"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
Ludwig von Mises: "It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights." - The Theory of Money and Credit
Of course, Friedman would then advise the Fed to use that absolute
power wisely, but no libertarian worth the name can have anything but
contempt for the very idea of vesting coercive power in any group and
then hoping that such group will not use its power to the utmost.
My friend messaged me recently, saying "I don't think I can finish this article," followed by the section that stuck:
"Democrats will respond that Thomas, Alito and their allies on the Court are the true judicial activists who are working to return us to the dark laissez-faire days before the New Deal."
Of course, the Democratic distortions of history should be irrelevant to a principled constitutionalist, but we all know that principled people of any sort are few and far between. Consequentialism rules, literally. And bad history rules among the consequentialists.
"The book's creative director, Anne Curtis, said the idea that including pigs in a story could be interpreted as racism was 'like a slap in the face'."
A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency's awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.
The digital book, re-telling the classic story, was rejected by judges who warned that "the use of pigs raises cultural issues".
I learned a lot during the first 35 years of my life. I've spent most of the past 5 years doing a lot of unlearning.
Here's a historical corrective worth passing along:
On January 26, 1893, Abner Doubleday died in Mendham, New Jersey. In 1905, Albert J. Spalding, a former player turned sporting goods manufacturer, established a commission to investigate the origins of baseball. After two years of questionable study (and primarily on the basis of unsubstantiated testimony from an elderly man of doubtful sanity), the commission concluded that Abner Doubleday formulated the essential rules of baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York (the current home of the Baseball Hall of Fame). Even though scholars have totally discredited the claim (Doubleday's own obituary says he disliked outdoor sports), the myth lives on. In his 1973 book "The Man Who Invented Baseball," Harold Peterson expressed it all in a beautiful example of chiasmus:
That's from the weekly newsletter I get from www.DrMardy.com, a website "for lovers of wit and wordplay," which was recommended to me by a lover of chiasmus.
I just got my first monthly newsletter from Merriam-Webster, included in which was a list of the most frequently looked-up words of December 2007. The one I didn't know was ...
That image is from the dictionary that comes with OS X. It doesn't quite capture the feel of the word. Here's Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: peck·sniff·ian
Pronunciation: ()pek|snifn Function: adjective Usage: often capitalized Etymology: Seth Pecksniff + English -ian : marked by unctuous hypocrisy : selfish and corrupt behind a display of seeming benevolence : SANCTIMONIOUS, HOLIER-THAN-THOU <pecksniffian cant> <legislation designed to correct injustice and to translate pecksniffian phrases into living realities — Nation> <a censorship that is … pecksniffian suppression — Springfield (Massachusetts) Union>
Seth Pecksniff, by the way, is one of the characters in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, someone memorable enough for an eponym, but not, apparently, for his own page at Wikipedia (unlike many other Dickensian characters).
Why was pecksniffian one of the most frequently looked-up words last month? According to the newsletter, it's because the word "was used by Bill O'Reilly a few times last year, and his use caused the word to spike in the daily list of words that are looked up online."
You may think I'm highlighting this particular word as a comment on recent rumblings in This Movement of Ours. Maybe I just think it's a useful word.
"No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind. … In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of 'protection.' It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty 'protection racket' on a giant and massive scale."
From John P. Cochran, economics professor and dean of the business school at Metropolitan State College of Denver:
Given all the misguided talk about stimulus and the need to get funds into the hands of consumers, it is a good time to revive the wonderful poem by Patrick Barrington, "I Want to be a Consumer" originally published in Punch two year prior to the publication of Keyness General Theory (issue April 25, 1934) and reprinted in Hazlitt's The Failure of the "New Economics", pp. 133-134:
I Want to be a Consumer
"And what do you mean to be?"
The kind old Bishop said
As he took the boy on his ample knee
And patted his curly head.
"We should all of us choose a calling
To help Society's plan;
Then what to you mean to be, my boy,
When you grow to be a man?"
"I want to be a Consumer,"
The bright-haired lad replied
As he gazed into the Bishop's face
In innocence open-eyed.
"I've never had aims of a selfish sort,
For that, as I know, is wrong.
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
And help the world along."
"I want to be a Consumer
And work both night and day,
For that is the thing that's needed most,
I've heard Economists say,
I won't just be a Producer,
Like Bobby and James and John;
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
And help the nation on."
"But what do you want to be?"
The Bishop said again,
"For we all of us have to work," said he,
"As must, I think, be plain.
Are you thinking of studying medicine
Or taking a Bar exam?"
"Why, no!" the bright-haired lad replied
As he helped himself to jam.
"I want to be a Consumer
And live in a useful way;
For that is the thing that is needed most,
I've heard Economists say.
There are too many people working
And too many things are made.
I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
And help to further trade."
"I want to be a Consumer
And do my duty well;
For that is the thing that is needed most,
I've heard Economists tell.
I've made up my mind," the lad was heard,
As he lit a cigar, to say;
"I want to be a Consumer, Sir,
And I want to begin today."
Suddenly, from almost 30 years ago, a limerick my father taught me comes flooding back:
While Titian was mixing rose madder
His model reclined on a ladder.
Her position, to Titian, Suggested coition
So he climbed up the ladder and had 'er.
"I heartily accept the motto, 'That government is best which governs least'; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe — 'That government is best which governs not at all'; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which we will have."
Maybe everyone already knows this story, but I just learned it.
In 1573, Italian painter Paolo Veronese was commissioned to paint a Last Supper for the convent of San Giovanni e Paolo to replace an earlier work by Titian destroyed in the fire of 1571.
Here is the painting he turned in, one of the largest canvases of the 16th century:
Notice that Christ and His Apostles seem to be dining in Venice, surrounded by marble columns and stone archways. Notice also that there are many more people in attendance than the one Redeemer and his dozen disciples: we have dogs, midgets, black African servants, and a score of drunken revelers. I don't know the period well enough to spot the other offending presence in the painting: German soldiers.
On July 18, 1573, Veronese was called before the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition. Asked if he guessed why he had been summoned, he replied that he believed it was because he ought to have painted the Magdalene instead of a dog. Indeed. Neither were the Inquisitors happy with the site of "buffoons, drunkards, Germans, dwarfs, and the like fooleries" at the Lord's last meal.
They demanded that Veronese change the painting.
Instead he renamed it "Banquet in the House of Levi."
I wonder how much Monty Python had this story in mind when they wrote "The Penultimate Supper":
Henry Hazlitt definitely held his own with the academics, to say the least, and not just with The Failure of the "New Economics", or his near-million-selling Economics in One Lesson. His whole life was testament to the power of well-directed self-education, maintained across almost 99 years. Take a look at his library sometime at FEE in Irvington. Or read, e.g., such non-economic works as Thinking as a Science (1916); The Way to Will-Power (1922), virtually impossible to find outside university libraries (I own two of the only privately-held copies in all of Christendom); The Anatomy of Criticism (1933), a charming "trialogue" on the principles of literary judgment, and *summa* of his three-year stint as literary editor at The Nation; The Foundations of Morality (1964), an erudite tome on ethics; or The Wisdom of the Stoics (1984), a selection from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, assembled with wife Frances as old age found stoicism of more than scholarly interest.
I had the good fortune of meeting Hazlitt while on spring break in 1982 in Wilton, Connecticut, where I lived while in high school five miles or so from Hazlitt. He was then 87. Two letters from him are in my files. Try to imagine him running regularly in the latter-day incarnations of Newsweek or the Reader's Digest, as he did for decades surrounding the mid-century last.
"Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings." - Julius Caesar
"So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?" - "THE PUNCH LINE," Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
This essay by Murray Rothbard is based on a paper presented at the April 1979 national meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Chicago. The theme of the meeting was "Conservatism and Libertarianism."
I came across this rave review in a letter dated July 18, 1959 from Murray Rothbard to the Volker Fund:
In a forthcoming review of Henry Hazlitt's The Failure of the "New Economics" in National Review, I write that this is the best book on economics to be published since Mises's Human Action, ten years ago. I do not think this an exaggeration. Exempting reprinted books, such as Mises's Theory of Money and Credit or the Böhm-Bawerk volumes, what book can compete with this one? (Mises's Theory and History and Hayek's Counter-Revolution of Science are more philosophical or epistemological than straight economics). […]
Frankly, I didn't realize that Henry had it in him. [Read the rest »]
January 29th, 2008 by 
bkmarcus
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