And they can't even claim it's "really about slavery" this time.

From blog.Mises.org:

She actually considered breaking up the union: thought crime

September 2, 2008 10:56 AM by Jeffrey Tucker | Other posts by Jeffrey Tucker | Comments (0)

Alaska only became a state in 1959, but somehow we are supposed to believe that it is part of the enternal natural law that it should always and everywhere be part of the union, and any thought to the contrary--the mere thought!--is grounds for permanent exclusion from public office.

Such is the implication behind the completely bizarre claim that Sarah Palin's involvement with the Alaskan secession movement amounts to a disastrous revelation for the McCain camp.

Why precisely this is such a horrid thought is never explained. Alaska would surely be better off, and does anyone in the other 49 states really believe that some calamity would befall the U.S. if Alaska became independent? It's nuts. Separating off territories from a mother country is at the very core of U.S. history and its founding, and we really saw many examples of peaceful secession in the old Soviet Union.

But somehow in the U.S., the very idea that the existing configuration of the nation state should ever be diminished by a single inch is a great taboo. And why? Because the media tell us so.

This book on secession clearly needs broader circulation.

Patrick Shaw-Stewart was an Oxford scholar who died in WWI. He wrote this during 3 days of R&R as he waited to be sent to fight at Gallipoli, which is across the Dardenelles (formerly known as the Hellespont) from the site of ancient Troy:

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask, and cannot answer,
if otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
Upon the Dardanelles:
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean Sea;
Shrapnel and high explosives,
Shells and hells for me.

Oh Hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese;
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest, and I know not;
So much the happier am I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros o'er the sea.
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

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.

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage."

– The Dhammapada: Path of the Dharma

Here is today's word from A.Word.A.Day:

And here is an example of an ancient boustrophedon:

The Gortyn Code

I once recommended George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman to a libertarian comrade who then said, "Wasn't he a socialist?"

Shaw's socialism wasn't as harmless as some shavians would want us to believe, but neither do I think it was coincidence that this brilliant playwright was friends with such antisocialists (in the shavian state-socialist sense) as G.K. Chesterton and Benjamin Tucker.

Also, when most intellectuals 100 years ago were somewhere on the spectrum from pink to red, we can't be too surprised when the cleverest stuff came from the pens of the revolutionary Left — or, in Shaw's case, the evolutionary Left.

Shaw hated the quirks of English spelling. True to the central-planning spirit (the version of "rationalism" that F.A. Hayek decried and sometimes mistakenly applied to his allies), Shaw wanted English spelling revised to be simple, straightforward, and logical.

To illustrate how much current spelling was the opposite of these three virtues, Shaw offered the following spelling of "fish":

ghoti

If you don't think that looks like an English spelling of something pronounced fish, then you're not alone. But Shaw pointed out that combining the gh of "tough" with the o of "women" and the ti of "nation" produced the exact phonemes needed for "fish."

(I just double-checked Wikipedia, and apparently Shaw didn't originate this suggested spelling; he just popularized it.)

This is not a non sequitur:

I'm listening to The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch. So far it's reminding me of my favorite stuff by Simon Winchester.

The Buried Book relays this amusing ghoti-like mistake in the rediscovery of ancient Mesopotamian mythology:

[A] major complication in the process … was that cuneiform had originally been developed in southern Mesopotamia by people who spoke Sumerian, an ancient language completely unrelated to any other known language. The script had then been taken over by speakers of Akkadian, which became the most commonly written language for much of Mesopotamian history. Yet the Akkadian scribes continued to learn Sumerian as they mastered the script, and they often employed Sumerian loan words amid their Akkadian texts. It is as though, in reading an English text we would often have to pause and determine whether pain meant 'suffering,' as in English, or 'bread,' as in French.

Conversely, a sign might have the same meaning in Akkadian as in Sumerian but a completely different sound: when used to mean 'sky,' the star symbol is pronounced an in Sumerian, but shamu in Akkadian. Names in particular could be tricky, for Assyrian names often included Sumerian elements, along with Akkadian symbols. This would lead George Smith [a self-taught linguist responsible for the first translation of Gilgamesh], for example, to misread the name Gilgamesh as 'Izdubar'; he didn't realize that what looked like two Akkadian characters, iz and du, were actually Sumerian signs pronounced 'giz-ga' or 'gil-ga.' He then guessed incorrectly on the final syllable, which was Akkadian as he assumed, but which can be pronounced either 'bar' or 'mesh.' … The reading of 'Gilgamesh' was finally established twenty-five years later by Smith's friend and successor Theophilus G. Pinches, in an article triumphantly entitled "EXIT GISTUBAR!"

(Transcription stolen from "Dare I read?")

One of the books that is still on sale at Audible.com is Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

Some Austrian scholars are discussing it on one of the mailing lists, and I decided to move it from my wishlist to my shopping cart.

I can't really review or recommend it, since I've only listened to about a quarter of it, so far, but I suspect I'll be giving it a thumbs up.

Meanwhile, I mention it here because I'm overwhelmed by how much of it already vindicates

1. Murray Rothbard's foreign-policy analysis from the 1950s onward, and

2. Robert Anton Wilson's information-theory analysis from "Celine's Laws," which you can read here on my website.

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.

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?

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.

Last year, I wrote,

… a great piece of silver trivia I'd never heard before:

In 1964, 3 silver dimes could buy you a gallon of gas (about 27¢/gallon); At the current rate of silver, the metal value of 3 silver dimes would be about $3, just enough for a gallon of gas.

I checked the math. Silver was $1.29/ounce in 1964, according to Kitco.com. Today's spot price is $12.93, again, according to Kitco. According to 1960sFlashback.com, gasoline was 30¢/gallon in 1964. And according to MSN, a gallon of gas in Charlottesville today ranges from $2.27 to $2.59/gallon.

So if anything, gasoline has gotten cheaper. At least by the silver standard. By the gold standard ($35.10/ounce in 1964 versus $650/ounce today), we should expect a gallon of gasoline to cost $5.55 in present dollars, so by gold-standard prices, gasoline prices have fallen significantly.…

Today's spot price for silver is $18.20. That would put a gallon of gas at $4.23.

In Charlottesville, gas prices range from $3.71 to $3.92 per gallon.

Just thought I'd offer an update. You can read the rest of last year's post for some background on the nature and history of money, inflation, coinage, etc.

Update: The "Silver Is Money" blog provides this handy chart:

Wendy McElroy's article for Liberty magazine on Rothbard's legacy ends on…

A Personal Note

Before closing, I want to render a sense of something that history books will not capture and future generations may not understand: namely, the profound and benevolent impact of Murray Rothbard's charisma on young scholars. Although reprints of his work will display the stunning breadth of his scholarship, they will give no clue as to the humor that made his listeners literally laugh for hours in after-conference sessions and gatherings at his home. When people finally walked away from Murray — reluctant to leave a world in which ideas were so much fun — they scattered to libraries and typewriters to research and write up the articles he had inspired. Murray Rothbard believed that ideas mattered. He infused you with that belief. I still hear his voice — admittedly a bit squawky — insisting that a certain insight was "key! it's key to the issue!," and admonishing me to write it up.

Murray had a habit of sitting with his right arm draped over his head, the elbow resting about five inches above ear level. I remember walking into a room where Murray was holding court for three young men who sat attentively before him, lined up on the couch. Each one had his right arm draped over his head. Not one realized they were mimicking him. A whole generation of libertarian theorists wanted to be Murray Rothbard. We adopted his slang terms, his gestures, his eccentricities … hopefully some of his intellectual magic has rubbed off as well.