Those of us who grew up on New York tend to be very particular about our pizza (and our bagels, and our Chinese food, and our street-vendor hot dogs, but right now I'm thinking about pizza).

You can get some good food in and around Philly, but I don't remember particularly loving any Philadelphia pizza. It was real pizza, at least, and not that chain-restaurant approximation that most people call pizza, but it didn't live up to New York City standards.

(Philadelphia pretzels, I must concede, are superior to New York pretzels. It's strange to think that cold pretzels with mustard would be better than the hot-and-salty New York variety, but there it is.)

Anyway, I was very surprised to discover, some 15 years ago now, that there's good pizza (and good bagels!?!) in central Virginia. Whodathunk.

So when, shortly after I'd moved down here, a woman drove up to me on the street, looking like she was going to ask me for directions (which I'm lousy at), I was relieved to hear her call out, "Excuse me! Can you tell me where I can some pizza?"

She had a couple of kids in the back seat.

I smiled with satisfaction and said, "You wanna know where you can get some really excellent pizza?"

And she looked disappointed. She now knew she'd asked the wrong guy. "No," she said. "You know … pizza!"

I stared blankly.

"Pizza," she said. "You know, like Dominoes or something."

I'm afraid I was no help at all.

In addition to recommending the LvMI video on the Fed, Gary North shows off his new video:

(I don't get any sort of kickback from this. I'm just interested in promoting education and demoting the schooling establishment.)

Cross-posted to blog.Mises:

In "How I Stole a Great Idea From Lew Rockwell" Gary North writes:

The Mises Institute in 1996 produced a superb 45-minute movie on the Federal Reserve System. It is the best introduction to what the FED really is and how it operates that I have ever seen. Yet I never saw the movie on a movie screen or a TV screen. I didn't even know it existed. I came across it through a search on Google Video. Here is the link.

This is a first-class documentary. Yet the Mises Institute never got much mileage from it. Then it posted the movie on Google's video site. The result? Over 100,000 people have at least begun viewing it.

The ones who finished viewing it have a better understanding of monetary theory, monetary history, and the Federal Reserve System than 90% of Congress. (OK, maybe 95%.)

What did it cost the Mises Institute to post this video? The time of one technician. What does it cost the Mises Institute for bandwidth? Nothing. Google pays for this. In short, once the video was on-line, Mises became a free rider on Google's nickel.

This kind of innovative marketing of libertarian ideas — pre-YouTube — is a good reason to send the Mises Institute a tax-deductible nickel. Maybe more. Do it here.

Lew Rockwell, addressing Murray Rothbard's advocacy for secessionism, wrote that "he was calling Lincoln the 'butcher of the South' in the early fifties, just as John T. Flynn, Mencken, and Nock did in earlier generations."

Does this mean he was pro-slavery? Anti-abolition?

Here's Rothbard in the Libertarian Forum, October 1969:

Murray Rothbard at his typewriter in the 1960s

Abolition: An Acid Test

It has come to our attention increasingly of late that many self-proclaimed libertarians balk at the idea of abolishing slavery. It is almost incredible to contemplate, for one would think that at least the minimal definition of a libertarian is someone who favors the immediate abolition of slavery. Surely, slavery is the polar opposite of liberty?

But it appears that many libertarians argue as follows: the slave-masters bought their slaves on the market in good faith. They have the bill of sale. Therefore, respect for their property rights requires that slavery be left intact, or at the very least that the slave-master be compensated for any loss of his slave at the market value.

I used to believe, and have written articles to that effect, that the idea that right-wingers uphold "property rights over human rights" is only a left-wing smear. But evidently it is not a smear. For these libertarians indeed go to the grotesque length of upholding property rights at the expense of the human right of self-ownership of every person. Not only that: by taking this fetishistic position these pro-slavery libertarians negate the very concept, the very basis, of property right itself. For where does property right come from? It can only come from one basic and ultimate source—and that is not the pronouncement of the State that Mr. A belongs to Mr. B. That source is the property right of every man in his own body, his right of self-ownership. From this right of self-ownership is derived his right to whatever previously unowned and unused resources a man can find and transform by the use of his labor energy. But if every man has a property right in his own person, this immediately negates any grotesquely proclaimed "property right" in other people.

There are five possible positions on the abolition of slavery question. (1) That slavery must be protected as a part of the right of property; and (2) that abolition may only be accompanied by full compensation to the masters, seem to me to fall on the basis of our above discussion. But the third route—simple abolition—the one that was adopted, was also unsatisfactory, since it meant that the means of production, the plantations on which the slaves worked, remained in the hands, in the property, of their masters. On the libertarian homesteading principle, the plantations should have reverted to the ownership of the slaves, those who were forced to work them, and not have remained in the hands of their criminal masters. That is the fourth alternative. But there is a fifth alternative that is even more just: the punishment of the criminal masters for the benefit of their former slaves—in short, the imposition of reparations or damages upon the former criminal class, for the benefit of their victims. All this recalls the excellent statement of the Manchester Liberal, Benjamin Pearson, who, when he heard the argument that the masters should be compensated replied that "he had thought it was the slaves who should have been compensated."

It should be clear that this discussion is of far more than antiquarian interest. For there are a great many analogues to slavery today, an enormous number of cases where property has been acquired not through legitimate effort but through State theft, and where, therefore, similar alternatives will have to be faced once more.

Here's a follow-up to "who's on first":

I'll stick with what I wrote about the relationship between Big Business and National Socialism, but I think it's important to add that the relationship is typically exaggerated (sometimes to the point of distortion) by the academic Left Establishment.

While looking for Ralph Raico's talk on the Industrial Revolution, I found a different talk of his on "The Role of the Intellectuals" (MP3) in which he mentions Yale historian Henry Ashby Turner and his book German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler, published in 1985, in which

… he rebutted the claim that it was German big business which primarily financed and otherwise promoted the attainment of power by Adolf Hitler. He argued that the extent of business support for Hitler and his Nazi Party had been much exaggerated. On the basis of careful examination of unpublished records of major German corporations and of Hitler's party, Turner concluded that the bulk of the Nazis' funds during their rise came from their party's members and other ordinary Germans and that the principal political recipients of big business funding were the traditional right-of-center parties, the German People's Party and the German National People's Party. The only election campaign in which big business contributed significant amounts of money to the Nazis was that of March 5, 1933, after they were already in power.

[source: Wikipedia]

This is my very close paraphrase of Professor Raico's paraphrasing Professor Turner:

At the end of his book, he asks how is it that all these famous historians repeated the myths that somehow big business was behind Hitler. And he said sometimes it was because of deliberate distortion of the evidence, but that was a small part of the case.

The real reason was that they began with a natural bias against business. As intellectuals, as academics, they distrusted business and especially big business. They were willing to accept any story about big business and their terrible machinations and conspiracies against workers and consumers because they had no knowledge of — and in fact a deep suspicion and animosity towards — business.

See also: "The Schooling of Intellectuals"

Cross-posted to blog.mises:

While we're revisiting the Industrial Revolution and the distortions of its historians, let me recommend Ralph Raico's talk on the subject from the 2001 Mises University (MP3).

Also, in Robert LeFevre's talks on the fear of a free market, he spends 4 sessions reviewing the Industrial Revolution: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 (also all MP3).

(If I'm forgetting anything, please link to it in the comments.)

With Tom Toles and Ruben Bolling attacking economic freedom with almost every swipe of their pens, it's nice to see a comic strip that can find humor and pathos in unemployment while showing at least some understanding of the larger issues. Maybe Carla Ventresca and Henry Beckett — the writers of "On a Claire Day" — are skeptical of the blessings of economic capitalism, but their comic strip isn't guilty of being ... well, cartoonish.

And Wiley Miller's "Non Sequitur" for today speaks to me on multiple levels:

And speaking of the F-word, here's a note from a reader:

If you really believe the spectrum should be private property, then in turn, I believe you must be a fascist. The principle of free speech, required by any true democracy, cannot be achieved unless the means to propagate that speech is also given. And in private ownership the means to propagate is denied: sure sign of an effective dictatorship, irrespective of whether you call it a 'democracy' or not.

This is presumably in reply to my article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, "Radio Free Rothbard" (available in PDF), or its earlier incarnation on Mises.org:

The Spectrum Should Be Private Property:
The Economics, History, and Future of Wireless Technology

How much of the spectrum should be privatized? All of it, writes B.K. Marcus. Even the vast "beachfront property" held by the military? Yes, all of it. Most government-held spectrum is currently unused, but remains off-limits to private appropriation. The result, in the United States, is an artificial scarcity well beyond that imposed by the FCC's protectionist practices. How do we privatize the airwaves? If the spectrum confiscation were a recent development, the answer would be obvious. In today's world, matters are more complicated. [Full article]

Advanced praise:

"It's the most extensive Rothbardian take on the topic that I've seen since, well, Rothbard."

— Jesse Walker, author of
Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America

Email and blog comments:

"Another great production from BKM."

"A super Halloween thank you for your well written article! I love having my mind blown and informed simultaneously."

"The goofiest collection of bull pippy I have read in a Mises essay."

My "what were you taught" post on schooling bias and the Nazi hatred of capitalism drew a critical comment from someone who clearly doesn't read this blog.

My impression is that some people troll technorati for recent posts on their favorite subjects. I suspect this is how, for example, I got biblical literalists attacking my post on our childbirth instructor's citation of Genesis 3:16 (1,2). "Attacking" might be too strong; they fell just short of being insulting, as does "chris" in his first sentence:

This is overly simplistic, bordering on the naive. The Nazis were masters of propaganda, and one of their tactics was to appropriate the mantle of European Socialism while carefully building up a Corporate State. Mussolini was more honest: "Fascism should more properly be called Corporatism". Germany's industrial corporations backed the Nazis all the way, and profited handsomely. The "Socialism" angle was a joke.

I'm not going to do a point-by-point reply to every foray from the loyal opposition, but the comments from "chris" (I'm using scare quotes because he entered his web address as "http://FooledYou") are so thoroughly wrong in nearly every regard, one might almost believe they came from a libertarian provocateur posing as an agnorant leftist.

Almost.

(1) This is overly simplistic, bordering on the naive.

Let's move on ...

(2) "The Nazis were masters of propaganda, and one of their tactics was to appropriate the mantle of European Socialism while carefully building up a Corporate State."

Yes, they were masters of propaganda. So what?

Are we to conclude that nothing they said about their own ideology was true? Are we to treat their anti-Semitic rants as evidence that they didn't really hate the Jews, that they were just trying to ride the wave of anti-Semitism and appropriate the mantle of, say, the Christian Socialists, who were equally anti-semitic in their propaganda? (Some suggest that Hitler learned the art of Jew-bating demagoguery from "Handsome Karl," the Christian Socialist mayor of Vienna, back when Adolf still lived there.)

Furthermore, my original point — that our schools do teach us that the Nazis attacked communism but do not teach us that they attacked capitalism, and that this omission constitutes significant bias on the part of the schooling establishment — is in no way refuted by an appeal the Nazis' disinformational mastery.

No, presumably, the point lies at the end of the sentence:

"…while carefully building up a Corporate State."

This is our first hint at the central problem in our disagreement. It seems "chris" thinks that the Corporate State has something to do with capitalism.

This is the equivocation fallacy I address in "Straw Men & Ham Sandwiches," where the opponents of capitalism fight the straw men of mercantilism and corporatism in order to then declare victory over capitalism.

Of course, the question isn't what "chris" or the 21st-century Left understand by the C-word. The question is what people understood by the word at the time, what Göbbels would have meant, and what he would have known his audience meant, which was private ownership of the means of production.

The Corporate State of right-wing socialism was every bit as much an attack on "the anarchy of the market" (to use the Marxist phrase) as was left-wing socialism.

(3) "Mussolini was more honest: 'Fascism should more properly be called Corporatism'."

Again, this might be an interesting point if "corporatism" had anything to do with capitalism. This may or may not be a case of someone using a word because he assumes he knows what it means but has never bothered to look it up.

Corporatism (or "Corporativism") is the official term for the economics of fascism. To quote Mussolini on the subject reveals far less than the quoter seems to believe.

To throw another monkey wrench into the works, Wikipedia claims that Mussolini never said it:

Several variations of the alleged quote exist. However the veracity of this quote is highly doubtful since the most common cited texts for the quote do not contain anything like this alleged quote.[2] Despite this, the alleged quote has entered into modern discourse, and it appears on thousands of web pages,[3] and in books,[4] and even a conspiracy theory advertisement in the Washington Post.[5] However, the alleged quote contradicts almost everything else written by Mussolini on the subject of the relationship between corporations and the Fascist State.[6]

In one 1935 English translation of what Mussolini wrote, the term "corporative state" is used,[7] but this has a different meaning from modern uses of the terms used to discuss business corporations. In that same translation, the phrase "national Corporate State of Fascism," refers to syndicalist corporatism.

Just to be clear: an advocate of capitalism cannot support corporatism, and no advocate of corporatism supports capitalism. They are completely antithetical arrangements.

Capitalism — private ownership of the means of production — is a decentralized economic system (thus the Marxist equation with "anarchy") while corporatism is an attempt to put the economy under the political control of state-privileged agents.

The confusion presumably comes from the words "corporate" and "corporation." But the political corporations of economic fascism are not the business corporations of economic capitalism. The former are government-created cartels; the latter are market-created firms.

Unfortunately, even in the business world, the word "corporation" means at least a half-dozen different things, some overlapping, some conflicting (and I recommend chapter 6 of How The West Grew Rich on the different origins, histories, and functions of the different types of corporation), but it should be easy to recognize the difference, at least in principle, between a firm that has to compete without political privilege and any entity created by the state.

(4) Germany's industrial corporations backed the Nazis all the way, and profited handsomely.

Yet again, this might be interesting if it had anything to do with capitalism.

It seems "chris" is ready to equate all commerce, trade, production, and profit-seeking with the C-word, whether these goals are pursued through market competition and innovation, or through lobbying, political privilege, and rent-seeking.

Capitalists are often the worst enemies of capitalism.

What David Friedman says of Adam Smith should be true of any ideological defender of private property and economic freedom: "He was a defender of capitalism — not of capitalists" (Hidden Order, p. 63).

A capitalist is someone who seeks profit from capital investment. Sometimes they seek their profit from honest entrepreneurship. Sometimes they petition the state for a coercive advantage. Sometimes (e.g., John D. Rockefeller) they pursue one strategy at one point in their career and the other in another.

Economic fascism has concisely been defined as private profit and socialized losses. It would certainly be naive to think all profit-seekers would decline such an arrangement. In fact, it is probably safe to say that behind almost all massive interventions into the market economy, there are private profit-seekers pulling the strings.

Capitalists supporting fascism does not translate to fascists supporting capitalism.

(5) The "Socialism" angle was a joke.

I think I've show that it wasn't, but suppose I'm wrong. Suppose the Nazis never meant any of it. Doesn't it still reveal schooling bias that even my most educated friends are surprised to learn that the Nazis claimed to be socialists, claimed to oppose capitalism, claimed that they hated the Jews because Jews were the epitome of capitalism?

The Jew is uncreative. He produces nothing, he only haggles with products….

As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism, of the misuse of the nation's goods.

– Joseph Göbbels

[Thanks, Stephen Carson, for drawing attention to this passage.]

Is it not evidence of indoctrination that this very debate is so alien and disorienting to people who got A's in their history classes?

The early British factory system may be said to have been the most obvious feature of the Industrial Revolution. W.H. Hutt writes that there has been a general tendency to exaggerate the "evils" which characterized the factory system before the abandonment of laissez faire. Also, factory legislation was not essential to the ultimate disappearance of those "evils." Conditions which modern standards would condemn were then common to the community as a whole, and legislation not only brought with it other disadvantages, not readily apparent in the complex changes of the time, but also served to obscure and hamper more natural and desirable remedies.

FULL ARTICLE

"The eugenists pretend that they want to eliminate criminal individuals. But the qualification of a man as a criminal depends upon the prevailing laws of the country and varies with the change in social and political ideologies. John Huss, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo Galilei were criminals from the point of view of the laws which their judges applied. When Stalin robbed the Russian State Bank of several million rubles, he committed a crime. Today it is an offense in Russia to disagree with Stalin. In Nazi Germany sexual intercourse between 'Aryans' and the members of an 'inferior' race was a crime. Whom do the eugenists want to eliminate, Brutus or Caesar? Both violated the laws of their country. If 18th-century eugenists had prevented alcohol addicts from generating children, their planning would have eliminated Beethoven."

From Robert Nozick's "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?":

What factor produced feelings of superior value on the part of intellectuals? I want to focus on one institution in particular: schools. As book knowledge became increasingly important, schooling — the education together in classes of young people in reading and book knowledge — spread. Schools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better.The schools, too, exhibited and thereby taught the principle of reward in accordance with (intellectual) merit. To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher's smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate? [...]

"The intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did so well and was so well appreciated."

Central Planning in the Classroom

There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the "anarchy and chaos" of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

[keep reading]

(I'm once again updating my cache.)