highly principled person

(Click to Enlarge)



From the archives:

• Monogamy vs. Integrity
• the principal principle of principles

nominated

Seems this here blog's been nominated for "Best Libertarian/Classical Liberal Individual Academic Blog" over at HNN L&P.

pop quiz

I'll post the answer to this question tomorrow:

How many dimes would you need to equal the weight of 4 quarters?

It's not a trick question. We're talking about the contemporary fiat metal issued by the United States federal government.

Register your answers in the comments section; and please be kind enough to indicate whether your answer is a guess, a deduction, or the result of research.

(No purchase necessary.)
((No reward is being offered.))
(((Void where prohibited by the State.)))

---

Update

Extra Credit Question:
WHY?

full-color and finely gradiated

In my espionage work for the anarchist underground, I recently intercepted this transmission from a political moderate to a radical libertarian:

I am fascinated as of late by positions that are extreme and the groups that espouse them like necons, hard-core libertarians, terrorists and fundamentalists of all religious stripes. (Nice grouping, huh?) My world is full-color and finely gradiated and I find the black and white of the rhetoric, including yours fascinating. I can't decide if it is the rhetoric is actually Entertainment, political theatre, radicalism, extremism or some kind of strange political marketing that I just don't yet understand. From a moderate's perspective, it makes almost no sense and it is therefore fascinating.

I've already emphasized elsewhere that a moderate is someone without principles.

It should hardly surprise any of us then when they confess to not understanding principled arguments. What does continue to catch me offguard is the extent to which they're willing to brag about this particular form of moral and mental retardation.

What the smug moderate boasts of as a world seen "full-color and finely gradiated" is really the blurry vision of a lazy eye.

monetary virtues

If you already subscribe to Ender's Review, you may already have read this list:

...the properties required of money were first described by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE.

1. It is durable. It won't evaporate, mildew, rust, crumble, break, or rot. Gold, more than any other solid element, is chemically inert. This is why foodstuffs, oil or artwork can't be used as money.

2. It is divisible. One ounce of gold-whether bullion, coin, or dust-is worth exactly 1/100th of one hundred ounces. When a diamond is split, its value may be destroyed. You can't make change for a piece of land.

3. It is convenient. Gold allows its owner physically to carry the wealth of a lifetime with him. Real estate stays where it is. An equivalent value of copper, lead, zinc, silver, and most other metals would be too heavy.

4. It is consistent. Only one grade exists for 24-carat gold, so there is no danger of owning 24-carat gold varying in quality. Twenty-four-carat gold (pure gold) is the same in every time and place since gold is a natural element, unlike gems, artwork, land, grain, or other commodities.

5. It has intrinsic value. Gold finds new industrial uses each year. Of all the metals, it is the most malleable (able to be hammered into sheets less than 5-millionths of an inch thick), most ductile (a single ounce can be drawn into a wire 35 miles long), and the least reactive (it can stand indefinite immersion in seawater, does not tarnish in air, and can withstand almost any acid). Next to silver, it's the most conductive of heat and electricity and the most reflective of light.

These superlatives make gold uniquely well suited as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Arguments that gold's value is "mystical" are silly; it is simply one of the 92 natural elements.

One important last point was not listed by Aristotle, probably only because he lived before the creation of paper and banking.

6. Gold cannot be created by government. Gold can, of course, be debased with impurities or falsified in weight, and governments strapped for revenue have tried those tricks. But a trader can protect himself with a pair of scales or a vial of acid, although a familiar and trustworthy hallmark of a coin saves him that trouble. Unlike currency, gold cannot lose value because of government mismanagement. On the contrary, it tends to gain value because of government mismanagement.

-- "What Most People Don't Know About Gold"
by Doug Casey
from Free-Market News Network

horology & frippery

The only reason I know the word horology is because of the passage I quote below.

The only reason I know the word frippery is because Murray Rothbard said Adam Smith considered diamonds "a mere frippery".

The description is accurate, but if the wording is a direct quote, I can't find the source.

Smith did call diamonds "the greatest of all superfluities". It's a word he uses quite a bit in The Wealth of Nations. For instance: "Corn is a necessary, silver is only a superfluity."

It's amazing to me the hubris with which people commonly judge what is and isn't necessary -- especially when discussing the demonstrated preferences of others. Not just conservatives, but even and especially the egregiously hypocritical PoMos who march beneath the banner of subjectivity and relativism.

Adam Smith seems to have considered the distinction objective, but since the Marginal Revolution, most economists would demur. Value is subjective.

One man's superfluity is another man's necessary. Perhaps more significant is the fact that the frippery of one era can become the indispensable technology of the next.

This is from How the West Grew Rich, p. 148f:

Until about 1880, the principle technological achievements of Western industry were in the mechanical arts. The mechanical skills needed for these accomplishments developed in substantial part in response to a Western interest in horology. This interest in timekeeping was traceable to the town clocks of the Middle Ages. As early as the sixteenth century, clocks had their eager collectors: the Emperor Charles V is said to have had three thousand of them. The invention of the telescope and the Copernican revolution in astronomy in the seventeenth century supplied an impetus for improvements in the accuracy of clocks. In struggling with the problems of building accurate clocks and portable watches, clockmakers advanced Western knowledge of precision machining; the effects of changes in temperature on different materials; friction; the uses and misuses of gear trains, levers, ratchets, springs, and other elements of mechanical systems; selection of suitable materials; lubrication; and mechanical durability. By 1750, when the Industrial Revolution was about to impose immense demands on the skill and ingenuity of mechanical designers, Western clockmakers had already brought mechanical design to an advanced state of development.

Much of the early Western interest in clocks and watches was in no sense utilitarian. In order to fit their development -- and the development of Western mechanical skills -- to the causal pattern, economic need to technological response, one must allow economic need to include fad, fashion, fascination with complex mechanisms, and similar foibles. Much later, the timeclock became a symbol of factory discipline; but Western interest in clocks and watches long antedated the factory system. A non-utilitarian fascination with clocks was not limited to the West, for clocks proved welcome gifts from early traders to Chinese officials, who became avid collectors but made no practical use of them whatever. Even the medieval town clocks were as much ornamental as useful. For watches more than for clocks, the market consisted almost entirely of those who bought them as articles of jewelry, status symbols, or from collector's enthusiasm. That the market existed was fortunate, for portable watches proved much more challenging to mechanical ingenuity than clocks, and hence were a substantial additional source of Western skills in the mechanical arts.

Horology was thus a jeweler's or astronomer's art, with one exception: the marine chronometer. Until nearly the end of the eighteenth century, navigators had no reliable or accurate way to find a ship's longitude, and as a result many lives, ships, and cargoes were lost in strandings on shores and reefs that had been thought to be many miles distant. Local noon, the time when the sun reaches its maximum altitude above the horizon, could be determined with reasonable accuracy by eighteenth-century instruments. What was needed was a clock accurately showing time at 0� longitude, for with such a clock mariners could determine their longitude by comparing local noon, as they observed it, to the time shown by the clock: each hour of time difference translated into 15� of longitude. Accurate eighteenth-century clocks depended, however, on the pendulum, which did not function on the unstable platform supplied by a ship. "Longitude, then, was the great mystery of the age, a riddle to seamen, a challenge to scientists, a stumbling block to kings and statesmen. Only such will-o-the-wisps as the fountain of youth and the philosophers' stone could match its aura of tantalizing promise -- and longitude was real."¹

Later, in the nineteenth century, accurate watches were needed both for the operation of the railroads and for passengers, who had to get to the station on time.²
High-grade watches became a status symbol, worn with pride by those who were far from the reach of factory discipline.

---

1. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 111.

2. The railway companies themselves and their employees were destined to become a major market for watches, but even more their riders, who not only wanted to know the hour and minute in order to catch trains but found their entire consciousness of time altered by the requirements and opportunities of a railway world.

free audio

I was very excited by Tim Swanson's post to blog.mises called Learncasting: Educational Podcasts Por Gratis, but after following his links, I found only one podcast that interested me -- HIST105 - Survey of Global History, Purdue University.

Silly me, I downloaded the whole semester before listening to the first 'cast. It was inaudible. Sounded exactly like some student in the back of the auditorium had recorded a lecture with a bad mic and a professor who didn't know how to speak up. You could hear the muffled coughs and creaking seats of students far better than the voice (let alone words) of the mumbling professor. Feh.

(No, it hasn't improved over the sememster.)

But with some further probing, I found this site: www.LearnOutLoud.com.

And through it, I found this site:

www.FreeAudio.org
It looks like they're just starting out. Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, and Frederic Bastiat!

A day after Thanksgiving, I give extra thanks (and a couple of bucks) to the noble souls at FreeAudio.org.

A Proper(tarian) Thanksgiving

Some of the links on last year's Thanksgiving post are broken, so I'll briefly quote and update here:

Thursday, November 25, 2004

Thanksgiving & Private Property

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

... here:

• "Giving Thanks for Private Property" by Tom Dilorenzo (LRC)
• "The Great Thanksgiving Hoax" by Richard J. Maybury (LvMI)
• " Our First Thanksgiving" by Sartell Prentice, Jr. (FEE)

If you read last year's post you can see how I deal with the extremely popular myth that American Indians had no concept of land property. (Here's the short version: Ask yourself what other practical options there are for dealing with scarcity. Addendum to the short version: Turns out the Indians had their own "tragedy of the commons" here and there.)

So far, in the set of stories the American culture tells itself about Thanksgiving, we have (1) the omission of the true story of communism and famine, (2) the addition of the false story of anti-propertarian "Native Americans" and now (3) Wally Conger brings up another critically important bit of lost Thanksgiving history:

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Rethinking Thanksgiving Day

From New York City?s The Plaindealer, Dec. 3, 1836, an editorial by William Leggett (1801-1839):

"Thursday, the fifteenth of the present month, has been designated by Governor Marcy, in his annual proclamation, as a day of general thanksgiving throughout this state.... [I]t may seem presumptuous to suggest an objection; yet there is one which we confess seems to us of weight, and we trust we shall not be thought governed by an irreligious spirit, if we take the liberty to urge it....

"It is to the source of the proclamation, not to its purpose, that we chiefly object. The recommending a day of thanksgiving is not properly any part of the duty of a political Chief Magistrate: it belongs, in its nature, to the heads of the church, not to the head of the state."

[Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy, by William Leggett; Liberty Press, Indianapolis]

Note: Thanks, Ralph Raico, for drawing this editorial to my attention in lecture after lecture.

So to whom or to what are we thankful? And who's "we"?

There are lots of things that we as individuals will be giving thanks for today. I can't give an account of what you're thankful for, and I'll refrain from reviewing my own list, which would be interesting only to me. But what a larger "we" ought to give thanks for is private property.

(Those who are ideologically most opposed to private property are, in fact, exactly those who benefit most from it. The very fact that we have time for ideological debate is the product of the capital accumulation of others. And yes, this makes socialists ignorant and self-indulgent spoiled brats. QED.)

As to who "we" are -- the ones giving thanks for private property -- it ain't the state, folks, except inasmuch as private property becomes plunder for the political class.

So given that the fourth Thursday in November is a government holiday, what exactly do they want us to be thankful for? Whatever it is, I'm sure I want no part of it.

Nevertheless, many of us in the American anti-political class will be sharing a harvest meal with loved ones. Looks like Thanksgiving is another anarchist shadow holiday.

---

Updated links:

"Property Rights and the First Thanksgiving" by Gary Galles (LvMI)

"Private Enterprise Regained" by Henry Hazlitt [PDF] (FEE)

"Happy Private Property Day" by Jim Cox (LRC)

---

Another update:

In the comments section, Anthony Gregory offers a couple of links to his own writing on the present topic. I find this wonderful summary to get right to the heart of the matter:

We are told to be particularly thankful for the public schoolteachers, the police officers, the legislators, bureaucrats, and especially soldiers.

Now, it is perfectly fitting to appreciate the humanity of everyone in our society, particularly in the holiday season. Yet neglected by most official hosannas sung for those whom we presumably owe our loudest thanks are the greatest public servants of them all.

I am talking about the merchants, the farmers and truck drivers, the waiters and waitresses, the storeowners and bag boys. I'm referring to the businessmen and businesswomen, the producers and sellers, the investors, the stockholders and brokers, and the people in all walks of life who serve their fellow humans every day.

These people aren't usually considered public servants, but that is precisely what they are. By serving their customers, clients, and employers in the framework of the market economy, they create wealth where none before existed. In any voluntary market exchange, both consenting parties part with something they value less for something they value more. Whether it is labor, a good, or a service, each participant in the economy contributes something that ends up where it is most valued. Although most engage in transactions primarily for the benefit of themselves and perhaps their families, they cannot help aiding others in the process, both those with whom they directly exchange and, indirectly, all of us who buy or sell or work on the market.

Indeed, if it were not for the market, the politicians too would have no resources, no salaries, and much less to be thankful for. Whereas the so-called private sector produces wealth, the government produces nothing on its own; it gets its revenue purely by extracting it from the productive sector through taxes or inflation.

All the material wealth in our society was created by human effort, and we are an especially wealthy country because our economic system, whatever its many faults, rewards and encourages individual effort and channels it in ever more productive ways for the masses.

Calvin & Hobbes on time preference

(Click to Enlarge)

Earlier examples of Calvin on time preference:

• 2004 December 18

• 2004 December 21

• 2005 March 16

jade versus gold

Roderick Long posted a comment to "ancient Chinese secret" that will probably escape the notice of anyone not digging through the handful of comments left on this blog, so here it is:

Roderick T. Long said...

A shorter and otherwise slightly different version of my Confucianism article was published in the JLS two years ago; link here.

6:30 PM

Long on Taoism: "No writing, education, material improvements, curiosity, travel, or trade -- this is not exactly the Hayekian 'Great Society.' Anarchic it may be, but it is less the dynamic market-based anarchism of Rothbard than the primitivist, acorn-munching anarcho-stagnation of Rousseau?s Second Discourse. If this is the price of freedom, statism begins to look good."

bk on spontaneous order:

There's the wu-wei of ecology, evolution, biology and the wu-wei of the market. Both are self-regulating systems and both can suffer from intervention, which will produce ugly unintended consequences.

Once upon a time, I thought it would be good to confront environmentalists with their own thoroughly anti-ecological worldview of markets -- their failure to grasp the parallel between the two. But the more economics I learn, the less strong I think that parallel is. The market is in fact superior to (or at least more complex than) ecology because of the spontaneous human invention of money and money-prices, which allow for a form of calculation completely absent in ecology and evolution. I don't know of any bio-equivalent to capital formation or entrepreneurship. I don't know of any eco-equivalent of technology or civilization.

In the end, I think the anarcho-primitivists are the only honest shade of green there is. They know that they are rejecting civilization, rejecting society, rejecting human happiness and health and welfare. They hate that which makes us different from other animals. They consider our species a disease.

If it's true that the Taoists themselves failed to perceive and celebrate the wu-wei of commerce and civilization then I'm with Long: the alternative starts to look better and better.

---

Update from "Mr B":

Hello again Mr. Marcus!

I read "Jade vs. Gold" this morning. You may be interested in a particular book, if you haven't already read it. The edition I have is called "Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem" by Michael Rothschild. This edition is out of print, but Amazon seems to have a few available for less than $10. There also seems to be a new edition, called "Bionomics: Economy as Business Ecosystem". The page at this link describes the second version. Barnes and Noble has the second edition for around $30. The cover art has changed, but the table of contents is the same as the edition I have. Perhaps the contents of the chapters have been updated, though. I would be glad to lend you my copy as well. This book points out many parallels between biological systems and economies, including a bumblebee hive income statement. The are too many good quotes from this book to list here. I will give these two, not because I think they are the best but because they are the first two that caught my eye and I have to get to work sometime today. If you would like more information about the book I can send you more stuff over the Thanksgiving break.

From the "Profits and Technology" chapter: "The human capacity to imagine, to consciously pull together unrelated pieces of knowledge and produce new answers, is what makes economic evolution happen so much faster than biological evolution. Nonetheless, the fundamental proces - turning profits earned today into information for tomorrow - is the same for both organisms and organizations."

From the "Savings and Taxes" chapter: "The second crucial error was made by John Maynard Keynes. Perhaps the most influential economist of the twentieth century, Keynes argued that recessions and depressions, particularly the Great Depression of the 1930's, were caused by too much saving and not enough consumption. Keynes imagined the economy to be an engine that could not run efficiently and keep everyone employed unless the government kept a heavy foot on the accelerator."

As for an eco-equivalent to technology, this article points out a recent discovery of gorillas using tools, and mentions other tool-using strategies by the other great apes (beyond the stick-down-an-ant-nest trick).

history minus theory

One problem I have with the author of The Whiskey Rebellion is that he knows that questions of property theory are central to the conflict, and yet he doesn't seem to know or care about property theory itself.

Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a "property" in his own "person." This nobody has any right to but himself. The "labour" of his body and the "work" of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

John Locke, The Second Treatise on Civil Government

Slaughter correctly calls the frontiersmen and rebels "Lockean" in their implicit theory and explicit rhetoric -- as was the American Revolution itself -- but then he doesn't point out that George Washington's claims to vast land ownership are anti-Lockean, that surveying doesn't count as "mixing labour" with the land, and that the so-called "squatters" were actually the legitimate property owners and victims of the aggression of absentee landlords such as George Washington.

He doesn't need to endorse the theory or tradition to acknowledge them. As it is, the squatters come across as ornery, recalcitrant, and criminal, where I see them as righteous and justified in their resistance.

whiskey: the patriotic spirit

Three things made me curious about the Whiskey Rebellion:

1. Murray Rothbard's essay;
2. L. Neil Smith's first novel;
3. Man, I love whiskey!

OK, actually, I can think of a 4th: on our honeymoon hiking in the Scottish Highlands, my beautiful new bride and I visited a couple of distilleries, which gave tours, explained the history, explained the process, then steered us into the gift shop. I learned that Irish whiskey (spelled with an 'e') is triple-distilled, whereas Scottish whisky (no 'e') is double-distilled. (Notice that Canada, which is more Scottish than Irish, has whisky, whereas we in these here United States are far more Irish than Scottish and have whiskey with an 'e'.)

I learned that the Scots import their whisky barrels from Kentucky, because the Kentucky legislature passed protectionist laws on behalf of the coopers' unions, making it illegal to reuse bourbon barrels. There's no good reason not to reuse bourbon barrels, but Kentucky distilleries aren't allowed to do it. So they sell them cheap to Scottish distilleries. The fanciest single-malt scotch you've ever had probably aged in a burnt-out, used bourbon barrel. (They also use French burgundy barrels, possibly for similar reasons.)

I learned what single-malt means, and why the market has made "blended whiskies" (a mix of malt whisky and grain alcohol) more popular: cheaper and less risky to make; same alcoholic effect. Once upon a time, all Scottish whisky was what we now call single-malt: whisky made from a single batch of malted grain.

I learned that after distilling, whisky is clear, like water. It takes its brown color from sitting in charred barrels for however many years -- takes on the color of the wood. Distillery workers used to be paid, in addition to the money they took home, "three whites and a goldy" -- meaning 3 shots of the thoroughly harsh, unaged product, plus 1 shot of the younger version of the final product. The British government has made that illegal, so to approximate tradition, the distilleries give their workers bonus bottles of the post-taxed stuff.

Taxes, of course, being the heart of the matter. Because whisky is scarce and valuable by volume, does not lose its value over time, and is divisible (fungible), it makes a pretty good money. I've noted elsewhere that 2 common commodity moneys that arise in local markets that lack precious metals are (1) tobacco, and (2) booze. In the fairly limited markets of rural Britain (and Ireland), farmers traded in whisk(e)y.
Unfortunately, what makes something a good money for markets also makes it good plunder for governments. The English (government soldiers) and the Scottish (farmers and distillers) fought long and hard over the individual's right to make and keep (or trade) his own whisky. The individuals lost. This picture to the left is of something called a "spirit safe". Good term, I think. It's a lockbox on the distillery premises to which only government agents hold the key. Because the distilling process requires human handling and human judgment to keep only the middle 90% of the flow of a batch of whisky (the beginning and end of the flow having different and less pleasant color and taste), and because the government doesn't want any whisky in human hands until after it's been taxed, they came up with this device, which lets the distillery worker see and handle the flow of the whisky without being able to actually touch it.

Not only does the distillery itself (the device, not the place) have to be registered with the government, but it has to be huge -- industrial scale. The existence of a 'still small enough to fit inside a room is itself illegal in Britain. Small enough for personal use is small enough to hide, and a hidden still means someone isn't paying taxes on every last drop of alcohol on the island.

If you've ever spent $40 on a decent bottle of single-malt scotch, you were paying about $10 in American taxes and $20 in British taxes. Only 1/4 of the price of scotch is for the scotch itself. Three times as much is for the taxes to various governments.

The US government was never quite as successful, thank goodness. The textbook version of the Whiskey Rebellion has the rebellion itself take place in a handful of counties in Pennsylvania. El Neil's Probability Broach takes place in an alternative timeline where the rebels won, General Washington was defeated, and the original vision of the Declaration of Independence continued to be the dominant ideology for the next two centuries.

Murray Rothbard suggests that the Whiskey Rebellion itself was much larger than the textbook version would have it. It crossed many states, up and down the mid-Atlantic and as far west as Ohio, and the rebels won! The handful-of-Pennsylvania-counties version is where the rebellion was successfully put down by Washington's soldiers, but as Rothbard has it, the government knew that the resistance was much larger, more widespread, and anonymous. They knew they could never really defeat it. So instead they declared victory and gave up. American whiskey continued to be made and consumed extralegally for over a century.

I haven't gotten far enough in Thomas Slaughter's book, The Whiskey Rebellion, to know whether his version is closer to the textbook version or to Murray Rothbard's revision, but I have read enough to note something very curious. The American frontiersmen who would become the whiskey rebels held to an ideological distinction they inherited from England: the idea that "external taxes" (meaning tariffs) were legitimate (!) while "internal taxes" (meaning everything else) were illegitimate. This distinction they held to be central to the American Revolution itself. So when the American government began to impose an excise tax on whiskey (an internal tax), these patriots saw their own government as violating their rights, exactly as the British had done.

What's the difference? Aren't both taxes involuntary? Isn't that what makes them taxes?

Well, there's a pragmatic distinction I'll get to in a moment, but there was also an ideological distinction that I think I follow, even as I reject it. Englishmen, both in Britain and in America, considered the borders of their countries to be the legitimate property of their governments. Tariffs were seen as fees, legitimately collected for the privilege of crossing (and therefore using) government property. Excise taxes, on the other hand, were claims that the government was making on goods that were decidedly not the government's property -- goods the government had played no part in creating and over which the government held no legitimate claim, even under the spurious doctrine of legitimate government ownership. (Unless, as I've noted elsewhere, you think the government really owns everything -- a common enough implicit assumption now, but very alien to Anglo-Americans for most of our history.)

I'm a big fan of Henry David Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" as a precursor of American anarchism, but he makes a similar statist assumption, as illustrated by this quote:

If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it.

(Notice that Thoreau implies that the ports are rightfully government property.)

Thoreau has a lot in common with the whiskey rebels. For one thing, they were literalists. Thoreau took Thomas Jefferson's dictum -- "That government is best which governs least" -- and carried it to its logical conclusion: "That government is best which governs not at all"!

Similarly, the rebels quoted the language of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence as justification for their rebellion. And unlike the commies who would do so a century or so later, the American rebels weren't distorting the meaning. They just took the language literally. The American mercantile class turned out not to mean any of it. They wanted to be the British.

But then both Thoreau and the rebels accepted (and excepted) tariffs, which violate the Jeffersonian language Thoreau and the whiskey rebels embraced. (Jefferson too violated the Jeffersonian ideal, not just in his slave ownership, but in his political use of tariffs once he was president.)

The one thing that helps me sympathize with the excise rebels (and Thoreau) is the idea that once upon a time, you could largely ignore a government funded only by tariffs. The frontiersman weren't exporting agriculture and they didn't depend on imported machinery. Before the excise taxes, they could live ungoverned -- in the statist sense, not the cybernetic sense.

They were wrong (like Thoreau) to see the State as the rightful owner of the borders, but they were right to see government as better limited than unlimited, and the excise was the beginning of the end of such limits.

who rules by whose rules?

Another great quote from Christian Michel's "THE CLASS STRUGGLE IS NOT OVER: Why Libertarians Should Read Marx And Engels ...":

The Ruling Class

Now the first answer to the question of why we allow ourselves to be exploited seems to be that the dominant class does not appear to be the wealthiest in society, and the fact is it is not. So how come they exploit us, if they don't make more money than the richest amongst us?

Some people in the new ruling class may not be rich, it is true, but neither were many slave owners or feudal lords. Many lived no better and were much poorer even than commoners, who were active in trade and other businesses. It is not the amount of wealth that makes you a member of the ruling class, but the way this wealth, however modest, is acquired. It is not how much you earn, but how you earn it, that qualifies exploitation. Do you make your money by political means or economical means? Is it earned or is it extorted?

compound interest on opportunity costs

Three science fiction novels played a critical role in my conversion from uppercase Libertarian to lowercase libertarian, and from a focus only on the ethics of liberty to an interest in the economics and history of liberty as well:

1. The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod
2. Alongside Night by J. Neil Schulman
3. The Probability Broach by L. Neil Smith

(Ironically, one result is that my reading is almost entirely non-fiction now.)

I reviewed Stone Canal and Alongside Night on BlackCrayon.com (here and here), but never did so for The Probability Broach. And I'm not about to review it now, but I do want to mention the contribution it made to changing how I think.

The libertaria that both the protagonist and reader visit in the novel -- a minarchy so minimal that I think it counts as anarchy -- is not only freer, happier, healthier than the worlds we're more familiar with, but it is vastly wealthier and more technologically advanced, not in some distant future, but in the present (albeit with an altered past).

As an ethical libertarian and an economic illiterate, I found the implicit claim pretty far-fetched. Freer, happier, healthier, yes. More prosperous, ok. But vastly wealthier? Everyone richer? And technology far more advanced?

Well, I was skeptical, but also beginning to be skeptical of my skepticism. Alongside Night had introduced me to the relevance of money, and it and Stone Canal had given me the final push I needed to start reading Rothbard.

I was beginning to grasp free-market economics, but what The Probability Broach forced me to do (and what I probably wouldn't have done otherwise) was to apply the concept of opportunity costs back two centuries!

I understood that intervention destroyed wealth, but I hadn't yet thought of the effect as cumulative through history. (I play with this idea briefly in my spectrum property article at Mises.org.)

There are a bunch of reasons I'd recommend reading Christian Michel's "THE CLASS STRUGGLE IS NOT OVER: Why Libertarians Should Read Marx And Engels ...", but at the moment, I just want to connect this one paragraph from it to the main lesson (for me) of The Probability Broach:

"...when you assess how much you are robbed by the taxman, it is not just what you pay today that you should take into account, but the compounded value of all what you have paid since the [sales tax] you incurred on your first ever purchase and the income tax on your first salary, plus the opportunity cost of all the projects and desires you could not fulfil with that money because it was taken away from you. Try to work out for yourself what these numbers add up to for yourself and you'll be staggered."

The Real Professor Bernardo de la Paz

Tim Minear was executive producer for the show "Angel" of which I'm a fan. He was the executive producer for "Firefly" of which I'm a fan. I have every episode of both those shows on DVD. He also directed and wrote for both those shows.

Those are both Joss Whedon shows. I've considered myself a fan of Joss Whedon's for a while, but I discovered I was a fan of Tim Minear's from Wally Conger's blog, where I learned not only that Minear is writing a screenplay for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but also that he "gets it":

This is about a revolution. It's big and it has a lot of really complex political ideas. It's hard in that respect. How do you personalize this? There's a lot of talking in the book ? theoretical talking about Libertarian ideals and political structure and that sort of thing ? how do you take that and make it immediate and dramatic and emotional? How do you say that stuff through scenes and action, as opposed to characters sitting around and having a conversation? That's difficult.

The other thing is to make sure the powers that be in Hollywood don't force you to turn it into some Marxist screed on socialism, when Heinlein was a Libertarian and it's about free-market capitalism. You want to try and not make it about an evil corporation. That's the trick.

At the time, I wrote that "there might be a big screen version of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in the works. (And by someone who is (a) connected to Firefly, (b) aware of what libertarianism is (although he miscapitalizes the word), and (c) aware of the fact that Hollywood is much more interested in Marxist screeds than in libertarian screeds!)"

Well, as it happens, Tim Minear himself stumbled onto that blog post yesterday and wrote me about it:

I don't know why this bugged me, but it did, so I e-mail you. I didn't miscapitalize the word "libertarian." The quote was from a phone interview, and while I was basically quoted correctly, I didn't proofread the copy for spelling.

Lame that I emailed you for that, huh?

Best regards --

Tim Minear

My wife was pretty impressed that I got a note from one of her favorite Hollywood bigshots, even if it was to correct me for impugning his knowledge and syntax.

Most of what Minear calls the "theoretical talking about libertarian ideals and political structure and that sort of thing" was done by the great Professor Bernardo de la Paz, the Jeffersonian rational anarchist whom Heinlein based pretty directly on his friend Robert LeFevre.

As I understand it, there were two great poles of radical libertarianism in the America of the middle 20th century: Murray Rothbard in the east, and Robert LeFevre in the west. In 1957, LeFevre founded the Freedom School, which he ran until 1968, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Rothbard organized economics seminars for LeFevre, and was responsible, I believe, for bringing Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises to the Freedom School.

And as it also happens, LeFevre's 1959 booklet The Nature of Man and His Government is today's daily article at Mises.org.

A few years ago, the LeFevre estate donated his library and papers to The Ludwig von Mises Institute. You have to visit Auburn, Alabama to see the books (over 10,000 of them) and papers, among which "are transcripts of lectures by many giants of the libertarian cause, Mises among them." (Lew Rockwell, "The Wisdom of LeFevre")

But you don't have to go to Alabama to listen to over 26 hours of LeFevre's audio commentaries, thanks to Mises.org. This is one of the very first things I did with my very first iPod. Having been a radio professional, LeFevre is wonderful to listen to and very good at explaining "the freedom philosophy".

magic thinking

Today's daily article at Mises.org, "Then a Miracle Occurs" by Gary Galles, is one of the best light-touch introductions to economic reasoning I've seen in a while. Short and sweet.

Deutschland Unter Alles!

From yesterday's London Times:

The new German Government is launching one of the boldest experiments ever undertaken in the history of economics -- or rather anti-economics. Germany in the past three years has been the world's most depressed economy, with the weakest growth in economic activity and consumption.

The coalition partners -- representing, as they do, the opposite ends of the political spectrum -- found it hard to find common ground on most issues, but on one point they could emphatically and enthusiastically agree: the way to stimulate an economy suffering from mass unemployment and stagnant consumption is to increase tax... the new German Government has decided to impose one of the biggest tax increases in postwar history and to target the extra taxes on the weakest and most sensitive parts of the economy: consumption, which will suffer a three percentage point increase in VAT, and housing, which will lose tax incentives for first-time buyers.

In addition, to fend off accusations that the new consumption taxes will bear unfairly on poorer consumers, the Government will hit the rich as well, increasing the top rate of income tax from 42% to 45%. It seems that Angela Merkel's idea of a compromise between the Christian Democrats, whose most unpopular idea was the VAT increase, and the Social Democrats, who were berated for demanding higher income tax, was to combine the most unpopular measures from both parties' manifestos, while dropping all the rest.

I mean really!

What kind of a monster raises taxes on a depressed economy?!

snail mail

Post Office Raises Rates Again
11/15/05

November 15, 2005

"The U.S. Postal Service board of governors approved a rate increase that will boost the price of mailing a first-class letter to 39 cents from 37 cents starting Jan. 8." (Washington Post, Tuesday)

Still just a penny a day!

FEE Timely Classic
"Time for the Mail Monopoly to Go" by Scott Esposito

(And if you still don't know who Lysander Spooner was, it's time to learn.)

It only just occurs to me now that this familiar ritual of rising stamp prices depends entirely on the American public believing that price inflation is a natural phenomenon, rather than the direct result of government fraud.

Now, as it happens, the early 21st century is seeing an increase in the demand for fuel from the developing economies of the East, which will raise global fuel prices, even without monetary inflation. We also have interruptions in supply, which will raise global fuel prices, even without monetary inflation. Rising fuel prices, mean some other prices will go up -- the prices of those things whose increased costs are still voluntarily borne by consumer demand -- while other prices go down, as purchases are shifted from lower-demand goods to stable-demand goods. (And other goods might all but disappear when their production costs come to exceed the market price.)

All of which is to say that fuel costs affect delivery costs, so a rise in the price of mail this year is not necessarily something we get to blame on the Fed.

Not necessarily.

This time.

But what's their excuse the rest of the time?

Well, I guess their excuse is that prices just naturally go up.

Everyone knows that, silly.

FSIM

One of my little rules-of-thumb for determining the quality of my life is how I feel around Sunday dusk. When I was in school, the sunset almost always brought on melancholy or worse. The couple of times I noticed that it didn't, I realized it was either because I'd studied all Sunday or looked forward to classes on Monday. In other words, the difference between weekend and weekday didn't seem like such a rupture.

This rule worked well in professional life, too. When I liked my job, Sunday evening was just a soft transition. When I hated my job, Sunday evening brought on deep depression. This served as a good indication that I needed to make a change.

(You might figure a sane person would just know how he feels without needing rules-of-thumb to figure it out. Maybe you'd be right.)

Anyway, I don't hate Mondays now. I do use the weekend to do the things I have less time for during the week, but the transitions are gentle, and I like both workdays and weekends.

Still, to communicate with the less-professionally-satisfied among my friends, I wanted an acronym to represent the opposite of TGIF, something to express sympathy with how they feel the first day of the workweek. I came up with FSIM. I tried it out on a couple of the worker bees I can instant-message with.

The more artistically inclined friend expanded it to:

Frankly Sorry It's Monday

The more technically inclined friend expanded it to:

Following Sunday, It's Monday

the division of labor in the division of risk

Chapter 4 of How the West Grew Rich is called "The Evolution of Institutions Favorable to Commerce".

The chapter is broken up into 9 sections, one for each of the institutions the authors credit with the creation of "The European Miracle" of capitalism:

1. legal enforcement of contracts and property claims;
2. bills of exchange and banking;
3. insurance;
4. the substitution of taxation for confiscation and the recognition of property rights;
5. economic association without kinship;
6. double entry bookkeeping;
7. the development of a religious and moral system suitable to the commercial community;
8. the mercantilist partnership; and
9. the divided European political structures and the part it played in allowing the growth of an autonomous merchant class.

I figure I'll blog the passages I might want to write about later.

Here's section 3:

Insurance

The earliest form of marine insurance was a loan, repayable with a high premium if the voyage succeeded but not repayable at all if the vessel was lost. Known as a "bottomry and respondentia bond," this form of insurance loan was used by the ancient Greeks. The separation of insurance from financing took place in Italy, perhaps as early as the latter part of the twelfth century, when insurers began to guarantee against loss of the vessel in return for a stated premium. There is, however, only a scant record of the use of marine insurance before the sixteenth century. A Florentine statute of 1523 contained a form of policy which differed but little from the form adopted by Lloyd's in 1779. Lloyd's itself dates from the late seventeenth century. Merchants who were prepared to accept an insurance risk would meet with shippers and shipowners at Lloyd's coffee house, in London, and negotiate the premium. The insurers were individuals who either did not have enough capital to pay for the loss of an entire vessel or who felt it imprudent to accept the whole risk. So, once a rate had been agreed upon, a number of insurers would sign on, each for a portion of the risk.

The development of marine insurance markets in Italy, Amsterdam, and London separated commercial risks from the risks posed by the perils of the sea and made it possible for merchants to venture increasingly large amounts of capital on the commercial outcome of a voyage without subjecting themselves to the less calculable uncertainties of the sea. The commercial risk was that the cargo might not be as profitable as expected, or might even result in a loss. But only rarely was there a commercial risk that the cargo might prove wholly worthless and produce a loss of the entire capital invested -- a risk decidedly present from storms, pirates, and the other hazards of the sea.

The division of risk between the perils of the sea and the perils of the market, with specialized insurers undertaking the former and merchants and shipowners the latter, converted an intrinsically hazardous business into one capable of drawing capital from relatively cautious and conservative merchants. Some such division of risk was essential to the development of maritime commerce. It is possible to think of other ways the risks might have been divided, such as marketing shares in the voyages themselves at Lloyd's instead of shares in the risk of loss from perils of the sea. But this would have required the underwriters of Lloyd's to familiarize themselves not simply with the risks of the sea, but also with the commercial risks involved in every line of trade conducted by sea. The division between specialists in maritime risks and specialists in market risks greatly facilitated the growth of maritime trade.

political science

My father is reading Michael Crichton's State of Fear. He sent me the following blockquote from the paperback, p 500ff:

The world has changed in the last fifty years. We now live in the knowledge society, the information society, whatever you want to call it. And it has had enormous impact on our universities.

Fifty years ago, if you wanted to lead what was then called 'the life of the mind,' meaning to be an intellectual, to live by your wits, you had to work in a university. The society at large had no place for you. A few newspaper reporters, a few magazine journalists could be considered as living by their wits, but that was about it. Universities attracted those who willingly gave up worldly goods to live a cloistered intellectual life, teacher timeless values to the younger generation. Intellectual work was the exclusive province of the university.

But today, who sectors of society live the life of the mind. Our entire economy is based on intellectual work, now. Thirty-six percent of workers are knowledge workers. That's more than are employed in manufacturing. And when professors decided they would no longer teach young people, but leave that task to their graduate students who knew much less than they did and spoke English poorly -- when that happened, the universities were thrown into crisis. What good were they anymore? They had lost their exclusive hold on the life of the mind. They no longer taught the young. Only so many theoretical texts on the semiotics of Foucault could be published in any single year. What was to become of our universities? What relevance did they have in the modern era?

... What happened ... is the universities transformed themselves in the 1980s. Formerly bastions of intellectual freedom in a world of Babbittry, formerly the locus of sexual freedom and experimentation, they now became the most restrictive environments in modern society. Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the PLM. Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the social anxieties. All the new restrictive codes. Words you can't say. Thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can't smoke, can't swear, can't screw, can't think. These institutions have been stood on their heads in a generation.

It is really quite extraordinary.

The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can thrive only in a restrictive setting, behind closed doors, without due process. In our society, only universities have created that -- so far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core ....

My father adds that the process was well underway long before the 1980s. He claims that it has been going on for centuries, forever, but escalating since WWII, as federal government money began to pour into universities.

And on his website Crichton himself points to earlier lessons of the dangers of politicized science:

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.

I don't mean global warming. I'm talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in state from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.

The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful --- and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing --- that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well know to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.

[keep reading]

ancient Chinese secret

I'm experiencing some sort of Chinese history synchronicity. This just showed up in my inbox:

Where did modern economics originate? History shows that concepts of inflation, regulation and the free market can all be traced to ancient China, whose ideas were later refined by the Enlightenment thinkers.

[...]

What is more, the concept of the 'free market' we are so proud of in the West is very strongly influenced by classical Chinese philosophy. It was the impact of Chinese ideas, especially Daoism (Taoism), on the scholars of the European Enlightenment that enabled the Europeans to break down the old restrictive mercantilist system and come to a coherent vision of the free market.

[...]

From wu-wei to laissez-faire

While the Confucians believed that virtue could best be achieved through regulation and control, the other great philosophical school of ancient China, the Daoists, argued the opposite. One of the key principles of Daoism is that true achievement comes not through action but rather through its opposite, wu-wei, or 'non-action'. The Daoist view was that the best way of achieving a desired result is through stillness, causing things to happen without intervening. In economic terms, this means letting nature take its course.

[...]

By the early 18th Century, Jesuit missionaries in China had translated many Chinese works of philosophy into French. These translations were widely read and admired by French Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire and Montesquieu, and also by the Physiocrats, the new school of economists who argued for the application of Enlightenment ideas to economics. One of these latter, Fran�ois de Quesnay, became a great admirer of Daoist ideas. He was particularly attracted to the idea of wu-wei. The perfect monarch, he argued in his Le despotisme de Chine (1764), "should do nothing, but let the laws rule", an almost exact translation of a passage in the Daodejing. Famously, Quesnay translated wu-wei as laissez-faire, and the concept went on to become the foundation stone of free-market capitalism down to this day. Adam Smith did not use the term laissez-faire in The Wealth of Nations, but used instead the phrase 'invisible hand', which is clearly taken from laissez-faire and is in some ways an even more accurate rendition of the Daoist original.

[read the whole thing]

Wow. Thanks to Murray Rothbard, whom I'll quote in a moment, I already knew about Taoism as early radical libertarianism, but I didn't realize that there was a traceable historical connection between Taoist thought and classical liberalism. That blows my mind. What it implies is that an ideology of individual freedom first evolved where political reality kept it from shaping economic reality -- see my recent posts (1, 2) on the Mandarinate -- but then the meme travelled to the more receptive host of a politically decentralized western Europe.

Western liberals may owe as much to the East as we do to the West.

Of course, the other lesson is that ideology is not enough.

---

In "Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez Faire," Rothbard wrote:

The first libertarian intellectual was Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism. Little is known about his life, but apparently he was a personal acquaintance of Confucius in the late sixth century B.C. and like the latter came from the state of Sung and was descended from the lower aristocracy of the Yin dynasty. Unlike the notable apologist for the rule of philosopher-bureaucrats, however, Lao-tzu developed a radical libertarian creed.

[download PDF]

---

Why are people starving?
Because the rulers eat up the money in taxes.
Therefore the people are starving.

[...]

Why are the people rebellious?
Because the rulers interfere too much.
Therefore they are rebellious.

[...]

The more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be.

[...]

The more rules and regulations, The more thieves and robbers.

Lao Tzu

---

PS Just as the pieces start to make sense, I find Roderick Long's dissenting revisionist history:
"Rituals of Freedom: Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism"
(Why the real Chinese libertarians were the Confucians, not the Taoists)

[download PDF]

I may comment on it once I'm finished reading it. It's 70 pages.


PPS Professor Long, I prefer your first section title:

"Confucianism: The Unknown Ideal"

forgetting armistice day

Something worth repeating from a year ago:

Undoubtedly, America's hawks will celebrate Veterans' Day, but they will forget about the time when November 11 was a day to remember the warriors while observing the blessings of peace. Instead, they will use the day to lionize war. They will forget the lessons of 1918, and will use a day that was meant to reflect on peace to cheer on more killing and destruction.

We must indeed remember the millions of Americans who have been and continue to be sent to foreign lands to fight for dubious causes and imperial crusades. I don't think the best way is by sending fresh faces into battle and adding fresh corpses to the graveyards of America's war dead.

One day, I hope that the last war fought will seem like a distant memory, and that the veterans who pass away will not be replaced by new ones returning from battle.

One day, I hope most Americans will pay respect to the tragic sacrifices of America's soldiers of the past by observing the beautiful bedrock of civilization that is peace.

One day, I hope we can rejoin the world in a celebration of truce.

One day, I hope we honor America's veterans by restoring the original meaning of Armistice Day.

November 11, 2004

"Forgetting Armistice Day" by Anthony Gregory

wage-gouging!

I'd like to see the antimarket slopebrows try to explain this one:

Worker Scarcity Boosts Pay in New Orleans
11/11/05
"Burger King is offering a $6,000 signing bonus to anyone who agrees to work for a year at one of its New Orleans outlets. Rally's, a local restaurant chain, has nearly doubled its pay for new employees to $10 an hour. . . . Ten weeks after Katrina, government officials and business leaders worry that a scarcity of able-bodied workers is hampering the area's recovery. In their desperation, they are using a variety of tactics to attract workers." (New York Times, Friday)

Wage-gouging!

FEE Timely Classic
"Why Wages Rise: 1. Labor Unions?" by F. A. Harper

more mandarins

Tim Swanson pointed me to a Gary North article I had somehow missed:

For a thousand years, China was administered by Mandarins. These bureaucrats swore loyalty to the emperor. Then they were granted enormous control over the entire society. From the days of the Pharaohs until the twentieth century, the Mandarin class was the world's most powerful bureaucracy.

To enter the ranks of the Mandarin class, a young man had to pass a rigorous written examination. The examination covered Chinese classical poetry. What did a knowledge of Chinese poetry have to do with ruling a vast empire? Directly, very little. Indirectly, a great deal.

A student needed five things to pass the exam:

1. advanced literacy;
2. enough leisure to study for the exam;
3. a very high IQ;
4. a teacher;
5. the ability to endure intense boredom for many years under a nearly absolute master.

The teacher was a man who had failed to pass the exam.

Had he passed, he would not have become a teacher.

[keep reading North's article]

mandarin meritocracy

I'm finally reading How the West Grew Rich, by Rosenberg and Birdzell. Ralph Raico recommends the book in almost every lecture of his I've heard. I'm only on page 90 and already I consider it one of the best books I've ever read. I'm marking the thing up like crazy because I plan to refer back to it plenty. It is dense with information, so far all of it interesting.

I'm not going to comment yet on the following passage, which begins at the bottom of page 86:

One of the stronger supports for market-to-technology causation takes the form of an argument that the Chinese had an equivalent and perhaps superior technology around the fourteenth century, but they came to a dead end in a culture more aptly characterized as mandarin than mercantile. The monumental researches of Joseph Needham have richly documented China's extensive achievements in both science and technology. Needham has presented a formidable mass of evidence to support his belief that "between the first century B.C. and the fifteenth century A.D., Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental in applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs."

Needham argued, moreover, that the social and economic systems of medieval China were, in many respects, more rational than their counterparts in medieval Europe. Whereas Europe was dominated by a ruling class entrenched by hereditary succession, China was ruled by mandarins, a class of civil servants with no prospect whatever of hereditary succession. Thus, Chinese civilization was more rational in the very specific sense that people were admitted to positions of leadership on the basis of ability and not of birth. The imperial examination determined entry into the bureaucracy and thus assured the continuation of a nonhereditary elite, drawing into itself the best brains of each generation.

But despite these advantages, Needham's conclusion is that the social and cultural values of Asian "bureaucratic feudalism" were simply incompatible with capitalism and, for that matter, with modern science. He leaves us with the disturbing thought that holders of political power will, if they can, check the development of economic power centers capable of achieving economic growth [...]

[...] What can be said is that the Chinese social system inculcated values that were not only hostile to hereditary aristocracies, such as those that dominated Western feudalism, but also to bourgeois values generally. A class of scholar bureaucrats held classical learning in high esteem and, at the same time, cultivated a contempt for material goals or acquisitiveness. (Not that these values dictated an ascetic life-style to the mandarins themselves.) The son of a successful merchant aspired, not to expand or even necessarily to perpetuate the family business, but to prepare for the imperial examinations and to enter and eventually rise in the mandarinate. These values underplayed the importance of bettering the material conditions of everyday life; in fact, they came to produce a collective self-satisfaction which might not unfairly be called smugness.

paleoliberal redux

From today's blog.Mises.org:

November 09, 2005

The Socialists still attacking Mises
Jeffrey Tucker

Hey, the commies are attacking Mises! But the article has all the expected confusions, like conflating public and private bureaucracy. Some stuff here is actually quite right: "In spite of the move away from public ownership and toward private ownership, governments around the world have continued to take taxpayers' money and essentially use it to subsidize private industry and to enhance the instruments of repression and war."

Umm, right, and Misesians are against that.

Posted by Jeffrey Tucker at November 9, 2005 03:39 PM

[...]

You know, I hate it when these commies call us neoliberals. I'm a paleoliberal. www.paleoliberal.com

As Tom DiLorenzo says, "Marxists [are] constitutionally unable to distinguish between free enterprise and special privilege." (How Capitalism Saved America, p. 45)

How much ignorance does it take to say that Mises's ideology has won!?

Posted by: bkmarcus at November 9, 2005 05:46 PM

[...]

At: bkmarcus. I rather would call myself a classical liberal.
Is that not the same?

Posted by: Nick at November 9, 2005 06:30 PM

[...]

Nick, yes and no. When social democrats started to appropriate the term 'liberal' in the early 20th century, several retronyms were coined to keep the distinction, including laissez-faire liberal, market liberal, old liberal, and your own preferred classical liberal. The problem is that many of the self-labeled classical liberals -- then as now -- are actually neoliberals: far less laissez-faire than the 19th-century liberals they claim as ideological forebears. Hayek himself, for example, expressly rejected laissez-faire. When the Mont Pelerin Society members began to be commonly referred to as neoliberals, Ludwig von Mises wrote in correspondence that he was a paleoliberal, in contradistinction to the neos he considered to be cowardly compromisers. With all the neoliberals, neoconservatives, neolibertarians, paleoconservatives, and paleolibertarians out there, I thought it was time to resurrect the term 'paleoliberal' to emphasize the uncompromising connection to the centuries-old tradition of laissez faire et laissez passer.

Posted by: bkmarcus at November 9, 2005 09:15 PM

Joe Sobran's amusing dictum

If you want the government to intervene domestically you're a liberal, if you want the government to intervene abroad you're a conservative, if you want the government to intervene both domestically and abroad you're a moderate, and if you don't want the government to intervene either domestically or abroad you're an extremist.

on the ethics of bloodsucking

If my last post was too long and involved, I offer you a less serious exploration of Rothbardian ethics from the great white north:

A Vindication of the Rights of Vampires