(Update: please note John Kyle's additional bailout haikus in the comments below.)

And a visual via Anthony Gregory:

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.

"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?")

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.

From Human Action: The Scholars Edition, chapter 15: "The Market":

The creative genius is at variance with his fellow citizens. As the pioneer of things new and unheard of he is in conflict with their uncritical acceptance of traditional standards and values. In his eyes the routine of the regular citizen, the average or common man, is simply stupidity. For him "bourgeois" is a synonym of imbecility. The frustrated artists who take delight in aping the genius's mannerism in order to forget and to conceal their own impotence adopt this terminology. These bohemians call everything they dislike "bourgeois." Since Marx has made the term "capitalist" equivalent to "bourgeois," they use both words synonymously. In the vocabularies of all languages the words "capitalistic" and "bourgeois" signify today all that is shameful, degrading, and infamous.^*

* The Nazis used "Jewish" as a synonym of both "capitalist" and "bourgeois."

This line from Human Action strikes me as very funny:

If maximizing profits means that a man in all market transactions aims at increasing to the utmost the advantage derived, it is a pleonastic and periphrastic circumlocution. (243)

It is also a great example, I think, of autological grandiloquence.

Forwarded to me by my mother:

These glorious insults are from an era when cleverness with words was still
valued, before a great portion of the English language got boiled down to
4-letter words.

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my
husband I'd give you poison," and he said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows
or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether
I embrace your policies or your mistress."

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston
Churchill

"A modest little person, with much to be modest about." - Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great
pleasure." Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the
dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" -
Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading
it." - Moses Hadas

"He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." -
Abraham Lincoln

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of
it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a
friend.... if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston
Churchill, "Cannot
possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston
Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." -
Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." -
Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others." -
Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." Jack E.
Leonard

"He has the attention span of a lightning bolt." - Robert Redford

"They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human
knowledge." - Thomas Brackett Reed

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." -
Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."- Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -
Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar
Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather
than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder "

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

I know a couple of westerners in Asia right now. One says it's the land of milk and honey. At least one notorious Randian I know has spent some time in China and thinks it's the great capitalist hope for the 21st century.

If these signs from Engrish.com are any indication, the right to discriminate is still respected in that part of the world (but the responsibility to communicate is not taken quite as seriously).

Click either image to enlarge and read the fine print.

(Thanks to Evan for forwarding these.)

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.

In a footnote to his recent review of Human Smoke, David Gordon used the expression "King Charles's Head." I had no idea what that meant, so I looked it up. Once I knew its definition, I wanted a way to communicate it to any other readers of the Mises Review who shared my ignorance. The problem is that most free dictionaries online are ugly and full of ads. So I decided to create an entry at Wiktionary.org. I created the entry as "King Charles's Head," exactly as Gordon used it. One of the Wiktionary regulars corrected and expanded my entry. Here's the note he left me:

Sorry, I made a mess of King Charles' head. Please feel free to improve that entry. King Charles's head should be marked as an {{alternative spelling of}} or {{misspelling of}}. But King Charles' Head with a capital on Head is incorrect. Yours Conrad.Irwin 20:39, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I changed "Head" to "head" in the review, but as I wrote the wiktionarian (perhaps in the wrong place?), I don't understand his stripping away the 's from King Charles's name:

Conrad.Irwin, thanks for catching the spurious capital and thanks for expanding the entry. Thanks also for teaching me some wiki syntax; I'm new here, as the rest of this message will no doubt reinforce.

I'm confused about your change in the spelling of the singular possessive, from Charles's to Charles'.

I see 3 arguments for the former:

1. The reference is originally to Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, where it is spelled "King Charles's head."
2. The Chicago Manual of Style says, "The possessive of a title or name is formed by adding ’s {Lloyd’s of London’s records} {National Geographic Society’s headquarters} {Dun & Bradstreet’s rating}. This is so even when the word ends in a sibilant {Dickens’s novels}..."
3. The much more accessible Elements of Style says the same in its very first rule:

Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's.

Follow this rule whatever the final consonant. Thus write,

• Charles's friend
• Burns's poems
• the witch's malice

This is the usage of the United States Government Printing Office and of the Oxford University Press.

Is there a Wiktionary style guide I should be referring to instead?

Thanks again.

I was recently forwarded this 2-year-old Non Sequitur as part of an email "memorial chain" for the victims of the Holocaust. My suspicion is that this is an exercise in preaching to the choir: the recipients of this email memorial will probably say "Amen," but think nothing new and do nothing new because of it.

Maybe this blog is a similar exercise in choir preaching, but it continues to bother me that history's atrocities are blamed on "extremists."

Extremism is just a dirty word for logical consistency. Don't blame Nazism on logical consistency. Blame it on the root philosophy — a philosophy of government and economy that very few in the choir understand beyond the central emphasis that the Nazis hated Jews and murdered millions.

Here's what I wrote about all this 2 years ago:

I, extremist

Today's Non-Sequitur is upsetting on several levels.

Seeing Danae in a concentration camp had the effect on me I'm sure Wiley sought. And I'm the last person to claim that there's anything inherently wrong with references to Hitler or the Holocaust (see "In Defense of Referencing Hitler") but when you make such comparisons, you'd better be clear on the parallel, and you'd better be right.

Having learned where and why the old man involuntarily received his numerical tattoo, Danae wonders why he hasn't had it removed...

I don't know whether Wiley meant to be targeting neocon war hawks, the Religious Right, the Bush administration, or extremists in general, but the words he chose explicitly target all political extremists, which would include me.

As Karl Hess wrote for Barry Goldwater,

...extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Every attack on political extremism is an attack on principle. The consistent application of principle is by definition extremist (so long as we're actually defining terms and using them consistently, rather than appealing always and only to emotional reflexes). It should be clear to anyone who can keep his knee from jerking for 30 seconds, that the problem isn't extremism per se, but rather which ideology is being applied in the extreme. Extreme pacifists will tend to behave quite differently from extreme nationalists. Extreme libertarians (i.e., liberal anarchists) will not lock people up just because of their background, whereas extreme egalitarians already have.

The standard attack on extremism is not an appeal to reason, but its opposite: the conflation of ideologies and the decrying of principle.

So according to Wiley, extremism in the defense of liberty can lead to another Holocaust. Try to figure that one out!

The problem isn't only with confusion on the words principle and extremism; there's also the standard problem that comes from the leftist map of politics. The Left and Right dichotomy may have started with 18th and 19th-century French republicans, but it has been applied throughout the world (especially the West) by 20th-century socialists.

First the Left is defined as progress, as it was for the French (and for classical liberals in general, back when progressives were the people who opposed the Ancien Regime). But now "progress" is linked to the State as egalitarian regulator, social safety net, etc. Thus "Progressives" are always calling for bigger and ever more pervasive government.

The Right, in contrast, is anyone opposed to the Left, anyone opposed to their vision of progress. We are the reactionaries, again by definition. For the socialists who controlled and continue to control the political language of Establishment intellectuals, all opponents of socialism are rightwing -- to varying degrees. So the classical liberals were rightwing, but then so were the fascists.

You might object, isn't fascism just nationalist socialism? Didn't the national socialists oppose liberal capitalism just as much as they opposed illiberal Communism? Sure, but to the left-socialists, any non-egalitarian socialists weren't real socialists. Since the fascists claimed to be defending the bourgeoisie and were, in fact, the dominant opposition to the Communists in many parts of the world, they were really the Right. Maybe these rightwingers said they opposed free-market capitalism, but any good socialist could see right through that: fascism was clearly the epitome of capitalism! (I'm not making this up.)

It didn't matter that classical liberalism and fascism are completely at odds, ideologically -- that one is based on individualism and laissez-faire, while the other is based on national collectivism and economic corpratism -- the Left just asserted that one led inexorably to the other, and we've been lumped together as rightwing extremists ever since.

I have no emotional attachment to the word extremist. I'm not trying to hold onto it the way I'm trying to hold on to the word liberal. I just don't like it when people throw more mud into already muddy waters.

• See Rothbard on moderation.
• See BK on moderation.
• See BlackCrayon.com on centrism.

Postscript to anyone who says that this is "just semantics": if you care about justice, if you care about meaning, then a just semantics is exactly what you care about.

PPS: If the leftwing scare-tactic smear term is "extremist" then the rightwing scare-tactic smear term is "radical". They're not equivalent terms, since radicalism is about perceiving both the problem and the solution as being at the "root" or foundation of the status quo, whereas extremism can designate any position, pro- or anti-radical, taken to the extreme. I am a radical extremist in the Rothbardian tradition, which is neither violent nor revolutionary. (Unfortunately, Murray Rothbard himself was responsible for some confusion on this point back in the 1960s.) Not all extremism is violent, just as not all radicalism is red.

As neural told me,

The quotemaster at qotd.org, G. Armour Van Horn (who signs his introductory comments "Van") has given some hints before of having libertarian leanings. He's suspicious of government in general, has expressed a past appreciation of Ayn Rand (with the standard disclaimers), and has a fondness for Thomas Jefferson. I've never sensed anything radical about him, however. Until this morning.

Today's mailing was the first hint, the first subtle sign of blasphemy against our secular religion.

Today's introductory comments begin, "I no longer participate in politics directly…"

Sound familiar?

Here's the whole message:

I no longer participate in politics directly, but for months now I've been drawn to watching the presidential race with much the same fascination a bystander might evidence at the scene of a multiple-vehicle road accident. Alas, things appear to be getting ugly, I thought a little cynicism from the ages would be in order. Note that one of our contributors, newsman Edward R. Murrow, was born a century ago today.

Today's Quotes:

• "The politicians were talking themselves red, white, and blue in the face."

  – Clare Boothe Luce, 1902–1987

• "Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision."

  – Dick Armey

• "The politician in my country seeks votes, affection, and respect, in that order…. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved."

  – Edward R. Murrow, 1908–1965

• "The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time."

  – Franklin P. Adams, 1881–1960

• "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

  – Henry Louis Mencken, 1880–1956

• "My choice early in life was either to be a piano–player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."

  – Harry S Truman, 1884–1972