sick 'em, George!

George Reisman is certainly not the most soft and cuddly of the Austrians. And he's not a Rothbardian, by any means. He's as much Randian as Misesian, and I tend to prefer the latter to the former. But it can be a real treat to have someone who doesn't minse words when it counts:

When it comes to economic understanding, the mentality of The New York Times and of the left in general is one of soft, mushy ignorance encased in an impenetrable shell of super-hardened self-righteous ignorance."

- George Reisman, "Incitement to Class War at The New York Times/Pravda"

Mr. Libertarian, Another runner in the night

The latest from Scott Lahti:

I recall reading, many years ago, an essay from the 1920s by H.L. Mencken spoofing the collegiate-sports mania which even then reigned sovereign across the national campus (recalling stock footage of Jazz-Age swains at the stadium in their fur coats, the better to carry their hip-flasks, and Yale pennants and megaphones, hoping for a glimpse of Rudy Vallee...). Mencken's title? "The Striated Muscle Fetish": leave it to a man who titled an essay on Shaw "The Ulster Polonius", or who could not mention DC's all-black ("Aframerican") Howard University without appending the tag "The Ethiop Sorbonne"...

So there I was, Googling to see if HLM's essay so-titled found honor in being mentioned among the, oh, eight billion or so pages spider-woven in Goog-goog-a-joob fashion...how many results for "striated muscle fetish"?

One.

And from whom?

Why, the late Murray N. Rothbard, that exquisitely-cackling blend of romantic and grump known for such Mencken-saluting essays as "The Joyous Libertarian"*, and who, in his spare time as economist-cum-libertarian-revolutionary-manqué (manqué see, manqué do, apparently), played Lenin to Ludwig von Mises's Marx.** Those who recall, with an obligatory wince, their daze in gym class - not to mention Rothbard himself in the flesh - will share my delight at how Rothbard - and he only - manages in the space of one essay to relate Bentham of all people, to the Columbian-athletic travails he sweated through - barely - in groaning apostolic succession therein to none other than that Undoubting Thomist, Mortimer Adler...vintage not-to-miss Rothbard, in other words.

DSL

*For The New Individualist Review, that pioneering 1960s monthly generated on a shoestring by U. of Chicago grad-student apostles of then-resident Uncle Fred [Hayek], Uncle Miltie [Friedman], and Uncle Dick [trad-con Richard Weaver].

**For that Rothbard, see in the same linked PDF issue below, e.g., his gleeful response to having had his Libertarian Forum "banned" by...Andrea Rich of Laissez-Laire Books, an agent of - wait for it - the dreaded "Crane Machine", after the Richelieu of Libertarian Nation, for whom Things Truly Do Go Better With Koch (pronounced "Coke")...apparently in that dawn E.R. (Early Reagan) the far-right Hunt brothers (remember them? Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive...) had their hands full trying to corner the silver market, so rather than bankroll the old-right thinktankariat, they left the field to other Oilymen the Magnificent ...

The Libertarian Forum, November-December 1982 [PDF]

Postscript

When I asked Mr Lahti's permission to post his note here, he replied

Yes - and with the blanche-iest of cartes (or the Blanchietts of Cates...er, the Phoebe-est of Cates...or, um, the FEE-biest of Blanchettes!!!)

DSL

Post-postscript

And then

One more cotton-pickin' Rothbardin' thing, Ben-Papa-San - as taken from a recent email to friends (my same laissez-faire permissions granted "pre-emptively"):

" P.S. Speaking of Murray Rothbard, I dug up his charming 1979 tribute [PDF] to Woody Allen's Manhattan ("'S Wonderful, 'S Marvelous"), the music of George Gershwin, the culture of Old New York and the need for restorative satire: a virtual manifesto for my nascent amateur's cultural classicism when, in 1981, I saw the movie, found lasting enchantment in the music, and a few months later in Manhattan while on spring break, talked all four of Rothbard's limbs off after a Laissez-Faire Supper Club dinner with him as keynote speaker. Rereading the piece, I can't help thinking once more that had he been able to auto-generate a twin in the full-time cultural sphere, he might have become one of our most admired cultural essayists somewhere in the composite vicinity of Chesterton, Mencken, Nock, Dwight Macdonald, Joseph Wood Krutch, and others. But I suppose that's just pointless counterfactual pining along the lines of "if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a bus," or the sort of myopic plea for another Lincoln or another Roosevelt to "save" us from the present afflictions of our body politic - blind and deaf to the fact to that you don't get a pristine Lincoln or Roosevelt delivered unto you like manna cut-and-pasted from above - you also get the Civil and/or World Wars that are the standard factory issue welded to them bodily, organically: "I'd like the Lincoln Special, please - hold the cannon fire." "Sorry, Ma'am - the LS only comes with th' grapeshot." "Then I'd like the Clinton instead - and yes, supersize it, and with extra napkins, please..."

sacrament

[This comment deserves to be its own post.]

Anthony Gregory said...

Here are some thoughts on possible reasons that even someone who questions or dismisses the myths surrounding the Civil War might not similarly be skeptical of the conventional attitudes toward World War II.

The most obvious difference to me is that World War II happened more recently. There are still people alive today who fought in it. Most Americans probably know someone who fought in it. There is a stronger psychological urge to defend it.

Furthermore, the stakes involved in debates over that war are so high. It was in many ways the biggest human event in World History, and certainly the most destructive. About fifty million people died, 2/3 of whom were civilians. The US government killed millions of people, including children, in that war. In fact, in targeted them. People don't want to believe this could have been for nothing. The Civil War seems more distant.

In both cases, the war was supposedly one of liberation and one against an evil regime. But a strong minority of Americans don't want to think of the South as deserving what came to it. Heck, most pro-war Americans are probably sympathetic to the cultural associations of the "bad side" in the Civil War.

Blacks were supposedly liberated by the necessary and just Civil War, whereas Jews were supposedly liberated by the necessary and just Second World War. Now, in both cases, it can be touchy to question this account at all. But there's been more time since the Civil War, and these days it's probably more likely you'll be accused of being anti-Jewish for questioning WWII than being anti-black or pro-slavery for questioning the Civil War. In the case of Walter Williams, and other black Americans skeptical of Lincoln, they are probably less likely to feel pressure not to question the Liberator of the Blacks, than they would feel not to question the Liberator of the Jews. (And perhaps a Jewish commentator would be given more slack in questioning World War II than he would the Civil War, at least comparatively).

And even Lincoln apologists would probably concede that the Confederacy's soldiers weren't all fighting for an evil cause -- some were obviously fighting, whether we think it was wise or correct or not, in percieved defense of their homeland. The Nazis don't get even that much benefit of a doubt. And since most people have a collectivist, nationalist streak, if the Nazis were pure evil, the innocent Germans firebombed in WWII probably deserved it to some degree, whereas the relatively less evil Confederates rendered their Southern compatriots less collectively guilty. Furthermore, since both sides in the Civil War were American, the nationalists who are indeed on the winning side of victor's history do not feel as compelled to silence all attempts to humanize the enemy or to question aspects of the Union's conduct of the war. The war was one to reaffirm the principles that we're all Americans, after all.

Overall, there is just something more sacred about World War II than the Civil War. Hitler is seen as an embodiment of evil against which no one, even perhaps WWII-era US-ally Stalin, compares. This is the way it's taught in schools. No one, on the other hand, sees Jefferson Davis in quite this light. Perhaps part of the reason is all the sympathizers of the American South since the Civil War and their impact on the way history is interpreted.

I think that people are really devoted to defending WWII because it was so horrific and people just don't want to believe it was as much an anti-Japanese race war, as far as American sentiment was concerned, or a war for US imperialism and New Deal fascism, as far as American politicians were concerned, as it was any other kind of war. I really think that in another generation or two, we'll see a shift towards more openness to different points of view on World War II.

inflammatory

After 9/11, anti-war libertarians started to really hate the Nolan chart and the accompanying "Word's Smallest Political Quiz" because it had a "personal" axis and an "economic" axis but absolutely nothing on foreign policy, so all these hawks scored as pure libertarians without ever learning that war is the health of the state.

Walter Block suggests the Nolan Chart needs 3 axes:

1. personal intervention
2. economic intervention
3. foreign intervention

In the 3D model, a "pure" libertarian would reject all 3 forms of intervention.

But even limiting himself to 2 axes, Rothbard better captured the issue:

1. the welfare state
2. the warfare state

And he emphasized that they were 2 sides of the same coin, a point utterly lost on left- and right-wingers.What brought these thoughts to mind this morning was an article that Anthony Gregory forwarded to me:

"Will the West defend itself?" by Walter E. Williams:

Any attempt to annihilate our Middle East enemies would create all sorts of handwringing about the innocent lives lost, so-called collateral damage.

Such an argument would have fallen on deaf ears during World War II when we firebombed cities in Germany and Japan. The loss of lives through saturation bombing far exceeded those lost through the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Ahh, those were the days! Remember when it was heroic to incinerate civilians? Let's not go too far back in time, though. A century earlier, western nation-states were establishing rules of war that would make everything the US military has done since then a serious war crime.

Anthony Gregory points out: "Williams is more seen explicitly as a libertarian, rather than as a conservative free marketer like Sowell." How depressing. I'm sorry I ever implied that Walter Williams is a libertarian. I was taking Tom DiLorenzo's word for it.

As one comrade recently asked, "Why are so many of the prominent iconoclastic un-PC anti-left free-marketer African Americans such warmongers? Sowell, Williams, Elder, Steele ..."

Good question. Here's one I find much more puzzling. The 3 biggest lies of Establishment History, American Chapter are

1. Lincoln was a good man;
2. FDR's New Deal was a good policy;
3. WWII was a good war.

(I invite any of you to disagree with my quick list of the big 3.)

Williams has rejected the first two on that list. Why would #3 be harder than #1?

libertarian purity

I knew I wouldn't get a perfect score on Bryan Caplin's Libertarian Purity Test, but I was pleasantly surprised by Caplan's last-minute qualification:

Your score is...

152

131-159 points: You are nearly a perfect libertarian, with a tiny number of blind spots. Think about them, then take the test over again. On the other hand, if you scored this high, you probably have a good libertarian objection to my suggested libertarian answer. :-)

[emphasis added]

If you want to take his test, I suggest you do so now, before reading a "good libertarian objection" or three ...

... I'll just wait for you here ...

OK, here they are:

11. Would school vouchers be an improvement over government schools?

No. School vouchers are a way to expand government's regulatory power. Private schools and homeschools are regulated now. Vouchers would make them even more so. Would the vouchers improve government schools? I definitely suspect they would. Would they improve education overall? I definitely suspect that they would have the opposite effect. Are they at least a legitimate half-measure in a libertarian direction? Definitely not. A half-measure moves you forward, even if only minutely. Vouchers are a move backward.

For more on the history of state-regulation and control of schooling, see Murray Rothbard's Education: Free & Compulsory.

13. Would housing vouchers be an improvement over government housing?

No. Same reason.

43. Should all of the Federal Reserve's discretionary powers be eliminated and the monetary base frozen?

Yes to the first half of the question, but No to the second half.

(T ^ F = F, for those familiar with boolean logical notation.)

Saying that the monetary base should be frozen may sound like a good idea, since Fed manipulation of the monetary base is so clearly evil, but having the Fed freeze the monetary base is like saying the US military should go to the other side of the world and take out evil dictators. No need to give the state a mandate in either case. Should the Fed stop expanding the monetary base? Yes. Should the government have the power to police the size of the monetary base in order to keep it frozen? Definitely not.

Note, however:

53. Should the Fed be abolished and replaced with free banking and privately-issued money?

A big Yes.

podcast manifesto: the final chapter

On May 12th, 14 weeks ago today, we announced the "For a New Liberty Podcast" -- an audiobook version of Rothbard's manifesto, as read by the great Jeff Riggenbach. We've done a chapter a week all summer, and as of today, you can download the entire audiobook, gratis, from the Mises Institute.

Podcast | Download MP3

Audio is a powerful tool for ideological outreach. And free audio makes the outreach that much easier. Download the 16 files (introduction plus 15 chapters), burn them to disc (MP3CD) and give them out to your friends and relatives, your co-workers, your favorite fence-sitters.

Again: This is the book that made me a Rothbardian. I read the first half online, sitting at my desk until sunrise. I bought the book to read the second half in the woods of West Virginia.

(And how smart of the Institute to make the ebook available for free! Book sales increase from making books like these freely available.)

FaNL made me a Rothbardian, but my interest in Austrian economics came earlier, from an audiobook: Economics in One Lesson (also read by Riggenbach). My original copy cost over fifty bucks. The Mises Institute now sells an MP3 version for half as much. Yes, that's still more than twice as much as the print version, but while I've gotten a couple of friends to read a print copy of For a New Liberty, I was able to get twice as many to listen to Economics in One Lesson.

Now we have both books available in both formats.

This is the libertarian audio revolution. Spread the word.

curse the darkness

From today's Brewster Rocket:

neocon Sowell

Right on, KDC!

Thomas Sowell, for so long, had been an ardent defender of the free market and free men, and opposed to the idea of redistribution or the suppression of property rights for the sake of equality. For that reason, he has long been on my list of heroic intellectuals who dared to go up against the establishment line. But no longer. I've got news for Mr. Sowell. The fruits of my labor do not belong to the state. I will not surrender my ability to produce or consume to the state so that I can share in the 'realism' and moral bankruptcy of its oppressive wars, fueled by the political ambitions of collectivist tyrants. I am not the state. I am an individual. I do not sanction the state's actions, and I do not benefit from its wars. Yes, my life will go on as undisturbed as is possible, and for that I am not one bit guilty."

Yeah. What she said.

---

Here are my earlier Sowell posts:

1. dreams can be deceiving
2. Thomas Sowell
3. best Sowell quote so far
4. social responsibility
5. never trust a conservative
6. unoriginal sources

cops busted

A follow-up to the previous post:

Sunday, Aug. 13, 2006

TWO MANCHESTER police officers, Derek Sullivan and Patrick Hogan, were busted by a 15-year-old girl and her Persian cat on Wednesday afternoon after having apparently gained illegal entry into the girl's home.

read it | digg it

police and property

Thanks to Tim Swanson:

A year ago, AOL had a contest where they decided to give away $20,000 in gold bars they had received from spammer Brad Bournival, as part of their settlement with him. Bournival is a name that should be familiar to anyone who read Brian McWilliams' excellent book Spam Kings. Bournival, if you recall, was the apprentice to the book's main character, Davis Wolfgang Hawke. While Bournival was willing to cooperate when authorities cracked down on their spamming activities, Hawke ran. However, since AOL won their case against both spammers, it feels that Hawke still owes them plenty of money. In the book, it details how Hawke would hide his money all over the place often in the form of gold bars, and apparently the folks at AOL have taken notice. They're now trying to dig up the backyard of Hawke's parents, in search of more gold bars. A judge has given permission for the search, which AOL says shouldn't be too destructive -- but Hawke's mother is vowing to fight the search, saying she has no clue where her son is and she's sure he didn't bury any gold on their property.

"AOL Goes Digging For Gold (Yes, Literally)"

And thanks to Murray Rothbard:

There is one concession we might make to the police argument, but it is doubtful the police would be happy with the concession. It is proper to invade the property of a thief, for example, who has himself invaded to a far greater extent the property of others. Suppose the police decide that John Jones is a jewel thief. They tap his wires, and use this evidence to convict Jones of the crime. We might say that this tapping is legitimate, and should go unpunished: provided, however, that if Jones should prove not to be a thief, the police and the judges who may have issued the court order for the tap are now to be adjudged criminals themselves and sent to jail for their crime of unjust wiretapping. This reform would have two happy consequences: no policeman or judge would participate in wiretapping unless he was dead certain the victim is indeed a criminal; and the police and judges would at last join everyone else as equally subject to the rule of the criminal law. Certainly equality of liberty requires that the law applies to everyone; therefore any invasion of the property of a noncriminal by anyone should be outlawed, regardless of who committed the deed. The policeman who guessed wrong and thereby aggressed against a noncriminal should therefore be considered just as guilty as any "private" wiretapper.

For a New Liberty, chapter 6: "Personal Liberty"

Amen!

Americans Not Keeping up with Events
8/15/2006
"Sleepy, Grumpy, Larry, Moe, Krypton -- that's what seems to stick in the national mind-set these days. Americans are more familiar with the Seven Dwarfs, the Three Stooges and Superman than with current events and world leaders, according to yet another poll that reveals our trite side. " (Washington Times, Tuesday)

It's called rational ignorance.

unoriginal sources

Ayn Rand, F.A. Hayek ... and ...?
It took me the longest time to realize that the guy with the afro is Thomas Sowell.

Here's his latest:

Some years back, there was a great flurry in the liberal media because a study showed that

1. black pregnant women received prenatal care less often than white pregnant women and that
2. infant mortality rates were higher among blacks.

There were indignant editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post blaming the government for not providing greater access to prenatal care in order to stop preventable deaths of infants.

After getting a copy of the original study, I discovered that in the same study -- on the very same page -- statistics showed that

1. Mexican American women received even less prenatal care than black women and that
2. infant mortality rates among Mexican Americans were no higher than among whites.

A few pages further on, statistics showed that American women of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino ancestry also received less prenatal care than white women -- and had lower infant mortality rates than whites.

Apparently prenatal care was not the answer, though it was the kind of answer that suited the mindset of the liberal media and provided an occasion for them to wax indignant.

- Thomas Sowell, "Studies Prove"
read it | digg it

This reminds me of the study that comes out early every year reporting that on average, women earn less than men ... which is supposed to prove somehow that there is, in the market, a cultural bias against women that prevents labor competition from bidding their wages and salaries up to their marginal revenue product (not that the commentators would understand my summary of their silly position).

Never mentioned are studies that show gays earning more than straights, or even better: lesbians in general earning more than men in general.

Anyway, I'm not as big a fan of Sowell as I initially was, but he's pretty good on economics and social science.


Here are my earlier Sowell posts:

1. dreams can be deceiving
2. Thomas Sowell
3. best Sowell quote so far
4. social responsibility
5. never trust a conservative

And since his latest piece ends up talking about the "scientific consensus" on "global warming" I guess I'll list those posts, too:

1. political science
2. climate agnosticism
3. damn data

WSJ discovers LvMI

A very nice write-up in the Wall Street Journal:

Von Mises Finds A Sweet Home In Alabama
By KYLE WINGFIELD
August 11, 2006; Page W9

AUBURN, Ala. -- Growing up next door in Georgia, I never thought of Alabama as a beacon of intellect. Living in its capital city of Montgomery for two years didn't exactly change my mind. It wasn't until I moved to Europe a couple of years ago that I realized the Heart of Dixie was also the heart of sensible economic thinking.

One by one, I met young capitalist Continentals who had studied in Auburn. Not at Auburn University, mind you. Alabama's largest college is associated more with free-running athletes like Bo Jackson than with free-market philosophers. Rather, my Continental acquaintances had spent time at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an unaffiliated think tank located just off-campus that preaches the works of Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard and other economists from the Austrian School -- including, of course, the institute's namesake.

read it | digg it

whoops!

Henry Hazlitt tells the story of the boy who breaks a store window, as Keynesians stand around and convince themselves it's a productive act. But the story was intended to illustrate an economic fallacy, not provide the intellectual foundation for a Commerce Department model."

- Lew Rockwell, "Gross Domestic Bunk"

fissile

I care not one whit about Mel Gibson's latest trouble. But I did find this commentary by Rabbi Daniel Lapin very interesting: "Mel Gibson and Me"

(Lapin also wrote the LRC article "Why Mel Owes One to the Jews" about various Jewish organizations targetting The Passion of the Christ.)

But this isn't a post about Mel Gibson, nor is it about Rabbi Lapin.

It's about the word 'fissile' which I encountered for the first time tonight in an article from The Guardian: "Why are we crucifying Mel Gibson?":

Gibson is under the influence of an even more fissile brew. He has shown what happens when you mix celebrity and fundamentalism, two of the most potent hallucinogens of the modern world. For that revelation, at least, he should be praised.

Fissile? A fissile brew?

I use Mac OS X's built-in dictionary for definitions on this blog because I think it looks purty, but I tend to turn first to the 1913 Webster's because I have faster tools for searching it and it's easier to save the definitions into a vocabulary folder:

Fissile \Fis"sile\, a. [L. fissilis, fr. fissus, p. p. of
findere to split. See {Fissure}.]
1. Capable of being split, cleft, or divided in the direction
of the grain, like wood, or along natural planes of
cleavage, like crystals.
[1913 Webster]

A brew capable of being split along natural planes? Still didn't make any sense.

Ah, but this is one of those words that shows the weakness of a hundred-year-old dictionary, because 'fissile' took on a very different meaning after the discovery/invention of nuclear fission:

initial premise

A Minority View
by Walter E Williams
Release: Wednesday, August 9, 2006, and thereafter

The Minimum Wage Vision

There are decent people, without a selfish hidden agenda, who support increases in minimum wages as a means to help low-skilled workers, and there are other decent people, with the identical goal, who strongly oppose increases in the minimum wage. So the question is: How can people who share the same goals, helping low-skilled workers, come up with polar opposite means that produce polar opposite results?

It all depends on one's initial premise. It would do us some good to make our initial premises explicit and check them against reality. [...]

read it | digg it

damn data

There IS a problem with global warming ... it stopped in 1998
By Bob Carter

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

read it | digg it

Previous posts:

• "climate agnosticism"
• "political science"

nigromantia

From A.W.A.D:

Before the word arrived in its current form, it was known as nigromantia in medieval Latin, from confusion of Greek nekro with Latin niger (black). Now you know why magic and sorcery are also known as the 'black arts'."

fuel price floors

From FEE:

Fuel Vendor Can't Charge Less Without Breaking Law

August 9, 2006

"An ethanol-pump owner says he wants to lower his prices but the state won't let him. Badger Ethanol in Monroe [Wisconsin] charges around $2.22 for a gallon of E-85, an alcohol-fuel mixture that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, by volume. Badger's owners wanted to cut the price to $2 but said they had to artificially hike prices after some competitors complained Badger wasn't meeting the state's minimum markup laws." (Chicago Sun-Times, Wednesday)

Government at work.

FEE Timely Classic
"Price Floors, Surpluses, and the Minimum Wage" by Dwight R. Lee

William Graham Sumner, anarchist

One of the great heros of American classical liberalism was William Graham Sumner (1840-1910).

Wikipedia calls him "the leading American advocate of free markets, anti-imperialism, and the gold standard".

Also:

Sumner opposed the Spanish American War and the subsequent U.S. effort to quell the insurgency in the Philippines. He was a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League which had been formed after the war to oppose the annexation of territories. In his speech "The Conquest of the United States," he lambasted imperialism as a betrayal of the small government ideals of anti-militarism, the gold standard, and free trade. According to Sumner, imperialism would enthrone a new group of "plutocrats," or businesspeople who depended on government subsidies and contracts.

But 19th-century classical liberals (with the exception of a few radical liberals in France) were supposed to be minarchists, right? Defenders of the State as a necessary evil.

Well, according to Irving Fisher, a neoclassical economist from the early 20th century and certainly no friend to laissez-faire thought, Sumner told his Yale students the following:

Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist."

(From a biography of Fisher by his son, quoted by Mark Thornton in his book on Prohibition — a policy Fisher supported, by the way.)

capitalist manifesto

A specter is haunting Europe. It's the gospel of free markets, loosed from chains."

– "Capitalist Manifesto" in Newsweek (of all places!)
read it | digg it

harmjoy

It would be great if I could find a comic strip to illustrate every vocabulary word my son might struggle to learn.

One down, thousands to go:

Dilbert, August 7, 2006

a Nobel Prize in what now?

A great blog post by Tim Swanson:

The Myrdal Mystery: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Filed under: Foolish, History, Economics, Culture, Weird News, Debate - Tim @ 4:32 am

Unless you hail from Sweden, you probably never heard of a guy by the name of Gunnar Myrdal.

He was a life-long technocrat, a do-gooder that lived off the dole of the Swedish taxpayer, and a dedicated socialist whose professional training was in economics. While he was a proto-Keynesian (a Keynesian before Keynes), what really separated him from hoi polloi was this: he was instrumental in establishing the Nobel Prize in Economics.

You see, before ol' Alfred Nobel passed on into the Eternal abyss, he established a trust fund that bears his name. And from this fund, monetary awards are divvied up each year to recognize five different fields of inquiry, none of which is Economics.

That didn't stop Gunnar though. Give and take, he shrewdly played the game of politics and convinced various governmental divisions in Sweden to approve a new award. He even got the Bank of Sweden - the world's oldest central bank -- to finance this new award, in Honor of Alfred Nobel (note: the Nobel trust fund is privately managed).

The prize got the go-ahead and was ultimately christened in 1969 ... however fewer than five years go by when one big conflict of interest arises: he is nominated and wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. Imagine that.

And that's not the only twist -- he actually shares it with an advocate of free-markets, F.A Hayek.

So, a socialist, whose publications promote Keynesianism, wins alongside someone whose laissez-faire theories are diametrically opposite to his. How much credibility does the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences have now? Oy vey!

I was reminded of these historical footnotes when I came across a tribute to Ludwig von Mises by columnist Lawrence Fertig:

Mirabile dictu, Gunnar Myrdal, who was the architect of interventionism and did much to promote the welfare state in Sweden, as in other parts of the world, had this to say: "The organized welfare state has gone mad ... It (the strike) has become a class struggle, with judges, academics and civil servants seeing the lower classes creep up on them ... It's an impossible situation."

There is a measure of poetic justice in the anguish of Gunnar Myrdal and the other academics in Sweden who promoted the equalitarian society, and are now hoist by their own petard.

Fertig's essay was written in the spring of 1971. Mises dies in 1973. Myrdal wins the Nobel prize in 1974.

Doneski, right?

One last wrinkle, the Nobel Peace Prize. Oddly enough, the stereotypically Statist-leaning Norwegian Nobel Committee is charged with awarding the Peace Prize each year (long story short, Norway once "belonged to" Sweden). Its five members are appointed by the interventionist-friendly Norwegian parliament.

In 1984 it went to Alva Myrdal. She was Gunnar's wife and a life-long promoter of State intervention through a sundry of welfare schemes.

Phrase of the day: nepotistic kleptocrats.

alphabet soup

Roger Thornhill: You're police, aren't you? Or is it FBI?

The Professor: FBI, CIA, ONI... we're all in the same alphabet soup.

From North by Northwest (1959)

The soup grows thicker and the pot grows ever bigger.

Back in 1990, Lew Rockwell ran through some of the alphabetic additions: OSHA, CPSC, EPA, HUD, SEC, ICC, FCC, DOA, FDA...

And no, it wasn't all created by those infamous incarnations of alphabetic evil, FDR and LBJ. Some of them were created by Republicans.

Here are just some of those agencies, and the way they function: Founded by Richard Nixon, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is an anti-entrepreneur agency. Not only does OSHA target small and medium-size businesses, its regulatory cases are easily handled by Exxon's squad of lawyers, while they can bankrupt a small firm.

Also founded by Nixon, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issues regulations drawn up in open consultation with big business -- regulations that often conform exactly to what those firms are already doing. Small businesses, on the other hand, must spend heavily to comply.

Another Nixon creation is the Environmental Protection Agency, whose budget is larded with the influence of politically connected businesses, and whose regulations buttress established industries and discriminate against entrepreneurs, by -- for example -- legalizing pollution for existing companies, but making new firms spend heavily.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development was founded by Lyndon B. Johnson, but its roots stretch back to the housing policy of the New Deal, whose explicit purpose was to subsidize builders of rental and single-family housing. Since LBJ's Great Society, HUD has subsidized builders of public housing projects, and of subsidized private housing. How can anyone be surprised that fat cats use HUD to line their pockets? That was its purpose.

The Securities and Exchange Commission was established by Franklin D. Roosevelt, with its legislation written by corporate lawyers to cartelize the market for big Wall Street firms. Over the years, the SEC has stopped many new stock issues by smaller companies, who might grow and compete with the industrial and commercial giants aligned with the big Wall Street firms. And right now, it is lessening competition in the futures and commodities markets.

The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887 to stop "cut-throat" competition among railroads (i.e., competitive pricing) and to enforce high prices. Later amendments extended its power to trucking and other forms of transportation, where it also prevented competition. During the Carter administration, much of the ICC's power was trimmed, but some of this was undone in the Reagan administration.

The Federal Communications Commission was established by Herbert Hoover to prevent private property in radio frequencies, and to place ownership in the hands of the government. The FCC set up the network system, whose licenses went to politically connected businessmen, and delayed technological breakthroughs that might threaten the networks. There was some deregulation during the Reagan administration -- although it was the development of cable TV that did the most good, by circumventing the networks.

The Department of Agriculture runs America's farming on behalf of producers, keeping prices high, profits up, imports out, and new products off the shelves. We can't know what food prices would be in the absence of the appropriately initialed DOA, only that food would be much cheaper. Now, for the first time since the farm program was established by Herbert Hoover, as a copy of the Federal Food Administration he ran during World War I, we are seeing widespread criticism of farm welfare.

The Federal Trade Commission -- as shown by the fascist-deco statue in front of its headquarters -- claims to "tame" the "wild horse of the market" on behalf of the public. Since its founding in 1914, however, it has restrained the market to the benefit of established firms. That's why the chief lobbyists for the FTC were all from big business.

When then-Congressman Steve Symms (R-ID) tried to partially deregulate the Food and Drug Administration in the 1970s to allow more new drugs, he was stopped by the big drug companies and their trade association. Why? Because the FDA exists to protect them.

OSHA, CPSC, EPA, HUD, SEC, ICC, FCC, DOA, FDA -- I could go on and on, through the entire alphabet from Hell. I have only scratched the villainous surface. But according to the average history or economics text, these agencies emerged in response to public demand. There is never a hint of the regulatory-industrial complex. We're told that the public is being served. And it is: on a platter.

- Lew Rockwell, "Regulatory-Industrial Complex"

black market self-regulation

iceberg is a hero of mine. He discovered the Austrians less than 2 years ago and he has devoured the reading list -- much more actively than I have -- and has managed to apply the insights in some of the least expected ways, exempli gratia:

On a totally unrelated note, a story in todays NY Times relates of an individual who claims to have collected nearly 2,000 dope bags. One thing that quickly caught my eye was this quote:

"The bags, which are generally made of plastic or wax paper, bear names or images that identify the contraband inside. Those labels -- part turf marker, part marketing message -- allowed users to differentiate among dealers and evaluate the drug's purity."

Screw the FDA -- who needs them? Even the drug dealers understand how important the elements of name-brand recognition and a consumers' goodwill are in the free market in respect to the fact that there are no government guarantees to product quality and safety when you are talking about illicit substances.

This is not to say that drugs are a totally unregulated market; only that in one aspect, in which the FDA pretends to provide safety and quality assurances to Joe Consumer when he buys a bag of Dorito's, the illusion of an FDA guaranteed product obviously does not extend to black market products, and yet there is a huge market for these products in which your only guarantee to a decent product is the goodwill and repeat business the dealer hopes to win from the user.

And it's sad to note that I would choose the voluntary honesty of the drug dealer over your everyday agency of statistical murder, joints down.

globalization

Here's a distinction that would make a lot of conversations more productive:

In the past, the anti-WTO protestors have claimed to be standing with the poor nations of the world against capitalist globalization, but the reality is much more complicated. By resisting the trend to 'upwardly harmonize' regulations, poor nations of the world have stood firmly with the free-trade tradition. What they were arguing for, in reality, is not less globalization in general but less political globalization in order to make possible more economic globalization. The two forces are at odds with each other."

Lew Rockwell, "Does World Trade Need World Government?"

the childhood pattern of genius

From one of my homeschooling lists:

In 1960 , Harold McCurdy directed a study titled "The Childhood Pattern of Genius," commissioned by the Smithsonian Institute.

The study uncovered a three part recipe for developing high achievement in our kids:

1. Much time spent with warm, responsive parents and other adults;
2. Very little time spent with peers; and
3. A great deal of free exploration under parental guidance.

McCurdy concluded, "The mass education of our public school system is, in its way, a vast experiment on reducing all three factors to a minimum; accordingly, it should tend to suppress the occurrence of genius."

So, print this paragraph and put it to memory and you shouldn't have any trouble explaining why you homeschool!

I thought I should look for McCurdy's study before blogging about it, but I can't find it online. I do, however, find many other references to it.

Marvin Minsky, the famous co-founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab quotes McCurdy in a recent paper:

Harold G. McCurdy: "The present survey of biographical information on a sample of twenty men of genius suggests that the typical development pattern includes these important aspects: (1) a high degree of attention focused upon the child by parents and other adults, expressed in intensive educational measures and usually, abundant love; (2) isolation from other children, especially outside the family; (3) a rich efflorescence of fantasy [i.e. creativity] as a reaction to the preceding conditions."

This is Minsky's footnote:

Harold G. McCurdy, The Childhood Pattern of Genius. Horizon Magazine, May 1960, pp. 32-38. McCurdy concluded that mass education in public schools has "the effect of reducing all three of the above factors to minimum values."