Ah! The Advocates

For Self-Government! I love them dearly. They have some good news for us in their last Liberator Online.

Dear friends,

There's good news in this issue for friends of liberty!

We report that two major U.S. newspapers have discussed the World's Smallest
Political Quiz -- with one printing the Quiz in its entirety and linking to it
at its Web site.

Those same newspapers also ran articles arguing that the old "left versus
right" view of politics is obsolete, that millions of Americans are
libertarians or libertarian sympathizers, and that libertarianism is a major
ideology in American politics.

Also reported in this issue is a new poll that indicates that, for the first
time, a majority of Americans -- 53% -- want to see a major, viable third party
emerge in America -- another sure sign of dissatisfaction with the left-right
statist quo.

All this comes on the heels of other surveys and newspaper articles we've
mentioned in the past few issues that make similar points.

These millions of libertarian-leaning Americans are what we've called for years
"the politically homeless" -- largely or completely libertarian in their
beliefs, but not aware there is a *name* for what they believe. And not aware
there is a vast, fast-growing movement of organizations, publications, and
activists working to put their beliefs into effect.

Our job as lovers of liberty is to reach them -- and bring them the good news
that they're not alone!

But it's not all good news, James Harris tells us that "Americans Know The Simpsons Better Than First Amendment"

* Only 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances).

* More than half, however, can name at least two members of the Simpson cartoon family.

* More than 1 in 5 of Americans could name all five Simpson family members -- Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie. But only 1 in 1,000 can name all five First Amendment freedoms.

Go to this link to see that it's actually worse than that.

Then go on down and read Michael Cloud's and Dr. Mary Ruwart's contributions about... Well, H***, I'll show ya...

Oh! Great definition of a Libertarian there: "I believe in individual liberty, free markets, private property, and limited government. Period. No exceptions." But see the Ruwart article on some sticky points. I'll just quote Michael:

What are the reasons we are libertarians? Here are a few of the many different reasons I shared with the reporter.

1. Moral: because we believe no person or group has the right to initiate force against another.
2. Pragmatic: Freedom works.
3. Utilitarian: Freedom produces the greatest good for the greatest number.
4. Self-Interest: Freedom benefits you. It's in your self-interest.
5. Altruistic: Freedom benefits others.
6. Big Government Doesn't Work. Freedom does.
7. Personal Responsibility: Freedom rewards personal responsibility and punishes irresponsibility.
8. Choice: freedom maximizes choice. In fact, freedom is choice.
9. Prosperity: Economic freedom creates prosperity.
10. Tolerance: the free, competitive marketplace makes bigotry and prejudice very expensive. And very widely known.

There's a persuasion lesson here.

When you talk with family, friends, and co-workers, how many different kinds of reasons for being libertarian are you offering them? How many different approaches to libertarianism do you put in front of them?

* Why Government Doesn't Work by Harry Browne is one approach.

* Libertarianism in One Lesson by David Bergland is quite different.

* Healing Our World by Mary Ruwart is another way to present liberty.

* The Libertarian Idea by Jan Narveson is yet another.

Buy them. Read them. They will stimulate your thinking. Trigger ideas. And provide you with new ways to present libertarianism. Different paths to winning the hearts and minds of those you care for.

Different individuals want different things.

Different approaches to liberty reach different people.

Different reasons for liberty convince different individuals.

There are many paths to libertarianism. Many reasons for becoming a libertarian.

Don't be trapped by the fallacy that there's only one reason, one case, or one justification for liberty.

So, as I like to say, there!

6-6-6

I'm making a point of writing the date that way today - often followed by "MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!" I'm sure that will lead to a position of greater responsibility.

I'd say it's vastly more important to celebrate the 62nd anniversary of D-Day than to worry about what The Anti-Christ is doing today, whether he's being born or initiating The Tribulation or whatever. Think of it this way: if the prophecy is true, there ain't a damn thing you can do about it anyway.

I'm much more disturbed by this portrait of German children:

In Germany, however, Lego's strategy worked exactly as intended. German children opened a box of Legos, sought out the instructions, read them carefully, and then sorted the pieces by color. They set to building, comparing their assembly progress to the crisp, helpful illustrations in the instruction booklet. When they were finished, they had an exact duplicate of the product shown on the cover of the box. They showed it to Mother who clapped approvingly and put the model on a shelf. Now the children needed another box.

Without even knowing it, Lego had tapped into the Culture Code for Germany itself: ORDER. Over many generations, Germans perfected bureaucracy in an effort to stave off the chaos that came to them in wave after wave, and Germans are imprinted early on with this most powerful of codes. It is that imprint which makes children reach dutifully for the instructions, and it is that code which prevents them from immediately destroying their neat construction in order to build it anew. Lego's elegant, full-color instructions had tapped into the German code in a way that assured repeat sales.

ORDNUNG!!

Oy, veh!

Answers to The Important Questions

asked here:

1. Sadly, too often, no.
2. Yes, but we/they don't care.
3. I'm sure there are porn sites for that.
4. You'd know better than I would.
5. I'd bet on amnesiac, but I'm a cat-person.
6. That question has caused me no end of frustration.
7. We don't. We're just screwed.
8. It's always rape. Haven't you heard of Katherine McKinnon?
9. See answer #3.
10. I vote no.

You know, I just noticed that I've seriously underpriced

the coolest thing in my store: the

Maxam 31pc Picnic/Backpack Set
only $47.92
Retail Price: $105.95
You Save: 54% ($58.03)

Trust me, that's a mistake. I'm only going to announce it here and I'll leave it like that till Sunday night, in case any of you are interested.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

I'm sure you commies out there will fail to see yourselves

in this description by Murray Rothbard, but it's you:

It is no accident that it was precisely the economists in the Communist countries who led the rush away from communism, socialism, and central planning, and toward free markets. It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. Yet this sort of aggressive ignorance is inherent in the creed of anarcho-communism.

The same comment can be made on the widespread belief, held by many New Leftists and by all anarcho-communists, that there is no longer need to worry about economics or production because we are supposedly living in a "post-scarcity" world, where such problems do not arise. But while our condition of scarcity is clearly superior to that of the cave-man, we are still living in a world of pervasive economic scarcity.

How will we know when the world has achieved "post-scarcity"? Simply, when all the goods and services that we may want have become so superabundant that their prices have fallen to zero; in short, when we can acquire all goods and services as in a Garden of Eden — without effort, without work, without using any scarce resources.
...
The fact that the abandonment of rationality and economics in behalf of "freedom" and whim will lead to the scrapping of modern production and civilization and return us to barbarism does not faze our anarcho-communists and other exponents of the new "counter-culture." But what they do not seem to realize is that the result of this return to primitivism would be starvation and death for nearly all of mankind and a grinding subsistence for the ones remaining.

If they have their way, they will find that it is difficult indeed to be jolly and "unrepressed" while starving to death. All this brings us back to the wisdom of the great Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset:

In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported … Civilization is not "just here," it is not self-supporting.

It is artificial … if you want to make use of the advantages of civilization, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilization — you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilization. Just a slip, and when you look, everything has vanished into air. The primitive forest appears in its native state, just as if curtains covering pure Nature had been drawn back. The jungle is always primitive and vice versa, everything primitive is mere jungle. (José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, New York: W.W. Norton, 1932, p. 97.)

I've got a Pentacost post next door

at Bourgeois Philistines.

Comment here if you don't like Blogger's comments.

Probligo has a comment for Omni's post that I feel rates more consideration.

Probligo. Omni's post.

Al, 'tis a pity that Omni does not allow comment. Not that I would want to lecture on mothering - there is no way that I have the qualifications for THAT! But I do have - as have you - some experience with fathering and I reckon that to be as important as mothering.

If there were comments allowed - and I hope that Omni comes past and reads this because I think it important - there is one small aspect of her treatise with which I might take issue.

The single most important skill to make sure your kids possess is the ability to fit in; knowing how to figure out what the "rules" are of whatever group they find themselves in and adhere to enough of them to be seen as "one of us." That goes x10 if your kid's an oddball like I was, because every little difference between them and the other kids is a strike against them that they have to overcome if they're going to have a shot at being well-liked with lots of friends, rather than ostracized and missing out on gaining crucial social skills... and social skills are the key to getting ahead in the work world and attracting a quality mate as well as to having lots of buddies.

Now I am not going to totally disagree with the thrust of what Omni is saying - but there is a most important fact that must predicate her idea.

So, rather than saying that "the ability to fit in" is the most important I am going to rank it second.

Ahead of it as a principle I would put my number one - and it is not something you "teach" as such, it is a case of allowing your kids to "grow into" it. "Allowing" requires guidance so there is a need for parents to set parameters in terms of acceptabile and appropriate alternatives.

That number one principle would have to be -

KNOW THE PERSON THAT YOU WANT TO BE. KNOW HOW TO MAKE THAT PERSON EVERYTHING THAT YOU MIGHT WANT IN THE FUTURE. KNOW THE GOALS THAT YOU CAN ACHIEVE.

BY THAT MEANS YOU CAN BE YOURSELF, AND NOT WHAT SOMEONE ELSE MIGHT WANT OR EXPECT YOU TO BE."

So, you can see that might be diametrically opposed to what Omni is suggesting, but it need not be so.

If your child knows their "own self" then they will select peers who reflect their own needs and interests rather than "hanging out with the 'in' crowd because they are cool".

It also requires parents (and I found this very hard) to guide (not teach) their kids in developing their social skills. Relying upon "peer society" to do it for you I would think to have problems for the future...
probligo |

Some Advice for Ya

From The Power of Concentration, by Theron Q. Dumont, 1920:

I want you to realize that no one has a monopoly on will power. There is plenty for all. What we speak of as will power is but the gathering together of mental energy, the concentration power at one point. So never think of that person as having a stronger will than yours. Each person will be supplied with just that amount of will power that he demands. You don't have to develop will power if you constantly make use of all you have, and remember the way in which you use it determines your fate, for your life is moulded to great extent by the use you make of your will. Unless you make proper use of it you have neither independence nor firmness. You are unable to control yourself and become a mere machine for others to use. It is more important to learn to use your will than to develop your intellect. The man that has not learned how to use his will rarely decides things for himself, but allows his resolutions to be changed by others. He fluctuates from one opinion to another, and of course does not accomplish anything out of the ordinary, while his brother with the trained will takes his place among the world's leaders.
...
The men that are looked upon as the world's successes have not always been men of great physical power, nor at the start did they seem very well adapted to the conditions which encompassed them. In the beginning they were not considered men of usperior genius, but they won their success by their resolution to achieve results in their undertakings by permitting not set-back to dishearten them; no difficulties to daunt them.

So there.

Mike Litman has spent the last three or so years updating and elaborating the message(s) of this book. He's a marketer, and a great one, so watch yerself if you go over there.

Oh! Here! Have a blurb!

MikeLitman.com Motivational, Self-help website - MikeLitman.com contains dozens of informative articles, archived success tip videos, and an assortment of products related to motivation, personal development and creating greater income in your life. Click Here For Mike Litman's Success Secrets

Walter Williams

(From Townhall.com today):

If you were really enthusiastic about not being a "price-gouger," I'd have another proposition. You might own a house that you purchased for $55,000 in 1960 that you put on the market for a half-million dollars. I'd simply accuse you of price-gouging and demand that you sell me the house for what you paid for it, maybe adding on a bit for inflation since 1960. I'm betting you'd say, "Williams, if I sold you my house for what I paid for it in 1960, how will I be able to pay today's prices for a house to live in?"

If there's any conspiracy involved in today's high gasoline prices, it's a conspiracy of cowardice and stupidity by the U.S. Congress. Opening a tiny portion of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas production, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's mean estimate, would increase our proven domestic oil reserves by approximately 50 percent. The Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf of Mexico offshore areas have enormous reserves of oil and natural gas, but like the Alaska reserves, they have been put off limits by Congress. Plus, the U.S. Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves estimates the world supply of oil shale at 1.6 trillion barrels, of which 1.2 trillion barrels are in the United States.

By the way, oil shale is now profitable to extract due to the high oil prices. Reread the last sentence of the quote. The BLM is allowing testing in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.

Invest in the companies doing the testing. Don't whine about high oil prices. Profit from it.

Read Williams whole article for a killer punchline.

Wow! Is that ever cool!!

I just ran LibertyBob through this Voycabulary.com thing, forgot about it and when I went to comment on something I got the definition of "comment".

Pretty good story over at Bob's today. I wonder if he got my last email.

Here's something to think about

from Clayton Makepeace (I don't know if you can get right in there without signing up for his newsletter):

Couple of thousand years ago, a pretty smart Jewish fella said that the meek will inherit the Earth. Seems like a pretty crazy statement on its face. Try as I might, I can’t imagine a meek little Wally Cox conquering every government on the planet.

So I figure the rabbi probably meant something closer to, "Be humble enough to learn and you’ll go far."

Or the corollary: "Be too proud to learn, and you'll wind up eating humble people's dust."

Or maybe, "The more you learn, the more you'll learn you need to learn."

Or even, "Learning is a journey – not a destination."

Was he right?

In a word, "Yep."

I've been meaning to say that myself.

The Mises guys are taking my name in vain.

Sean Corrigan opens his article, "What Does the High Price of Gold Mean?" with these derogatory remarks:

Among the Anglo-Saxons, there is a school of thought called the "Whig view of history," which sees the course of events as an unrolling tapestry on which is woven a record of a steady, ineluctable progression from barbarity to civilization.

Yet, ironically, the Whigs' own supremacy — mostly enjoyed during Britain's years of commercial and military triumph in the 18th century — was underwritten by a system of rapidly expanding government debt, deviously and often corruptly financed through the offices of the fledgling Bank of England.

As a result, the period was not unblemished by periods of wild, speculative excess and interposed monetary panic, the most spectacular instances of which were the two, partly interrelated schemes whose respective Mississippi and South Sea Companies served to give us the word "bubble" itself.

No one who reads the accounts of those roistering times can fail to be entertained by the tale of human folly they contain, though not without a rueful reflection that they also prove the Whigs were hopelessly optimistic in their perception of man's relentless self-betterment.

For, indeed, our own experiences of just the past decade show that, if we follow a recipe that mixes the eternal human failing of avarice with the oft-recurring mass delusion that one lives in a "New Era," and which allows the kitchen to be supervised by sharp-minded financiers, it will produce just as explosive a cocktail today as it did nearly three centuries ago.

Of course, these were not the Old Whigs of whom Hayek spoke, and, though many powers of 10 times better than the American Whig Party, the movement's chief speakers, my beloved Acton, Gibbon and Macauley, did indeed perpetuate the belief that history was a linear path upward. From which it is all too easy to deduce that the hard-earned lessons of the past no longer apply to our situation now.

There appears to be no evidence that the Founders of this nation were afflicted by any such delusion, but were rather grimly aware that any human, entrusted with too much power, would soon succumb to its enticements. It was Acton, of course, who said, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," but all that did was mitigate, for a time, the logical development of Whig History into Progressivism.

Indeed it was already too late. The descendants of the Puritans in New England had already developed secular/messianic tendencies that meshed all too well with Hegel's theory of history. Unfortunately, Whig History supported that trend.

By the way, when you can understand this paragraph, to quote Master Kan, "...you will have learned":

This is why the middle-class poor are able to "invest" so much even as they spend more than every last earned penny on iPods, designer beers, exotic holidays, and vast McMansions — plowing money into ETFs and emerging bond funds even when it costs $200 a pop to fill up the 6-year-lease-bearing new Hummer in the driveway.

What was I going to say?

My daughter popped down to say goodnight, and I absolutely forgot my train of thought.

I was telling her a tale, earlier, in agreement with a point Mrs. Montgomery was making in Rainbow Valley, that my mother and grandmother told me about my great-grandmother's first wedding night.

Yes, she had two.

She sewed herself into a "union suit" and spent the night running away from her new husband. She was thirteen. He was twice her age. She got married to get away from her mother.

I believe the marriage was annulled within a month, but I'd be delighted to be corrected on that score.

Somebody's got to ask Grandma for elaboration on that story. I want to know everything she knows about her mother... and I especially want to know what she knows about her grandparents.

What I do know for sure about the former story, is that there was no progeny from it. (At least I've never heard of any.)

My Grandma married at sixteen to get away from her mother. She gave birth to my mother. Then, after her divorce, my Grandpa (sadly, not my direct ancestor - my mother never saw a difference in treatment between her and the other children, and you see that I call him Grandpa--I could use those genes) saw her riding on a wagon into Vian, Oklahoma, holding my mother, and said to his friends, "There's my wife!"

Vian is pronounced "Vy-Ann", btw. That's the first time I ever considered the possibility that strangers wouldn't know how to pronounce that. Come to think of it, what was Grandpa doing there then, considering that he was born in Northeastern Arkansas? I seem to remember him telling me and even looking up his birthplace on the map, but I can't remember how he ended up there in Vian in the late Thirties.

If you want to see what Vian looks like, buy or rent the movie

Where the Red Fern Grows

. It was filmed there in the late '70s. The area where the boys fight was mowed to look like a park, but otherwise it still looks just like that.

The movie is wonderful for many reasons other than that. If you liked Old Yeller, you'll like Where the Red Fern Grows.

I used to spend my summers eight miles from there, 1/2 a mile from Lake Tenkiller (an Indian name that's a story in itself), and within spittin' distance of Blackgum School. Grandmother actually lived on the grounds of that school, and I know the vandals who tore that house down--hint: one of the bunch uses an alias with the initials O.W. Hey! I was a little kid! My uncle said it would be all right!

His inits are JVB. But that doesn't come as any surprise to the inheritors of the property.

Yes, I still feel guilty.

But, the place was a s**thole. Thank God Grandma had compassion and moved her into a trailer on her own property.

Did I ever mention that Grandmother once felt the need to push a Revenuer into a well?

Well, let's see if I can bury that last post.

My manic mode sometimes makes for bad ones (posts, I mean). No, I'm not really bipolar, but the moods do take some inexplicable swings now and then.

Although, I suppose Wednesday was a pretty good day, beautiful weather, everything went well, though not so well that I need to document it.

The DaVinci Code opens tonight. Our pastor is bringing a group to see it tomorrow, then they're going to go back to the church and discuss it. We haven't arranged for babysitting, so we're not going. If I were going to go, that'd be the way I'd want to do it.

I have Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels, though I haven't read it yet. I wish I had, I might be able to discuss the movie intelligently. If I hadn't taken on a couple other projects, I'd do it right away.

The commentary I hear on the radio seems to be ininformed by any awareness of the Gnostics.

Praise the Lord!

I gotta say, I'm generally pleased with my BlogAds. As pleased as a man can be in This World, anyway.

I don't get to click these links ("I'm not allowed!" as my effin', formerly-goody-two-shoes-[but-still-nevertheless-effin'] cousin used to say), so I'm not going to present them as links,

Axiomatic Economics
Mises Said He Was Deductive But He Was Not. Aguilar's Theory Really Is
www.axiomaticeconomics.com

Lew Rockwell
No war. No taxes. Just freedom.
lewrockwell.com

The Mises Store
Books on liberty by the greats Austrian economics, libertarianism
www.mises.org/store

How To Create Wealth Now
Little-Known Strategies To Give You Complete Financial Freedom
www.wealthandfreedomstrategies.com

Dr. Seuss meets Ayn Rand.
Buy this beautiful illustrated book Warning against big government.
www.oakleafpublishing.biz

I just consider these to be high praise from the Internet.

Founding First Principles

"[I]ndividual liberty, the sanctity of private property, the rule of law, free markets with peaceable, voluntary exchange, and choice and responsibility over government coercion."

Walter Williams made that list, not I, but there you have it.

In the context of the Da Vinci Code controversy

Debi Ghate, of The Ayn Rand Institute, in an article called Catholic Leaders Need to Show a Little Respect for Freedom says:

To respect something means to hold it in high regard. Respect is something that we reserve for the people and ideas we judge to be worthy of our love and admiration--we reserve it for what we value. Our respect is a precious commodity, used to express our sanction and approval of others and their actions. We respect Thomas Jefferson for writing the Declaration of Independence. We respect American soldiers who defend this great country's values. In contrast, we disrespect, even hate, those who oppose our values. If a white supremacist comes to your town to deliver a speech advocating that non-whites should be corralled and shot, do you have an obligation to respect his beliefs? Or should you speak out against what you consider to be evil, and in favor of what you judge to be good? And other cases are harder to judge. If your neighbor believes that a hard-working Mexican busboy should be deported because he is here without a work permit, do you have an obligation to respect that belief?

By suggesting that there is a "right to respect." the bishops are clamoring that we owe them respect regardless of whether we think their beliefs are true or false, worthy of our admiration or denunciation. Many people, of course, do respect the Catholic Church, but others agree with Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, who concluded: "Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world." Respect can only be granted willingly, where we judge it to be due, not demanded by those whose ideas we conclude to be false or despicable. There can be no "right" to be respected.

The great thing about Western Civilization is that we no longer treat organized religions as many people now-days are wont to treat the government. Humanity will truly flourish when we stop worshipping the State as well.

Crap!! I've been teaching the older girl to be like me!

Omni says that's all wrong!

Now, what do we do?

Libertarian-Conservate Dave Thompson

(I'm a conservative-libertarian, btw. The distinction is important.) did a poll last night on the vitally important question of whether women's feet could be cute or whether they're all gross.

The question makes me realize that I am absolutely indifferent to feet. I mean, I'm sure you could send me a picture of someone doing something with their foot, or someone else's foot, that I might find...interesting... But... It's not the foot that I find interesting.

I'm also absolutely indifferent to footware. Or footwear, as it is. I wonder what "footware" is.

Did I mention that I'm absolutely a Dave Groupee? Too bad I'm an old, fat, bald, heterosexual, white guy, eh?

I spent most of my research time today reading

Michael Fumento's accounts of his time as an embedded reporter in Ramadi, Iraq last month, and links to articles by other embeds and Michael Yon's blog.

There's not much I need to add to what he said, but something we need to deal with as voters here is these complaints about fraudulent war profiteers:

In a guerrilla war, building a school or hospital or laying electrical lines or providing flowing potable water can be far more important than killing bad guys. To the extent these projects are not completed -- and vast numbers are not -- it's threatening the war effort. These people are scum and may as well be working for bin Laden. If they violate their contracts, force them to comply -- don't reward them. If they can't comply, jail them. They're traitors. From what I've seen, this war can still go either way depending on the willingness of the American public to stick it out. From what I saw can still go either way. Everybody likes to target Cindy Sheehan -- as indeed I have -- but really she's just an idiot voice crying in the wilderness trying to cling to 15 minutes of fame that expired long ago. It's contractors and those who refuse to hold them accountable who have the ability to make or break this war.

I think a call to your congressman is in order.

Considering what I've been up to lately,

it's a bit surprising that I didn't notice Kyle Bennett's April 19th post, Happy Patriot's Day.

The blog like content I'm planning to put in my store is going to be just that sort of thing. I'll need to work in a product appropriate for celebrating whatever event I'm talking about.

Speaking of Kyle, I'm also rather fond of his fable Simple Simon Makes a Law.

I just discovered Tibor Machan's and Aeon Skoble's

Reason Papers. In the archives, there's a great piece about blending the ideas of [Nobel Prize winning economist] Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard. [37 page PDF.] I'm not very far into it yet, but here's an interesting (to me) passage:

[H]ad Hayek clearly set out a Rothbardian idea of liberty, the intellectuals would have asked: Just how far would you go in adhering to the maxim? Even though Hayek approved of state activity beyond night watchman functions, it was to an extent the smallness of which, had Hayek come clean, would have alarmed the intellectuals of his time. In the terminological sunlight of Rothbardian liberty, it would have been nearly impossible for Hayek to conceal his true positions, for he would have had to lie outright or remain damningly silent. Drenched in sunlight, Hayek would have been dismissed and ignored.

To speculate, we might imagine that Hayek's meta-conscious faced a trade-off between obscurantism and obscurity. Hayek's obscurantism, his muccled definition of liberty, however, willful, enabled the philosophy of anti-statism to gain a hearing that was extensive and persuasive.

It's interesting to see that aspect of Hayek's writings defended, however weakly. He may have been a closet libertarian, but he never closed the door.

Sowell, Williams and Stossel are kickin' butt

at the Townhall site today.

Williams: "Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that self-interest and the free market system produce perfect outcomes, but they're the closest we'll come to perfection here on Earth."

Sowell: "Many, if not most, of the great American fortunes -- Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford -- have been made by finding ways to charge lower prices, not higher.

"In the early 20th century, the A & P grocery chain became renowned for both its low prices and its high quality. Its profit rate never fell below 20 percent during the decade of the 1920s. That's a higher rate of profit than the oil companies make."

Stossel: "If one-tenth of what the reporters suggested was happening did happen, there would be mass death. The opposite is true: Despite exposure to radiation and all those nasty new chemicals, Americans today live longer than ever."

I haven't read the Crunchy Cons book

In fact I can't remember who wrote it, but I've heard him on the radio. But I must be a Crunchy Libertarian.

I bought a reel mower last year. Because I was sick and tired of gas mowers pooping out on me. My review: it does an okay job. I wish I could adjust the height. It takes about 25% longer to mow the lawn, and if you want it to look good, you have to mow more often.

On the plus side: Phew!! It cost me 70 Bucks and there's no cost for gas. No fumes from the machine (no guarantees about emanations from the operator), and although it is loud enough to interfere with a conversation, it doesn't make you fear deafness.

It is more exercise than my old push gas mowers. You feel the resistance of high grass. I don't mind exercise. In fact I look for ways to get it without going out of my way.

It's easy to store. It takes up about three square feet of floor space in my RubberMaid (or whatever the H that cheap plastic thing is) storage shed. Leaving plenty of room for my rake collection (the variation in the lengths of the broken handles would be a worthy study for any museum curator), my rototiller, my kindling for Rendezvoux, the jogging stroller and assorted hedge care tools. Oh! And the Fokker Triplane kite! [Red, naturally, though they left off the Urkraut markings. (Real Krauts don't use hyphens!)]

How else am I "crunchy"?

Well, my parents were both farmers as kids, and they made us grow a big garden. We never had anything but fresh or home canned green-beans and peas. Tomatoes were a summer and fall staple. We grew a lot of lettuce, and don't ever offer any of my siblings or I any zucchini nor anything made out of it.

Don't get me wrong. I like the stuff. But the s*** grows like a weed. There is no shortage of zucchini in the world. Free is too high a price.

Rhubarb too. Our rhubarb plant is already about 5 feet high. What the H*** are we going to do with it?! Maybe we should donate it to stranded sailors who are suffering from scurvy.

Okay, besides the rhubarb, this year I'm trying to grow cantaloup and sunflowers. We've planted the sunflowers two ways: directly, by digging holes an sticking the seeds in the ground, and indirectly, by feeding live seeds to the birds.

It's amazing how effective the latter method is. The last time I did that I ended up with a huge yardful of sunflowers. I had to mow down a lot of them, but where I spared them, we had a crop that kept the neighborhood squirrels and rabbits happy all winter. [There's a lot of sarcasm in that remark, but that's a whole 'nuther post.... Oh! And, message to somebody who's quite a bit more famous than I: it's not wise to encourage raccoons. National Lampoon's Summer Vacation really went rather easy on the little vandals. There's nothing like a giant german shephard for keeping all the preceding in their proper places. RIP Sunshine.]

Ah! Crap! I've gone and mentioned our beautiful dog whom I had to bury. I need to go visit her grave this year.

We had a nice weekend here.

60s and 70s for highs, sunny... What more can you ask? I sunburned my bald head... Hey! It's like a joke from That '70s Show!

I used to make fun of people like me myself back in the seventies. I see the humor now from both sides. You kids look pretty humorous to me too.

Anyway...

We had the in-laws in last weekend. I know I said we were going to have them in last weekend, but they had some plumbing problems they needed to take care of...

Sure, I was happy to spend the weekend washing my non-existent hair.

No, I've taken up the hobby of tending my yard, particularly battling the recent infestation of dandelions. All right, I've planted Sunflowers, Cantaloupes and Morning Glories, and I'm also defending the wild Violets from all the broad-leaved weeds that are attacking my yard.

Yeah, yeah, I've allowed my hick gardening tendencies free reign for too long. Of course, if I'd grown up in a climate in which getting beautiful things to grow were a problem, I might have understood the situation better here in Suburbia. Where I grew up, you just cut down the things you didn't want and the things you did want would have free reign.

Basically, that meant that, if I didn't like a plant, I ran the lawn-mower over it and something I liked better would take it's place. I was mowing at least an acre of land when I moved out of my parent's house. I notice nobody since has equaled my assault on the encroachment of the wilderness...

On the other hand... I spent my childhood and youth seeking the peace of the wilderness, and only encroached on it on orders from my beloved elders.

I looked at that land last summer. My wife didn't think we had time to make further inquiries... And since our baby was too young to appreciate much of her environment, I passed on the opportunity to experience My Land further.

But... I plan to invoke my best persuasive efforts toward showing those places to my daughters: the strawberry fields, the blueberry and raspberry patches... I know the apple and plum trees are gone. They were cut down by my Uncle Dave when he owned the place... And he was right to do it, they weren't going to produce any more fruit... But... And the three big, I suppose, overgrown lilac bushes.

I've been missing them all terribly this beautiful spring. The smell of lilacs, the smell of apple blossoms...plum blossoms...

We have a big, overgrown lilac bush here. Many of our neighbors have big apple trees, heavily laden with fragrant blossoms.

I think I saw a plum tree around here in the neighborhood.

Nostalgia, to me.

Here's my present and my future.

I see much to love.

Don't you?

Interesting testimony

A Misesian on the School Board

We all recognize that public education is in a sorry state. Money is being thrown down the rabbit hole by those who adhere to the Mad Hatter logic of "Clean cup, clean cup, move down" whereby the initiator of the intervention wins the clean cup full of hot tea while the rest are drinking from someone else's cup. The unions, the state departments of education and the local school boards all conspire to grab the new cup — the tax dollars — in the name of a supposed public good. "It's for the kids you know." No it's for the system. And our future — our children — will be stuck trying to down a lukewarm liquid from a used cup.

I started my intellectual journey toward economic truths after I was first elected. At the time I believed in the system. Sure there were failures in the past, but I was going to be the one to set the right direction, I would be the omniscient one. But as Mises showed decades earlier, and Rothbard confirmed, there is no rational way to direct a government bureaucracy. In fact, it's impossible. It does not even matter if the elected or appointed board member or administrator is skilled in the market or knowledgeable about economics; all members of a bureaucracy are flying blind.

But that truth never stops those who aspire to use government as the mean to an end. Instead of omniscient, I became omnipotent in matters of school policies.

That's enough. I'd quote the whole article, but you have the link. Have another.

Oh, I meant to stuff in this part:

I have been on the school board for over six years and I can state that government cannot solve the current education fiasco, and never will. Mises knew this in the early 1900s, but the advocates of public education sit here in the 21st century pretending that what Mises said has no value. They truly accept the Progressive belief that government is the way to salvation. I am here to say that Mises was indeed correct.

And, finally:

Do not buy the "education is a public good" mantra, and do not accept the current system — a system patterned after the 19th-century collectivist and socialist Prussian state. Instead, work for a free-market education system that benefits all and harms none. That is a future worthy of envisioning. That is the means to reestablish liberty in the United States.

I put in some of Mr. Fedako's links, there are a bunch. I particularly like this one, Omnipotent Government, even though it's a 301 page PDF. Slow computers and connections need not apply. I'm sure you've all noticed that pdfs are bigger than most other files.

Update: Jim Fedako's blog, The Anti-Positivist, is going to get a link here. He writes great stuff there too.

I've been watching Texas Ranch House

on PBS, so forgive me if I sound like Sam Elliot.

I ran my eighth run today. Tuesday, the first sunny day after all the rain, I bumped my runs up to 15 minutes. Today, on a known course that brought me just shy of two miles. If I'd run the race last week at that pace, I'd have cut a minute off my time.

I admitted in a comment that I've signed up for the Twin Cities Marathon on October 1st. My goal for that is to finish it in less than four hours. I think I can do it if I can build my endurance between now and then to where I'm maintaining 8 minute miles for most of the race.

The most I've ever run before is a 3 hour run of 17.5 miles, the summer after Rosie was born. She's nine now. Then I bought the s#*&%y running shoes and didn't know what was wrong, so I quit running.

Laurie bought me a pile of running shoes to try out last Sunday. Guess who won the contest. You're right! Nikes. They're light and comfortable. And they kick butt on my Earth Shoes walking shoes for breathing.

For all that, the question remains: what the f have I gotten myself into?!

Here's an interesting ebook I found in a Google search:

Why People Fail, by Josh Evoy. They are indeed selling something. I haven't bought it, but I may well buy it one day.

Thirteen personality flaws and three patterns of action that block success. And solutions. I've got a couple of 'em. #2, I don't think I'm a #3, #10 maybe, a bit of #11, and I felt my face redden when I read #12.

I'll work on it.

Surprising words, considering the source

From Re-Framing the Immigration Debate, by Bob Burg:

Keep in mind that when President Johnson instituted government-sponsored welfare in the 1960's, it was to win the "War on Poverty." President Johnson predicted it would take two years to eradicate poverty in this country.

The result? Fifty years later, we have more and more people on welfare (even with so-called Welfare Reform), with many families into their third and fourth generation. Many children have never known their parents to have a job. If anything has been eradicated, it is the self-esteem of the welfare recipients and their children, many of them feeling they have no opportunity to live their own life. They are wards of the state.

Government-sponsored welfare has robbed the American middle class of much of their income.

Government-sponsored welfare isn’t even efficient. Sixty-six percent of every taxpayer dollar paid into the welfare system goes to the middle-class bureaucrats administering the system. Perhaps the remaining 34 percent goes to the needy. But, are all recipients needy? Many of us know people who have simply made the decision to stop working or not look for a job because it's easier to accept "free money." In a corrupted system such as this, there will also be people playing the system.

I didn't know him from Adam before I read this, though I'd heard of his bookWinning Without Intimidation: How to Master the Art of Positive Persuasion--and I know Robert Ringer and Michael Masterson do similar things and would agree whole-heartedly--I'm just surprised to see another guy saying these things. I keep thinking that my views are held only by a tiny, tiny minority.

Great quote from Peter Schwartz

on (in? at?) The Atlasphere:

We need to stop confusing democracy with freedom. Morally supporting freedom is always in our interests. But supporting unlimited majority rule is always destructive — to us, and to all who value the rights of the individual.

I suppose I should give a little more for context:

The Iraqis may reject freedom, in which case military force alone — as dismally inadequate as our efforts in that realm have been so far — will have to ensure our safety against any threats from them. But if we are going to try to replace tyranny with freedom there, we must at least demonstrate what freedom is.

We should have been spreading the ideas and institutions of a free society, before allowing elections even to be considered. For example, we should have written the new constitution, as we did in post-WWII Japan.

There'll be no Wirtschaftswunder (I don't know what the Japanese called their recovery after the War) in Iraq, the way we're going.

Wow! You contact a gal and 24 hours later

you get this!!!

Looks like a goin' concern, doesn't it?

Now I need to go back and address LibertyBob's issues.

And, no. This blog isn't going to become an endless commercial for that or anything else. The rest of my marketing will be done through normal channels. I may be hijacked by that, but you won't be.

I've been trying to come up with logos and designs for my store.

I'm going to bug you all with a little behind the scenes brainstorming.

The woman who did these has done a great job, I think:
The Spark of Elegance - cool sparkles. And mother's day is almost here. Nice jewelry. Hmm.

Maybe, I'd better go for one of the others.

Sweet Fragrance Sensations - There's an enticing image! And, yes, I've bought perfume before as gifts. Some good ones there.

Handbags, Coats and Accessories - Get's right down to business, and does it nicely.

I'll just take a look at the women's coats. ... Ho HO! Got my wife's size?

Well, anyway. That's what I'm up to.

Update: here's another one she did: Natural Beauty and Nutrition.

When I get this thing going, I'm going to try to integrate original content into it. Oh, you can buy stuff there now (link up there on the left), but I need to do some organizing. I've found a bunch of stuff and need more.

Russ Nelson, like Principle Skinner, has decided to play with his trains.

If anybody knows a link to this more generally relevant commentary, let me know. Otherwise, the genius I've linked to as The Angry Economist is no more.

I mean, I might enjoy hearing about what happened to the trains in Superior and Duluth. Superior, until I was in college had the third largest railyard in the US. I'd like to know how that came about. I suppose it had something to do with the fact that Superior had the world's tallest grain elevator and the world's longest ore docks.

I grew up in a town with the heart of Texas. If you doubted any of those claims, there was absolutely no way you could doubt the magnificence of Lake Superior herself. And no resident of Superior would had taken you seriously if you tried to. She gave us an extraordinary amount of crappy weather: more fog and drizzle than Seattle or San Francisco... but there is no doubt that we love her. On the lousiest days you can go down to her shores and light a driftwood fire, have a few beers, and/or roast a fish and have the time of your life listening to the rustling of the wave, or even of the ice in the winter...whatever sound you hear is of astounding beauty.

It strikes me dumb, remembering it. And it's all still there for you to visit. The elevators, the rail yards and the ore-docks are gone now, but the Lake is still there.

I'm pleased that people, looking for a definition of Old Whig,

often find their way here. My archives work so crappily, however, that I'm afraid they leave unsatisfied, and usually their search doesn't lead them to this post, so I'll repost the relevant part of it:

What is needed at this stage in Latin America is probably akin to what took place in 18th-century England when old Whig reformers decided to undo much of the statute book—and the agencies attached to those laws and norms legated by previous generations. By the third quarter of the 18th century, more than 18,000 norms had been repealed—some four fifths of the laws passed since Henry III. The process was dictated by the principle of individual liberty—most of the norms that undermined individual liberty and personal responsibility were done away with to the effect that the power of the state over the citizens was dramatically reduced. The result was a long period of prosperity that we now partly associate with the Industrial Revolution.

--Alvaro Vargas Llosa [emphasis added for the purpose of this post].

I think that explains very well what Old Whigs are about, and makes us all very proud.

Whiggarchy! Isonomy! Fraternity!

If you're looking for Catholic Packer Fan

I know where to find him.

For reasons of his own, he's moved to a new blog that you can find by using your intuition as you check out my blog roll--under Free Speech Friends.

If the hints don't seem strong enough, it ain't him.

(Yes, if I decide situationally when to use Cheesehead Dialect and when not to.)

Stephen den Beste Alert!!

Here!

The Calves are lookin' good after two weeks of running.

Of course, I'm not showing you pix of my belly or my bald head--and I cut off my ugly toes--but the legs are lookin' good.

Just ignore that Kimball Organ in the background.

Aaron Clarey's ON!

AM1500

Captain Capitalism dot com

OK, why is "'The Nose on Your Face" stuck in my 'right-click'?

Captain Capitalism dot com

"Intenza-guy!!" Hilarious!!

I didn't know that John Thune

was a moron. H/T Taranto.

I didn't hear about it on Hugh Hewitt.

Want to rail against Capitalism as actually practiced?

The Mises Institute has a piece out today, The Organization of Debt into Currency: On the Monetary Thought of Charles Holt Carroll, by Robert Blumen, explaining why fractional reserve banking is fraud. The whole world's monetary system[s] are based on it, and it has some major problems. [What are you talking about?! Everything's fine!]

It may help to keep in mind that there are [up to] three people in the two kinds of transactions: the depositor, the banker/creditor, and the debtor. The fraud comes in when the debtor is handed a depositor's money by the banker... Well, here:

Fractional reserve banking is a term describing the capital structure of a bank that has loaned funds that were placed there on deposit. This is problematic because deposit and loan transactions are fundamentally different. A deposit is a contract for the storage of currency in the bank to be held in safekeeping and returned immediately on demand. The deposited funds must be available at all times should the depositor wish. In contrast, a loan is a transfer of ownership and availability for a definite term. The creditor in a loan transaction has the right to invest the funds, and pays the depositor a rate of interest. These two types of contracts are mutually exclusive from a legal point of view. [2]

When funds placed on deposit are handled as if they were loans to the bank, then the bank will attempt to earn a return on the deposits by loaning them out or otherwise investing them, while at the same time maintaining the promise of immediate availability to the depositor. In such a case, the new debtors are issued on-demand claims for the principal value of their loan, indistinguishable from the claims of the depositor whose money they have borrowed. The bank has created multiple immediate-demand claims for the same gold coins. These new notes (at least for a time) circulate at parity with their face value in gold, and therefore function as currency.

[Charles Holt] Carroll advanced several brilliant arguments against the system of "fictitious money": that it is based on a confusion in thinking; that it creates a state of permanent indebtedness; that it leads to national impoverishment rather than prosperity; that it results in price inflation; and that it inevitably leads to bank runs and then to systemic banking crises; and that it unjustly redistributes wealth from the honest and industrious to bankers and their accomplices. We will examine what he had to say on each of these.

Emphasis mine. The point is that the depositor is not the same as an investor. An investor relinquishes his claim on the money for a time. That would be like buying a CD. A perfectly honest transaction.

When you buy stocks or bonds from a company, then sell it the next day, you're not getting a refund from the company, generally, you're selling it to somebody else. Nor can you expect to draw the monetary value of the stock from that same company while retaining ownership of the stock. A bank might accept it as collateral, of course... Well, I guess that's a bad example that just makes the matter more complicated. It certainly doesn't refute the point that someone who expects to be able to withdraw all his money within moments of depositing it is NOT an investor. And investing his money AND simultaneously giving it back to the depositor is fraud. It would be literally impossible with solid money.

In any case, the article is a clear explanation of, probably, the biggest difficulty Austrians have with other economics schools. It is the fundamental flaw in Capitalism today.

Three Articles about Oil

Oil and Metals Going Wild! (by Sean Brodrick)
4/26/2006 8:00:00 AM

Oil prices slowed their bull charge yesterday as the White House desperately applied the brakes. But that bull run won't slow for long.

I think his enumeration of the President's moves is important, and much ignored (though, perhaps, deservedly so).

President Bush did four things …

1) He waived regional clean-air specifications for summer-grade gasoline in order to boost imports of motor fuel to the United States.

2) He ordered that deliveries to the nation’s emergency reserve be suspended.

3) He gave refiners extra time to pay back emergency oil loans, and

4) He said Congress should find a way to approve permits to build new refineries a year after they are filed.

Talk About Rearranging
Deck Chairs on the Titanic!

President Bush is swimming against a tidal wave of forces that are likely to push oil and gas prices sharply higher this summer.

Emphasis his, though it's actually a subtitle. You'll have to read the rest of his piece to see what all he has to say.

I'll just quote the blurb in my email for Tibor Machan's article The Oil Conspiracy Conspiracy

Today President Bush joined the chorus of voices demanding an investigation into oil company profits. It's enough to make you think there's some kind of conspiracy -- to ignore the laws of economics.

I've praised President Bush's economic accumen before (faint praise, perhaps, but higher than the MSM), and if all he did were what's listed above, he'd be doing all he can or should do. Unfortunately, that's not all he's up to.
BTW, from Machan:

Americans are still merrily purchasing huge, gas guzzling cars, SUVs, boats, and so forth, thereby giving support to the conclusion that they aren’t hurting as much as they make out when they complain to some shallow news reporter who takes their complaint as decisive evidence for how bad things are getting.

So, yes, not only are gasoline prices not that high, all relevant things considered, but their rise is fully explainable by plain commonsense economics and politics.

Finally this from the Mises Institute:

So, let us trace this sorry story to its most recent beginnings.

(1) Congress requires new fuel mixtures during the warm weather months which are costly and disrupt available supplies, but those mixtures do not make the air any cleaner;
(2) The President and Congress decide to invade Iraq and now are making threats toward Iran, thus guaranteeing political instability and violence in the largest oil-producing region of the world;
(3) Congress requires even more ethanol mixtures, despite the fact that it disrupts supplies and ethanol manufacturers cannot meet the goals;
(4) gasoline prices spike, and members of Congress call for arrest and imprisonment of oil executives.

Something obviously is wrong with this picture.

Not surprisingly, almost all of the anger from consumers — if editorial cartoons are an indication of the direction of the rage — is pointed toward oil companies and their executives. On the other hand, members of Congress, which created this current crisis, are calling for the near-destruction of oil companies, imprisonment of executives, as well as a whole new set of taxes that would further reduce available fuel supplies — all in the name, of course, of lowering gasoline prices.
We cannot put these things into the category of bad policies made by well-meaning people. Instead, we are seeing the attempted destruction of one of the most vital industries in our country to be carried out by incompetent, venal tyrants who have no intention of telling the truth — and we have a cynical media acting as the mouthpiece.
There is a way out of this mess — reinstitute free markets in gasoline and oil — but Congress and the President of the United States, not to mention those who are politically connected, have no intention of permitting the markets to work.

Emphasis mine. I also reformatted the numbered points for emphasis.

My points, limiting myself to the present topic:
Anybody who acts surprised that starting a war in the Middle East would have an effect on gas prices is either an idiot or dishonest.

There is a great deal of political unrest in the world and most of it is in oil producing regions. Besides the obvious Middle Eastern producers we have Russia, Venezuela and Nigeria.

On the demand side, there is the economic growth of India and China. All these articles describe that better than I would.

Broderick recommends you buy oil-related stocks and precious metals, Machan says to quitcher bitchin', and Anderson says throw out the politicians, with particular emphasis on the Republicans, but Schumer and Pelosi take hits too. It's about to get tougher folks. Do one of those things, or hunker down.

Update: anybody who hasn't yet, should also read Joe Gandelman's post on the same topic. Many of the same points are made by different sources. I'd like to counter his implication that a windfall profits tax on the oil companies would be helpful for stabilizing gas prices by mentioning that one of the consequences of that would be to dry up investment in the firms, and do harm to those of us with IRAs and 401ks that are invested in oil. We'll either pay now or pay later.

BTW, let's see 'em act to stabilize the price of ethanol, while we're at it.

I ran the Medtronic TC 1 Mile today.

I think I did quite well. I haven't been running much, just walking. I did do a few (three) 10 minute jogs just to be sure I could make the minimum time. Apparently I was running farther than a mile those times though. Even when I found a route that's uphill all the way. (That made me breathe hard!)

My results were:
NO FN LN OVERALL DIVPL SEXPL TIME PACE
930 Alan Erkkila 603 56/60 370/411 8:40 8:40

I'm a bit unclear about my division. Must be 40-49 yr-olds, but I'm trying to check that out now. 56th oout of 60 looks pretty awful, though, somehow 370th out of 411 Men doesn't bother me. I knew I'd get my butt whooped if I ran with my division, so I just ran with the first wave. I had to bend down to get rid of a cramp at the end, but I...shall we say...didn't "leave it all on the track." I felt pretty good and could have done it again. I even did a little jogging on the way back to the start to pick up my sweats.

Yeah, it's gotta be 40-49 year-olds. Hey! Among 56th place finishers, I was second! Whoo-hooo!

Now I need to shower-up before my wife will let me in the bed.

FEE gets me again, though this is just a section, not a whole piece:

From Economic Fascism, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo:

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. The American Ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, was so impressed with "corporatism" that he wrote in the preface to Mussolini's 1928 autobiography that "it may be shrewdly forecast that no man will exhibit dimensions of permanent greatness equal to Mussolini. . . . The Duce is now the greatest figure of this sphere and time."[1] Winston Churchill wrote in 1927 that "If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been entirely with you" and "don the Fascist black shirt."[2] As late as 1940, Churchill was still describing Mussolini as "a great man."

U.S. Congressman Sol Bloom, Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said in 1926 that Mussolini "will be a great thing not only for Italy but for all of us if he succeeds. It is his inspiration, his determination, his constant toil that has literally rejuvenated Italy . ."[3]

One of the most outspoken American fascists was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism, Dennis declared that defenders of "18th-century Americanism" were sure to become "the laughing stock of their own countrymen" and that the adoption of economic fascism would intensify "national spirit" and put it behind "the enterprises of public welfare and social control." The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was "liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights."

Certain British intellectuals were perhaps the most smitten of anyone by fascism. George Bernard Shaw announced in 1927 that his fellow "socialists should be delighted to find at last a socialist [Mussolini] who speaks and thinks as responsible rulers do."[4] He helped form the British Union of Fascists whose "Outline of the Corporate State," according to the organization's founder, Sir Oswald Mosley, was "on the Italian Model." While visiting England, the American author Ezra Pound declared that Mussolini was "continuing the task of Thomas Jefferson."[5]

Thus, it is important to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and '30s. The evil deeds of individual fascists were later condemned, but the practice of economic fascism never was. To this day, the historically uninformed continue to repeat the hoary slogan that, despite all his faults, Mussolini at least "made the trains run on time," insinuating that his interventionist industrial policies were a success.

A Fantastic Justification for my nom de keyboard

I found it at the end of Alvaro Vargas Llosa's acceptance speech for the Sir Antony Fisher International Memorial Award, entitled The State of Freedom: 2006:

What is needed at this stage in Latin America is probably akin to what took place in 18th-century England when old Whig reformers decided to undo much of the statute book—and the agencies attached to those laws and norms legated by previous generations. By the third quarter of the 18th century, more than 18,000 norms had been repealed—some four fifths of the laws passed since Henry III. The process was dictated by the principle of individual liberty—most of the norms that undermined individual liberty and personal responsibility were done away with to the effect that the power of the state over the citizens was dramatically reduced. The result was a long period of prosperity that we now partly associate with the Industrial Revolution.

That's the penultimate paragraph. Here's the conclusion:

Around 2,400 B.C., a man known by the name of Urukagina led a people's revolution against the oligarchic state in Lagash, one of the city-states of Sumer, in Mesopotamia, accusing special interests-court priests, administrators, the governor—of acting for their own benefit and either usurping the property of others or simply enslaving them. "The priest no longer invaded the garden of a humble man", says the document that conveys his reforms and gave the human race the first recorded word for liberty: amagi (literally "a return to the mother", referring to an idyllic past in which the gods wanted people to be free). He banned the authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil, from seizing property from commoners, did away with most of the tax collectors, curtailed the power of judges to rule in favor of oligarchs trying to exploit the weak, and got the government out of proceedings such as divorce. Although Lagash thrived, Urukagina's reign succumbed to a rival king after a decade.[sic] It stands as perhaps the first case of reform along classical liberal lines (to use a much more recent paradigm) and a very early example of struggle against collectivism, plunder and conquest. Something of the spirit of Urukagina, the first free-market reformer in recorded history, needs to impregnate the popular and intellectual discussion so that decision-makers can begin the process of "undoing" much of what has been done over the last few centuries. That process will liberate African and Latin American societies from the constraints that today impede their development even as other regions of the world—less endowed by nature and with less impressive histories—are moving in the right direction.

In the body of the speech he discusses the recent growth of Freedom and Prosperity in Ireland, New Zealand, Chile, El Salvador, China, India and some other Far Eastern nations, as well as Eastern Europe. He highlights particularly the advances in Botswana. He also discusses backward steps taken in Russia, the US and Western Europe, ominous signs in China and the resurgence of interventionist-populism and socialism in Latin America.

I have an aversion to mining all the nuggets out of a brilliant piece. RTWT. But I especially liked the "call to arms" in paragraph 16, which I paraphrase without emendation marks to make it stand better alone:

Intellectual entrepreneurs see more clearly than others the cornucopia that awaits countries that adopt limited government and let people produce and exchange value, and that let the spontaneous order breathe comfortably, you find creative ways of forwarding your ideas in order to change the mindset of others who still cling to political and economic superstition.

In Which I Rip-Off a FEE Article:

Is Socialism Good in Theory?
By Sheldon Richman

Socialism has been mortally discredited on economic grounds, thanks to Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and history. But for many people it has not been discredited on moral grounds. You can tell this by how often people say that while socialism doesn’t work in practice, it is good in theory.

Strange notion—that a theory which doesn't work in the world can somehow still be good. Where else is it to be judged? One would think that a theory whose consistent realization requires gulags and secret police would be morally disqualified even if it "worked."

I guess the people who say socialism is good in theory really mean they regret that it doesn’t work without the attendant unpleasantness. Why should that be regrettable? The typical answer is that in socialist theory people are not acquisitive or self-regarding; they are more concerned about others. The regret about socialism turns out to be a regret about human nature.

Leaving aside the facts that the taint on self-interest is assumed not established and that one prospers under capitalism by competitively attending to others, is this a valid statement about socialism? Originally socialism promised a superabundance of goods—so much of everything that no one would have to do without anything. Sharing would be unnecessary because scarcity would be abolished. Wasn’t that an appeal to acquisitiveness, even gluttony? To be sure, socialism’s miserable record has compelled its advocates lately to discover the "age of limits," but that is only to make a virtue of necessity.

Socialism of course did promise to reconstruct humanity, but the message was always mixed. It promised to subordinate the individual to society while liberating him to be fully himself—free of the necessity to make a living. Leon Trotsky wrote that "Communist man . . . will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx." But the nice Bolshevik also said, "In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat."

Was the new Socialist Man to be a self-centered achiever or group-centered worker bee? It was never clear how both could be accomplished.

Maybe all that people mean when they lament socialism’s impracticality is that the theory held out hope for an end to material inequality. As intellectual historian Ralph Raico reminds us, it didn’t exactly do that. Marx promised only "to each according to his needs." He never said we all have the same needs. Besides, it is capitalism not socialism that has achieved essential material equality. (See Donald Boudreaux, "Equality and Capitalism," September 2002.)

The ugliness of socialist theory now comes into focus. Under individualist and capitalist theory (and practice) each person is free to determine his own needs and, through the division of labor and voluntary exchange, to produce what’s required to satisfy them. (As the old Spanish proverb puts it, "Take what you want and pay for it.") Under socialist theory the individual's needs are determined and satisfied collectively. Dissent and venturing out on one’s own are not options. As Trotsky acknowledged, everyone is an employee and tenant of the collective—that is, the state.

It's a mystery why anyone would find that theory beautiful or regret that it doesn't work in practice.

Bourgeois logic, obviously.

Richman's my here.

Taranto would call this a "bottom story":

Interstellar Deathray Not Likely to Hit Earth

It's just the title that's funny, though. The article's pretty interesting. I believe I'll allow myself to be comforted by their computer-modeling efforts. As opposed to how I feel about economic and weather modeling.

Ain't a darn thing we could do about it anyway.

This makes me sad that I stayed out of politics this year.

Right here, right now is the battle I long to see as the final political battle. Unfortunately, it's only a preliminary battle to the gubernatorial election in November... But I would love to see the election turn on the issue of Capitalism vs. Socialism. Instead of the mealy-mouthed middle-of-the-road arguments we most likely will actually face.

Sue Jeffers is a true Free-Marketeer. She'll be in the race with or without the Republican delegates endorsement.

God bless her.

Look at this! The Complete Works of William Shakespeare!

Right here!

This thing popped up in my comment window a few minutes ago while I was trying to write something. I'd clicked a link in a PDF document and it took about 15 minutes to do its bit. So I wandered off to do something else.

Have a soliloquy:

HAMLET
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Such a cheery thing.

My BlogAds want to lure me back into the Dog Doo biz

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www.petyardpickup.com


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Scented Pet Waste Bags
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Dude! I'm IN! The flyers will be out in the morning!

Agh! They got me!

The computer security folks at work have totally blocked my access to my store. Bad enough that I couldn't select products for it there.

PP!! (Hey! I'm a Dad! We're not supposed to know worse words than that.)

I suppose it used a lot of bandwidth, and I apologize for that. I promise not to abuse your abilities in the future.

I have to say, though, that I admire the way they handle these things. They just shut yer ass down. Nor recriminations or anything.

Aside to Bob: tell me what you think sucks. You're an expert and I'm not.

Ken convinced me to Wikipedia my birthday.

I'm sure there's some cool term for that, but I'm 42, fat, bald and have ugly scars. I was cool before all that happened.

I'm going to make you guess the day.

Three events:

1945 - Japan accepts the Allied terms of surrender in World War II and the Emperor records the Imperial Rescript on Surrender (August 15 in Japan standard time).

Well, that gives it away.

1980 - Lech Wałęsa leads strikes at Gdańsk, Poland shipyards.
1994 - Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the terrorist known as "Carlos the Jackal", is captured.

Thus wrecking the mystique Robert Ludlum had built around him.

Two births:

1851 - Doc Holliday, American gambler and gunfighter (d. 1887)
1983 - Mila Kunis, Ukrainian-born actress

I may borrow that picture.

One death:
1980 - Dorothy Stratten, Canadian actress and model (b. 1960)
Ugh! Anybody seen Star '80.

I'll leave up the poop-scooping blurb for a while yet

but I'm not proceeding with that with any enthusiasm. If anybody bites on the blurb, I'll take the job, but I don't expect much.

My store, on the other hand, I'm going to market like a madman. It has the advantage of not being very far out of my ordinary activities. And to the degree that it is different, it's a good thing.

"Idle hands are the devil's workshop" and all that.

Still working on the store. I did a bunch of work on it yesterday and then discovered that, although it looked like it was working, my security settings were causing everything I did to disappear into the ether. I found that out this morning. So, I get to look forward to doing that all over again this evening.

Yeah, it's a tight niche I'm moving into there, but I'm told that's a good thing. If only 1% of America's citizens are interested, that's about 3 million people. A buck profit on 3 million items would make a nice nest-egg. Even with the Alternative Minimum Tax.

It never occurs to those whoresons in the legislature

that acts that are "immoral" for private citizens are also immoral for the government. I used the quotes because I tend to doubt the immorality, or unethicality, if that's a word, of business collusion or natural monopolies.

It is especially immoral for the government to pull a gun on the electorate and force us to pay high prices for any producer's product. [Calm down, Al. Step away from the exclamation mark.]

This is a comment I would like to put on this post at Homeland Stupidity. [The guy's URL is ioerror.us? It looks like an error message.] The article is titled, "Government Drives Up Milk Prices Again."

Here are the worthy bloggers who led me to that post: Left Brain Female, VodkaPundit and Lance.

WOD time again: I've been thinking about simony

That is, selling sacred things. I suppose I should go get the dictionary definition.

Here: "Simony is the ecclesiastical crime and personal sin of paying for offices or positions in the hierarchy of a church, named after Simon Magus, who appears in the Acts of the Apostles 8:18-24. Simon Magus offers the disciples of Jesus payment for the power to perform miracles."

Okay, I think this part is more in line with what I usually think of:

Canon law also outlawed as simony some acts that did not involve the sale of offices, but the sale of spiritual authority...

The Free Dictionary gets too much into the history of medieval litigation. Let me pull out my Webster's.

Ah, this is better: "the act of buying or selling...things regarded as sacred or spiritual."

Why do I bring it up? Why, I'm wondering if I'm guilty of it, of course.

Whaaaaaat?!!

Eric's Grumbled his last grumble?!
...

I can see the possible demise of my own efforts in this omen, for similar reasons. Of course I'm naturally given to paranoia.

Yet, I can foresee the rise of something greater in the future. For him, obviously, and also for me on the net. It, and we, won't go away.

The Call of the Web will bring Eric back home to us.

One day.

H/T The Unrepentant Individual.

I let that sit like that all weekend?!

Sorry about that.

Anyway, Robert Ringer has a nice theory:

Today, less than 10 years after pulling Hong Kong into its clutches, China has gone from 50 million telephone users to 500 million! And people with telephones tend to be more difficult to rule than those who communicate by carrier pigeon.

What this means is that 40 percent of China's once impoverished population now has telephone service. Even more remarkable is that 300 million of those telephones are cellphones - and that number is projected to double by 2010. (Isn't it amazing how those nasty little "sweatshops" have a way of improving the lives of the very people who produce the sweat - notwithstanding the protestations of self-anointed, clueless moralists from Manhattan's Upper East Side to Hollywood?)

I mean, it's not quite "We will bury you!" But I like it.

Godless Goodness

for Good Friday:

You can celebrate Good Friday by celebrating the Good.

For those atheists who can see no way to make this particular holiday your own, perhaps you’d be willing to reconsider.

We hear about, and are exposed to, hatred of the good for being good. But what about celebration of the good for being good?

But I'd better let him explain. If that link doesn't work for you somehow, the article is called "'The Good' on Good Friday" by Jason Dixon - Apr 14, 2006.

A second WOD.

I felt like looking up "cupidity" to see if I was guilty of it. I wish. If I were, I wouldn't be here goofing off.

n.
Excessive desire, especially for wealth; covetousness or avarice.

Actually, I'm no fan of covetousness, nor envy nor jealousy. And averice is determined by its consequences: what does it lead you to do?

I can't find it now, but I read a quote from one of the Founders to the effect that there is nothing so innocent or salubrious as earning money. Since I can't find it and check the context, I guess all I can do is provide my own thoughts.

I used earning in my paraphrase, though I like the expression making money just as well, because earning is difficult to confuse with stealing, scamming and counterfeiting. If your cupidity leads you to those activities, hopefully the cops will get you soon. Earning is getting paid to produce, trade or transport something.

Here. I need to go produce something.

D... (excuse me). Drat, I'm lazy!

I meant to cite Oldsmoblogger ["Slow and in the way, eh?" My Dad's '58 98 J-2 Rocket would do 140. Stock. Of course, they quit makin' 'em like that, already, by the early '60s.]

Where was I? ...Oldsmoblogger's brilliant post on libertarianism vs. republicanism.
Two paras stand out to me as points that should be more widely disseminated and understood:

...[S]omeone is likely to mention that Adams himself signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which violated the very natural rights he previously extolled. I would say in reply that it isn't that the Founders weren't republican, it's that they weren't infallible. As I've said previously in this space, they got it as close to right as any collection of flawed and fallen human beings have ever done, but neither they nor that which they created is without blemish.

...

I assert that the Founders did not intend the several states to be able to abrogate the natural rights of individuals willy-nilly. If they did intend such, they were wrong. This is why originalism has evolved to original public meaning rather than the original intent of the Founders, that we may have government restrained by a written Constitution, rather than being forced to submit to rule by the dead.

It's an RWTW post. It looks like I agree with every word. [Particularly his use of Dut-d-da-DAH! Word of the Day! Risible: adj.

1. Relating to laughter or used in eliciting laughter.
2. Eliciting laughter; ludicrous.
3. Capable of laughing or inclined to laugh.]

Why do I express any doubt about that? My tendency to be agreeable gets out of hand a lot.

HAH! Thought you'd catch me saying something new, did ya?

I'm just posting to let you know I'm still here. What I want you to do is check out the comments in the previous post.

Don't make me link it!

Lisa's Blog

Lisa's Blog

Anybody wanna feel some envy?

Check out Lisa, there. You'll see what I mean.

Hey!! What the heck happened to Catholic Packer Fan?!

Did he move?

I can't find any of his stuff. Wait a minute! Who's Jane?

I came upon this as a result of this Google search. Note the "Notify Blogger about objectionable content." Are we stifling dissent?

The NBER folks might want to consider

this study before they go pushing what these guys propose:

"The Effects of Retirement on Physical and Mental Health Outcomes" by Dhaval Dave, Inas Rashad and Jasmina Spasojevic. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 12123. A team of economists finds that Americans age 50 to 75 who retire suffer a 23 to 29 percent increase in difficulties associated with mobility and daily activities, an 8 percent increase in illness, and an 11 percent decline in mental health compared with their counterparts who don't stop working.

Hammermesh and Slemrod, the second link above, want to tax prosperous people into retirement to discourage Workaholism.

Edward Hudgins of the Objectivist Center has some strong words for the latter:

With dark humor the authors give their study -- a manifestation of all that's wrong with academia -- the subtitle, "We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper." Damned right you shouldn't have!

Rumors of workaholism on my part are greatly exaggerated.

There's a good bit of epistemology over at

The Mises Blog. I'll just quote the conclusion:

Thus, a statement's self-referential nature can do nothing to demonstrate its falsehood; quite the contrary, it is necessary for any statement to be true. The genuine criterion for truth is non-contradiction; the action axiom meets this criterion, whereas its denial does not. Because the action axiom cannot be contradicted, it is irrefutably true. Furthermore, its formulation encompasses facts beyond the statement itself; thus, it is true about actions other than its own assertions.

If you want to see the Action Axiom in action, Read...uh...Mises' magnum opus. Or, actually, anything written by any Austrian Economist. Socialism is a small book with a big impact.

Hmm. I must have been thinking of Liberalism. Socialism can only be called small by comparison with Human Action.

Huh! Liberalism isn't that small either. How about The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality? You can read that in an afternoon.

Boner of the Year candidate

TF Stern reminded me of this story from earlier today. Former Boner of the Month: TF Stern, I should say.

But doubling the "http://" in your links hardly rises to the level of this boner ... Agh!! TF!!! You led me astray!! Where is that link?!

What?! Right smack in the middle of your post, you say?

Oh! Very well then...

A teacher who kept a 40 mm shell on his desk as a paperweight blew off part of his hand when he apparently used the object to try to squash a bug, authorities say.

The 5-inch-long shell exploded Monday while Robert Colla was teaching 20 to 25 students at an adult education class.

Part of Colla's right hand was severed and he suffered severe burns and minor shrapnel wounds to his forearms and torso, fire Capt. Tom Weinell said. No one else was injured. He was reported in stable condition at a hospital.

My beloved Red Forman would, I believe, call him a "Dumb-Ass!"

Here ya go, pal,


Of course, this gent gets the special April Fool version of the Boner of the Month Award. Kindly contact this site, sir, to receive your trophy.

Hmm. Interesting.

Objectivists disagree with Nativists. Check out Immigration Quotas vs. Individual Rights: The Moral and Practical Case for Open Immigration
by Harry Binswanger (April 2, 2006)

Suppose a tidal wave of immigrants came here. Suppose that half of the people on the planet moved here. That would mean an unthinkable eleven-fold increase in our population--from 300 million to 3.3 billion people. That would make America almost as "densely" populated as today's England (360 people/sq. km. vs. 384 people/sq. km.). In fact, it would make us less densely populated than the state of New Jersey (453 per sq. km.). And these calculations exclude Alaska, Hawaii, and counts only land area.

And contrary to widespread beliefs, high population density is a value not a disvalue. High population density intensifies the division of labor, which makes possible a wider variety of jobs and specialized consumer products. For instance, in Manhattan, there is a "doll hospital"--a store specializing in the repair of children's dolls. Such a store and the many specialized, niche businesses require a high population density to have a market. Try finding a doll hospital in Poughkeepsie. In Manhattan, one can find a job as a Pilates Method teacher or as a "Secret Shopper" (2 jobs actually listed on Craig's List). Not in Paducah.

[Tee hee! Binswanger means, "I'm pregnant."]

He has much more to say, including a very clear definition and defense of Rights.

A dose of Mises,

From here:

When a peace-loving nation is attacked by a bellicose enemy, it must offer resistance and do everything to ward off the onslaught. Heroic deeds performed in such a war by those fighting for their freedom and their lives are entirely praiseworthy, and one rightly extols the manliness and courage of such fighters. Here daring, intrepidity, and contempt for death are praiseworthy because they are in the service of a good end. But people have made the mistake of representing these soldierly virtues as absolute virtues, as qualities good in and for themselves, without consideration of the end they serve. Whoever holds this opinion must, to be consistent, likewise acknowledge as noble virtues the daring, intrepidity, and contempt for death of the robber. In fact, however, there is nothing good or bad in and of itself. Human actions become good or bad only through the end that they serve and the consequences they entail. Even Leonidas would not be worthy of the esteem in which we hold him if he had fallen, not as the defender of his homeland, but as the leader of an invading army intent on robbing a peaceful people of its freedom and possessions.

How harmful war is to the development of human civilization becomes clearly apparent once one understands the advantages derived from the division of labor. The division of labor turns the self-sufficient individual into the dependent on his fellow men, the social animal of which Aristotle spoke. Hostilities between one animal and another, or between one savage and another, in no way alter the economic basis of their existence. The matter is quite different when a quarrel that has to be decided by an appeal to arms breaks out among the members of a community in which labor is divided. In such a society each individual has a specialized function; no one is any longer in a position to live independently, because all have need of one another's aid and support. Self-sufficient farmers, who produce on their own farms everything that they and their families need, can make war on one another. But when a village divides into factions, with the smith on one side and the shoemaker on the other, one faction will have to suffer from want of shoes, and the other from want of tools and weapons. Civil war destroys the division of labor inasmuch as it compels each group to content itself with the labor of its own adherents.

Mises is using the term "liberal" in its original sense. If you go to this link, he explains what that means.

I meant to mention: I just watched my beloved George Mason University

get bounced out of the Final Four.

Good thing I don't love them for their basketball. Florida's gonna kick some butt.

Kyle's got another great post up:

First They Came for the Drunks.

His latest is pretty good too.

Ya'll hungry?

You gotta check out this link from the Teflon Man.

Awesome, baby!!

Anybody sellin' that around here?