Today's daily article at Mises.org is Lew Rockwell's "Three National Treasures" — about Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, and … W.H. Hutt.

Anyone who knows anything about Austrian economics has heard of Hazlitt and Rothbard, but who's this Hutt guy? I admired his article " The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century," which I had read in Hayek's Capitalism and the Historians, but I hadn't remembered his name. He was a classical liberal in apartheid South Africa — a position that can't have been too popular with either blacks or whites at the time. As Rockwell writes,

"Hutt showed that South Africa's economic apartheid was designed largely to protect white labor union members from black competition. The free market, he said, offers the only hope to minorities and the disadvantaged, and for a free society in South Africa. Government controls benefit only loot-seeking special interests."

He's worth reading about.

A friend whom I grew up with just showed me that Google Maps now has 360º single-axis photo maps of NYC, where we grew up. Very eerie. Here's my old high school:

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

May 23, 2007 | Issue 43•21

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's School for Behavioral Science concluded that more than one-third of the U.S. population is neither entitled nor qualified to have opinions.

"On topics from evolution to the environment to gay marriage to immigration reform, we found that many of the opinions expressed were so off-base and ill-informed that they actually hurt society by being voiced," said chief researcher Professor Mark Fultz, who based the findings on hundreds of telephone, office, and dinner-party conversations compiled over a three-year period. "While people have long asserted that it takes all kinds, our research shows that American society currently has a drastic oversupply of the kinds who don't have any good or worthwhile thoughts whatsoever. We could actually do just fine without them."

In 2002, Fultz's team shook the academic world by conclusively proving the existence of both bad ideas during brainstorming and dumb questions during question-and-answer sessions.

(via Ender)

I offer my less-funny take on the supposed right to an opinion here:

1. I opine
2. there are rights and then there are rights

Kenny Johnsson interviews Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., for The Liberal Post:

Johnsson: Do you consider yourself a libertarian?

Rockwell: Most certainly. What are the choices? Conservative is obviously out, even though the media describe us this way. The term's heritage dates to the Tory party in Britain, the very mercantilist-landowners who resisted change in the Corn Laws. This group opposed capitalism as socially destabilizing. They didn't like the merchant class to making more money than the old families — meaning that they didn't want to lose their privileges. In the US, the term conservative came about after World War II. It had no meaning, really, other than to refer to the general desire to be prudent in public affairs, in contrast to the revolutionary tendencies on the left. The problem is that it amounted to a defense of the status quo, and, after Buckley, it was irretrievably wrapped up with the Cold War cause.

I like the term liberal since genuine liberalism is our heritage. It was their insight that society is self-managing, and this is the greatest political idea ever advanced in human history. But there are two problems here. The first is that the term was hijacked by socialists during the Progressive Era and especially after the New Deal, when the liberals finally sold out to the state. The second is more obscure but it is important: even the good kind of liberalism was very much bound up with republican theory, that you could have a government made up of the people rather than the elites. This error, which is really utopian, led to a commitment to government as an essential institution. Advances in economics and political philosophy since that time have shown that this is a misnomer. There is no way to keep government in check, since by definition it is guilty of committing the very aggressions it is supposedly designed to keep at bay: namely, theft, murder, counterfeiting, kidnapping, and the like. So the liberal critique of the state just wasn't radical enough.

There are other options, such as the term I once used, "paleolibertarian," which refers to libertarianism before the movement emerged to institutionalize it as an ideological wing of the state's political apparatus. This term was designed to address a very serious problem that libertarians in Washington had come to see themselves as a pleading pressure group hoping to find "market-based" solutions to public policy problems but within public policy, and thus do they support school vouchers, limited wars, managed trade, forced savings as an alternative to social security, and the like. Unfortunately, the term paleolibertarian became confused because of its association with paleoconservative, so it came to mean some sort of socially conservative libertarian, which wasn't the point at all — though the attempted definition of libertarian as necessarily socially leftist is a problem too.

There are other strange terms bandied about from time to time, but in the end, I think we have to be happy with the term libertarian, while knowing that politics tends to taint all word usage issues. What is a libertarian? It is a person who believes in the absolute right of private property ownership. All else follows from that one proposition.

FULL INTERVIEW at Mises.org

This should be really great:

The History of Political Philosophy: From Plato to Rothbard, with David Gordon, June 4–8, 2007.

Is the state a natural institution, an organic part of society with necessary functions? Or is it an artificial construct that only exploits society? Or is it something else entirely?

SCHEDULE

1. Plato
2. Aristotle
3. Thomas Aquinas
4. Thomas Hobbes
5. John Locke
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
7. Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel
8. John Stuart Mill, Lysander Spooner and Herbert Spencer
9. John Rawls
10. Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard

More information here. Register here.

Someone oughta put together a package of Mises.org resources for homeschoolers and adult autodidacts. It'll probably turn out to be me….

Original image here: http://geocities.com/mrkodytoon/socialization.jpg

(via Po Moyemu)

From The Ethics of Liberty, by Murray Rothbard:

Suppose, for example, that there are many competing cantaloupe stores in a particular neighborhood. One of the cantaloupe dealers, Smith, then uses violence to drive all of his competitors out of the neighborhood; he has thereby employed violence to establish a coerced monopoly over the sale of cantaloupes in a given territorial area. Does that mean that Smith's use of violence to establish and maintain his monopoly was essential to the provision of cantaloupes in the neighborhood? Certainly not, for there were existing competitors as well as potential rivals should Smith ever relax his use and threat of violence; moreover, economics demonstrates that Smith, as a coercive monopolist will tend to perform his service badly and inefficiently. Protected from competition by the use of force, Smith can afford to provide his service in a costly and inefficient manner, since the consumers are deprived of any possible range of alternative choice. Furthermore, should a group arise to call for the abolition of Smith's coercive monopoly there would be very few protesters with the temerity to accuse these "abolitionists" of wishing to deprive the consumers of their much desired cantaloupes.

And yet, the State is only our hypothetical Smith on a gigantic and all-encompassing scale. …

What great timing. Just as I was beginning to discuss with various friends and acquaintances how to include economics in homeschooling, Mises.org releases this thorough set of recommendations.

Note this comment from Jim Fedako:

Whatever Happened to Penny Candy was the book that introduced me - at age 38 - to Austrian Economics. I read the book after my wife bought it as an economics text for my oldest son. Penny Candy shook my neoclassical background to the core, in an evening nonetheless.

The book is a great introduction to the free market for middleschoolers, highschoolers, and adults who haven't yet shed the statist influences of public education.

A truly excellent book!

Here's one that could have been written by George Reisman himself:

A wonderful Hayek quote via Sudha Shenoy:

[E]xclusive knowledge of a single sector of the social sciences is of little use…. While you may be a very useful member of society if you are a competent chemist or biologist but know nothing else, you will not be a useful member of society if you know only economics or political science and nothing else. You cannot successfully use your technical knowledge unless you are a fairly educated person, and, in particular, have some knowledge of the whole field of the social sciences as well as some knowledge of history and philosophy…. But if you know only economics and nothing else, you will be a bane to mankind, good, perhaps, for writing articles for other economists to read, but for nothing else."

The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, p. 42.

What do homeschool parents and children say when pro-schooling busybodies ask those imposing questions?

News from Hawkhill Acres offers some candidate answers.

(via Po Moyemu)

Here's my favorite set:

Q. Why aren't you in school?

A. Why aren't you in therapy?

A. Why would you ask?

A. I'm still contagious.

A. If I can't take my gun, I'm not gonna go.

A. Head lice.

A. My religion lets me marry at 9 and I'm on my honeymoon.

A. Leprosy

A. Psychiatrist appointment.

A. I had to see my parole officer.

A. Court date.

A. My parents refuse to make me go to a place where I'm cooped up for six hours with 22 other kids my own age and completely separated from both the real world and the people who love me the most.

During the 6th century BC, "the powerful Lydians of Asia Minor were now ruled by Croesus, son of Alyattes, who had extended his empire even further; the Phrygians were subject to Lydia, and the Lydians had alliances with the Greek Ionian cities along the coast. 'Sardis was at the height of its prosperity,' Herodotus remarks, 'and was visited … by every learned Greek who was alive at the time, including Solon of Athens,' who was on the ten-year exile from his city. The trade routes across Asia Minor had brought Croesus as much wealth as his predecessor Midas, two hundred years before; and like Midas, Croesus had gained a reputation of being one of the richest men in the world.

(The History of the Ancient World, p. 459)

Meanwhile, Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire decided to … found the Persian Empire. How? Step 1 was to take over the territory of his great-uncle Croesus.

The two armies met at the Halys river and fought to a draw. Croesus drew back, intending to send to Babylon for aid, but Cyrus (knowing better than to allow time for this) pressed forwards into Lydia and finally cornered the Lydian army in front of Sardis itself. He scattered the Lydian cavalry by bringing in camels (which frightened the horses into bolting), laid siege to the city itself, and brought it down after only fourteen days.[15]

Cyrus thought that his men deserved a reward, so he let them pour into the city, plundering it of its fabled wealth. Meanwhile Croesus — taken prisoner and marched into Cyrus's presence — watched from the walls beside his captor. He said not a word, so Cyrus asked him why he wasn't distressed to see his wealth disappearing. "It isn't my wealth," Croesus remarked, "it's yours that they're stealing." Upon which Cyrus immediately ordered the plundering to stop.[16] (p. 460f)

---

[15] Herodotus, I.75–87

[16] Herodotus, I.88–90

Here's a pattern that's long puzzled me: pro-schooling people will often talk about that one amazing teacher who made a profound difference in their lives — or they'll repeat such a story as told by someone else.

The thing is, that one amazing teacher is always the one who violates the rules, who is unlike the rest of the pupil's experience of school.

The lesson the pro-schoolers seem to take from this is: See how important school is?

The lesson I take from it — and the lesson I presume any unbiased observer with an IQ over 50 would also take from it — is this: See how stifling school is? See how important this teacher is precisely because he or she is unlike the schooling norm?!

Just imagine if individualized education were the norm.

Poems like this one, from The Writer's Almanac, wouldn't make any sense to us:

Poem: "Mrs. Krikorian" by Sharon Olds, from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002.

She saved me. When I arrived in 6th grade, a known criminal, the new teacher asked me to stay after school the first day, she said I've heard about you. She was a tall woman, with a deep crevice between her breasts, and a large, calm nose. She said, This is a special library pass. As soon as you finish your hour's work— that hour's work that took ten minutes and then the devil glanced into the room and found me empty, a house standing open— you can go to the library. Every hour I'd zip through the work in a dash and slip out of my seat as if out of God's side and sail down to the library, solo through the empty powerful halls, flash my pass and stroll over to the dictionary to look up the most interesting word I knew, spank, dipping two fingers into the jar of library paste to suck that tart mucilage as I came to the page with the cocker spaniel's silks curling up like the fine steam of the body. After spank, and breast, I'd move on to Abe Lincoln and Helen Keller, safe in their goodness till the bell, thanks to Mrs. Krikorian, amiable giantess with the kind eyes. When she asked me to write a play, and direct it, and it was a flop, and I hid in the coat-closet, she brought me a candy-cane as you lay a peppermint on the tongue, and the worm will come up out of the bowel to get it. And so I was emptied of Lucifer and filled with school glue and eros and Amelia Earhart, saved by Mrs. Krikorian. And who had saved Mrs. Krikorian? When the Turks came across Armenia, who slid her into the belly of a quilt, who locked her in a chest, who mailed her to America? And that one, who saved her, and that one— who saved her, to save the one who saved Mrs. Krikorian, who was standing there on the sill of 6th grade, a wide-hipped angel, smokey hair standing up weightless all around her head? I end up owing my soul to so many, to the Armenian nation, one more soul someone jammed behind a stove, drove deep into a crack in a wall, shoved under a bed. I would wake up, in the morning, under my bed—not knowing how I had got there—and lie in the dusk, the dustballs beside my face round and ashen, shining slightly with the eerie comfort of what is neither good nor evil.

Wally Conger once gently chastised me for talking about growing old, but I'm going to do it again. I have no idea what this article is talking about:

Like Medea in her fury, last summer Sienna Miller destroyed Boho, the bohemian look she had created and made her own: "I feel less hippy," she lamented to American Vogue. "I just don't want to wear anything floaty or coin-belty ever again. No more gilets, or cowboy boots. There are 12-year-olds wearing exact replicas of my mother's Moroccan belt."

I don't know what "foho" is; I don't know what "boho" is; I don't know who Sienna Miller is….

I do know who Medea was. And I found this page by following a link from the article (via LRC) on how "Alexander the Great had 'Mother Nature' on his side when he conquered the island fortress of Tyre in 332 BC," but "low-slung belts, tiered gipsy skirts and straw cowboy hats"? Not a word.

I know who "Kate Moss, and style-mongers from Elle Macpherson to the Olsen twins" are, but I have no idea what is being referred to in this sentence: "Few of us were sorry to kiss goodbye to what had turned into an identikit head-to-toe look."

From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the man who wrote The Wizard of Oz, Lyman Frank Baum, born in Chittenango, New York, in 1856. […]

[…]

Baum was a socialist, and the Emerald City of Oz was his socialist utopia. He wrote, "There were no poor people in the land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. Each person was given freely by his neighbors whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire. Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do."

I can't help it. I have a lot of fondness for the old red. I associate the Oz books with my beautiful wife's pregnancy, when I read them to the growing bulge of her belly. There was a stage where Oz was basically the theme of the baby blog:

Sung to the tune of "If I Only Had a Brain" from the Wizard of Oz: With the missus mid-term testing I could show my knack for nesting with the vacuum, brush, and broom; and every act of cleaning would be invested with extra meaning if I only had a womb! I'd be tender, I'd be gentle and awful sentimental as I paint the pumpkin's room. I'd be careful, I'd be cautious and every morning I'd be nauseous if I only had a womb. Oh I ... could tell you why ... a pickle goes so well with custard cream and pie, how it smells the moment milk goes bad, or why I'm crying all the time when I'm not sad. But as it is I feel pathetic and more than slightly apologetic 'bout the roles of bride and groom; my contribution's just genetic, my labor only sympathetic, cause I just don't have a womb. - papa

Actually, this is just orthodox Émile Durkheim — one of the few things I remember from college sociology.

A.W.A.D is doing eponyms this week. A word mentioned in passing was 'boycott,' which I didn't realize was eponymous, so I looked it up:

According to A.W.A.D,

The boycotting of Captain Boycott was perhaps one of the most successful boycotts of all time. Charles C. Boycott was an estate agent in Ireland whose rigorous enforcement of pay-high-rents-or-get-out policy of his boss earned him the wrath of the tenants. They banded together and soon Boycott found himself completely isolated. Stores declined to sell to him, mailman refused to deliver his letters, and no one wanted to work in his farms. If it could be a consolation for this ostracized man, he soon found his name not only in the English dictionaries but also in the lexicons of many other languages.

In early June, Mises.org will be "simulcasting" (putting out a daily article and a podcast chapter on the same day) Rothbard's take on the ethics of boycotts, but since we already make all of The Ethics of Liberty available as a free ebook, you can read the chapter now.