“What noted conservative advocates jailing people to prevent the spread of their ideas?” If David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom was written nowadays, he could challenge readers to think of one who doesn’t.

Friedman observed that National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s then-recent 1965 call for “quarantining all [narcotics] addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague” was “inconsistent with [Buckley’s] belief in a free society.”  The pugnaciously partisan pundit of conservatism wouldn’t take the implications of his own analogy far enough to “favor jailing Galbraith, Bundy, and several Rockefellers as carriers of liberalism.”

By 1996, Thomas Szasz could be confident that “Buckley has since moderated his views” on the issue (even if he hadn’t “abandoned defining the ‘drug problem’ as a medical matter”).

Yet in February 2025, former Reagan staffer Glenn Loury still considered applying a Just Say No approach to other vices, deeming “online gambling and pornography … detrimental … to marriage,” enough so to possibly justify efforts to “prosecute producers of … the most obscene videos.” Friedman had quipped that the decisions made by what Buckley called the “psychologically weak or misinformed” might include “getting married or subscribing to National Review.”

Loury’s “obscene videos” may not include Academy Award champion Anora, but on May 3, Lauren Smith vouched that its filmmakers’ acceptance speeches would “legitimise the act of sexually exploiting women for money” (“The ‘vibe shift’ hasn’t reached the Oscars,” spiked). That same day, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called anti-Semitism “comparable to history’s most deadly plagues” not just in its harmful effects but its catchiness, with top universities serving as “greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence” — while decrying in the same breath “censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.” JFK’s nephew ignores such ills among his new bedfellows in the Trump administration as intently as the new PBS American Masters documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse covers them as if they are only found there.

Friedman pointed out that “a university may proclaim its neutrality, but neutrality, as the left quite properly argues, is also a position” — one particularly hard to maintain “if one believes that the election of Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy would be a national tragedy.” Long after their time, the solution remains not “a university run from the outside, by a state government” but developing “noncoercive cooperation.”

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

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“Social Security is the biggest Ponzi Scheme of all time,” Elon Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan on the latter’s podcast. “If you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue.”

Cue outrage.

“Billionaires like you to pay the same amount into Social Security as a truck driver,” US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) whined, failing to mention that billionaires like Elon Musk also receive the same maximum monthly Social Security check as that truck driver.

“He’s going after the elderly, the disabled, and orphaned children so he can pocket it in tax cuts for himself,” said US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s disgusting.” AOC apparently thinks people won’t notice that Congress has “borrowed” nearly $3 trillion from the Social Security Trust fund, and that she’s voted for much of that “borrowing.”

For the most part, Musk is correct to refer to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. It pays out benefits from newer revenues, not by investing Social Security taxes in profitable ventures.

There’s one respect in which it differs from the traditional Ponzi scheme, though.

In the “private sector,” Ponzi scammers try to hide what they’re up to. Investors are led to BELIEVE their money is being used profitably, when in reality their “dividends” come from luring in new investors until the con collapses and the perpetrator either flees with his ill-gotten gains or goes to prison.

Social Security, on the other hand, has transparently operated in a facially Ponzi-like manner for decades — and the US Supreme Court publicly declared, 65 years ago, in its ruling on Flemming v. Nestor, that no one is “entitled to” any payout at all: “The noncontractual interest of an employee covered by the Act cannot be soundly analogized to that of the holder of an annuity, whose right to benefits are based on his contractual premium payments.”

Politicians still pretend that Social Security is retirement “insurance,” but it’s neither actuarially based nor guaranteed to provide any “return” at all.

Nor is it an “investment.” It’s just a tax you and your employer have to pay, loosely linked to the possibility of getting a check in the future … if Congress doesn’t change its mind.

Social Security was a Depression-era welfare program that its primary backer, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said in 1935 “ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”

The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi scheme is that it defrauds presumably unsuspecting victims.

The sad truth that Musk didn’t bring up is that the victims have known — or at least should have known — they were being scammed since at least as early as 1960.

Apparently most Americans would rather remain scammed, and hope for the best, than admit the truth to themselves.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On February 26, ABC News reports, Europol announced the arrest of 25 individuals it accuses of being “part of a criminal group engaging in the distribution of images of minors fully generated by artificial intelligence.”

Again, for emphasis: “Fully generated by artificial intelligence.”

Yes, sexual abuse of children is a horrific crime. Yes, those who engage in it are criminals. But can imaginary characters be “minors?” And are fictional depictions of those characters being victimized really “crimes?”

Over the years, politicians and law enforcement agencies have increasingly exploited such claims to groom the public into moral panic at the expense of REAL children suffering REAL sexual abuse in REAL life.

It’s a pretty simple con. Most people rightly find the sexual molestation of children horrifying. They want it stopped. They want the perpetrators brought to justice.

But investigating and proving real crimes is hard work.

Police departments would rather run sting operations with fake victims — cops posing online as minors available for sex — for easy arrests and good publicity, than put their officers to the more difficult (and expensive) task of conducting real investigations and tracking down real criminals.

Prosecutors would rather try those cases, which require no  evidence of an actual victim or an actual crime, than have to present a real victim, a real perpetrator, and real proof to a jury.

Politicians live in perpetual need of gut-wrenching topics to virtue signal to voters about, and since real child molestation and real child porn are already illegal, they make do with promoting new laws against fake child molestation, fake child porn, “child-like” sex dolls, etc. … and, as noted above, entirely fictional material “fully generated by artificial intelligence.”

None of this makes our children any safer — the real problems aren’t going away and for all we know might even be getting worse — but it’s great for law enforcement budgets and helps politicians herd panicked voters to the polls.

Your tax dollars at work, folks. And here’s the thing:

While the legal availability of AI-generated child pornography, “child-like” sex dolls, etc., wouldn’t eliminate real child sexual abuse, it would probably reduce the incidence.

Put another way, at least SOME pedophiles are probably prone to settle for fantasy, especially if the difference between fantasy and reality is the difference between freedom and imprisonment. If they face prison either way, more of them will opt to really molest real children instead of fantasize that they’re molesting fake children.

And to put it a third way: Those who support laws against “fully generated by artificial intelligence” child porn objectively support more real child porn, and more of the crimes that go into its creation.

That’s reality, not a story “fully generated by artificial intelligence.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY