pro-choice

When I was in 9th grade, my best friend and future best man went to school two blocks away.

This post isn't about him.

I was in private school and he was in a "magnet" school -- meaning a government school that you had to take a special test to get into. We'd known each other since we were 5. We went to the same day camp in the summer, but then different day schools during the year; we went to the same middle school, but then went to different high schools; we went to the same college, but then he went on to graduate school and I didn't. I did follow him down to his university town, however, which is why I live in Charlottesville (even though he moved back to New York).

This post isn't about any of that, but it comes to mind because I was thinking back on the first time I ever saw the slogan

Pro-Choice

...

He was wearing it on a button after school one day. When his school let out, he'd come over the 2 blocks and hang out with me at my school. I asked him where he'd gotten the button. He said some girl had pinned it on his lapel as he was leaving school. I told him I thought it was the best button I'd ever seen. He explained to me that it didn't mean what it said.

Oh no?

No, it only refers to the choice to have an abortion.

Oh, man, what a let-down!

I once saw a libertarian button or bumper sticker or something that said:

I'm Pro-Choice On Everything
I was past displaying slogans when I saw it, but if I were a button-wearer or bumper-sticker putter-onner I would have definitely gone with that one.

This post isn't about abortion either, though it is sort of about what my friend and I thought the slogan should have referred to:

Writing in the pages of The American Prospect, [prominent feminist thinker Linda] Hirshman argued that "feminism has largely failed in its goals." As she explained [...] this problem is largely traceable to the fact that too many women are staying at home with their children. In particular, she attacked the notion that women should feel free to choose motherhood as a life calling. In attacking "choice feminism," Hirshman asserts that women who give themselves to mothering undermine the status of all women and threaten the emergence of an egalitarian civilization.

The added emphases are mine. The rest comes from crosswalk.com via ifeminists.net.

Here's another great quote from this thoroughly anti-choice feminist:

"I am saying an educated, competent adult's place is in the office."

coercion and contract

From FEE:

Executions and the Morning-After Pill: When Can One Refuse?

2/27/2006

"No one disputes that there are circumstances in which people have a fundamental right to assert a moral or religious objection to performing duties ? such as military service ? and thus cannot be pressed by law into performing them. The problem lies in sorting out who can opt out and when. Consider, through that lens, the parallels between California physicians who refused last week to participate in the execution of a convicted killer and the growing numbers of pharmacists around the country who refuse to dispense morning-after pills." (Washington Post, Monday)

Basic distinctions between state and private sector -- coercion and contract -- would be helpful. [emphasis added by bk]

FEE Timely Classic

"The Person and His Society" by Edmund A. Opitz

Hear, hear!*

To the libertarian, so many of what generally pass for tough questions aren't tough at all.

Is that because we're simplistic zealots who see a multi-hued world in black and white?

Or is it because the questions themselves are based in statist assumptions that depend on the conflation of coercion and contract. To read them properly, we have to highlight the assumed starting phrase, "Assuming the legitimacy of initiatory coercion..." and recognize that rest of the question can usually be summarized as "When is it going too far?"

In other words: no principles; all judgment calls.

Feh.

Hoppean sociology

I often like Hans Hoppe's presentations of pure economic theory, whereas I am significantly less a fan of his sociology. His social theory often challenges my prejudices, but also often has me wishing I could more directly challenge his.

This weekend, however, my reactions are reversed. I quite liked his "Economics of Taxation" article on Friday, but the Mises.org weekend read -- "The Sociology of Taxation" -- is just phenomenal. None of it offends me. Doesn't even prickle. With Hoppe, that's really saying something.

But if that sounds like damnation by faint praise, let me clarify: I think Hoppe's summary of taxation as a social phenomenon (in the context of his summary of taxation as an economic phenomenon) is one of the best things I've ever read on the topic of government.

The two articles together comprise chapter 2 of The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, newly published by the Mises Institute.

I guess I'll have to read the whole thing.



Between this weekend's read and last Monday's "Stateless in Somalia, and Loving It" by Yumi Kim, I think it's been a banner week for anti-political reading.

Clinton the Republican

I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992.

Last major party candidate I ever voted for.

As a civil libertarian (I scored North-West the first time I took the WSPQ) who remembered Nixon and Watergate as the major event of childhood and then came of age under Reagan and Bush, I associated the GOP with Big Brother and militarism. I voted Democrat every chance I got (almost) until one of them actually won. Then I felt burned.

It was Clinton who taught me that the problem is government itself, not who's in charge.

In the years between 1992 and 1999, I heard a lot of this from the Left:

"Bill Clinton is the best
Republican president
we've ever had."

Right on!

Or, um, maybe kinda on and kinda off. I agreed with the leftists (of which I then considered myself one) because that sumbitch didn't give a damn about privacy (or any other "civil" liberty), was centralizing everything, and starting little wars all over the place.

But that's not what the lefties meant. They meant that that sumbitch wasn't enough of a socialist.

So much for common cause.

homesteading the ephemeral

I grew up in New York City, where parking is already scarce without a snowstorm.

Once I had my license, my grandmother paid me a dollar a day to find her a parking spot.

(For those who don't know NYC: alternate-side-of-the-street-parking laws mean your spot is only good until tomorrow.)

Ever since leaving New York, I've found parking to be plentiful. It's one of the many reasons I've liked everywhere else I've lived better than New York.

The building we've lived in for a couple of years now (in the Pennsylvania town we'll be leaving soon so we can raise our son back in central Virginia) has a parking lot for its tenants. So long as only tenants use it, there's rarely a problem finding a place to park. Until it snows.

About a year ago, digging my wife's car out from under the feet of snow that the plow had pushed on top of it, I started thinking about Lockean/Rothbardian homesteading theory, and how it might apply to circumstances more temporary than those we normally consider when talking about property rights.

If I dig out a parking space and drive to work (ha!) only to find someone else in "my" space when I return, am I wrong to feel robbed? Do I need the scare-quotes around "my" or is the space rightly mine? (Not in the sense of statute or municipal law, obviously, but in the ethical or natural law sense.)

A nominal parking space is not an actual parking space if actual cars can't get to it. In the context of the snowstorm, I'm creating the actual parking space by digging out the nominal parking space. By mixing my labor -- not with Locke's land but with the space over the asphalt -- am I not bringing property into being? Again, not in the long-term sense, but in the context of the snowstorm?

What I liked about the example is precisely that it does not fit most people's understanding of property, which is associated, if not with land, then with things. But according to Rothbardian property theory, property is not in things but in the use of things.

I consider this to be the single most misunderstood point of private property theory, especially among those who consider themselves opposed to private property.

I figured I'd either blog the thought or write something up for Mises.org. Here it is a year later, another snowstorm come and gone, and I never did get around to writing any of it down.

But Jesse Walker has made my point for me:

Reason: This Asphalt Is Mine! Homesteaders in the snow

Walker has done his usual professional job of journalism -- with real people in the real world -- whereas my own thinking remained, as usual, at the theoretical level.

Superseding the Apprentice System

This is from How the West Grew Rich, pp. 173ff:

2. Superseding the Apprentice System

To evaluate the impact of the factory on Braudel's "sub-proletariat" or, in current terms, the least-advantaged members of eighteenth-century society, it is necessary to consider the part played by the antecedent apprentice system in the antecedent artisan industry. There it was customary to train workers through a long apprenticeship. Access to an apprenticeship was frequently restricted at the outset by the necessity of paying the master a substantial sum in advance, both for the support of the apprentice and for the master's instruction. Access was also restricted by guild rules limiting the number of apprentices a master might teach at one time.

An even more fundamental restriction was the practice of prolonging the apprenticeship. The usual term of the medieval apprenticeship was seven years. One purpose was to teach the apprentice all aspects of the craft. In some crafts, this meant acquiring skill in every step of producing the final product. In crafts where there was no specific product to be produced repetitively, it meant acquiring a range of skills defined in some other way, perhaps by the material being shaped (gold, silver, wood, leather, for examples). A second purpose of the prolonged apprenticeship was to give the master the benefit of the apprentice's labor for a period of time. This unpaid labor was rationalized as part of the master's compensation for instructing the apprentice.

The apprentice system restricted access to employment and it also restricted the production of goods. Its effect on the prices exacted of those outside the system -- often buyers poorer than the guildmasters -- was monopolistic, resulting from the restriction of access to the guild trades and the consequent restriction of the supply of goods. Secondarily, it reflected the wastefulness of unnecessarily prolonged training. Its persistence can be attributed to the fact that the guilds exercised combined political and economic functions, and so had the power to enforce uneconomic arrangements highly beneficial to themselves and highly injurious to the other members of society, including the very poor. Happily, the guilds were typically municipal political agencies, so that their writ did not run to the countryside. When factories were introduced, the legal power of the guilds was evaded by locating them in areas outside the guilds' jurisdiction. The medieval flight to the cities to escape the oppression of the manors ended as a return to the countryside to escape the oppression of the guilds.

There were, in the eighteenth century, a numerous subproletariat who had no funds to buy tools, no skills in their use, no possibility of supporting themselves through the years of an apprenticeship, none of the personal influence needed to obtain an apprenticeship, and no money to buy one. It was from this subproletariat that the early factories often drew their labor, even to the point of emptying an occasional poorhouse en masse.

Neither the entrepreneurs who built the factories nor anyone else supposed that they were engaged in a work of charity or an exercise of social conscience. But whatever the moral quality of their intentions, their actions advanced the interests of a down-trodden subproletariat -- a subproletariat in part, perhaps, characteristic of pre-industrial societies and, in part, drawn from an agricultural work force hard pressed by the enclosure movement and a high rate of growth in agricultural productivity.

The reaction of the English middle class to all this remains a fascinating case study in social pathology. Having for centuries seen no better use for the poor than supplying an opportunity for their betters to exercise, with due moderation and modesty, the virtues of charity and compassion, much of middle-class England perceived the factory system not as a significant social advance, but as a ruthless exploitation of the poor. Just below the middle class were the artisans, whose guild rules had long blocked all but privileged access to much of the everyday world of work. They did not think of themselves as monopolists at long last caught up with, but as victims of a new and highly unfair form of competition. Literary England, by and large, shared the opinion of both the middle class and the artisans. The reality could hardly have been more absurdly caricatured.

househusband fairytales

For prenatal storytime, I've been reading The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904 sequel to the Wonderful Wizard). In the story, an army of girls from throughout the land of Oz, have taken over the Emerald City. His Majesty the Scarecrow fled the city and sought the aid of his old friend The Nickel-Plated Emperor (formerly known as the Tin Woodman). The Emperor has promised to return His Majesty the Scarecrow to his rightful place on the throne of Emerald City ...

Then, swinging his axe in a great circle to right and left before him, he advanced upon the gate, and the others followed him without hesitation.

The girls, who had expected no resistance whatever, were terrified by the sweep of the glittering axe and fled screaming into the city; so that our travelers passed the gates in safety and marched down the green marble pavement of the wide street toward the royal palace.

"At this rate we will soon have your Majesty upon the throne again," said the Tin Woodman, laughing at his easy conquest of the guards.

"Thank you, friend Nick," returned the Scarecrow, gratefully. "Nothing can resist your kind heart and your sharp axe."

As they passed the rows of houses they saw through the open doors that men were sweeping and dusting and washing dishes, while the women sat around in groups, gossiping and laughing.

"What has happened?" the Scarecrow asked a sad-looking man with a bushy beard, who wore an apron and was wheeling a baby-carriage along the sidewalk.

"Why, we've had a revolution, your Majesty as you ought to know very well," replied the man; "and since you went away the women have been running things to suit themselves. I'm glad you have decided to come back and restore order, for doing housework and minding the children is wearing out the strength of every man in the Emerald City."

"Hm!" said the Scarecrow, thoughtfully. "If it is such hard work as you say, how did the women manage it so easily?"

"I really do not know" replied the man, with a deep sigh. "Perhaps the women are made of castiron."

Why Benjamin?

Q:

Why will this little guy be named Benjamin?

A:

Because his mother vetoed the name Lysander.

a nickel-plated emperor

What do you call it when someone defends position X by falsely claiming that your argument against X commits the strawman fallacy?

I'd like to propose this:

The Tinman Fallacy

For example, see Vache Folle's claims for postmodernism. Then see my comment on his blog:

VF, I think you'd quite like Robert Anton Wilson's books on science, psychology, faith, and agnosticism. Start with Quantum Psychology. Wilson very briefly called himself postmodern, but then changed his mind when he discovered the crazy nonsense that other postmoderns were claiming.

My problems with your argument are (1) what you claim are strawmen are actually flesh-and-blood people ardently arguing in the name of postmodernism for what you claim postmodernism isn't; I went to school with them; I studied under them; I read them; I fled them; (2) when I tried, as a philosophy major in an advanced undergraduate class on postmodernism (though that term was in neither the course's short main title nor its long subtitle), to salvage postmodernism in the name of a metacultural model agnosticism, the professor gave me a lower-than-usual grade and told me I was stuck in linear thinking and scientific models. I'm pretty sure she'd grade your blog post similarly.

If postmodernism means anything (and this is a by no means clear), then it means what you say it doesn't mean. It certainly does not mean what you say it means.

bk

PS That same professor once accused me of fighting straw dogs.

Straw DOGS?

I guess she thought the "strawman" label was sexist. But then I have to assume that she doesn't realize that "dog" is actually the masculine form of "bitch" -- just ask a breeder.

Chapter 2

"A Secret History of the Boom and Bust"

From the book "Speaking of Liberty," as read by the author, Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., 15 February 2006, pp. 25-40.

Podcast feed:

http://www.mises.org/audiobookRSS.aspx

iTunes:

itpc://www.mises.org/audiobookRSS.aspx

I'm not even going to mention P-Day

(dis)engage

Jeffrey Tucker can be really good:

Thus says the Economist: So many foreigners are down on the US that polls reveal that we are wondering "What's the point...of engaging with such people?... Many Americans wish to disengage from the world in one or more of four ways: by fighting fewer wars, by trading less freely, by allowing fewer foreigners into their country or by giving less foreign aid."

Now, this is just strange language and a crazy mix of radically different behaviors. Let's reduce this to the level of a single neighborhood to see just how strange. The Smiths live next to the Joneses. The Smiths are beginning to think that they should disengage from the Joneses. For example, the Smiths might stop breaking into the Jones' house and ransacking the place. They might stop loaning and borrowing sugar. They might stop inviting them to dinner. And they might stop robbing others and putting the loot in the Jones' mailbox.

Read the rest.

the State celebrates itself

From FEE.org:

Virginians Observe School-Board Appreciation Month
2/13/2006
"In Virginia, February is School Board Appreciation Month, which should not be confused with National School Board Recognition Month ? in January. That's a lot of appreciation and recognition, say some parents and school officials in the Washington area, many of whom wonder whether the tradition, despite its quaintness, amounts to an unseemly display of public relations." (Washington Post, Monday)
Appreciation for what?
FEE Timely Classic
"The Origins of the Public School" by Robert P. Murphy

the alleged doctor

Am I the last person in the world to know that the word nerd comes from Dr. Seuss?

Am I the last person in the world to know that Dr. Seuss did some pretty frightening war propaganda about the Japanese (including Japanese Americans)?

the right to vote

There are property rights. There is no right to steal. There is no right to vote to steal. A majority voting to steal is no different in principle than a majority voting for a lynching."

George Reisman,
"Under Siege: Voting Rights of Felons or Property Rights of Citizens?"

Reisman's point is important and well stated (especially for someone who rejects libertarian anarchism), but there's also an important comment from "David C":

While I don't like the notion of anybody voting who would tend to want to use government to take away my freedoms, it seems to me like it just leaves way too much subjective room for the government to decide who can vote and who can't. Just how long would it be before it would extend over to unauthorized drug possession, then to unauthorized firearms ownership, then to breaking tax law, then to "unruly" protesters.

crypto fascists

A certain Aristotelian brought this to my attention:



NSA.gov/kids

---

Here's what I'm reminded of:

no child left behind ...

audiophilia

Here's another moment of I'm-so-proud:

February 09, 2006

Speaking of Liberty
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Over the next couple of months, I'll be recording my book Speaking of Liberty in preparation for an audio book. We'll podcast each chapter as they are completed. Here is the Introduction and Chapter 1.

You can subscribe to the new Mises.org Audio Book Podcast at http://www.mises.org/audiobookRSS.aspx.

Link post | 10:07 AM | Comments (0) | contact Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. | other posts

never trust a conservative

I've written fondly of Thomas Sowell here, here, here, and of course here.

I said in my first withdrawl of support for MLK2:

And of course, any contemporary free-market black writers are vilified as sell-out Uncle Tom race-traitors. This makes Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams personal heroes of mine, whatever conservatism of theirs I might disagree with.

Now this sad news from Lew Rockwell:

February 08, 2006

Thomas Sowell, Regime Libertarian

Posted by Lew Rockwell at February 8, 2006 12:30 PM

It is sad, if not surprising, to see Sowell endorse the police state. (Thanks to Norm Singleton for the link.)

The Republican Ideology of the Total State

I laughed out loud (yes, a literal LOL) at this punchline from Anthony Gregory:

On Monday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, one of the few men who could make a libertarian miss John Ashcroft, defended the president's dictatorial power grab by invoking precedent: "President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale," Gonzales said.

Putting aside the absurdity of George Washington in the late 18th century authorizing "electronic surveillance on a far broader scale" than what Bush has done, we see here a truly unpleasant line of argument: If the very worst presidents of American history did it, then President Bush can do it too.

---

Update:

The Quotable Rockwell

All licensed professionals earn more than a market wage;
that is the point of licensure, artificially to decrease supply and raise incomes at the expense of the consumers (and potential competitors).

The evil Flexner Commission, almost a century ago, led to the closing of many medical schools, and the AMA and related cartels have worked hard to keep supply low ever since.

Lew Rockwell,
"Doctors Exempt From Economics?"

more than vaporware

New from the Molinari Institute:



I plan to buy one of each.

Greenspan's gift to you

Q: Mr. Greenspan, how do you account for the phenomenal rise in the price of gold over the past several years?

A: Well, when we talk about the "price" of gold, we mean the number of dollar-denominated Federal Reserve Notes currently traded for each ounce of gold on the open market. To ask why the dollar-price of gold is rising so dramatically is equivalent to asking why the gold-price of dollar notes is falling so precipitously. You see, after centuries of exploration and mining, we've got a relatively stable supply of gold. As I'm sure you all remember from intro econ, price is set by a combination of supply and demand. Since the supply of gold isn't changing much, the assumption most people make is that a change in the dollar-price of gold is a change in the demand for gold. But they're leaving out another possibility: changes in the supply of dollars. For the past eighteen and a half years, I've been steadily increasing the dollar supply -- though maybe nothing like my successor is going to do, look out!

Q: Um. I, uh, I see. Sir, we were led to believe you'd be saying something about terrorists ... and, um, general uneasiness -- something along those lines.

A: Oh, Good Lord, yes! Is this thing on? I thought we were speaking off the record. What was I thinking? No, I certainly didn't mean to imply that I had anything to do with the diminishing value of everyone's dollars. No, you're quite right:
It's terrorists!

[Note from bk: If I had any extra Federal Reserve Notes right now, I'd be buying gold first thing tomorrow morning.]

---

Update:

"Buy Silver or Gold?" by Gary North
(N.B., the section on "THE GOLD-LEASING OPERATION")

30-odd years

eanwhile, it is starting to be noticed that chronically high unemployment has almost wholly drained away the bargaining power of labour in the private sector.

Union militancy is now confined to the public sector — essentially, to public transport workers, teachers and government clerks.

-odd years of socialist economic policies have reduced the mythical, red flag waving 'working class' to passive impotence.

Anthony de Jasay

"Winning Policy Battles,
but Losing the War
Against Economic Realities"

In case you don't know what Anthony de Jasay is talking about, let me quote his closing paragraph from an earlier essay:

The irony of it all is that chronically high unemployment is the unmistakable product of the very policies, pursued ever more intensively over the last thirty years, that socialist governments of all hues have put in place to make income distribution more equal, protect the workers, achieve "social justice" and banish "unequal exchange". It is thanks to these policies that "globalisation", the export of jobs and the flight of enterprise, has come to present a genuine menace to the ordinary worker. Not for the first time, his avowed advocates are proving to be his worst enemies.

"The Doctrine of 'Unequal Exchange':
The Last Refuge of Modern Socialism?"

If I only had a ...

Cross-posted to lowercase marcus:

how to fold a shirt

A friend sent me this video a couple years ago. I was amazed and amused, and figured I'd have to slow it down and give it a try myself. It's taken me this long to get around to it.

Yes, it really does work. I've learned something from the Internet. Now if only I could find someone to certify that I know it ...

What you mean WE, paleface?

That the government is at war, no sane person would deny. But we are no more at war than we are governing the country, and that is true whether the plural pronoun refers to the peoples or people of America, the nation, or the country.

H. Arthur Scott Trask,
"War, What War?
On the Fantasy and Usefulness
of a Permanent State of Siege"

Batman versus the State

Cross-posted to blog.Mises.org:

February 02, 2006

Batman versus the State
B.K. Marcus

Libertarian comicbook writer Paul Pope is at it again.

The creator of the famed 1998 comic Batman & Mises has now written Batman: Year One Hundred.

Is the Dark Knight battling Nazis again? No, this time his target is Police State America!

According to the current Wired magazine,

The series is set in a high-anxiety future, where totalitarianism has nearly snuffed out the remnants of humanity. America in 2039 is a police state, individual liberties have been curtailed, and there's a dark sense of impending doom. Roving police squads, Blade Runner-esque floating vehicles, and robotic watchdogs scan the skyline... A distressed-looking Batman is the only person Big Brother fails to track, and the superhero's mask symbolizes the last hope against a corrupt government encroaching on individual privacy.

More on the Misesian crusader here and here.

February 2, 2006 06:27 PM | contact B.K. Marcus | other posts

iPrax

synthesis

Thesis:


Antithesis: