“No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom remains.”

– Sheldon Richman, editor of The Freeman (via Laurence M. Vance)

When Mises.org published my piece on Gilligan’s Island economics, someone slashdotted it and drew huge traffic to the website. I only looked through the first few comments on slashdot. One that stood out for me said that it was obvious I was a libertarian because of my use of the word “State.”

In the comment that author Anthony Pagden left on this blog, he wrote, “I do not see how ‘the State’ (which has a lingering Marxist flavour to it) can be construed as an agent. States in the west have clearly been guilty of myriad evils, but not THE STATE.”

The slashdotter was right, of course. My article was indeed a libertarian article. I don’t know if Anthony Pagden is right or not. In the circles in which I’ve travelled for much longer than I’ve been a libertarian, the term “the State” has an old-fashioned flavor to it, but not a specifically Marxist one. My guess is that Pagden just knows more Marxists than libertarians or classical liberals.

Here’s Frank Chodorov on “the disappearance of any discussion of the State qua State.” If you were to take out Chodorov’s “New Deal” and replace it with Pagden’s “States in the west,” it would read as if the two writers were addressing each other directly.

The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between State and Society, conceptually or institutionally. The State is Society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political establishment…

One indication of how far the integration has gone is the disappearance of any discussion of the State qua State — a discussion that engaged the best minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The inadequacies of a particular regime, or its personnel, are under constant attack, but there is no faultfinding with the institution itself. The State is all right, by common agreement, and it would work perfectly if the “right” people were at its helm. It does not occur to most critics of the New Deal that all its deficiencies are inherent in any State, under anybody’s guidance, or that when the political establishment garners enough power a demagogue will sprout. The idea that this power apparatus is indeed the enemy of Society, that the interests of these institutions are in opposition, is simply unthinkable. If it is brought up, it is dismissed as “old-fashioned,” which it is; until the modern era, it was an axiom that the State bears constant watching, that pernicious proclivities are built into it. (The Rise and Fall of Society, p. xx)

From Barbara Frank Online:

Ok, class, time for a quick current events pop quiz:

Which country just approved a $6 billion initiative that includes the following, directing its legislative body to determine:

“….whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed, and how such a requirement could be implemented in a manner that would strengthen the social fabric of the Nation and overcome civic challenges by bringing together people from diverse economic, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.”

FULL BLOG POST

Another Modern Superstition Identified & Destroyed

Posted by Stephen Carson at March 27, 2009 11:33 AM

When I was in gov’t school as a child I absorbed some kind of hyper-Whig theory of history… We live now at the pinnacle and culmination of civilization. The only reason to learn about the past is to learn about those hopeless neanderthals who believed the earth was flat, believed flies came from old rags, thought slavery was great, were racists and sexists and listened to Glenn Miller.

Of course, there was never any hint that our own age might have superstitions and unreasoned prejudices of its own.

Eventually putting away childish things, I learned that the view of the past I absorbed wasn’t very charitable to say the least. For example, it is a myth that the earth being flat was generally accepted in the Middle Ages.

But more relevantly, I have learned that our own age has superstitions as well. Hayek usefully defined superstition as thinking you understand something that you really don’t. He held up Keynesianism and Marxism as chief superstitions of the 20th century. In the case of Marxism and its appalling body count we have a modern superstition as terrible or worse than the ones of our forebears.

In a delightful lecture at the recent Austrian Scholars Conference, Gerard Casey from Dublin put his finger on another modern superstition. FULL BLOG POST

Sean Gabb, director of the Libertarian Alliance writes, “Mr Blake has been a good friend of the Libertarian Alliance over the years, and anything that enriches him can be taken as a benefit to the libertarian cause in England.”

“Nasty, fun, and educational”?

Historical fiction by a libertarian?

Sure, I’m willing to promote it before I read it.

From Telegraph.co.uk:

The Terror of Constantinople

by Richard Blake

421pp, Hodder & Stoughton, £19.99

Buy now for £17.99 (plus £1.25 p&p) from Telegraph Books

At first, the vain, amoral and sexually voracious exiled seventh-century scholar Aelric seems purpose-built to fill a Flashman-shaped hole in wry historical fiction.

But Aelric is a killer, not a coward, surprisingly principled for a scatological cynic and incapable of exploiting virtue if only because there are no good guys in Richard Blake’s portrayal of the political rats’ nest between the fall of Rome and the supremacy of the Roman Church.

His plotting can seem off-puttingly anarchic until the penny drops that everyone is simultaneously embroiled in multiple, often conflicting, scams. Aelric’s survival among the last knockings of empire in Constantinople depends not on deducing who wants him dead, but who wants him dead at any given moment.

Vivid characters, devious plotting and buckets of gore are enhanced by his unfamiliar choice of period. Nasty, fun and educational.

I enjoyed this post from Adventures in Editing:

Harry Potter Made Me Vomit

Well, not really. I just wanted to get your attention. I did become very ill once while reading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but it wasn’t Harry’s fault. Actually, it was the chemotherapy. I had taken the book with me to a chemo treatment, thinking Harry and friends would distract me from the more unpleasant things going on that day. Unfortunately, the unpleasant things completely took over. Between the nausea and the drugs they gave me to allegedly relieve the nausea, I was unable to read more than a few pages. I put Harry Potter aside that day and couldn’t pick him up again until over a year later; every time I thought of Harry I became so queasy I would have to lie down.

Which brings me to my actual point. Sometimes people dislike or refuse to read certain books for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the books themselves. I love Harry Potter. I admit I was a late convert and didn’t begin reading the books until the first movie came out, but I love him just the same. For that one year though, I absolutely could not read or even think about him.

About 20 years earlier, I stopped reading Stephen King because of some interview he gave in which he said he was happy to settle for the gross-out when he couldn’t quite achieve a more disquieting sense of horror in his readers. I had enjoyed Stephen King until then, but I was idealistic and unforgiving in my youth and thought writers should be perfect all the time. Thank goodness those days are over. In the meantime, I’m sure I’ve missed some pretty good books. Now I wonder if my memory of that King quote is even remotely correct. Perhaps I got it all wrong and shunned a favorite writer for no reason at all.

Happily, I did eventually get back to Harry Potter and have eagerly read all seven books. I haven’t quite found my way back to Stephen King yet, but that’s mostly because I have so little time to read these days. I have forgiven him for that gross-out comment (which he may or may not have actually made)—or maybe I didn’t forgive him. Maybe what really happened was I realized what an arrogant nitwit I was being.

Finally.

“What Does an Egyptian Pharaoh Smell Like?”

By Heather Whipps, LiveScience’s History Columnist:

She may have ruled like a man, but Egyptian queen Hatshepsut still preferred to smell like a lady.

The world may be able to get a whiff of that ancient royal scent when researchers complete their investigation into the perfume worn by Hatshepsut, the powerful pharaoh-queen who ruled over ancient Egypt for 20 years beginning around 1479 B.C.

Analyzing a metal jar belonging to the famous queen , the team from the Bonn University Egyptian Museum in Germany recently found residue thought to be leftovers from Hatshepsut’s own perfume.…

I wrote a brief review of Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: the 2500-Year Struggle Between East and West — and the author briefly replied.

The audiobook is on sale right now at Audible for only five bucks:

In my previous post, I linked “listening to” to Bart D. Ehrman’s courses at the Teaching Company, but it just occurred to me that the first audio commentary I heard on the Bible was from Mises.org’s archive of Robert LeFevre talks:

1. “First Secretary of Agriculture”

2. “The Biblical Prophet: He Told It Like It Is”

I find the KJV difficult to read, but I love reading and listening to biblical scholarship. Here’s something you miss if you try to read the Bible for yourself:

Genesis 24:63. And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide: and he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming.

(This is the first time Isaac and his bride-to-be see each other.)

Genesis 24:64. And Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she lighted off the camel.

Apparently "meditate" is a guess at an untranslatable word that appears nowhere else in the Bible, and "she lighted off the camel" is a mistranslation of "she fell off the camel."

So Isaac went out to ____ in the field, and when Rebecca saw him, she fell off her camel.

(Brought to you by the Teaching Company.)