I might have missed Grover Cleveland’s 188th birthday on March 18 if Paul Jacob hadn’t pointed it out in his own column on the man who (as Jacob mentions) many libertarians consider “the last great president of these United States.” I don’t consider the presidency a venue for greatness, but as presidents go “Big Steve” was arguably one of the least bad.

Cleveland, of course, has been noticed lately for some of his similarities with Trump. He was the first, and until Trump the only, president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Like Trump, he was a New York Democrat. And, like, Trump he won his first presidential election despite a sex scandal — although unlike Trump he openly admitted his past conduct (he’d fathered a child out of wedlock, something more scandalous then than now).

The differences between the two, however, are more interesting.

On foreign policy, Cleveland was an anti-imperialist who opposed the US annexation of Hawaii. He never seems to have considered adding, say, Greenland or Canada to the constellation of American states. Trump’s an imperialist in practice who occasionally talks a not very convincing non-interventionist game while somehow managing to escalate every conflict he inherits and who couldn’t be bothered to complete his negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan before leaving office the first time.

On tax policy, Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and seems determined to wreck the US economy with his capricious demand-then-back-down approach to foreign trade. Cleveland worked to lower tariffs, and laid out the irrefutable case against them to American workers who thought such taxes “protected” their jobs:

“Those who buy imports pay the duty charged thereon into the public Treasury, but the great majority of our citizens, who buy domestic articles of the same class, pay a sum at least approximately equal to this duty to the home manufacturer. … with slight reflection they will not overlook the fact that they are consumers with the rest …”

Perhaps the biggest differences, both of which informed Cleveland’s opposition to high tariffs and Trump’s support for them:

First, in Cleveland’s time, the federal government enjoyed an increasing budget surplus rather than continuing deficits, while Trump inherited a government $20 trillion in debt and left office the first time with that debt at more than $28 trillion.

Second, Cleveland opposed the “spoils” system under which the party in power rewarded its supporters with government jobs and contracts. He wanted a “civil service” based on competence rather than partisan loyalty, and considered the tariff-fueled budget surplus a problem because it made so much money available to pay for those “spoils.”

Trump, on the other hand, clearly sees government employment as “spoils” candy to be handed out on the basis of personal loyalty.  And since his biggest supporters are among the American wealth elite, he gets a “two-fer” by taxing your purchases of foreign goods to their advantage (revenue) while rewarding less well-heeled loyalists with those government jobs (spending).

We could use a man like Grover Cleveland again. Too bad we got another Herbert Hoover.

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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Tony Gilroy, creator/showrunner of (among many other projects) of the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, said in 2023 that he planned to release the show’s scripts for fans to read. Last week, he explained why he hasn’t: He doesn’t want those scripts read by artificial intelligence. “Why help the f***ing robots any more than you can?,” he told Collider.

Meanwhile, more than 400 industry entertainment figures recently appealed, in an open letter to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, against letting  AI models read from, and train on, Hollywood’s output:

“America’s arts and entertainment industry supports over 2.3M American jobs with over $229Bn in wages annually ….  AI companies are asking to undermine this economic and cultural strength by weakening copyright protections for the films, television series, artworks, writing, music, and voices used to train AI models at the core of multi-billion dollar corporate valuations.”

There’s nothing new about demands that government deny tuition and reading material to whomever or whatever might threaten the interests of a powerful economic class.

“Allow our slaves to read your writings,”  pro-slavery advocate James M. Hammond wrote to British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in 1845, “stimulating them to cut our throats! Can you believe us to be such unspeakable fools?”

In most southern states prior to the Civil War and the end of chattel slavery, teaching a slave (or, in some cases, anyone with dark skin) to read and write was punishable by fine or imprisonment if the teacher was white, flogging if the teacher was black.

As relatives of antebellum slaveholders go, the jealous beneficiaries of “intellectual property” laws aren’t especially distant. The former claimed to own their subjects’ bodies first, and secondarily, as the anti-literacy laws demonstrated, minds. The latter merely reverse those priorities.

Nor are their reasons dissimilar.

Slaveholders believed that, absent a property rights claim on other bodies, their plantation-based economic model would collapse.

Copyright holders believe that absent a property rights claim on other minds, the journalists, novelists, screenwriters, and actors of the world might have to find other jobs.

As a practical matter, the former were only temporarily right (agriculture produces more, both more profitably and at lower prices now than it did then), and I suspect the latter are just wrong.

As a moral concern, such claims of ownership over the bodies, minds, or both of others are repugnant.

In both areas, the “open letter” smacks of the Charlottesville marchers’ “Jews will not replace us” chant.

Those who don’t want “the robots” to read and learn from their creations are, as Gilroy notices, free to simply not publish those creations — but if they DO publish them, they’re not entitled to demand that certain people or entities not notice and learn from them.

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 March 14, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order reducing “statutory functions of unnecessary governmental entities to what is required by law.”

Among other institutions, the order targets the United States Agency for Global Media and the broadcast media it operates and funds: Voice of America, Radio and Television Martí, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

At less than one 6,750th of last year’s $6.75 trillion federal spending, USAGM may seem like small potatoes, but as the late US Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) reportedly said, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” And good reasons for wadding up the agency and tossing it in the dustbin of history go far beyond the financial.

What are the agency and its outlets, really? In a word, propaganda.

Their entire purpose is and always has been to regale the world — especially that portion of its population ruled by non-US-approved governments — with the US government’s take on every event and every issue.

While that approach never seemed very much like what America advertises itself as, it may have made at least a little sense during the Cold War when Radio Moscow and China Radio International likewise spread their regimes’ messages via the airwaves.

Now, though, in addition to not reflecting supposed American values (you know, free speech and free press instead of government propaganda), those state-operated broadcast media are beyond redundant.

These days, US “mainstream private sector” media — print, radio, television, and Internet — go toe-to-toe with competitors (state-operated and “private sector” alike) worldwide, reaching far more people than their USAGM predecessors.

And, for the most part and in most respects,  those “private sector” platforms have long since brought their editorial lines into compliance with the US regime’s every whim.

Yes, American media tend to segregate along partisan lines, but they’re generally all MURKA! (as defined by Washington, DC) all the time, from Fox News on the “right” to MSNBC on the “left.” Each of those outlets, and many others, dispose of budgets several times that of USAGM while serving as, effectively, government stenographers without tax funding from Congress.

I’d personally prefer a more combative and inquisitive American press to “private sector” government propaganda mills, but that ship has sailed. Why continue paying government to do what it’s managed to cow the “private sector” into doing for it? Give USAGM the ax.

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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