Tom Walker: May 13, 1948 - September 17, 2026

You wanna live to an old age? You will have to say goodbye to most of your friends. Another of mine just passed. I did get to have a chat with him two days ago.

Tom used the pen-name of ‘The Sandwichman’ in his prolific online writing. The reference was to advertising signs that people once hung around their neck. Like (not Walker) this:

Much of it was about his unique take on Marxist theory. Most of his output was over my head. One thing he did impress upon me was the importance of a shorter work week.

I met him on an Internet group chat known as “LBO-Talk,” run by Doug Henwood. ‘LBO’ was an acronym for Doug’s newsletter, the Left Business Observer. He was one of the first on the Left to offer an accessible explanation of financial markets in his “Wall Street” book, now available for free as a PDF. LBO-Talk was a very active mailing list in the 1990s with numerous brawls and a great array of characters. I used to speculate that at times it included agents of four different intelligence services. No matter. All of the discussion was political argument. No conspiracies. It really deserves a book of its history.

Tom and I began corresponding and I invited him to join my new blog, with the shy, retiring title, “MaxSpeak, You Listen!” This was among the original blogs, launched a couple of years before the second Iraq war. Google AI has a praiseworthy summary of its importance, perhaps exaggerated. It was somewhat unique because it focused on economics from a radical perspective. Another collaborator was Professor Barkley Rosser, who himself passed a couple of years ago.

One of our specialties was Federal budget numbers, then a principal focus of my own work. Later on our monopoly on the subject was broken by similar analysis on a Washington Post website run by Ezra Klein.

Both Tom and Barkley helped elevate MaxSpeak, which got to be a thing. I learned early that to an important extent, a blog’s prominence depended on its volume. Of course, Tom and Barkley provided high-quality, sophisticated content, not just blather. The other way our blog became heavily trafficked was due, I think, to my vicious attacks on right-wing bloggers, who were uniformly shameless apologists for Bush’s Iraq invasion. Bush II, a.k.a. “Dubya,” drove a lot of us mad. Now in comparison to our present nemesis, he looks like Winston Churchill. Trolling worked if you could provoke more prominent bloggers to punch down, as it were.

Tom carried on a full schedule of activism in Vancouver, while working in various low-wage jobs and teaching university courses. That is a story for someone else to tell. He really dedicated himself to an honorable ‘drop-out’ lifestyle, more than this poor sod. We only met once IRL. I was on a junket to Japan and had a stop-over in Vancouver, decades ago.

I did like to cultivate what I called “real libertarians,” meaning those who had the wit to honestly apply libertarian principles to criticism of the George W. Bush administration. At one point we set up a ‘transpartisan’ blog entitled “Stand Down,” devoted to denunciations of the war.

My own chief target on MaxSpeak was Professor Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. “InstaPundit,” then a professor of law in Knoxville, TN. Reynolds was and I suppose still is a 2nd Amendment obsessive. He still commits punditry. I haven’t read or interacted with him in a long time. We actually had an amicable exchange with regard to the Federal government’s repression of Kurdish-Americans. Reynolds fancied himself a libertarian, though like many others in this respect I thought him a fraud, or at least grossly inconsistent. Since then we have observed the grim spectacle of other avowed libertarians, Reynolds included, rolling over for the likes of Donald Trump, but when the second Iraq war jumped off, many put party loyalty before libertarian principles.

Our blog was going great guns but I was forced to step back in 2009, when I joined the Federal government. At that point I set up a second blog, “EconoSpeak,” as a platform for Tom and Barkley. Tom also had his own site, which he called “Ecological Headstand.” There is more Tom on Twitter-X and Bluesky.

I will leave the Econospeak content up as long as possible. It is still accessible. Tragically, the original MaxSpeak blog was erased by my host provider after it failed to inform me of unpaid bills. You can still find many pieces of it via the Internet Wayback Machine.

Now blogs are no longer a thing. MaxSpeak used to have thousands of readers and comment threads with dozens of entries. Everybody went to Twitter, Musk blew up Twitter, and now, who knows where they have gone. Facebook is mostly old folks.

A few good blogs are still running. One of the best is Crooked Timber, another group effort. Another that is still active was virtually one of my brothers-in-arms, known as Eschaton. At some point, he ghosted me. I don’t know why; that’s how ghosting works.

After I retired I started up this substack. There is another book for somebody on the glory days of blogging, but I won’t be writing it.