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…)

[Read the rest »]

Our opponents like to cast libertarians as shills for Big Business. If their mistake is made in good faith, it can be corrected by a little reading of some actual libertarians on the subject.

Here's H.L. Mencken on the 2 major-party candidates in the 1924 US presidential election:

Big Business, it appears, is in favor of him [Republican candidate Calvin Coolidge]…. The fact should be sufficient to make the judicious regard him somewhat suspiciously. For Big Business, in America … is frankly on the make, day in and day out…. Big Business was in favor of Prohibition, believing that a sober workman would make a better slave than one with a few drinks in him. It was in favor of all the gross robberies and extortions that went on during the war, and profited by all of them. It was in favor of all the crude throttling of free speech that was then undertaken in the name of patriotism, and is still in favor of it.

Did Mencken prefer Democratic candidate John. W. Davis?

Dr. Davis is a lawyer whose life has been devoted to protecting the great enterprises of Big Business. He used to work for J. Pierpont Morgan, and he has himself said that he is proud of the fact. Mr. Morgan is an international banker, engaged in squeezing nations that are hard up and in trouble. His operations are safeguarded for him by the manpower of the United States. He was one of the principal beneficiaries of the late war, and made millions out of it. The Government hospitals are now full of one-legged soldiers who gallantly protected his investments then, and the public schools are full of boys who will protect his investments tomorrow.

– H.L. Mencken, "Breathing Space," Baltimore Evening Sun, August 4, 1924; reprinted in H.L. Mencken, A Carnival of Buncombe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), pp. 83–84.

(But I got these quotes from The Betrayal of the American Right by Murray Rothbard.)

This photo ran in the New York Times on May 12, 1970:

And this is from Murray Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right:

In the spring of 1970, a new political term — "the hard hats" — burst upon the American consciousness. As the hard-hatted construction workers barreled their way around the Wall Street area, beating up college kids and peace demonstrators, earning the admiration of the right wing and a citation from President Nixon, one of the banners they raised summed up in a single phrase how remarkably the right wing has changed over the past two decades. For the banner said simply: "God Bless the Establishment."

In that single phrase, so typical of the current right wing, the hard-hats were expressing the age-old political philosophy of Conservatism, that philosophy which formed the central core of the originally labeled "Conservatism" of early 19th-century Europe. In fact, it is the philosophy that has marked genuinely conservative thought, regardless of label, since the ancient days of Oriental despotism: an all-encompassing reverence for "Throne-and-Altar," for whatever divinely sanctioned State apparatus happened to be in existence. In one form or another, "God Bless the Establishment" has always been the cry on behalf of State power.

But how many Americans realize that, not so long ago, the American right wing was almost the exact opposite of what we know today? In fact, how many know that the term "Establishment" itself, now used almost solely as a term of opprobrium by the Left, was first applied to America not by C. Wright Mills or other Left sociologists, but by National Review theoretician Frank S. Meyer, in the early days of that central organ of the American Right?

$20

In the mid-1950s, Meyer took a term which had previously been used only — and rather affectionately — to describe the ruling institutions of Great Britain, and applied the term with proper acidity to the American scene. Broader and more subtle than "ruling class," more permanent and institutionalized than a "power elite," "the Establishment" quickly became a household word. But the ironic and crucial point is that Meyer's and National Review's use of the term in those days was bitterly critical: the spirit of the right wing, then and particularly earlier, was far more "God Damn" than "God Bless" the establishment.

The difference between the two right wings, "Old" and "New," and how one was transformed into the other, is the central theme of this book.

It's unlikely that I'll ever contribute anything original to scholarship. That's never really been a goal. (Well, I may have toyed with the idea briefly when I was about 20.) To the extent that I've ever had any grand-scale goal, it has been to "spread the word."

Among scholars, there's a certain dismissal in terms like "popularizer." Even among libertarians, who should aim at broad dissemination of their message, Hayek's "professional secondhand dealers in ideas" aren't exactly honored for their contributions. I think this a huge mistake, strategically.

Tom Woods has probably made his unique contribution. He's not supposed to have a PhD without having done so. But I haven't read it, and however good it may be, it's not his original scholarship I want to honor him for. What I want to praise is summarized in this passage from How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization:

[Read the rest »]

I confess I felt strange about the former price tag on this, my first audio project:

$40 now $15!

I'm listening to Tom Woods's book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, in which we learn of the 11th-century Benedictine monk named Eilmer of Malmesbury, who, having worked out his own rudimentary theory of flight, tested it by fashioning a pair of wings for himself and jumping off the roof of the abbey. He glided for some 600 feet before plunging to the ground and breaking both his legs.

"Crippled for life but undaunted," says Wikipedia, "Eilmer believed that he could make a more controllable landing if his glider were equipped with a tail, and he was preparing for a second flight when the abbot of Malmesbury Abbey forbade him from risking his life in any further experiments."

Q: When was the last time the guillotine was used in France?

A: 30 years ago today

(via my friend Carolyn)

From A Word A Day:

What's common among an orange and an omelet... and an uncle and an umpire?

Earlier all these words used to take the indefinite article "a", not "an".

They were coined by a process called false splitting. Let's take orange. The original word was Sanskrit naranga. By the time it reached English, the initial letter n had joined the article a, resulting in "an orange". The word for orange is still narangi in Hindi, naranja in Spanish, and naranj in Arabic.

This false splitting caused what should have been "a napron" to become "an apron". The same process transformed "a nadder" into "an adder", and reshaped many other words.

The n went the other way too. "Mine uncle" was interpreted as "my nuncle" resulting in a synonym nuncle for uncle. The word newt was formed the same way: "an ewte" misdivided into "a newte".

Could false splitting turn "an apple" into "a napple" or "a nail" into "an ail" some day? Before the advent of printing, the language was primarily oral/aural, resulting in mishearing and misinterpreting. Today, spelling is mostly standardized, so chances of false splitting are slim, though not impossible.

I'm reminded of a false splitting in ancient history: Alexander the Great is known as Al-Iskander in Arabic, where "Al" means "The" and so Alexander's name was falsely split into Al-Iskander ("The Exander").

Now available through Amazon:

A new feature at the Mises Blog allows you to look at every brilliant thing I've ever posted over there.

(It also offers an easier way to review previous Weekend Editions.)

Like many others, writes Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Ludwig von Mises anticipated the outbreak of World War I years in advance.

Unlike many others, he dreaded it.

He was a Lieutenant of the Austro-Hungarian Army and dearly loved his country, but he was no chauvinist and despised the militarism and statism that were about to drag an entire continent into catastrophe. But the ruling philosophy of government glorification under the guise of patriotism had made its cause irresistible.

After the war, Mises would write on these subjects in detail. He explained how the war had resulted from state worship, in this case, from worship of the nation-state. But for now he thought that he — the agnostic Jew, cultural German, political individualist, scientific cosmopolitan, and Austrian patriot — had to fight the nationalists' war.

FULL ARTICLE

It seems that any artist I appreciate for not being a knee-jerk leftist turns out to be knee-jerk right-winger.

The difference between the 2 species of 'jerk is that left-wing kneejerks sound that way all the time, whereas right-wing kneejerks can sound libertarian during peacetime.

This is the last time I'll quote Touraj Daryaee for a while.

Here he quotes an NPR interview with Frank Miller:

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I once said some kneejerk-leftist thing against marketing to a girlfriend in college. I'd forgotten that her mother worked for the marketing department of a book publisher. Smooth move, BK.

I am now pro-marketing in the abstract, but real-life marketing people sure do make it hard to champion their profession.

In my previous career, I met hundreds of marketing people. I liked maybe … oh, I don't know. Some small number. Something single-digit. The least egregious were the pure number crunchers. Many of them had real minds and real lives. It was the "creative" people who typified all the marketing stereotypes, including shallowness and agnorance.

Professional authors in particular should be wary of knee-jerk sentiments against marketing. If nobody buys your books, you'd better learn to love your day job. But the marketers practically insist on insulting everyone's intelligence. Case in point: what's wrong with the following book's title?

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As soon as I type the title of this post, I imagine a mainstream reader, happening across this blog by chance, imagining that I'm about to insult a Persian historian for distorting the record. I am, of course, about to praise a Persian historian for taking the standard distortion and untwisting it.

If you find that at all confusing, see this post on revisionism.

Part of the confusion comes from a different-but-related use of the R-word that I myself employed in a recent post on Robin Hood: "I have no problem with folklore revisionism; updating the story to fit current concerns is an ancient and well-established part of folklore itself."

What's legitimate in the evolution of folklore is rightly suspect in the study of history.

"Revision," then, is a neutral term, something that can distort for the sake of propaganda, correct for the sake of scholarship, or alter for the sake of art, depending on the intentions of the reviser and on the subject matter being revised.

How does this apply to a movie like 300? Are the changes made to the history of Sparta, Persia, and the Battle of Thermopylae more like recasting Robin Hood (now Norman, now Saxon, now aristocratic tax rebel, now egalitarian hero, etc.) or more like blaming the Jews for the Holocaust (or denying that there ever was such a thing)?

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