“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

“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

Has The New York Times Magazine‘s David Wallace-Wells forgotten the star of Bedtime for Bonzo?

Maybe not, but his “Javier Milei Is a New Prophet of Apocalyptic Capitalism” (March 31) never mentions an obvious forerunner of the current president of Argentina. Wallace-Wells finds the tone of Milei’s speech at Davos 2024 on January 18 “vehement” and “millenarian,” but Milei’s conclusion that “The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself” is a near-verbatim echo of a much-quoted line from Ronald Reagan’s First Inaugural Address.  Most of what preceded it could have appeared in an issue of The Freeman magazine like the one Reagan was photographed reading.

Perhaps Wallace-Wells’s comparison of Milei’s “Ayn Rand regime” to “a free-market junta, this time imposed not militarily but by 55.7 percent of the popular vote” intends to evoke Reagan, even if Wallace-Wells associates the phrase “shock doctrine” with milder measures than described in Naomi Klein’s book that introduced it. Milei’s opposition to abortion is to Wallace-Wells a sign that free-marketers regard feminism as a “war on progress and achievement.” Reagan’s was a deal-breaker for Rand, who warned a Q&A audience in 1976 that “should that monster succeed in 1980 … I damn any of you who vote for him.”

Rand’s assessment of Reagan as “a cheap Hollywood ham” who “always played idiotic parts in grade-B movies” was unduly harsh.  Bonzo wasn’t in the league of Oliver Stone’s effort to remake Planet of the Apes with another California actor-governor, or even Clyde the Orangutan’s outings with a Carmel-by-the-Sea mayor. Its lead does convincingly portray a college professor whose chimpanzee-rearing antics aim to scientifically disprove that crime and vice are inevitable results of innate inferiority.

Such a bleeding-heart academic activist might expect to be denounced by the ideologue Wallace-Wells describes as “not a protectionist trade warrior speaking to the losers of globalization but a radical free marketeer who believes too much has been done to console them.” Yet Milei explains at length how economic growth cuts the losses of “the losers of globalization” by making even the poorest less poor (speaking as the head of the country whose comic strip heroine Mafalda called it a grower primarily of “pesimistas”). At least Wallace-Wells acknowledges contrasting views on trade of a politician who otherwise “shares a certain style with Trump.”

Wallace-Wells calls Milei “certainly the first avowed anarchist to be running a large modern government” for whom “all tax was coercion” while accepting Milei’s self-description as a “minarchist,” which Wallace-Wells explains as someone who would “preserve only the defense and law-enforcement functions of the state.” Samuel Edward Konkin III, who coined the term, noted that by their own reasoning minarchists called “for criminals … to fight other criminals” rather than using “free-market (all-voluntary) methods.”

Instead of wielding his office as a cudgel “against the forces of collectivism, social justice, environmentalism and feminism,” Milei could try following Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood with a role in a future Apes or Kong installment.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY