My clever beloved served us a Rothbardian repast last night: Manicotti and Steak (I kid you not)!

And in anticipation of Scott Lahti’s next question, yes I did have Hunan earlier in the weekend, and yes, you could count that as Hunan Action.

(See this old post if you have no idea what I’m talking about. And if you’d care to.)

In reply to my post “taking the Book of Job seriously,” author Robert Sutherland left this comment:

You might be interested in this online commentary “Putting God on Trial: The Biblical Book of Job” (http://www.bookofjob.org) as supplementary or background material for the Book of Job. It is not a sin to question God, to demand answers from God. There is a time and a place for such things. It is written by a Canadian criminal defense lawyer, now a Crown prosecutor, and it explores the legal and moral dynamics of the Book of Job with particular emphasis on the distinction between causal responsibility and moral blameworthiness embedded in Job’s Oath of Innocence. It is highly praised by Job scholars (Clines, Janzen, Habel) and the Review of Biblical Literature, all of whose reviews are on the website. It is also taught in 262 US high schools in 40 states through Chapter 17 in The Bible and Its Influence. The author is an evangelical Christian, denominationally Anglican. He is also the Canadian Director for the Mortimer J. Adler Centre for the Study of the Great Ideas, a Chicago-based think tank.

After a couple of exhausting hours with a snow shovel, I’m inclined to republish this “lowercase liberty classic”:

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

homesteading the ephemeral

I grew up in New York City, where parking is already scarce without a snowstorm.

Once I had my license, my grandmother paid me a dollar a day to find her a parking spot.

(For those who don’t know NYC: alternate-side-of-the-street-parking laws mean your spot is only good until tomorrow.)

Ever since leaving New York, I’ve found parking to be plentiful. It’s one of the many reasons I’ve liked everywhere else I’ve lived better than New York.

The building we’ve lived in for a couple of years now (in the Pennsylvania town we’ll be leaving soon so we can raise our son back in central Virginia) has a parking lot for its tenants. So long as only tenants use it, there’s rarely a problem finding a place to park. Until it snows.

About a year ago, digging my wife’s car out from under the feet of snow that the plow had pushed on top of it, I started thinking about Lockean/Rothbardian homesteading theory, and how it might apply to circumstances more temporary than those we normally consider when talking about property rights.

If I dig out a parking space and drive to work (ha!) only to find someone else in “my” space when I return, am I wrong to feel robbed? Do I need the scare-quotes around “my” or is the space rightly mine? (Not in the sense of statute or municipal law, obviously, but in the ethical or natural law sense.)

A nominal parking space is not an actual parking space if actual cars can’t get to it. In the context of the snowstorm, I’m creating the actual parking space by digging out the nominal parking space. By mixing my labor — not with Locke’s land but with the space over the asphalt — am I not bringing property into being? Again, not in the long-term sense, but in the context of the snowstorm?

What I liked about the example is precisely that it does not fit most people’s understanding of property, which is associated, if not with land, then with things. But according to Rothbardian property theory, property is not in things but in the use of things.

I consider this to be the single most misunderstood point of private property theory, especially among those who consider themselves opposed to private property.

I figured I’d either blog the thought or write something up for Mises.org. Here it is a year later, another snowstorm come and gone, and I never did get around to writing any of it down.

But Jesse Walker has made my point for me:

Reason: This Asphalt Is Mine! Homesteaders in the snow

Walker has done his usual professional job of journalism — with real people in the real world — whereas my own thinking remained, as usual, at the theoretical level.

posted by bkmarcus on Tuesday, February 21, 2006

(permalink)

This blog post (“Uncle Sam Will Use Schoolchildren to Pressure Parents on 2010 Census,” h/t Carolyn) inspires me to rerun this lowercase liberty “classic” from several years ago:

Back in my previous professional incarnation, I managed the development of Sesame Street’s 30th Anniversary Trivia Game.

Having grown up on Sesame Street, I found the project warmly nostalgic and quite rewarding.

There were a few new faces among the muppet cast of our trivia game, but mostly it was my old friends.

As my babymomma and I start window-shopping for baby clothes, toys, children’s books, nursery sets, etc., I find I have an ambivalent reaction to all the Disney and Sesame Street merchandise. I’m not nearly so anti- “commercial culture” as I once was, and I like the idea of my child having the same characters in his or her life as I did. But I also wonder how much authority we’re unwittingly handing over to those whose values and agenda are different from ours.

This sort of thing is especially present for me as I begin to look into homeschooling. As much as secular homeschooling is taking off, the foundation of the movement is still Christian, and despite the far superior academic results of an at-home education, the primary motive for teaching the kids at home is still sociological: they don’t want the Enemy’s message infecting their children.

I find I don’t have to be religious to sympathize. All it takes is a strong belief contrary to the mainstream ideology. Their enemy is Satan; mine is the State.

I was schooled in statism. If you think the idea is paranoid, I can only imagine that statism is still your unquestioned foundational assumption.

Going back through some old articles on Mises.org, I find this ominous piece of recent history:

For many years, voluntary compliance has been falling. In anticipation of this problem, the Census Bureau has been relying on wholly owned sectors of society to propagandize for its campaign. The Sesame Street character named Count von Count is touring public schools to tell the kids to tell their parents to fill out the census, even as more than 1 million census kits have been sent to public schools around the country. Think of it as the state using children to manipulate their parents into becoming volunteers in the civic planning project.

“The Census and Despotism”
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

Here’s an update to my previous post on the denotation and connotation of the word

I had read this passage of Mises before (from Human Action, chapter 15: “The Market”), but had somehow failed to notice the irony of an Austrian Jew using this particular term in this particular way:

It is quite common nowadays to deprecate the capitalists and entrepreneurs. A man is prone to sneer at those who are more prosperous than himself. These people, he contends, are richer only because they are less scrupulous than he. If he were not restrained by due consideration for the laws of morality and decency, he would be no less successful than they are. Thus men glory in the aureole of self-complacency and Pharisaic self-righteousness.

I received this helpful comment from a reader:

This is FYI only. I tried accessing your blog through my office proxy, and this is the message I get:

Somehow your site has been categorised as “Adult Theme”. I know you don’t exactly write kids’ stuff but blocking access seems excessive to me :)

Now, first of all, I do write some kids’ stuff. See, for example,

• “The 3 Austrian Pigs and Their Different Rates of Time Preference” or
• “Goldilocks and the 3 Sovereign Clients of Ursa Mutual”

Secondly, I did get a rather furious denouncement about 4 years ago for posting about “female breasts” (see also “giving offense”), but even if you think I was being sexist, misogynistic, and objectifying, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any images in that post that you couldn’t find at an art gallery, museum, or comic-book store.

Finally, I do have an image folder called “sexy” for my more PG13-rated images, but here’s the lot of them (decide for yourself):

[Read the rest »]

I learned a new word today from the Gospel of Luke.

(It’s in Matthew 11:18–19, too, but I somehow missed it.)

Luke 7:

33. For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil.
34. The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!

Does that remind anyone else of Professor Long’s guide to arguing with libertarians?

A lowercase liberty classic (aka rerun):

“Is the western liberal tradition a result of clerical celibacy?”

The Twitter: ^*

Psalm 137 is beautiful and disturbing. The most-often-quoted opening lines. The least-often-quoted last lines.

The Psalm:

1. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
2. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
3. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
4. How shall we sing the LORD’S song in a strange land?
5. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
6. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
7. Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
8. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
9. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

The music video with, well, abridged lyrics:

* The “tweet”?

When Mises.org published my piece on Gilligan’s Island economics, someone slashdotted it and drew huge traffic to the website. I only looked through the first few comments on slashdot. One that stood out for me said that it was obvious I was a libertarian because of my use of the word “State.”

In the comment that author Anthony Pagden left on this blog, he wrote, “I do not see how ‘the State’ (which has a lingering Marxist flavour to it) can be construed as an agent. States in the west have clearly been guilty of myriad evils, but not THE STATE.”

The slashdotter was right, of course. My article was indeed a libertarian article. I don’t know if Anthony Pagden is right or not. In the circles in which I’ve travelled for much longer than I’ve been a libertarian, the term “the State” has an old-fashioned flavor to it, but not a specifically Marxist one. My guess is that Pagden just knows more Marxists than libertarians or classical liberals.

Here’s Frank Chodorov on “the disappearance of any discussion of the State qua State.” If you were to take out Chodorov’s “New Deal” and replace it with Pagden’s “States in the west,” it would read as if the two writers were addressing each other directly.

The present disposition is to liquidate any distinction between State and Society, conceptually or institutionally. The State is Society; the social order is indeed an appendage of the political establishment…

One indication of how far the integration has gone is the disappearance of any discussion of the State qua State — a discussion that engaged the best minds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The inadequacies of a particular regime, or its personnel, are under constant attack, but there is no faultfinding with the institution itself. The State is all right, by common agreement, and it would work perfectly if the “right” people were at its helm. It does not occur to most critics of the New Deal that all its deficiencies are inherent in any State, under anybody’s guidance, or that when the political establishment garners enough power a demagogue will sprout. The idea that this power apparatus is indeed the enemy of Society, that the interests of these institutions are in opposition, is simply unthinkable. If it is brought up, it is dismissed as “old-fashioned,” which it is; until the modern era, it was an axiom that the State bears constant watching, that pernicious proclivities are built into it. (The Rise and Fall of Society, p. xx)

I wrote a brief review of Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: the 2500-Year Struggle Between East and West — and the author briefly replied.

The audiobook is on sale right now at Audible for only five bucks:

If you’re getting tired of my linking to Jeffrey Tucker’s blog posts, well, I don’t blame you. At best, it constitutes a conflict of interest. At worst, it’s sycophantic. But he’s been on a roll, lately, and I keep wanting to point friends and family to pieces they might otherwise miss. For the rest of you, it probably sounds like an echo. Sorry about that. If you haven’t done so, please read JT’s great blog post, “Retrospective on the 1948 Smashing of Hollywood,” which tells a history I certainly didn’t know.

I really need to do more vanity searches. I have no idea when someone links to me.

Some of the links are even somewhat flattering, e.g.,

The Top 100 Libertarian Blogs

By Sarah Scrafford

While we at WebPreneur typically try to steer clear of politics, it is clear that issues such as net neutrality and controlling the size and scope of government are of increasing importance to web entrepreneurs. Thus a growing number of web entrepreneurs are expressing new found interest in libertarian principles. So to assist those of you interested in educating yourselves further, we’ve sorted through thousands of sites and selected the best of the best for what we believe to be the top 100 libertarian blogs arranged by category.

[Read the rest »]