Power & Market

In the age of Trump, many American conservatives are adopting populist positions. Policies that were once considered the right-wing status quo are being questioned and assailed, particularly when it comes to capitalism and markets.

Fox News personality Tucker Carlson is often on the front lines of this iconoclasm, with his regular diatribes against unfettered capitalism and financial elites. His voice is that of a growing traditionalist movement that has begun to vocalize their idealistic challenges to basic capitalist principles. These traditionalists want a larger role for religion in the public square. Unfortunately, they want the state to help facilitate this, and in seeking government’s help, they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

Recently, a great many traditionalists were up in arms over North Dakota’s repeal of its blue laws, which prohibited retail businesses from operating before noon on Sundays. Blue laws were once in place across the country and increasingly have been rolled back. Usually they take the form of bans on alcohol and retail sales, hunting, and certain other recreations.

In response to North Dakota’s repeal, Father Dominic Bouck, a Catholic priest in Bismarck, argued in First Things that the move will hurt the poor and even make the siren song of socialism more palatable to the tired and restless masses.

Without blue laws, Bouck contends that many workers “conscripted into hourly wage jobs” will be denied the ability to attend mass and enjoy holidays with their families. In Bouck’s words, “the legal protection of Sunday rest helps the individual worker and preserves the family from the arms race that is our consumer society.” He also cautions that the decline of blue laws has helped facilitate the rise of our hyper-consumerist culture and the tendency to view man as “the sum of his production and consumption.”

Bouck is onto something here. However, blue laws aren’t going to address his concerns.

Rest from work is crucial, and a person’s worth doesn’t stem from his ability to be a cog in the retail machine. This lack of regularized rest has doubtless contributed to the current increases in anxiety and depression. In 1843 Magazine, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen notes that “anxieties about burnout seem to be everywhere these days.” Coupled with this problem is a lack of togetherness and fellowship. Whereas Sundays have traditionally provided opportunities for families and friends to spend time together, Cigna reports that there’s currently an epidemic of loneliness in the United States.

There can be no doubt that most people would benefit from taking Sundays slowly and spending time with their friends, family, and God. However, reinstating blue laws won’t solve the problem. It’s completely off-base to attribute the dramatic decline in American churchgoing to the lack of legal prohibitions on Sunday work. According to Gallup, weekly religious attendance has been going down since the 1950s.

Ask a young person why he didn’t go to church last Sunday, and I doubt he’ll offer a work shift as the reason. More likely, you’ll hear that church isn’t relevant to his life.

As sociologist Robert Nisbet noted in his classic work The Quest for Community, the relevance of a social institution depends on its maintaining a function and fulfilling the needs of its members. As the centralized state has usurped more and more of the traditional functions of important mediating institutions such as the church and family, the relevance of those institutions has waned. Relying on the same state to rejuvenate church attendance would only further religion down the path of irrelevance and decay.

In his essay “The Balance of Power in Society,” sociologist Frank Tannenbaum discussed the importance of maintaining a balance in society between the various institutions that comprise it: the family, the church, the state, and the market. According to Tannenbaum, these institutions are frequently in conflict and constantly trying to encroach upon the territory of the others. This push and pull is natural, Tannenbaum says, and even healthy when it results in societal balance. Unfortunately, when one institution gains too much power, the result is usually chaos and disorder.

There’s no doubt that our society is woefully out of balance. Family and church are deprioritized in favor of the market and job concerns, and all three are dominated by the powerful centralized state. Many in our Western world see their primary value in their jobs to the neglect of other aspects of their lives. It’s this imbalance that traditionalists are getting at with their call for more blue laws. But legislation is a poor method of restoring balance and order to society because it fails to address the underlying issue: the values that motivate people’s actions.

In the long run, consumers determine the shape of the market, a concept known as consumer-sovereignty. As I’ve argued previously, it’s inaccurate to say that markets are responsible for the decay of community and family. Markets are merely a mirror of people’s values. Employers can’t actually force or “conscript” others into working for them, Father Bouck’s hyperbole notwithstanding. Although man must eat “by the sweat of his brow,” that does not mean he must let the world determine in what manner he will sweat. Employers only have as much power as their employees give them. It may be uncomfortable and inconvenient to resist, but no one is forced to worship mammon.

Blue laws are merely an attempt to make the already very low barriers to church attendance even lower—to match the low value people ascribe to it. That isn’t going to fix anything. Early Christians were martyred and fed to the Roman lions because they valued their beliefs even more than their lives, much like the merchant seeking the pearl of great price. Have contemporary Christians really fallen so far that they’re unable to organize their economic lives so they too can worship?

Republished with permission of the author

Private roads shine in their ability to smooth and reduce traffic, and as a result, save our time, save billions of dollars of labor and leisure hours, and reduce pollution from cars.1 Moreover, they would save the lives of a portion of the tens of thousands of annual victims of fatal crashes by making roads safer. This cornucopia of benefits is made possible by introducing currently government-run roads to market prices, allowing consumers to coordinate who drives when and how much, and signaling to entrepreneurs to enlarge road systems and design them to be smoother-flowing and safer to capture profits from consumers who demand these services. However, skeptics criticize the viability of private roads on the grounds, among others, that roads are natural monopolies. The might of the market overcomes this concern.

Natural monopolies in neoclassical economics are characterized by services with high fixed-costs and low additional marginal costs per customer once the expensive, fixed infrastructure is finished. Examples of alleged natural monopolies include electricity grids, telephone lines, gas pipelines, and roads. Given the high cost and inefficiency of having two competing roads that both go from A to B running parallel to one another, not enough of such competition will exist because roads are a natural monopoly, the argument goes. As a result, road owners can abuse their leverage as the owners of the only road from A to B to force consumers to pay high prices and offer low-quality roads, or even blockade individuals. There are several issues with this objection. First, we currently face not only supposed natural monopolies at the scale of individual roads, we face a legal monopoly on the highways from sea to sea, and municipal monopolies on all of the roads in entire cities. The state has immensely greater power to abuse than any private road owner would.

Returning now to private roads, the longer the distance one is traveling, the more possible routes there are to get to the destination. Even if Jones has no choice but to use road X to get to the local grocery store, because people traveling long distances do have a choice in whether they take road X as part of their longer trip or not, the owner of road X will face pressure to make road X more appealing in quality and price to long-distance travelers, benefiting local drivers as well.2

Even if Jones is forced to use road X when he drives to certain locations, he has flexibility in the upper bound of how often and to what extent he uses road X. If road X is high-quality and reasonably priced, Jones won’t just use it when he absolutely has to, but rather he will choose to go out more often and stay home less. When he does go out, he will be more willing to go to locations that require staying on road X for a greater distance, such as going to a far away movie theater rather than the nearby bowling alley, which is relevant if a road or highway charges by distance traveled. Thus, even when road X has no other roads to compete with, which it does indeed in the case of long-distance travelers, it competes against Jones’ phone, TV, computer, video game console, board games, books, etc.

Any road providers who make part or all of their income via billboards and other advertisements, vendor stands, stores, or pit stops on property on or adjacent to their roads have an incentive to maintain a smooth and constant flow of traffic to constantly draw new eyes and wallets, which would increase the amount they could charge for advertisement and vendor space.3

The question of an abusive proprietor of a road in a residential area would seldom even be raised, as networks of residential roads would be owned by the homeowner associations, covenant communities, or simply residents of the neighborhoods in which they are located, and have predetermined contracts guaranteeing road use to those buying homes in those neighborhoods. No one buys a house without also buying legal ownership of something as essential as the roof or driveway of the house. Likewise, in the future of more widespread privatized roads, road access rights will almost certainly be bundled into home purchases as much as the roofs or driveways of homes are now. As an example, a network of neighborhood streets with two hundred homes might be 1/200th owned by each homeowner, including a contract guaranteeing permanent road access to each homeowner.

Finally, with the matter of the roads immediately connected to people’s homes and in their neighborhoods solved, this provides breathing space (the longer the distance traveled, the more possible routes) such that this larger unit, the neighborhood, would likely possess multiple competing options for roads connecting it to the rest of the world from the north, south, east, and west.

Small is the gate and narrow the road that is centrally planned, but wide is the gate and broad is the road that is privately owned.

• 1. Robert P. Murphy, “A Gas Tax Hike is the Wrong Way to Fund Highways,” Mises Wire, 2018.
• 2. Price discrimination against local drivers could admittedly complicate this issue, but it would be costly to enforce and draw public contempt.
• 3. If road owners attempted to increase revenue the opposite way, by intentionally causing traffic jams to force drivers to view advertisements for longer periods of time, or purchase food from the road owners’ stores, this may work in the very short term until consumers learned of this tactic, and then ceased to patronize the road altogether. Only perpetual good service can secure perpetual profits.

Governments have too much power over people. But most of us can’t truly grasp how deep this power goes until our lives are completely changed by a new policy.

Three years after President Obama lessened travel restraints to Cuba, the Trump administration imposed new restrictions for American tourists. This new policy impacts private and corporate planes and boats, cruise ship tours, and other group trips to the island nation.

In a statement to the press, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the travel ban was reinstated because of the “destabilizing role in the Western Hemisphere, providing a communist foothold in the region and propping up U.S. adversaries in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua by fomenting instability, undermining the rule of law, and suppressing democratic processes.”

With the new restrictions, Mnuchin said, the administration hopes “to keep U.S. dollars out of the hands of Cuban military, intelligence, and security services.”

On Twitter, Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla said the U.S. wants to “[suffocate] the economy & [harm] the living standards of Cubans in order to forcefully obtain political concessions.”

Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla, Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, strongly criticized the new travel sanctions.

“I strongly reject new sanctions announced by #US vs. #Cuba which further restrict #US citizens’ travels to Cuba, aimed at suffocating the economy & harming the living standards of Cubans in order to forcefully obtain political concessions,” Parrilla wrote on Twitter. “Once again they will fail.”

Regardless of how he feels, the conflict between the U.S. government and the Cuban regime shouldn’t impact people who have nothing to do with it. Whether officials of both countries recognize this or not, they have no legitimate authority over people’s lives.

Government Shouldn’t Dictate Travel Policy

This new attack on Cuba, Mnuchin himself admitted in his statement, is due to Cuba’s close association with Venezuela. But because these restrictions impact Cuban citizens directly, as many are only able to make a living thanks to U.S. tourists , Trump’s move might as well be seen as an act of war.

Whether you support the oppressive regimes in both Venezuela and Cuba or not, the nature of the current administration’s policy can’t be ignored, as it puts America, once again, in the role of the world’s police. And as we’ve seen in the past, to play this role means to put innocent people’s lives in jeopardy.

While to some, it might seem OK to punish the entire country for its corrupt government, the reality is that Cubans aren’t in love with communism . Quite the contrary, many agree that their government doesn’t represent them. But when the United States imposes sanctions or travel bans, it ends up fueling Cuban state propaganda while restricting the individual’s right to do what he or she pleases with their own money. In the end, those who hurt the most are the Cuban people, many whose livelihood depend on exchange with foreigners.

Originally published by Advocates for Self Government.

World War I is the gift that just keeps on giving. Although the U.S. government’s intervention into this senseless, immoral, and destructive war occurred 100 years ago, the adverse effects of the war continue to besiege our nation. Among the most notable examples is the Espionage Act, a tyrannical law that was enacted two months after the U.S. entered the war and which, unfortunately, remained on the books after the war came to an end. In fact, it is that World War I relic that U.S. officials are now relying on to secure the criminal indictment of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks head who released a mountain of evidence disclosing the inner workings and grave wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, especially with respect to the manner in which it has waged it undeclared forever wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Some news media commentators are finally coming to the realization that if the Espionage Act can be enforced against Assange for what he did, it can be enforced against anyone in the press for revealing damaging inside information about the national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. Therefore, they are calling on the Justice Department to cease and desist from its prosecution of Assange.

Of course, they are right, but the problem is that they don’t go far enough. Their mindsets reflect the customary acceptance of the status quo. The mindset is that we Americans simply have to accept the way things are and plead with the government to go easy on us.

That’s just plain nonsense. It is incumbent on the American people to start thinking at a high level, one that doesn’t just accept the existence of tyrannical laws and instead calls for their repeal. After all, isn’t that what our Declaration of Independence says — that when government becomes destructive of the legitimate ends for which it was formed, it is the right of the people to alter or even abolish it and form new government?

What does that mean with respect to the Espionage Act? It means that the law should simply be repealed and that Americans need to start demanding repeal rather than simply pleading with the Justice Department to enforce it in a more judicious manner.

Let’s keep in mind that the law is the fruit of a rotten foreign intervention. Hardly anyone defends the U.S. intervention into World War I. That war was, quite simply, none of the U.S. government’s business. President Wilson, however, was hell-bent on embroiling the U.S. in the conflict. Wilson believed that if the force of the U.S. government could be used to totally defeat Germany, this would be the war to finally end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy.

Wilson’s mindset, of course, was lunacy. Sure enough, the U.S. intervention resulted in Germany’s total defeat, which was then followed by the vengeful Treaty of Versailles, which Adolf Hitler would use to justify his rise to power. Nazism and World War II soon followed. So much for the war to end all wars and to make the world safe for democracy. Tens of thousands of American men were sacrificed for nothing.

Moreover, Wilson had to force American men to fight in World War I. He conscripted them. Enslaved would be a better word. When a government has to force its citizens to fight a particular war, that’s a good sign that it’s a bad war, one that shouldn’t be waged.

In fact that was one of the reasons for the Espionage Act—not to punish people for spying but rather for criticizing the draft and the war. The law converted anyone who publicly criticized the draft or attempted to persuade American men to resist the draft into felons. And make no mistake about it: U.S. officials went after such people with a vengeance, doing their best to punish Americans for doing nothing more than speaking.

One example was Charles Schenck, who was prosecuted and convicted of violating the law after circulating a flier that opposed the draft. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court upheld the conviction, one of the earliest examples of judicial deferment to the military, a deference that would become virtually complete after the U.S. government was officially converted to a national-security state after World War II.

Another example was Eugen Debs, who got convicted for criticizing the war and for encouraging men to resist the draft. President Wilson called Debs “a traitor to his country.”

How in the world can such prosecutions and convictions possibly be reconciled with the principles of a free society? Freedom necessarily entails the right to criticize government for anything, including its wars, its enslavement of people, its tyranny, and anything else. Perhaps it is worth nothing that both Schenk and Debs were socialists, something that today’s crop of Democrat presidential candidates might want to take note of.

Longtime supporters of FFF know that one of my favorite stories in history is the one about the White Rose, a group of college students in Germany who, in the midst of World War II, began distributing pamphlets calling on Germans to resist their own government and to oppose the troops1.When they were caught and brought to trial, the members of the White Rose were berated by the presiding judge, who accused them of being bad German citizens and traitors, just as Wilson, the Justice Department, and the U.S. Supreme Court had said of Americans who were violating the Espionage Act.

Today, any U.S. official would praise the actions of the White Rose, but that’s just because it was foreign citizens opposing an official enemy of the U.S. government. The fact is that if the White Rose members had done the same thing they did in Germany here in the United States, U.S. officials would have gone after them with the same anger and vengeance as German officials did. And they would have used the Espionage Act to do it.

It’s time to acknowledge that the horror of U.S. intervention into World War I and the horrible consequences of that intervention. It’s also time to rid our nation of the horrific relic of that intervention, the Espionage Act. We need to continue demanding the dismissal of all charges against Assange. But let’s not stop there. Let’s repeal the tyrannical World War I-era Espionage Act under which he is being charged to ensure that this cannot happen to others.

Originally published at the Future of Freedom Foundation

• 1. Also, see the great movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days