Had I Known was the title of Barbara Ehrenreich’s final book before her passing on September 1, and indeed, the longtime investigative journalist never closed the book on what there was to learn.

In the introduction, Ehrenreich wrote that “I realized that there was something wrong with an arrangement whereby a relatively affluent person, such as I had become, could afford to write about minimum-wage jobs” — the subject that brought her fame and fortune as an author.

Ehrenreich’s reporting on the conditions of low-paying work in the bestselling exposé Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America was summed up by Roderick T. Long as a rebuke “to those on the right who heroise the managerial class and imagine that the main causes of poverty are laziness and welfare.”  As Charles W. Johnson noted at the time, Nickel and Dimed manages to also be “a frighteningly real response to those feel-good liberals who proclaim the virtues of voluntarily living in poverty and complain about how frustrated they feel with their Palm Pilots and SUVs.”

A decade later, Ehrenreich wrote in the afterword to a new edition of Nickel and Dimed that having assumed that “the standard liberal wish list” of more “public programs” was the way to “reduce poverty” had obscured how the same government increases poverty by criminalizing efforts of the poor to get by.

Had I Known includes a lauding of “informal networks” which “put the official welfare state, with its relentless suspicions and grudging outlays, to shame.”  Yet it also ascribes economic inequality to “the free-enterprise system” which “depends only on markets.” Ehrenreich suggests this is really a “free-president system” in which elected officials are “free of all responsibility for the economically anguished.” Yet her own muckraking shows an economy actually existing far closer to Paul Goodman’s term “un-free enterprise.”

In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Ehrenreich viewed a Templeton Foundation report’s rhetoric about how “free enterprise and other principles of capitalism can, and do, benefit the poor” as indicating “a foregone conclusion.”  While not “a right-wing conspiracy,” free-enterprise advocacy by groups like Templeton and the Association of Private Enterprise Education was inherently “conservative.”

Ehrenreich should not have been so sure if she had attended a panel at APEE’s conference the following year making the case for “free market anti-capitalism,” including contributions from both Johnson and Long. Unhindered by obstacles such as what Johnson calls “the government-supported stranglehold of big banks on capital” withholding funding for business outside of big business, market forces would not conserve entrenched power dynamics but dissolve them. Ehrenreich might even have recognized a comrade in Long when he concludes that “libertarianism is the proletarian revolution.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, USA Today, September 9, 2022
2. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Spectrum, September 9, 2022
3. What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, Yahoo! News, September 9, 2022
4. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Montana Standard, September 9, 2022
5. “What Ehrenreich didn’t know” by Joel Schlosberg, The Daily Star [Hammond, Louisiana], September 12, 2022
6. “What Ehrenreich Didn’t Know” by Joel Schlosberg, Williston, North Dakota Herald, September 26, 2022

That today’s culture wars lack a convenient place to pigeonhole Tom Cornell, whose seven decades of activism in the Catholic Worker movement continued until his passing on August 1, shows their limitations rather than his.

In a 2002 profile, Andrew Blackman noted that Cornell “shares common beliefs with liberals and neo-conservatives, communists and cardinals, and he harshly criticizes all of them.” Cornell was the sort of radical for social justice who told liberals that radicalism didn’t mean being “liberal but more so,” since his analysis of the ills of war and poverty traced them to fundamentally “different premises.” He wasn’t any more accommodating to those who professed his anti-abortion position but who seemed to be only  “concerned about people … until they’re born.”

Cornell’s means were just as distinct from partisan politics on either side. In a 2014 interview with Commonweal, he explained: “In the Bible we read, ‘I was hungry and you fed me.’ It does not say, ‘I was hungry and you formed a committee!’ Our thing is just getting down and doing it.”

Cornell’s opposition to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq drew and built on a tradition of Catholic Worker pacifism going back to Ammon Hennacy’s noncompliance with the draft during World War I (Hennacy was the sort of labor comrade Dorothy Day could dub “a pacifist even in the class war”). Cornell was instrumental in legitimizing pacifism as an alternative to just war theology and ensuring, as Karl Hess observed at the American bicentennial, “that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty.”

If, as Hess added, “there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing” (since “the state takes money more seriously than life”), that was not for Cornell’s lack of trying. A 1967 petition cosigned by Cornell vouched that living below the minimum income tax threshold was morally preferable to funding the “poisoning of food crops, blasting of villages, napalming and killing of thousands upon thousands of people.”

Raising that income tax threshold would allow more workers of all belief systems to follow Cornell’s example. Meanwhile, the sort of voluntary community organizing pioneered by Cornell and other Catholic Workers to deal directly with social problems could make up for any ensuing budget shortfalls for the functions of the state that aren’t deadly.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War” by Joel Schlosberg, Antiwar.com, August 8, 2022
2. “A Pacifist Even in the Tax War” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, August 10, 2022

“What’s the matter with Kansas?” is a question sure to be asked whether or not the state’s voters decide to ratify Value Them Both on August 2.

The proposed amendment would overturn the 2019 Kansas Supreme Court verdict Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt, which Kansas Reflector reporter Allison Kite notes was something of “a state-level Roe.” While among other restraints, “patients seeking abortions must sit through waiting periods and efforts to persuade them against the procedure,” it did reliably guarantee a baseline of access. Though the result was far from laissez-faire, let alone opponents’ fever dreams of state-subsidized abortion on demand, removing it would set the stage for efforts at more restrictive policies up to a near-total ban.

In 2018, Eric Flint took a break from writing an alternate history of the 1630s to foresee that an impending repeal of Roe would not only unleash immediate moves to restrict abortion in “15 to 20 states” but that an equal number would “immediately liberalize abortion back to where it was decades ago before the right succeeded in chipping away at it.” Flint added that the steady liberalization of views on abortion in urban centers nationwide would give the pro-choice side an advantage beyond the relatively even divide between the two at the state level.

A decisive popular veto of Value Them Both would not only reaffirm the right of abortion for Kansans (and for the Missourians who account for nearly half of the abortions in their neighboring state).  It could serve as a model for state-level Roes in other contested states. So could a backlash if Value Them Both’s passing proves to be against the tide of public opinion.

The Garrison Center’s Thomas L. Knapp has noted (“Abortion: No, Dobbs Isn’t ‘Decentralization’,” June 25) that “decisions concerning abortion were largely decentralized to the lowest possible level, that of individual choice … such decisions are now largely centralized into the hands of state legislatures.”

The outcome of Kansas’s referendum could revive Roe‘s decentralization of choice to the individual by decentralizing it to the states.  Then Dorothy and her little fetus too won’t have to travel to Oz.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Pay attention to that woman behind the voting booth curtain” by Joel Schlosberg, Argus Observer [Ontario, Oregon], July 24, 2022