest of the country. While the country is almost evenly split, leftists dominate almost every bureau of the federal government.

Even though official partisanship data is scarce, campaign contributions are a good proxy. Here’s what we learn when we follow the money. In both 2016 and 2020, every branch of federal workers gave more to Democrats. In the last election, Homeland Security workers’ split was 71% Democratic, 29% Republican. For Defense workers, it was 66% Democratic, 34% Republican. For economic regulatory bureaus, Democrats usually get over 90%. 99% for the Federal Communications Commission, the bureau you’d expect to end up regulating social media!

Data on state and local government workers’ partisanship are even scarcer, but there’s little doubt that, with few exceptions, they too lean heavily left.

The upshot: If you get a federal Department of Anti-Wokeness, you should expect to alternate between the following two scenarios.

Scenario #1: Republican politicians manage hostile Democratic bureaucrats. Maybe you’ll squeeze some good results out of this pairing, but can conservatives really be optimistic?

Scenario #2: Democratic politicians manage friendly Democratic bureaucrats. An obvious conservative nightmare. Working hand-in-hand, they’ll “realize” that anti-wokeness is wokeness. To quote a great meme: “I specifically requested the opposite of this.”

Admittedly, you might get lucky on the state level in a strongly Republican part of the country. Yet even there, you’ve got to worry. The kind of people who staff their regulatory bureaus will look a lot like the kind of people who inhabit their state capitols. Texas regulators will be typical citizens of Austin. Tennessee regulators will be typical citizens of Nashville. Been there? You get the idea.

What’s the alternative?

First, do no harm. Investing resources into “reforms” expected to make outcomes worse is folly. Avoid Action Bias.

Second, prioritize deregulation. Want to help free speech? Carve out a free-speech exception to discrimination laws. Want to revive working-class jobs? Get out of the way of the construction industry. This doesn’t just push policy in the desired direction. It also helps disempower heavily leftist regulators, and hobbles left-wing politicians when – not if – they regain power.

If you diligently deregulate, opposing politicians can’t just flip a switch when they gain power. They have to burn political capital to re-install the switch!

Bottom line: Conservatives needn’t buy any grand theory of government to continue and redouble their opposition to Big Government. They just need to remember how often their enemies will actually run the government. “Leftist politicians will be in command half the time, and leftist bureaucrats will decide day-to-day policy all the time.” It’s a bitter pill, but can you really doubt it?

Isn’t it better to not create a problem in the first place than to try to fix it after it happens?

I appreciate those organizing a trash pick-up day, and those who took time out of their week to participate. I appreciate the people who don’t toss their trash around in the first place. and those who regularly pick up litter whenever they see it, even more.

If there is a pre-existing problem, make sure any solution you try isn’t going to have the unintended consequence of making things worse. In some cases, much worse. Such as what has happened with the War on Politically Incorrect Drugs.

I understand the desire to try to stop people from abusing, and dying of, dangerous drugs like Fentanyl. However, it would have been better to have never started down the doomed path of prohibition which made Fentanyl (and the stronger drugs which will replace it) inevitable.

With litter and prohibition, irresponsible people made a mess and the rest of us have to deal with it. But picking up trash doesn’t make litter worse, while prohibition does make drug abuse much worse.

Trash is the easier problem to deal with because no one attacks you for picking up litter, but if you try to help get rid of trashy “mala prohibita” laws — counterfeit “laws” that make crimes of things which aren’t wrong, only forbidden — such as drug laws, you risk being harmed by those whose jobs depend on those fake crimes being treated as though they are real. In a strange upside-down way, you’re treated like the bad guy.

So many of the problems society faces were created or made worse by someone — possibly with good intentions — deciding to use political government to address an issue.

The war on poverty, waged with handouts of money confiscated from workers, trapped many people into generational poverty, which is nearly impossible to escape.

Laws mandating safety have made people helpless to use judgment to keep themselves from being injured.

Legislation against guns has made everyone more vulnerable to bad people who have no intention of following the rules anyway.

These “cures” were worse than the disease.

Keep doing the same dumb things and you’ll keep getting the same bad results. It’s so much better to stop creating these problems out of situations that could have been easy to handle if you hadn’t fertilized them and made them grow.

“Check your privilege.” It was around 2015 that I started hearing this odd woke admonition. Roughly mid-explosion, according to Google Ngram.

In normal English, “privilege” requires “especially good treatment.” You can enjoy United Plus privileges, or the privileges of membership in a swim club. It’s also long been standard to describe young people from rich families as “privileged.” Privilege often has the connotations of “unearned good treatment,” but not always. The question, “How can I earn these privileges?” is perfectly good English.

What’s bizarre about the revisionist notion of “privilege” is that almost anything counts.

Lack of mistreatment counts as “privilege.” Things like receiving common courtesy from strangers, or not being brutalized by the police.

Lack of misfortune counts as “privilege.” Things like being able to walk, or having good health.

Stranger still, merely possessing desirable attributes counts as “privilege.” I’ve actually heard people talk about “height privilege,” “testosterone privilege,” and “pretty privilege.”

All definitions, needless to say, are conventional. When a political movement struggles to change a long-standing linguistic convention, though, you have to wonder why. After years of hearing people redefine “privilege,” I say the main motivation is quite clear.

Namely: The point of talking about “privilege” is to make innocent people feel guilty.

Suppose you’ve never been brutalized by the police. If you frame police brutality as “mistreatment,” you’re an innocent bystander. Bad cops are doing bad things, so blame them. In contrast, if you frame the lack of police brutality as “privilege,” you’re complicit. After all, bad cops are showing you special treatment. Which makes you part of a system of oppression.

Similarly, suppose you’re attractive. If you frame the plight of the less-attractive as “misfortune,” you’re an innocent bystander. You didn’t make them ugly, after all. In contrast, if you frame the positive attention you receive as “privilege,” you’re complicit. Pretty people like you get special treatment. Which makes you part of a system of oppression.

Though this is all insinuation, it’s vociferous insinuation. Normal language matches normal moral intuitions: If you keep your own hands clean, you’re a morally OK person. Not a hero, but immune to condemnation. Your failure to crusade against police brutality doesn’t make you guilty of police brutality. Your failure to fight lookism doesn’t make you guilty of tormenting the unattractive.

Woke revisionist language, on the other hand, doesn’t merely question normal moral intuitions. It acts as if these intuitions never existed. Unless you’re a full-time social justice activist, you share in the guilt of our wicked society.

Do woke activists really think they can guilt lots of normal people into joining their crusade? Probably not. They’re goal, rather, is to guilt lots of normal people into shutting up. If you get your potential critics to muse, “I’ve never been savagely beaten by the cops. Given this privilege, who am I to challenge Black Lives Matter?,” maybe they’ll let you get away with murder and arson. Better yet, the language of privilege lets you pretend like complex factual questions are long-resolved. If you get your potential critics to muse, “I’m male. Given this privilege, who am I to challenge gender quotas in STEM?,” they won’t just acquiesce to gender quotas. They’ll probably also forget that men are grossly overrepresented at the bottom of society as well as the top.

Yes, we can imagine a world where “privilege” is just a synonym for “lack of problems.” We can imagine a world where we say that everyone except the worst-off person in the world has “privilege.” In such a world, we could intelligibly discuss questions like, “Why is your lack of privilege my problem?,” and “Should people be proud of their privilege?” The reason activists are revising language, though, is to equivocate: To capitalize on the emotional connotation of the word “privilege” while expanding its denotation to mythic levels. Once again, then, the woke movement is right out of Orwell:

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

What is to be done? First and foremost, hold the line. Keep speaking normal English. Don’t be intimidated by words masquerading as arguments. And if you must speak about “privilege,” be clear that no one can legitimately win an argument by changing the way they use words.

“Hereby it is manifest,” Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651’s Leviathan, “that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man.”

Hobbes’s solution to the absence of a “common Power” was a “covenant” with a “sovereign” who would act on behalf of all — what we today call “the state” or “government” — thus bringing an end to the terrible war he discerned.

So, how well has that worked out for us?

Hobbes wrote in the shadow of the Thirty Years’ War, concluded by the Peace of Westphalia, which created the state as we know it. Casualties in that war are estimated at eight million.

Here are some  death tolls for a select few of Earth’s near-constant wars since the consolidation of the Westphalian nation-state model in the late 19th century with the unifications of Germany and Italy, and subsequent struggles between/within nation-states:

World War One: 40 million
Russian Civil War: 9 million
Chinese Civil War: 11.6 million
Second Sino-Japanese War: 25 million
World War Two: 85 million
Korean War. 4.5 million
Vietnam War: 4.3 million
Nigerian Civil War: 3 million
Afghanistan Conflict: 2 million
Second Congo War: 5.4 million

The verdict was certainly in by 1918, when Randolph Bourne died and his essay “The State” was published posthumously. The takeaway line:  “War is the health of the state.”

Hobbes’s “sovereign” suggestion, as taken, didn’t end war. It put war on steroids.

Political government as we’ve constructed it is geared toward maximizing death to increase its own power and expand its own reach at the expense of everyone. We’ve still got perpetual war of  every man against every man. Only now it’s highly organized, well-funded, and waged for the benefit of the political class.

As Leon Trotsky — a “state-ist” himself, but one who hoped for a “withering away” of political government into communism — put it in 1937’s The Revolution Betrayed:

“Whatever be the programs of the government, stateism inevitably leads to a transfer of the damages of the decaying system from strong shoulders to weak. … State-ism means applying brakes to the development of technique, supporting unviable enterprises, perpetuating parasitic social strata.”

What private commercial interest, operating under a weak state or no state at all, would have invented the tank, the aerial bomb, or the nuclear warhead? Such weapons only promise profitability in the context of a strong, powerful states waging war with each other.

I’m often told that my anarchist philosophy and my goal of reaching, at least, a “panarchy” under which each individual chooses a governing entity instead of remaining trapped in the Westphalian Model’s geographic “sovereignty” trap, are unrealistic fantasies worthy only of dismissal.

But if unrealism is a disqualifying factor, Hobbes’s “sovereign” and the state as we know have, unlike my ideas, had their chance … and are clearly failures when it comes to ending war.

As we stare down the barrel of nuclear holocaust, it’s clearly time to re-think how we do government.

Nobody asked but …

For the umpteenth time, someone I revere is saying that he or she will leave Facebook.  We voluntaryists believe that is one’s choice.  But for selfish reasons, I hate to see good people go.

Some of the best people are discovered on Facebook.  You know who they are.

You have been living your entire life to prepare yourself for today — a day in which Sturgeon’s Law applies.

Sturgeon’s Law:

Sturgeon’s law is the adage that “ninety percent of everything is crap”. This suggests that, in general, the vast majority of the works that are produced in any given field are likely to be of low quality.

For instance, being wishful about the quality of social media is vain.  But when you find quality don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Remember, while 90% (or more) may be crap, 10% is not.

— Kilgore Forelle

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, Nikolas Cruz murdered 14 students and three school employees at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. More than four years later, a jury determined that Cruz’s crimes made him eligible for the death penalty, but did not unanimously vote to recommend that penalty. That absence of unanimity means Cruz will instead serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.

While it’s a stretch to say that the jury made the right decision — the vote was 9-3 in favor of death — those three votes did prevent it from making the wrong decision.

Yes, some crimes are so heinous that they merit death.

If Cruz had been killed at the scene of the crime, in immediate defense of innocents and when split-second decisions had to be made, I’d be the last to criticize his killers.

But trusting the state with the power to kill disarmed prisoners in cold blood and with premeditation is never a good idea, for two reasons.

One is that any time we trust the state with power of any kind, mistakes will inevitably be made.

The other is that any time we trust the state with power of any kind, political considerations will affect how that power is exercised.

The difference between most mistakes and political considerations and this particular type is that in most cases the damages can be at least partially remedied. The victims can take the government to court or vote  the calculating politician out of office. Those wrongly convicted of crimes can continue to seek exoneration and freedom.

But dead is dead. The executed prisoner can’t be freed. No damage award can make the executed prisoner whole. If the governor who signed a death warrant because he needed that 1% edge in the polls from the “tough on crime” crowd loses his next election, the executed prisoner can’t rise from the grave and take up his or her life where it left off.

The Death Penalty Information Center’s Innocence Database lists 190 persons sentenced to death in the United States, but later exonerated, since 1973. The group also provides 20 examples of actual executions of likely innocent convicts.

Does Nikolas Cruz deserve to die? In my opinion, he does.

Do the rest of us deserve to live with the possibility of wrongful execution hanging constantly over our heads? No.

To spare the innocent, we must deny the state power to kill the guilty.

What does the libertarian philosophy have to say about business management as an institution? Is it analogous to the state or something entirely different? Since we libertarians generally dislike seeing people being bossed around, whether by the state or anyone else, we may be tempted, as I’ve certainly been, to think that a free and just society would spontaneously dispense with the traditional employer-employee relationship. After all, libertarians have good reasons to at least be suspicious of all hierarchies and subordination, right?

So freedom would achieve its glorious pinnacle through flat bossless worker-owned co-ops, small partnerships, single-proprietorships, and peer-to-peer arrangements that lack even Uber’s central ownership.

But maybe not.

The prediction that managerial specialists are due for extinction, however, looks more like wishful thinking in light of solid economic theory and empirical evidence, write economists Peter G. Klein and Nicolai J. Foss in their new book, Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Economy. (This is not intended as a formal book review. Listen to Klein’s conversation with Keith Knight of Don’t Tread on Anyone.)

Klein and Foss’s thesis grabbed my attention because, as I’ve experienced firsthand, drawing an analogy between the state and the traditional firm is seductive. On the other hand, I’ve known and respected Klein, an economist of the Austrian school who teaches at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, for many years. I take him seriously. (Foss teaches at the Copenhagen Business Schools in Denmark.)

The case against the traditional firm has this touch of plausibility: because government interventions in mixed economies can make quitting a job artificially costly, people might feel trapped in bad work situations. To the extent that the government deliberately or inadvertently creates obstacles to starting businesses or relocating (through licensing,  zoning, and more), or through a tax system that ties medical insurance to one’s job — to that extent, the government can in effect block employees from leaving bad workplaces or reduce their bargaining power. Such interventions provide a politically derived advantage to employers over actual and prospective employees that could not be achieved in the market.

But employers can create these impediments. Politicians and bureaucrats can and do.

For libertarians, the obvious remedy for politically bestowed advantages on employers is freedom, specifically, the freedom to compete, to start businesses, to move where the terms are better, etc. Ready options increase employee bargaining power. (Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations decried the English laws that barred workers from moving to other areas in search of better pay.) Competition is the universal solvent.

The case against government policies that favor employers (again, not necessarily by design) should not facilely be extended to managerial hierarchy or traditional employment per se. Socialists haven’t been the only ones to equate employment with servitude. Even the great classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer compared it to slavery. (Ironically, the pre-Civil War South’s most eloquent defenders of chattel slavery denounced the wage slavery of the free labor market.) However, in a free market and even in a mixed economy like ours, the problem isn’t distinct ownership and management. It’s politicians and bureaucrats.

This is a big subject, and I’m certainly no expert, so I can only scratch the surface here. But Klein and Foss specialize in the economics of industrial organization and are an important reality check on those who think managerial hierarchy is morally objectionable and economically superfluous or worse.

Morally, of course, as long as neither side of a transaction, including the employer-employee relationship, uses force against the other, the transaction passes muster. It is irrelevant that one side can be said to have a “greater need” than the other for that relationship at that time. It is no employer’s fault that people need to earn a living. One might even praise the employer for providing the means to do so. But let’s remember that no firm is founded to provide jobs. Firms exist to make money for their owners by producing something of value for others. To do that they will typically hire people. Like other market transactions, all these exchanges produce mutual gains.

People start businesses with plans to produce something specific. Until they decide that a new objective is needed, the owner (or owners) will want to motivate and guide the staff to carry out the mission. Exactly who decides how the mission is carried out is a management’s judgment call that depends on many factors. That’s what management is about, and managing is real work, as the early classical liberals understood. The owner of an Indian restaurant is unlikely to hire chefs who insist on the autonomy to add other kinds of dishes to the menu. It would be wrong to think that those chefs are oppressed or stripped of their dignity.

Owners or their managerial agents, then, select the company’s ends. However, the authors say, in the new information economy, it makes more sense than ever to leave the means to frontline employees. “We agree that the new environment suggests the need for a redefinition of the traditional managerial role.” But they add: “Despite all the changes that have occurred, there is a strong need for someone to define the framework. In the knowledge economy, the main task for top management is to define and implement the rules of the game.” Managers are also important for coordinating different divisions of a company that depend on each other.

Nuance, then, is the order of the day. Klein and Foss clearly are not dogmatically pro-hierarchy: “Indeed, some companies have excessive corporate fat: layers could often be cut, and empowering employees might increase productivity.”

But the authors note that although the new technologies have revolutionized business, “the laws of economics are still the laws of economics, human nature hasn’t changed, and the basic problem of business — how to assemble, organize, and motivate people and resources to produce the goods and services consumers want  — is the same as it ever was.”

Any firm or noncommercial organization, for that matter, requires a focus on both the forest and the trees, the long and short term. Why would we be surprised that different people have different skills and different preferences in this regard? Skills, of course, are not evenly distributed throughout a population. A division of labor, knowledge, and inclinations is to be expected. Many will want to concentrate on a specific job, without having to think about management, long-term planning, and such. Lots of people dislike sitting through meetings.

Moreover, people differ in their preferences for risk-taking. Some prefer a regular paycheck in return for less overall responsibility.

The upshot is that human diversity makes noncoercive hierarchies perfectly understandable, inevitable, and beneficent as long as the market is free. That in no way means that bosses can’t be stupid, obnoxious, or abusive. Of course they can and are. But if they have to compete without government privilege, abuse and stupidity won’t survive because profits will go to the better-run firms, which will attract the best employees.

In interviews (as in his and Foss’s book), Klein emphasizes that one size surely does not fit all companies. As a Hayekian, he understands that nonmanagement workers possess local and tacit knowledge that managers don’t — and that good managers will want their employees to capitalize on that knowledge and reward them for doing so. “[T]here are many benefits to decentralization, as well as costs, and these vary widely with context and circumstance,” Klein and Foss write.

Klein and Foss intend their book to correct the impression given by many current writers on management philosophy that hypes the spread of nonhierarchical companies and predicts a future marked by this new way of doing business. It’s not true, Klein and Foss respond: “… echoing Mark Twain … the death of hierarchy has been greatly exaggerated and … its bad reputation is largely undeserved.”

Their point is not simply that some degree hierarchy is more efficient than none at all, but that bosslessness poses perils to businesses, such as discoordination and — perhaps counterintuitively — lack of flexibility.

As you can tell, this is a rich thesis. I’ll close with a couple more quotes:

Writers [who favor bossless firms] … are fiercely critical of traditional hierarchy, but we think they exaggerate its problems and neglect many benefits…. The near-bossless companies — and there aren’t many of them — with their self-managing teams, empowered knowledge workers, and ultra-flat organizations are not generally or demonstrably better than traditionally organized ones. Bosses matter not just as figureheads but as designers, organizers, encouragers, and enforcers….

[I]f you look more closely at … ostensibly bossless companies, you see that they do have formal [or informal] bosses…. Right away, this suggests that perhaps the whole bossless company narrative is a bit of a head-fake — a way to draw attention to the charismatic, influential leaders who create and promote flat structures….. Contrary to popular opinion, the world is not becoming dominated by flatter, even bossless, network organizations.

The market is an efficient decentralized information-generating process. Through private property, voluntary exchange, free enterprise, and the price system, we learn things that we can’t learn in other ways. This is as true for the best management methods as it is for the many other things we look to the market for. Government should never impede worker-owned enterprises, but it shouldn’t help them either. Freedom is for all.

Related reading: “Free Men for Better Job Performance” by C. L. Dickenson, published by the Institute for Humane Studies in 1966. It is posted here and here.

Being political leads to unfortunate outcomes. Politics never makes people act smart.

I don’t think federal agents — FBI or anyone else — have any business digging for things over which to prosecute Hunter Biden. I don’t find federal agents credible.

When someone is targeted for political reasons, whether Donald Trump or Hunter Biden, it makes those targeting them look unintelligent and corrupt. Maybe because they are unintelligent and corrupt — as bad as their target, or worse. All politically connected people have done things truly wrong, so why do their opponents choose to be political, too?

Because it’s easier.

I don’t care about Hunter Biden’s so-called tax crimes or gun crimes, no matter how clear the evidence may be. I have no love for the Bidens, but I don’t believe there is even one legitimate tax or anti-gun rule. Not one. Accusing someone of breaking one of those fake laws is completely pointless.

The same would go for charging him with drug crimes for the things he was seen doing on video.

People want to see those connected with the other side get what’s coming. The Trump-obsessed anti-Trumpers want to see Donald Trump hurt, just like the reactionary anti-Biden faction would love to see Biden hurt by targeting his son. Leave me out of your political circus.

The thing is, I only care about real crimes — where an individual’s life, liberty, or property has been violated. Trump, Biden, and every other former and future politician violates everyone in some way. Yes, even the president you like the best. If you’re going to go after them for something, look at these real crimes.

No, having “classified documents” isn’t real either, since government shouldn’t keep any secrets from its bosses.

I don’t care even a little what such laws say. Even if I wouldn’t do what someone else does, if the legislation is illegitimate — as is all gun, drug, and tax legislation — then I am not in favor of using it against anyone. Not even someone I think is clearly a bad person. If you can’t find a real crime with an individual victim, then back off. I’m not interested in using fake laws against anyone.

The root problem is allowing anyone to hold the office of president of the United States, or any political office, and wield its political power. Strike at the root instead of thrashing at the twigs by prosecuting illegitimate “crimes.”

Opening a column with statistics and dates may not be the best way to get your attention, but these three statistics and single date are important, so please take note:

The median age in the US is 38.5 years.

The median age in Russia is 39.8 years.

The median age worldwide is 31 years.

The Cold War ended, more or less, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, 31 years ago.

To put it a different way, half of humanity and close to half of Americans and Russians in general can’t remember the days of “Mutual Assured Destruction.”

Put simply, MAD was a situation in which at least two world powers (the US and the USSR) possessed enough nuclear weapons, in enough locations, to ensure that if one of the two decided to go nuclear on the other, both countries (and likely the world) would be reduced to lifeless, radioactive wastelands.

Those of us who came to adulthood before 1991 grew up in constant knowledge of our own prospective annihilation on, at most, a few minutes’ notice.

It wasn’t a good feeling.

On the other hand, I guess it worked. We’re still here, anyway.

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about the possibility of “limited” nuclear war using “tactical” weapons. That talk is based in speculation that Vladimir Putin might resort to a nuclear strike in Ukraine. Whether that speculation is really warranted is an interesting question and one I can’t answer for you, since I don’t work at the Kremlin.

What’s far more dangerous than that speculation is additional speculation over what the response from other nuclear powers would be if the Ukraine war DID “go nuclear,” even in a small way.

The problem with nukes is that the genie is out of the bottle. They’ve been around since 1945 and used twice (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). They’re not going to get un-invented, nor are the regimes which possess them likely to give them up (we should work toward that, but don’t bet the ranch on it happening).

That being the case, the notion that hey, maybe we could live with nukes being used here and there, in very special cases, by very special regimes, and just pile on some more sanctions or throw a non-nuclear cruise missile or two at the rogue state to express displeasure, is madness … which is the opposite of MADness.

The way — the  ONLY way — to get through this crisis or any other without popping the cork on Armageddon is for every regime decision-maker  in the world to know, down in their guts, beyond a shadow of  doubt, that if they use nukes, nukes will be used on them.

Even that might not work, but it’s the only thing that ever HAS worked.

If any one regime goes nuclear, even in a small way, and gets away with it, every other nuclear power on earth will consider itself free to do the same, and sooner or later it will exercise that option.

There must not be a third time.

My article “Complete Liberalism” prompted an unexpected challenge. An interlocutor, who says he owns a business and thus is not antibusiness, claimed that my article suggested that, unlike government regulators, businesses never get things wrong. Yet business failures outnumber successes 10,000 to one, this person said, for all kinds of reasons, both innocent and malign, including a desire to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes for as long as possible.

The problem with the comment is that my article never claimed that business people always get it right or are always virtuous. I’ve pointed out repeatedly that the best economists — especially the Austrian economists — never ignore the inherent existence of error in describing how markets work. And libertarian writers have never suggested that business owners cannot have bad intentions, which are magnified by access to state power. Quite the contrary! What these thinkers have emphasized are the systematic incentives and disincentives produced by free competition that reward pro-consumer performance and penalize incompetence and malevolence. Think of all the libertarian criticism of the malignant relationship between business and government. Now think of Ayn Rand’s businessmen-villains in Atlas Shrugged.

One need only read the accessible writings of Ludwig von Mises (“Profit and Loss,” Bureaucracy), F. A. Hayek (“The Use of Knowledge in Society,” “Competition as a Discovery Process”), or Israel Kirzner (“Economics and Error”) to see that the plague of uncertainty, error, and incomplete and dispersed knowledge figures heavily in good economic analysis. The question they sought to answer is: how can people coordinate their productive social cooperation in the face of such ignorance? Individual freedom produces the only answer for a great society: prices.

In fact, if it weren’t for imperfect knowledge, free markets would be unnecessary and profit and loss would disappear. Mises wrote:

If all people were to anticipate correctly the future state of the market, the entrepreneurs would neither earn any profits nor suffer any losses…. What makes profit emerge is the fact that the entrepreneur who judges the future prices of the products more correctly than other people do buys some or all of the factors of production at prices which, seen from the point of view of the future state of the market, are too low….

On the other hand, the entrepreneur who misjudges the future prices of the products allows for the factors of production prices which, seen from the point of view of the future state of the market, are too high. His total costs of production exceed the prices at which he can sell the product. This difference is entrepreneurial loss.

It’s hard to believe that an economist who writes about entrepreneurs with correct or incorrect judgments about the future could have thought that business owners were infallible. Economic analysis, after all, is supposed to be about real human beings who, whether they are acting as producers or consumers, are fallible.

The free-market position is that free and competitive markets are not perfect but better than government bureaucracies at detecting and correcting errors about what consumers will want and what they will be willing to pay. That’s what counts, isn’t it? Since omniscience is not an option, we want the best method available. That’s all we can hope for, and it turns out not to be too bad. We must always ask about any touted solution to a problem: compared to what? Thomas Sowell’s Law — “There are no solutions, There are only tradeoffs” — is relevant here.

David D. Friedman is another important scholar who has shed on the relative merits of bureaucracies and markets in his important article “Do We Need a Government?” (I recommend his video lecture.) Friedman addresses a different matter than the one I’m concerned with, namely, the collective-action problem, one manifestation of which is called “market failure.” But much of what he writes applies. Here’s the key, which is about systematic incentives:

In private markets, most of the time, an individual who makes a decision bears most, although not all, of the resulting costs, and receives most of the resulting benefits. In political markets that is rarely true. So we should expect that the market failure that results from A taking an action most of whose costs or benefits are born by B, C, and D should be the exception in the private market, the rule in the political market. It follows that shifting control over human activities from the private market to the political market is likely to increase the problems associated with market failure, not decrease them.

This shouldn’t be controversial. We experience this as shoppers when we spend our own money on the very goods we then bring home and use, and as voters, where the disconnect among choices, costs, and benefits is stark. This has critical implications for both business owners and bureaucrats. A fundamental contribution of public-choice theory is that the normal principles of human action apply to government employees. Bureaucracies are filled with ambitious people too, so this is only fair. They don’t become sainted creatures with perfect knowledge and perfect virtue merely because they step across the threshold and take government jobs.

Incentives matter, as we all know first-hand. The same human being operating in two different institutional environments should be expected to behave differently. And indeed they do.

In a competitive — that is, free — market a business owner’s mistake or bad conduct is someone else’s chance to make a profit. Because entrepreneurs know this, they are on the lookout for errors. “Hence in a market society,” Friedman writes, “there is an incentive for private parties to find ways around the inefficiencies due to market failure.”

Nothing is more powerful than the profit motive, something that even opponents of the market readily concede.

The same incentive is not to be found in bureaucracies, which are not profit-and-loss organizations. Most important, bureaucrats don’t have the price information that entrepreneurs have. Their revenue is obtained by force — taxation — and their “products” are not offered on markets where prospective buyers can pass them by for competing offerings. That’s an entirely different ballgame from market activity.

Notice that bureaucratic failures are routinely portrayed as market failures (most people’s economic ignorance leaves them gullible) and are used to justify even more government: larger budgets, bigger staff, and wider powers. If (alleged) market failures require more government, as some people believe, how can government failures require, not more markets, but more government?

We should want the incentives for spotting and fixing errors to be as undiluted as possible. The way to achieve that is to keep the government from interfering with people’s peaceful activities.

Over the past couple of years, there has been a surge in the number of microschools spreading across the country. These small, multi-age, co-learning communities with hired educators were gaining popularity before the educational upheaval of 2020, but they were still very much at the edge of the educational landscape. The disruption caused by the pandemic response thrust microschools from the margins into the mainstream. Recent estimates suggest that as many as two million US children may now be attending microschools full-time.

One of the questions I frequently get asked is: Will these microschools last or will interest fade the further we get from 2020’s tumult?

It’s an important question and something I think about a lot. If you ask today’s microschool founders, they will tell you—without hesitation—that microschools are here to stay. They are certain that microschool momentum will grow, that these programs will thrive, and that there is no going back to the educational status quo. Of course, some individual microschools will undoubtedly flounder and shut down, signaling a dynamic, efficient microschool marketplace; but I believe that these microschool founders are right that the microschool movement will last.

It’s worth revisiting an earlier time of cultural disruption and educational experimentation that led to a flurry of new, small schools that looked a lot like the microschools of today. The reasons why they mostly failed offer lessons for why today’s microschools are well-positioned to succeed.

Lessons from the 1960s “Free School Movement”

During the 1960s and early 1970s, amid a countercultural revolution toward smaller, self-sustaining communities, growing discontent surrounding the Vietnam War, and a broad rejection of traditional public school practices, the “free school movement” was born. These small, learner-centered schools, that were free in educational philosophy but not in cost, captured the countercultural ethos of the time and prioritized student freedom, autonomy, and independence. Many of the free schools were modeled after the Summerhill School in England that was founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill, and was the first enduring example of a self-directed, non-coercive learning community that provided maximum freedom for students, along with an emphasis on personal responsibility.

In 1960, Neill’s book Summerhill School: A New View of Childhood was first published, selling over two million copies in its first decade in print. Other well-known authors at the time published popular books that reinforced and expanded upon Neill’s message. Paul Goodman wrote Compulsory Miseducation in 1964; John Holt, who coined the term unschooling, wrote How Children Fail and How Children Learn in 1964 and 1967, respectively; and Ivan Illich wrote Deschooling Society in 1970. All of these writers, and many more, fueled the free school movement and encouraged the proliferation of these small, nontraditional schools.

In his 1972 paper on free schools, Allen Graubard reported that the number of these schools grew from about 25 schools in 1967 to approximately 600 schools in 1972. The schools averaged about 33 students, so they are remarkably similar to what we would today call microschools.

After their initial success, the free schools rapidly faded throughout the later 1970s. The Vietnam War ended, the countercultural revolution subsided, and interest in experimental education models and child-centered learning dwindled. Ron Miller wrote in Free Schools, Free People that “when, in the 1970s, American politics stabilized and hippie fashions, rock music, natural foods, and other trappings of the counterculture were transformed into commercial commodities, the tension between consciousness and politics, between personal wholeness and social change, developed into a split, and radical pedagogy was largely divided into its constituent elements.” (p. 130).

There were some exceptions. Unschooling, or a more self-directed version of homeschooling that has its roots in the 1960s, has persisted and grown, along with the general homeschooling population. The Sudbury Valley School, which was founded in Massachusetts in 1968, is one of the only remaining free schools of that era and continues to flourish more than 50 years later. The LiberatED podcast episode this week features my interview with Sudbury Valley School co-founder, Mimsy Sadofsky, on some of the reasons for her school’s lasting success.

Why Today’s Microschools Will Grow 

While most of the free schools and experimental learning models of the 1960s disappeared, there are two primary reasons why I think the current microschool movement will avoid the free school fate:

1. Educational Diversity – The free school founders were influenced primarily by “radical pedagogy” and adopted educational ideas and practices that were often far outside of the norm. Today’s microschools, by contrast, are extremely diverse. They represent all ideological and political persuasions, embrace a variety of educational philosophies and approaches, and use a wide assortment of curriculum resources and learning tools, including, in some instances, standardized tests and traditional curriculum. Some founders recruit only certified teachers, while others prefer not to hire certified teachers. This becomes a market differentiator for today’s founders, whereas the free school movement was more overtly opposed to teacher certification and other characteristics of conventional schooling.

Aside from their intentionally small size and commitment to individualizing learning, today’s microschools each have distinct values, approaches, and educational perspectives. This diversity of thought and practice is likely to lead to greater staying power. They are less apt to fade with changing cultural or political trends.

2. School Choice Policies – Many of the microschools today have been able to launch and expand at least in part due to state-level school choice policies that decentralize education funding and allow more families greater access to a variety of learning options. In South Florida, where there is a large hub of education entrepreneurship, microschool founders point to the state’s robust scholarship school choice programs as a primary reason why they have been able to start and scale their programs. Without these choice policies, they say that they would only be able to serve a handful of families who could afford to pay, despite charging a tuition that is lower than that of traditional private schools in the area. For the free schools of the 1960s, affordability and access were key constraints. As Graubard explained in 1972:

“It is obvious that if there were some arrangement such as a voucher plan where parents were given a choice as to where their tax money for education went, there would be much more participation in free schools than there is now. Many people are still involved in public schools only because there isn’t a free school in their locality or because they can’t afford to pay tuition.”

This crucial combination of diversity and access distinguishes today’s microschools from yesterday’s free schools and will be the key to their long-term success and growth. Throw in some founder tenacity, and these microschools could be here for decades to come. As Sudbury Valley’s Sadofsky says, the reason why her school has endured while most of the other free schools failed is “pure stubbornness.” The microschool founders I meet today are similarly steadfast.

On October 13, the US Department of Labor published a “draft rule” which, if adopted, will escalate California’s disastrous war on workers and the “gig economy” to the national level.

Like California’s Assembly Bill 5, the Department of Labor’s rule would force companies who use services offered by “independent contractors” (think Uber, Lyft, Instacart, et al.) to pretend that many of those contractors are, legally speaking, “employees.”

The theory of the anti-worker forces behind this movement is that they’re really helping workers.

Employees get guaranteed rates of pay (including higher wages for “overtime”) and other government-mandated benefits. Independent contractors get whatever they agree to accept for whatever they agree to do.

Who makes more money? That varies from job to job and person to person. An employee who shows up 40 hours a week probably knocks down more money than an Uber driver who works 15 hours a week between college classes.

That latter part explains the benefits of independent gig work:

Employees work when they’re ordered to, where they’re ordered to, and how they’re ordered to.

Independent contractors own, as Karl Marx would approvingly note, the means of production. They set their own schedules and determine their own work loads. They decide what they’re willing to do, and when, where, how they’re willing to do it. They’re their own bosses.  That flexibility is a benefit for students, single parents, and others for whom 9-5, Monday-Friday creates problems.

One fake benefit of employee status is that employees can form labor unions. That’s not a benefit. It’s the result of government acting — on behalf of business owners who didn’t like wildcat strikes and existing union bosses who didn’t want competition for dues revenues — to tame and cage organized labor with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

Absent the NLRA, independent contractors would be just as free (more free, actually) to form unions and drive hard bargains as employees are now. Having broken workers’ legs, it’s unseemly to expect gratitude for providing a second-hand crutch.

Why so much hate for gig work — which fits the classic definition of “socialism” — from alleged “progressives?”

If you have to ask why, the answer is usually money.

One of the National Employment Law Project’s complaints about the gig economy is that it may be “costing states billions of dollars in tax revenue. “

It may also cost Big Labor’s government-dependent unions  opportunities to “organize” gig workers, whether they like it or not, and siphon dues from their paychecks.

The war on the gig economy is just one of many examples of how conservative today’s “progressives” really are. They’re more interested in saving an old and busted system, in the name of “the workers,” than they are in  the actual interests of real workers.

It’s easy to focus on our problems; on what’s going wrong. It’s harder to notice what’s not going wrong right now. It’s good to find a balance between the two.

I’m thankful we didn’t have a devastating hurricane blow through this area last week. I’m also glad we aren’t in the middle of a violent war, trying to defend our homes from the military of an invading government from a neighboring country. Not everyone in the world can say the same. Shouldn’t we be grateful for the problems we don’t have?

Nothing is perfect. If you look hard enough you can find things to worry about anywhere. In this region, we are vulnerable to an uncertain water supply, made worse by an unending drought, but nothing immediate is threatening us right now.

We all have our individual day-to-day troubles. We’d still have those even if some horrible external event were affecting us, too. Maybe even if it were crowding our personal problems from our minds. In that case, we’d have all our mundane problems made worse by some life-threatening threat piled on top. As it is, you have the opportunity to face your individual trouble without the distractions of civilization crumbling around you. Take advantage of this chance. It may not last forever.

This is one reason I think it’s a good idea to be a prepper: it relieves some of the pressure so you can focus on the things we all face daily without having to worry about some big “what if” sneaking up on you. If you don’t have to worry about running out of food, water, or toilet paper you can spend more time thinking about how to improve your health or your relationships. Or working on a hobby you enjoy.

I’m not suggesting you bury your head in the sand or ignore potential threats until it’s too late. Pay attention, but don’t let yourself be distracted from living your life. Again, finding the right balance is the key.

We are at the mercy of nature and politics. You can’t control hurricanes or wars. You can be prepared for things outside of your control so they don’t cause as much harm as they might otherwise.

Be happy when those things you can’t control aren’t wrecking your life. Let yourself enjoy whatever you can. Occasionally stop and be glad about the things that aren’t going wrong.

Is anyone shocked by this observation?

Public statements, emails, and recent publicly released documents establish that the President of the United States and other senior officials in the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by directing social-media companies to censor viewpoints that conflict with the government’s messaging on Covid-19….

This insidious censorship was the direct result of the federal government’s ongoing campaign to silence those who voice perspectives that deviate from those of the Biden Administration. Government officials’ public threats to punish social media companies that did not do their bidding demonstrate this linkage, as do emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to social media companies that only recently were made public.

So states the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) in announcing its lawsuit against President Joe Biden, former chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, and other government public-health officials,  departments, and spokesmen. The case now before a federal district court in Louisiana is called State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. No social-media company was named as a defendant. Rather, the suit is about the government’s illegal and unconstitutional conduct. (See the complaint for the eye-opening details.) In fact, the complaint states: “Notably … prior to Defendants’ campaign of threats and pressure, social-media platforms generally declined to engage in the acts of censorship alleged herein.”

The plaintiffs are the states of Missouri and Louisiana and several health care experts, including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University (among other prestigious affiliations) and Dr. Martin Kuldorff of Harvard University, two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, published in October 2020 and signed by thousands of medical professionals. The Declaration challenged the government-led strategy of shutting down American society through a variety of mandates as though everyone — young and old, healthy and ill — were equally vulnerable to the dangers of COVID-19. The government’s data on who was suffering serious, possibly lethal illness and requiring hospitalization contradicted that baseless premise early in the pandemic.

The Declaration, which today has signatures from more than 62,000 scientists and health care professionals (and 932,000 signatures overall) called instead for “focused protection” of the elderly and those with already-compromised immune systems. Otherwise, Americans should be left free to live normal lives. The shutdown of society, this view holds, would inflict untold harm in regard to health (because of deferred medical examinations/treatments), psychological well-being, children’s education, and lost income. All of this and more have now been documented. “Focused protection,” it must be emphasized, was not a radical position in 2020. Rather, it had been the mainstream approach to pandemics for the previous 100 years.

Unfortunately, the authors, who also included Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, were smeared by government officials and spokesmen as fringe characters who could be safely ignored. At the same time, the national government pressured social media to suppress challenges to its message and policies. In other words, the government did everything it could short of direct censorship to keep the American people from knowing that eminently qualified doctors and other scientists disagreed with the party line.

Under the U.S. Constitution and case law, the government is not only barred from directly interfering with speech on the basis of content, but it is also prohibited from inducing or coercing private entities, such as social networks, to do so. The Supreme Court has spoken on this.

The plaintiffs contend that this is precisely what the defendants did during the pandemic through “express and implied threats” against the social networks, including the threat of antitrust action and the threat to withdraw the protection provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes the platforms from liability for what participants post.

NCLA says:

Government-induced censorship is achieved through a wide variety of mechanisms, ranging from complete bans, temporary bans, “shadow bans” (where often neither the user nor his audience is notified of the suppression of speech), deboosting, de-platforming, de-monetizing, restricting access to content, requiring users to take down content, and imposing warning labels that require click-through to access content, among others. These methods also include temporary and permanent suspensions of disfavored speakers.

This sort of censorship, which strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect—free speech, especially political speech—constitutes unlawful government action. The federal government is deciding whose voices and ideas may be heard, and whose voices and ideas must be silenced. Moreover, this state action deprives Americans of their right to hear the views of those who are being silenced, a First Amendment corollary of the right to free speech.

The lawsuit seeks no monetary damages, but it asks the court to declare that the plaintiffs acted illegally. It also asks the court to

Preliminarily and permanently enjoin Defendants, their officers, officials, agents, servants, employees, attorneys, and all persons acting in concert or participation with them, from taking any steps to demand, urge, pressure, or otherwise induce any social-media platform to censor, suppress, de-platform, suspend, shadow-ban, de-boost, restrict access to content, or take any other adverse action against any speaker, content or viewpoint expressed on social media.

Going further, we must demand an end to the government-university-science complex, which puts a heavy political thumb on the scale of scientific debate without which the truth cannot be ascertained. As the complaint states, “Yesterday’s ‘misinformation’ often becomes today’s viable theory and tomorrow’s established fact…. This prediction has proven true, again and again, when it comes to suppressing ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ on social media.” (The complaint notes other examples of similar reversals despite official government efforts, including the Hunter Biden laptop story and the Wuhan lab-leak theory of the coronavirus’s origins. These once-belittled accounts either have been confirmed, as with the laptop story, or have achieved reasonable credibility if not confirmation, as with the lab-leak theory.)

Government officials must not be permitted to suppress, directly or indirectly, public-health and other sorts of claims they disagree with. Officials of course can say what they believe are the facts, but they must not attempt to smear, marginalize, and silence dissenters. The very act of financing scientific research is prejudicial because of the stamp of exclusive legitimacy it implies. As the pandemic illustrates, a truly free marketplace of ideas is literally a matter of life and death.

Politics divides.

If you distrust your neighbor because of political differences, it’s not your neighbor — or you — who’s at fault. It’s politics. Some would have you believe we are at war with each other, but your neighbors aren’t the enemy, even if they follow the enemy. Or if you do. Don’t let politics make you hate each other — that would be a tragedy.

I’ve heard people claim “everything is political.” This is not a healthy way of looking at life — it’s not even a smart claim. Things are only political if someone makes them political by threatening to use government violence against any who disagree with them. That’s what politics is.

The major political parties infesting America are both guilty of antisocial behavior. Whichever side has the most government and corporate power at the moment is usually the worst offender, but this top position never lasts. Currently, it’s the left, but this hasn’t always been the case.

Nothing should have been made political to begin with. It was and we are paying the price.

A new cold virus shouldn’t have been made political. People could have been warned it existed, then allowed to decide what to do with the information. Medical advice based on the best guesses could have even been offered. This wasn’t what happened. Instead, some people decided government should be used to force everyone to do what those in power imagined was the best thing to do. Control-freaks among us helped government tyrants impose their will on the people.

Now the economy is damaged; inflation has frittered away the value of our money, and broken people point fingers at each other instead of blaming the guilty ones who caused it.

I always try to assume the best of people until they show me this trust is misplaced.

Unless a person comes up to you on the street and shoves a gun or a law in your face, assume they aren’t one of the bad guys. If they treat you right by respecting your liberty, give them the same courtesy.

Those who won’t respect your liberty may not understand the harm they are doing by supporting a political policy. They may not have considered the effects, only believing the lies told to them by the political criminals they follow.

Let’s not treat each other as the enemy. Our real enemies don’t want us united. They feed on the power you give them, so starve them instead.

The US Supreme Court has agreed, in its coming session, to hear an appeal in the case of Gonzalez v. Google. The case deals with one aspect of “the 26 words that created the Internet” — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

As is usually the case when Section 230 comes up, the pundit-media industrial complex goes into overdrive describing Section 230 as a “liability shield” that provides “immunity” for Big Tech. It isn’t a “liability shield,” nor does it provide “immunity,” except in the sense that you are neither “liable” for, nor need “immunity” from prosecution over, a crime you didn’t commit.

Here are the “26 words” in question:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The important thing to understand about those 26 words is that they should have been condensed to 23 words that say the same thing:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service IS the publisher or speaker of any information published or spoken by someone else.”

Today’s Internet thrives on self-publishing platforms. Social media like Twitter and Facebook. Commenting services like Disqus. Blog platforms like WordPress.

Those platforms are analogous to printing presses, which can be used by anyone to print anything, not to newspapers or magazines where an editor pre-selects what content gets published.

If I sell you a hammer, I’m not the one who beats your spouse to death with it. If I sell you a car, I’m not the one who gets drunk and rams it into a tree. If I give you a printing press, I’m not the one who uses it to publish a Ku Klux Klan tract or a stack of revenge porn flyers.

Gonzalez v. Google takes that obvious fact of reality a little far afield. It’s not about who published what, but about Google subsidiary YouTube’s “recommendation algorithm.” The plaintiffs assert that because YouTube’s algorithm recommended recruitment videos for the Islamic State to viewers, Google is responsible for that organization’s 2015 terror attacks in Paris (in which a relative of the plaintiffs was killed).

But YouTube didn’t publish those videos. They just made a video “printing press” available to all comers, then used an algorithm to recommend videos particular viewers might be interested in watching.  The makers of the videos made the videos. The people who were interested in the videos watched — and may have acted in response to — the videos.

Yes, YouTube helped make that possible — but only in the same sense that a magazine running an ad for chainsaws helps make it possible for some nitwit to  bring a tree down on your house.

Attempting to unmake reality by repealing or undoing the effect of Section 230 won’t stop terrorism. It won’t keep us safe. It will just make us easier to muzzle.

The lower courts were correct in ruling against the Gonzalez v. Google plaintiffs. The Supreme Court should likewise recognize reality and put this vexatious lawsuit out of its misery.

By now Randolph Bourne’s observation that “war is the health of the state” ought to be such a cliché that it would hardly need to be said. And yet, it must be said — often — because many still haven’t gotten the word.

If the state is the adversary of liberty, as it nearly always has been, then it follows that war is also the ill health of liberty. And when one thinks of war, one ought also to think of conscription because it’s often somewhere close by. In a perverse way, Americans have been lucky. The divisive decade-long Vietnam war and access to the latest war-making technology have made the draft just a bad memory for Americans since 1973 and politically toxic. Repeated attempts to bring it back, even with “national service” packaging fortunately have failed.

Outrageously, however, American men 18-25 must register with the euphemistically named Selective Service System, as they’ve been required to do since 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Make no mistake about it. This is not a registration for a benign contest. As the Selective Service website states:

While there is currently no draft, registration with the Selective Service System is the most publicly visible program during peacetime that ensures operational readiness in a fair and equitable manner. If authorized by the President and Congress, our Agency would rapidly provide personnel to the Department of Defense while at the same time providing an Alternative Service Program for conscientious objectors.

How reassuring. The draft is always in the wings. And the penalty for the felony of not registering is a $250,000 fine and/or a five-years prison term.

The evil of slavery is almost universally appreciated, so why is the draft, which is slavery with an expiration date and high risk of death and injury, not universally condemned? Is it because in many places people believe that governments ultimately own their subjects and may dispose of them as they see fit?

The draft has been in the news lately because Russia, the invader, and Ukraine, the invaded, compel men into combat and other military “service.” It is encouraging that neither Russians nor Ukrainians are fans of that policy. Russian men are protesting and some are getting out of the country. Ukraine has had to forbid men from leaving. Many people just don’t relish war.

It should go without saying that if individuals have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then individuals have the right to decide when they will take up arms, free of a despotic elite or majority. We may not always like the consequences of freedom, but that’s how it is.

Until 1973 America had suffered the tyranny of conscription repeatedly, but not everyone accepted it. One of the most eloquent speeches ever delivered in the House of Representatives was aimed at conscription by Rep. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts (1782-1852) in 1814 after a bill to draft men for the lingering War of 1812 had been introduced. Despite Webster’s efforts, the bill passed, but the war ended before it took effect. Originally from New Hampshire, Webster also was a U.S. senator and secretary of state. He was in the Federalist party until 1825. As a staunch nationalist, he opposed nullification by the states of national legislation, a position that will seem at odds with his objection to the conscription bill.

We must bear in mind that Webster’s speech came when many people distrusted standing armies and believed that the national government constitutionally could call up the state militias only in specified emergencies, namely, to “repel invasion, suppress insurrection, or execute the laws.” In the first few decades of the republic, however, membership in the militias was mandatory. But unlike a regular army, the militia did not require full-time service for a period of years. For the rank and file, it was a sideline (like being in a fire brigade) that was part of their normal lives. All but one of America’s earliest wars were fought with such conscripts.

Webster objected not to compulsory military service per se, but rather to a bill according to which the “services of the men to be raised … are not limited to those cases in which alone this government is entitled to the aid of the militia of the States.” In other words, he was making a federalist case against the claims of the national government. This is a far narrower objection than a libertarian might have hoped for, but Webster still had worthwhile things to say against the inherent features of conscription.

Webster thought the bill was an attempted end-run around the Constitution. He asked:

What is this, Sir, but raising a standing army out of the Militia by draft, and to be recruited by draft, in like manner, as often as occasions require?… That measures of this nature should be debated at all, in the councils of a free government, is a cause of dismay. The question is nothing less than whether the most essential rights of personal liberty shall be surrendered, and despotism embraced in its worst form. [Emphasis added.]

Later in the speech he said, “If the Secretary of War has proved the right of Congress to enact a law enforcing a draft of men out of the Militia into the Regular Army, he will at any time be able to prove quite as clearly that Congress has power to create a Dictator.”

He saw the threat of despotism all through the bill:

Is this, sir, consistent with the character of a free government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No sir, indeed it is not. The Constitution is libelled, foully libelled. The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of despotism. They have not purchased at a vast expense of their own treasure and their own blood a Magna Charta to be slaves.

Imagine such words being spoken in Congress today. He clearly spelled out the consequences, which should be familiar to all in our own time:

Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty?

Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life itself, not when the safety of their country and its liberties may demand the sacrifice, but whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it?

Then he addressed the stated concern of Secretary of War John Armstong, a champion of the bill:

But it is said that it might happen that an army would not be raised by voluntary enlistment, in which case the power to raise an army would be granted in vain, unless they might be raised by compulsion. If this reasoning could prove anything it would equally show that whenever the legitimate powers of the Constitution should be so badly administered as to cease to answer the great ends intended by them, such new powers may be assumed or usurped, as any existing administration may deem expedient.

Webster, here sounding like an old Antifederalist, seemed to be rejecting the Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause as a potential blank check. That doctrine attributed to Armstrong, he said, would result in a central government of unlimited self-defined powers, which he condemned as a violation of the framers’ intent: “An attempt to maintain this doctrine upon the provisions of the Constitution is an exercise of perverse ingenuity to extract slavery from the substance of a free government.”

Should the law pass, he said, it would fall to the states to protect their citizens from that arbitrary national encroachment. The central government would then require an army to enforce conscription, just as it believed it needed conscription to raise an army. Webster said:

It will be the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their own authority over their own Militia, and to interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power. These are among the objects for which the State Governments exist, and their highest obligations bind them to the preservation of their own rights and the liberties of their people. [Emphasis added.]

How is that not nullification?

In his expectation that the states would protect their citizens from a national draft, Webster’s speech reminds us of the Defend the Guard campaign now going on in state legislatures to end Washington’s power to commit National Guard units to overseas combat without a declaration of war, as has happened throughout the 21st century. (Watch Scott Horton’s speech in Minnesota on behalf of the Defend the Guard movement there.)

The more things change….

As Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its eighth month, the European Union scrambles for energy to heat its homes and power its industry in the coming winter, the US and China continue to rattle sabers at each other over Taiwan, and smaller actual and potential conflicts rage around the world, it seems like a good time to take stock of two old, busted, worn-out terms: “American hegemony” and “unipolar world.”

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly last week, the Russian Federation’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov  condemned both: “[A]t some point, having declared victory in the Cold War, Washington elevated itself almost to the position of the messenger of the Lord God on Earth, who has no obligations, but only the ‘sacred’ right to act with impunity.”

Washington, Lavrov declared, is trying to “stop the march of history” against “sovereign states ready to defend their national interests … resulting in the creation of an equal, socially-oriented, multipolar architecture.”

While Lavrov and the government he represents clearly have a hand in the empire business themselves, he’s not wrong in pointing out the US regime’s hubris, which stretches back to well before the end of the Cold War.

In fact, notions of a “unipolar world” and “American hegemony” were always delusional. While the US came out of World War 2 in better shape than other world powers and ruthlessly exploited its advantageous position to extend political and military tentacles toward every corner of the earth. But it never achieved those two goals despite the expenditure of trillions of dollars and the endings of millions of lives in the pursuit.

With the Russian empire trying in vain to stave off final collapse, the US empire clearly in terminal decline, the EU threatening to come apart at the seams, and any near-future Chinese imperial ambitions likely to fail, the future of humanity might best be served by discarding the notion of empire itself. A 200-year-old poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley points in the right direction:

Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.

That’s how all empires end, though usually only after stealing and wasting untold quantities of  blood and treasure from both their opponents and their subjects.

Governments — especially states with the ambition to expand their rule across mutually agreed turf lines, which all of them become at some point — are the pedestal upon which empires stand and the component parts of which empires are built. They are not our benefactors. We are their victims.

So long as we continue to tolerate political government, we deny ourselves peace and prosperity.

My How Evil Are Politicians? is subtitled Essays on Demagoguery. “Demagoguery”: though my fellow economists rarely use the word, it’s the essence of politics. If you listen to successful politicians speak, and fail to realize that they’re speaking strings of pretty lies, you’re missing the point. To understand politics deeply, just ask one follow-up question: “Why is speaking strings of pretty lies the path to power?” The bitter answer: Because in politics, pretty lies are what most people want to hear.

Since most economists neglect the vital concept of demagoguery, I am hyper-aware of counter-examples – economists who take demagoguery seriously. Recently, while re-reading a passage from his Power and Market, I remembered that Murray Rothbard is one such counter-example. In fact, the book uses the concept five times to make three distinct points.

First, while the “survival of the fittest” operates in both markets and politics, political fitness is very different from market fitness:

[T]he vital criterion of “fitness” is very different in the government and on the market. In the market, the fittest are those most able to serve the consumers; in government, the fittest are those most adept at wielding coercion and/or those most adroit at making demagogic appeals to the voting public.

Much later, he adds details. Slightly exaggerated, but basically correct:

A further reason for governmental inefficiency has been touched on already: that the personnel have no incentive to be efficient. In fact, the skills they will develop will not be the economic skills of production, but political skills—how to fawn on political superiors, how demagogically to attract the electorate, how to wield force most effectively. These skills are very different from the productive ones, and therefore different people will rise to the top in the government from those who succeed in the market.

Second, demagoguery works well. Telling pretty lies about government paints a bizarrely optimistic picture of government, which most of us naively accept:

It is curious that people tend to regard government as a quasi-divine, selfless, Santa Claus organization. Government was constructed neither for ability nor for the exercise of loving care; government was built for the use of force and for necessarily demagogic appeals for votes. If individuals do not know their own interests in many cases, they are free to turn to private experts for guidance. It is absurd to say that they will be served better by a coercive, demagogic apparatus.

Third, anti-market paternalism is itself an expression of demagoguery. Politics, not markets, is where most people’s grasp of their own best interests is reliably poor.

[T]he proponents of government intervention are trapped in a fatal contradiction: they assume that individuals are not competent to run their own affairs or to hire experts to advise them. And yet they also assume that these same individuals are equipped to vote for these same experts at the ballot box. We have seen that, on the contrary, while most people have a direct idea and a direct test of their own personal interests on the market, they cannot understand the complex chains of praxeological and philosophical reasoning necessary for a choice of rulers or political policies. Yet this political sphere of open demagogy is precisely the only one where the mass of individuals are deemed to be competent!

In the past, I’ve heavily criticized almost all of Rothbard’s alleged analytical contribution to economics. With few exceptions, his a priori arguments turn out to be logically invalid. Instead, like Mises, Rothbard shines as an empirical political economist. Let’s give him credit where credit is due.

To understand the social world, we don’t need a new economics. Standard textbook economics is surprisingly solid. Even the “market failure” parts, understood correctly. We just need to acknowledge that standard textbook economics, though intellectually sound, is emotionally unappealing. Which leads the world’s power-hungry people to embrace intellectually unsound but emotionally appealing ideas. In a word, “folly.” They embrace folly rhetorically to gain power. And once they have power, they use folly to make policy.

What is to be done about demagoguery? All the easy answers suffer from a catch-22, but as usual, the first step is admitting that we face a dire problem.

Now is often the time of year when parents begin looking into other learning options and schooling alternatives for their kids. The new school year has been in session for several weeks and some parents may be finding that bubbling issues may have reached a boiling point.

Perhaps their child isn’t a good match with his or her assigned teacher. Perhaps parent-child battles over homework have emerged. Perhaps parents see certain elements of their child’s curriculum that they dislike, or hear about various classroom practices that they find unsettling. Perhaps their child is bored or withdrawn, frustrated or irritable, anxious or depressed. Perhaps the bullying has started or worsened.

Whatever the reason, some parents may be searching for other educational possibilities for their children. Fortunately, they now have an abundance of options to explore. From high-quality virtual learning programs to low-cost microschools, learning pods, and homeschooling collaboratives, exiting an assigned district school for a different, better learning environment has never been easier.

Over the past 30 months, both parents and educators have been empowered to seek or build new K-12 learning solutions. Education entrepreneurship, which was gaining traction before 2020, has soared since then, driven by broad parent demand for more educational options and accelerated by the growth of education choice programs in many states that make opting out of a district school more feasible for more families.

Many of these entrepreneurial educators have had the desire to create a new learning offering for years, but they lacked the catalyst to take the leap and launch their organization. Similarly, many parents have long been dissatisfied by their children’s default educational option, but weren’t sure how to make a change. The disruption caused by prolonged school closures and related policies provided that necessary nudge for educators and parents alike.

One such education entrepreneur is Nathan Fellman. He had been a public middle school teacher in New Hampshire for nearly 20 years before leaving the profession to launch his own middle school program this fall. “I’ve had the core concept for a dedicated middle school with small classes engaged in collaborative learning for a while,” he told me recently. “I don’t know if I’d ever have really tried to build that thought into an actual reality if our whole society hadn’t been sideswiped by COVID-19. The final push to leave public schools and try to start something different came with the disruption to the status quo that the pandemic brought.”

This month, Fellman, along with two colleagues, launched The Harkness House, a private microschool and schooling alternative in Nashua, New Hampshire that emphasizes personalized, self-directed learning for middle school-age students. Middle schoolers have long been a neglected group of learners, says Fellman. Just as they enter adolescence and confront enormous physical and emotional change, they get thrust into larger buildings and more impersonal classes, which can leave many of them feeling unmoored.

During his public school’s prolonged remote learning and hybrid schedule, where his middle schoolers attended much smaller classes than usual, Fellman saw his students come alive. In a more intimate, personalized setting, they were talkative, engaged, and enthusiastic about learning. Once schooling returned to its pre-pandemic “normal,” Fellman’s students again withdrew.

He decided to finally do what he had long been dreaming about and create a middle school where young people can thrive. “If we give adolescent learners the respect, autonomy, and attention that they crave and deserve, we can make middle school the most important educational years,” said Fellman.

The Harkness House offers a full-time, private school option that is accessible to more families thanks to New Hampshire’s new Education Freedom Accounts that enable education funding to follow students. It also provides customizable learning opportunities for homeschooled adolescents who are looking for an affordable schooling alternative, with 2-day and 4-day a week programming options.

“As we’ve built our full-time program at The Harkness House, we’ve found a shared excitement for student autonomy and self-directed learning among families who are pursuing non-traditional educational pathways and who are not necessarily seeking full-time options,” said Fellman. “We know that we can give those students the ability to explore their interests and develop their passions in ways that just aren’t available in traditional schools.”

Prompted by the pandemic response, more parents and teachers are imagining and introducing new K-12 learning models and schooling alternatives. They are reshaping the landscape of available education options, leveraging new and expanded school choice policies where possible, and creating decentralized, individualized learning environments where young people can flourish.

At this time of year, many parents may be starting to look for other education options for their children. Thanks to entrepreneurial educators like Fellman, they are now more likely to find what they are looking for.

It seems it should be obvious to everyone by now: those who seek positions of political power can’t even run their own lives; they certainly shouldn’t be allowed to run yours. No one is less qualified to do so.

Just look at the news. Locally, nationally, and internationally — those with political power are drawn to criminal behavior like Junebugs to porch lights.

They are not better than you. They are not smarter or wiser, more moral, or more expert. They aren’t entitled to decide how you should live your life. They shouldn’t have power over a hamster, much less over other humans.

Sometimes, what they want you to do (or want you to not do) is the same thing you already want. Letting them believe they are governing isn’t going to hurt anything too much — other than perhaps making them bolder. All too often though, they demand you behave in ways that aren’t in your interest. Things that will actually hurt you in some way. Complying with their demands may be safer than defying them. but you lose either way.

These arbitrary demands are usually in their interests, though, and they’ll dream up excuses to pretend they aren’t arbitrary. Their real reason is less noble.

What they demand you give up for them — for “the good of society” — invariably gives them more power and usually enriches them in some way as well. They exempt themselves from the rules they impose if these rules would hamper their own ambitions too much. They believe they are a higher class of human.

They commonly frame their policies as good for society, but this is a lie.

If something isn’t good for individuals, it isn’t good for society. Society is nothing but all the individuals and their actions combined. It’s not something politicians can, or should, control.

People who seek political power are the last people who should be allowed to have it. The temptation to misuse this power is too great. You’ve heard the old saying about power tending to corrupt people and absolute power corrupting them absolutely. If you respect someone, why would you put them in the position to be corrupted and ruined? This is why you never vote for someone you like. Never vote for anyone you don’t like, either.

You have the right to run your own life, even if you are fooled into giving up control to politicians. Don’t be fooled.

“A world of obedience and unity. A world where the thought of each man will not be his own, but an attempt to guess the thought of the brain of his neighbor who’ll have no thought of his own.”

Toohey used to seem like a far-fetched villain. And maybe he is. Maybe all of those impulses and traits cannot exist in a single body to such a degree. But Toohey definitely exists, even if in aggregate, and has become one of the dominant forces at war in this world.

The total sublimation of self into an infinite regress of what each person imagines the next person wants sounded crazy too me until 2020.

The deliberate destruction of beauty and propagation of ugliness sounded too much until the bulk of critically acclaimed art and advertisement in the last half decade or so.

I don’t know if there are singular Tooheys behind these shifts, but the spirit of the character has definitely taken hold.

The only way to fight it is as Roark did. Not with Twitter call-outs and exposes. By ignoring it and building the beauty you want in the world.

Neuroscientist/philosopher Sam Harris caused quite a stir recently by defending the social networks’ conspiracy (his word) to suppress news coverage of Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s smoking-gun laptop shortly before Election Day 2020. Harris said the suppression was justified because Donald Trump was such a threat to America that he had to be defeated whatever the cost to the election’s integrity.

In other words, according to Harris, such tampering is okay as long as he deems it necessary to save American democracy from the voters.

The social networks are privately owned, of course, but remember that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that the FBI warned him, shortly before the New You Post broke the laptop story, that unspecified major Russian disinformation aimed at the election was about to surface. The authenticity of the laptop, with its damaging emails about Hunter Biden’s lucrative business dealings with Ukrainian and Chinese entities while his father was the vice president, was known early on and has since been confirmed by others. Even the New York Times now concedes it. Allegations of Russian election tampering had as much merit in 2020 as they had in 2016, when Trump was portrayed by his critics as a Russian stooge.

But with or without prodding from the FBI, the social network operators, should not have suppressed the laptop story for a host of obvious reasons. These businesses acquired huge numbers of participants on the promise that they would be open forums. When they first began to interfere with that process, the networks let users down. To do this during a presidential election is a particularly egregious disservice. Why do people still depend on them for information? (No, this does not justify antitrust action.)

I leave it to others to debate whether Harris’s assessment of Trump is accurate. I’m more interested in the principle Harris has set out.

Although I am as far from Trump fandom as anyone could be, the first question I would ask Harris is whether he considers himself the only person wise and trustworthy enough to decide if a candidate is sufficiently threatening to justify concerted suppression of unflattering information about the other candidate. If he says yes, then he’s as self-centered as Trump. If he says no, he might do us the courtesy of spelling out how that decision would be made. Does he want a constitutional office created? How would the decider be chosen?

If he were to answer my questions, I would move on to this one: what makes him think that if his principle was adopted, he would like its future applications? Supreme Court justices have often disappointed the presidents who appointed them. For similar reasons, the decision makers anointed to carry out the Harris principle might somewhere along the way disappoint him. Harris must be a lousy chess player because he doesn’t think even two moves ahead.

Still, Harris’s remarks do raise an interesting dilemma. It’s not a new conundrum: what if democracy looks to be on a suicide course? Does the “sacred” principle of majoritarianism, which libertarians as individualists abhor, extend to the principle itself? Or is it proper to cripple democracy to save it?

Small-d democrats might say, “Yes — temporarily.” But there’s the rub. The future is uncertain. Temporary in intent is not necessarily temporary in fact. Governments taught us that long ago. We know that people don’t like to give up power, as Lord Acton taught us. Power doesn’t only tend to corrupt; it attracts the already corrupt. Wouldn’t that suggest that democracy should never be suspended or tampered with in the present for fear that the winner of an election might suspend or tamper with it in the future? What say you, Sam Harris?

If this problem is addressed only after it arises, it’s probably too late. The time to think about it is before a democracy with few real limits on power is launched. The War Games line, spoken by the computer after learning that nuclear war is futile, applies: “The only winning move is not to play.”

It’s not as if the original classical liberals and their libertarian descendants didn’t warn us. Individualist political economists and social philosophers long ago pointed to the dangers of a democratic state with the power to meddle in all aspects of people’s lives. For these thinkers, the whole point of laissez-faire in the age of democracy was to keep elected rulers, and thus the electorate itself, out of our private peaceful productive affairs so that the contest for political power would not become socially and economically disruptively cutthroat. When the government is just about omnipotent, everyone will want to get to their hands on it — if only for defensive purposes.

Even if those pioneering political economists did not want to dispense with government entirely (a few did), they understood that society essentially runs itself without a heavy-handed state because people generally understand that their best interests are served through cooperation with others. Thomas Paine, for example, in Rights of Man wrote:

Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilised community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their law; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.

Thus, at most, governments should be kept on a short leash, with their powers dispersed and their missions held to the barest minimum necessary to protect the peace, that is, individual rights. If we can eliminate the state altogether, even better!

What the good liberals didn’t tell us — because there’s no magic formula — is how to keep government to the bare minimum. Constitutions are no guarantee, are they? Today’s libertarians are still working on cracking that nut. Most people are not going to read books on political philosophy or economics, even something as accessible as Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law. So somehow we must strive to create a taboo against asking the government to do anything more than keep the peace in ways that respect everyone’s rights. How do we do that?

I guess I should’ve expected it.

I had a naïve assumption that the internet meant the release of information permanently. That everything – good, bad, true, false – would make its way online, and therefore be forever findable.

I never thought everything would be easy to find or equally treated (which would be a horrible experience), but assumed it would be there. I assumed controversial things would have findable info from all sides. I assumed things done or said wouldn’t disappear or become altered with no record of what they used to be.

Those assumptions were wrong.

It’s been shocking how quickly this seemed to happen, or at least how quickly I began to take notice.

Google searches are not good anymore. And they’re getting worse. Google’s goal of “a single result” is one of the worst ideas I can imagine. And they seem to be moving towards it with fewer and fewer meaty results, more flimflam, lots of sanitized “officially sanctioned” fluff, and a whole lot of weird bot created content in between.

Wikipedia was never perfect, but it seems worse than ever. But now, even the internet archival services are scrubbing things. History is literally being erased.

I don’t know if there’s any solution except to change our comfy assumptions about the availability of information. The internet seems to be creeping toward a much noisier version of Pravda. At least wholly owned state propaganda papers were known as such and discounted accordingly.

We’re caught off guard because the level of fakery and bullshit on the internet happened quickly, and the quantity of info out there can make you feel like everything’s represented. But scratch the surface and those assumptions fall apart.

New approaches, tools, and mindsets are needed to wade through the internet today. And new offline info sources are needed as well.

Nobody asked but …

Today there was a meeting of the central Kentucky special interest group on Lifelong Philosophy (affiliated with the University of Kentucky’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute).  The topic for discussion was Human Destructiveness.

After a consensus that the world was topsy-turvy, the most vocal segment claimed that parents were to blame.  The implication was that earlier generations of parents were better.

What our parents were actually was from a much narrower demographic.  There was a concentration of fathers named Tom, Dick, and Harry.  Our mothers were housewives, many of whom did not have a paying job or a drivers’ license.

Can we go back?  Probably not.  America was always destined to deteriorate as an enclave of western European colonialists — slaveholders.  America would always become cosmopolitan — dependent on multivariate walks of life.

Conservatism is not nostalgia for the old days.  Realistic conservatism is deciding to make the most of what will be.  And there’s the trick: figuring out what tomorrow may bring.

— Kilgore Forelle

According to a recent poll, a majority of New Mexico voters approve of stiffer anti-gun legislation.

This is why the U.S. Constitution exists, and why America was established as a republic, not a democracy: to protect individual rights from majority opinion. It places human rights beyond the reach of politics. You don’t get to vote on liberty.

Whether or not this works in practice could be the subject for another conversation.

Invariably, the anti-gun faction claims that “in spite of” all the legislation they’ve imposed, the crime rate remains high. The truth is, the crime rate is pushed higher by those laws. Bad people will continue to break laws, no matter how harsh the consequences.

Part of being a bad guy is the belief that you’ll get away with it — and a lack of consideration of consequences. This is why harsher legislation and nastier penalties will always hurt good people more than they will discourage criminals.

Democracy is nothing but mob rule; might through superior numbers makes “right.” It is nothing to celebrate or fetishize. Those who place faith in democracy are telling you they don’t understand what rights are, nor do they understand the dangers of letting the mob decide which rights to respect and which to ignore.

It doesn’t matter what everyone wants if everyone wants to violate someone’s rights.

Imagine slavery somehow makes a comeback, or at least becomes something most people are willing to consider again. It’s obviously illegal — prisons excepted — to enslave people. What if the people demand to vote on the matter? Could an election make slavery OK? What if the vote was 99% in favor of re-instituting slavery?

If you don’t have the right to do something to someone, winning a majority vote on the issue doesn’t create this right. You have no right to tell anyone they aren’t allowed to have some sort of gun or otherwise violate their natural rights or enslave them. No legislation, election, or majority opinion can change this.

You might still have the power to do it anyway, just as governments had the power to prop up slavery throughout most of human history. This doesn’t make it right. Try it and the abolitionists will rise again, with their new version of underground railroads. The bad people will call them the “criminals,” as they always do when good people defy bad government rules. I can live with that.

In the 1960s a popular button that New Left activists wore implored everyone to “Question Authority!” It was good advice, even though many kinds of authority exist. Some authority is chosen (for example, one’s doctor) and others are compulsory (the government). But in either case, questioning it is reasonable. The button did not implore anyone to reject authority, only to question it.

What about intuition? I have the impression that people think their own intuitions need not be questioned because they are reliable. But is that wise? I don’t think so.

First let’s acknowledge that much of what people take for an intuition is often a mere claim heard repeatedly through the mass media or social networks. Something that seems like an intuition may not be one at all.

But ignore that distinction for this discussion. Some factual claims just feel true to people who have not read much about the matter. For example, many people are likely to say that it is intuitively true that a growing human population must bring a progressive depletion of natural resources (and the products embodying them) and thus scarcer supplies, higher prices, more hardship for poorer people, greater economic inequality, and other bad things. They feel this must be the case. How could it not be true? Resources are finite and nonrenewable, so if more and more people demand them, harm must follow.

But is it really true? Or is this a case of knowing something that isn’t so?

It will shock many people to learn that we know empirically and theoretically that it is not true. If that sense of doom is an intuition, then intuition can be and often is wrong. Malthus got it exactly upside down. As Marian Tupy and Dale Cooley, building on the work of the late great Julian Simon, demonstrate, world population has grown dramatically — one billion in 1800, eight billion today — along with a dramatic fall in absolute poverty and a dramatic increase in the production of and access to food and all the other things we need and want.

More people are living longer and materially better lives than ever before. This simply cannot be denied. Tupy and Cooley emphasize a largely unknown fact among laymen: today it takes people on average everywhere less labor time to earn the money to buy all sorts of goods and the underlying resources than it took in the past, even the fairly recent past. In the time the average manufacturing worker labored to earn the money to buy one egg in 1919, he could buy 36 eggs in 2019. The time price of an egg thus had dropped to 1/36 of the earlier time price, roughly a 97 percent drop in the real price. And so on across the board.

Today, Tupy and Cooley say, average time prices have fallen to 2 percent of their 1850 level. (Quality improvements, which are hard to quantify, make this fall an underestimate.) Let that sink in, especially how that disproportionately benefits the poorest people. They have more time to buy more things or to enjoy leisure. That’s new wealth. Industrious people at all levels have become smarter and more productive because of modern technology.

Tupy and Cooley call their new book Superabundance because, contra Malthus, the increase in resources has outpaced population growth. That’s counterintuitive. We forget that while people are consumers, most are also net producers. (See the charts here.)

Exactly what accounts for that great progress? Two things, the authors say. The first is human intelligence, or as Simon called it, the “ultimate resource.” This is an apt term. Contrary to intuition, there are no natural resources. Zilch. In the pilot of the 1960s TV show The Beverly Hillbillies, the backwoods farmer and hunter Jed Clampett discovers oil on his land. Does he cheer? No, he is unhappy. He sees it as a curse. When a city man offers to remove the oil, Jed says he can’t afford to pay for the removal. The city man laughs and explains that Jed will be paid (a lot), not charged, for the removal. (Jed was really behind the times.) Obviously, that was not always the case.

What happened? Knowledge happened. Chemically, the crude was the same stuff as before. But in the 19th century, a chemist (in Canada, I believe) discovered that kerosene, which could fuel lamps, could be distilled from that oil. Then others discovered that oil could be pumped and refined economically, that is, cheaply enough to make a mass market. (John D. Rockefeller had a lot to do with this.) This solved a problem: the common fuel for lamps, whale oil, had been getting expensive because the whales were being killed off. Eventually, it was discovered that gasoline, which could fuel machines, also could be refined from oil, and we were off to the races.

What turned useless black gunk into useful “black gold” was human intelligence. This is true for all so-called natural resources. Nature provides stuff, but it neglected to furnish a user manual. People had to figure it out for themselves. And we all benefited immeasurably.

As important as human intelligence is to the creation of resources, something more is needed: freedom (or at least a good measure of it). If people are not substantially free to act and interact, peacefully, of course — if society instead is planned from the top — little if any innovation will take place to improve the lives of entire populations. Freedom and innovation go together.

A further implication, as Simon heroically taught, is that population growth (along with immigration, by the way) is good. More people means more ideas that can combine with other ideas to produce even better ideas. (Free speech is obviously crucial.)

The great economist Ludwig von Mises understood all of this. My favorite line in his magnum opus, Human Action, reads: “The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier.” As the number of our fellow human beings increases, getting shoes and everything else becomes even easier — if the government can be kept at bay.

Everything today is more plentiful and cheaper than in previous eras — well, almost everything. The only thing that has gotten more expensive is labor, which indicates that people have become more scarce relative to consumer demand and resources. If a demographic problem for economic growth is looming, it’s de-population in the most productive parts of the world. What’s your intuition have to say about that?

Indisputably, then, free human beings have made the earth more, not less, hospitable. (For details on all these matters, see the works of Simon and Tupy and Cooley, as well as others, including Matt Ridley, Bjorn Lomborg, Alex Epstein, Patrick Moore, and Michael Schellenberger.)

Football players make money with their bodies. Some are injured. But football is legal.

So why is sex work illegal?

My video this week focuses on that.

Sex worker “Aella” has made hundreds of thousands of dollars, mostly by “camming,” showing her body to men online and talking intimately with them. Her customers are happy to pay for that.

This offends people.

It’s “exploitation…under the banner of a career choice!” complains feminist Heather Brunskell-Evans.

Aella laughs at that, saying, “Where was she when I was working at a factory? Lots of people work terrible jobs. [But] a lot of sex workers make more money.”

Aella left home to escape strict parents when she was 17. That’s when she got that factory job.

Eventually, someone suggested she try camming, which Aella says turned out to be much better than factory work. “I could decide what kind of things I wanted to do, what my limits were.”

Also, she made $200 an hour.

After camming, Aella tried “escort” work. That’s really just another word for prostitution.

“I remember going into my first appointment feeling really nervous. Then it was actually a lovely experience….And I left with a bunch of money in my pocket. I was like, ‘This was awesome.'”

To protect themselves, Aella and her friends have a screening process. When a new man calls, they demand references from previous escorts.

She doesn’t understand why prostitution is illegal, why people like her need to be “protected” from prostitution. On Twitter, Aella labels herself “whorelord.”

“When I was working at the factory, that was a thousand times worse,” she says. “But nobody cared about that.”

Prostitution is legal in parts of Nevada, in Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Netherlands, Hungary, Turkey, Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand.

Legalizing sex work doesn’t solve its problems, but it makes it safer and easier to regulate.

Of course, some women are forced into prostitution. Some are tricked into coming to America, where traffickers confiscate identity papers, withhold pay, and tell the woman they owe them for bringing them to the U.S.

That’s obviously evil and should be prosecuted. But that would be easier to do if sex work were legal.

“It really would be a lot safer if it were decriminalized,” says Aella. “I’ve been assaulted during sex work. It wasn’t an option in my mind to go get the authorities’ help.”

Also, the vast majority of sex work is voluntary—a business transaction between consenting adults.

You might not realize that most is voluntary because police and media routinely call voluntary sex work slavery.

In 2019, New England Patriots owners Robert Kraft patronized a massage parlor that offered “happy endings.” Police arrested him as part of what they called a “sex trafficking” sting.

But there was no “trafficking.” Later prosecutors conceded that.

“Ninety-nine percent of the headlines are not true,” says Reason reporter Elizabeth Nolan Brown. “They say ‘we rescued these women,’ but by ‘rescue,’ they put them in jail and give them a criminal record. The victims are the sex workers themselves.”

Today, Aella has mostly retired from sex work. She got funded to work as a data scientist.

She uses her hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, Reddit, FetLife, and TikTok to run polls that ask provocative questions like, “Do women have systemic privilege due to their gender?”

“I’m really curious about the ways that our moral intuitions don’t line up,” Aella says. “I poke at things that make people feel confused about what they believe.”

Sex work is one of those things.

Polls show a slight majority of Americans think sex work should be decriminalized.  Support for legalization has been increasing.

“It should be legal,” says Aella. “Discovering sex work was one of the best things that’s happened to me. I have my own life. I make good money. I have a ton of spare time to do what I want. People are concerned about my ‘exploitation’? That’s wrong.”

Do you only care about some things because you’ve been manipulated into caring?

There are many things you can’t change about the world. Caring too much about those is going to make your life worse. You could lose your mind obsessing over things you can’t control, even if they are important.

Should anyone care that the president gave a more dark and divisive speech than usual? Will caring about it accomplish anything?

Are there other things you’re being told to care about, but which you probably shouldn’t?

If climate change is real, if it is caused by human activity, if it is a net negative, if anything reasonable can be done about it, and if it’s not already too late, is there anything you – individually — can do to solve it? Should you beg government to crack down on everyone in order to force them to do what you believe they should? What if you’re wrong? Might worrying about it destroy your peace of mind without any benefit whatsoever?

Do you still care about Covid? How could caring about it improve your life? Are you making your life better or worse by worrying about whether others have submitted to the shots?

What about unconstitutional control of people’s movement across government borders? Should you really care whether the person standing in line in front of you at the store has government permission to be here? Why? If someone isn’t currently violating the life, liberty, or property of some individual, their existence isn’t hurting you at all. If they are violating someone, why would it matter to you where they were born or which government claims them as property? Caring about it only makes your life less joyful.

Maybe you think I’ve been fooled into caring about liberty. Do you feel as though I’m trying to manipulate you into caring about something you shouldn’t? Should I care about liberty, or is it pointless and meaningless to my quality of life? Should you care?

You need to decide for yourself which things are important enough to focus on. If liberty matters to you — and imagine how your life would be without it — then join me in caring about it. If you’d rather have false promises of safety in exchange for giving up your rightful liberty to politicians, then worry about how other people’s liberty scares you and beg to be saved from those exercising their freedom responsibly.

Nobody asked but …

A horrendous TV news link appeared in today’s Facebook news feed, “Iowa school district promises to end seclusion rooms use.”  I read the term, “seclusion” as  “solitary confinement,” and I flash back to scenes from “Cool Hand Luke.”

How many public school districts are getting away with this kind of bureaucratic insanity?  If it took the feds 4+ years to bring their suasion to bear, with a half-baked solution (at best), how many eons will it take to gain a smattering of confidence in a continuation of this system?

Have we heard enough?  Probably not.

— Kilgore Forelle

I’ve written elsewhere, in places too numerous now to recall, about the fact that many if not most libertarians make the erroneous – and largely false – assumption that the average person actually wants to be free.  All the evidence demonstrates that they don’t.

There’s another reason why libertarianism fails to gain mass appeal:  It’s too rational.

Libertarian ideology (and it is just that – an ideal – one that is probably unrealizable, given that it requires human cooperation with such) is consistent.  It’s not based on the same arbitrary, infinitely flexible tenets of Statism.  It appeals to pure logic and reason (albeit even among self-proclaimed libertarians, there’s room for disagreement on some of the finer points).

And that is another of its downfalls.

Yes, human beings are capable (ostensibly, anyway) of reason, rational thought, and logical deduction.  It’s what separates us – some say – from the beasts in the wild.  It’s why some human beings are able to build skyscrapers, build computers, solve complex math equations, and send spacecraft out to distant celestial bodies. Libertarianism presumes that people – at least, most people — act this way all the time.  But this ignores that, in large measure, human beings do not act rationally.  And they fail to do so on a supremely consistent basis.

Many innocuous aspects of human nature do not rely upon logic.  There is nothing particularly “logical,” for instance, in having a favorite color, liking a certain rock band, or falling head over heels for a certain woman.  But none of these are quirks that in any way threaten the existence or functionality of a free and prosperous society.  On the contrary, they may even contribute to it in a complimentary way.

People, however, favor ideas and behavior which is not so easily assimilated: They favor redistribution of wealth (government theft), attack free markets as evil, are angered by gun ownership and free speech, accept and work at government jobs.  They see racism in everything that moves, cheer on the State’s aggressions as if they were part of a winning team.  They vote.  They eat Tide pods.

You get the picture.  With that as the raw material to work with – crowds of cattle who are more interested in football games and sitcoms than Spooner or Mises (and don’t even know who those two latter were – or care) – what chance does an elevated, evolutionary philosophy like libertarianism / voluntaryism stand?

None.

You cannot “educate” a society full of beings who exhibit such low intellect, coupled with an almost total inability to process facts in a consistent and cogent manner.

I wish I could read you a comfy bedtime story here at this point, but that’s not the world we’re stuck in.  The rulers know the ruled are basically complete fucking idiots – even many if not most of the ones with several university accolades hanging on their office walls – and while the rulers are often no prodigies themselves, they are cunning, ruthless, and brazen enough to get away with playing farmer on the farm.  And they have plenty of even more sinister, bloodthirsty goons with guns to help them get their way (more evidence of the irrationality of the herd) in the face of any resisters. Needless to say, most people aren’t resisters.  They’re just soft, pliable, Silly-Putty clowns who only want pan et circe.

Conclusion?  Is there one? You tell me.  Just thought I’d point out the obvious, once again.

Enjoy life.

The push-back against identity politics by disillusioned leftists is welcome, but the striving to replace identity with economic equality as the guiding political principle? Not so much.

I won’t spend time on the problems with identity politics, a zero-sum game if ever there was one. The virtue of universalism extolled by classical liberalism seems indisputable. Why wouldn’t everyone begin with the same entitlement to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness free of government impediment?

As a general matter, past crimes committed by some long-dead people against other long-dead other people cannot be rectified without creating new crimes and instigating an unending chain of grievances. That’s no recipe for the liberty, cooperation, and peace that our individual and social welfare require. Identity politics is founded on collectivism, according to which people are judged by their membership, typically involuntary, in a racial or ethnic group. The obsession with identity has now gone from the ridiculous (skin color) to the absurd (“gender”), but that’s a topic for another day — perhaps. It’s a minefield.

So let’s turn to the proposed replacement: economic equality, sometimes called class-based politics. A contingent of people, including but not limited to some orthodox Marxists, have pointed out that identity politics has tragically taken our eyes off the ball. Instead of focusing on something that can unify all “oppressed” people — the wealth and income gaps — we have been misdirected toward something that needlessly divides them and reduces or obliterates their ability to resist and to make things better. One proposal is to replace race-based government programs like affirmative action with class-based versions that give preferences to people with less-affluent upbringings. (One finds this view expressed in a heterodox publication I like quite a bit, Spiked Online.)

Why is that not a promising alternative? Because it is riddled with fallacies. I’m not saying we have no good way of talking about class; many classical liberals have done so. Karl Marx himself, who is dubiously credited with creating class analysis, acknowledged his debt to the early French laissez-faire liberals for their pioneering work in the field — before he proceeded to mangle it because of his fallacious economics. According to the classical liberal view, the state creates class antagonism by appropriating wealth from the industrious people (the tax-producers, who include, along with nonmanagement workers, the creators of businesses and employers) and giving it to their cronies (the tax-consumers). This sets in motion a social conflict with wide ramifications.

Needless to say, most contemporary class analysts are not of the classical liberal variety even those who are increasingly suspicious of state power. They still suffer the fallacy that economic inequality is an inherent bug in market-oriented societies that requires force-wielding enlightened rulers (Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez perhaps) to intervene.

I think that the pursuit of economic equality is doomed to fail because it clashes with immutable reality. I emphasize, though I shouldn’t have to, that I am not talking about legal equality, equality of liberty, or what Roderick Long calls “equality of authority.” (Equality of opportunity is a slippery term if it means more than freedom from government impediment.) I mean only income or wealth equality.

Why would the quest for that kind of equality clash with reality? It must do so because individuals will never be the same in many key respects. They differ vastly in talent, drive, energy, ambition, entrepreneurial intuition, and more. These things are clearly relevant to their degree of ability to create wealth and earn income through voluntary exchange in the marketplace. We all know that not everyone is equally endowed with the ability to produce value for consumers, say, by organizing a business. That would be the case even if everyone had a good upbringing and no one was forced to attend a decrepit government school. That’s just the way it is.

A serious attempt to create economic equality, or even something close, would create the nightmare world envisioned in Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.” The philosopher Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia set out a scenario that is only slightly less dystopian. He pointed out that even if everyone started the day with the same amount of money, they wouldn’t finish the day that way because some would have been better at pleasing consumers than others. So what now? If the goal remained perfect equality, government officials would have to start each day by redistributing the money evenly again. What would that do to people’s incentive to produce? The policy might lead to equality, but it would be at an abysmally low level. Only the envious would be satisfied, but envy is no basis for a prosperous or pleasant society. So which do we prefer: equality of poverty or inequality in which the lowest living standard is higher than it would be in the egalitarian dystopia?

The connection between inequality and actual living standards is illusory. Imagine a rising elevator: the ceiling goes up, but so does the floor. Now imagine a rising accordion-like elevator that rises: even as the distance between the ceiling and floor increases, the entire unit goes up. This demonstrates the distraction of focusing on inequality.

The vast difference in incomes and wealth among people in the United States, which defines classes, obscures the more-important shrinking of the gap in consumption. For decades now, lower-income people have had progressively easier access to life-improving conveniences and necessities that the upper class once had only at enormous expense — if at all. (Not long ago, no rich person walked around with a powerful computer/communications device in his pocket.) One-time luxuries have become commonplace necessities and affordable for virtually everyone even as they have greatly improved in quality.

In fact, if you measure this increasing access to products, not according to money prices (which are confounded by inflation and other things), but according to how long the average employee must work to earn the necessary money (time price), the picture that emerges is astounding. This is a good measure because we ultimately pay for things with our effort.

Average working people today toil a fraction of the time their parents and grandparents did to earn what it takes to buy not just the same products, but much better ones. In other words, we all get more and more utility for free. Think about it: if today you can buy something with only 15 minutes of work instead of the hour you had to spend before, you obtain three-quarters of the product’s utility gratis. You have money left over for other things that you previously could not afford.

How does that happen? It happens through dramatic increases in productivity, which are made possible through investment (of savings and profits) in innovative technologies, which in turn are made possible by human ingenuity. (“The ultimate resource,” the great Julian Simon called it.) Better machines, computers, tools, and other inputs vastly increase the power of unaided labor, enlarging the volume of goods that can be produced in an hour. When that happens, wages go up and time prices fall. That is called progress, though I don’t mean to imply that money is all that’s required for happiness. (We also ought to pay tribute to fossil fuels and their producers, without which this could not have happened.)

One more ingredient is needed: competition among producers and employers free of government fetters. Without it, the potentially improved terms of trade won’t be converted into consumer welfare.

These insights are is central to a new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley. But I first encountered this insight in Myths Of Rich And Poor: Why We’re Better Off than We Think (2000) by Michael W. Cox and Richard Alm. (Listen to Keith Knight’s interview with Tupy.)

What ought to matter, then, is not the differences in living standards but the absolute levels. The change at the lowest level alone is a good proxy for the general condition. Equality is a chimera and a destructive one at that. What we should want to see eradicated is real poverty, not inequality. Poverty is a comparative matter as well, however, since no matter how affluent the lowest income group is, it is still at the bottom. So the focus on (relative) poverty can also be an unfortunate distraction. We must keep our eye on the ball: real poverty.

America’s lowest-income population is better off than even their recent ancestors, not to mention many people around the world today. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be even richer. The way to bring that about is to eliminate every government impediment to wealth creation, business formation, entrepreneurship, and labor mobility. That means eliminating everything from business regulations and subsidies to occupational licensing to home-building restrictions to intellectual property to taxes and much more. That’s a large enough agenda to keep any politician busy for a while.

There are mounting concerns over profound learning loss due to prolonged school closures and remote learning. New data released last week by the US Department of Education reveal that fourth-grade reading and math scores dropped sharply over the past two years.

Fingers are waving regarding who is to blame, but the alleged “learning loss” now being exposed is more reflective of the nature of forced schooling rather than how children actually learn.

The current hullabaloo over pandemic learning loss mirrors the well-worn narrative regarding “summer slide,” in which children allegedly lose knowledge over summer vacation. In 2017, I wrote an article for Boston NPR stating that there’s no such thing as the summer slide.

Students may memorize and regurgitate information for a test or a teacher, but if it has no meaning for them, they quickly forget it. Come high school graduation, most of us forget most of what we supposedly learned in school.

In his New York Times opinion article this week, economist Bryan Caplan makes a related point: “I figure that most of the learning students lost in Zoom school is learning they would have lost by early adulthood even if schools had remained open. My claim is not that in the long run remote learning is almost as good as in-person learning. My claim is that in the long run in-person learning is almost as bad as remote learning.”

Learning and schooling are completely different. Learning is something we humans do, while schooling is something done to us. We need more learning and less schooling.

Yet, the solutions being proposed to deal with the identified learning loss over the past two years promise the opposite. Billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds are being funneled into more schooling and school-like activities, including intensive tutoring, extended-day learning programs, longer school years, and more summer school. These efforts could raise test scores, as has been seen in Texas where students receive 30 hours of tutoring in each subject area in which they have failed a test, but do they really reflect true learning?

As we know from research on unschoolers and others who learn in self-directed education settings, non-coercive, interest-driven learning tends to be deep and authentic. When learning is individually-initiated and unforced, it is not a chore. It is absorbed and retained with enthusiasm because it is tied to personal passions and goals.

Certainly, many children have been deprived of both intellectual and social stimulation since 2020, as lockdowns and other pandemic policies kept them detached from their larger communities. I wrote back in September 2020 that these policies were damaging an entire generation of kids, and urged parents to do whatever possible to ensure that their children had normal interactions with the wider world.

Children who were not able to have those interactions will need more opportunities now to play and explore and discover their world. It is through this play, exploration, and discovery that they will acquire and expand their intellectual and social skills. This is best facilitated outside of a conventional classroom, not inside one.

“What we need is less school, not more,” writes Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray. “Kids need more time to play and just be kids. Mother nature designed kids to play, explore, and daydream without adult intervention because that is how kids develop the skills, confidence, and attitudes necessary for mental health and overall wellbeing.”

Fortunately, non-coercive schooling alternatives are becoming more widely available. My latest Forbes article describes an Illinois public middle school science teacher, Josh Pickel, who quit his job this summer to open a new self-directed microschool. As Pickel wondered: “What if we removed coercion and those kids were allowed to focus their energy and their intellect on things they care about?”

The start of this new school year brings with it greater education possibilities, including those like Pickel’s that enable children to joyfully explore content they care about, in pursuit of goals that matter to them, leading to genuine learning retained for years to come.

We can criticize school shutdowns and affirm that they never should have happened, while also recognizing that imposing more schooling is not the solution to presumed pandemic-era learning loss. It might raise test scores, but it’s unlikely to lead to true learning. Only freedom can do that.

“When police found a kindergarten boy who had walked off from school after attacking his teacher and classmates,” Elizabeth K. Anthony writes at The Conversation, “it didn’t take them long to start guessing about the cause of his behavior.”

Long story short: The cops concluded  the boy wasn’t getting enough of That Good Old Corporal Punishment at home, and told his mother exactly that.

“He’s bad because no one’s correcting it.”

“This is why people need to beat their kids.”

“As law enforcement officers  … we applaud the fact that you will please beat your kid.”

There are no happy endings to such incidents, but this case did result in a hefty settlement after a judge ruled that the police behavior involved was “assaultive in nature.”

For much of my own life, I assumed that “spare the rod, spoil the child” was not only how things were, but the only way they could be. My wife and I debated that belief in a spirited manner and she largely prevailed in banning corporal punishment for our kids. I learned to keep my opinion (or at least my hands) to myself. But I never questioned it.

Then I inherited the razor strop.

It was my great-grandfather’s, then my grandfather’s, then my father’s, and when he passed away it — and memories of it that I’d tried to bury — came to me.

I assume my grandfather and his father used the strop for its intended purpose, sharpening the straight razor which I also inherited. And, yes, maybe for other things.

My dad didn’t need the razor or strop for shaving — disposable razors were fine with him.  But he used that strop liberally, on me, when my behavior didn’t measure up to his standards.

It’s just a strip of leather, backed by a strip of thick cloth, maybe two feet long and four inches wide. But in memory,  it’s a giant serpent of fire and pain that I lived in abject terror of throughout my childhood.

Was my father an evil man? I don’t think so.

On the other hand, 40 years or more after my final disciplinary encounter with the strop, I’m no longer convinced that his decision to inflict pain on me is the reason I’m not dead, in prison, or an alcoholic.

If the strop taught me anything, it was the false lesson that instant resort to violence “works.” I suspect I’m not dead, in prison, or an alcoholic in spite of, not because of, the strop.

I also suspect that violent punishment of children makes those children, and their parents, more inclined to non-defensive violence in general.

Corporal punishment becomes a shortcut that superficially “solves” problems without the time and effort required to understand and work through those problems for real. It’s the crack cocaine of dispute resolution — an instant high followed by the constant need for more.

If you’re a good person with good kids — and I bet you are — don’t make it harder on them, or on yourself. Parent peacefully.

Is it my imagination, or do many people run from responsibility as fast as they can?

If you cause harm to a person’s life, liberty, or property you need to take responsibility. Don’t wait for someone else to hold you accountable. Step up and accept it.

If it was an accident, it can’t be a real crime, no matter how bad it was or what government says. You still owe restitution, but government has no stake in the matter. It’s between you and the one you harmed. Punishment shouldn’t even be an option.

It’s only if you refuse to take responsibility that I can see how some might justify government involvement. I still suspect this will always make things worse.

If you caused harm on purpose you committed a crime. You can still choose to take responsibility, although if you’re the sort to commit crimes I doubt you will unless backed into a corner. Some people imagine government is the right tool to use to back criminals into a corner; I think it’s a weak tool and still makes things worse in the long run. Being punished by government isn’t the same as accepting responsibility or even being held accountable. It’s nothing.

It’s not just the big things like this, though. In fact, those are the extreme cases, even if too common. The smaller examples are even more common, and probably affect more people.

People don’t take responsibility to put their trash in a proper receptacle and, if they do, they don’t care if it’s going to blow right back out again. They’ll leave paper in the back of their pickup, knowing it’s going to blow out and become litter.

They dump cats and dogs, not caring about the pain and misery they’ll suffer as strays — and the puppies and kittens born doomed.

I get it; responsibility is hard. It’s not fun. It’s easier to let someone else deal with your messes and suffer your consequences. But this is how others justify political government — which is just more irresponsibility; every bit as damaging as the other things I’ve mentioned. Laws are pollution, too.

You are responsible for your actions, whether you accept it or not. If you don’t face it you are hurting yourself. You’re making a world none of us — including you — would want to live in. You might as well be telling everyone that you’re not very smart or good.

In the late 1940s, just after World War Two, a small knot of wanna-be writers attending Harvard University got together and formed the nucleus of what would be labelled the Beat Generation.  After graduation, and once they got their typewriters clacking in earnest, these three icons of Beatnik fame – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs – would pen, between 1957 and 1959, the three largest looming pillars of Beat literature: Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” and Burroughs’s surrealistic novel The Naked Lunch. They would not be alone.  A whole host of other poets and authors put pen to paper in their wake, and ended up defining the Beat experience and lifestyle: A kind of nomadic existence characterized by wanderlust, prodigious drug and alcohol use, spiritualism, free sex, rejection of traditional societal values, and a wholesale immersion into literature, jazz music, and artistic creation.  This nascent Bohemian culture – though far smaller in scope and numbers than the press it received – unquestionably set the stage for what would follow in the 1960s, with its far bigger hippie youth culture, psychedelic drug and rock music atmosphere, and anti-Vietnam Conflict stance.

There were differences between these two ostensibly “antiestablishment” lifestyles, and not all of them merely temporal.  The Beats projected a different vision than the hippies who followed after them, and it was one that, I contend, appealed much more to an individualistic sensibility.

While some beatniks gravitated towards or at least flirted with Marxism (most notably Ginsberg, who was later one of the few Beats to transition over to the hippie cause), many of the more prominent ones, like Kerouac and Burroughs, decried communism vociferously.  Kerouac additionally defended his French-Canadian Roman Catholic roots, while Burroughs remained a staunch defender of firearms ownership his whole life.  They unapologetically capitalized on their bestselling books, fought against censorship, and revelled in the material benefits of living in an American land of plenty – even during the time before their writings made them wealthy and famous, and they survived on shoestrings as they traversed the countryside, stopping in roadside diners and cheap motels along the way, scribbling down their experiences in notebooks for later typed manuscripts.

As the 50s gave way to the 60s, and the Beat Generation got a little older, the landscape began to change.  JFK was killed.  The Beatles and the Rolling Stones came to America. Troops started shipping off to Vietnam, and coming home in flag-draped caskets. The culture shifted.  Young people began facing off against the system through draft resistance and protests in the streets. Rock concerts became huge, drug-soaked festivals. College campuses broke out in riots.  Mansonites murdered.

The Beats who were left by then (save Ginsberg) mostly faded into the background.  Some kept writing.  Kerouac died a broken and devastated alcoholic in 1969.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti kept running City Lights Books and Publishing in San Francisco (and lived to the ripe old age of 99).  Few threw themselves into the wave of youth tumult that characterized the 60s.

I like that.  The Beats weren’t out to change the world – they only wanted to change their relationship to it. They didn’t want to overthrow the system – just remove themselves from it in certain respects. They wanted to change themselves, not others. If they wrote a few things down and told us about their experiences, it was only to expiate themselves – and maybe make a few bucks in the process, when and where possible.  It wasn’t a cry to revolution. It was just living life.

The hippies proved, in many ways, the antithesis to all of this. “Tune in, turn on, drop out,” somehow became “Get clean for Gene.” Instead of staying in communes, the Baby Boomer “counterculture” made about the biggest mistake possible: They tried “changing the system” from within.

Look at the result of their folly.

One might argue, “Well, that generation had a draft and a war on their hands.  What else could they do?”  I think if the Beats had faced a similar situation, they would’ve just simply disappeared. There would’ve been no marches, no riots, and no running for political office.  They wouldn’t have had the hubris to see themselves as harbingers of deliverance from anything.  They would’ve just split to Mexico (as many of them did anyway), to never be heard from again, except maybe in a few underground literary journals.

The hippies made the mistake of trying to live and manage everyone else’s life for them, instead of just building lives for themselves – and leaving the rest of us alone.  And they’re still doing it.  As are their descendants.  And boy, have they ever fucked things up.

The Beats are long gone now, of course, as is the America and the world they knew. I often think what it must’ve been like in those boozy, smoke-filled jazz clubs full of poetry readings and loose women.  There was a time in my life when I would’ve revelled in that.  I probably still could, in truth.  But I’m older now, I’ve kind of been-there, done-that, and my perspective is a little wider.

Ginsberg famously wrote in his 1958 poem, “Howl,” that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but he was actually writing about the 60s yet to come.  The end product of that has most certainly been madness.  One look at modern 21^st century “woke” cultural Marxism proves it to inarguable conclusion.

I don’t think the Beats – most of them, anyway – would like what today’s Left are. But they certainly wouldn’t try forcing them to change, either.  Likely, the members of the Beat Generation would just tell the lot of such self-righteous prigs to go fuck themselves – and just go and do and say and write whatever they wanted to, regardless.