berets, left and right

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apr�s moi le d�luge

(Thanks to Lew Rockwell for this picture.)

Sometimes, I'll type "LOL" in instant messenger even if my laughter was muted. When I saw this picture in email, I guffawed loudly. Oh how we once-mighty have fallen.

Then of course, the scenario spins itself out for me where a former Razorfish employee found a bum in Manhattan who was willing to wear the hat and hold the sign for a photograph. Maybe he gave him $20 to do it. Or maybe he fed him. Maybe he just gave him a cigarette.

The former 'fish now has a photo to spread around the internet, make his friends laugh, etc.

Is the bum better off for the exchange?

Some of us might feel like he was exploited, like he'd sold his dignity for next to nothing.

But values are subjective. They only exist where an actor gives up A for B, foregoes one thing for the expectation of another. In the mind of the actor, the exchange is beneficial, or he wouldn't do it. And value doesn't exist anywhere other than in the mind of the person acting.

Still, my knee jerks at this stuff sometimes.

linoleum blownapart

In the petition for the Idaho state legislature to approve the filming of Napoleon Dynamite in Preston and Franklin Counties, the record states that:

• Napoleon and Kip, because they didn't drive, promoted good air quality and alternatives to fuel-dependent modes of transportation,
• that Grandma's trip to the St. Anthony Sand Dunes promoted the state's famous vacation spot,
• that Kip, Rico, and Deb promoted entrepreneurialism and self-sufficiency,
• that Napoleon's artistic talents and Happy Hands Club membership promotes K-12 visual and theater arts programs,
• that the school elections promoted youth civic engagement,
• that Pedro baking a cake for Summer illustrated a connection between culinary skills and a lifelong relationship,
• that Kip's relationship with LaFawnduh represents e-commerce and Idaho's technology driven industry,
• that the prevalence of steak recognizes Idaho as an important beef industry contributor,
• that Napoleon's tether-ball "dexterity" promotes physical education, and
• that Tina the Llama, Deb's 1% milk preference, the FFA, and the "chickens with large talons" promoted Idaho's dairy production. The petition ends with "WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" and run the risk of having the "Worst Day of Their Lives!" It was approved by the 58th Idaho State Legislature in their First Regular Session in 2005.

Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374900/trivia

fear of abandonment

Ignoring for the moment the very good question of why there is a younger generation of American socialists, we ask instead what this younger generation does with the fact that the older generation's intellectual leadership eventually abandoned the cause.

Robert Heilbroner "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right...."

John Kenneth Galbraith "You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too."

Apparently, they're in denial.

the right to make choices

These two Bloom County strips came out in July of 1988.

I remember 1988 pretty well.

These strips seem to me to work better in 1983 ...

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(Click to Enlarge) ... or 1993.

But maybe that's just because I was in college in 1988.

Might not be a fair comparison.

social responsibility

What all this pious talk amounts to is that when third parties want somebody else to pay for something, they simply call it a "social responsibility," an "obligation" or a "social contract."

[...]

It would be devastating to the egos of the intelligentsia to realize, much less admit, that businesses have done more to reduce poverty than all the intellectuals put together. Ultimately it is only wealth that can reduce poverty and most of the intelligentsia have no interest whatever in finding out what actions and policies increase the national wealth.

They certainly don't feel any "obligation" to learn economics, out of a sense of "social responsibility," much less because of any "social contract" requiring them to know what they are talking about before spouting off with self-righteous rhetoric.

Thomas Sowell
"The latest liberal crusade"
May 12, 2005

simply a babbler who parrot-like repeats what he has picked up

In our age the conflict between economic freedom as represented in the market economy and totalitarian government omnipotence as realized by socialism is the paramount matter. All political controversies refer to these economic problems. Only the study of economics can tell a man what all these conflicts mean. Nothing can be known about such matters as inflation, economic crises, unemployment, unionism, protectionism, taxation, economic controls, and all similar issues, that does not involve and presuppose economic analysis. [...] A man who talks about these problems without having acquainted himself with the fundamental ideas of economic theory is simply a babbler who parrot-like repeats what he has picked up incidentally from other fellows who are not better informed than he himself. A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties.

Ludwig von Mises,
Economic Freedom and Interventionism
(Reprinted from The Freeman, August 1959.)

for our protection?

We may test the hypothesis that the State is largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects by asking: which category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely ? those against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax. Or compare the degree of zeal devoted to pursuing the man who assaults a policeman, with the attention that the State pays to the assault of an ordinary citizen. Yet, curiously, the State's openly assigned priority to its own defense against the public strikes few people as inconsistent with its presumed raison d'�tre.

Murray N. Rothbard
"The Anatomy of the State: What the State Is Not"
Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays
(Auburn: Mises Institute, 2000 [1974]), pp. 55-88.

la bamba

Baila		bamba
BYE-lah		BAHM-bah
dance the bamba
para		bailar		la	bamba
PAH-rah		bye-LAHR		lah	BAHM-bah
in order to dance the bamba
una		poca		de	gracia
OO-nah		POH-kah		day	GRAH-sya
a little bit of grace
ay	arriba		y	arriba
I	ah-RREE-bah		ee	ah-RREE-bah
ah higher and higher
para		bailar		la	bamba
PAH-rah		bye-LAHR		lah	BAHM-bah
in order to dance the bamba
se	necesita			una	poca	de	gracia
say	neh-seh-SEE-tah			OO-nah	POH-kah	day	GRAH-sya
a little bit of grace is needed
una		poca		de	gracia
OO-nah		POH-kah		day	GRAH-sya
a little grace
y	otra		cosita
ee	OH-trah		koh-SEE-tah
and another little thing
y	arriba		y	arriba
ee	ah-RREE-bah		ee	ah-RREE-bah
and higher and higher
ay	arriba		y	arriba
I	ah-RREE-bah		ee	ah-RREE-bah
ah higher and higher

arriba	ir�		arriba	ir�
ah-RREE-bah	ee-RAY		ah-RREE-bah	ee-RAY
higher I will go, higher I will go
arriba	me		ir�
ah-RREE-bah	may		ee-RAY
higher I will take myself
baila	bamba
BYE-lah	BAHM-bah
dance the bamba
para	bailar		la	bamba
PAH-rah	bye-LAHR		lah	BAHM-bah
in order to dance the bamba
una	poca		de	gracia
OO-nah	POH-kah		day	GRAH-sya
a little bit of grace
ay arriba		y	arriba
I ah-RREE-bah		ee	ah-RREE-bah
ah higher and higher
yo no	soy		marinero
yo no	soy		mah-ree-NEH-roh
I am not a sailor
yo no	soy		marinero
yo no	soy		mah-ree-NEH-roh
I am not a sailor
por ti	ser�,		por	ti	ser�
pohr tee	seh-RAY		pohr	tee	seh-RAY

for you I'll be, for you I'll be

para	bailar			la	bamba
PAH-rah bye-LAHR				lah	BAHM-bah
in order to dance the bamba
se	necesita		una		poca	de	gracia
say	neh-seh-SEE-tah		OO-nah		POH-kah	day	GRAH-sya
a little bit of grace is needed
ay	arriba	y		arriba
I	ah-RREE-bah	ee		ah-RREE-bah
ah higher and higher
(repeats 2nd half of song, with some phrases from 1st half)

La Bamba lyrics in Spanish and English, with pronunciation guide from Musical Spanish

the economics of fascism

The Economics of Fascism
Supporters Summit 2005
October 7-8, 2005
Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama

"Whenever the fascists came to power in Europe, they banned the work of the Austrian economists. The reason: the Austrians wrote as vehemently against "right-wing" central planning as against old-fashioned left-wing socialism. While many are alert to the dangers of socialism, far fewer know of the danger of fascism, which might be defined as economic regimentation toward monopolized state capitalism." [more]

I offer a very brief introduction to economic fascism here.

I offer my thoughts on fascism in general here.

I offer a definition of the F-word here.

what should not be privatized

Here's a handy rule of thumb for what can and can't exist as part of a free market: if it shouldn't be done, then it shouldn't be privatized; if it shouldn't be privatized, then it shouldn't be done.

A common form of sale of privilege, especially hated by the public, was "tax farming." Here, the king would, in effect, "privatize" the collection of taxes by selling, "farming out," the right to collect taxes in the kingdom for a given number of years. Think about it: how would we like it if, for example, the federal government abandoned the IRS, and sold, or farmed out, the right to collect income taxes for a certain number of years to, say, IBM or General Dynamics? Do we want taxes to be collected with the efficiency of private enterprise?

Considering that IBM or General Dynamics would have paid handsomely in advance for the privilege, these firms would have the economic incentive to be ruthless in collecting taxes. Can you imagine how much we would hate these corporations? We then have an idea of how much the general public hated the tax farmers, who did not even enjoy the mystique of sovereignty or kingship in the minds of the masses.

In our enthusiasms for privatization, by the way, we should stop and think whether we would want certain government functions to be privatized, and conducted efficiently. Would it really have been better, for example, if the Nazis had farmed out Auschwitz or Belsen to Krupp or I.G. Farben?

Making Economic Sense
by Murray Rothbard
Chapter 51: Government-business "Partnerships"

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giving offense

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that what I find tasteful someone else finds offensive to women. Here's what furious had to say in her last comment:

I'm sorry to read and see that you're jumping on this bandwagon. Up until now I had enjoyed your blog, feeling like it was a place where women were more than objects.

I'm not sure what "bandwagon" I'm jumping on. Is there a breast blog bandwagon?

This is what happened. I'm playing with Spanish, trying to see what I can pick up. I bought a Musical Spanish program online, which is why I now know all the words to La Bamba.

The main vocalist is named Jorge Parra, and I liked his voice, so I googled the name. I didn't find him. What I found instead was www.JorgeParra.com -- the website of a photographer.

I liked his work and wanted to put one of his images on my blog.

Oh no, you can't do that!

Don't worry I'll link back to his site.

But you can see that woman's breasts!

So?

So you can't do that!

Why the hell can't I do that?

People might take offense!

At which point I pummeled my superego unconscious.

Meanwhile, that story came back to me from high school: "I did what they call 'nude scenes' -- but I don't consider that nudity because it was art."

I thought the combination made for an interesting blog post, and I thought I'd succeeded in keeping it on the safe side of an R-rating, but I guess not. I never intended to offend anyone (I try to save that for www.DailyApology.com) but I obviously knew it was a risk. I didn't anticipate whom and how. I thought if anyone took issue it would be social conservatives. Live and learn.

female breasts

Well, I'm sorry to say it, because I've been trying to walk the razor's edge between those who'll take this as understood and those who'll be repelled, but I'm afraid I'll have to give a you-must-be-this-tall-to-enter criterion for reading this blog.

Here it is: breasts will occasionally be displayed.

My grammar-check doesn't like that warning, so here it is in the active voice: I will occasionally display exposed female breasts.

I just find them too purty to exclude.

Back in the innocent days of the early 1980s, I went to a private NYC school where actors, models, and the children of actors and models were educated. (Or schooled, at least.)

A friend of mine was the regular Saturday-night babysitter for SNL star Billy Crystal. Someone I barely knew, but saw all the time, was a soap opera actress after school. You may now know her as Kevin Bacon's wife. Another schoolmate has directed some films, including the live-action version of Madeline. Another schoolmate (in my acting class, no less) was then known as Lee, but is now known as Liev Schrieber.

There was also the 8th-grader who turned our heads. My father recently asked if he remembered that correctly, to which I replied:

She was a disturbingly, unsettlingly beautiful 8th-grader when I was a high school senior. She was undeveloped -- skinny and without curves -- but her eyes, her mouth, her poise, were enough to drive many of my peers to distraction. Her nickname among the high school boys was "Jail Bait" but they didn't mean it in the vulgar, slutty sense. It was a comment on us, not on her.

(And while we're talking about female breasts, I'll mention that this same alumna of my primary/secondary school displayed hers in The Whole Nine Yards. Based on a casual google search, she's somewhat famous for that.)

Well, one of the girls, whose name I can't remember for the life of me, showed up as a senior during my junior year. She was thin, blonde, southern. And she was recently returned from France, where she regularly shot underwear ads for fashion magazines. Of course, all us hormonally imbalanced guys would have gathered around for her stories even if she'd been recently returned from the shit-swamps of lower Elbonia, but it didn't hurt that she'd been shooting topless spreads in the City of Lights.

"I did what they call 'nude scenes' -- but I don't consider that nudity because it was art."

Um, yeah, of course, said we. Whatever. (Although I confess that I am enough of a nerd that my horny-teenaged-boy self was battling with my young-proto-intellectual-snob self, thinking, it's nudity whether or not it's art, you air-head!)

She kept this up, this distinction of hers between nudity and art. Eventually, a senior stoner sort-of interrupted her and said, "It's still nudity, but it's not pornography."

"Yes, exactly!" she said. And she continued to discuss her recent career of having her exposed breasts photographed for public consumption.

(It occurs to me that this may now count as child pornography, but no such legislation existed at the time.)

Anyway. That girl's breasts count as two of the many such I've never gotten to witness first-hand, but I'm not going to let that keep me from the occasional (tasteful, of course!) display of others' in this here blog.

implied consent revisited

I find today's Daily Article at Mises.org interesting and unusual. In "Why the State Celebrates Its Failures", Grant M. N�lle moves from a fairly specific review of the fiasco that was and is the war in Iraq to a more general review of why the State has no incentive to correct, reduce, or avoid failures (unlike the incentive structure in civil society, where the prerequisite of individual consent naturally promotes successes and penalizes failures). It's a good article, well worth reading, but what brings me to blog here about consent is an older Mises.org Daily Article that Grant N�lle cites at the end of his own.

What is considered theft in the private sector is "taxation" when done by the state. What is kidnapping in the private sector is "selective service" in the public sector. What is counterfeiting when done in the private sector is "monetary policy" when done by the public sector. What is mass murder in the private sector is "foreign policy" in the public sector.

Lew Rockwell, "Why the State Is Different"

It's a great quote from an article I'd never read, so I went back and had a look at "Why the State Is Different".

Before I get to the point, here's another bit of the article that's been moved to my quotations file:

There will always be those who claim to have special rights over the rest of society, and the state is the most organized attempt to get away with it. To focus on these people as a unique problem is not an obsession, but the working out of intellectual responsibility.

Lew Rockwell, "Why the State Is Different"

Rockwell's article uses what was then the recent issue of anti-spam legislation to review the central lessons of how the State is irreconcilably different from and outside the rules of the rest of society. (A point that should be obvious to anyone not already indoctrinated to avoid seeing it.)

Here's Lesson Two: "the state is the only institution in society that can impose itself on all of society without asking the permission of anyone in particular. You can't opt out."

Again, it's an obvious point, whose ramifications would be obvious in any other context, but we're trained to assume the State's legitimacy and require arguments against it, rather than applying to the State the same rules we apply everywhere else.

I myself, despite a few years of self-deprogramming now, still fall into this trap.

When iceberg recently asked about two of the standard defenses of state legitimacy and the moral obligations of obeying legislation, I answered the legal positivism question more ably than the question about implied consent. I've spent more time thinking about the former than the latter.

It's not that I have any problem with the responses I gave, but I think I completely missed the most devastating argument against implied consent.

I've written more than once (here, here, here, and here) about the question of language banditry -- the deliberate appropriation of well-established words with well-established meanings to denote something different (or opposite) while attempting to maintain the previous connotation. My standard examples are liberal, liberty, free, freedom, free market, rights, etc. One could throw in left-wing, progressive, and even the terms crime, law, rule of law, and civil society. Where I'm noticing it here is with the words contract and consent.

How can I be held liable for a "social contract" if I never signed it?

Well, say the social-contractarians, your consent is implied.

(More on implied consent below.)

But, say I, a contract has specified responsibilities for both parties, and breach of contract by either party is understood to release the other party from all contractual obligations.

Well, er, um, it's not that sort of contract ...

Then why do we let them get away with calling it a contract at all?

OK, finally: implied consent. I'm fine with the idea of implied consent in civil society. If the host says, "I'm ordering pizza -- is everyone OK with anchovies?" I don't have to explicitly say Yes outloud to give my consent. My consent to anchovies is implied by the absence of my dissent.

If I lend you my lawnmower and then complain when you use it to mow your lawn ("I never said you could use it -- I only said you could borrow it!") I'd be taken for crazy. In a culture where borrowing implies using, consent to borrow implies consent to use. And if you ask to borrow my mower and I say that I'd like it back hosed off and refueled, you don't have to explicitly agree to that condition to be responsible for it. Borrowing the mower when you know my conditions implies your consent to those conditions.

But notice that in all of these cases, there's a way to withdraw consent. In fact, the very existence of consent depends on the possibility of its absence!

I could speak up about anchovies and you could decline to borrow the mower if you don't feel like hosing it off or putting gas in it when you're done.

Where's the withdrawal-of-consent option in the case of statutory law?

To take the example offered by iceberg's interlocutor, my buying a gun in New York does not imply my consent to New York State's authority concerning gun laws.

Well, says the statist, you have the option not to buy the gun.

Yes, but that too would be implying consent to the State's authority.

But, he says, you don't have to live in New York -- you could always move to some place that doesn't require gun registration.

But leaving New York for that reason still implies consent to the State's authority -- or else why would I be moving somewhere else in the first place?

My question is this: how do I withdraw my consent to the State's authority? If I can't do so, then you can't call it consent.

In fact the only possible way for me to explicitly challenge the State's authority on the issue is not to leave quietly, but to stay put and explicitly oppose its edicts in word or deed. The conclusion is the exact opposite of the one implied by the advocates of implied-consent theory.


Does this mean I can do whatever I want, anywhere I want, so long as I've never implied consent to behave otherwise?

No, of course not. It only means that whatever restrictions there are on my behavior will have to be accounted for by means other than an appeal to implied consent. I believe in natural rights to person and property. We can argue about those things some other time.

What social contracts, implied consent, legal positivism (and probably most other statist positions) are masking is the statists' real core belief: eminent domain -- the State owns everything.

When Samuelson asserts that economic regulations are like traffic regulations, he wants us to assume that the State owns the economy in the same way that most people accept state ownership of "public" roads. (But even if you believe that the State can legitimately own a specific strip of territory, how can you compare such territorial ownership to an abstraction like the economy? The economy is nothing more than the name we give to the aggregate phenomena of individual exchanges. When two people want to exchange something, the something can be owned, but the exchange itself cannot be.)

In essence, all these supposed arguments for the State's legitimacy are based on the presupposition of the State's legitimacy. Assuming your conclusion is about as fallacious as it gets.

The state's legitimacy is exactly what's in contention. I argue against. If you want to argue for, then you'll have to appeal to something other than the very thing we're disagreeing over.

Social contracts and implied consent don't cut it.

If I ever signed the social contract then the State broke its side of the deal repeatedly, and I am therefore no longer bound by it. But no, of course I never signed it. I never gave explicit consent. I never implied consent. And if I was ever taken to have done any of those things, I hereby officially withdraw my consent.

---

"Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any society which I have not joined." [...] If I had known how to name them, I should then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never signed on to; but I did not know where to find such a complete list.

Henry David Thoreau
Civil Disobedience

HHGG

Don't bother seeing the movie. (You've been warned!)

Listen to the original BBC radio program, read the book adapted from the radio program, watch the TV show adapted from the books, or ... play the game!

---

Update: Tom Woods asked me if I'm old enough to remember the Infocom text-based game for HHGG. Here's what I said:

Tom, yes I'm old enough (late 30s), but the problem is that I tried playing them before I knew the stories. They're available online as a Java applet -- http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/infocomjava.html -- and I looked at them again a few years ago. Apparently, to survive the first few rounds, you need to drink too much beer, put a fish in your ear, and trust that the vacuum of space is safer than a life-supporting ship. These choices are obvious to Hitchhiker fans, but had made no sense to a semi-literate teenager.

And if you go to that game link, you'll find what is (as far as I can tell) a perfect Java-based reproduction of the text-based game I tried to play in 1984.

A huge problem with the Java reproduction, however, is that you have to start from scratch every time you die (which I do often). Apparently, there are Flash versions of the game without that problem here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game.shtml

no comment

pix so hot you'll tell your friends

I'm now using Gmail. It's incredible. I highly recommend it.

But it's still in training mode for identifying spam.

I got a message passed through to my inbox with this subject heading:


Picks so hot you'll tell your friends

(Which I read as "Pics so hot ..." as in pictures.)

I deleted it in my local Mail.app and logged into the Gmail.com web interface to make sure it was marked as spam and not left in their copy of my inbox. But Gmail shows the first line of text in each message and I saw something I didn't expect:

Wysak Petroleum (WYSK)
Current Price: O.165

Apr 25, 2O05 -- Wysak Petroleum is pleased to report that due diligence is near|y complete in regards to the company's further p|anned leases in the Wyoming oi| region.
[...]

Yes friends, this is what it's come to -- penny stock companies disguising their spam as pornography just to get you to read it!

(Or maybe my mind is in the gutter.)

resident anti-state crackpot

"Being the resident anti-state crackpot is lonely, and the libertarian blogosphere is a sanity preserver." -- Vache Folle

Amen, brother!

(Since I don't seem to be blogging this week, I recommend catching up on Vache Folle's St George Blog.)