how to tie your shoes

Man, it took me forever to learn to tie my shoes. The gym teacher in 2nd and 3rd grade never stopped complaining about it.

Actually, that's not exactly true. I did know how to tie my shoes. Some kid in kindergarten showed me how. But they never stayed tied for more than a dozen steps. I still don't know what my problem was. To this day I tie my laces with a double-knot to keep them from coming undone.

Meanwhile, iceberg, who remembers the "how to fold a shirt" video, has informed me that there in an accelerated way to tie your shoes:

1. The old way.
2. The new way.
3. A longer look at the new way (with explanation).

the wolf and the lamb

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: the Fabian crest

From Aesop's Fables, translated by George Fyler Townsend:

WOLF, meeting with a Lamb astray from the fold, resolved not to lay violent hands on him, but to find some plea to justify to the Lamb the Wolf's right to eat him.

He thus addressed him: "Sirrah, last year you grossly insulted me."

"Indeed," bleated the Lamb in a mournful tone of voice, "I was not then born."

Then said the Wolf, "You feed in my pasture."

"No, good sir," replied the Lamb, "I have not yet tasted grass."

Again said the Wolf, "You drink of my well."

"No," exclaimed the Lamb, "I never yet drank water, for as yet my mother's milk is both food and drink to me."

Upon which the Wolf seized him and ate him up, saying, "Well! I won't remain supperless, even though you refute every one of my imputations."

private law weekend

We didn't plan it this way, but serendipity has made this Private Law Weekend over at Mises.org.

Friday's daily article:

"The Idea of a Private Law Society" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Weekend article:

"The Market For Liberty" by Linda and Morris Tannehill

For a New Liberty podcast chapter:

"The Public Sector, Part 3: Police, Law, and the Courts" by Murray Rothbard

incorrectables

Stephen Carson has pointed me to a very useful page:

Non-Errors
I make regular use of Professor Paul Brians's "Common Errors in English" web pages, but I had not yet encountered that one.

What Brians calls "hypercorrection" -- when someone is so anxious to get something right that they "over-apply" (misapply) a rule -- is similar to but distinct from a phenomenon I label "incorrection" (whose verb form is "to incorrect"). Incorrection is when I use a non-error and you tell me I'm in error.

More than once, I've said I felt bad about something and someone has incorrected me: "You mean you felt badly!"

Or when I say that something is between my wife and me, and I am incorrected: "'My wife and I!'"

Or when I use the word "girl" and a feminist tells me that I mean "woman" -- and yet I'm referring to a female minor.

However, I think many of the distinctions that Brians labels as "Non-Errors" are nevertheless quite useful distinctions:

• Using "between" for only two, "among" for more
• Gender vs. sex
• Using "who" for people, "that" for animals and inanimate objects
• Lend vs. loan
• Regime vs. regimen
• Don't use "reference" to mean "cite."
• Persuade vs. convince
• "Preventive" is the adjective, "preventative" the noun.
• People are healthy; vegetables are healthful.
• Dinner is done; people are finished.
• Crops are raised; children are reared.

I was raised ... ahem, I mean reared to believe that grammar and meaning were established by usage. My father, the former English prof, used the term "prescriptive grammarian" only as a derogative.

I think descriptive grammar and semantics are critically important, as is distinguishing the prescriptive from the descriptive, but it now strikes me as absurd to prescribe away prescription.

If the purpose of language is thought and communication, then it certainly follows that there will be better and worse uses of language, just as there are more and less successful approaches to thinking and communicating.

Any distinction that communicates useful information is a distinction I want to promote, and it's silly to imagine that mass-usage will reflect the most important distinctions. Usage will reflect conflations. Grammar and vocabulary that mirror those conflations are only "correct" in the purely descriptive sense, and again, pure description isn't the only useful job for people who focus on the mechanics of language.

The distinction between "ain't" and "isn't" is purely cultural and stylistic -- semantically arbitrary at its foundation. But the pure descriptivist would tell us that "liberal" means socialist, that "United States" is a singular noun, that "coin" means token, and that "inflation" is the general rise of nominal prices.

Most of us equate prescriptive linguistics with social conservatism, but I think my examples should show that descriptivism reflects the real conservative impulse: an implicit defense of the status quo -- any status quo.

In our statist culture, the implicitly prescriptive form of descriptivism is a stealth defense of the most insidious conflations. (Try saying that 10 times fast.)

Freethinkers need the discipline of linguistic distinctions, whether or not the conflations count as errors.

---

But surely, you might object (as one comrade already did after reading a draft of this post), you're not trying to blur the distinction between errors in speaking and writing and errors in thinking! Brians is concerned with the former; you are discussing the latter.

What I'm trying to say, actually, is that errors in thinking, when they are built into language usage, should count as errors in speaking and writing.

abyss abyssum invocat

Thanks to Christopher Westley for sharing this excerpt from the Time Magazine review of Ludwig von Mises's Omnipotent Government from June 19, 1944:

Facing the future, Mises is filled with gloom. He sees no willingness anywhere to return to the free market. To him there is little difference between British Liberals, British Tories and British Laborites; they all believe in the gospel of government interventionism. Hitler, says Mises, must be defeated. But in defeating him, Mises thinks it likely that the whole world will become fascist. Such, to him, is the logical end of "interventionist" economics, whether it bears the label of "liberalism," "progressivism," "New Dealism," or what not.

slavery forever

The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution reads:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

But that's only the version that actually passed. Before it (and before the War of Secession) there was a very different 13th Amendment created by Lincoln himself and passed by a primarily Northern House and Senate after the South had seceded:

No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

(See US House of Representatives, 106th Congress, 2nd Session, The Constitution of the United States of America: Unratified Amendments, Doc. No. 106-214)

Today on LRC, Tom DiLorenzo's article opens:

On July 19 the Associated Press and Reuter?s reported an "amazing find" at a museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania: A copy of a letter dated March 16, 1861, and signed by Abraham Lincoln imploring the governor of Florida to rally political support for a constitutional amendment that would have legally enshrined slavery in the U.S. Constitution.

Actually, the letter is not at all "amazing" to anyone familiar with the real Lincoln....

Read the rest:

"The Lincoln Cult's Latest Cover-Up"

lost tools of learning

My comrade, Stephen Carson, who just left a good link in his comment on the Straight Dope, maintains a list of homeschooling links that I find very helpful.

Reviewing his list today, I read for the first time "The Lost Tools of Learning" by Dorothy Sayers. It gave me a jolt to read something so eerily familiar when its contents were so utterly unprecedented for me.

Here's what I wrote to a friend and future homescooler:

Do you remember on one of our many hikes when, during one my many rants against the politically correct cultural agenda of my own schooling, I made up a ... I'm not sure what to call it: education theory? teaching method?

I said I thought the best way to teach kids would be in 3 separate stages:

1. Literacy
2. Metalearning
3. Cultural Agenda

And I said that I considered the first two essential and the third one optional. Most important was that the third one not take place before or during the first two.

By literacy I meant "the 3 Rs" and by metalearning I meant learning how to learn, where the subject matter was not nearly as important as the tools for learning any particular subject.

By cultural agenda, I meant the music and literature and "social studies" that are the focus of the PC cabal. I didn't think this last one was essential, but I recognized it as part of what we mean when we describe someone as "educated".

Well, it turns out that my 3-part scheme maps pretty well onto the medieval method as described by Dorothy Sayers in her essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning":

The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium. The second part--the Quadrivium--consisted of "subjects," and need not for the moment concern us. The interesting thing for us is the composition of the Trivium, which preceded the Quadrivium and was the preliminary discipline for it. It consisted of three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order.

Now the first thing we notice is that two at any rate of these "subjects" are not what we should call "subjects" at all: they are only methods of dealing with subjects. Grammar, indeed, is a "subject" in the sense that it does mean definitely learning a language--at that period it meant learning Latin. But language itself is simply the medium in which thought is expressed. The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to "subjects" at all.

It seems to me that the Trivium maps to my metalearning ("To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.") and the Quadrivium to what I was calling the cultural subjects. ("At 16, he would be ready to start upon those "subjects" which are proposed for his later study at the university: and this part of his education will correspond to the mediaeval Quadrivium.")

What about stage 1?

Later in the essay, she writes:

But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn; besides, one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will, therefore, "catch 'em young," requiring of our pupils only that they shall be able to read, write, and cipher.

I'd say that "read, write, and cipher" is pretty clearly the "3 Rs" of what I was calling literacy (although the 3rd R is numeracy).

You can find the whole text (sprinkled with transcription errors, I'm afraid) right here:

http://www.gbt.org/text/sayers.html

It's a wonderful read.

laissez faire,
bkmarcus
www.bkmarcus.com

the straight dope

My father recently encountered the Chicago lyrics, "25 or 6 to 4," and was baffled: "... I just don't get it: 25 or 6 to 4? What's the reference? What's the ambiguity? It suggests NOTHING to me."

So I pointed him to Cecil Adams and The Straight Dope, only to discover that he'd found the same answer at the same source. I like The Straight Dope, although I never seek it out. I just keep coming across it accidentally.

It's because of Cecil Adams that I am treating my current cold with Sudafed, rather than following my Rousseauvian upbringing and trusting Nature to do Her thing.

Turns out Mr. Adams knows a thing or two about monetary theory, as well:

"How much money is there?
With the U.S. borrowing so much,
why aren't we broke?"

23-Aug-1991

a people's movement of genuine liberals

"Simply put, every interference with free people in the free market is first and foremost an attack on the poorest, most vulnerable in society."

3 cheers for Sheldon Richman (digg it) for his "New Strategy":

Our work is cut out for us advocates of the free market. Since the educational strategy we have pursued until now has failed with large numbers of lay people, I suggest a modified strategy: It is essential that principled opponents of the minimum wage not appear insensitive to the plight of low-income workers. Some people of course are responsible for their economic plight, but many others are put at a disadvantage by the mercantilist, mixed economy we live in. (Let's not forget, it's not laissez faire out there.) In opposing the minimum wage we should champion the disadvantaged by emphasizing that:

• Any regulation, tax, and trade restriction that stifles the formation of new businesses, and thus competition, reduces the bargaining power and self-employment options of workers -- low-income workers most of all. Less bargaining power equals lower wages.
• Every intervention that raises the price of housing, clothing, food, and medicine harms low-income people most of all.
• Every land-use rule and all government landholding keeps the price of real estate and rents artificially high, harming low-income people most of all.
• The actions of the central bank devalue people's money, harming low-income (and fixed-income) people most of all.
• A rotten education system harms the children of low-income people most of all.

Simply put, every interference with free people in the free market is first and foremost an attack on the poorest, most vulnerable in society. But notice that each intervention has its beneficiaries; together they constitute the privileged class. The chief enemy of the vulnerable is the corporate state, the system of mercantilist privilege for the politically connected that constrains the creation and diffusion of wealth. In this light the welfare state (the minimum wage and such) is revealed as a way to keep the vulnerable from catching on and rocking the boat. The Manchester liberals Richard Cobden and John Bright put these considerations at the heart of their nineteenth-century peace-and-free-trade movement.

People of good will never stop voting for the minimum wage until they realize, first, that economic laws are implacable; second, that pretending the laws don't exist hurts those they wish to help; and third, that the best way to help is to sweep away all government privilege. Genuine liberals must rededicate themselves to making their movement a people's movement.

- "A Failure to Communicate: The Case of the Minimum Wage"

My own thoughts on communicating the case of the minimum wage are here:

"The 3 'E's of the Minimum Wage"

This looks like a job for ...

Libertarian theory depends heavily on the concept of implicit consent.


www.Non-Sequitur.com

the joys of Yiddish

When the program director of the kibbutz discovered I wasn't Jewish, she looked shocked. She said (this was in Hebrew, since she didn't speak English), "But you know Yiddish!"

"Yes," I replied in my rudimentary Hebrew, "I'm from New York."

Actually, I never knew Yiddish. I just knew a bunch of Yiddish words that New Yorkers use -- plus maybe a few more than usual, since I hung out with maybe more Jewish kids than the typical goy.

Visiting a friend in Indiana, I was astonished that no one had heard of Woody Allen. I figured Hollywood had made New York culture universal -- or at least, universally American.

Not so.

At least, not before Seinfeld.

On PBS's The Story of English, Robert MacNeil asked some hillbillies what the word schlep means. No one knew. One offered this: "I schlep in this hyar bed last night!"

Everyone I knew growing up used the word schlep (to carry or move reluctantly, as a burden) all the time: blacks, WASPs, Italians ...

So I was bemused and amused this week that A.Word.A.Day had a Yiddish theme.

Rather than giving AWAD's definitions, I'm using my usual Mac OS X dictionary, which did indeed have them all listed:

Let My People Go a little bit please

From Lew Rockwell's "Society Needs No Managers":

Imagine if Moses had sought the advice of Washington policy experts when seeking some means of freeing the Jewish people from Egyptian captivity.

They might have told him that marching up to the Pharaoh and telling him to "let my people go" is highly imprudent and pointless. The media won't like it and it is asking for too much too fast. What the Israelites need is a higher legal standing in the courts, more market incentives, more choices made possible through vouchers and subsidies, and a greater say in the structure of regulations imposed by the Pharaoh. Besides, Mr. Moses, to cut and run is unpatriotic.

Instead Moses took a principled position and demanded immediate freedom from all political control -- a complete separation between government and the lives of the Israelites. This is my kind of libertarian. Libertarianism is more correctly seen not as a political agenda detailing a better method of governance. It is instead the modern embodiment of a radical view that stands apart from and above all existing political ideologies.

Libertarianism doesn't propose any plan for reorganizing government; it calls for the plan to be abandoned. It doesn't propose that market incentives be employed in the formulation of public policy; it rather hopes for a society in which there is no public policy as that term in usually understood.

Barron's on Hoppe

Barron's ($) recommends Hans-Hermann Hoppe's book Economics and Ethics of Private Property among five books on its list of "page-turners on the dismal science":

Hans-Hermann Hoppe's dryly titled The Economics and Ethics of Private Property (von Mises Institute, 2006), is anything but dry. When Ludwig von Mises brought "Austrian School" economics to the U.S., the American Murray Rothbard became his worthy disciple. With Rothbard's death in 1995, the German-born Hoppe, a professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, became Rothbard's most important disciple by far.

Hoppe's writings are like a laser beam. The clarity and force of his arguments seemingly can't fail to hit their targets. But be prepared for arguments that push you beyond your limits. For Hoppe is a Misesian of the Rothbardian kind: an anarcho-capitalist eager to convince you that anything useful that the state does, the market can do better -- in fact, that the state so abuses its appointed roles, there is really no contest between the two. The intrigued should also try Rothbard's own book, For a New Liberty (von Mises Institute, 1978, revised edition).

---

Update: Tim "Movementarian" Swanson points out that the author of this book review was interviewed at LvMI 6 years ago:
Austrian Watchdog at Barron's:
An Interview with Gene Epstein

why the State is different

There will always be those who claim to have special rights over the rest of society, and the state is the most organized attempt to get away with it."

I've blogged before about Lew Rockwell's essay, "Why the State Is Different."

Here I just want to summarize the "lessons" of the piece:

1. The State has one tool, and one tool only, at its disposal: force.
2. The State is the only institution in society that can impose itself on all of society without asking the permission of anyone in particular. You can't opt out.
3. The State is exempt from the laws it claims to enforce, and manages this exemption by redefining its criminality as public service.
4. The State gets to write the history. Unlike the other three issues, this is not an intrinsic feature of the state but rather is a reflection of the culture. This can change so long as people are alert to the problem. And this is the role, the essential role, of libertarian intellectuals: to change the ideological culture in ways that make people aware of the antisocial nature of the state, and how it always stands outside of society, no matter how democratic it may claim to be.
   

bounty hunters versus government police

The Movementarian has pointed me to this interesting post by Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution:

Overkill

My research on bounty hunters shows that they are more effective than the police in recapturing criminals. I'm often asked (and sometimes told), however, about the potential for abuse and mistaken arrests. No one ever bothers, however, to ask how bounty hunters compare on the abuse score with the police. My suspicion is that the bounty hunters would come out better because they know that a mistake can put them out of business while the police may routinely break down the wrong door under cover of law.

Some data on the potential for abuse and mistaken arrest or worse from the police is provided in a new Cato report, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, by Radley Balko. The report notes:

Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they?re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers.

Along with the paper is an interactive map showing hundreds of mistaken raids over the past several decades, a number of which lead to the deaths of innocents.

fire the drug czar!

D o w n s i z e r - D i s p a t c h
Forward this to friends who care . . .

Quick. You need help. Desperately. Get out the yellow pages, or do a web search. Look under "people to tell you what to think."

Don't find it? Maybe it's in the government pages?

Oops. Sorry for the bother. You've already hired someone to tell you what to think. He's called the Drug Czar. His job, paid for with your tax dollars, is to tell you what to think about national drug policy.

That's it. That's all. That's what the Drug Czar does. He tells you what to think.

Aren't you relieved?

As you go about your labors today put a smile on your face. You're working, in part, to pay for that guy you hired to tell you what to think about our nation's narcotics laws. Isn't it comforting? Just think how confused you'd be without that Drug Czar guy to do the heavy mental lifting for you.

What's that you say? You didn't know you hired someone to do that? You don't need it? You don't like the name "Czar?" You won't have a smile on your face as you labor to pay his salary?

Well, perhaps you just need more information. Don't you know that this guy lobbies state legislatures to keep them from passing drug laws the federal government doesn't like? And don't you know that this guy works hard to defeat medical marijuana initiatives, and keep voters from voting the wrong way? Isn't that worth something to you?

No?

Well, then perhaps you'll want to know that there are some in Congress who want to fire the guy and close his office. In fact, his job is up for renewal right now, and there's legislation that would send the Czar packing. You might want to let your representatives know that you don't need no stinking Drug Czar. If you feel so moved, you can send your message here.

Thank you for being a DC Downsizer.

Perry Willis
Communications Director
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

climate agnosticism

I'd like to quote Roderick Long's recent comment on climate agnosticism in its entirety, but first I'd like to confess that my agnosticism about global warming is like my agnosticism about a supernatural overperson, which is to say that it's largely perfunctory.

I can't prove that there is no God, and so I try not to insist on His non-existence, but I still tend to believe He's not there.

Similarly, I know that I know too little to have an informed opinion on supposed climate disaster, but I sure do trust the people who say it's a sham more than those who insist the looming disaster is real.

And now, the good professor:

I suspect I'm one of the few political bloggers who has no opinion about global warming. My problem is that I know too many intelligent and sincere people, with way more scientific expertise than mine, on both sides of the issue. Many on the left seem to assume that anyone who's skeptical about the cause and/or extent of global warming must be in the pay of the corporations; and many on the right seem to assume that anyone who thinks global warming is serious and manmade is just a shill for big government. I know from personal experience that both of those assumptions are just plain false.

But I suspect the stereotypes -- both stereotypes -- are largely true of all too many of the politicians and lobbyists involved in the debate. As I've written elsewhere:

We might compare the alliance between government and big business to the alliance between church and state in the Middle Ages. Of course it's in the interest of both parties to maintain the alliance -- but all the same, each side would like to be the dominant partner, so it?s no surprise that the history of such alliances will often look like a history of conflict and antipathy, as each side struggles to get the upper hand. But this struggle must be read against a common background framework of cooperation to maintain the system of control.

Now the main difference, insofar as there is one, between the Establishment Left and the Establishment Right in this country is that while both are the running-dog lackeys of the neofascist government-business alliance, the Establishment Left somewhat favours a shift in power toward government, while the Establishment Right somewhat favours a shift in power toward business. Playing up the threat of global warming thus serves the interests of the statocratic faction, while playing down that threat serves the interests of the plutocratic faction ? and so you'd expect to see the two sides taking the sides they're taking, regardless of what the truth actually is. But it?s just a squabble within the ruling class.

In fact, of course, if global warming does turn out to be serious and manmade, that shouldn't lead us to grant more power to the state; the more serious the problem, the more disastrous any centralised, bureaucratic solution is likely to be. And if on the other hand global warming turns out to have been overhyped, that shouldn't lead us into complacency about the plutocracy either. Both halves of the ruling-class machine need to be dismantled, whatever the weather may bring.

And there's more:

I didn't quite complete my thoughts on global warming yesterday.

I talked about people who take the sides they do primarily on the basis of scientific evidence, and about people who take the sides they do primarily on the basis of political calculation. But I don't think either of those groups is the majority. Most people with positions on global warming don't have sufficient scientific expertise to belong to the first group, and aren't dishonest enough to belong to the second group.

I suspect most people take whatever position they take on global warming because people are generally more likely to read, and/or to believe, whichever scientific case best fits in with their worldview. If you're conventionally left-wing, then you're probably accustomed to thinking of business interests as selfish and irresponsible forces that need to be reined in by public-spirited civil servants, and so you?re going to view claims that seem to support the business community with heightened suspicion. If, on the other hand, you're conventionally right-wing, then you're probably accustomed to thinking of business interests as decent hard-working folks who are constantly being demonized and micromanaged by rapacious regulators, and so you're going to view claims that seem to support government regulation with heightened suspicion.

Even if these respective value-judgments were correct, one should be cautious about allowing them to influence one's view of the evidence. But I don't think they're even correct; one should avoid putting too much faith in either the bosses or the bureaucrats.

Here's the only other post I've made so far on global warming:

"political science"

there oughta be a law

One of the few advantages of the illegality of prostitution is that sex workers can't lobby government for protection against foreign competition.

Here's an interesting story with a view askew to Gary North's comments on immigrants and labor competition:

"Australian sex workers complain of Asian competition"

(Thanks to ifeminists.net for the link.)

creative destruction

Somehow iceberg has managed to come up with a genuine example of broken windows increasing wealth.

If you want to be a nitpicker (and who doesn't?!) you might say that the "creative destruction" isn't so much increasing wealth as it is suppressing the suppression of wealth.

When government intervention is involved, being anti-anti-wealth can count as being pro-wealth. Under the circumstances, we have to celebrate small victories.

Gary North on immigration

It's hard to argue with Gary North's consequentialist logic on "closing" "our" "borders" to Mexican immigrants:

"Close Our Borders!"
And here's Lew Rockwell on immigration about 6 months ago.

It is passing curious how conservatives whose rhetoric is generally suspicious of "Big Government" seem to get such a hard-on for the Police State.

Superman as Capital(ist) Good

I've been waiting for this day for almost a year.

Now I can finally point to this brilliant piece by Robert Murphy:

"Superman Needs An Agent"

This is no Randian paean to the virtue of selfishness. As a devout Christian (and even a pacifist, I believe), Bob Murphy is fully sympathetic to the premise that (to borrow from a different superhero from a different publisher) "...with great power comes great responsibility."

Murphy is all for the mandate that the The Last Son of Krypton should use his powers for the good of humanity; he just wants to ask the question of how best to maximize Kal-El's benevolent effects. And the answer is ... Superman needs an agent! Someone to find the highest bidder for his services, so long as those services don't violate ethical principles.

The article definitely deserves to become the title piece of a best-seller.

After first reading this one, I mulled over it for a long time, talking parts of it out with the pre-pregnant missus on long hikes. What I realized is this: Superman's productivity (and therefore his philanthropic potential) isn't just magnified by the division of labor; it's even more magnified by the structure of capital.

In other words, superpowers can be used as a consumer good -- directly helping those in immediate need, as we see him do almost exclusively in the comics, cartoons, TV shows, and movies -- or they can be used as capital goods, the means of production.

For example: when terrorists are about to blow up the Eiffel Tower (or when Lois Lane has been kidnapped, or when a doting pet owner has let her cat get stuck in a tree) people have immediate needs that Superman can fly in and immediately satisfy, in which case his powers are consumer goods.

But if he freezes the surface of a lake and carries the ice sheet to farmers in drought-stricken areas, his powers are functioning as capital goods; they are functioning higher in the structure of production.

Even higher would be his cooperation in producing technology to duplicate those powers.

How high up the ladder of capital goods should he go? There's no way to determine that without free pricing. This is why Superman needs an agent. Does he help out 1 person in immediate need? Sure, but how many individuals in immediate need should he serve if it means time not spent helping millions of people more indirectly? Again, only a pricing structure can determine the opportunity costs of such a decision.

Murphy's article (and all the thinking I did about it afterwards) helped me solidify my understanding of the role of prices in determining priorities, but more important (for me, anyway) it got me over the hump in grasping the distinction between the free market, in which voluntary exchange leads to a more productive division of labor, and CAPITALISM -- where surplus can be invested higher in the structure of capital, serving more people more efficiently at lower costs.

(Digg it!)

guard duty

Cross-posted to baby blog:

It's about 3 in the morning and I'm on guard duty in the nursery.

Benjamin is perfectly healthy; there's no reason to worry; we're just acting out our roles as new first-time parents, starting at every sound or lack of sound, needing to see him fidget in his sleep to reassure ourselves that all is well with our beautiful baby boy.

The nightwatch takes me back 19 years to the several months I lived on a kibbutz (Zionist commune) in Israel. As the kibbutzim move away from their socialist roots, family arrangements are becoming more "traditional" -- meaning the bourgeois nuclear family in shared quarters -- but in Kibbutz Givat Oz in 1987, all the kibbutznik babies were housed communally in the beit tinokot (literally, the "house of babies").

I had a surreal semi-date in the beit tinokot with a petite chemist, who, having done the standard mandatory military service, looked completely comfortable with her hand-held radio monitor to one side of her and her Uzi submachine gun to the other. When I expressed surprise that she was so well armed in the house of babies, she looked at me like I was crazy. This is guard duty, she said. These babies are our most valued treasures.

I'm not armed at the moment, and my surroundings would be better represented in marine-themed na�ve art than in socialist realism, but guard duty has me more in touch with that most-valued-treasures mandate than I possibly could have been any time earlier.

BTM

Benjamin Tucker Marcus, born July 5th, 2006.
hours before | minutes after | hours after

independence day

Things are suddenly quite busy chez Marcus. Not sure when I'll be back again. Here's another classic lowercase liberty:

Monday, July 04, 2005

anarchist shadow holiday

Abraham Lincoln famously said, "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation..."

What new nation?

How does one "bring forth" a new nation?

Lincoln spoke those words in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863.

Since 1863 - 87 (year of address minus four score and seven) = 1776, he was referring to the events we celebrate today, Independence Day.

Did 1776 bring forth a new nation?

[Keep reading "anarchist shadow holiday".]

foreign aid is evil

The idea that foreign aid is a route out of poverty and political instability is not only bankrupted but a cruel and evil hoax as well."

- Walter Williams, "Foreign Aid to Africa"

I am first and foremost an ethical libertarian -- on the Natural Law side of the Natural Law/utilitarian divide, if I'm forced to choose a side (Roderick Long provides arguments why that divide is artificial, by the way) -- but one huge strategic problem with ethical libertarianism is that so many statists who are unmoved by the ethics of non-aggression dismiss libertarianism as if it were nothing more than a moral appeal against coercion.

What drives me crazy about statists (and left-statists in particular) is the fact that their ethic is self-evidently consequentialist, and yet they don't seem to give a damn about actual consequences -- just the symbolic affiliation of "caring about" consequences.

When I say that foreign aid is evil, many would assume I'm just talking about the violation of principle involved in the confiscatory source of the funding, where in fact, I'm referring to an evil that any open-eyed consequentialist should be willing to label as such.

One of the lowercase liberty posts that got the most attention last year was "aid kills" about the Live 8 scam. I felt I had to emphasize the consequence of aid (it kills) rather than ethics, but most of what I saw in response was along the lines of But we have to do something!

Walter Williams provides a very useful contrast in his most recent column -- a contrast that only the most die-hard dogmatist in the anti-capitalist camp could ignore:

Zimbabwe and Botswana

Zimbabwe provides an excellent example of why foreign aid, as a way out of poverty, is a fool's errand.[...] It has the world's highest rate of inflation, currently over 1,000 percent. [...] Unemployment hovers around 80 percent. Its financial institutions are collapsing. The specter of mass starvation hangs over a country that once exported food.

What's the cause? President Robert Mugabe blames domestic and foreign enemies, particularly England and the United States for trying to bring about his downfall. Of course, according to Mugabe, and some of the world's academic elite, there's that old standby excuse, the legacy of colonialism and multi-national firms exploiting the Third World. The drought is used to "explain" the precipitous drop in agricultural output. Then there's AIDS.

Let's look at drought and AIDS. Zimbabwe's next-door neighbor is Botswana. Botswana has the world's second-highest rate of AIDS infection, and if there's drought in Zimbabwe, there's likely a drought in Botswana, whose major geographic feature is the Kalahari Desert, which covers 70 percent of its land mass. However, Botswana has one of the world's highest per capita GDP growth rates. Moody's and Standard & Poor gives Botswana an "A" credit rating, the best credit risk on the continent, a risk competitive with countries in central Europe and East Asia.

Botswana compared to her other African neighbors prospers not because of foreign aid. There's rule of law, sanctity of contracts, and in 2004, Transparency International ranked Botswana as Africa's least corrupt country, ahead of many European and Asian countries. The World Forum rates Botswana as one of Africa's two most economically competitive nations and one of the best investment opportunities in the developing world.

Red Emma

Yesterday's post links to some MP3 versions of Emma Goldman's most famous essays.

I'm very fond of Red Emma as a historical character, and have been since I was a young teenager. It was because of her that I knew there were serious anarchist thinkers, not just cartoon bomb-throwers and thoughtless punk rockers.

My conversion to anarchism happened because I read Benjamin Tucker, at which point I thought I ought to read old Emma herself. She's got plenty of wonderful quotes, but the essays themselves helped push me away from left-anarchism.

Here's the review I wrote for BlackCrayon.com:

Not only is Emma Goldman the most famous American anarchist, but she's the only anarchist most Americans have heard of. (If they've heard of any.)

This is both good and bad news for American anarchists of a more individualist or philosophical inclination.

The good news is that there is at least one famous anarchist who is known more for her feminism and her rejection of war than for supposed murder plots or bombings. (Some might even know that she spent time in newly Communist Russia and rejected the growing authoritarianism and centralization she witnessed there.)

The bad news is that Emma Goldman's philosophy is not well defined, and the anarcho-communism she is associated with does, in fact, deserve much of its association with bullets and dynamite.

While Emma Goldman did trace the roots of 20th-century anarchism to the 19th-century individualism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she did not make self-ownership or individual sovereignty a clear and explicit part of her theory of freedom. (It might be more accurate to say that she didn't have a clear and explicit theory of freedom.)

Her own tendency toward individualism is simply an assumed part of her anarchism, where the other libertarian socialists and anarcho-communists with whom she is associated reject individualism as "typically American" (sneer implied) and see violence (a.k.a. "Direct Action") and revolution as part-and-parcel with any movement toward anarchy.

In Anarchism, and Other Essays, we have Emma Goldman's words at their most inspiring, and also at their most embarrassing.

She is right to recognize that authoritarian culture has deliberately cast "unregulated humanity" in a monstrous light -- "Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name!" -- but she responds with an antithesis that would blame the Church, the State and Capitalism for every selfish act or unsavory inclination. She was a woman well ahead of her time, herald to late-20th-century feminism, reproductive rights activists, anti-war protestors and the civilly disobedient. Unfortunately, she is equally the harbinger of liberal guilt and class-based double standards.

bkMarcus

[You can find several of Emma Goldman's best quotes on BlackCrayon's Emma Goldman page, or among our general collection of anarchist quotes.]

libertarian listening

Learn Out Loud is offering some free audio for Independence Day.

For those of us who are classical-liberally inclined, there are The Founding Documents of the United States of America.

Here are the documents featured in the order of their historical progression:

1. Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death" Speech
2. The United States Declaration of Independence
3. The Articles of Confederation
4. The Virginia Plan
5. The Constitution of the United States
6. Federalist Paper No. 51
7. United States Bill of Rights
8. Subsequent U.S. Constitutional Ammendments
9. First Inaugural Address of President George Washington

And for those who are more left-anarchist in their demonstrated preferences, a link to Audio Anarchy's Emma Goldman Essays.

1. Anarchism: What It Really Stands For
2. "Anarchism" continued
3. Prisons: A Social Crime And Failure
4. The Tragedy Of Woman's Emancipation
5. Woman Suffrage
6. Marriage And Love