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:

In his article, "Nixonian Socialism," Murray Rothbard defined economic fascism as "an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses."

That definition was already damning to our current system of political capitalism well before the PTB started bailing out all these government-business "partnerships." I've added this cartoon to my definition of fascism. I doubt the artists realized the economic history behind their astute joke.

Salacious bed-sheet print ad from 1949:

(via Snopes via steve2 via email from Scott Lahti)

The ad copy says "This buck may look more like 47¢ — which is what most bucks are worth these days." I thought I'd check this inflation calculator to see if 47¢ is the right number.

Nope. According to the calculator, a 1947 dollar was worth 40¢ (meaning that what cost a buck in 1949 would have only cost 40¢ the year the Federal Reserve was created).

Of course, that's still ten times the value of a current dollar.

(Click to Enlarge)

Harper Lee has been on my mind recently — ever since seeing her portrayed in Capote a few weeks ago.

But tonight she came to mind in an unusually perverse way. I found myself wondering if there was a cocktail called Tequila Mockingbird. There had to be, right?

Turns out there are a bunch of them. They all start out with tequila and lime juice, but the last ingredients vary:

• tomato juice
• green peppermint liqueur
• green creme de menthe (2)
• white creme de menthe (2)
• black currant-flavored liqueur & apple cider
• triple sec, blue curacao, OJ, cranberry juice

That's not a complete list, I'm sure, but it's what I pulled from the first page of Google hits. The green and white cremes de menthe each occurred on 2 pages, so I think creme de menthe, generically, wins the competition for genuine recipe.

That image in the upper right is from MAD magazine issue 289, September 1989. Because Google reads PDF files, and because I run Google Desktop on my MacBook, and because I have decades worth of back issues of MAD magazine stored on my hard drive, the top hit for "tequila mockingbird" was for this panel from MAD289.pdf.

This is from About.com : Babies & Toddlers :

Court Intervenes, Changes Child's Name

From the story in the Telegraph:

A lawyer acting for the girl claimed she was so embarrassed by her name that she had kept it from her friends, insisting she should be known as 'K' instead. She also feared that if it became public she would be mocked and teased.

The lawyer claimed the girl fully understood the absurdity of her name, unlike her parents who had not considered the implications when they named her.

Justice Robert Murfitt said the name clearly presented a social hurdle for the child.

Read the rest of the story, too. It's got lots of examples of names that folks have given their kids as well as names rejected by the New Zealand government. I'm also reading a book right now called Bad Baby Names which has some incredibly funny and sad (please don't name your kid Typhus or Rubella) baby naming blunders.

It makes me think of the "Seinfeld" episode where Jerry couldn't remember the name of the girl he was dating and she told him that it rhymed with a female body part. They spent the rest of the episode trying to figure it out. "Mulva?" Turns out it was Delores. It also makes me wonder how I would feel if the government wanted to tell me that I couldn't give my child a name that they didn't approve of. With the last name Brown, I had plenty of choices of odd baby names and being a strange girl with a bizarre sense of humor, some pretty entertaining ones came up during the initial phases of baby name negotiation. In the end, I chose a name that was pretty normal and had significance on both sides of our family. Certainly we won't be having any upcoming days in court over it.

Then I think about that song, "Boy Named Sue," and I wonder if giving your kid a name like Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii might build character or prepare them for some serious adversity that they may face later in life. Maybe they're doing a disservice by changing her name now. But... Nah.

What Do You Think?

Right now in the poll, almost half of you say that the court should be allowed to intervene in cases like this.

Chante says,

I agree with the court. I don't for one minute think that their intervention was wrong, for the reason that the girl was so utterly embarrassed. If someone had a totally bizarre name, but was proud of it... maybe that would be a different story.

Michelle says,

I disagree with the court. No one should have any rights over the parents unless the parents were causing harm to their children. A name does not cause harm. Why didnt the girl who obvously is smart just have people call her Talula or Mary or Jessica? My daughter's name is Sunshine. Everybody told me that she would be made fun of. It is exactly the opposite. Everybody alwasy tells her how pretty her name is.

I think I'll use Jeffrey Tucker's blog post about Batman: The Dark Knight as an excuse to repost my review of Batman Begins from 3 years ago:

der Fledermaus Mann fängt an

Joe Salerno must be feeling a void after his great summer seminar, June 6-10 [2005] at LvMI.

(I've listened to 9 of the 10 lectures, so far. I'd better finish #10 tonight so I can focus on Tom Woods's summer seminar starting tomorrow.)

Salerno seems to have turned to film reviews, starting with this critique of Batman Begins.

I've just returned from a sold-out matinee.

Salerno says, "This is the best Batman movie yet." I agree.

He says, "Bale's Batman is dark, dangerous, disturbed, dehumanized and vengeful — as he was meant to be." Right on.

He says, "The new menacing-looking, tank-like, car-crunching, building-smashing Batmobile is a better reflection of Batman's spiritual being than the sleek Batmobile of earlier movies." I agree enthusiastically, and I add that it's clearly based on Frank Miller's vision of the revamped Batmobile in the great 1985 graphic novel, The Dark Knight Returns. (My impression is that this movie began as a film adaptation of Miller's follow-up series, Batman: Year One. If so, little of the original remains, but I certainly think Batman Begins is the most "Milleresque" of Hollywood's attempts to tell Bruce Wayne's story. To whatever extent modern audiences can imagine Batman as "dark, dangerous, disturbed, dehumanized and vengeful" instead of the high-camp grinning idiocy of Adam West, we have Frank Miller to thank for it.)

Salerno says, "The slow-paced and meandering build-up in the first half hour or so ultimately pays off handsomely in the movie's climactic scenes, with plenty of action and suspense along the way." While we both enjoyed the movie, my review is the opposite of his: my favorite part of the movie is the "slow-paced and meandering build-up" — the best superhero origin back story I've yet seen on film. Was it only half an hour? Felt more like an hour to me, and I was enjoying all of it. Felt like we didn't even get to see the hero costume for the first half of the film, and for my tastes, the story deteriorated from that point on. Not much. It would still have been the best Batman movie ever, even if they'd started at what I'm calling the downturn. But I definitely preferred the character of Bruce Wayne to the character of Batman.

So why is an Austrian School economist reviewing a superhero movie?

I'll say that before I read Salerno's review (which I saved for after the movie), I was already thinking that this was the most self-consciously economically minded comic book movie I've seen. Some of this economic mindedness is revealed in the standard myths and misunderstandings of economic illiteracy, but there were two points I thought Austrians could readily embrace.

Point #1:

The first one turns out to be something Salerno did not at all embrace, but put into the economically illiterate column of the tally:

The notion that a conspiracy of bad guys can "use economics as a weapon" to cause a depression in Gotham City is ridiculous — unless they have somehow infiltrated the Federal Reserve System.

Well, yes, exactly. Why shouldn't we believe that this is precisely what the bad guys have done?

No, it's not specifically explained that way, but what is both explained and demonstrated is that the bad guys have infiltrated every level of every aspect of Gotham City government. How much sense would it make for them to have kept their hands out of the federal government's mechanisms?

Do I assume that the screenwriters understand that government monetary inflation is responsible for the business cycle? No, I don't assume that. (But if they did understand, they'd be wise to keep the details of their insight out of the script. After all, they're trying to turn a tidy profit, and therefore want the overwhelming population of young Marxoids to buy film tickets and recommend the movie to their young Marxoid friends.)

What I embrace in this detail is the perception that depressions are created! They are not natural, not just an inevitable symptom of market economies. They are artifacts of intervention, and this is what I take to be the point.

The film posits a criminal conspiracy behind a devastating economic depression. That's only half the story — Austrians know that the criminal intervention is a conspiracy of bankers and politicians — but that's already more than I ever expected to get from Hollywood film writers. As Murray Rothbard would say: their suspicions are right, even if they don't have all the details (although when Rothbard said it, he was referring to people's suspicions of bankers — not of criminal secret societies).

Point #2:

"Where does he get those wonderful toys?"

When I was a smart-alec kid, watching James Bond marathons, my smart-alec friends and I would question the logistics of the bad guys' lairs. How did Dr. No arrange for the construction of a secret volcano fortress? Fine, the bad guys had plenty of money from past bad-guy activities, but how did they turn it into so much advanced infrastructure and technology.

What we never questioned was how MI6 managed to do the same. We grew up in an era when most people took for granted that governments had technology more advanced than we had on the private market — and feared that the Soviets' infrastructure and technology were just that much better than MI6 and the CIA's. That was the Cold War mentality, and even those of us who opposed the Cold War often failed to question its most basic assumptions — like the idea that command economies could out-compete free economies.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the discovery that we'd been lied to for decades by both Left and Right (each for their own reasons) about the strength of the Soviet economy and military, and after finally learning some of the economics behind the reality behind the lies, I now find every adventure movie to come out of the 1960s, 1970s, and even 1980s to be based in the economic misunderstandings of Cold-War thinking. (Even the supposedly somewhat libertarian The Incredibles suffers from this ignorance — though I suppose we can forgive a movie that is consciously playing with an already established superhero tradition. PoMo, donchaknow.)

But how can Batman have such an elaborately constructed Batcave? Well, in this movie, he doesn't. The cave looks like a cave, not like an underground military installation. There are no hydraulic lifts, no supercomputer, absolutely nothing it would take negotiations with teamsters to construct. We even see Bruce Wayne himself rappelling down from the cave ceiling where he's been putting in the lighting. Faithful butler Alfred stands by the small gas-powered generator that provides the electricity.

And how can Batman have such high-tech crime-fighting gadgetry unavailable on the market?

The old answer was the Bruce Wayne is a billionaire — same answer for James Bond's supervillains.

But Batman Begins offers no such pretense. We see Alfred and Bruce Wayne planning how to buy which parts of the costume from which foreign manufacturers, without attracting attention. We learn that the department of the Wayne Corporation originally funded to develop defense technology has been all but shut down, as the new WayneCorp management focuses on government weapons contracts.

Of course Bruce Wayne didn't build the Batmobile! What were you thinking?

Batman's high-tech costume, vehicles, gadgetry — they are products of the market, abandoned with changes in demand. (Though the demand comes from government, not consumers.)

Batman's gadgets are what economists call "sunk costs". They already exist and have already been paid for, whether or not anyone wants or can afford to buy them. They're too expensive to mass-produce, given the lack of demand, but they've already been produced as prototypes.

Batman Begins is not Austrian, not even as much as "The Berlin Batman" (1, 2, 3), but it is by far the most market-oriented superhero movie I'm aware of. Many libertarians celebrated The Incredibles for its Randian individualism and bourgeois family values, and I can join them in much of that, but The Incredibles also showed the private insurance corporation as criminally malicious while giving a complete pass to the secret government agency that enforces the ban on private security (a.k.a. superheroes). I guess libertarians have to take what we can get. But for my money, the more interesting questions are asked by Batman Begins — even if the answers it hints at are sometimes less than satisfactory.

"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.

I was working on an article by Thorsten Polleit today, when I was taken by this passage he quotes from Ludwig von Mises. I made a mental note to blog it after Mises.org publishes the Polleit article, but Jeffrey Tucker got the same idea and ran with it earlier, so I guess that frees me up to blog it now:

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. The individual is always ready to ascribe his good luck to his own efficiency and to take it as a well-deserved reward for his talent, application, and probity. But reverses of fortune he always charges to other people, and most of all to the absurdity of social and political institutions. He does not blame the authorities for having fostered the boom. He reviles them for the inevitable collapse. In the opinion of the public, more inflation and more credit expansion are the only remedy against the evils which inflation and credit expansion have brought about. (Human Action, chapter 20, section 9)

I thought this comment from Miklos Hollender on blog.Mises.org about the article "WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity" was very interesting:

I generally agree with pretty much everything in this article, what I would like to point out that terminology can sometimes be very confusing. Here you use the word "modernity" in a positive sense (technological progress), from where I am coming (Oakeshott, Voegelin etc.) modernity is used in a negative sense (regression in philosophical thought, social sciences). This movie "criticizes" modernity in the technological sense, however in the other sense this movie IS modernity, it's very modern, because this sort of nonsense is very characteristically modern. The bourgeois of 100-200 years ago, however ignorant they were, generally happened to have the right prejudices and would have not accepted such a nonsense.

I spent much of the weekend listening to The Iliad, which I'm enjoying immensely. I had recently read that Homer's epic is appreciated not just as a work of literature but also as a set of clues for historians. The story is filled with details about the culture of prehistoric Greece — if not the culture of Agamemnon and company, then at least the culture of Home and his audience a few centuries later. One such detail is something I'm surprised I've never heard any libertarians mention (by which I mean radical libertarians who are better read and more educated than I am): Agamemnon has insulted Achilles and Achilles has withdrawn from the war in protest. (I'd describe Agamemnon's offense as theft, but that would require acknowledging property rights in other human beings: the warlord Agamemnon "steals" the sex slave of his best warrior, Achilles.)

The war goes very badly while Achilles is on strike, and Agamemnon relents, recants, says mea culpa, and offers Achilles very generous restitution, including the return of "the girl" whom Agamemnon swears he never touched, and a boat load of gold — literally, Achilles can fill his ship with as much gold as it can carry. Agamemnon sends Achilles's most beloved comrades to deliver the apologies and give the details of what is, in essence, a verbal contract for the two warriors to forgive each other. Achilles tells his friends just where Agamemnon can stick his boat load.

At this point, Ajax scolds Achilles for being unreasonable:

Ajax son of Telamon then said, "Ulysses, noble son of Laertes, let us be gone, for I see that our journey is vain. We must now take our answer, unwelcome though it be, to the Danaans who are waiting to receive it. Achilles is savage and remorseless; he is cruel, and cares nothing for the love his comrades lavished upon him more than on all the others. He is implacable — and yet if a man's brother or son has been slain he will accept a fine by way of amends from him that killed him, and the wrong-doer having paid in full remains in peace among his own people; but as for you, Achilles, the gods have put a wicked unforgiving spirit in your heart, and this, all about one single girl…

There is is, stated quite starkly: murder wasn't a crime against the king or the state; it was a crime against the murder victim and his family; once restitution was paid, that settled the matter.

I figured someone has to have written about this, but I've only found one brief mention so far, and I found it at StephanKinsella.com/texts (thanks, Kinsella!):

• Schafer, Dr. Stephen, Restitution to Victims of Crime, 1960 (selected chapters)

PAST OF RESTITUTION AND PUNISHMENT

…neither the adherents of restitution nor its opponents can be indifferent to the fact that restitution to victims of crime is an ancient institution, has had an established position in the history of penology, and for a long period was almost inseparably attached to the institution of punishment.

The historical origin of restitution, in a proper sense, the so-called system of "composition," lies in the Middle Ages, and can mainly be found in the Germanic common laws.

Earlier sources do not offer clear information. There are some sporadic references. The death fine in Greece is referred to more than once in Homer; thus, in the 9th Book of the Iliad, Ajax, in reproaching Achilles for not accepting the offer of reparation made to him by Agamemnon, reminds him that even a brother's death may be appeased by a pecuniary fine, and that the murderer, having paid the fine, may remain at home, free among his own people.

Having examples in famous literature strikes me as far more helpful to us than assertions about little-known tribal law among ancient Celts and Vikings, or even recent Indonesians.

Does anyone have any other examples?