Wall Street Journal editor Matthew Hennessey correctly observes that vice-president JD Vance could stand to brush up on his economic education (“Vance is Wrong: The Market Isn’t a ‘Tool,'” May 27). He may have learned the essentials of exchange at Ohio State and Yale, but “speaks as if he didn’t.”

Yet Vance’s remark that “the market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics” is not so much incorrect as an inadvertent self-indictment. To Hennessey, “laws of economics,” akin to “laws of gravity,” mean that economies “can’t be bullied into compliance with a political agenda.” To the contrary, manipulative politicking all too often pushes the populace to take the fall.

Hennessey sees the mechanical-market metaphor dovetailing with Vance’s advocacy of “a revived industrial economy that is planned and directed by enlightened tinkerers for the common good.” A tall order when the Apollo 13 mission team had its hands full kludging a literal square-peg-in-a-round-hole connector from spacecraft spare parts to get back down to Earth.

Vance maintains his social conservative Catholicism, but is realigning its focus to “launch a missile at the market.”  Yet the tradition of Catholic social criticism includes the subject of John P. McCarthy’s Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical combining a “dislike of capitalism and enthusiasm for property ownership,” and so seeking alternatives to “the usual statist solutions,” as well as John Médaille’s call to push the actually existing market economy Toward a Truly Free Market.

Hennessey claims that “the idea that markets exploit the weak and release corrosive social forces has always been popular on the left.” Less subtly, the online edition’s subtitle calls Vance “as economically illiterate as any leftist Democrat,” forgetting the 2020 Journal op-ed headline recalling the Carter administration: “When Democrats Were Deregulators.”  In 1992, George McGovern had even written for the Journal to chide Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, who aimed to assist “entrepreneurs who will risk their capital” to “create job opportunities,” for failing to “consider whether we are choking off those opportunities.”

If politicians and pundits across the political spectrum increasingly echo Robert Kuttner, quoted by Hennessey decrying “the utopian worship of free markets” in 1998, they should note how the fettered enterprise of the current decade was foreshadowed in 1943 by what Astounding Science Fiction called “a rigidly frozen economy” where interplanetary incomers with innovative “inventions to sell” could be stymied to starvation by “a law against inventions” in Henry and Catherine Moore Kuttner’s “The Iron Standard.” (That early in the twentieth century, the Kuttners could imagine their stagnant “world state” would at least be blessed with “no wars and no tariffs.”)

Hennessey rues Americans receiving “miseducation … from philosophy professors.”  They could learn something from Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long, who emphasizes that “devaluing of compassion” or assuming its incompatibility with laissez-faire liberty stymies efforts “to visualize and formulate the institutions of a free society.” That false dichotomy likewise empties the toolbox necessary for building a fair one — and getting methods that distort supply and demand and inhibit honest cooperation out of the picture.

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

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On April 14,  Mohsen Mahdawi arrived at a government immigration office in Vermont for a citizenship interview. After 10 years as a “legal” US resident with a “green card,” he wanted to officially become an “American.” Instead, he found himself handcuffed, hooded, and whisked away to a cage pending deportation. He was finally released on bail two weeks later.

On April 15, Kasper Eriksen arrived at a government immigration office in Tennessee. Eriksen, also a “green card” holder, with a family and pregnant wife in Mississippi, also thought he was attending a citizenship interview. He was also arrested and caged pending deportation. As of this writing, he has yet to receive bail.

On April 30, Ming Li Hui, better known to her friends and neighbors in Kennett, Missouri as “Carol,” found herself summarily ordered to report to an immigration office in St. Louis. Carol arrived in the US as a refugee from Hong Kong in 2004. Twenty years later, she’s gainfully employed, a convert to Catholicism, and has a family including three children. The US government locked her up pending deportation back to Communist China.

One of her local friends, Vanessa Cowart, interviewed by the New York Times, puts it bluntly: “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here. But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves. This is Carol.”

Why are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, some even seeking to become American citizens, finding themselves in cages and facing deportation?

Let’s not kid ourselves: It was going to come to this eventually. Authoritarian police states never stop looking for victims and scapegoats. They eventually collapse, thankfully, but until they do it’s open season on enemies, real and imagined.

But why so soon? Because Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants has, so far, proven itself an epic fail. At the moment, the US government is deporting people at half the pace of the Obama regime.

In late May, Axios reports, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called the Trump regime’s top immigration thugs in for a dressing down. They’re unhappy with the slow rate of immigrant abductions and want it tripled to 3,000 per day.

And there’s your answer: It’s easier to reach an artificial “quota” by kidnapping immigrants who show up to appointments on demand than it is to track down a handful of real criminals in their lairs, or nab foreign-born workers quietly making their livings (and making our lives better) while avoiding contact with “law enforcement.”

In the opening salvos of his first administration’s nativist push, Donald Trump groused about immigrants from “sh*thole countries.”

Now he’s discovering that the only way to stop immigration to the US is to turn it into one of those sh*thole countries that no one wants to live in.

He’s doing his best to accomplish that, and even his supporters are starting to notice.

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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In early May, Reuters reports, the US government revoked “virtually all” of Harvard University’s federal research grants — nearly $3 billion worth — because they “no longer effectuate agency priorities.”

Now, president Donald Trump says (in a post to his “Truth Social” platform) he’s “considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land.”

Mainstream media coverage of the whole matter seems focused mainly on the reality TV style melodrama — Trump’s specialty — and on the question of whether he can legally take money appropriated by Congress for Party A to do Thing B and re-appropriate it for Party B to do Thing C.

The melodrama sees to itself, and the legal horse seemingly escaped the barn years ago when Trump unconstitutionally misappropriated Defense Department funds to build his silly “border wall” — after Congress refused him the money multiple times — and got away with it instead of facing impeachment and removal for his lawless mishandling of government funds.

What I’m not seeing much discussion of is whether it’s a good idea for the federal government to stop writing checks to a well-heeled private university (Harvard has more than $50 billion in the bank) for various things, and instead spend that money on teaching young Americans to weld, build houses, repair cars, etc.

At first blush, the concept does look like sound. America is full of college graduates working behind the counters of convenience stores, in the kitchens of fast food restaurants, wrangling carts at Walmart, etc., all while trying to pay off the crippling debt they incurred studying social work, creative writing, and so forth. Why not equip the NEXT generation with the skills they need to earn better livings, and hopefully make that training affordable?

Here’s why:

The government does not and cannot know how many welders, carpenters, and auto mechanics the economy “needs,” let alone how many it will “need” a year from now or in 2035 … just as it has no way of knowing whether Little Bobby should rack up tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt while hoping to become an elementary school math teacher or university physics researcher.

That’s what markets are for. Markets aren’t perfect, but they’re much better at figuring out what people need, and delivering it less expensively, than governments.

Ending all federal funding of “higher education” institutions would negatively impact my household’s finances, at least temporarily (a close family member works in university research), but it would be the right thing to do. It would result in better, cheaper, and more relevant education all around.

Let Harvard be Harvard, and let trade schools be trade schools. Give tax funding to neither.

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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