The editors of the Queens Chronicle admit that it “shouldn’t be surprising when” those who “seem determined to drive businesses out of” New York City “bill themselves as Democratic Socialists, but it still is” (“Another anti-biz bill to nix,” December 1).

Their shock evidently isn’t at socialists being anti-business.  The editorial posits that employers being “allowed to hire and fire whom they choose” makes “the free market better respected,” unrestricted not only by legislation — such as a proposal from the New York City Council’s Tiffany Cabán to require “just cause or a legitimate economic reason” for terminations — but organized labor negotiation.  “Unions aren’t always appropriate,” since they can keep “rubber-room teachers or excessive-force cops” on the payroll.

What should be startling is that the assumptions that workers have it better than they would in a freer market, and that their bargaining power is bad for business, have lasted so long.

The Wall Street Journal has lauded the socialist mayors of Milwaukee who “implemented a range of new programs, but paid for them largely through gains in efficiency rather than tax increases.” Other socialists went beyond such “an entrepreneurial approach to government, improving systems, cutting waste” to entrepreneurialism in the private sector. Some even did so in New York, before its markets became synonymous with the hard-charging capitalism of Wall Street and The Apprentice.

The town that elected Mike Bloomberg leader of its business nearly made free-trade populist Henry George mayor in 1886 on the United Labor Party ticket.  Brentwood, Long Island hometown of hip-hop duo EPMD of Strictly Business fame, was where Josiah Warren’s ideals of Equitable Commerce were put into practice by voluntary trading of “labor for labor.” The dominance of bookstore chains over independents once seemed so inevitable that You’ve Got Mail needed Tom Hanks’s likability to make it palatable. A decade before the first Barnes & Noble, New Yorkers had laissez-faire socialist Benjamin Tucker’s Unique Book-Shop, which boasted the “Largest Stock in the World Of Advanced Literature in English, French, German, and Italian” … all at the “Lowest Prices in the United States.”

Tucker’s little shop shouldn’t have remained an anomaly. He proposed that a free market in credit would “secure the greatest possible production of wealth and its most equitable distribution.” And dismantling the interlocking monopolies he identified would spur producers by the promise of getting well paid for serving consumers rather than the sheer dread of hearing “you’re fired!”

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

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Freedom isn’t Just Another Word For a Job Left to Lose” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, December 6, 2022
2. “‘Freedom’ not just another word for job left to lose” by Joel Schlosberg, The Daily Star [Hammond, Louisiana], December 8, 2022
3. “Freedom isn’t just another word” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Madill, Oklahoma Record, December 8, 2022
4. “Freedom Isn’t Just Another Word For a Job Left to Lose” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, December 10, 2022

Since his acquisition of Twitter, Elon Musk has styled himself the very avatar of “free speech,” descending from on high to defend us against the forces of “censorship.” On the whole, I think he’s sincere in his approach to the issue. I also think he’s in error as to what, precisely, “free speech” means.

To be fair, Musk benefits from a great deal of support in his misunderstanding — even more from his opponents than his supporters.

Take, for example, Guardian columnist Nesrine Malike, who tells us that “free speech is not simply about saying whatever you want, unchecked, but about negotiating complicated compromises. … for some speech to be free, other speech has to be limited.”

Unsurprisingly, Malike wants speech she agrees with to be “free,” and speech she disagrees with to be “limited,” with law as the instrument of “limitation.”

Musk agrees: “By ‘free speech,'” he tweeted on April 26, “I simply mean that which matches the law.  I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”

Speech regulated by law — even law that embodies “the will of the people,” were there such a thing — isn’t free speech.

Free speech is simply an absence: The absence of threats of force (by law or otherwise) to forbid or punish speech.

I’m a big fan of free speech. The moral principle underlying it is that people aren’t property, and their thoughts and expressions are thus no one else’s to rightfully control. The practical value of it is that freedom to debate makes it possible for us to solve problems instead of just obeying orders.

I’m also a fan of what Musk is actually defending:  Twitter as a permissive platform.

Just as your right to keep and bear arms imposes no obligation on my part to provide you with an AR-15 or let you use my back yard as a firing range, your right to free speech imposes no obligation on Elon Musk’s part to provide you with a Twitter account or let you use his servers as your soapbox.

He’s indicated his intention to let pretty much anyone have a Twitter account, and to let Twitter account holders say as much (or at least almost as much) as the law allows them to say.

That’s not free speech, but (assuming he means it) it’s about as close as he’s allowed to get to free speech, and he deserves our thanks for it. A poke in the timeline with a sharp tweet is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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

The 2022 midterm election results “stand as an expression of overwhelming lack of confidence in the major parties,” J.D. Tuccille writes at Reason magazine, “with a resulting breather for the country resulting from the split decision’s ensuing, and quite welcome, gridlock.”

Tuccille’s sigh of relief is only partial. While Republicans’ slight majority in the House of Representatives and 40+ seat “filibuster-capable” Senate minority means the most ambitious Democratic legislation won’t make it to President Joe Biden’s desk to be signed into law, he notes, “[t]he increasingly autocratic nature of the presidency allows enormous room for the nation’s chief executive to act unilaterally.”

Like his predecessors, Biden has a pen and a phone. And he’s proven himself at least as, if not more, inclined to use them to buy time (and more importantly, as columnist James Bovard notes with regard to “student loan forgiveness,” buy votes) even when he freely admits in advance that the courts will likely overturn his orders.

I’m even less optimistic than Tuccille about the potential benefits of gridlock — because it just ain’t what it used to be.

Once upon a time, and not that long ago, Congress at least occasionally fought real battles, over real issues, with winners and losers. Legislation passed or it didn’t. The Current Thing got done, or it got thrown into the dustbin (until after the next election, anyway).

These days, ideas that can’t pass as stand-alone bills get slipped into “must-pass” omnibus bills.

Take, for example, Democrats’ desire to add women to the Selective Service System’s draft registration requirements. That’s in the current “National Defense Authorization Act.”

“The defense bill isn’t the place for Democrats to indulge the wild ideas of their latest social experiments, like forcing women to register for the draft,” US Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) complains.

It looks like Cotton may have to either give up his love of big military spending — fat chance — or vote for a bill including said “social experiment.”

And Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) seems to be planning to fold the NDAA into an even larger end-of-year spending package, forcing other members of Congress to make such all-or-nothing decisions.

That’s the problem with the current version of “gridlock”: Instead of neither side getting anything it wants, both sides get the WORST things they want, even before the president pulls out his pen and starts fiddling with his phone.

That’s not “gridlock” — it’s unlimited government.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) 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