Andrew Langer’s “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Hamilton” (The Wall Street Journal, August 28) could as aptly have been titled “What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Milton Friedman.”

Langer notes that Hamiltonian trade barriers were “generally moderate” in comparison with “President Trump’s sweeping protectionism,” but is just as concerned that “Mr. Vance also caricatures Friedman’s legacy by implying that laissez-faire elevates economic development above human dignity” — a distortion needed to justify the shift of American economic conservatism’s lodestar from one to the other as “obviously a good thing.”

Not heeding that, as put in John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Astounding Science Fiction, “the really appropriate epitaph for many and many a man is ‘Why, it’s obvious …’,” Vance’s supposedly self-evident case for reburying the man of monetarism in order to resurrect the man on the money is even more of a departure than the Broadway version’s hip-hop beats.

After all, many of the right and many more of the left have attributed virtually every American ill since the Reagan administration to free trade and deregulation.  Yet Vance argues for Friedman’s obsolescence by contending that his ideas succeeded back then — but only due to “a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity” that has become impoverished enough to require a ten-dollar substitute for its devaluated coinage.

The usual demonization of Friedman posits Margaret Thatcher as a Wicked Witch East of the Atlantic to his Elphaba, ignoring his influence on Estonia and New Zealand. Vance would need to make a stretch to find the “powerful institutional Christianity” responsible for the embrace of international markets in Israel, Singapore or even the India of Usha Vance’s ancestors.  At least it doesn’t seem like Vance is tracing his wife’s success at Yale Law School back to the influence on Gandhi of Leo Tolstoy’s “A Letter to a Hindu.”

Vance could buttress his argument by noting that American deregulation was more thorough, and brought more economic benefits, under faithful Sunday school teacher Jimmy Carter than the divorced Hollywood union boss who followed him.  Yet that would be as awkward for partisan platitudes as recalling that the previous Second Lady who had issued a 1987 jeremiad against a “bizarre occult subculture” which “rejects Judeo-Christian religion, turns good and evil upside down, and rebels against life itself” was not Barbara Bush but Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society author Tipper Gore.

Vance is also unlikely to compare his own adeptness at shedding convictions to what Friedman biographer Alan Ebenstein calls his subject’s “excessively religious phase as a young boy” — “noteworthy because it reflects the natural character of his mind … he tends to got he whole way intellectually or not at all, and seeks order and harmony in the universe. When he was unable to achieve this intellectual state through the logical observation of every detail of Orthodox Judaism in its dietary and other strictures, he dropped religion completely.”

In asserting that Hamilton’s heavy hand rather than a Jeffersonian lighter touch (let alone Adam Smith’s invisible mitt) “will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future,” Vance isn’t just rebuking Jefferson’s anti-Hamiltonian’s view: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”  Vance may, to misquote the famous line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, have a first-rate ability to function while holding ten opposed ideas in mind. But all bring a risk of injury to your pocketbook and mobility.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In 2024, Floridians voted, by a margin of 55.9% to 44.1%, to legalize recreational marijuana. Unfortunately, the threshold for passage of “Amendment 3” was 60% and the measure failed.

So far so bad … but it gets worse.

Nearly two years later we’ve learned that state government officials misappropriated millions of dollars in taxpayer money; funneled it through a charity founded by governor Ron DeSantis’s wife and into Republican PACs operated by the man who later became the state’s attorney general, with the approval of the then sitting attorney general, now a US Senator; and poured it into a campaign to defeat the measure.

We know this because someone leaked a grand jury report on the matter to CBS News Miami.

“Based on the impending ballot initiative, the expedited nature of the movement of these funds  … and the quick disbursement of the funds to their final destination,” the report reads, “we conclude that these funds were misappropriated as part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities.”

Unfortunately, the grand jury couldn’t figure out exactly who to charge  with which elements of the criminal conspiracy and didn’t issue indictments: “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida … or had any memory of who made it.”

De Santis’s response to the matter: “The only crime that was apparent was whoever leaked the grand jury report.”

Now-AG James Uthmeier, who seems to have been the central figure running the $10 million embezzlement operation, calls the affair “a politically motivated hoax” which “shows that the Democrats had to collude with the press to break the law.”

It’s not their fault they embezzled taxpayer money to rig an election, see? It’s everybody else’s fault for finding out!

If that grand jury had minded its own business, if that whistleblower had kept the report under wraps, if the media hadn’t told the public about it, IF IT WEREN’T FOR THOSE MEDDLING KIDS … the word that comes immediately to mind is “Clintonesque.”

What’s next?

Hopefully we’ll get a new, more vigorous investigation that finds out who did and knew what, when they did and knew it, and charges those responsible. I hate to leave anything to the federal government, but Florida’s state government is too tightly under the control of the perpetrators for it to get done any other way.

We should also get another vote on the recreational marijuana measure, this time an un-rigged one.

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

“California,” Milo Yiannopoulos wrote last year on X, “needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections and government buildings, with on the spot deportation for anyone who can’t prove they are in the US legally.”

On August 27, ICE agents abducted Yiannopoulos at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, briefly detained him at one of the gang’s concentration camps in Alexandria, Louisiana, and deported him the next day to his native country, the United Kingdom. It seems he had overstayed his visa, and after failing to appear for a hearing, had become subject to a “final order of removal.”

Oops.

You can see, I hope, temptation to  schadenfreude from those of us who support truth, justice, and the American way  (i.e. “open borders” as called for in the Declaration of Independence and mandated by the US Constitution).

Do we really need a mouthy Brit jetting over here at will, spouting stupid, evil, and abhorrent opinions at high volume, then overstaying the “welcome” he insists everyone else must continually bow and scrape for both initially and on a recurring basis, on pain of abduction and deportation?

In my opinion, yes, that’s exactly what we need.

I don’t have to like Milo Yiannopoulos, or agree with his odious ideas, in order to understand that where he travels to or chooses to live is neither my business nor the US government’s.

In fact,  the case against deporting Yiannopoulos is strengthened, not weakened, by his 24/7 public stupidity.

It’s pretty easy for anti-immigration advocates to make the case for deporting, say, a (non-ICE) gang member who has committed violent crimes in the US or seems likely to based on having committed such crimes elsewhere.

It’s not quite as easy to make the case for deporting immigrant workers to “protect American jobs.” That requires preying on abject economic ignorance to convince Americans that immigration makes them less, rather than more, prosperous. But it’s obviously doable, at least for a little while, until a head of lettuce costs ten bucks.

Yiannopoulos, however, traffics mainly in speech.

Speech is not a violent crime. In fact, it’s not a crime at all.

Speech moves easily across borders. If Yiannopoulos wants to say something, we can listen whether he says it in London or in Los Angeles.

And the ability to speak isn’t a resource of fixed quantity. When Yiannopoulos speaks, he isn’t reducing the ability of anyone else to speak. He can speak all he wants … and the rest of us can too. As we should.

Even “bad” speech has value. As Louis Brandeis put it, “if there be time to expose through discussion the falsehoods and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

The rants of a Milo Yiannopoulos embody ideas — bad ideas — that, unfortunately, many other people also hold. The cure for bad ideas isn’t to deport a particular mouthpiece, it’s to entertain those ideas and expose them as bankrupt with better ideas.

Back in the UK, Yiannopoulos will continue doing the  same things he was doing in the US, just as successfully … and spending his money, probably mostly earned from US sources, there instead of here.

No schadenfreude from me. He’s owed an apology and his freedom to travel.

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