It happens twice a year, every year. I complain about it — often to you! — twice a year, every year. It’s the semi-annual switch between “Standard Time” and “Daylight Saving Time.”

Fall back! Spring forward! In most of the United States, we just did the latter. Again.

The clock on my desktop computer and the clock in my brain are announcing two different times, an hour apart, and my body just doesn’t want to accept the differential.

As usual, that makes me grumpy.  But I’m one of those lucky people for whom grumpiness is pretty much the maximum negative side effect.

I work from home, and  in theory I set my own schedule. In theory, I could just ignore the fake time change. The various things I do would look like they were an hour “off”  to the world, if the world watched me closely, but it doesn’t watch me closely and there aren’t any damsels in distress, tied to tracks and counting down to meetings with trains that I mustn’t be late to interrupt or anything like that.

In fact, ignoring the switches between “Standard Time” and “Daylight Saving Time” would impact even my boring, semi-house-bound, life.

I’m married. I’ve got kids. I’ve got friends and co-workers. I occasionally, grudgingly, shop offline at physical stores with set hours of business. I’ve even been known to visit a bar now and again. Ignoring the fake time changes would put me out of phase with all those people and things. It would disrupt morning coffee with my wife, screw up planned interactions with my kids, get me to stores, happy hours, and medical appointments early or late, etc. So I grimace and comply.

Others have it far worse. Every year, tens of commuters die in excess car accidents because the fake time changes throw people off their bodies’ preferred adherence to circadian rhythms. Others show up late or tired to work, reducing productivity to the tune of billions of dollars.

If a natural disaster or terror attack had that kind of impact, Congress would pass yet another disastrous and ineffectual version of the USA PATRIOT Act and social media would provide a whole new category of “never forget” memes.

The Daylight Saving Time scheme isn’t a natural disaster, but it is a century old semi-annual terror attack.  Congress and the president COULD address this particular attack effectually, by picking a single version of time (“Standard” or “Daylight Saving”) to stick to year-round.

A month before his second inauguration as president, Donald Trump promised his party would use its “best efforts” to eliminate the fake time changes:  “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

Now in office, he’s unwilling to address it after all, calling it a “fifty-fifty issue …. I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark.”

So much for strong-man “leadership,” I guess.

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.

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“What noted conservative advocates jailing people to prevent the spread of their ideas?” If David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom was written nowadays, he could challenge readers to think of one who doesn’t.

Friedman observed that National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr.’s then-recent 1965 call for “quarantining all [narcotics] addicts, even as smallpox carriers would be quarantined during a plague” was “inconsistent with [Buckley’s] belief in a free society.”  The pugnaciously partisan pundit of conservatism wouldn’t take the implications of his own analogy far enough to “favor jailing Galbraith, Bundy, and several Rockefellers as carriers of liberalism.”

By 1996, Thomas Szasz could be confident that “Buckley has since moderated his views” on the issue (even if he hadn’t “abandoned defining the ‘drug problem’ as a medical matter”).

Yet in February 2025, former Reagan staffer Glenn Loury still considered applying a Just Say No approach to other vices, deeming “online gambling and pornography … detrimental … to marriage,” enough so to possibly justify efforts to “prosecute producers of … the most obscene videos.” Friedman had quipped that the decisions made by what Buckley called the “psychologically weak or misinformed” might include “getting married or subscribing to National Review.”

Loury’s “obscene videos” may not include Academy Award champion Anora, but on May 3, Lauren Smith vouched that its filmmakers’ acceptance speeches would “legitimise the act of sexually exploiting women for money” (“The ‘vibe shift’ hasn’t reached the Oscars,” spiked). That same day, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called anti-Semitism “comparable to history’s most deadly plagues” not just in its harmful effects but its catchiness, with top universities serving as “greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence” — while decrying in the same breath “censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture.” JFK’s nephew ignores such ills among his new bedfellows in the Trump administration as intently as the new PBS American Masters documentary Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse covers them as if they are only found there.

Friedman pointed out that “a university may proclaim its neutrality, but neutrality, as the left quite properly argues, is also a position” — one particularly hard to maintain “if one believes that the election of Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy would be a national tragedy.” Long after their time, the solution remains not “a university run from the outside, by a state government” but developing “noncoercive cooperation.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Freedom: Not Another Word for Things Left to Lose” by Joel Schlosberg, The Newton Kansan, March 10, 2025

“Social Security is the biggest Ponzi Scheme of all time,” Elon Musk told podcaster Joe Rogan on the latter’s podcast. “If you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue.”

Cue outrage.

“Billionaires like you to pay the same amount into Social Security as a truck driver,” US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) whined, failing to mention that billionaires like Elon Musk also receive the same maximum monthly Social Security check as that truck driver.

“He’s going after the elderly, the disabled, and orphaned children so he can pocket it in tax cuts for himself,” said US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It’s disgusting.” AOC apparently thinks people won’t notice that Congress has “borrowed” nearly $3 trillion from the Social Security Trust fund, and that she’s voted for much of that “borrowing.”

For the most part, Musk is correct to refer to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. It pays out benefits from newer revenues, not by investing Social Security taxes in profitable ventures.

There’s one respect in which it differs from the traditional Ponzi scheme, though.

In the “private sector,” Ponzi scammers try to hide what they’re up to. Investors are led to BELIEVE their money is being used profitably, when in reality their “dividends” come from luring in new investors until the con collapses and the perpetrator either flees with his ill-gotten gains or goes to prison.

Social Security, on the other hand, has transparently operated in a facially Ponzi-like manner for decades — and the US Supreme Court publicly declared, 65 years ago, in its ruling on Flemming v. Nestor, that no one is “entitled to” any payout at all: “The noncontractual interest of an employee covered by the Act cannot be soundly analogized to that of the holder of an annuity, whose right to benefits are based on his contractual premium payments.”

Politicians still pretend that Social Security is retirement “insurance,” but it’s neither actuarially based nor guaranteed to provide any “return” at all.

Nor is it an “investment.” It’s just a tax you and your employer have to pay, loosely linked to the possibility of getting a check in the future … if Congress doesn’t change its mind.

Social Security was a Depression-era welfare program that its primary backer, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said in 1935 “ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.”

The distinguishing feature of a Ponzi scheme is that it defrauds presumably unsuspecting victims.

The sad truth that Musk didn’t bring up is that the victims have known — or at least should have known — they were being scammed since at least as early as 1960.

Apparently most Americans would rather remain scammed, and hope for the best, than admit the truth to themselves.

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.

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