Anthony Gregory warns us: “Wearing black is now a reason to be harrassed by the man because you just might be an anarchist”

Reminds me of an email exchange I had last weekend:

Haven’t yakked with you in a while […] but I check out your sites occasionally. I’ve also been refering my various friends w/ an anarcho/libertarian slant to them. But I can’t remember the Black Crayon story. I know it had something to do with the black crayon being banned somewhere because of some stupid mistake of cause and effect. Can you refresh me?

To illustrate the post hoc fallacy, my philosophy professor told us a story about a friend of his who learned that disproportionate use of black crayons was correlated with suicide … so she took away all her son’s black crayons.

I heard that story in the mid-1980s. After Columbine happened about 15 years later I heard

1. that the kids who did it were part of a group that called themselves “The Black Trench Coat Mafia” (a reference, it turned out, to the Basketball Diaries — know that book?) and
2. that high schools throughout America were suddenly banning the wearing of black trench coats — sometimes banning the wearing of all black clothes in general.

Sounded like my professor’s illustrative story, where “crayon” had become “trench coat” … so I got www.BlackCrayon.com and planned on using it as a philosophy site called The Black Crayon Mafia. But I never did pursue that vision. Around the same time, I became a philosophical anarchist and decided that Black (flag of anarchy) Crayon (scribblings from a child/novice) would be a good name for a site on that subject instead.

Economics is not politics, wrote Frank Chodorov.

One is a science, concerned with the immutable and constant laws of nature that determine the production and distribution of wealth; the other is the art of ruling. One is amoral, the other is moral. Economic laws are self-operating and carry their own sanctions, as do all natural laws, while politics deals with man-made and man-manipulated conventions. The intrusion of politics into the field of economics is simply an evidence of human ignorance or arrogance, and is as fatuous as an attempt to control the rise and fall of tides. Such undertakings must fail because the only competence of politics is in compelling men to do what they do not want to do or to refrain from doing what they are inclined to do, and the laws of economics do not come within that scope. They are impervious to coercion. Wages and prices and capital accumulations have laws of their own, laws which are beyond the purview of the policeman. FULL ARTICLE

See also Jeffrey Tucker’s “Why didn’t ‘Rise and Fall’ have legs?”