Photo of the cavalcade available to shoppers half a century ago by Gay Hoover’s father; released by Hoover under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The Wall Street Journal editor Gerard Baker proclaims that “America Is the Land of Endless Choice, Except in Politics” (June 30).  Yet he wants Lady Liberty to be pregnant with just a little bit more of it.

Baker doesn’t have to work up a sweat to find more economic options in the US than the EU.  His attempt to ask for a steak to be cooked medium rare over there being seen as outlandish as a request to “bring me the cow” may not be the most universally representative of anecdotes.  For many Americans, such fine dining may be as fantastically out of reach as Charlie Chaplin’s dream in Modern Times of being able to get fresh milk immediately from a bovine conveniently passing by his front door.  And a perusal beyond the superhero stacks at his local comic shop might turn up second varieties imported from Europe, such as an Italian retelling of Dante’s Inferno starring Mickey Mouse and Goofy.

Yet Baker finds the most extra, if not the best, menu among the little Caesars of Euro-politicians, one in which “you can have your politics served Communist, nationalist, Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, Green, Socialist, conservative, liberal and anything in between.”  Across the pond, he hopes instead merely to be able to have just enough extra options to be able to “choose a government that is sane, honest, patriotic, responsible and worthy.”

Baker may see opening the door too wide as unleashing such socialist sects violently from Pandora’s box, but they have already left the stable.  As New York Times reviewer Walter Goodman noted of the various membership cards Ronald Radosh carried across most of the twentieth century as recounted in his memoir COMMIES: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left: “It takes some dedication to sort out one group from another, since they all seemed to be using ‘socialist’ in their titles.”

Baker frets that the Democrats may become “a party of graduate student activists” beholden to “ideas about economics that were discredited half a century ago.”  Radosh was among the graduate student activists who learned from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s William Appleman Williams to discredit the entire framework of viewing modern liberalism as “a popular movement, opposed by business … to challenge the one-sided power of large corporate business” rather than “the ideology of dominant business groups” which “have in reality favored state intervention to supervise corporate activity” (as Radosh described in Debs, an account of a socialist leader who “did not favor any form of regulatory activity”).

Big business versus big government is the ultimate false dichotomy of our time.  Championing the former won’t break the cycle that allows both to marginalize the scope of (and solutions emerging from) voluntary cooperation, decentralized association, and individual freedom.

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

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“I am calling on average Americans everywhere to peacefully exercise your First Amendment rights en masse every day until this administration is removed and our democratic republic is restored,” US Air Force major Jason Watson said in a  public speech, delivered in uniform, before standing on the steps of the US Capitol with a sign reading “IMPEACH CONVICT REMOVE.”

Many Americans enthusiastically agree with the positions Watson  expressed. Many other Americans vehemently disagree.

Neither the agreement nor the disagreement matter to whether what he did was good, bad, right, or wrong.

Here’s what does matter:

Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids US military officers to use “contemptuous words against the President.”

US Department of Defense Directive 1344.10 — issued under Congress’s constitutional authority to regulate the conduct, discipline, and uniform wear of the armed forces and nearly 20 years old in its current form — forbids active duty military personnel to wear their uniforms, or make speeches, at political events.

No one forced Major Watson to accept an Air Force Commission.

That choice — and the choice to be bound by the UCMJ and by DOD directives — was Major Watson’s and Major Watson’s alone.

So was the choice to violate the rules he chose, of his own free will, to be bound by.

While I’m on record as noticing that the Constitution doesn’t seem to matter much to those who rule us when those rulers find its strictures inconvenient, one of its features does make a good deal of sense for nearly any social or political system.

That feature is requiring that civilians control the armed forces rather than vice versa.

In any given week, you’re likely to come across multiple news stories concerning actual or attempted coups d’etat in various countries around the world.

A coup happens when the military (or some other branch of the “security state”) deposes civilian leadership and installs new leadership of its choice.

That’s almost always followed by violence as the new rulers act to suppress public unrest and pursue unpopular policies.

We’ve probably had at least one coup here in the US: In 1963, president John F. Kennedy was assassinated, almost certainly with the involvement of the CIA and other regime elements, and almost certainly for the express purpose of letting those elements get back to escalating an overt war in Vietnam and covert wars in Latin America.

The rest of that decade saw more political assassinations, social tumult that included literal “cities on fire,” law enforcement officers murdering civil rights activists and National Guard troops murdering college students with impunity, nearly 60,000 US and millions of Vietnamese deaths … the list goes on and on, and significant features of the coup-installed regime persist to this very day.

Forbidding military personnel to engage in politics, especially while in uniform, may only be a bare minimum standard when it comes to  preventing coups, but it IS such a bare minimum standard.

If you’re in the military, but would rather be involved in politics, hang the uniform up, not on.

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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When the Continental Congress adopted its “Declaration of Independence,” officially published on July 4, 1776, there were reasons — reasons laid out in detail in that very same declaration.

King George III, the founders of “the United States of America” said, obstructed immigration.

He kept standing armies in times of peace.

He sent out “swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.”

He restricted foreign trade.

He imposed taxes without their consent.

And so on, and so forth.

And by golly, when a government became destructive of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as the King of England had, the people had a right to “alter or abolish it.”

Fast-forward 250 years. The current US government obstructs immigration, keeps standing armies in times of peace, employs more, and more meddlesome, bureaucrats than George III might have ever dreamed possible, restricts foreign trade, and imposes an average tax burden about 16 times as large as that the American colonists moaned about.

The colonists declared independence from Britain.

Today’s America is built a very different proposition, best summarized by Benito Mussolini in the early 20th century to define his philosophy, fascism: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Today’s America is built on dependence, not independence.

The average American is born in a government-regulated hospital, issued a government birth certificate, assigned a government identification number, shipped off as early as possible to government-regulated schools, graciously allowed by government to work in government-regulated businesses (if his or her government papers are found to be in order), retires on a government pension, and is eventually buried or cremated in accordance with government regulations.

And, of course, every Fourth of July, he or she dutifully waves a piece of cloth representing that government, cries tears of gratitude for the brave government employees who defend his or her “freedom,” and perhaps — if, and only if, the government allows it — enjoys some fireworks.

I used to find the differences between the Declaration and modern reality horrifying enough to title my Independence Day columns “Mourn on the Fourth of July.”

That horror, however, has faded to boredom over time.  America today feels a lot like the pictures of those gray old Soviet housing blocs — brutalist in architecture and only semi-functional in  construction — and I’ve reached a new stage: “Meh on the Fourth of July.”

Enjoy your holiday weekend, fellow serfs.

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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