“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

“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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY