1 lefty + 1 righty

1. A left-wing poem typed entirely with the left hand:

   
   after we saw free trade a rat race was vast
                                                  
   wages were bad
   we rads scarred scabs
   swabbed sweat
   bartered rags
                                                  
   a secret race
   ate feasts
   as we starved
                                                  
   far freer were we
   aware as we were
   
   sage reds
   
   
   
   

2. A right-wing poem typed entirely with the right hand:

   
   kill
   
   kill
   
   kill
   

Post-postscript:

For those who don't get it ...

These are the letters you can type with the left hand:

 qwert
 asdfg
 zxcvb

And these are the letters you can type with the right hand:

  yuiop
  hjkl
  nm

(I invite you to submit your own lefties and righties.)

Batman versus Capitalism

Kinda sorta cross-posted to blog.Mises.org:

July 29, 2005

Batman versus Capitalism
B.K. Marcus

Batman is no stranger to Mises.org. (1, 2, 3)

How does the Caped Crusader feel about peace, freedom, and prosperity? Ambivalent, at best.

Some of us thought Batman Begins was not only the best big-screen appearance for the Dark Knight, but also a sign that the scales were tipping in favor of free markets (and maybe even Austrian insights), but Matthew Hisrich begs to differ: featured today at FEE are his thoughts on the Anti-Capitalistic Themes of the latest Gotham blockbuster.

Posted by B.K. Marcus at July 29, 2005 12:25 PM

a bevy of camp-following whores

Walter Block is wrapping up his week-long seminar, Radical Austrianism, Radical Libertarianism.

I recommend his lecture on Minimum Wage Law, but it was in some follow-up he did at the beginning of his Introduction to Libertarianism, part II that he reads this great quotation from Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan, commenting in The Wall Street Journal on the infamous Card-Krueger Study:

Just as no self-respecting physicist would claim that water runs uphill, no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimum scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.

top 5

On the right side of this page, you’ll see links to my quote files.

(Just take the ?RANDOM=TRUE off the end of the URL to see a whole list.)

When I add a new quotation to the files, I usually put it at the end of the list, but sometimes I’ll think something is so concise and important that I put it at the top instead, just in case someone decides to read from top to bottom. By this semi-accidental process, my economics quotes list seems to have generated a top 5:

1. The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it.

   The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.

   Thomas Sowell

2. Prices aren’t just made up.

   Walter E. Williams, “Market Wonders”

3. When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.

   Fredric Bastiat

4. Prices are signals. They communicate vital information about the state of resources, goods, and services. Changes in those signals indicate changes in prevailing conditions — and stimulate remedial action: conservation by consumers and new supplies and alternative products from entrepreneurs. The idea that anything good can come from distorting or squelching those signals is astounding in its lack of wisdom. It’s equivalent to believing that a person with a fever can be helped by placing his thermometer in ice water.

   Sheldon Richman, Canute’s Courtiers Were Wrong

5. A regulation is essentially a tax on nonmonetary wealth such as time, liberty, energy, and property.

   James Ostrowski

Note #1: Mises and Rothbard have their own separate lists, which is why you don’t find them in this one.

Note #2: Anyone with the interest and inclination to submit candidates to fill in a full Top 10, I hereby encourage you to do so.

1 panel

From 3 to 2 to 1:

Crayola's forgiving lawyers

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

I quote myself from a blog post called “color me critical”:

Flesh … Name voluntarily changed to “peach” in 1962, partially as a result of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Does this imply that the other name changes were involuntary?

Indian Red is renamed Chestnut in 1999 in response to educators who felt some children wrongly perceived the crayon color was intended to represent the skin color of Native Americans. The name originated from a reddish-brown pigment found near India commonly used in fine artist oil paint.

This one reminds me of the North Carolina teacher who was reprimanded a few years ago for using the word ‘niggardly’ in class.

Crayola’s forgiving lawyers

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

I quote myself from a blog post called “color me critical”:

Flesh … Name voluntarily changed to “peach” in 1962, partially as a result of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Does this imply that the other name changes were involuntary?

Indian Red is renamed Chestnut in 1999 in response to educators who felt some children wrongly perceived the crayon color was intended to represent the skin color of Native Americans. The name originated from a reddish-brown pigment found near India commonly used in fine artist oil paint.

This one reminds me of the North Carolina teacher who was reprimanded a few years ago for using the word ‘niggardly’ in class.

anarcho-Nixonism?

Today’s article at Mises.org is Murray Rothbard’s assessment of President Nixon in late 1970, “before Nixon’s price and wage controls and many other interventions over the course of his presidency. Rothbard predicted the future state of the Nixonian economy in every respect.”

Two stand-outs from the article:

1. In the 1960 campaign there first appeared the curious phenomenon of “anarcho-Nixonites”, several friends of mine who had become aides to Dick Nixon, and who assured me that Tricky Dick had assured them that he was “really anarchist at heart”; once campaign pressures were over, and Nixon as President was allowed his head, we would see an onrush toward the free market and the libertarian society.

   In the 1968 campaign, anarcho-Nixonism redoubled in intensity, and we were assured that Nixon was surrounded by assorted Randians, libertarians, and free-market folk straining at the leash to put their principles into action.

   Well, we have had two years of Nixonism, and what we are undergoing is a super-Great Society — in fact, what we are seeing is the greatest single thrust toward socialism since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. It is not Marxian socialism, to be sure, but neither was FDR’s; it is, as J. K. Galbraith wittily pointed out in New York (Sept. 21) a big-business socialism, or state corporatism, but that is cold comfort indeed.

2. definition of the economy of fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses

I’ve put #2, the concise definition of economic fascism, in both my Rothbard quotes file and my BlackCrayon.com definition of fascism.

I still like my own concise definition of fascism — anti-egalitarian collectivism — but in its concision, it does leave out the all-important consideration of who reaps the benefits and who bears the costs.

Congressman Crockett

During the Jacksonian era, a distinguished Naval Officer had passed away and a bill was introduced in Congress to give money to his widow. A number of moving speeches were given on her behalf, and the bill seemed destined to pass unanimously. Then a congressman from Tennessee named Davey Crockett gave an alternate suggestion. Instead of taking tax dollars from the public to give to the widow, he offered to give one week?s pay out of his own pocket to the widow and suggested the rest of the members of Congress do the same. Crockett believed that “we have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.” After hearing the speech, almost all of the members of the House reversed their intended vote and the bill was soundly defeated. Crockett and the rest of Congress back then understood that there is absolutely nothing charitable or compassionate about taking taxpayers money and giving it to the needy. It is easy to be generous with other people?s money, but true charity is voluntary.

Marcus Epstein, “Dead 8″

neither Left nor Right

Libertarians [...] are not to the Right or Left of authoritarians.

They, as the human spirit they would free, ascend — are above — this degradation. Their position, if directional analogies are to be used, is up — in the sense that vapor from a muck-heap rises to a wholesome atmosphere. If the idea of extremity is to be applied to a libertarian, let it be based on how extremely well he has shed himself of authoritarian beliefs.

Establish this concept of emerging, of freeing — which is the meaning of libertarianism, and the golden-mean or “middle-of-the-road” theory becomes inapplicable. For there can be no half-way position between zero and infinity. It is absurd to suggest that there can be.

What simplified term should libertarians employ to distinguish themselves from the Moscow brand of “Leftists” and “Rightists”? I have not invented one but until I do I shall content myself by saying, “I am a libertarian,” standing ready to explain the definition to anyone who seeks meaning instead of trademarks.

Neither Left Nor Right
Published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty – January 1956
by Leonard E. Read