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

“How can this be called a ‘continuing resolution,'” Elon Musk asked concerning Congress’s next-to-last stopgap government funding bill, “if it includes a 40% pay increase for Congress?”

The real number was 3.8%, but Musk’s little white lie played a part in tanking that bill and getting another one, with no raise, passed and signed.

Non-leadership members of the US Senate and House of Representatives receive “only” $174,000 per year in salary. They’d like to get more — at least automatic “cost of living” adjustments — but they’ve been thwarted in that desire since 2009.

Not counting expense allowances/reimbursements, they “only” get paid about twice the US per capita income. The poor dears.

Which brings me to my perennial proposal, perhaps for notice by Musk’s upcoming “Department of Government Efficiency,” concerning congressional pay.

DOGE won’t really be a government department, just an “advisory” commission that can make “recommendations” to cut costs, improve operations, etc. But I expect it will at least achieve “bully pulpit” status to move public opinion, MAYBE resulting in a few actions.

So let’s try this recommendation on for bully pulpit size:

Two thirds of both houses of Congress should propose, and three quarters of the state legislatures should ratify, a constitutional amendment permanently setting PRE-federal-income-tax congressional salary at the previous year’s POST-federal-income-tax personal per capita income.

If my calculations are correct (you know how it is with taxes — even the IRS never seems really sure how much they want from you), that would bring next year’s congressional salary in at a little under $66,000.

While that would save taxpayers some money right off the bat, it wouldn’t really amount to much — 535 members of Congress times savings of $74,000 per year each totals less than $40 million versus annual federal spending of around $6 trillion.

But direct savings is only a small part of the “efficiency” equation here.

Tying congressional pre-tax salaries to your post-tax income would encourage Congress to legislate in ways that increase your income and reduce your taxes.

Such legislation would itself entail increased “efficiency” — cutting government spending, reducing government regulation, avoiding costly wars, etc.

Would the politicians look hard for ways to game the new system? Of course. They’d probably give military personnel and other government employees big raises, while creating new taxes on you — probably disguised as “user fees” — that wouldn’t count in the formula.

But you’d know what they were doing, and you’d know why.

Run with that, Elon! Happy New Year.

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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More than 40 years after its release, an exchange in the opening scene of Warren Beatty’s Academy Award-winning film Reds floats to the front of my mind whenever I think about war.

Master of Ceremonies: “I, for one, see no reason why we here at the Liberal Club shouldn’t listen to what Jack Reed has to say. What would you say this war is about, Jack Reed?”

Reed, standing, looking a bit confused and annoyed: “Profits.”

The one-word answer, while correct — Reed, as a staunch Communist,  held to some fairly silly ideas on economics — was also incomplete.

World War One was indeed about profits. It was a clash of declining empires: Empires purpose-built to  rake off a share of profits, taken by imperially protected business enterprises from colonized places and peoples, for the benefit of the imperial political classes.

World War Two largely killed off the old empires, but created new ones for its victors, the US and the Soviet Union.

Eighty years later, the declining remnants of THOSE two empires (and even smaller European remnants of the imperial age) rage against the dying of their light, scrapping over territory and the attached profits in the Middle East, Africa, the Americas, and, of course, Ukraine.

Nearly three years into the second phase of that war (the first phase involved the 2014 secession from Ukraine of, and subsequent “frozen conflict” over, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea), I’ve still got friends who want to believe the war is over “democracy” versus “authoritarianism,” “protecting ethnic Russians from literal Nazis,” etc.

In fact, that war is, and always has been, about whether poor, politically corrupt — but resource-rich, and geographically located in ways that maximize its strategic importance —  Ukraine will go forward as the US/EU/NATO imperial satrapy it became in 2014, or revert to its former status as a Russian imperial satrapy.

In other words, it’s about profits for Rome on the Potomac versus profits for Constantinople on the Moskva.

An odd bifurcation: Whenever I point this fact out on X, I’m accused of being “pro-Russia.” Whenever I point this fact out on a site where I frequently comment, I’m accused of being “pro-US/EU/NATO.”

But I’m going to stick to my guns — pardon the militaristic turn of phrase — on this one.

There are no “good guys” at the policy level here. The only moral principle at stake is whether it’s acceptable for imperial gangs to murder each other’s colonial serfs to benefit their own political classes.

I say no, but hey, that’s just me. Your mileage may vary. If it does, and if you think you must take a “side” in this war other than the side of peace, at least be honest with yourself about what you’re supporting.

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