All posts by Joel Schlosberg

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
Op-Eds

Voters Can’t Get Mad Enough to Get Happy

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Computer printout from the MAD compiler at the University of Michigan showing a character drawing of MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman and the phrase “What Me Worry” following an error, c. 1960. Public domain.

Larry Penner vouches that “the Democrats could run Mad magazine’s ‘What, Me Worry?’ Alfred E. Neuman for president and still carry the Empire State by a wide margin” (“True blue New York,” Queens Chronicle, August 27). That’s a harsh assessment … of Neuman. Unlike Democratic politicians in solidly blue states, or Republicans in their red-state counterparts, he had real rivals to contend with.

For decades, the dimwitted mascot of the irreverent humor institution risked losing customers to comparably foolish competitors, like Cracked magazine’s Sylvester P. Smythe and Sick magazine’s Huckleberry Fink. “Mad‘s Maddest Artist” Don Martin found gainful employment in becoming “Cracked‘s Crackedest Artist.” Fink’s “Why Try Harder?” is a more fitting slogan for political machines that have minimal incentive to serve their electors than the “What, Me Worry?” which obviously inspired it.

Cracked may have cracked jokes about how it had “a fan base primarily comprised of people who got to the store after MAD sold out.” Yet while it competed with Mad for the same pool of pocket money, customers who picked both, neither, yet another funnybook, or candy would get their choice. If they wound up wasting their time (and money), it would not be due to having to settle for a lesser-evil imposition.

Only reader loyalty could ensure the permanence of such perennial Mad features as the Fold-In or Spy vs. Spy (which long outlived the Cold War it originally satirized). Even a feature as mild as Dave Berg’s “The Lighter Side Of …” did more to keep up with the times than politicians who yearn for a return to the staidness of the 1950s (minus such upstarts as the early Mad to skewer it).

Alfred E. Neuman For President mock campaigns have always had self-deprecating slogans like “He’ll keep all his promises because he promises nothing!” and “At least he’s honest about his idiocy!” But moving more of the scope of social interaction to the realm of free association and voluntary choice — and not only, but especially, activities far more serious and consequential than gag magazines — would be a very smart thing to do.

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

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