Former US president Donald Trump supposedly absconded from the White House with reams of classified documents, stored them at his Mar-a-Lago home, responded first lackadaisically then combatively when called upon to hand them back over, finally resorting to weird claims about having declassified those documents by “thinking about it.”

Former US vice-president (now president) Joe Biden supposedly absconded from his official residence at the US Naval Observatory with reams of classified documents, which ended up in a closet at a private office, in a garage at one of his homes, and possibly elsewhere. He began returning them of his own volition, but apparently discovered them before, and waited to mention them until after, the 2022 midterm elections.

Either situation would constitute marvelous grist for the scandal mill;. In combination the effect is exponential. Most of that grist has to do with double standards:

First, why do presidents and vice-presidents get to just walk around (and, apparently, out) with classified information when members of Congress have to look at it in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) and hand it back over immediately?

Second, why are presidents and vice-presidents who apparently drive away moving vans full of the stuff treated more leniently than lowly government employees who (possibly unintentionally) take single classified documents home from work in their briefcases?

I’ve written before about a third, non-grist category of scandal: Why do we let the government treat much, or for that matter any, information as secret in the first place?

But here, I’d like to focus on a fourth question: What does this whole thing tell us about the quality of management in the managerial state?

Running back to the first two paragraphs, we should probably understand how unlikely it is that either Trump or Biden personally walked away with those documents. They’ve got staff members to take care of such things. Neither of them has ever been lauded as intellectually curious or an avid reader. Heck, they may not have KNOWN they had the documents until they were told.

The president is the “chief executive” of the federal government. Strip away the pomp, circumstance, and ceremony, and he’s just a manager. He supervises a boatload of employees. Most decisions he makes really amount to signing off on other people’s recommendations.

Two presidents in a row have proven they can’t even impress upon their underlings the importance of not abandoning the nuclear launch codes in a garage or on the floor of a resort.

Would you trust someone with such poor management skills to run a convenience store or coffee shop?

If not, why on earth would you trust him to run the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, and most dangerous organization in history?

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

“By the end of this year,” Michael Munger writes at Reason, “GPT4 chatbots will be able to produce, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, millions of texts on all the topics that you can think of, as well as those no one has ever thought of.”

Which, coupled with a couple of “conceptually simple” steps, leads to a “text singularity” in which writing as a human activity essentially stops. Artificial intelligences automagically write … well, all the things. People are reduced to mere readers.

As a working writer, I can’t help but shudder for the same reasons that inspired Ned Ludd and his disciples to rebellion against early factory automation in the 19th century. If machines can do what I do — better, faster, and cheaper — I guess I’m out of  the writing racket.

On the other hand, as a working writer, I’ve pointed out numerous times that automation is, generally speaking, a good thing.

Automation results in products that are more available, less costly, and often of higher quality.

And since that results in more demand for such products, it often creates more jobs than it eliminates — more people to bring material to the machine, more people to haul away and sell the machine’s output. In fact, England employed far more textile workers after the  automation of weaving than before, putting the lie to Luddism’s complaints.

Maybe I can get a job dusting cooling fins or replacing defective cables at the Big Writing Machine’s server farm.

Or maybe I won’t have to.

Much as it grinds my Austrian economics devotee gears to think so, it could be that the impending “text singularity” and similar developments are bellwethers leading us toward the post-scarcity of Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — an age in which few if any humans really need to “work” because automation makes EVERYTHING abundant and free or nearly so.

That sounds like the better side of the utopian science fiction milieus I immersed myself in as a young reader. Whether we can avoid the worse sides — which usually involve political schemes to subjugate us all — is a different question.

It also sounds unlikely, but perhaps my long-held prejudice toward the value of human creativity, ingenuity, and motivation as the way toward a better future are skewing my viewpoint.

Either way, history runs forward, not backward. And the future promises, if nothing else, constant fascination.

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

A week into 2023, The New York Times has gotten perspective on the news from further back than one week.

In the newspaper’s January 7-8 weekend edition, Carlos Lozada took “A Peek Behind the Curtain of American History” via a deep dive into Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.  (Not to be confused with Richard Shenkman’s Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History from 1989.)

The longtime editor of The Washington Post‘s 5 Myths series acknowledges that “some myths serve a valid purpose” when they provide a narrative for facts rather than being mere falsehoods, or akin to what Nigel Andrews called political spin “somewhere between the simple truth and the possible souping-up” in the Arnold Schwarzenegger biography True Myths.

Lozada pushes for a more complex interpretation; even focusing on outright deceptions from the right-of-center aisle of American politics implies that “left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story.” Ironically, Lozada buttresses conservative framings while determined to push back against them.

Lozada lists “notions that free enterprise is inseparable from broader American freedoms” among the “myths peddled or exaggerated, for nefarious purposes, by the right.” While Trump slapped tariffs on Canadian imports that literally provided the paper on which dissenting views were printed, his opponents extended their dismission of free trade to civil liberties in general (earlier American left leaders like Henry George supported both.)

Lozada and Myth America contributor Eric Rauchway consider the New Deal unfairly maligned by misguided reactionaries, reinforcing what Ronald Radosh dubbed “The Myth of the New Deal.” That two of the essays forming the basis for Radosh’s were Barton Bernstein’s “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform” and Howard Zinn’s “The Limits of the New Deal” —  and that Radosh saw them as understating the failure of the New Deal to break with the status quo — indicates how far it was from a partisan potshot.

“The Myth of the New Deal” was part of A New History of Leviathan, in which coeditors Radosh and Murray Rothbard attempted to “transcend the ideological myths that enable the large corporations to mask their hegemony over American society.” Rothbard balanced Radosh’s uncovering of the corporatist nature of the New Deal with a retrospective on how its policies amplified those set in motion by Franklin Roosevelt’s supposed antithesis, Herbert Hoover.

Marvin Gettleman and David Mermelstein observed that “although Rothbard’s critique is based upon a belief in the kind of free-market, laissez-faire principles that are usually associated with the political ‘right,’ many of the points he makes could easily be assented to by the ‘new left'” to which those editors of The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism belonged.

If, as Chris Matthew Sciabarra noted in 2005, “mainstream politics offers no genuine opposition to FDR’s Old ‘New Deal’ or Bush’s New ‘Old Deal'” equally committed to “massive government intervention,” that may be because it has forgotten the old lessons of the New Left.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “In 2023, myths are true lies and new deals are old” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, January 12, 2023
2. “In 2023, myths are true lies and new deals are old” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], January 12, 2023
3. “In 2023, myths are true lies” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Madill, Oklahoma Record, January 12, 2023