calling the kettle black

At the bottom, Dubya has signed his name and then added:

("Liberty" being subject to definition and infringement by the commander in chief for purposes of national security as he defines them.)

Tom Toles is right about der f�hrer, of course.

But for a leftist to complain when someone changes the definition of the word "liberty" whenever it fits his political agenda is the height of hypocrisy!

the corporate state in action

From FEEmail:

Indiana Taxpayers on Hook for New Honda Plant
6/29/2006
"Indiana became the winner yesterday in a short five-way race to land the Honda Motor Company's newest assembly plant in North America. . . . The project will cost the State of Indiana about $140 million. Of that, $40 million will go directly to Honda; about $45 million will be spent on roads and other infrastructure to serve the plant, and another $50 to $55 million will go to improvements in the region in anticipation of growth caused by the plant." (New York Times, Thursday)

The corporate state in action.

FEE Timely Classic
"Quasi-Corporatism: America's Homegrown Fascism" (PDF) by Robert Higgs

Robert Higgs originally gave this talk here:

You can find it in Mises Media:

Quasi-Corporatism: America's Home-grown Fascism Audio Files		10/11/2005
Quasi-Corporatism: America's Home-grown Fascism (video) Video Files		10/12/2005

frightening ideologies

What Economics Is Not

The most common misunderstanding about economics is that it is only about money and commerce. The next step is easy: I care about more than money, and so should everyone, so let's leave economics to stockjobbers and money managers and otherwise dispense with its teachings. This is a fateful error, because, as Mises says, economics concerns everyone and everything."

- Lew Rockwell, "What Economics Is Not"

more Austrian puns

Here's the old "Austrian puns" post.

And here's the latest comment from Scott Lahti:

And furthermore -

Thanks to my praxeologist's
penchant for puissant-pun letters, I have another candidate in my series of improvised Austrian "word jazz" (apologies to Ken Nordine), the very incarnation of diminishing marginal utility: please allow me to introduce (not, per Sir "Rooster Lips" Jagger's immortal Satan-sympathetic ditty, "myself" but) that poetic ornament of Stuart-age English letters -

Mary Wroth, Bard (1587?-1651?),
at http://tinyurl.com/j2vja

If in my further excavation of the catacombs of libertarian genealogy I discover that her formative tutors included war-torn exiles from the Habsburg court, and neo-Thomist divines, and that she had family ties to Dutch colonies along the Hudson and East Rivers, and their first wave of immigrant Sons of Israel, I shall bolt from the tub instanter, raising my Archimedean you-shrieka alarums thus in a New Amsterdam Minuit.*

*As for Hebraic orthodoxy within the C17 Netherlands proper, every philosophy major has read of how the Pharisees among Dutch Jewry Amsterdamned their fledgling philosopher-immortal-to-be as a heretic, declaring their Tabernacle a no-Spinozone layer unto eternity...worldy redemption came soon enough, though, as the ostracized Baruch/Benedict moved downtown and formed the indie lute-distortion band Sophic Youth...speaking of excommuniques, I think at this rate I'm due any minute to be added to the Index of Scriptorum Prohibitum by the Popes of Auburn...

You heard it here first, folks:

Mary Wroth, Bard
A gen-u-ine historical personage.

I take credit only for spreading the word ...

beyond non-aggression

Today's Doonesbury provides the opportunity to point to a very good daily article from a couple years ago (to the day, in fact):

"Fairness with Your Coffee?" by N. Joseph Potts

Says Potts:

Before going further, I'd like to make it perfectly clear that it is entirely within coffee-bean buyers' rights to pay any price, including an inflated price, they can get growers to agree to. And I consider it entirely within the rights of coffee consumers to buy coffee represented to have been so purchased at any price the retailer is willing to part with it for. This is all voluntary. There are no governments involved and so, as far as I can see, no coercion.

So, why does it rankle me so? Am I so intensely uncharitable that the charity of others bothers me, even when it costs me nothing? How very refreshing it is, after all, not having the taxman threatening me with the armed might of the state if I should shirk in paying his levy!

So my objection to Fair Trade isn't a libertarian objection. There's nothing about smug ignorance that violates the non-aggression principle. I do have a strong semantic objection (As Potts says, "But worse, this is yet another Newspeak-style hijacking of the word, 'fair,' coupled here with 'trade' that bothers me.") But I'll leave the semantics alone for now, assuming that they'll be obvious from the rest of my objections, which are primarily intellectual and utilitarian.

Bad thinking is producing bad results. And the whole Fair Trade campaign is bad economic thinking at an almost cartoonish level. Potts again: "� la Bastiat, it's what is not seen that troubles me worst."

The issue of Fair Trade helps make clear that not all leftist dupes are philosophical collectivists. Some are merely methodological collectivists.

They want to help "the poor" -- but "the poor" is a false aggregate. The actions they take -- whether coercive, like minimum wage legislation, or voluntary and market-based, such as the whole "fair trade" swindle -- end up transferring wealth from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the poor (and to the wealthier people running the scam).

The whole concept of Fair Trade in the 21st-century West is socialist at its heart, even if not necessarily statist. It is based on the belief that the market price is unfair, that it necessarily involves exploitation, or is at least somehow arbitrary. So, the thinking goes, just pay more than the market price. But here's the kicker: this higher, "fairer" price is still a market price -- for a different product.

If I find out that gardeners in my area make only $10/hour and I think that's absurdly low, offering $20/hour may mollify my sense of social injustice, and ends up getting me a superior gardener, but in no way does it help the gardeners whose marginal productivity earns them $10/hour.

When fair traders realize this, they can either abandon the erroneous concept of a "fair price" other than the free-market price, or they can turn to more coercive actions such as minimum wage: outlaw the hiring of gardeners at only $10/hour. Again, the higher-skilled gardeners will immediately benefit from this action, but the guys whose gardening labor can only draw $10/hour on the free market will in no way benefit from now being coercively disemployed.

Fair Trade is the same story on a smaller (and yes, voluntary) scale. When you choose to spend your dollars on Fair Trade products, not only are you not helping out the poorest coffee growers or farm workers; you're actually steering wealth away from them. I don't know too many leftists who feel sanguine about further impoverishing the poorest of the working poor, and yet that's what all leftist economic policy amounts to -- even, it turns out, when that policy is pursued peacefully.

economics in 5 lessons

Two great resources for teaching basic economics to kids:

1. Today's daily article at Mises.org: "Teaching Basic Economics to Fifth Graders"


2. Today's new product at Shop Mises: Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?

on price-fixing and prostitution (sort of)

Thanks to the movementarian for pointing me to this:

Most visitors to the Cafe know the familiar arguments against minimum-wage legislation. Allow me here to spin the core argument -- that minimum-wage legislation prices many low-skilled workers out of their jobs -- by wondering aloud if proponents of higher minimum wages would ever make the following claim:

The market prices of most used-cars are too low for sellers of those cars to support their families. This fact is especially true for poor people, who, when they sell their old cars, almost always have only old, high-mileage, often dilapidated used-cars to sell. These people aren't selling two-year-old Lexuses or BMWs. They're selling 15-year-old Chevys and 20-year-old Hondas. So let's enact legislation mandating that no used-car can sell for less than, say, $25,000. That way, anyone who sells a used-car is assured that he or she will earn at least enough money to support a family for a year.

I'm still quite fond of this great quotation from Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan, commenting in The Wall Street Journal on the infamous Card-Krueger Study:

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

I think I should point out, however, that comparing the honorable practioners of the peaceful sex trade with the bevy of camp-follers is unfair to the whores. Let's leave working women out of it and just call the morally bankrupt bevy what they are.

To quote Hans Hoppe on the subject:

Of these two requirements -- intellectual competency and character -- the second is the more important, especially in these times. From a purely intellectual point of view, matters are comparatively easy. Most of the statist arguments that we hear day in and out are easily refuted as more or less economic nonsense. It is also not rare to encounter intellectuals who in private do not believe what they proclaim with great fanfare in public. They do not simply err. They deliberately say and write things they know to be untrue. They do not lack intellect; they lack morals. This in turn implies that one must be prepared not only to fight falsehood but also evil -- and this is a much more difficult and daring task. In addition to better knowledge, it requires courage.

Re the subject heading, I was talking about intellectual prostitution, so-called, not the oldest profession.

Yes you could offer an analogy where sexually non-repressed do-gooders notice that thousand-dollar-a-night call girls are generally healthy and comfortable whereas street walkers are diseased and miserable, so therefore let's legislate a $1000 minimum for sex workers ... but I'm not going to spell the whole thing out ...

We were all Bismarckians then.

In my "camouflaged as superliberalism" post, I link back to my Bismarckianism post of a year ago. Exactly a year ago today, as it turns out. I'm pleased to say that I think it holds up. I still agree with it. Either I was starting to figure things out back then or my mind is now calcifying into a complacent worldview.

Either way, here's a classic episode of lowercase liberty:

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

We are all Bismarckians now.

When Rothbardians talk of our opposition to the "Welfare-Warfare State" we are often taken to be implying that the enemy is a coalition of left- and right-wing statists, with Welfare on the Left and Warfare on the Right. This works in the recent American context, but from a larger historical perspective it doesn't work at all.

The first modern welfare state was a Machiavellian strategy on the part of Otto von Bismarck, the architect of the German Empire. There was nothing ideological about it. Bismarck knew that the impoverished masses were in favor of liberalism. The poor of the 19th century understood that free markets and free trade would improve their lives, and they recognized mercantilism, protectionism, and other forms of statist privilege as the enemies and oppressors of common people. By creating a new generation of dependents, Bismarck effectively denied the German liberals the support of the masses.

(Just as the state monopoly on education created a class of dependent academics and denied the liberals their old position in the intellectual mainstream.)

This was clearly socialism of the welfare-statist variety, but notice that it was not at all what we would currently call left-wing. It was not remotely egalitarian.

Left-wing socialism -- the kind most people think of when they hear the S-word -- is an egalitarian attack, not just on the economy, but on all the institutions of culture and civilization, both Old Regime and bourgeois. Right-wing socialism, in contrast, is the coercive attempt to give permanence to the current power establishment -- The Establishment -- a power base in constant fear of the changes that liberalism brings. Ironically, the bourgeoisie (the very "class" created by liberalism) and the poor and working masses (whose lot is improved by liberalism and ultimately made worse by the state) become the populist coalition behind right-wing socialism.

I go on to talk about fascism then and now.

Keep reading, if you like.

Mises on piggybanks and pinkos

Yet more from The AntiCapitalistic Mentality by Ludwig von Mises:

All pseudoeconomic doctrines which depreciate the role of saving and capital accumulation are absurd. What con�stitutes the greater wealth of a capitalistic society as against the smaller wealth of a noncapitalistic society is the fact that the available supply of capital goods is greater in the former than in the latter. What has improved the wage earners' standard of living is the fact that the capital equipment per head of the men eager to earn wages has increased. It is a consequence of this fact that an ever increasing portion of the total amount of usable goods produced goes to the wage earners. None of the passionate tirades of Marx, Keynes and a host of less well known authors could show a weak point in the statement that there is only one means to raise wage rates permanently and for the benefit of all those ea�ger to earn wages -- namely, to accelerate the increase in capital available as against population. If this be "unjust," then the blame rests with nature and not with man.

[emphasis added]

camouflaged as superliberalism

More from The AntiCapitalistic Mentality by Ludwig von Mises:

No less a man than Bismarck, among the nineteenth-century statesmen the foremost foe of liberty, bears witness to the fact that even in the Prussia of Frederick William III the Gymnasium was a stronghold of republicanism. The passionate endeavors to eliminate the classical studies from the curriculum of the liberal education and thus virtually to destroy its very character were one of the major manifestations of the revival of the servile ideology.

It is a fact that a hundred years ago only a few people anticipated the overpowering momentum which the antiliberal ideas were destined to acquire in a very short time. The ideal of liberty seemed to be so firmly rooted that everybody thought that no reactionary movement could ever succeed in eradicating it. It is true, it would have been a hopeless venture to attack freedom openly and to advocate unfeignedly a return to subjection and bondage. But antiliberalism got hold of people's minds camouflaged as superliberalism, as the fulfillment and consummation of the very ideas of freedom and liberty. It came disguised as socialism, communism, and planning.

No intelligent man could fail to recognize that what the socialists, communists, and planners were aiming at was the most radical abolition of the individual's freedom and the establishment of government omnipotence. Yet the immense majority of the socialist intellectuals were convinced that in fighting for socialism they were fighting for freedom. They called themselves left-wingers and democrats, and nowadays they are even claiming for themselves the epithet liberals.

our fair share of machines

From The AntiCapitalistic Mentality by Ludwig von Mises:

The World Council of Churches, an ecumenical organi�za�tion of Protestant Churches, declared in 1948: "Justice demands that the inhabitants of Asia and Africa, for in�stance, should have the benefits of more machine produc�tion." This makes sense only if one implies that the Lord presented mankind with a def�inite quantity of machines and expected that these contrivances will be distributed equally among the various nations. Yet the capitalistic countries were bad enough to take possession of much more of this stock than "justice" would have assigned to them and thus to deprive the inhabitants of Asia and Africa of their fair portion. What a shame!

The truth is that the accumulation of capital and its in�vest�ment in machines, the source of the comparatively greater wealth of the Western peoples, are due exclusively to laissez-faire capi�talism which the same document of the churches passionately misrepresents and rejects on moral grounds. It is not the fault of the capitalists that the Asiatics and Afri�cans did not adopt those ideologies and policies which would have made the evolution of autochthonous capitalism possi�ble. Neither is it the fault of the capitalists that the policies of these nations thwarted the attempts of foreign investors to give them "the benefits of more machine production." No one contests that what makes hundreds of mil�lions in Asia and Africa destitute is that they cling to primitive methods of production and miss the benefits which the employ�ment of better tools and up-to-date technological designs could be�stow upon them. But there is only one means to relieve their distress -- namely, the full adoption of laissez-faire capitalism. What they need is private enterprise and the accumulation of new capital, capitalists and entrepreneurs. It is nonsensical to blame capitalism and the capitalistic nations of the West for the plight the backward peoples have brought upon themselves. [...]

All those rejecting capitalism on moral grounds as an unfair system are deluded by their failure to comprehend what capital is, how it comes into existence and how it is maintained, and what the benefits are which are derived from its employment in production processes.

[emphasis added]

eye of the beholder

From today's A.Word.A.Day mailing:

From: Rhana Bazzini
Subject: Words and meanings

I've been meaning to tell this story for ages and am just getting around to it.

Many years ago when I was teaching first grade in a small town in CT. I had an epiphany......I think I can call it that. It was a time when Julie Andrews's movie "Mary Poppins" came out and everyone was fascinated with the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. My first graders just loved to say it. I thought this a great opportunity to introduce new words to the children.

Toward the end of each day when the children were a bit tired and restless I'd put a new word on the board, show then a picture illustrating the word and ask them what they thought it meant. I was introducing the word grotesque with a picture of an angler fish, very grotesque to most people :-) The hands went up with words like ugly, horrible, scary etc. I noticed one of my brightest students sitting at her desk with a very puzzled expression on her face. Cynthia, what's the matter I asked. Well, Mrs Bazzini everyone is saying such mean things about him and I think he's beautiful.

The eye of the beholder. One of those priceless "teacher" moments.

piggybank pinko

These 1940s capitalism cartoons (1, 2) reminded me to check up on our old friend over at www.Captain-Capitalism.com.

When I first encountered this muscle-bound icon of economic illiteracy, I wrote about it here and on blog.Mises:

The good and funny folks at Powerhouse Animation have brought us a new, schizophrenic version of the square-jawed, patriotic superhero[...]

Check out the "Economy" animation in which Captain-Capitalism explains to us that the health of the economy is based on spending readily -- but only with domestic producers.

Oh well, what can you expect from a flag-worshipper with a nuclear pistol?

Well, he's at it again:

I was an ardent advocate of the free market as an ethical principle long before I accepted captitalism as an economic blessing, a practical strategy toward general prosperity.

It was only 3 years ago that I was still struggling with the big C. A domain name that I reserved but then abandoned as it became less accurate was www.ReluctantCapitalist.com.

At the time, I was watching Ric Burns's documentary on New York. (Ric and Ken Burns are both documentarians, and both devout Hamiltonians, as it turns out. That's really all you have to know to make any sense out of Ken Burns's Civil War film.)

At the same time that I was watching the New York documentary, I was discovering Mises.org (after having listened to the audiobook version of Henry Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson.) These Austrians were the most ideologically pure pro-capitalists I'd encountered. As much or more so than Ayn Rand and much more palatable to me -- plus, the Austrians seemed extremely focused on history, which appealed to me.

Meanwhile, on the New York documentary, the message of the earliest episodes was clear: Hamilton, Hamilton, Hamilton!

What was puzzling, however, was that everyone was describing Hamilton's economic philosophy as "capitalism"! New York City was supposedly the result of mixing Hamiltonian capitalism with a thousand different ethnicities.

From the Austrians, on the other hand, I was learning that Hamilton was the enemy of free-market capitalism, that capitalism understood ideologically as the private ownership of the means of production was incompatible with Hamilton's system of central banking, public debt, and corporate welfare. What Hamilton was promoting was an American version of the British mercantilism that Adam Smith had debunked in The Wealth of Nations. Just what exactly was this Ric Burns character trying to pull?

The Republicans have been rightwing Keynesians since President "We are all Keynesians now" Nixon. Supplyside economics is rightwing Keynesiansism. It's all about a government-managed economy. It's all about spend, spend, spend, where the glory of true capitalism is in saving and investing, in the increased structure of capital and the increased division of labor. (I'm not going to worry here about how those things get distorted by the fractional-reserve business cycle.)

The maker(s) of Captain Capitalism clearly think that the Republicans speak for capitalism. "Piggybank Pinko" is a funny attack on Keynesianism that (I'm pretty sure) thinks it's an attack on capitalism.

Meet King Joe

Garry North this week on his website announces his discovery of archive.org and the pro-capitalism cartoons of former Disney cartoonist, John Sutherland.

Two of the animated shorts North points to (1, 2) are in the list I gave on Thursday. Here's one I missed:

http://shurl.org/kingjoe
North gives more details:

In the late 1940s, a former Disney cartoonist, John Sutherland, started his own cartoon production company. Various organizations hired the company to produce cartoons about the free market. Some of these cartoons are really quite good. I saw one of them, "Meet King Joe," back in 1959. It was produced in 1949 for the National Education Program at Harding College, a Church of Christ college in Searcy, Arkansas. In 1949, Harding College was unique: politically conservative, pro-free market. It still is at the top of my list as the country's most conservative college, department for department. Harding's president, George S. Benson, was a great believer in free markets. The cartoon is 8 minutes long. It's ideal for 4th graders or 5th graders.

paying twice for statist indoctrination

I am the product of private schooling. For most of my life I've been aware of how much better my schooling was than the government standard. Only in the past 5 or 10 years have I become aware of just how much the private schools are teaching the government's agenda. What this means is that private schools are better than government schools at teaching government propaganda. My family paid twice -- once through taxes and once through tuition -- to have me indoctrinated in statist history and statist assumptions. The people who paid those taxes and tuitions were statists themselves, so maybe they don't mind, but I do.

I was recently telling the missus that the primary reason for homeschooling as a movement is Christian, and that the secondary reason is libertarian (or some version of anti-statist), but while I hear about the superiority of a homeschooling education, I never hear superior education as a specific goal or rationale of the movement.

While I definitely fit into the anti-statist category of homeschoolers, I'd still choose to homeschool before sending my son to an elite libertarian academy (if one existed and I had the money for it) because I can't imagine him getting as good an education from anyone other than us -- not because we have such superior educations or because we're such superior teachers, but because no one will ever care more about our child's education than we will, and no one will ever devote as much thought and effort to it.

There have been a couple of interesting LRC articles on homeschooling this week. Today's contribution from Brad Edmonds spends most of its time conveying the horror story that is government schooling.

He makes this very important point:

Yes, there are honest teachers and administrators, but their efforts are wasted in a system that discourages competence and high performance, and rewards only loyalty to the teachers' unions.

Unions exist to protect union members at the expense of every other stakeholder, and teachers' unions are no exception.

Which leads to a point that is of growing concern to me:

Results: Other unionized employees, such as government police, join in the victimization of children. While teachers horrifically abuse students and the public trust, teachers and cops see to it that even the smallest children who misbehave can be arrested, taken to jail, and charged with a felony.

Recent experience has reminded me how little contact we want with government officials. We had a small fire on the deck last spring that I thought I'd put out with a garden hose. Twelve hours later, the fire started up again and I called the fire department. The result of that call was a letter from the city telling me I was now in violation of building codes. Why was I in violation? Because of the fire! I won't go into all the sordid details, but that one call to 911 resulted in much more contact with a truly inept systems (e.g., the inspection to confirm that I was now up-to-code was scheduled (a) for a day the entire city government was closed for holiday, and (b) 3 weeks before the minimum amount of time required to get the necessary building permit to do the repairs needed to get up-to-code...) all because the people who put out the fire are required to serve a policing function for city government. If a private alternative were available, I doubt they'd narc out their customers to the government, especially for non-crimes.

There are other recent examples, but I won't go into them. That one was already longer than I'd intended.

The point is: the less contact with government -- even the most seemingly useful or benign branches of government -- the safer we are. That will go more than double for a small kid.

But Brad Edmonds concludes his piece with a point I don't hear discussed enough:

What of private schools? There are some so good that the first year or two of college is a review for their graduates. However, few private schools teach anything but the official government party line with regard to history and economics; and some are downright unhealthy, with most of the girls anorexic and most of the boys lecherous party animals. Private schools are often far better than government schools, but still not as effective, affordable, or healthy as home schooling.

That one very important and underdiscussed point was a single paragraph in Edmonds's piece, but it was the theme of an entire article from Gary North earlier this week:

"Why Home Schools Are Superior to Private Schools"

Most of the non-Christians I know either avoid reading Christian writers who are addressing Christian audiences, or they seek such material out only as a sort of "Know Thy Enemy" strategy.

Secular homeschoolers should learn everything we can from the vanguard of the movement. We owe a lot to them. They have the experience. They've put a lot of time and a lot of thought into homeschooling, and it hasn't all been about the evils of Darwinism and the "Homosexual Agenda".

I'm definitely attracted, for example, to the general principles of the Robinson Curriculum, mentioned in North's article.

I think atheist anarchists have a lot to learn from paleoconservative Christians.

emancipated only yesterday

Speaking of history, here's what Ralph Raico tells us of the significance of history to classical liberal class conflict theory, according to the great 19th-century French radical liberal, Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry:

Thierry stresses the role of historical writing in aiding in the great struggle.
We are the Sons of these serfs, of these tributaries, of these bourgeois that the conquerors devoured at will; we owe them all that we are." History, which should have transmitted memories of this tradition to us, "has been in the pay of the enemies of our fathers ... Slaves emancipated only yesterday, our memory has for a long time recalled to us only the families and the acts of our masters."

Raico is quoting from the Censeur Europ�en, which he discusses in a talk given at the Mises Institute's Marx and Marxism conference held in October, 1988. Professor Raico's talk is available in MP3.

born-again capitalists

Here are some pro-capitalism propaganda shorts from around the 1940s. There was certainly nothing like this when I was growing up, and if there had been, I'm sure my little red schoolmates and I would have laughed at it.

I never heard anything positive said about capitalism during my childhood.

Why were these films being made at the time? Most of them are labeled "Cold War Era" but I don't think that captures it. As the American Right demonstrated for decades, you can be viciously anti-Communist without being remotely pro-freedom.

In the 19th century, the main assault on free enterprise was from the Republican Party, which, following its spiritual ancestors, the Federalist and Whig parties, promoted "government/business" partnerships. Adam Smith had called this arrangement "mercantilism" and his Wealth of Nations was written as a rejection of it. I don't know what Hamilton called it, but under the Whigs and early Republicans it was called "The American System" and its proponents were Big Business, trying to eliminate the competition from below.

In the 20th century, this "partnership" arrangement came to be known as "corporatism" or "fascism" and was the driving economic vision behind the so-called Progressive Movement. Again, Big Business was the driving force behind Big Government. Socialists may have provided the rhetoric and the rank-and-file, but it was organized business funding and maintaining the assault on liberalism and laissez-faire.

As I understand it, FDR's New Deal had 2 stages, first the fascist and later the communist. If the political capitalists were leading the early assault on economic capitalism, it was the labor unions and the Communist Party who continued the later assault. Big Business came to realize that FDR was not really their friend, and that the New Deal, which began as a cartelizing of American industry, was becoming evermore socialist in the scary lefty anti-commerce sense.

Suddenly the capitalists rediscovered capitalism, and began fighting a rearguard action against the anti-capitalistic movement that they themselves had started. (Yes, I'm slipping into some sloppy, collectivist language: it wasn't necessarily the same individual capitalists switching sides, but I'm pretty confident it was a lot of the same organizations, including the Republican Party.)

Somewhere between the era of these films and my childhood, they seem to have given up. I don't know if it's because they admitted defeat or because they regained control of the government. Some of the Mises and Rothbard I've read suggest it was the latter. Anyway, these film shorts are the artifacts of that in-between era, when capitalists were rediscovering the virtues of capitalism.

(By the way, my remedial study of history is proceeding very slowly. Please feel free to correct me on any part of this you think I got wrong.)

Tannehillian terminology

I hate sloppy semantics. It's not just an aesthetic issue, some pet peeve I have, but rather the belief that semantic pollution is the basis of bad thinking and pernicious persuasion. Those who control the language control the debate, control the agenda, control the narrow range of default positions ...

(It's not that I'm trying to take over that position of control. I just believe that intellectual precision is our best defense against Establishment manipulation.)

I do occasionally update the BlackCrayon dictionary, but BlackCrayon.com is at this point mostly an archive of my early philosophical anarchism, not an ongoing project. I'd like to port parts of it over to bkmarcus.com, which I'd maintain more vigilantly. (This requires me to become tech-geeky again in a way I'm hesitant to do, but I'll eventually get around to it.)

Meanwhile, I blog the issues as they come up, yesterday's epistle on extremism being the most recent example.

Today, I will share instead the terminological precision of Linda and Morris Tannehill, after a few of my own comments on confusion over the concept of coercion.

To a libertarian, the non-agression principle seems very straight-forward. So much so that we are baffled by others' confusion.

Sometimes people grasp the concept of non-aggression, and approve of it, but have no idea what the word "principle" really means.

Sometimes people grasp both "non-aggression" and "principle" but fail to understand that groups don't have any greater rights than those possessed by group members -- in other words, many people are philosophical collectivists without even realizing it. The dominant ideology of the contemporary West is majoritarian democracy: the belief that 51% can decide whether something is right or wrong.

Then there are pure individualists -- anarchists even -- who don't understand why the threat of force is itself a form of force, or why fraud, or even outright theft, are still forms of aggression, whether or not anyone is actually injured physically. At the other pole, we have some "minarchists" who think that being rude or cruel should count as forms of coercion, or who count non-scarce, non-tangibles (i.e., "intellectual 'property'") as potential targets of aggression.

Ultimately, I do think we have to appeal to property theory to explain what is and isn't coercion, even in the supposedly non-economic cases, but I think the Tannehills do an admirable job of trying to lock down all the potential confusions on what I still think should be the straight-forward question of COERCION:

The society we propose is based on one fundamental principle: No man or group of men -- including any group of men calling themselves "the government" -- is entitled to initiate (that is, to start) the use of physical force, the threat of force, or any substitute for force (such as fraud) against any other man or grouop of men. This means that no man, no gang, and no government may morally use force in even the smallest degree against even the most unimportant individual so long as that individual has not himself initiated force.[1]
--
[1] The terms "initiated force" and "coercion" are used to include not only the actual initiation of force but also the threat of such force and any substitute for force. This is because a man can be coerced into acting against his will by threats or deprived of a value by force-substitutes, such as fraud or theft by stealth, just as surely as he can by the actual use of physical force. The threat of force is intimidation, which is, itself, a form of force.

(from chapter 1)

Another great source of confusion and equivocation is the term FREE MARKET:

The free-market system, which the bureaucrats and politicians blame so energetically for almost everything, is nothing more than individuals trading with each other in a market free from political interference. Because of the tremendous benefits of trade under a division of labor, there will always be markets. A market is a network of voluntary economic exchanges; it includes all willing exchanges which do not involve the use of coercion against anyone. (If A hires B to murder C, this is not a market phenomenon, as it involves the use of initiated force against C. Because force destroys values and disrupts trade, the market can only exist in an environment of peace and freedom; to the extent that force exists, the market is destroyed. Initiated force, being destructive of the market, cannot be a part of the market.)
[...]
To the extent that voluntary trade relationships are no interfered with (prohibited, regulated, taxed, subsidized, etc.), the market is free. Since governments have always made a practice of interfering with markets, and indeed depend on such interferences in the form of taxes, licenses, etc., for their very existence, there has never been a sizable and well-developed market which was totally free.

(from chapter 3)

On SOCIALISM and FASCISM:

The United States of America, though theoretically a free country, suffers from an almost unbelievable amount of market regulation. Though often called a capitalistic country, the USA actually has a mixed economy -- a mixture of some government-permitted "freedom," a little socialism, and a lot of fascism. Socialism is a system in which the government owns and controls the means of production (supposedly for "the good of the people," but, in actual practice, for the good of the politicians). Fascism is a system in which the government leaves nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legislation and reaps most of the profit by means of heavy taxation. In effect, fascism is simply a more subtle form of government ownership than is socialism. Under fascism, producers are allowed to keep a nominal title to their possessions and to bear all the risks involved in entrepreneurship, while the government has most of the actual control and gets a great deal of the profits (and takes none of the risks). The USA is moving increasingly away from a free-market economy and toward fascist totalitarianism.

(from chapter 3)

Following Albert Jay Nock, I try to maintain the distinction between "government" which is a potentially voluntary activity, as with the governing bodies of contractual groups, and the State, which, following Hans Hoppe, I now define as "A compulsory territorial monopoly on final judgments." (I'll try to blog about this Hoppean definition soon.) The Tannehills do not make any such distinction:

Government is a coercive monopoly which has assumed power over and certain responsibilities for every human being within the geographical area which it claims as its own. A coercive monopoly is an institution maintained by the threat and/or use of physical force -- the initiation of force -- to prohibit competitors from entering its field of endeavor. (A coercive monopoly may also use force to compel "customer loyalty," as, for example, a "protection" racket.)

Government has exclusive possession and control within its geographical area of whatever functions it is able to relegate to itself, and it maintains this control by force of its laws and its guns, both against other governments and against any private individuals who might object to its domination. To the extent that it controls any function, it either prohibits competition (as with the delivery of first class mail) or permits it on a limited basis only (as with the American education system). It compels its citizen-customers by force of law either to buy its services or, if they don't want them, to pay for them anyway.

(from chapter 4)

I, extremist

Today's Non-Sequitur is upsetting on several levels.

Seeing Danae in a concentration camp had the effect on me I'm sure Wiley sought. And I'm the last person to claim that there's anything inherently wrong with references to Hitler or the Holocaust (see "In Defense of Referencing Hitler") but when you make such comparisons, you'd better be clear on the parallel, and you'd better be right.

Having learned where and why the old man involuntarily received his numerical tattoo, Danae wonders why he hasn't had it removed...

I don't know whether Wiley meant to be targeting neocon war hawks, the Religious Right, the Bush administration, or extremists in general, but the words he chose explicitly target all political extremists, which would include me.

As Karl Hess wrote for Barry Goldwater,
...extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Every attack on political extremism is an attack on principle. The consistent application of principle is by definition extremist (so long as we're actually defining terms and using them consistently, rather than appealing always and only to emotional reflexes). It should be clear to anyone who can keep his knee from jerking for 30 seconds, that the problem isn't extremism per se, but rather which ideology is being applied in the extreme. Extreme pacifists will tend to behave quite differently from extreme nationalists. Extreme libertarians (i.e., liberal anarchists) will not lock people up just because of their background, whereas extreme egalitarians already have.

The standard attack on extremism is not an appeal to reason, but its opposite: the conflation of ideologies and the decrying of principle.

So according to Wiley, extremism in the defense of liberty can lead to another Holocaust. Try to figure that one out!

The problem isn't only with confusion on the words principle and extremism; there's also the standard problem that comes from the leftist map of politics. The Left and Right dichotomy may have started with 18th and 19th-century French republicans, but it has been applied throughout the world (especially the West) by 20th-century socialists.

First the Left is defined as progress, as it was for the French (and for classical liberals in general, back when progressives were the people who opposed the Ancien Regime). But now "progress" is linked to the State as egalitarian regulator, social safety net, etc. Thus "Progressives" are always calling for bigger and ever more pervasive government.

The Right, in contrast, is anyone opposed to the Left, anyone opposed to their vision of progress. We are the reactionaries, again by definition. For the socialists who controlled and continue to control the political language of Establishment intellectuals, all opponents of socialism are rightwing -- to varying degrees. So the classical liberals were rightwing, but then so were the fascists.

You might object, isn't fascism just nationalist socialism? Didn't the national socialists oppose liberal capitalism just as much as they opposed illiberal Communism? Sure, but to the left-socialists, any non-egalitarian socialists weren't real socialists. Since the fascists claimed to be defending the bourgeoisie and were, in fact, the dominant opposition to the Communists in many parts of the world, they were really the Right. Maybe these rightwingers said they opposed free-market capitalism, but any good socialist could see right through that: fascism was clearly the epitome of capitalism! (I'm not making this up.)

It didn't matter that classical liberalism and fascism are completely at odds, ideologically -- that one is based on individualism and laissez-faire, while the other is based on national collectivism and economic corpratism -- the Left just asserted that one led inexorably to the other, and we've been lumped together as rightwing extremists ever since.

I have no emotional attachment to the word extremist. I'm not trying to hold onto it the way I'm trying to hold on to the word liberal. I just don't like it when people throw more mud into already muddy waters.

• See Rothbard on moderation.
• See BK on moderation.
• See BlackCrayon.com on centrism.

Postscript to anyone who says that this is "just semantics": if you care about justice, if you care about meaning, then a just semantics is exactly what you care about.

PPS: If the leftwing scare-tactic smear term is "extremist" then the rightwing scare-tactic smear term is "radical". They're not equivalent terms, since radicalism is about perceiving both the problem and the solution as being at the "root" or foundation of the status quo, whereas extremism can designate any position, pro- or anti-radical, taken to the extreme. I am a radical extremist in the Rothbardian tradition, which is neither violent nor revolutionary. (Unfortunately, Murray Rothbard himself was responsible for some confusion on this point back in the 1960s.) Not all extremism is violent, just as not all radicalism is red.

short shrift

I have a friend who edits technical articles for medical journals. He says it helps him to do his job that he doesn't understand or care much about the content of the articles.

I'm the opposite. I have a hard time imagining doing editorial work in a subject area I don't care about.

I once edited a newsletter for a professional psychoanalytic society. Fascinating.

Now, of course, I only do libertarian stuff. Even better.

(Though it's true that I might catch more mistakes in a dense monograph than I will in a piece where I get swept up in the writing.)

One of the great benefits of this work, no matter what the subject, is how much I learn about the language itself, just from the professional habit of looking everything up.

For example, when Murray Rothbard writes that "Baumol's concept of the 'community indifference curve,' which he purports to build up from individual curves, deserves the shortest possible shrift," I realize that I'm used to hearing the phrase "short shrift" and know what it means in context, but I have no idea where the term comes from or why it means what it means.





So shrift is absolution from a priest, and short shrift used to refer to the brief period between condemnation and execution, presumably when you made your last confession. Therefore "giving something short shrift" means giving something very little time between condemnation and execution.

I like it.

Genesis 3:16

[Cross-posted to baby blog.]

At our last childbirth class, after about an hour and a half discussing labor pain (although mostly avoiding the word "pain" for some reason), the instructor asked the class why childbirth involves pain.

My very first thought was about the evolution of the human brain, the cranial capacity to accomodate it, etc. But I kept all that to myself, because I assumed the teacher wanted to make a different point.

My second thought was about the Garden of Eden, and I contemplated (very briefly) making a joke by saying in my best dumb voice, "Something about a snake and an apple, right?" But I kept that to myself, too. (And yes, my time out among other human beings is largely spent thinking of things that I then force myself not to say.)

Nathalie was the first to raise her hand. The answer she offered: "Information."

The childbirth teacher praised her answer and talked about how we would know what stage of labor we were in from the degree and duration of pain, etc.

I thought about all the reading I had done on the subject of pain back in my senior year of college, when I had originally considered it as a philosophy thesis. I studied torture, surgery, phantom pain ...

Here's one of my favorite quotes from my biological psychology professor:

Pain is an emotion masquerading as a sensation."

These thoughts kept me from hearing the other one or two answers offered by other couples in the childbirth class. Mostly I was thinking how this "purpose of pain" talk was better-suited to a religion class. Pain is the product of our evolutionary history. It has less "purpose" than we tend to think.

Then the teacher said, "What else? What's the reason for pain in childbirth?"

The class was silent.

She said, "Genesis 3:16. You might want to look it up when you get home."

We were dumbstruck. I thought, Hey! That was my joke!

But of course, she wasn't joking.

In case you don't know the passage, here it is:

the source

From the very beginning of this blog, I've had the same main quote in the sidebar:

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

- Murray Rothbard

Only recently did I realize that I couldn't cite the source.

I think I must have first encountered it in Making Economic Sense, but I can't find it.

Today's daily at Mises.org is the original source: January 1, 1970 (meaning it was written in late '69). It gives us some interesting surrounding context:

It is no accident that it was precisely the economists in the Communist countries who led the rush away from communism, socialism, and central planning, and toward free markets. It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. Yet this sort of aggressive ignorance is inherent in the creed of anarcho-communism.

strike 3

against the state, that is

(That's my lowercase version of an LRC-type headline.)

I confess it: I'm an imposter. I've only read 2 of the 3 great 20th-century manifestos of free market anarchism:

Only tonight have I finally received manifesto #3, The Market for Liberty, by Linda and Morris Tannehill.

This is from the foreword by Karl Hess:

The fundamental question of politics has always been whether there should be politics.

Morris and Linda Tannehill, in this book, which has become something of a classic even while being (until now) out of print, answer that politics is not necessary, that the ancient and ongoing contrivance of the marketplace can be substituted for it with ennobling results.

Advocates of state power will of course recoil from the idea and point out that it is all idle dreaming, that the state has always existed and must always exist lest brutal humans descend into, horrors, ANARCHY. They are correct, of course. Without the state there would be anarchy for that is, despite all of the perfervid ravings of the Marxist Left and statist Right, all that anarchy means -- the absence of the state, the opportunity for liberty.