The USA’s campaign season remains a puzzling labyrinth, but one less appealing than Jim Henson’s “a ‘mazing tale of never-ending fantasy.” Cartoon for Puck magazine’s March 11, 1896 issue by Charles Jay Taylor. Public domain.
Michael Gallagher considers the relatively low inflation rates of the period “from Reagan’s second term through Trump’s” first to be “America’s amazing capitalism” (Queens Chronicle, September 5), sarcastically suggesting that “for 35 years … the robber barons of industry didn’t realize they could set their prices and gouge more money from the American people,” only getting the notion after the inauguration of noted anti-capitalist Joe Biden.
Gallagher makes no mention of Biden’s vice president, but the candidate Donald Trump dubs “Comrade Kamala Harris” will presumably carry forth such a break from said “amazing capitalism.” Meanwhile, a September 4 USA Todayheadline crows: “Goldman Sachs says Comrade Kamala is better for economy. She can’t even do communism right!”
By the standards of 2024 mud-slinging, the ranks of Reds could include even Ronald Reagan himself. When not lauding workers’ “cooperative effort aimed at sharing in the ownership of the new wealth being produced” or being photographed under a towering statue of Vladimir Lenin at Moscow State University, the Gipper occasionally paraphrased a remark by socialist intellectual George Bernard Shaw. “A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul” was Shaw’s way of explaining to readers of Everybody’s Political What’s What? how inflationary policies remained popular when inevitably “the return to normal prices rescues pensioners from destitution; but it ruins debtors, making the cure as calamitous as the disease, Paul being now robbed to pay Peter.”
That sounds more like something one might expect to hear from such a free-market advocate as Henry Hazlitt, whose The Conquest of Poverty echoes the Shaw he denounces as “shamelessly ignorant and silly” on economics in pointing out that “practically everybody concede[s] that the State does have a right to seize from Peter to pay Paul, when it levies necessary taxes, say, on Peter, a businessman, to pay Paul, a policeman” rather than asking “whether or not Paul is performing necessary and legitimate services in return for payment.”
One might expect Hazlitt to have reacted to Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons with Gallagher’s snideness, seeing them as unjustly unloved Ubermenschen who instead deserve to be lionized on Ayn Rand book covers. Instead, Hazlitt’s assessment for The New York Times Book Review found that by reading such surveys “we would understand our country much better than we do” than from what he quotes Progressive historians Charles and Mary Beard as calling the “shadow picture” of conventional histories that offer more on “politicians of minor rank” than business leaders. Even Rand’s tomes offer a more critical view between their covers of many malevolent magnates, whether archetypal fictional antagonists or all too real, who rely on “the power of forced, unearned, economically unjustified privileges.”
A history of actually existing capitalism that ignores the wide valleys between the highest peaks is as incomplete as an account of the Amazin’ Mets which only touches on their 1969 and 1984 World Series wins. In contrast, an economy of free exchanges between Peter and Paul (or Paulette) is a win-win for everyone involved.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
Westminister College’s photo of the Bedtime for Bonzo star revisiting its academic setting while not calling for rebuilding the Berlin Wall. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
As Americans take August to process the presidential race upheavals of July, the most consequential may prove to be a union leader garnering wild cheers for declaring that “the biggest recipients of welfare in this country are corporations … we must put workers first!”
In the twentieth century, such campaign rhetoric was heard of only at the margins from the likes of Ralph Nader and Eugene Debs, not from any respectable Democrat, let alone a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention. Yet Teamsters president Sean O’Brien draws on enough mainstream discontent to position himself as a counter to “the extremes in both parties,” less than a year after conservatives united against actors’ and teachers’ union strikes.
They’re still a long way from warming to those professions. Another 2024 RNC big shot may have been dubbed “Hollywood” Hulk Hogan, but the lead of the Jordan Belfort-produced turkey Santa With Muscles lacks the star power of Batman and Robin‘s George Clooney.
Meanwhile, when Trump’s running mate JD Vance got the nod from O’Brien for having “the courage to sit down and consider points of view that aren’t funded by big money think tanks,” he wasn’t talking about what Vance learned at Yale. Republicans are as reluctant to laud their candidate’s choice to complete college as Democrats are to take Kamala Harris to task for not speaking out against early 2020s class closures after having been heavy-handed as a prosecutor on kids who skipped school.
An earlier Democratic nominee was distinctly less enthusiastic about imposing educational choices. In a 1988 introduction to John Holt’s How Children Fail, George McGovern noted that he had read the original edition during his 1972 bid and that “a visit to schools in any part of the nation will reveal the same uninspired children and lack of attention to what is being taught of which John Holt wrote.” Given such a status quo, “there is nothing lost and much to be gained in encouraging children to follow their own curiosity about life and to build on their own personal interests.”
The Cato Institute which exemplifies “big money think tanks” for liberals (while getting lip service from big-spending conservatives) reached leftward in 1977 with a denunciation of “schools that promise equal enlightenment [but] generate unequally degrading meritocracy and lifelong dependence on further tutorship” by Ivan Illich in the first issue of Inquiry magazine. They succeeded in getting Anthony Burgess and Noam Chomsky to write for later issues.
In The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, historian Rick Perlstein sees a Reagan “obsessed with preserving the factory system” as his own stardom faded, quipping that “the future champion of individualism and entrepreneurship despised the new, more individualistic, entrepreneurial Hollywood.” Such values, fully compatible with free association, can usher teachers’ unions into an educational environment as far from the longstanding model of a factory-like assembly line as today’s unionized filmmakers are from the dream factory studios of yore — with comparable paydays above scale for popular talent.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
Michael J. Fox played the ultimate post-hippie yuppie on screen, but rallied with Jane Fonda, whose fitness merchandising empire bankrolled then-husband Tom Hayden’s Campaign for Economic Democracy. Photo by Liliana Nieto of the Los Angeles Times. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
“Trump Is Pat Buchanan With Better Timing” feels like a current headline eight years after it ran in Politico. Is America trapped in a rerun of the Republican Revolution of ’94, with the platforms of “presidential candidates Buchanan, David Duke and Ross Perot — the most visible figures of the political fringe” perpetually mainstreamed? The New York Times Book Review‘s Jennifer Szalai is convinced (“Ticking Time Bomb,” June 30). Or in one of the ’80s, “When Greed Was Good” — Jacob Goldstein’s headline on the facing page of the Book Review.
Goldstein writes that the cultural catchet of financial flummery made “the United States suddenly fall in love with finance while inequality skyrocketed,” suggesting Billy Joel-style verses about the likes of “Milton Friedman’s ‘Free to Choose,’ Jane Fonda, running shoes.” At the time, Mother Jonesquipped that the rock star “ain’t ‘livin’ here in Allentown'” after “marryin’ a … fashion model.” Nowadays, an ode to Air Jordan marketing from Matt Damon, previously known for plugging Howard Zinn’s People’s History, raises few eyebrows.
The line from Gekko to Gingrich needs little elaboration when Szalai places the sociopolitical rancor of the early 1990s “atop a wreckage of junk bonds, bank failures and vacant skyscrapers” of “the debt-fueled growth of the ’80s.” While Friedman was civil enough in his limited-government sentiments to be a PBS host, Szalai finds one of the most vocal supporters of Buchanan’s 1992 campaign in “the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard” who considered George Herbert Walker Bush’s re-election bid “too timid and polite.”
Szalai traces Rothbard’s “taste for conflict” to his juvenile insistence that “Communist aunts and uncles” were too harsh on Francisco Franco’s repressive rightist regime in Spain. Yet Rothbard’s pugnaciousness led him to positions unhinted at by Szalai’s selections. In 1988, he advocated voting for Democratic “cautious spender” Michael Dukakis since Bush was providing “only lip service to the free market.” His Libertarian Forumberated Friedman for providing “a free-market cloak for state despotism” in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and recommended an “angry dissection of the intellectuals in the ruling class” by Noam Chomsky.
Buchanan offered meager warmth to his libertarian bedfellows, who he said “don’t know anything about American history” when Rothbard’s publications identifying the ills of intervention included four volumes on the Revolutionary period alone. Llewelyn Rockwell recalled that by 1995, Rothbard could see that Buchanan’s “commitment to protectionism was mutating into an all-round faith in economic planning and the nation state;” by 2002, hostility to international comity ranged from the Buchanan who “hates China and the developing world” to a President George Bush who “hates the Muslim world” (Rockwell would sum up his administration as “red-state fascism”).
Goldstein notes that Trump’s first presidential term ended with a release of the Michael Milken who personified “the ’80s financialization wave” from boom to bust; the Trump of 1989 drew Rothbard’s mockery for calling Milken overpaid “from his own lofty financial perch.” Real competition in business and political economy would cut Trump’s towering shadow down to size.
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
