Warren Buffett’s father should have changed Radical Son David Horowitz’s red diapers.

At first glance, Horowitz’s vehement rejection of his card-carrying Communist Party upbringing to become an equally unwavering Grand Old Party loyalist, from voting for Ronald Reagan’s re-election right up until his passing on April 29, would seem the mirror opposite of the path to Buffett’s retirement a week later.  Six decades after inheriting the Berkshire Hathaway he would nurture into a trillion-dollar conglomerate from a Republican congressman deemed “arch‐conservative” in his New York Times obituary, Howard Homan Buffett’s son had become the sort of capitalist who could not only be commended by Times guest essayist Roger Lowenstein for having “long stood out on Wall Street because he eschewed its frequent chicanery, self-dealing and greed” (“Taking the Measure of Warren Buffett,” May 5), but gladly cited as a role model by It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism author Bernie Sanders.

Yet the Times acknowledged that the “arch-conservative” had urged “curbs … on the United States military leadership,” anticipating Dwight Eisenhower’s better-remembered caution to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex.”  E. J. Dionne, Jr. observed in Why Americans Hate Politics that “New Left scholars … took a much more favorable view of the old isolationists such as Robert A. Taft” and Buffett “than liberal scholarship ever had” — and that Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby had quoted Buffett on how “we cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.”

Dionne’s caveat that “the New Left’s attack on large corporations was not a cause to which conservatives repaired” is hard to maintain when a devoted Ayn Rand fan like Roy A. Childs, Jr. could note in the May 1972 issue of Libertarian Forum not only the validity of “students’ reactions to Dow Chemical’s presence on campuses across the U.S., at the time when Dow’s own napalm was being used to zap Vietnamese peasants” but that law-and-order dismissals ignored how “so-called ‘private’ universities … seize land from its rightful owners by aligning with the State’s power of eminent domain.”

One of those “New Left scholars” was none other than David Horowitz.  The back cover of Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism includes a blurb from the Horowitz who would later coedit The Anti-Chomsky Reader lauding its “understanding of the imperial dynamics of America’s postwar course” underneath Noam Chomsky lamenting “how much has been lost by narrowing the spectrum of debate” when such a “critique of … the centralization of state power was perceptive at the time, and has much to offer to us today.”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “They Could Have Overruled the Empire as Father and Son” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 9, 2025
2. “Opinion: They could have overruled the empire as father and son” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, May 13, 2025
3. “They could have overruled the empire as father and son” by Joel Schlosberg, PCM Explorer [Prairie City, Iowa], May 15, 2025 [Page 4 of print edition]

Donald Trump wants Americans to start having more babies and, the New York Times reports, is mulling possible financial incentives (like $5,000 government checks for mothers upon childbirth) and “educational” initiatives (i.e. classes to help women figure out when they’re ovulating so they can get pregnant more easily) to achieve the goal.

But the US government has encouraged and subsidized having kids for decades.

Child/dependent tax credits.

Tax deductions for buying homes to house the kids.

Welfare programs like WIC to help feed the kids.

Spreading the costs of “public education” around to non-parents so that parents don’t have to cover those costs themselves.

If subsidizing kids got the job done, we wouldn’t be seeing the birthrate decline we’re seeing — and there’s no particular reason to believe that boosting the subsidies even higher will change the fact that in ever more prosperous societies, people choose to have ever fewer children.

And if that whole program that sounds like a bad fit with Trump’s policy of trying to deport millions of foreign-born residents (who are seemingly more inclined to have the children he wants had), and even the native-born children of those residents, it is.

If you want a higher birth rate, throwing out the people who have kids makes zero sense.

Unless, that is, you couple the “demographic decline” panic with a “Great Replacement” theory positing that people who come to the United States and have kids are being “imported” for the express purpose of changing American politics and culture in particular and negative ways.

If you can successfully sell those claims as a pair, then you can justify both the deportations and the birth incentives.

To be fair, Trump is fairly good at selling silly ideas to gullible buyers. It’s how he built his “brand” in business. His various cons didn’t make him as much money as he’d have made from investing his inheritance in an S&P 500  indexed mutual fund, but they did make him more famous, and he seems to value the adoration of his marks more than he loves money.

But even Trump should have trouble putting over this double con.

“The Great Replacement” is real in the sense that people move and cultures change. But here’s the evidence that this particular cycle of movement and change, in this country, is part of an intentional conspiracy to create Democratic voters, corrupt our precious bodily fluids, etc.:

THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

America looks almost nothing like it looked 250 years ago, 150 years ago, or even 100 years ago, and almost nothing like it will probably look 100 years from now, because people move and cultures change.

Neither subsidizing childbirth nor deporting immigrants will magically freeze America at some “perfect” point in Donald Trump’s memory or imagination (Studio 54 in the late 1970s, maybe?).

Trump’s demand that you sacrifice your freedom and prosperity to such a project and start having more babies because REASONS has only one guaranteed result, in the now rather than in the future: Less of that freedom and prosperity.

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

Amazon, Punchbowl News reported on April 29, “will soon show how much [US president Donald] Trump’s tariffs are adding to the price of each product …. The shopping site will display how much of an item’s cost is derived from tariffs — right next to the product’s total listed price.”

Cue whining from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who called the idea “a hostile and political act.”

Amazon quickly backed down, saying it had “considered the idea” but wasn’t going to actually follow through.

Then, for some reason, Walmart felt the need to weigh in and announce that it also has no plans to let its customers know how much of what they pay is due to Trump’s tax hikes on you because it does “not itemize what goes into the cost of goods on our website.”

That’s an odd claim. To test it, I just went to Walmart’s website and  put an item (supposedly priced at $17.16) into my cart.

Whaddayaknow, when I got to the checkout screen, the site itemized “estimated taxes” of $1.71, as well as $6.99 in shipping charges. Are those not “costs of goods” on their website?

The “estimated taxes” on that screen are state and local sales taxes. Most stores in most states (and on the Internet) break those tax costs out. In fact, in some states, they’re required by law to do so, which is why when you see an item for $1.99 at your local grocery store, you have to do a little mental arithmetic and add, say, $2.10 instead of $1.99 to your running total.

Imposing taxes on consumers is a “hostile and political act.”

From a business point of view, it makes sense to let customers know who’s imposing these  latest massive tax hikes. That way the customers know who to blame for — and who to hold accountable for — unnecessarily higher prices.

Why should tariffs be treated any differently than sales taxes? They’re taxes. You’re paying them. Why are Amazon, Walmart, and likely other businesses running and hiding instead of telling you so?

The only explanation that makes sense is fear. American businesses know that Trump can hurt them in various ways, from taxation and regulation to urging his base to boycott businesses who tell the truth to their customers. Who can blame them for fearing his wrath?

Truth, someone once said, is the first casualty of war.

Trump is waging war on all of us, in this case on our ability to buy the goods we need and want to live our lives. He doesn’t want us to know that, and rages against us knowing.

Amazon and Walmart shouldn’t let fear push them into our enemy’s ranks. They should tell us the truth … with every sale.

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