In addition to Our Enemy, The State and The State of the Union, which you can still buy from the Mises Store, you can now find these Albert Jay Nock titles available via print-on-demand:

I just don’t understand how such an obvious fallacy carries so much weight with so many people.

We do X now … or We did Y back then … or my favorite, We did Z in World War II … therefore … therefore what?

The therefore is always that X, Y, and Z must have been OK. How can I possibly complain about XYZ actions when precedent says they’re permissible?

This was the basis of Walter Williams’s inflammatory remarks.

According to today’s article at Mises.org, it’s the basis of Judge Posner’s defense of the police state in general:

Posner admits we have no idea how likely a catastrophic terrorist attack is, but given that it is possible, he is ready to seriously curtail civil liberties. “The set of rights we call ‘civil liberties’ is,” he writes, “the point of balance between security and liberty, with neither entitled to priority” (Posner 2004a, 228). He suggests that comprehensive, 1984-style surveillance is something we just might have to “learn to live with.” He points out that the law already suppresses a lot of speech — so what, he asks, is so bad about suppressing some more?

He also suggests “extreme police measures” should not be off the table. What might those include? There’s torture, of course, but also “collective punishment” — for example, punishing terrorists’ families. Though we may find the idea of collective punishment initially shocking, Posner says it really should not bother us, because, after all, “[t]he economic sanctions that we imposed on Iraq … were a form of collective punishment and caused many innocent people to die, as did our bombing of German and Japanese cities in World War II” (Posner 2004a, 235).

A.Word.A.Day:

petrichor (PET-ri-kuhr) noun

The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.

[From petro- (rock), from Greek petros (stone) + ichor (the fluid that is supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology). Coined by researchers I.J. Bear and R.G. Thomas.]

Wikipedia:

Petrichor (IPA: pět’ɹǐkəɹ) (from Greek petros, “stone” + ichor) is the scent of rain on dry earth; more specifically, it is the name of the yellow organic oil that yields this scent.

The term was coined by two Australian researchers in 1964 for an article in the journal Nature. In the article, the smell is shown to derive from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is adsorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, producing the distinctive scent. In a follow up paper, the researchers showed the oil retards seed germination and early plant growth.

The scent is generally regarded as pleasant and refreshing, and is one of the most frequently cited “favorite smells”. In desert regions, the smell is especially strong during the first rain after a long dry spell. The oil yielding the scent can be collected from rocks and concentrated to produce perfume. However, it has yet to be synthesized, perhaps due to its complexity. It is composed of more than fifty distinct chemical substances.