LvMI just put up a free PDF copy of The Theory of Education in the United States, by Albert Jay Nock.

I've been wanting to read this one for a while, a collection of lectures given at the University of Virginia, just on the other side of town.

I've only just started the book, but already I've found one passage laugh-out-loud funny:

A few months ago, an Italian nobleman, one of the most accomplished men in Europe, told me that he had had a curious experience in our country; he wondered whether I had made anything like the same observation, and if so, how I accounted for it. He said he had been in America several times, and had met some very well-educated men, as an Italian would understand the term; but they were all in the neighborhood of sixty years old. Under that age, he said, he had happened upon no one who impressed him as at all well-educated.

I told him that he had been observing the remnant of a pre-revolutionary product, and coming from a country that had had the Sicilian Vespers and Rienzi and Masaniello and now Mussolini, he should easily understand what that meant; that our educational system had been thoroughly reorganized, both in spirit and structure, about thirty-five years ago, and that his well-educated men of sixty or so were merely holdovers from what we now put down, by general consent, as the times of ignorance — holdovers from pre-Fascist days, if I might borrow the comparison.

"But," I went on, "our younger men are really very keen; they are men of parts, and our schools and universities do an immense deal for them. Just try to come round one of them about the merits of a bond-issue or a motor-car, the fine points of commercial cake-icing or retail shoe merchandising, or the problems of waste motion involved in bricklaying or in washing dishes for a hotel, and you are sure to find that he will give a first-rate account of himself, and that he reflects credit on the educational system that turned him out."

My friend looked at me a moment in a vacant kind of way, and presently said that proficiency in these pursuits was not precisely what he had in mind when he spoke of education.

"Just so," I replied, "but it is very much what we have in mind. We are all for being practical in education. Do you know, it would not surprise me in the least to find that our Russian friends had taken a leaf out of our book in designing their Five-Year Plan?"

He looked at me again for a moment, and changed the subject. I thought of explaining myself, but saw it would be of no use; my little pleasantry had been dashed to pieces against the solid adamant of his patrician seriousness.

"Government expenditure continued to mount through the year 1389 to an excess as extravagant as the uncles', although its purpose was civil rather than military. Its climax was the ceremonial entry into Paris of Isabeau of Bavaria, for her coronation as Queen, an event of spectacular splendor and unparalleled marvels of public entertainment. Though its cost contradicted the good intentions of the new government, the performance was in itself a form of government in the same sense as a Roman circus.

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?

Circuses and ceremonies are meant to encourage the acceptance; they either succeed or, by costing too much, accomplish the opposite."

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 21: "The Fiction Cracks," p. 455 (emphasis added)

Once upon a time, democracy was understood as a liberal means, not an end unto itself.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, "the masses" were far more liberal (in the libertarian sense of the word) than they became in the last century. They understood that the ruling class pursued a command economy in their own interest and to the detriment of working-class consumers. British "Radicals" such as James Mill put universal suffrage ahead of laissez faire as a political priority, not because they thought democracy was more important than economic freedom, but precisely because they believed democracy would inevitably lead to economic freedom. They failed to support the Anti–Corn Law movement because they saw it as too middle class and as a distraction from the more immediate issue (for them) of mass majoritarianism. Ironically, the masses they idolized did support the Anti–Corn Law movement. As Rothbard writes, "by rejecting this middle-class movement, [Mill, et al.] rebuffed a successful one, and this refusal to support the Anti–Corn Law League in the 1840s helped eliminate Radicalism as a powerful force in British politics" ("Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez Faire," available in PDF).

Modern libertarians, with our very different take on mass democracy ranging from ambivalence to antipathy, might have a hard time seeing how the process of electoral or legislative rules could ever be more important than freedom or peace, but classical liberals seem to have been as mixed up on this point as are our illiberal contemporaries.

Barbara Tuchman offers another example of this value reversal of means and ends, although, as she makes clear, she agrees with the fetishists:

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Many Americans had grown weary of the New Deal during the second term of President Roosevelt's administration. More and more people realized that their president had brought about a revolution in the American system of government. But the majority gave FDR a third term. The president promised to keep America out of the new European war that would eventually turn into World War II. When Roosevelt went back on his word, the majority started to wane. The population still stood behind the commander in chief in a time of war, but the disenchantment with New Deal policies became ever more manifest. People started listening to critical voices, and these voices could now be heard everywhere. FULL ARTICLE

Top: Isabel Paterson, Albert Jay Nock, John T. Flynn, Rose Wilder Lane Bottom: Henry Hazlitt, Benjamin Anderson, Frank Chodorov, and John Chamberlain

Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

It was through the 1990s manifestation of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and its magazine The Freeman that I became an economic libertarian.

Half a century earlier, FEE introduced a young Murray Rothbard, who was already an advocate of economic laissez faire, to the larger libertarian movement and to a far broader, more penetrating, and radical libertarianism.

"One of the most important influences upon me," writes Rothbard, "was Baldy Harper, whose quiet and gentle hospitality toward young newcomers attracted many of us to the pure libertarian creed that he espoused and exemplified — a creed all the more effective for his stressing the philosophical aspects of liberty even more than the narrowly economic." [emphasis added]

Even more influential was Frank Chodorov: "that noble, courageous, candid, and spontaneous giant of a man who compromised not one iota in his eloquent denunciations of our enemy the State — was my entree to uncompromising libertarianism."

This doesn't sound like the FEE I knew, which proudly displayed a photograph of Ronald Reagan reading The Freeman.

What happened?

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Barbara Tuchman believed that historical facts had to precede historical theory, and that narrative was more important (or more compelling, anyway) than analysis. (She talks about historiography in her book Practicing History.) I hope to write about these points at a later date, but I mention them now to say that A Distant Mirror is far from a libertarian perspective on 14th-century history, but does contain plenty of facts of interest to "our side," e.g.,

When shortly after Easter the Duke of Lancaster left England with a large force in 200 ships to conquer the throne of Castile, the French opportunity was at hand. Information about each other's movements was known through French and English fishermen, who, ignoring hostilities, came to each other's aid at sea and exchanged catches, keeping trans-Channel communication open.

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 20: "A Second Norman Invasion," p. 424.

I like the image of peace and cooperation persisting through commerce, defiant of the ruling war parties at home.

Murray N. Rothbard

From chapter 7 (today's daily article at Mises.org) of The Betrayal of the American Right:

The winter of 1949–50, in fact, witnessed the two most exciting and shattering intellectual events of my life: my discovery of "Austrian" economics, and my conversion to individualist anarchism.

[…]

My conversion to anarchism was a simple exercise in logic. I had engaged continually in friendly arguments about laissez-faire with left-liberal friends from graduate school. While condemning taxation, I had still felt that taxation was required for the provision of police and judicial protection and for that only. One night two friends and I had one of our usual lengthy discussions, seemingly unprofitable; but this time when they'd left, I felt that for once something vital had actually been said. As I thought back on the discussion, I realized that my friends, as liberals, had posed the following challenge to my laissez-faire position:

They: What is the legitimate basis for your laissez-faire government, for this political entity confined solely to defending person and property?

I: Well, the people get together and decide to establish such a government.

They: But if "the people" can do that, why can't they do exactly the same thing and get together to choose a government that will build steel plants, dams, etc.?

I realized in a flash that their logic was impeccable, that laissez-faire was logically untenable, and that either I had to become a liberal, or move onward into anarchism. I became an anarchist.

Furthermore, I saw the total incompatibility of the insights of Oppenheimer and Nock on the nature of the State as conquest, with the vague "social contract" basis that I had been postulating for a laissez-faire government. I saw that the only genuine contract had to be an individual's specifically disposing of or using his own property.

Naturally, the anarchism I had adopted was individualist and free-market, a logical extension of laissez-faire, and not the woolly communalism that marked most of contemporary anarchist thought.

Mr B suggested this Frank & Ernest comic would make a good follow-up to the Helicopter Bernanke caricature in "failedpunner joe":

This one belongs in a history of private defense:

Unsuccessful war stimulated more than murmur. While Lancaster was bogged down in Brittany, English merchant ships were harassed and captured with impunity by French and Scottish pirates. When the merchants complained, the nobles and prelates of the King's Council replied only that defensive action was up to Lancaster and his fleet.

At this, a rich alderman and future Mayor of London, John Philpot, Master of the Grocers' Company, assembled a private force of ships with a thousand sailors and men-at-arms and went forth to battle the pirates, several of whom he captured together with their prize ships. When, after a triumphant welcome in London, he was summoned by the Council to answer for acting without the King's leave, his hot reply summed up the growing exasperation of the Third Estate with the less than than adequate performance of the Second. He had spent his money and risked his men, Philpot said, not to shame nobles or win knightly fame, but "in pity for the misery of the people and country which, from being a noble realm and dominion over other nations, has through your supineness been exposed to the ravages of the vilest race. Since you would not lift a hand in its defense, I exposed myself and my property for the safety and deliverance of our country." Even if Philpot and his fellow merchants were primarily concerned with the safety and deliverance of their trade, his complaint of the country's defenders was none the less valid.

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 17: "Coucy's Rise," p. 352.

And now a word from Scott Lahti (1, 2):

…I pass along my latest Austrian-''inspired'' drive-by, prompted by a caricature of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's presumed intention to inject ''liquidity'' into the rattled credit markets (attached image), sent to me by my roommate at Hillsdale College (1980-1), a Misesian-Austrian economist…. Only those ignorant of 1970s pop lyrics are assured of being spared the worst.

Bern, Baby, Bern (Fiscal Inferno), or -

Benny and the Debts! *

*You know I didn't read it in a magazine...**

**And ever since our ''raining'', pennies-from-Heaven monetary carjackers began to sing along to ''Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road'', abandoning (g)old standards in favor of ''payola'', they've made the nation's Brink's trucks as vulnerable to blowouts as a candle in the wind...***

***At least one band had the better part of hard-money wisdom in singing ''Give me silver, blue and gold'', which is not Bad Company to find yourself in when inflation is rampant - dunno about the ''blue'' part, but, hey - ''two out of three ain't bad'', or, Half a (Meat) Loaf is Better Than None...

Lew Rockwell on the agenda of schooling:

[T]he structure of the institution doing the educating matters a great deal. If the institution is owned and managed by the state, we can expect that the ideas it promotes will be favorable to the regime.

This should not be a controversial claim. If, for example, Wal-Mart were running our schools, who would be surprised that criticism of Wal-Mart would be kept to a minimum and that pro-Wal-Mart attitudes would be cultivated among students? We would expect that. It would not shock us. We would just consider the source.

But how rarely do we consider the source when it comes to state-funded education! There is an assumption that people make that education when sponsored by the state will be objective and keep the student's best interest at heart. This assumption makes no sense whatever, but it is nonetheless widely held. We encounter this often in dealing with the issue of elementary and secondary schools. If someone attends a Baptist or Catholic school, people ask how they can stand all that religious indoctrination. But have you ever heard a student in public school questioned as to how they can stand all that statist indoctrination? It's not likely.

The ownership and control of institutions does in fact matter for the quality of education a student receives and what the student will be taught.

– Lew Rockwell, "The First and Next 25 Years,"
a talk delivered on the 25th anniversary
of the founding of the Mises Institute

This is from Jim Fedako's "Word for the day: fungible":

Fungible means interchangeable. The word comes into play when (inter alia) earmarked funds end up in a general account. These funds are then free to be used for purposes other than intended.

Example: You would like to go on a vacation but you have unpaid car repair bills. A wealthy uncle hears that you are having financial trouble and sends money to help. However, he would never have agree to pay for your vacation — he's nice, but not that nice.

Once your uncle's money is deposited into your checking account, you are free to spend it as you please. You then get to pay off your bills and go on vacation. In essence, you paid your bills (a necessity) while your uncle funded your vacation.

Jim goes on to make a great point about about government-subsidized health "insurance."

You might have expected the World-War-II-was-necessary crowd to have piped up in the comments section of "World War II: The Nadir of the Old Right." Instead, we find the cliché assertion in "Mises in America" of all places:

Was the outcome of the war known before the United States entered it? After all, Hitler most likely would have conquered Europe without the United States' intervention.

That's certainly what we've all been taught all our lives: American entry into WWII saved Europe from fascism. But I've never heard any argument for this claim, only the claim itself, repeated endlessly.

Is it true?

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(See also, 14th-century price fixing, part I: "branded with an F".)

14th-century price fixing, part II:

Outlawry among free peasants had increased because their command of higher wages, as a result of depopulation, brought them in constant conflict with the law. The Statute of Laborers, in a world that believed in fixed conditions, still held grimly to pre-plague wage levels, blind to the realities of supply and demand. Because the provisions against leaving one employment for a better were impossible to enforce, penalties were constantly augmented. Violators who could not be caught were declared outlaws — and made lawless by the verdict. Free peasants took to the nomadic life, leaving a fixed abode so that the statute could not be executed against them, roaming from place to place, seeking day work for good wages where they could get it, resorting to thievery or beggary where they could not, breaking the social bond, living in the classic enmity to authority of Robin Hood for the Sheriff of Nottingham.

"EVERY LAW CREATES A WHOLE NEW CRIMINAL CLASS OVERNIGHT!"

– Hagbard Celine, "Celine's Laws"

It was now that Robin Hood's legend took on its great popularity with the people, if not with the country gentlemen and solid merchants of the Commons. They complained bitterly how "out of great malice" laborers and servants leave at will, and how "if their masters reprove them for bad service or offer to pay them according to the said statutes, they fly and run suddenly away out of their service and out of their country … and live wicked lives and rob the poor in simple villages in bodies of two and three together."

To keep them on the land, the lords offered many concessions, and towns welcomed the wanderers to fill the shortage of artisans, so that they grew aggressive and independent. They were most angry and seditious, and haughty about food, according to Langland, when their fortunes prospered. "They deign not to dine on day-old vegetables … penny ale will not do, nor a piece of bacon," but rather fresh-cooked meat and fried fish, "hot-and-hot for the chill of their maw." Joining with the villeins and artisans, they learned the tactics of association and strikes, combined against employers, subscribed money for "mutual defense," and "gather together in great routs and agree by such Confederacy that everyone shall aid the other to resist their Lords with a strong hand." A generation ready to revolt against oppression was taking shape.

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 14: "England's Turmoil," p. 286f.

(See also, 14th-century price fixing, part I: "branded with an F".)

A history of price fixing would have to begin in antiquity, but I didn't encounter quotable passages in any of my ancient history books. I'm definitely encountering some in the Middle Ages. This is from Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century:

When death slowed production, goods became scarce and prices soared. In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350. At the same time the shortage of labor brought the plague's greatest social disruption — a concerted demand for higher wages. Peasants as well as artisans, craftsmen, clerks, and priests discovered the lever of their own scarcity. Within a year after the plague had passed through northern France, the textile workers of St. Omer near Amiens had gained three successive wage increases. In many guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age when social conditions were regarded as fixed, such action was revolutionary.

The response of rulers was instant repression. In the effort to hold wages at pre-plague levels, the English issued an ordinance in 1349 requiring everyone to work for the same pay as in 1347. Penalties were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of employment to seek higher pay, and for the offer of higher pay by employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statue of Laborers. It denounced not only laborers who demanded higher wages but particularly those who chose "rather to beg in idleness than to earn their bread in labor." Idleness of the worker was a crime against society, for the medieval system rested on his obligation to work. The Statute of Laborers was not simply a reactionary dream but an effort to maintain the system. It provided that every able-bodied person under sixty with no means of subsistence must work for whoever required him, that no alms could be given to anyone who claimed him. Down to the 20th century this statue was to serve as the basis for "conspiracy" laws against labor in the long struggle to prevent unionization.

A more realistic French statute of 1351 applying only to the region of Paris, allowed a rise in wages not to exceed one third of the former level. Prices were fixed and profits of middlemen were regulated. To increase production, guilds were required to loosen their restrictions on the number of apprentices and shorten the period before they could become masters. In both countries, as shown by repeated renewals of the laws with rising penalties, the statutes were unenforceable. Violations cited by the English Parliament in 1352 show workers demanding and employers paying wages at double and treble the pre-plague rate. Stocks were ordered set up in every town for punishment of offenders. In 1360 imprisonment replaced fines as the penalty and fugitive laborers were declared outlaws. If caught, they were to be branded on the forehead with F for "fugitive" (or possibly for "falsity"). New laws were enacted twice more in the 1360s, breeding the resistance that was to come to a head in the great outbreak of 1381.

– Barbara Tuchman
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
Chapter 5
"This Is the End of the World": The Black Death
(p. 120f)

World War II: The Nadir of the Old Right

The advent of World War II brought the Old Right to its darkest days. Harassed, reviled, persecuted, the intellectuals and agitators of the Old Right, the libertarians and the isolationists, folded their tents and disappeared from view. While it is true that the isolationist Republicans experienced a resurgence in the 1942 elections, they were no longer supported by an ideological vanguard. The America First Committee quickly dissolved after Pearl Harbor and went to war — despite the pleas of the bulk of its militants to continue being a focus of opposition to the nation's course.

FULL ARTICLE

[This article is chapter 6 of The Betrayal of the American Right.]

An email from a stranger (probably in reference to "ancient Chinese secret"):

From: Manuel
Date: Oct 17, 2007 1:31 PM
Subject: Wu Wei (laizze faire)
To: bkmarcus.com

Check out "The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation" by John Hobson (Cambridge University Press) for an excellent discussion on the Chinese origins of laizze-faire (wu wei).
Hobson traces the transmission of wu-wei from Jesuit missionaries to Francouis Quesnay (aka "The European Confucius").

http://www.amazon.com/Eastern-Origins-Western-Civilisation/dp/0521547245

Caution: Eurocentrists and Europhiles beware of this book. It will break your heart to discover that the majority of "inventions" and ideas of pre-1500 Europe are EASTERN in their origins.

Here's a Sunday comic strip I think Robert Higgs would appreciate:

At the Mises Institute's 25th Anniversary Celebration, the Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty went to the great Robert Higgs, author of Crisis & Leviathan and Resurgence of the Warfare State. Here is his acceptance speech:

The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised — a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o'erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.

Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state's depredations and therefore augments the public's multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as national emergency — war and other crises comparable to war in the seriousness of the threats they pose. FULL SPEECH

Today would have been 137th birthday of Albert Jay Nock, described by the Mises.org Freedom Calendar as "American essayist and libertarian aristocrat."

In The Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard called him a "Tory anarchist," but Nock might have objected to the "Tory" part of the label.

As an individualist, an opponent of Prohibition and Big Business, and an opponent of centralization and coercive authority more generally, Nock was considered a "Man of the Left."

Then the 1930s New Deal drew most of the 1920s American Left into the social fascism of FDR's corporate state, leaving laissez-faire individualists like Mencken and Nock in the cold. But rather than openly embracing their own shift to the fascist Right, the American Left turned semantics on its head, called their new corporatism "liberalism" and thereby pinned on the original liberals the labels of "conservative," "reactionary," and worse:

The individualists and laissez-faire liberals were stunned and embittered, not just by the mass desertion of their former allies, but also by the abuse these allies now heaped upon them as "reactionaries," "fascists," and "Neanderthals." For decades Men of the Left, the individualists, without changing their position or perspectives one iota, now found themselves bitterly attacked by their erstwhile allies as benighted "extreme right-wingers." Thus, in December 1933, Nock wrote angrily to Canon Bernard Iddings Bell:

"I see I am now rated as a Tory. So are you — ain't it? What an ignorant blatherskite FDR must be! We have been called many bad names, you and I, but that one takes the prize."

Nock's biographer adds that "Nock thought it odd that an announced radical, anarchist, individualist, single-taxer and apostle of Spencer should be called conservative."

If you don't know Nock, you can start with Jeffrey Tucker's "Albert Jay Nock: Forgotten Man of the Old Right" or you can jump right in to Nock's own "Anarchist's Progress," first published in the American Mercury in 1927 and republished in On Doing the Right Thing:

Economics, wrote Henry Hazlitt, is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is due in no small part to the special pleading of selfish interests. But there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences. In this lies almost the whole difference between good economics and bad. The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond.

FULL ARTICLE

A neural comrade pointed me to this video by the Pet Shop Boys.

I was surprised by its message. I'm glad someone with an audience is speaking out against ID cards and the whole if-you've-done-nothing-wrong mentality.

Here are the lyrics:

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