3 reminders

I got three reminders this week from the blogosphere:

Reminder #1

On Wednesday, Wally Conger reminded those of us who'd failed to notice, that it's been one year since the death of anarchist and "Left Rothbardian" Sam Konkin, also known as SEK3.


I learned about Konkin from reading the science fiction novel, Alongside Night, by J. Neil Schulman. (I wrote Mr. Schulman to tell him the ebook shopping cart on his website was broken, and he was generous enough to give me a free copy of the book!)

Alongside Night pointed me to Agorism and Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto, which finally got me to start reading Murray Rothbard.

Reminder #2

Yesterday, Tom Ender published Bob Wallace's review of an old detective/adventure novel, The Green Ripper, by John D. MacDonald.

(And I just noticed that Lew Rockwell did, too.)

Here I show the original paperback book cover as I remember it when I first read this book around age 14. This was one of the books that got me to finally start reading.

All of MacDonald's Travis McGee novels have a color in the title, which McGee-as-first-person-narrator eventually works into his narration. What Wallace doesn't mention is what this title means -- a title which I can never forget because it's so connected to this book cover. The Green Ripper is how McGee and his girlfriend refer to Death personified. Their in-joke is based on a story they heard of a kid who had terrible nightmares about "The Green Ripper" coming to take him away. Eventually his parents figure out that he's misheard some grown-up talk about The Grim Reaper. When McGee loses his girlfriend to a domestic terrorist ring (this book was written in the late 1970s!) McGee infiltrates the ring to exact his revenge, wishing he could take on The Green Ripper himself.

Reminder #3

Finally, Thomas L. Knapp reminds us, "There is, in fact, still a war on." Have a look at his lists of "a few of the people you haven't been hearing much about lately" and also "a few of the people who, all in all, are glad you aren't hearing about it".

socialists of the chair

One of the great great things about the blogosphere is the discovery of smart and talented people I'd never meet offline.

Vache Folle -- who was once a cop, but never I suspect a thug -- has a new blog with this great post about egalitarian indoctrination in the Ivy League:


Power relations in musical chairs
I have a thing about decorative shell barter, cigarette money, online game economies, and now also the chair-rich and the chair-poor.

(And once again, I note the pervasiveness of the chair itself in academic metaphors. In undergraduate philosophy, we were always talking about chairness and what features of a chair were accidental or essential. My father says, "Those who see the Institutions' arse are beneath the Institutions' notice." But apparently academics notice what's beneath their arses all the time.)

---

I should probably explain the title of this post. Ludwig von Mises was educated in Vienna at a time when the dominant economic thought in the German-speaking world was called Historicism, and its political wing was the Kathedersozialisten -- Socialists of the Chair, which to me implies armchair socialists (parlor-room Marxists, limousine liberals, et al.) but the "Chair" turns out to refer to the tenured position of full professorship in the Central European university system. I guess American academia has chairs, too, like the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Chair in Economics, but I don't think I ever hear the word used that way outside official titles. Anyway, Kathedersozialisten might best be translated as "Socialists With Tenure".

muchachas de la rotura del resorte

Trust me, these Rated PG pictures are the cleanest I could find on a page full of R and NC-17:

muchachas de la rotura del resorte idas salvajes

Why am I sharing semi-dirty pictures with you?

Because they are the result of a vanity Google on the search string "bkmarcus".

(I kid you not.)

To attract Google hits, porn pages put lots and lots of words on certain target pages.

Apparently, some pornographer must read this blog (or Mises.org or LRC or BlackCrayon.com or someone else's blog who links to mine) because this is the B-section of the Spring Break page:

beauty beaver because becky become becomes becoming bed bedroom bedrooms bedroon beds bedugul been beer before began begin beginning begins behalf behi behind behrendt being belgium beliefs believe belize bellaonline below belowthecold ben bend benefits bentley berets berkeley bermuda best bet beta beth bethlehem better betting between beyond bianchi bible bid big bigger biggest bike biker biketoberfest bikini bikinibreak billing billion bin binge bird birds birthday biscayne bit bitch biz bk bkmarcus black blackjack blackspringbreak blackwhale blair blanp blast blc bless blessed blind blintz blog blogging blonde blossom blossoms blue blues blumhardt blvd board boarders boards boasting boasts boat boats boatslip bobby boces bodies body bodybuildin boing bold bollex bonaventure bonds bonuses boob boobs boogies book booked bookies booking bookings bookit bookmark books boom booze booze is bora borah border bored boredom born boss boston both bottom boulder boulevard bourbon bowl box boxers boy boys bq br braces brancatelli brand branson bras brastonya brats brave brazil bre brea break breaks break break american-breakdowns breaker breakers breakfast breakfasts breakfate breaks breakthrough breathtaking breckenridge breezes brek brent brewing brian brief bright brighton bring bringing brings bringyourpet british brob brochure brochures brock broke broken broker brook brother brought brown browse browser brunette brurbqi bs bsb btdt bu buccaneers buckhornexchange bud buddha buddhist

salvaje ido muchachas de la rotura del resorte en estilo doggy

This same list of B-words was on a page called Girls Gone Wild Doggy Style!

I have no pictures to share with you from that page.

autor anarquista

But not all the interesting search results were pornagraphic.

I've actually been translated into Spanish:

"L'estatisme �s la pretensi� que va institucionalitzar que la coerci� activa �s justificada" (BkMarcus, autor anarquista, a "Isn't Anarchism Unrealistic?")

And a different Spanish-language website had this:

"""
(Joke:
What's the opposite of diversity?
University.
bkMarcus)
"""

Welcome to the Wild Wild Web.

cigarette money

I'm often asked where to begin by those who are interested in acquiring basic economic literacy. (Basic economic literacy is really all I have, after all.)

My standard answer is available in an earlier blog post.

I used to keep an economics portal uptodate as I read online articles that I thought were useful and fundamental.

One of the most useful articles I've ever read was "The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp" by R.A. Radford, a British officer in World War II and an economist in civilian life. It's not a long read and it's fascinating.

I've been thinking about the article because of a discussion that took place at the new Austrian Economics Forum on the monetary economics of virtual markets in online games. (I think this POW article should be considered required reading by online game designers.)

Radford's POW article is about:

1. how money and markets emerged in Prisoner Of War camps (which, by the way, would seem to disprove the Labor Theory of Value);
   
2. how cigarettes came to be the standard commodity money; and
3. what happened to supplies when economically illiterate officers tried to intervene in the market to address what they perceived as inequities, exploitation, and other market failures.

Money and Prices
(55:21) -- Murray Rothbard

Exactly eleven minutes and thirty seconds (11:30) into his lecture on Money and Prices, Rothbard mentions Radford's piece and summarizes its significance. I believe he calls it the most anthologized economics article ever.

Of course, if I'm going to plug a short article as a good place to begin to understand money, I have to mention my own contribution to Gilligan's Island Economics, but really, the POW article is more basic -- and it actually happened, unlike Robinson Crusoe or the seven stranded castaways.

I'm always fighting the misimpression that economics is about money -- that economic concerns mean monetary or material concerns -- but really, an understanding of money is necessary to understanding sound economics, and as Austrian School economists will warn you, anyone who tries to describe the economy without reference to prices or price theory is probably trying to pull a fast one. (This might describe the majority of professional macroeconomists.)

PS I keep encountering claims that it was Milton Friedman who first pointed out the cigarette money that evolved in WWII. He definitely talks about commodity monies in his book, Free to Choose, but he's not the source. Let's clear that up, shall we?

PPS Another thing Friedman talks about is how in hyperinflationary Central Europe, two main commodity monies evolved: cigarettes for small purchases and cognac for large. This seems to me like the bimetalism of previous centuries, where silver and gold played similar parallel roles. One question that remains for me: on a truly free market, where no government controls the money or the money supply, would we evolve toward a trimetalism (e.g., copper, silver, gold) or a system of money substitutes (digital and paper) for claims on one metal (e.g., gold or platinum)?

PPPS For the reason I assume a free-market money would be metal-based, see my Gilligan article, mentioned above.

distinctions

And of course, while we're once again on the topic of labels, labeling, pigeonholing, etc., we should remember that the centrally important concept for intelligent thought and intelligent communication is the making and maintaining of useful distinctions:

February 23, 2005

Important Distinctions

Posted by Anthony Gregory at February 23, 2005 02:28 PM

When a stranger puts a gun to your head, and threatens you with injury if you do not turnover the contents of your wallet, it's robbery.

When the government does it it's tax policy.

When an organized crime syndicate prints massive amounts of cash on worthless pieces of paper, it's counterfeiting.

When the government does it it's monetary policy.

When some reprobate breaks into your home, strips you away from nonviolent activity and takes you into his lair and locks you in a cage, it is breaking and entering and kidnapping.

When the government does it it's drug policy.

When some criminal street gang shoots and kills you in cold blood while engaging in a violent conflict with another criminal gang, it's murder.

When the government does it it's foreign policy.

When a man forces you to work for him, beats or kills you if you don't comply or attempt to escape, and is not subject to any real enforcement when he crosses the legal protections nominally afforded to you, it is slavery.

When the government does it it's conscription policy.

Just so you all know.

http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/007488.html

the other other L-word

If the L-word is liberal, and the other L-word is libertarian, then the other other L-word is label, examples of which include the L-word and the other L-word.

This blog often deals with all three.

I address labels here, and here, and more generally here.

(And here and here less centrally.)

James Leroy Wilson has an excellent LRC article this week called "The Futility of Labels" from which I quote:

So, call me Federalist, or Anti-federalist. Patriot or Rebel. Progressive or Populist. Liberal or Conservative. Libertarian. Call me American for supporting Jeffersonian principles. Or call me Anti-American when Jeffersonian principles conflict with the policies of our Glorious Leader, President Bush. Call me Right-wing because I want taxes cut. Call me Left-wing because I think everyone deserves a fair shake.

Call me whatever you like. I don't know if it matters anymore. All I want is what the Revolutionary leaders wanted, to get our freedoms back.

What Wilson himself considers ironic is that he also has a recent article at The Partial Observer in which he "pigeonholed a lot of libertarian and pseudo-libertarian movements."

He adds, "But maybe the longer we insist of defining "libertarian" precisely, the less likely the word will be corrupted."

Libertarian Critter had more to say on Wilson's LRC article. So did my anarchist comrade Wally Conger.

(And so too do 9 links from 7 sources. I guess this post will be the 10th link and the 8th source.)

rubbing it in

Am I the only one who finds this letter presumptuous and indelicate?

From: jg------@haverford.edu Subject: Advanced Degrees Date: February 21, 2005 4:37:09 PM EST To: Brian Knatz Marcus While generating a list of alumni with graduate degrees, I noticed that you have not informed the College of an advanced degree. If you have obtained any advanced degrees, please provide this information so we may keep your record up to date. You need to send me the degree, year, school and major. Thank you, in advance, for this information. J------- G-------- Database Coordinator Advancement Services Haverford College jg------@haverford.edu 610-@$$-#*|=

OPB: "critter"

... I choose not to call police officers "pigs". Why? Because it's disrespectful to actual pigs, that's why! There are plenty of good alternatives to use here, like "thugs" for example. I'm not too concerned with showing disrespect toward thugs.

That excellent point comes from the libertarian critter's latest post, asking after the origins of the term "Congresscritters".

I think I provided the answer. We'll see if someone suggests a different source.

bkMarcus said...

And all this time, I assumed I knew what your blog title referred to. I felt like I was "in" on it. Turns out I was so in I was out of it.

I believe that Robert Anton Wilson (or his late wife, Arlen) coined the term:

I coined the term spokesentities, because I was in a restaurant in Boulder, and they gave me a card, to evaluate the food, the service, this that and the other, and they asked me to evaluate the waitperson. And it asks for comments. So I wrote in the comments, I wrote, "Waitperson stinks of human chauvinism. Change it to waitentity at once!" And I signed it "animal lover."

And then I started using that, then, and my wife, Arlen, changed it to waitcritter.. Waitcritter, Congresscritter; clergycritter... I wouldn't want a clergy-critter getting into my house.

(source)

what the stranger said

Said to me today while we were grocery shopping:

"You are wearing that hat, Mister Man!"

(Looking at this picture, I realize that my wife almost succeeded in putting her long orange scarf around my neck before we went out.)

Anthony Gregory: "Drug War Hypocrisy"

Posted by Anthony Gregory at February 18, 2005 06:50 PM

For years, MDMA was used clinically for psychiatric treatment, marital counseling, helping people get over post-traumatic stress disorder, and dealing with addiction problems. The drug was invented in the early 20th century and accepted by many scientists as having some medical uses. Then the feds made it illegal, along with other empathogens and hallucinogens. After that ? surprise! ? it became wildly popular in colleges and dance clubs. For a few years, there was some hysteria over this "designer drug" ? which, like "assault weapon," means something the feds don't like ? and possession of it became punished through increasingly draconian means and unconstitutional mandatory minimum sentences. About five years ago, there were some proposals to make it illegal to have it in one's bloodstream, unusual even for the drug war, and the drug was seen as a menace that would justify banning speech about it. Censorship was in the original draft of Feinstein and Hatch's "Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act," later renamed the "Club-drug Anti-Proliferation Act," and once again renamed the warm and fuzzy "Children's Health and Safety Act."

Yes, MDMA (or "ecstacy") seems to cause long-term problems in large doses, but there's been junk science on the issue as well, including a doctored photo of a brain of a user that became famous. (BTW, I hope no one reads this as an endorsement of the drug.) But what of the original medical uses, before the feds turned it into a forbidden fruit? Is it really, like marijuana supposedly is, totally without any medicinal value? And if so, why is it now being administered to U.S. soldiers with shell shock from Afghanistan and Iraq "to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares," in the precise way it was used clinically for years before it was made illegal? Of course, the state typically exempts itself from its own laws, and this is simply one more example. Either the drug has some medical benefits, in which case it does not belong under Schedule I, the most restricted federal category, even under current federal guidelines, or it doesn't have such benefits and the state is doping its troops up on something so awful that, we are told, the crusade against it legitimizes a federal war on the Bill of Rights.

contract law

Woman Sued Over Pregnant Stomach Ad Space

A pregnant woman in Roswell, Ga., is being sued over advertising space on her stomach, according to a Local 6 News report.

Elisa Harp offered the ad space on her belly this month on the eBay auction Web site. However, when the auction ended, Harp refused to offer her stomach to the highest bidder -- SunPoker.com.

Harp instead is giving her stomach space to The Golden Palace Casino.

"The highest bidder at first was SunPoker.com but I decided after the auction ended not to go with them and decided to go with The Golden Palace Casino," Harp said.

"I guess his feeling was that it was binding that you went with them the highest bidder," the reporter said.

"No, even if I was selling T-shirts or anything else on eBay, as a seller, I have the right to decide who I want to sell to."

Local 6 News reported that according to the auction site's rules, once bidding ends, a product must go to the highest bidder and that the auction is a binding contract."

EBay did not have a response.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

Copyright 2005 by Internet Broadcasting Systems and Local6.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

(And yet here I, bkmarcus, have done so. I'm helping Local6.com spread their story and their name, and yet ... I await the cease-and-desist order...)

((Via iFeminists.net.))

(((For more on Intellectual Property, see Kinsella's IP page.)))

[Note: I wrote this last fall with the intention of submitting it to LRC. When I finished writing it, I decided against submission. It's only about one idea. I like a piece to combine two seemingly unrelated ideas before I consider it interesting enough for a broad readership. Since I haven't come up with a way to fill it out, to make it more dimensional -- and since I'm constantly wanting to refer to my full argument as stated here -- I've decided to post it to this blog instead. (A friend of mine, predicting a firestorm if I ever published this, asked, "Why not just take the word 'Referencing' out of your title?")]

In Defense of Referencing Hitler

By B.K. Marcus

Suppose you were to make the claim that the correct policy will always be whatever the majority decides. And suppose I were to respond by pointing out that the "Jim Crow" racial segregation laws were the will of the majority at the time they were in effect.

Would you think I was calling you a racist? Or would you understand that I assume the opposite and am therefore using a repugnant extreme to test the limits of your position?

Now suppose instead of referencing Jim Crow, I used Adolf Hitler, who was after all elected in a majoritarian democracy and remained popular for some time. Would you think I was calling you a Nazi? Would you accuse me of equating Election Night with the Holocaust?

Well, maybe you wouldn't, but there are plenty who would. The moment the words Hitler, Holocaust, or Nazi come up, the assumption is that the speaker has left the bounds of good taste and rationality and slipped into the realm of hyperbole and name-calling.

In Internet culture, there is even a name for this phenomenon: Godwin's Law, which states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is also the tradition online that once such a comparison is made the discussion is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.

The tradition is not limited to the Internet. A year ago, the following exchange took place on the public radio interview program, Fresh Air:

Grover Norquist: "[S]ome who play at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' ... [but] that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.'"

Terry Gross: "Excuse me. Excuse me one second. Did you just compare the Estate Tax with the Holocaust?"

Grover Norquist: "No, the morality that says it's OK to do something to a group because they're a small percentage of the population is the morality that says that the Holocaust is OK because they didn't target everybody, just a small percentage."

Terry Gross: "So you see taxes ... the way they are now [as] terrible discrimination against the wealthy comparable to the kind of discrimination of, say, the Holocaust?"

After that show, I stopped listening to Fresh Air. I used to love Terry Gross, and I'd never heard of Grover Norquist before that interview, but no matter how you feel about the morality of progressive taxation -- or of taxation in general -- it should be obvious to any thinking person that Norquist was challenging the stated moral logic of a position. He was claiming an underlying principle that an action's ethical status isn't determined by the number of people it affects. But Gross was reading his challenge as a comparison of policies -- equating the Estate Tax with the Holocaust.

Search Google on the terms Norquist and Holocaust and you'll find plenty of people who share Terry Gross's interpretation of that exchange. (One of them even posted to the Mises Blog in reaction to a Lew Rockwell post.)

At the time, I wrote an angry rant about the Norquist interview, to which one reader replied, "Well, yes, but the speaker may reasonably be expected to have used the example he did because of the emotional effect of linking these two particular concepts."

Is this an objection? If so, what does it mean? Is the claim that referencing Hitler is illegitimate in principle, or that from a pragmatic point of view, it's bad strategy?

The only reason I can see for calling it illegitimate in principle is the implicit claim that all such references are examples of the Appeal To Emotion fallacy, where one abandons reason and appeals instead to visceral reflexes. But is it always fallacious to appeal to emotion? It's invalid as an argument, and it's invalid if it's expected to conclude the argument -- and perhaps this is how it's most often used -- but the appeal to emotion can also be used to confront someone with the logical consequences of their stated principles.

It is true that if you support "majority rules" as some sort of moral principle, you must also support Hitler's rise to power. If you think Hitler's power and policies were wrong no matter how many people supported them, then you can't take a principled stance in favor of majoritarianism. At best, you can only support it as a general strategy.

If you still think that democracy is a moral system, then you have to deal with the cases of Jim Crow and Adolf Hitler and decide how and why they aren't part of what you mean. If you think it would be OK to target a policy at 2% of the population that would be wrong to target at 52%, then you have to give some account of why the numbers are relevant -- and your explanation had better apply as well to the historical hard cases as it does to the present context you have in mind.

OK, you say, so maybe a reference to Hitler isn't illegitimate, but it's still a bad idea. It derails the discussion rather than moving anything forward.

Suppose we're having the majority rules debate and when I bring up the popular election of Hitler, you say, "I understand that you're making a formal comparison, but I think it's counter-productive to bring up the Nazis; there's just too much ugly emotion tied into that for me to deal with it rationally."

That certainly sounds reasonable, and perhaps if Terry Gross had said something similar to Grover Norquist I'd still be one of her listeners.

But I think even the bad-strategy argument is wrong. The whole point of referencing Hitler is to force you to test your principles in the extreme cases, and for most people, Hitler is as extreme as it gets. If we disallow reference to Hitler, it can only be an acknowledgement of the extreme position he holds in our moral imagination. But by banishing the extremes from rational discourse, we make it too easy to settle our beliefs with the comfortable cases, never having to follow positions through to their logical conclusions.

The attempt to apply logic to a disagreement is always based on formal parallels. Their purpose is to separate the underlying principle from the distractions of particular circumstance. Sometimes this involves finding less emotional examples, and sometimes it requires more emotional ones.

Sometimes they're good parallels ("So if you were the breadwinner, then it would be OK for me to do all the housework?"). Sometimes they're bad parallels ("If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff?"). And sometimes they're absurd parallels ("Hitler was a vegetarian, you know! You wanna be like Hitler?"). People who can't tell the difference have no business taking offense at what they don't understand.

Think of a reference to Jim Crow, Hitler, Stalinism, Pol Pot -- whoever or whatever is your most effective symbol of political evil -- as a rhetorical shortcut to the reductio ad absurdum. The question is this: are you willing to stand by your logic when I apply it in the extreme? That is absolutely not an unfair question. If the history of the 20th century teaches us anything, it's that these extreme cases are relevant. They do happen. And they not only can be part of a rational conversation about political principles, I would argue that they should be.

post-Valentine's Day massacres

An excerpt from today's Agoraphilia:

The Ex-Precedence

Few people want to be alone on Thanksgiving... or Christmas... or New Year's... or Valentine's Day. As a result, many courtships that by all rights should have expired in the autumn linger on into mid-February. Now that V-day's over, the Annual Rite of Overdue Dumping should soon commence, thereby setting the stage for the Spring Mating Season.

Man, I sure wish I didn't recognize the accuracy of Glen Whitman's account.

political capitalism

From today's Daily Article at Mises.org:

The "protesters" made it on to the evening news in their latest attempt to dupe the American public into believing that they were not really the millionaire owners of large corporate farms, but lowly dust bowl families just trying to make ends meet and feed their families. A public that is gullible enough to believe a president who promises to eradicate tyranny from the planet is likely to fall for this lie as well.

"Farmed Robbery" by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The article is an excellent short course on politicalCapitalism, also know as mercantilism, protectionism, corporate welfare, corporatism, or sometimes state capitalism.

It is the opposite of economicCapitalism in a freeMarket, also known as laissez faire, and sometimes classicalLiberalism.

For more on the distinction, see Straw Men & Ham Sandwiches for the short light version, or the BlackCrayon essay Reluctant Capitalist for the long dense version.

Virtually everything government does increases the cost of living by driving up prices. Yet most Americans still believe in the fairy tale that it is the free market that causes higher prices and that it is government, through benevolent and wise antitrust regulation, that "saves" us from rapacious monopolists. This has always been a lie; antitrust regulation has always been, at best, a smokescreen designed to divert the public's attention from the real causes of higher prices, such as agricultural price support programs, protectionism, and myriad other forms of government-mandated price increases.

Ibid.

frozen Ice Rage mocha latte

Today, on the LRC blog, I read this:

February 14, 2005

Another Time, Another Name

Posted by Jeffrey Tucker at February 14, 2005 06:18 PM

So today, I was at the fancy pants coffee shop and ordered my daughter a frozen Ice Rage mocha latte, with whipped cream on top. She loved it, so I asked for a taste. "It's a chocolate milkshake!" said I. "A what?" she asked.

I can't stand hypocrisy.

File under "black humor":

The New York Post, rag of my youth, has what I remember as a typical NYP headline:

SLAIN BY MOM

... about what the ifeminists.net newsfeed headline calls a "DV activist" (DV is "Domestic Violence" and I assume her activism was opposed to it):

DV activist kills daughter
A suicidal mom, despondent over her divorce... beat her 14-year-old daughter to death with a hammer...Friends said Lynn Giovanni had written a book, "Judicial System Loopholes," last year that slammed the court's treatment of domestic violence. Giovanni used the nom de plume "Faith Hope." (02/08/05)

I feel like I should have an emotional response of shock, outrage, sadness for the victim, etc. It would be hard to find a more "innocent victim" than your own sleeping daughter. But a slain-by-mom headline would rarely even draw me into reading the article, whereas the hypocrisy referenced in a DV-activist-kills-daughter headline catches my attention with its very dark irony. And it reminds me of a recent Boondocks ...


(Click to Enlarge)
I'm with Huey Freeman on this one.

What's this? A priest in favor of freedom?

Regular readers of this blog (Are their truly such creatures?) will know that I'm a paragon of "everything bad that begins with an 'A'" and yet I have this respect and affection for a classical-liberal Catholic priest in the tradition of Lord "absolute power corrupts absolutely" Acton.

Don Jim says:

[G]overnment should be as small as possible and regulate only what is absolutely necessary for the basic functioning of society. Other than that, it should butt out.

And also:

Perhaps I'm biased, being both a Catholic and a Southerner, but it's always seemed to me that the traditional Southern approach to life and humanity is particularly congenial to Roman Catholicism, and that congregational Protestantism holds sway here only because (a) that's the type of religion that historically spread here first and (b) anti-Catholicism is instilled in people while they're young. The Southern character, though, is eminently suited to Catholicism. I'm thinking especially of the South's sectional mythology, our old notions of aristocracy and kinship, our comfortable tolerance for what is strange and eccentric, our respect for tradition, our general freedom from the Protestant work ethic, and the darker recognition (confirmed by the loss of the War) that man is fallen and that he is not promised victory in this life. All of which has long made me think that the Southland is the closest thing in the world to Spain.

Condorcet's so-called Paradox

All you proponents of majoritarian democracy out there, you do know Condorcet's Paradox, right?

Of course you do.

You'd never advocate an ideology based only on indoctrination and ignorance, now would you?

DiLorenzo on Williams on Affirmative Action

According to Thomas DiLorenzo:

[E]very state-funded university has had a mandatory "affirmative action officer" for at least the past twenty-five years. In addition, many schools also require each academic department to have one as well, who must write an annual report to the Chief Commissar. When I was on the faculty of George Mason University in the 1980s our economics departmental representative was Walter Williams, a fact that OUTRAGED the university Commissar. I can recall one report that Walter wrote saying, "This year we tried to hire a tall, statuesque blond from UCLA, but the university was too cheap to give us enough salary money to enable us to compete for her services."

I need an anarchist vibe like I need a hole in the head.

Well, it seems (according to Raymond.Fuller@EconomicsDaily.com) that Gene Callahan just lacked the proper "Anarcho-Capitalist Vibe".

I guess anarchism means never having to say you're sorry.

My 2� in 2 seconds: yes, government interventionism increases petty crime; yes the minimum wage reduces low-skilled employment and therefore reduces entry-level on-the-job training; no, that doesn't let a mugger off the hook; yes, I'd still be willing to shoot him in the head.

(Oh, and no I wouldn't have talked back, would have tried to avoid trouble, etc. -- going armed means an extra personal responsibility to avoid all confrontations, since any confrontation is potentially lethal -- but there's a definite risk here of blaming the victim while making anti-statist excuses for the actual, individual initiators of force.)

I'm quite willing to blame the State for crime in the statistical aggregate, but I insist on blaming individual criminals for individual crimes. There's no contradiction there, and in fact any other position is ultimately incoherent.

Batman & Mises

Today at blog.Mises.org:

Ludwig von Mises and Batman

Mises.org Updates

The famed 1998 comic is now online:

View or Link This Item | posted 07:52 AM

L'homme de batte de Berlin

I've expressed something less than love for Les Fran�ais before, but between Far� (here, here, and here) and now Herv� de Quengo (and of course, the beautiful, patient, and thoroughly loveable Professor Marcus herself), I might just become a Francophile.

M. de Quengo has some of The Berlin Batman online:



(Thanks to the Mises Scholars community for tracking this down.)

sacraliser c'est immoraliser

Here's my attempt to translate the French blog entry I quoted earlier:

To declare something sacred is to hold it above comparison. It is to refuse to make a rational choice on the subject. It is to call for the automatic and irrational acceptance of certain behaviors by banishing the alternatives under the imposing yoke of moral authority. It is, in short, intimidation.

The refusal to choose rationally does not prevent the dilemma -- it prevents only the rational decision-making to best solve the dilemma, and substitutes instead the superstitious faith in arbitrarily accepted codes of conduct, which are themselves subject to the manipulations of sentimentalists, blackmailers, and other swindlers.

To make something sacred is to remove it from the realm of morality: it is to deny the moral dignity of man, his freedom and his responsibility, when faced with the choice of exactly those things most precious to his existence.

The next time you hear someone use as an argument The Sacredness Of Life (or of anything else) or ask indignantly, But how can you make such a comparison? -- don't fall for it! It is precisely because the comparison is possible -- and offers a crushingly obvious conclusion -- that there is a moral choice on your part. Your fate depends on your ability to escape the fiends who would take your conscience hostage.

(With help from babelfish and Professor Marcus.)

Actually, just for kicks, I'll include babelfish's somewhat less coherent version:

To declare a thing crowned, it is to prohibit to compare it with other things. It is thus to refuse to make rational choices since this thing is concerned. It is to call with the irrational acceptance of a certain behavior posed a priori by evacuating the alternatives under the imposing yoke of the moral authority. In short, it is intimidation. The refusal to choose rationally does not prevent the emergence of dilemmas concerning the sacrilized thing, it prevents just the rational decision-making to solve these dilemmas as well as possible, and the superstitious faith in certain arbitrarily accepted codes of conduct substitutes to him, and which are then the subject of handling of traffickers in finer feelingss, main singers, and other swindlers. To sacrilize it is immoraliser: it is to deny the moral dignity of the man, his freedom and its responsibility, vis-a-vis with the choices which precisely relate to the most invaluable things of its existence. The next time that you will intend somebody to use the crowned character of the life (or other) like argument, or to be indignant but how can you make this comparison? -- you do not let take with the trap. It is precisely because the comparison is possible, and offers a conclusion of a crushing obviousness, that there is moral choice of your share. Your fate depends on your capacity to escape to the torturers who take your conscience as an hostage.

mugging anarchists

Gene Callahan, author of Economics for Real People, which I've previously recommended as a good place to begin developing economic literacy, was mugged in London two days ago.

He begins his blog post about it, "The old quip was that a neoconservative was a liberal who had been mugged."

Now I first heard that joke in either the late 1980s or the early 1990s, when very few quippers knew what a "neoconservative" was.

I only knew because my highschool girlfriend explained it to me. Her mother, who was such a creature, worked for Norman Podhoretz, one of the founders of that now famous movement. (Which label too many leftists use as if it were synonymous with "conservative" or "right-wing". Morons.) In fact, I interviewed my mother as a typical so-called liberal and my girlfriend's mother as a typical so-called conservative (when they were actually a social democrat, and a neocon, respectively) for a high school history project on the different perspectives of different political persuasions. The topic was the Cuban Missile Crisis. One thing I remember from the neocon mom was that she rejected the "Old Right" (which I'd never heard of) and considered herself a JFK Democrat, a trade-unionist, etc., but the establishment Left had moved away from what she saw as the correct positions on the Cold War and culture. (She had a big blue campaign button that said "Reagan!" in Hebrew. I didn't like that one very much.)

The way I heard the joke was this: A social conservative is a social liberal who has been mugged.

Another version: A social conservative is a social liberal with a teenaged daughter.

Anyway, I'll write about neoconservatism some other time; I'll write about my own experiences with muggings another time; right now I just wanted to point you to Callahan's blog.

my foul-mouthed mother

A few days after a certain blog post back in November, my mother phoned.

Caller ID told me who it was, which she knows, but she still began the call by announcing herself, "This is your foul-mouthed mother!" And then she burst into laughter.

She was referring to this:

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.

Back in college, I had a girlfriend who was writing me from her summer job as a waitress. She said she was serving a middle-aged woman and her teenaged son, who apparently had nothing to say to each other. They didn't look angry or uncomfortable. Just not interested in talking.

My girlfriend wrote me to say that she had seen the exact opposite of how she imagined "Hilary and Brian at dinner."

(Hilary is my mom's name and Brian is the B in BK.)

She was right, too. I think she may have been present for the following dinner exchange:

Hilary: Are you thesis or antithesis?
Brian: I'm synthesis!
Hilary: Oh, that's what they all say ...

Anyway, I'm sure that the Mises.org blog keeper wouldn't object to any of that. What he would object to is what my mother forwarded me tonight in email:

Cherchez Far�

I discovered Fran�ois-Ren� Rideau (aka Far�), the French libertarian who runs Bastiat.org, when I was searching for the March 1969 Playboy article, "The Death of Politics" by Karl Hess.

I put a bunch of Far�'s quotes on my website and pointed some French-speaking friends to his website: fare.tunes.org.

Only today did I learn Bastiat.org is also his, so I'd apparently already been using one of his websites without realizing it.

Far� himself wrote me to correct an error in one of my BlackCrayon essays, in which I mention both Fr�d�ric Bastiat and Gustave de Molinari.

(Bastiat was Mises to Molinari's Rothbard.)

((If you don't know what that means, imagine I'd called Bastiat Socrates to Molinari's Plato -- except you'd have to imagine Plato as an anarcho-capitalist rather than as the spiritual father of central planning.))

(((OK, maybe I should have said Bastiat was Plato to Molinari's Aristotle; that captures the ideological vector a little better.)))



Anyway, I just now learned that Far� has started his own blog.

He writes some entries in French and some in English.

Maybe this will inspire me to improve my French, since (1) his French entries are relatively short, and (2) I'm interested in what he has to say (which is not always the case with other French-language stuff on the web).

Here I quote one of each:

� Sacraliser c'est immoraliser

D�clarer une chose sacr�e, c'est interdire de la comparer � d'autres choses. C'est donc refuser de faire des choix rationnels d�s lors que cette chose est en jeu. C'est appeler � l'acceptation irrationnelle d'un certain comportement pos� a priori en �vacuant les alternatives sous le joug imposant de l'autorit� morale. Bref, c'est de l'intimidation.

Le refus de choisir rationnellement n'emp�che pas l'�mergence de dilemmes concernant la chose sacralis�e, il emp�che juste la prise de d�cision rationnelle pour r�soudre au mieux ces dilemmes, et lui substitue la foi superstitieuse en certaines r�gles de conduites accept�es arbitrairement, et qui font alors l'objet des manipulations de trafiquants en bons sentiments, ma�tres chanteurs, et autres escrocs.

Sacraliser c'est immoraliser: c'est nier la dignit� morale de l'homme, sa libert� et sa responsabilit�, face aux choix qui concernent pr�cis�ment les choses les plus pr�cieuses de son existence.

La prochaine fois que vous entendrez quelqu'un utiliser le caract�re sacr� de la vie (ou autre) comme argument, ou s'indigner mais comment peux-tu faire cette comparaison? -- ne vous laissez pas prendre au pi�ge. C'est pr�cis�ment parce que la comparaison est possible, et offre une conclusion d'une �vidence �crasante, qu'il y a choix moral de votre part. Votre sort d�pend de votre capacit� � �chapper aux bourreaux qui prennent votre conscience en otage.

25 d�c 2004 @ 09:51

(Envoyez un commentaire)

� Positive Thinking

Another important way in which americans are free and french are not: in public messages, whether in ads or in public venue regulations, the main way that people are enticed to do things, in the States, is you can do it, you can help preserve the environment, you can achieve something for yourself, etc. In France, it's you must, whether you like it or not, you cannot, because someone who knows better than you has decided it this way. Of course, this is more visible in public regulations than in private advertisements, since the latter always rely on the good will of the consumer. Still, even french ads more often than not resort to bad conscience and other forms of self-loathing. This is not something to be found in the States.

06 d�c 2004 @ 22:46

(Envoyez un commentaire)

more of Other People's Blogs

Recently, my OPB activity has primarily been among people I either know personally offline or people I know with a certain familiarity online.

• My friend and former regular movie-viewing partner, CJ, who claims he can get his hands on The Berlin Batman for me (!) spends all his time directing plays. (Maybe he's still writing them, too. I'm not sure. I haven't kept up on the latest.) Anyway, he apparently found time to watch the commentary on the DVD of X-2, which led me to review my own favorite DVD commentaries.
  

• Doctor Furious asked if marketing is necessary in a free market and I answered -- risking, as I saw it, the embarrassment of learning that I had yet again missed the point. Turned out I didn't. This time.

• On blog.Mises.org (which by the way, my friend AC is now involved in hosting!) Stephan Kinsella takes exception to my "But"...
  

• And that same friend and former business partner, AC Capehart, a good man and a good geek who has helped carry me through tough times with encouragement and support when such things were otherwise few and far between, now has his own blog.

  Ten years ago, AC and I learned that we were interviewing for the same job -- peon webmaster at a game company -- in our parallel attempts to escape the basement computing at the University of Virginia. I think neither of us wanted to be "that guy" who'd have a good reason to have trouble sleeping after things shook out. The manager hired both of us. He said he'd never experienced such a thing: AC spent much of his interview talking about how talented I was, and I'd spent my interview talking about AC's talents. Guy figured we must be a fantastic team so he sacrificed a graphic artist from his head count and hired the both of us. (It was also weird for him, as it is for so many, that we each go by initials rather than proper names.)
  

  Anyway, a few weeks ago, Mr. Capehart started a blog, and I was caught off-guard by what a good read it is. AC is talented in many ways, but I'd never considered him a particularly compelling writer. Apparently, that's because I'd only seen his textual equivalent of corporate-speak. In his own voice, he's something else. See, for instance, his analysis of the game like virtues in the latest @Home distributed computing project. Or his lessons learned and not-yet-learned about how we can and should treat other drivers. (I have yet to add my 2� on the perils of principled driving.)

OPB ... did I leave anyone out?

The Berlin Batman

Artifact: Human Action Comics

By Brian Doherty

Ideas may run the world. But no idea stalled in the world of professional intellectuals can run far. F.A. Hayek wrote that, to thrive, ideas must be spread by such "second-hand dealers in ideas" as journalists and teachers.

But what about a venue as purportedly third-rate as popular comics? At left, Hayek's mentor, the economist and philosopher Ludwig Von Mises, (1881-1973) is the surprising offstage hero in a recent issue of the DC comic Batman Chronicles, which uses the Batman concept in unusual settings. In a tale set in 1939, the "Berlin Batman" (by day the wealthy painter "Baruch Wane") tries to foil the Nazis' theft of Mises's papers. That theft really happened; the papers fell into Soviet hands after World War II and were thought lost until a Mises biographer found them in 1996.

Written and drawn by Paul Pope, the highly stylized comic is resolutely ideological in Mises's support. A postscript in the voice of the Berlin Batman's ward, Robin (here a young woman), describes how "Von Mises' anti-authoritarian ideas were first a threat to the Nazis, then the Soviets, and to all increasingly regulatory governments in our own times. He was against socialism in all its many forms. He was an advocate of individual liberty, free speech, and free thinking...and so, should I add, was the Berlin Batman."

---

Wait a minute ... you mean my two greatest heroes -- Ludwig von Mises and The Batman -- actually share a comic book? An official, DC-issued comic book?

---

More:

• Holy Praxeology, Batman! by Paul A. Cantor


• Paul Pope - Libertarian


• Batman and Mises: Discovery of the Boulder Letters, by Ari Armstrong

---

So, my contact at LvMI says they have it and can scan it ... but I ain't seen no scans!

And my contact at the JLS says he has it somewhere, but can't find it -- must be in storage, etc.

(I'm making certain gestures right now that communicate unambiguously if we're in the same room and you aren't blind, but they don't work so well in electronic text format.)

on taking things "too far"

"The difference between the radical and the moderate is not one of degree. It is an intellectual and mental outlook of a completely different sort, one that goes to the very heart of whether one views the people in power as the source of the problem, or the source of the solution."

-- Lew Rockwell, "Moderates and Radicals"

Rothbard on moderation

[T]he Aristotelian "golden mean" bears no relation to the attempt by hawkers for "moderation" or "prudence" to weaken high principle. Aristotle's virtues properly apply to cases where more or less of a certain act changes its qualitative merits. Thus, "too little" food and "too much" food are both bad for the individual. But politics is an entirely different matter. For here we are dealing with acts that remain qualitatively identical regardless of number: e.g., the murder of 10 people is the same type of act as the murder of 100. In neither case do we abandon principle. In one, we uphold the rational principle of "optimum food"; in the other, the rational principle of "abstaining from murder."

The Heresy of Prudence

For more on moderation, see the BlackCrayon definition of centrism.

"A political moderate is someone without principles." -- me