(via Jeffrey Tucker)

This is Sherlock Holmes, explaining the reason for his disguise:

I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know. (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)

One of the many things I love about reading on my Kindle is that I can point to a word on the screen and immediately see how the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the term. (This turns out to be the same dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OS X, so I get the same definitions on both platforms.)

“Instinctive sympathy or fellow feeling between people with something in common.” I had no idea that “freemasonry” had this secondary meaning. I love it. I’ll try to slip it into casual conversation at some point.

From The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk (1918) by Thornton W. Burgess:

XIII: JIMMY SKUNK EXPLAINS

You’ll find this true where’er you go
That those prepared few troubles know.

“To begin with, I am not such a very big fellow, am I?” said Jimmy.

“Ah reckons Ah knows a right smart lot of folks bigger than yo’, Brer Skunk,” replied Unc’ Billy, with a grin. You know Jimmy Skunk really is a little fellow compared with some of his neighbors.

“And I haven’t very long claws or very big teeth, have I?” continued Jimmy.

“Ah reckons mine are about as long and about as big,” returned Unc’ Billy, looking more puzzled than ever.

“But you never see anybody bothering me, do you?” went on Jimmy.

“No,” replied Unc’ Billy.

“And it’s the same way with Prickly Porky the Porcupine. You never see anybody bothering him or offering to do him any harm, do you?” persisted Jimmy.

“No,” replied Unc’ Billy once more.

“Why?” demanded Jimmy.

Unc’ Billy grinned broadly. “Ah reckons, Brer Skunk,” said he, “that there isn’t anybody wants to go fo’ to meddle with yo’ and Brer Porky. Ah reckons most folks knows what would happen if they did, and that yo’ and Brer Porky are folks it’s a sight mo’ comfortable to leave alone. Leastways, Ah does. Ah ain’t aiming fo’ trouble with either of yo’. That li’l bag of scent yo’ carry is cert’nly most powerful, Brer Skunk, and Ah isn’t hankering to brush against those little spears Brer Porky is so free with. Ah knows when Ah’s well off, and Ah reckons most folks feel the same way.”

Jimmy Skunk chuckled. “One more question, Unc’ Billy,” said he. “Did you ever know me to pick a quarrel and use that bag of scent without being attacked?”

Unc’ Billy considered for a few minutes. “Ah can’t say Ah ever did,” he replied.

“And you never knew Prickly Porky to go hunting trouble either,” declared Jimmy. “We don’t either of us go hunting trouble, and trouble never comes hunting us, and the reason is that we both are always prepared for trouble and everybody knows it. Buster Bear could squash me by just stepping on me, but he doesn’t try it. You notice he always is very polite when we meet. Prickly Porky and I are armed for defence, but we never use our weapons for offence. Nobody bothers us, and we bother nobody. That’s the beauty of being prepared.”

Unc’ Billy thought it over for a few minutes. Then he sighed and sighed again.

“Ah reckons yo’ and Brer Porky are about the luckiest people Ah knows,” said he. “Yes, Sah, Ah reckons yo’ is just that. Ah don’t fear anybody mah own size, but Ah cert’nly does have some mighty scary times when Ah meets some people Ah might mention. Ah wish Ol’ Mother Nature had done gone and given me something fo’ to make people as scary of me as they are of yo’. Ah cert’nly believes in preparedness after seein’ yo’, Brer Skunk. Ah cert’nly does just that very thing. Have yo’ found any nice fresh aiggs lately?”

My friend Carolyn just won the grand prize for the GreatSchools Bedtime Story Contest:

The grand-prize winner of the GreatSchools Bedtime Story Contest is equal parts quirky and quaint.

The bath was too hot. The yellow duckies squirted icky water. And her favorite tiger towel was still in the laundry.

Annie had had enough.

She wrapped herself in a frayed blue towel, curled up into a ball on the bathmat, and went away.

She went away to the Middle of Nowhere.

It was nice in the Middle of Nowhere. Soft. Dark. A little moist. But nice.

Annie was listening to the sound of her heartbeat in the Middle of Nowhere when from far away she heard a voice.

A shrill, scratchy sort of voice. It reminded her of her mother.

“Annie!” the shrill, scratchy voice shouted. It grew louder. It sounded like it was on top of her.

“Annie!”

“Annie’s not here!” Annie shouted back. “She’s gone far away.”

The shrill, scratchy voice was silent. Then it said, “Oh.”

The “oh” was soft and just a little bit scratchy. It reminded Annie of her mother when she read a bedtime story.

“Can you tell me where Annie has gone, please?”

“Far away,” Annie said. “To the Middle of Nowhere!”

“Oh!” said the voice. “And where exactly is the Middle of Nowhere?”

“It’s very far away. It’s farther than Australia and Gibraltar. You have to take 17 airplanes to get there.”

“Oh my,” said the voice. “That is far away. I wonder how Annie managed.”

“Well,” said Annie, “she does run the fastest of anyone. She got there quick as a flash.”

“Of course,” said the voice. “But what is the Middle of Nowhere like? What’s in it?”

“Oh, it’s a beautiful place,” said Annie. “There are only giraffes. And no ants and no spiders can live there.”

“Really?” asked the voice. “Just giraffes. No people?”

“No. No people,” said Annie.

“Except for Annie, right?” said the voice.

Annie thought that the soft, scratchy voice was chuckling a little bit. It reminded her of her mother when she was listening to her father tell a joke.

“Yes, except for Annie. She’s allowed there. The giraffes like her.”

“Do the giraffes play with her?”

“No. They never play with her. They only eat leaves and moo.”

“Wait … the giraffes moo? Like cows?”

“Yes. They moo all day long. They’re very noisy.”

“Wow. So do the ants and the spiders play with Annie?”

“No! Remember I told you there are no ants and spiders in the Middle of Nowhere. Just giraffes.”

“Just giraffes that moo. Yes, you did tell me that. I’m sorry,” the voice softened even more. “Well, I have an important question to ask you. If there’s no one to play with her there, why did Annie leave our cozy house to go to the Middle of Nowhere?”

“Slugs,” said Annie.

“Excuse me?” said the scratchy voice, turning a tiny bit shrill again.

“There are slugs in the Middle of Nowhere. Annie likes slugs,” said Annie.

“Annie likes slugs?” the voice said with a sigh.

“I’m a slug,” said Annie.

The voice was silent for a second. Then it said slowly, “Let me get this straight. You’re a slug?”

“Yes,” said Annie.

“From the Middle of Nowhere?”

“Yes,” said Annie.

“And you arrived here when Annie left for the Middle of Nowhere?”

“Yes!” cried Annie.

“Oh!” said the voice. “Welcome to our bathroom.”

“Thank you,” said Annie.

“Do you like it here in the bathroom?”

“Very much,” said Annie.

“Well, well,” said the voice, sounding brighter. It reminded Annie of her mother when they were out walking in the woods. “The rest of the house is even nicer. How would you like to spend the night? Since Annie’s run off to the Middle of Nowhere, there’s an empty spot in her bed. You might as well wear her pajamas too — that is, if slugs wear pajamas.”

“Slugs do,” said Annie. “And yes, I would like to spend the night. I’m quite tired.”

Annie stood up and threw off the blue towel. Annie’s mother was sitting on the bathroom floor, holding her favorite red and white striped pajamas.

“Oh!” said Annie’s mother, sounding exactly like when she opened a surprise present.

“What is it?” said Annie.

“You look just like my daughter Annie, even if you are a slug,” said Annie’s mother. “Now, come on, let’s go find Annie’s father. We’ve never put a slug to bed before, and I know he’s going to be very interested to meet you. Do you leave a trail of slime wherever you go?”

Annie giggled.

And far off, in the Middle of Nowhere, a herd of giraffes mooed.

The end.

In reply to my post “taking the Book of Job seriously,” author Robert Sutherland left this comment:

You might be interested in this online commentary “Putting God on Trial: The Biblical Book of Job” (http://www.bookofjob.org) as supplementary or background material for the Book of Job. It is not a sin to question God, to demand answers from God. There is a time and a place for such things. It is written by a Canadian criminal defense lawyer, now a Crown prosecutor, and it explores the legal and moral dynamics of the Book of Job with particular emphasis on the distinction between causal responsibility and moral blameworthiness embedded in Job’s Oath of Innocence. It is highly praised by Job scholars (Clines, Janzen, Habel) and the Review of Biblical Literature, all of whose reviews are on the website. It is also taught in 262 US high schools in 40 states through Chapter 17 in The Bible and Its Influence. The author is an evangelical Christian, denominationally Anglican. He is also the Canadian Director for the Mortimer J. Adler Centre for the Study of the Great Ideas, a Chicago-based think tank.

After a couple of exhausting hours with a snow shovel, I’m inclined to republish this “lowercase liberty classic”:

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

homesteading the ephemeral

I grew up in New York City, where parking is already scarce without a snowstorm.

Once I had my license, my grandmother paid me a dollar a day to find her a parking spot.

(For those who don’t know NYC: alternate-side-of-the-street-parking laws mean your spot is only good until tomorrow.)

Ever since leaving New York, I’ve found parking to be plentiful. It’s one of the many reasons I’ve liked everywhere else I’ve lived better than New York.

The building we’ve lived in for a couple of years now (in the Pennsylvania town we’ll be leaving soon so we can raise our son back in central Virginia) has a parking lot for its tenants. So long as only tenants use it, there’s rarely a problem finding a place to park. Until it snows.

About a year ago, digging my wife’s car out from under the feet of snow that the plow had pushed on top of it, I started thinking about Lockean/Rothbardian homesteading theory, and how it might apply to circumstances more temporary than those we normally consider when talking about property rights.

If I dig out a parking space and drive to work (ha!) only to find someone else in “my” space when I return, am I wrong to feel robbed? Do I need the scare-quotes around “my” or is the space rightly mine? (Not in the sense of statute or municipal law, obviously, but in the ethical or natural law sense.)

A nominal parking space is not an actual parking space if actual cars can’t get to it. In the context of the snowstorm, I’m creating the actual parking space by digging out the nominal parking space. By mixing my labor — not with Locke’s land but with the space over the asphalt — am I not bringing property into being? Again, not in the long-term sense, but in the context of the snowstorm?

What I liked about the example is precisely that it does not fit most people’s understanding of property, which is associated, if not with land, then with things. But according to Rothbardian property theory, property is not in things but in the use of things.

I consider this to be the single most misunderstood point of private property theory, especially among those who consider themselves opposed to private property.

I figured I’d either blog the thought or write something up for Mises.org. Here it is a year later, another snowstorm come and gone, and I never did get around to writing any of it down.

But Jesse Walker has made my point for me:

Reason: This Asphalt Is Mine! Homesteaders in the snow

Walker has done his usual professional job of journalism — with real people in the real world — whereas my own thinking remained, as usual, at the theoretical level.

posted by bkmarcus on Tuesday, February 21, 2006

(permalink)

[From chapter 8 of The Rise and Fall of Society by Frank Chodorov.]

As everyone knows, an analogy is neither evidence nor proof. And yet, since Aristotle it has been common practice among political scientists to call upon an analogy to support a theory of the origin of Government; namely, that Government grew out of the organization of the family.

There is, of course, no historical evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between the two institutions; all that we have is an unproven hypothesis, resting on an assumed similarity between parental authority and Government authority.

The hypothesis disproves itself, however, when the biological factor in parental authority is taken into consideration. The child looks to the parent for guidance simply because of the inadequacies and insecurity of childhood, and seeks or accepts authority as a matter of necessity. Government has no such claim on its citizenry, nor is loyalty to it in any way analogous to filial devotion. Even the father-son relationship alters in character as the offspring reaches maturity and attains self-sufficiency, a relationship in which authority diminishes and disappears; the citizen’s allegiance to Government is unrelated to his age or to his ability to take care of himself.

Neat as the analogy is, it does not bear up under analysis and one must look elsewhere for some explanation of the phenomenon of Government.

Frank Chodorov was an advocate of the free market, individualism, and peace. He began as a supporter of Henry George and edited the Georgist paper the Freeman before founding his own journal which became the influential Human Events. He later founded another version of the Freeman for the Foundation for Economic Education and lectured at the Freedom School in Colorado.

…and it’s not even romantic:

And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. (Ruth 1:16–17)

That’s probably my favorite passage in the Bible, the widowed Ruth refusing to abandon her widowed mother-in-law.

The same book also contains what might be the sexiest scene in the Bible (outside the Song of Songs):

And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid her down.

And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid, and turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet. And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid… (Ruth 3:7–9)

1978: