"All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage."

– The Dhammapada: Path of the Dharma

Here is today's word from A.Word.A.Day:

And here is an example of an ancient boustrophedon:

The Gortyn Code

I once recommended George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman to a libertarian comrade who then said, "Wasn't he a socialist?"

Shaw's socialism wasn't as harmless as some shavians would want us to believe, but neither do I think it was coincidence that this brilliant playwright was friends with such antisocialists (in the shavian state-socialist sense) as G.K. Chesterton and Benjamin Tucker.

Also, when most intellectuals 100 years ago were somewhere on the spectrum from pink to red, we can't be too surprised when the cleverest stuff came from the pens of the revolutionary Left — or, in Shaw's case, the evolutionary Left.

Shaw hated the quirks of English spelling. True to the central-planning spirit (the version of "rationalism" that F.A. Hayek decried and sometimes mistakenly applied to his allies), Shaw wanted English spelling revised to be simple, straightforward, and logical.

To illustrate how much current spelling was the opposite of these three virtues, Shaw offered the following spelling of "fish":

ghoti

If you don't think that looks like an English spelling of something pronounced fish, then you're not alone. But Shaw pointed out that combining the gh of "tough" with the o of "women" and the ti of "nation" produced the exact phonemes needed for "fish."

(I just double-checked Wikipedia, and apparently Shaw didn't originate this suggested spelling; he just popularized it.)

This is not a non sequitur:

I'm listening to The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch. So far it's reminding me of my favorite stuff by Simon Winchester.

The Buried Book relays this amusing ghoti-like mistake in the rediscovery of ancient Mesopotamian mythology:

[A] major complication in the process … was that cuneiform had originally been developed in southern Mesopotamia by people who spoke Sumerian, an ancient language completely unrelated to any other known language. The script had then been taken over by speakers of Akkadian, which became the most commonly written language for much of Mesopotamian history. Yet the Akkadian scribes continued to learn Sumerian as they mastered the script, and they often employed Sumerian loan words amid their Akkadian texts. It is as though, in reading an English text we would often have to pause and determine whether pain meant 'suffering,' as in English, or 'bread,' as in French.

Conversely, a sign might have the same meaning in Akkadian as in Sumerian but a completely different sound: when used to mean 'sky,' the star symbol is pronounced an in Sumerian, but shamu in Akkadian. Names in particular could be tricky, for Assyrian names often included Sumerian elements, along with Akkadian symbols. This would lead George Smith [a self-taught linguist responsible for the first translation of Gilgamesh], for example, to misread the name Gilgamesh as 'Izdubar'; he didn't realize that what looked like two Akkadian characters, iz and du, were actually Sumerian signs pronounced 'giz-ga' or 'gil-ga.' He then guessed incorrectly on the final syllable, which was Akkadian as he assumed, but which can be pronounced either 'bar' or 'mesh.' … The reading of 'Gilgamesh' was finally established twenty-five years later by Smith's friend and successor Theophilus G. Pinches, in an article triumphantly entitled "EXIT GISTUBAR!"

(Transcription stolen from "Dare I read?")

This is from About.com : Babies & Toddlers :

Court Intervenes, Changes Child's Name

From the story in the Telegraph:

A lawyer acting for the girl claimed she was so embarrassed by her name that she had kept it from her friends, insisting she should be known as 'K' instead. She also feared that if it became public she would be mocked and teased.

The lawyer claimed the girl fully understood the absurdity of her name, unlike her parents who had not considered the implications when they named her.

Justice Robert Murfitt said the name clearly presented a social hurdle for the child.

Read the rest of the story, too. It's got lots of examples of names that folks have given their kids as well as names rejected by the New Zealand government. I'm also reading a book right now called Bad Baby Names which has some incredibly funny and sad (please don't name your kid Typhus or Rubella) baby naming blunders.

It makes me think of the "Seinfeld" episode where Jerry couldn't remember the name of the girl he was dating and she told him that it rhymed with a female body part. They spent the rest of the episode trying to figure it out. "Mulva?" Turns out it was Delores. It also makes me wonder how I would feel if the government wanted to tell me that I couldn't give my child a name that they didn't approve of. With the last name Brown, I had plenty of choices of odd baby names and being a strange girl with a bizarre sense of humor, some pretty entertaining ones came up during the initial phases of baby name negotiation. In the end, I chose a name that was pretty normal and had significance on both sides of our family. Certainly we won't be having any upcoming days in court over it.

Then I think about that song, "Boy Named Sue," and I wonder if giving your kid a name like Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii might build character or prepare them for some serious adversity that they may face later in life. Maybe they're doing a disservice by changing her name now. But... Nah.

What Do You Think?

Right now in the poll, almost half of you say that the court should be allowed to intervene in cases like this.

Chante says,

I agree with the court. I don't for one minute think that their intervention was wrong, for the reason that the girl was so utterly embarrassed. If someone had a totally bizarre name, but was proud of it... maybe that would be a different story.

Michelle says,

I disagree with the court. No one should have any rights over the parents unless the parents were causing harm to their children. A name does not cause harm. Why didnt the girl who obvously is smart just have people call her Talula or Mary or Jessica? My daughter's name is Sunshine. Everybody told me that she would be made fun of. It is exactly the opposite. Everybody alwasy tells her how pretty her name is.

This paragraph from Human Action forces me to check my vulgar antimilitary reflexes and seek a subtler understanding of the nature of demand and the fallacy of manufactured demand:

The moralists' and sermonizers' critique of profits misses the point. It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers — the people, the common man — prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling "bad" things than in selling "good" things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely. People do not drink intoxicating beverages in order to make the "alcohol capital" happy, and they do not go to war in order to increase the profits of the "merchants of death." The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause. (c15, s9)

What did Mises make of President Eisenhower's warning of a growing "military-industrial complex"? Did he dismiss the MIC as a left-wing bogey man? And what did Rothbard make of the statement, "The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause"?

We Rothbardians tend to reject the standard left-wing claims about "manufactured demand" when they are hurled at private enterprise; do we fall into a similar fallacy when we imply a manufactured demand for military spending?

In one sense, no, it's not parallel: you can get people to "support" all sorts of things when they're not free to volunteer or withhold payment. Political polls on spending priorities falsely imply that how people choose to spend their dollars and how they want the government to spend "its" dollars is somehow the same thing.

Of course it's not. My real-life expressed preferences, complete with internalized opportunity costs and the direct benefit of my spending decisions, are very concrete. They reveal my values based on what trade-offs I've actually made. My vocalized "preferences" for how tax dollars are spent is always abstract, and produces very little practical consequence for me either way.

So when the voting public howls for Osama's head or Saddam's head or for the head of whoever is the current bad guy, there's definitely something manufactured about this "demand" — something orchestrated. People tend to lose their enthusiasm for war when they start to see the bill, so to speak. This suggests that their initial support for war would be similarly muted if they had to make the immediate choice of reaching into their wallets and paying for war or using that same money instead to buy beer or books, faster DSL or a bigger HDTV.

But there's another sense in which I think I've been sloppy in attributing power to the malevolent MIC. I sometimes unthinkingly blame the arms dealers for the knee-jerk hawks themselves. When, in fact, the hawks are just knee jerks.

I think there's a lot to be said for the political power of hiding the costs of policy. But this externalization of costs is really different from the manufacturing of demand. A more pacific people would not have fallen for the great neo-Con, no matter how much the books were cooked.

It is not the business of the entrepreneurs to make people substitute sound ideologies for unsound. It rests with the philosophers to change people's ideas and ideals. The entrepreneur serves the consumers as they are today, however wicked and ignorant. (Ibid.)

I think I'll use Jeffrey Tucker's blog post about Batman: The Dark Knight as an excuse to repost my review of Batman Begins from 3 years ago:

der Fledermaus Mann fängt an

Joe Salerno must be feeling a void after his great summer seminar, June 6-10 [2005] at LvMI.

(I've listened to 9 of the 10 lectures, so far. I'd better finish #10 tonight so I can focus on Tom Woods's summer seminar starting tomorrow.)

Salerno seems to have turned to film reviews, starting with this critique of Batman Begins.

I've just returned from a sold-out matinee.

Salerno says, "This is the best Batman movie yet." I agree.

He says, "Bale's Batman is dark, dangerous, disturbed, dehumanized and vengeful — as he was meant to be." Right on.

He says, "The new menacing-looking, tank-like, car-crunching, building-smashing Batmobile is a better reflection of Batman's spiritual being than the sleek Batmobile of earlier movies." I agree enthusiastically, and I add that it's clearly based on Frank Miller's vision of the revamped Batmobile in the great 1985 graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns. (My impression is that this movie began as a film adaptation of Miller's follow-up series, Batman: Year One. If so, little of the original remains, but I certainly think Batman Begins is the most "Milleresque" of Hollywood's attempts to tell Bruce Wayne's story. To whatever extent modern audiences can imagine Batman as "dark, dangerous, disturbed, dehumanized and vengeful" instead of the high-camp grinning idiocy of Adam West, we have Frank Miller to thank for it.)

Salerno says, "The slow-paced and meandering build-up in the first half hour or so ultimately pays off handsomely in the movie's climactic scenes, with plenty of action and suspense along the way." While we both enjoyed the movie, my review is the opposite of his: my favorite part of the movie is the "slow-paced and meandering build-up" — the best superhero origin back story I've yet seen on film. Was it only half an hour? Felt more like an hour to me, and I was enjoying all of it. Felt like we didn't even get to see the hero costume for the first half of the film, and for my tastes, the story deteriorated from that point on. Not much. It would still have been the best Batman movie ever, even if they'd started at what I'm calling the downturn. But I definitely preferred the character of Bruce Wayne to the character of Batman.

So why is an Austrian School economist reviewing a superhero movie?

I'll say that before I read Salerno's review (which I saved for after the movie), I was already thinking that this was the most self-consciously economically minded comic book movie I've seen. Some of this economic mindedness is revealed in the standard myths and misunderstandings of economic illiteracy, but there were two points I thought Austrians could readily embrace.

Point #1:

The first one turns out to be something Salerno did not at all embrace, but put into the economically illiterate column of the tally:

The notion that a conspiracy of bad guys can "use economics as a weapon" to cause a depression in Gotham City is ridiculous — unless they have somehow infiltrated the Federal Reserve System.

Well, yes, exactly. Why shouldn't we believe that this is precisely what the bad guys have done?

No, it's not specifically explained that way, but what is both explained and demonstrated is that the bad guys have infiltrated every level of every aspect of Gotham City government. How much sense would it make for them to have kept their hands out of the federal government's mechanisms?

Do I assume that the screenwriters understand that government monetary inflation is responsible for the business cycle? No, I don't assume that. (But if they did understand, they'd be wise to keep the details of their insight out of the script. After all, they're trying to turn a tidy profit, and therefore want the overwhelming population of young Marxoids to buy film tickets and recommend the movie to their young Marxoid friends.)

What I embrace in this detail is the perception that depressions are created! They are not natural, not just an inevitable symptom of market economies. They are artifacts of intervention, and this is what I take to be the point.

The film posits a criminal conspiracy behind a devastating economic depression. That's only half the story — Austrians know that the criminal intervention is a conspiracy of bankers and politicians — but that's already more than I ever expected to get from Hollywood film writers. As Murray Rothbard would say: their suspicions are right, even if they don't have all the details (although when Rothbard said it, he was referring to people's suspicions of bankers — not of criminal secret societies).

Point #2:

"Where does he get those wonderful toys?"

When I was a smart-alec kid, watching James Bond marathons, my smart-alec friends and I would question the logistics of the bad guys' lairs. How did Dr. No arrange for the construction of a secret volcano fortress? Fine, the bad guys had plenty of money from past bad-guy activities, but how did they turn it into so much advanced infrastructure and technology.

What we never questioned was how MI6 managed to do the same. We grew up in an era when most people took for granted that governments had technology more advanced than we had on the private market — and feared that the Soviets' infrastructure and technology were just that much better than MI6 and the CIA's. That was the Cold War mentality, and even those of us who opposed the Cold War often failed to question its most basic assumptions — like the idea that command economies could out-compete free economies.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the discovery that we'd been lied to for decades by both Left and Right (each for their own reasons) about the strength of the Soviet economy and military, and after finally learning some of the economics behind the reality behind the lies, I now find every adventure movie to come out of the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s to be based in the economic misunderstandings of Cold-War thinking. (Even the supposedly somewhat libertarian The Incredibles suffers from this ignorance — though I suppose we can forgive a movie that is consciously playing with an already established superhero tradition. PoMo, donchaknow.)

But how can Batman have such an elaborately constructed Batcave? Well, in this movie, he doesn't. The cave looks like a cave, not like an underground military installation. There are no hydraulic lifts, no supercomputer, absolutely nothing it would take negotiations with teamsters to construct. We even see Bruce Wayne himself rappelling down from the cave ceiling where he's been putting in the lighting. Faithful butler Alfred stands by the small gas-powered generator that provides the electricity.

And how can Batman have such high-tech crime-fighting gadgetry unavailable on the market?

The old answer was the Bruce Wayne is a billionaire — same answer for James Bond's supervillains.

But Batman Begins offers no such pretense. We see Alfred and Bruce Wayne planning how to buy which parts of the costume from which foreign manufacturers, without attracting attention. We learn that the department of the Wayne Corporation originally funded to develop defense technology has been all but shut down, as the new WayneCorp management focuses on government weapons contracts.

Of course Bruce Wayne didn't build the Batmobile! What were you thinking?

Batman's high-tech costume, vehicles, gadgetry — they are products of the market, abandoned with changes in demand. (Though the demand comes from government, not consumers.)

Batman's gadgets are what economists call "sunk costs". They already exist and have already been paid for, whether or not anyone wants or can afford to buy them. They're too expensive to mass-produce, given the lack of demand, but they've already been produced as prototypes.

Batman Begins is not Austrian, not even as much as "The Berlin Batman" (1, 2, 3), but it is by far the most market-oriented superhero movie I'm aware of. Many libertarians celebrated The Incredibles for its Randian individualism and bourgeois family values, and I can join them in much of that, but The Incredibles also showed the private insurance corporation as criminally malicious while giving a complete pass to the secret government agency that enforces the ban on private security (a.k.a. superheroes). I guess libertarians have to take what we can get. But for my money, the more interesting questions are asked by Batman Begins — even if the answers it hints at are sometimes less than satisfactory.

One of the books that is still on sale at Audible.com is Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

Some Austrian scholars are discussing it on one of the mailing lists, and I decided to move it from my wishlist to my shopping cart.

I can't really review or recommend it, since I've only listened to about a quarter of it, so far, but I suspect I'll be giving it a thumbs up.

Meanwhile, I mention it here because I'm overwhelmed by how much of it already vindicates

1. Murray Rothbard's foreign-policy analysis from the 1950s onward, and

2. Robert Anton Wilson's information-theory analysis from "Celine's Laws," which you can read here on my website.

"No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other."

Pilar Diez del Corral writes,

I'm a doctor in Art History and I usually read your blog with great interest. Do you think "The Human Action" is too difficult for a reader like me? I mean, is it a very technical book only for economits? I'm actually interested in understanding the mechanics of the economy because my country (Spain) is under the worst goverment in its last seventy years. We're suffering an extraordinary economic crisis and our "premier" keeps on denying it!

When I first tried reading Human Action, I got very bogged down in the beginning and then gave up for a while. I had come to Austrian economics through Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson (or rather, through the audiobook version, read by Jeff Riggenbach), and I think that's a great place to start. I also recommend The Concise Guide to Economics (which has the advantage of being brief, clear, and online!) and Economics for Real People, by Gene Callahan. All of these books are included in Mises.org's list of books for beginners, as is the MP3CD of Rothbard's Economics 101, which I proudly produced.

But so far I'm mostly just repeating my old post "where to begin."

Pilar Diez del Corral is asking something more specific.

Before I return to the specific question, however, let me say that I've also read a few popular introductions to mainstream economics; audited an online intro course, which used McConnell & Brue, one of the most popular college intro texts; and listened to the Teaching Company's introduction to economics, as well. I decided that the standard Austrian accusations against mainstream economics were true. There may be exceptions out there, but for the layman trying to achieve economic literacy, I recommend the books you can get at Mises.org — and while I can easily be accused of bias, I assure you that I came to Mises.org through Austrianism and not the other way around. All the books I've listed so far, I originally purchased through Amazon.com. I didn't even know about Mises.org until I was reading Callahan's book, which The Mises Institute published.

So back to Human Action. I've been preparing a chapter a month for over a year now, running them as weekend editions, usually the first weekend of every month.

As part of this preparation, I've also been preparing HTML versions of Bob Murphy's study guide chapters, which are extremely helpful. You can find these HTML versions listed among Murphy's daily articles at Mises.org or you can grab the first 32 chapters here in PDF.

If you start by reading a chapter of Murphy, then a chapter of Mises, alternating your way through Human Action, I think you'll find it much more accessible, and I have to say that reading Mises quickly becomes a blast. If your experience is at all like mine, you'll find that you acclimate to his prose style, which might seem stiff at first, and you'll develop a profound appreciation for his logic and his thoroughness.

In every chapter I prepare, there are passages I find very funny and passages I find very revealing — lots of AH HA! moments — and sometimes they're the same passages. As I said, the very beginning might take some getting used to, and I've only made it through half the book at this point, but I very much look forward to reading the rest. I will end up having taken 2 or 3 years to read the whole thing, but that doesn't bother me. It's a book to digest, not a book to swallow whole.

Yes, it is "a very technical book," but no, it is certainly not "only for economists."

My mother understands me well enough to send me this cartoon:

I'm not usually a big fan of Maxine, but this one spoke to me.

"Just when I can't stand the Right anymore, I'm reminded of how blockheaded and resistant to economic knowledge the Left is."

At this point I spend more money on audiobooks than I spend on print books (although that's in part because loved ones send me print books as gifts (thanks, loved ones!)) and it adds up fast. For me, it's worth it, but the hefty price of audiobooks makes it hard for a newcomer to try things out, especially when there's so much free audio available online. Why pay for the professionals? Again, for me, the professionals earn their keep, but I can easily see why this is a hard case to make.

So it's very smart of Audible.com to hold these holiday and summer sales. The one going on now is a doozy: a list of "summer paperbacks" (which I assume means the audio versions of books that, in print, are paperbacks) for only $5.95 each.

I just grabbed these, all unabridged:

• Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers by Michael Barone
• How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion
  by Daniel H. Wilson
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by (yes, our very own) Dr. Robert P. Murphy

The only reason The Whiskey Rebellion by William Hogeland isn't also on that list is because I already own it.

Here are the on-sale titles I didn't buy but do recommend:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clark
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Another on-sale title that I already own and listened to only last spring is The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager.

It is a fascinating and little-known tale about the first false steps and real advances that took us from an age of epidemics and common childhood death and crippling disease to a medical era of inoculations, antibiotics, and surging survival rates. It does have an unbelievably naive chapter about the heroic government finally gaining the power to reign in and regulate the evil capitalists, but you can fast-forward through that section. The rest of the book is unexpectedly engrossing.

I'm embarrassed by how little of this I knew and how much of our current condition I'd taken for granted. Less than 100 years ago, the rich and powerful shared with the poor and marginalized the likelihood of seeing at least one of their children (or the mother, giving birth do those children) die from the sort of disease and infection we barely think about today. Millennia of disease followed by less than a century of pharmaceuticals.

My whole family took turns being miserably sick last week from a mysterious infection, so this topic hits home right now. After listening to The Demon Under the Microscope, I'm more grateful than ever to have been born in the 20th century and to still be alive in the 21st.

I was working on an article by Thorsten Polleit today, when I was taken by this passage he quotes from Ludwig von Mises. I made a mental note to blog it after Mises.org publishes the Polleit article, but Jeffrey Tucker got the same idea and ran with it earlier, so I guess that frees me up to blog it now:

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. The individual is always ready to ascribe his good luck to his own efficiency and to take it as a well-deserved reward for his talent, application, and probity. But reverses of fortune he always charges to other people, and most of all to the absurdity of social and political institutions. He does not blame the authorities for having fostered the boom. He reviles them for the inevitable collapse. In the opinion of the public, more inflation and more credit expansion are the only remedy against the evils which inflation and credit expansion have brought about. (Human Action, chapter 20, section 9)

When I was a young teenager, I looked forward to being middle aged. Part of the story there is that my fictional heroes were all middle aged, most of them played by Humphrey Bogart. So when I have these boy-do-I-feel-like-an-old-codger moments, I know I can't take them too seriously, since I've probably been having them since statute law decreed me too young to drink, vote, sign contracts, etc.

Here's my latest old-codger moment: on LRC this morning, Lew links to "Are We There Yet? The ten best travel games aren't just for kids." I quickly clicked the link, expecting Botticelli (my favorite) plus 9 more ways for parents and children to pass the travel miles. My reaction to this list of gadgets and gizmos was (I kid you not), Why, in my day, we had to entertain ourselves with knowledge, with words, with imagination!

My father and I played many rounds of Botticelli during my childhood. I've since played with almost anyone I've shared a long drive with. It's not "just a game." I have fond and detailed memories of long Botticelli sessions with old friends and former loves.

On blog.Mises, as a late comment to Hans Hoppe's "On the Impossibility of Limited Government," Joe Stoutenburg makes an important point that I have yet to hear any of the better-known ancaps address:

Having an actuarial background and working for a large insurance company, I have long been intrigued with the idea of insurance companies providing security. I believe that the arrangements could work. There are two main factors (in addition to throwing off the yoke of oppressive government) that must be worked out:

1. The public greatly mistrusts insurance companies. How would they be convinced to accept insurance company services for government? [Though I have to wonder why they trust government more than insurance companies...]

2. Sadly, much of the mistrust is well-placed. Insurance companies enjoy many advantages through regulations, barriers to entry, tax laws and so forth. While the institutions of insurance require massive assets, I'm not convinced that individual companies must be so gigantic. There are markets for sharing risk, and insurance industries fight their development for fear of losing dominance. While insurance companies do compete among each, the level of innovation in a free market would drastically change the industry.

In short, the marketplace could provide the services outlined in this article. But the current insurance industry would probably drastically change if it was to adapt to an unfettered market.