3 sorts of "equality"

I told a certain Misesian tonight that I had a proposed revision to the left/right and up/down axes described in the Nolan Chart, and I gave him my thumbnail sketch of the revision.

He pointed me to Roderick T. Long's "Equality: The Unknown Ideal", which I'll comment on later, when I try to present my revision to Nolan.

Meanwhile, I'd like to quote Wendy McElroy, as Long himself quotes her in his lecture:

[T]he meaning of equality differs within the feminist movement. Throughout most of its history, American mainstream feminism considered equality to mean equal treatment under existing laws and equal representation within existing institutions. The focus was not to change the status quo in a basic sense, but rather to be included within it. The more radical feminists protested that existing laws and institutions were the source of injustice and, thus, could not be reformed. . . . [T]heir concepts of equality reflected this. To the individualist, equality was a political term referring to the protection of individual rights; that is, protection of the moral jurisdiction every human being has over his or her own body. To socialist-feminists, it was a socio-economic term. . . . While Marxist class analysis uses the relationship to the mode of production as its point of reference, libertarian class analysis uses the relationship to the political means as its standard. Society is divided into two classes: those who use the political means, which is force, to acquire wealth or power and those who use the economic means, which requires voluntary interaction. The former is the ruling class which lives off the labor and wealth of the latter.

From: "Introduction: The Roots of Individualist Feminism in 19th-Century America," pp. 3, 23, in Wendy McElroy, ed., Freedom, Feminism, and the State, 2^nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), pp. 3-26.

The Ministry of Truth

According to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal,

What was determinative is that the two political parties view the American people very differently. The Republican Party has become the party of individualism, believing that free enterprise, market economies, and individual choices give people the best chance of a good life; that if ordinary Americans are left alone to make their own decisions, they will generally be good decisions, so they -- not the government -- should have the power to make them.

See Wally Conger's take on this nonsense.

See also Scott Bieser's comment on Conger's blog.

My own opinion is all but spelled out here. The one thing I'll add is that the GOP likes to use libertarian rhetoric to advance anti-libertarian goals. Anyone who thinks the Republican Party stands for individualism, liberty, or principle, needs to either have his head examined or have it removed from his arse.

I do, however, agree with the editorial writer's take on the loyal opposition:

Conversely, the Democratic Party is the party of centralization, believing that a wise and benevolent, best-and-brightest, urban blue-county government can make better choices than those of rural, red-county Americans. This is not a new belief; it is the legacy of the 1930s (the New Deal) and the '60s (the Great Society). It was fully reflected in John Kerry's campaign: Taxes must rise and government must grow; trade must be regulated and limited; the 1935 Social Security system is perfect and nothing about it may be changed.

He may be right about perception -- perhaps people vote Republican because they see it as the alternative to an ever-growing government -- but the problem is that the perception is false. George Dubya has spent more than any president since Johnson. At this point, he's probably spent more than anyone since FDR. His so-called tax cuts aren't real tax cuts: they're tax deferments. Unless you actually cut spending, apparent tax cuts are just smoke and mirrors. (And I'm not even mentioning the most insidious, hidden tax of all: monetary inflation.) Dubya loves central regulation. Look what he's done to airports. Look what he wants to do to the power grid.

We're supposed to sit still for talk of "trusting people" with the USA PATRIOT Act still on the books?!

The GOP government doesn't trust its citizens at all -- and yet asks us to trust them with practically everything. No thank you.

The neoconservatives are not for small government! They're just for corporate welfare and foreign warfare rather than social programs and class warfare -- and actually, they seem to like their own set of social programs, too!

As I wrote in a letter last year,

You say that the sorry state of the world is from lack of education, and I agree, but it's economic education that I believe is most fundamentally lacking. People misunderstand the basic rules of cause and effect, and politicians promote that misunderstanding, either out of their own ignorance, or out of self-interest. Rail at the Republicans for trying to direct tax dollars into the accounts of large corporations, and I won't disagree with you. If "capitalism" is government intervention for the benefit of capitalists, then I am as anti-capitalist as any socialist is. But the socialists will take us all to hell. It's their programs that caused the problems in the first place -- and if you don't understand why I say so, then I beg you to learn some more economics. We're on a steep decline and the Democrats and Republicans are arguing about whether to steer left or right. Neither seems to want to actually put on the brakes, and what we need is full reverse.

turkey postmortem

Nat's Franco-Scottish Oatmeal Stuffing

• olive oil
• onions
• garlic
• sausage
• ground pork
• salt, pepper, herbs
• oatmeal (raw)
• chicken broth
• walnuts
• apples? cranberries?
• a shot of Scotch

1. Melt onions and garlic in olive oil until soft. Remove from pan.
2. Brown the walnuts in the pan and then set them aside.
3. Brown sausage and ground pork, mixing them and breaking clumps.
4. Add the onions and garlic and walnuts.
5. Add two cups of raw oats (to start).
6. Add enough broth to almost cover the mixture.
7. Add apple pieces if you want to have apples in the stuffing.
8. Season with salt, pepper, herbs, and scotch.
9. Cook mixture adding oats (if it's too wet) or broth (if it's too dry) if necessary, stirring occasionally.

Apple-Brined Turkey

I'd never cooked a turkey before, so I was in the apprentice role. The turkey comes already emptied out, leaving an upper and a lower cavity. Its neck is stuffed into one cavity and a bag of "giblets" -- gizzard, liver, heart -- stuffed into the other.

(Note to the fellow who left a comment earlier saying meat is murder: I didn't pull the trigger; I only took delivery of the corpse.)

Neck and giblets will be used for gravy. The rest of the turkey spends 12 hours in a 5-gallon bucket filled with 2 gallons of apple brine:

• 1 gallon of apple cider
• 1 gallon of water
• 2 cups of kosher salt

Our 14-pound turkey did not taste salty. It tasted moist and delicious. After stuffing it with Nat's Franco-Scot concoction, we put it in an oven bag (pre-powdered with flour) on top of strips of celery and carrot. It cooked in just over 2 hours at 350�F. It was unbelievably delicious.

Sides

We had spiced carrots, cranberry compote with ginger and molasses and garlic mashed potatoes.

We boiled the neck and giblets with a diced red onion and olive oil. Strain the broth and mix with flour to make incredible gravy. (And we're using the gravy now to start soups.)

My mother brought candied yams -- she mixes the yams with undiluted orange juice concentrate (!) and brown sugar. She also brought pumpkin pie for dessert.

We are, of course, experimenting greatly with leftovers.

follow-ups

Yesterday, I wrote about the libertarian lessons of the earliest Pilgrims. The day before, I wrote about buying gold. And earlier still, I've made reference to Lysander Spooner.

Since last blogging, I've read this recent Mises.org article on the Pilgrims, this recent LRC article on buying gold, and this LRC article on Lysander Spooner's opinion of the Lincoln administration.

I'm starting to feel like maybe my blog is redundant.

Thanksgiving & Private Property

On Thanksgiving, libertarians like to tell the lesser-known story of the early Pilgrims, their initial communism, their early famine, and their physical salvation through the institution of private property. It's not the version we were taught in elementary school (government- or private school), nor on television, nor in children's books, but you can read about it here, here, and here.

A year or so ago, a left-leaning anarchist lady -- a lawyer if I recall properly -- came across BlackCrayon.com and wrote to disagree with my philosophical individualism. My reply became one of the essays at BlackCrayon. I quote only this excerpt:

I look to the American Indians, who couldn't understand the idea of "ownership" of the land.

I think you need to do more research on Indians and property. I think all us 30-somethings grew up hearing this claim, but I don't think it turns out to be true. I'm crossing over briefly into economics here, but before doing the research, I would guess that the Indians treated land that was relatively abundant as unowned (as we still treat most of the ocean) and that they would treat any resources they perceived with more relative scarcity -- including certain types of land -- as private property (the way we treat much of the beach). Having made that prediction, I then did some very quick, very rudimentary research, and found indications that that prediction is correct. Different tribes had different amounts of private property, very much connected with their relative perceptions of abundance and scarcity of various resources. I'm not denying that many Indian tribes were collectivist. I simply don't know. But I am denying that they couldn't understand the idea of "ownership" of land.

(By the way, the first European settlers did not have private property. Their farms were communal and they almost starved to death. When the governor declared (or perhaps recognized) the settlers' rights to private property, and the product of their labor, the famines vanished. I don't know how this compares with the experience of the Indians nearby and on similar land, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that individuals claimed the right to the product of their labor.)

But I've drifted over into economics, and I want to focus on ethics. From an ethical/philosophical perspective I would judge the Indians the same way I judge anyone: who was acknowledged to have rights? To what extent was aggression tolerated or condoned? Were peaceful individuals left in peace?

Individualist libertarianism is that very position: that peaceful individuals should be left in peace.

Philosophical collectivism is the basis for claims that peaceful individuals might have obligations that they never agreed to, obligations that legitimize the initiation of force against those individuals. Collectivism is the claim that the rights of those peaceful individuals are secondary to the "rights" of "society".

You can read the rest of the exchange here.

unsolicited advice

I've been on the road. I'm back. Now I have to learn how to make Thanksgiving Dinner.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that you never asked or even hinted that you were curious or open to it, I've decided to offer you some unsolicited advice:

1. It's $5 cheaper to travel I-95 from Philly to DC than it is to travel I-95 from DC to Philly. One of the three tolls only charges northbound traffic. Not only is it cheaper to head southbound, but it's consistently less dangerous and less traffic-jammed. I have no idea why, but as bad as it is southbound, it's regularly twice as bad northbound. To take the indirect, slightly more scenic route (up I-81 and over on I-76) takes 6 hours between Charlottesville and Swarthmore. In theory, the more direct route should take less than 5 hours. Mapquest.com says 4.5. But last night it took me 6 hours coming the supposedly faster way. I watched a couple accidents, sat absolutely still three or four times, twice because of rubber-necking in the northbound lanes to watch some accident in the southbound lanes. Taking the longer route would have been safer and less stressful. So my unsolicited advice is to avoid I-95 northbound even if you believe it will be quicker. You're probably wrong, and even if you're right, it's just too damn dangerous.
2. As I write this, gold is at $449 an ounce. I wish I'd paid attention to gold before I did. I didn't start taking notice until it was about $330. Didn't start buying until it was at $350. Didn't really invest until it was about $375. I told all my friends and family to buy gold before it reached $400. Few did so. When it got to about $425, it fell drastically, even dipping down to my purchase price before climbing again. I was glad not to have to defend my advice to any loved ones who were nervous investors. Is the price of gold just a random walk? Does it undergo ups and downs based on people's whims? My faith in gold is based on my distrust of Federal Reserve Notes. Anyone contemplating a hedge against "inflation" (so-called) should buy before gold goes above $450. (Of course, the higher the price of gold, the weaker my recommendation to buy. On the other hand, I just don't see the Fed behaving itself -- or better yet, going away -- any time soon.)
3. Do you ever see gadgets that look like they might be really useful and great -- or they could just be a complete waste of your money? Well, I finally bought myself a EuroSealer -- as seen on TV! -- after a couple of years of wondering. It's great great great. Takes 2 AA batteries, sticks to the fridge by magnet. Cuts bags open; heat-seals them back closed. Definitely worth the $10 you can get it for.

Wish me luck with the bird.

George F. Smith

(Not to be confused with George H. Smith.)

George F. Smith is a libertarian writer I discovered through the Strike The Root website. His STR archive is here and his own website is LibertyAsylum.com.

His articles include these 3 brief summaries of the Federal Reserve and the crime of inflation:

• "The Story of the Fed Is a Story of a Crime"
  

• "Myths of the Money Machine"
  

• "The Fed's Grasping Invisible Hand"
  

Smith first wrote me when he read my Gilligan's Island piece at Mises.org.

He recently wrote me again and I have his permission to share here his very complimentary and supportive email:

From: gfs...
To: bkmarcus...
Subject: Thurston Howell III
Date: November 18, 2004 1:24:12 PM EST

B.K.,

While catching up on my reading I noticed a footnote in your article about the spectrum that said your Howell III piece was the most popular ever on Mises.org. When I think of everyone who's written for Mises, that is a stunning accomplishment, but in recalling the article it is no less well-deserved. Congratulations!

George F. Smith

P.S. Your spectrum article was also outstanding.

Libertarianism -- especially lowercase-L libertarianism, for those of us who eschew electoral politics -- can be extremely lonely. Maybe I'd find it worse in the heartland "red states" but my impression is that the isolation is worse in the blue territories, especially university towns.

One of the great blessings of the Internet is that geographically scattered and otherwise isolated libertarians can find each other and form the kind of vibrant intellectual community we see at Mises.org or Strike The Root. (& LRC, TLE, ASC, etc.)

But emotional support is also important. I've gotten some very spirit-lifting feedback lately, which I won't share here.

This Thursday, after I'm done panicking over my first time ever making a Turkey Dinner, I'm going to give thanks for the web, email, MP3, iPod, Amazon, Netflix ... those mass market phenomena of the Information Age that have made my life more rewarding and pleasant.

I'll also give thanks for a bunch of people I won't name here, several of them people I've never met offline.

Will the real fascists please stand up?

I had a terrible disagreement with someone once over the importance of semantics and the twistability of terminology.

She said she objected to slumlords.

I told her I couldn't take a position on slumlords until she defined the term -- but I knew that by the time she was done defining it, she'd either (a) have taken out all the connotative sting and reduced it to an economic transaction that I could defend both ethically and economically, (b) reduced it to something illegal in the coercive sense, in which case we weren't talking about slumlords, but about coercion, or (c) refused to reduce it to anything other than more connotative tautology ... something like "exploitative landlords" ... and then we'd have to define exploitation, etc. This process can lead to some really important deep issues if the other person is willing to sit through it, but very few are.

Instead, she just accused me of being equally guilty of emotionally manipulative language by talking about government intervention as "the threat of proactive violence".

I stand by that definition. I don't consider it emotionally manipulative, except in the sense that uncovering manipulative euphemism is itself intended to have an emotional effect.

If the CIA talks about "termination with extreme prejudice," and I say, "Oh, you mean assassination -- killing a person in pursuit of a political goal," then which one of us is manipulating the language?

If a Pro-Lifer is talking to me about "murdering innocent babies," and I question the legitimacy of all three words, saying instead "killing a fetus," then who's being manipulative? The Pro-Choicers tend to dislike my use of the language, too, because it leaves room for an emotional response to the word 'killing' but we clearly talk about killing germs and killing plants without shedding tears. You can even buy spermicide at the corner pharmacy.

It seems to me that definitions such as "threat of proactive violence," "killing a person in pursuit of a political goal," and "killing a fetus" leave us with exactly the relevant core issues -- or at least closer to the core than the familiar euphemisms do.

This is my long preamble to what Matthew Barganier at the AntiWar.com/blog calls, "The N-Word & the F-Word" -- 'Nazi' and 'fascist'.

And let me immediately interrupt myself to clarify a capitalization distinction I try to maintain:

A capital-L Libertarian is a member of the Libertarian party. Same with capital-D Democrats, capital-R Republicans. There's enough confusion caused already from these unfortunate party names, where libertarians, democrats, and republicans all existed before the political parties that took their labels. Nazis and Fascists, on the other hand, started as political parties. Nazi was a shorthand -- like GOP -- for the National Socialist German Workers Party. ('Nazi' coming from the German for National Socialist.)

The term, 'fascism' you can look up here, in my BlackCrayon dictionary. See both my definition of lowercase-F fascism and Wikipedia's definition of the uppercase-F variety. See also this passage in the furyblog. (The furious blogger -- Doctor furious! -- is currently writing a book on Italian Fascism and the cultural movements around it.)

It's more complicated with Communism, but no less important. Lowercase-C communism is like democracy, republicanism, and libertarianism, in that it was a word already in use to describe certain communities, or to describe a certain ideology about property and cooperation. The term is older than Marx or Marxism.

Before capital-C Communism, those who would eventually take its name just called themselves socialists. There was already the divide between anarchist socialists and the better-known statist variety, which Lenin called the left- and right-wings of socialism, respectively, making himself a right-wing socialist at the time.

But then other statist philosophies started calling themselves socialist, first the Fabians and later the Nazis. (Actually, there were Fabian-type socialists in France before both Marxism and Fabianism. We have 19th-century France to thank for both the best of classical liberalism and the worst of classical socialism.) Within Russia itself, socialism was divided between the Marxist Bolsheviks (the minority, by the way) and the more Fabian Menscheviks, so the need for a distinguishing term was immediate.

Lenin changed the name of his brand of socialism to Communism -- an appeal to (a) the egalitarian and communitarian core of Marxism, and (b) the lowercase-C communism that is supposed to mark the final stage of Marxian dialectical history. In 1919, Lenin founded the Comintern -- the Communist International -- and invited (instructed?) all the Marxist/Leninist parties throughout the world to change their names to capital-C Communist. For most of the 20th century, almost anyone anywhere talking about Communism was talking about governments and parties that came out of the Comintern.

Of course, this still leads to confusion, as when someone correctly calls Noam Chomsky a communist and people incorrectly infer that he was a Communist.

With the exception of the socialist anarchists, who saw little critical difference between these competing forms of statism, the unifying theme for all these varieties of socialism was the role of the State in (supposedly) managing the economy. We anti-socialists would see another theme in socialism's elimination (either immediate or through erosion) of "personal" freedoms -- the so-called civil liberties. But while that was an inevitable result, it was not essential to the original ideologies of the various socialisms. (Seeing this distinction as semantically valid, but politically impossible, Hayek wrote The Road To Serfdom to show how economic central planning leads inevitably to authoritarianism.)

So with all these terms and confusions flying around, isn't it throwing gas on the fire to talk of lowercase-F fascism after World War II?

This is a tough one for me. I think quick reference and facile usage will only add to the noise. I'm not a big fan of political language in general, but least of all when it diverges from ideological language -- by which I mean ideologically descriptive language, not the rhetoric of the ideologies.

But, as both Barganier and furious note, at their respective blogs, there really is something useful to getting past the name-calling and comparing the historical policies of Italian Fascists and the National Socialist German Workers Party with the policies of their contemporaries (Roosevelt, Churchill) and the policy positions and proposals of our contemporaries (Democrats, Republicans).

If you just use the F-word to attack anti-leftists, you're being infantile. Stop it.

If you borrow the emotional power of the term to talk about racism or nationalism or the statist implementations of these -isms, then you should probably just talk about racism and nationalism and stop confusing the issue.

The actual denotative, semantic, and intellectual power behind the word 'fascism' lies in its synthesis of the welfare and warfare states, in the partnership of Big Government and Big Business, in its appeal to both collectivist inclusivity and collectivist exclusivity, and in its twistability to adapt to almost any local issue of "the people" and warp it into the mandate of central authority.

There are differences between leftist collectivism and right-wing collectivism, between for instance gender feminism and the conservatives' "social norms" -- but both are to be implemented with the power of the State ("the threat of proactive violence"), and when you centralize authority (especially in a majoritarian democracy), you get a hybrid identity politics that is neither left nor right.

Fascism, in both the upper- and lowercase forms, is really neither left nor right, but an incoherent amalgam of both agendas appropriated for the glory of the State.

There is, of course, a very different option that is also neither left nor right.

Roderick Redux

Doctor Long's reply to my call for cultural agnosticism is here.

rising costs

(As short as I've tried to keep this reply, it's still too long to put into the comments section of my earlier post, so it gets to be its own blog entry.)

Do you know whether CMS also considered other factors in their study, such as increasing costs coming from new technology and new drugs that might not have been available during the earlier years of the data, but that raise costs?

I know nothing about CMS or their numbers or the JEC report that uses their numbers to report on the costs of regulation. I meant to use the graph as an illustration of a more basic principle, not as a smoking gun.

But I can definitely comment on the new technology fallacy.

I address this in my radio spectrum piece:

"The Big Broadcasters warned that such diversity would be a burden on the consumer, because radio receivers would have to be smarter and more precise and therefore more expensive. But cost doesn't drive price; demand drives cost. Hundreds of millions of consumers will quickly bring down the price of any technology in a competitive market of manufacturers."

The point is (a) that technology makes everything less expensive, not more -- the only complexity being in the relationship between technology and the price of labor, where short-term, one can displace the other, but long-term they rise together -- and (b) competition, free entry, the ability of the consumer to walk away, and the obligation of the consumer to bear the costs will drive prices lower. And only the more efficient technologies will survive this process.

(Of course, the question of patent law and drug prices is a very different can of worms. I'm against patents and see them as a form of political privilege, but they are more relevant and damaging in a "managed" market than they are in the unhampered variety.)

The new technology fallacy is really two deeper fallacies: (1) that technology raises prices, and (2) that we should have all the newest technology as soon as possible. Deeper fallacy #1 is just false. Deeper fallacy #2 requires a longer conversation on the nature of trade-offs and the best use of scarce resources. The summary is that only an unhampered price system can tell us where scarce resources are best directed to satisfy the most consumers to the greatest degree.

I suppose I am just wondering whether the fact that those two changes happened over the same period of time actually indicates a causal link.

This is a much longer conversation, and is debated among economists and philosophers throughout the world: What can experience show us about causation?

Can either history or logic tell us anything about how the world will work in the future? I obviously can't go into all of that here, but if you believe that either economic history or economic logic can guide us, then we already know that socializing medicine -- which is what national health insurance is, make no mistake -- will raise costs. If the government then tries to control costs through price controls, the costs don't go away: they just become non-monetary costs, such as lower supply, longer waits, poorer service.

Among economists -- those who don't work for the government or either major party -- these claims are very basic.

a very old fantasy of mine

But I'm guessing I'm not the only one who thinks this way sometimes...


(Click to Enlarge)

That Girl!

I've mentioned earlier how much I was a child of television. TV was so much more soothing, so much friendlier, more welcoming than real life. Especially since I was surrounded by the reality of the 1970s while watching American television's version of the 1960s. I still feel nostalgia for fictional worlds of that medium. Like the movie Pleasantville shifted 10 or 15 years later.

No surprise then that my very first infatuation was with with a young Marlo Thomas from the TV show That Girl.

Every episode opened with people talking about her character, Ann Marie, in the third-person, eventually pointing and saying, "that girl!" and Ann Marie would spin around and smile that dazzling, cute smile, all wide-eyed, and then they'd go into the opening credits where we see the single young woman new to the big city.

Click here to listen to the very first opening.

And here for the theme song I remember from my childhood.

When I was about 5, I announced to my friend Cynthia that I was in love with Marlo Thomas. Cynthia told me she was in love with Liza Minelli. I guess at that age, it made complete sense to me that Cynthia would have a crush on a woman. Women were so much prettier, after all. But I sure did think I'd picked a prettier woman to crush on. We pretended we were out on double dates with our beloved celebrities.

I owned two copies of the Free To Be You And Me album and listened to them all the time. I had the book, and I watched the television special, which they repeated every year throughout the 70s.

A few years later, when my mom was figuring out that I wasn't learning to read, she hired a tutor. (The first reading test I remember taking put me 2 years behind my age group, where all my peers were 2 years ahead of our age group!)

My tutor must have asked my mom what I was interested in, and my mom must have said, The boy's got it bad for Marlo Thomas! So my tutor told me she was the head of the local chapter of the Marlo Thomas fan club (Hey, it could happen!) and that she'd get me an autographed photo if I did my reading assignments. Good motivation. I never did learn to read properly, but I must have done my assignments, because I had a "Warmest Wishes XOXO" autograph for years. I don't know where it is now, but this is the image:

---

---

But we have to learn to laugh at even our warmest, fondest icons of childhood. My old college friend and I constantly make fun of the opening of That Girl, and SNL apparently did their own spoof in the 1980s called "That Black Girl!"

The other night, I discovered a dead-on parody in the third season of Family Guy, which I've reproduced here.

(click for the entire set)

analysis: a blog for individualists

Just a few days ago, a great new blog was born:

Welcome to analysis

From 1944 to 1951, Frank Chorodov wrote, edited and published analysis, a monthly broadsheet that sought to stem the tide of rising statism. While it never garnered more than 4,000 subscribers, analysis was (is) unique for its voice, its clarity and its influence.

It is the modest hope of this blog's present authors that Chodorov's spirit can be maintained through postings, comments and discussions. While this analysis may differ with Chodorov on a few specific issues (although we can't think of any off the top of our heads), we share his view that humans are wiser, happier and richer when left free.

And already they've got me updating the BlackCrayon dictionary for the first time in a while:

The word 'individualist' had little of the idea of the abstracted self that the word today conjures. Rather, it was a dense concept suggesting an alternative to the collectivism of socialism and communism, certainly, but also remaining open to the interaction between the individual and his society and culture that crafts distinctive personality. Individualists, in this sense, belong to societies in ways they couldn't possibly belong to states, any more than theory could be wholly self-created.

numbers that should surprise no one

Health Care In 1 Lesson:


(From the new analysis blog.)

why bk is not unemployed

(Click to Enlarge)

Cat Farmer

"Go ahead and give me hell for not voting for my idea of heaven, but don't tell me to 'vote my conscience' when it told me not to vote. Vote your conscience, but mind your own politics - my voting is not your affair, and my conscience does not take dictation from yours."

Yesterday I mentioned Cat Farmer. Today I include not just a quotation, above, not just another link to her site, but also a link to my collection of Cat Quotes, including this link to a randomly selected Cat Quote.

Roderick T. Long

My favorite left-brained anarchist of late has been Roderick T. Long, a philosophy professor at Auburn University and the head of a small, market anarchist think tank called The Molinari Institute.

( Cat Farmer is still my favorite right-brained anarchist.)

(You can listen to Long's recent lecture on anarchism here or read a PDF transcript here.)

When I wrote my recent blog post on liberal anarchism, I hadn't yet read his recent post on a very similar topic.

I disagree with him: I think it's dangerous to fight candidate symptoms of statism, since our candidates are so often wrong.

Above all, do no harm.

But it's sobering to have someone I respect take the opposing view.

Up with literalism ...

... and down with euphemism, no matter how popularly accepted.

Please give significant thought to the libertarian critter's latest rant against corporatism and language banditry!

Leftists who ignore, distort, or defame the classical liberal prefix of "free" in terms such as free market and free trade should be deeply and profoundly ashamed.

Even more shame is deserved by the right wingers who give the leftists reason to do so.

�aptain-�apitali$m

Cross-posted to the Mises.org/blog:

November 14, 2004

Captain-Capitalism!

by B.K. Marcus

The good and funny folks at Powerhouse Animation have brought us a new, schizophrenic version of the square-jawed, patriotic superhero:

Check out the "Economy" animation in which Captain-Capitalism explains to us that the health of the economy is based on spending readily -- but only with domestic producers.

Oh well, what can you expect from a flag-worshipper with a nuclear pistol?

liberal anarchism

Hagbard Celine, the Nietzschian superman and leader of the Discordian anarchists in Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy, defines anarchism as "That organization of society in which the Free Market operates freely, without taxes, usury, landlordism, tariffs, or other forms of coercion or privilege."

He goes on to distinguish what he calls RIGHT ANARCHISTS, who "predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to compete more often than to cooperate," and LEFT ANARCHISTS, who "predict that in the Free Market people would voluntarily choose to cooperate more often than to compete."

As someone who came to libertarianism through the Nolan Chart and its rejection of the left-right dichotomy, (and as someone who was rejecting the Left but absolutely didn't want to be associated with anything remotely right-wing, as I understood the term) I wasn't happy with the language Wilson chose for this competition/cooperation distinction. (In fact, I'm not even happy with the competition/cooperation distinction itself.)

But that was the language being used by anarchists themselves back in the 1960s, as evidenced by the Left-Right Anarchist Supper Club in NYC, conducted by Murray Rothbard on the right and Murray Bookchin on the left.

According to Sam Konkin, of the "left-Rothbardian" movement, Bookchin claimed to disband the supper club over ideological differences, but actually quit because too many young, left-anarchists were being converted to Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism.

The anarchism of the 19th century was split in America between the Chicago Anarchists, who were communist, and the Boston Anarchists, who were free-market individualists. The commies accused Benjamin Tucker, the lead figure in individualist anarchism, of being a "liberal anarchist" -- which was meant, of course, as an insult. Tucker accepted the label as accurate. He saw anarchism as the logical consequence of consistent liberalism (in the classical, 19th-century sense of the L-word).

Recently, a friend of mine chaired a panel at an academic conference. The panel was called something like "Anarchists & Rebels" and one paper was going to be on "Anarchist Aesthetics". She asked me what in the world anarchist aesthetics could possibly mean.

I took a guess: both left- and right-anarchists reject coercion, but left-anarchists believe that hierarchy is inexorably linked to coercive authority, and that bourgeois culture and values are symptoms of the State, products of political privilege. Right-anarchists draw no such conclusions. Whatever aspects of hierarchy result from voluntary and spontaneous order are legitimate, while only those aspects that result from coercion and state privilege are illegitimate.

This brings me back to the idea of liberal anarchism. Classical liberalism was based not only in the rejection of coercion, but in the belief in Society as distinct from the State. The State is force, whereas Society is the spontaneous order that arises from voluntary arrangements. Liberals believed that property -- the recognition of mine and thine -- was the foundation for peace, cooperation, prosperity, and progress.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first man to call himself an anarchist, wrote, "Property is theft!" and believed that the bourgeois order was anything but spontaneous and rested entirely on political privilege and State-sanction. He also rejected communism, promoted individualism and free markets. Anarchism since Proudhon can be seen as three historical traditions:

1. Those who remained Proudhonian -- the Mutualists;
2. Those who rejected Proudhon's individualism and support for markets -- the anarcho-communists;
3. Those who rejected Proudhon's denouncement of property and the bourgeoisie -- the right-anarchists.

Now look at today's Boondocks and see which flavor of anarchism Huey Freeman believes in:

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This, unfortunately, is the reputation that left-anarchism has earned for the A-word: "tearing down the societal order!"

(No wonder people equate anarchy with chaos.)

I would argue, in fact, that while so-called left-anarchism is an umbrella term for the mutualists and communists alike, so does so-called right-anarchism cover two distinct sub-cultures, or visions of a Stateless spontaneous order:

1. conservative anarchists, who believe they know which aspects of bourgeois and capitalist history were the result of voluntary, spontaneous order, and which aspects were artifacts of the State; and
2. liberal anarchists, who remain agnostic on the cultural symptoms of statism and embrace whatever peaceful order might emerge from voluntary contracts and private property.

Just as left-anarchists combine an anti-political agenda with a cultural agenda -- leading to such perplexing paper topics as "Anarchist Aesthetics" -- so do conservative anarchists combine an anti-political agenda with a cultural agenda: traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian family values.

Liberals -- as anarchists -- are culture-neutral. To the degree that any individualist has a cultural agenda, it is distinct from his individualism.

By these criteria, I'm a liberal anarchist, and I'm not always comfortable with the conservative prejudices and assumptions of the rest of anarchy's right wing.

conspiracy theories

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I, too, have written about black kids, The Tooth Fairy, and conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theory my protagonist forms is somewhat less credible than the one Huey Freeman is suggesting to Jazmine, above. So I guess the point is that some conspiracy theories are wacky, some aren't as wacky, and some are just true.

It's very strange to me when people use "conspiracy theory" as a dismissive term. Which part don't they understand, the word 'conspiracy' or the word 'theory'?

It's even stranger to me when people explicitly say they don't believe in conspiracies. Not only are they proclaiming a shocking ignorance of history, they are denying the Holocaust.

Was Watergate not a conspiracy? What about Iran-Contra? When Churchill and FDR plotted in secret to get the US into WWII, was that a conspiracy?

We have documentary evidence from the 1950s and 60s that the CIA planned secret mass murders of American citizens with the goal of blaming Fidel and the communists. I consider that a big-time conspiracy whether or not the crimes were ever carried out.

If the skeptics knew the facts of what happened at Jekyll Island, would they deny them, or would they invoke tautology and say, "Oh, but I don't consider that a conspiracy."

As Butler Shaffer reminds us, after 9-11 George WMD Bush warned the American people against conspiracy theories -- and then tried to convince us that there was a secret alliance between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein! So don't believe the conspiracy theories we don't want you to believe but do believe the conspiracy theories we do want you to believe.

This sort of intellectual abdication is considered sophistication? And the belief that powerful people sometimes try to hide what they've done, or plan future coordinated acts in secret -- this belief is paranoia?

Today's paranoia -- at least some of it -- will some day be called history.

the lazy gourmet

No, I'm not really a gourmet, but "the lazy guy who is learning to cook" doesn't have the right ring to it.

I'm amazed at the quality of certain frozen foods from Trader Joe's, but I can't find a link to their frozen stuff, so instead I'll recommend A Taste of Thai.

Even a culinary moron can make delicious spicy meals with Taste of Thai products. Our favorite is the red curry base. My advice is to start by following the recipes on the back, but to double the coconut milk and even triple the red curry base itself.

My other advice, long-standing, is to prepare curries, stews, and barbecues the night before you plan to start eating them. The meat takes a while to absorb all that flavor.

Ken MacLeod

I have a permanent love and devotion for Ken MacLeod, just for having taken all my favorite philosophical and science fictional themes and using them, in his great SF novel, Stone Canal, to introduce me to Benjamin Tucker and individualist anarchism -- and then, indirectly to David Friedman and Murray Rothbard, whose anarcho-capitalism inspired two of the settings in the novel, according to a later article MacLeod wrote for the British Libertarian Alliance. One of the very successful "tricks" he used in his novel was having his anarcho-capitalist protagonist surrounded by the usual band of complacent university lefties, and letting the left-leaning reader know, through history, language and reference, that our libertarian anarchist is no stranger to Marxism, Trotskyism, and all the communist -isms ...

My devotion is permanent, but not invariable -- and I was devastated to learn that not only does MacLeod make a habit of voting, but he votes Labour. Here I was, convinced that MacLeod had left his socialist past behind and embraced individual liberty and free-market ethics and economics as the true path to greater wealth and happiness for everyone. Silly me. He's a fiction writer. His talent is taking on the mindset of his protagonist. But it's so hard for us libertarians to believe that anyone can actually grasp individual liberty and not instantly convert to our persuasion -- unless he's an amoral, Machiavellian cynic who knows the actual effects of the State and plans to benefit from them.

So now I don't really know what he is. He subscribes to a left-Rothbardian mailing list I belong to. He writes for libertarian publications, while speaking Marxist language. He plays up the free market while blasting capitalism -- and I can't tell how carefully he's distinguishing between politically-privileged capitalists and laissez-faire propertarian economics, as I try to discuss in my first LRC piece.


Anyway, his blog continues to be one of the few worth following, and his latest post is much better advice for the post-election American Left than I could have possibly had the patience to put together.

(N.B., MacLeod believes that "the American people" chose Bush last week. Thomas Knapp and others question that conclusion.)

Can we shoot nihilists?

My father has claimed for years that Socrates should have punched Thrasymachus in the nose.

In recent discussion with a prominent libertarian legal theorist, I responded to his insistence that "ethics is for the ethical" by asking if that meant I got to shoot nihilists.


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Lucky for the nihilists, he told me I would be unjustified in initiating force against them. Otherwise I'd have a new hobby.

("Ethics is for the ethical" means that ethical debate is for those who have already accepted the validity of normative language.)

the glass teat

A few years ago, I suggested to the wife that we cancel our cable subscription. At the time, our town only had one and a half broadcast channels, an NBC affiliate and a PBS affiliate. Cable gave us The Sopranos, which I loved but was growing tired of, The Simpsons, which I loved but was confident I could survive without, and Deep Space Nine, which was coming to an end. By the time DS9 was over, we'd gotten hooked on Buffy The Vampire Slayer -- actually, I fell in love with this show while in Paris, where each episode was played once a week in English with French subtitles and once a week dubbed into French, so it was a good way to pick up the language. When Buffy was over, we cut the cable and we don't even have a television in our current digs. DVDs are much better, anyway. DVDs let us select for quality and watch at our convenience, which is not that often.

But as happy as I am to be living without the idiot box, I remember it very well, and I find this spoof, sent by a friend, to be dead-on:

New Fall Line-Up

NBC
8:00 Friends
8:30 Girlfriends
9:00 One Guy with Several Female Friends
9:30 My Gay Friends
10:00 Friends You Wish You Had But Don't

FOX
8:00 Real Humans in Real Pain
8:30 Feral Dingoes Eating Children on Tape
9:00 Jiggle It Beach
9:30 LA Chicks
10:00 Beverly Hills 90210: The 90,210th Episode

UPN
8:00 The Unwatchables
8:30 Voyage To The Bottom Of The Ratings
9:00 Theoretically Existing Show
9:30 Praying For Syndication
10:00 The Last Thing You'd Ever Want To Sit Through

WB
8:00 Where My Wife At?
8:30 Gittin' Yo Freak On
9:00 Me & My Psychic
9:30 Kids Suck The Darndest Things
10:00 Dawson's Clothes

ANIMAL PLANET
8:00 Incontinent Rhinos
9:00 Dan Taylor: Mongoose Optometrist
10:00 STAY!
10:30 The Best of STAY!

E!
8:00 Andy Gibb: A Nightmare Descent Into Booze & Pills
8:30 John Belushi: A Nightmare Descent Into Booze & Pills
9:00 Margot Kidder: A Nightmare Descent Into Booze & Pills
9:30 River Phoenix: A Nightmare Descent Into Booze & Pills
10:00 Boy George: A Nightmare Descent Into Booze & Pills

ESPN2
8:00 Finland's Brutalest Men
8:30 Being Hit By A Trolley Regional Semifinals
9:00 60 Minutes Of Joe Theismann's Leg Breaking
10:00 Co-Ed Spread-Eagled Weight-Training From Maui

SCI-FI
8:00 Space: 1972
9:00 The Bermuda Triangle: Myth Or Fiction?
10:00 Mid-Budget Galaxy

LIFETIME
8:00 How Can I Choose Between My Daughters?
9:00 The Abused Wife Who Didn't Mean To Kill Her Policeman Husband In Self-Defense
10:00 The Boy Whose Mommy Watched Far Too Much Television

TNN
8:00 Well, I'll Be Dipped In Pigshit!
9:00 You Hush Up, Wanda Mae
9:30 Sheeeeeeee-It!
10:00 Hold 'Er Down While I Get The Rifle From The Truck

TELEMUNDO
8:00 Roberto Amorosa En Agua Caliente!
9:00 Whoomp! Donde Esta?
9:30 Goooooooooooooal!
10:00 Ai! Ai! Ai! Ai! Ai!
10:30 La Hora De Goya

PUBLIC ACCESS
8:00 Blurry Steve
8:30 Inaudible City Council Meeting
9:00 Do We Have A Caller On The Line? Hello?
9:30 The Best Of Lunch Menus
10:00 My Friend Made This Short Film
10:30 Men With Braids Speak Out

CINEMAX
8:00 Bare Ambition (Tanya Roberts)
8:30 Naked Exposition (Traci Lords)
9:00 Body Of Nudity (Dana Plato)
10:00 Unclothed Anguish (Joyce DeWitt)

anarchist, socialist, or what?

From the new LvMI FAQ:

Are you conservative, libertarian, anarchist, socialist, or what?

We are Misesians! The media will typically describe all non-socialists as conservatives, so we are usually lumped in among them, though the actual orientation of the Institute is libertarian. This designation can encompass a wide range of thought from Jeffersonian classical liberalism to the modern anarcho-capitalism of Murray N. Rothbard (Mises's American student and the founding vice president of the Mises Institute). Nor do we insist on the term libertarian, because it can often create more confusions than it clarifies. The core conviction is what matters: peaceful exchange makes everyone better off; private property is the first principle of liberty; intervention destroys wealth; society and economy need no central management to achieve orderliness. Given these views, it would make sense that some of our biggest critics, apart from the predictable ones on the left, are often from varieties of right-wing thought (protectionist, imperialist, Luddite, moralist, etc.) that have their own agenda for what they want the state to do. Though the editorial policy of the Institute is rooted in strict attachment to principle, there is a great deal of diversity among our 200+ adjunct scholars. This diversity is on display at such conferences as the Austrian Scholars Conference. It is also correct to distinguish between Austrian economics as a value-free science and libertarian political economy, which is rooted in many different philosophical points of view. [back to faq]

bad words

@$$#*|&!

Well, I can't find where it is, but somewhere on the Mises.org/blog rules, we are advised to avoid language we wouldn't use in front of our mothers. I can accuse my own mother of many things, but linguistic prudery is not one of them. At least, not now, and not since I was a teenager, more or less.

I felt "grown-up" when I heard my 9th-grade English teacher talking to an older student about "hard, throbbing" somethingorother. The student, a big Japanese/Hawaiian guy, with whom I'd later become sort-of friends, looked very uncomfortable. The teacher, a middle-aged white woman who lived around the corner from me, looked thoroughly comfortable. Even pleased with herself. This was my introduction to the language and dynamics of academic culture.

My beloved friend of the sponge diary used to quote any foul-mouthed thing from broadcast TV to his mother, just to get a rise out of her. "Pussy Barinko! Wha'd'ya think of that, mom?"

Bart Simpson, on his way home from church, happily repeats the minister's words: hell, hell, hell, damn, damn, damn! (And Marge tells him she doesn't want to hear that language outside of church!)

Back in 4th grade, my friend and I went through the music library at our school and discovered the soundtrack album for Hair -- this was before the movie.

We were pretty happy to discover these two songs, whose lyrics we repeated to our parents over and over again:

Sodomy
Fellatio
Cunnilingus
Pederasty

Father, why do these words sound so nasty?

Masturbation
Can be fun
Join the holy orgy
Kama Sutra
Everyone!

and

I'm a
Colored spade
A nigger
A black nigger
A jungle bunny
Jigaboo coon
Pickaninny mau mau

Uncle Tom
Aunt Jemima
Little Black Sambo

Cotton pickin'
Swamp guinea
Junk man
Shoeshine boy

Elevator operator
Table cleaner at Horn & Hardart
Slave voodoo
Zombie
Ubangi lipped

Flat nose
Tap dancin'
Resident of Harlem

And president of
The United States of Love
President of
The United States of Love

(and if you ask him to dinner you're going to feed him:)

Watermelon
Hominy grits
An' shortnin' bread
Alligator ribs
Some pig tails
Some black eyed peas
Some chili
Some collard greens

And if you don't watch out
This boogie man will get you
Booooooooo!

My friend was half-black, and his mom was white, so I think these lyrics especially upset her. Years later, when his family moved to northern California, he happily accepted the nickname 'Zebra' from the locals. His mom was less happy with her son's new nickname.

And while I'm using racially insensitive language, I might as well link to The Party Party (thanks to furyblog for bringing this to my attention) and the track Who's the Nigga?

annos domini

Despite Aaron Sorkin's complacent so-called liberalism, which does unfortunately permeate the stories even more than I had remembered, I still consider Sports Night to have been one of the best-written shows on television. Well cast, well directed. Everything.

As with almost all intelligent shows on commercial broadcast television, this one was short-lived.
(Right now, the wife and I are discovering Freaks & Geeks, which looks like it's going to be another example of this phenomenon, as was My So-Called Life.)

Netflix is one of the many great, life-changing commercial technologies. (Or is it a technological business model?)

Anyway, I think I'll try to report my favorite lines from these shows as I (re)discover them. This is one of my favorites from Sports Night:

[reflecting upon the wording used on a formal invitation]
Casey: "October the Eighth, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Eight, A.D."
A.D. They're worried I might accidentally show up 2,000 years before the birth of Christ!

anonymous minor celebrity

Spent the day doing errands, listening on my iPod to the lectures from the recent Radical Scholarship conference.

Turns out I was mentioned not once but twice -- though neither time by name, and for all I know neither mentioner would have recognized that the other was referring to me. The second guy doesn't even know who I am, but seemed grateful that I had transcribed and posted to the Mises.org/blog a couple of my favorite quotes from Murray Rothbard's economics lectures. I've been paraphrasing both quotes for a while now, but I'd wanted to include them in my radio spectrum essay so I needed to get the wording right; now I'm especially glad I decided to post them first.

It feels good to have an impact, however minor it may be for now.

definition of moral values

MORAL VALUES: what voters tell pollsters they care about when unemployment is at 5.4%, the stock market is rising, the Fed is holding interest rates at 1%, and no one has the stomach to look at the massacre being carried out in Iraq.

(Thanks to a certain Misesian for that definition.)

(And also for linking the Mises.org/blog page to this here blog of mine!)

Hang on, Voltaire!

Today my friend the poet was talking about the dark associations of the term 'fester'.

I said yes, they'd be dark, if I didn't associate the word mainly with Uncle Fester.

A child of television, I knew the name before I knew the word.

Right now I'm reading the third installment in the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, by Robert Anton Wilson, and the current chapter has Voltaire as a character.

So what's my main association with the name Voltaire?

WAITRESS

Are you ready to order?

MIKE

Coffee...
[(points to Trent, who nods)]
Two coffees. It says "Breakfast Any
Time", right?

WAITRESS

That's right.

MIKE

I'll have "pancakes in the Age of
Enlightenment".

[It goes over like a lead balloon.]

WAITRESS

And you?

TRENT

I'll have the Blackbeard over easy.

WAITRESS

I'll be back with the coffee.

[She takes the menus and goes.]

TRENT

[(genuinely)]
Nice, baby.

MIKE

I should've said Renaissance, right? It
went over her head.

TRENT

Baby, you did fine.

MIKE

[(disgusted with himself)]
"Age of Enlightenment". Shit. Like some
waitress in a Las Vegas coffee shop is
going to get an obscure French
philosophical reference. How demeaning.
I may as well have just said "Let me jump
your ignorant bones."...

TRENT

...Baby...

MIKE

... It's just, I thought "Renaissance"
was too Excaliber, it's the wrong casino.
She would've gotten it, though...

TRENT

You did fine. Don't sweat her. We're
meeting our honeys soon. You know
Christy's friend is going to be money.

MIKE

I hope so.
[(checks watch)]
We gotta go soon.

TRENT

Baby, relax. It's just down the hall.
She's gotta change... we'll be fine.

MIKE

We didn't do so bad after all.

TRENT

Baby, we're money.

[Mike tries to catch the attention of their waitress, who is
passing with a huge platter containing a BREAKFAST BANQUET.]

MIKE

Excuse me. We're in a bit of a hurry.

WAITRESS

Hang on, Voltaire.

But here are some choice quotes from the man himself:

• "Common sense is not so common."
• "History is fables agreed upon."
• "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
• "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities"

signal interference

I'm also the kind of guy who needs 8 hours of sleep to function.

I usually get them between 4am and noon.

(Last weekend, finishing up my spectrum article, I sat down to write at about 3pm and didn't get up again until 3am. These are the kind of working hours I can only manage when Professor Marcus is away at a conference. )

This morning -- late morning -- when the rest of the world was awake, I still wasn't. I heard a knock at the door. That only happens when we get a UPS delivery, so I threw on some clothes, wiped my eyes, started to clear my throat ... and opened the door.

Standing before me was a smiling, middle-aged woman with an enormous VOTE KERRY button. You should hear my voice in the morning. The first words out of my mouth sound like a truck tire on gravel. And I'm told I don't need to try very hard to express patience at its limit. I barely needed to say anything to make the poor woman shrink into herself and back away, head down, eyes averted and apologies under her breath.

Actually, for an anarchist, that's not a bad way to start the morning. I thought I'd be in a bad mood all election day, but I got the worst of it over with early, and found myself almost cheerful throughout the afternoon.

But toward evening, awaiting the return of my breadwinner, I discovered I'd never made the bed!

See? I'd thrown on clothes to answer the door. If I'm not in my pajamas, then the bed must already be made. Never gave it a second thought.

Maybe I need to start developing backup signals.