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

As “the city that never sleeps” turned the calendar to 2022 with the inauguration of Eric Adams just after midnight, partygoers didn’t need Frank Sinatra’s reminder to “start spreading the news” heard on the New Year’s broadcast from Times Square. New Yorkers were well aware, as Brooklyn’s Chris Matthew Sciabarra put it, that “the best news about the next mayor is that it won’t be Bill de Blasio.”

Few would vouch that de Blasio’s administration had lived up to Eric Alterman’s first-year hopes that the post-Bloomberg mayor would “use the power of the city government to make New York a fairer and more equal place for all its inhabitants.”

Was the relentlessness of inequality since 2014, even well before the unexpected effects of COVID, merely due to de Blasio being the wrong choice to steer “the power of the city government,” or disgraced governor and sometime de Blasio foe Andrew Cuomo likewise mishandling state government, not the nature of government power itself?

Elections don’t offer control over policies that persist no matter who is in office.  Concentrated political power, rather than being a counterbalance to economic consolidation, is more likely to promote and ossify the latter far beyond market levels. Columbia University alumnus Thomas E. Woods warned Americans that “no matter whom you vote for [president], you always wind up getting John McCain.” New Yorkers always wind up getting Rudy Giuliani.

It’s not too late to revive the plan offered by Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin in 1969, whose mayoral campaign literature told New Yorkers that they “want neighborhoods to govern themselves.” Since “politicians have ridden this city right into the ground,” they asked for decision-making to be transferred away from them to local communities who could have “power over their schools, police, sanitation, housing, parks and life styles.”

Citywide impositions of uniform policies on issues from standardized testing to indoor smoking inevitably makes them politically contentious. Decentralization would unleash the ability of voluntary groups to coordinate cooperative activities, the potential for which has expanded far beyond what was possible eight years ago, let alone 53. And it’s not too late for New York City to “be a part of it.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, January 7, 2022
2. “A New Year One For Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, January 12, 2022
3. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Ledger, January 12, 2022
4. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Forest Hills/Rego Park [New York] Times, January 12, 2022
5. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Leader/Observer [New York City], January 12, 2022
6. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, The Long Island City/Astoria [New York] Journal, January 12, 2022
7. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Queens [New York] Examiner, January 12, 2022
8. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Greenpoint [New York] Star, January 12, 2022
9. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, Brooklyn [New York] Downtown Star, January 12, 2022
10. “A New Year One for Gotham” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, January 13, 2022

Six decades later, America’s headlines could remain in “America.”

Memorials to Stephen Sondheim didn’t have to search far to find parallels between the musical West Side Story and a United States disunited by class and ethnic strife in 2021.  Sondheim’s lyrics “Everywhere Grime in America, Terrible Time in America” became Jacobin‘s headline for an anniversary retrospective on the 1961 film version two weeks before his passing on November 26.

Meanwhile, current-year academic contentions that “white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty” may as well have borrowed the couplet “Life is all right in America/if you’re all-white in America.”

Less fashionable are sentiments celebrating the right to be “free to be anything you choose” nearly two decades before Milton Friedman popularized a shorter version of the phrase. In contrast to the rejoinder that this meant a mere freedom “to wait tables and shine shoes,” Friedman documented how economic restraints, rather than their absence, trapped workers in low-paying jobs and kept goods out of reach of consumers.

Sondheim’s paeans to expanded personal options were likewise echoed at the end of the 1960s in Karl Hess’s “libertarian insistence that men be free to spin cables of steel, as well as dreams of smoke.”  Hess noted the emerging libertarian movement’s break with “patriots who sing of freedom but also shout of banners and boundaries.” West Side Story‘s wayward youth, faced with prejudice and legal harassment, refuse to be barred from the “sweet land of liberty” of another song named “America.”

Esquire‘s critic Dwight Macdonald saw West Side Story as replacing a “lively and disrespectful” musical style with a “schmaltzy” one at odds with urban grit. Ironically, the same Macdonald championed the cultural ferment of city-states “riven by faction, stormy with passionate antagonisms” squelched by the “uniformity and agreement” needed for “that achievement of power over other countries that is the great aim of modern statecraft.” As Hess observed in writings like Neighborhood Power, the decentralization of politics to the smallest possible scale need not result in social devolution. Freedom of choice has enough room for all of us.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “All Should Be Free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, December 3, 2021
2. “All should be free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, Kenosha, Wisconsin News, December 4, 2021
3. “All Should Be Free in America” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, December 7, 2021
4. “Six decades later, America’s headlines could remain in ‘America.'” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Glasgow [Montana] Courier, December 8, 2021