"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."
Moshe ben Maimon was born at Cordoba, Spain on this day in 1135, at a time when that portion of Spain was under Moorish rule. The family fled to Morocco after Cordoba was captured by a far less tolerant Islamic dynasty, and Moshe studied at the university at Fez. He was free to write and study because his younger brother was a gem merchant, but after the brother was lost at sea Moshe became a physician. After living briefly in Israel, he settled at Cairo and became the physician to the Sultan Saladin. He was a Jewish rabbi who lived almost his entire life in Muslim communities, wrote philosophy and medical treatises in Arabic, and is best known by a Greek name, Maimonides.
Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.
Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.
Be convinced that, if man were able to reach the end without preparatory studies, such studies would not be preparatory but tiresome and utterly superfluous.
Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics.
Further, there are things of which the mind understands one part, but remains ignorant of the other; and when man is able to comprehend certain things, it does not follow that he must be able to comprehend everything.
The soul is subject to health and disease, just as is the body. The health and disease of both … undoubtedly depend upon beliefs and customs, which are peculiar to mankind.
I recently quoted from an old movie review by my playwright friend, Clinton Johnston — CJ to some of us. The first time I mentioned that review was in October 2004, at which time I described CJ as "the soon-to-be-published playwright." Well, the play that was then soon to be be published is now headed for the stage, specificially Washington, DC’s (OK, Arlington, VA’s) Charter Theatre :
Am I Black Enough Yet?
by Clinton Johnston
directed by George Grant
featuring Paige Hernandez, Brittney Sweeney, David Lamont Wilson, Edward Daniels, and Matthew Eisenberg
“Can you feel it? Can you see it? When do you wanna be it and when break free of it? And after all, what is it? Where does it start … and where does it end?”
No matter who you are or where you’re from, for one night at Charter Theatre, you get to be African American. Playwright Clinton Johnston takes you on a touching, thoughtful, and hysterically funny tour of the state of Blackness in America. Don’t miss it.
In a never-before-published essay, Murray Rothbard points to a book on American history as an archetype of how not to write history. “The first test of a historical work then, and one that the author fails, is a richness of factual material. But the historian is more than a chronicler; he must also have a command of the significance of events. The historian must have a ‘vision’ of the meaning, of the significance, of the material he is presenting.”
2:26:35 PMDavid Miller: did you note that Arthur C. Clarke died?
2:26:42 PMBK Marcus: yes
2:26:45 PMBK Marcus: age 90
2:28:13 PMDavid Miller: yup, interesting that technology seems to have been so much more focused on earthspace than his books suggested.
2:28:50 PMDavid Miller: The iPod the Web… not manned flights to Jupiter
2:30:11 PMDavid Miller: I wonder if I’ll ever be able to enjoy sci-fi that ignores economics again.
4:19:35 PMBK Marcus: An interesting note from my wife:
Nathalie Marcus
4:01
I find this interesting. Rothbard is talking about the Hansen stagnation thesis: "As for technological progress, that too is slowing down. After all, the railroads have already been built and the automobile industry has reached maturity. Whatever minor improvements there might be will probably be withheld by ‘reactionary monopolists,’ etc."
4:01
They didn’t seem to have much imagination.
4:02
Should have read more science fiction…
4:35:16 PMDavid Miller: yes , it is an interesting note and compliment to my observation. Economist ought to read more Sci-fi and Sci-fi writers should read more econ.
The day began, as all days should, with Ray Bradbury. In Saturday’s early afternoon, I had just climbed back into the cab of my frequent movie partner’s truck to have him tell me that the voice on the radio came from that old man of SF. While I was mailing our bills, he had tuned in Writer’s Corner on our local NPR station. It must have been fifteen to twenty minutes before we were able to date the interview. For all we knew, the conversation could have been live; Bradbury could have been dead for years. I find I am able to keep track of these things less and less without cues.
[This article by Murray N. Rothbard follows "The Road to Civil War," and is excerpted from the same unpublished report to the Volker Fund, 1961.]
The Civil War was one of the most momentous events in American history, not only for its inherent drama and destruction, but because of the fateful consequences for America that flowed from it.
We have said above that the War of 1812 had devastating consequences for the libertarian movement; indeed, it might be said that it took twenty years of devotion and hard work for the Jacksonian movement to undo the étatist consequences of that utter failure of a war. It is the measure of the statist consequences of the Civil War that America never recovered from it: never again was the libertarian movement to have a party of its own, or as close a chance at success. Hamiltonian neo-Federalism beyond the wildest dreams of even a J.Q. Adams had either been foisted permanently on America, or had been inaugurated, to be later fulfilled.
Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized "rules of war" that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman’s march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism). Another consequence, of course, was the ending of effective states’ rights, and of the perfectly logical and reasonable right of secession—or, for that matter, nullification. From now on, the Union was a strictly compulsory entity.
[This article by Murray N. Rothbard is excerpted from a 30,000-word report to the Volker Fund, written in September 1961, giving a very detailed description of everything wrong with A History of the American Republic by George B. DeHuszar. The full memo will be included in the forthcoming collection Renaissance Man, edited by David Gordon.]
The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:
the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
the immediate causes of the war itself.
The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.
The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern "slavocracy." Very few Northerners proposed to abolish slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection — and certainly a proper one — was to the attempt of the Southern slavocracy to extend the slave system to the Western territories. The apologia that the Southerners feared that eventually they might be outnumbered and that federal abolition might ensue is no excuse; it is the age-old alibi for "preventive war." Not only did the expansionist aim of the slavocracy to protect slavery by federal fiat in the territories as "property" aim to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories; it even violated the principles of states’ rights to which the South was supposedly devoted — and which would logically have led to a "popular sovereignty" doctrine.
I don’t think the concept of “disproportionality” enters into it. If you punch me in the shoulder, it would be (very) disproportionate for me to shoot you in the head. It would not be disproportionate, exactly, for me to respond by shooting an innocent bystander — that’s not “disproportionate”; it’s simply aggression. If I steal resources from a third party to help in my response to your aggression, that also is not “disproportionate,” but rather aggression too.
If two governments are at war with each other, they are both capable of committing aggression against individual property rights. In fact, it’s hard to think of many wars where this isn’t the case. Even in a “defensive” war, a government typically taxes and even enslaves “its” own people, and thus even when one government is much less guilty than another, its war power is not a libertarian program — at least no more so than, say, welfare, which is no more reliant on the aggression of taxation than government war.
But in discussing a modern war like World War II, the aggression on all sides is even worse. The crimes of a regime cannot possibly justify dropping bombs on innocent children, for example, since those children have an inalienable right to life that is not conditional upon the crimes committed by the state they happen to have the misfortune to live under. It is this principle that allows us to conclude, unqualifiedly, that terrorism is always evil and wrong. Just because the US government has engaged in aggression in the Middle East over the years (and I think this cannot be seriously denied) does not in any respect exculpate the terrorists who target innocent American civilians. Similarly, just because people live under an aggressive foreign government, doesn’t give any one on earth a right to kill them.
Our rights not to be bombed — not to be bombed by anybody — are not sacrificed by the mere fact that we live under governments that commit aggression.
War is not a conflict of rights between nations. Nations don’t have rights. Individuals do. War is a class conflict of states against individuals. During war, all civilians killed and taxed and enslaved are victims, and, typically, the states involved are all, to varying degrees, aggressors, not just against foreign subjects but also against “their” own subjects as well.
Whereas historians obsessively trace every event’s causal lineage further and further into the past, nonhistorians tend toward the opposite extreme: they assume in effect that the world began immediately before the event they have in mind. I call this unfortunate tendency “truncating the antecedents.” Among the general public, it has given rise to mistaken interpretations of historical causation in cases too numerous to mention, and mistakes of this sort continue to occur frequently, in part because politicians and other conniving parties have an interest in propagating them.
My own basic perspective on the history of man, wrote Murray Rothbard, is to place central importance on the great conflict that is eternally waged between Liberty and Power, a conflict that was seen with crystal clarity by the American revolutionaries of the 18th century. I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.
Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life. But liberty has always been threatened by the encroachments of power, power which seeks to suppress, control, cripple, tax, and exploit the fruits of liberty and production. Power, then, the enemy of liberty, is consequently the enemy of all the other goods and fruits of civilization that mankind holds dear. And power is almost always centered in and focused on that central repository of power and violence: the State. FULL ARTICLE
In the last decade of the last century, Fed Chairmain Alan Greenspan (former libertarian, supposed fiscal conservative) and President Bill Clinton (left-neoliberal for life) decided that the way the government measured and produced official economic statistics was misleading (read: too revealing), and so they started fudging the numbers. Dubya’s government has continued to do so, while adding the new strategy of discontinuing publication of certain numbers.
Here’s a site that tracks the present economy according to the government’s own previous methods:
Have you ever wondered why the CPI, GDP and employment numbers run counter to your personal and business experiences? The problem lies in biased and often-manipulated government reporting.
March 30th, 2008 by 
bkmarcus
From qotd:
No Comments »
The Civil War was one of the most momentous events in American history, not only for its inherent drama and destruction, but because of the fateful consequences for America that flowed from it.
The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts: 
Food quotes from 
My own basic perspective on the history of man, wrote Murray Rothbard, is to place central importance on the great conflict that is eternally waged between Liberty and Power, a conflict that was seen with crystal clarity by the American revolutionaries of the 18th century. I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.
