“V-U. DAY!” proclaimed the May 2 cover of the New York Post. Despite the jubilant headline and “mostly sunny, warm” weather forecast, the national mood in early May is more malaise than morning-in-America.

After all, even the classic Cold War political thriller Seven Days in May took its time revealing the scope of the challenge to the American way, rather than letting it into the open on day one.

New York mayor Eric Adams is quoted as considering it “despicable that schools will allow another country’s flag to fly in our country.” (Has Adams forgotten the Israeli flags unfurled by counterprotesters, or the multitudinous banners seen on class trips to the United Nations?)

The paranoid Post is more historically true to its founder Alexander Hamilton’s backing of the Alien and Sedition Acts than his fictionalization in The Hamilton Mixtape finding it “astonishing that in a country founded by immigrants, ‘immigrant’ has somehow become a bad word.”  Even so, they should calm down about the university populations they liken to the Axis.

Historian James Loewen emphasized that polls consistently found more approval for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq among those with college education.  Antiwar demonstrators have always been “the loud minority” of Mad magazine’s 139th cover from 1970.

Even many not viewing protesters as a fifth column on campus share the frustrations of Resentment Against Achievement author Robert Sheaffer, who sees “the largesse of the taxpaying class” leading to “far fewer concerns about productive activity” than among those who prefer to spend time on pursuits “that will yield far more gain” than “joining some probably futile protest.”

Heavy financial subsidization, extending to even nominally private American institutions, does atrophy their resource-allocation acumen in, and outside, the classroom. However, as Loewen notes, funding pays for itself as “a bulwark of allegiance” to the state.  While paralleling the “vastly extended schooling” of Castro’s Cuba and Maoist China, it results in a student body far more loyal to the USA than to the ghost of the USSR.

Ronald Radosh was haunted by that specter when he wrote of having been to New York’s “historic center of radical protest” in Union Square as a red-diaper baby from literal infancy.  In the summer of 2001, he perceived a “growing irony” that May Day parades were “the first step of my journey to America, a country where I was born but didn’t fully discover until middle age.”  Ironically, that celebration originates with labor agitators not from the twentieth century Kremlin but nineteenth century Chicago. Hippolyte Havel pointed out that organizers like Albert Parsons and Dyer Lum drew upon American experience for ideas dismissed as “foreign poison imported into the States from decadent Europe.”

For a century before Sheaffer suggested it, “pro-freedom” Americans inspired by the first May Day have been on the march “against government restrictions on our liberties.” As Liberty‘s Benjamin Tucker recommended in 1884, their supporters need “not even gather in the streets but stay at home and stand back on their rights” to win them.

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

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On April 29. the US Department of Justice “unsealed” a 2023 indictment of one Roger Ver, better known in cryptocurrency circles as “Bitcoin Jesus.” He was arrested in Spain and as of this writing awaits extradition proceedings.

The indictment claims that Ver failed to hand over a sufficiently large extortion payment to the US government  in 2017, after  leaving the country and renouncing his citizenship in 2014.

The DOJ press release doesn’t put it quite that way, of course. Instead it claims that  “[A]s a result of his expatriation, Ver allegedly was required under U.S. law to file tax returns that reported capital gains from the constructive sale of his world-wide assets …. He was also allegedly required to pay a tax — referred to as an ‘exit tax’ – on those capital gains. … [Ver] concealed the true number of bitcoins he and his companies owned.”

Yes, you have that right. Roger Ver left the US in 2014. Roger Ver renounced his citizenship in 2014. He’s charged with not paying a $48 million bribe to the US government after selling some of his Bitcoin in 2017, when he was neither a citizen of, nor resident in, the US.

In 1931, Germany’s Weimar Republic instituted something called the Reichsfluchtsteuer — “Reich Flight Tax” — to prevent wealthy Germans from going, and taking their money, elsewhere … or at least to grab much of that money.

After the Nazis rose to power in 1933, the tax was instead used to seize everything of value from Jews trying to flee the new government’s persecution.

But, so far as I can tell, even the Third Reich didn’t display anything like the sheer gall and temerity of the US regime, chasing down emigrants years later and extorting additional money from them. Hitler’s goons limited themselves to things like pawing through emigrants’ luggage and stealing their jewelry.

Roger Ver’s wealth was never any of the US government’s business (neither is yours), and he never “owed” them a cut of it even when he lived here (nor do you).

This “nice life you’ve built elsewhere,  shame if anything happened to it” routine  is a giant, audacious step beyond most governments’ protection rackets.

To add insult to injury, “Bitcoin Jesus” has probably done you more good — with his investments in, and evangelism for, cryptocurrencies —  than “your” government ever has.

Which may or may not be why they’re after him. But either way, telling Hitler “hey, hold my beer” just isn’t a very good look.

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.

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“Americans aren’t having enough babies,” Catherine Rampell writes at the Washington Post. “Ironically, pro-life politicians might be making the problem worse.”

Her suggestion for addressing the supposed problem: “Slash the tax burden for families with young kids, a traditionally bipartisan policy that a few Republican senators are currently blocking.”

I’ve got a few problems with that suggestion.

One is that most “child tax credit” proposals of the type implied are actually subsidies — that is, they are “refundable,” such that beneficiaries can actually receive a net payment FROM the government (in other words, from the taxpayers), rather than paying any taxes at all TO the government.

Another is that I don’t like social engineering by government.

Using tax policy to influence how much beer people drink, what kind of cars people drive, or how many babies people have is just a way of imposing some people’s social preferences (and the costs of exercising those preferences) on other people.

Americans, Rampell tells us (citing polling data), are “having fewer kids than they say they want.”

She doesn’t cite any polling data on how many kids those same people want to pay the costs of conceiving, delivering, and raising. I suspect the latter number would be lower.

I want one more Tesla than I currently own (the latter number is zero), but I don’t want to pay the advertised sticker price. Nor do I support taxing you, or Ms. Rampell, more to buy me one (or to give me a tax credit to reduce my cost of buying one).

Ms. Rampell does posit substantive “problems” arising from “a population that fails to replace itself” — a smaller work force that doesn’t pay as much in taxes, for example.

And to her credit, she notices that there’s also a ready “solution”: More immigration.

A healthy economy attracts people from elsewhere to fulfill demand for goods and services.

As it happens, those people tend to come from cultures where having babies hasn’t gone quite so out of fashion as it seems to be getting here.

And instead of demanding subsidies for having those babies, they’d be paying the taxes that the “missing” babies would have eventually been paying. “Problem” solved.

[Note: I don’t consider taxes, or paying them, a good thing, but I guess I’m a sort of “moderate” — if we’re forced to pay them, I consider using them to engineer desired social outcomes worse than using them to fill potholes, but better than using them to murder poor brown people in the Middle East and Central Asia.]

How many babies are “enough?” As many as people choose to have in the expectation of covering the costs without subsidies. Any other number is just damaging political interference.

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.

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