Dan D'Amico has blogged his recommended books for learning to write well. I want to give him props for even paying attention to the issue. Academic writing can be the worst — a lesson I learned the hard way, but was lucky enough to learn relatively early.

My last semester of college I had to take Latin in order to graduate. I hated the professor. Awful, awful man. I was far from alone in this assessment, but that's tenure for you. He still did me a big favor, right before giving me my lowest grade on my college transcript — which I never protested b/c I wasn't applying to grad schools and had no real reason to care about grades. He asked his students to hand in samples of our writing from other classes, whatever we were most proud of. I handed in something very finely crafted from an advanced philosophy class (the postmodernism course I've described here).

The Latin professor whose name I can't remember said it was the worst thing any student had handed in … and I got the impression he wasn't just talking about that particular class during that particular semester. He added, however, that it did seem like the kind of writing that was "very popular among academics these days."

That was excellent feedback. Here I'd shown him something that had gotten a 4.0 from an ungenerous grader, something that fellow students had praised for sounding polished enough for publication, and an educated man outside the tradition was telling me it was … well, he used the Anglo-Saxon version of the term excrement. (See George Orwell, below, on Anglo-Saxon versus Latinate words.) However much I disliked the man, I'm still grateful to him for his nasty warning to me about how narrowly I had been trained, and I immediately determined to shed myself of all those pomo affectations.

I hope to homeschool my son in such a way that he never needs to unlearn those habits.

Several of the documents Dan D'Amico points to should be helpful.

To correct typos, change formatting, and add internal links for better navigation, I've "cached" these pages on my website:

1. "How to Write with Style" by Kurt Vonnegut

2. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr.

3. "12 Writing Tips" by George Orwell, which is excerpted from his famous essay,

4. "Politics and the English Language."

Few aspects of libertarian political theory are in a less satisfactory state than the theory of punishment, writes Murray Rothbard. Usually, libertarians have been content to assert or develop the axiom that no one may aggress against the person or property of another; what sanctions may be taken against such an invader has been scarcely treated at all. We have advanced the view that the criminal loses his rights to the extent that he deprives another of his rights: the theory of "proportionality." We must now elaborate further on what such a theory of proportional punishment may imply. FULL ARTICLE

[This article is excerpted from chapter 13 of The Ethics of Liberty. Listen to this article in MP3, read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download.]

How about some rage at the fact that

1. These people call themselves liberal;
2. They think they're the only alternative to the neocons!

?

We're back to the glory days when the only alternatives were supposedly communism and fascism. How's that for progressive?

Re patriotism and nationalism:

I'm Prepared To Give My Life For This Or Any Country

By Curtis Stalbank

March 28, 2007 | Issue 43•13

As a true patriot, I would gladly die in battle defending my homeland. I love my country more than my own life. But I would also be more than willing to give my last breath in the name of, say, Mexico, Panama, Japan, or the Czech Republic. The most honorable thing a man can do is lay down his life for his country. Or another country. The important thing is that it's a country.

Like those heroes who spilled their blood fighting for independence against the British Empire, I, too, would forfeit everything to win for my countrymen the right to be governed by politicians in our own capital instead of in a capital located further away. Nothing is more profound or more sacred than to die for one's country, an adjacent country, or some other, foreign country.

[keep reading]

(via Manuel Lora)

This spoof reminds me of this quote:

"All politics and war opinions aside, I have the highest respect for people — of any nation — who choose to devote their lives to the service of their country."

Which I rant against here:

A.W.A.D is back on track — where "on track" means only that I find it interesting again.

Today's word helped me clear up a spurious connotation I've had for most of my life.

Good word, and an easy expansion from multi- to omni-, but I had been carrying around a twisted meaning of 'multifarious':

The example given — "a vast multifarious organization" — strikes me as a typical use of this word, and also strikes me as quite sinister. I can imagine a benevolent organization being described as "vast" but not "multifarious." Why this sinister connotation? I think I was associating the -farious of 'multifarious' with another -farious:

By the way, I love the list of synonyms for 'nefarious':

wicked, evil, sinful, iniquitous, egregious, heinous, atrocious, vile, foul, abominable, odious, depraved, monstrous, fiendish, diabolical, unspeakable, despicable; villainous, criminal, corrupt, illegal, unlawful; (dated) dastardly.

(It's such shame that 'dastardly' is considered dated. What a great word!)

Anything in bold italics is my emphasis:

Prices provide suppliers of goods and services with clear signals of what consumers want, and relative prices are an important source of information that markets use to represent the relative value of alternative uses of resources. Willingness to pay a high price to a supplier typically means that the producer is doing a very good job of providing for consumers. If that high price generates high profits, then the producer is able to employ more resources and produce more of the desired commodity. [Profits also draw competition, which will ultimately lower the prices of the most-desired commodities. -bk]

Non-price Measures of Performance. Because legislators do not enjoy a clear information source like prices when determining how to allocate publicly employed resources, they are forced to consider less reliable measures of performance. Typically, this means using some statistical representation of the "quality" of work being done by a bureau, since market prices do not place a direct value on the work. For instance, the function of police in the minds of most citizens is to "fight crime." But how can we tell if they are doing a good job in order to justify a particular budget? They must demonstrate their effectiveness like any other bureau. What statistic is readily available to demonstrate that police are fighting crime? The number of arrests is a natural measure, and other legal sector bureaucrats rely on similar statistics.

The important question is, what incentives does reliance on statistical measures of effectiveness provide? When the price that consumers are willing to pay measures effectiveness, producers have strong incentives to provide the quality of goods or services that consumers desire. If a private security firm is hired to protect a home or business, then that firm will have incentives to prevent crime through watching and wariness. Private individuals who join neighborhood watch groups do so largely to set up patrols that deter criminals and thus prevent crimes.

But public police must produce arrest statistics and have no strong incentives to watch or patrol. Public police have incentives to wait until a crime is committed in order to make an arrest. Prosecutors have similar incentives to bargain for convictions on lesser charges, perhaps with concurrent sentences, in order to generate conviction statistics. All such incentives arise because these bureaucracies are not market institutions. (pp. 131f)

One very anti-socialist (but useful) definition of socialism might be the organized externalization of all costs. By that definition, anarcho-capitalism would be the opposite: the internalization of all costs.

I'm guessing most readers of this blog already know what the Tragedy of the Commons is. It's hard to believe that anyone can know what that term refers to and still support any degree of socialism, but the strange truth is that the man who coined the term (as recently as 1968, believe it or not) was anything but libertarian: Garrett Hardin found privatizing "objectionable," considered talk of rights and freedom meaningless, declared ethics to be situational at best, and advocated "mutual coercion mutually agreed upon" (a new phrasing for an old appeal to democratic social-contract theory, since by "mutual" he really means "majority"). The solution to the tragedy of the commons, apparently, is far fewer individual rights and far greater social power. Specifically, he advocated a sort of environmentalist eugenics: "The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon."

(Is it unfair to accuse him of eugenics? Am I just misapplying a loaded word to a straightforward concern about overpopulation? "At the moment, to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted, because an appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run…." In other words, any appeal to voluntary action means a natural deselection of the best individuals. Therefore some overarching authority needs to control who gets to breed and when. I didn't make any of this up!)

For a radically different take on the tragedy of the commons, applied in a radically different field of study, here is Bruce Benson on the government court system:

Economists often suggest that the solution for a commons problem is allocation by willingness to pay — that is, price allocation. This would reduce litigation by discouraging the frivolous, low-valued use of the justice system. But several justice groups would vehemently resist such a change. For example, "lawyers are reluctant to accept any rules that discourage litigation, since litigation is their bread and butter. While the tragedy of the common may have a disastrous effect on litigants, it is a bonanza for tens of thousands of lawyers who graduate from law school each year."[62] Actually, not all litigants view the consequences of the allocation system as disastrous. There are special interest groups who benefit substantially because they can use the judicial system with its current rationing mechanism. Neely cited some of the "endless" number of examples of such "frivolous disputes" or "non-disputes."[63] For instance, in most landlord and tenant disputes the only issue is back rent, and the court will ultimately decide that the landlord is right and the tenant wrong.[64] The tenant can refuse to pay and threaten to go to court, however, forcing the landlord to bear court costs, which may be greater than the benefit of gaining the back rent. So the landlord simply gives up. If the loser of such cases had to pay the court costs of the winners, fewer cases would be threatened or brought.

In the insurance industry, if a company wants to reduce its settlement when a house and its contents have been destroyed by fire, then the company can demand proof of the fair market value of the house's contents, forcing litigation for full recovery.[65] In order to avoid the court costs, the policyholder may be forced to settle for less than he is legally owed. One of the most significant court costs arises directly from the commons problem, as rationing by waiting leads to court delay. Sufficient delay substantially reduces the value of the ultimate award and benefits some groups.

The longer a loser can delay a decision in a civil case, the longer he can use the money he will have to pay. Given that judgments do not include the full cost of litigation, many litigants who expect to lose have incentives to litigate. This can be a substantial benefit for insurance companies, but it can also be significant for other political interests. For example, slightly over one-fifth of the civil cases concluded in New York City in the 1979–1980 fiscal year were brought against the city government.[66] Neely reported: "New York City cannot afford an efficient court system because it would be bankrupt beyond bail-out if all the suits go to trial in one or two years."[67] When faced with several years in delay, a plaintiff may also have strong incentives to settle out of court for much less than he might otherwise receive. This benefits insurance companies, New York City, and many others who face large liabilities. Delay may also benefit guilty criminals, because prosecutors have incentives to settle and reach an agreeable plea bargain. The longer the court delays, the strong is a criminal's bargaining position.

Political pressure to maintain the common pool character of the courts and, more generally, the entire justice system comes from many sources, ranging from business interests to governments to those involved in the legal process to those outside the law. In fact, there are many "special interests that actively seek mediocre, if not downright incompetent, court performance."[68] Any change in the current system makes the transfer of wealth from some group to another more (or perhaps less) efficient, and someone's interests suffer. The public sector justice system will continue to be inefficient because it will continue to be part of the political battleground over the allocation of property rights and wealth. (pp. 118f)

---

[62] Richard Neely, Why Courts Don't Work, p. 61

[63] Ibid., pp. 168–170.

[64] Ibid., p. 169.

[65] Ibid., p. 108.

[66] Ibid., p. 16.

[67] Ibid., p. 17.

[68] Ibid., p. 241.

Buy the book!

New in the Mises Store:

The anti-capitalists are still with us, and how. Robert Murphy has decided to give them an in-your-face economics education that they won't forget — ever.

His approach comes from years of teaching undergraduates and dealing with the most common errors. He also draws from his teaching experience at the Mises University to offer an Austrian perspective on economics.

He offers explanations and examples that are clear and compelling. What's wrong with zoning? Murphy explains it. Isn't outsourcing destroying America? On the contrary says Murphy: it is a wonderful for Americans! Shouldn't the rich fork over in the name of social justice? Murphy says that this would make us all poorer.

Isn't the Fed protecting us against depressions and inflations? Precisely the opposite, he says: the Fed is causing economic instability.

In so many ways, this book is a product of the Mises Institute. Murphy learned his economics at the Mises University (while getting his PhD at New York University) and then began to teach at our programs. He now serves as the headmaster of the Mises Institute online classroom.

This could be the most accessible and compelling introduction to free-market economics since Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Certainly economics has rarely been this fun! The socialists and Keynesian of the world will hate this book and make it a target of all their venom. But if they read it, they might learn something.

This book is sure to become a hot seller, and a major source of controversy on campuses. A previous book in this series landed on the New York Times bestseller list. How splendid to think that with this book, the Austrian perspective is receiving yet another boost in public life.

Some topics covered:

• Why central planning has never worked and never will
• How prices operate in a free market (and why socialist schemes like rent control always backfire)
• How labor unions actually hurt workers more than they help them
• Why increasing the minimum wage is always a bad idea
• Why the free market is the best guard against racism
• How capitalism will save the environment — and why socialist countries were the most polluted on earth
• Raising taxes: why it is never "responsible"
• Why no genuine advocate for the downtrodden could endorse the dehumanizing Welfare State
• The single biggest myth underlying the public's support for government regulation of business
• Antitrust suits: usually filed by firms that lose in free competition
• How tariffs and other restrictions "protect" privileged workers but make other Americans poorer
• The IMF and World Bank: why they don't help poor countries
• Why the industrial revolution was the biggest boon for the middle class in human history
• Plus: Are you a capitalist pig? Take the quiz and find out!

Breezy, witty, but always clear, precise, and elegantly reasoned, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism is a solid and entertaining guide to free market economics written from the perspective of the Austrian School.

Murphy deploys all his abundant talents here, and to spectacular effect.

Buy the book!

… are condemned to to quote Santayana."

Anthony Gregory: The modern right has fully embraced humanitarian war, in ways more than even the Wilsonian left ever did. But maybe it's just to defend Bush.

bkmarcus: I can't believe they use the term "Wilsonian" as a self-description. Really unbelievable. My new favorite word is deracinated. The deracinated Right.

Anthony Gregory: Rightwingers are amazing in their ignorance. Whenever I meet a young Republican (or an older one!) it's astonishing how little they know of their heritage.

bkmarcus: This didn't use to be the case — or at least, there was greater polarization. Knee-jerk rightwingers were probably always as ignorant as the stereotypes, but now the rightwing intellectuals barely know their history. One thing that becomes clearer and clearer to me over time — and something that seems so obvious when stated that I can't believe how hard a point this is to make — is that government schools will never really teach history. Never. They can't. The system just won't allow it. I had an unbelievably biased history [private] schooling, but maybe it was better than the government-school alternative. Maybe strongly leftist history is better than bland statist establishment history.

Anthony Gregory: It is.

Strongly leftist history + an appreciation of markets = a pretty good sense of history.

Establishment statist history + an appreciation of markets = conservative establishment statist history.

A leftwinger who learns economics becomes either a libertarian or a neocon. It depends how they learn economics. If from Austrian economists, they have a chance at salvation. If from making lots of money in the semi-private sector, they have a larger chance at becoming cynical, abandoning their radicalism, and embracing the American system, including its "capitalist" wars.

See also one of Anthony Gregory's first articles:

"Government Schools: There's No Success Like Failure"

"First, to the extent that government successfully provides little Jimmy with academic skills, he grows up thinking that only the government can teach such skills. Second, insofar as the government fails to endow little Jimmy with scholastic and intellectual prowess, he grows up that much more docile, uncritical, malleable. Either way, the government comes out ahead."

I've already spent too much time blogging today, so I won't do anything thorough with Garrison's Keillor's attempt to redeem William Jennings Bryan (born on this day in 1860).

I'll only say that his approach — yes, Bryan opposed evolution being taught in the schools, but it's because he feared the social darwinists and their ultimate eugenic agenda; and don't forget he launched all these important attacks on the free market — reminds me very much of some recent left-wing attempts to redeem Nixon — yes, he was a liar and a warmonger, but don't forget he launched all these important attacks on the free market!

A friend of mine who is well aware of (and even often sympathetic to) my "politics" and penchant for attacking sacred cows (though not sacred chaos) was nevertheless caught off guard by some recent rancor I expressed toward MADD — Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

While I was able to sketch what I knew of the history of MADD and the legislation they've pursued, I still wish I'd had this much more thorough article to point to:

Fighting MADD

Where an idealist will go home after winning a war, a mercenary will prolong and seek out conflict, so long as he continues to get paid. But the money would only continue to roll in if the public perceived there was still a need for war, and a huge part of MADD's budget is dedicated to keeping that perception in place.

MADD's core statement, the one that gets the most attention, the one that is most repeated by the media, is this: Drunk drivers kill 16,000 Americans a year. It's an impressive statement. It gives the impression that crazed drunks are swarming the roads, seeking out innocent victims to plow into, laughing maniacally all the while. With so many homicidal maniacs loose, an organization like MADD seems entirely necessary and even noble.

The only problem is that statement is a flat-out lie. And they know it's a lie.

(via Ender)

I do take issue with the article … for being too easy on the founder:

Disturbed by the shift from attacking drunk driving to attacking drinking in general, the founder of MADD later joined the liquor lobby, declaring, "I worry that the movement I helped create has lost direction. (The .08 legislation) ignores the real core of the problem. If we really want to save lives, let's go after the most dangerous drivers on the road."

The description of how MADD ousted its founder and transformed its mission is reminiscent of Cato and Rothbard, but the MADD founder can't pretend that her own mission to raise the minimum drinking age from 18 to 21 is consistent with a distinction between drunk driving and drinking itself.

As the author says about blood-alcohol laws,

It's the only legal circumstance I can think of where someone is arrested and imprisoned for presenting the mere possibility of committing a crime. It's akin to the police randomly stopping and testing lower-income people for hunger. If they are hungry, they're arrested for shoplifting, because there's a possibility a poor hungry person will steal a loaf of bread from a nearby supermarket.

Damn straight. But then why let the founder off the hook for chronological profiling? Statistics about age and accident are no more relevant to criminal law than statistics about race and robbery. Either an individual has harmed someone or he hasn't. The odds of his cohort doing something similar should have no bearing on the determination of his own guilt or innocence.

For a much more plumbline treatment of this question, please see Lew Rockwell's great classic,

I'll close with this critical point from "Fighting MADD":

How are they getting away with this sinister nonsense? They're powerful. They're a sacred cow with an aura of untouchability. What politician is going to call what the public perceives to be a well-meaning group of tragedy-stricken widows a gang of frauds and liars? That's why the president of MADD is always selected from members who've had a loved one killed by a drunk driver. The perception of MADD as an organization of victims must be maintained.

iceberg points me to this review by science fiction author Neal Stephenson of Frank Miller's movie 300:

"It's All Geek To Me"

It was probably Neal Stephenson who introduced me to anarcho-capitalism, in his premier novel, Snow Crash, a post-cyberpunk quasi-satirical adventure story, in which there are private courts, a private floating ad hoc "nation" (not really a nation, by my definition, but local anarchy of the peaceful, if not capitalistically developed, variety), and a United States government in territorial and economic retreat. I never got the sense that Stephenson advocated libertarianism in its most radical forms, but he knew his stuff, at least the Usenet variety. But at age 25, I apparently wasn't ready to dig any deeper. More's the pity.

(By the way, Stephenson mentions libertarianism in his 300 review. Yes, he knows the position, at least in strong, broad strokes, but he gets one thing very wrong: "The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction." Um, we're not conservatives, Neal. Not even an ostracized wing. Libertarians and conservatives have a long-standing alliance against socialism, just as we have occasional alliance with the Left against war and the police state. Doesn't make us a "wing" of socialism, either.)

iceberg informs me that Stephenson has kept writing science fiction. I stopped reading him after his second novel, The Diamond Age. I may have read a short story, too. It seemed to me that Stephenson was all about ideas — great, fascinating, even inspiring ideas — but just didn't know what to do with a plot, and I got tired of the anticlimaxes. But I've loved each piece of non-fiction of his I've come across.

Here's his classic: "In the Beginning was the Command Line."

The same source of my last citizen-journalist post sent me email with the subjecting heading "I've got some Alaskan woodland to sell you..." and the following link:

CNN.com
U.S. News
"21st century homesteading: Free land in Alaska"
http://cnn.com/2007/US/03/16/alaska.land.ap/

Today is William Gibson's birthday. In the mid-to-late 1980s, he and Bruce Sterling were as gods to me.

When my now-wife was becoming my then-girlfriend, she told me she didn't read much science fiction, but loved William Gibson's Neuromancer. That made her more attractive to me. I haven't reread any Gibson in a while, but I reread Sterling's Schismatrix a few years ago, and it holds up. Still one of my favorite novels.

I've never had any fiction published, but I've had some flattering rejection letters. When I was in high school, Espionage magazine rejected a story I wrote about a hit man. The rejection letter said, "Understand, the story is good enough. It's just not espionage."

Just out of college, I wrote my attempt at cyberpunk and submitted it to OMNI. The editor wrote back, "The writing is good enough, but I think cyberpunk is just about played out." Maybe that's just a polite way of calling my story derivative, but I was pleased with what he said — though obviously not as pleased as I would have been to have the story published.

Seventeen years later: "Trim Is Dead"

The image for the current weekend edition at Mises.org is from "The Fight between Carnival and Lent" (1559) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–1569).

It might be my favorite painting. I blogged it here a couple summers ago.

Click on the image if you want to see it even larger:

Today's Onion Radio News:

Old lowercase liberty post:

what should not be privatized

Here's a handy rule of thumb for what can and can't exist as part of a free market: if it shouldn't be done, then it shouldn't be privatized; if it shouldn't be privatized, then it shouldn't be done.

A common form of sale of privilege, especially hated by the public, was "tax farming." Here, the king would, in effect, "privatize" the collection of taxes by selling, "farming out," the right to collect taxes in the kingdom for a given number of years. Think about it: how would we like it if, for example, the federal government abandoned the IRS, and sold, or farmed out, the right to collect income taxes for a certain number of years to, say, IBM or General Dynamics? Do we want taxes to be collected with the efficiency of private enterprise?

Considering that IBM or General Dynamics would have paid handsomely in advance for the privilege, these firms would have the economic incentive to be ruthless in collecting taxes. Can you imagine how much we would hate these corporations? We then have an idea of how much the general public hated the tax farmers, who did not even enjoy the mystique of sovereignty or kingship in the minds of the masses.

In our enthusiasms for privatization, by the way, we should stop and think whether we would want certain government functions to be privatized, and conducted efficiently. Would it really have been better, for example, if the Nazis had farmed out Auschwitz or Belsen to Krupp or I.G. Farben?

Making Economic Sense
by Murray Rothbard
Chapter 51: Government-business "Partnerships"

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To say that someone has the absolute right to a certain property, writes Murray Rothbard, but lacks the right to defend it against attack or invasion is also to say that he does not have total right to that property. Furthermore, if every man has the right to defend his person and property against attack, then he must also have the right to hire or accept the aid of other people to do such defending: he may employ or accept defenders just as he may employ or accept the volunteer services of gardeners on his lawn. FULL ARTICLE

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. See his archive.

This article is excerpted from chapter 12 of The Ethics of Liberty. Listen to this article in MP3, read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download.

A comment at blog.Mises.org:

The poles of Bucharest are laden with coils of optical fiber and between them curtains of wire are blackening the sky. I rejoyce at this view of capitalistic accumulation. A token of liberty. To it I owe the banwidth necessary for waching live the ASC. What a treat!

You can listen live to the Austrian Scholars Conference here.

And here's one she forwarded a couple years ago.

My grammar metarule is that grammar rules must be logical, consistent, and useful — where useful usually entails establishing or maintaining an important semantic distinction.

All other grammar rules can bite me.

In that bite-me spirit, I've dismissed the split-infinitive "rule" for decades. But it took Grammar Girl to help me see that not splitting infinitives (or should I say, "to not split an infinitive") is sometimes to change the semantic content of a sentence:

The logic behind the 19^th century rule about not splitting infinitives rests on comparing English to Latin, because in Latin there is no two-word form of the infinitive. They don't have to deal with full verbs versus bare verbs. Therefore, it's impossible to split infinitives in Latin. For some reason, many grammarians in the 19^th century got the notion that because it is impossible to split infinitives in Latin, it shouldn't be done in English either.

But notions change over time, and today almost everyone agrees that it is OK to split infinitives, especially when you would have to change the meaning of the sentence or go through writing gymnastics to avoid the split. English isn't Latin after all.

So here's an example of a sentence with a split infinitive:

EXAMPLE: Steve decided to quickly remove Amy's cats.

In this case, the word quickly splits the infinitive to remove: to quickly remove.

If you try to just unsplit the verb, you actually change the meaning. For example, you might try to say:

EXAMPLE: Steve decided quickly to remove Amy's cats.

Now, instead of saying that Steve removed Amy's cats quickly (zip zip) while she stepped out for a minute, you're saying that he made the decision to remove the cats quickly.

I'm not the only one using the 3 pigs to make Austrian points.

(Yes, I know Toles doesn't really know it's an Austrian point.)