All posts by Joel Schlosberg

Libertarianism: No Infantile Disorder

The faces of horror comics in 1954 were as alarming to authority figures as Facebook is in 2021. Public domain.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat could use a refresher on Freudo-Marxist psychiatrists.

Douthat chides libertarians — or at least “the kind of libertarian who identifies forever with his 13-year-old self” — for taking a laissez-faire attitude to “a novel, obviously addictive technology that might well be associated with depression and self-harm” (“Instagram Is Adult Entertainment,” September 30). Douthat refers to social media websites, but he should take a closer look at “the people who panicked over the moral effects of comic books” before dismissing a parallel.

Seduction of the Innocent author Fredric Wertham was sure that the shift of comics from the funny pages to funnybooks was causing psychological harm to young readers, a diagnosis drawn not from old-fashioned prudery but the Frankfurt School’s suspicion of commercial culture. Wertham cited the Progressive Era’s forays against reckless robber barons in his efforts to clean up crime comics. Ironically, such regulation allowed cartelized industries to get away with lower safety standards (and higher profits) than possible under the pressure of market competition.

By the 1960s, Mad magazine was spreading as a primer for rebellious adolescents after the Comics Code Authority forced its publisher to discontinue horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear. Meanwhile, psychoanalyst Erich Fromm introduced American audiences to a British import that became an icon of the youth counterculture. While the Beatles were proving that rock and roll would outlast Elvis Presley leaving for the Army, Fromm highlighted how “the idea of education without force” was being put into practice at the alternative school Summerhill.

Fromm insisted to those who saw an excess of permissiveness in pedagogy that, just as in the realm of politics, “it is not that authority has disappeared, nor even that it has lost in strength, but that it has been transformed from the overt authority of force to the anonymous authority of persuasion and suggestion.” Freedom did not fail when it was genuine.

Douthat’s inistence that the state save social life from social media likewise ignores Fromm’s insight, drawn from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, that social organization can only be a social benefit if its “associations are free and spontaneous, and not state imposed.” What Fromm called Proudhon’s “drastic condemnation of the principle of authority and hierarchy” as “the prime cause of all disorders and ills of society” should serve as a warning to those who see it as the cure.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “Libertarianism – No Infantile Disorder” by Joel Schlosberg, The Glasgow, Montana Courier, October 6, 2021
  2. “Libertarianism: No Infantile Disorder” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, October 6, 2021

More Reasons of State, More Troubles

Publications associated with the CNT and FAI
Ideas on liberty in CNT-FAI publications during the Spanish Civil War. Public domain.

Linguist Noam Chomsky is known for mincing no words about the corruptions of political power. Yet when asked whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people is just a sham” at the end of an interview by John Rachel for CounterPunch (August 27), Chomsky insists that it is only “if we let it be,” and that Americans could instead “choose to exercise” their ability to turn their nation into a “cooperative commonwealth.”

This is at odds with Chomsky’s preceding replies, which detail how the United States wages war in ways that not only contradict popular opinion but violate its own laws. Chomsky’s 1973 book For Reasons of State took its title from a passage by Mikhail Bakunin about how “the State is the organized authority, domination, and power of the possessing classes over the masses.”

Chomsky holding out hope in 2021 that the people can and should “take the reins of government into their own hands” likewise ignores Bakunin’s observation that the state’s use of force necessarily “shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest.”

Chomsky himself documented in Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship how the “organs of power and administration remained separate from the central Republican government” in the social movements fighting the fascist seizure of power during the Spanish Civil War, yet he reinforces what Larry Gambone calls “the myth of socialism as statism,” the very conflation of popular and political power for which Chomsky famously took mainstream historians to task.

Modern-day popular movements seeking an end to social warfare could do well to rediscover the forms of voluntary socialist organization noted by Chomsky and Gambone. They should also revive Bakunin’s vigilance against the “bold plunder” and “shabby betrayal that [is] daily being perpetrated by the representatives of the states.”

Correction: In the original version of this op-ed, John Rachel was misidentified as John Roberts.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “More Reasons of State, More Troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, September 3, 2021
  2. “More reasons of state, more troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, AZ News, September 3, 2021
  3. “Sham Government?” by Joel Schlosberg, Salt Lake City Weekly, September 8, 2021 (both online and print)
  4. “More reasons of state, more trouble” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], Madill, Oklahoma Record, September 9, 2021
  5. “More reasons of state, more trouble” by Joel Schlosberg, Sidney [Montana] Herald, September 11, 2021
  6. “More Reasons Of State, More Troubles” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, September 12, 2021
  7. “More Reasons of State, More Troubles” by by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup Record-Tribune & Winnett Times [Montana], September 15, 2021

The Money Monopoly Itself is The Abuse

The Joshua of our silly senate in his great act of trying to make the sun stand still, by Charles Jay Taylor. Public Domain.
The Joshua of our silly senate in his great act of trying to make the sun stand still, by Charles Jay Taylor. Public Domain.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler might seem one of the least likely people in the world to praise Bitcoin as an example of “how technology can expand access to finance and contribute to economic growth” — while noting its founder Satoshi Nakamoto’s intentions “to create a private form of money with no central intermediary, such as a central bank or commercial banks” (“Remarks Before the Aspen Security Forum,” August 3).

Yet while Gensler praises the technological breakthroughs of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, he evaluates them from the existing framework of money issued by governments, contending that “we already live in an age of digital public monies — the dollar, euro, sterling, yen, yuan” since they circulate in forms less tangible than printed bills.  With exchanges between different forms of cryptocurrencies at present largely relying on “stable value coins … pegged or linked to the value of fiat currencies,” it seems natural to Gensler to bring them under the SEC’s established regulatory structure.

Yet as Benjamin R. Tucker noted in 1887, allowing only forms of banking that “observe the prescribed conditions” of “law-created and law-protected monopolies” prevents them from becoming a true alternative.

One such experiment, Ralph Borsodi’s Constant, was stalled in 1974 by the prospect of the same SEC securities regulation proposed by Gensler for current private currencies. The Constant secured against the inflation which steadily diminishes the purchasing power of state currencies by being based directly on the real supply and demand values for a representative sample of common goods. Borsodi had correctly presumed that even though the Constant had achieved his aim, since it “takes money creation completely out of the government’s hands,” it was “not likely to make governments very happy.”

Gensler warns that cryptocurrencies are “rife with fraud, scams, and abuse in certain applications.” Mutualists like Tucker and Borsodi saw how political influence over the currency, implemented via seemingly neutral rules, inevitably consolidated economic clout by stealthily rigging the whole economy to favor the powerful. A free market in money itself, not just in what can be traded for money, would keep its providers honest and its value fair.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “The Money Monopoly Itself Is The Abuse” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, August 8, 2021
  2. “The Money Monopoly Itself Is the Abuse” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, August 11, 2021
  3. “The Money Monopoly Itself Is the Abuse” by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup, MT Record Tribune & Winnett Times, August 11, 2021
  4. “The money monopoly itself is the abuse” by Joel Schlosberg, Claremont, NH Eagle Times, August 12, 2021
  5. “Do the regulators view Bitcoin as a real alternative?” by Joel Schlosberg, The Press [Millbury, Ohio], August 23, 2021
  6. “The money monopoly itself is the abuse” by Joel Schlosberg, Elko, Nevada Daily Free Press, August 27, 2021