Nearly two weeks into the latest production of Shutdown Theater — a theatrical performance in which the US government doesn’t actually “shut down,” but some “non-essential” functions do — we’re still seeing the usual Blame The Other Party rhetoric from Republicans and Democrats alike.

My opinion has always been that the better strategy, for either party, is to claim ownership of, rather than bemoan, these shutdowns.

Instead of the same tiresome “those mean ol’ Republicans/Democrats won’t play nice” sympathy pleas, go with positional strength: “Darn right we shut some things down — we’re in control here and those things will come back after, and ONLY after, the Democrats/Republicans give us what we demand.”

In this case, the guy I’d expect to take that latter line,  the guy who would benefit most from doing so, is US president Donald Trump. Two reasons why:

First, there’s zero doubt whose shutdown this is.

The Republicans control the White House.

The Republicans control the US House of Representatives.

The Republicans control the Senate, and as recently as last month, they’ve shown they’re willing to use the “nuclear option” to get things done by majority, instead of super-majority, vote.

The US government is (partially and cosmetically) shut down because the Republicans want it that way. The shutdown will end when the Republicans want it to end. It’s theirs. They own it.

They (especially Trump) would look a lot better leaning into that ownership than they sound with their 24/7 whining about the Democrats.

Second, Trump is actually doing some good things with the shutdown — things that accentuate the “ownership” angle if he’d just claim that angle.

First, the White House is questioning whether furloughed government employees are entitled to “back pay” when the shutdown ends and they return to their offices.

That seems to be a legal question, but in the private sector, it’s not a question at all. If a factory shuts down and lays off its workers, those workers don’t get paid then or later, because they’re um, NOT WORKING. They can file for unemployment benefits, or they can just wait the shutdown out while living on their savings, or they can go find other jobs, but they don’t get retroactive paid vacations for the layoff period. Why should government employees be treated any differently?

Second, the Trump administration has begun “Reduction In Force” cuts to the government employee population.

Not temporary “shutdown” layoffs with guaranteed recall, but rather “going forward, this agency can get by with a staff of 400, not 500 … best wishes for your future in the private sector!” More than 4,000 government employees have already received RIF notices.

That’s some good stuff — and where political optics are concerned, bragging about it makes more sense than trying to shift blame for it.

I’d rather the US government shut down for real, and for good — but if Trump can use this partial, temporary shutdown to trim some fat and nix the “back pay” scam, that’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

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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“Rather than letting gabillionaires like Elon Musk put practically none of their massive incomes into” Social Security, Jim Hightower writes at CounterPunch, “make them pay Social Security taxes exactly like regular workers do.”

As is always nearly the case when discussing Social Security, there’s quite a bit to unpack, but let’s start by congratulating Hightower on the fulfillment of his wish, long before he even expressed it:

Elon Musk DOES pay Social Security exactly like regular workers do.

Regular workers pay 12.4% — half directly and half theoretically from their employers, but thereby reducing the money available for wages —  in Social Security tax on every dollar of income they earn up to $176,000.

Elon Musk (and other “gabillionaires”)  also pay 12.4% in Social Security tax on every dollar of income they earn up to $176,000.

$176,000 isn’t the only Social Security “cap.” There’s also a maximum benefit amount. Elon Musk (and other “gabillionaires”), just like regular workers, can potentially receive a maximum monthly payout of $5,108  if they wait until the age of 70 to retire.

Hightower doesn’t really want to treat Elon Musk just like a regular worker. He wants Musk to pay more, without receiving a  commensurate increase in return, so as to subsidize the retirements of those regular workers.

He wants, in the common parlance, to “redistribute wealth,” in the form of retirement income.

Social Security already does that, but in a different direction: It forces black men to subsidize the retirements of white women.

The average life expectancy of a black man in America is 68 years, which means that the black man who doesn’t retire early receives a whopping one year of Social Security checks before shuffling off this mortal coil. Kind of a raw deal, huh?

The average life expectancy of a white woman in America is 81.1 years, which means that even the white woman who works to the maximum retirement age of 70 receives more than 11 years of those payments. Sweet deal, huh?

To add insult to injury, the labor participation rate of white women is lower than that of black men — in part because our culture still encourages “one-income households” after marriage with the man as “breadwinner” — so white women work fewer years before retirement, but enjoy more years after retirement, at the financial expense of black men.

If Hightower merely suggested reversing the flow of wealth redistribution — from bottom-up to top-down — I’d still call shenanigans, but he instead characterizes the Social Security Ponzi scheme as “an egalitarian effort to provide a decent retirement for all,” which it isn’t now and never has been.

The best thing to do with Social Security, if “decent retirements” is the goal — and, more importantly, if individual freedom and choice are the criteria — is eliminate it.

“Regular workers” and their households earn an average annual return on their involuntary Social Security “investment” of 1.23%. Actually investing that 12.4% of income in an S&P 500 indexed mutual fund produces an average annual return of 10%.

Instead of taxing the “gabillionaires” more, tax everyone at 0% and let the market make them prosperous.

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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“Medicine today is a business enterprise,” Dr. Joseph Varon writes at the Brownstone Institute. “Patients are consumers, doctors are ‘providers,’ and healing has been crowded out by billing codes, liability fears, and the suffocating weight of bureaucracy. The vocation has been replaced by a job, and a job can always be abandoned.”

In case you didn’t catch the tone, yes, Dr. Varon bemoans healthcare  traded as a “commodity” rather than delivered as a quasi-priestly “vocation.”

A young socialist-minded acquaintance of mine puts it more plainly. “Healthcare shouldn’t be a commodity,” she says. “Everyone needs it. Without it, people die.” And of course the whole socialist premise is based on opposition to the “commodification of labor” in general.

For any good or service, there are two alternatives to commodification:

First, do without that thing. In a world where doctors and other health practitioners do their work just because they love it, subsisting on whatever alms grateful patients happen to throw their way, the number of healthcare workers available will dwindle, not grow. More people will receive less care. More people will die younger.

Second, enslave those who can provide that thing and force them to provide it. The most obvious problem with that is the moral implication. Slavery is wrong. It’s wrong if you expect the slaves to pick cotton, and it’s wrong if you expect the slaves to perform surgery. A nearly as obvious problem is that slaves tend to care less about, and put in less effort to achieve, positive results from their forced labor. Would YOU hand a slave a scalpel and demand a heart bypass?

The evolution of money boosted humanity from a barter economy in which, if I had a cow and needed an appendectomy, I had to find a doctor who wanted a cow, to an exchange economy in which goods and services could be commodified and traded indirectly but easily.

Without large-scale commodification and money as medium of exchange, we’d all be — and once were — much, much poorer than we are now, even if enterprises were “worker-owned.” Healthcare workers would still have to eat, even if they were outright slaves. And if they weren’t, their collectives would spend a lot more time trading medicines, stitches, casts, etc. for chickens, goats, and shingles for the roofs of their little shacks and a lot less time actually practicing their “vocations.”

If there’s a down side to commodification, it’s that an exchange economy makes it easier for governments to extort a portion of our economic production from us as taxes, then spend it. Instead of X bushels of grain or Y gallons of milk in “in-kind” taxes that have to be further bartered, they just grab Z dollars out of our wallets.

Taxation, of course, is something we should eliminate, along with the gangs that practice it. But that’s a subject for another column. The point here is that we owe everything above our barest subsistence, and maybe even that, to “commodification” of healthcare and everything else.

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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