It comes, it goes, but seldom a month goes by without the notion of “term limits” popping up in the American political discussion.

At the moment — and since Sheldon Whitehouse proposed legislation for it in 2023 — that discussion has mostly revolved around the Supreme Court, whose justices remain in office, according to the Constitution, “during good Behaviour,” generally understood as “for life absent impeachment or voluntary retirement.” Whitehouse wants non-renewable 18-year terms.

Really, though, term limits are a perpetual panacea.

Congressional candidates talk about them a lot — usually when promising to serve no more than X terms in the US House of Representatives, and right up to the point where they decide to seek their X+1th terms “due to popular demand.”

The president is already limited to two four-year terms. That limit  required a constitutional amendment to implement, as would House or Senate term limits and, arguably, Supreme Court term limits. Some would like to see the presidential version changed to a single six-year term.

I’m skeptical that term limits, as envisioned by their promoters, would do much to restrain or improve the quality of government, and as a political matter their opponents aren’t wrong when they point out that “we already have term limits, they’re called elections.”

At the state level, in Missouri, I watched what happened after legislative term limits became law. Instead of one person sitting in a state house or senate seat forever, we got a “ladder and rope” system with politicians climbing the ladder from local office all the way to state senate (and possibly the executive branch), term-limiting out and moving up to the next rungs, while throwing down ropes and pulling hand-selected proteges behind them and into the offices they vacated. Different faces, same ideas … and a more difficult system for outsiders to break into at all than if vacated seats became “open” in any real sense.

But if we want to give term limits a real try, I have some ideas on the matter.

First, the limit should be one term.

Second, the term should be fairly short — say, two years.

Third, once a person has been elected to a particular office, that person becomes ineligible for election to any other office, and for employment by any branch of the government in question … ever, for life.

That may sound extreme, but let’s look at the impact on the federal government (because it happens to be so, I’m treating local, state, and federal governments as separate governments), and include cabinet appointees and Supreme Court justices (even though they’re appointed rather than elected).

That comes to 561 people (435 US Representatives, 100 US Senators, one president, one vice-president, 15 cabinet secretaries, and nine Supreme Court justices).

With a population of 340 million, the US could fill each of those offices about 610,000 times. Single two-year terms and lifetime bans afterward wouldn’t  lead to a labor shortage.

What it WOULD lead to is more difficulty building perpetual political machines and an entrenched political class.

Which is why politicians would hate it.

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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Three Card Monte. Photo by ZioDave. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Plans to cut  various taxes seem to enjoy high levels of public support around the country right now. Florida’s voters will have an opportunity in November to cut residential property taxes; last week a Massachusetts court ruled against letting that state’s voters cut their own income tax bills.

On the other side of the ledger, proposed and actual tax INCREASES seem to be driving “the rich” out of New York City and California to less greedy political climes.

Watching the public discussion of these various tax topics — especially on a local social media here in Florida — I see that most opponents of tax cuts and supporters of new taxes or higher rates keep playing the same card: “If we do/don’t do that, public services will have to be cut.”

I personally consider that a feature, not a bug. Most “public services” — that is, government operations — fall into one of two categories:

First, things that shouldn’t be done at all (for example, war, including domestic wars on e.g. drugs and immigrants).

Second, things that the private sector not only could do, but in the past has done, less expensively and more effectively than government does them (for example, pretty much everything else).

I’ll leave that first category open for your further exploration and focus on the second.

“The state,” 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote, “is the great fiction by which  everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”

Many, maybe even most, people seem to believe that without government we not only wouldn’t, but couldn’t, have things like roads, schools, mail delivery, and electricity.

And yet all those things existed long before any of the governments that provide them today existed, and in some cases long before political government itself, as we understand it, existed.

In the US, most government roads were, early on, “post roads” to facilitate delivery of mail. Which, by the way, was often a private sector activity until the US Postal Service put its competitors out of business with the “Private Express Statutes.” One of those competitors, Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company, delivered letters between New York City and Philadelphia not just cheaper, but faster, than the US Snail. Other roads were privately built and maintained.

Horace Mann kicked off the “public education” movement in the US for the express purpose of turning out compliant, obedient factory workers. Before that, most kids got educations  at home or in small cooperative or community schools. It took nearly 50 years  to make “public education” universal — the last resisters, in Vermont, saw their children marched off to the custody of the new system at bayonet point in the late 19th century —  but I guess “public education” really falls into the first, rather than second, category, since its job is to provide daycare and indoctrination, not to actually educate.

In the early days of electrical power, private utilities built the plants, ran the lines, and provided the energy. But in the early 20th century, their owners went to governments and complained that competition kept prices too low, leading to “natural monopoly” legislation that ended competition in most places and let utility-dominated “public service commissions” jack up prices for consumers who could no longer take their business elsewhere.

The list goes on and on: We’re sold “public services” as if they are things that must be done, and can only be done by government. Those “services” enjoy constituencies which want the “services” … and want other people to pay the costs.  Almost everyone seeks to live, in this or that way, at the expense of everyone else … and believes it’s working.

As WC Fields said, “you can’t cheat an honest man.” Government became the most lucrative scam in the history of humankind by convincing the victims that they’re the ones getting over … so much so that they panic if it looks like anyone else might get a tax break.

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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“The US government,” artificial intelligence firm Anthropic informed the public in a June 12 statement, “citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. ”

As of June 15, according to Just Security, the  government isn’t allowing the public to see what’s actually in that directive, but according to Anthropic, it cites concerns that the company’s models are vulnerable to “jailbreaking” that would let users get around “guardrails” that prevent them from answering certain kinds of questions (obvious example: How to successfully execute a terrorist attack).

Whatever the real reasons for the directive — the move looks, on its face, less like a real “national security concern” and more a revenge move against Anthropic for refusing to let the Pentagon use its models in autonomous weapon and mass surveillance projects — it’s both a bad idea and an unambiguous violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment’s free speech protections.

A syllogism:

Code is speech (as ruled by a US district court and affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Bernstein v. Department of Justice).

AI models are code.

Therefore, AI models are speech, and the government doesn’t get to control them.

Not that the current administration, or any other, or Congress, or the courts, can be counted on to respect the Constitution. The ink wasn’t dry on that document before the American political establishment started ignoring its inconveniences.

Which leaves Anthropic and other artificial intelligence firms in a bind. At every point in their development of better models, they’ve had busybodies and bureaucrats peering over their shoulders, nudging them in various directions and cuffing their hands when the nudges don’t work.

As a legal matter, I describe the problem above.

As a practical matter, if Anthropic et al. want to innovate and compete in a growing market that’s already changing how the world works, they need to get away from the US government, which means getting away from the US.

They should re-domicile their companies to, and move those companies’ operations to, places beyond the long reach of Uncle Sam.

Money may not buy happiness, but in certain contexts it can probably buy substantial freedom. There’s lots of money in AI. There’s going to be more.

It’s a big planet, and while much of it groans beneath the rule of authoritarian regimes like the US, the People’s Republic of China, and the Russian Federation (among others), there’s almost certainly a government SOMEWHERE possessed of the common sense to accept golden eggs without strangling the geese that lay them.

These firms should look for governments willing to offer non-interference pledges in return for infrastructure investment and a reasonable tax rate.

One long-term alternative is moving AI infrastructure not just offshore, but off-planet, mostly beyond the control of ANY government, but we may be decades away from that as a practical option.

Remember: If something can be done, it will be done.  If it’s not done by one of the large US AI firms, it will be done somewhere else and/or by someone else, to the detriment of those firms and quite possibly to the detriment of their American customers.

My own concern is less with the future of Anthropic, OpenAI, et al. than with the US regime’s perpetual attacks on speech in general and on code AS speech. My first experience with the latter came during the regime’s attempts to “contain” strong encryption with export controls in the 1990s. Freedom fighters beat them then, and can beat them now.

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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