Whether or not Roe v. Wade is overturned, it will be headed the way of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The Supreme Court decision establishing a broad decriminalization of abortion throughout the United States has been unusually resilient for such a contentious subject. For nearly half a century, the verdict seemed as settled as any could be in American politics, with those favoring greater restrictions content to limit access de facto, rather than risk pushback against drastic changes to what is allowed de jure.

Yet the legal status of such a controversial topic remaining stable for such a period of time was the exception, not the rule.  Beneath the long detente lay decades “of compromising, and dickering, and trying to keep what was as it was, and to hand sops to both sides when new conditions demanded that something be done, or be pretended to be done” — words written more than half a century before Roe, about the issue of slavery.

Essayist Voltairine de Cleyre noted that political compromise set the stage for clashes between opposing camps, regardless of what the laws were on paper. Abolitionists pressed not only against slave owners, but those who thought that slavery  “was probably a mistake” but “were in no great ferment of anxiety to have it abolished.”

It’s particularly ironic that advocates of family planning have forgotten de Cleyre’s reminder of how things can get done by individuals or groups in voluntary association “without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them.”

Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger got the idea from de Cleyre’s anarchist comrade Emma Goldman. Yet as Goldman biographer Richard Drinnon observed, Sanger “guided the movement into respectably conservative channels by emphasizing the need for legislation which would give doctors, and doctors only, the right to impart contraceptive information.”

Sanger had joined with de Cleyre and Goldman not only in promoting personal autonomy for women, but for children between birth and adulthood in Modern Schools.  Yet Sanger ceded to the state the very power over reproductive health she had wrested from private patriarchs, viewing “the personal liberty of the individual” in that realm as “unrestricted and irresponsible.”  Her successors have insisted that organizations like Planned Parenthood can only function with government subsidies — while minimizing the fraction of funds going directly to abortion!

Once again,  as de Cleyre put it, “the direct actionists on both sides” will “fight it out” in contested territory, which this time spans the entire country.  The collapse of consensus will unleash plenty of acrimony, but “pro-choice” and “pro-life” partisans may as well drop the pretense that the government is either.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Abortion: Out Of The Political Trap” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, May 9, 2022
2. “Abortion: Out of the Political Trap” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 10, 2022
3. “Abortion: Out of the political trap” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, May 10, 2022
4. “Abortion: Out of the political trap” by Joel Schlosberg, Creston, Iowa News Advertiser, May 11, 2022

The 94th Academy Awards ceremony on March 27 saw misunderstanding erupt into an acrimonious conflict: The battle of the ghosts of Reitman, Reagan, Ramis, and Roosevelt.

Bill Murray paid tribute to the memory of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, while the Academy also marked the 15th anniversary of Jason Reitman’s Juno. The junior Reitman recently directed a Ghostbusters sequel in which generations joined forces to commemorate Murray’s departed fellow Ghostbuster Harold Ramis.

Meanwhile, four Oscar nominations yielded zero wins for Don’t Look Up, in which the world is endangered rather than saved by private enterprise out-muscling the state during a crisis.  The parallels between its villains and the Ghostbusters is no coincidence, since co-writer David Sirota’s book Back to Our Future is admittedly inspired by what the Bernie Sanders speechwriter considers a nefarious undermining of trust in government by such 1980s heroes.

Sirota views American popular culture as so dominated by Reagan-era renegades that citizens are blinded to the beneficence of public service.  Yet partisans on both sides of the aisle were happy to seize on the iconography of “busting” ever since Ghostbusters ruled the 1984 box office.  That year’s presidential election featured dueling “Fritzbusters” and “Reaganbusters” takeoffs on the iconic anti-ghost logo. Each advocated the other candidate as a substitute rather than a downsizing of the presidential power available to either.

Ghostbusters imagery has even been retrofitted to previous administrations, with the 1990s educational TV show Histeria! providing trustbuster Theodore Roosevelt with an off-brand proton pack to blast corporate piggery.  The overpowering of Main Street by Wall Street is treated as a natural result of market consolidation, as if Reagan’s chimpanzee costar Bonzo matured into King Kong.

Gabriel Kolko observed that the Progressive Era was in fact marked by “intense and growing competition” outpacing the “economic expansion and … greater internal concentration of capital” of the largest companies, whose owners welcomed regulation burdening smaller upstarts more than themselves. Free traders of the time called protectionist policy that sheltered domestic firms from foreign competitors “the mother of trusts.”

Kolko led a generation of historians to rediscover how supposed archenemies big business and big government actively encouraged the development of each other, as if Beowulf monsters Grendel and Grendel’s mother reproduced in a continuous chicken-and-egg cycle.  Severing the apron strings that connect the two would cut both Walter Peck-style bureaucracy and Gordon Gekko-style plutocracy 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. “The ghost of the mother of trusts” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles CIty, Montana Star, March 31, 2022
2. “The Ghost of the Mother of Trusts” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, April 1, 2022
3. “The ghost of the mother of trusts” by Joel Schlosberg, The Daily Star [Hammond, Louisiana], April 2, 2022
4. “The Ghost Of The Mother Of Trusts” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, April 2, 2022

Jacobin‘s Seth Ackerman tells us that “Higher Inflation Doesn’t Reduce Real Wages” (February 22) since it “can only be sustained over time if the demand for labor is strong enough, relative to the supply, to force employers to continually bid up wages.” In those cases, “wages tend to rise faster than profits,” so their purchasing power more than compensates for higher prices.

The socialist magazine editor views worries about inflation as stoked by “central bankers, financial journalists, Wall Street analysts, and the like” to provide cover for the Federal Reserve to enrich them under the pretext of fighting it.  Yet the assumption that inflation is driven primarily by labor bargaining power has been eagerly encouraged by Ackerman’s capitalist enemies.

“Why Play Leap Frog?” asked the title of one of a series of animated shorts made for corporate America by John Sutherland Productions in the late 1940s and early 1950s to mollify postwar workers into compliance with management.  Only a smooth  “production of more and better goods at lower costs” would garner “a real raise” rather than one eaten up by a commensurate bump in prices.  The role of bosses and bankers is downplayed in the propaganda they paid for.

Even more ironically, free-market libertarians have exposed the role of inflationary policies in benefiting capitalist elites who are willing to agree with socialists on its causes.  At the height of Richard Nixon’s “timid and fitful battle against inflation,” the November 1, 1970 issue of Libertarian Forum noted that “Austrian [economic] theory shows that in the later stages of a boom wages tend to catch up with prices, squeezing profits, and it is then that businessmen are tempted to turn to the totalitarian (and ineffective) coercion of price-wage controls” (Jacobin dubs them “revenue caps”).

In the Winter 1993-94 issue of Free Nation Foundation’s Formulations, Roderick T. Long noted that “an increase in the money supply results in an increase in prices and wages — but not immediately. There’s some lag time as the effects of the expansion radiate outward through the economy. The rich — i.e., banks, and those to whom banks lend — get the new money first, before prices have risen.”  This distortion also inevitably causes malinvestment, and “the unemployment caused by this misdirection hurts the poor most of all.”

Thus, inflation need not reach Weimar Republic levels to cause harm far beyond its apparent effects.  Ralph Borsodi observed that “it is a lie to say that a little inflation, say two or three per cent, is not stealing but that a lot of inflation, say ten or twenty or thirty percent, is all wrong” since “it is a lie to say you are against stealing, when you are in fact saying that a little stealing is all right.”  Instead of prescribing one enlightened policy for the Federal Reserve to manage the economy, Borsodi wanted the Fed to allow competition from private alternatives like his Constant currency.

A free market for labor backed by reliable money would be a real leap forward past inflated political profiteering.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Inflation Whips Labor” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, March 3, 2022
2. “Inflation Whips Labor” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, March 4, 2022
3. “Inflation Whips Labor” by Joel Schlosberg, Miles City, Montana Star, March 4, 2022
4. “Inflation whips labor” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, Arizona News, March 5, 2022