I haven't followed the Olympics and I don't plan to follow the electoral horse race.

We don't even plan to adjust our lives or our technology to the upcoming switchover from analog to digital television (and no, we don't have HDTV, just an old-fashioned behemoth that mostly serves as a screen for the DVD player).

But I still identify with this comic:

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

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.

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.

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.

You will thank me for this one.

Years ago, our dear friends AC and Carolyn taught us the ultimate cure for having a song stuck in your head. In fact, that's probably at least part of the reason they became such dear friends. (I may not be sociable, but I'm good at gratitude and loyalty.)

The trick is this: you can displace a stuck song with another song; of course, this new song will then annoy you just as much if it stays stuck, so you have to displace the first song with "the world's least sticky song." After that, you will have found peace. At least until you listen to the radio again.

This is the world's least sticky song, only 99¢ at Amazon.com/mp3:

I had a college girlfriend who set her clock radio to Howard Stern for exactly this reason. She found that she'd get angry enough that she couldn't fall back asleep, so instead she'd get up and go to Russian class. I think the flaw in her plan, however, was that over time she began to find the funny parts funnier and the offensive parts less and less offensive.

What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?

"Make me one with everything!"

I think my generation caught the worst of political correctness as college and university students in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However bad it may still seem, we're in a much less antirational era now.

This is from Rothbard's 1991 introduction to a 1970 essay of his called "Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor":

Perhaps the most chilling recently created category is "logism" or "logo-centric," the tyranny of the knowledgeable and articulate. A set of "feminist scholarship guidelines" sponsored by the state of New Jersey for its college campuses attacks knowledge and scientific inquiry per se as a male "rape of nature." It charges:

mind was male. Nature was female, and knowledge was created as an act of aggression — a passive nature had to be interrogated, unclothed, penetrated, and compelled by man to reveal her secrets.[3]

---

[3] John Taylor, "Are you Politically Correct?" New York (January 21, 1991, p.38. Also see ibid., pp. 32-40: "Taking Offense," Newsweek (December 24, 1990), pp. 48–54.

Some of this was already going on in high school in the early 1980s, although it was subtler and gentler than the peak it would reach a few years later.

I remember a winter wilderness trip to climb Mount Washington over Christmas break with my logocentric, nature-raping schoolmates.

My friend Scott (same one I wrote about in "look for the union label") said he wanted to "conquer the mountain!"

The wilderness teacher was frustrated with him. "That's exactly the kind of attitude we're trying to get you past!" he scolded. "You're goal should be to become one with the mountain."

Scott replied: "I want to become one with the top of the mountain!"

My favorite Hayekian has died. I suspect I'm not the only one who is taking this hard, despite never having met Sudha Shenoy in person.

Focused on the development of India and China, she was an ardent opponent of all government intervention. She was a lonely voice among third-world statists.

Several times, I've written her questions about economic history and she'd reply with concise but thorough answers followed by these long lists of citations. She never seemed to care whether she was talking to a scholar or not. She wanted the information out there. She was a true teacher in the most unpolluted sense of that word.

I had the distinct privilege of being the first person outside the Riggenbach household to hear this recording. All the praise of Garet Garrett's novels had failed to convince me to read any of them. Listening to the audiobook was something I did for work, to check for errors before we went into production. I didn't even take up the task with any pleasure, as there was a very narrow window for quality review and it meant that I had to spend my weekend doing something other than R&R.

I thought I'd at least get some yard work done while I listened, so the first chapters are etched into my memory with visions of my own manual labor as the book opens with crowds of unemployed workers, organizing to march on Washington.

My first reaction was skeptical. Riggenbach's is a great voice for nonfiction. He is clear, easy on the ears, and conveys the importance of his subject; but these virtues in the context of nonfiction don't necessarily carry over to the quirky, emotional, character-driven realm of fiction.

Well, I quickly forgot those reservations as I got swept up in the story. The Mises Institute and its supporters have mostly discussed the economic history of The Driver, which is much more interesting than you might fear, and much more interesting, I found, than is conveyed in all the reviews that emphasize how interesting it is. It is indeed a procapitalism novel, and Garrett manages to communicate that part of the story with passion and fascination, feelings that are contagious for the reader (or listener).

What I was not expecting was the human story behind the economic history. Back to Riggenbach as reader: after a few chapters, it was obvious that Jeff Riggenbach was, in fact, the perfect choice for the unnamed first-person narrator of this novel. The narrator is a journalist, and so is Riggenbach. The narration is wry and reserved, which isn't a bad description of Riggenbach's reading voice. But this reserved style acts as a counterpoint to the often chaotic action of the story. The man telling the story is the calm at the center of the storm of human activity that surrounds him. When we meet the hero of the story — the great railroad capitalist, Henry Galt — we find in him the only other steady presence in the swirl of confusion that was turn-of-the-20th-century Wall Street. I don't mean to suggest similarities between the two characters beyond that central complementary calmness; Galt is irritable, impatient with people, and far from charming in any mundane sense; the narrator is patient and sociable without being quite outgoing. He is also primarily an observer, whereas Galt is The Driver: the driver of the story and the driver, it turns out, of the American economy.

The human side of the story is everything Galt fails to see, mostly concerning his family: an elderly mother, a socialite wife, and two daughters — one attractive but aloof and the other winsome and playful. Galt's family suffers through their waxing and waning fortunes, and continues to suffer the anti-new-money social ostracism of Galt's ultimate success. Galt is immune to society's subtler punishments and he doesn't have the moral imagination to understand why his family isn't happy. Fortunately for him, they love him devotedly.

And love, believe it or not, is the other driver of this book. It turns out to be a love story, or two or three love stories — between the narrator and (1) Henry Galt himself, (2) the Galt family, who come to adopt him slowly and quietly as one of their own, and (3) one of Galt's daughters, for whom his feelings become more than fraternal.

What began as labor quickly turned to pleasure as I listened to this newly available audiobook, and I recommend it highly, whether or not you care about economics or history. It is a very human story. The fact that you might finish it with a greater respect for the social benefits of speculation and entrepreneurship is merely an added bonus.

Update: The Mises Institute has made an audio sample available:

I used this expression for about the first 25 years of my life. Of course it says the opposite of what it means, but it seemed to me that (1) all New Yorkers used this expression, and (2) we all meant it ironically.

I had a girlfriend after college who reacted like the woman in this comic strip. It drove her crazy.

What's more, she couldn't believe that I of all people — someone who was especially persnickety about logical and linguistic consistency — would use such an ignorant expression. I ignored her. I owe her an apology about that, I suppose. I experienced our difference as dueling regionalisms. (She was from Virginia.)

A couple years later, when I started reading books on linguistic nitpicking, I finally realized I'd been giving my fellow New Yorkers too much credit. Apparently "less" is mistakenly read as a negative, so "not … less" reads as a double negative, when it isn't.

But I must confess that I could still care less.

I'm a big fan of highbrow Cliff Notes. For example, Kant's famous metaphysical treatise is called
Critique of Pure Reason; I eventually had to read it for an upper-level course on Kant, but in 101, we read his much shorter Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, which was, our intro professor explained to us, Kant's own summary presentation of his longer work.

These days, I'm reading H.G. Wells's A Short History of the World, which is the summary version of his two-volume Outline of History.

In both cases, the author wrote his own summary. I couldn't hope for an equivalent with the Bible — which I've started several times but never made it out of Genesis — so instead I'm reading and enjoying David Plotz's "Blogging the Bible," from Slate.com.

As they come up, I'm also keeping track of famous saying I didn't realize were biblical in origin, some of which have been reworded in their popular form, such as, "Can the Cushite change his skin or the leopard his spots?" (Jeremiah 13:23). I guess the Bible isn't very politically correct.

Here's Plotz's introductory comment to Jeremiah chapters 14–16:

Anyone who's ever been in a bad relationship knows the Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Cruelty: Before you go through the torture of dumping a boyfriend, you act meaner than you feel toward him. (This usually goes on at an unconscious level.) Boyfriend understandably bristles and retaliates. This makes the actual leave-taking much easier. You get to lighten your own guilt by blaming the dumpee for being such a jerk.

This appears to be God's strategy.

My father used to lament the lack of biblical literacy in my so-called education. For most of my life, I haven't shared his regret. But that concept alone — the doctrine of preemptive cruelty (which yes, I suppose might be more Plotz's than God's) — would have been well worth knowing in my formative years. My teens and 20's would have looked very different if I'd known it.

My father, who in one of his professional incarnations was a college English instructor specializing in Shakespeare, is currently reading Conn Iggulden's Emperor series, historical fiction based on the life of Julius Caesar. He's also watching the HBO/BBC series Rome, at our enthusiastic recommendation.

He wrote me today about the complexities of emotionally allying with different "sides" in historical struggles, and how much our allegiance is affected by already knowing the winners and losers.

I replied with a very different perspective on what affects the sides we take and whom we root for:

This is something I've been meaning to ask you about, and to research more generally.

Do you think of Shakespeare's play as pro-Caesar? That's certainly the impression I remember.

For most of my life, I've sensed from our culture an approval of Julius Caesar and a disapproval (or hatred) for Brutus. But the more history I learn, the less sense this makes. Or rather, the more Anglo-American republican history I learn, the greater is my sense that American admiration of Caesar is a 20th-century phenomenon.

The Lockean liberals in England, the American revolutionaries, and the founding fathers wrote and published under not just Roman names but Roman republican names — the names of the opponents of Caesar, the allies of Brutus. The once-upon-a-time-libertarian Cato Institute is named for the 18th-century "Cato's Letters" whose English authors were taking the name of the Roman republican Cato. When the American Revolution was over and the debate was beginning for and against a centralizing constitution, the so-called anti-Federalists (the classical liberal/libertarian, decentralist, republicans) wrote under the names Cato and Brutus! (And despite the eventual victory of the Federalists, the mass of the population was on the side of the anti-Federalists.)

Eighty years later, John Wilkes Booth expressed his bafflement, after assassinating Lincoln, that he was so universally reviled when Brutus was so universally honored!

My current guess is that Shakespeare wrote a pro-Caesar play in an era of pro-monarchy, at least somewhat genuinely felt. But English and American republicans recognized that they were historically on the opposite side. In the 20th century (this theory would have it), Americans lost their classical educations and forgot their historical alliances. We knew we should admire Shakespeare, and Shakespeare seemed to admire the centralizers, therefore we abandon our decentralist history and alliances and all hail Caesar.

My father says that Shakespeare saw through Julius Caesar — but despised Brutus.

I'm still hoping someone can tell me about the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes toward Caesar and Brutus. How much of this story do I have right?

Ludwig von Mises wrote,

The system of free enterprise has been dubbed capitalism in order to deprecate and to smear it. However, this term can be considered very pertinent. It refers to the most characteristic feature of the system, its main eminence, viz., the role the notion of capital plays in its conduct.

That's from chapter 13 of Human Action.

I think Robert Murphy's summary is even better:

Capitalism was originally a smear term for the system of free enterprise, meant to imply that this system only serves the narrow interests of the capitalists. However, the term is a good one, for the very notion of capital — of summing the market prices of the resources available for a project — is inextricably linked to monetary calculation, which itself can only occur in a capitalist society.

I was a free-market advocate before I became an advocate of capitalism. The free market is an ethical concept, not an economic one; it is merely the recognition that nonaggression needs to apply to exchange as much as it applies to anything else. (Robert Nozick summarized this idea as "capitalist acts between consenting adults.")

Capitalism is a separate issue and a separate agenda — a positive agenda, in contradistinction to the negative agenda of nonaggression, a utilitarian concept rather than an ethical one — but the more I learned of economics, capital theory, and economic history, the less I could understand the left-libertarian position of embracing the free market while rejecting capitalism.

The free-market anticapitalists define capitalism as any system of political privilege for current capitalists, especially as it suppresses bottom-up competition, entry-level entrepreneurship, and the rights of labor. But we already have plenty of other terms to cover that idea — mercantilism, corporatism, even fascism — but what alternative is there to indicate the universal benefits of capital accumulation, capital structure, and capital calculation — all of which result from the private ownership of the means of production?

In fact, private ownership of the means of production (that is, of capital) was the technical definition of capitalism, even among the anticapitalists who coined the term! The idea of political privilege for capital owners was just an assumed consequence, a conflation of definition and theory.

The only advantage I see to accepting this linguistic conflation is to conciliate the heirs of the New Left, to tease out of them a more consistent individualism without tripping their anticommercial reflexes. But aside from what I consider its intellectual dishonesty, this strategy, it seems to me, does more than postpone anti-economic prejudices; it implicitly promotes them.

Faced with these same prejudices, many anti-anti-capitalists adopted the label of "free enterprise," but that term, taken literally, tells us nothing more than "free market" does. It certainly indicates nothing about the structure of ownership or of the means of production.

Until a free-market anticapitalist can offer me a useful alternative label for the utilitarian economic concept Mises called "capitalism," I'll stick with his reclaimed word.