Spooner shirts?

(Click if you don't know who that is.)


(Click to see a close-up of the image.)

A Lysanta shirt will have to wait for next year.

Rothbardian Left and Right

Rothbard did not use the terms Left and Right in the usual one-dimensional sense.

Yes, the Left was radical or progressive and the Right was conservative or reactionary, but this split then had to be applied to political distinctions in other dimensions.

At a time when the so-called Progressives were plunging American society head-first into full-bore statism, Rothbard was proudly part of the Old Right -- the reactionary resistance.

But within bourgeois liberalism, he was on the Left: radical libertarianism. And bourgeois liberalism itself he saw as part of a larger divide in history between the progressive forces of liberty and the reactionary forces of statism. This too put him on the Left.

Socialism was not leftist when seen from this larger historical perspective, because its strategy (and some would say its ultimate goal) was conservative: centralized power. The confusion came from the fact that Socialism's rhetoric and stated goal was progressive, borrowed from the language of liberalism.

Personally, I'm happy to use the terms Left and Right to refer to the egalitarian and anti-egalitarian branches of the dominant political thinking of our time: social democracy. To me, libertarianism is neither left nor right.

But many of my comrades (random sample) want to emphasize this Rothbardian understanding of the Left. They may also have various other reasons for emphasizing the left side of a Left/Right distinction. I'm sure the reasons vary.

Anyway, for my allies among the Left Rothbardians, I offer the following designs ideas:

market anarchist tees

When I was paying attention to BlackCrayon.com, I wanted to have t-shirts made, but Cafe Press didn't do black, so I scrapped that idea. Apparently, in November (years later now), they finally started doing black tees. I missed it. No longer paying attention.

Anyway, some sleepless nights recently had me playing in photoshop. Would anyone be interested in a market anarchist series of tees?

the torture of living documents

I consider this very dark humor, but it is very true and, I confess, a bit delicious:

Constitutional Torture

Liberals are claiming that President Bush has violated constitutional restrictions on torture and spying on Americans. Don't they understand that the constitution is a living document that must be reinterpreted in light of new events and understandings? An originalist reading of the constitution would throw us back into the primitive past when the minimum wage was unconstitutional. Fortunately, conservatives know that constitutional interpretation must change with the times and never more so than now. We live in a different world. The Founding Fathers may have been great in their time but they did not face the problems that we face today and we should not be bound by their 18th century ideas of liberty and executive tyranny.

Posted by Alex Tabarrok on December 28, 2005 at 07:12 AM in Law | Permalink

Thanks to Tim Swanson for pointing me to Marginal Revolution.

Lysanta

silver & gold

Silver and gold, silver and gold,
Ev'ryone wishes for silver and gold.
How do you measure its worth?
Just by the pleasure it gives here on earth.


Silver and gold, silver and gold
Means so much more when I see,
Silver and gold decorations
On ev'ry Christmas tree.

---

Update:
Somehow I had missed Karen De Coster's rather more extensive blog post on the great Rudolph TV special from last December. Me, I just watched the DVD with my beloved and had to do a quick screen-capture and blog post when I heard that song.

Christmas reading list

Let's put the X back in Xmas!
from lowercase liberty

putting the "chi" back in chiMas
from lowercase liberty



The Economics of Santa's Workshop
from Mises.org

Scrooge Defended
from Mises.org



And the Christmas viewing list grows longer and longer but must always include some historical context. I make my reservations explicit in "Let's put the X back in Xmas!" but I still consider the History Channel's Christmas Unwrapped to be the seasonal must-see.

DHMO

(Thanks to Tim Swanson for bringin this to my attention.)

IP vs Captain Marvel

Is Intellectual Property Law more powerful than The World's Mightiest Mortal?

Today's featured article at Wikipedia:

Captain Marvel was the most popular superhero of the 1940s, with his Captain Marvel Adventures series selling more copies than Superman and other competing superhero books. He was also the first superhero to be adapted into film in 1941 (The Adventures of Captain Marvel). Because of a decline in the popularity of superheroes and a copyright infringement suit from DC Comics alleging similarities between Captain Marvel and Superman, Fawcett ceased publishing Captain Marvel and Marvel Family comics in 1953. They later licensed the Marvel Family characters to DC in 1972 and ceded the rights to them outright in 1980. Captain Marvel and the Marvel Family have been integrated into the "DC Universe", and DC has attempted a few revivals. However, Captain Marvel has not found widespread appeal with new generations, although a 1970s Shazam! live action television series featuring the character was very popular. Due to the fact that Marvel Comics trademarked their Captain Marvel comic book during the interim between the original Captain Marvel's Fawcett years and DC years, DC Comics has to promote and market their Captain Marvel/Marvel Family properties under the title Shazam!.

If Superman needs lawyers to fight his battles for him ... well that's not very super, is it?

why I am a liberal

I'm proud to be a libertarian, but I sure don't love the word.

I will never forgive the left-liberals and neo-liberals for sullying the word I would have been proud to claim in any century previous to the 20th.

Ah, to live in a world where the following passage needed no special links or footnotes of explanation:

Liberalism is no religion, no world view, no party of special interests. It is no religion because it demands neither faith nor devotion, because there is nothing mystical about it, and because it has no dogmas. It is no world view because it does not try to explain the cosmos and because it says nothing and does not seek to say anything about the meaning and purpose of human existence. It is no party of special interests because it does not provide or seek to provide any special advantage whatsoever to any individual or any group. It is something entirely different. It is an ideology, a doctrine of the mutual relationship among the members of society and, at the same time, the application of this doctrine to the conduct of men in actual society. It promises nothing that exceeds what can be accomplished in society and through society. It seeks to give men only one thing, the peaceful, undisturbed development of material well-being for all, in order thereby to shield them from the external causes of pain and suffering as far as it lies within the power of social institutions to do so at all. To diminish suffering, to increase happiness: that is its aim.

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism

Here's another great one:

The enemies of liberalism have branded it as the party of the special interests of the capitalists. This is characteristic of their mentality. They simply cannot understand a political ideology as anything but the advocacy of certain special privileges opposed to the general welfare.

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism

And here's my whole list of them.

And here's a randomly selected quotation from Mises.

And here's one from Mises.org, also randomly selected:
And here's a whole book of them.

Sprachgefuhl

Because of this morning's post, a friend alerted me to this word:



She got it from a word-a-day mailing list. The email goes on:

If you have Sprachgefuhl, you have an ear for idiomatically appropriate language. The best illustration of Sprachgefuhl, or the lack of it, was an 1855 Portuguese-English phrase book intended to help Portuguese speakers master the English language.

Titled "English As She Is Spoke", it was authored by one Pedro Carolino. The only problem was that Pedro didn't know any English. On the plus side, he did have a Portuguese-French phrase book. Pedro simply picked up a French-English dictionary and tried the circuitous route: Portuguese to French to English. The result was such gems as:

Names for body parts:
"Of the Man: The inferior lip; The superior lip; The fat of the leg."

Food:
"Eatings: Some black pudding; A little mine; Hog fat; Some wigs; Vegetables boiled to a pap."

Swimming instructions:
"For to swim: I row upon the belly on the back and between two waters."

Idioms:
"Idiotism: Cat scalded fear the cold water."

This book was even used as a textbook in the Portuguese colony of Macao. I regret to say they eventually stopped using it. Imagine, in just a few years, we could have witnessed a lovely new strain of the English language take root.

Pedro was simply ahead of his time. Today anyone can achieve the same results with computer translation: http://google.com/language_tools

I love this word. It is vaguely autological and yet vaguely heterological at the same time. Germans have wonderful words, but the people themselves are not known for their Sprachgefuhl in English, g'bless'em.

Also, the diversity of Sprachgefuhl is why the division of labor allows me the job I have and also why my job is simultaneously fun, educational, and humbling.

homo-what-now?

Here's a word I always misspell, as do many, many economists:



[Note the usage distinction between homogenEous and homogenous.]

Just to be clear: I believe I have never once in my entire life spelled this word correctly, since spell-checker never alerted me to the fact that I was using an entirely different word.

Was LeFevre Interested in Economics?

Re this post by Jeffrey Tucker at blog.Mises.org:

Introduction to Lift Her Up, Tenderly

This is a textbook. It is designed to serve as the scaffolding around which a course in basic economics can be provided for students. Educators may possibly view it as a novel. Certainly, it is novel to discover a text about economics which contains human drama and emotion. The text is interesting. That contradicts all prior theories about economics.

Ever since Carlyle thundered his melancholy maledictions against the "gloomy science," scholars have reacted as though Carlyle were right. I think he was wrong. Without realizing it, Carlyle was probably reacting against the way economics is usually taught. If so, I can readily understand his pessimism and find myself equally uninspired.

All economic ideas are basically simple. That, in itself, may provide part of the difficulty economists have concerning the teaching of those ideas. After all, an economist is a human being and wishes to be respected and admired. How much respect and admiration will he engender if it is discovered that the course he teaches is so fundamentally simple that even children will readily understand it? Few persons holding doctoral degrees could attract the awe of the uninformed by interpreting Mother Goose.

In more than twenty years of studying and teaching economics, I have usually found that economic ideas which are really little more than common sense have been cloaked in such profundity that the discipline appears to be esoteric, abstruse, and far too difficult for the average adult to fully comprehend. However, if one will persist in probing the pedants who have constructed the most obtuse and convoluted definitions, one emerges finally with the realization that economics is something which could be taught in grade and high schools, while the student is quite young.

Let me provide an example. One economist has been receiving public recognition for his discovery of "demonstrated preference." Doesn't that sound impressive? What does it mean? It means that people often tell you something but act in a contrary manner. The point is that "actions speak louder than words," the old adage that anybody can understand. But who, without an interpreter, will immediately grasp that the ponderous, obfuscatory statement which sets forth the principle of "demonstration of preferences" means the same thing?

Then we have the earth-shaking theory of "marginal utility." This is such an important discovery that when it was first introduced, it virtually revolutionized the classic approach to economics. What it means is that people tend to favor those useful things which are most difficult to get. That could be summed up as "Easy come, easy go" plus "Hard to come by, bitter to lose." I did that last one myself because adages are fairly easy to construct and anyone can readily grasp the meaning.

In the United States, for many years emphasis has been placed on the physical sciences, technologies of various sorts, and supportive disciplines. The humanities and social studies have been either downgraded or construed into a kind of political format which virtually demands that the growing child submit all his problems to democratic decision-making. Before the youngster graduates from the grades, he has come to believe that he can get anything he wants if only he is popular enough and has a following. The verities of life are replaced by the processes of balloting. The values that make life worth living are shunted aside in favor of arrogant or submissive assurance that the numbers game governs all.

The formal teaching of economics has, unfortunately, tended to pursue this same direction. I am not seeking to downgrade or decry the importance of mathematical data nor the obvious usefulness of mathematical probabilities. What I am seeking to emphasize is that human values and common sense must take precedence. The basics ought to be taught to young people. And they should be taught in the home and in the early years in school. After such a foundation is laid, there's time enough for the computer.

Lift Her Up, Tenderly is pure fiction. A man in his fifties is the guardian of a twelve-year-old girl. The situations and dialogue are entirely imaginary. But the laws of economics (common sense) are suggested by the guardian and applied by the young lady in her efforts to deal with real life situations. I was influenced in preparing this text by my own experience in which I acted as an unofficial guardian for a young lady. Yes, there is a real Virginia.

My hope is that teachers will make use of this simple approach to economics and offer it as a course of study to young people in high school, or even in the grades.

Even more importantly, I hope that in its pages parents will rediscover the exciting and rewarding task of teaching their own children. Love alone is not enough. Physical maintenance, paying the bills, playing together -- none of these is enough. Learning the meaning and common sense of living is a life-long challenge for parents and children alike.

To the young people who may read these pages, I would urge patience. Your parents really do love you. They may or may not be technically skilled, they may or may not be rich, or famous, or applauded, but the living of life contains great values that can never be found by measuring and computing, by tallying votes, or by popularity contests. And you have many things to teach them, too. The learning process is always mutual.

Bob LeFevre
California, 1976

Austrian puns

A fellow Rothbardian, whose name rhymes with Phil Filigree, was delighted when his wife told him she'd be making manicotti and steak for dinner. Then, she laughed. She was kidding. She just said it because it sounds like the title of a certain Austrian treatise.

He suggested I come up with a recipe, but I'm not sure our steak budget is generous enough for such experimentation.

I googled the phrase to see if anyone else had thought of it. Indeed, one Scott Lahti, who tried to destroy the evidence by deleting his blog, once wrote the following:

... as an economist of the Austrian school, I would be remiss if I did not mention that far superior work on regional Chinese delicacies by one who was himself a master of epistemology - Hunan Action by Ludwig von Mises, whose great disciple, Murray Rothbard, refined his mentor's culinary-praxeologic insights from a vantage which diverged from the former in national cuisine and epistemology alike, in a work beloved of Brooklyn restaurateurs, the magisterial Manicotti and Steak, whose neo-Thomist epistemology found as much favor with local Jesuits as its Neapolitan pasta-and-beef offerings sated the appetites of two generations of libertarian mobsters.

And here are the obligatory bookstore links for anyone who doesn't get the puns:

contender criteria

What makes a Mises.org daily article a "Best of 2005" contender?

Here's what I had to say on the subject for my Best of 2004 nominations:

I don't know what criteria others will use, but for me, a "best article" should teach something foundational and important to a new reader. It should appeal to a neophyte, and it should probably correct a misconception -- since so much of people's implicit economic understanding is based in misconceptions. I want the reader to come away thinking That's so obvious, now! about a claim that first seemed counterintuitive. Based on these criteria, I'd pick Trask's Ten Recurring Fallacies. (Let me know what you think.)

By the way, a bad cold has been keeping my head fuzzy all week, so I probably won't post anything original until I'm healthy again. But if you're bored or just jonesing for bk's take on the world, you might look through last December's posts. That was a good blogging month for me ... and the posts are seasonal!

nominating 20 contenders

Cross-posted to blog.Mises.org:

December 14, 2005

Best of 2005

B.K. Marcus

It's that time again. Time to select the best articles of 2005.

I thought I'd get to ball rolling by nominating 20 contenders for a Top 10 list of best Daily Articles appearing this year on Mises.org.

(Someone else ought to jump in and start nominating best journal articles.)

So here are my 20 candidates, presented in chronological order:

Continue reading "Best of 2005"

the silly season

inspired by this past weekend's shopping

introducing Adele Mises

Boss man wanted this one turned into a daily article. So here it is.

What ever happened to sexy stews?

One of the things that's interesting about having been a television child in the 1970s is that my worldview was shaped by a series of unexplained present-tense crises and a vision of the recent past that looked so much warmer and more welcoming. The 1950s looked like Happy Days. The early 1960s looked like JFK and all the TV shows that bragged about being IN COLOR. Only in the 1970s did TV start to look dark and gritty, like the world outside.

One of the interesting things about taking up economics and history relatively late in life is that I can begin to unravel the mysteries of the world of my childhood.

Here's one:

What happened to all those
sexy stewardesses?
The sign that you were a jetsetting playboy used to be that you had a stewardess or two on your arm. On TV, one guy would be trying to get some other guy to be the necessary second guy for a double date: "They're stewardesses, Bob ... stewardesses!"

If I'd thought about it at all in my youth, I probably would have come up with candidate answers such as

1. Everything's getting worse; or
2. Damn feminists!

I suppose it's possible that I could have come up with a more economically sophisticated answer, such as

3. Supply & Demand: more passengers means more stewardesses means less exacting selection standards means moving lower toward the hump of the bell curve.

Here's an answer I would never have dreamed of:

Price Fixing
Yes, it's possible that there are fewer attractive stewardesses for similar reasons to there being fewer nuts in Murray Rothbard's Baby Ruth, or rip-off "toy" "surprises" in my childhood box of Cracker Jack.

Let's review the basics.

A price ceiling, when legal prices are not allowed to rise to their market-clearing level, causes shortages. There are more buyers at the legal price than there are sellers. Only the most efficient producers can afford to produce the controlled goods, because only they still have a margin between their costs and the legal price. Less efficient producers stop producing the controlled goods, steering those resources where there's more profit, or at least less risk of loss. Price ceilings explain bread riots and the so-called oil crisis of the 1970s. (No, it wasn't French aristocrats or Arab sheiks at fault.)

A price floor, when legal prices are not allowed to fall to their market level, causes gluts. There are fewer willing buyers than there are willing producers at the inflated prices. For agricultural goods, the result is that the government buys up all the surplus with coercively acquired funds. This hurts domestic taxpayers and foreign farmers. It also steers resources away from the goods people actually want, thereby hurting consumers as a whole. A too-seldom recognized form of price-floor-fixing is minimum wage law. Unemployment is a labor glut. Same economic laws apply.

So that's the review of basic price fixing, but the above summary assumes uniform goods at established quantity and quality.

With many goods, quality can vary significantly, not always in easy-to-measure ways. If people are used to paying 25� for a Baby Ruth, to use Rothbard's example, then the Baby Ruth company is going to be loath to raise the price to 50�, even if inflation has doubled all their input costs. What they do instead is cut whatever costs they can to keep the price at a quarter. So maybe they cut the number of peanuts in half, dilute the chocolate with cheaper vegetable oil, and make the candy bar 10% smaller. The product looks the same on the outside, and many people won't notice the difference on the inside. But fans of the Baby Ruth chocolate bar will notice that the quality has fallen.

In my case, it wasn't the falling quality of the candy I noticed, but the ever-crummier toy surprise in a box of Cracker Jack. Grownups would tell me about the whistles and decoder rings their childhood boxes of Cracker Jack had contained. Meanwhile, I watched plastic toys become cardboard-and-plastic toys become pure cardboard crapola.

Those are inflation examples, but similar dynamics are at work under a legislated cost ceiling of 25� for candy.

If price ceilings drive quality down, do price floors drive quality up?

In a sense, yes.

Suppose you used to be able to employ 3 unskilled, fresh-off-the-boat immigrants to perform a job at $1/hour each. And suppose a skilled craftsman for that job can do the same work as 3 unskilled men, but he charges $5/hour. Some people will employ the more expensive, higher quality craftsman, and others will employ the 3 less expensive, lower quality unskilled workers. Historically, the craftsmen don't like the unskilled competition, so they launch a minimum wage campaign: how dare anyone pay less than $4/hour?!

With the new price floor on labor, the 3 marginal workers are all unemployed while the demand rises for the "higher quality" labor product of the craftsmen.

It's not exactly the same thing with sexy stewardesses, but very close. According to Tom DiLorenzo's Mises U 2005 lecture on monopoly and competition, when the airlines were all cartelized, it was illegal for them to compete with each other on price. The result was that (1) only a certain jet set could afford to fly with any regularity, and (2) the airlines competed for these wealthier passengers not by cutting costs and lowering prices, but with comfy seats, free booze, and stews who looked like fashion models.

Once the industry was deregulated, however, the inefficient giants went out of business and the survivors found that they had to compete by cutting costs and lowering prices. At cheaper airfares, we unwashed masses started to fly more often, and airline flights became commoditized. Get me from here to there. I'll pack my own lunch and bring my own booze, thank you very much. If I want to stare at unattainable fashion models, I can bring a magazine.

There are plenty of people who will see this as an inherent failure on the part of the market -- Just look at how small the bag of peanuts is! Can you believe they charged me for that tiny bottle of scotch? -- but more people can travel more conveniently for less money.

If you want something fancier, you can pay for a first-class ticket. The fact that so many people don't fly first class tells us those dollars are better spent elsewhere.

I guess that leaves us free marketeers leading a lonely cheer for average-looking flight attendants.

... b'bye now ...

I have seen the future ...

... and it looks 50 years old.

Professor Marcus only teaches 3 times a week this semester. This means I get to enjoy lunch with her on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our recent habit is to watch an episode of some rented cartoon, such as The Simpsons, Futurama, or King of the Hill. These make nice 20-minute breaks to the work day. (TV sans commercials!)

But today was different. Today I noticed that Apple's iTunes store now offers television shows for download. Our leftover-Thanksgiving-meal lunch was accompanied by a Christmas episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents from 1955.

High technology makes half-century-old television convenient.

tasting the whole worm

Here's The Quaker Economist on the PBS television show, The Commanding Heights.

I wasn't wild about the show. It conflates classical liberalism with neo-liberalism, Austrian School with Chicago School, Misesian economics with Hayekian economics with Friedmanite economics ...

It gave Milton Friedman yet another opportunity to slander Ludwig von Mises with his "You are all a bunch of socialists!" story. (Friedman changes the details, timing, and location, depending on the telling, and no one else backs him up on its accuracy. Still, if Mises had said something so undiplomatic at some neo-liberal gathering, he would have been justified, if indelicate.)

But I was amazed that PBS put out anything remotely market-friendly. So I own the DVDs.

Someone wrote me about an email from Jay Hanson's DieOff.com attacking the series. Here is my reply, slightly edited:

Subject: Re: Hanson
Date: December 6, 2005 1:01:51 PM EST

what's you're read on where's he's coming from?
Do you see him as part of what you regard as "left"?

Well, yes and no. The left/right labels are limiting obviously. You can't accurately use a single dimension to designate multiple issues. I tend to equate anti-market and anti-economic ranting with the Left, but then people like Pat Buchanan are clearly on the Right, and he's no friend of either markets or economics. Rothbard wrote quite a bit on conservative anti-market sentiment.

I had my own reservations about the Commanding Heights series, as you know. The leftists and libertarians sound the same sometimes in our attacks against neo-liberalism, but they're angry at the liberalism (and I can't even tell if they understand the meaning of the "neo" prefix) whereas we are angry that the neos are sullying both liberalism (which the Left already did, of course) and now markets as well.

But I'm grateful in a sense for the term neo-liberalism. Leftist morons may not follow the importance of the prefix, but at least they're not leaving it off entirely. Marx may have popularized the term 'capitalism' but as I've said elsewhere, he at least started by defining it in a way that its supporters would agree with: free markets, free trade, private ownership of the means of production -- laissez faire. But then Marx and the Marxists go on to conflate laissez faire with political privilege, making it next to impossible to discuss laissez faire capitalism with anyone coming from the Left.

The difference between classical liberalism and neo-liberalism is exactly the same. The original was about less government. The newcomer is about more. At least we've moved past using one word to designate both meanings.

Anyway, I subjected myself to a few of Hanson's rants a few years ago. I found nothing valuable in them. He doesn't know economics and he doesn't know history. He is all noise. I don't need to taste the whole worm to know what it is.

laissez faire,
bkmarcus
www.bkmarcus.com

The slight editing involves my inserting "taste the whole worm" for something more impolite.

By the way, some linguistic geek trivia for those who didn't catch it:



Professor Spooner (no relation to Lysander, as far as I know) originally chastised his class, "You have tasted the whole worm!" when he meant to say that they had wasted the whole term.

Ludwig's Mother Remembers

Cross-posted to blog.Mises.org:

� Currency Manipulation in China And Japan | Main

December 05, 2005

Ludwig's Mother Remembers
B.K. Marcus

While looking up the names of some of Mises's relatives, I came upon this piece of personal history at JewishGen� ShtetLinks:

Adele Mises Remembers . . .

A Day in the House of My Parents

(Mrs. Adele Mises dictated her reminiscences to a relative around 1929. Born in 1858, she was a granddaughter of Moses Kallir, grandniece of Mayer Kallir, prominent citizens of Brody, a city then in Austrian Galicia, now in Ukraine.)

[read more]

I especially enjoyed Adele's description of the "potato raffle."

Posted by B.K. Marcus at December 5, 2005 12:30 PM

they have no political theory

Rothbard on Friedman&co.:

This is one of the problems with Friedmanites -- they have no political theory of the nature of the state. They think of the state, and this is true of Milton and the whole gang as far as I can see, as another social instrument. In other words, there is the market out here and then there is the state, which is another friendly neighborhood organization. You decide on which thing, which activity, should be private and which should be state on the basis of an ad hoc, utilitarian kind of approach. "Well, let's see, we'll feed the thing through the computer. We find that the market usually wins out, that the market is usually better." So, most of the time they come out in favor of the market on things like price control or government regulations, but they really think of the state as just another social instrument. And so when they come out in favor of the state, they go all out. In other words, there is no limitation. Well, they say, the state will do this. The state will run the educational system or whatever the cop out happens to be. So, they feed the thing in -- we'll have controls for a while and then they will die out -- it's not very important anyway. You see, they really think they can put through Friedmanism, let's say, just by educating Nixon. The sort of thing I said before jocularly, about Nixon reading Atlas Shrugged and being converted. That is really the sort of theory of social change the Friedmanites have. You see the President once in a while, you talk to him and you convince him that there shouldn't be price controls, the ICC should be eliminated, or whatever -- and then he goes ahead and does it. But it just doesn't work that way. They have no realization that the state is essentially a gang of thieves and looters. That they are exploiting the public, that they have a whole bureaucratic apparatus of exploitation, and that they are not just going to give it up. In other words, there is the whole problem of power involved which the Friedmanites refuse to face. They don't realize that the state is not a social instrument. It's an inimical organization which is hostile to society, plundering it, which has to be confined, whittled away, reduced and hopefully ultimately abolished. They have no conception of that at all. They just think of it as another friendly, corner grocer kind of thing which you either use or don't use.

"The New Banner Interview with Murray N. Rothbard"

on allying with the Left

Rothbard on splits and alliances:

NEW BANNER: At the outset, your newsletter, Libertarian Forum, was co-edited by Karl Hess. He has since departed. What ideological differences Led to this split?

ROTHBARD: [...] The concrete split came when I made a very tangential attack on the Black Panthers. [...] But more deep than that is the fact that Karl after having been an anarcho-capitalist for some time shifted over to become an anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist. I don't really see any basis for collaboration between the two groups, because even if we are both against the existing state, they would very quickly come up with another state. I don't think you can be an anarcho-communist or an anarcho-syndicalist. You know if the commune runs everything, and decides for everything, whether it is a neighborhood commune or a mass country commune -- it really does not matter in this case, somebody's got to make the communal decision. You can't tell me that you'll have participatory democracy and that everybody is going to equally participate. There is obviously going to be a small group, the officiating board or the statistical administrative board or whatever they want to call it, whatever it's going to be, it's going to be the same damn group making decisions for everybody. In other words, it's going to be a coercive decision for the collective property. It will be another state again, as far as I can see. So I really can't see any basis for collaboration. That is really part of a broader analysis of the communist versus the individualist position.

You see, I was one of the people who originated the idea of an alliance with the New Left. But I didn't think of it in these terms. I didn't think of an alliance with the New Left as living in communes with the Black Panthers. I thought of it as participating with the New Left in anti-draft actions or in opposition to the war. I conceived of a political rather than an ideological alliance. While we are both against the draft, let's have joint rallies to attack it, or something like that. This is a completely different sort of thing.

This incidentally has been a problem with libertarians for a long time. Both in the old days when they were always allied with the right-wing and now when they tend to be allied with the left. You start allying yourself with a group and pretty soon you find yourself as one of the group. In other words, the alliance slips away. Start with the idea that we are going to work with either conservatives or radicals for specific goals and somehow they start spending all their time with these people and they wind up as either conservatives or radicals. The libertarian goal drops away and the means become the ends. This is a very difficult problem because you don't want to be sectarian and have nothing to do with anybody. Then you're never going to succeed at all. I think that one of the answers to it is to have a libertarian group which is strong enough to keep reinforcing the libertarianism of our members.

[...]

NEW BANNER: Do you see any wisdom in anarcho-capitalists allying with today's New Left?

ROTHBARD: There is no New Left now. The New Left is really finished -- there isn't any such animal anymore. One of the reasons that I liked the New Left in the old days, in the middle-60's, was that there were a lot of libertarian elements in the New Left. Not only was there opposition to the war and the draft, but also opposition to bureaucracy, central government and so forth. But all that seems to have dropped out. There is really nothing going on in the New Left now at all.

NEW BANNER: Why do you think the New Left has never strongly supported the anti-draft movement? They seemed to have been more anti-war , but not concerned with anti-draft.

ROTHBARD: They were against the draft, but as you say, they didn't really have their heart in it. They really weren't against the draft. They are in favor of the People's Republic draft, when the People's Republic gets established. I remember when Castro first got in power in 1959. A lot of the more sincere Castro followers said that one of the great things about Castro was that he had abolished the draft. Of course, he had, but a couple years later it was back. So you see, they're against a draft by a reactionary government, but not by a people's government. Ha, ha.

"The New Banner Interview with Murray N. Rothbard"

criminal ignorance versus criminal knowledge

Today's LRC borrows a couple of its articles from elsewhere -- "The Economics of Jimmy Carter" (sennholz.com / lrc) and "Exclusive Interview With Murray Rothbard" (mises.org / lrc).

Jimmy Carter seems to be as criminally ignorant of economic law today as he was in the 1970s. Good intentions will kill us all.

Richard Nixon, on the other hand (whose fascist economics Rothbard addresses in the interview) had a bunch of Chicago School advisors, including Milton Friedman, telling him not to do what he then did. I'll post a little later on what Rothbard has to say on the Friedmanites, but one thing is clear: they know the perils of microeconomic centralization, price controls, minimum wage laws, etc.

This means Nixon was perfectly aware of the devastating effects his policies would inevitably have. But they won him re-election, which was apparently what mattered.

When I was growing up, Richard Nixon was the icon of all things evil. (This was before Ronald Reagan became the icon of all things evil.) How is it, then, that I knew nothing of the economic devastation the Nixon administration wrecked on the country? The most obvious answer is that I was raised and schooled on the Left, which has strong anti-fascist rhetoric, but no real problem with fascist economics.

right behind

"Imagine if, say, James Carville wrote a novel in which a band of heroic gay socialists defeated a voracious army of slack-jawed Bible-quoting Republicans to turn the world into a gigantic French-speaking free-love commune."

"Fundamentally unsound" by Michelle Goldberg

That's Michelle Goldberg's mirror-universe description of the Left Behind series, which her subtitle describes as "the bestselling series of paranoid, pro-Israel end-time thrillers," adding that it "may sound kooky, but America's right-wing leaders really believe this stuff."

When I first heard about this series on NPR, I bought the
"Dramatic Audio" edition: "An Experience in Sound and Drama". This wasn't the audiobook version, where a single voice actor reads the words from the print edition. This was like something made for radio. A play for voices, with a full cast and sound effects. I really enjoyed it.

The Rapture and End Times weren't part of either my Episcopal or Quaker schooling. The first I'd heard of any of it was in Heinlein's great novel, Job: A Comedy of Justice. Heinlein's theological science fiction is literalist only in the perverse and imaginative sense. Left Behind is literalist in the earnest, pressing sense. It reminded me of the televangelists I used to watch as a child (to my mother's alternating horror and bemusement).

I lent the CDs to a friend of mine, telling him I thought he'd find the series funny. He didn't. I think my recommendation had him expecting something more ironic. We were mutually confused. I thought, Hey, it's biblical literalist end-times fiction -- what did you expect?

It reminded me of the time a lesbian friend in college lent me a bunch of her pornography, a magazine called On Our Backs. I'd seen plenty of magazine covers from gay-male porn on every subway ride to and from high school. I've never seen the inside of one, but they're not too hard to imagine. Gay male culture was omnipresent in 1980s Manhattan. I had no idea what lesbian pornography would look like. The most fascinating thing about it was that (1) it was just as vaginally obsessed as hetero-male pornography, and (2) it looked nothing like hetero-male pornography. Entirely different aesthetic and presentation for a very similar subject matter.

I told my friend and boss and psychology professor about it. (That's one guy, not three.) He said he'd be curious to see the magazines when I was done with them. When he handed them back to me, he had that same baffled look that my more recent friend would have 15 years later as he handed back my Left Behind discs.

I said to my professor friend, "You look disappointed."

He said, "Yeah, I guess I was expecting something more ... intellectual?"

I said, "Come on, it's porn!"

(Somehow my post on biblical-literalist end-times fiction has turned into my lesbian pornmag story, but I guess I'll just go with it.)

I had a coffee date with the woman who had lent me her magazines. I returned them to her in the brown paper in which she'd originally given them to me. She started to take them out and ask me what I thought. My face began to burn and I asked her to put them back in the bag. "It's not polite to read pornography in public," I said.

So we chatted about other stuff. Then her girlfriend came into the cafe. My friend was the femme and her girlfriend was definitely the butch. Butch came in with her leather jacket, big black boots, buzz-cut hair. Stepped up onto our table and walked over it to sit on the windowsill. The windowsill where the brown paper bag currently sat.

Butch says, "Oh! Dirty magazines!" Takes them out and starts leafing through them.

My femme friend: "Brian says it's not polite to read pornography in public."

Butch girlfriend: "I'm not reading. I'm just lookin' at the pictures!"

Best of November (2004)

In keeping with my newly established tradition, I'll link to last year's "best of" at the end of each month, roughly.

My November 2005 scribblings are still on the top page at this point, but what was I scribbling a year ago?

November [archive]

signals to myself

signal interference

conspiracy theories

liberal anarchism

That Girl!

rising costs

Will the real fascists please stand up?

Thanksgiving & Private Property

The Ministry of Truth

a buck is a buck is a buck

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

MisterBixby said, "Wouldn't it be swell if the answer were 10?"

Yes it is.

It seems everyone got the numerical answer to yesterday's "pop quiz" correct. As iceberg points out, one dollar's worth of dimes and one dollar's worth of quarters both weigh exactly 22.68 grams. Mr. Carson did his research on Wikipedia. I did mine at usmint.gov.

I'm very curious about Joe's guess ("so that vending machines or parking meters can judge when you've put $1 in"). I doubt very much it's the main reason, but I'd like to look into how vending machines work and whether they were already prevalent in the age of silver coins. My own sense of the main reason for consistent coin weight is implicit in my answer to the question "Why do dimes and quarters still have milled edges?"

I also suspect that the inconsistent weight of new dollars (the Susan B. Anthony Dollar and the Sacagawea "Golden Dollar") has played a significant role in their failure as money.

Like the dime and the quarter, the Kennedy half-dollar is "reeded" (has milled edges) and has the same metallic distribution: "8.33% Nickel, Balance Copper". It weighs 11.34 grams, so 2 half-dollars weigh the same amount as 4 quarters or 10 dimes.

Here's what the FAQ on the website of the United States Mint has to say about coin size:

Why is the one-cent coin (the penny) larger than the ten-cent coin (the dime)? What determines the sizes of our coins?

The sizes of United States coins can help you to identify each one, but have nothing to do with their value. [emphasis added throughout by bk] The first U.S. five-cent coins (nickels) were made of silver, and were smaller than the ten-cent coins (dimes) in circulation today. You may be interested to know that our coinage system, to a certain extent, has grown out of custom or, in other words, out of daily use. When United States coins were first produced in 1793, our standard coin was the silver dollar. The United States Mint produced the rest of our coins (except the one-cent coin) in a proportionate metallic content to the dollar, with the sizes regulated accordingly. The half-dime (or five-cent denomination) had 1/20th the amount of silver contained in the dollar. Our 10-cent coin contained 1/10th the amount of silver, the quarter-dollar coin (the quarter) contained 1/4th the amount, and the half-dollar coin contained 1/2 the amount. Mint officials recognized the need for a larger five-cent coin because the half-dime was exactly half the size of the dime. This proved to be too small for convenient handling by the public. Adoption of the five-cent coin as we know it today occurred in 1866. The Mint increased the coin's size and changed its metallic content from silver and copper to a combination of copper and nickel.

Notice how they imply that the silver content of US minted coins was somehow a decision of the US mint, rather than a requirement for the coins to be treated as money. Notice how they label this requirement "custom". Notice how they call "The first U.S. five-cent coins" nickels. Why would a 5-cent coin have been called a "nickel" before it was made out of nickel? Isn't it more likely that the people themselves later called the new smooth-edged 5-cent token a nickel to distinguish it from the real silver coin it replaced?

You can find silver half-dimes on ebay.

This is how small they are: