From The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk (1918) by Thornton W. Burgess:

XIII: JIMMY SKUNK EXPLAINS

You’ll find this true where’er you go
That those prepared few troubles know.

“To begin with, I am not such a very big fellow, am I?” said Jimmy.

“Ah reckons Ah knows a right smart lot of folks bigger than yo’, Brer Skunk,” replied Unc’ Billy, with a grin. You know Jimmy Skunk really is a little fellow compared with some of his neighbors.

“And I haven’t very long claws or very big teeth, have I?” continued Jimmy.

“Ah reckons mine are about as long and about as big,” returned Unc’ Billy, looking more puzzled than ever.

“But you never see anybody bothering me, do you?” went on Jimmy.

“No,” replied Unc’ Billy.

“And it’s the same way with Prickly Porky the Porcupine. You never see anybody bothering him or offering to do him any harm, do you?” persisted Jimmy.

“No,” replied Unc’ Billy once more.

“Why?” demanded Jimmy.

Unc’ Billy grinned broadly. “Ah reckons, Brer Skunk,” said he, “that there isn’t anybody wants to go fo’ to meddle with yo’ and Brer Porky. Ah reckons most folks knows what would happen if they did, and that yo’ and Brer Porky are folks it’s a sight mo’ comfortable to leave alone. Leastways, Ah does. Ah ain’t aiming fo’ trouble with either of yo’. That li’l bag of scent yo’ carry is cert’nly most powerful, Brer Skunk, and Ah isn’t hankering to brush against those little spears Brer Porky is so free with. Ah knows when Ah’s well off, and Ah reckons most folks feel the same way.”

Jimmy Skunk chuckled. “One more question, Unc’ Billy,” said he. “Did you ever know me to pick a quarrel and use that bag of scent without being attacked?”

Unc’ Billy considered for a few minutes. “Ah can’t say Ah ever did,” he replied.

“And you never knew Prickly Porky to go hunting trouble either,” declared Jimmy. “We don’t either of us go hunting trouble, and trouble never comes hunting us, and the reason is that we both are always prepared for trouble and everybody knows it. Buster Bear could squash me by just stepping on me, but he doesn’t try it. You notice he always is very polite when we meet. Prickly Porky and I are armed for defence, but we never use our weapons for offence. Nobody bothers us, and we bother nobody. That’s the beauty of being prepared.”

Unc’ Billy thought it over for a few minutes. Then he sighed and sighed again.

“Ah reckons yo’ and Brer Porky are about the luckiest people Ah knows,” said he. “Yes, Sah, Ah reckons yo’ is just that. Ah don’t fear anybody mah own size, but Ah cert’nly does have some mighty scary times when Ah meets some people Ah might mention. Ah wish Ol’ Mother Nature had done gone and given me something fo’ to make people as scary of me as they are of yo’. Ah cert’nly believes in preparedness after seein’ yo’, Brer Skunk. Ah cert’nly does just that very thing. Have yo’ found any nice fresh aiggs lately?”

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)

"To save the idea of private property, it must be completely severed from impostor forms."

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)

Another Modern Superstition Identified & Destroyed

Posted by Stephen Carson at March 27, 2009 11:33 AM

When I was in gov’t school as a child I absorbed some kind of hyper-Whig theory of history… We live now at the pinnacle and culmination of civilization. The only reason to learn about the past is to learn about those hopeless neanderthals who believed the earth was flat, believed flies came from old rags, thought slavery was great, were racists and sexists and listened to Glenn Miller.

Of course, there was never any hint that our own age might have superstitions and unreasoned prejudices of its own.

Eventually putting away childish things, I learned that the view of the past I absorbed wasn’t very charitable to say the least. For example, it is a myth that the earth being flat was generally accepted in the Middle Ages.

But more relevantly, I have learned that our own age has superstitions as well. Hayek usefully defined superstition as thinking you understand something that you really don’t. He held up Keynesianism and Marxism as chief superstitions of the 20th century. In the case of Marxism and its appalling body count we have a modern superstition as terrible or worse than the ones of our forebears.

In a delightful lecture at the recent Austrian Scholars Conference, Gerard Casey from Dublin put his finger on another modern superstition. FULL BLOG POST

Jeffrey Tucker points us to an excellent article in Reason by senior editor Brian Doherty:

“Conservatism’s Hollow Defeat: The intellectual right, now in the wilderness, keeps deluding itself about supposed past glories.”

Here are my favorite passages from his review of some new histories of the American Right:

Schneider might not agree, but the lesson that comes through most clearly is this: War is the health of the state and the death of a principled movement supposedly dedicated to keeping the state limited. From the Cold War to the Iraq war, conservatives—and certainly Republicans—have sacrificed liberty in the name of national security.

[...]

There’s a reason most books about the right don’t recount these tales, or at least not in great detail: The intellectual and political tradition they represented was modern libertarianism, not modern conservatism. Phillips-Fein elides this point by telling a story about conservatism that pretty much ignores what became its constitutive aspect: foreign policy and the Cold War, which is the battleground on which the nascent libertarian and conservative movements fought and eventually separated.

[...]

While Phillips-Fein isn’t 100 percent solid on all the nuances of the ideas of the Austrian libertarian economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, she is far more savvy than most nonlibertarians who grapple with them in noting that their thinking was not conservative—that is, they were not defenders of any existing plutocratic privilege. Instead, they stood for the notion that “the market created a space of freedom, a world in which individual action could revolutionize society.”

[...]

Truly radical free market policies, of the sort Read and Mullendore supported, have always been and remain a niche concern, not the focus of a major political party or movement. Businessmen in politics mostly have supported what they think they need to support to get by in a world of omnipresent government. That sometimes entails loosening a particular regulation or trimming a particular tax, but it almost never entails general advocacy of laissez faire.

I love this history and I’m amazed at how consistently the mainstream (both Right and Left) gets it wrong. Doherty points to the essential reason: if you don’t follow the distinctions among these supposedly “right-wing” ideas — and the fact that the libertarian and conservative threads of this intellectual history are ultimately incompatible — then you can’t possibly makes sense of the discrepancy between word and deed in the 20th-century American Right.

For a history that does get it, you still have to turn to Rothbard’s Betrayal of the American Right.

I can’t comment on Doherty’s own Radicals for Capitalism, since I haven’t read it. (It came out just as my own focus was shifting more intensely from modern history to the ancient variety.) But if “Conservatism’s Hollow Defeat” is any indication, we have in Doherty a singular and worthy historian of American political thought.

Briggs Armstrong writes an excellent post on blog.Mises.org about the “regression fallacy” and the fact that so many people consider the boom phase of the past decade to have been “normal”:

There is nothing normal about a recession; likewise, a boom phase is equally abnormal. During the boom phase no one asked when the banks would return to normal lending practices.

[...]

It is important that we are aware of our tendency to make this mistake. If the goal for the economy is to return to “normal” then we must recognize that the last several years have been an exceptional boom, not normal or average.

But my wife added an important twist to Armstrong’s observation. She pointed out to me that many people were asking exactly the right questions during the dot-com bubble. And while there were people back then who insisted that the rules had changed (there always are such people), the general public didn’t seem especially shocked when that particular bubble popped.

So what’s the difference? She suggests that a boom in a new technology will be looked on with more suspicion than a boom in something as basic and familiar as housing.

I, of course, discovered the Austrians during this post-dot-com/post-9/11 boom, so I was plenty aware that we were in another classic bubble, but apparently far fewer people thought so in 2004 than had thought so in 1999.

It’s the invisibility of the boom period that makes people open to New Deal nonsense when the bubble pops. All bubbles are bad, but perhaps tech bubbles are somewhat less bad.

Two cheers for cultural elitism.

This is from About.com’s art-history mailing:

Do I Have to Like Everything?

This is an awfully frequently Frequently Asked Question that makes me sad and angry. How can The Arts expect to drum up popular support (read: ask for increased public funding) when many Arts writers seem hell-bent on alienating the tax-paying public? It’s arrogant and stupid, I tell you. In a better world, art should be presented to all humans as human friendly, by humans who are capable of BEING friendly.

So is it human friendly to coerce funding, so long as you make it feel inclusive? Or should we conclude from this note that About.com’s art-history guide is hell-bent on alienating fiscal conservatives and principled libertarians?

I have the same frustration with a lecture series I just finished listening to on classical archaeology. Hardly a lecture passed without an appeal for more “enlightened” government policies — meaning a disregard for property rights. Apparently an interest in the physical evidence of ancient cultures requires a paternalistic philosophy and a preference for expansive government.

(And of course, the underlying problem in both examples is the unquestioned assumption that anyone interested in education must have left-wing politics.)

Come on!

Seriously, how hard is this distinction?

Obama Change in Stem-Cell Policy Imminent

“U.S. President Barack Obama will soon issue an executive order lifting an eight-year ban embryonic stem cell research imposed by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, a senior adviser said on Sunday.” (Reuters, Sunday)

Correction: The ban wasn’t on research; it was on tax-financing of research.

FEE Timely Classic

“Some Thoughts on Taxation” by George C. Leef

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have, for years, thought the ban was on the research itself.

(Can you blame this one on my not reading newspapers? Apparently the newspapers perpetuate the confusion.)

Calvin reconstructs Pascal’s Wager:

From Human Action, chapter 2:

With regard to praxeology the errors of the philosophers are due to their complete ignorance of economics and very often to their shockingly insufficient knowledge of history. In the eyes of the philosopher the treatment of philosophical issues is a sublime and noble vocation which must not be put upon the low level of other gainful employments. The professor resents the fact that he derives an income from philosophizing; he is offended by the thought that he earns money like the artisan and the farm hand. Monetary matters are mean things, and the philosopher investigating the eminent problems of truth and absolute eternal values should not soil his mind by paying attention to problems of economics.