(Thanks to Gil Guillory and the Left Libertarian list)

(I mean: Thanks to Francois Tremblay, who actually created the thing.)

Email from my friend David Miller:

Well, Benazir Bhutto's political comeback has been cut short by a fusillade of bullets and a suicide bomber. I don't know enough about her political career to know how to interpret the loss to Pakistan. But when I saw the news this morning I thought that this was perhaps the beginning of more and greater suffering.

Bhutto's situation was a difficult one. She wanted to be a politician, but some people who opposed her politically or religiously (it seems there's little difference in fundamentalist religion) were willing to kill her and to sacrifice everyone around her in order to achieve that end. So BB must have known that each time she mounted the rostrum the eyes and hearts of her audience might be torn out by a homemade bomb.

I wonder how she rationalized putting so many people at risk.

Was it that she didn't believe it would ever actually happen? That can't be, since, on the day she returned to Pakistan, a bomb that detonated in the crowd demonstrated just how determined and homicidal some of her opponents were.

Or did she simply assume that the people around her understood the peril they placed themselves in by being near her? "If you support me then you're liable to die with me." It doesn't seem like a very winning platform for a campaign, but it was the truest statement of her political position.

I think perhaps the rationale for exposing her supporters to potential bomb blasts comes in the belief that if people didn't stand with her today then they were likely to die at the hands of fundamentalists on a different day in the near future. I'd like to believe that that dire prediction is what propelled her back to Pakistan and into "public life."

It's not a choice I'd ever want to have to make. Indeed, I don't think I could make it. I don't believe that an individual can become part of a centralized system of government coercion and argue persuasively that others should vote for, much less die for, the cause of one particular boss over another. I don't believe the claim that my mode of coercion is so much less coercive than my political opponent's mode coercion.

Coercion has by definition a binary bluntness to it: either you are forced or you are not. Rothbard makes some interesting comments about Hayek's notion of coercion in The Ethics of Liberty that essentially say the same thing.

I ask myself if Bhutto as prime minister would use the police and the army against the fundamentalist opposition in coercive ways and I think it likely that she would, though admittedly I have no strong evidence for this evaluation, just a general impression about the type of prime minister she was.

So no, I could not, in good conscience, place a single person in jeopardy in order to further my political aspirations. I imagine that I could be convinced to mount the barricades in a revolution and I suppose if I could be convinced that that is what Bhutto was doing then I'd think very differently about the whole matter.

I'm tempted to post this as a blog entry, but not without the picture that came across the news feed this morning. It was from the blast site. I'd like to use it, but of course I don't want to be guilty of leaking that photo to the world without paying the proper fees or giving the appropriate credit. If I did show the photo I'd have to own up to where I got it, which would probably lead to my getting fired in which case no more photos or blog posts with AP photos. And I couldn't in good conscience post it without credits. Someone (B.K. Bangash) risked life and limb for that picture; the viewers ought to know whom to revere. Then again, perhaps they wouldn't thank Bangash: it's a horrible picture, the foreground is filled with the abject despair of a corpse, which only a moment before was a person with a name; a person who might make you laugh with a joke or a well-timed wink; a person who you might have shared a meal with; a person who might have laughed with you about how after only two glasses of wine the world looked one hundred times rosier; a person you might have confided in about some desire still not come to fruition — "still I love her" — "I've never said to him…"; a person, the person standing next to you on the subway train or in line at the grocery store. Now that person is just so much meat, raw material for nature's composting and human grief. Yes, it's a horrible picture, but in a way I want everyone to see it, so that they have a chance of feeling the precarious nature of being a human in society with other humans. It isn't all ice cream and sitcoms. Some of human existence is so very desperate and beautiful because it thrives in the face of its desperate circumstances.

Alas, I'm an inveterate individualist. I start by writing about a political assassination — by definition a matter of state — but what affects me is the loss of a person. Ah well, sometimes I fear I have gone too far from my enthusiastically leftist upbringing. I don't believe in sacrificing the one for the many. I believe that the one makes the many meaningful. A woman died today by gunshot wound or shrapnel (it doesn't really matter which, but in the early news coverage there were gaps of air time that the networks filled with speculation on this point). She was a mother, a lover, a wife. She loved pretty things, especially scarves. She thought that her place was as a leader of the country she could not stay away from. She was willing to die rather than be denied the opportunity to live in her country on her terms. That is quite enough tragedy for a Thursday. Whether it is part of something larger is a separate and secondary matter, but I fear that it is. I fear it's the beginning of real instability in a country with nuclear capability.

From iceberg:

Oddly enough, Austria is the latinized name for Ö–sterreich, deriving from the Old German term meaning "eastern realm". Similarly, the term "Orient" refers to lands located eastwards towards the direction of the rising sun, while "Occident" refers to the western world, the direction in which the sun sets.

In this light one can view Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis as allies against the Bavarian conspiracy, to help counter the influence of the German Historical School, the legacy of which today lives on in the mainstream endorsement of empiricist foundations for economic studies, the emblem of which brazenly displayed on every federal [fractional] reserve note of one monetary unit, originally named for a Bohemian valley, once the standard for money of good reputation.

As I mention here, San Francisco once dealt successfully with disaster by letting the market work. With drastic shifts in prices came significant adjustments in both supply and demand. But that was 1906. Today we have a more overtly market-friendly man in charge:

April 30, 2007

Left Coast Road Socialism and the Market-friendly Governor

B.K. Marcus

Yesterday afternoon, my friend, who has recently moved to the Left Coast, pointed to this blog to alert me to the fact that MacArthur Maze, "the complex of freeways where Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and all the traffic from the East and South Bay area come to a head," has collapsed again.

("Again?" Yes, again: the exact same spot that collapsed in the 1989 earthquake.)

My first thought was, of course, "road socialism." The blog author concludes it's corrupt government, without any apparent sense of redundancy.

Last night, my friend wrote me again:

One of the first things I thought was "Oh, ferry and BART prices are going to skyrocket," as that would be the normal (aka market) method for balancing the suddenly decreased supply of "transportation between the East Bay and SF."

But no.

http://bart.gov/news/features/features20070429.asp

I'm gonna have an interesting commute tomorrow.

So Governor Schwarzenegger — who has claimed that the two people who have most profoundly impacted his thinking on economics are Milton Friedman and Adam Smith ("At Christmas I sometimes annoy some of my more liberal Hollywood friends by sending them a gift of Mr Friedman's classic economic primer, Free to Choose") — thinks the best way to deal with sudden changes in supply and demand is to obliterate the price system.

So much for electing market-friendly politicians.

April 30, 2007 10:16 AM | comment | Digg | contact B.K. Marcus | other posts

(Many thanks to Choicy White Boy.)

Anthony Gregory writes:

My friend, not exactly a libertarian but not a socialist (pro-market, anti-war, anti-cop) — okay, pretty libertarian, actually — thinks that if the US government, for the last 40 years, had spent nothing on war or welfare or anything else, but retained the same tax schedules, it would have been able to fund the creation of a dragon.

Yes, a dragon. As in a large flying nearly reptilian beast that breathes fire.

Aside from some limits of socialist calculation, he has a point. Maybe even with government inefficiency taken for granted, he might be onto something.

[keep reading]

The same source of my last citizen-journalist post sent me email with the subjecting heading "I've got some Alaskan woodland to sell you..." and the following link:

CNN.com
U.S. News
"21st century homesteading: Free land in Alaska"
http://cnn.com/2007/US/03/16/alaska.land.ap/

Dan D'Amico and some 9 or 10 other grad students at GMU will be celebrating Murray Rothbard's birthday tonight by eating at Denny's (which Dan says was Rothbard's favorite restaurant) and watching Death Wish (which he says was his favorite movie).

Interesting timing. I had just been wondering what Rothbard's favorite movie had been. That may seem like a strange thing to wonder, but Jeff Riggenbach had recently mentioned Rothbard's love of the Godfather movies:

It was the legendary acting teacher Lee Strasberg, cast in the role of Hyman Roth, whom Wikipedia calls an “elderly Jewish organized crime figure retired to Miami and overlord of criminal enterprise[s] in Cuba” (that is, a renamed Meyer Lansky), who spoke a probably immortal line in an onscreen conversation with Al Pacino (as Michael Corleone) in The Godfather: Part II: “This is the business we have chosen.” Doherty writes that “Old movement hand Ralph Raico was known to sigh, at news of the latest absurdity or strategic misfire or failure on the part of a fellow libertarian, echoing the Godfather, ‘This is the movement we have chosen.’”

I used to hear Ralph say that back in the ’70s, but I always thought he’d got it from Murray (Rothbard). Burt Blumert seems to remember things the same way. “‘This is the business we have chosen,’” he recalled nearly four years ago in a short Internet essay, “was Murray Rothbard’s favorite line from Francis Ford Coppola’s great movie and he often adapted it when confronted by some wacky or unprincipled libertarian.”

This was the 4th or 5th time I'd heard the Godfather movies mentioned in connection with Murray Rothbard. I enjoy the mentions, because (a) they are interestingly connected, not always directly, with libertarianism, and (b) I love the Godfather movies and like to think that they were something I had in common with my hero. George Will hated them; Murray Rothbard loved them. All was in alignment.

But Death Wish?!

Now I know that Rothbard's favorite bread was Wonder Bread, because he talks about it about half way through his lecture on price theory (MP3). When I first listened to this lecture, I thought Wonder Bread? WONDER Bread!? You gotta be kidding me.

Then I realized I was being the worst sort of snob: the sort whose snobbery is based on assumptions rather than experience. I hadn't tasted Wonder Bread since I was 10 years old. I grew up with plenty of cultural indoctrination (and other sorts of indoctrination). Why should I assume Wonder Bread is lousy bread, that it barely deserves the name "bread"?

So I went out and bought a loaf of Wonder Bread. While I was at it, I figured I'd confront some other forms of food snobbery. I bought bologna, and Kraft's individually wrapped slices of American cheese — the kind that looks too shiny to be real cheese. I bought the canary-yellow mustard that comes in the squeeze bottle. While I was at it, I bought some cans of Budweiser beer. Might as well confront all the big snobberies at once.

Well, now I am no longer the worst sort of snob — at least not for those products. I now know from recent personal experience that they are all awful. Really unbelievably awful.

I'm trying not to be the worst sort of snob about Death Wish. I haven't seen the movie. I should suspend judgment.

A revision to the history of economic thought:

Econonmics has often been called "the dismal science," mainly because of the results that would flow from Malthus's population hypothesis: Since population grows geometrically and food arithmetically, the economic prospects of humankind are dismal. This usage is generally attributed to essayist Thomas Carlyle. Joseph Persky ("Retrospectives: A Dismal Romantic," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1990) and David Levy ("How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Debating Racial Quackery," Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2001) point out, however, that that attribution is incorrect. Carlyle did, indeed, coin the phrase, but it was in reference to classical economists' views on race, not their views on population. He called it the dismal science because economics saw all races as equally capable of entering into trades, whereas Carlyle believed that the races were different and that slavery was natural for blacks. Levy argues that modern economics should see its history as being pro-equality, and that it is too often characterized as anti-egalitarian. Whether Levy is right in this argument is debatable, but it is worth remembering that the initial use of the term "dismal science" was not made in reference to Malthus's population thesis. That association came later and did not begin with Carlyle, who coined the term.

– Harry H. Landreth, David C. Colander, History of Economic Thought, page 111.