“What noted conservative advocates jailing people to prevent the spread of their ideas?” If David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom was written nowadays, he could challenge readers to think of one who doesn’t.

Friedman observed that National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s then-recent 1965 call for “quarantining all [narcotics] addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague” was “inconsistent with [Buckley’s] belief in a free society.”  The pugnaciously partisan pundit of conservatism wouldn’t take the implications of his own analogy far enough to “favor jailing Galbraith, Bundy, and several Rockefellers as carriers of liberalism.”

By 1996, Thomas Szasz could be confident that “Buckley has since moderated his views” on the issue (even if he hadn’t “abandoned defining the ‘drug problem’ as a medical matter”).

Yet in February 2025, former Reagan staffer Glenn Loury still considered applying a Just Say No approach to other vices, deeming “online gambling and pornography … detrimental … to marriage,” enough so to possibly justify efforts to “prosecute producers of … the most obscene videos.” Friedman had quipped that the decisions made by what Buckley called the “psychologically weak or misinformed” might include “getting married or subscribing to National Review.”

Loury’s “obscene videos” may not include Academy Award champion Anora, but on May 3, Lauren Smith vouched that its filmmakers’ acceptance speeches would “legitimise the act of sexually exploiting women for money” (“The ‘vibe shift’ hasn’t reached the Oscars,” spiked). That same day, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called anti-Semitism “comparable to history’s most deadly plagues” not just in its harmful effects but its catchiness, with top universities serving as “greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence” — while decrying in the same breath “censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.” JFK’s nephew ignores such ills among his new bedfellows in the Trump administration as intently as the new PBS American Masters documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse covers them as if they are only found there.

Friedman pointed out that “a university may proclaim its neutrality, but neutrality, as the left quite properly argues, is also a position” — one particularly hard to maintain “if one believes that the election of Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy would be a national tragedy.” Long after their time, the solution remains not “a university run from the outside, by a state government” but developing “noncoercive cooperation.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Freedom: Not Another Word for Things Left to Lose” by Joel Schlosberg, The Newton Kansan, March 10, 2025

With the end of January consigning Christmas decorations to cheerful memory, even if northern blizzards and hot-button issues stoked by the incoming Trump administration are less conducive to jollity, is it “time to cut the green tape”?  Lauren Smith thinks that such eco-bureaucracy is “Why Britain can’t build anything” (spiked, January 29).

Solar power is not in fact as much of a real-world threat to England as it was in the hands of Christopher Lee’s fanciful Bond villain Francisco Scaramanga.  Across the Atlantic, red-staters are the ones eager to snip red tape, even if the bounteously bearded fellow in a red hat gracing the Wall Street Journal editorial page was not Kris Kringle but Karl of Das Kapital, illustrating Jacob Berger’s case for why conservatives have more in common than they assume with the original Red (“Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx,” January 23).

The prospect of a so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” may provoke Green New Dealers, but the original New Deal’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had been promptly inducted into the “Society of Red Tape Cutters” created by Dr. Seuss for the staunchly leftist newspaper PM to laud “Boldness and Directness of purpose” in overcoming “petty bureaucratic detail.”

Even after Seuss became more associated with the amusements of what Dissent‘s Michael Kazin called “lovely nonsense with no discernible moral point” than pointed propagandizing, the lines were not so clearly drawn. In 1982, conservative columnist George Will gushed that “the space program is the greatest conceivable adventure; yet the government scants it.” Will leaves unnamed any particular “Philistine utilitarians” he has in mind who need to be swayed by “such marvels as nonstick frying pans” but must have had in mind the likes of Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who had infamously insisted that NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence “should be postponed for a few million light-years” (or at least “until right after the federal budget is balanced”).

In 1999, Garry Wills couldn’t understand why Americans would “want inefficient politicians to govern us” when “we do not want inefficient doctors to treat us, inefficient lawyers to represent us,” a year after Barry Goldwater’s New York Times obituary reminded readers that his “philosophy was never more simply put” than when he had declared that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient… for I propose to extend freedom.”

The “new, smaller government” promised in Bill Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address was compromised by micromanagement as well as malpractice — as when proposing deeper involvement “in the workplace, in religious, charitable, and civic associations” or “to cut bureaucratic red tape so that schools and teachers have more flexibility for grassroots reform, and to hold them accountable for results” in ways that were inevitably top-down — and laid the ground for the seemingly endless conflicts and post-dotcom-boom busts of the twenty-first century. Disentangling voluntary cooperation from such astroturfing is necessary to break free from red (and green) tape.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “One Dog, Too DOGE, Red Tape, Green Tape” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, February 3, 2025

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