All posts by Joel Schlosberg

Op-Eds

No Body for President? Pay Mind.

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Photo by US Food and Drug Administration, 1988. Public Domain.
Part of a 1988 poster of Jesse Ventura by the US Food and Drug Administration. Public domain.

A celebrity who unleashed a frenzy of media attention with an unexpected attainment of a term in political office, despite being famed more for an outlandish personal style and uninhibited public statements than governmental experience, garnered insufficient ballots to win the 2020 US presidential election.

The slightly over 1,500 votes on the Green Party of Alaska line for former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura may seem a mere footnote to the failed re-election bid of Donald Trump, whose level of support for Ventura’s rerun was much less than the “one hundred percent” promised at WrestleMania in 2004. Yet the success of referendum initiatives for drug decriminalization, two decades after Ventura’s endorsement of such measures was viewed as no less outrageous than his feathered boas, hints that he may have had more to offer than a coincidental foreshadowing of the paths from performance to politics of Trump or Ventura’s movie costar Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In his 1999 book I Ain’t Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up, Ventura argued against drug prohibition not only on pragmatic grounds that it would be ineffective and counterproductive, but that “the government has no business telling us what we can and can’t use for pain relief and in matters of our own health.” Despite bragging to Reason magazine that year about how “I’ve taken the libertarian exam and scored perfect on it,” his record in office was less consistent, and he failed to sustain an alliance with libertarians.

However, Ventura was right to note that “we’ve gotten into the bad habit of looking to the government to solve every personal and social crisis that comes along” and that “there are a lot of good causes out there, but they can’t possibly all be served by government.”

Ventura’s proposed remedies, such as legislatures spending one year in four pruning old laws rather than passing new ones, may not have been the most practical ways to achieve that ideal. But such a healthy skepticism of the status quo could boost efforts to rebuild voluntary civil society and mutual aid. And despite his Green Party of Alaska nod being unsought, and at odds with the national party’s backing of longtime Green New Dealer Howie Hawkins, it should inspire the Greens to return to their own roots in proclaimed key values of grassroots democracy and decentralization.

In the 1987 movie The Running Man, Ventura portrayed “America’s own Captain Freedom” as a foe of Schwarzenegger’s freedom fighter. Its tagline predicted that 2019 would be a time when “America’s finest men don’t run for President.” Ironically, the finest ideas of the man who played Captain Freedom in the movies might help the USA of the 2020s escape from the ideological confines of previous decades.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Jimmy Carter Freed Markets. Will Joe Biden?

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Joe Biden with Jimmy Carter. Public Domain.

On October 1, Jimmy Carter became the first-ever US president to live past 95 years. He enjoyed a celebratory cavalcade in Plains, Georgia.  Yet his Democratic party has ignored one of his most enduring legacies.

Signing the Airline Deregulation Act, the Motor Carrier Regulatory Reform and Modernization Act, and the Staggers Rail Act into law, Carter’s pen struck longstanding regulatory restrictions on commerce via sky, road, and railway. More goods from more sellers could now be bought — and delivered — in more ways.

The regulatory structures left in place by such partial measures have faced no real challenge from subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations. Partisans on both sides would soon mistake deregulation for a right-wing project, originating with rock-ribbed conservative Ronald Reagan and continued by centrist Bill Clinton, despite neither putting into practice their rhetorical echoes of Carter.

The view of Carter’s economic program from farther left was summed up by Howard Zinn: That it preserved “the fundamental facts of maldistribution of wealth in America.” Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer puzzles that Carter’s deregulation was supported by “an odd coalition of right-wingers, mainstream economists, liberals, and consumer advocates.”

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader urged Carter to allow “wide-open price competition in the marketplace.” This, he argued, would undermine corporate “federal and state welfare supports” which “assure price-setting cartels.”  Gabriel Kolko’s historical study Railroads and Regulation supports that case, showing how industry titans not only supported federal regulation but “enthusiastically worked for its extension.”

Given how much “the motives and consequences of regulation have been misunderstood,” Kolko was onto something in inferring that “the conventional interpretation … warrants a radical reappraisal.”

Carter has called Joe Biden his “first and most effective supporter in the Senate.” The current Democratic nominee should be reminded to follow Carter’s deregulatory path.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Testing, Testing, One, Two, Zero

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Photo of ACT test prep volumes by dorante10. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

For this fall’s college freshmen, standardized tests weren’t as crucial in determining their selection as they would have been before 2020. Hundreds of educational institutions waived exam requirements when COVID prevented on-site administration. Some even excised the tests from the application process entirely. Yet Jeffrey Selingo reports that “something strange happened: Teenagers continued to sign up for the exams” (“The SAT and the ACT Will Probably Survive the Pandemic—Thanks to Students,” The Atlantic, September 16).

This devotion to getting an edge into colleges has remained persistent even a year after the Operation Varsity Blues investigation revealed how much of the admission criteria were being exaggerated or outright fabricated. With colleges replacing their on-campus offerings by remote video instruction — and online course materials like those long made accessible for free by initiatives like MIT’s OpenCourseWare — elite colleges have much less to offer in return for the tens of thousands in annual tuition they still charge. How has their draw remained so persistent?

Maybe it’s less that their wares are uniquely valuable than that they’ve closed off alternatives. Kevin Carey explains in The End of College that “the higher-education industry receives hundreds of billions of dollars every year in the form of direct appropriations, tax preferences, and subsidies for their customers in the form of government scholarships and guaranteed student loans. The only way to get that money is to be an accredited college. And the accreditation system is controlled by the existing colleges themselves, who set the standards for which organizations are eligible for public funds.”

Standardized tests provide the accreditation monopoly with the data the top-down system needs to function. As anthropologist James C. Scott observes, “those at the greatest distance from ground zero of the classroom” particularly benefit from having “an index, however invalid, of comparative productivity and a powerful incentive system to impose their pedagogical plans.”

When Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution became one of the earliest journalistic accounts of the culture of computer programmers, Levy noted their insistence on evaluating each other by the quality of their programs, eschewing what they considered “bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.” In an addendum to a 2010 reissue of his book, Levy found many of its personalities had retained that spirit, as expressed by Bill Gates: “If you want to hire an engineer, look at the guy’s code. That’s all. If he hasn’t written a lot of code, don’t hire him.”

Higher learning — and its certification — can follow computer power’s path out of elite institutions to everyday ubiquity. If its participants can win the freedom to choose, share and exchange, the process can become more equitable as well as less bogus.

The Garrison Center’s Joel Schlosberg wrote his SAT essay on freedom in the science fiction of Eric Frank Russell.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “Testing, Testing, One, Two, Zero” by Joel Schlosberg, The Citizen [Chicago, IL], September 11, 2020 (both web and print)
  2. “Testing, testing, one, two, zero” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, September 24, 2020
  3. “Testing, Testing, One, Two, Zero,” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, September 25, 2020
  4. “Despite not needing to, college-bound students flock to ACTs, SATs,” by Joel Schlosberg, Greater Southwest News-Herald [Summit, IL], September 25, 2020
  5. “Testing, Testing, One, Two, Zero,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, September 26, 2020