All sorts of monstrous situations will occur. Decline in quality, for example. We will find that there will be more air in the Baby Ruth — you can't find the Baby Ruth anymore anyway. There will be less chocolate in the chocolate. There is no way the state can police this, of course. And it's very harmful to the public.

I fleshed out Rothbard's example in "What ever happened to sexy stews?" and gave my own example:

With many goods, quality can vary significantly, not always in easy-to-measure ways. If people are used to paying 25¢ for a Baby Ruth, to use Rothbard's example, then the Baby Ruth company is going to be loath to raise the price to 50¢, even if inflation has doubled all their input costs. What they do instead is cut whatever costs they can to keep the price at a quarter. So maybe they cut the number of peanuts in half, dilute the chocolate with cheaper vegetable oil, and make the candy bar 10% smaller. The product looks the same on the outside, and many people won't notice the difference on the inside. But fans of the Baby Ruth chocolate bar will notice that the quality has fallen.

In my case, it wasn't the falling quality of the candy I noticed, but the ever-crummier toy surprise in a box of Cracker Jack. Grownups would tell me about the whistles and decoder rings their childhood boxes of Cracker Jack had contained. Meanwhile, I watched plastic toys become cardboard-and-plastic toys become pure cardboard crapola.

Now it's happening to the McDonald's "Dollar Menu":

McDonald's Cuts Cheese to Save Dollar Menu

Turns out the cheese in McDonald’s cheeseburgers is actually made with real dairy! The Wall Street Journal reports that the rising cost of cheese has put the franchise’s famed Dollar Menu in jeopardy. Some restaurants are now pushing a double cheeseburger with just one slice of cheese instead of the usual two. At other locations the price has been jacked up to an obscene $1.10. Now McDonald’s executives are considering yanking cheese from it altogether and calling it a double hamburger. But then there’s the price of beef to consider, which is also rising! It’s only a matter of time before the double mime burger – wheat-free bun, some lettuce and a little imagination – is rolled out.

(via Gothamist via iceberg)

(Human Action, c15, s12)

It is often asserted that the poor man's failure in the competition of the market is caused by his lack of education. Equality of opportunity, it is said, could be provided only by making education at every level accessible to all. There prevails today the tendency to reduce all differences among various peoples to their education and to deny the existence of inborn inequalities in intellect, will power, and character. It is not generally realized that education can never be more than indoctrination with theories and ideas already developed. Education, whatever benefits it may confer, is transmission of traditional doctrines and valuations; it is by necessity conservative. It produces imitation and routine, not improvement and progress. Innovators and creative geniuses cannot be reared in schools. They are precisely the men who defy what the school has taught them. (Human Action, c15, s11)

(via Snopes via steve2 via email from Scott Lahti)

The ad copy says "This buck may look more like 47¢ — which is what most bucks are worth these days." I thought I'd check this inflation calculator to see if 47¢ is the right number.

Nope. According to the calculator, a 1947 dollar was worth 40¢ (meaning that what cost a buck in 1949 would have only cost 40¢ the year the Federal Reserve was created).

Of course, that's still ten times the value of a current dollar.

"You would be hard-pressed to find any industry with this level of income that is less efficient than higher education. If Wal-Mart gets into the field, this will change. "

Harper Lee has been on my mind recently — ever since seeing her portrayed in Capote a few weeks ago.

But tonight she came to mind in an unusually perverse way. I found myself wondering if there was a cocktail called Tequila Mockingbird. There had to be, right?

Turns out there are a bunch of them. They all start out with tequila and lime juice, but the last ingredients vary:

• tomato juice
• green peppermint liqueur
• green creme de menthe (2)
• white creme de menthe (2)
• black currant-flavored liqueur & apple cider
• triple sec, blue curacao, OJ, cranberry juice

That's not a complete list, I'm sure, but it's what I pulled from the first page of Google hits. The green and white cremes de menthe each occurred on 2 pages, so I think creme de menthe, generically, wins the competition for genuine recipe.

That image in the upper right is from MAD magazine issue 289, September 1989. Because Google reads PDF files, and because I run Google Desktop on my MacBook, and because I have decades worth of back issues of MAD magazine stored on my hard drive, the top hit for "tequila mockingbird" was for this panel from MAD289.pdf.

"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."

Here is today's word from A.Word.A.Day:

And here is an example of an ancient boustrophedon:

The Gortyn Code

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?")

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.

The moralists' and sermonizers' critique of profits misses the point. It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers — the people, the common man — prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling "bad" things than in selling "good" things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely. People do not drink intoxicating beverages in order to make the "alcohol capital" happy, and they do not go to war in order to increase the profits of the "merchants of death." The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause. (c15, s9)

What did Mises make of President Eisenhower's warning of a growing "military-industrial complex"? Did he dismiss the MIC as a left-wing bogey man? And what did Rothbard make of the statement, "The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause"?

We Rothbardians tend to reject the standard left-wing claims about "manufactured demand" when they are hurled at private enterprise; do we fall into a similar fallacy when we imply a manufactured demand for military spending?

In one sense, no, it's not parallel: you can get people to "support" all sorts of things when they're not free to volunteer or withhold payment. Political polls on spending priorities falsely imply that how people choose to spend their dollars and how they want the government to spend "its" dollars is somehow the same thing.

Of course it's not. My real-life expressed preferences, complete with internalized opportunity costs and the direct benefit of my spending decisions, are very concrete. They reveal my values based on what trade-offs I've actually made. My vocalized "preferences" for how tax dollars are spent is always abstract, and produces very little practical consequence for me either way.

So when the voting public howls for Osama's head or Saddam's head or for the head of whoever is the current bad guy, there's definitely something manufactured about this "demand" — something orchestrated. People tend to lose their enthusiasm for war when they start to see the bill, so to speak. This suggests that their initial support for war would be similarly muted if they had to make the immediate choice of reaching into their wallets and paying for war or using that same money instead to buy beer or books, faster DSL or a bigger HDTV.

But there's another sense in which I think I've been sloppy in attributing power to the malevolent MIC. I sometimes unthinkingly blame the arms dealers for the knee-jerk hawks themselves. When, in fact, the hawks are just knee jerks.

I think there's a lot to be said for the political power of hiding the costs of policy. But this externalization of costs is really different from the manufacturing of demand. A more pacific people would not have fallen for the great neo-Con, no matter how much the books were cooked.

It is not the business of the entrepreneurs to make people substitute sound ideologies for unsound. It rests with the philosophers to change people's ideas and ideals. The entrepreneur serves the consumers as they are today, however wicked and ignorant. (Ibid.)