All posts by Joel Schlosberg

When History Doesn’t End

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 Jones quipped 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 Forum berated 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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “When History Doesn’t End” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, July 4, 2024
  2. “SCHLOSBERG COLUMN: When History Doesn’t End” by Joel Schlosberg, The LaGrange, Georgia Daily News, July 5, 2024

Don’t Chip Off the Old Mr. Block

Donald Trump wasn’t the first to call Queens home while being a magnet for controversy and legal trouble due to flouting convention in sexual relationships and work, but lacks Wilhelm Reich’s emphasis on free choice and mutual respect. Public domain.

“Mr. Block … licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him.” Industrial Worker editor Walker C. Smith wasn’t foreseeing, by 111 years, Walter Block, PhD’s “Libertarians Should Vote For Trump” (The Wall Street Journal, May 29); the character from Walker’s newspaper was fictional enough to be a blockhead in the most literal sense.

Dr. Block should get his head examined. “Hats off” to inviting Donald Trump to the Libertarian National Convention as being a more effective move than anything else the Libertarian Party “did in more than half a century of existence?” Such mental gymnastics dwarf the cartoon Block’s comically undersized bowler.

Block wants “the party of principle to be better publicized,” but if an afterthought to Trump’s ambition is the best notice they can get, libertarians could quote Progressive Conservative minister Darcy McKeough: “those are my principles, and if you don’t like them I have some others.” Maybe even take a page from the name of McKeough’s party and rename themselves “authoritarian libertarians.”

“Libertarian socialists” may seem just as oxymoronic; Block contrasts Republican “free enterprise” with “Biden the socialist.” Yet he extolled the voluntary socialism of “the convent, monastery, kibbutz, commune, syndicalist association, cooperative” in the 2019 Journal op-ed “Bad Capitalism and Good Socialism,” garnering a letter to the editor indignant at Block for not mentioning that “there are no countries in which socialism has worked on a large scale” (the same can be said of actually existing state capitalism).

Block trusts Trump’s promise of leniency for Ross Ulbricht during his second term (in living memory of Jimmy Carter enacting the Granting Pardon for Violations of the Selective Service Act immediately upon starting his first), and makes a qualified claim that through his re-election “we may get a slightly more libertarian president” than Biden.

On tariffs, perhaps: Biden has augmented Trump’s.  Regarding the underlying principle that voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial, Trump surpasses Pat Buchanan’s relatively literate dismissal of its intellectual origins in “scribblers like David Ricardo, James Mill and John Stuart Mill,” roaring that the notion that “both sides win” in negotiations is “a bunch of crap.”

Block might include that among the “obnoxious behavior” characteristic of gruff New Yorkers: Trump as Archie Bunker with his prejudices discreetly de-emphasized.  Not that the star of The Apprentice would follow the lead of Archie Bunker’s Place in getting berated as “one of them bleeding-heart liberals” for supporting gender neutrality in sports when a girl Bunker raises is turned away from an all-male baseball team.

Trump’s GOP would be even more unwelcome to another sitcom conservative, Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties, who teased his flower-adult parents but cited John Stuart Mill when joining them in opposing book bans.  Alex was the only Keaton to enthuse over Milton Friedman, but they all could have appreciated Friedman’s insistence that “I admire [modern liberals] for the softness of their heart,” only objecting when it “extends to their head as well.”  That’s a long way from excusing illiberalism that is simultaneously hard-hearted and blockheaded.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “Don’t Chip Off the Old Mr. Block” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, June 3, 2024

I Protest: It Is Not a Merry May

Retlaw’s cartoon from a 1923 issue of Industrial Worker shows Wobblies being “in favor of fun” as they have some around a maypole. Public domain.

“V-U. DAY!” proclaimed the May 2 cover of the New York Post. Despite the jubilant headline and “mostly sunny, warm” weather forecast, the national mood in early May is more malaise than morning-in-America.

After all, even the classic Cold War political thriller Seven Days in May took its time revealing the scope of the challenge to the American way, rather than letting it into the open on day one.

New York mayor Eric Adams is quoted as considering it “despicable that schools will allow another country’s flag to fly in our country.” (Has Adams forgotten the Israeli flags unfurled by counterprotesters, or the multitudinous banners seen on class trips to the United Nations?)

The paranoid Post is more historically true to its founder Alexander Hamilton’s backing of the Alien and Sedition Acts than his fictionalization in The Hamilton Mixtape finding it “astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word.”  Even so, they should calm down about the university populations they liken to the Axis.

Historian James Loewen emphasized that polls consistently found more approval for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq among those with college education.  Antiwar demonstrators have always been “the loud minority” of Mad magazine’s 139th cover from 1970.

Even many not viewing protesters as a fifth column on campus share the frustrations of Resentment Against Achievement author Robert Sheaffer, who sees “the largesse of the taxpaying class” leading to “far fewer concerns about productive activity” than among those who prefer to spend time on pursuits “that will yield far more gain” than “joining some probably futile protest.”

Heavy financial subsidization, extending to even nominally private American institutions, does atrophy their resource-allocation acumen in, and outside, the classroom. However, as Loewen notes, funding pays for itself as “a bulwark of allegiance” to the state.  While paralleling the “vastly extended schooling” of Castro’s Cuba and Maoist China, it results in a student body far more loyal to the USA than to the ghost of the USSR.

Ronald Radosh was haunted by that specter when he wrote of having been to New York’s “historic center of radical protest” in Union Square as a red-diaper baby from literal infancy.  In the summer of 2001, he perceived a “growing irony” that May Day parades were “the first step of my journey to America, a country where I was born but didn’t fully discover until middle age.”  Ironically, that celebration originates with labor agitators not from the twentieth century Kremlin but nineteenth century Chicago. Hippolyte Havel pointed out that organizers like Albert Parsons and Dyer Lum drew upon American experience for ideas dismissed as “foreign poison imported into the States from decadent Europe.”

For a century before Sheaffer suggested it, “pro-freedom” Americans inspired by the first May Day have been on the march “against government restrictions on our liberties.” As Liberty‘s Benjamin Tucker recommended in 1884, their supporters need “not even gather in the streets but stay at home and stand back on their rights” to win them.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “I protest: It is not a merry May” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, May 7, 2024
  2. “I Protest: It Is Not a Merry May” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 9, 2024
  3. “KNAPP [sic] COLUMN: I Protest: It Is Not a Merry May,” The LaGrange, Georgia Daily News, May 9, 2024
  4. “Knapp [sic]: It is not Merry May” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Madill, Oklahoma Record, May 8, 2024
  5. “Opinion: I protest: It is not a merry May” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, May 11, 2024