Bastiat's favorite movie

In one of the most unexpected and startlingly simple (and therefore brilliant) analogies ever offered to the movement, Lew Rockwell helps libertarians see the unseen:

"We Need an Angel Like Clarence"

an endless and arid dispute over semantics

"You're not really an anarchist!"

How boring.

But it does happen.

I like Bryan Caplan's reply:

Let us designate anarchism₁ anarchism as you define it. Let us desiginate anarchism₂ anarchism as I and the American Heritage College Dictionary define it. This is a FAQ about anarchism₂.

Bryan Caplan, Appendix: Defining Anarchism

Here is Murray Rothbard's rather longer reply from "Society without a State," today's daily article at Mises.org, originally published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975 (available from Mises.org in PDF):

In attempting to outline how a "society without a state" -- that is, an anarchist society -- might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense of or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not "really" anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as "taxation"; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.

Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.

And a brief note on the other sometimes-disputed term:

Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term "coercion" can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it "physical violence or the threat thereof," with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.

It's amazing to me that we somehow never got around to putting up this brief manifesto before today. It's Rothbard's great, short introduction to market anarchism. The best thing about it is that it opens by addressing and debunking all the standard confusions and non sequiturs that immediately come up as soon as we speak the dreaded A-word.

Liberty Loves Justice

I was searching for an image of Blind Justice and found this funny picture instead:
If anyone knows its origin, please let me know.

honeymoon cash

"But the movie isn't about fractional reserve banking, any more than it's about angels getting their wings. It's about the positive, cumulative, but unseen benefits to many people of individual acts of charity and honesty. It's also about capitalism: home ownership, small businesses, and sacrificial hard work. That's why immigrants should be required to take a test on 'It's a Wonderful Life.' It wouldn't hurt to have political candidates take the test, either. I suspect that most of them would flunk."

"'Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter!'"

by Gary North

reclaiming Christmas

"Those who call for 'putting Christ back in Christmas' are only confessing their profound historical ignorance...."

Let's put the X back in Xmas!

anarclaus

Looking for a good image to go with my praise of Gary North's recent piece on Scrooge, I looked through the holiday images I've used in my blog over the past couple of years.

My favorite by far is Lysanta.

I think it goes particularly well with "Anarcho Claus is Coming to Town" by Samuel Edward Konkin III.

Initiate force?
You better not try.
You better not steal;
I'm telling you why.
Anarcho Claus is coming to town.

He's taking a risk,
Flying in low,
Smuggling in toys
So the statists won't know.
Anarcho Claus is coming to town.

He sees when you are trying
To trade what's good for you
For all that which you really want
So he'll run it in for you.

So...Be closing your door,
But not very tight,
The market will clear
Late Christmas night.
Anarcho Claus is coming to town.

My wife and I sang this to our baby boy the other night.

(Thanks to Wally Conger for posting the lyrics last Christmas!)

dining with Scrooge

Our whole culture gets plenty of Scrooge this time of year.

I think libertarians, anxious to defend the Industrial Revolution and the prosperity engine of capitalism more generally, drink in a lot more Scrooge even than the already supersaturated norm.

But Gary North has written such a wonderful piece on Dickens and Scrooge, such a rich and dimensional treatment of the historical background -- both of book and author -- of the issues Dickens was and wasn't aware of, and even why Scrooge really did need redemption, contrary to many of his libertarian defenders ... I just have to recommend it.

My favorite of the many libertarian pieces on Scrooge, which may sound like damnation by faint praise, but it's actually hearty praise:

"Dining With Scrooge"

The Shaffer Dictionary

I try to keep track of my own and others' definitions of the most critical words used in discussing political philosophy. Here's something Butler Shaffer wrote when I was only 3 years old:

The following definitions comprise a part of my view of reality, in all its humorous -- and often frustrating -- manner.

GOVERNMENT

an institution of war, theft, murder, rape and predation, . . . the absence of which, it is said, would lead to disorder.

TAXATION

a practice employed by governments in looting all of its citizens in order to obtain the necessary funds to chase down and punish looters.

WAR

the price men are forced to pay in order to keep peace among the politicians.

Shaffer's more recent writings are here.

lying to the state

For the most part, embracing ethical libertarianism meant that my actions were far more restricted. For instance, I had previously had no problem in principle with the justice of punching someone in the face for mere verbal abuse. The concept of coercion -- and specifically, the emphasis on the initiatory nature of coercion -- narrowed the field of ethically legitimate options.

There is one thing, however, (and some might see it as quite a major thing) that I had previously considered unethical which became quite straightforwardly legitimate when submitted to the Do-Not-Initiate-Force-Or-Fraud Test.

I refer to the question of lying to the police -- or to state operatives in general.

Previously, I had considered it wrong to lie. Does that mean I would have told the Nazi soldiers where exactly I had hidden the Jewish family in my annex?

No.

First of all, I distinguished candor and honesty. My personal restriction against lying was very technically about the truth content of my statements, and not about any positive obligation to give people all the information they want. Secondly, it was clear to me that the hypothetical Nazi soldiers didn't count, although I'm not sure I could have given a coherent explanation why.

The Non-Aggression Principle is demanding. It leads inexorably to philosophical anarchism, after all, if you're willing to follow the logic to its ... logical conclusion. But it also makes clear that state agents are automatically aggressors, and just as it is ethically legitimate to defend oneself against force by using force against the aggressor, just as it is potentially legitimate even to seek retribution for the initiation of rights-violations, so too is it ethically righteous to lie to thugs and liars. Hitting back is not the same thing as hitting first, no matter how many TV heroes tell you it makes you "no better than them!" (But notice that these action-show moralists are never pacifists: they want you to let the police take care of it. Talk about propaganda for a monopoly!)

Here's how Dom Armentano put it:

In my view the victim has absolutely no moral duty to be truthful to anyone hell-bent on harming him or stealing his property, especially if the truth would make the crime even more likely. Simply put, criminals forfeit their right to truth when they steadfastly refuse to respect the sanctity of life and private property. Therefore it would be entirely appropriate, I dare say mandatory, for a potential victim to fib or lie (about the nearness of the police, for example) if the fib could prevent the robbery or help catch the criminal. And since 99% of politics concerns the suppression of liberty and the forceful redistribution (theft) of property, I would argue that the same fib loophole applies there -- and with a vengeance.

"It's OK to Lie to Ted Kennedy"

And here's Rothbard on the same point:

If the State, then, is a vast engine of institutionalized crime and aggression, the "organization of the political means" to wealth, then this means that the State is a criminal organization, and that therefore its moral status is radically different from any of the just property-owners that we have been discussing in this volume. And this means that the moral status of contracts with the State, promises made to it and by it, differs radically as well. It means, for example, that no one is morally required to obey the State (except insofar as the State simply affirms the right of just private property against aggression). For, as a criminal organization with all of its income and assets derived from the crime of taxation, the state cannot possess any just property. This means that it cannot be unjust or immoral to fail to pay taxes to the State (since it cannot be unjust to break contracts with criminals).

The Ethics of Liberty, p. 183.

Hemingway, on the other hand ...

Here is a blockquote within a blockquote on Ernest Hemingway among the lefties:

When left-wing critics of the 1930's attacked him for not embracing doctrinaire Marxism, Ernest Hemingway replied:

I cannot be a communist now because I believe in only one thing: liberty. First I would look after myself and do my work. Then I would care for my family. Then I would help my neighbor. But the state 'I care nothing for. All the state has ever meant to me is unjust taxation ... I believe in the absolute minimum of government.

A writer is an outlyer like a gypsy ... If he is a good writer he will never like the government he lives under. His hand should be against it....

(Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969)

In the foreword to his own book, Baker writes: "If [Hemingway] was the fierce individualist who resisted fad and fashion like the plague ... who believed that that government is best which governs least, who hated tyranny, bureaucracy, taxation, propaganda...."

- Jerome Tucille, "From Libertine To Libertarian," Libertarian Forum, 2.2, January 15, 1970, available from Mises.org in PDF.

consistency is a harsh mistress

I say in my review of Robert A. Heinlein's most libertarian novel,

There are many of us who are grateful to Heinlein for introducing us to the distinction between liberty and democracy, between personal freedom and collective sovereignty, between the society and the State.

But after giving us our first push in an unpopular and unsupported direction, he then refused to follow us to the natural conclusions of his own arguments. He was our ideological forefather, not our brother.

I won't comment any further on this short article I found in a 1969 issue of Murray Rothbard's Libertarian Forum, other than to note that agorists Sam Konkin and J. Neil Schulman were not only big fans of Heinlein, but defended him as a libertarian.

HEINLEIN AND LIBERTY: A Warning

One of the more distressing tendencies among American right-wing "libertarians" is a symptomatic willingness to identify popular authors as freedom-loving if they so much as use the term liberty in their works. The undisputed guru of this coterie is Robert A. Heinlein, writer of scores of science fiction short stories and novels; his book, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", is often singled out as representative of "anarchist" or "libertarian" science fiction. It is an enthralling novelette describing a futuristic moon colony which rebels against planet Earth under the aegis of a small group of classical liberals who have come into power via revolution. The rhetoric of these bourgeois revolutionaries is unabashedly Randian, although a signal character is identified as a "rational anarchist".

"Moon" is the latest production of the prolific Mr. Heinlein, noted also for "Stranger in a Strange Land", which supposedly captivated the attention of hip people several years ago. One would expect Heinlein to be somewhat sympathetic to the Movement, having read his utopian creations which hint at the possibilities of an open society; to the contrary, a bitter awakening is in store for Heinlein fans who are more than armchair devotees of liberty.

According to a February issue of National Review magazine, Robert Heinlein is one of 270 signers of a jingoist petition circulated in the US Author's Guild by the facile William Buckley and his spiritual cohort Frank S. Meyer. The petition, a belated retort to an earlier anti-Vietnam war roster of authors (which was eminently successful), calls for "the vigorous prosecution of the Vietnam war to an honorable conclusion." Deep contemplation is not necessary to comprehend the statist, authoritarian implications of such New Right weasel words and the concomitant beliefs of men who would endorse it.

Only one other science fiction writer joins Heinlein in the missive, Poul Anderson; the other signatories are well known in the rightist arsenal (Stefan Possony, Eugene Lyons, Brent Bozell, John Dos Passos, Francis Russell . . . ad nauseam). The case of Robert Heinlein is useful in evaluating both the politics of his followers and the commitments of entrenched and established American writers: It is clear that a writer cannot serve two masters, both justice and the mighty dollar -- one must give way, if not on the written page, then in one's personal life. While Heinlein has never been so explicitly libertarian as to be judged hypocritical, the lesson remains an open and obvious one.

An interesting footnote to this question comes from our British comrades: Several years ago, in Anarchy magazine, the monthly publication of Freedom Press in London, an article appeared on science fiction in the English language, in which Heinlein was singled out as "the only fascist science fiction writer in America." This prophetic note comes from a libertarian community that has no need for propertied quislings.

- Wilson A. Clark, Jr.

The Machinery Of Friedman

For a long time, I've felt bad that BlackCrayon.com never included a review of David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. I read it and Rothbard's For a New Liberty back to back, and Rothbard's book (which I also never reviewed) drew me into Austro-libertarianism and ultimately to The Ludwig von Mises Institute, which was the beginning of the end of my own anarchist website.

But now and again, I will add something to BlackCrayon.com (as I did yesterday) and today I'm adding Joseph Salerno's review of Friedman from back in 1973:

Summary:

"Suffice it to say that crippled in its inception, Friedman's analysis cannot but lead to lame conclusions."

Review:

The Machinery Of Friedman

By Joseph Salerno

[First published in The Libertarian Forum, 5.12, December 1973, available from Mises.org in PDF.]

In The Machinery of Freedom, David Friedman bases his apologia for anarcho-capitalism on solely "practical" considerations. In so doing, he eschews the bedrock foundation of the natural rights ethic and rests his theoretical structure on the dangerously shifting sands of utilitarianism. All this, we are told, to avert the popular disapprobation that attends ethical vis a vis practical concerns. Consequently, we find Mr. Friedman in chapter 34 equably discussing the production and utilization of retaliatory nuclear weapons in a free society, without recognition of the moral problem entailed in the very existence of weapons of indiscriminate mass annihilation. But this particular shortcoming bears an integral relation to an overriding general flaw in Friedman's exposition.

[Keep Reading]

rights

Here is how I defined rights at BlackCrayon.com:

OBLIGATIONS (Rights & Responsibilities)

Obligation: Something that a moral agent ought or ought not to do.

1. Positive obligations are those things you are obliged to pursue.
2. Negative obligations are those things you are obliged to avoid.

Responsibilities: The obligations you have to others in the world.

1. Positive responsibilities are those things you are normatively required to do for others.
2. Negative responsibilities are those things that you are proscribed from doing to others.

Rights: The responsibilities that the rest of the world has to you.

1. Positive rights are those things the world owes you.
   (Examples of claimed positive rights include: the right to employment; the right to healthcare; the right to an education.)
2. Negative rights are those things that all others must avoid doing to you.
   (Examples of claimed negative rights include: freedom of speech; right to privacy; right to self-defense.)

And here's what I've decided to add today:

RIGHTS

We shall be speaking throughout this work of "rights," in particular the rights of individuals to property in their persons and in material objects. But how do we define "rights"? "Right" has cogently and trenchantly been defined by Professor Sadowsky:

When we say that one has the right to do certain things we mean this and only this, that it would be immoral for another, alone or in combination, to stop him from doing this by the use of physical force or the threat thereof. We do not mean that any use a man makes of his property within the limits set forth is necessarily a moral use.[53]

Sadowsky's definition highlights the crucial distinction we shall make throughout this work between a man's right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right. We will contend that it is a man's right to do whatever he wishes with his person; it is his right not to be molested or interfered with by violence from exercising that right. But what may be the moral or immoral ways of exercising that right is a question of personal ethics rather than of political philosophy -- which is concerned solely with matters of right, and of the proper or improper exercise of physical violence in human relations. The importance of this crucial distinction cannot be overemphasized. Or, as Elisha Hurlbut concisely put it: "The exercise of a faculty [by an individual] is its only use. The manner of its exercise is one thing; that involves a question of morals. The right to its exercise is another thing."[54]

---

[53] James A. Sadowsky, S.J., "Private Property and Collective Ownership," in Tibor Machan, ed., The Libertarian Alternative (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974), pp. 120-21.

[54] Hurlbut, cited in Wright, American Interpretations, pp. 257 ff.

Murray N. Rothbard,
The Ethics of Liberty,
"Natural Law and Natural Rights"

And another thing ...

From my beloved Chicago Manual of Style:

"Next to the groundless notion that it is incorrect to end an English sentence with a preposition, perhaps the most wide-spread of the many false beliefs about the use of our language is the equally groundless notion that it is incorrect to begin one with 'but' or 'and.' As in the case of the superstition about the prepositional ending, no textbook supports it, but apparently about half of our teachers of English go out of their way to handicap their pupils by inculcating it. One cannot help wondering whether those who teach such a monstrous doctrine ever read any English themselves."⁷

---

7. Charles Allen Lloyd, We Who Speak English: And Our Ignorance of Our Mother Tongue (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1938), 19.

And here's another one:

a; an. Use the indefinite article a before any word beginning with a consonant sound {a utopian dream}. Use an before any word beginning with a vowel sound {an officer} {an honorary degree}. The word historical and its variations cause missteps, but since the h in these words is pronounced, it takes an a {an hourlong talk at a historical society}. Likewise, an initialism (whose letters are sounded out individually) may be paired with one article, while an acronym (which is pronounced as a word) beginning with the same letter is paired with the other {an HTML document describing a HUD program}. See 5.73.

That's right, folks, it's "a history" not "an history"!

It occurs to me that there is a connection between deliberately awkward English usage prescriptions and, e.g., recycling paper: neither makes any sense from the perspective of the supposed goals -- clear and consistent communication on the one hand and efficient, environmentally friendly use of scarce resources on the other -- but they both appeal to that religious instinct to create an elite minority who feel good about the extra efforts they make while looking down on those who don't make the same sacrifices.

bling-bling

Someone felt compelled to leave an anonymous comment on this post, giving dictionary definitions for "tinsel," "tree," and "bling-bling." I was surprised that "bling-bling" was already in the dictionary. But here it is, less than a week later, and A.Word.A.Day at Wordsmith.org is featuring "The Reduplicatives. That could be the name of a rock band -- the one known for razzle-dazzle and a hoity-toity demeanor. They come in pairs, have a little chit-chat, and then hurry-scurry off to their next go-go gig."

Today's example:



Something's in the air ...

I have seen the future ...

... and it gives me the creeps!



I wonder why the legs bend at unexpected angles.

Check out the part where the guy tries to kick to robot over!

(Thanks to Machina Maleficarum for pointing this one out.)

black Americans understood FDR's New Deal

(some of them, anyway)

From the very bottom of today's daily article at Mises.org:

Note

[1] That blacks in the 1930s knew that they stood to suffer increases in racism is explained in Bernstein, David E., Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts From Reconstruction to the New Deal (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2001).

Consider also a cartoon that appeared in a black Chicago newspaper, the Chicago Defender, during Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term:

In the first panel, a man says to his wife, "Dear, the Old Factory is Now a Member of the 'NRA' [National Recovery Administration] which means better wages and better hours!" In the second panel, men crowd a factory before work, reading a sign that says, "UNDER THE 'NRA' THIS FACTORY SHALL ADVANCE WAGES AND MINIMIZE HOURS OF ALL EMPLOYEES. HENCEFORTH WE SHALL EMPLOY WHITE HELP ONLY."

How the same dynamics apply to minimum wage legislation (and all other labor regulation) is left as an exercise for the enterprising reader.

Pinochet

I'm fine with the right-wing claim that the Left is thoroughly hypocritical on the question of Pinochet.

I'm even fine with the consequentialist claim that Pinochet's criminal actions averted a greater catastrophe.

But to fail to condemn his crimes is thoroughly illiberal and to actually defend them is anti-libertarian.

Skye Stewart, commenting at blog.Mises, did us a service in posting these 2 block quotes:

The Institute featured many articles on Bush's SS 'privatization' proposal that I enjoyed reading. Let's not forget Pinochet's similar fascist economic proposals. As well his 'war on terror':

Have conservatives taken America in the direction of the Pinochet regime that they hailed and celebrated for so long? How can anyone doubt it? Torture; indefinite detentions; murders; sex abuse; "renditions"; indefinite detentions; military tribunals; and denial of habeas corpus, due process of law, trial by jury, and judicial supremacy. And just as they did during the Pinochet regime, U.S. conservatives are looking the other way while all this is going on -- even claiming it's necessary, all the while hailing and celebrating Bush's "free-enterprise" policies.

President Bush is claiming the same power that Pinochet claimed -- the power to arrest, torture, and kill "terrorists," not just inside the country, but all over the world. It was, in fact, Pinochet, not Bush, who first developed the concept that the entire world was a battlefield in the "war on terrorism." This is what motivated Pinochet to send DINA agents (one of whom perceived himself to be a James Bond) to Europe and the United States to assassinate "terrorists."

- Jacob Hornberger,
"Augusto Pinochet and the Conservative Threat to America"

Rockwell wrote,

"The American right today has managed to be solidly anti-leftist while adopting an ideology -- even without knowing it or being entirely conscious of the change -- that is also frighteningly anti-liberty. This reality turns out to be very difficult for libertarians to understand or accept. For a long time, we've tended to see the primary threat to liberty as coming from the left, from the socialists who sought to control the economy from the center. But we must also remember that the sweep of history shows that there are two main dangers to liberty, one that comes from the left and the other that comes from the right. Europe and Latin America have long faced the latter threat, but its reality is only now hitting us fully.

What is the most pressing and urgent threat to freedom that we face in our time? It is not from the left. If anything, the left has been solid on civil liberties and has been crucial in drawing attention to the lies and abuses of the Bush administration. No, today, the clear and present danger to freedom comes from the right side of the ideological spectrum, those people who are pleased to preserve most of free enterprise but favor top-down management of society, culture, family, and school, and seek to use a messianic and belligerent nationalism to impose their vision of politics on the world.

- "The Reality of Red-State Fascism"

All I can add is my bafflement at the consistent hypocrisy of many on the Right who are 100% anti-collectivist in their explicit rhetoric, and then 100% collectivist in their defense of the state's theoretical monopoly on force and its actual use of violence.

retrotech

I grew up with black-and-white TV.

That doesn't mean I'm now collecting social security -- just that my family was slower to move to color than everyone else. And then when the main TV in the apartment was a color set (a very small color set), I still watched a portable old black-and-white because I wanted to watch "Brady Bunch" or "Gilligan's Island" while the grownups had something more grownup on the main set.

Also: we never had cable, and the broadcast reception on the upper west side of Manhattan was terrible. This means that much of my childhood television "viewing" was really more of an audio experience. Sometimes we'd go up to the Catskill Mountains, where cableless television was a purely audio experience at best. I don't think I've ever seen the stage production of Peter Pan, but I have a strong memory of listening to the play while I stared into the television snow trying to make out the general shape of what was going on. (Sort of like scrambled porn 10 or 15 years later.)



Then I went to summer camp in Maine, on an island with no electric power. For a kid who watched as much TV as I did, that was a real challenge. The kids who had been there longer showed me that you could tune in to the audio portion of NBC TV around 88 FM on the radio. The main reason I remember the once-infamous flop sitcom "Hello, Larry" is because I spent a summer listening to it every week on a battery-powered transistor radio.

Apparently 88FM is just above VHF channel 6, which means that the TV audio bleeds over into the FM radio dial. We didn't have channel 6 in New York, so I never knew. There is a channel 6 in Philadelphia. NBC again. I had a girlfriend in college who listened to "Jeopardy" on the radio.

When the web was young, bandwidth meant you couldn't put the latest games online very easily. Arcade games from the 1970s and '80s -- Asteroids, Pong, Pacman -- all made a comeback. Retro chic.

With www.Bleenks.com, I can watch pirated American television from China. (Most of the pirated American television in the United States has already been removed.) We don't pay for cable TV, but we do pay for decent broadband. I was hoping it would make web video a convenient reality. So far, it's like Pacman, Pong, and Asteroids.

Here it is the 21st century and I'm once again listening to TV that I can't see very well. But I do mark it as progress. "My Name Is Earl" is much better than "Hello, Larry" -- even audio-only.

Illuminatus Audio

I'm very excited about the announced release for Winter 2007 of an unabridged audiobook version of Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy.

I'm not as big a fan of Wilson's Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, but I loved the first of those 3 books: The Earth Will Shake, about Sigismundo Celine as a boy in late 18th-century Naples. And now DeepLeaf Audio has released an unabridged audiobook for download:

libertarianism's north star

I looked up F.A. "Baldy" Harper at Wikipedia and found ... nothing!

This is the man whom Murray Rothbard described as, "my first dear friend and mentor in the libertarian movement."*

Can you imagine?

Harper founded the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) but their website tells us practically nothing about him. Wikipedia has a page on IHS, which mentions Harper, but his name is one of those red links that invites you to create a new page.

I also couldn't find an image of him online -- not even at the institute he founded. The one in this post was scanned from one of Harper's books by Chad Parish of the Mises Institute. (Thanks Chad!)

Here's a Spencer MacCallum's summary of Harper's anarchism:

[L]et's now come to the question of limited government versus anarchy and which term, if either, a thinking person could adopt as his philosophical badge. (And so as not to let it cloud our minds, let's try to leave out of account the fact that anarchy, as popularly understood, is a pejorative term, bringing to mind images of terrorism.) Baldy Harper, Leonard Read's first associate at FEE and later founder of the Institute for Humane Studies, looked at it in a way that I find attractive. He had no more idea than the man in the moon whether we or our descendants will ever actually see a "total alternative," as he put it, to political, tax-supported government. But he pointed out the importance of holding the ideal clearly in mind as a heuristic device and a compass to help us keep moving always in the direction of freedom. The analogy he used was that of the north star and the mariner who steers by it. The mariner doesn't expect to reach the star. But, steering by it, which is a process entailing innumerable small decisions and self-corrections, not one of which he could make without the star, he eventually reaches Liverpool. We need a transcendent ideal always in mind, Baldy would say, to help guide our everyday decisions that determine whether or not we keep on our heading toward freedom.

That's why I'm less than fully satisfied with the ideal of "limited government." Whether mankind will ever regain the completely free society we know he enjoyed at the pre-state level, where the authority of the village headman was the same in kind i.e. authority over his person and property and not that of anyone else, as that exercised by the poorest member of the village, it will probably not be for you or me to know. But while we live, let perfect liberty be our guiding star.

The "limited government" concept cannot serve reliably as a guiding star because it is relative; any government at virtually any time or place in the world is limited with respect to some other government, real or imagined, that might be named. So we must ask, limited by comparison with what?

* You can read Rothbard's memorial for Harper in the May, 1973 edition of Libertarian Forum, available from the Mises Institute in PDF.

benefit of clergy

I'd never heard the expression "benefit of clergy" before, but I'm very glad to know its origins nevertheless.

This brief audio file, from "On Words" with John Ciardi,
covers 2 phrase origins:

1. benefit of clergy;
2. nose stitch.

It's the first one that reminds me of this post by Ralph Raico and this post by me.

(Or download MP3.)

corrupting language and confusing thought

Henry Hazlitt on "Negative Income Tax" as a policy euphemism:

Trick names of this sort corrupt the language and confuse thought. It would hardly clarify matters to call a handout a "negative deprivation" or having your pocket picked "receiving a negative gift."

from "Man vs. the Welfare State"

Calvin's unbelievably LOW time preference

See also:

• Calvin & Time Preference
• More Calvin on Time Preference
• Yet More Calvin on Time Preference
• now until later

monstrous moderates

(or "Why I Hate (Yes, Hate!) the Political Center Far More than Left or Right")

I've blogged Lew Rockwell's take on "The difference between the radical and the moderate" and Murray Rothbard's comments on "the attempt by hawkers for 'moderation' or 'prudence' to weaken high principle."

I've spewed my own rancorous bile at hated centrists here and especially here.

But I've never seen as thorough a treatment on the evil Middle Of The Road as Anthony Gregory's

"An Extreme Threat to Liberty -- Centrism"

offered today at LRC.

liberty bands

I just got my new wristband from the Adam Smith Institute.

It says, "I buy goods from poorer countries."

It goes nicely with my wristband from the Mises Institute, which says (of course), "Tu ne cede malis."

mandatory semantics

I sent this Nest Heads comic to my traceur friend:

His reply: "That is marvelous. And a little terrifying -- the old coot mandating meaning."

dumb luck

Today is the 15th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I'd love to take credit for the fact that we're running Murray Rothbard's "The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited" this weekend, but the truth is I didn't even know the significance of today's date until it came up on the Freedom Calendar.

speculative etymology

My only exposure to NPR last year was my wife's mentioning of stories she heard on her commute.

My only exposure to NPR now is through their podcasts. And the only one I listen to regularly is "On Words" with John Ciardi, who died in 1986.

Podcasts are bringing back old radio commentaries, a form once thought to be ephemeral.

In one of his not-so-ephemeral commentaries, Ciardi recommends a book called History in English Words by Owen Barfield. He said he couldn't call it a review, because the book was out of print, but recommended the listener seek it in the library.

The book is no longer out of print, and I plan to get it, based on this fascinating non-review:


(Or download MP3.)

---

Update: In his comment, Stephen Carson recommends this book:


Studies in Words by C.S. Lewis


There's also a description of the book on Wikipedia.

luddites on the Right

I had just said:

This one I don't experience at the beginning of the 21st century nearly as much as I did at the end of the 20th:

• Technophobia -- fear of technology (see also Luddite).

But unlike Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute, I don't read conservatives and I don't know too many conservatives -- and those I do know are more of the neoconservative technophile variety.

A feature of conservative thought that I've never entirely understood is its persistent anti-technology theme. If the roots of left-wing anti-technology views are probably with Rousseau, where can we find the roots of similar right-wing views?

... technology is the result of human action to better one's material lot, and nothing more than that. It is not "unnatural" or "external" to human action; technological progress is merely the material expression of the inner drive to adjust one's surroundings in a manner that achieves our ends. It is what results when rationality is permitted the freedom to innovate in the service of humanity. It is not foreign or external to the nature of man but integral. To say that we should be willing to give it up is saying nothing other than that we ought to act in ways that diminish our well being. There are times when doing so is heroic, to be sure. But can or should we expect this as a social propensity in normal times? Surely not.

For me it's like a peek into an alien culture.

strange bedfellows

Here are 2 books I never expected to see sitting right next to each other on the same short list:

'Politically Incorrect...' by Thomas Woods

Almost everything you know about American history is wrong, because most textbooks and popular history books are written by left-wing academic historians who treat their biases as fact. But fear not, Professor Thomas Woods has written the perfect antidote. This delightful book is funny and inviting, but factually sound. It shatters the myths about American history by separating fact from fiction. A treasure trove of facts, both shocking and trivial.

• Buy 'Politically Incorrect Guide to US History'
• More From AOL Books

'The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge'

'The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge' includes insightful sidebars by Times writers, and covers major categories including art, astronomy, business, sports, history, medicine, philosophy, photography, biology, film, and much more! This one volume is designed to offer more information than any other book on the most popular subjects as well as providing easy-to-access data vital for everyday living. It is the only comprehensive reference book to include authoritative, engaging, in-depth essays from experts in almost every field of endeavor, with innovative cross-referencing to allow for even greater understanding.

• Buy 'The New York Times Guide...'
• More From AOL Books

(via LRC)

praxeology of war

Joe Salerno's "Praxeology of War" is amazing.

He gave a talk on the subject at a Mises Circle over the summer, and then another one at the Mises Institute's conference on Imperialism.

The latter became today's daily article at Mises.org.

Definitely check it out:

"Imperialism and the Logic of War Making"

phobia

My wife discovered a neighborhood cat living in our tool shed. She tried to chase it out, but thought she had failed. Now she keeps checking the shed to make sure he isn't trapped in there.

She tells me she's paranoid about killing something inadvertently.

Ever the pedant, I said, "I think you mean phobic, not paranoid -- unless you're afraid the cat is out to get you..."

But once I'd brought "phobia" into it, I wanted to know exactly which phobia she was claiming to have. I can't find "fear of killing" on Wikipedia's phobia list. The closest they have is

• Necrophobia -- fear of death, the dead.

But I know that Wikipedia's list is incomplete, because they don't even have the next-closest phobia to the one I'm looking for: Thanatophobia - fear of being killed.

They do have an interesting list.

For instance,

• Agoraphobia -- fear of a place or event where escape is impossible or when help is unavailiable.

How did a term that clearly should mean fear of the market turn into something so different? We Agoraphiles need this word! Fear of the market is obviously prevalent and should be identified as what it is.

There is another term that many of us ought to find useful in our discussions with the less liberty minded:

• Hoplophobia -- fear of firearms (guns).

I came to college a lot more sympathetic to feminism than I was when I left. Part of that change was the result of encountering too many feminists who seemed to have

• Androphobia -- fear of males.
• Erotophobia -- fear of sexual love or sexual questions.
• Gymnophobia -- fear of nudity.

(Some of my favorite feminists had the same complaint. They started calling themselves "do-me feminists" or "pro-sex feminists" to distinguish themselves from the phobias of what seemed to be the academic feminist mainstream.)

Here's one the detractors of individualism are regularly accusing us of:

• Sociophobia -- fear/dislike of society or people in general (see also "sociopath").

That's not true of the philosophy or the method, though it's certainly true of some individual individualists ... individually. I might fairly be accused of sociophobia, mainly because I find that so many people have conversational bathophobia:

• Bathophobia -- fear of depth.

Where's the opposite malady? We need a name for fear of shallowness.


This one I just like for the irony of it:

• Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliaphobia - fear of long words (go figure)

This one I don't experience at the beginning of the 21st century nearly as much as I did at the end of the 20th:

• Technophobia -- fear of technology (see also Luddite).

Here's one of my least-favorite words:

• Homophobia -- dislike of homosexuality or of becoming homosexual. (This word has become a common political term, and many people interpret it as a slur.)

Interpreted as a slur? No, that word was invented as a slur. When I first heard it, I assumed it was the clinical term for what an older generation called "homosexual dread" -- the fear of turning out to be gay. But no, it was a deliberate slur term that conflated fear of with opposition to.

That conflation is not without precedent, of course. It's just a more specific version of how this word gets used:

• Xenophobia -- fear of strangers, foreigners, or aliens.

Everyone knows that Doctor Octopus and the Green Goblin suffer from

• Arachnophobia -- fear of arachnids, usually specific to spiders.

But thanks to this list, I now know that The Penguin, The Riddler, and The Joker suffer

• Chiroptophobia -- fear of bats.

And of course, we have the monstrous FDR to thank for

• Phobophobia -- the fear of fear itself.

our numbers grow

Is this a liberty blog or is this a baby blog?



Stephen Carson writes:

After 5 hours of labor, Spencer Caleb Carson was born at 12:13pm on Monday, December 4th. He's a big boy at 9 lbs. 11 oz. and 22 1/4 inches. He has a head full of hair and is doing great!

He is named after Stephen's maternal grandfather, William Spencer, who was a true gentleman of the old school.

(By the way, the rumor is that Spencer was born at home and under water!)

Congratulations to Stephen and Heather for their first son and also to Laurellyn and Madeleine for their new baby brother.

the power of words

This idea, the absolutist idea of the state, seems to be very generally prevalent at the moment. The great majority of social philosophers and publicists treat it as a matter of course; not only in Europe, where some form of theoretical absolutism has always been more or less in vogue, but also in America, where the idea of government, as expressed officially in the Declaration, runs all the other way. Since my return here I cannot help noticing that the rank and file of Americans seem to be extremely well reconciled to the idea of an absolute state, for the most part on pragmatic or "practical" grounds; that is to say, having found the frying pan of a misnamed and fraudulent "rugged individualism" too hot for comfort, they are willing to take a chance on the fire. If only one is tactful enough not to name the hated names of Socialism, Bolshevism, Communism, Fascism, Marxism, Hitlerism, or what not, one finds no particular objection to the single essential doctrine that underlies all these systems alike -- the doctrine of an absolute state. Let one abstain from the coarse word slavery and one discovers that in the view of many Americans -- I think probably most of them -- an actual slave status is something that is really not much to be dreaded, but rather perhaps to be welcomed, at least provisionally. Such is the power of words.

This is from the article "Life, Liberty, and..." by Albert Jay Nock, which originally appeared in Scribner's in March 1935 and is now the introduction to Our Enemy, The State.

V for Vacuous

I mention V for Vendetta here and here, and indirectly here, but I hadn't seen it before last night. I went out of my way to avoid all reviews and commentary -- especially in the libertarian blogosphere -- back when I thought I'd be seeing it "any day now," but I got the impression that libertarians loved it and that left-anarchists hated it. To me, that's a strong recommendation, implying a liberal-anarchist hero.

Now I'll have to go back to those old commentaries to see who misunderstood what. Maybe I'll agree with the left-anarchists, after all.

There are only 3 genuinely libertarian statements in the movie:

1. "People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people."
2. "Stealing implies ownership; you cannot steal from the censors."
3. "One thing is true of all governments: their most reliable records are tax records."

While watching the movie, I kept thinking, This isn't libertarian. This is just left-wing Hollywood.

And sure enough, Alan Moore, author of the original comic book, had this to say about how they'd perverted his story:

It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.... It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives -- which is not what the comic "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England.

(Source: "Alan Moore: The last angry man," cited on Wikipedia.)

parkour

I was never a great traceur, but what I lacked in strength, stamina, speed, or agility, I made up for in enthusiasm and what, in retrospect, I can only call something less than the correct amount of self-preservation instinct.

My friend, on the other hand, was great at it. He is now an active rock-climber. And he has brought to my attention the fact that there is a now a name for what we used to do namelessly.

We didn't call it "parkour" and we didn't call ourselves "traceurs" ... for those names to come along, someone in France had to organize it, and someone in Russia had to popularize it. Still, it's essentially the same thing: urban gymnastics.

Here's what I'm talking about:

"except by law"

Almost a year and a half ago, the Iraqi bill of rights was drafted.

It was a scary collection of not-very-reassuring assurances, e.g.:

• There is no censorship on newspapers, printing, publishing, advertising, or media [hey, this sounds alright!... but wait: ] except by law. [uh oh]

(Square-bracketed commentary by Stephan Kinsella.)

born to run said...

i love the "no censorship except by law." it's kind of like "no violence except by force" or "no shootings except by gun."

Exactly right.

So what's the difference between this modern example of unlimited government, and "the medieval papal bull, In Coena Domini -- evidently republished each year into the late eighteenth century -- which threatened to excommunicate any ruler 'who levied new taxes or increased old ones, except for cases supported by law, or by an express permission from the pope'"?

(Source: Religious Thought and Economic Society by Jacob Viner, cited by Ralph Raico in "The Theory of Economic Development and the 'European Miracle'")

The difference is this: in the modern era of the nation-state, the "law" of "except by law" is understood to be the creation of some branch of the government of the nation-state itself, whereas the medieval conception of law was something to which kings and civil governments were themselves subject.

The Iraqi law is like a promise you make with your fingers crossed. The medieval case is more like a general understanding within the culture, an explicit limit on the population's willingness to put up with a ruler, and a warning from a competing power that is willing to enforce that limit, whether by noble or pragmatic motivation.