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 who 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.

I recently quoted from an old movie review by my playwright friend, Clinton Johnston — CJ to some of us. The first time I mentioned that review was in October 2004, at which time I described CJ as "the soon-to-be-published playwright." Well, the play that was then soon to be be published is now headed for the stage, specificially Washington, DC's (OK, Arlington, VA's) Charter Theatre :

Am I Black Enough Yet? by Clinton Johnston directed by George Grant featuring Paige Hernandez, Brittney Sweeney, David Lamont Wilson, Edward Daniels, and Matthew Eisenberg "Can you feel it? Can you see it? When do you wanna be it and when break free of it? And after all, what is it? Where does it start ... and where does it end?" No matter who you are or where you're from, for one night at Charter Theatre, you get to be African American. Playwright Clinton Johnston takes you on a touching, thoughtful, and hysterically funny tour of the state of Blackness in America. Don't miss it. at Theatre on the Run [directions] April 11 - May 3, 2008. Thurs - Sat nights at 8:00 p.m. Sat. and Sun. matinees at 3:00 p.m. $25 on Fri and Sat. nights $20 all other performances Special $10 Previews: April 9 and 10 at 8:00 p.m.

2:26:35 PM David Miller: did you note that Arthur C. Clarke died?

2:26:42 PM BK Marcus: yes

2:26:45 PM BK Marcus: age 90

2:28:13 PM David Miller: yup, interesting that technology seems to have been so much more focused on earthspace than his books suggested.

2:28:50 PM David Miller: The iPod the Web... not manned flights to Jupiter

2:30:11 PM David Miller: I wonder if I'll ever be able to enjoy sci-fi that ignores economics again.

4:19:35 PM BK Marcus: An interesting note from my wife:

Nathalie Marcus

4:01

I find this interesting.  Rothbard is talking about  the Hansen stagnation thesis: "As for technological progress, that too is slowing down. After all, the railroads have already been built and the automobile industry has reached maturity. Whatever minor improvements there might be will probably be withheld by 'reactionary monopolists,' etc."

4:01

They didn't seem to have much imagination.

4:02

Should have read more science fiction...

4:35:16 PM David Miller: yes , it is an interesting note and compliment to my observation. Economist ought to read more Sci-fi and Sci-fi writers should read more econ.

The exchange reminded me of the opening of an old friend's movie review of Speed (1994):

The day began, as all days should, with Ray Bradbury. In Saturday's early afternoon, I had just climbed back into the cab of my frequent movie partner's truck to have him tell me that the voice on the radio came from that old man of SF. While I was mailing our bills, he had tuned in Writer's Corner on our local NPR station. It must have been fifteen to twenty minutes before we were able to date the interview. For all we knew, the conversation could have been live; Bradbury could have been dead for years. I find I am able to keep track of these things less and less without cues.

We drove, listening to 1978. [Read the rest »]

After I posted an email from my friend about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Scott Lahti and David Zemens asked in the comments about the author, David Miller — specifically where they could read more of his prose.

David was the best man at my wedding and the humorless friend I mention in my first piece for LewRockwell.com, "Staw Men & Ham Sandwiches."

He is a poet and a photographer, who works for Associated Press, but unfortunately, despite his insinuation otherwise, David doesn't currently keep a blog. I will encourage him to try again.

In December, during the fortnight around the solstice, my wife and I sip single-malt whisky and take turns each evening, one reading the other a poem about the season. Every year, I include some of David Miller's poetry in my readings. Here's the one I read this year:

"Christmas Shopping"

Our hands slip apart,
I'm castaway.
Bobbing in a pedestrian current
thrown out among the hungry shoppers
of east 59th street.

David?

My name, like me is so small
among these people
as they hunt for symbols,
things to give the sense of
"Lie with me for 12 times 4 years."

She scans full-circle
a lighthouse look,
taking in the street
(its pickpockets,
          vendors,
               beggars innocents.)
in two half circles.

I, a baby boy in a red row boat
lost in the juggling and jostling
     handbags-thighs-knees-shoes.
She picks me out
the child she takes clasping
warm and tight against
the tide
her mother smell sweet,
with a deep hint of woman
                    shuts out the rest.

Lets it be unsaid
that you are my love,
               my jacket,
                    my safety belt
and I will never undo you
or let you come undone.

Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York

It was through the 1990s manifestation of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and its magazine The Freeman that I became an economic libertarian.

Half a century earlier, FEE introduced a young Murray Rothbard, who was already an advocate of economic laissez faire, to the larger libertarian movement and to a far broader, more penetrating, and radical libertarianism.

"One of the most important influences upon me," writes Rothbard, "was Baldy Harper, whose quiet and gentle hospitality toward young newcomers attracted many of us to the pure libertarian creed that he espoused and exemplified — a creed all the more effective for his stressing the philosophical aspects of liberty even more than the narrowly economic." [emphasis added]

Even more influential was Frank Chodorov: "that noble, courageous, candid, and spontaneous giant of a man who compromised not one iota in his eloquent denunciations of our enemy the State — was my entree to uncompromising libertarianism."

This doesn't sound like the FEE I knew, which proudly displayed a photograph of Ronald Reagan reading The Freeman.

What happened?

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I wrote this 2½ years ago:

I only knew [what a "neoconservative" was] because my highschool girlfriend explained it to me. Her mother, who was such a creature, worked for Norman Podhoretz, one of the founders of that now famous movement. (Which label too many leftists use as if it were synonymous with "conservative" or "right-wing". Morons.) In fact, I interviewed my mother as a typical so-called liberal and my girlfriend's mother as a typical so-called conservative (when they were actually a social democrat, and a neocon, respectively) for a high school history project on the different perspectives of different political persuasions. The topic was the Cuban Missile Crisis. One thing I remember from the neocon mom was that she rejected the "Old Right" (which I'd never heard of) and considered herself a JFK Democrat, a trade-unionist, etc., but the establishment Left had moved away from what she saw as the correct positions on the Cold War and culture.

Today on Mises.org, David Gordon reviewstrashes Podhoretz's latest book, World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

(You can, of course, read all about this "shift" on the Right from individualist, antiwar, anti-Establishment to collectivist, nationalist, traditionalist in Murray Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right.)

First posted 3 years ago today:

We married on September 29th, 2001.

Two years of marital bliss ...

(Anyone who ever appreciated that joke has long grown tired of it, but it continues to amuse me.)

Not only is today our anniversary, but it is also Ludwig von Mises's 123rd birthday.

We got married on his 120th birthday, though I didn't know it at the time. I barely knew who Mises was ... um, had been.

Our ceremony, which took place in front of the Barboursville Ruins, only looked like an anarchist wedding.

No official of Church or State stood above or between us. We wrote our own vows, which we exchanged in English and French, with best man and maid of honor translating, and then we pronounced ourselves married.

But in the back of the field, behind the guests, was Charlottesville's sheriff, in uniform, filling out the paperwork that means our union is recognized by the government. I'm more radical in theory, it seems, than I am in practice.

Still, I'm inspired by the story of Lillian Harman, daughter of the great 19th-century liberal anarchist, Moses Harman. The Harmans published a journal on birth control, reproductive rights, sexual consent ... all topics one might think were protected under the First Amendment, but which ran afoul of the infamous Comstock laws.

When the U.S. Deputy Marshall arrived at the publication's offices, looking to arrest the staff, the co-editor, E. C. Walker, and Lillian, age 16, weren't there. They were already in jail for having conducted a non-state, non-church marriage in September 1886.

In their ceremony, E. C. Walker pledged, "Lillian is and will continue to be as free to repulse any and all advances of mine as she had been heretofore. In joining with me in this love and labor union, she has not alienated a single natural right."

Lillian pledged, "I make no promises that it may become impossible or immoral for me to fulfill, but retain the right to act always as my conscience and best judgment shall dictate."

The ceremony concluded with Moses Harman declaring, "I do not 'give away the bride', as I wish her to be always the owner of her own person . . ."

When the judge asked if there was any reason why sentence should not be passed, Lillian answered: "Nothing except that we have committed no crime."

Lillian was sentenced to a month and a half, her husband to two and a half months, but they refused to pay court costs and remained in jail for six months.

Lillian Harman gave her reason for breaking the law: "I consider uniformity in mode of sexual relations as undesirable and impractical as enforced uniformity in anything else. For myself, I want the right to profit by my mistakes ... and why should I be unwilling for others to enjoy the same liberty? If I should be able to bring the entire world to live exactly as I live at present, what would that avail me in ten years, when as I hope, I shall have a broader knowledge of life, and my life therefore probably changed?"

Moses Hull, publisher of the Des Moines New Thought, wrote that the couple had been jailed "for being anarchists, agnostics, atheists, and everything bad that begins with an A."

In his LRC review of The Betrayal of the American Right, Charles A. Burris links to a 1997 article from the Rothbard-Rockwell Report (RRR):

"Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?"

It is a chilling read. If anyone out there knows enough about these claims to deny or confirm them — with sources, preferably — please do let me know.

I have a feeling I need to look more deeply into the history of the CIA.

(But honestly, whenever I've begun to approach the subject, I've immediately felt overwhelmed by the complexity, the surreality, and the creeping sense of paranoia…)

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