The 94th Academy Awards ceremony on March 27 saw misunderstanding erupt into an acrimonious conflict: The battle of the ghosts of Reitman, Reagan, Ramis, and Roosevelt.

Bill Murray paid tribute to the memory of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, while the Academy also marked the 15th anniversary of Jason Reitman’s Juno. The junior Reitman recently directed a Ghostbusters sequel in which generations joined forces to commemorate Murray’s departed fellow Ghostbuster Harold Ramis.

Meanwhile, four Oscar nominations yielded zero wins for Don’t Look Up, in which the world is endangered rather than saved by private enterprise out-muscling the state during a crisis.  The parallels between its villains and the Ghostbusters is no coincidence, since co-writer David Sirota’s book Back to Our Future is admittedly inspired by what the Bernie Sanders speechwriter considers a nefarious undermining of trust in government by such 1980s heroes.

Sirota views American popular culture as so dominated by Reagan-era renegades that citizens are blinded to the beneficence of public service.  Yet partisans on both sides of the aisle were happy to seize on the iconography of “busting” ever since Ghostbusters ruled the 1984 box office.  That year’s presidential election featured dueling “Fritzbusters” and “Reaganbusters” takeoffs on the iconic anti-ghost logo. Each advocated the other candidate as a substitute rather than a downsizing of the presidential power available to either.

Ghostbusters imagery has even been retrofitted to previous administrations, with the 1990s educational TV show Histeria! providing trustbuster Theodore Roosevelt with an off-brand proton pack to blast corporate piggery.  The overpowering of Main Street by Wall Street is treated as a natural result of market consolidation, as if Reagan’s chimpanzee costar Bonzo matured into King Kong.

Gabriel Kolko observed that the Progressive Era was in fact marked by “intense and growing competition” outpacing the “economic expansion and … greater internal concentration of capital” of the largest companies, whose owners welcomed regulation burdening smaller upstarts more than themselves. Free traders of the time called protectionist policy that sheltered domestic firms from foreign competitors “the mother of trusts.”

Kolko led a generation of historians to rediscover how supposed archenemies big business and big government actively encouraged the development of each other, as if Beowulf monsters Grendel and Grendel’s mother reproduced in a continuous chicken-and-egg cycle.  Severing the apron strings that connect the two would cut both Walter Peck-style bureaucracy and Gordon Gekko-style plutocracy down to size.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The ghost of the mother of trusts” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles CIty, Montana Star, March 31, 2022
2. “The Ghost of the Mother of Trusts” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, April 1, 2022
3. “The ghost of the mother of trusts” by Joel Schlosberg, The Daily Star [Hammond, Louisiana], April 2, 2022
4. “The Ghost Of The Mother Of Trusts” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, April 2, 2022

Jacobin‘s Seth Ackerman tells us that “Higher Inflation Doesn’t Reduce Real Wages” (February 22) since it “can only be sustained over time if the demand for labor is strong enough, relative to the supply, to force employers to continually bid up wages.” In those cases, “wages tend to rise faster than profits,” so their purchasing power more than compensates for higher prices.

The socialist magazine editor views worries about inflation as stoked by “central bankers, financial journalists, Wall Street analysts, and the like” to provide cover for the Federal Reserve to enrich them under the pretext of fighting it.  Yet the assumption that inflation is driven primarily by labor bargaining power has been eagerly encouraged by Ackerman’s capitalist enemies.

“Why Play Leap Frog?” asked the title of one of a series of animated shorts made for corporate America by John Sutherland Productions in the late 1940s and early 1950s to mollify postwar workers into compliance with management.  Only a smooth  “production of more and better goods at lower costs” would garner “a real raise” rather than one eaten up by a commensurate bump in prices.  The role of bosses and bankers is downplayed in the propaganda they paid for.

Even more ironically, free-market libertarians have exposed the role of inflationary policies in benefiting capitalist elites who are willing to agree with socialists on its causes.  At the height of Richard Nixon’s “timid and fitful battle against inflation,” the November 1, 1970 issue of Libertarian Forum noted that “Austrian [economic] theory shows that in the later stages of a boom wages tend to catch up with prices, squeezing profits, and it is then that businessmen are tempted to turn to the totalitarian (and ineffective) coercion of price-wage controls” (Jacobin dubs them “revenue caps”).

In the Winter 1993-94 issue of Free Nation Foundation’s Formulations, Roderick T. Long noted that “an increase in the money supply results in an increase in prices and wages — but not immediately. There’s some lag time as the effects of the expansion radiate outward through the economy. The rich — i.e., banks, and those to whom banks lend — get the new money first, before prices have risen.”  This distortion also inevitably causes malinvestment, and “the unemployment caused by this misdirection hurts the poor most of all.”

Thus, inflation need not reach Weimar Republic levels to cause harm far beyond its apparent effects.  Ralph Borsodi observed that “it is a lie to say that a little inflation, say two or three per cent, is not stealing but that a lot of inflation, say ten or twenty or thirty percent, is all wrong” since “it is a lie to say you are against stealing, when you are in fact saying that a little stealing is all right.”  Instead of prescribing one enlightened policy for the Federal Reserve to manage the economy, Borsodi wanted the Fed to allow competition from private alternatives like his Constant currency.

A free market for labor backed by reliable money would be a real leap forward past inflated political profiteering.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Inflation Whips Labor” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, March 3, 2022
2. “Inflation Whips Labor” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, March 4, 2022
3. “Inflation Whips Labor” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, March 4, 2022
4. “Inflation whips labor” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, Arizona News, March 5, 2022

The Empire Center’s James Hanley tells readers of The Wall Street Journal that “anyone who wants to pay more to go green should have that choice”  (“Congratulations, You’ve Won a Higher Electric Bill!,” January 31). The subject of Hanley’s op-ed, the residents of Yonkers in upstate New York, did have the freedom to choose between two energy plans, with a higher electric bill for the renewable-sourced one. Hanley objects to them being defaulted to the renewable option, the sort of policy which has given Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s “libertarian paternalism” the reputation for being more paternalist than libertarian in practice.

It’s true that “in a properly functioning market, consumers express their preferences through the prices they pay.” Yet Hanley tacitly implies that renewable options are a luxury. This has been asserted outright by John Stossel: “The market didn’t arbitrarily pick oil as the dominant source of energy.”

R. Buckminster Fuller observed that the ability of fossil fuels to burn quickly after being formed over far vaster stretches of time makes them an “energy savings account.” The short-term benefit doesn’t reflect their limited supply, with the “fabulous energy-income wealth” of renewable alternatives untapped.

Paul Krugman noted a decade ago that despite Solyndra becoming a symbol of solar as government boondoggle, that particular company’s “failure was actually caused by technological success: the price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn’t keep up with the competition.” One would expect Stossel rather than Krugman to be the pundit noting the limits of political policymakers’ ability to foresee market winners.  Yet when Stossel writes that “government’s ‘green’ subsidies suck money away from far more useful activities,” he overlooks how the non-green energy sources which he assumes to be simply more economical are subsidized on a much larger scale.

Helen Leavitt’s 1970 muckraking tome Superhighway–Superhoax documented how “a staggering number of private interests” formed the impetus for “the largest single public works project ever undertaken.” Amory Lovins points out that “100-plus percent subsidies” aren’t enough to draw private investment to nuclear power, so that “we can have as many nuclear plants as Congress can force the taxpayers to pay for.”

Whether your way is the greenway or the parkway, you’re not going to get very far without a clear view of the price.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, February 7, 2022
2. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way”
   by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, February 7, 2022
3. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, February 9, 2022
4. “You can’t have the state highway your way” by Joel Schlosberg, Dillon, Montana Tribune, February 9, 2022
5. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Ledger, February 10, 2022
6. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Forest Hills/Rego Park [New York] Times, February 10, 2022
7. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Leader/Observer [New York City], February 10, 2022
8. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, The Long Island City/Astoria [New York] Journal, February 10, 2022
9. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Examiner, February 10, 2022
10. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Greenpoint [New York] Star, February 10, 2022
11. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Brooklyn [New York] Downtown Star, February 10, 2022
12. “You Can’t Have the State Highway Your Way” by Joel Schlosberg, Independent Political Report, February 10, 2022
13. “You can’t have the state highway your way” by Joel Schlosberg, The Millbury, Ohio Press, February 11, 2022
14. “You can’t have the state highway your way” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, February 24, 2022