Thanks to this web page and this video (and especially thanks to neural who is my long-suffering and ever-patient Mac guru), there's a new, bigger hard drive in the Mac Mini and my family's blogs and websites are back online on the correct machine, now upgraded to all the most recent software.

Hosting sites on a dying laptop is kind of cool, but it's nice to have everything back where it belongs.

(The local fixit shop told me $60 for a 60GB hard drive and $70 for an hour's labor. I found an 80GB hard drive for $40, and I decided not to charge myself for labor. There are always opportunity costs, but I'm willing to call this a hobby, so it gets filed under consumption rather than capital investment.)

I have a friend who works at a small but very well-known company in online entertainment. He just forwarded me this exchange from an internal discussion list:

Subject: Re: NYT article - "Venture Investors Wrap Up an Unusually Bleak Quarter"

Yes, I spam misc lists with articles from the NYT.

Key paragraphs in this week's Fwd: "In the second quarter of this year not a single company backed by venture capitalists has gone public. It is the first time that has happened since 1978, according to a venture capital industry group."

"Nancy Pfund, a veteran venture capitalist with DBL Investors in San Francisco, said the absence of venture-backed offerings in the quarter was surprising, but the reasons behind it were not hard to understand.

"She said there were two overriding factors. Wall Street is being very selective in taking companies public, and blessing only those with particularly high revenue and growth projections. And venture capitalists are wary because they worry that their returns will be limited in a depressed market."

The ginormous costs inflicted by Sarbanes-Oxley have killed going public for many startups. Companies now face a couple million bucks a year in new compliance costs and pervasive controls over just about everything they do on top of all the other headaches of going public. That increases the temptation for going the buyout route and lessens interest in initial startup funding. Surely the last couple years' changes in stock option accounting rules have hurt startups' ability to pull talent, too.

This is the pattern with all such regulations. The bigger corporations support them, quietly or not, because they can bear the costs and thereby eliminate competition from "below." And the Marxoids say that unregulated capitalism has a natural tendency toward monopoly…

The Left loves small markets, small merchants, small businesses, but then does everything they can to promote the bigness of business — in the name of fighting Big Business.

This is exactly what Karen De Coster was saying Sarbanes-Oxley would do, back when it was a recent development.

A few years ago, just before I discovered the Austrian School, I read The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. Austrians are somewhere between suspicious and dismissive of game theory (see this paper [pdf] for an exception and this article for a more typical example), but I find the central "point" of this book quite compelling and relevant to libertarianism. I'll explain why after this humorous interruption from my mother:

As a young boy enters a barber shop, the barber whispers to his customer, "This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you."

The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, "Which do you want, son?"

The boy takes the quarters and leaves.

"What did I tell you?" says the barber. "That kid never learns!"

Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. "Hey, son!" he says. "May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?"

The boy licks his cone and replies, "Because the day I take the dollar, the game's over!"

That's one she sent me last week in email. I laughed out loud and then thought about it. It reminded me of Axelrod's book, which is also about how the meaning of a single event is turned upside down when we can expect the event to be iterative — when, in other words, we expect it to repeat. How's that for humorless nerd talk?

The boy seems stupid when we think he believes $1 < 50¢. He seems surprisingly cunning when we realize he knows $1 < 50¢+50¢+50¢…

(I won't even touch the question of time preference, though you'll notice the joke implicitly includes that concept, as well.)

So Axelrod's book is about a similar shift involving the prisoner's dilemma.

In its "classical" form, the prisoner's dilemma (PD) is presented as follows:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies ("defects") for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act? (Wikipedia)

Pure self-interest, guided by reason, will lead a prisoner to rat out his partner.

The standard interpretation of this classical prisoner's dilemma is that rational self-interest guides individuals to reject cooperation, even when cooperation assures the greatest good for the greatest number. And the standard interpretation of that standard interpretation is that therefore we need a coercive authority to impose cooperation on us for our own good.

To borrow the Google Books summary of The Evolution of Cooperation,

This widely praised and much-discussed book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists—whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals—when there is no central authority.

Axelrod changed the rules to create the "iterated prisoner's dilemma" (IPD), wherein prisoner A and prisoner B face the classical prisoner's dilemma over and over again, remembering what decisions were made and what results occurred in previous iterations. He invited others to submit strategies (programmed in BASIC) to compete in an IPD tournament.

The result: the best strategy was called "Tit-for-Tat" in which the player is always cooperative with strangers and always imitates the last move, cooperative or uncooperative, of any player whose game history is known.

That result is already interesting, and the Tit-for-Tat strategy seems to me to be something you could reasonably call "the libertarian strategy": don't hit first; do hit back.*

As the Wikipedia page puts it, "Axelrod reached the Utopian-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious."

The even more interesting and "Utopian-sounding" result comes from iterating the already-iterated form of the PD, in which winning strategies "go forth and multiply" where the game rules dictate that losing players adopt the strategies of the players that beat them. The more successful a player's strategy, the more like-minded players are encountered over time. Tit-for-Tat ends up taking over the world. Eventually everyone cooperates. This is a very different result, obviously, than the one-shot "lesson" of the classical prisoner's dilemma.

My favorite part of Axelrod's book is the historical section, where he applies the Tit-for-Tat insights to examples of spontaneous cooperation among strangers and enemies across battle lines. Unfortunately, while most of his conclusions are libertarian friendly, he also draws some very interventionist conclusions about the need to prevent the forms of spontaneous cooperation that might take place between market competitors in the absence of antitrust policing.

Despite what might seem like two strikes against it (from an Austrolibertarian perspective), I still recommend the book to anyone who is trying to think through the dynamics of cooperation and self-interest.

* Pacifist libertarians might object to my summary of libertarianism as "don't hit first; do hit back," and they'd be right: the libertarian strategy says don't hit first; whether or not to hit back is, technically, outside the limits of libertarian theory.

Anyone who tried to read this blog in the past 2 or 3 days either found it down or found it upside down.

Black Bloke left a comment asking, "Why did posts from early 2007 suddenly come up on my RSS Reader?"

Fair question, not least because he'd just left another comment making an interesting point about how "in the context of an empire a nationalist of the ruled people can have a philosophy that is pro-liberty and decentralist, but a nationalist of the ruling people will be entirely the opposite."

He left these comments on my January 2007 post on nationalism: "Le Pen versus Joan of Arc"

Sorry for the absence and subsequent confusion, folks. The hard drive on my web server died, but it died slowly, so I spent a lot of time troubleshooting and attempting to fix via software what ultimately turned out to be a hardware issue. Only when I figured that out did I get a temporary substitute up and running instead, and when I did that, everything came up in "ascending" chronological order: old before new, just the opposite of what everyone is used to. That turned out to be the very weird result of an incompatibility between old blog software and new database — or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, it was all fixed by updating everything: latest MySQL, latest PHP, and latest WordPress, all running on a defunct powerbook laptop (defunct as a laptop because half the pixels on the monitor are purple! but not defunct, it turns out, as a web server).

We've had terrible, terrible luck with computers in the Marcus household this month. Of the 3 computers in use, all 3 broke in some way: aforementioned purple pixels (corrupt VRAM); aforementioned dead hard drive; and my wife's optical drive stopped working, too. I haven't been elbow deep in technology problems in quite a while. It's fun, if you ignore the time, money, and stress involved.

You will thank me for this one.

Years ago, our dear friends AC and Carolyn taught us the ultimate cure for having a song stuck in your head. In fact, that's probably at least part of the reason they became such dear friends. (I may not be sociable, but I'm good at gratitude and loyalty.)

The trick is this: you can displace a stuck song with another song; of course, this new song will then annoy you just as much if it stays stuck, so you have to displace the first song with "the world's least sticky song." After that, you will have found peace. At least until you listen to the radio again.

This is the world's least sticky song, only 99¢ at Amazon.com/mp3:

I spent much of the weekend listening to The Iliad, which I'm enjoying immensely. I had recently read that Homer's epic is appreciated not just as a work of literature but also as a set of clues for historians. The story is filled with details about the culture of prehistoric Greece — if not the culture of Agamemnon and company, then at least the culture of Home and his audience a few centuries later. One such detail is something I'm surprised I've never heard any libertarians mention (by which I mean radical libertarians who are better read and more educated than I am): Agamemnon has insulted Achilles and Achilles has withdrawn from the war in protest. (I'd describe Agamemnon's offense as theft, but that would require acknowledging property rights in other human beings: the warlord Agamemnon "steals" the sex slave of his best warrior, Achilles.)

The war goes very badly while Achilles is on strike, and Agamemnon relents, recants, says mea culpa, and offers Achilles very generous restitution, including the return of "the girl" whom Agamemnon swears he never touched, and a boat load of gold — literally, Achilles can fill his ship with as much gold as it can carry. Agamemnon sends Achilles's most beloved comrades to deliver the apologies and give the details of what is, in essence, a verbal contract for the two warriors to forgive each other. Achilles tells his friends just where Agamemnon can stick his boat load.

At this point, Ajax scolds Achilles for being unreasonable:

Ajax son of Telamon then said, "Ulysses, noble son of Laertes, let us be gone, for I see that our journey is vain. We must now take our answer, unwelcome though it be, to the Danaans who are waiting to receive it. Achilles is savage and remorseless; he is cruel, and cares nothing for the love his comrades lavished upon him more than on all the others. He is implacable — and yet if a man's brother or son has been slain he will accept a fine by way of amends from him that killed him, and the wrong-doer having paid in full remains in peace among his own people; but as for you, Achilles, the gods have put a wicked unforgiving spirit in your heart, and this, all about one single girl…

There is is, stated quite starkly: murder wasn't a crime against the king or the state; it was a crime against the murder victim and his family; once restitution was paid, that settled the matter.

I figured someone has to have written about this, but I've only found one brief mention so far, and I found it at StephanKinsella.com/texts (thanks, Kinsella!):

• Schafer, Dr. Stephen, Restitution to Victims of Crime, 1960 (selected chapters)

PAST OF RESTITUTION AND PUNISHMENT

…neither the adherents of restitution nor its opponents can be indifferent to the fact that restitution to victims of crime is an ancient institution, has had an established position in the history of penology, and for a long period was almost inseparably attached to the institution of punishment.

The historical origin of restitution, in a proper sense, the so-called system of "composition," lies in the Middle Ages, and can mainly be found in the Germanic common laws.

Earlier sources do not offer clear information. There are some sporadic references. The death fine in Greece is referred to more than once in Homer; thus, in the 9th Book of the Iliad, Ajax, in reproaching Achilles for not accepting the offer of reparation made to him by Agamemnon, reminds him that even a brother's death may be appeased by a pecuniary fine, and that the murderer, having paid the fine, may remain at home, free among his own people.

Having examples in famous literature strikes me as far more helpful to us than assertions about little-known tribal law among ancient Celts and Vikings, or even recent Indonesians.

Does anyone have any other examples?

From Human Action: The Scholars Edition, chapter 15: "The Market":

The creative genius is at variance with his fellow citizens. As the pioneer of things new and unheard of he is in conflict with their uncritical acceptance of traditional standards and values. In his eyes the routine of the regular citizen, the average or common man, is simply stupidity. For him "bourgeois" is a synonym of imbecility. The frustrated artists who take delight in aping the genius's mannerism in order to forget and to conceal their own impotence adopt this terminology. These bohemians call everything they dislike "bourgeois." Since Marx has made the term "capitalist" equivalent to "bourgeois," they use both words synonymously. In the vocabularies of all languages the words "capitalistic" and "bourgeois" signify today all that is shameful, degrading, and infamous.^*

* The Nazis used "Jewish" as a synonym of both "capitalist" and "bourgeois."

I posted my seasteading comments to blog.Mises over the weekend. Patri Friedman of the Seasteading Institute left a comment, saying, "Polycentric Order has a nice counter-argument to Rothbard here."

The post at Polycentric Order is written by Kevin K. Biomech, and I think he makes the right points, by which I mean he makes my points — only more thoroughly and less hesitantly.

I had a college girlfriend who set her clock radio to Howard Stern for exactly this reason. She found that she'd get angry enough that she couldn't fall back asleep, so instead she'd get up and go to Russian class. I think the flaw in her plan, however, was that over time she began to find the funny parts funnier and the offensive parts less and less offensive.

On Jun 10, 2008, at 7:19 AM, neural wrote:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/seasteading-engineering-the-long-tail.ars

(Be sure to click Next Page at the bottom... it's a three page article, but that isn't initially obvious.)

Thanks!

I've heard the term "seasteading" but I hadn't yet looked into it.

Murray Rothbard dismissed such schemes as "anarcho-zionism," emphasizing that libertarian goals had to be pursued in the world of industrial-level division of labor, but I find the pirate radio introduction compelling. The point isn't necessarily "a place to escape the state" so much as it is, as the article says, a lowering of the barriers to competition. It would be nice if "government" could become a voluntarily acquired service in the context of competition, rather than the coercive territorial monopoly of the nation-state.

I understand why Rothbard discouraged the science-fictional fantasies of lifestyle libertarians, but I'm not ready to dismiss these schemes, especially as they become ever-more focused on practical issues.

What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?

"Make me one with everything!"

I think my generation caught the worst of political correctness as college and university students in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However bad it may still seem, we're in a much less antirational era now.

This is from Rothbard's 1991 introduction to a 1970 essay of his called "Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor":

Perhaps the most chilling recently created category is "logism" or "logo-centric," the tyranny of the knowledgeable and articulate. A set of "feminist scholarship guidelines" sponsored by the state of New Jersey for its college campuses attacks knowledge and scientific inquiry per se as a male "rape of nature." It charges:

mind was male. Nature was female, and knowledge was created as an act of aggression — a passive nature had to be interrogated, unclothed, penetrated, and compelled by man to reveal her secrets.[3]

---

[3] John Taylor, "Are you Politically Correct?" New York (January 21, 1991, p.38. Also see ibid., pp. 32-40: "Taking Offense," Newsweek (December 24, 1990), pp. 48–54.

Some of this was already going on in high school in the early 1980s, although it was subtler and gentler than the peak it would reach a few years later.

I remember a winter wilderness trip to climb Mount Washington over Christmas break with my logocentric, nature-raping schoolmates.

My friend Scott (same one I wrote about in "look for the union label") said he wanted to "conquer the mountain!"

The wilderness teacher was frustrated with him. "That's exactly the kind of attitude we're trying to get you past!" he scolded. "You're goal should be to become one with the mountain."

Scott replied: "I want to become one with the top of the mountain!"