On October 7, the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal from X — formerly Twitter — concerning, among other issues, the use of  “nondisclosure orders” when prosecutors serve search warrants. In this specific case, the prosecutor was special counsel Jack Smith, the target was former president Donald Trump, and the warrant was for Trump’s Twitter account.

Smith received the warrant on January 17, 2023, but even now, more than two years later, the public has only seen redacted versions of the court proceedings around Twitter’s initial refusal to comply with it (the company was fined $350,000) and the nondisclosure order.

Secret court hearings, secret warrants, nondisclosure orders, and continuing secrecy around all those things are evil.

Yes, even if the target is a political figure you may dislike.

Yes, even if making warrants available to the public upon their issuance might make it harder for prosecutors to do their jobs.

If I considered the US Constitution a workable blueprint for a just society, rather than a paper wall that government actors punch through or set on fire whenever its provisions prove inconvenient, I’d support the following change to the Fourth Amendment (my addition in brackets):

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. [All such warrants shall be posted to a public-facing website prior to execution, where they shall remain publicly available in perpetuity, and published to the Federal Register within one working day of execution.]”

If the purpose of the “justice system” is indeed justice, the operation of that system must be transparent to the public its agents claim to represent and protect.

Even a fully transparent system wouldn’t necessarily be secure against incompetence, abuse, and corruption.

But power to conduct work allegedly “for the public” in secret guarantees not just more incompetence, abuse, and corruption, but the ability to hide that incompetence, abuse, and corruption.

Nondisclosure orders in particular are unconstitutional on their face: They violate the First Amendment’s prohibition on abridging their targets’ freedom of speech.

That fact Trumps (pun intended) prosecutorial convenience and even investigative efficacy. Neither those targeted by the state, nor the general public, should tolerate the state acting with forcible secrecy against anyone.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Another natural disaster, another round of complaints about “price-gouging.” Per Business Insider, South Carolina’s attorney general reported 142 “price-gouging” complaints in the early aftermath of Hurricane Helene, while North Carolina’s AG claimed 64. Those numbers will  multiply as electricity and phone service gets restored in the hardest-hit areas.

One South Carolina example from the Business Insider story:  “[S]tores that have been putting out cases of bottled water for sale, but ringing up customers for each bottle individually.”

That is, charging the same price per bottle as previously — hardly “price gouging” — but without the usual discount for bulk “by the case” purchasing.

Or: Using normal, non-discounted, pricing to ration water so everybody can get at least some water, instead of a few customers taking home cases and other customers going without.

Even in cases of actual price increases (instead of temporarily ending bulk discounts), that’s the main effect so-called “price-gouging” has. Yes, you pay more for what you need … but you actually GET what you need for $2, instead of NOT getting what you need for $1.

Not, mind you, that sellers are “price-gouging” solely out of the goodness of their hearts. As Adam Smith pointed out centuries ago, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”

What serves the self-interest of long-term, reputable merchants? Customer satisfaction.

Your grocer was glad to sell you food last week. He wants to sell you food next week. He’ll do his best to sell you food this week.

If the roads are blocked and the supply is limited, he’d rather charge more and have more customers get at least some what they’re looking for than charge less and have more customers see a “closed, everything’s gone” sign when they show up hungry and thirsty after difficult treks over storm-ravaged roads.

“Price-gouging” isn’t, as some people pretend, a case of market failure. It’s markets doing their job, in the face of dire circumstances, getting goods to the people who need them.

If the circumstances weren’t dire, “price-gouging” would be a terrible idea … and an impossible one, since competition from down the street would clean the “price-gouger’s” clock.

Yes, non-profit “mutual aid” is a beautiful thing. But when supplies are short, “price-gouging” is the next best thing, offering you an option other than praying to FEMA and hoping for the best.

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.

Jimmy Carter is garnering more attention for becoming a centenarian on October 1 than he did when he was the first former president of the USA to celebrate a 96th birthday. Yet what thin hope I held in 2020 that the Democratic candidate might “follow Carter’s deregulatory path” seems even more distant from a party that will have further lost its way even if it defeats Donald Trump’s second bid at re-election. (A September Wall Street Journal opinion headline noted that “Biden and Buttigieg are Reregulating the Airlines.”)

Tom Tomorrow’s cover illustration for Eric Alterman’s Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America found room for philosophical intellectuals like John Stuart Mill and John Dewey to lend support behind Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi. 2024 Democrats are less likely to invoke either John than to ridicule opponents as spineless stooges for white supremacy and fascism (charges considered cheaply contemptible when hurled at the Michael Moore stand-in of An American Carol in 2008) or just plain “weird.” The New York Times can only make one of the most popular taunts against Trump’s running mate JD Vance fit to print by referring to it obliquely as “a vulgar, untrue joke.” President Joe Biden and NYC mayor Eric Adams have fallen out of favor for personal failings rather than stale ideas.

Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 laments the public’s shift away from New Hollywood “moral ambiguity, dark moods, [and] suffusing skepticism toward establishments of every description” to the “Old Hollywood pastiche” of the original Star Wars at the same time they abandoned the Carter who channeled Reinhold Niebuhr’s suspicion of “a too-simple division of the world into lightness and dark” in favor of the star of Knute Rockne All American. A future historian covering the quadrennial since Perlstein’s 2020 publication would find even less room for nuance. If anything, the lightness projected by a party purportedly devoted to “joy” is tempered by the bad vibes of anxiety threatening to overwhelm it (as literally happened onscreen in this summer’s Inside Out 2).

Yet Perlstein’s division of Hollywood into New and revanchist is itself oversimplified. The novelization of Star Wars portrays an emperor who fails to heed “the cries of the people for justice” not out of malice but due to being isolated from popular opinion by “assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office.” In the spinoff novels published during Carter’s term, Alan Dean Foster described a Luke Skywalker who “reflected grimly [that] if there was one thing he was sure of it was that the callow youth he had once been was dead and dry as dust,” while Brian Daley wrote of a young Han Solo whose seemingly “callous exterior” is realized to be a shield “from the derisions of fools and cowards” by an ally who warns that “in trying to preserve [one’s] ideals, one risks losing them.”

Let’s hope that this galaxy’s liberals learn a similar lesson before they divide the White House against liberalism in order to save it from conservatives.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism. He also enjoys the Lando Calrissian Adventures written for Lucasfilm in 1983 by libertarian author L. Neil Smith.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The Party of Carter Wouldn’t Get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, October 4, 2024
2. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Newton Kansan, October 4, 2024
3. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, October 4, 2024
4. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
5. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
6. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
7. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], October 4, 2024
8. “The party of Biden wouldn’t get Carter” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], October 7, 2024