New York City Council candidate Alexa Avilés asserts that “the free market will never provide decent housing for all, and we should stop pretending otherwise” (“The Free Market Will Never Provide Decent Housing for All,” The Indypendent, April 2).  Who’s pretending?

Avilés doesn’t outright claim that the current housing market is free, but implies that a free market would reinforce the existing power of “banks and corporate landlords” over “tenants in private housing, NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] residents, and small homeowners.”

In treating the latter as the only beneficiaries of intervention in the market — and conflating a free market with policies that “let big developers take control” — Avilés ignores what Roderick T. Long notes are the far larger effects of “regulations that strangle competition in the housing market.”

Assuming that “developers’ greed drives gentrification and displacement” obscures the ways that limiting competition distorts supply and demand. Market competition compelled stockbrokers, who are not generally distinguished by an absence of greed, to reduce trading fees from $199 to $8.

Long concludes that a free housing market would be one “with landlords competing for tenants,” so that “rental contracts would cease to be as one-sidedly favorable to the landlord as they often are today.” Tenants would also enjoy more power to take many of the steps recommended by Avilés toward ownership, such as “the opportunity to collectively purchase” their buildings.

Moreover,  any free market approach must make unjustified land claims null and void. As Murray Rothbard put it, in such cases any “reform is picayune and fails to reach the heart of the question” short of “an immediate vacating of the title … with certainly no compensation to the aggressors who had wrongly seized control of the land.”

Avilés’s “Green New Deal for NYCHA” could take a page from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and revisit the writings of Henry George, who carried forth the tradition of combining free trade with land reform pioneered by such market liberals as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. FDR wanted George’s works to be “better known and more clearly understood” since they “contain much that would be helpful today.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “The Finest Trick of the Developer is to Persuade You That Free Markets Should Not Exist” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 04/07/21
• “The Finest Trick of the Developer is to Persuade You That Free Markets Should Not Exist” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 04/13/21

Paul Krugman believes he’s discovered a flaw in the work of a fellow Nobel laureate economist. The late Milton Friedman, Krugman writes, was under the mistaken impression “that more choice is always a good thing” due to taking for granted that “people have more or less unlimited capacity to do due diligence on every aspect of their lives,” but was unaware that “in the real world, too much choice can be a big problem” (“Too Much Choice Is Hurting America,” New York Times, March 1).

A closer look at Free to Choose makes clear that Friedman’s take on The Power of Choice (another Friedman title) is more sophisticated than the sheer boosterism suggested by a cursory name-check. Friedman contends that the free-market price of a commodity “transmits only the important information and only to the people who need to know.” It is precisely because it avoids “clogging the ‘in’ baskets” of producers that it allows them to focus on satisfying consumer needs.

Krugman implies that the author of Free to Choose would have no problem with people being forced to choose between flavors of mandatory programs such as Medicare Advantage. The real Milton Friedman’s argument for a negative income tax as an alternative to welfare bureaucracies was that “replacing the ragbag of specific programs with a single comprehensive program” would be more effective.

Meanwhile, if you’re among the employees who “have to decide how to invest your 401(k)” pensions, or micromanage your health insurance, you lack access to options crowded out by government policies discouraging the creation of simpler programs not tied to employers.

As Roderick Long noted in 1994, “the market creates uniformity when customers need it, and diversity when they need that instead,” not foreseeing how quickly DVDs would date his example of how “video cassettes come with lots of different kinds of movies” but not “in fifty different shapes and sizes.”

Long suggests that free competition might bring similar innovation in areas where legal monopolies are deemed inevitable or “natural” (Friedman himself wasn’t confident enough in the power of choice to fully endorse “[Friedrich] Hayek’s proposals for removing any legal obstacles to the development of private competitive money”). That approach could send waste and confusion in political economy to join Betamax — and subsequent also-ran home video formats such as Digital Video Express and HD DVD — into the dustbin of history.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Not Free Enough to Choose” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 03/05/21

February 8 marks the silver anniversary of an iconic early manifesto defending the Internet as a space where personal liberties and social cooperation might flourish free of political control … just in time. John Perry Barlow emailed “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from the World Economic Forum the day Bill Clinton signed into law restraints on free expression via the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Barlow couldn’t have foreseen that on February 2, 2021, The New York Times would print a call for incoming President Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar” to verify online information.  He did predict that national administrative substitutes for “parental responsibilities” would fail to contain “the virus of liberty” in “a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.”

Barlow’s Declaration promptly became ubiquitous in the cyberspace it extolled, its text reposted on tens of thousands of web pages (no mean feat when websites numbered in the hundreds of thousands). Detractors penned multiple Declarations of the Dependence of Cyberspace on governmental oversight, misinterpreting Barlow’s ideal of a World Wide Web freed from rulers as a Wild West Web un-moored by rules.

Barlow himself noted on his Declaration’s twentieth anniversary that it had become largely remembered as “an example of the sort of wooly-headed hippie thinking we could entertain in more innocent times.”  He admitted that he had overly high hopes for the amount of “horizontally networked consensus” that would result, and that he had underestimated the new medium’s potential for abuse.

Yet if Barlow under-emphasized the basis of his confidence in voluntary agreement to those who lacked his experience with the “unwritten social contracts” undergirding everyday life in his home state of Wyoming, he himself failed to fully appreciate its power.  He told Reason magazine in 2004 that the very nation-states he had famously declared “weary giants of flesh and steel” eight years before were now “the only force I know that is fairly reliable” at “countervailing against monopoly.”

To the contrary, political gigantism is the source of economic monopoly.  United States Steel Corporation chairman Elbert Henry Gary feared the “bitter warfare” of unregulated competition, as have industrialists closer on the cutting edge to U.S. Robotics than U.S. Steel.  Microsoft called for the United States to enact “a broad, nationwide privacy law” in 2005, just as users were abandoning Microsoft Internet Explorer for more secure competing web browsers like Firefox and Opera. Similar regulatory capture tipped the balance away from such alternatives and toward the consolidation of the Internet into a handful of centralized platforms.

Freedom of exit to innovative upstarts can still restore the potential of the early Internet to secure freedom in virtual reality, and in the real world “of flesh and steel” as well.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, February 6, 2021
2. “Brave new world wide web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Intrepid Report, February 8, 2021
3. “Brave New World Wide Web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Elko, Nevada Daily Free Press, February 8, 2021
4. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, February 9, 2021
5. “Brave new World Wide Web revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Brattleboro, Vermont Reformer, February 9, 2021
6. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, February 11, 2021
7. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Pottstown, Pennsylvania Mercury, February 12, 2021
8. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Phoenix Reporter & Item [Phoenixville, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
9. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Delaware County [Pennsylvania] Daily Times, February 12, 2021
10. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Mainline Media News [Exton, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
11. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Montgomery News [Lansdale, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
12. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, Daily Local News [West Chester, Pennsylvania], February 12, 2021
13. “Brave New World Wide Web Revisited” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times Herald [Port Huron, Michigan], February 12, 2021