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

A revision to the history of economic thought:

Econonmics has often been called "the dismal science," mainly because of the results that would flow from Malthus's population hypothesis: Since population grows geometrically and food arithmetically, the economic prospects of humankind are dismal. This usage is generally attributed to essayist Thomas Carlyle. Joseph Persky ("Retrospectives: A Dismal Romantic," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1990) and David Levy ("How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Debating Racial Quackery," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2001) point out, however, that that attribution is incorrect. Carlyle did, indeed, coin the phrase, but it was in reference to classical economists' views on race, not their views on population. He called it the dismal science because economics saw all races as equally capable of entering into trades, whereas Carlyle believed that the races were different and that slavery was natural for blacks. Levy argues that modern economics should see its history as being pro-equality, and that it is too often characterized as anti-egalitarian. Whether Levy is right in this argument is debatable, but it is worth remembering that the initial use of the term "dismal science" was not made in reference to Malthus's population thesis. That association came later and did not begin with Carlyle, who coined the term.

– Harry H. Landreth, David C. Colander, History of Economic Thought, page 111.

Cross-posted at blog.Mises:

In "The Forgotten Man," William Graham Sumner wrote:

"All schemes for patronizing "the working classes" savor of condescension. They are impertinent and out of place in this free democracy. There is not, in fact, any such state of things or any such relation as would make projects of this kind appropriate. Such projects demoralize both parties, flattering the vanity of one and undermining the self-respect of the other."

Sumner wrote that in 1883, as part of a chapter in his short book What the Social Classes Owe Each Other. The chapter was called "On the Case of a Certain Man Who Is Never Thought Of." It was republished as a standalone essay with the more memorable title, "The Forgotten Man."

If you google "The Forgotten Man" you will get around 600 hits for Sumner … and over 18,000 hits for Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

Why FDR?

Because on April 7, 1932, Roosevelt gave a now famous radio speech with the same title:

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Obviously, these few minutes tonight permit no opportunity to lay down the ten or a dozen closely related objectives of a plan to meet our present emergency, but I can draw a few essentials, a beginning in fact, of a planned program.

It would be hard to find a writer more opposed to a planned economy than William Graham Sumner. And it would be hard to find someone guiltier than FDR of what Sumner called social and economic quackery, against which, "the obvious injunction to the quacks is, to mind their own business."

A major point of Sumner's book is that FDR's "forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid" isn't forgotten at all. He is the central focus, at least rhetorically, of all "social doctors" who "enjoy the satisfaction of feeling themselves to be more moral or more enlightened than their fellow men."

Who is the real forgotten man?

The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man.

Was FDR trying to make sure that C remained forgotten? Was he appropriating Sumner's title in the hope that we'd forget both C and Sumner himself?

Sumner again:

The Forgotten Man is not a pauper. It belongs to his character to save something. Hence he is a capitalist, though never a great one. He is a "poor" man in the popular sense of the word, but not in a correct sense. In fact, one of the most constant and trustworthy signs that the Forgotten Man is in danger of a new assault is that "the poor man" is brought into the discussion. Since the Forgotten Man has some capital, anyone who cares for his interest will try to make capital secure by securing the inviolability of contracts, the stability of currency, and the firmness of credit. Anyone, therefore, who cares for the Forgotten Man will be sure to be considered a friend of the capitalist and an enemy of the poor man. [emphasis added]

But iceberg brings to my attention how inadequate the above etymology is:

maroon (muh-ROON) tr.verb

1. To put ashore on a deserted island or coast and intentionally abandon.

2. To abandon or isolate with little hope of ready rescue or escape: The travelers were marooned by the blizzard.

maroon noun

1. Often Maroon.

a. A fugitive Black slave in the West Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries.

b. A descendant of such a slave.

2. A person who is marooned, as on an island.

[From French marron, fugitive slave, from American Spanish cimarron, wild, runaway, perhaps from cima, summit, from Latin cyma, sprout.]

WORD HISTORY: The history of the word maroon, which we associate with desert islands, takes us back to the days of slavery, when the noun maroon was a term in English for a Black person who lived in the mountains and forests of Dutch Guiana (Suriname) and the West Indies, a term that is still used in parts of the Caribbean. These were plantation slaves who had run away to live free in uncultivated parts. The English word is taken from the French word marron, "runaway Black slave," which in turn was an alteration of American Spanish cimarron, meaning "runaway slave." Cimarron is perhaps from cima, "summit." Having come into English (first recorded in 1666), maroon took on a life of its own and came to be used as a verb meaning "to be lost in the wilds," from which our sense "to put ashore on a deserted island or coast" evolved.

maroon noun

Color. A dark reddish brown to dark purplish red.

[French marron, chestnut, from Italian marrone.]

"Marooned on a bucolic island without any other culture, their personal and professional lives become almost indistinguishable." Klein, Jeffrey, Billing us softly. Mother Jones, 11 Jan 1998.

This week's theme: words with interesting histories.

Source: wordsmith.org/awad/archives/0498

Stephen Carson has brought it to my attention that this Calvin comic strip has received 1,767 diggs.

(And now over 1,800 just in the time it took me to put this post together!)

Too bad it's killing somebody's bandwidth. It deserves broad distribution.

In 1933, Henry Hazlitt left The Nation magazine to become H.L. Mencken's successor at the American Mercury. During the transition, he wrote an important but lost book on literary criticism that will be of intense interest to economists and scholars of literature. His appendix is particularly compelling, for here he blasts the rise of a new breed of critic, one who sees all literature through Marxian eyes. Hazlitt wrote long before this strain of thought became dominant in the profession. FULL ARTICLE

George Will is the kind of conservative I love to hate: the right-wing authoritarian. (And it certainly helps that he's such an obviously uptight nerd: he thinks, for example, that The Godfather is a terrible movie because everyone in it is some sort of criminal!)

So there should be nothing surprising in "Will's insinuation that [Ron] Paul is an eccentric out of touch with the glorious modern world of the Leviathan state." Nor in the claim that "Will has always been a big-government man."

What's surprising, in fact, is Ralph Raico's claim that Will was once, however briefly, a libertarian:

As it happened, at Princeton Bruce [Goldberg] also came to know another grad student, this time in political science, named George Will. Will was another run-of-the-mill member of the American intelligentsia, a "liberal" in the mold of his father, a well thought of professor of philosophy at Champaign/Urbana. Bruce, then the dynamic, genial propagator of our ideas, converted Will as well. Temporarily. Will left to study at Oxford, where he was seduced by the tradition of Tory paternalism he discovered there. Cecil Rhodes would have been pleased.

I haven't read Pierre-Joseph Proudhon nearly as much as I've read Benjamin Tucker, and at this point, I probably haven't read as much Tucker as I've read Rothbard. There are those who would trace the 3 thinkers in a straight line, adding some Lysander Spooner at the Tucker stage and some Gustave de Molinari (and Ludwig von Mises, of course) at the Rothbard stage.

The problem with this A-B-C line is that so many would perceive A and C as opposite poles. Proudhon is most famous for the dictum "Property is Theft!" and is happily claimed by the socialists as a spiritual ancestor. Frédéric Bastiat, who should certainly be considered an ancestor in the Misesian line, debated Proudhon and endorsed Molinari. But then, Proudhon and Marx debated each other, too. (Proudhon titled his attack on Marx, "The Philosophy of Poverty"; Marx's reply had the clever title, "The Poverty of Philosophy.")

Murray Rothbard, who was called "Mr. Libertarian" could as easily have been called "Mr. Propertarian" — certainly the antithesis of "Property is Theft!"

Tucker and Molinari were obviously market anarchists. Was Proudhon?

Brad Spangler says yes:

Proudhon and Market Anarchism

Some have ventured that Proudhon’s anarchism supposedly never specified “private courts” and “private police”. While he certainly didn’t appear to go into the detail that Molinari and Rothbard did on such matters, it seems clear that he in fact did so specify.

[keep reading]

Today's Non Sequitur reminds me of this passage from William Graham Sumner's book What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other:

Suppose […] that a person lecturing on the law of gravitation should state the law of falling bodies, and suppose that an objector should say:

You state your law as a cold, mathematical fact and you declare that all bodies will fall conformably to it. How heartless! You do not reflect that it may be a beautiful little child falling from a window.

[…] It is the objection of the sentimentalist; and, ridiculous as the mode of discussion appears when applied to the laws of natural philosophy, the sociologist is constantly met by objections of just that character. Especially when the subject under discussion is charity in any of its public forms, the attempt to bring method and clearness into the discussion is sure to be crossed by suggestions which are as far from the point and as foreign to any really intelligent point of view as the supposed speech in the illustration.

In the first place, a child would fall just as a stone would fall. Nature's forces know no pity. Just so in sociology. The forces know no pity.

Robert Nozick died on January 23, 2002. Two weeks later, his former comrade Ralph Raico wrote a short historical note on Nozick for LewRockwell.com.

New York City was different in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s (and 1980s, etc., I'm sure), but what held constant was what I will call a "default leftism" among educated people.

When Bob Nozick entered grad school at Princeton from Columbia in 1959, he was, politically speaking, a run-of-the-mill social democrat. In the same year, another New Yorker, Bruce Goldberg, entered the same Princeton program in philosophy, from the City College of New York. Bob and Bruce had much in common, except that, at that point, Goldberg was an enthusiastic, proselytizing libertarian.

[...]

When we first met, Bruce had no firm political views, inclining to a vague Trotskyism. For some reason, he'd attended a Trotskyist summer camp one year, and his family, not notably political, were average left-leaning Jews.

It didn't take long to convert Bruce to the free market, through our talks and most of all his readings of Mises and others I brought to his attention. Bruce met Murray, who fascinated him (big surprise), and the rest of the gang, and became a junior member, so to speak, of the Circle Bastiat. [...]

At Princeton, Goldberg and Nozick gravitated to each other at once, both recognizing the other's obvious high intelligence and deep love of philosophy. But Bruce was always a fervent missionary[...]. He pressed his libertarianism on Bob, who, ever intellectually omnivorous, quickly absorbed Mises, Hazlitt, Hayek, and other thinkers.

Soon Nozick was radically questioning his social-democratic orientation, picked up pretty much by accident from his New York Jewish environment. As Bruce told me the story, one time Bob went back to his pals at Dissent magazine and confronted them. If the minimum wage is so good, why not set it at, say, $10 an hour? They had no answer to the question. That is, these lifelong professional socialists, well-known and widely published writers respected to this day, could not even proceed past the first stage of the argument. Nozick began to rethink things furiously.

[red emphasis added]

Despite what I've written about the ardent Marxism among my grade school classmates, most of my age peers, through most of my life have been leftists by default, not leftists by conviction. We drank it in with mother's milk. It was the water we swam in. It was some other pervasive liquid metaphor I'm not coming up with at the moment.

Of the handful of people I've converted to libertarianism, all but one of them have been default leftists — the exception being one of my little red schoolmates. And absolutely all of them have been age peers. I've scored a 0% conversion rate with anyone over 40. The only peer I've devoted considerable energy to bringing around who I never succeeded in convincing was also a leftist by default and not ideology or conviction, but not everyone is willing to "rethink things furiously" as young Nozick did. Some people aren't really willing to rethink things at all.

As I wrote in my previous post,

The fact that I was so slow to embrace economic capitalism, long after I'd embraced libertarianism and free-market ethics, is because my thinking was still so strongly influenced by my Marxoid upbringing and education. It can take a long time and concerted effort to overcome decades-old connotations.

The advice of several of the senior fellows at the Mises Institute is not to bother addressing professors and parents. They'll probably stick with the world views they have. This advice is very difficult emotionally, but almost certainly correct, nevertheless. What makes it even harder is that I and my peers are now aging into the parents-and-professors category.

The Misesians I know are mostly focused on conservatives — on trying to talk them out of their love for war and the police state. The very idea of intellectual discourse with such people is utterly alien to me. Maybe I only know how to talk to left wingers.

But while we're choosing our battles, and ruling out certain "targets" for our proselytizing efforts, let me suggest the default Left as more open-minded than either the ardent Left or the default Right.

The enemies of capitalism, either Marxist or (what's far more common now, whether they realize it or not) Marxist influenced, tend to associate capitalism with monopoly. Even some who claim to be more for than against capitalism, believe the natural tendency of free competition is toward consolidation and cartels.

I was a fan of diversity before I was a fan of free-market capitalism. I never bought into the statist, coercive, and politically correct uses of the D-word. My appreciation for diversity came from evolutionary science and systems theory. Decentralization and diversity go together. Centralization is the enemy of diversity. So is egalitarianism.

It is more than passing curious that those in the university community who are most heavily addicted to diversity cannot tolerate it when it comes to divergence of opinions, conclusions, public policy prescriptions, etc.

– Walter Block, "Social Justice"

The fact that I was so slow to embrace economic capitalism, long after I'd embraced libertarianism and free-market ethics, is because my thinking was still so strongly influenced by my Marxoid upbringing and education. It can take a long time and concerted effort to overcome decades-old connotations.

The penultimate chapter of How the West Grew Rich is called "Diversity of Enterprise." It is about, among other things, the disastrous confusion of anti-capitalists on the relationship between capitalism and diversity.

Here's a passage from early in the chapter:

The Role of New, and Small, Enterprises in Change

Economies growing at the rate to which the West has become accustomed duplicate themselves every quarter-century, give or take five years. Because change is continuously producing obsolescence in older lines of business, the new economic activity required to achieve a net duplication considerably exceeds the activity being duplicated. The new activity arises in part from the expansion of some older enterprises (others are static or die), in part from the conversion of old enterprises to new lines of activity, and in part from the formation of new enterprises.

While all three sources of new activity are important, the formation of new enterprises plays a particularly important part in growth by innovation. New enterprises are useful devices for experimenting with innovation, because they can be established on a small, experimental scale at relatively low cost and therefore in large numbers, and their efforts can be intensely focused on a single target. The experimental aspect of new enterprises is reflected in the facts that they usually start small, their number is large, and, as with other kinds of experiment, most of them fail. But those that succeed have been an important source of Western innovation, and the amount of growth attributable directly to new enterprises is large in its own right.

The easy formation of new enterprises also acts as a disciplinary device for older enterprises, in both cases opposing the forces that produce change and growth. But in Western economic sectors the forces of change can express themselves in the formation of new enterprises, thereby circumventing bureaucratic rigidity and supplying older enterprises with an incentive — self-preservation — for taking internal measures to avoid the habits and practices that eventually lead to rigidity.

The practice of forming new enterprises for novel ventures is no doubt as old as the prudent merchant's desire to limit the amount at risk on unfamiliar transactions. In the West, a prominent feature of the Industrial Revolution was the formation of new enterprises to establish factories, almost always initially small. It was their growth in numbers and size that displaced artisan manufacturing and greatly increased the total production of goods. The diffusion of the Industrial Revolution from England to the Continent, to the United States, and eventually to Japan and other countries was effected far more by the formation of new enterprises than by the establishment of branches of old enterprises. The decay of the American trust movement of the 1880s and 1890s was attributable partly, and probably principally, to the inability of the trusts to check the formation of new enterprises. New enterprises, specializing in new technologies, were instrumental in the introduction of electricity, the internal-combustion engine, automobiles, aircraft, electronics, aluminum, petroleum, plastic materials and many other advances. This is not to say that older companies played no part; on the contrary, some of them kept abreast of the times very well indeed. It is to say that the part played by new enterprise formation was indispensable to the total result, both directly and because of its effect on incentives in older companies.

Some economists and publicists have stressed the importance of large enterprises in Western economies to the point of arguing that the giants are all that matters in the modern West. Such arguments greatly understate the importance of smaller enterprises in a modern Western economy. The mistake is endemic among Marxists who see monopoly capitalism as a stage of development leading to nationalization of the monopolies and so to monopoly socialism. The effects of the mistake have been tragic, insofar as it has misled socialist and Third World countries into seeking growth by imitating the largest mature Western enterprises rather than by imitating the Western practice of growth through experiment with a wide variety of initially small enterprises. It is a mistake of a type that, ironically, Marx often attributed to his critics — a failure to distinguish being from process.

(Here are earlier passages I've blogged from this book.)

This week's theme at AWAD: words that are homophones of everyday words.

The words so far: tocsin, annalist, butte, boll.

I like the theme, though annalist is the only word I imagine using. But today's word is one near and dear to Misesians:

From the Mises.org FAQ:

What is that foreign-language slogan I see here and there?

Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito.

It is from Virgil and it means "do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it." Mises wrote in 1940, after he arrived in New York having fled Europe, that he chose this sentence as a young man to be his guide in life. He returned to it again and again as he faced threats and adversity on all sides. We have it printed in the Mises Institute conservatory in many languages, and it often appears on Mises Institute t-shirts and the like.

E.g.,

"Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians — for The Simpsons, they're all goofballs, and I think that's a great message for kids."

– Matt Groening, born Portland, Oregon, 15 February 1954

(via Writer's Almanac)

Cross-posted at blog.Mises:

Which do you prefer, this beautiful little calculating device … or one of these 72 Old Soviet Calculators collected at EnglishRussia.com?

Thanks to Isaac Bergman for bringing the commie calculators to my attention.

(Actually, the cartoony owl calculator for Soviet tots is kind of cute.)

"Philosophy," says Professor Kasser, "is the art of asking questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers."

(source)

See, if we privatize everything, this is is the sort of anarchy that will ensue.

(Via an email from my mother)

From The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1945 that Allied planes began the bombing of the German city of Dresden in World War II. At the beginning of the war, both Hitler and Churchill vowed that they would not attack civilian targets. But the German's broke their promise and used incendiary bombs on London, and Great Britain quickly followed suit. By 1943, the British had begun firebombing cities like Hamburg, creating firestorms that reached 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, with hurricane-force winds, which boiled all the water in the city and sucked all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, killing tens of thousands of people. The Allied military commanders argued that saturation bombing of German cities was the only way to force the Nazis to surrender.

One of the cities on the list for possible firebombing was Dresden, long considered one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and often called Florence on the Elbe. It had also become a sanctuary for refugees from all over Germany. Allied military commanders considered it an appropriate target because it was a source of optical equipment used in German submarines and fighter planes.

But still, Dresden might not have been bombed on this day if it hadn't been for the good weather. When cloud breaks were reported over the city, the British RAF went ahead with the attack and dropped 2,700 tons of bombs on Dresden, half of them incendiary. An area of almost 13 square miles was totally destroyed. No one knows exactly how many people died. Estimates have ranged from 35,000 to more than 135,000.

One of the survivors was an American GI named Kurt Vonnegut, who'd been a prisoner of war since the Battle of the Bulge. The night of the bombing, he and his fellow prisoners were locked in a slaughterhouse underground, and when they climbed up to the surface after the bombing was over they found the city had been reduced to ashes. The Germans forced Vonnegut and his fellow soldiers to collect the bodies, and they found that most of the people had died of asphyxiation.

Vonnegut spent 20 years trying to write about the experience. He finally had to give up on writing a true account of the event, and instead wrote the novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969), because he said, "You can't remember pure nonsense. It was pure nonsense ... the destruction of that city." The war in Europe ended just three months after the bombing of Dresden.

"If your intended destination is suddenly vaporized, consider pulling over and watching the cool light show."

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(Via Jeffrey Tucker)

So I'm looking for an image to go with an article on the history of private dykes, canals, and levies — and I thought maybe I'd use a picture of the Little Dutch Boy.

So I google "dutch finger dyke" …

And it turns out I don't have filtering turned on for my Google image searches.