"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: "The essence of etatism is to take from one group in order to give to another. The more it can take the more it can give. It is to the interest of those whom the government wishes to favor that their state become as large as possible." - Omnipotent Government
The "partnership of government and business" is a new term for an old, old condition. We often fail to realize that the point of much of Big Government is precisely to set up such "partnerships," for the benefit of both government and business, or rather, of certain business firms and groups that happen to be in political favor.
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.
"I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have the sense to do without my persuading them. That's all the powers of the President amount to."
Now I learn of this gem from Truman's successor:
"You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that's assault, not leadership." – Dwight D. Eisenhower
If only it were true. If only the presidency were a ceremonial position, an elected figurehead, the secular equivalent of a spiritual leader whose advice we were free to accept or reject by our own criteria — if only the Declaration of Independence were taken literally, with "the consent of the governed" understood to mean the individual consent of the individual governed — then I wouldn't feel nearly so frightened by the upcoming elections. Clinton, Obama, McCain? They don't seem so scary if you think of them as holding positions equivalent to those of the pope or the Dalai Lama.
What do you think? Did Truman and Eisenhower feel embarrassed by the overtly coercive nature of the executive office, or were they merely embarrassed by the idea that the rest of us might be on to them?
No matter what else you might think of George Washington, he deserves some credit for a more candid assessment of the position he inaugurated:
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
In this book forum from the Cato Institute, John Stossel (Co-Anchor of ABC's 20/20) discusses his latest book Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong. In his entertaining, no-nonsense style Stossel advocates opening up K-12 education to the free markets because he feels American public schools are falling behind the rest of the world and competition would give school systems the necessary kick they need to get America's schools back on top. This audio program is available on MP3 download as well as streaming audio from the Cato Institute and streaming video from FORA.tv.
Consumer advocate, investigative reporter, and bestselling author Stossel is back with a new audiobook based on his top-rated "20/20" segment, which debunks popularly reported misconceptions.
"Both primitive man and the infant, in a naive anthropomorphic attitude, consider it quite plausible that every change and event is the outcome of the action of a being acting in the same way as they themselves do. They believe that animals, plants, mountains, rivers, and fountains, even stones and celestial bodies, are, like themselves, feeling, willing, and acting beings. Only at a later stage of cultural development does man renounce these animistic ideas and substitute the mechanistic world view for them. Mechanicalism proves to be so satisfactory a principle of conduct that people finally believe it capable of solving all the problems of thought and scientific research. Materialism and panphysicalism proclaim mechanicalism as the essence of all knowledge and the experimental and mathematical methods of the natural sciences as the sole scientific mode of thinking."
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is a radio program that tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity. Written and hosted by John Lienhard, it is heard nationally on Public Radio and produced by KUHF-FM Houston. Among other features, this web site houses the transcripts for every episode heard since the show's inception in 1988.
Click here for the newest Engines episode, No. 2342.
Recent Engines episodes are now available as a Podcast. Click Here.
Each individual episode begins with a link to its audio version.
(By the way, Hannibal was famously from Africa, but he wasn't black. The Carthaginians — aka Phoenicians, aka Canaanites — originated in the Middle East. It's probably better to picture him as Lebanese, and played by, oh, I don't know, maybe Alexander Siddig of DS9. Oh, look! He played Hannibal in a 2006 TV movie I never heard of.)
Anyway, with all the different perspectives I'm getting on the Punic Wars and their significance, I was still caught off guard by H.G. Wells's summary from A Short History of the World:
It was in 264 B.C. that the great struggle between Rome and Carthage, the Punic Wars, began. In that year Asoka was beginning his reign in Behar and Shi-Hwang-ti was a little child, the Museum in Alexandria was still doing good scientific work, and the barbaric Gauls were now in Asia Minor and exacting a tribute from Pergamum. The different regions of the world were still separated by insurmountable distances, and probably the rest of mankind heard only vague and remote rumours of the mortal fight that went on for a century and a half in Spain, Italy, North Africa and the western Mediterranean, between the last stronghold of Semitic power and Rome, this newcomer among Aryan-speaking peoples.
That war has left its traces upon issues that still stir the world. Rome triumphed over Carthage, but the rivalry of Aryan and Semite was to merge itself later on in the conflict of Gentile and Jew. Our history now is coming to events whose consequences and distorted traditions still maintain a lingering and expiring vitality in, and exercise a complicating and confusing influence upon, the conflicts and controversies of to-day. [emphasis added]
Amerigo Vespucci was born at Fiorenze (Florence, Italy) on this day in 1451. As a youth he read widely, collected and copied maps, and studied briefly under Michelangelo. He became an agent of the Medicis and was dispatched to Spain in 1492. While there he learned of ships and navigation, and made four voyages to the New World, exploring far more of the coast than Columbus, but his first voyage wasn't until 1499. Although he wasn't the first, he was the first to comprehend that this was not the Indies — Columbus died believing he had reached Asia. One German cartographer labeled South America as "America" in Vespucci's honor, and even when he changed his mind the name had stuck…
In honor of the birthday boy, I republish this lowercase liberty classic:
Monday, November 27, 2006
proud to be misnomerian
I'm proud to be an American.
I won't try to defend that pride: it's based mostly on things I had no responsibility for and no control over, which puts the pride in the same camp as many other collectivist emotions, but I can't pretend I don't feel it just because I think it's irrational.
One of the things I'm proud about is that "American" is a contested word — contested by another entire continent (not to mention 2 other nation-states on my own continent). There's something very fitting to me about the label being so over- and underdefined.
No one calls me a United Statesian, even though that would be a more accurate description of my official statist citizenship.
Another thing I'm proud of about the American label is that it comes from the phenomenal PR genius Amerigo Vespucci — not because he discovered anything, but because his maps and stories promoted curiosity and fantasy about this New World back in the Old World. (And I'm proud to descend from the cultural and economic history of that Old World.)
We United Statesians somehow managed to get primary claim to the term "American" even though Amerigo's maps were of SOUTH America. The nerve of us.
Meanwhile, the people of the extended gene pool of those the Pilgrims feasted with are called Indians (unless you're politically correct enough to call them "Native Americans," which would make you a sequacious numskull, since the term literally means anyone born in America — wherever that is (as you know, my own favorite term is Amerindividual, but that's not very helpful, since I'm a native-born Amerindividual myself)). They're called Indians because Columbus thought he found them in India. To distinguish them from the real Indians in real India, they came to be called American Indians, which still begs the where-is-America question.
Lest we let the Europeans get too smug about this absurd tangle of longstanding misnomers, let me point out that France and England are both named for German tribes (which isn't so much a misnomer as it is a little confusing), Scotland literally means "The Land of the Irish," (and Ireland does not mean the Land of Ire — though it sure sounds like it does), and finally, the name "Spain" comes from the Phoenician word I-Shaphan, meaning "The Island of Hyraxes." Is Spain an island? No. What's a Hyrax, you might ask? Wikipedia tells us that they are any of 4 species of small, thickset, herbivorous mammals living in Africa or the Middle East — but not in Spain. That's like naming my part of the world "the satellite of penguins."
I'd love to hear more examples of misnomerian nationalities.
"A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." – Alford Korzybski, 1879–1950
could help the world to understand that there is no Just War, there is just war — and that wars are not caused by isolationists and peaceniks but by the promoters of warfare.
I find it very encouraging that World War II revisionism is becoming an open topic in our culture. I hope that in the next few decades, it loses its unique status as the one historical war we're not supposed to scrutinize too closely. This review and book help me in that hope.
According to my quote of the day email, "Today is the traditional feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who died on this day in 1274. He was a scholar, theologian, and philosopher — both in the modern sense and the older sense meaning scientist."
Here's a quotation I wouldn't have expected from a Catholic saint:
"Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them."
March 30th, 2008 by 
bkmarcus
From qotd:
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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.
Now I learn of this gem from Truman's successor:
Only at a later stage of cultural development does man renounce these animistic ideas and substitute the mechanistic world view for them. Mechanicalism proves to be so satisfactory a principle of conduct that people finally believe it capable of solving all the problems of thought and scientific research. Materialism and panphysicalism proclaim mechanicalism as the essence of all knowledge and the experimental and mathematical methods of the natural sciences as the sole scientific mode of thinking."
I've become a bit obsessed with Carthage and Hannibal recently. Between the 
According to my