“GOP Needs to Leave Trump Behind on Trade” proclaimed the Wall Street Journal opinion page on October 3.   The Cato Institute’s Jeb Hensarling offered “a refresher course on the dangers of protectionism” to Republicans who have yet to reckon with the economic losses stemming from Trump’s full-throated embrace of tariffs — or to reconcile their abandonment of Reagan’s free-trade rhetoric with talking points about “freedom of speech, free enterprise and the freedom to bear arms.”

I’m not holding my breath. The Bush administration’s foreign policy blunders haven’t impelled the GOP to rediscover the noninterventionism of its earlier Congressional leaders such as Robert Alphonso Taft Sr., Howard Homan Buffett and Mark Hatfield.  (Hensarling cites Adam Smith’s “national-security exceptions to the free-trade rule,” making a concession to current Sinophobia. Hopefully a revived Adam Smith wouldn’t take exception to Tetris, dubbed “glasnost in a computer game” by AMIGA Plus magazine in 1989,  as exemplary of the exchange across the Iron Curtain that thawed the Cold War.)

That conservatives would neglect their traditions worth preserving is at least understandable in the short-memory world of partisan politics.  Far more puzzling is why the trade policies of the Trump Tower landlord live rent-free in the heads of those who purport to despise everything he stands for.

There have been some sharp jabs at Trump’s views on trade: During his first month in office, Vox’s “Zero-sum Trump” took a deep dive into Donald’s deep obliviousness to the gains from trade in markets with more room to grow than NYC’s tightly regulated real estate.  Yet the issue barely registered in the contentious half-decade since.

Perhaps it was simply lost in the noise.  Or the left-of-center may have gotten too used to demonizing Reagan to grasp the magnitude of the shift from “tear down this wall” to “build the wall.” Bernie Sanders told Vox that immigration freedom was “a right-wing proposal” which “would make everybody in America poorer” a month into Trump’s campaign.

Sanders should have taken a page from Noam Chomsky’s 2007 tome What We Say Goes, which observed that “Cuba and Venezuela are doing exactly what we were all taught we’re supposed to do in graduate courses in economics: they’re pursuing their comparative advantage.”  Over a century earlier, Vilfredo Pareto had noted that “the workers of [England] enjoy much greater well-being than the workers of the European continent” due to free trade making food affordable, and Benjamin Tucker made a socialist case against “the tariff monopoly.”

At the end of George W. Bush’s first term, libertarian author James Bovard explained that “the notion of ‘free trade’ — but only with nationalities that American politicians bless — is a charade. This is like proclaiming freedom of the press, and then adding that people can buy books only from publishers specifically approved by the U.S. Congress.”  How many election cycles will it take for American voters to see through the sham?

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

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1. “The Left Needs to Leave Trump Behind on Trade” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, October 15, 2022

The US Supreme Court has agreed, in its coming session, to hear an appeal in the case of Gonzalez v. Google. The case deals with one aspect of “the 26 words that created the Internet” — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

As is usually the case when Section 230 comes up, the pundit-media industrial complex goes into overdrive describing Section 230 as a “liability shield” that provides “immunity” for Big Tech. It isn’t a “liability shield,” nor does it provide “immunity,” except in the sense that you are neither “liable” for, nor need “immunity” from prosecution over, a crime you didn’t commit.

Here are the “26 words” in question:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

The important thing to understand about those 26 words is that they should have been condensed to 23 words that say the same thing:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service IS the publisher or speaker of any information published or spoken by someone else.”

Today’s Internet thrives on self-publishing platforms. Social media like Twitter and Facebook. Commenting services like Disqus. Blog platforms like WordPress.

Those platforms are analogous to printing presses, which can be used by anyone to print anything, not to newspapers or magazines where an editor pre-selects what content gets published.

If I sell you a hammer, I’m not the one who beats your spouse to death with it. If I sell you a car, I’m not the one who gets drunk and rams it into a tree. If I give you a printing press, I’m not the one who uses it to publish a Ku Klux Klan tract or a stack of revenge porn flyers.

Gonzalez v. Google takes that obvious fact of reality a little far afield. It’s not about who published what, but about Google subsidiary YouTube’s “recommendation algorithm.” The plaintiffs assert that because YouTube’s algorithm recommended recruitment videos for the Islamic State to viewers, Google is responsible for that organization’s 2015 terror attacks in Paris (in which a relative of the plaintiffs was killed).

But YouTube didn’t publish those videos. They just made a  video “printing press” available to all comers, then used an algorithm to recommend videos particular viewers might be interested in watching.  The makers of the videos made the videos. The people who were interested in the videos watched — and may have acted in response to — the videos.

Yes, YouTube helped make that possible — but only in the same sense that a magazine running an ad for chainsaws helps make it possible for some nitwit to  bring a tree down on your house.

Attempting to unmake reality by repealing or undoing the effect of Section 230 won’t stop terrorism. It won’t keep us safe. It will just make us easier to muzzle.

The lower courts were correct in ruling against the Gonzalez v. Google plaintiffs. The Supreme Court should likewise recognize reality and put this vexatious lawsuit out of its misery.

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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As surely as day follows night, a presidential visit follows any major disaster in the United States, so it’s no surprise that US president Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden plan, as reported at Politico, to personally “survey storm damage” from Hurricanes Fiona and Ian, and “meet with officials,”  in Puerto Rico and Florida.

That’s always how it goes, and it’s always a bad idea.

I understand WHY it happens. It doesn’t happen because a president thinks a disaster area is a great place to campaign for re-election or for his party’s candidates. It happens because a president’s opponents will paint him as callous, uncaring, and out of touch if he doesn’t get on a plane and go through the motions of comforting the afflicted.

But presidential visits to disaster areas don’t comfort the afflicted, they afflict the afflicted.

How many planes full of urgently needed cargo and people will be delayed by the security measures around Air Force One’s arrival, presence, and departure?

How many cops and other first responders will spend their time providing motorcade security and so forth when they could have been helping displaced and distressed Puerto Ricans and Floridians get back on their feet? How badly will essential traffic get delayed by the presidential circus?

Whatever you think about federal disaster aid, it’s also worth considering how many destroyed homes could be replaced with the money spent to fly in a political sight-seer and his entourage.

Joe Biden doesn’t need to personally “survey the damage.” Plenty of other people are doing that right now, and producing reports on it for him to read.

If he needs to “meet with officials,” he has numerous telephone/Internet conferencing options at his disposal — options that don’t require those officials to deal with a real emergency AND a presidential visit emergency when they owe their full attention to the real emergency.

Unlike many, I don’t normally associate politicians with words like “leadership” and “courage.” But if Joe Biden wanted to put those qualities on display, he’d issue a statement along these lines:

“I won’t be visiting Puerto Rico and Florida this week. They’re busy.  They’ve got work to do. Anything I could do for them would best be done from the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. I’m going to stay out of their way, wish them well, and help from here. If that’s bad politics, so be it.”

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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