From Barron’s magazine’s “Gifts That Promote Ideas” by Gene Epstein:

LUDWIG VON MISES (pronounced “meezis”) had an unusually active existence for a person who mainly led a life of the mind. That life makes for a good story, skillfully told in Mises (Mises Institute, 2007) by economist Jorg Guido Hulsmann. To find this lengthy biography enthralling, however, it is probably necessary to feel some connection to Mises’ intellectual achievement as the dean of the Austrian School of economics. Hulsmann makes us aware of the man’s stunning originality. But a useful companion volume to the biography is the great work Human Action (Mises Institute, 1998), which Mises first published in English in 1949, nine years after he and his wife fled Hitler for New York City.

Ironies abound in Mises’ story. Had he not been a Jew forced to flee the Nazis, he would not have taught his legendary seminar at New York University, or published in English, which inspired his brilliant American disciples. And as an almost delicious irony, documents taken by the Nazis from Mises’ Vienna apartment were later taken by the Red Army, only to be discovered in a Moscow archive in 1991 — after the demise of the economic system whose doom Mises anticipated — so that Hulsmann could eventually use them for his biography of Mises. The biography’s subtitle, The Last Knight of Liberalism, should also be read ironically. Mises was also the first knight of an intellectual movement that has disciples all over the world.

(via blog.Mises)

From the Advocates for Self-Government:

Education: Too Important to Be Left to the Government

Jeff Jacoby, award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe, has written another wonderfully devastating column calling for the separation of school and state. And, as previously, he cuts through to the essence of the issue.

Here are some excerpts:

Americans differ on same-sex marriage and evolution, on the importance of sports and the value of phonics, on the right to bear arms and the reverence due the Confederate flag. Some parents are committed secularists; others are devout believers. Some place great emphasis on math and science; others stress history and foreign languages.

“Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children’s minds and character.”

Americans hold disparate opinions on everything from the truth of the Bible to the meaning of the First Amendment, from the usefulness of rote memorization to the importance of teaching music and art. With parents so often in loud disagreement, why should children be locked into a one-size-fits-all, government-knows-best model of education?

Nobody would want the government to run 90 percent of the nation’s entertainment industry. Nobody thinks that 90 percent of all housing should be owned by the state. Yet the government’s control of 90 percent of the nation’s schools leaves most Americans strangely unconcerned….

In a society founded on political and economic liberty, government schools have no place. Free men and women do not entrust to the state the molding of their children’s minds and character. As we wouldn’t trust the state to feed our kids, or to clothe them, or to get them to bed on time, neither should we trust the state to teach them….

Education is too important to be left to the government.

Jacoby, it should be noted, is one of the most influential columnists in America. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe is the largest newspaper in the New England area, and the 15th largest-circulation newspaper in America, with over 600,000 readers. His column is carried by other publications as well, and widely disseminated on the Web.

Source: “Big Brother at School,” by Jeff Jacoby

Today, Mises.org features the final chapter of Murray Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the American Right:

This means all chapters have been published in HTML and I can now make another free book page, thanks to the Mises Institute.

As I said in “free books, first installment,”

The idea is to give you a single portal to all the formats of all the chapters of all the multi-format books that the Mises Institute already makes available for free.

The Betrayal of the American Right is only “multi-format” if two counts as “multi,” but here it is:

The print version of Murray Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the American Right is gorgeous and well worth the price, but Mises.org has made the entire book available for free online in PDF and HTML:

$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

You’ll never think of Left and Right the same way again.

(The permanent link to the book page is here.)

Via veritas noctis:

New Forum for Fans and Writers of Libertarian Speculative Fiction

If you have a passion for liberty and are a fan (and/or writer) of science fiction or fantasy, then you’ll find this new forum interesting. It’s a dedicated forum where libertarians can go to discuss their favorite science fiction and fantasy stories, especially those with libertarian themes. If you’re a published or unpublished writer, we’ve got special sections where you can post your stories for others to read, offer comments, constructive criticism, tips and suggestions. There are also sections for movies, tv shows, graphic novels and comics, games, art, non-genre fiction and more. We’ll be posting news and reviews as well as resources to help you find good speculative fiction, especially those with libertarian themes, both on and off the web.

Come join the community.

This week, A.Word.A.Day is doing not words but 2-word phrases of the pattern X’s Y.

Today’s phrase was curate’s egg, which is based on an 1895 cartoon from Punch magazine.

A.W.A.D’s email didn’t include the cartoon, but Wikipedia’s entry for “curate’s egg” did, so I provide them both here:

This week’s theme: whose what?

curate’s egg (KYOOR-itz eg) noun

Something having both good and bad parts.

[From a cartoon in Punch magazine (London, UK) in which a timid curate (a junior clergy member), when served a stale egg at a bishop's table, tries to assure his host that parts of the egg were edible:

Right Reverend Host: I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!

The Curate: Oh no, My Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!

The cartoon was drawn by George du Maurier and published in the Nov 9, 1895 issue of the magazine. That makes it one of the very few terms whose origin we can pin down to a specific date.]

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

“One act of sportsmanship by London Irish and a moment’s opportunism by Saracens separated these two sides after a curate’s egg of a match.” David Llewellyn; Saracens 24 London Irish 20; The Independent (London, UK); Nov 25, 2007.

Apparently, the only way I’ll write about political candidates is when one of them endorses a comic book hero.

This was sent to me by my friend Clinton:

Mon Dec 10, 2007 — by Martha Thomases

Presidential candidate Ron Paul picks his super-hero favorite

Exclusive To ComicMix!

As part of the run-up to the presidential primaries next year, ComicMix asked Texas Congressman Ron Paul who his favorite comic book super-hero might be. We think this is at least as revealing as their favorite movies, favorite books, or favorite chocolate-chip cookie recipes.

Candidate Paul, running for the Republican nomination on a Libertarian platform, was happy to respond. From Congressman Paul:

“My favorite comic book superhero is Baruch Wane, otherwise known as Batman, in The Batman Chronicles. “The Berlin Batman,” #11 in the series by Paul Pope, details Batman’s attempts to rescue the confiscated works of persecuted Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, from Nazi Party hands.

“Batman’s assistant Robin writes in the memoirs, “[Mises] was an advocate of individual liberty, free speech, and free thinking… and so, should I add, the Berlin Batman.” Batman, a Jew in hiding in Nazi Austria, was willing to risk his life for the sake of the promulgation of freedom, and I find this to be super-heroic.”

This weekend Mises.org posted the last chapter of Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty as a weekend edition (HTML) and as an audiobook chapter (MP3) directly downloadable from the media library or available through the “Ethics of Liberty” audiobook podcast.

You’ll notice that I didn’t put any links in the previous paragraph.

That’s because you can find all the relevant links to all the chapters of the book here, on my Ethics of Liberty book page.

I hope this will be the first of many such pages. The idea is to give you a single portal to all the formats of all the chapters of all the multi-format books that the Mises Institute already makes available for free. Enjoy.

From Scott Lahti:

Parts of the essay below from Monday’s New York Times on the civic and cultural virtues of learning Latin, by English journalist Harry Mount (son of Ferdinand Mount, novelist of manners and former editor, 1991–2003, of The Times Literary Supplement) —

But what they gain is a glimpse into the past that provides a fuller, richer view of the present. Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer that lies beneath the skin of the Western world. And you open up 500 years of Western literature (plus an additional thousand years of Latin prose and poetry) …

With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government. The novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes people who know history’s turning points as being able to look at the world as a sequence of rooms: Greece gives way to Rome, Rome to the Byzantine Empire, to the Renaissance, to the British Empire, to America….

put one in mind at once of a passage by Albert Jay Nock from The Theory of Education in the United States :

We may admit, I presume, the disciplinary value of these studies, since that has never been seriously disputed, so far as I know, but we may say a word, perhaps, about their formative character. The literatures of Greece and Rome comprise the longest and fullest continuous record available to us, of what the human mind has been busy about in practically every department of spiritual and social activity — every department, I think, except one: music. This record covers twenty-five hundred consecutive years of the human mind’s operations in poetry, drama, law, agriculture, philosophy, architecture, natural history, philology, rhetoric, astronomy, politics, medicine, theology, geography, everything. Hence the mind that has attentively canvassed this record is not only a disciplined mind but an experienced mind — a mind that instinctively views any contemporary phenomenon from the vantage point of an immensely long perspective attained through this profound and weighty experience of the human spirit’s operations. If I may paraphrase the words of Emerson, this discipline brings us into the feeling of an immense longevity, and maintains us in it. You may perceive at once, I think, how different would be the view of contemporary men and things, how different the appraisal of them, the scale of values employed in their measurement, on the part of one who has undergone this discipline and on the part of one who has not. These studies, then, in a word, were regarded as formative because they are maturing, because they powerfully inculcate the views of life and the demands on life that are appropriate to maturity and that are indeed the specific marks, the outward and visible signs, of the inward and spiritual grace of maturity. And now we are in a position to observe that the establishment of these views and the direction of these demands is what is traditionally meant, and what we citizens of the republic of letters now mean, by the word "education"; and the constant aim at inculcation of these views and demands is what we know under the name of the Great Tradition of our republic.

[Read the rest »]

LearnOutLoud.com’s Free Resource #451 is Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for Bobby Kennedy. No thanks.

But before I delete the email, I notice the last line: “This speech is available from American Rhetoric on MP3 download.” I thought "American Rhetoric" sounded like an interesting website, so I went to www.AmericanRhetoric.com to look around. Lincoln, FDR, MLK … more "no thanks."

But they also have this incredible section called "Rhetorical Figures in Sound":

Rhetorical Figures in Sound is a compendium of 200+ brief audio (mp3) clips illustrating 40 different figures of speech. Most of these figures were constructed, identified, and classified by Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric in the Classical period. For each rhetorical device, definitions and examples, written and audio, are provided. Audio examples are taken from public speeches and sermons, movies, songs, lectures, oral interpretations of literature, and other media events. Some artifacts have been edited further to make the devices easier to detect. In the interest of diversity, I have included a range of voices and perspectives.

Figures, Definitions, Audio Illustrations

Alliteration	Allusion	Anadiplosis	Analogy
Anaphora	Anesis	Antimetabole	Antithesis
Aposiopesis	Appositio	Assonance	Asyndeton
Catachresis	Climax	Conduplicatio	Diacope
Distinctio	Enthymeme	Enumeratio	Epanalepsis
Epistrophe	Epitheton	Epizeuxis	Euphemismos
Exemplum	Expletive	Hyperbole	Hypophora
Metaphor	Oxymoron	Paradox	Parallelism
Personification	Polysyndeton	Rhetorical Question	Scesis Onomaton
Sententia	Simile	Symploce	Synecdoche

Rhetoric, by the way, is the highest stage of the trivium of classical education (after grammar and logic). In the system we’re considering for homeschooling (The Well-Trained Mind), each stage takes 4 years, so that the grammar stage maps pretty directly to "grammar school," logic to middle school, and rhetoric to high school. I won’t go into any details here; that summary should be enough of a launchpad for your own investigations, if you don’t already know what I’m talking about. I mention it only to give context to my saying that this website looks like a wonderful resource for classical homeschoolers.

My friend Carolyn pointed me to this:

Sesame Street is now brought to you by the letter P and the letter C — for political correctness, that is.

The fun police have slapped an “adults only” warning on a new DVD of classic episodes, which featured a world in which children played in the street, a monster gorged on cookies and a bad-tempered puppet lived in a bin.

The episodes, made between 1969 and 1974, have been released in the US with the caution: “These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

[keep reading]

N.b.: “Andrew Fuller, a clinical psychologist and consultant on children’s television production, said a sanitised world was far more dangerous than the whacky world of Sesame Street.”

Susan Wise Bauer, whose book The History of the Ancient World I have quoted here so often is now working on a history of the Middle Ages. This is from her most recent blog post:

Zoe, in a doodle on a Byzantine manuscript

After a stupefyingly long time, I have emerged from slogging through the details of the tenth century and am on to chronicling the eleventh. Now I’m getting into some REALLY extraordinary behavior … such as that of the Empress Zoe, who in 1034, at the age of 56, was widowed when her husband, the Byzantine emperor Romanos III, conveniently drowned in his bathtub. Zoe was less than crushed; she had only married him on her father’s orders anyway (her father had forced Romanos to divorce his own wife and marry Zoe instead). On the same day that Romanos III died, Zoe married her lover, the twenty-four-year-old palace chamberlain Michael. He then became Emperor Michael IV.

However, Zoe hadn’t been long married when she developed a crush on another young man, a court official named Constantine Monomachos, twelve years younger than she.

Michael IV was annoyed enough by this to exile Constantine to a distant island.

Emperor Constantine IX

As Zoe was past producing an heir, Michael IV adopted his nephew (also named Michael, and only five years his junior) as his son and appointed him to be the next Emperor. The nephew-son didn’t have to wait long. Michael IV, although apparently quite good-looking, was also a bit of a weakling; he died at the age of thirty-one from a long-standing illness, after only seven years on the throne. Almost at once, Zoe had the nephew-son arrested, blinded, and castrated. He died, unsurprisingly, and she became senior ruler of the Byzantine Empire.

At this point, Zoe (who was now in her sixties), became reigning empress of Byzantium. At once, she called Constantine (aged 41) back from his exile and married him.

Entertaining, but not very edifying. Happy Advent.

By the way, if you like gruesome history like this, you might want to check out the “12 Byzantine Rulers” podcast.

PS Extra credit to those who can identify the source of the title of this post.