On November 3, the Washington Post reports, “fast-fashion” retailer Shein banned sales of sex dolls on its site after a government regulatory agency threatened to bar the company from operating in France and referred it to prosecutors. Some of the dolls sold on Shein’s online platform were, it seems, too “childlike” in appearance.

I consider it lazy to assert, as many opinionators do, that “no one” supports, or “everyone” wants, this or that particular thing, but if there’s a subject that commands anything close to societal unanimity, it’s opposition to the sexual molestation of children.

Pretty much all of us who aren’t sexual abusers of children want sexual abusers of children stopped and punished. Many even advocate capital punishment as a permanent individual solution and future collective deterrent, and while I’m opposed to the death penalty myself, I do find the opinion understandable.

It’s odd, then, that so many opponents of child molestation also advocate for laws which increase, rather than decrease, the likelihood that someone with such tendencies will act, in that way, on those tendencies.

Or is it really that odd? These days, public opinion — followed by legislative and law enforcement attitudes — seems largely driven by moral panic. Many people don’t want to just stop actual harmful Activity X, but also want government to suppress anything which might activate the “ick factor” associated with seeing, hearing, or thinking about topics adjacent to Activity X.

Thus the increasing tendency toward banning “child pornography” in which no actual children are involved, and “childlike” sex dolls that, whatever else they may be, are not actual children.

If we want to see actual reductions in the incidence of child sexual abuse, it’s worth considering what economists call the “substitution effect.” Per the Corporate Finance Institute, that effect is the “change in demand for a good as a result of a change in the relative price of the good compared to that of other substitute goods.”

A vanilla example, literally: Suppose you like vanilla ice cream. A scoop of vanilla ice cream made with real vanilla costs $1. A scoop made with artificial vanilla flavor costs 50 cents. You prefer saving 50 cents and putting up with artificial flavor. But suppose the price of the artificial version goes up? If it’s 75 cents or 80 cents or 90 cents, you’re more likely to pay just a little bit extra for the real thing.

I don’t keep track of sex doll prices, but so long as they’re legal, they’re presumptively “cheaper” than long prison sentences, mandatory sex offender registration and the handicaps that come with it, maybe even “chemical castration. “Some potential child molesters will opt for the lower “price” of the doll.

Making “childlike” sex dolls illegal brings their “price,” in non-monetary terms, closer to the “price” of actually molesting a child. That, to at least some degree, incentivizes potential child molesters to become actual child molesters.

So, do we want fewer or more child molesters? If the former, we’ll stop letting moral panic drive our legal and political demands.

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

“A top Justice Department lawyer,” the Washington Post reports, “has told lawmakers that the Trump administration can continue its lethal strikes against alleged drug traffickers in Latin America — and is not bound by a decades-old law requiring Congress to give approval for ongoing hostilities.”

That law is the War Powers Resolution, which requires the president to inform Congress within 48 hours of commencing military hostilities, and to cease those operations within 60 days unless Congress authorizes their continuation.

The first admitted US military strike on a boat in the Caribbean occurred on September 4; under the War Powers Resolution those strikes (which have killed dozens) would necessarily end on November 4 unless Congress says “sure, keep on going.”

But it’s more complicated than that, and not just because White House Office of Legal Counsel chief T. Elliot Gaiser claims the War Powers Resolution only applies when US troops are “in harm’s way,” and that the drone strikes  in question pose no such danger.

The big issue with the War Powers Resolution is that it’s unconstitutional. Not for the reason most administrations claim — that it limits an imagined presidential power to wage war at will and on whim — but in the other direction.

The US Constitution assigns the power to declare war exclusively to Congress. Not after the president has done whatever he wants for 60 days, but from the very beginning. Aside from immediate defense against direct attack, a president waging war prior to or outside of a congressional declaration is an impeachable “high crime.”

Some argue that the passage of time and advancement of technology imply a necessary expansion of presidential war powers: He must be able to act in the moment and not wait around on a dawdling Congress. It’s actually the other way around.

In 1941, it took 29 hours and 30 minutes from the first explosions at Pearl Harbor for Congress to declare war on Japan. That was before members of Congress could hop on planes to return to Washington — or, for that matter, boot up their laptops for Zoom meetings.

Since Congress has used remote and proxy technology before (during COVID), the infrastructure is already there for Congress to act quickly if its members believe a war is called for. Absent something on the level of a nuclear holocaust, the president could receive full war authority within single-digit hours.

But let’s take Gaiser at his word for a moment: If the drone strike campaign in the Caribbean isn’t war, what is it?

It’s not law enforcement. In law enforcement, there are investigations, charges filed, judicial warrants issued, and attempts at arrest. These drone strikes include none of those elements except, supposedly, investigations. They also take place entirely outside the legal jurisdiction of the United States.

Not war. Not law enforcement. What, then?

Murder. Murder most foul. Murder plain and simple.

Instead of whining at the administration to explain itself pursuant to legislation which illicitly assigns congressional war powers to the president in violation of the Constitution, Congress should impeach,  remove, and forward criminal referrals to the Department of Justice concerning, the president, the secretary of defense, and military commanders who issued unlawful orders to commit dozens of murders as a distraction from the president’s domestic failures and political problems.

And then Congress should address one of those distractions by releasing the Epstein files.

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

If New York Times guest essayist Finn Brunton is to be believed, the Federal Reserve Board Building is haunted by the ghosts of crackpots past. Trump’s cozying up to corporate cryptocurrency coiners during his second term, reinforcing “his thirst for money and power, has … embraced the corruption at the heart of digital currencies — a corruption inherited from the libertarian ideals that created them” (“Cryptocurrency Promised Us Freedom — and Brought Tyranny,” October 26).

Brunton’s gloomy portrait of a new-Gilded-Age Grand Old Party recasts it in the image of the Libertarian Party that might have “languished for decades as a clown show” but whose resemblance to the Gathering of the Juggalos conceals something less like the Insane Clown Posse fanbase’s dedication to social self-support and freewheeling fun than a real-life manifestation of their Dark Carnival mythology.  At their most innocent, “quirky, high-minded libertarian intellectuals” or “civil liberties activists [who] wanted anonymous payments for political donations and for financially vulnerable industries” are, like Martin Short’s Stubbs the Clown in We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, unwitting tools of far more nefarious and exploitative hucksters who employ and envelop them (like the literal dark carnival where Stubbs works).

From the invocation of Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard with their most unsavory alliances implied to be representative, to quoting Robert Heinlein’s mantra that “an armed society is a polite society” to the obligatory mention of Ayn Rand, “libertarians’ favorite novelist” due to glamorizing “rich, brilliant supermen” who “despise everyone else” — but not her nonfictional clarification distinguishing her preferred, ethical egoism from that of those who “are lone wolves (stressing that species’ most predatory characteristics)” — about the only cliché missing is a nod to the Mad Max series more overt than a supposed ideal of “a nerd-warlord society of failed states.”  Yet a fuller and closer reading of the libertarian bookshelf, rather than a glance at placarded slogans, would reveal a wish, not to let loose the likes of Max nemesis Immortan Joe, but rather to prevent concentrations of power from existing for such malefactors to exploit.

To Brunton, the contrasting model of power offered by Scranton Joe Biden is at worst “inconsistent, confusing and cautious.”  Yet it was Rothbard who clued in the coalescing libertarian movement to the work of leftist scholars like Gabriel Kolko, who saw Progressive Era efforts to centralize banking as a broader effort not to bring an oligarchic economy under popular control but to “increase the power of the big national banks to compete with the rapidly growing state banks.” Rather than calling for “removing all checks on the power of the wealthy to do what they want,” Rothbard traced how it came from inside the Jekyll Island Clubhouse where the Fed was conceived.

Rothbard also asked those who “charge that fraud would run rampant” if currency competition was allowed: “if government cannot be trusted to ferret out the occasional villain in the free market in coin, why can government be trusted when it finds itself in a position of total control over money?”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “We have met King Joe and he is us” by Joel Schlosberg, Lake Havasu City, Arizona News, November 2, 2025
2. “We have met King Joe and he is us” by Joel Schlosberg, Mohave Valley Daily News [Bullhead City, Arizona], November 2, 2025