more on labels
You should know that whenever I title something "more on ..." I think "moron..."
Not that that's what I always mean. I just have punny reflexes.
My favorite humorous descriptions of libertarianism are:
The only reply I got to my "labels" letter was this:
But I'm pleased I wrote the letter, because if I hadn't written it spontaneously, I wouldn't have posted it to my blog, and if I hadn't posted it to my blog, Wally Conger wouldn't have commented on it in his blog.
On the subject of an ever-changing language: I have no problem with organic change. I don't even have a problem with directed change. What I have a huge problem with is directed change whose design is to obscure distinctions or deny options.
After centuries of the term 'liberal' denoting ...
The claim at the time was that there was this "old liberalism" that no one really believed anymore, but that this "new liberalism" would manage the anti-coercive goals of the old school under the benevolent coercion of the new.
When some classical liberals -- yes, they were still around, despite the claims of "new liberalism" -- decided to start calling themselves individualists instead, giving up the L-word in the hopes of keeping the old distinction alive, socialist "new liberals" like John Dewey said, Well, you know there was this old individualism that believed that too much government was bad, but no one believes that anymore, so now there's a "new individualism" that will harness the power of the entire society to promote the goal of actualizing individuals ...
In the United States, some classical liberals accepted the title "conservative" in contradistinction to "progressive" (which was another term that had once meant liberal but now meant statist) -- but the problem with that move is that conservatism already had an established meaning in the English-speaking world, and it had everything to do with interventionism and political privilege. Still, I do feel some sympathy with the American old school of Old Right conservatism who have lived to see their label appropriated by Cold Warriors (William F. Buckley), war hawks (Barry Goldwater), "Big Government conservatives" (Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan, despite his rhetoric), the coercive social conservatives of the Christian Right (you know who I'm talking about), economic protectionists (Pat Buchanan), and the latest incarnation of chickenhawk neocons.
So, to review, we no longer know what liberal means, no longer know what individualism is, watched progressivism pass from the hands of anti-interventionists into the hands of the interventionists, no longer know what conservatism is, and even libertarianism is being lost to a group of statists.
Some of us have to resort to the word anarchist to communicate, unambiguously that we are against state intervention, but everyone knows that anarchists are in favor of chaos, violence, and property damage. (By the way, this wasn't true at first, either. Anarchists were seen as starry-eyed dreamers, not bearded bomb-throwers.)
Real confusion results from these semantic reversals. People don't know how to read history, read theory, understand different schools of thought across time.
Some left-liberal professor at Duke earlier this year referenced John Stewart Mill on the natural stupidity of conservatives. (Actually, it was on the natural conservatism of stupid people, but the Duke prof wasn't recognizing that distinction.) The professor didn't seem to realize that in Mill's 19th-century British context, those words had opposite meanings to the ones he, the Duke prof, was intending: the British conservatives were the interventionists and liberals the anti-interventionists.
But even I am getting tired of the L-word example, in both its liberal and libertarian manifestations. How about terms like privilege, exploitation, monopoly ... all of which were understood for centuries to denote symptoms of political intervention, now taken to mean the opposite?
Or take the word, 'inflation'. According to classical economics, inflation is the growth of the money supply. One of the symptoms of monetary inflation is a general rise in prices. The Austrian Business Cycle theory (ABC) claims that monetary inflation leads to malinvestment, which leads to booms, which lead to busts.
But between the world wars, new economists wanted to promote and justify monetary growth, so they started using the word 'inflation' to designate a rise in prices, in order to de-stigmatize the evils of fractional reserve and central banking.
I've read mainstream economists claiming to disprove the ABC because they fail to find a statistical correlation between inflation and business cycles. But they're talking about the wrong inflation! Now there are mainstream studies showing that monetary increases (which used to be called "inflation") correlate to business cycles. This is news? It wouldn't be if the economists knew the history of their own language. By not doing so, they fail to even understand the theories they dismiss.
I wouldn't mind it so much if the confusion resulted from ordinary consumers using the term inflation to mean a rise in prices. Why should their terminology be rigorous in the distinction between cause and effect? But that's not what happened. It wasn't an organic change. It was a deliberate change, specifically designed to divorce the concept of (what we now have to call, for precision) monetary inflation from (what I insist on calling) price inflation.
There are, of course, plenty more examples, but this post has grown way too long.
Not that that's what I always mean. I just have punny reflexes.
My favorite humorous descriptions of libertarianism are:
- armed economists on drugs,
- low taxes and low morals,
- capitalist acts between consenting adults.
The only reply I got to my "labels" letter was this:
Dear Mr. Marcus,I've never been very good at picking up on sarcasm. I'm always inclined to take things literally. And then sometimes I assume something must be sarcastic when it turns out not to be. Here, I have no idea.
Thanks for the labels; I never heard of them before.
best regards,
Robert Klassen
But I'm pleased I wrote the letter, because if I hadn't written it spontaneously, I wouldn't have posted it to my blog, and if I hadn't posted it to my blog, Wally Conger wouldn't have commented on it in his blog.
On the subject of an ever-changing language: I have no problem with organic change. I don't even have a problem with directed change. What I have a huge problem with is directed change whose design is to obscure distinctions or deny options.
After centuries of the term 'liberal' denoting ...
- philosophical individualism,
- promotion of individual liberty,
- open-mindedness,
- belief in organic progress,
- trust in voluntary social institutions, and
- a profound distrust of all involuntary institutions,
The claim at the time was that there was this "old liberalism" that no one really believed anymore, but that this "new liberalism" would manage the anti-coercive goals of the old school under the benevolent coercion of the new.
When some classical liberals -- yes, they were still around, despite the claims of "new liberalism" -- decided to start calling themselves individualists instead, giving up the L-word in the hopes of keeping the old distinction alive, socialist "new liberals" like John Dewey said, Well, you know there was this old individualism that believed that too much government was bad, but no one believes that anymore, so now there's a "new individualism" that will harness the power of the entire society to promote the goal of actualizing individuals ...
In the United States, some classical liberals accepted the title "conservative" in contradistinction to "progressive" (which was another term that had once meant liberal but now meant statist) -- but the problem with that move is that conservatism already had an established meaning in the English-speaking world, and it had everything to do with interventionism and political privilege. Still, I do feel some sympathy with the American old school of Old Right conservatism who have lived to see their label appropriated by Cold Warriors (William F. Buckley), war hawks (Barry Goldwater), "Big Government conservatives" (Richard Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan, despite his rhetoric), the coercive social conservatives of the Christian Right (you know who I'm talking about), economic protectionists (Pat Buchanan), and the latest incarnation of chickenhawk neocons.
So, to review, we no longer know what liberal means, no longer know what individualism is, watched progressivism pass from the hands of anti-interventionists into the hands of the interventionists, no longer know what conservatism is, and even libertarianism is being lost to a group of statists.
Some of us have to resort to the word anarchist to communicate, unambiguously that we are against state intervention, but everyone knows that anarchists are in favor of chaos, violence, and property damage. (By the way, this wasn't true at first, either. Anarchists were seen as starry-eyed dreamers, not bearded bomb-throwers.)
Real confusion results from these semantic reversals. People don't know how to read history, read theory, understand different schools of thought across time.
Some left-liberal professor at Duke earlier this year referenced John Stewart Mill on the natural stupidity of conservatives. (Actually, it was on the natural conservatism of stupid people, but the Duke prof wasn't recognizing that distinction.) The professor didn't seem to realize that in Mill's 19th-century British context, those words had opposite meanings to the ones he, the Duke prof, was intending: the British conservatives were the interventionists and liberals the anti-interventionists.
But even I am getting tired of the L-word example, in both its liberal and libertarian manifestations. How about terms like privilege, exploitation, monopoly ... all of which were understood for centuries to denote symptoms of political intervention, now taken to mean the opposite?
Or take the word, 'inflation'. According to classical economics, inflation is the growth of the money supply. One of the symptoms of monetary inflation is a general rise in prices. The Austrian Business Cycle theory (ABC) claims that monetary inflation leads to malinvestment, which leads to booms, which lead to busts.
But between the world wars, new economists wanted to promote and justify monetary growth, so they started using the word 'inflation' to designate a rise in prices, in order to de-stigmatize the evils of fractional reserve and central banking.
I've read mainstream economists claiming to disprove the ABC because they fail to find a statistical correlation between inflation and business cycles. But they're talking about the wrong inflation! Now there are mainstream studies showing that monetary increases (which used to be called "inflation") correlate to business cycles. This is news? It wouldn't be if the economists knew the history of their own language. By not doing so, they fail to even understand the theories they dismiss.
I wouldn't mind it so much if the confusion resulted from ordinary consumers using the term inflation to mean a rise in prices. Why should their terminology be rigorous in the distinction between cause and effect? But that's not what happened. It wasn't an organic change. It was a deliberate change, specifically designed to divorce the concept of (what we now have to call, for precision) monetary inflation from (what I insist on calling) price inflation.
There are, of course, plenty more examples, but this post has grown way too long.
[Cross-posted to 
You may notice in the second lecture that Rothbard briefly touches on this history of American radio and the FCC.
Last year, when Professor Marcus was teaching at Haverford College, I looked at their economics website to see if there were any courses I might ask to audit. I saw that they had a new free-market-friendly professor from the former Soviet Union.
My great grandfather was the president of Radio Vienna in the 1930s and 1940s. So family lore tells me.
The good news is that my disastrously over-
Computer owners in Germany will need a TV licence in future after German TV and Radio Licensing Authorities proved PCs could be used to watch the telly.
You'll notice more obscenity than we usually use. That's not just because it's on [the] Showtime [premium cable channel], and we wanna get some attention. It's also a legal matter. If one calls people "liars" and "quacks", one can be sued and lose a lot of one's money. But "motherfuckers" ... and "assholes" ... it's pretty safe. If we just said it was all scams, we could also be in trouble. But "BULLSHIT!" -- oddly -- is safe. So forgive all the bullshit language. We're trying to talk about the truth without spending the rest of our lives in court because of 
I'm no longer a member of the 
You mean FDR and Winston Churchill didn't plan US entry into WWII well before Pearl Harbor? You mean FDR didn't goad the Japanese into attacking through economic warfare and deliberate diplomatic sleights? He didn't refuse to communicate with them when they sought negotiations to avoid war? He didn't deliberately load up the harbor with derelict military hardware, which he considered worth losing, and sailors -- whom he also considered worth losing -- however many of them were needed to make so many Americans cry out for blood vengeance?
Here's the recipe for the Chinese Beef Stew we had last night. It was very good, but I made the mistake of adding the rice noodles the night before, rather than cooking them separately and serving the stew over the noodles. The result was that the noodles sucked up all the liquid from the stew and I had to add more broth the next day, diluting what was Chinese about the flavor. This one counts as both a success and a mistake.
Bob Wallace might be 
To some people (mostly women) that will sound shocking. Others (mostly men) will either shrug or announce an even longer hiatus.
This semester, with the help of my-friend-the-former-restaurant-cook Anthony, and the guidance of 
(The funniest letter I got in response to that article was from a young economics professor I'd read but never corresponded with. He wrote: "I hate to admit this, but when your article first appeared on Mises.org I didn't read it, because what did I care about the writings of Thurston Howell III, some dead economist I'd never even heard of? (I.e. I didn't remember he was the millionaire.")
