Wall Street Journal editor Matthew Hennessey correctly observes that vice-president JD Vance could stand to brush up on his economic education (“Vance is Wrong: The Market Isn’t a ‘Tool,'” May 27). He may have learned the essentials of exchange at Ohio State and Yale, but “speaks as if he didn’t.”

Yet Vance’s remark that “the market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics” is not so much incorrect as an inadvertent self-indictment. To Hennessey, “laws of economics,” akin to “laws of gravity,” mean that economies “can’t be bullied into compliance with a political agenda.” To the contrary, manipulative politicking all too often pushes the populace to take the fall.

Hennessey sees the mechanical-market metaphor dovetailing with Vance’s advocacy of “a revived industrial economy that is planned and directed by enlightened tinkerers for the common good.” A tall order when the Apollo 13 mission team had its hands full kludging a literal square-peg-in-a-round-hole connector from spacecraft spare parts to get back down to Earth.

Vance maintains his social conservative Catholicism, but is realigning its focus to “launch a missile at the market.”  Yet the tradition of Catholic social criticism includes the subject of John P. McCarthy’s Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical combining a “dislike of capitalism and enthusiasm for property ownership,” and so seeking alternatives to “the usual statist solutions,” as well as John Médaille’s call to push the actually existing market economy Toward a Truly Free Market.

Hennessey claims that “the idea that markets exploit the weak and release corrosive social forces has always been popular on the left.” Less subtly, the online edition’s subtitle calls Vance “as economically illiterate as any leftist Democrat,” forgetting the 2020 Journal op-ed headline recalling the Carter administration: “When Democrats Were Deregulators.”  In 1992, George McGovern had even written for the Journal to chide Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, who aimed to assist “entrepreneurs who will risk their capital” to “create job opportunities,” for failing to “consider whether we are choking off those opportunities.”

If politicians and pundits across the political spectrum increasingly echo Robert Kuttner, quoted by Hennessey decrying “the utopian worship of free markets” in 1998, they should note how the fettered enterprise of the current decade was foreshadowed in 1943 by what Astounding Science Fiction called “a rigidly frozen economy” where interplanetary incomers with innovative “inventions to sell” could be stymied to starvation by “a law against inventions” in Henry and Catherine Moore Kuttner’s “The Iron Standard.” (That early in the twentieth century, the Kuttners could imagine their stagnant “world state” would at least be blessed with “no wars and no tariffs.”)

Hennessey rues Americans receiving “miseducation … from philosophy professors.”  They could learn something from Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long, who emphasizes that “devaluing of compassion” or assuming its incompatibility with laissez-faire liberty stymies efforts “to visualize and formulate the institutions of a free society.” That false dichotomy likewise empties the toolbox necessary for building a fair one — and getting methods that distort supply and demand and inhibit honest cooperation out of the picture.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Warren Buffett’s father should have changed Radical Son David Horowitz’s red diapers.

At first glance, Horowitz’s vehement rejection of his card-carrying Communist Party upbringing to become an equally unwavering Grand Old Party loyalist, from voting for Ronald Reagan’s re-election right up until his passing on April 29, would seem the mirror opposite of the path to Buffett’s retirement a week later.  Six decades after inheriting the Berkshire Hathaway he would nurture into a trillion-dollar conglomerate from a Republican congressman deemed “arch‐conservative” in his New York Times obituary, Howard Homan Buffett’s son had become the sort of capitalist who could not only be commended by Times guest essayist Roger Lowenstein for having “long stood out on Wall Street because he eschewed its frequent chicanery, self-dealing and greed” (“Taking the Measure of Warren Buffett,” May 5), but gladly cited as a role model by It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism author Bernie Sanders.

Yet the Times acknowledged that the “arch-conservative” had urged “curbs … on the United States military leadership,” anticipating Dwight Eisenhower’s better-remembered caution to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex.”  E. J. Dionne, Jr. observed in Why Americans Hate Politics that “New Left scholars … took a much more favorable view of the old isolationists such as Robert A. Taft” and Buffett “than liberal scholarship ever had” — and that Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby had quoted Buffett on how “we cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.”

Dionne’s caveat that “the New Left’s attack on large corporations was not a cause to which conservatives repaired” is hard to maintain when a devoted Ayn Rand fan like Roy A. Childs, Jr. could note in the May 1972 issue of Libertarian Forum not only the validity of “students’ reactions to Dow Chemical’s presence on campuses across the U.S., at the time when Dow’s own napalm was being used to zap Vietnamese peasants” but that law-and-order dismissals ignored how “so-called ‘private’ universities … seize land from its rightful owners by aligning with the State’s power of eminent domain.”

One of those “New Left scholars” was none other than David Horowitz.  The back cover of Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism includes a blurb from the Horowitz who would later coedit The Anti-Chomsky Reader lauding its “understanding of the imperial dynamics of America’s postwar course” underneath Noam Chomsky lamenting “how much has been lost by narrowing the spectrum of debate” when such a “critique of … the centralization of state power was perceptive at the time, and has much to offer to us today.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “They Could Have Overruled the Empire as Father and Son” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 9, 2025
2. “Opinion: They could have overruled the empire as father and son” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, May 13, 2025
3. “They could have overruled the empire as father and son” by Joel Schlosberg, PCM Explorer [Prairie City, Iowa], May 15, 2025 [Page 4 of print edition]

Donald Trump’s attempts at “fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past” have a chance to succeed — by spurring the very sort of “revisionist movement” he denounces in his March 27 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Not that Trump’s “solemn and uplifting public monuments” will engender much high-mindedness among the American public, even though they will surely avoid quoting from Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School. And Trump’s trumpeting of America’s “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing” is at odds with his 2017 inaugural address describing a country in which heretofore “there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land,” since “for too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.”

But the administration’s very heavy-handedness might make Americans think twice about what they think they know about their history.  On April 2, New York Times contributor David W. Blight insisted that what Trump dubs a “revisionist” approach is necessary to “maintain relevance,” and that “many Americans … actually prefer complexity to patriotic straitjackets.”

The newspaper wasn’t always so charitable to the revisionists.  In 2007, Howard Zinn responded to Walter Kirn calling his A Young People’s History of the United States less devoted to “telling the truth” than “editing and motivating” in The New York Times Book Review with a letter to the editor insisting that “there is no such thing as a single ‘objective’ truth” independent of “the viewpoint of the historian.”  This year, a contribution by Jeet Heer discerned “a proto-Trumpian politics” in Murray Rothbard viewing America’s rules as “a sham that ripped off ordinary citizens” (“Why We Got Kash Patel and a ‘Gangster Government’,” January 30).

Yet the Rothbard who Heer sees as yearning for rule by real-life equivalents of “the mobster antiheroes of the ‘Godfather’ movies” had no use for the not-so-little “Caesar in the White House” who imposed wage and price controls in his 1971 Times op-ed “The President’s Economic Betrayal,” or Nixonian Republicans who “have forgotten their free enterprise rhetoric and are willing to join in the patriotic hoopla.”

In contrast, the February 1976 issue of Rothbard’s The Libertarian Forum lauded “the Revisionist, even if he is not a libertarian personally” since “to penetrate the fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals” is “a vitally important libertarian service.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Trump Makes History Again? Great…” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, April 4, 2025