First posted 3 years ago today:

We married on September 29th, 2001.

Two years of marital bliss ...

(Anyone who ever appreciated that joke has long grown tired of it, but it continues to amuse me.)

Not only is today our anniversary, but it is also Ludwig von Mises's 123rd birthday.

We got married on his 120th birthday, though I didn't know it at the time. I barely knew who Mises was ... um, had been.

Our ceremony, which took place in front of the Barboursville Ruins, only looked like an anarchist wedding.

No official of Church or State stood above or between us. We wrote our own vows, which we exchanged in English and French, with best man and maid of honor translating, and then we pronounced ourselves married.

But in the back of the field, behind the guests, was Charlottesville's sheriff, in uniform, filling out the paperwork that means our union is recognized by the government. I'm more radical in theory, it seems, than I am in practice.

Still, I'm inspired by the story of Lillian Harman, daughter of the great 19th-century liberal anarchist, Moses Harman. The Harmans published a journal on birth control, reproductive rights, sexual consent ... all topics one might think were protected under the First Amendment, but which ran afoul of the infamous Comstock laws.

When the U.S. Deputy Marshall arrived at the publication's offices, looking to arrest the staff, the co-editor, E. C. Walker, and Lillian, age 16, weren't there. They were already in jail for having conducted a non-state, non-church marriage in September 1886.

In their ceremony, E. C. Walker pledged, "Lillian is and will continue to be as free to repulse any and all advances of mine as she had been heretofore. In joining with me in this love and labor union, she has not alienated a single natural right."

Lillian pledged, "I make no promises that it may become impossible or immoral for me to fulfill, but retain the right to act always as my conscience and best judgment shall dictate."

The ceremony concluded with Moses Harman declaring, "I do not 'give away the bride', as I wish her to be always the owner of her own person . . ."

When the judge asked if there was any reason why sentence should not be passed, Lillian answered: "Nothing except that we have committed no crime."

Lillian was sentenced to a month and a half, her husband to two and a half months, but they refused to pay court costs and remained in jail for six months.

Lillian Harman gave her reason for breaking the law: "I consider uniformity in mode of sexual relations as undesirable and impractical as enforced uniformity in anything else. For myself, I want the right to profit by my mistakes ... and why should I be unwilling for others to enjoy the same liberty? If I should be able to bring the entire world to live exactly as I live at present, what would that avail me in ten years, when as I hope, I shall have a broader knowledge of life, and my life therefore probably changed?"

Moses Hull, publisher of the Des Moines New Thought, wrote that the couple had been jailed "for being anarchists, agnostics, atheists, and everything bad that begins with an A."

"ON SEPTEMBER 29, 1881, Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was the first in his family to be born a nobleman."

So begins The Last Knight of Liberalism, by Jörg Guido Hülsmann.

Happy Birthday Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises!

The introduction, preface, and first three chapters of Murray Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right are now available online as web pages. The entire book is available for free as a PDF. The print version is gorgeous and well worth the price. You'll never think of Left and Right the same way again.

$20 "How many Americans realize that, not so long ago, the American right wing was almost the exact opposite of what we know today?" Introduction by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Preface to the 1991 Revision by Murray N. Rothbard Two Rights, Old and New Origins of the Old Right I: Early Individualism Origins of the Old Right II: The Tory Anarchism of Mencken and Nock The New Deal and the Emergence of the Old Right Isolationism and the Foreign New Deal World War II: The Nadir The Postwar Renaissance I: Libertarianism The Postwar Renaissance II: Politics and Foreign Policy The Postwar Renaissance III: Libertarians and Foreign Policy The Postwar Renaissance IV: Swansong of the Old Right Decline of the Old Right National Review and the Triumph of the New Right The Early 1960s: From Right to Left The Later 1960s: The New Left

Town Rethinks Ban on "Illegals"

9/27/2007

"A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal
immigrant. Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated. The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well. With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered.... So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer." (New York Times, Wednesday)

Reality bites back.

FEE Timely Classic

"The Benefits of Immigration" by Donald J. Boudreaux

I was reviewing a list of the kings of England today and stumbled on this interesting mix of history and technology:

Origin of the name and the logo

Bluetooth was named after a late tenth century king, Harald Bluetooth King of Denmark and Norway. He is known for his unification of previously warring tribes from Denmark (including now Swedish Scania, where the Bluetooth technology was invented), and Norway. Bluetooth likewise was intended to unify different technologies, such as computers and mobile phones.

The name may have been inspired less by the historical Harald than the loose interpretation of him in The Long Ships by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson, a Swedish Viking-inspired novel.

The Bluetooth logo merges the Nordic runes analogous to the modern Latin H and B: hagall and bjarkan from the Younger Futhark runes forming a bind rune.

The problem with this definition is that "protection" implies that the tax was used to fund military defense, but in fact the more appropriate term would be not "protection" but "protection racket," i.e., money paid to thugs to dissuade them from immediate thuggery.

Rudyard Kipling wrote,

… once you have paid him the Danegeld,
You never get rid of the Dane.

Danegeld is simply money coerced from landowners to pay the Vikings to go away.

Wikipedia notes, "The term has come to be used as a warning and a criticism of paying any coercive payment whether in money or kind," but no criteria are offered to distinguish Danegeld from any other kind of taxation.

I've updated my dictionary.

Herbert Spencer

Government being simply an agent employed in common by a number of individuals to secure to them certain advantages, wrote Herbert Spencer, the very nature of the connection implies that it is for each to say whether he will employ such an agent or not.

If any one of them determines to ignore this mutual-safety confederation, nothing can be said except that he loses all claim to its good offices, and exposes himself to the danger of maltreatment — a thing he is quite at liberty to do if he likes. He cannot be coerced into political combination without a breach of the law of equal freedom; he can withdraw from it without committing any such breach; and he has therefore a right so to withdraw….

Probably a long time will elapse before the right to ignore the state will be generally admitted, even in theory. It will be still longer before it receives legislative recognition. And even then there will be plenty of checks upon the premature exercise of it. A sharp experience will sufficiently instruct those who may too soon abandon legal protection. Whilst, in the majority of men, there is such a love of tried arrangements, and so great a dread of experiments, that they will probably not act upon this right until long after it is safe to do so. FULL ARTICLE

Manuel Lora sent me this strange visual history of humanity:

Warning: By "graphic," I don't just mean that it's wordless pictures. I mean it's full of sex and violence. Those with delicate sensibilities should not scroll the image.

Thanks to Anthony Gregory, I now know Matthew 20:1-16:

1. The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out at dawn to hire laborers for his vineyard.
2. After agreeing with them for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard.
3. Going out about nine o'clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace,
4. and he said to them, 'You too go into my vineyard, and I will give you what is just.'
5. So they went off. (And) he went out again around noon, and around three o'clock, and did likewise.

Going out about five o'clock, he found others standing around, and said to them, 'Why do you stand here idle all day?' They answered, 'Because no one has hired us.' He said to them, 'You too go into my vineyard.' When it was evening the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, 'Summon the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and ending with the first.' When those who had started about five o'clock came, each received the usual daily wage. So when the first came, they thought that they would receive more, but each of them also got the usual wage. And on receiving it they grumbled against the landowner, saying, 'These last ones worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us, who bore the day's burden and the heat.' He said to one of them in reply, 'My friend, I am not cheating you. Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what is yours and go. What if I wish to give this last one the same as you? (Or) am I not free to do as I wish with my own money? Are you envious because I am generous?' Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last."

unsung: stephen carson

This is from Albert Jay Nock's Memoirs of a Superfluous Man:

What is patriotism? Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from others spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one was born? But birth is a pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having been born on this spot or on that. Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Fuhrer, a camorra of commissars? I should say it depends entirely on what the jobholders are like and what they do. Certainly I had never seen any who commanded my loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if ever once I thought they could. Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political system and its institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-not? But if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from the standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than names. The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is regarded as good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if it has any, ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the people who live under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of the world, I found no reason in the nature of things why a person should be loyal to one system rather than another. One could see at a glance that there is no saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit may attach to any of them lies in the way it is administered.

So when people speak of loyalty to one's country, one must ask them what they mean by that. What is one's country? Mr. Jefferson said contemptuously that "merchants have no country; the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." But one may ask, why should I? This motive of patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it should be sound for merchants, why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in respect of material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains, intellectual and aesthetic gains? As a general principle, I should put it that a man's country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.

I've updated the patriotism entry in my personal dictionary.

The man credited with founding Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales — known to Wikipedians as "Jimbo" — was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austrolibertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek.

The essay argues that prices in the market represent a spontaneous order that results from the interaction of individuals with diverse wants, allowing them to cooperate to achieve complex goals. According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia.

The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales?

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

FULL ARTICLE

A friend of mine was telling me about how her father was originally a supporter of the Vietnam War, but changed his mind in the 1960s and has been against all the other American wars since. She was telling me about this in the context of the CIA article I blogged about earlier today. She said her father had swallowed everything the government and press said about Vietnam. So how did he turn around?

"He stopped listening and opened his eyes."

In his LRC review of The Betrayal of the American Right, Charles A. Burris links to a 1997 article from the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (RRR):

"Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?"

It is a chilling read. If anyone out there knows enough about these claims to deny or confirm them — with sources, preferably — please do let me know.

I have a feeling I need to look more deeply into the history of the CIA.

(But honestly, whenever I've begun to approach the subject, I've immediately felt overwhelmed by the complexity, the surreality, and the creeping sense of paranoia…)

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