Articles written by Thomas Knapp
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"The public good" isn't Mark Zuckerberg's - or Congress's - priority
Facebook "whistleblower" Frances Haugen, the Washington Post reports, has "repeatedly accused [Facebook CEO Mark] Zuckerberg of choosing growth over the public good." The Post's headline puts it a...
Prescription drug prices: Politicians are all talk, no action
On July 26, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order under which the U.S. government's Medicare Part D program would have negotiated lower prescription drug prices based on an "Inte...
Internet censorship: The real monopoly threat
"If [Donald] Trump and [Bernie] Sanders take the same position on Big Tech censorship," David Catron writes at The American Spectator, "the issue deserves serious attention." He's right, but in...
The Filibuster: Imperfect, but better than nothing
In its current form, the U.S. Senate’s delaying tactic called the "filibuster" hangs on a rule requiring 60 votes for "cloture." Simply put, it takes 51 Senators to pass a bill, but before that, it takes the consent of 60 Senators to end debate...
Dr. Seuss monetizes the culture wars
On March 2 -- the late Theodor Seuss Geisel's 117th birthday -- Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that, some time last year, it ceased publishing/licensing six of the popular author's children's books which "portray people in ways that are hurtful and...
Big tech's playing Monopoly. It's going to lose.
Over the years, I've written many columns concerning the war on Internet freedom. My usual targets are the politicians and government agencies who serve as shock troops for the Dark Side across fronts ranging from encryption to sex worker advertiseme...
The Political Class: At war with each other and on the rest of us
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible," President John F. Kennedy said in a 1962 speech, "will make violent revolution inevitable." Nearly 60 years later, two warring groups within the American political class seem resolutely determined to...
Election 2020: The Up Side of Undivided Government
As of late October, the political modelers at FiveThirtyEight gave Democrats a 72% chance of pulling off the trifecta -- winning the White House and majorities in both Houses of Congress -- on...
This is the most important presidential election since the last one
Every four years without fail (and usually a little earlier in each quadrennial cycle), both “major” American political parties wind up and toss the same slow, fat pitch across the public’s plate: This is the most important presidential...
Yes, the COVID-19 panic does call for drastic measures
As an old saying goes, it's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the end. The world's politicians are innovating on the fly (pun intended) by trying to combine the fall – the COVID-19 epidemic – with the sudden stop, bringing...
A proposal for real coronavirus "stimulus"
On March 12, the New York Federal Reserve announced a $1.5 trillion injection of money into the U.S. financial system. Three days later, it cut its benchmark interest rate to zero and announced it would be buying at least $500 billion in government...
The politics of panic are far deadlier than the coronavirus
U.S. President Donald Trump "Has a Problem as the Coronavirus Threatens the US," assert the authors of a New York Times analysis: "His Credibility." In the tagline and elsewhere in the article, the authors imply that the spread of COVID-19, aka "the...
Iraq: America's Other "Longest War"
As the calendar prepared to flip from 2019 to 2020, protesters stormed the US embassy in Baghdad. As I write this, the action -- a response to US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria which killed at least 25 and wounded more than 50 -- hasn't yet become a re...
Jedi mind tricks: Amazon versus the Pentagon and Trump
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, boasting revenues of more than $230 billion last year. But last month the company sued the US Department of Defense over a paltry potential $10 billion spread over ten years. Amazon lost out to Mic...
Thankful in 2019
A political writer's annual Thanksgiving column can be easy to write, or incredibly difficult to put together. It can also be inspiring or banal. The two are probably connected. It's always a difficult one for me; its quality is a matter of your opin...
Voters say they want a third party. They should vote accordingly.
According to an October Rasmussen poll, 38% of likely voters say they intend to vote for "someone other than President Trump or the Democratic presidential nominee" in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. In a three-way presidential race, 38%...
Holiday consumerism: Who decides what "nobody really needs?"
"Wasting resources, capital and income on stuff nobody really needs," Charles Hugh Smith wrote in 2017, "is a monumental disaster on multiple fronts. Rather than establish incentives to conserve and invest wisely, our system glorifies waste and the d...
"The Grid" is the problem, not the solution
On Oct. 9, Pacific Gas & Electric began shutting down power to about 750,000 customers (affecting as many as 2 million people) in California. The company claims the shutdowns are necessary to reduce the risk that its power lines and other...
Politicians: A necessary demystification
Politicians are people with jobs and with bosses. On its face that seems like a relatively uncontroversial statement, but I'm always surprised at how much time people spend looking for high principle in the decisions politicians make instead of...
Human sacrifice: a grand old American political tradition
On July 25, U.S. Attorney General William Barr ordered the Federal Bureau of Prisons to update its execution protocol and schedule five executions starting this December. Whether you support the death penalty or not – I don't because I prefer...
Photo ID is obsolete and unnecessary. Facial recognition technology makes it dangerous.
In mid-May, San Francisco became the first American city to ban the use of facial recognition surveillance technology by its police department and other city agencies. That's a wise and ethical policy, as a July 7 piece at the “Washington Post...
The "solution" to flag-burning is simpler than a constitutional amendment
On June 14 -- "Flag Day" in the United States -- US Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) and U.S. Representative Steve Womack (R-AR) proposed a constitutional amendment: "The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the...
Facebook isn't a "monopoly" - let's not make it into one
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, adding his voice to calls to "break up" the social media giant, calls it a "powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition." In recent years, we've seen similar claims, and heard demands for...
Social media regulation: speak of the devil and in walks Zuck
In a recent column on the mating dance between Big Government and Big Tech, I noted that "Big Tech wants to be regulated by Big Governments because regulation makes it more difficult and expensive for new competitors to enter the market." Two days...
A preference for peace
I'm not ashamed to admit it: I'm a peacenik. I think war is a bad thing. I've seen it up close and personal as an infantryman, and I'd like to see less of it, preferably none at all, either up close or from a distance. In part, this desire also...
