When you pull out your phone, tablet, or laptop — or sit down at a desktop computer — what Internet content should you not need the government’s permission to view?

It’s a simple question and the only correct answer is “all of it.”

But Florida’s politicians, following those of several other states,  are stomping their feet, declaring themselves your babysitters, and yelling that if you want to view particular web sites, you need to beg for their permission first.

HB3, which came into effect on January 1, includes two silly components and one truly terrible implementation hook.

Component #1: HB3 restricts access to social media for those under 14 years of age, and requires parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds to use social media accounts. Fortunately, that part has been blocked by the courts … for now.

Component #2: HB3 requires users to be 18 years of age or older to access “material harmful to minors” — that is, pornography.  But there’s already a federal law (18 US Code § 1470) against providing pornography to those under 16. It’s not Florida politicians’ job to enforce that law or to change its age threshold.

The implementation hook is a requirement that social media platforms and porn sites implement “age verification” protocols for all viewers.

How are these platforms supposed to “verify” your age? By requiring you to show them your government-issued identification card, of course.

So even if you’re an adult, you’re not allowed to view pornography on the Internet, from Florida, anonymously.

Some porn sites are complying with the law. Others are blocking access from Florida IP addresses. And still others are simply ignoring the whole thing.

Fortunately, the whole matter remains entirely in the hands of Floridians, thanks to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

These handy-dandy services — some free, some paid, and of varying reliability and variety — allow you to disguise where you’re from when visiting web sites.

For example, you might be at your desk in Gainesville, Florida, but access Pornhub (one of the sites blocking Florida IPs) “from” the Netherlands. Yes, I just did that. Purely for research purposes, of course.

Unsurprisingly, according to media reports, Floridians’ use of VPNs has increased by a factor of ten or more since January 1.

Are some of those Floridian VPN users minors? Of course. I’d rather children didn’t view porn, but I know they’re going to (I feel old; when I was a kid, my friends and I  didn’t have the Internet and had to raid adults’ hidden print magazine stashes). Forbidding it just makes it more attractive.

The cool thing about VPNs isn’t that they make it possible to view porn when politicians don’t want you to.

It’s that they make it possible to view ANYTHING, whether politicians want you to or not, and without those politicians even being able to know you viewed it.

Internet freedom and Internet privacy are important — which is why it’s important that HB3 fail, and fail spectacularly, and be SEEN to fail spectacularly, in its mission of making politicians our Internet babysitters.

Fortunately, it’s doing just that.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) 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

“I need to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost,”  Master Sergeant Matthew Alan Livelsberger (US Army) allegedly wrote in an explanatory note on his phone before shooting himself inside a Tesla Cybertruck packed with fireworks and gas tanks set to detonate outside a Las Vegas casino, “and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”

I say “allegedly” because, as is often the case, we’re only getting details and versions of the story that the government and its law enforcement agencies choose to release. Those details and versions are at best incomplete and at worst not necessarily true. But I consider that particular sentence the elephant in the room.

The rest of the released content indicates a kind of fuzzy political motive, but Livelsberger’s personal life and mental health also seem to have been unraveling in various ways leading up to the incident.

Yes, incident — not, really, an “attack.” Based on what’s been publicly released about his Special Forces experience and skill set, if he’d wanted to create a true mass casualty event, he wouldn’t likely have ended up killing only himself (and inflicting allegedly minor injuries on seven others).

While the whole thing clearly didn’t amount to a “cry for help” — he no longer needs, or could use, help — it was definitely a cry of some kind rather than an attempt to kill others.

Back to that elephant in the room:  More than one in four American “mass shooters” come from military backgrounds, while only 7% or so of the general population has that kind of experience and training.

On the same weekend as the Las Vegas explosion, army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 and injured dozens in a New Orleans rampage using a truck.

Timothy McVeigh received the Bronze Star as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle gunner in Desert Storm before going on to commit the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Does military “service” make one more likely to engage in violent conduct?

Or does a proclivity for such conduct cause future mass shooters to seek out such “service?”

Maybe it’s a bit of both. Maybe there are other factors. But the correlation seems strong enough to believe there’s a connection of SOME kind.

While the whole subject is likely too complex to admit of simple solutions, the problem can clearly at least be reduced at one end — by creating fewer people who find themselves mentally twisted and morally haunted by the experience of killing other people.

Preferably, none of those people at all.

But even just adopting a sane foreign policy that doesn’t entail decades of needless war without end, and significantly cutting the head count of the US armed forces to match, would be a good start.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) 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

Oren Cass’s “What Economists Could Learn From George Costanza” (The New York Times, December 23) has forgotten what economics Henry George taught.

That’s the pundit named Cass who invariably calls for constrictions on consumers, as opposed to Cass Sunstein‘s advocacy of “choice-preserving but psychologically wise interventions” that would make “automatic enrollment in government programs” the default (in the words of the University of Pennsylvania’s Angie Basiouny).

In 2012, Oren Cass campaigned for Mitt Romney versus the incumbent who had Sunstein head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  If it’s harder to tell the party lines apart three presidential elections later, maybe it’s because such “choice” was an echo all along.

Oren Cass sees “the continued reliance on the theory of comparative advantage” as the fountainhead of America’s economic woes, comparable to the Seinfeld sidekick’s bad karma from stubbornly sticking to tuna sandwiches instead of trying chicken. If Adam Smithian academics come off as slightly more charitable in that analogy than NYU Marxist Bertell Ollman likening free-market libertarians to “people who go into a Chinese restaurant and order pizza,” Oren Cass makes them seem more sinister than silly, asking rhetorically whether “the Uyghurs performing forced labor in the supply chains of China’s refrigerator exporters are doing so in return for economic advice.”

When labor isn’t coerced, either directly or by restrictions on how it can be used, markets really do involve what the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome calls “billions of humans freely cooperating for mutual gain” — a phrase Oren Cass sees as “spin” and “reframing” despite such liberty always being key to the case for laissez-faire.

Henry George noted in Progress and Poverty that “the pen with which I am writing is justly mine … because transferred to me by the stationer, to whom it was transferred by the importer, who obtained the exclusive right to it by transfer from the manufacturer, in whom, by the same process of purchase, vested the rights of those who dug the material from the ground and shaped it into a pen.”  Such books he penned became some of the most celebrated international bestsellers of the nineteenth century.

At the close of the twentieth, Oren Cass’s preferred George acknowledged that his outstanding high score on a Frogger arcade machine relied on “the perfect combination of Mountain Dew and mozzarella” — the product of an international web of influence that ushered pizza pies and piquant pixels (and Peking duck) across oceans.  The April 1983 cover of Video Games magazine trumpeted “America’s Newest Games: Q*Bert & Joust” as fresh homegrown rivals to the output of Japanese companies like Frogger’s Konami and Sega, but they built on the European examples of Euclid, Escher and Excalibur.

In The World According to Star Wars, Sunstein perceived that “in a truly repressive society — one against which rebellion is most justified — it will be very hard to know the magnitude of people’s dissatisfaction, because people will not say what they really think.” Seemingly minor trade blockades can have a similar chilling effect.

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “What Oren Cass Sunstein Could Learn From Henry George Costanza” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, January 3, 2025
2. “What Oren Cass Sunstein could learn from Henry George Costanza” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], January 9, 2025