fighting for the truth

Murray Rothbard was always so gentle in his disagreement with his mentor, Ludwig von Mises.

1. They disagreed on natural rights;
2. they disagreed on the necessity of the State; and
   
3. they disagreed on foreign policy (based, I suspect, on disagreements #1 and #2)

What might seem at first to be the least significant is (4) their disagreement on the best strategy for educating the public:

Mises's [turn-of-the-century] article on the gold standard proved highly controversial. He called for a de jure return in Austria-Hungary to gold redemption as a logical conclusion of the existing de facto policy of redeemability. In addition to running up against advocates of inflation, lower interest rates, and lower exchange rates, Mises was surprised to face ferocious opposition by the central bank, the Austro-Hungarian Bank. In fact, the Bank's Vice-President hinted at a bribe to soften Mises's position. A few years later, Mises was informed by Bohm-Bawerk, then Minister of Finance, of the reason for the vehemence of the Bank's opposition to his proposal for a legal gold standard. Legal redemption in gold would probably deprive the Bank of the right to invest funds in foreign currencies. But the Bank had long used proceeds from these investments to amass a secret and illegal slush fund, from which to pay subventions to its own officials, as well as to influential journalists and politicians. The Bank was keen on retaining the slush fund, and so it was fitting that Mises's most militant opponent was the publisher of an economic periodical who was himself a recipient of Bank subsidies.

Mises came to a decision, which he pursued for the rest of his career in Austria, not to reveal such corruption on the part of his enemies, and to confine himself to rebutting fallacious doctrine without revealing their sources. But in taking this noble and self-abnegating position, by acting as if his opponents were all worthy men and objective scholars, it might be argued that Mises was legitimating them and granting them far higher stature in the public debate than they deserved. Perhaps, if the public had been informed of the corruption that almost always accompanies government intervention, the activities of the statists and inflationists might have been desanctified, and Mises's heroic and lifelong struggle against statism might have been more successful. In short, perhaps a one-two punch was needed: refuting the economic fallacies of Mises's statist enemies, and also showing the public their self-interested stake in government privilege.

That's from Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero, which we're running as the weekend edition to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Mises's birth.

What appears at first to be either a difference in personal style or a minor difference of opinion on strategy is in fact a critical difference in understanding

1. how the academic profession works;
2. how the political class works; and
3. how history works.

The Viennese Austrians had a very different view of truth and progress than did the scrappy New Yorker who would carry the Austrian School into the second half of the 20th century (and into the 21st century, thanks to the institute he helped found). Rothbard's most significant strategic insight, the one behind the founding first of the Cato Institute and later the Mises Institute, is that the truth has to be fought for tooth and nail. The progress of ideas does not advance by the linear Whig Theory of History or even the zigzag advancement of Hegelian dialectic. True to the insights of philosophical and methodological individualism, Rothbard saw that human beings are perfectly capable of screwing things up through bad thinking and bad decisions. There is no guarantee that the truth will out, certainly not in the short run.

Rothbard again:

Unlike their successful enemies, such as Schmoller and Lujo Brentano, and even Wieser, neither Menger nor Bohm-Bawerk saw the academic arena as a political battlefield to be conquered. Hence, in contrast to their opponents, they refused to promote their own disciples or followers, or to block the appointment of their enemies. In fact, Bohm-Bawerk leaned even further backward to urge the appointments of sworn enemies of himself and of the Austrian School. This curious form of self-abnegation helped to torpedo Mises's or any similar academic appointment. Menger and Bohm apparently insisted on the naive view that truth will always win out, unaided, not realizing that this is hardly the way truth ever wins out in the academic or any other arena. Truth must be promoted, organized, and fought for as against error. Even if we can hold the faith that truth, unaided by strategy or tactics, will win out in the long run, it is unfortunately an excruciatingly long run in which all too many of us -- certainly including Mises -- will be dead. Yet, Menger adopted the ruinous strategic view that "there is only one sure method for the final victory of a scientific idea, by letting every contrary proposition run a free and full course."

Joe Salerno starts with Rothbard's insight and takes it further in his history of the French Liberal School.

Bastiat's school didn't fade away; neither did it lose in honest competition with rival schools of thought. The French liberals made the fatal error of recruiting the French government into their effort to promote economic literacy. The result, of course, is that the French government promoted social democrats and legal positivists. Where the French liberals had been the leading economists in a nation without any official university economics departments, they became outsiders in a statist profession -- a profession they had dirtied their hands to create.

To summarize:

1. Rothbard's first insight is that the truth must be fought for.
2. His corollary insight is that a school of thought needs institutional support.
3. Salerno's emphasis (one I'm sure Rothbard championed) is that the State will never help advance economic truth, since the truth is greatly to the disadvantage of the political class.

In his tribute today, George Reisman writes, "Mises is important because his teachings are necessary to the preservation of material civilization." That may sound like hyperbole, but it isn't. Bad theory can destroy civilization if the bad theory is about what creates or destroys civilization.
I didn't begin this post as an apologia for the Mises Institute, but apparently that's where these observations have led me. I consider myself lucky to be able to spend my days doing something I enjoy. And I feel even luckier to spend them doing something I consider important. But I don't quite know how to describe the growing sense I have that what we're doing might well be the most important work there is to be done: battling the forces, malicious nor not, of destruction and decivilization.

5th anniversary

Today is our 5th wedding anniversary, our first anniversary spent with our son, and the official end of the 5-year term we had on the prenuptial agreement we never got around to signing. (We negotiated the terms, paid a lawyer to vet our agreement and write it up as a contract, and then we sort of shrugged and each said, "I trust you.")

Whenever I want to know how long we've been married, I calculate the age of Ludwig von Mises (September 29, 1881 - October 10, 1973) and I subtract 120 ...

Here's my anniversary blog post from 2 years ago:

everything bad that begins with an A

competition

This is probably the single hardest thing to communicate to anticapitalists:

"Mises demonstrated that competition under capitalism is of an entirely different character than competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition for scarce, nature-given means of subsistence, but a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth, from which all gain."

- George Reisman, "Mises: Defender of Freedom"

the Petrov incident

Have you ever had the feeling after a near-miss accident, when it's all over and you know you're safe and then you start to shake?

That's how I feel about this Petrov incident, which an old friend just brought to my attention:

Stanislav Yefgrafovich Petrov (born c. 1939) is a retired Russian Army colonel who, on September 26, 1983, averted a potential nuclear war by refusing to believe that the United States had launched missiles against the USSR, despite the indications given by his computerized early warning systems. The Soviet computer reports were later shown to have been in error, and Petrov is credited with preventing World War III and the devastation of much of the Earth by nuclear weapons. Because of military secrecy and international policy, Petrov's actions were kept secret until 1998.

[read more]

It happened a few weeks after the Soviets shot down Korean Air Flight 007, killing all 269 people onboard. I remember those weeks very vividly. In my very politically active high school, we were more and more worried about the Cold War and the eventuality of nuclear holocaust. One of the few political drives I don't regret from that era was the call for unilateral nuclear disarmament. I didn't know at the time that Rothbard was with us because I didn't yet know who Rothbard was.

knatzig

As I've already mentioned, the K in BK stands for Knatz, my original family name. In America, the K is silent, so it's now pronounced like Gnats. In Germany, it's still pronounced K'natz.

My father recently received this email from a previously unknown distant relative:

Ludwig Knatz(*1914-1995) married my Granny Ruth Erhardt in 1944, who lived in a small village (Willerstedt, near the city of Weimar) in the federal-state of Germany called Thuringia, where he came to in 2nd World War. [...] The two "boys" and their families are still named "Knatz".

I also don't know, where the name Knatz comes from. Indeed, to be"knatzig" is a German dialect-expression for someone, who is kind of "odd fish" or "crotchety", as far as I can translate this. And "knartzen" means this squeaking-door-expression. But, I also think, that it might be rooted in "Ignatz" or "Ignatius". Maybe by ledgend, this guy was a bit like a squeaking door?!

But, in fact, the word/name "Ignatz" often appears connteced with jewish people, too. But I don't have any information about that. And as far as I know none of my relatives was Jewish (but, as you will know, there was a time in Germany, when being Jewish was not so favorable, so I cannot be sure about that). I only know, that the Knatz family in Niedenstein used to be simple workers, craftsmen and farmers. I once saw, where the old family-house was standing, but as I remember it is not existing anymore. Some other Knatz people should still live there or nearby.

warbucks

After the NYC Mises Circle, Tom Woods blogged:

Toward the end of his talk, Joe Salerno described the potential for a 'praxeology of war,' and discussed specific measures people can take to cripple the state's ability to carry on a particular war. This is definitely an mp3 worth listening to when these talks are posted, since Professor Salerno has identified an interesting and original research paradigm for the future.

Well, the mp3 is posted and it really is amazing:

War and Inflation: The Monetary Process and Implications Joseph T. Salerno [30 min]

barking cat fallacy

Like any good Rothbardian, I've made my criticisms of Milton Friedman.

He is a radical libertarian's greatest challenge because he gives the mainstream someone to dismiss as radical without ever having to confront real libertarian radicalism.

They love to say, "Well even Milton Friedman admits that the State needs to do such-and-such..."

And of course, he is the kept intellectual of central banking and the ideological enemy of all goldbugs, whom he considers fetishists.

Worst of all, we can combine my two complaints into one big whammy: "Even Milton Friedman admits that the Great Depression was caused by too little government intervention!"

Grrrrrrr.

Having said that however, I'm quite grateful to him for 3 things, all from the book Free To Choose:

1. Chapter 7, "Who Protects the Consumer?"
2. Chapter 8, "Who Protects the Worker?"
3. The following paragraph:

   What would you think of someone who said, "I would like to have a cat provided it barked"? Your statement that you favor a government provided it behaves as YOU believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The political principles that determine the behavior of government agencies once they are established are no less rigid than the biological principles that determine the characteristics of cats. The way the government behaves and its adverse consequences are not an accident, not a result of some easily corrected human mistake, but a consequence of its nature in precisely the same way that a meow is a consequence of the nature of a cat.

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worst ... president ... ever!

Gary North treats the word 'liberal' with great disrespect and the word 'conservative' with plenty of respect -- as if the mid-20th-century use of those terms was timeless.

He insists that George Dubya Bush is not really a conservative, but he has no problem calling the 1930s admirers of German and Italian fascism "liberals" without modifier or qualification.

Other than this one very annoying pattern (and he does make up for it somewhat by showing respect for the term 'libertarian'), his analysis of how the history books treat presidents in general, and how they will treat George Bush Junior specifically, is really wonderful:

"Why Bush Will Become the Textbooks' Worst President"

the perverse joys of being an ex-househusband

all cats are

(Click to Enlarge)

that which will always be with us

(7) "Of course war is horrible, but it will always exist, and I'm sick of these pacifist [expletive deleted] ruining any shred of political decency that they can manage."

Many people have observed that wars have recurred for thousands of years and therefore will probably continue to occur from time to time. The unstated insinuation seems to be that in view of war's long-running recurrence, nothing can be done about it, so we should all grow up and admit that war is as natural, and hence as unobjectionable, as the sun's rising in the east each morning. It's "how the world works."

This outlook contains at least two difficulties. First, many other conditions also have had long-running histories: for example, reliance on astrologers as experts in foretelling the future; affliction with cancers; submission to rulers who claim to dominate their subjects by virtue of divine descent or appointment; and many others. Eventually, people overcame each of these long-established conditions. Science revealed that astrology is nothing more than an elaborate body of superstition; scientists and doctors discovered how to control or cure certain forms of cancer; and citizens learned to laugh at the pretensions of rulers who claim divine descent or appointment (at least, they had learned until George W. Bush successfully revived the doctrine among the benighted rubes who form the Republican base). Because wars spring in large part from people's stupidity, ignorance, and gullibility, it is conceivable that alleviation of these conditions might have the effect of diminishing warfare, if not of eliminating it altogether.

Second, even if nothing can be done about the periodic outbreak of war, it does not follow that we ought to shut up and accept it without complaint. No serious person expects, say, that evil can be eliminated from the human condition, yet we condemn it and struggle against its expression in human affairs. We strive to divert potential evildoers from their malevolent course of action. Scientists and doctors continue to seek cures for cancers that have afflicted humanity for millennia. Even conditions that cannot be wholly eliminated can sometimes be mitigated, but only if someone tries to mitigate them.

Finally, whatever else one might say about the pacifists, one may surely say that if everyone were a pacifist, no wars would occur. Pacifism may be criticized on various grounds, as it always has been and still is, but to say that pacifists "lack any shred of political decency" seems itself to be indecent. Remember: war is horrible, as everybody now concedes but many immediately put out of mind.

- Robert Higgs, "War Is Horrible, but ... "

theory-laden anti-theory

Man, I sure wish I'd known David Gordon back when I was one of the few non-pomo majors in my college philosophy department:

A Mistaken Argument for Relativism

| David Gordon |

A very popular argument among postmodernists and other inhabitants of the Kingdom of Epistemological Darkness goes like this: We see things only from our own perspective, and we can never grasp the truth as it is in itself. All observation is "theory-laden".

Of course we see things from a point of view, but it doesn't follow from this that we are not making an objectively true judgment about what we see. I'm now, for example, looking at a computer screen in normal light. Is there any reason to think that the computer screen isn't really there, or that my view of the screen is distorted? In the absence of reason to think otherwise, it is entirely rational for me to accept my common sense belief that I am viewing a real screen. The argument from perspective mistakenly assumes that the "real" object exists at no point of view at all. As Jim Sadowsky puts it, the claim is that because we have eyes, we can't see.

In like fashion, the argument that observation is theory-laden assumes that our theories block access to the world as it really exists. But some of our theories, at least, are true, and known to be true. The argument for relativism relies on an equivocation in the meaning of "theory". In one sense, a theory is a speculative belief that is not known to be true. We can, in this sense, speak of the theory that intelligent life exists on other planets than Earth in our galaxy. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn't; we don't know. In another sense of the word, a theory is a statement that goes beyond a "pure observation statement", if such a thing exists. In this sense, perfectly obvious claims, e.g., elephants weigh more than sociologists, count as theoretical statements. To say that a statement is theory-laden, in this second sense, gives us no reason whatever to doubt its truth.

prohibition

For the 3 or 4 of you who don't read Mises.org, I want to draw special attention to Friday morning's article.

Mark Thornton has written an incredibly concise and powerful summary of the economics of prohibition.

The article was excerpted from his book, titled ... wait for it ... The Economics of Prohibition, available at ...

legal tender

What interesting timing. Now and again someone will object to my goldbug monetary rants by saying, "But anyone is perfectly free to negotiate trades in gold or silver or Monopoly* money if they want!"

The implication is that my objections to Federal Reserve Notes are nonsense. They're not imposed on us. We just prefer them.

Well, even without legal tender laws, there would be plenty of problems with that argument, but it's also important to point out to people just how many of their assumed (and always untested!) freedoms are denied by the state -- just how jealously the state guards its monopolies, from "first-class mail" to coinage and well beyond ...

See blog.mises re the Fed crackdown on the Liberty Dollar.

My own comments on the Liberty Dollar idea are here.

---

* By capital-M "Monopoly money" they mean, of course, the play money from the board game Monopoly^TM -- not the notes from the Federal Reserve monopoly ...

You got that, right?

Rothbard's Money Podcast

Last week was Guido Hulsmann's preface.

This week is Murray Rothbard's introduction.

The download page is here.

The podcast feed is here:

my tax dollar

My daily mailing from MyComicsPage.com didn't include Frank & Ernest this morning.

Good thing Mr B happened to forward it to me:

erisian moment

My father passed this news along to me. I'm waiting for a source to cite.

The lonely rock at the edge of the solar system that caused Pluto's downfall has been dubbed Eris after the Greek goddess of strife, astronomers said on Thursday.

Eris caused strife and discord by causing quarrels among people and that's what this one has done too...

The astronomers' union accepted Eris on Wednesday. The group also accepted Brown's proposed name for Eris's moon, Dysnomia.

Dysnomia is Eris' daughter in Greek mythology, and the word means "lawlessness" in Greek.

See "Sacred Chao".

See also the "Law of Eristic Escalation".

I would also like to mention that my first Mac OS X computer was named Kallisti.

Fnord.

Vroom, vroom!

As a quick postscript to yesterday's Mises quotation, let me briefly quote Gary North from today's LRC:

The desire to get rich drives most commodity futures speculators. This is a third-rate goal in life, hardly worth pursuing. But a free society puts this natural desire to productive service. Men get rich by serving the public. The public benefits.

with all due respect...

I think this is a funny line:

Of course, as a rule capitalists and entrepreneurs are not saints excelling in the virtue of self-denial. But neither are their critics saintly. And with all the regard due to the sublime self-effacement of saints, we cannot help stating the fact that the world would be in a rather desolate condition if it were peopled exclusively by men not interested in the pursuit of material well-being.

- Ludwig von Mises, "Profit and Loss"

proportionality

... to insist on proportionality in warfare does not imply that the Air Force can only use radar if the enemy has it as well. Rather, it means that ... oh let me try to think of an exaggerated example just to make the point ... Okay I've got it! Proportionality in warfare means that if a foreign government bombs a military target and kills a few thousand of your soldiers, then you're not allowed to turn around, invent atomic weapons and use them to melt tens of thousands of children who are subjects of that same government, particularly when you've already blockaded their mainland and their troops are no longer a threat. There ... If that ridiculous example doesn't get the idea across, I don't know what else will.

- Bob Murphy, "Muddled Michael Medved"

See also Tom Woods, "Another Conservative Contribution to Civilization":

Ah, what intellectuals today's conservatives are, always brimming with erudition. In a recent column, Michael Medved speaks of the idea of proportionate response as a criterion of the just war as a "currently trendy notion" and a "misguided contemporary" tool of moral evaluation. How embarrassed we all must feel to have thought it came from Hugo Grotius (1583-1645).

And on questioning the justice and goodness of WWII:

Those are pretty good questions, actually, even if the entire range of respectable opinion forbids us to pose them. Some issues, you understand, can never be discussed or considered lest society revert instantly to barbarism.

a rant from Mr B

So, when I was reading your blog and ran across gigantic open-quotes, I started grinding my teeth. Now, I notice that your last couple of posts didn't use quotation marks at all. Hopefully, you got the 'giant quotation graphic' urge out of your system. If not, please, please, pretty-please do so as soon as possible. Preferably in private."

The big ol' quote marks were one response to those who told me it wasn't always clear which words were mine and which were someone else's. This color is another one. But I value a loyal and helpful reader enough to let a major preference of his override a very minor one of mine. So the above is the last you'll see of the big ol' quote marks.

At least for now.

Until I find the urge irresistible ...

let's collect bromides

Last week, A.W.A.D's theme was words from chemistry, and the first word of the series was "bromide":
A Stephen Ross wrote A.W.A.D:

I thought you might be amused by these packages I saw on display in convenience stores in Japan back in 2003:

I believe that the packages contain photo cards of the ever-renewed teen-pop group "Morning Musume" (morning daughter). I do not understand the "Let's collect Bromides!" caption, neither does my Japanese wife. Yet another of the many mysteries of Japan.

But the mystery was immediately solved by a Joe Presley, who seems to have been unaware of the mystery he was solving:

In Japanese, a "buromaido", is a photo of a celebrity. It comes from the days when a silver bromide emulsion was used for photography.

god save us from better government

Old World Government has always been (supposed to be) an Authority controlling a planned economy. Actually it is a use of force to prevent material progress. The lazy, selfish, dissolute ruler neglects that job. Caligula, for instance, the worst of Roman Emperors, merely wasted goods in extravagant living and enjoyed torturing a few hundreds of his helpless subjects. People always get along comparatively well under a ruler like that.

It was sober, ascetic, conscientious Augustus Caesar who laid the firm foundations of the misery in which all Europeans lived for generations. He began to establish a planned world-economy, the famous Roman Peace that the Roman legions gave the whole world's people by conquering them. (Just such a peace as Hitler, and some of his enemies, are planning now.)

That Roman Peace was designed to last forever. When Diocletian perfected it, its economy was so thoroughly planned and so well administered that farmers could no longer farm nor workers work, and Government took care of them on the relief that taxes provided, until the increasing taxes pushed so many farmers and workers onto tax-supported relief that there was not enough productive energy left to pay the taxes, and the Roman empire with its world peace collapsed into the Dark Ages.

- Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom

Or as Robert Anton Wilson put it:

AN HONEST politician is a national calamity.

At first glance, this seems preposterous. People of all shades of opinion agree that at least on the axiom that we need more honest politicians, not more crooked ones. Please remember, however, that people of all shades of opinion once agreed that the Earth is flat.

Your typical dishonest politician (bocca grande normalis) is interested only in enriching himself at the public expense, a goal he shares with most of his fellow citizens, especially doctors and lawyers. This is normal behavior for our primate species, and society has always been able to endure and survive it.

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, OR IF THEY DO, THEY ARE CAREFUL TO HIDE THE FACT!

An honest politician (bocca grande giganticus) is far more dangerous. He or she is sincerely committed to bettering society by political action. In practice, that means by writing and enacting more laws. Indeed, many groups of idealistic citizens publish rating sheets on politicians every year, and those who have created more laws are estimated as having higher value than those who are frequently absent when bills are voted upon. The assumption is that adding more laws to statute books is a positive achievement, like adding more money to our paychecks or more art works to a museum.

A little thought, however, shows that this assumption is not tenable. Every law creates a whole new criminal class; for instance, when marijuana was illegalized in 1937, several hundred thousand formerly law-abiding citizens became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. As more and more laws are passed, more and more citizens become criminals. The chief cause of the rising crime rate is the rising number of laws being enacted. An honest politician, who keeps his nose to the grindstone and enacts several hundred laws in the course of his career, thereby produces as many as several million new criminals.

It is furthermore mathematically demonstrable that the more laws there are, the more restrictions there are on the freedom of the individual. If there were, say, only three laws in a given society---e.g., Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie or defraud---there would be only three restrictions on freedom, which all rational persons would accept as obviously necessary to the maintenance of order. When there are several hundred thousand restrictions on freedom, most of them are felt as extremely irksome by large segments of the populace.

In fact, it would take a brigade of lawyers several weeks, minutely examining your affairs, to determine if you are a criminal. Certainly, no ordinary citizen has the time or research facilities to discover if he or she is in violation of one out of skillions of laws currently on our statute books. In many cases, two lawyers consulted independently will give opposite opinions about whether or not a given course of action is in violation of the statutes.

And new laws are being enacted all the time. Obviously, unless there is a sudden paper shortage, the number of laws on the books will eventually reach the point satirized by T.H.White, in which "everything not prohibited is compulsory." It would then probably only take a few years or decades more for a cadre of honest politicians diligently writing even more laws to reach the complementary point where "everything not compulsory is prohibited."

EVERY LAW CREATES A WHOLE NEW CRIMINAL CLASS OVERNIGHT!

At that stage the nightmare world of Orwell's 1984 will be achieved. Crooked politicians, merely interested in the normal human activity of making themselves rich and comfortable, could never create that ultimate horror; but honest and idealistic politicians bring us closer to it every day, with every new law they enact.

These three generalizations -- that national security produces national insecurity; that authoritarianism produces miscommunication and eventual idiocy; and that honest politicians are a plague upon society -- will be found to fully explain the Decline and Fall of Rome, the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, and the Decline and Fall of any country you care to name. They are as universal as Newton's laws of motion and apply to ALL cases.

Of course, the American Sociological Association says I am mad. Mad, am I? They said the Wright Brothers were mad. They said Edison was mad. They said Baron Frankenstein was mad...

- Hagbard Celine (aka RAW),
Laws of Social Cybernetics

RAW and RWL have such similar takes on the world, despite such different aesthetic styles.

Rose Wilder Lane again:

Nobody can plan the actions of even a thousand living persons, separately. Anyone attempting to control millions must divide them into classes, and make a plan applying to these classes.

But these classes do not exist. No two persons are alike. No two are in the same circumstances; no two have the same abilities; beyond getting the barest necessities of life, no two have the same desires.

Therefore the men who try to enforce, in real life, a planned economy that is their theory, come up against the infinite diversity of human beings. The most slavish multitude of men that was ever called "demos" or "labor" or "capital" or "agriculture" or "the masses," actually are men; they are not sheep.

Naturally, by their human nature, they escape in all directions from regulations applying to non-existent classes. It is necessary to increase the number of men who supervise their actions. Then (for officials are human, too) it is necessary that more men supervise the supervisors. Still, individuals will continue to act individually, in ways that they plan. These ways do not fit into Authority's plan. So still more men are needed, imperatively needed, to stop or to supervise these new ways of acting; and more men to supervise these supervisors; and more men to co-ordinate the constantly increasing complexity of all this supervision.

An attempt to exercise a control of individuals that in reality does not exist, must increase in volume.

Bureaucrats are not to blame for increasing a bureaucracy; bureaucracy by its nature must increase.

RAW

The man who got me to start thinking about (i.e., stop dismissing) anarchism is apparently very sick.

Robert Anton Wilson, psychedelic discordian guru, was my introduction to the names Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner.

I read everything of his I could get my hands on, including stuff that was out of print at the time (now brought back by New Falcon Publications).

As I got more seriously into the philosophical questions behind libertarianism (utilitarianism vs natural law; model agnosticism vs praxeology), I found myself less and less of a Wilsonian and more and more of a Rothbardian.

But it was Uncle Bob who got me started down this road, and I receive the news of his illness with even more sadness than I'd anticipated. If he wants to keep going, then I hope he pulls through again. If he's ready to let go, then I hope he gets to do so peacefully and painlessly, and I will mourn his passing whenever it comes. This is the message I got in email tonight:

From: admin@maybelogic.org
Date: September 7, 2006 8:40:56 PM EDT
To: eListLM
Subject: MLA eList September

Hello!
Many of you have emailed asking of Bob Wilson's health, sending kind, discordian wishes. Bob is still quite weak but he remains cheerful, without pain, and optimistic that he may recover. Here's an official RAW communique:

just to let you know
i'm still alive
and i love you all
i'll write more when i'm stronger.

olga

Tell the General, "Shit happens."
CAPTAIN RON

For kicks and to help fund his care, Bob has been hosting a garage sale on eBay. Please join in on the fun:

http://tinyurl.com/f5ftp

We are also readying our first Robert Anton Wilson audiobook of The Earth Will Shake, hoping to generate a few more greenbacks for dear Mr. Wilson and to get his words into human minds via human ears. This first audiobook should be ready for download in November, but in the meantime we are delighted to offer an exclusive preview as a sample of what's to come:

http://www.deepleafaudio.com/EWSSample.htm

Here's RAW on anarchy and minarchy, Tucker, Spooner, Tolstoy, Kropotkin, and canine liberation:

Media Files	Speaker	Date
Anarchism From TSOG [0:02:58]	Robert Anton Wilson	2002

progress

Now and then Tim "Movementarian" Swanson will point me to an article about what's on the cutting edge of new technology. These seem to be written by either

1. enthusiastic geeks, or
2. respectable journalists.

As a geek-oriented fellow, I was always hearing snide dismissals about geek enthusiasm. "So when is the Internet going to change the nature of democracy? So when are we all going to start telecommuting for huge salaries? What ever happened to 'Push Technology'?!"

What amazes me is the consistency with which group B, the respectable types, show their utter ignorance of economic history (which is a superset of technological history -- a point missed by the geeks as well). An article will start off describing something seemingly science fictional -- e.g., hologrammatic home video -- and then explain who's now working on it and how. Invariably, it will go on to quote someone with a university affiliation about how little demand there is for such technology at its projected $100k price tag.

As Mises emphasized, "An industrial innovation ... enters the market as the extravagance of an elite before it finally turns, step by step, into a need of each and all and is considered indispensable. What was once a luxury becomes in the course of time a necessity."

He continues:

Centuries passed before the fork turned from an implement of effeminate weaklings into a utensil of all people. The evolution of the motor car from a plaything of wealthy idlers into a universally used means of transportation required more than twenty years. But nylon stockings became, in this country, an article of every woman's wear within hardly more than two or three years. There was practically no period in which the enjoyment of such innovations as television or the products of the frozen food industry was restricted to a small minority."

Ludwig von Mises,
Economic Freedom and Interventionism,
"Luxuries into Necessities"

And here is Rose Wilder Lane on a similar point:

Men in Government who imagine that they are controlling a planned economy must prevent economic progress -- as, in the past, they have always done. For economic progress is a change in the use of men's productive energy. Only individuals who act against the majority opinion of their time will try to make such a change. And if they are not stopped, they destroy the existing (and majority-approved) Government monopoly.

To know the everlasting majority attitude toward new uses of productive energy, remember that your great-grandfather did not believe that railroads were possible. At the time, a committee of learned men investigating the question for the British Government, reported that railroads were not possible, for the reason that the proposed speed of fifteen miles an hour would kill any human being; the human body could not endure such a pressure of air.

Remember what sensible men thought of Alexander Graham Bell's insisting that a wire could carry a human voice. Remember that ships could not be made of iron because iron does not float. Recall that the horseless carriage could never be more than a rich man's toy, not only because it cost at least five thousand dollars, but also because it ran only on macadam and therefore could never leave the cities. Or, what do you think of the experimenters in New Mexico who are working on rocket-ships to carry men from planet to planet? How much of your own money will you invest in a rocket-line from here to Mars? No majority will ever take up arms against their Government to defend such men as these.

Rose Wilder Lane ~1943

abolitionist secessionist

Or is it secessionist abolitionist?

Professor Long has forced me to update my Ezra Heywood page at BlackCrayon.com:

Another Pro-Secession Abolitionist

When the Civil War came, many abolitionists, including William Lloyd Garrison, abandoned their traditional anti-war, anti-state stance to support the Northern cause, in the hope that a Union victory would bring a quicker end to slavery. One abolitionist who stuck to his anti-war position and defended Southern secession was Ezra Heywood; his critique of the Garrisonian position is now online here. Commentary here.

Roderick T. Long, Praxeology.net
(as announced on blog.Mises.org)

godless faith

One of my earliest blog posts, "On Atheism, Agnosticism, and Faith", written over 2 years ago, has continued to get comments, both in email and on the blog. Here's one that arrived today:

On faith and strong or positive atheism

I don't believe it is correct to categorize strong or positive atheists as having faith. Although there probably is no absolutely definitive evidence for the non-existence of gods, there is strong evidence to support that contention. The evidences are generally of the following kinds:

1. So many gods are said to exist that the likelihood of any one of them actually existing is very small.
2. The term "god" is often poorly defined. It is reasonable to discount arguments for such a god.
3. Where the term is reasonably well defined the definition is often internally inconsistent or inconsistent with those aspects of the natural world with which the entity is said to interact.
4. The religious tracts supposedly inspired by the entity can be shown to be full of internal and external inconsistencies.

Lastly, one must not forget that it is possible to be a strong or positive atheist in respect of some gods and not others.

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Posted by Anonymous to lowercase liberty at 9/04/2006 12:51:01 PM

none but the dead are permitted to tell the truth

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

"The War Prayer" by Mark Twain

Note Lew Rockwell's postscript:

Twain wrote The War Prayer during the Spanish-American War. It was submitted for publication, but on March 22, 1905, Harper's Bazaar rejected it as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Dan Beard, to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth." Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Mark Twain could not publish "The War Prayer" elsewhere and it remained unpublished until 1923.