“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 The vocation has been replaced by a job, and a job can always be abandoned.”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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“We Will Never Be Rid of Google” (The New York Times, September 30) is quite a headline for the same Julia Angwin who wrote the book on MySpace.

Angwin’s comprehensive unofficial account was published in 2009 as Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (not “We Will Never Be Rid of MySpace”). Its subtitle didn’t remain current for long: Facebook’s international reach already made the “in America” qualifier requisite for the other social network by 2008. Still, the snapshot of the then-hip site, not yet a punchline in a David Pogue Times column exemplifying when “a hot property becomes a lame has-been” (alongside action star Steven Seagal, well after his career transition from Hard to Kill to direct-to-video, and the Macarena dance craze), remains an instructive case study.

In Angwin’s own words, the juggernaut “now positioned to further entrench its dominance of our information landscape” due to lack of antitrust enforcement was a parenthetical in the post-Y2K cyberspace from which MySpace emerged: “In early 2003 the dot-com boom was over, and the next Internet boom had not yet begun. During this in-between period, only the big three companies — AOL, MSN, and Yahoo ([MySpace cofounder Chris] DeWolfe called them ‘the untouchable triumvirate’) — were thriving  (Google had not yet taken off.)” The first of the troika disconnected its formerly ubiquitous dial-up service on the same day that “We Will Never Be Rid of Google” saw fit to see print.

While Angwin asserts that “Google has an unassailable lead in collecting and analyzing data from across the web” in 2025, in 2009 she had noted that by 2003, “even high school students could build expert-looking webpages;” upstarts like MySpace no longer “required massive computer resources and huge teams of computer programmers” as they had when Google and Yahoo were founded in the 1990s. Individual web designers unaffiliated with Google have made such improvements to its core services as &udm=14, which automatically filters out AI from Google web searches, and Filmot for finding phrases in video subtitles on Google-owned YouTube.

Angwin’s desired future of “competing search engines that offer different experiences” independently of Google already exists, albeit unevenly distributed in the remaining 10% of total search traffic, from generalists such as DuckDuckGo whose crawlers span the publicly accessible World Wide Web, to the hyper-specific likes of “The Geocities Animated Gif Search.”

To be sure, their names are harder to remember, even when typable just as quickly, but Google’s originated as a pun on a previously obscure math term for a quantity so ludicrously gigantic as to defy any conceivable practical use. So did that of their Googleplex headquarters; but is the relevant quantity not a googol or even a googolplex, so much as the trillions spent by the Pentagon?

Angwin highlights the tech maverick’s “small but growing defense contracts” —  an example of how “despite its power in the marketplace, Google is still vulnerable to all kinds of pressure campaigns from the government.” Yet apparently it simultaneously possesses “unfettered market power” — a contradiction untangled by libertarian activist Karl Hess in a 1970 New York Times Magazine profile: “We have the illusion of freedom only because so few ever try to exercise it. Try it sometime. … We have all the freedom of a balloon floating in a pin factory.”

Angwin’s feared “possible future in which the administration starts pressuring Google to shape search results in its favor” was already the present reality during the four years of the Biden administration (and even Trump’s first four years). As Jenin Younes explained in “How Biden Enabled Trump’s Censorship” (Compact, March 19): “the lesson of the past five years is clear: Civil-liberties violations that you countenance will be turned against you sooner than you expect. That is why we need a renewed commitment to civil liberties from both the left and the right, not the sort we have seen in which each side uses the concept as a cudgel when convenient.”

Humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow made a frequently paraphrased observation that “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” You should be less so inclined when you don’t have the hammer — especially when it’s about to be used on you.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Military leaders have raised serious concerns about the Trump administration’s forthcoming defense strategy,” the Washington Post reports. “The critiques from multiple top officers … come as [US defense secretary Pete] Hegseth reorders U.S. military priorities — centering the Pentagon on perceived threats to the homeland, narrowing U.S. competition with China, and downplaying America’s role in Europe and Africa.”

I’m writing this on the morning of, and you’ll presumably read it after, a meeting Hegseth and Trump have called with the US military’s general and flag officers, supposedly to harangue them about something called the “warrior ethos,” which mostly seems to involve endorsing, and unquestioningly executing orders to commit, war crimes rather than prosecuting such crimes.

Hopefully the meeting will instead be dedicated to explaining three facts of reality to those generals and admirals.

Fact #1:  Any “national defense strategy” that’s actually about national defense would indeed involve “centering the Pentagon on perceived threats to the homeland, narrowing U.S. competition with China, and downplaying America’s role in Europe and Africa.”

Fact #2: In a time of massive government deficits and debt, re-centering “national defense strategy” on, you know, “national defense” instead of constant, dangerous, and expensive military adventurism around the globe makes financial sense. Current US “defense” spending  officially hovers at just below, and likely actually exceeds, $1 trillion per year. Cutting that by 80-90% would still provide a robust “national defense,” while reducing the economic damage government spending in general does to the people living in the nation in question.

Fact #3: The military is the employee, not the employer. It’s not a general’s or an admiral’s job to define the overall “national defense strategy.” It’s a general or admiral’s job to execute the lawful orders he’s given by the civilian government.

For the most part, Trump, Hegseth, and US military leaders openly disdain the “lawful” part of Fact #3 … but the proposed “national defense strategy,” if it’s as described, would tend to reduce opportunities for lawless military conduct. Fewer troops in fewer places would have fewer opportunities to commit (or be ordered to commit) war crimes.

Unfortunately, it’s probably not as described. We almost certainly won’t see the cuts in military spending or the reductions in foreign adventurism the description implies.

“Mission inflation” lobbying from both military commanders and corporate welfare queens dependent on large weapons orders and other military contracts may have to change things up, but they’ll find ways to keep their gravy trains on the rails.

On the civilian government side, foreign entanglements are go-to excuses for more of the taxing, borrowing, and spending politicians love, and also provide useful distractions from domestic policy failures and popular discontent.

The only way to get the US Department of Defense (or is it War now?) out of our wallets and off our necks is to discard the idea of political government itself. We should treat Washington, DC the way the Scipio Africanus the Younger treated Carthage.

But meanwhile, we should welcome even the slightest reorientation of US military policy toward “national defense” rather than foreign meddling.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY