Monthly Archives: November 2021

Op-Eds

When Giving Thanks, Don’t Forget Your Local Paper

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Photo by Joanna Bourne. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Photo by Joanna Bourne. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

As Thanksgiving approaches, I usually take a little time to think about who and what I’m thankful for and express my. That seems to be the point, after all. This year, for various reasons, my thoughts and appreciation turn toward journalists, newspapers, and other news media.

Sometimes the people and institutions we rely on to keep us informed get a bad rap, and sometimes they deserve it.

When the Washington Post and New York Times act more as stenographers for the political class than reporters of the facts, we all lose.

When trusted (by their particular partisan audiences, anyway) sources of information like Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow who pretend to seriousness but then answer  defamation suits with the “Alex Jones” defense — that they’re just entertainers whose statements are hyperbole and should never be relied on as factually  accurate — they embarrass an honorable and worthy profession. Even mere “opinion journalists” (like myself) should operate from a respect for fact and truth.

But the Post, the Times, Fox/Carlson, and MSNBC/Maddow aren’t the institutions and journalists I’m thinking of in expressing thanks.

I’m thinking — of course! — of whistle-blower journalists like Julian Assange and foreign correspondents like Danny Fenster, cooling their heels in cells for bringing us the truth. And of the many journalists killed, accidentally or purposely, “in the line of duty” while covering wars and investigating crimes.

More than that, though, I’m thinking of America’s local and community newspapers, the dailies and weeklies scattered across the country which continue to do the job of keeping us informed and bringing us together (or at least facilitating our arguments). And, of course, the fine people who write and edit those publications.

Yes, I’m biased: I got my start in “hard,” just the facts, ma’am journalism more than 40 years ago,  writing club notices for publication  in my hometown daily, the Lebanon, Missouri Daily Record. I moved on to my junior high, high school, and college papers, long before eventually finding my perch in opinion/advocacy journalism.

If you know how your local high school athletes are making out, or which local church is hosting an ice cream social, or which local hero had a birthday or went to the hospital, thank your local paper. If you know what your neighbors think about a pending bond issue or local scandal, thank that paper’s letters editor.

America’s local dailies and weeklies are supposedly dying. At the very least, many have moved entirely online or cut down the size and frequency of their print editions.

That’s sad. We need them, and we should appreciate them. They’re a key ingredient in the glue that holds us together, part of the mix that constitutes what Thomas Paine called “so celestial an article as freedom.” Discussing our problems may not solve them, but not discussing them certainly won’t. A free press is still largely where the productive substance of such discussions happens.

This Thanksgiving, please spare a moment of thanks (and perhaps a subscription check!) for your local newspaper of choice.

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 HISTORY

Op-Eds

How Markets are Like the Internet and Dinosaurs

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Long Beach container port. Photo by Charles Csavossy. Public Domain.
Long Beach container port. Photo by Charles Csavossy. Public Domain.

“Slowly but surely,” Neal Freyman reports at Morning Brew, “the supply chain bottlenecks that have plagued the global economy for over a year appear to be easing — or at least have been circumvented.”

That’s good news for an American economy damaged by nearly nearly two years of shutdown, lockdown, and slowdown driven less by the COVID-19 pandemic itself than by the pandemic’s attendant,  politically encouraged mass hysteria and hygiene theater.

Not too long ago, the prospects for a  big Black Friday and Cyber Monday looked pretty bleak. Now, major retailers report recovering inventory levels while major auto-makers report a draw-down of the chip shortage that shut down assembly lines. Ships are once again getting unloaded, and shipping containers hauled to their destinations.

Lest politicians attempt to take credit for the apparent recovery, let’s be clear: Government did nothing but get in the way, and is doing its utmost to remain in the way. This hopeful recovery is driven by market actors, doing what market actors do.

John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, famously said that the Internet “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” So far, despite the best efforts of politicians to bring it under their control, that remains true.

Market actors, likewise, interpret anything that disrupts their attempts to profit — by bringing products and services to paying customers — as damage and respond by finding ways around those obstacles.

When government outlaws something — heroin, for example — “black” markets spring up to provide it.

When government taxes something so heavily that it becomes unaffordable — cigarettes in New York City, for example — “gray” markets spring up to provide it sans  those taxes.

When government — California, for example — regulates something so ham-handedly that shipping containers stack up because all trucks operating in the state must be less than 10 years old and driven by corporate employees rather than owner-operators – market actors buy new trucks, increase their use of rail transport, and seek less restrictive port locations.

Even in central planning hell-scapes, markets spring up to at least partially make good on the damage government does. At the height of the Cold War, young people in the Soviet Union bought up American blue jeans as fast as they could be smuggled into the country. Even as their government starves them, North Koreans consume western media from smuggled flash drives.

As Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm, puts it concerning supposedly non-reproducing dinosaurs, “life finds a way.” Markets are one of the best examples of that phenomenon.

If Joe Biden wants to claim any credit for the burgeoning economic recovery, he should encourage and strengthen that recovery by following the examples of predecessors like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. That is, he should pursue deregulation and free trade instead of continuing down the damaging protectionist path blazed for him by Donald Trump.

Markets will find a way with or without the politicians’ cooperation, but standing aside means more prosperity, and faster, than trying to fight the inevitable.

Side note: Morning Brew, cited in this column, is a free daily email newsletter covering business/market developments … and I earn swag like mugs and t-shirts by referring subscribers. Click here to help put a new t-shirt on my back!

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 HISTORY

Op-Eds

US Policy on Taiwan is a False and Dangerous Two-Step

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Members of the Republic of China Army board a ship bound for Taiwan in 1949. Author unknown. Public Domain.
Members of the Republic of China Army board a ship bound for Taiwan in 1949. Author unknown. Public Domain.

On November 15, US president Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a “virtual summit” covering a number of subjects and resulting, for the most part, in banal public pledges of “cooperation” to “ease tensions.”

Biden, however, managed to score a double own goal on the subject of Taiwan by simultaneously justifying bad US foreign policy and endorsing Beijing’s false “One China” claim.

On one hand, the US has neither any obligation nor any good reason to continue guaranteeing Taiwan’s  de facto independence from the mainland regime.

Taiwan is not a US state. Taiwan is not a US territory.  There are no plausible circumstances under which a change of political authority in Taiwan would represent a threat to the defensibility or security of the United States. Therefore the only thing the Taipei regime should expect, or get, from the US regime is a Jeffersonian policy of  “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

On the other hand, there’s also no obligation on the part of the US government to pretend that Taipei is part of the People’s Republic of China and subject to the Beijing regime’s authority. It is not, it never has been, and no amount of “One China” posturing on the part of other regimes will change that fact.

Some people paraphrase the question as an answer: “Taiwan has always been part of China.” That’s no more true than the claim that “Cuba has always been part of Spain” or “Ireland has always been part of the United Kingdom.” All three islands have histories preceding their invasion, occupation, and colonization, and all three islands have long since established independence (apart from Ireland’s Six Counties, anyway).

Taiwan has, over the last few hundred years, been “part of” the Netherlands, “part of” Qing Dynasty China, “part of” Japan, and finally independent under Chinese Nationalists who wanted no part of the mainland’s Communist revolution.

Whether Taiwan ever BECOMES “part of” the People’s Republic should, in an ideal world, be a decision for its own people to make through whatever institutions they set up to make such decisions.

In our non-ideal world, there’s a good chance that it will become “part of” the People’s Republic through invasion, occupation, and colonization. While would be a bad thing, it’s something the US government should neither commit American blood or treasure to prevent, nor encourage with its “One China” diplomatic balderdash.

Frankly, the latter course seems the likely goal of US strategy. Much as the Carter and Reagan administrations used Afghanistan as bait to give the Soviet Union “its own Vietnam,” the Biden administration may be using Taiwan as bait in hopes of giving Beijing “its own Afghanistan.” That would be a very bad outcome for all involved — especially the Taiwanese people.

Sooner or later, the US will return to the “hands off foreign disputes” approach that characterized its first century. Better that it do so sooner and voluntarily than later under the compulsion of military, economic, and political collapse.

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 HISTORY