In the months leading up to the USA’s 250th birthday party, some debris from its 200th is making headlines.

The New York Times‘s Jennifer Schuessler finds conspicuously “much less investment and enthusiasm overall” for this year’s semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than the 1976 bicentennial, itself diminished by jaded jeers charging that “‘Buy-centennial’ huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76” (“How a Historian Saved the Schlock of ’76,” May 5).

Schuessler chronicles plenty of “hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles” currently being hawked under the aegis of Donald Trump, but compared to such bicentennial-branded excrescences of “unapologetic 1976-style schlock” as toilet paper, diapers and condoms, even the output of a coauthor of Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life can be described on the pages of the Gray Lady as “tasteful.”

Yale University’s library includes a permanent panorama of such effluent ephemera thanks to State University of New York academic Jesse Lemisch, who preserved what he predicted would become “a deeply embarrassing heritage for 2076.”  Schuessler explains how Lemisch drew a stark contrast between the actually existing capitalism of ’76 and “the ‘arrogant nationalism and elitism’ of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.”

Lemisch confronted “the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power” as early as a 1967 analysis of the American Revolution, “a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.”  That viewpoint was “particularly recommended” in the newsletter The Libertarian, whose “Washington Editor,” Karl Hess, was on the path that led to his interview in the July 1976 issue of Playboy (which highlighted his observation that “The Declaration of Independence is so lucid we’re afraid of it today … because it tells us there comes a time when we must stop taking orders”).

Yet even back then, Lemisch suspected that efforts at “replacing elite history with a history of ‘average people'” had, in shifting emphasis from the halls of power to the market square, “merely traded in the heroes of politics for the heroes of business.” So it was not completely out of character for him to see the spirit of 1976 as one that “floated down from above, and responded to no popular longing to celebrate the Bicentennial,” despite Schuessler noting that voting with dollars for “Patriotic Dixie cups and cereal boxes might seem to epitomize the kind of populist ‘history from below’ that Lemisch championed” (less than a month after Mekado Murphy has written in the Times that relics of Rocky‘s bicentennial bout “are as essential to Philadelphia tourism as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall”).

One replica of the Declaration from the Me Decade, a freebie for Fourth of July grocery shopper Michael Hart, might have made the perfect bit of decorative detritus for Lemisch — if Hart hadn’t instead typed up the text, immortalizing it as the first entry of his Project Gutenberg collection (he would oversee it growing into an online library tens of thousands strong).  In 1971, one of the few files starting to spread as widely on nascent computer networks was a popular Star Trek game by Mike Mayfield.

The utopian universe whose tricky traders rarely “wear red, white and blue, or look anything like Uncle Sam” (as surmised in the 1987 episode “The Last Outpost”) ironically also provided inspiration to the patriotic Objectivist Hart. Times obituary author William Grimes described Hart’s eBook giveaways as aiming to prefigure a Trek-like “age of universal abundance,” one which would upend “all established power structures” and  “challenge the entire social and economic system of the United States.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Citing anonymous sources, the New York Times reported on May 4, US president Donald Trump is considering an executive order that would require pre-release  “national security vetting” of all new Artificial Intelligence models.

The following day, the US Department of Commerce revealed that three three large AI firms — Microsoft, Google, and xAI —  have already agreed to submit their models for “pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research.”

For obvious reasons, those developments trigger my strong aversion to regulation of anything, at any time, and at any level of government. I can indulge a little — very little — bit of sympathy for the position Trump’s in though:

Individual state governments have been rolling out AI regulation proposals for some time, and that’s just not According to Hoyle.

AI, at least if connected to the Internet, is clearly an interstate and/or international commercial activity, and the US Constitution clearly and unambiguously assigns the power to regulate such activity to the federal government. Specifically to Congress, but in the absence of congressional action, I can see why Trump would want to preempt the illegal state-level schemes with something of his own.

I just wish that something of his own was “none, period.” Here’s why:

“Whatever can happen,” Augustes De Morgan wrote in 1866, “will happen if we make trials enough.”

To which I must add, if “we” don’t make trials enough, someone else will.

AI will inevitably be pushed to whatever, if any, limit it has.

If American researchers can’t legally do it, Chinese researchers will do it.

If Chinese researchers can’t legally do it, Swiss researchers will do it.

If every government on the planet imposes pesky regulations on doing it, people who don’t care about pesky government regulations will do it.

It can happen. Therefore it will happen.

I don’t wear rose-colored glasses … or at least, in poor metaphor mix, I consider those glasses half-full. We can plausibly expect both good and bad things out of AI developed to its limits.

Those  of us who are allowed to avail ourselves of the most advanced AI possible will disproportionately reap whatever rewards it produces.

Those of us for whom maximal AI is forbidden fruit will be more vulnerable to AI’s dark sides.

Since I like rewards and loathe punishments, I prefer to belong to the former group. So should you.

King Canute understood that he could not effectually command the tide. Our rulers should heed the lesson.

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

On May 2, Spirit Airlines ceased operations after it failed to get the US government to bail it out of the latest in a series of untenable situations — at least two of which the US government put it in to begin with.

As of 2023, Spirit was the seventh largest air passenger carrier in North America, and largest in the “ultra-low cost” category.

Like many businesses, Spirit had taken some hard knocks during the COVID-19 panic, and like many businesses it had availed itself of government grants and loans to stay afloat. By way of recovery, the company explored possible mergers, first with Frontier and then with JetBlue.

The former deal didn’t work out. The latter, which would have made the combined companies the fifth largest US airline, worked out just fine … until the US Department of Justice sued, predicting “higher fares, fewer seats, and harm [to] millions of consumers.” A judge agreed.

Spirit’s stock price tanked. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection twice in two years, reducing the size of its fleet and the number of people it employed in a desperate race to achieve solvency and remain in business. All because the US government decided it, rather than the market, knew what the market needed.

Then, on February 28, the US regime attacked Iran — and, by way of an attendant massive increase in fuel prices, attacked Spirit Airlines yet a second time. That attack proved fatal.

Maybe Spirit would have failed even absent the massive jet fuel price increases.

Perhaps the proposed merger with JetBlue would have dragged that airline down, too, instead of profitably folding Spirit’s assets into a more efficient operating environment.

And maybe all of Ted Bundy’s victims were mere moments away from choosing suicide when he strangled them to death instead.

We’ll never know, will we?

What we do know is that the US government’s murder of Spirit Airlines will almost certainly result in (checks notes) “higher fares, fewer seats, and harm [to] millions of consumers.”

Airlines come and airlines go. Some of the brands I grew up with — Pan Am, TWA, Northwest — have gone under or merged with others in the 21st century alone.

It’s not always as obvious that government was behind those disappearances as it is responsible for the death of Spirit, but you can always count on government to reduce your choices and increase your costs — while claiming to do the opposite.

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