If you listen to The Writer’s Almanac, you can hear interesting biographical trivia about writers born on that day, plus utterly gullible retellings of Establishment history by Garrison Keillor, plus a daily poem, some of which are even worth listening to. In fact, I’d say many of them are.

Here’s one that almost seems written for Misesians:

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed — or were killed — on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

By William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems.

“Peter Pinguid was really our first casualty,” said Peter Pinguid Society member Mike Falopian, in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. “Not the fanatic our more leftleaning friends over in the Birch Society chose to martyrize.”

Our more leftleaning friends over in the Birch Society.

That was a joke. No one reading Pynchon in the late 1960s would have thought anyone could be further to the right than the John Birch Society.

Forty years later and neocon hawk Sean Hannity is calling the Birchers “liberal” for opposing Hannity’s favorite war.

Do the Bircher’s deny it?

They deny being “leftist” but they’re ready to embrace “liberal” as a label, so long as they’re allowed to review the history of liberalism first:

Some of our members contacted us yesterday after listening to the Sean Hannity Show. Though we didn’t hear it ourselves, our members indicated that Mr. Hannity accused the Birch Society of being liberal. Apparently, and again we didn’t hear this directly, Hannity argued that the John Birch Society opposes the war in Iraq, ergo the Society is liberal.

Really? The John Birch Society? Liberal? Is Hannity suddenly off his nut? Hasn’t he heard the oft- repeated line that Birchers are “far-right,” “ultra-conservative,” and “right-wing extremists”?

The shocker is, Hannity may just be right about the label, though not in the way he thinks. If he said the things we were told he said about our supposed “liberalism,” then what Hannity was trying to do was discredit the Society in the eyes of conservatives by lumping us in with groups from the left side of the political spectrum. But while those groups on that side of the aisle are nowadays referred to as liberal, they are anything but.

Explaining takes a bit of history, provided admirably by Professor Ralph Raico in his essay “The Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of Classical Liberalism.” [...]

[keep reading]

(via Brad Spangler)

I’ve cached Ralph Raico’s essay here.

A.W.A.D’s “practical vocabulary” weeks tend to bore me.

But etymology can be very interesting, even for not-so-interesting words.

E.g.,

Hans Hoppe writes:

In the Garden of Eden only two scarce goods exist: the physical body of a person and its standing room. Crusoe and Friday each have only one body and can stand only at one place at a time. Hence, even in the Garden of Eden conflicts between Crusoe and Friday can arise: Crusoe and Friday cannot occupy the same standing room simultaneously without coming thereby into physical conflict with each other. Accordingly, even in the Garden of Eden rules of orderly social conduct must exist—rules regarding the proper location and movement of human bodies. And outside the Garden of Eden, in the realm of scarcity, there must be rules that regulate not only the use of personal bodies but also of everything scarce so that all possible conflicts can be ruled out. This is the problem of social order.

His example of “standing room” as the first alienable property might be praxeologically correct, but etymology suggests that, historically speaking, the first property was not a place to stand, but a place to sit.

In addition to an excellent letter to the editor of the Opelika-Auburn News on the subject of smoking in private restaurants, Roderick Long shares with us an unpublished letter to …

Dear Abby:

Your readers who supported the mother for turning her son and his friends over to the cops for drug use are confusing the legal with the ethical. Laws against drug use are profoundly immoral, since they treat human beings as though they were the property of the state; and this country was founded on the principle that an immoral law is not binding. “Second Guessing” should be ashamed of herself for siding with armed enforcers against her own son and injecting governmental violence into a peaceful situation.

Roderick T. Long