Is “cutthroat economic libertarianism” force-feeding Americans a “homogenized corporate culture?”  New York Times opinion columnist Matthew Walther thinks so (“Shopping for ‘Woke-Free’ Beer? Read This,” May 1).

Walther correctly notes that current culture wars over beer brands like Bud Light have largely ignored how many of them are owned by a handful of larger companies — and how all of them operate in a larger marketplace dominated by “generic large-scale corporate profit-seeking.” But is this really “economic libertarianism?”

Walther observes that in the less consolidated industry of the 1970s, regional brewer Coors had real clout to enforce its owners’ union-busting conservatism despite being shunned by “respectable middle-class liberal social circles.” True enough, but the Coors-hauling outlaws of Smokey and the Bandit aren’t so tidily relegated to the same “right-wing” extreme.

After all, the Burt Reynolds vehicle wasn’t the only 1977 blockbuster in which rural restlessness and speedy smuggling defies domineering, corrupt authorities. Yet the Galactic Empire of Star Wars was inspired by the administration of the same Richard Nixon whom the Coors family considered a “squish”  (meanwhile, the outlaw truckers on the Seventies screen were a nod to real-life convoys at odds with union bosses not for “feckless paternalism” but for compromising negotiations with plain old bosses).

The distrust of culinary as well as cultural homogenization was less a forerunner of the here’s-the-beef presidency of Coors favorite Ronald Reagan than an echo of the hippies busted for improper disposal of a communal meal in Alice’s Restaurant — or, for that matter, a parallel to the peanut seller then in the Oval Office decriminalizing homebrews.

Walther borrows the name of the 1980 book Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale to denote the antithesis of the globalized economy. Yet Sale’s less-remembered-than-its-title tome argued that the “growth of conglomerates and ogliopolies” would be halted if “the myriad government supports favoring large (and therefore largely unresponsive) businesses were withdrawn.”

The impersonality of commerce might seem to make the pursuit of any value system an exercise in futility. While Anheuser-Busch’s all-Americanism is diluted by the merger with Belgian Interbrew and Brazilian AmBev, groovy Ben & Jerry’s has been gobbled up by the equally multinational Unilever.  Even the “staid Midwestern brands” and built-in-the-USA autos which Walther recalls as having been the acceptable alternatives to the Coors can and the “foreign car” were built from the raw materials of a worldwide market.

Yet the very tendency to enmesh consumers into webs more far-flung than they can trace is in fact a strength. As Milton Friedman put it: “The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Smokey Versus the Market” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 5, 2023
2. “Smokey versus the market” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], May 5, 2023
3. “Smokey versus the market” by Joel Schlosberg, The Times and Democrat [Orangeburg, South Carolina], May 11, 2023

“White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday discussed the brutal slaying of five people in Texas,” the New York Post whines, “without noting the fugitive accused of the heinous crime is an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported four times.”

Francisco Oropesa, the subject of a continuing manhunt as I write this, allegedly murdered several of his neighbors after they complained about his noisy behavior (shooting in his back yard while intoxicated).

What does Oropesa’s immigration status have to do with anything? I’m tempted to say “nothing,” but on further thought this strikes me as a teachable moment.

The usual suspects, of course, want us to take this incident as confirmation that “illegal” immigration is an inherently terrible thing, and that the US government needs to dramatically increase its funding ($25 billion is the number in president Joe Biden’s 2023 budget request) and manpower (more than 40,000 government employees between the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement) dedicated to “immigration enforcement.”

The REAL lesson is that throwing tens of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of people at “immigration enforcement,” turning a 100-mile strip around the edges of the United States into a “constitution-free” zone where native and immigrants alike are subjected to warrantless searches and other predatory government behavior, and abducting and deporting people multiple times:

HAS. NOT. WORKED.

Nor is it about to suddenly, magically START working.

The borders of the United States have always been open (by constitutional mandate until the late 1800s, when the Supreme Court decided to start ignoring the Constitution and just let Congress do whatever it felt like).

The borders of the United States are open now. People who want to get in, get in. Some of them are abducted and deported. And those who still want to be here get BACK in.

The borders of the United States will always be open. With 95,500 miles of border and coastline, “securing the border” wouldn’t be an option even if the government put every member of the US armed forces, plus every state and local cop, on nothing but the business of “securing the border.”

Our choices are:

1. Open borders; or
2. Open borders AND a $25-billion, 40,000-guard, 100-mile-wide police state dedicated to the preposterous claim that we can have something other than open borders.

Pick one.

Either way,  Oropoesa’s victims remain exactly as dead as they would be if he was from Peoria.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) 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.

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“When it had a Democratic majority last year,” the New York Times reports, more than 200 years after the Boston Gazette decried Massachusetts state Senator Elbridge Gerry’s district as a sprawling, curving salamander-shaped monstrosity,  “the North Carolina Supreme Court voided the state’s legislative and congressional maps as illegal gerrymanders. Now the court has a Republican majority, and says the opposite.”

I’m shocked — SHOCKED! — to hear that a change of partisan composition on a court has resulted in partisan changes to the partisan content of that court’s rulings on partisan political matters.

The drawing of legislative districts across America is a never-ending partisan war. As the Forward Party’s platform points out, “over 80% of Congressional districts are considered  ‘safe’ seats — they are either clearly Republican or clearly Democratic, leading to a reelection rate over 90%.”

That’s not a side effect. It’s the intent. Legislative majorities draw districts to guarantee that they’ll REMAIN legislative majorities. Legislative minorities then go to court begging for rulings that give them majorities, or at least increase their minority numbers.

While those majorities and minorities often have demographic components — black vs. white, urban vs. rural, etc. — the components are generally subsumed into the simpler identifier of party affiliation.

The Forward Party’s proffered solutions are to “[i]mplement independent or non-partisan redistricting commissions” and pass federal legislation making it illegal to gerrymander by “packing” particular voter types into, or “cracking” them between, districts to benefit one party.

While I like the way the Forward Party thinks on the matter of gerrymandering, neither of those solutions will end gerrymandering, for two reasons.

One is that “independent” and “non-partisan” are meaningless terms. They just mean the party affiliations of the contemplated commissions’ members wouldn’t be publicly advertised, not that those affiliations wouldn’t exist. Anyone who lives in a town with “non-partisan” local elections knows what parties the mayor and council members belong to. Not mentioning a fact doesn’t change the fact.

Another is that the federal law in question would — like the North Carolina law mentioned above —  be interpreted by party-affiliated judges.

There are three ways to fix gerrymandering.

The simplest would be to do away with “districts” altogether and elect all political representatives “at large.” Every Floridian, for example, would get to vote to fill each seat in Florida’s legislature. That would entail its own problems, but it would move the complexities from the administrative end to the campaigns’ side of things.

The most obvious — and I’m far from the first to suggest it — is algorithmic districting: Have a computer draw districts of uniform population, taking no account whatsoever of any other factor (party affiliation, race, urban/rural, etc.). One person, one vote, no gaming of the system. Problem solved.

The third, and my preferred one, is to abandon political government, with its false claims of “representation,” altogether. I sense, however, that most Americans aren’t ready to go that far just yet.

Algorithmic districting is a distant second place solution, but it’s better than gerrymandering, even gerrymandering falsely advertised as “independent” or “non-partisan.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) 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.

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