COLLEGE QUICK JOBS

To:   bkMarcus.com
Subject: lowercase liberty
Date: February 28, 2007 5:48:34 PM EST

Hi Markus,

My name is Mike and I’m a student at UVa. I have a website that connects Charlottesville area residents with UVa students for short term jobs like babysitting, tutoring, pet care, moving, etc. We just started up and we have a …uh… very limited marketing budget. I was wondering if it would be possible to get a link somewhere on your blog. I think a lot of your readers would find our service useful (Charlottesville residents will be getting responsible and qualified short term workers). Thanks a lot! I hope I hear from you soon!

Grammar Girl of the Grammar Girl Podcast ("Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing") sells this clever and helpful mouse pad:

The problem with this quick and dirty tip, however, is that it implies that "to affect" is the verb and "effect" the noun.

Unfortunately, the distinction is trickier, e.g.,

• Monetary inflation affects prices.
• Monetary inflation effects price inflation.

So now to make things really confusing: To affect X is to have an effect on X. But to effect Y is to cause Y to take place.

The rain dance is supposed to affect the weather; specifically it is supposed to effect rain.

(And I'm not even bothering with the noun and adjective forms of "affect" (except in the title of this post.))

"On a Claire Day," 28 February 2006:

(I blogged briefly about Claire's employment woes here.)

In his review of Radicals for Capitalism, Jeff Riggenbach makes good use of

a point H. L. Mencken first made in the Atlantic Monthly back in 1914. “One of the principal marks of an educated man,” Mencken wrote, “is the fact that he does not take his opinions from newspapers.” Why? “He knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge, — that is, within the narrow circle of his special education, — and so he assumes that they make the same, or even worse errors about other things. … This assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts.” (Gang 45-46) More than forty years later, when he was putting together his last book, Mencken returned to this thought, formulating it a little differently. When it comes to newspapers, he mused, “[t]he more reflective reader … reads next to nothing, and believes the same amount precisely. Why should he read or believe more? Every time he alights on anything that impinges upon his own field of knowledge he discovers at once that it is inaccurate and puerile.” (Minority 74)

References

Mencken, H. L. “Newspaper Morals” [1914] in A Gang of Pecksniffs: And Other Comments on Newspaper Publishers, Editors and Reporters. Ed. Theo Lippman, Jr. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975

——. Minority Report: H. L. Mencken’s Notebooks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.

Here is a snippet of a longer interview between Bill Steigerwald at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Brian Doherty, author of Radicals for Capitalism: A (Freewheeling) History of the Modern Libertarian Movement:

Q:

What was the most surprising or important thing you learned from doing this book?

A:

Exactly how despised and outsider these ideas were in the '40s and '50s. I kind of knew it, but I was shocked to find certain details about it. One was the story of Rose Wilder Lane, the great libertarian author and the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of the "Little House on the Prairie" books. She was actually investigated by the FBI in the late '40s for daring to write on a postcard, that an officious postmaster read, that she considered Social Security the sort of socialist central control that we were supposed to be fighting against in World War I and World War II.

Q:

Of the big five of the libertarian movement — Von Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard and Friedman — who is your favorite?

A:

Murray Rothbard, and I'll tell you why. Rothbard, in one way, was the most distinctly libertarian of the libertarians. He was influenced a lot by both Mises and Rand, not so much by Hayek and Friedman. He brought together Mises' deep economist's understanding of why government economic intervention tends to fail and Ayn Rand's sort of natural rights-based philosophy that argued that it is morally wrong for government to do certain things, whether or not it worked better — even though it didn't work better.

Rothbard also took them to sort of the most colorful and radical extremes. He actually was a complete anarchist. Unlike Rand and Mises, he didn't believe there was any role for government. He wrote so well and was so impassionedly in so many fields — philosophy, economics and history — and was so intimately involved at an organizational level with lots of great libertarian institutions, from the Cato Institute to the Institute for Humane Studies to the Foundation of Economic Education. He really had his hands in every aspect of the story, was such a colorful and fun writer, and was so bracing in his radicalism, that I found him the most fun to contemplate of all those figures.

Q:

Who has been the most influential American libertarian of the last 100 years?

A:

Milton Friedman, unquestionably. His success as a technical economist — he won the Nobel Prize in 1976 — was combined with a very great skill in explaining technicalities to a popular audience, which he did in a column in Newsweek from 1966 to 1984, and in popular books in "Capitalism and Freedom" and "Free to Choose" and then the PBS series that "Free to Choose" arose from. Unlike a Rothbard, he didn't try to bang you over the head with sort of the anarchist radicalism, which helped in him being influential.

As my book tells, he really was the guy who convinced the Nixon-era Gates Commission that an all-volunteer army could work and was directly responsible for the end of the draft in the early '70s. His writings on monetary policy were the key intellectual influence that helped shape Federal Reserve policy in the Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan era that brought the inflation level down to a more manageable level. Those were his two biggest polemical victories and certainly vitally important. He was certainly also the most widely respected of the great libertarian thinkers.

Tim Swanson was kind enough to remember my old stewardess article and to point me to this collection of retro-stewardess photos:

(via Anthony Gregory)

I wrote a paper in college (one that did not receive a particularly good grade) in which I claimed that Artificial Intelligence would not advance significantly until a robot could stand up in a strong wind.

Static thinking occurs when we imagine changing one feature of a dynamic system without appreciating how doing so will alter the character of all other features of the system.

For example, I would be engaging in static thinking were I to ask how, if the state did not provide the law and courts, the free market could provide them in their present form. It is this type of thinking that is responsible for the conventional assumption that free market legal services would be 'competing governments' which would be the equivalent of organized gang warfare.

Once this static thinking is rejected, it becomes apparent that if the state did not provide the law and courts, they simply would not exist in their present form. This, however, only highlights the difficulty of describing free market order-generating services and reinforces the speculative nature of all attempts to do so.

– John Hasnas,
"The Myth of the Rule of Law,"
1995 Wisconsin Law Review 199 (1995)

My first Broken Window Award nomination of 2007 goes to Michael E. Kanell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, not because he gets the war/economy equation so wrong, but because Tom Woods gave him every opportunity to get it right:

I got the impression during our conversation that the author understood the traditional what-is-seen and what-is-not-seen argument I made, yet anyone walking away from this article would probably conclude that war really is a nice if unfortunate source of stimulus.

I do object to this characterization of what I said: "The idea that war is an economic stimulus is especially suspect if the economy is already in decent shape, said Thomas Woods Jr...." I never said any such thing; whether the economy is in decent shape or lousy shape, war is not a boon, period.

Here's a word I wish I'd already known:

This week's theme from A.W.A.D:

Little strokes make a letter and those letters come together to form words.
We assign meanings to the words. Often they express simple ideas: tree,
rock, water, and so on. Sometimes a word describes a more complex idea.

Have you ever found yourself wondering, "Wouldn't it be nice if there were
a word for it?" Well, there is a word for almost everything under the sun.
This week we have dug up five words you may not have known existed.

One of the great heros of American classical liberalism was William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), author of this weekend's read.

Wikipedia calls him "the leading American advocate of free markets, anti-imperialism, and the gold standard."

Also:

Sumner opposed the Spanish American War and the subsequent U.S. effort to quell the insurgency in the Philippines. He was a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League which had been formed after the war to oppose the annexation of territories. In his speech "The Conquest of the United States," he lambasted imperialism as a betrayal of the small government ideals of anti-militarism, the gold standard, and free trade. According to Sumner, imperialism would enthrone a new group of "plutocrats," or businesspeople who depended on government subsidies and contracts.

But 19th-century classical liberals (with the exception of a few radical liberals in France) were supposed to be minarchists, right? Defenders of the State as a necessary evil.

Well, according to Irving Fisher, a neoclassical economist from the early 20th century and certainly no friend to laissez-faire thought, Sumner told his Yale students the following:

Gentlemen, the time is coming when there will be two great classes, Socialists, and Anarchists. The Anarchists want the government to be nothing, and the Socialists want government to be everything. There can be no greater contrast. Well, the time will come when there will be only these two great parties, the Anarchists representing the laissez faire doctrine and the Socialists representing the extreme view on the other side, and when that time comes I am an Anarchist.

(From a biography of Fisher by his son, quoted by Mark Thornton in his book on Prohibition — a policy Fisher supported, by the way — and also on Roderick Long's website, where Fisher is quoted as commenting, "That amused his class very much, for he was as far from a revolutionary as you could expect. But I would like to say that if that time comes when there are two great parties, Anarchists and Socialists, then I am a Socialist.")

Auguste Renoir, "Moulin de la Galette" (1876)

Who are the classes respectively endowed with the rights and duties of posing and solving social problems? William Graham Sumner says they are as follows: those who are bound to solve the problems are the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable, educated, and healthy; those whose right it is to set the problems are those who have been less fortunate or less successful in the struggle for existence. The problem itself seems to be, How shall the latter be made as comfortable as the former? To solve this problem, and make us all equally well off, is assumed to be the duty of the former class; the penalty, if they fail of this, is to be bloodshed and destruction. FULL ARTICLE