Oren Cass’s “What Economists Could Learn From George Costanza” (The New York Times, December 23) has forgotten what economics Henry George taught.

That’s the pundit named Cass who invariably calls for constrictions on consumers, as opposed to Cass Sunstein‘s advocacy of “choice-preserving but psychologically wise interventions” that would make “automatic enrollment in government programs” the default (in the words of the University of Pennsylvania’s Angie Basiouny).

In 2012, Oren Cass campaigned for Mitt Romney versus the incumbent who had Sunstein head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  If it’s harder to tell the party lines apart three presidential elections later, maybe it’s because such “choice” was an echo all along.

Oren Cass sees “the continued reliance on the theory of comparative advantage” as the fountainhead of America’s economic woes, comparable to the Seinfeld sidekick’s bad karma from stubbornly sticking to tuna sandwiches instead of trying chicken. If Adam Smithian academics come off as slightly more charitable in that analogy than NYU Marxist Bertell Ollman likening free-market libertarians to “people who go into a Chinese restaurant and order pizza,” Oren Cass makes them seem more sinister than silly, asking rhetorically whether “the Uyghurs performing forced labor in the supply chains of China’s refrigerator exporters are doing so in return for economic advice.”

When labor isn’t coerced, either directly or by restrictions on how it can be used, markets really do involve what the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome calls “billions of humans freely cooperating for mutual gain” — a phrase Oren Cass sees as “spin” and “reframing” despite such liberty always being key to the case for laissez-faire.

Henry George noted in Progress and Poverty that “the pen with which I am writing is justly mine … because transferred to me by the stationer, to whom it was transferred by the importer, who obtained the exclusive right to it by transfer from the manufacturer, in whom, by the same process of purchase, vested the rights of those who dug the material from the ground and shaped it into a pen.”  Such books he penned became some of the most celebrated international bestsellers of the nineteenth century.

At the close of the twentieth, Oren Cass’s preferred George acknowledged that his outstanding high score on a Frogger arcade machine relied on “the perfect combination of Mountain Dew and mozzarella” — the product of an international web of influence that ushered pizza pies and piquant pixels (and Peking duck) across oceans.  The April 1983 cover of Video Games magazine trumpeted “America’s Newest Games: Q*Bert & Joust” as fresh homegrown rivals to the output of Japanese companies like Frogger’s Konami and Sega, but they built on the European examples of Euclid, Escher and Excalibur.

In The World According to Star Wars, Sunstein perceived that “in a truly repressive society — one against which rebellion is most justified — it will be very hard to know the magnitude of people’s dissatisfaction, because people will not say what they really think.” Seemingly minor trade blockades can have a similar chilling effect.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “What Oren Cass Sunstein Could Learn From Henry George Costanza” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, January 3, 2025
2. “What Oren Cass Sunstein could learn from Henry George Costanza” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], January 9, 2025

“Bad opinion pieces in papers of record” are getting a bad rap from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The congresswoman took to Bluesky on December 2 to suggest discussing “thinkers we find valuable” and avoiding “linking to bad columns” so that “incentives change” for news outlets chasing attention (and, presumably, ad revenue).

Such voluntary mindfulness avoids the appeal to force in Ocasio-Cortez’s previous intimation that  “one billionaire … shouldn’t be allowed to own so much of the internet.” (Would a flourishing Bluesky be satisfied with a valuation of $999,999,999?) The Dr. Evil a couple years back was not Twitter purchaser Elon Musk but Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose holdings included the Instagram where Ocasio-Cortez posted.

Still, that’s halfway to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s maxim that “the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” The “better argument” of the other half may well come from a cold, hard look at the “fallacious argument.” Sagan and Druyan note John Stuart Mill’s contention that truth arises from “collision with error,” elaborating that “if we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.”

Such pallor might blanch Bluesky’s atmosphere if it drowns out a no-longer-silent majority. Ocasio-Cortez’s November takeaway on the site: “[A]n echo chamber just won a presidential election.”

That interpretation is unconvincing when Trump’s constituency compounded consistently nationwide, amid the ruins of early-2000s interventionist expansionism and a level of economic elitism that made a landlord playing a boss on TV seem like an upstart.

In particular, support for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was bolstered by Thomas L. Friedman downplaying warning signs in New York Times rather than New York Post columns. Friedman wanted to “take a very big stick” to pop a “terrorism bubble;” Ben Burgis reminds us that outside of Friedman’s own bubble, “what the bubble-bursting meant in practice was that hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives.”  And while Marxists like Burgis are blamed for ideological groupthink in academia, he follows Marx in challenging capitalist economics with counterargument rather than dismissal.

Friedman’s “Suck. On. This.” promptly became one of the most infamous examples of his own phraseology doing the sucking.  In 2009, The Spectator‘s Alex Massie observed that laughing at “the sheer gawd-help-us ghastliness found on the Gray Lady’s op-ed page” via Friedman was uniting the blogosphere, sharing a takedown from liberal muckraker Matt Taibbi at the alt-weekly New York Press linked by Reason libertarian Matt Welch, who in turn got it from The Atlantic‘s conservative Andrew Sullivan.

Such post-Bush unity didn’t eventually last in those publications, let alone push more editorial oversight onto Friedman.  But his assertion that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15” can serve to perfectly crystallize a contrasting vision of the sort of market that results when neither burgers nor bombers receive handouts.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “OPINION: Why I don’t want bad takes to go to waste” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], December 10, 2024

Unlike most advocates of tariffs in the Trump-Biden era, Alexander William Salter is willing to ask “Will Free Trade Bring Peace and Prosperity?” (The Wall Street Journal, October 29). The Rawls College of Business Administration academic even sees said peace as an admirable if uncertain goal, and acknowledges that the answer to the second half of the queston is probably yes.

Yalie JD Vance, and for that matter his high school social studies teacher debate opponent Tim Walz, could use some of that remedial Adam Smith 101. Vance puzzles over “the idea that if we made America less self-reliant, less productive in our own nation, that it would somehow make us better off.”  The “somehow” comes into focus when imagining US states taking Vance’s “we’re going to make more of our own stuff” mentality to heart, with New Yorkers attempting to plant vast tracts of orange groves while Floridians put up ersatz Appalachian ski slopes.

Yet Salter insists that while “tariffs … doubtless make us poorer … they can also make us freer.” The trivialization of free choice in the marketplace used to be the purview of those putting down schools of economics, from James K. Galbraith dismissing what he called the “freedom to shop”  to the book-length slam at Milton Friedman titled Not So Free to Choose. Restricting it makes us not so free, period.

Salter offers the conflicts embroiling the Athenian Golden Age and the modern United States as “counterexamples to the ‘capitalist peace’ hypothesis.” Those same cases were to Bertrand Russell exemplars of how “a recurrent product of commerce” is the need for merchants to cultivate a mindset of understanding “customs different from their own.”

The precarious balance between imperial and commercial power traced historically by Russell need not be left to happenstance.  If war persists even after “it became impossible to ruin others without imperilling one’s own investments,” as Emile De Laveleye noted regretfully in 1871, that devotee of free trader Richard Cobden was prescient to observe how “electricity had done away with distances” when it was newly generated by steam.

As to why “Europe’s economic integration didn’t stop the cataclysm of World War I,” it was the continent’s socialists who were the champions of internationalism at the time. Tom Mann noted in the March 1915 issue of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth that “the organized Social Democrats of Germany … singularly failed to practice the solidarity they had stood for;” Goldman’s autobiography stressed that non-participation by over ten million workers in that country alone would have had the effect of “paralyzing war preparations.”

Salter urges Americans “to weed out authoritarian rivals from critical supply chains.” The heavy-handedness that ultimately pushes them into rigidity and brittleness is coming from inside the White House.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. The Future of Freedom Foundation Daily – November 9, 2024