Jeffrey Tucker points us to an excellent article in Reason by senior editor Brian Doherty:

“Conservatism’s Hollow Defeat: The intellectual right, now in the wilderness, keeps deluding itself about supposed past glories.”

Here are my favorite passages from his review of some new histories of the American Right:

Schneider might not agree, but the lesson that comes through most clearly is this: War is the health of the state and the death of a principled movement supposedly dedicated to keeping the state limited. From the Cold War to the Iraq war, conservatives—and certainly Republicans—have sacrificed liberty in the name of national security.

[...]

There’s a reason most books about the right don’t recount these tales, or at least not in great detail: The intellectual and political tradition they represented was modern libertarianism, not modern conservatism. Phillips-Fein elides this point by telling a story about conservatism that pretty much ignores what became its constitutive aspect: foreign policy and the Cold War, which is the battleground on which the nascent libertarian and conservative movements fought and eventually separated.

[...]

While Phillips-Fein isn’t 100 percent solid on all the nuances of the ideas of the Austrian libertarian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, she is far more savvy than most nonlibertarians who grapple with them in noting that their thinking was not conservative—that is, they were not defenders of any existing plutocratic privilege. Instead, they stood for the notion that “the market created a space of freedom, a world in which individual action could revolutionize society.”

[...]

Truly radical free market policies, of the sort Read and Mullendore supported, have always been and remain a niche concern, not the focus of a major political party or movement. Businessmen in politics mostly have supported what they think they need to support to get by in a world of omnipresent government. That sometimes entails loosening a particular regulation or trimming a particular tax, but it almost never entails general advocacy of laissez faire.

I love this history and I’m amazed at how consistently the mainstream (both Right and Left) gets it wrong. Doherty points to the essential reason: if you don’t follow the distinctions among these supposedly “right-wing” ideas — and the fact that the libertarian and conservative threads of this intellectual history are ultimately incompatible — then you can’t possibly makes sense of the discrepancy between word and deed in the 20th-century American Right.

For a history that does get it, you still have to turn to Rothbard’s Betrayal of the American Right.

I can’t comment on Doherty’s own Radicals for Capitalism, since I haven’t read it. (It came out just as my own focus was shifting more intensely from modern history to the ancient variety.) But if “Conservatism’s Hollow Defeat” is any indication, we have in Doherty a singular and worthy historian of American political thought.

Jeffrey Tucker’s blog post on Keynes is worth quoting in full:

Keynes Politely Explains How to Destroy Civilization

From time to time, it is a good idea to remind yourself what it is that Keynes actually believed, and there’s no better place than his final chapter of The General Theory (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch24.htm), in which he presents his view, at once vitriolic and uncomprehending concerning laissez-faire but politely stepping away from recommending full-scale socialism in all things.

His goal is “transmuting human nature,” not managing it — though this claim if ridiculous on its face, since it is presumably impossible to change one element into another, as in attempted alchemy, without managing it.

You will also find here his bonkers view that the state can abolish the interest rate with the stroke of a pen and thereby guarantee full employment. Of course this means the “euthanasia of the rentier” who wickedly exploits such inconvenient facts as the scarcity of capital. Still, nothing short of the “socialisation of investment” is needed finally to bring utopia. A good start, he writes, would be very high taxes on the rich.

Won’t all of this change the incentive structure of society? Sure, he admits, but not enough to make a difference anyone should care about.

I’m sorry, but reading this guy again just gives me the chills. I can easily imagine his dispassionately narrating events in a Gulag, justifying every horror with a pseudo-scientific rationale made up on the spot.

Oh wait: he did do that. As he wrote in the 1936 foreword to the German edition of The General Theory: “Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a lance measure of laissez-faire.”

The Hazlitt evisceration should never have been necessary but I’m glad he did it.

After all the ghastly statism of the Bush years, you might think that the Left would back off from using power to achieve its aims. Instead, they have learned nothing. The Left has been lying in wait for its chance. As the Obama people entered the White House, it was as if they found a closet labeled “failed ideas of the past.” They opened it and the contents spilled everywhere. They started grabbing things and putting them in the regulatory books and in legislation.

FULL ARTICLE

Briggs Armstrong writes an excellent post on blog.Mises.org about the “regression fallacy” and the fact that so many people consider the boom phase of the past decade to have been “normal”:

There is nothing normal about a recession; likewise, a boom phase is equally abnormal. During the boom phase no one asked when the banks would return to normal lending practices.

[...]

It is important that we are aware of our tendency to make this mistake. If the goal for the economy is to return to “normal” then we must recognize that the last several years have been an exceptional boom, not normal or average.

But my wife added an important twist to Armstrong’s observation. She pointed out to me that many people were asking exactly the right questions during the dot-com bubble. And while there were people back then who insisted that the rules had changed (there always are such people), the general public didn’t seem especially shocked when that particular bubble popped.

So what’s the difference? She suggests that a boom in a new technology will be looked on with more suspicion than a boom in something as basic and familiar as housing.

I, of course, discovered the Austrians during this post-dot-com/post-9/11 boom, so I was plenty aware that we were in another classic bubble, but apparently far fewer people thought so in 2004 than had thought so in 1999.

It’s the invisibility of the boom period that makes people open to New Deal nonsense when the bubble pops. All bubbles are bad, but perhaps tech bubbles are somewhat less bad.

Two cheers for cultural elitism.

This is from About.com’s art-history mailing:

Do I Have to Like Everything?

This is an awfully frequently Frequently Asked Question that makes me sad and angry. How can The Arts expect to drum up popular support (read: ask for increased public funding) when many Arts writers seem hell-bent on alienating the tax-paying public? It’s arrogant and stupid, I tell you. In a better world, art should be presented to all humans as human friendly, by humans who are capable of BEING friendly.

So is it human friendly to coerce funding, so long as you make it feel inclusive? Or should we conclude from this note that About.com’s art-history guide is hell-bent on alienating fiscal conservatives and principled libertarians?

I have the same frustration with a lecture series I just finished listening to on classical archaeology. Hardly a lecture passed without an appeal for more “enlightened” government policies — meaning a disregard for property rights. Apparently an interest in the physical evidence of ancient cultures requires a paternalistic philosophy and a preference for expansive government.

(And of course, the underlying problem in both examples is the unquestioned assumption that anyone interested in education must have left-wing politics.)

Come on!

Seriously, how hard is this distinction?

Obama Change in Stem-Cell Policy Imminent

“U.S. President Barack Obama will soon issue an executive order lifting an eight-year ban embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, a senior adviser said on Sunday.” (Reuters, Sunday)

Correction: The ban wasn’t on research; it was on tax-financing of research.

FEE Timely Classic

“Some Thoughts on Taxation” by George C. Leef

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have, for years, thought the ban was on the research itself.

(Can you blame this one on my not reading newspapers? Apparently the newspapers perpetuate the confusion.)

Calvin reconstructs Pascal’s Wager:

Via LRC:

“There are a lot of aspects of selling education that are tinged with consumer fraud,” Sander says. “There is a definite conspiracy to lead students down a primrose path.”

“The Great College Hoax,” by Kathy Kristof,
Forbes magazine, February 02, 2009

Hustler magazine’s Larry Flint

Nobody could imagine that pornographers would be brazen enough to line up at the government trough. But sure enough, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt and Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame have asked their local Congressman, Henry Waxman, for $5 billion because, “People are too depressed to be sexually active,” according to Flynt. Ever the patriot, Flynt says an unsexed nation is an “unhealthy” nation. “Americans can do without cars and such but they cannot do without sex.”

But the jobs that Joe Francis assured Fox Business that he and Flynt would create are likely to be jobs for intellectual-property lawyers, in hopes of benefiting Hustler and Francis’s Mantra Films, Inc. at the expense of their innovative and creative competitors. FULL ARTICLE

During my sojourn in Israel, two things conspired to make me, quite fleetingly, a newspaper reader:

1. Someone — either the Jewish Agency or the kibbutz — provided all ulpanists with free copies of the Jerusalem Post;
2. Israel’s state-run radio and television stations went on strike for 52 days.

So for the only time in my life, I read more than the funny pages when handed a newspaper.

I remember three things from that brief tryst (or was it a forced marriage?):

1. The scandalous official visit to Israel of Italian porn-star-turned-politician Cicciolina;
2. Black Monday;
3. an editorial on why Israel should side with Iran against Iraq.

The gist of the editorial was that Arabs hated Jews more than non-Arab Muslims did, and not only was Iran non-Arab but the Iranians had a strong historical link with the Jews, and the recent anti-Semitic rhetoric from Iran was just bluff and posturing for the Muslim world.

I had no idea what it was talking about. I don’t think I had fully realized before reading that editorial that Iranians are not Arabs (!) and I had no idea what historical links it was referring to. I’m sure I didn’t know that "Iranians" and "Persians" referred to the same people, and if I had known, I didn’t have much clue who the Persians were in history and what their connection was to Judah, Jerusalem, or the Jews.

Now the two worst enemies the Jews had before the Romans destroyed the Temple for the second and last time in 70 AD, were (1) the Babylonians who destroyed the Temple in 587 BC (and exiled the Jews from Judah), and (2) the Seleucids whose treatment of the Jews is written about symbolically in the Book of Daniel and less symbolically in 1 Maccabees.

Iran Rescues Jews from the Babylonians

Cyrus the Great, in founding the first Persian Empire, overthrew the Babylonians, released the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and even sponsored the building of the Second Temple. The Jews were so fond of Cyrus that the Book of Isaiah refers to him as God’s anointed (aka messiah aka christ).

Iran Rescues Jews from "the Grecians"

From Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, pp. 720f:

Persia

The Jewish victory at Beth-horon was sufficiently spectacular to raise the rebellion from a local tumult to an internationally observed matter. Clearly the prestige of the regime now required that a major effort be put into the suppression of the rebels.

Unfortunately for Antiochus it was easier to see the need than to do something about it. The same old problem arose — lack of money. Furthermore, the empire was fading at the other end, too. If Judas and his army of irregulars were shaking the west, in the east whole provinces were falling away.

The Parthian rulers, who had been subservient to the Seleucids even as late as the reign of Antiochus III, were little by little enlarging their independence. In 171 B.C., a vigorous king, Mithridates I, ascended the Parthian throne and the last vestige of dependence on the Seleucids disappeared. Indeed, Mithridates extended his power in all directions and was making himself a major factor in central Asia.

It may be that if Parthia had remained quiet, Antiochus could have handled the Jewish rebellion. As it was, he found himself pulled in both directions. His prestige abroad, already badly shaken by his humiliation in Egypt, demanded that he not allow the Jews to remain unpunished. On the other hand, if he could but bring the eastern provinces back into the fold, he could collect all the money he needed in the form of punitive tribute. With prestige pulling one way and money the other, he made the worst possible decision. He decided to divide his forces and embark on a two-front war…

As the Arabic proverb supposedly says, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

So the Persians (aka Parthians aka Iranians) helped out the Jews of Judah twice, once against their Babylonian oppressors and once against their Greco-Syrian oppressors. That’s Big Enemy #1 and Big Enemy #2. What about Big Enemy #3, the Roman oppressors?

Well, no one came to the rescue when the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple, and no one could really help the Jews of Judah after that, because there weren’t really any Jews left in Judah. They were scattered to the neighboring empires, Rome and Rome’s only viable enemy … Persia!

Iran Rescues Jews from the Romans

Despite the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews faired relatively well in the Roman Empire — until the empire became officially Christian, at which point official suppression of the Jewish religion began. But while the Jews were hunkering down for more than a millennium of oppression in the Christian West, Judaism was flourishing in Persia.

Here’s Wikipedia on "The Parthian Period" of Jewish history:

The Parthian Empire was an enduring empire based on a loosely configured system of vassal kings. This lack of a rigidly centralized rule over the empire had its drawbacks, such as the rise of a Jewish bandit-state in Nehardea (see Anilai and Asinai). Yet, the tolerance of the Arsacid dynasty was as legendary as the first Persian dynasty, the Achaemenids. There is even an account that indicates the conversion of a small number of Parthian vassal kings of Adiabene to Judaism. These instances and others show not only the tolerance of Parthian kings, but is also a testament to the extent to which the Parthians saw themselves as the heir to the preceding empire of Cyrus the Great. The Parthians were very protective of the Jewish minority as reflected in old Jewish saying "When you see a Parthian charger chained to a tombstone in the Land of Israel, the hour of the Messiah will be near".

Today, on the front page of JPost.com, the website of the same newspaper in which I read that “pro-Iranian” editorial back in 1987, the third-most-prominent link in their nav bar (after Home and Headlines) is Iranian Threat. That’s before the links for Jewish World, Israel, Middle East, or even Elections ‘09.

I prefer reading history to reading the news.

From “This actually did happen” by Jeffrey Tucker at blog.Mises.org:

In Los Angeles, a window repairman secretly went around breaking windows by shooting them with a slingshot. Times are hard and he needed the business. The police caught him and, because he was a private individual instead of a state, now he is in trouble for his attempt to stimulate the economy. Thanks Broken Window Watch and Vanguardist.