1 lefty + 1 righty

1. A left-wing poem typed entirely with the left hand:

   
   after we saw free trade a rat race was vast
                                                  
   wages were bad
   we rads scarred scabs
   swabbed sweat
   bartered rags
                                                  
   a secret race
   ate feasts
   as we starved
                                                  
   far freer were we
   aware as we were
   
   sage reds
   
   

2. A right-wing poem typed entirely with the right hand:
   

   
   kill
   
   kill
   
   kill
   

---

Postscript:


Post-postscript:

For those who don't get it ...

These are the letters you can type with the left hand:

 qwert
 asdfg
 zxcvb

And these are the letters you can type with the right hand:

  yuiop
  hjkl
  nm

(I invite you to submit your own lefties and righties.)

Batman versus Capitalism

Kinda sorta cross-posted to blog.Mises.org:

July 29, 2005

Batman versus Capitalism
B.K. Marcus

Batman is no stranger to Mises.org. (1, 2, 3)

How does the Caped Crusader feel about peace, freedom, and prosperity? Ambivalent, at best.

Some of us thought Batman Begins was not only the best big-screen appearance for the Dark Knight, but also a sign that the scales were tipping in favor of free markets (and maybe even Austrian insights), but Matthew Hisrich begs to differ: featured today at FEE are his thoughts on the Anti-Capitalistic Themes of the latest Gotham blockbuster.

Posted by B.K. Marcus at July 29, 2005 12:25 PM

a bevy of camp-following whores

Walter Block is wrapping up his week-long seminar, Radical Austrianism, Radical Libertarianism.

I recommend his lecture on Minimum Wage Law, but it was in some follow-up he did at the beginning of his Introduction to Libertarianism, part II that he reads this great quotation from Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan, commenting in The Wall Street Journal on the infamous Card-Krueger Study:

Just as no self-respecting physicist would claim that water runs uphill, no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimum scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.

top 5

On the right side of this page, you'll see links to my quote files.

(Just take the ?RANDOM=TRUE off the end of the URL to see a whole list.)

When I add a new quotation to the files, I usually put it at the end of the list, but sometimes I'll think something is so concise and important that I put it at the top instead, just in case someone decides to read from top to bottom. By this semi-accidental process, my economics quotes list seems to have generated a top 5:

1. The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it.

   The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

   Thomas Sowell

   
   
2. Prices aren't just made up.

   Walter E. Williams, "Market Wonders"

   
   
3. When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will.

   Fredric Bastiat

   
   
4. Prices are signals. They communicate vital information about the state of resources, goods, and services. Changes in those signals indicate changes in prevailing conditions -- and stimulate remedial action: conservation by consumers and new supplies and alternative products from entrepreneurs. The idea that anything good can come from distorting or squelching those signals is astounding in its lack of wisdom. It's equivalent to believing that a person with a fever can be helped by placing his thermometer in ice water.

   Sheldon Richman, Canute's Courtiers Were Wrong

   
   
5. A regulation is essentially a tax on nonmonetary wealth such as time, liberty, energy, and property.

   James Ostrowski

Note #1: Mises and Rothbard have their own separate lists, which is why you don't find them in this one.

Note #2: Anyone with the interest and inclination to submit candidates to fill in a full Top 10, I hereby encourage you to do so.

1 panel

From 3 to 2 to 1:

Crayola's forgiving lawyers

(Click to Enlarge)



(Click to Enlarge)




I quote myself from a blog post called "color me critical":

Flesh ... Name voluntarily changed to "peach" in 1962, partially as a result of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Does this imply that the other name changes were involuntary?

Indian Red is renamed Chestnut in 1999 in response to educators who felt some children wrongly perceived the crayon color was intended to represent the skin color of Native Americans. The name originated from a reddish-brown pigment found near India commonly used in fine artist oil paint.

This one reminds me of the North Carolina teacher who was reprimanded a few years ago for using the word 'niggardly' in class.

anarcho-Nixonism?

Today's article at Mises.org is Murray Rothbard's assessment of President Nixon in late 1970, "before Nixon's price and wage controls and many other interventions over the course of his presidency. Rothbard predicted the future state of the Nixonian economy in every respect."

Two stand-outs from the article:

1. In the 1960 campaign there first appeared the curious phenomenon of "anarcho-Nixonites", several friends of mine who had become aides to Dick Nixon, and who assured me that Tricky Dick had assured them that he was "really anarchist at heart"; once campaign pressures were over, and Nixon as President was allowed his head, we would see an onrush toward the free market and the libertarian society.

   In the 1968 campaign, anarcho-Nixonism redoubled in intensity, and we were assured that Nixon was surrounded by assorted Randians, libertarians, and free-market folk straining at the leash to put their principles into action.

   Well, we have had two years of Nixonism, and what we are undergoing is a super-Great Society -- in fact, what we are seeing is the greatest single thrust toward socialism since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. It is not Marxian socialism, to be sure, but neither was FDR's; it is, as J. K. Galbraith wittily pointed out in New York (Sept. 21) a big-business socialism, or state corporatism, but that is cold comfort indeed.

2. definition of the economy of fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses

I've put #2, the concise definition of economic fascism, in both my Rothbard quotes file and my BlackCrayon.com definition of fascism.

I still like my own concise definition of fascism -- anti-egalitarian collectivism -- but in its concision, it does leave out the all-important consideration of who reaps the benefits and who bears the costs.

Congressman Crockett

During the Jacksonian era, a distinguished Naval Officer had passed away and a bill was introduced in Congress to give money to his widow. A number of moving speeches were given on her behalf, and the bill seemed destined to pass unanimously. Then a congressman from Tennessee named Davey Crockett gave an alternate suggestion. Instead of taking tax dollars from the public to give to the widow, he offered to give one week?s pay out of his own pocket to the widow and suggested the rest of the members of Congress do the same. Crockett believed that "we have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money." After hearing the speech, almost all of the members of the House reversed their intended vote and the bill was soundly defeated. Crockett and the rest of Congress back then understood that there is absolutely nothing charitable or compassionate about taking taxpayers money and giving it to the needy. It is easy to be generous with other people?s money, but true charity is voluntary.

Marcus Epstein, "Dead 8"

neither Left nor Right

Libertarians [...] are not to the Right or Left of authoritarians.

They, as the human spirit they would free, ascend -- are above -- this degradation. Their position, if directional analogies are to be used, is up -- in the sense that vapor from a muck-heap rises to a wholesome atmosphere. If the idea of extremity is to be applied to a libertarian, let it be based on how extremely well he has shed himself of authoritarian beliefs.

Establish this concept of emerging, of freeing -- which is the meaning of libertarianism, and the golden-mean or "middle-of-the-road" theory becomes inapplicable. For there can be no half-way position between zero and infinity. It is absurd to suggest that there can be.

What simplified term should libertarians employ to distinguish themselves from the Moscow brand of "Leftists" and "Rightists"? I have not invented one but until I do I shall content myself by saying, "I am a libertarian," standing ready to explain the definition to anyone who seeks meaning instead of trademarks.

Neither Left Nor Right
Published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty - January 1956
by Leonard E. Read

ignorance and envy

From the very beginnings of the socialist movement and the endeavors to revive the interventionist policies of the precapitalistic ages, both socialism and interventionism were utterly discredited in the eyes of those conversant with economic theory. But the ideas of the immense majority of ignorant people [are] exclusively driven by the most powerful human passions of envy and hatred.
[...]
They are socialists because they are blinded by envy and ignorance. They stubbornly refuse to study economics and spurn the economists' devastating critique of the socialist plans because, in their eyes, economics, being an abstract theory, is simply nonsense. They pretend to trust only in experience. But they no less stubbornly refuse to take cognizance of the undeniable facts of experience[...].

Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality

more comics digest

Once again, I offer you the benefit of my editorial skills, such as they are.

I took this long and not-very-funny (and also kinda confusing) 14-panel (!) "Lucky Ducky" by Ruben Bolling, and created a concise 4-panel version with the relevant content still intact:

Guiness & chocolate donuts

For the record, when I told Tucker that my favorite morning drinks were Mimosa and Bloody Mary, he called me boring!

Bring Back the Breakfast Drink

by Jeffrey A. Tucker

(And when he first asked me what was my favorite morning drink, I thought it was a veiled criticism of my afternoon editing skills.)

what me belated?

From: z---@probedbyaliens.com
Subject: Re: In Defense of Hitler (sic)
Date: July 15, 2005 2:40:51 AM EDT
To: goldbug@bkMarcus.com

Hey man,

Came across your article on referencing Hitler. I was just having a conversation about this with a friend. You summed up logically and concisely what we both thought. I would go so far as to add though that even if the use of Hitler were for a purely emotional effect, even if it did nothing to help (or hurt) one's argument, it still doesn't justify the condemnation that would follow (though, of course, one's free to do that also). It's odd the way the slightest infraction now is followed by calls for retraction and apology. The latest, Hillary Clinton compares Bush to Alfred E. Neuman. I'm no fan of either (Hillary or Bush, I like Al), but big friggin' deal. And the comparison of Guantanimo to Stalin's gulags. Ok, no it's not as bad. That's not the point. The point is, does it follow the same philosophy. Stalin killed 1 person to start with. And if you are the one person who is tortured to death, then to you, yes it's every bit as bad.

Keep up the good work,
MA

there are rights and then there are rights

Oldsan leaves this comment on this post.

And this is my reply:

I was making a cultural point, not a legal one. Libertarians are more precise with the word "right" than is the general population, but in this case I was using the phrase "right to an opinion" in the common cultural sense, not in the stricter sense of rights theory.

The only irony in my post was the stylistic conflation of the two, but if you understand that cultural point, you can take what I say at face value.

Legally and ethically, I define rights negatively, according to this scheme:

blackcrayon.com/library/dictionary/?term=obligations

I am not advocating that anyone use coercion against the ignorant or the irrational.

What I am advocating is a culture of intellectual responsibility. The mature and responsible thing to do with a subject you don't understand is to decline from holding an opinion on it. If you want to have an opinion, then the mature and responsible thing to do is to have an informed opinion, and to recognize that those who disagree with you are behaving appropriately when they ask you to defend your opinion under the scrutiny of both facts and logic.

I am in favor of the legal right to do all sorts of dumb and ugly and irresponsible things, but I'm also in favor of a culture where we don't hesitate to call those things dumb and ugly and irresponsible. Expressing an uninformed opinion is one of those things.

Instead we live in a culture where we are supposed to believe that "one person's opinion is as good as the next" -- a view which is not only absurd but poisonous.

I confess that this point is so obvious to me that I am puzzled when anyone struggles with it.

less is more

In my editing, one of my main tasks is to cut cut cut. Shorter is usually better. Since you're still going to have to wait a while for this book project to get done, I thought I'd find a different way to share with you some of the benefits of my new cutting skills.

I've been enjoying a recent comic strip series called...

Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!
It's full of the geeky references that have long colored TV shows like The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, etc., but which hadn't yet made it into comic strips. (Well, maybe Boondocks began to pave the way.)

BR:SG is a good old-fashioned 3-panel strip. If you're like me, you just don't have the time or energy to read those exhausting 4-panel comic strips. And if you're even more like me, 3 panels is still pushing the limits of your attention span.

Thus, I bring you, the 2-panel comic strip digest of BR:SG!

Monday:

Tuesday:

anarchist fashion statements

I'm noticing a definite stylistic theme here:




So given this theme, can you spot the anarchist in Bruegel's famous painting "The Fight between Carnival and Lent"?


(Click to Enlarge)

Here's where I think I've spotted him.

Broken Window Award

On the LRC blog, Bulter Shaffer wrote the following:

July 11, 2005

An Economic Ignorance Award

Posted by Butler Shaffer at July 11, 2005 01:14 AM

It is only a matter of time before some nitwit with access to a television camera stumbles onto a news show to announce how beneficial the present hurricane will be to the economies of Florida, Alabama, and other southeastern states. "Think of all the homes and businesses that will have to be rebuilt," this ignoramus will advise.

I propose the establishment of an award - akin to the "Darwin" and "Stella" awards - to give due recognition to the propagators of such economic ignorance. In honor of one man who did so much to deflate such skewed reasoning, I suggest calling this the "Frederic Bastiat Award." No one need apply for this award: we'll find you!

I wrote him:

I like your idea, but I hate the idea of associating Bastiat's name with these idiots.

How about The Broken Window Award?

It suggests itself to an easily identifiable award statue or medal, doesn't it?

laissez faire,
bk
http://bkmarcus.com/blog/

For more on Bastiat, see here.

For more on the Broken Window Fallacy, see here and here.

Does Gary North want to stone homosexuals?

I doubt it.

Does he want to live under theonomy, in a state that administers Biblical Law?

I believe he does.

Would Biblical Law require the stoning to death of homosexuals?

I believe he believes that it would.

---

My next-door neighbors love me. They care about both my mortal future and the destination of my immortal soul. They think I'm going to Hell because I don't believe in God. I don't take it personally. That's just how it works: I can't accept Jesus Christ as my only path to Heaven if I don't believe in an afterlife, and my soul won't go where they want it to go unless I embrace Christ. Them's the rules.

Unbelievers like me have no right to require believers to accept our non-belief -- especially if we can't acknowledge the facts or consequences of their beliefs. I've written about this before in two of my earliest blog posts:

• Aren't I worth saving?
• On Atheism, Agnosticism, and Faith

According to my neighbors' understanding of the Christian Bible, my soul is bound for an eternity of flames, and according to North's interpretation, the Christian community has a right (an obligation?) to put sexual deviants to death -- and adulterers, and blasphemers, etc.


When I was half-way through college, we got a new computer science professor who was what I learned in Israel to call a Black Hat -- an ultra-orthodox Jew with the black coat, the covered head, the tassels (tzitzis) outside the jacket, the beard, the ringlets of hair, etc.

When he first came into the scheduling office where I was working, the lady who ran the place got up to introduce herself and shake his hand. He said, "I don't shake with women, but I am very pleased to meet you." I found out later that she felt quite insulted.

When the new professor invited his class over for dinner, a secular Jewish classmate of mine tried to shake hands with the professor's wife. "Oh, I don't shake with men." So now my classmate was offended.

I, liberal-minded secularist, couldn't understand why anyone would take offense at any of that. Why would they take it personally? These religious Jews weren't singling people out for cold treatment -- they were following their understanding of God's law!

I may not be a theist, but I do believe in a higher law than culture or etiquette (or legislation) and I admire people who accept the social consequences of adhering to higher laws.

(I guess that makes me both an atheist and a religious conservative.)

Does that mean I'd forgive Gary North if he tried to seriously injure a gay friend of mine? No, I'd probably shoot him dead. But aggressive actions actually taken are different from religious interpretations of what God sanctions and wants -- even when those interpretations seem to condone aggressive acts.

Yes, I'm a little uncomfortable with Gary North's religion. But until he actually tries to impose it on anyone, I say there's no ill will between us, and I continue to consider him a potential ally and an actual teacher. If I could learn computer programming from the orthodox Jew, why can't I learn economics and history from the Christian Reconstructionist?

Anarky in July

I'm opening birthday presents early this year.

High time preference.

A great gift from good friends arrived over the weekend: a whole bunch of comic books starring Anarky!

Roderick T. Long, professor of philosophy at Auburn University, founder of the Molinari Institute, and Editor of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, explains who Anarky is here:

praxeology.net/anarky.htm

What I had forgotten from Professor Long's introduction is this:

Anarky is a DC comics superhero created by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, inspired by the anarchist hero of the V for Vendetta comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd.

Maybe popular culture is slowly catching up.

Here's what I learn about V for Vendetta from Claire Wolfe:


www.clairewolfe.com/wolfesblog/00001477.html

the rhetoric of peace

Yes, yes -- I realize that Gary North has said some illiberal things.

Still, if you believe that war is the health of the state (or if you are anti-war for less libertarian reasons), then you absolutely must read his article in LRC today:

"The Asymmetrical Rhetoric of War and Peace"
I read Gary North all the time and I learn plenty from him. I don't need to disbelieve in the evolution of species or advocate the stoning of homosexuals to think he's good on history and economics (and on logic and rhetoric).

(And yes, I did stock up on batteries, fresh water, and ammunition for Y2K. So sue me.)

economic psychologism

One generation of my family consisted largely of Keynesians. The next generation produced psychologists instead of economists. I never had the chance to address economics with the economists, but a few months ago, one of the psychologists was asking me what I've been up to, other than keeping house.

I told her that I write and edit for the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

"Who's Ludwig von Mises?"

"He was one of the big names in the Austrian School of economics."

"What's the Austrian School?"

"Have you heard of Friedrich Hayek?"

"No."

"Have you ever heard the term Marginal Revolution?"

"No."

"Well, the Austrian School was founded in the late 19th century by Carl Menger who was one of the three men to discover the law of marginal utility."

"What's marginal utility?"

We were sitting at a restaurant table, so I pointed to my water glass. "Marginal utility is the fact that I value my second glass of water less than I value my first glass of water."

"Oh," she replied. "Any psychologist could have explained that!"

I was happy to let the conversational spotlight leave me, so I didn't say anything more. But there's plenty to say on the subject of economic psychologism.

If you are already familiar with Austrianism, you might not want to bother reading further. I'm not going to say anything new. But because I don't really know who reads this blog, and because I find it helpful and clarifying to write things out, I'm going to repeat that part of value theory that focuses on the distinction between mainstream economics and Austrian economics.

The other two "Marginal Revolutionaries" were Jevons and Walras, both of whom posited a quantifiable psychological substance that we now call utility. 'Utility' in the neo-classical (which just means the Jevons/Walras tradition) economic sense means something like want-satisfaction, or satiation. 'Marginal' refers to the quantity of utility experienced at the margins of decisions, the boundary between one-more-please and no-thanks-I've-had-enough. According to marginal utility theory, the value of all the units of a good is determined by the want-satisfaction of that last one-more-please unit.

It was Menger's student, Wieser (himself an advocate of neo-classical psychologism) who coined the term marginal utility. A French Mengerian came up with the much less opaque term la moindre jouissance, which means "the least enjoyment". The value of a glass of water is the least of the enjoyments you can satisfy with a given supply of water. If I'm not very thirsty and can't drink more than 1 glass right now, then the 2nd glass of water might be used to rinse my hands and I might turn down a 3rd glass of water altogether. Given a supply of 3 or more glasses, the value of any particular glass is the value I get from rinsing my hands -- la moindre jouissance.

Notice that in the Mengerian account of value, there are no hypothetical quantities of want-satisfaction. There's only a ranking of my preferred uses.

So neo-classical value theory continues to be based on hypothetical quantities of a hypothetical satisfaction substance they call utility. Menger used the word value instead of utility, and by value he meant the results of an evaluation.

What Ludwig von Mises did to Austrian value theory was to remove it entirely from the realm of psychology. The fact that I value a thing less as its supply increases does not depend on any empirical facts of human psychology, but is the a priori logical consequence of

1. a good having multiple uses, and
2. some uses being more important to me than others.

So long as those two conditions hold, an increasing supply of a good will mean that I apply the next available units to less and less important uses.

Human psychology might explain the proximate causes of certain expressed preferences, but the logic of preference expression is independent of human psychology and independent of human experience.

Operation Iraqi Liberty

Thank goodness for O.I.L.

Here is what freedom will look like in Iraq:

• Social justice is the basis of building the society.
• The state must ... implant moral values ....
• The state shall guarantee for women the appropriate services related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the period after childbirth and provide her free health services as well as adequate nutrition while she is pregnant and nursing.
• Iraqi citizens have the right to enjoy security and free health care.
• The state is responsible to support the provision of work opportunities for all qualified and pay monthly salaries for all unemployed for any reason until opportunities are provided in the case of disability, handicap, or illness until the malady ceases.
• There is no tax or fee except by law [note: well, that's a relief!]. The basis for taxes and public expenditures is social justice [oh, goody, better than some other ... basis].
• All natural resources and the [resulting] revenues are owned by the people. The state shall preserve them and invest them well. [Well, heck, we ought to just require American mutual funds to "invest well". That would be a good idea, no?]
• Citizens may not own, bear, buy, or sell weapons, except by a permit issued in accordance with law.
• The state shall guarantee the realization of social and health insurance for the child from his birth until he completes his university studies.
• The state shall guarantee the realization of the social guarantee necessary for citizens in case of old age, disease, inability to work, or if they are homeless, orphans, widowed, or unemployed. It shall provide them social insurance services and health care and protect them from the talons of ignorance, fear [shades of Woodrow Wilson!], and want, providing them with housing, and special programs to train them and care for them.
• The state and regional governments shall combat illiteracy and provide their citizens with the right of free education at the various stages.
• There is no censorship on newspapers, printing, publishing, advertising, or media [hey, this sounds alright!... but wait: ] except by law. [uh oh]

Sample provisions and square-bracketed comments via Stephan Kinsella.

To paraphrase Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, the American so-called "Civil War" emancipated slaves while enslaving free men. Was it a good thing? Even if you believe that a war was necessary for emancipation, it still seems to me that the answer is far from straight-forward. And if you don't think that a war was necessary, then the answer definitely shifts more toward the negative.

Saddam Hussein is evil. I have no trouble saying so. I don't care how much Dubya overuses the E-word -- it still applies. The Baathist government was even more evil than many other governments. Again, I don't hesitate to say so. I don't know anyone who would defend the way Saddam Hussein or his government treated their enemies. But I dare say that the majority of Iraqi citizens enjoyed more freedom under Saddam's men than they will under Dubya's.

aid kills

Here's something that should surprise absolutely no one paying attention:

"For God's Sake, Please Stop the Aid!"

SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...

Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

SPIEGEL: Do you have an explanation for this paradox?

Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

Thanks to James Waddell on blog.mises for this pointer.

I'll say here what Shikwati won't say quite as bluntly:

Foreign Aid is always presented as helping the people of a nation, but it never does. Even the IMF has had to concede this.

The money goes (1) to the governments that rule over the people of a nation -- often brutally -- in return for redirecting the money (2) to Western political capitalists in the form of large capital purchases.

That's right: Foreign Aid is colonialism abroad and corporate welfare at home. It strengthens the worst political players in Africa and the worst political players back here.

Well-intentioned people need to take more responsibility for consequences!

I also find Live 8 to be repulsive and ironic from an ethical perspective. It is a very disturbing development. Twenty years ago, I was in a London hotel room watching Live Aid. Back then, Bob Geldof and company were asking for private donations (which may have been damaging, but at least they were voluntary), but Live 8 specifically says on their website that they don't want my money! What they want is my support in petitioning governments to tax and spend more. They don't want my voluntary support in any traditional sense. What they want is for me to help them get involuntary support. If that isn't the perverse-but-logical consequence of the democratic ethos, I don't know what is.

Finally, there is the economic absurdity at the foundation of this whole thing. Forget politics, forget ethics for a moment. What is the basic claim?

To quote Geldof, "This is without doubt a moment in history where ordinary people can grasp the chance to achieve something truly monumental and demand from the 8 world leaders at G8 an end to poverty."

Anyone who thinks more money can somehow end poverty doesn't know the first thing about either money or poverty. Perhaps if Geldof took some time off to study the nature of wealth-creation and value, he would do far less damage to people who are already suffering.

mood told in stolen images

I opine ...

The American motto (or perhaps the democratic motto) should be:

"I have a right to my opinion, whether or not it's rational or informed."

(Why do I never hear anyone else talk about the responsibilities involved in holding an opinion?)

Just think how much more reasonable the world would be if we could stamp out this one cancerous meme.

On the other hand ... Cui bono?

hippies and suits

Anthony Gregory just pointed me to this great photograph of him and Tom Palmer:



It's even funnier when you read the context!

(Wait 'til you see what booklet they're reading and what passage Gregory is pointing to. Then have another look at Palmer's face.)

But if I ignore the story and context of the above picture, and focus only on the surface details, it definitely reminds me of a send-up The Onion did of the Libertarian Party about 5 years ago. Here's the photo I saved:


I'm glad I saved that image, because back issues of The Onion are taken offline.*

---

* Ahem. Mr. Gregory wrote back to demonstrate how lazy and unimaginative is your humble narrator... Here is a public archive of the above-mentioned send-up:

http://tinyurl.com/9b996

anarchist shadow holiday

Abraham Lincoln famously said, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation..."

What new nation?

How does one "bring forth" a new nation?

Lincoln spoke those words in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863.

Since 1863 - 87 (year of address minus four score and seven) = 1776, he was referring to the events we celebrate today, Independence Day.

Did 1776 bring forth a new nation? A nation is a people who share a culture, a language, and often a religion. Nationalism is the position that the nation should have its own state. (This comes with all the usual problems of collectivist concepts, but I can distinguish the nation from the state without supporting either one.)

In an imperial context, nationalism is a secession movement, a decentralizing of power, as we saw with the nations under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires.

Outside of empires, nationalism is the opposite: an attempt to centralize power, as in 19th century Germany and Italy. Thus my reference in my previous post to a "nationalist coup" in 1787.

Contra Lincoln, what would eventually be "brought forth on this continent" is a new nation-state -- but that would come later, either 1787 or 1865, depending on when and where you think the current nation-state begins. I was taught in school that the United States of America was born on July 4th, 1776. But I was taught a lot of nonsense in school.

So why does this nation-state have July 4th as a national holiday? Well, for one thing, the centralizers in charge of the United State (singular) want to promote exactly this confusion. If we notice the huge disparities between the Founders of 1776 and the Founders of 1787* -- between the events that culminated on or around those dates and between the governments they produced -- then modern patriotism, militarism, statist propaganda (plus central banking, fiat dollars, the Supreme Court, and the imperial presidency) all become problematic.

Anywhere I've ever lived here in the US of A, people celebrate the 4th of July as a flag-worshipping, statist holiday that is somehow about both militarism and freedom. I don't celebrate their holiday. What I celebrate is a different holiday that happens to have the same name and takes place on the same date, but mine -- ours -- is about a time when American colonists decided to declare independence from empire, from mercantilism, from taxes and regulations, and then fight for that declaration under the banner of natural rights. What the original Founders declared independence from was not just Britain, but the very foundations of the modern state.

So while patriots, militarists, imperialists, and other statists gather to celebrate a false history and a real empire, we can gather alongside them and celebrate the opposite. Ours is a shadow holiday that we celebrate in broad daylight.

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* Do you know how few of the signers of the Declaration of Independence also voted to ratify the new US Constitution?

Here's what I wrote in the Black Crayon Violent Revolution Q&A, using numbers I got from Robert LeFevre's Commentaries. I'd just introduced the distinction between violent revolution and non-aggressive secession:

It's possible that I just described the American War of Independence, which began in 1775. At first, the colonists didn't attack Britain, and didn't attack British troops. They just withdrew their economy from British taxation, regulation, and military enforcement. When the British tried to impose their rule by means of violent force, the Americans fought back. Our history books refer to this as The American Revolution, but it really wasn't a revolution in the traditional historical sense. In contrast, for instance, with the French and Russian revolutions, no one tried to take over the ruling government. When the British retreated, we didn't try to follow them back over the ocean and take over their government. We were just happy to be out from under their rule. It wasn't a struggle for power: it was a struggle against power. I see libertarian anarchism as ideological heir to the so-called American Revolutionaries -- though not to the Federalists who later created a centralized government to replace the British. (It might be worth noting that only 6 of the original 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence also signed the Constitution. Another 15 were either dead or had fled the country. That leaves 35 of the original signers who were in fact protesting the creation of the Constitution, which they saw as a recreation of the kind of government they had just fought for so long to abolish. My sentiments are with those 35 anti-Federalists.)

on goldbugs and free-market money

I'm curious to read Richard Powers's bestselling novel, The Goldbug Variations. I found what I thought was a review of it in The Village Voice: an article called "The Goldbug Variations" by Julian Dibbell. The piece has nothing to do with the Powers novel, but it is a review of sorts, both of the book Cra$hmaker and of the sound-money movement in general.

Dibbell describes Cra$hmaker as "a book for sound-money cranks."

He continues:

An ultra-wonky libertarian sub-subculture, the sound-money crowd stakes its ideological identity on the proposition that today's paper currencies, backed only by government debt and the laws that make them legal tender, are the fraudulent cornerstone of the welfare state. By printing money at will, goes the logic, the government raises revenues that citizens would never pay knowingly, through the hidden tax of inflation. The full argument is complicated, but the proposed solution isn't: Also known as goldbugs, sound-money cranks demand a return to the days when money had to be mined before it was minted.

So far his facts are accurate, even if I disagree with his judgments. Smug and condescending, yes. But not ignorant. Somehow he's both knowing and naive.

He makes a grave error however when he says this:

Where your average libertarian fetishizes the Bill of Rights as the only part of the Constitution that really matters, goldbugs cling to an even smaller patch of text: Article I, sections 8 and 10, enshrining gold and silver as the exclusive coin of the realm.

Nope. Sorry. First of all, libertarianism is what produced the Bill of Rights. It is not a product of those ten amendments. Secondly, howevermuch overlap there is between American libertarianism and the strict constructionism of constitutional conservatives, the two are not the same. Some of us are fans of the Articles of Confederation, and see 1787 as a nationalist coup against the then-dominant belief in a near-anarchistic decentralism. (And some of us don't give a hoot for American history at all, and base our libertarianism entirely on the Non-Aggression Principle.) But third and most important, neither the ethics nor economics of the free market depend in any way on a mere document. And as Austrians are increasingly inclined to emphasize, advocacy for a gold standard is the combination of (1) advocacy for free-market money, and (2) a prediction about what commodity money the free market will choose. I know at least one prominent Misesian who thinks the market would choose silver. Personally, I think it's more than mere coincidence that history keeps producing bimetallism or its equivalent -- two moneys for smaller and larger purchases or investment. More than once it's been tobacco and whiskey rather than silver and gold. (I mentioned this to my friend Clinton and he replied, "Tobacco and whisky -- putting the fun back in fungible!")

I even argued in my second article for Mises.org that paper could beat gold under unusual circumstances.

The last paragraph of Dibbell's review begins, "In the end, then, the readers likely to get the most out of this long, strange trip may well be those of us who, unlike the average sound-money nut, have never come so close to the edge of consensus reality that we fell off."

I'm not even going to bother with the frightening implications of an appeal to "consensus reality" on a political question that has been constantly and very expensively propagandized for more than a century. Even on less manipulated issues, I've never been very impressed by What Everyone Knows or How Everyone Thinks. I prefer appeals to facts and reason, which you'll notice are far more abundant outside the mainstream. As I've said elsewhere, reality itself is not subject to majority rules. (This by the way was exactly the issue in the Methodenstreit between the Austrians and the Historicists. Austrians believed then and still believe that economic laws are unbreakable and unchangeable: they are part of the fabric of social reality. Historicists seem to have believed that if enough people wish for something really hard, they could make it come true. Think of Tinkerbell in the stage production of Peter Pan, except the Historicists were talking about the control of prices rather than resurrection of fairies.)

When I started calling myself a goldbug, I thought it was a reclaimed word.

Our enemies like to paint us as paranoids and fetishists. But isn't it puzzling that however much they may disagree with free-market arguments on other issues, they rarely sink to calling us bugs and nuts and cranks on those issues?

I'm not denying that there are paranoids and conspiracy nuts in the sound money movement. All movements outside or against the mainstream attract more than the average portion of head cases. (And of course, not all conspiracy theories are crazy.) But the argument for sound and depoliticized money is just a special case of the argument for free markets in general. Nothing nutty about it.

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PS I took the above image from Paul van Eeden's "What is a gold bug?"

Turns out I'm wrong about the reclaimed status of the word. The term was what the McKinley supporters called themselves in the 1896 presidential campaign between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Bryan's supporters in the "Free Silver Movement" called themselves silver bugs. It's an interesting read. Have a look.

But the history of the terms helps highlight an important divide in the sound-money movement. Bryan and the silver bugs weren't advocating a free-market bimetallism. Theirs was an inflationist scheme based on price-fixing (requiring a fixed exchange rate between silver and gold coins, rather than allowing supply and demand to determine the real market value of silver). McKinley and the gold bugs were right to oppose the price fixing, but wrong to oppose bimetallism. There's nothing unsound about silver money and nothing inflationist about free-market bimetallism.

There are those still among us who, like McKinley's supporters, want a gold standard implemented by a central government. They are not advocating free-market money: they are advocating a central plan based on gold. The political goldbugs and the anti-political goldbugs have a lot in common, but ultimately, we disagree on the nature of gold and the importance of choice.

The Supremes

I have a new hobby: rather than writing my own pieces for LewRockwell.com (which requires, after all, sifting through email feedback that's 1/3 hateful race theory and 1/3 gibbering leftist idiocy), I'm going to try to get myself mentioned in everyone else's stuff.

Last week, I wriggled my way into Robert Murphy's review of Batman Begins.

This week, I've finagled a mention in Anthony Gregory's article:

Why The Supreme Court Should Have Just Shut Up

PS It's probably worth listening to Thomas Woods on the 14th amendment to the US Constitution (from last week's summer seminar), and certainly worth knowing Stephan Kinsella's "Libertarian Defense of 'Kelo' and Limited Federal Power", to which Gregory's piece is a reply.