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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

US president Donald Trump loves being “first.” Whenever something newsworthy happens, big or small, in fact or in fantasy, he reliably touts it as being unprecedented in American, possibly even world, history, and a either a personal, positive accomplishment or an unjustified persecution (“witch hunt”).

When it comes to bragging rights, he’s certainly entitled to some:

He’s the first president elected without previously either holding public office or achieving significant military victory as a general.

He’s the first Republican, and second ever, president to serve non-consecutive terms (Grover Cleveland did so in the 19th century).

He’s the first president impeached twice (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton only managed that one time each), the first president inaugurated while under indictment for a crime, and the first former president convicted of a felony.

He’s the first president to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship match at the White House (are you not entertained?).

And now, he’s the first president to oversee US surrender in not one, but two, wars.

James Madison, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon were forced to eat crow in one war each.

Like Nixon with Vietnam, Trump didn’t start, but did negotiate US surrender in, the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Personally, I put that on the positive, not negative, side of the “accomplishment” ledger, even though he failed to follow through on the actual withdrawal, leaving that job (and the blame for what exit from a lost war looks like) to Joe Biden.

Like Madison and Truman with the War of 1812 and Korea, Trump now says he’s ending a war he started and lost, this time with Iran.

The terms of the US surrender remain partially under wraps, but in broad outline seem to consist of 1) the US getting out, 2) Iran letting the US get out, 3) so long as the US lifts sanctions and pays reparations.

Which, really, isn’t a bad deal if Trump can pull it off. The war was stupid, evil, and pointless from the beginning, and the absolute best outcome we could ever hope for was minimal American casualties and an eventual end to the attendant economic disaster.

That outcome may be on the table, if we can get two flies out of the ointment.

Fly Number One: The victors also insist that Trump must force a real ceasefire in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.  Benjamin Netanyahu is  shaking his fist and yelling that he’ll do whatever he pleases. The only way Trump can likely force that issue is to credibly threaten an end to US military aid/ assistance and an invitation to Iran to keep fighting the Israelis absent US interference. It’s not obvious he’s possessed of the testicular fortitude to make that wise move.

Fly Number Two: Trump’s own credibility. Between February and this week, he announced that a “deal”  was”near,” “very close,” etc., no fewer than 38 times before finally saying a “deal” was done.  He announced strikes that ended up not happening, ceasefires under which firing didn’t cease,  and other seeming moves in which the only actual movement turned out to be hot air rising as hot air naturally does. This “deal” could turn out to just be more of those false promises and more of that hot air.

But hey, maybe things will work out. Maybe Trump will withdraw his “armada” from the Persian Gulf region and let the world get back to shipping  oil, fertilizer, and other products through the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe the US economy can  get started on a “return to normalcy.”

If so, hey, let the guy add another “First Place” trophy to the shelf in his vivid imagination.

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