situational ethics

American Youth Hostile

My step-brother -- whom I haven't seen since the morning after the last presidential election, when the results were still being disputed -- used to write a freaky-assed column for Webster's Weekly, the first weekly features magazine on the web, founded one decade ago by yours truly and some friends.

Ten years later, I'm googling for my favorite haiku, written by the young man himself, no longer so young and now a private pilot rather than some talented punk kid. I can't find it. Nowhere to be found. I don't understand why. Had to dig around in my local copies to reproduce the following, my 2 favorite haikus -- the first one memorized, and the other forgotten until tonight:

Kurt Cobain on ice
Sent a message from the grave:
"Elvis Isn't Here."


Shut your trap, Grampa!
You do not have Alzheimer's!
We went over this.

the artist formerly known as Radio Free Rothbard

Cross-posted to the Mises.org/blog:

The Spectrum Should Be Private Property: The Economics, History, and Future of Wireless Technology

How much of the spectrum should be privatized? All of it. Even the vast "beachfront property" held by the military? Yes, all of it. Most government-held spectrum is currently unused, but remains off-limits to private appropriation. The result, in the United States, is an artificial scarcity well beyond that imposed by the FCC's protectionist practices. How do we privatize the airwaves? If the spectrum confiscation were a recent development, the answer would be obvious. In today's world, matters are more complicated. [Full Article]

"It's the most extensive Rothbardian take on the topic that I've seen since, well, Rothbard."

-- Jesse Walker, author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America

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B.K. Marcus is an independent scholar in Charlottesville, Virginia. His last piece on "The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III" became the most viewed article in the history of Mises.org, while his article on election markets sparked a wide discussion of the relationship between prediction and pricing. See his website, send him mail, and comment on the blog.

worth a thousand words

Bush Is Lord!


Lord Gives Finger

(Thanks to LRC blog for both links.)

economic illiteracy

We all have our theories about What's Wrong With The World. Mine is economic illiteracy. What I find even more frustrating than economic illiteracy is the illiterates' complacency about their illiteracy. They know that they don't know and don't know why they should know. Some even deny that they should know. To me this is like having an opinion on evolution without knowing basic biology, or having an opinion on NASA's engineering options without knowing the first thing about physics. Like giving a review of a book you haven't read.

It is irresponsible, by definition, to hold an irresponsible opinion. It is responsible, by corollary, to refrain from holding irresponsible opinions. But everyone feels entitled to espouse economic opinions, and most don't even recognize that that's what they're doing.

People don't like X, so they advocate the measures that are established to make X worse, because they sound like they really ought to have the opposite effect. Try to point out that they're making X worse, and they'll accuse you of being secretly pro-X. (The ad hominem fallacy being the favorite fallback of the ignorant.)

The FEE daily brief gives the usual illuminating examples:

High stakes over health care initiative
10/28/04
"California restaurants, retailers and labor unions are throwing millions of dollars into the campaign for and against Proposition 72, which would require large companies to provide health insurance." (San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday)

And we wonder why health care is a mess.

FEE Timely Classic
"Rising Health-Care Costs: Who's the Villain?" by Charles Van Eaton


Could we see'29 all over again?
10/28/04
"With more people in the stock market than ever before, nobody seemed to pay much attention to the bad news that cropped up throughout the year in 1929.

"Individual investors were buying stocks on margin, speculators drove up prices and the government had a hands-off policy on the economy." (San Mateo County Times, Thursday)

Government had a "hands-off" policy?!?!

FEE Timely Classic
"Great Myths of the Great Depression" by Lawrence W. Reed

radio free bk

I've been distracted from the blog -- and everything else -- because I've been putting the final touches on my upcoming essay for Mises.org. It will not be called "Radio Free Rothbard".

This one was written on request. It's a very different beast.

It is the longest piece of non-fiction I've written. Longer than my college thesis which is now the second longest essay I've ever written. And this new one has more sources and more footnotes, too.

I'm entering unknown territory. In my author's bio, I've been upgraded from "freelance writer" to "independent scholar" which is flattering.

I also learned today that my Gilligan's Economics article was the "most viewed article in the history of Mises.org". Very cool.

Calm before the storm.

What is history?

History is a selective recreation of the events of the past, according to a historian's premises regarding what is important and his judgment concerning the nature of causality in human action. This selectivity is a most important aspect of history, and it is this alone which prevents history from becoming a random chronicling of events. And since this selectivity is necessary to history, the only remaining question is whether or not such judgments will be made explicitly or implicitly, with full knowledge of what one considers to be important and why, or without such awareness.

Roy Childs, "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism"

marking time

My friend (of the sponge diary) recently wrote to point out that someone born during our freshman year in college is now old enough to be a freshman in college.

That's one way of marking time.

I have a cousin, in fact, who was born during my first college semester, and she is indeed in college now, so my friend's observation was already painfully clear to me.

I have a different friend (the photographer and poet) who I've known since we were 5 years old, although we failed to realize that fact until we were teenagers ...

"Hey, did you used to go to Hoffman's Camp?"
"That was YOU?!"

He and I used to mark the age of our friendship with different milestones. When we were 21, we'd note that our friendship was old enough to drive. When we were 23, our friendship was old enough to vote. And when we were 26 our friendship was finally old enough to drink. And that's it for now. I guess in a few years we'll note that our friendship is old enough to run for President of the United States, and a few years after that our friendship will have its midlife crisis. Then onto retirement, Social Security (ha!) and eventually our friendship will be old enough that all its friends will have passed.

Here's a different way to mark time:

Even the smallest kids in the theater who enjoyed this ...


... are now old enough to be doing this ...

our own monstrosity

Tex of the Antiwar.com/blog was kind enough to give comments (here and here) on my own war posts in this blog.

Below is my reply:

The remaining question for me is this: Why support the war?

You suggest it's a follow-the-leader phenomenon -- people want to believe their president. (Whether "their" means Americans' or Republicans' I'll leave ambiguous.) They experience cognitive dissonance from evidence that delegitimizes the leader. We saw this with Nixon supporters during Watergate and we saw it with Clinton supporters during Tailgate. I accept this is a contributing factor to the blood fever, but I don't see it as the dominant cause since support for the war seems to be greater than support for Dubya.

We see the pattern over and over again, but the pattern is larger than the denial stage. Once the evidence against Nixon was too overwhelming to be denied, his supporters switched gears from He didn't do it! to He was right to do it! Same with supporters of Ollie North. The pattern was only minorly different with Clinton, where it went from He didn't do it! to So what if he did it? It seems to me that in all three cases, the second response is only legitimate if it was held as an initial position. Otherwise, the first response invalidates the second.

But let's assume the second response is always the more accurate reflection of the supporters' views. If the support for the war is greater than the support for the president, then we really only have two remaining candidates for explanation:

1. Love of war -- there's always some of this, but since Clinton's wars were unpopular, we can discount this factor;
2. Hatred of this enemy -- where enemy is not defined as a man or a clique or a regime or a nation-state, but as a people. The Arabs in this case. Thus my claim of racism.

I agree with you about the Likud Doctrine, but again, I don't think it's enough, because I don't think enough Americans took Israel or the Middle East personally to account for the current level of support. Zionists and Christian fundamentalists take the situation very personally, but are there really enough of them to account for this level of hatred and insanity?

Would this racism have blossomed before 9/11? I doubt it. But that feeling that "we" had been attacked by "them" brought out some deep, primitive ugliness that now has to be rationalized and justified, and the real "them" is just too small and too slippery a group to absorb our pain and fear and rage. I think the cognitive dissonance experienced in the face of evidence is brought about not by loyalty to the man at the top, and not just by a need to see these frightening dark foreigners obliterated, but by questions of personal identity and self-perception. If the war is wrong, then what does that say about us for feeling so good about it? I really do think it's our own monstrosity that we're hiding from.

francophilia

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(mes propres commentaires sur la francophilie sont ici et ici)

It's like OJ all over again ...

You've got to read these numbers cited at AntiWar.com.

Unbelievable.

But the article also contradicts the conclusion I drew in a recent blog post, that the hawks don't care about justifying the slaughter:

"Another reason that Bush supporters may hold to these beliefs is that they have not accepted the idea that it does not matter whether Iraq had WMD or supported al Qaeda. Here too they are in agreement with Kerry supporters."

That's a very awkward double negative, so let me translate: Bush supporters apparently do care about the legitimacy of going to war. I have come to believe the opposite about them.

Asked whether the US should have gone to war with Iraq if US intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters said the US should not have, and 61% assume that in this case the President would not have. Kull continues, "To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance, and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about prewar Iraq."

I'm willing to believe that plenty of it is dissonance and denial, but that seems like an untestable hypothesis. How can you tell the difference between a person who is unmoved by evidence because the evidence is irrelevant to them and a person who is unmoved by evidence because they're emotionally incapable of accepting the evidence?

Calling it denial is itself a form of denial. We don't want to believe that these people could be such monsters.

just desserts

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Hernando de Soto

Cross-posted to Mises.org/blog:

Hernando de Soto to speak at UNC

B.K. Marcus

Hernando de Soto is no Rothbardian.

He writes of social contracts, of voluntary taxation (meaning the coercive kind we have now), and of the indispensable role of the State in defining and securing the private right to property.

But unlike so many development economists, he sees the solution to world poverty as secure property rights for the poor, based on a principle of homesteading.

In his book, The Mystery of Capital, he illustrates the distinction between property-as-possession and property title as the basis for the entrepreneurial generation of wealth. The world's poor have the former; they need the latter.

Austro-libertarians will take issue with much of his writing, including his assertion than only Marxism presents a credible theory of class conflict -- apparently DeSoto doesn't realize that Marx took the structure for his model of conflict (working class versus capitalist class) from classical liberal class theory (productive class versus political class) -- but DeSoto's bottom-up emphasis on the creation of wealth is a breath of fresh air in a field dominated by top-down models of "development".

DeSoto will be speaking at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, next Tuesday, October 26th. The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, visit the web page for this event.

budding liberventionist?

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Note on terminology.

disaggregating the foreigners

On the antiwar.com/blog we learn that at least a couple of anti-war journalists are alive today because of Google.com. Seems the kidnappers googled the journalists' names, read their articles and let them go. (Though one of the journalists was tortured a bit -- you know, just on general principle.)

So I mentioned to my wife that technology helps the Arabs disaggregate the presumably-white westerners. I wondered aloud why we high-tech westerners seem intent on lumping all the Arabs together.

She replied that she'd listened to an interview on the radio this evening with a small-town Republican woman talking about how she supported President Bush's war and how we just had to invade Iraq after 9/11. The reporter told her that there was no evidence of any connection between 9/11 and Iraq. The woman replied, "Oh I don't care. Just kill them all!"

I don't know why it took me so long to realize that the hawks don't care what the official rationale for the invasion was. No WMDs? No problem. It's us against the ay-rabs, whatever fancy packaging that gets put in.

It's an almost overtly racist war. That's not an accusation I make lightly, since I know how over-used and plenty-abused the race card is. But how else can you explain it?

A clash of civilizations, blah blah blah. OK, so maybe it doesn't matter that their skin is brown. Maybe it's some form of bigotry other than racism, but the point is that a big chunk of the world's population is all lumped together. Collective guilt on a massive scale. And the hawks don't give a damn how crazy that sounds.

Kill 'em all. Let Allah sort 'em out.

ginger fish

Tonight's dinner was an especially pleasant success because not only was the missus quite vocal in her praise for the results, but it's a recipe I can half claim to have made up. Actually, I made up nothing in this recipe -- I just took half of a pork stew recipe and grafted it onto half a fish recipe.

• olive oil
• salt & pepper
• 8 garlic cloves, minced
• 4 tablespoons chopped peeled fresh ginger
• 1 bunch of green onions, chopped
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon of butter
• 4 tilapia fillets
  

Previously, I reported that a package of 4 frozen tilapia fillets costs $3.99 at Trader Joe's. Well, I bought 5 frozen tilapia fillets at Genuardi's for about $2.50. These fillets are also individually wrapped, so I can thaw only those I need.

Refer to the spicy fish recipe for preparation of the fish, which is identical, but instead of making a sauce from olives, tomatoes, and parsley, I made a sauce from garlic, ginger and green onions -- which is the contents of the Coke stew recipe minus the Coke and the pork.

Brown the minced garlic; add the minced ginger; add about 2/3 of the chopped green onions. When everything is cooked -- it shouldn't take too long -- add the soy sauce and the butter. As soon as the butter is melted, spoon the sauce over the fish and garnish with the remaining chopped green onion.

I love tilapia fillets. And the wife loved my new ginger fish recipe.

why "we" are at war

http://www.strike-the-root.com/blog/archives/000734.html

etymology of 'trade'

An etymology lesson from Gil Guillory:

trade

c.1375, "path, track, course of action," introduced by the Hanse merchants, from M.Du. or M.L.G. trade "track, course" (probably originally of a trading ship), cognate with O.E. tredan (see tread). Sense of "one's habitual business" (1546) developed from the notion of "way, course, manner of life;" sense of "buying and selling" is first recorded 1555. The verb is 1548, from the noun. Trade wind (1650) has nothing to do with commerce, but preserves the obsolete sense of "in a habitual or regular course." Trademark first attested 1838; in figurative sense, 1873.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=trade

So the etymological roots of "trade" and "tradition" are probably the same. Your trade is what you traditionally do. So I guess the highwayman really does have a trade, whether he exchanges anything or not.

No, see, here it gets complicated again:

tradition

c.1382, from O.Fr. tradicion, from L. traditionem (nom. traditio) "delivery, surrender, a handing down," from stem of tradere "deliver, hand over," from trans- "over" + dare "to give" (see date (1)). The notion in the modern sense of the word is of things "handed down" from generation to generation.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=tradition

So the Latin tradere (tradeo: I deliver) seems to me to be as likely a root for modern English 'trade' as the medieval germanic roots etymonline cites. If nothing else, we have a hint that the "giving" of trans-dare is present in the early and late meanings, even if it faded in the middle.

everything is OK

From the FEE daily brief:

Private Airline to Start up in China
10/18/04
"China is to launch its first private airline -- named Okay Airways -- by the end of the year, according to state media reports." (BBC News, Monday)

China continues to develop, at least economically.

FEE Timely Classic
"China's Entrepreneurs: Keeping the Faith after Tiananmen" by Sheila Melvin

Okay Airlines?! That name doesn't inspire confidence.

Reminds me of driving around the midwest twenty years ago and reading all the different state license plates. New York was, of course, the Empire State. New Jersey was the Garden State. I think DC had recently changed their licenses to read "A Capital City!" duh

The less popular states were adopting more self-promoting slogans. I can't remember any of them. (That's how successful they were!)

My favorite: "Oklahoma is OK"

Not great. Not even good. Just OK.

No, I get it. It's a pun. Their postal code is OK the way New York's is NY and Pennsylvania's is PA. It's not that I fail to see the humor, it's just that I'm surprised to see such self-deprecating humor from a state bureaucracy. Not exactly a promotional slogan, is it?

I just can't decide if it's deadpan humor -- not something Oklahomans are known for -- or if it's just dumb.

So a Chinese airline -- probably destined to become one of the 21st century's biggest -- is Okay. They're not the world's greatest airline; they're an Okay Airline. Again, is it ignorance of English? Is it anglophone self-deprecation? (Are all those hilariously mistranslated fortune cookie "fortunes" and instructions on chopstick wrappers actually evidence of highly self-aware humor?)

Here's a frightening third option. Maybe it's not ignorance, in which case the Chinese know what "Okay" means in English. And neither is it a joke at their own expense. Maybe, in fact, it's because they don't care what English-speaking customers think. Maybe they consider us irrelevant to the long term of the 21st-century economy.

Maybe "Okay Airlines" is a big middle finger proferred to us complacent, self-satisfied Anglo-American Westerners!

Coke & Ketchup Barbecue

The recipe for Coke stew called for 2 pounds of boneless pork ribs. The packages at our supermarket are about 2/3 pound each. I should use 3 of them. Instead, I keep using 2. With the Asian flavored Coke stew, I got away with it, but since there's sugar in ketchup, the combination of ketchup with a can of Coke makes the barbecue sauce too sweet. Still, it was good. Just needed to add enough spices to overcome the sweet. Next time, I'll not only use more meat, but I'll also substitute something like Spicy V8 for the ketchup. The missus says she'd like to try it with worcestershire sauce. Spicy V8 and worcestershire sauce is basically a bloody mary mix. So next time we'll try making our barbecue sauce with Coke and bloody mary!

Other simple recipes for barbecue sauce are welcome. (She's allergic to garlic powder, which means most commercial sauces are off-limits.)

You know, ten years ago, as a New York Yankee by way of the Philadelphia suburbs, I thought "barbecue" meant you cooked something on a grill. We northerners even call grills barbecues. The singular noun never refers to food, only to the tool used to cook the food. The food is always "barbecued" (adjective) somethingorother. Barbecued ribs, barbecued chicken, etc.

"Thrown another shrimp on the barby!" -- No, that's the wrong hemisphere.

Down south, barbecue (singular noun) means slow-cooked pork in a tomato-based sweet sauce. The slow-cooking is what makes the pork fall apart into shreds, as the surrounding fat cooks off into the sauce. The meat gets infused with the sauce flavor, so the sauce is important.

There's a terrible monstrosity called "shredded pork in barbecue sauce" that looks the same, but absolutely doesn't taste like barbecue. Shredded pork is just what it sounds like, pork that's been shredded. No infusion of flavor. Stuff's really gross. (These are objective facts I'm reporting, not mere personal preferences of course.)

So to make your very own southern-style barbecue, cut your 2 pounds of boneless pork ribs into cubes. Brown them in vegetable oil in a dutch oven. Add your can of Coke. Bring to a boil. Turn heat down to simmer and cover the dutch oven for half an hour.

Meanwhile, cut up some onion and some garlic. Maybe just cut up some tomatoes instead of using ketchup, but like I said, we're gonna try bloody mary next time. Maybe throw in some peppers, too. I like spice. Mix it all together with the pork and Coke. Keep simmering for about a day. Seriously. I didn't leave the simmer on while we slept, but it was on the whole time we were awake. I'm told you can use an electric crock pot, too.

White rice cooks faster than brown rice, but I think brown rice tastes better. We eat our barbecue over rice. Southerners eat it straight off the plate or as a sandwich -- usually on a hamburger bun. I'd like to try it on a good baguette.

look for the union label

You know, I'm starting to think that my 8th grade teacher was a Marxist.

But no, her leftism wasn't international: she took us on a field trip to the headquarters of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, where the tour guide explained to us how impoverished American rag workers would be without the ILGWU, and how the working class was now threatened by cheap imports from cheap foreign labor. Yup, we were being taught economic protectionism as part of our social studies curriculum. My friend Scott wouldn't let the tour guide slip that one past us. "What would trade barriers do to poor foreign workers?" The class was full of fledgling lefties, but we were definitely not nationalists, and this guy's socialism was clearly of the nationalist variety, as is true of all the big labor unions.

This teacher is the same one who told us that the FCC was necessary because the 1920s had been an anarchy of the airwaves.

This is the same lady who told us that capitalism, unchecked by government intervention, leads inexorably to monopoly.

And this is the same lady who told us that the US was such a wealthy "nation" because of our vast natural resources.

There are all sorts of leftist lies I didn't shed for another couple decades. It wasn't until a few years ago I started thinking seriously about wealth -- not "riches" but any level of wealth. What is it? Where does it come from? How can everyone have more of it?

To believe the vast-natural-resources thesis requires utter ignorance of the world's economies. (All of these lies require economic ignorance!) South America has similar vast resources to North America. The most densely resource-rich countries are some of the poorest -- but always with a small, rich ruling class. In contrast, Britain built its wealth without vast resources. Japan barely had any. And Hong Kong has next to nothing. But these tiny territories became the wealthiest through property rights and trade. In the US, we had property rights and vast natural resources, which certainly didn't hurt.

Today I learned about modern Iceland, which seems to have undergone an economic miracle by staying out of the European Union:

"Blue-eyed sheikhs" by Daniel Hannan, The Spectator (UK).

grammatical inversion

I wish more people would take seriously the semantics of such terms as 'because' or 'since' or 'for the sake of'.

If I say, "I'm not going to donate because I'm broke," then I am also saying, "If I weren't broke then I would donate."

If you then say you don't believe me, it would be misguided for me to reply, "But I am broke!" Maybe you believe I'm broke, but you also think that my financial status is irrelevant to my willingness to donate.

People who talk this way are trying to hide their lies from themselves. They know that the components of their statement -- e.g., (a) "I'm not going to donate" and (b) "I'm broke" -- are both true, and must think that the "because" is somehow irrelevant, rather than the crux of the claim.

On the AntiWar.com/blog, I find this brilliant point:

It is high time we recognize the grammatical inversion that has seized our Imperial Wing. While they produce sentences of the form "I support the War for the sake of this reason," the truer template is "I support this reason for the sake of the War."

Indeed.

Robert Nozick, author of Anarchy, State, & Utopia, said that when arguing with leftists, he would one by one address their stated reasons for opposing capitalism, and one by one they would concede the particular point, but come up with a different objection. However many of their objections he convincingly addressed, they'd find more. It was, he said, as if they argued with the verdict already in their pocket, and the verdict was death.

This issue also reminds me of a conversation I had with a Biblical literalist, who claimed to have studied "both sides" in the evolution debate, and had concluded that the theory of evolution wasn't convincing. He kept stressing, "They've never found evidence of a missing link, a halfway point between two species!" Now that sounded wrong to me, but I'm no expert on the history of evolutionary science, so I wasn't about to contradict him. Instead I asked, "And if they do find such evidence, will you find the theory more convincing?" He resisted the question, but finally admitted that he wouldn't. He could find, he said, some other explanation. So I didn't bother arguing with him. If he wasn't going to be honest about his reasons, I wasn't going to waste my time.

more coke stew

The Politically Incorrect Gourmet told me about Coke & Ketchup Barbecue.

I tried it, but I'm not ready to report on it yet.

Meanwhile, I made tonight's dinner according to the Asian Coke Stew recipe, doubling both the ginger and garlic quantities, and it was excellent! Give it a try sometime.

predatory innovation

Really, this one was a collaboration between another Misesian and myself.

Cross-posted to Mises.org/blog:

Google's World

B.K. Marcus

Google's new tool makes inroads into areas that belong to others for now, and raises the question: how long before Google supplants Windows?

And the inevitable next question: how long before the Justice Department goes after Google for violation of anti-trust?

Will Microsoft claim to be Google's victim? Will Bill Gates have completed his conversion from peaceful, a-political billionaire to professional victim in need of mercantilist protection?

There are a lot of Windows machines in Washington DC...

Non Sequitur

Here are two more from Non Sequitur:

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Our Enemy, the State

Mises's 123rd and Nock's 134th within a month of each other.

In today's daily brief from FEE:

Happy Birthday, Mr. Nock
10/13/04
Today is the 134th anniversary of the birth of the great individualist and essayist Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945), an inspiration to FEE since its founding in 1946. Nock was the author of such unique works as Our Enemy, the State (1935), Mr. Jefferson (1926), and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943).

"The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed."

-- Albert Jay Nock, "On Doing the Right Thing"

FEE Timely Classics
"The Genial Mr. Nock" by Edmund Opitz
"Nock on Education" by Wendy McElroy
"Nock Revisited" by Sheldon Richman
Book Review: The State of the Union
Book Review: Mr. Jefferson

(I'm about half-way through an audible.com reading of Our Enemy, the State.)

aristide dans son cabaret

Here's another French thing I love:

When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be a private detective.

I told my dad I'd need a logo, and he suggested this poster.

Twenty years later, out of nowhere, la tante de ma femme gave me the nickname Aristide.

("Brian" and "Bruant" sound similar in French.)

Click the image for background on the artist and his subject.

age of reason

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Paranoia versus Scholarship

Cross-posted to Mises.org/blog:

Murray Rothbard gave a lecture at Polytechnic University in the 1970s on the economics of labor and labor regulation. I assume it was part of his regular teaching duties for basic economics. You can download the audio file here.

Two of my favorite-ever Rothbard quotes are in that one lecture, and I can't find them written out anywhere, so I've transcribed them:

• "In general, I urge everybody to look at a government measure ... not in terms of a tragic failure to achieve the common good, public interest, or general welfare, but [rather] as a conscious agency for doing all sorts of monopolizing, cartelizing, and other restrictive things. In other words, the government is not that dumb!"

• "There's a rational conspiracy view of history, and an irrational, sort of sloppy conspiracy theory of history. The sloppy view only says cui bono and then says, Ah ha! These guys are responsible! They're evil and so forth... The rational conspiracy theorist looks more deeply and asks, Who caused these measures? Who lobbied for them? Who continues to lobby for them? ... This makes him a scholar instead of a hopped up paranoid. [laughter] So scholarship is essentially confirming your early paranoia through a deeper factual analysis."

Abraham & Isaac

Here's what the Family Guy pictures when he learns that God told Abraham to kill Isaac:

The Sunday Paper

I don't read newspapers. Never have.

(Oh, well, OK, there were those few months in Israel during the television strike (!) when the Kibbutz gave out copies of the Jerusalem Post for free. And an old college buddy recently insisted to me that I used to read the college paper when we were new freshmen.)

For a long time I got all my news through NPR.

Now I get almost all of my information online. (I can use my wife's academic status to search the back issues of hundreds of scholarly journals, which is coming in awful darn handy for the article I'm researching.)

If you ever did see me with a newspaper -- and I suspect this even explains the college freshman case -- I was probably reading the funnies. Now I pay to have a batch of them dropped in my email Inbox every morning. Sometimes I put some of them here.

This morning, I find a lovely parallel between a supposed struggle on the left and a supposed struggle on the right.

I really wish I saw more signs of both these struggles!

P.S.

While I'm here, let me link to this editorial I found in a mid-1990s issue of Reason Magazine. In it, Nick Gillespie has his own struggles with the L-word, as I did in two earlier blog posts, here and here.

(Btw, Gillespie misrepresents the paleolibertarians and completely fails to understand Noam Chomsky, which I guess is easy to do in both cases.)

mechanical television era

I find this really amazing.

There were televisions back in the 1920s.

That's the same decade that saw the start of voice broadcasts in radio!

"The 'first' generation of television sets were not entirely electronic. The display (TV screen) had a small motor with a spinning disc and a neon lamp, which worked together to give a blurry reddish-orange picture about half the size of a business card! The period before 1935 is called the Mechanical Television Era."

This is an actual television picture taken by Mr. Steve McVoy,
as displayed on his 1930 operating 30-line Baird mechanical television set.

(http://www.tvhistory.tv/)

Feds Getting Ready to Regulate Space Tourism

From the FEE News & Commentary brief:

Feds Getting Ready to Regulate Space Tourism
10/7/04

"Federal regulators and rocket developers are working on how to govern the up-and-coming space tourism industry." (Associated Press, Thursday)

The question isn't "how" but "whether."

FEE Timely Classic
"Has a New Era of Space Venture Arrived?" by Raymond J. Keating

contrasting versions of radio history

Contrast these two versions of early broadcast history:

1. "The chaos that developed ... was indescribable.... Private enterprise, over seven long years, failed to set its own house in order. Cut-throat competition at once retarded radio's orderly development and subjected listeners to intolerable strain and inconvenience."
   -- Charles Siepmann, Radio, Television and Society, 1950


2. "One of our troubles in getting legislation [to nationalize the airwaves] was the very success of the voluntary system we had created. Members of the Congressional committees kept saying, 'it is working well, so why bother?'"
   -- The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 1952

the wisdom of children

Gil Guillory recently posted this to an email list I'm on. I quote it with permission from the man himself:

My 6-year-old daughter and I were discussing the song lyrics of "Highwayman" sung by Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, et al. In the first stanza is the line:

"many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade"

She had a real problem with interpreting "trade" as "occupation" -- she noted that, as a robber, he didn't trade anything for the jewelry; and, so, he didn't have a trade; or, what did he trade for the jewelry? She tentatively resolved the problem by declaring that robbers trade threats for things, then concluded with my help that using "trade" for any sort of occupation involving theft is misleading -- a "trade" should always involve trading.

Sometimes I learn so much talking to my 6-year-old.

-gil

the C-word

Better late than never, I suppose.

I got an email recently responding to my LRC essay, Straw Men and Ham Sandwiches.

The email had a lot to say, but I only replied to 2 parts:

I've long since felt annoyed by the insistence of so many libertarians in professing their faith in capitalism.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the C-word. Two things made a difference. One, the strict Marxist definition of capitalism (which Marx himself didn't stick to) is private ownership of the means of production (capital). Socialism, in contrast, is the socialized ownership of capital. By that distinction, I'm pro-capitalist. Second, the distinction between capitalism and other free-market philosophies has to do with ownership of capital value, meaning the price a property title can fetch. Mutualist anarchists, for instance, are free-market advocates, but their definition of ownership is limited to occupation and use. Under a mutualist system, no one would own title to property and therefore no one would own capital value and therefore no one would preserve or develop capital value. So by the strict Marxist (anti-libertarian/anti-capitalist) definition of capitalism, I'm in favor of it, and by the strict Mutualist (pro-libertarian/anti-capitalist) definition of capitalism, I'm still in favor of it. I agree with you that state capitalism is an evil, but the evil isn't in the private ownership of capital -- it's in the State.

A question: Do not Austrian economists place the most emphasis rather on the entrepreneur's function than the capitalist's function ...

Sam Konkin, founder of the Movement for the Libertarian Left (MLL) called himself and his movement "left-Rothbardian" and claimed to be more consistently Rothbardian than Rothbard himself. One of the areas they insisted Rothbard got his emphasis wrong was in the distinction between entrepreneurs (innovators) and capitalists (owners). Rothbardianism (according to the left-Rothbardians) is pro-entrepreneur, not pro-capitalist. Entrepreneurs are good, free-market capitalists are neutral, and state capitalists are evil.

The Austrians, however, split over the role of capital ownership in entrepreneurship. My understanding is that Israel Kirzner, a Hayekian Misesian, emphasizes prediction and innovation in entrepreneurship, whereas the Rothbardian Misesians insist that "capitalist-entrepreneur" should be a single, hyphenated term, and that entrepreneurial prediction and innovation are irrelevant without the risk and risk-assessment of capital ownership.

Should pro-capitalists have left Marx with the ambiguities of his own term and coined something new to describe a free market in private property titles? Maybe so, but since they didn't, we're left having to specify what exactly we advocate as our preferred economic system.

To quote myself, "The term 'capitalism' is as semantically unstable as the term 'liberalism' and will rarely mean the same thing for two people in an argument -- or even an agreement -- or even for one person in a private monolog from one moment to the next."

Coke stew

I'm going to skip right over the wee mistake I made with this one and just report it as a success -- mostly because I like putting a picture of a big Coke can in the middle of my blog!

• 1 can of Coke (!)
• vegetable oil
• 2 pounds of boneless pork ribs, cut into 1-inch cubes
• 8 garlic cloves, minced
• 4 tablespoons chopped peeled fresh ginger
• 2 bunches of green onions, chopped
• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 cup of rice
  

1. Heat oil in large pot over high heat.
2. Add half of pork; sauté until brown on all sides.
3. Transfer pork to bowl.
4. Repeat with remaining pork.
5. Return pork to pot.
6. Turn off heat and pour cola slowly into pot.
7. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer 30 minutes.
8. Add garlic, soy sauce, ginger, and half (or 2/3) of green onions.
9. (Start to cook rice -- the basmati I used takes 45 minutes.)
   
10. Cover and simmer until pork is tender, about 50 minutes longer.
11. Uncover and simmer until sauce is slightly thickened, about 10 minutes.
12. Season stew with black pepper.
13. Fill dinner bowl with cooked rice.
    
14. Scoop stew into center of dinner bowl.
15. Sprinkle with remaining green onions over and around stew.

The recipe says steamed white rice, but boiled brown basmati was just fine. I wish I'd made twice as much so we'd have more leftovers. The recipe calls for 2 pounds of pork ribs, which was more than I'd purchased, so I cut up a pork chop and mixed it in with the other meat. They come out with very different textures: the rib meat gets very tender -- good stew meat; the chop stayed more solid, which the missus says she liked. She prefers the mixture of textures.

She was also very skeptical about a stew recipe that called for a can of Coke, but it was delicious. Not sweet at all.

I'm defintely going to do more pork stews. Much easier to work with than beef.

Next time I'll use more garlic and more ginger.

elections, tomatoes, grapes

I'm more present than usual on the Mises.org/blog today.


First there's this post from editorial veep, Jeffrey Tucker, about how the election futures markets are registering price changes after the debates. He calls my prediction markets article a cautionary note.

Then there was today's Daily Article on the Taco Bell boycott: "Well meaning or not, the boycott of Taco Bell by misguided activists, in the name of helping labor, is deeply ignorant and very destructive."

Which reminded me of "Angus Black" on Cesar Chavez and the wrath of grapes, so I posted this comment:

Rothbard on boycotts:

As the pseudonymous free-market economist "Angus Black" admonished liberals at the time of the grape boycott: if you really want to improve the lot of grape workers, don't boycott grapes; on the contrary, eat as many grapes as you can stand, and tell your friends to do the same. This will raise the consumer demand for grapes, and increase both the employment and the wages of grape workers.

But this lesson, of course, never sunk in. It was and still is easier for liberals to enjoy a pseudo-religious "sense of belonging" to a movement, and to "feel good about themselves" by getting a vicarious thrill of sanctification by not eating grapes, than actually to learn about economic realities and what will really help the supposed objects of their concern.

Making Economic Sense, Chapter 38: "The Legacy of Cesar Chavez"

Shermomma

I mentioned Shermomma in a recent post, though not by name. I link to the "Speed" movie column, which I have a personal attachment to, since I'm the regular movie-viewing partner with a pickup truck, mentioned in the piece. It brings back memories.

But here's my favorite Shermomma column, for which I continue to feel great nachas for my playwright friend, the former author of long cinephilosophical commentaries and short film reviews:

Volume 1, issue 11 -- 17 August 1994:
[Response to Letter]

spicy fish with olives and tomatoes

Here's one I got from epicurious.com. We've tried it about three times and each time was a success, so I'll share it here.

A package of 4 frozen tilapia fillets costs $3.99 at Trader Joe's. The original recipe says you can also use red snapper or orange roughy fillets.

The cooking takes almost no time at all, but the prep takes me over half an hour. I guess I'm slow with the knife.

Get a bunch of fresh parsley. The recipe says 1/2 cup, but I have no idea how to buy half a cup of parsley. The bunches I can get fresh at the grocer turn out to be about right. Everything for this recipe comes in the proper amount at the store. A container of cherry tomatoes, a container of pitted kalamata olives ... I guess 6 garlic cloves is less than a head of garlic. I probably use more garlic than you'll want to. You'll also want olive oil and dried crushed red pepper -- those red flakes you can sprinkle on pizza.

Chop up the leafy part of the parsley and throw away the stalky ends. Cut all the olives in half. Cut all the cherry tomatoes in half. Mince the garlic. This is the part that takes me forever.

Heat olive oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Sprinkle fish with salt and pepper -- I use kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper. Add half of fish to skillet and sauté until just opaque in center, about 3 minutes per side. Transfer fish to platter. What I do is take out our 2 dinner plates, put the fish on one plate and cover with the other plate, upside down.

Repeat with remaining fish. So you'll end up with 4 fillets on one plate, covered by the other plate to keep the fish warm.

Now, with the hot oil in the pan and the little salty, peppery, fishy bits still sizzling, add garlic, parsley and crushed red pepper to same skillet; sauté a minute or two. Add tomatoes and olives; sauté until tomatoes are soft and juicy, about 2 minutes.

Separate your plates and your fillets -- 2 fillets per spouse. Spoon the sauce over the fish.

There's usually leftover sauce, which is good. It's a great leftover to experiment with.

safe at last

Click to Englarge

w2x10

My friend the soon-to-be-published playwright is renting our house while he finishes his MFA in Charlottesville and we're up here in Pennsylvania, where Professor Marcus is teaching this year.

He alerted us today that the schedule is now out for the annual Virginia Film Festival. This year's theme is "Speed" -- and yes, they will be showing the famous action movie of the same name. What caught me off guard is that it is the 10th anniversary showing of Speed.

Ten years? Has it really been ten years? A decade since OJ?

A decade since my poet friend and my playwright friend and I founded Webster's Weekly, the first weekly features magazine on the web! (w2 for short)

Here's the great movie column that connects Speed and OJ and w2 forever in my mind:

"Going Out of My Head. Cha-cha-cha!"

sponge diary

A friend wrote to thank me for recommending the sponge holders that stick to the inside wall of the kitchen sink with suction cups. He suggested that these inexpensive little do-hickies "should cut the rate of domestic violence at my house by at least 15% or 20%. Thanks."

I replied:

One thing that's very nice about being "a housewife" is having authority in the kitchen. It's my kitchen.

I didn't know where something was that the missus had put in the kitchen last June, and as she handed it to me, she paused and said, "I'm realizing that with this, I'm letting go of control of the kitchen."

But when we shared the Charlottesville kitchen, the only sponge rule that I insisted on -- not that she had a problem with this -- was that dish sponges couldn't be used as counter and surface sponges, or else they permanently became non-dish sponges.

(That isn't the best way to describe the distinction, because I'll use the same scouring pad on the sink and the counter and the bottom of a pan. It's less about objects and more about surfaces. Certain sponges are reserved for those surfaces that are used for cooking or serving the food.)

He replied:

Yes, same rule with us (there are two classes of surfaces encountered in the kitchen, which may not be shared by one sponge).

Anything used in the bathroom may not even be taken out of the bathroom (must be discarded in that wastebasket or the toilet). I don't trust him not to get distracted and put it in the kitchen.

Nothing may be cleaned in any sink (Kitchen or bathroom) that is or relates to any part of the body below the waist (think feet and shoes, a disgusting enough image but less than others the imagination might call up without this distraction). I can't tell you how violent some of the fights were about these particulars, but they no longer seem to be particularly problematic.

These I don't have as much trouble enforcing as the following two:

1. Do not leave sponges in the sink where they will get wet and become bacteriogenic.
2. If the sponge IS sitting dry on the top edge of the sink where it's supposed to, do not mindlessly "wash" a dish by picking up the dry, dirty sponge and rubbing it on the dish (without making sure that the sponge is cleaned out, hot, wet, and soaped).

It's interesting to me how many people I've heard from who are not primary or full-time housekeepers, who nevertheless take their domestic roles quite seriously. As I said in my article, I myself hadn't made the bed in 20 years. But dishes have always been different. I was even the shotef sirim -- the pot scrubber -- in the communal kitchen of an Israeli kibbutz. (Dishes were washed by machine; I washed everything that didn't fit in the machines.)

There's just something meditative about working a kitchen sink. Now I'm discovering that the same can apply to the rest of the kitchen.

But apparently, for some couples, the kitchen is more of a battleground than a sanctuary.