All posts by Joel Schlosberg

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Let the Twenties Roar Free

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Rodents frolic in the 1925 Disney short Alice Rattled By Rats. Public domain.

New Year’s Eve partiers had good reason to celebrate at the stroke of midnight on January 1. If the end of 2020 felt like a farewell to the missteps of more than one previous year, in a way it truly was. The culture of the year 1925 broke free from shackles imposed in 1998.

That year’s Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was far from the first of its kind. The United States Congress had reinterpreted its Constitutional mandate to grant an “exclusive Right” to creative works “for limited Times” to encompass increasingly longer periods of time. When George Washington signed the original Copyright Act into law, copyrights spanned at most 28 years. Bill Clinton’s pen bumped them from 75 years to 95.

What was unprecedented was that the additional decades didn’t just apply to new works whose creators might possibly be incentivized, but to Jazz Age classics already due to enter the public domain. A 1995 New York Times article quoted a representative of Houghton Mifflin on how they would “like to publish a successful book exclusively forever;” the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act was close enough, setting the precedent for further re-extensions in the future.

Copyrights with no effective end point might seem to be simply be the “intellectual property” equivalent of the physical kind. To the contrary, as Ayn Rand observed, they “would become a cumulative lien on the production of unborn generations, which would ultimately paralyze them.” If “Jack London fought as fiercely to control the copyright on his work as he fought for” the revolutionary socialism advocated in his writings (as noted by The Radical Jack London editor Jonah Raskin, who adds that the expiration of their copyrights that made the 2008 collection possible “would no doubt rankle him”), free-market radicals have fought to get copyrights under control.

Self-described “Ayn Rand freak” Michael S. Hart founded Project Gutenberg to give away royalty-free electronic books “for the most selfish of reasons — because I want a world that has Project Gutenberg in it.” James M. Buchanan and Milton Friedman were among the laissez-faire luminaries who detailed the economic losses of excessive copyright terms in a legal brief endorsing the overturn of the Copyright Term Extension Act.

This challenge, culminating in the the Supreme Court’s Eldred v. Ashcroft decision, was unsuccessful. Yet the absence of a follow-up Extended Extension Act has allowed some of the “limited Times” to eventually reach their limit. Publications from 1923 finally entered the public domain in 2019, and the rest of the Roaring Twenties are gradually following suit. Meanwhile, some creatives are releasing their copyrights early. This past October, Tom Lehrer waived copyright restrictions to his songs, so that nobody will have to wait until 2061 to update his satires of New Math and Hubert H. Humphrey.

The 2020s face many problems, but a failure to learn from the 1920s need not be one of them.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “Let the Twenties roar free” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, January 2, 2021
  2. “Let the Twenties Roar Free” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, January 3, 2021
  3. “Let the twenties roar free” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, January 5, 2021
  4. “Let the ’20s roar free” by Joel Schlosberg, Claremont, NH Eagle Times, January 6, 2021
  5. “Let the Twenties Roar Free” by Joel Schlosberg, Roundup, MT Record Tribune & Winnett Times, January 6, 2021
  6. “Let the Twenties Roar Free” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, January 7, 2021
Op-Eds

The Negative Philanthropic Highway

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Lloyd George as “The Philanthropic Highwayman” by Edward Linley Sambourne from the August 5, 1908 issue of Punch magazine. Public domain.

Some of the richest young heirs plan to use their inherited wealth “to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top” despite being among them (“Silver-Spoon Socialists,” The New York Times, November 29). Convinced that “true wealth redistribution means redistributing authority” rather than mere largesse, they are “investing in or donating to credit unions, worker-owned businesses, community land trusts, and nonprofits” that spread power as well as money.

Such alternatives have long been dismissed as marginal, it having been assumed that only concentration of political power can effectively fight concentration of economic power. As Doug Henwood has advised anti-corporate protesters, “socialize Merck, don’t dissolve it,” since he considers “large, complex organization” necessary. Such urgings were little needed at the close of a twentieth century when socialization had become almost synonymous with nationalization (or at the very least heavy regulation).

Yet the move away from such a conflation two decades into the twenty-first century was anticipated as far back as the nineteenth, when the economic stratagems of Josiah Warren, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker aimed at what Tucker called “subjecting capital to the natural law of competition.” A freer market could “socialize its effects by making its use beneficial to all instead of a means of impoverishing the many to enrich the few.”

Even as the twentieth century produced unprecedented amassings of wealth and power, attentive historical scholars confirmed Tucker’s view that legal privileges entrenched dominant firms and blocked the benefits of market exchange in the realms of banking, real estate, international trade, and invention. Bertrand Russell observed that “the harm that is done by great industrialists is usually dependent upon their access to some source of monopoly power.” Gabriel Kolko showed how “it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.”

The sources of monopoly power identified by Tucker are still the primary factors that distort free trade into unfair trade. Those interested in using what they have to help have-nots should aim to reroute the economy beyond those barriers — or remove them entirely.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

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