Sheldon Richman on the great hero of "individualism, liberty, free markets, and — the indispensable framework — peace":

[E]xpansion and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people, and that they will plunge us into a network of difficult problems and political perils, which we might have avoided, while they offer us no corresponding advantage in return.

These might be the sentiments of a contemporary left-wing intellectual whose notion of America's traditions, principles, and interests would differ markedly from those held by advocates of the freedom philosophy. But they're not. They were written 108 years ago by William Graham Sumner (1840-1910), who, if he gets any attention at all, is usually castigated for his evolutionary (Social Darwinist) and laissez-faire views. Sumner, a founder of American sociology and a distinguished professor at Yale University, was an uncompromising champion of economic freedom, unfettered international trade, individual liberty, and limited government. It is fair to say that in his time he was the best-known American exponent of individualist, classical-liberal ideas.

FULL ARTICLE

Two and a half years ago, I posted this:

Reminder #2

Yesterday, Tom Ender published Bob Wallace's review of an old detective/adventure novel, The Green Ripper, by John D. MacDonald.

(And I just noticed that Lew Rockwell did, too.)

Here I show the original paperback book cover as I remember it when I first read this book around age 14. This was one of the books that got me to finally start reading.

All of MacDonald's Travis McGee novels have a color in the title, which McGee-as-first-person-narrator eventually works into his narration. What Wallace doesn't mention is what this title means -- a title which I can never forget because it's so connected to this book cover. The Green Ripper is how McGee and his girlfriend refer to Death personified. Their in-joke is based on a story they heard of a kid who had terrible nightmares about "The Green Ripper" coming to take him away. Eventually his parents figure out that he's misheard some grown-up talk about The Grim Reaper. When McGee loses his girlfriend to a domestic terrorist ring (this book was written in the late 1970s!) McGee infiltrates the ring to exact his revenge, wishing he could take on The Green Ripper himself.

One day after Raymond Chandler's birthday, I learn from Writers Almanac that it's John D. MacDonald's birthday:

It's the birthday of mystery novelist John D. MacDonald, born in Sharon, Pennsylvania (1916). He wrote a series of novels, including The Deep Blue Good-By (1964) and Nightmare in Pink (1964), featuring Travis McGee, a beach bum detective who lives on a houseboat that he won in a poker game.

While he was serving in the army during World War II, MacDonald entertained his wife by writing her fictionalized stories in his letters. She liked one story so much that she typed it up and sent it to the magazine Story, where it was published. MacDonald was so surprised and happy that he devoted himself to writing.

He had four months of severance pay when he came home from the Army, so he spent those four months writing seven days a week, 14 hours a day. Everyone but his wife thought he was shell-shocked. By the end of the year, he was making a living selling short stories to pulp fiction magazines. He published 73 stories in 1949 alone.

He used his mystery novels to criticize what he called American junk culture: fast food, bad TV, and land development. He wrote, "I am wary of a lot of things, such as ... time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants ... pageants, progress, and manifest destiny."

Wary of land development and progress, hm? Oh well. Travis McGee's sidekick was a retired economist whose houseboat was called "The John Maynard Keynes." I guess that says plenty.

About the man who was my favorite writer when I was a teenager, the Writer's Almanac says

It's the birthday of crime novelist Raymond Chandler, born in Chicago, Illinois (1888). He's known for his novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe such as The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1954). He started out writing second-rate poetry and essays, but couldn't get much published, so he gave up and took a bookkeeping class, got a job at a bank, and went on to become a wealthy oil company executive.

He lost his job when the stock market crashed in 1929. So at the age of 45 he began writing for pulp fiction magazines, which paid about a penny a word.

Chandler was one of the first detective novelists to become known for the quality of his prose, and he became famous for his metaphors. In one novel he wrote, "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight." In another he wrote, "She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket."

Chandler said of Dashiell Hammett, "He took murder out of the parlor room and put it back in the streets where they're good at it." Chandler could have said the same of himself. Ross Macdonald, the man who figured out how to make hard-boiled detective fiction work in the era of the Counter Culture, said of Chandler, "He wrote like a slumming angel and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a wonderful gusto and imaginative flair."

Tom Woods, author of 33 Questions About American History You're Not Suppose to Ask, has this to say at Mises.org:

"The traditional story is familiar to American schoolchildren: the American Indians possessed a profound spiritual kinship with nature, and were unusually solicitous of environmental welfare. If we are to avert environmental catastrophe, the not-so-subtle lesson goes, we need to recapture this lost Indian wisdom. As usual, the real story is more complicated, less cartoonish, and a lot more interesting." FULL ARTICLE

If you happen to have been reading this blog forever, you might remember that left-anarchist lawyer lady wrote me a few years back to disagree with my philosophical individualism and my advocacy of private property.

She wrote, "I look to the American Indians, who couldn't understand the idea of 'ownership' of the land."

My reply to her is here.

I showed the exchange to Tom Woods after I prepared this article for Mises.org. He said, "Right. I can't speak for all of them, but I know that anthropologists have not found a single New England tribe that held land in common and knew nothing of private property."

There's so much schooling to unlearn.

Most people, writes Murray Rothbard, including most political theorists, believe that once one concedes the importance, or even the vital necessity, of some particular activity of the State — such as the provision of a legal code — that one has ipso facto conceded the necessity of the State itself. The State indeed performs many important and necessary functions: from provision of law to the supply of police and fire fighters, to building and maintaining the streets, to delivery of the mail. But this in no way demonstrates that only the State can perform such functions, or, indeed, that it performs them even passably well. FULL ARTICLE

Tom Woods, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, has written another volume of corrective American history. I look forward to reading it. Sounds like he was able to go into some things in greater depth.

He writes about it at LRC.

What I find interesting about Woods's approach is that he is not doing revision, technically speaking.

Revisionism is reinvestigation of the Establishment's pro-state (and usually pro-war) narrative.

What Woods does, it seems to me, is address the rift between that which is generally accepted by history scholars and that which is taught, repeated, and reinforced by schools, the mainstream media, and popular culture more generally.

(See, for example, this recent bit of ahistorical propaganda from Newsweek: "China today resembles nothing so much as the United States a century ago, when robber barons, gangsterism and raw capitalism held sway. Now as then, powerful vested interests are profiting from murky regulations, shoddy enforcement, rampant corruption and a lack of consumer awareness.")

Now some of Woods's positions are still at odds with Establishment historians, such as his Austrian School approach to the Great Depression. This is because any analysis of economic history will require more than just facts; it will require theory to interpret the cause and effect behind those facts. But most of what he focuses on are generally accepted facts among historians that are extremely inconvenient to the historical narrative most of us have been taught.

One of the absurd criticisms of his Politically Incorrect Guide was the claim that he was pretending controversy where there wasn't any. To paraphrase: What professional historian would disagree that the Civil War was caused, in part, by a complex combinations of factors, including economic concerns other than the question of slavery?!

Well, the answer is probably that no respectable historian would deny a complex array of factors behind any big event in history. But that argument is a straw man. Woods wasn't saying that his claims would be considered controversial among historians; he was saying that they would be considered controversial among almost everyone else, and he was clearly correct, as proven by all the fallout from both the old Left Establishment and the neocons. The history we all think we know is not the history that historians know, and it's that very discrepancy that Woods addresses in his books.

Here's Tom's reaction to this post:

By and large I think that's what I'm doing, though while reading it I think you'll find that in some cases I'm doing both the things you describe here. The Establishment's pro-state narrative is extremely shaken, I think, by the time the book ends.

Now I'm even more anxious to receive my copy of the book.

Don't Cut Subsidies, Education Lenders Plead

7/11/2007
"With the House set to take up legislation this week that would sharply cut subsidies to student loan companies by about $19 billion, lenders are trying to do something they have barely had to bother with in recent years: appeal to Democrats." (New York Times, Wednesday)

Political supply and demand.

FEE Timely Classic
"Subsidized Education" by Russell Madden

NY Schools Find New Role

7/10/2007
"The New York City school system is pushing far beyond the corridors of summer school in delivering free meals, handing out breakfast and lunch for the first time in housing projects, libraries, day camps and church groups to become one of the nations largest summer soup kitchens." (New York Times, Tuesday)

It's easier than teaching kids to read.

FEE Timely Classic
"The Origins of the Public School" by Robert P. Murphy

An ancient Bloom County:

Today at Mises.org:

The assertion of human rights is not properly a simple emotive one, writes Murray Rothbard. Individuals possess rights not because we "feel" that they should, but because of a rational inquiry into the nature of man and the universe. In short, man has rights because they are natural rights. They are grounded in the nature of man: the individual man's capacity for conscious choice, the necessity for him to use his mind and energy to adopt goals and values, to find out about the world, to pursue his ends in order to survive and prosper, his capacity and need to communicate and interact with other human beings and to participate in the division of labor. ... Natural law is necessarily species-bound. FULL ARTICLE

Today on "The Writer's Almanac":

It's the birthday of one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the 20th century, Peter Singer, born in Melbourne, Australia (1946). His book Animal Liberation (1975), which is generally credited with starting the animal rights movement, has sold more than a million copies and is estimated to have converted more people to vegetarianism than any other book ever written.

But Singer has said he is disappointed by the book's impact. He said, "When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the '60s still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them. All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's to see how successful I have been."

Lew Rockwell points to some "Latin You Should Know" from Neatorama.com.

Among the Latin phrases, I found this common-law term I learned from reading Murray Rothbard on property theory:

Cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos: "Whoever owns the land it is theirs up to the sky and down to the depths." The state of Kansas used this law in the 1970s to argue that airlines could not serve liquor when flying over Kansas, a dry state. "Kansas," Attorney General Vern Miller said, "goes all the way up and all the way down." (If that’s true, Kansas can lay claim to, and prohibit drinking in, about 82,282 square miles of western China.)

There's plenty wrong with the Kansas interpretation, but there's even more wrong with Neatorama's snide aside about western China.

Here's my summary of Rothbard on the ad coelum rule:

Property Units: Rothbard versus Common Law

Rothbard's main departure from common law tradition is his disagreement with the common-law principle "that every landowner owns all the airspace above him upward indefinitely unto the heavens and downward into the center of the earth. In Lord Coke's famous dictum: cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum; that is, he who owns the soil owns upward unto heaven, and, by analogy, downward to Hades."

But according to Rothbard, the ad coelum rule never made any sense in the context of homesteading: "If one homesteads and uses the soil, in what sense is he also using all the sky above him up into heaven? Clearly, he isn't."

So Rothbard rejected ad coelum, but we needn't side with Rothbard to reject both the Kansas interpretation (pro–ad coelum) and the Neatorama interpretation (anti–ad coelum).

What's wrong with the Kansas Attorney General's argument is that ad coelum is a common law property precedent, and the state of Kansas does not own the entire territory of Kansas, according to common law. Even if you recognize the state government as a legitimate property owner (which Rothbardians don't, of course), its property is limited to those areas not owned by the citizens and residents of Kansas. The irony of the state's mouthpiece citing common law as an excuse to extend the reach of its "dry law" is that alcohol prohibition is itself a violation of common-law property rights.

But Neatorama's parenthetical commentator is wrong at a much more rudimentary level, because ad coelum establishes a three-dimensional property boundary in the shape of a cone, not a cylinder. The point of the cone starts at the theoretical center of the planet; its supposedly infinite reach is only heavenward, not bidirectional.

Lord Coke's dictum extends ownership "upward unto heaven, and, by analogy, downward to Hades."

China isn't Hades.

"This is a day to remember liberation, disunion, the idea that a house divided might be more civil, peaceful and secure than one kept together by force."

– Anthony Gregory, "The Case for Independence"

I recently wrote,

I love [Gary] North the most when he's writing about education. Second best: history. I used to love his stuff on gold and banking and money in general, but since I deal with Austrian economics all day every day, I don't learn as much from his economic writings as I used to. On education and history, I still learn plenty.

Well his LRC article today is a perfect example of the kind of history I was talking about. It even includes a bit on education (the fact that the slogan "No taxation without representation" is a fabrication of history textbook writers) and on gold and banking and money.

This passage alone is worth the cost of admission:

The British in 1763 had signed a treaty with France settling the Seven Years War, which was called the French and Indian War in the colonies. This war had drained the treasuries of both countries.

The name of the war is incorrect. It refers to the dates of the official hostilities: 1756–63. It should be called the Nine Years War, because it began, not in 1756, but in 1754. It began on May 28, when an inexperienced 22-year-old Virginia militia officer led about thirty-five troops in an unprovoked surprise attack on a small group of Frenchmen commanded by Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville. The battle is called the Battle of Jumonville Glen. It took place in Western Pennsylvania.

The previous year, the militia's commander had established an alliance with a village of Seneca Indians. He consulted with their leader the day before the attack. The Indian had encouraged him to strike first, without warning, which he did the next morning. The French lost the skirmish. Nine were killed; 21 were captured. Thirteen were wounded, but the group of about eight Indians without warning killed them. The Virginian met with the wounded French commander to discuss the terms of surrender. Before he could formally surrender, the Indians' leader smashed his skull with a tomahawk.

France and England had not been at war. This was the opening salvo.

Another 400 men soon arrived. This was not enough. He surrendered on July 3 to a French and Indian force of 600 French and 100 Indians. As a condition of his troops' release, he signed a document admitting that the French commander had been assassinated while surrendering to him. The French word was "l'assassignat," which the young officer later said he thought meant "killing."

The officer was Lt. Col. George Washington.

From "Shorn on the Fourth of July" by Gary North

On the baby blog, exactly one year ago this hour:

independence day Benjamin has declared his Independence this July 4th by breaking his mother's bag of waters. (We may be out of touch for a while.)

A substantial point of disagreement between Mises and many American libertarians was the question of democracy. Mises would come to taste the particular American flavor of hostility to democracy in a 1947 exchange of letters with Rose Wilder Lane. Apparently they had met for lunch, and Lane had the impression that Mises believed they shared the same outlook on fundamentals. At the meeting she did not feel it was the right moment to start a discussion on the subject, but later wrote him to set the record straight: "as an American I am of course fundamentally opposed to democracy and to anyone advocating or defending democracy, which in theory and practice is the basis of socialism." FULL ARTICLE

I think I might start collecting anticapitalist propaganda. There are worse hobbies.

This one is via Tim Swanson:

Via Walter Block:

"Malaria: Anti-DDT Policies Are Deadly."

by Thompson Ayodele and Adegoke Anthony, Lagos

Last year, one of our colleagues, his wife and their two children were diagnosed with malaria. In an instant, their lives were turned upside down, and all other priorities and plans were postponed. The new priority was getting better — and simply staying alive.

For countless families in Nigeria and the rest of Africa, this horrible drama is repeated over and over, year after year. Over 300 million Africans get malaria — and up to 1 million of our children die from it — every year.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, in countries that no longer have malaria, environmentalists were celebrating the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson, whose book Silent Spring helped launch the environmental activist movement and get the repellent-insecticide DDT banned nearly all over the world. Were she still alive, she would have witnessed the countless family tragedies that this ban helped cause and probably would have been appalled by them.

Keep reading …

See also: "The Spring is Silent on DDT" by Lew Rockwell

It's been a while since I've blogged any punchline panels.

Here are some I think can stand alone:

• less is more
• more comics digest
• yet more Calvin on time preference