My clever beloved served us a Rothbardian repast last night: Manicotti and Steak (I kid you not)!

And in anticipation of Scott Lahti’s next question, yes I did have Hunan earlier in the weekend, and yes, you could count that as Hunan Action.

(See this old post if you have no idea what I’m talking about. And if you’d care to.)

I lived half a year on a kibbutz back in the late 1980s, just as the intifada was starting.

For most of that time, I was the “shotef sirim” — the pot scrubber. For me, it was a proud title. It was the one kitchen job they wouldn’t let women do (something about the weight of the pots or the height of the top shelves), so I spent the work days surrounded by women — but with my own little domain behind the oversized sinks and the power spray of hot and cold water.

Now I learn from the Financial Times (“The rise of the capitalist kibbutz”) that “Tasks that used to be performed by kibbutzniks regardless of their education and background — such as washing the dishes — are today largely the preserve of hired workers from outside the community.”

As the article’s title implies, that’s not the only change confronting the kibbutzim, the once-upon-a-time bastion of voluntary socialism — the “proof,” as some of us once claimed, that “it worked.”

As kibbutznik-turned-economics-professor Omer Moav argues,

the kibbutz movement was always destined to fail. It worked, he says, only as long as kibbutzniks enjoyed a standard of living broadly comparable to, if not better than, the Israeli average. “People respond to incentives. We are happy to work hard for our own quality of life, we like our independence,” he says. “It is all about human nature — and a socialist system like the kibbutz does not fit human nature.”

Here’s what I wrote 5 years ago about what happened 15 years ago:

Friday, January 07, 2005

Murray N. Rothbard, R.I.P.

I came to libertarianism through taking The World’s Shortest Political Quiz at a gun show in Richmond. (That’s one version of the story. Another is that 10 years earlier, my mother baptized me a libertarian when I told her she wasn’t being liberal and she told me I had the wrong L-word in mind.)

I had already quit the Democrats, but was still voting and calling myself “independent”. Now I joined the Libertarian Party and started handing out the business-card-sized version of the quiz and talking to people about the ethics of economic liberty.

It turns out that around the same time, Murray Rothbard died. I had no idea who he was.

My libertarian reading consisted first of Robert Anton Wilson and later of Wendy McElroy. I can’t remember how I discovered McElroy, but Wilson was one of those writers all the weirdos in college knew and loved — so, true to my established habits, I read his stuff several years after I no longer knew anyone who had heard of him.

Wilson and McElroy (and Ken MacLeod) lead me to Benjamin Tucker and to Individualist Anarchism, which manifested in BlackCrayon.com.

Meanwhile, I was crossing the name Rothbard more and more. Never happily. Who was this “Mr. Libertarian” and how dare he (or his followers, rather) claim himself to be so central to this movement that now defined my life (but about whose history I apparently still knew nothing).

McElroy went so far as to claim that the modern libertarian movement was founded in Rothbard’s livingroom on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — which is more or less where I grew up. The nerve of this man: I’d never heard of him!

MacLeod said that the anarchies in his novel were based on the writings of Murray Rothbard and David Friedman. He also talked in the novel about Ludwig von Mises, some dead old-world economist.

Economics didn’t interest me yet, but I had to read the Friedman and Rothbard books he’d referred to. And I did. And I like them both, but I was clearly a natural-law Rothbardian and not a utilitarian Friedmanite.

I added a Murray Rothbard page to BlackCrayon.com and looked into creating a Rothbard website. But now I learned there were these other websites — Mises.org and LewRockwell.com — seeming to represent the great man’s work. Again, I was put off. Who were these people I had never heard of claiming to represent the legacy of this other guy I had only recently heard of!? Such chutzpah!

(Yes, I know that all this outrage makes me sound like I was in my teens, but I was already in my thirties. Some of us develop slower than others.)

Today, January 7th, 2005, it’s the 10-year anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s death. I’m not positive how long I’ve been part of the movement, but I’ve decided to call it 10 years as well. Nice symmetry that way.

I know that the calendar marks arbitrary units and aggregates of time only roughly corresponding to some combination of our planet’s motion around itself and our star as counted in the number system of our evolved anatomy, but still: a 10-year anniversary has an emotional impact on me. It feels meaningful. I feel sad that he died before I’d heard of him, sad that I never got to meet him. I’m now in correspondence with plenty of people who did know him, and I’m unbelievably envious of them. (See emotional-maturity comment, above.)

On my Murray Rothbard page, I link to the two books I’d recommend starting with, for those of you fortunate and unfortunate souls who don’t know them yet. (They’re also available, gratis, in electronic format here, here, and more generally here.)

To mark the occassion, today’s Daily Article from the Ludwig von Mises Institute (and also the lead article at LewRockwell.com) is here:

The Unstoppable Rothbard

His influence increases, his detractors are confounded.

posted by bkMarcus on Friday, January 07, 2005

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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

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The boy and I were walking in the woods. His mother phoned me to say that we should look up.

My 3yo son recently developed a love for monsters.

He was headed in the Godzilla-movie-monster and Halloween-monster direction (based on the toys he was seeing in the stores), but I succeeded in diverting him in a more ancient-world direction with DK Classics: The Odyssey and Ludmila Zeman’s Gilgamesh Trilogy.

Jury’s still out on DK’s Odyssey — which we’ve been skipping around in, rather than reading from beginning to end — but my son loves the Gilgamesh story and all its Mesopotamian monsters.

These are whitewashed and bowdlerized, but the illustrations are gorgeous and all the main characters and events of the epic are introduced. I started to read the boy Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the original Gilgamesh (which I love), but quickly realized that some of the story was way too adult for him. I was happy to find a version written for children. I think Ludmila Zeman changed more than she had to, but the result is a set of stories compelling to a 3yo boy and his father, both.

Highly recommended, but not unreservedly so.

My granddad used to read chapter books at the dinner table to his two daughters. My mother says she’d sneak into the library after dinner and read the next chapter.

When granddad brought his family over from Britain, the first things he read to them were The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

"You can’t get much more American than Dorothy Gale and Tom Sawyer," I said to my mother on the phone the other night.

"That’s why he chose those books," she replied.

L. Frank Baum’s choice of a little girl as his protagonist was influenced by Alice in Wonderland: "The secret of Alice’s success," he wrote, "lay in the fact that she was a real child, and any normal child could sympathize with her all through her adventures."

"But," writes Michael Patrick Hearn in The Annotated Wizard of Oz, "Dorothy is not an English child."

"Both are independent, brave, and practical little girls," noted novelist Alison Lurie in "The Fate of the Munchkins" (The New York Review of Books, April 18, 1974), "but Alice, as an upper-middle-class Victorian child, is far more concerned with manners and social status. She worries about the proper way to address a mouse, and is glad she doesn’t have to live in a pokey little house like Mabel. Dorothy already lives in a pokey little house. Demographers would class her among the rural poor, but she takes for granted her equality with everyone she meets."

Dorothy is American through and through. And she embodies not only America but the West as well. Baum firmly believed in "the superiority of western women in usefulness over their eastern sisters. … What a vast difference between these undesirable damsels [of the East] and our brave, helpful western girls! … Here a woman delights in being useful; a young lady’s highest ambition is to become a bread-winner. And they do." They "have more energy and vitality than those of the east, and … there is no nonsense or self pride in their constitutions and they cannot brook idleness when they see before them work to be done which is eminently fitted to their hands." Dorothy embodies this same Western determination and independence in her quest to get back to Kansas.

Three-and-a-half years ago, I read Peter & Wendy (aka Peter Pan) to my wife’s pregnant belly, a chapter a night. The idea at the time was to get Benjamin used to his father’s voice before he was born.

We read several other books this way during the pregnancy, including both of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and several of Frank Baum’s Oz books, but it was Peter & Wendy that affected me most. It is not a comfortable book. It is not quite for children and not quite for grownups. The plays, musicals, cartoons, and films manage to leave out most of what’s disturbing about the book, but in doing so, they rip out its heart.

Those nightly readings ended when the boy was born, and I have missed them terribly. For three years now I’ve been waiting to resume chapter-a-night family book time, and it’s finally happened. We began with Alice in Wonderland, but because of recent travel, Alice has been interspersed with various versions of Peter Pan — and, like me, Benjamin is hooked on the J.M. Barrie story. He likes it in all its forms. I’m only really a fan of Barrie’s novelization (although I admit that the musical stage production can be amazing).

To me, this is a book worth exploring, and I do want Benjamin to know it well, but we will have to have many talks about its more perverse elements. For now, he just likes the flying and fighting, which is what I suspect most children focus on.

I’m enjoying reading the negative reviews on Amazon from horrified grownups. I excerpt a few of them here.

By Jackie M. Bachenberg:

I certainly wouldn’t recommend reading this to a 5 or 6 year old before they drift off to sleep. There are just too many references to the fact that Dad in particular, may not have wanted all three of those children. There is also a very healthy amount of violence that you just might not want your elementary kid listening to. Peter cut off Hook’s arm and threw it to the crocodile. The lost boys are always fighting either the “redskins” or the pirates. And if you’re into the politically correct, this book is not. Instead of using the modern day “native American” we’re given “redskin”. I don’t have a problem with it, but I can just see the furor it would cause if Jr. goes to school and calls his little native American classmate a redskin.

By Katherine A. Kennedy:

I picked up what I thought would be a playful fairy tale and got just that; for I had forgotten about the cannibalistic witch in Hansel and Gretel, about the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid, and about the Wolf in the original telling of Little Red Riding Hood. This is a haunting and horrific tale of abuse and neglect masked with the innocent ideals of childhood. It came to a chilling conclusion and will stay with me for quite a while.

I am quite impressed that the themes in this book were so elegantly masked as to double as a children’s story as well as an adult story with very disturbing themes. I will keep my copy of this book, but it certainly won’t be the first thing that I read to my daughter out-loud.

By Daniel Mackler:

The extreme: The perverse sexual dynamics. I feel the author set up Peter Pan and Wendy and Tinker Bell as a vile little love-sex triangle. If you think I’m nuts writing this, look at all the obvious romantic dynamics between Peter and Wendy alone, and then add in the EXTREME jealousy and rage of Tinker Bell over this, and note how the author radically sexualized Tinker Bell – how she was an adult woman, how she flaunted her sexuality, how she dressed in ways that best showed off her body. (Even the OLD version of the book I have shows Tinker Bell as a definite woman, not a girl, dressed sexy and flirting with a DEFINITELY pre-pubescent boy.)

To back up my point, imagine the genders of the characters flipped, with Peter Pan being a little prepubescent girl and Tinker Bell a man, constantly flaunting his adult body for a girl’s attention, and flying into rages and trying to literally kill off the romantic competition? Sick!! It would be called pedophilia.

And then the whole dynamics with Wendy being Peter’s mother-lover: not healthy!

Two weeks ago, I “tweeted” the following:

Was Jesus a hologram? Or was he a human possessed by a noncorporeal extraterrestrial called Christ? This was the division within Docetism.

I have to say, studying the ancient heresies is the perfect geek hobby. Better than Star Trek. Similar, in some ways, as my Docetism tweet should illustrate. (By the way, the two varieties of Docetism are called phantasmal and separationist respectively.)

And as with any new obsession, once you start to learn the ins and outs, you start seeing it everywhere. Recently, I’ve been seeing signs of the heresies in Doonesbury:

(click to enlarge)

This distinction between God and His son smacks of Arianism. I suspect a lot of present-day Christians are Arian heretics without realizing it.

There’s also this past Sunday’s strip:

(excerpt from this full strip )

All my life, I’ve heard this observed distinction between the Old Testament God of wrath and the New Testament God of love. Without building an explicit theology from it, many modern Christians — especially religious liberals, I suspect — see the old Jewish God and the new Christian God as different gods. This isn’t a new phenomenon. In the 2nd century, Marcion of Sinope, led a very large and influential rival movement to proto-orthodox Christianity. Marcion

argued for the existence of two Gods: Yahweh, who created the material universe, and the Heavenly Father of the New Testament, of which Jesus Christ was the living incarnation. Yahweh was viewed as a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, and whose law, the Mosaic covenant, represented bare natural justice: i.e., an eye for an eye. Jesus was the living incarnation of a different God, a new God of compassion and love, sometimes called the Heavenly Father. The two Gods were thought of as having distinct personalities: Yahweh is petty, cruel and jealous, a tribal God who is only interested in the welfare of the Jews, while the Heavenly Father is a universal God who loves all of humanity, and looks upon His children with mercy and benevolence. This dual-God notion allowed Marcion to reconcile the apparent contradictions between the Old Testament and the tales of Jesus’ life and ministry. [Wikipedia]

I mention this “lesser demiurge” of the Marcionites in this earlier blog post of Calvin & Hobbes:

When I was kid in an Episcopal choir school, attending services 2 or 3 times a week, I think I was guilty of both Arianism and Marcionite dualism. I was also guilty of the heresy of Patripassionism, the belief that God the Father was incarnate and suffered on the cross. I guess I’ve never grokked the Trinity.

Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend:

One thing that can be said about Pharisees is that the most common stereotype about them is almost certainly wrong. In the dictionary, today, if you look up the word Pharisee you’ll find as one of the later definitions “hypocrite.” This has always struck me as bizarre — somewhat like defining Episcopalian as “drunkard” or Baptist as “adulterer.” To be sure, there are no doubt Episcopalian alcoholics and Baptist philanderers, just as there must have been Pharisaic hypocrites. But as I tell my students, agreeing to commit hypocrisy was not an entrance requirement for the Pharisaic party. There was no hypocritic oath.

One thing we do know about the Pharisees is that they strove to follow God’s law as rigorously as they could. This doesn’t make them hypocrites; it makes them religious. (p. 106)

It seems the cultural equation Pharisee = hypocrite must come from Matthew 23, where Matthew’s Jesus juxtaposes the terms 7 times within 17 lines (13, 14,15, 23, 25, 27, 29). Outside Matthew, the words appear together only once (Luke 11:44), again on Jesus’s lips.

Matthew’s is the most insistently Jewish of the gospels, not just Jewish, but rabbinic Jewish, i.e., Pharisaic. It is also, some have argued, the most anti-Jewish (though I think there are passages in John that might outstrip Matthew for vitriol).

When I was in college, the most venomous attacks I’d hear against black men came from the mouths of black women. If I quoted them to you out of context, you’d take it as racist “hate speech.” The context makes all the difference. I think Christianity becoming a gentile religion ended up taking a lot of this ancient Jewish infighting very much out of context.

At the Charlottesville City Market yesterday morning, I desperately wanted a cup of coffee. I bypassed the nearby coffeehouse thinking I should spend my money with one of the City Market’s weekend merchants. But all I found was “organic fair-trade” coffee. Nope. I’m not tithing to that religion. I like my coffee full of pesticides and produced with maximum exploitation.

Similarly, I like my housing to have maximum environmental impact, and yet, I sure do see the aesthetic appeal of this Welsh environmentalist’s “‘low-impact’ Woodland home,” taken from the pages of JRR Tolkein:

See more. (Thanks, Carolyn.)

An instant-message exchange after I recommended Bart D. Ehrman’s The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, which I listened to over the weekend:

BK

I read very little outside my job. All my "intake" is audio.

Carolyn

oh that’s right

I keep forgetting

you "read" all this sophisticated and complex stuff, I keep figuring it’s print

BK

heh

no

I keep encountering the claim in early-Christian history that most people who knew these texts were illiterate, but not necessarily uninterested. And so they’d have the texts read to them, usually in groups.

Other than the group part, that sounds like me and my iPhone.

I’m like a modern-day illiterate.

One benefit for Nathalie is that I volunteer to do pretty much anything that allows me to focus and listen: shopping, errands, dishes, dinner, yard work …

Gary North recommends carrying a book whenever you’re out in the world, so you don’t waste time standing in lines or sitting in waiting rooms. That’s what I do, minus the physical book.

I realized the other day that I was standing in an especially slow line at the store but didn’t bother switching since I was interested in what I was listening to.

Carolyn

right

I like the modern day illiterate claim

you should blog that

BK

will do