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 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?

Actually, that's the wrong question, since the law-enforcement lobby would make it very, very expensive to abolish the police through legal channels, and any violent attempt to bypass legal channels would probably end up having the opposite effect.

What I mean is this: if we pushed the Rothbardian button* and made all the cops go away tomorrow, how much would it cost to implement a private libertarian replacement, where person and property are protected, and victimless so-called crimes are nobody's business but the nonexistent victims?

Gil Guillory, et al. have crunched the numbers. He summarizes on LRC. Here's my summary of his summary (dollar amounts are per annum per household):

* Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty, final chapter, "A Strategy for Liberty":

"The libertarian, then, should be a person who would push the button, if it existed, for the instantaneous abolition of all invasions of liberty."

** If the payouts were capped at your homeowner's insurance deductible, it would only be $25.

In the summer of 1940, with Hitler's troops moving through France to encircle Switzerland, Ludwig von Mises sat beside his wife Margit on a bus filled with Jews fleeing Europe. To avoid capture, the bus driver took back roads through the French countryside, stopping to ask locals if the Germans had been spotted ahead — reversing and finding alternative routes if they had been.

Mises was two months shy of his fifty-ninth birthday. He had left Vienna some years earlier, escaping only days before the Nazis ransacked his apartment, confiscated his records, and froze his assets. He had hoped to be safe in Geneva. Now nowhere in Europe seemed safe. Not only was he a prominent intellectual of Jewish descent; he was widely known to be an archenemy of National Socialism and of every other form of socialism. Some called him "The Last Knight of Liberalism."

Failing to catch him in Vienna, the Nazis tried to snatch him in Switzerland. Again they did not succeed. Mises did not assume his luck would last.

[keep reading]

Mr B forwarded me this:

I'm reminded of a recent unfortunate week at A.W.A.D guest-hosted by a sesquipedalian judge:

Monday

aposematic

Tuesday

pleochroic

Wednesday

pastiche

Thursday

haboob

Friday

resipiscent

Lew Rockwell points to some "Latin You Should Know" from Neatorama.com.

Among the Latin phrases, I found this common-law term I learned from reading Murray Rothbard on property theory:

Cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos: "Whoever owns the land it is theirs up to the sky and down to the depths." The state of Kansas used this law in the 1970s to argue that airlines could not serve liquor when flying over Kansas, a dry state. "Kansas," Attorney General Vern Miller said, "goes all the way up and all the way down." (If that’s true, Kansas can lay claim to, and prohibit drinking in, about 82,282 square miles of western China.)

There's plenty wrong with the Kansas interpretation, but there's even more wrong with Neatorama's snide aside about western China.

Here's my summary of Rothbard on the ad coelum rule:

Property Units: Rothbard versus Common Law

Rothbard's main departure from common law tradition is his disagreement with the common-law principle "that every landowner owns all the airspace above him upward indefinitely unto the heavens and downward into the center of the earth. In Lord Coke's famous dictum: cujus est solum ejus est usque ad coelum; that is, he who owns the soil owns upward unto heaven, and, by analogy, downward to Hades."

But according to Rothbard, the ad coelum rule never made any sense in the context of homesteading: "If one homesteads and uses the soil, in what sense is he also using all the sky above him up into heaven? Clearly, he isn't."

So Rothbard rejected ad coelum, but we needn't side with Rothbard to reject both the Kansas interpretation (pro–ad coelum) and the Neatorama interpretation (anti–ad coelum).

What's wrong with the Kansas Attorney General's argument is that ad coelum is a common law property precedent, and the state of Kansas does not own the entire territory of Kansas, according to common law. Even if you recognize the state government as a legitimate property owner (which Rothbardians don't, of course), its property is limited to those areas not owned by the citizens and residents of Kansas. The irony of the state's mouthpiece citing common law as an excuse to extend the reach of its "dry law" is that alcohol prohibition is itself a violation of common-law property rights.

But Neatorama's parenthetical commentator is wrong at a much more rudimentary level, because ad coelum establishes a three-dimensional property boundary in the shape of a cone, not a cylinder. The point of the cone starts at the theoretical center of the planet; its supposedly infinite reach is only heavenward, not bidirectional.

Lord Coke's dictum extends ownership "upward unto heaven, and, by analogy, downward to Hades."

China isn't Hades.

[This article is excerpted from the first two chapters of The Enterprise of Law by Bruce Benson.]

Anyone who would even question the "fact" that law and order are necessary functions of government is likely to be considered a ridiculous, uninformed radical by most observers.

	$15
"No one would voluntarily recognize a legal system that was not expected to treat him fairly."

This study will use economic theory to compare institutions and incentives that influence public and private performance in the provision of law and its enforcement. Some critics may contend that law is not an appropriate subject for "economic analysis," because it is not produced and allocated in exchange markets. To be certain, economics has a great deal to say about market institutions, but its relevance and scope are not so narrowly limited. Economic theory requires only that scarce resources be allocated among competing uses. Clearly, the enterprise of law — the use of police services, court time, and all other inputs in the process of making law and establishing order — requires scarce resources that must be allocated. Beyond that, economic theory explains human behavior by considering how individuals react to incentives and constraints.

Using economic theory, then, it can be convincingly demonstrated that private-sector (i.e., market or voluntary) institutions are capable of establishing strong incentives that lead to effective law making and law enforcement. The resulting legal constraints facilitate interaction and support social order by inducing cooperation and reducing violent confrontation. It can also be shown that public-sector institutions create incentives that can lead to substantial inefficiencies in the provision of these same functions. In fact, our modern reliance on government to make law and establish order is not the historical norm.

FULL ARTICLE

Here's a typical irony. Defenders of current anti-prostitution laws often make 2 claims: one is absurd on its face; the other is often more compelling to anyone who isn't a principled libertarian.

The first claim is that anti-prostitution laws are meant to help the prostitutes themselves — protect them from their terrible lives, protect them from their terrible pimps, protect them from their terrible customers, etc.

But anyone can think beyond two steps of cause and effect can tell you that it is the criminal status of their trade that makes these women so vulnerable to less-than-ethical pimps and johns. Recognize self-ownership and contract rights, and they are no more vulnerable than any other private service worker. (OK, maybe they'd still be more vulnerable than a telecommuter, but no more so than, say, a massage therapist or a chiropractor.)

The second claim — the one that many otherwise liberally inclined people are often sympathetic to — is that prostitution ruins neighborhoods. Here the prostitution prohibitionists are appealing to our images of streetwalkers. The irony is that streetwalkers may also be a creation of the prohibitionists.

From the most recent Weekend Edition at Mises.org:

IV. Saving Our Boys from Alcohol and Vice

One of organized womanhood's major contributions to the war effort was to collaborate in an attempt to save American soldiers from vice and Demon Rum. In addition to establishing rigorous dry zones around every military camp in the United States, the Selective Service Act of May 1917 also outlawed prostitution in wide zones around the military camps.

[…]

At that point, the new Secretary of War, the progressive former mayor of Cleveland Newton D. Baker, became disturbed at reports that areas near the army camps in Texas on the Mexican border, where troops were mobilized to combat the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, were honeycombed with saloons and prostitution. Sent by Baker on a fact-finding tour in the summer of 1916, scoffed at by tough army officers as the "Reverend," Fosdick was horrified to find saloons and brothels seemingly everywhere in the vicinity of the military camps. He reported his consternation to Baker, and, at Fosdick's suggestion, Baker cracked down on the army commanders and their lax attitude toward alcohol and vice.

[…]

Employing the argument of health and military necessity, Fosdick set up a Social Hygiene Division of his commission, which promulgated the slogan "Fit to Fight." Using a mixture of force and threats to remove federal troops from the bases if recalcitrant cities did not comply, Fosdick managed to bludgeon his way into suppressing, if not prostitution in general, then at least every major red light district in the country. In doing so, Fosdick and Baker, employing local police and the federal Military Police, far exceeded their legal authority. The law authorized the president to shut down every red light district in a five-mile zone around each military camp or base. Of the 110 red light districts shut down by military force, however, only 35 were included in the prohibited zone. Suppression of the other 75 was an illegal extension of the law. Nevertheless, Fosdick was triumphant: "Through the efforts of this Commission [on Training Camp Activities] the red light district has practically ceased to be a feature of American city life."[35] The result of this permanent destruction of the red light district, of course, was to drive prostitution onto the streets, where consumers would be deprived of the protection of either an open market or of regulation.

Murray N. Rothbard, "World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals"

(emphasis added, of course)

Well, you might say, the federal government of the United States can't possibly be to blame for streetwalkers, since they could be found in London in the 19th century, and probably elsewhere throughout the history of cities.

My guess is that brothel-based prostitution is the norm wherever it is legal (and call girls, after the invention of the telephone), and that streetwalking is a black-market phenomenon … throughout the history of cities.

Virginia Warns New York Over Gun Buys

5/10/2007

"[Virginia] Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell is warning New York to stop, by the summer, sending private agents into Virginia to look for illegal gun sales, saying that the agents could face legal action. Because of a Virginia law that goes into effect in July, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R) and his agents could be charged with a felony if they continue to target Virginia gun dealers with undercover sting operations, McDonnell said." (Washington Post, Thursday)

This could get interesting.

FEE Timely Classic

"Guns, Gun Laws, and Liberty" by Lawrence W. Reed

Ludwig von Mises at a conference on inflation and war, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, April 5-8, 1951:

I want to ask a question. What is a loophole? If the law does not punish a definite action or does not tax a definite thing, this is not a loophole. It is simply the law. Great Britain does not punish gambling. This is not a loophole; it is a British law. The income-tax exemptions in our income tax are not loopholes. The gentleman who complained about loopholes in our income tax — he did not refer to the exemptions — implicitly starts from the assumption that all income over fifteen or twenty thousand dollars ought to be confiscated and calls therefore a loophole the fact that his ideal is not yet attained. Let us be grateful for the fact that there are still such things as those the honorable gentleman calls loopholes. Thanks to these loopholes this country is still a free country and its workers are not yet reduced to the status and the distress of their Russian colleagues.

I do not want to assert that our laws are perfect and do not require any amendment. Let us discuss this problem in detail and let us examine every instance according to its merits. But do not confuse the issue involved by resorting to the meaningless slogan "elimination of loopholes."

Anything in bold italics is my emphasis:

Prices provide suppliers of goods and services with clear signals of what consumers want, and relative prices are an important source of information that markets use to represent the relative value of alternative uses of resources. Willingness to pay a high price to a supplier typically means that the producer is doing a very good job of providing for consumers. If that high price generates high profits, then the producer is able to employ more resources and produce more of the desired commodity. [Profits also draw competition, which will ultimately lower the prices of the most-desired commodities. -bk]

Non-price Measures of Performance. Because legislators do not enjoy a clear information source like prices when determining how to allocate publicly employed resources, they are forced to consider less reliable measures of performance. Typically, this means using some statistical representation of the "quality" of work being done by a bureau, since market prices do not place a direct value on the work. For instance, the function of police in the minds of most citizens is to "fight crime." But how can we tell if they are doing a good job in order to justify a particular budget? They must demonstrate their effectiveness like any other bureau. What statistic is readily available to demonstrate that police are fighting crime? The number of arrests is a natural measure, and other legal sector bureaucrats rely on similar statistics.

The important question is, what incentives does reliance on statistical measures of effectiveness provide? When the price that consumers are willing to pay measures effectiveness, producers have strong incentives to provide the quality of goods or services that consumers desire. If a private security firm is hired to protect a home or business, then that firm will have incentives to prevent crime through watching and wariness. Private individuals who join neighborhood watch groups do so largely to set up patrols that deter criminals and thus prevent crimes.

But public police must produce arrest statistics and have no strong incentives to watch or patrol. Public police have incentives to wait until a crime is committed in order to make an arrest. Prosecutors have similar incentives to bargain for convictions on lesser charges, perhaps with concurrent sentences, in order to generate conviction statistics. All such incentives arise because these bureaucracies are not market institutions. (pp. 131f)