“Let Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York serve as your periodic reminder that capitalism is in dire need of able defenders.” Matthew Hennessey’s call that “Capitalism Needs Champions” (Wall Street Journal, July 1) would have provoked Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal author Ayn Rand’s trademark reminder to “check your premises.”

According to Hennessey, who uses “capitalism” interchangeably with “free markets” and even plain “markets,” “anticapitalists on both left and right struggle to make a serious case that things are worse now than they were 100 or 150 years ago.” Chris Matthew Sciabarra notes: “For Rand, this ‘unknown ideal’ had been approximated in history but it had never been practiced in its full, unadulterated laissez-faire form. It was largely undercut by state intervention.”

Even while America’s actually existing mixed economy produced the “washing machines [and] chemotherapy” hailed by Hennessey, manufacturing became so intertwined with federal contracts and organizational bureaucracy that Karl Hess could quip in a 1976 Playboy interview that “to find a difference worth dying for in opposing the Soviet Union while supporting General Motors requires a theological position.” Michael Harrington observed in The Next Left that ostensibly private healthcare providers accepted being primarily funded by “socialized insurance premiums” to the point of becoming “the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism combined,” in which “no one was particularly concerned about controlling the outlays or quality.”

“Free people” do “abominate coercion,” but Hennessey overlooks how capitalists have taken the initiative in burdening their competitors.  Asserting that “the owner-operator of a corner deli is no less a capitalist than Jeff Bezos” ignores how, in the words of Roy Childs, “men in larger businesses supported and even initiated acts of government regulation” (and would obviate the case against antitrust breakups).

Hennessey dismisses “soft-headed notions about inequality,” since “the incredible wealth [markets] generate can be used to fill the gaps.”  Yet the most pro-market mayoral candidate in New York’s history, Henry George, saw how unfree markets aggravated what he called the “Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth.”

Hennessey predicts that Mamdani will require “plans to keep New Yorkers captive,” forgetting his own Journal op-ed page’s survey of socialist mayors who “took an entrepreneurial approach to government, improving systems, cutting waste, and finding creative new sources of income” (Michael Trinklein’s “Sanders Can Learn From ‘Sewer Socialists’,” March 19, 2020).  The New York mayor who hailed “the crumbling bricks of the Berlin wall” yielding to “a world liberated from the crushing weight of fascism and totalitarianism” was card-carrying member of Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America David Dinkins.

Harrington’s heirs lack the socialist stalwart’s perceptiveness of “the worst of socialism.”  Mamdani’s proposed municipal groceries would have a harder time recreating efficient supply chains geared to local retail needs than dot-com bubble fiascoes like Kozmo or Webvan.  Free buses would at least not jeopardize free markets in a transit economy so subsidized that fares act like a regressive tax. But no free ride would get as far as free trade.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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“A government burdens the religious exercise of parents,”  Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito writes on behalf of the court’s majority in Mahmoud v. Taylor, “when it requires them to submit their children to instruction that poses ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that the parents wish to instill.”

Consequently, the court ruled, the Montgomery County, Maryland “Public” School System must allow parents to “opt out” of sending their children to classes in which “LGBTQ+-inclusive” stories are read and discussed if those parents claim their religious beliefs, and their “right to direct the religious upbringing of their children,” go against having their children exposed to that content.

I’m personally both “LGBTQ+-positive” AND in favor of the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children — not just where religion is concerned but in every respect that doesn’t constitute physical abuse or neglect.

I have to disagree, however, with fellow libertarian writer James Bovard, who claims that, with its ruling, “SCOTUS Strikes a Blow against Public School Indoctrination of Young Children.” Indoctrination is baked in to “public” education. The court simply weighed in on one particular aspect of that indoctrination while going out of its way to preclude the correct solution for indoctrination in general.

“It is no answer,” the case syllabus claims, “that parents remain free to place their children in private school or to educate them at home. Public education is a public benefit, and the government cannot ‘condition’ its ‘availability’ on parents’ willingness to accept a burden on their religious exercise. … Moreover, given that education is compulsory in Maryland, the parents are not being asked simply to forgo a public benefit. They have an obligation — enforceable by fine or imprisonment — to send their children to public school unless they find an adequate substitute they can afford.”

So:

We’re going to set up a system.

We’re going to make you pay for that system.

We’re going to force you to put your kids into that system unless you can ALSO afford to pay for an alternative system.

But then we’re going to allow a heckler’s veto on anything in that system that anyone with the money and friends to get a case before the Supreme Court may happen to dislike.

Because the thing they dislike, THAT’s the problem.

No, the system is the problem.

The right to direct the upbringing of one’s children entails the obligation to bear the costs of bringing up one’s children.

The system itself violates parents’ rights to direct the upbringing of their children AND forces them to bear the costs of that violation, making them less able to afford the costs of whatever upbringing they might prefer.

So long as “public” education — education funded by compulsory taxation — exists, parents will be “burdened” by that system’s “indoctrination” of their children in various ways.

There’s one, and only one, way to solve the problem of school “indoctrination” that this or that sub-set of parents may dislike: Separation of school and state.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“John Marshall has made his decision” regarding relations between the Cherokee Nation and the United States,  US president Andrew Jackson supposedly said of the US Supreme Court’s chief justice in 1832. “Now let him enforce it!”

That sentiment comes to mind when considering the Supreme Court’s June 27 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The court ruled that the government of Texas doesn’t run afoul of the First Amendment by requiring websites to verify users’ ages if those sites serve content the regime deems “harmful to minors.”

Even if the Jackson quote isn’t apocryphal, there are differences, of course.

One is that enforcement of Texas’s age verification law falls to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, not to chief justice John Roberts (or to associate justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion).

The other, bigger difference is that Jackson successfully defied Marshall — herding the Cherokee westward at gunpoint without further legal consequence — while Paxton stands virtually no chance of implementing his permission slip from the Roberts court to intrude on Texans’ Internet privacy.

The response of the porn industry to these state-based “age verification” laws breaks down into three types:

A few sites comply. They put up a web gate and require users from states with such laws to prove they’re over 18 by providing government-issued ID or submitting a face picture that lets AI estimate their ages.

Some other sites put up a different kind of web gate — they simply don’t allow users whose IP addresses seem to be located in states with “age verification” laws to see what’s behind the gate.

Those two responses probably cover 10% or so of “porn” sites, mainly the big operators who have a lot of money invested in their operations and don’t want legal trouble.

Most sites go a third way: They just ignore the Ken Paxtons of the world.

And, like Andrew Jackson versus Marshall, they can get away with it.

Their servers aren’t located in Texas, or possibly even in the United States. Maybe it’s possible to tell who operates those servers, maybe not. Anonymous website operators in Thailand probably don’t lie awake at night worrying about a Ken Paxton lawsuit.

Paxton might waste a bunch of taxpayer money creating a Chinese-style “Great Firewall of Texas” to stop Texans from viewing web content he doesn’t like … but Virtual Private Networks would get those Texans around that firewall. VPNs would also help those users convince sites that DO require age verification from Texans that they’re actually from the Netherlands, Japan, or Romania.

I’m a big fan of VPNs and other tools for circumventing government control of what we can access on the World Wide Web. I’m also old enough to remember the US government’s war on encryption in the 1990s. Short version for you youngsters: The government lost that war. Paxton and his co-belligerents will lose this one, too.

That’s a good thing. Government control over what we may or may not see and hear on the Internet is far too dangerous to allow.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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