Agh! Attack of family duties this weekend.

We had to catch up with the housework after all that goofing off the last two weekends. The hedge and lawn were a mess. The lawn's easy, but I still don't have the spare cash for a power-trimmer for the hedge, and although I employed two pairs of grass-cutters like Edward Scissorhands, the forearms wear out rather quickly. [Nuts! No back-yard pictures saved. I've got some on CD, but... well, let's see... Hey! It works!]
Rainy August day 2003

That gives you an idea of what I'm up to. I'm not done yet. I figure I'll spend a half hour a day doing the scissorhands thing, and that should keep me from having to pull out the big guns. You'll know me by the Popeye forearms.

For my political-economic note of the day, I was surprised to see The Mises Institute praising Henry George in their daily article. But as usual, they provide many good reasons to admire him.

Protectionists contend that to secure the highest prosperity of each nation it should produce for itself everything it is capable of producing, and that to this end its home industries should be protected against the competition of foreign industries. They also contend (in the United States at least) that to enable workmen to obtain as high wages as possible they should be protected by tariff duties against the competition of goods produced in countries where wages are lower (p. 25).

The aim of protection, in short, is to prevent the bringing into a country of things in themselves useful and valuable, in order to compel the making of such things. But what all mankind, in the individual affairs of every‑day life, regard as to be desired is not the making of things, but the possession of things (pp. 32–33).

To make a protective tariff that would even roughly accord with the protective theory would require in the first place a minute knowledge of all trade and industry, and of the manner in which an effect produced on one industry would act and react on others. This no king, congress or parliament ever can have. But, further than this, absolute disinterestedness is required (pp. 84–85).

And even were it possible to obtain for the making of a protective tariff a body of men themselves disinterested and incapable of yielding to bribery, to threats, to friendship or to flattery, they would have to be more than human not to be dazed by the clamor and misled by the representations of selfish interests (p. 85).

The making of a tariff, instead of being, as the protective theory requires, a careful consideration of the circumstances and needs of each industry, is in practice simply a great "grab" in which the retained advocates of selfish interests bully and beg, bribe and logroll, in the endeavor to get the largest possible protection for themselves without regard for other interests or for the general good. The result is, and always must be, the enactment of a tariff which resembles the theoretical protectionist’s idea of what a protective tariff should be about as closely as a bucketful of paint thrown against a wall resembles the fresco of a Raphael (p. 85).

To admit that labor needs protection is to acknowledge its inferiority (p. 19).

There is something in the very word "protection" that ought to make working-men cautious of accepting anything presented to them under it. The protection of the masses has in all times been the pretense of tyranny (p. 19).

Protective tariffs are as much applications of force as are blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—to prevent trade. The difference between the two is that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading (p. 43).

What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war (pp. 43–44).

Protection calls upon us to pay officials, to encourage spies and informers, and to provoke fraud and perjury, for what? Why, to preserve ourselves from and protect ourselves against something which offends no moral law; something to which we are instinctively impelled; something without which we could never have emerged from barbarism, and something which physical nature and social laws alike prove to be in conformity with the creative intent (p. 50).

There's quite a bit more in the article alone. The citations refer to...

Oops! Be right back.

Sorry. The computer needed rebooting. I probably need to do some cleaning.

Anyway, the citations refer to Protection or Free Trade: An Examination of the Tariff Question, With an Especial Regard to the Interests of Labor, by Henry George.