afraid of the dark

Calvin and Hobbes both speak for me. I love autumn, bu there is an unavoidable melancholy in the fall.

It's been cold and very rainy in this part of the world. Hard to hike on the weekends when the weekends have all been so miserable out. Then yesterday was gorgeous -- shorts and sandals in the last few days of October, clear blue skies -- but the missus is neck deep in paperwork, so I ended up heading out by myself.

I took the iPod, of course. Mises University 2005 lectures for the drive to and from the state park, but I listened to The Map that Changed the World while hiking.

Other than missing my beloved hiking partner, I found it perfect.

Except that it's late October and it was already getting dark earlier -- AND we set the clocks back this weekend, so the 6pm darkness came around 5pm and I finished the loop in pitch black. It's amazing the things that look like monsters and bad guys in total darkness. I'm glad I decided at the last minute to stick to the paved trail instead of taking our usual meander through the woods.

Tonight is Halloween, but I got a fair spooking a day early this year.

persuasion & envy

When I was newly aware of libertarianism as a movement and not yet decidedly part of it, I learned that there had been a contest of sorts between socialists and libertarians. Each side had to argue that Dilbert belonged to their political philosophy. Scott Adams himself judged the contest. The libertarians won, sort of. Scott Adams said they had employed the brilliant tactic of defining libertarianism so broadly that almost anyone would have to be a libertarian.

I'd read the 2 arguments. I can confirm Adams's assessment. Here's the one I remember most clearly: Dilbert is against bureaucracy, therefore he is a libertarian. Got that? Anyone who is against bureaucracy is a libertarian. Man oh man. Now ... I do recognize that move. It's a ham sandwich argument, in fact. First you define bureaucracy the old-fashioned way, and then you point out that Dilbert opposes bureaucracy -- but now you mean the word in the newfangled way.

bu·reauc·ra·cy n. pl. bu·reauc·ra·cies

1. 1. Administration of a government chiefly through bureaus or departments staffed with nonelected officials.
   2. The departments and their officials as a group: promised to reorganize the federal bureaucracy.
2. 1. Management or administration marked by hierarchical authority among numerous offices and by fixed procedures: The new department head did not know much about bureaucracy.
   2. The administrative structure of a large or complex organization: a midlevel manager in a corporate bureaucracy.
3. An administrative system in which the need or inclination to follow rigid or complex procedures impedes effective action: innovative ideas that get bogged down in red tape and bureaucracy.

See? Libertarians oppose bureaucracy by definition #1 above -- as a form of government. Dilbert opposes bureaucracy by definition #2, which can apply to the administration of any organization, even private and voluntary ones. Ham sandwich.

This is one of my main problems with those within the movement who emphasize persuasion. I'm not opposed to persuasion, certainly. I even wrote about it in one of my earliest pieces. But those who emphasize persuasion tend to want to lower the net and enlarge the tent. They end up asserting a lot for which they don't offer arguments. When I became a libertarian it was for ethical reasons. I finally just rejected aggression in all its coercive forms. I had no sense that there were solid economic arguments for non-intervention. And the persuaders didn't persuade me. They just kept saying that a free market would be more prosperous ... for everyone ... raise all boats, etc. Yeah, fine, I could hear the assertions, but they never explained why. I had to start researching it for myself over a decade later before I became convinced that freedom was not only moral but also generally beneficial in the consequentialist sense.

Not only did the persuaders not persuade me, but they hurt their own cause, by sounding more like political candidates than political philosophers -- more like ad execs than truth-seekers.

If they're succeeding in expanding the movement, they're doing so by dumbing us down, and possibly driving away the deeper thinkers who share my reflexes and suspicions of certain rhetorical styles.

Anyway, I'm not convinced that either Dilbert or Scott Adams is or ever was libertarian. Comics -- both the stand-up variety and the squiggles-on-paper -- are sensitive to irony, more literalist than most, and chafe against political correctness. This combination might make them seem libertarian at times. But comics don't tend to look for logical consistency, don't tend to follow things through to their unfunny consequences, don't tend to be intellectually or ethically rigorous. These traits will always produce half-assed ideologies -- more attitude than content.

But while I'm not convinced that Dilbert is libertarian, we now have some pretty strong evidence that Wally is a leftist:


(Click to Enlarge)

---

PS Rex Curry, attorney at law and libertarian activist, suggests:

Dilbert could be improved in most cases with a simple computerized "find-and-replace" program changing "buzz-words" such as "management" "business" and "corporation" and replacing them with "politics," "bureaucracy" and "government."

PPS According to the LP, the contest took place in 1999, rather than when I was remembering it -- about 1994 -- and it was between libertarians and "liberals" rather than self-labeled socialists. Apparently my memory is a fiction-generating machine. Or someone tampered with the records. I did remember this part right:

After pondering both sides -- and "based on the persuasiveness of their arguments and not the truth behind them" -- Adams rendered his verdict: "The winner is: Jeremy Lott." [the libertarian]

But not so fast. Adams then noted: "In my view, Mr. Lott won the debate by cleverly creating a definition of libertarianism so inclusive that almost everyone on earth -- including Mr. Burlingame [the leftist] -- would be a member."

mp3cd in 1 lesson

I love my iPod. I rarely use it for music. I love audiobooks and downloadable talks and lectures. These are great for long drives, long walks, housekeeping, cooking, etc.

For audiobooks, I mostly buy CDs and rip them to MP3, but it saves a lot of time if you can buy an MP3CD -- a data CD with the MP3 files already on it. I sometimes buy from Audible.com. Their books are cheaper and you can download them and listen to them immediately. But they're encrypted to prevent piracy, which can be a pain in the ass. For one thing, it means you can't lend your audiobooks to friends, and lending my audiobooks to friends has proven very rewarding:

[...] begin with Henry Hazlitt. That's how I stumbled into all this. But I didn't read the book. Being only semi-literate, I knew I'd have an easier time listening to the audiobook during my 2 hours a day commuting between Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia. (This was a couple of years ago, when I was still a productive member of society.) I don't think it would be an overstatement to say that Hazlitt changed my life. Certainly changed my view of the world.

I lent the CDs around to my friends, all of whom responded favorably. One of my friends said, "He makes it so simple." That friend gave the book to his leftist dad, who was apparently less impressed, but we can't really tell how carefully he read it.

Unfortunately, while the print book is only $10, the unabridged CD audiobook is almost $50. I'm completely satisfied with my own purchase at that price, but I can hardly recommend someone shell out that much for an introduction. You can download the audiobook from Audible.com for less than $30.

If I were a dying millionaire, I'd buy the rights to Hazlitt's book and distribute it for free.

-- where to begin?

For some reason it is very hard to shop for MP3CDs at Amazon. They aren't always listed under other editions, and sometimes I can't even find something through a direct search.

But I've discovered a way to shop for bargain MP3CDs:

1. shop around at Audiobooks Online or Blackstone Audio;
   
2. copy the ISBN of the audiobook you want -- 0786196025 in this case;
3. paste the ISBN into the search field at Amazon.com;
4. optional: click on the "used & new" link.

At the moment, this method will get you an unabridged MP3CD of Hazlitt's great book for about $15!

new buddy icons

fnord

Posting my Alongside Night review, I realized that I hadn't yet re-posted my review of Illuminatus! Trilogy:

Some people can't make it past the first 50 pages of this book. It's too disorienting, too unfamiliar, too ... weird!

I've known several people who have gone back and tried again, finding themselves pulled in, immersed, obsessed with the story and the characters, struggling between the ingrained habit of trying to figure out What The Heck Is Really Going On?! and the increasingly pleasurable new habit of letting go, relaxing into the experience, allowing themselves to imbibe, to soak, to enjoy, to learn.

The book is written in an eclectic, polycentric style, jumping around through history as much as it jumps around through space and through the perspectives of its multiple narrators.

The medium is the message.

The authors succeed well in entertaining the reader, but they are also trying to break us out of our intellectual reflexes and prejudices -- they are teaching, implicitly, the skepticism, meta-skepticism (i.e., doubt your doubts!), and model agnosticism of modern semantic epistemology. I realize that this description makes the book sound very theoretical and academic, but it isn't. I am using the concepts that Robert Anton Wilson addresses in his non-fiction to describe what he was up to in this, his first published fiction.

(The so-called trilogy really was published in three separate books originally, but is only currently available as one volume, which is how most of its readers first encountered it.)

The book is a romantic adventure, a detective story, a war story, a crime drama, several memoirs, occasional pornography as well as a semantic, psychological, and political philosophy lesson. I couldn't begin to describe the plot here -- not in any way that could be truthful or revealing. The tome is 800 pages long and it keeps seeming to change its mind about what the story is -- although it does all tie together by the end.

Illuminatus! Trilogy was the first book to get me to take anarchist ideas seriously -- which it might not have been able to if it hadn't first conditioned me to suspend my judgments and to look past connotation to judge unpopular ideas with fresh eyes and an open mind.

After 622 of the 800 pages, we find Hagbard Celine's "Definitions and Distinctions" in which he defines CAPITALISM as "That organization of society, incorporating elements of tax, usury, landlordism, and tariff, which thus denies the Free Market while pretending to exemplify it." I've copied the whole set of definitions to the BlackCrayon library -- BlackCrayon.com/library/dictionary/celine/ -- and I highly recommend them.

I also highly recommend the book itself. If you find yourself wanting to give up before page 50, push onward. And relax your mind. It could change everything.

bkMarcus

Other R.A.Wilson links:

• BlackCrayon: People: Robert Anton Wilson
• Hagbard Celine's Laws of Social Cybernetics
• RAWilson.com

Alongside Night

I'm not exactly a member of the Movement for the Libertarian Left, but I'm certainly a fellow traveller. It was reading J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night that introduced me to Agorism, and through Agorism to gold and monetary economics, and eventually to Rothbard.

This past weekend, Wally Conger posted his review of Alongside Night. Because I never shy away from ripping off the ideas of my comrades, I've decided to post my own review. This is from the currently defunct BlackCrayon book reviews (1st, 2nd , 3rd, 4th):

Unlike Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress or Ken MacLeod's Stone Canal, J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night shows how a free society might happen here and now (assuming that the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre has been spending the past few decades preparing for it).

I discovered Agorism and Alongside Night within the same week. What they finally offer is an image of non-aggressive, anti-political revolution within our lifetimes.

But Schulman's novel is also a fast-paced, exciting adventure story that manages to touch on all the basics of free-market anarchism and libertarian philosophy without ever slowing down to lecture or preach.

I have no idea what I would have made of this novel had I read it before my own (anti-)political conversion -- as I did with The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Illuminatus! Trilogy -- but I'm sorry I didn't discover it much sooner.

spontaneous order

Hayek is in!

Best known for The Road to Serfdom and the popularizing of the term "spontaneous order", Hayek changed the way the world talked about "the anarchy of the market". Hardcore Misesians (and Rothbardians) take issue with Hayek on the particulars, but we certainly agree with the central message of his political economy:

Collectivism is Slavery

(Now we just need Menger and Hazlitt to complete the 6-pack.)

Morningside Heights

My friend the dramatist makes fun of me for a habit he's observed over the years. We'd be watching a movie shot in New York and I'd say, "Hey, that was shot in my neighborhood!" as I'd witness a glimpse of some familiar corner or building from childhood.

The thing is, the neighborhood I grew up in, Morningside Heights, is not really on the cognitive map of people not from New York -- and probably not on the map for many people in lower Manhattan.

(By the way, the big blue rectangle on this map is Columbia; the narrow pink rectangle is Barnard College; the unmarked pale green rectangle to the left of Barnard is the block where I grew up. Click the image to see Barnard's guide to the neighborhood.)

George Carlin, who grew up in Morningside Heights, calls it White Harlem. We were the caucasian oasis between Spanish Harlem and Negro Harlem. George Carlin grew up in the town side of a town/gown split in that area -- Morningside Heights is where Columbia University is. I grew up in faculty housing. I was the gown side of the local town/gown split.

But while the neighborhood is not well known as a neighborhood, a lot of shots make it into television and movies. The movie Eyewitness (1981) actually takes place in the neighborhood, as did the play You Can't Take It With You, but usually Hollywood just grabs shots and ignores the setting. Sometimes, Columbia's campus is used, as in Ghostbusters (1984) and Spiderman (2002), and sometimes it's harder-to-identify local buildings, like Tom's Restaurant, which has been made famous as the exterior shot for all coffee shop scenes in Seinfeld.

Now, apparently, NBC is making a sitcom called Morningside Heights, and it's very much about the neighborhood itself. (Thanks to iceberg for forwarding me the New York Times article on this show.)

The sitcom is set on Seminary Row, the block of West 122nd Street where the Jewish Theological Seminary sits diagonally across Broadway from Union Theological Seminary. The show is a piously irreverent comedy about good-looking would-be ministers, rabbis and imams who share a dorm and try not to sleep with one another.

It could scarcely be set anywhere else.

"The neighborhood is a huge character in the show," said Mr. Light, 31, who attended Columbia as an undergraduate and a graduate student in the film division of the School of the Arts, and whose wife studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Along with its grand Gothic churches, Riverside Church and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the neighborhood's sheer density of institutions of higher learning - Columbia, Barnard and Seminary Row itself - makes Morningside Heights an area that Mr. Light calls "a hotbed of seeking."

"Whether it's knowledge, or what your place is in the world, it's a place to ask these huge questions," Mr. Light said. "Whether in Riverside Park or St. John the Divine or the Hungarian Pastry Shop, it's a truly contemplative and vibrant place that I love."

The area also provides the soaring visual backdrop for a new, perhaps more spiritually highbrow representation of New York than America is accustomed to seeing in television comedies.

The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons

Those propaganda posters that iceberg brought to our attention reminded me that the Mises.org fun page has The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons -- an illustrated rendition of F.A. Hayek's famous classic -- both as a web page and as a video.

The pictures are a little grainy and the image files could be half the size if the text were text rather than pictures of text ... so I thought I'd put together a higher-contrast, faster-download version here.

---

Originally published in Look magazine. Reproduced from a booklet published by General Motors, Detroit in the 'Thought Starter' series (#118). 1 War forces "national planning" To permit total mobilization of your country's economy, you gladly surrender many freedoms. You know regimentation was forced by your country's enemies. 2 Many want "planning" to stay ... Arguments for a "peace production board" are heard before the war ends. Wartime "planners" who want to stay in power, encourage the idea. 3 The "Planners promise Utopias .... A rosy plan for farmers goes well in rural areas, a plan for industrial workers is popular in cities -- and so on. Many new "planners" are elected to office ... 4 but they can't agree on ONE Utopia With peace, a new legislature meets; but "win the war" unity is gone. The "planners" nearly come to blows. Each has his own pet plan, won't budge. 5 And citizens can't agree either .... When the "planners" finally patch up a temporary plan months later, citizens in turn disagree. What the farmer likes, the factory worker doesn't like. 6 "Planners" hate to force agreement ... Most "national planners" are well-meaning idealists, balk at any use of force. They hope for some miracle of public agreement as to their patchwork plan. 7 They try to "sell" the plan to all ... In an unsuccessful effort to educate people to uniform views, "planners" establish a giant propaganda machine -- which coming dictator will find handy. 8 The gullible do find agreement .... Meanwhile, growing national confusion leads to protest meetings. The least educated -- thrilled and convinced by fiery oratory, form a party. 9 Confidence in "planners" fades .... The more that the "planners" improvise, the greater the disturbance to normal business. Everybody suffers. People now feel -- rightly -- that "planners" can't get things done! 10 The "strong man" is given power ... In desperation, "planners" authorize the new party leader to hammer out a plan and force its obedience. Later, they'll dispense with him -- or so they think. 11 The party takes over the country ... By now, confusion is so great that obedience to the new leader must be obtained at all costs. Maybe you join the party yourself to aid national unity. 12 A negative aim welds party unity ... Early step of all dictators is to inflame the majority in common cause against some scapegoat minority. In Germany, the negative aim was Anti-Semitism. 13 No one opposes the leader's plan ... It would be suicide; new secret police are ruthless. Ability to force obedience always becomes the #1 virtue in the "planned state." Now all freedom is gone. 14 Your profession is "planned" .... The wider job choice promised by now defunct "planners" turns out to be a tragic farce. "Planners" never have delivered, never will be able to. 15 Your wages are "planned" .... Divisions of the wage scale must be arbitrary and rigid. Running a "planned state" from central headquarters is clumsy, unfair, inefficient. 16 Your thinking is "planned" .... In the dictatorship, unintentionally created by the planners, there is no room for difference of opinion. Posters, radio, press -- all tell you the same lies! 17 Your recreation is "planned" .... It is no coincidence that sports and amusements have been carefully "planned" in all regimented nations. Once started, "planners" can't stop. 18 Your disciplining is "planned" .... If you're fired from your job, it's apt to be by a firing squad. What used to be an error has now become a crime against the state. Thus ends the road to serfdom!

a handy refuge for the intellectually lazy

From the October 24, 2005 issue of New York Magazine (via LRC):

Are Jews Smarter?

Did Jewish intelligence evolve in tandem with Jewish diseases as a result of discrimination in the ghettos of medieval Europe? That's the premise of a controversial new study that has some preening and others plotzing. What genetic science can tell us -- and what it can't.
[...]
They were advancing a theory with a patina of sexiness and political incorrectness, one that would generate a good deal of discussion. And that it did. Some of that discussion was positive, and some was not, as one might expect. That's always the problem with theories that exploit stereotypes -- they're titillating, sure, but also handy refuges for the intellectually lazy.

When I got to college, a young Jewish woman befriended me. Within a few weeks, it became clear that she assumed I was Jewish, which I'm not.

"Why did you think I was Jewish?"

"Well, for one thing you're smart ..."

"Thank you."

"... and your name is Knatz ..."

"That's Bavarian, not Jewish."

"... and you're from New York ..."

"Uh-huh."

"... and you know and use Yiddish words ..."

"That's 'cause I'm from New York."

"... and you're rich."

"What?!"

"Well, you have a computer."

I guess she'd never met any geeks among the goyim ...

This same woman helped me figure out how to spend a half a year on a kibbutz in Israel. (No, really, I'm not Jewish, but I do understand the confusion.) She is now a professor of religion at a major university.

fiat metal

I've written plenty on language banditry, especially the appropriation of ideological, legal, and economic terms.

Here's a word I bet you didn't realize had been appropriated by the state, its meaning changed so radically that it has almost reversed itself:

"COIN"

A coin is a type of packaging for valuable metal.

What we now call coins aren't really coins -- not by the original meaning. They're actually tokens. A token is a representative of something else -- not money, but a money substitute. Think poker chips.

Once upon a time, coins were the most valuable money, because they were the only real money. Bank notes weren't money, but again, money substitutes -- promises of money that were more convenient than the silver and gold coins they represented. Now our so-called coins are our least valuable money. "Pocket change." Why? Well, for one thing because they're cheap metal tokens.

When I was growing up in New York City, a token was the coin-like-thing you used for subways and busses. It said "NYC" on it, and the Y was cut out of the metal -- a Y-shaped hole between the angular N and C. As a small kid, I once called the subway token a coin and my parents corrected me. "Why isn't it a coin?" I asked. "Because," they explained, "it's not really money -- you can't spend it outside the subway." (That wasn't true: I found a pizza place where a slice cost 75 cents and the immigrant owner thought a token was worth a dollar. I could pay 60 cents to buy a token (circa 1980), then go to the pizza place where I could spend it on a slice of pizza and get back a quarter. It took me longer than it should have to feel bad about cheating the man.)

Another strange thing about the old subway tokens is that their edges were completely smooth, whereas the "coins" I was used to -- dimes, quarters -- had rough edges, which I now know to call milled edges.

Why, you might wonder, do 21st-century dimes and quarters have milled edges?

A token is to a coin what a promissory note is to cold hard cash. (And notice the words "cold" and "hard" before the word "cash" and ask yourself what "cash" must have once referred to.) Coins used to be gold and silver. Popular coins were the ones that bore the mark of a reliable mint so you could know that they held a certain weight and purity of precious metal. Think of a modern gold bar and realize that that's what a gold coin used to be.

One problem with coins was that people would clip or shave the edges, hoping to pass the clipped coin on at face value, while saving up enough clippings to melt them down and sell. As clipped coins became common, prices adjusted to the lower-valued coins. Price inflation before fiat money. Inflation is the result of fraud, but that fraud can be either private or public. (I won't here go into the history of kings, minting monopolies, and the debasement of government currency. You can read all about it in Murray Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money?)

Milled edges were the solution to coin clipping. You could feel the rough edge around a coin and know that it hadn't been clipped or shaved -- that it held the full weight of its face value.

Now that our so-called coins are made of cheap copper and nickel (or are nickels also made of copper now?) instead of silver and gold, they have become tokens -- symbols, rather than packages. A clipped gold coin really was worth less than its face value because its face value was based on its original weight. If you tear a corner off a paper fiat dollar, it still trades at the same value. If you shaved the edge of a Susan B. Anthony or Sacajawea dollar, it would maintain its face value. Why? Because it's not really a coin. Its weight is irrelevant. It's just a token.

So why do our tokens have milled edges?

So that they feel like coins. So that we'll think of them as coins. So that we won't notice that we no longer have real coins.

I can't run my thumb across the edge of a quarter without thinking about what government has done to our money.

---

Update

"Mr B" (1, 2) adds his, um, 2 cents worth:

And now, some more "coin" tidbits I found while researching the question of what nickels are composed of nowadays. First, I didn't remember nickels having the reeded edges. I checked my pocket change, and my nickels and pennies are smooth. That makes sense since they don't appear to have ever been made of precious metals (and I don't count silver-containing "half-dimes" as "nickels"). According to the wickipedia article, nickels have been made of 75% copper and 25% nickel since after the War Between The States. And, according to the U.S. Mint list, since 1982 pennies have been composed of 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper. Up until then they were composed of a few alloys consisting mostly of copper. Pure copper pennies only lasted a mere 44 years from 1793 to 1837.

You can still get gold and silver coins from the U.S. Mint (as well as the Canadian Mint) in addition to the gold bars you displayed in your article. U.S. American Gold Eagles are 0.9167 gold and the balance is a mix of silver and copper (according to this source). Canadian gold coins are .9999 gold. U.S. silver coins appear to be listed as 99.9% pure, whereas the Canadian silver Maple Leafs have .9999 stamped on them. There are also a host of private label silver coins, including the one I wrote to you about. The problem with the gold coins currently produced is that even the smallest size is still way too valuable for many everyday purchases. The silver coins are better, but they only seem to be readily available in 1 oz sizes. That's still too valuable for really small purchases. And then there's the problem of re-educating the public...

Anyway, there's my two copper-plated-zinc-token's worth.

your grandparents' tax dollars at work

I stole these image files from iceberg.

See his post for commentary.



Then listen to George Reisman's recent talk:
Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism is Totalitarian
Recorded 10/08/2005 [32:24] at ...


Supporters Summit 2005
October 7-8, 2005
Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama

(And plenty more audio and video where that came from!)

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Postscript

I just happened on Lew Rockwell's 2003 article, "The Violence of Central Planning" in which he makes the following observation:

Ever since 9-11 and the authoritarian, militarist response, the political left has warned that Bush is the new Hitler, while the right decries this kind of rhetoric as irresponsible hyperbole. The truth is that the left, in making these claims, is more correct that it knows. Hitler, like FDR, left his mark on Germany and the world by smashing the taboos against central planning and making big government a seemingly permanent feature of western economies.

economics on 1 t-shirt

Something to look forward to:





Meanwhile:

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Update:

Soon we can buy the full 6-pack!

Wilde & Tame

I'm not sure why I was invited to LIBERTY 2005: The Annual London Conference of the Libertarian Alliance and the Libertarian International. The mailing went to my BlackCrayon.com address so they're either mailing libertarian webmasters in general (let me know) or it might have something to do with a pleasant email exchange I once had with Perry de Havilland, who you can find quoted in my BlackCrayon dictionary definitions a few times.

Anyway, the email came from the director of the Libertarian Alliance, Dr. Chris R. Tame.

His name reminded me of something I've failed to mention in this blog before:

The hero of my favorite anarchist science fiction novel, The Stone Canal, is named Jonathan Wilde. I wondered if his name was supposed to be meaningful to me so I looked it up in Wikipedia. I found Jonathan Wild (no ultimate E on this spelling) :

Jonathan Wild (1683-May 24, 1725) was perhaps the most famous criminal of London -- and possibly Great Britain -- during the 18th century, both because of his own actions and the uses novelists, playwrights, and political satirists made of them.

I wasn't sure what the connection was supposed to be. Jonathan Wilde of Stone Canal is clearly the hero (isn't he?) -- an anarchist in the peaceful market-anarchist sense of the A-word, not a villain. But maybe his name is a comment on how he is perceived. Or maybe it was the historical Jonathan Wild's role as "Thief Taker General" -- could it be a reference to private security? Polycentric law?

Well, I didn't worry about it too much.

Then when I was reading David Liss's historical mystery/literary thriller, Conspiracy of Paper, the question came up for me again, because the historical Jonathan Wild is a major character (and major villain) in Liss's novel. I've had brief correspondence with Stone Canal's author, Ken MacLeod, but never thought to ask. When my father was reading Conspiracy of Paper, however, he did think to ask.

This is what MacLeod replied:

The real Jonathan Wild (not Wilde) was an eighteenth-century (I think) entrepreneur who supplied protection services. Unfortunately he also supplied quite a few of the crimes his agency protected against, and he ended up on the gallows.

This ironic side-light on anarcho-capitalism wasn't, I'm afraid, at all in my mind when I invented the guy's name. Though I must have read about Jonathan Wild in the children's magazine Look and Learn when I was very young, I had forgotten all about him.

Jonathan Wilde first appears in The Star Fraction as a minor character, the eminence grise of the space movement, and I consciously gave him that name to distinguish him from (and thus, of course, to obliquely allude to) the famous real-life English libertarian activist, Chris Tame - a point duly noted in the first notice of the book in the Libertarian Alliance journal Free Life, which in a later issue carried a review of the book, by Chris Tame.

So it all just came from the not very brilliant pun on the two names, Wilde and Tame. I wish I'd been clever enough to notice the historical echo, but I wasn't.

All the best
--
Ken MacLeod

regard for the Bard

Anthony Gregory (4:30:38 PM): I like Shakespeare a lot.

bkmarcus (4:30:44 PM): I can't really like Shakespeare. My father is a Shakespearian scholar. Judging Shakespeare, for me, is like what other people struggle with to judge their religion or their nationality.

Anthony Gregory (4:31:52 PM): I see.

bkmarcus (4:32:25 PM): I graduated from high school never having read Hamlet. I didn't realize I'd be in the minority in Freshman English in college. I graduated from college w/o having read Hamlet. So my friend and I bought a couple of copies of Hamlet, went up to my family's cottage in the Catskill mountains -- smoked cigars, drank cognac, and took turns with the different parts, and read Hamlet to each other. That was a blast. My wife and I are friends with the couple who introduced us (who just had a baby, incidentally)

Anthony Gregory (4:34:17 PM): Good for them!

bkmarcus (4:34:23 PM): and they visited us at that same cottage in winter, so we lit a fire, drank wee drams of single malt whisky all night, and the 4 of us read Macbeth to each other. That was also a blast. My 2 favorite Shakespeare experiences. Much better than seeing performances.

Anthony Gregory (4:35:10 PM): I love a good performance.

bkmarcus (4:35:18 PM): When I was a teenager, my father convinced me to read along with the PBS presentation of Julius Caesar. That was pretty good, too. But I can't seem to get it from the performances alone, or from the text alone. I need them both. My dad and I read Romeo and Juliet to each other. That was good too. Maybe I'll rediscover Shakespeare when we have kids.

Anthony Gregory (4:39:07 PM): I cannot help but be brought back to romantic recollections of sharing his sonnets and some of his comedies, namely Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, with a lover I had in college. I can recall it as though it were yesterday, the scents of the autumn air all around and the grin and glimmering eye of my female companion, even though this never happened. Yet the memories linger.

unbroken windows

Going over some old articles, I encountered once again, an attempt to debunk some modern example of the broken-window fallacy by summarizing Bastiat's great essay, "Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas" (That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen).

A boy breaks a baker's window ... everyone thinks it's a shame ... some wise-ass proto-Keynesian steps forward to speak to the bright side of destruction ....

You know the story.

And you also know that Henry Hazlitt based his
entire economic primer on Bastiat's broken window, exploring the contemporary (and often evergreen) economic fallacies of the unseen.

The fallacy is older than econometrics, and yet I still blame that statist (and state-created) pseudoscience for its current prevalence. But not entirely. The basis for econometric stupidity is older than econometrics itself, even older than Popperian positivism, I would argue.

The basis for the fallacy and the fallacious "discipline" both, is the popular confusion between wealth and money.

Your money is part of your wealth to the degree that you value the money itself, for whatever reason. But for most of us, money is a means for acquiring wealth -- it isn't wealth itself. The stuff you buy is more valuable than the money you use to buy it; if that weren't the case, you'd never make the exchange. For the merchant, in that same transaction, the money is more valuable than what he sells to you, but it's unlikely that what he wants is the money: he wants to use the money to buy something he values more than the money. And on and on.

What-is-seen-and-what-is-unseen is a powerful way to introduce someone to the concept of opportunity costs, but in the case of the broken baker's window in Bastiat's original essay (and in the cases of World War II, the World Trade Center, typhoon-ravaged coastal cities, and now New Orleans), what should be seen is the whole and functional window as part of the wealth in the world and the destroyed window as part of the destruction of wealth.

Before the little vandal, the baker had a window and some savings. After the vandal, the baker has a new window and less savings. That means less wealth. What exactly is unseen?

Rothbard page

BlackCrayon.com is a bit of a ghost town. I'm sorry about that.

This weekend I was coordinating with Brad Spangler who is setting up a new Agorist wiki. I was telling him that my BlackCrayon copy of Sam Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto is my proofing and editing of the flag.blackened.net version, which is riddled with typos and other errors.

Mr. Spangler pointed out that my own version was still in its hacked stage, uncorrected for the past half a year. How embarrassing.

So the bookstore (2 , 3, 4) is broken and some of my library is still hacked. The pipes are leaking and there's the general dank smell of disuse.

But at least I've updated my Murray Rothbard page!

It now includes a summary of Rothbardian Property Theory, my blog memorial, some product links, some more photos, and my entire collection of Murray Rothbard quotes. Enjoy.

fascism is not just a smear term

"It is as important for libertarians to be anti-socialist as it is for them to be anti-fascist. But first we need to recognize that fascism is a reality, not just a smear term."

-- Lew Rockwell,
"The Problem of Fascism",
The Free Market
Volume 26, No. 5, May 2005

More:

In short, what we have alive in the US is an updated and Americanized fascism. Why fascist? Because it is not leftist in the sense of egalitarian or redistributionist. It has no real beef with business. It doesn't sympathize with the downtrodden, labor, or the poor. It is for all the core institutions of bourgeois life in America: family, faith, and flag. But it sees the state as the central organizing principle of society, views public institutions as the most essential means by which all these institutions are protected and advanced, and adores the head of state as a godlike figure who knows better than anyone else what the country and world's needs, and has a special connection to the Creator that permits him to discern the best means to bring it about.

The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while adopting an ideology -- even without knowing it or being entirely conscious of the change -- that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a long time, we've tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.

-- Lew Rockwell, " The Reality of Red-State Fascism"

And even more:

The Economics of Fascism
Supporters Summit 2005
October 7-8, 2005 [right now!]
Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama

Read More
Hear More

... and more and more and more ...

sexy anti-lefties

There's a strange feature article over at FrontPageMag.com:

"The Right's Left Turn"

What's strange about it is that in attacking Lew Rockwell's "left turn" the author quotes the best of Lew Rockwell, revealing Rockwell's Austro-libertarianism to be steadfast and principled, while the article writer's own prose ranges from regime-partisan to soporific.

Much more interesting was the T-shirt advertisement that accompanied the article. (Shown above.)


I love the Mises and Rothbard shirts for sale at the Mises Store, but they don't quite have the same sex-appeal. (Or am I confusing packaging and contents?)

So while the befuddled Right scratches its head over libertarian anti-war alliances, let's take this opportunity to promote the anti-Left libertarianism that better fits my own esthetic:

Political Ts!

(Or should that read "Political Tease"?)

So here is one of my favorite sexy T-shirt models for the politically incorrect resistance.



(I welcome your nominations.)

politicized pricing

Economic ignorance plus political power. The end of civilization. I despair.

The leftists (and plenty of rightwing radio talkshow hosts, apparently) haven't the first clue what the source of peace, cooperation, and wealth is.

We're like cartoon characters out on a limb, sawing the branch between ourselves and the trunk ...

From FEE:

Politicians Act to Soothe People's Wrath over Gas Prices
10/3/05
"Rising fuel prices are stoking popular anger around the world, throwing politicians on the defensive and forcing governments to resort to price freezes, tax cuts and other measures to soothe voter resentment." (Washington Post, Monday)

Don't just stand there, undo something!

FEE Timely Classic
"Freedom of the Price" by Dwight R. Lee

From Robert L. Bradley Jr., President of the Institute for Energy Research and Senior Research Fellow, Center for Energy Economics, University of Texas at Austin:

Post-Katrina, there has been purposeful underpricing by some major refiners in an attempt to avoid political prosecution. This has resulted in out-of-gas situations at some gasoline stations. This problem is likely to become much worse post-Rita. Gas prices will need to go a good deal higher to the extent that refining capacity is interrupted, yet there is a good chance that prices will not go high enough, given the circumstances. Closed service stations will tell the tale, and even with such underpricing there will still be charges of "price gouging" and "unconscionable pricing."

The clarion call to oil companies and politicians from economists, consumer advocates, and environmental groups (the last who believe that oil prices are below "social costs") should be "price to clear the market," not "hold the line on prices."

Consumers do not really save money when gas is not conveniently available and time is wasted in gas lines. There is mental strain just knowing that gas may not be available to support routine activities or for that emergency moment.

We have a strong intellectual case for full pricing. Here are some points that come to my mind[...]. This is likely to be a big issue for some time, and expect congressional hearings and calls for price controls, allocation controls, and windfall profits tax.

Market-clearing pricing:

1. discourages tank topping, thus creating more effective supply;
2. empowers consumers with optionality--the ability, the choice, of buying gasoline;
3. reduces gasoline lines, which waste fuel, waste time, and create unnecessary emissions (it is ozone season during hurricane season);
4. encourages full conservation, where consumers see the real scarcity price and act accordingly (carpooling, etc.);
5. provides full incentive to refiners and other industry parties to eke out more supply in the short term and, longer term, increase nameplate capacity.

"Buffer of Civility"

It oil pricing becomes politicized and physical shortages/gas lines result, we are back to the summer of 1979. There will be civil disobedience in the gas lines, and it will bring out the worst in all of us. I would like to share a quotation from a Wall Street Journal opinion-age editorial of June 26, 1979, published in the wake of a fuel riot in Levittown, Pennsylvania. (Scattered gunfire, arson, vandalism, etc. were happening elsewhere in the shortage environment.)

Simply entitled "Buffer of Civility," the op-ed read in part:

Classical economists used to list among the virtues of the price mechanism that it avoided social strife. It did not set group against group, they taught. In our lifetime ... we have generally allowed prices to allocate goods among different end uses. It worked so smoothly we did not understand what the classical economists meant; today, we see. In addition to its economic virtues, the price mechanism is a vital buffer of civility.

It will be not only economically efficient but also civil to allow prices to work their magic in bad times, as in good. I hope we can get this message out in every way we can in the challenging weeks and even months ahead.

Amen, brother!

Welcome to the world, Samantha Fay Capehart!

Another strange 21st-century experience: checking your friend's blog where he is updating by digital cellphone the latest news of a very dramatic delivery of his new baby girl.

So welcome to the world, Samantha Anaïs Daphne Eloise "Serenity" Fay Capehart! So glad you made it here safe and sound.