I knew that Anthony was writing it, and I knew the general topic, but it wasn’t until I read Allen Mendenhall’s review in the Freeman that I understood how radical, and how very Gregoryesque, the book turns out to be:

"Sometimes it takes a non-lawyer like Gregory to remind lawyers of the philosophical implications of the practical and everyday functions of the law. Likewise, it takes a philosopher, again like Gregory, to show that a series of small legal victories is really one big loss in a larger scheme."

The foundational legal principle of habeas corpus is really one big loss? The principle that the state can’t hold you without cause, the one that Sir William Blackstone called "the most celebrated writ in the English law"? Does this mean that Thomas Jefferson was wrong to say, "Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume." How can libertarians oppose a legal doctrine that limits state power and secures individual rights?

Mendenhall writes,

Gregory’s scope is wide. He maps more than 400 years of legal history in roughly 400 pages and reminds us that the origin of the habeas remedy was not libertarian: “The king’s courts developed habeas corpus to centralize judicial authority and collect revenue.” His impressive sweep of history recognizes that “it took centuries before the writ was genuinely turned against the king’s oppression.” Ever since the Norman conquest, if not earlier, the writ of habeas corpus has been tied to royal or governmental prerogative. In the seventeenth century, in fact, the writ served as a procedural mechanism for ensuring that prisoners remained in prison rather than being released from prison.…

“For every vindication of a custodian’s power,” Gregory explains, “the authority to detain is upheld. For every undermining of a custodian’s power, there is the affirmation of another official’s power — a judge’s power, to say nothing of the state’s general power to decide whom to detain.”…

At once a tool of liberation and authority, the writ of habeas corpus undermines State authority even as it validates and solidifies that authority. In other words, it enables the very power that it subverts. Because it destabilizes institutionalized power ultimately to sustain that power, the writ is, in Gregory’s words, “mythical” and retains an “idealistic mystique” … a “tool of usurpation and centralization.”

Mendenhall lauds Gregory’s approach and recommends it to "libertarian jurists and jurisprudents who appear to be moving toward stodgy consensus on a number of pressing legal issues."

It might be that other pet favorites of these legal libertarians — say, incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states — are really short-term techniques serving as vehicles to long-term, centralized power.

The book review is well worth a thorough read, as is, I’m sure, the book it reviews.

Cross-posted at InvisibleOrder.com.

But I think J.M. Barrie was on to something when he ended Peter Pan with these words: "and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless."

That chilled me the first time I read it, as did several scenes in the novel.

I think the authors of the book of Genesis had a similar ambivalence toward the prelapsarian ideal. What does the first man, so called, say when God confronts him with his newly acquired knowledge of good and evil? Does he take responsibility? Does he protect his woman?

Genesis 3:12: And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

It’s not my fault, God. It’s her fault. And really, since you gave her to me, it’s kinda your fault, too.

The story tells us that Eve came from Adam’s rib. Clearly, there was no backbone involved.

Genesis 3:13: And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

Don’t blame me, God. Blame the snake!

The Bible is full of terrible role models for children. The book of Genesis might be the worst, but I’ve never shared in Christendom’s cultural condemnation of the agents of Original Sin. The whole thing feels like a setup from "In the beginning … " (OK, maybe not from Genesis 1:1, but certainly by Genesis 2:9!)

So I’ve been pretty slow to blame the first couple, but reading these passages with my six-year-old son this morning, I felt angry at their spinelessness.

Then it occurred to me: Adam and Eve aren’t just innocents; they’re children. How could they be anything else? Taking responsibility takes character, and character takes experience.

Innocence is neither moral nor immoral; it’s amoral. To long for innocence is to spurn morality, to yearn for freedom from responsibility. "Don’t blame me" is, in fact, the perfect expression of innocence.

The King James Version says that God formed "man" from the dust of the ground, but don’t these passages make more sense with a little editing:

And the LORD God formed a boy of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the boy became a living soul.

And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from the boy, made he a girl, and brought her unto the boy.

Thomas DiLorenzo writes today in LewRockwell.com about an “important new, must-read book,” a “great work of scholarship,” which will help Americans to wean themselves off the propaganda from “politically-correct, heavily state-censored textbooks or movies made by communistic-minded Hollywood hedonists.”

What is this book that brings such high praise?

Why, it’s Lincoln Uncensored of course, by Joseph E. Fallon. (Buy it now, complete with a new preface by Jeffrey Tucker, on Amazon.com.)

Here’s more of what DiLorenzo has to say about it:

I was taught in public elementary school in Pennsylvania that Abe was so honest that he once walked six miles to return a penny to a merchant who undercharged him (and six miles back home). He was supposedly so tendered hearted that he cried after witnessing the death of a turkey. He suffered in silence his entire life after witnessing slavery as a teenager.…

The real Lincoln was a dictator and a tyrant who shredded the Constitution, fiendishly orchestrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens, and did it all for the economic benefit of the special interests who funded the Republican Party (and his own political career). But don’t take Joseph Fallon’s or Thomas DiLorenzo’s word for it. Read the words of Abe Lincoln himself. That is what Fallon allows everyone to do in his great work of scholarship, Lincoln Uncensored.

We’re prouder than ever to be the producers of Joseph Fallon’s great ebook. Buy it now.

(As the piece makes clear, they’re using "liberal" in its classical, more libertarian sense: "In the United States our creed is so misunderstood that people associate liberalism with big government, when it advocates the opposite.")

It’s a very encouraging article, and I hope what it says is true, but a minor point caught my eye:

There are several explanations for this commendable fashion.… During their formative years they were exposed to the internet — an organ with an inbuilt resistance to government meddling. [emphasis added]

In my blog post "Should we thank the State for the Internet?" I mentioned that

Pro-regulators and advocates of market intervention like to cite the Internet as an example of an infrastructure that required massive central funding and government planning — something the free market couldn’t have produced.

Here’s President Obama taking the position I described:

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.

(Obama made that claim in the same infamous speech in which he pronounced, "If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.")

In "Who Really Invented the Internet?" former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz declares it "an urban legend that the government launched the Internet." (But this piece from Ars Technica seems to debunk the debunking.)

Blogger Brian Carnell, whom Crovitz quotes approvingly in his WSJ editorial, acknowledges the military source of the Internet’s creation, but he’s not exactly giving the state "credit" for their role:

Prior to the early 1990s almost nobody outside of governments and universities had home access to the Internet while several million had logged on to a BBS at one point or another. What caused the change? Something [left-liberals] usually fight tooth and nail — privatization. The floodgates of the Internet came open only after key resources became privatized and companies and individuals could operate on the Internet. For much of its existence, commercial activity on the Internet had been forbidden. The removal of that barrier is primarily responsible for the Internet we have today, where both anarchists and Abercrombie and Fitch use the web to broadcast their respective messages. [link added]

Here’s the part Crovitz quoted:

The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished with almost no added benefit other than to the military and academia. In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia.

I know libertarians more Internet savvy than I am who remain divided on the question of the Internet’s origins. We all seem to agree on the emphasis I tried to give in my post about the critical role of counterfactuals in any causal claims. Carnell makes the point well: statists, he says, "must demonstrate that without the government, innovations such as the Internet wouldn’t exist.”

But I still think the factual historical question is important: where did the Internet come from?

Clearly the American government played an important role, but how much?

How much of a role was played by the private sector before privatization of the network itself?

I expect we’ll be seeing historians, technologists, and libertarians weigh in on this question in the near future.

Here’s a puzzle piece I’d like to see included: when the Economist magazine calls the Internet "an organ with an inbuilt resistance to government meddling," it’s referring to the decentralized structure of the network. Economist Peter Klein, in his Mises Daily "Government Did Invent the Internet, But the Market Made It Glorious," tells why a central political power would want to build a radically decentralized network:

During the 1960s, the RAND Corporation had begun to think about how to design a military communications network that would be invulnerable to a nuclear attack. Paul Baran, a RAND researcher whose work was financed by the Air Force, produced a classified report in 1964 proposing a radical solution to this communication problem. Baran envisioned a decentralized network of different types of "host" computers, without any central switchboard, designed to operate even if parts of it were destroyed. The network would consist of several "nodes," each equal in authority, each capable of sending and receiving pieces of data.

Klein adds, parenthetically, that "former ARPA head Charles Herzfeld says that distributing computing power over a network, rather than creating a secure military command-and-control system, was the ARPANET‘s original goal, though this is a minority view" (links added).

The Cold War scenario is one I’m fond of for its irony, and it makes sense to me.

If it’s not true, then where did the Internet get its anarchic architecture?

The anti-capitalists contend that the market fosters whatever has the broadest appeal, even when the lowest common denominator indulges our basest appetites.

Defenders of freedom and markets tend to fall back on one of two strategies: either explaining why capitalism’s apparent vice is really a virtue (would we really prefer a system in which a self-selected elite got to plan the supply independent of demand?), or championing the products impugned by capitalism’s critics.

Ludwig von Mises took the first position. In The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, he defended the popularity of detective stories not because of any inherent virtue in the genre but because murder mysteries were what the reading public wanted, whether or not the literati approved of their preferences.

Attempts at the second approach include compelling defenses of car culture, panegyrics to the Twinkie, even praise for shoddy products.

Some targets of disparagement, however, deserve a third approach.

One such target is the canned laughter of television comedies, which has been the object of critical censure for over half a century.

As University of Minnesota art history professor Karal Ann Marling says,

Most critics think that the laugh track is the worst thing that ever happened to the medium, because it treats the audience as though they were sheep who need to be told when something is funny — even if, in fact, it’s not very funny.

James Parker, entertainment columnist for the Atlantic, disagrees. In fact, he laments the laugh track’s recent decline:

Silence now encases the sitcom, the lovely, corny crackle of the laugh track having vaporized into little bathetic air pockets and farts of anticlimax. Enough, I say. This burlesque of naturalism has depleted us.… Who knew irony could be so cloying?

So do we file the laugh track in the same category into which Mises put pulp fiction?

Or should we instead follow the model of the staunch defenders, and explain why the elitists are simply wrong?

The third approach is to question the premise. Is the laugh track really a product of the market, or did it dominate TV comedies for decades because of government regulation of broadcast media?

In "Did Capitalism Give Us the Laugh Track?" I act as defense attorney in the case of The People versus Capitalism, pleading not guilty in the case of the laugh track.

Postscript:

Given the limited length of a Freeman article, I had to give an extremely condensed version of the history of broadcast media and cartelization. You can find a more thorough account of that story in my 2006 article for the Journal of Libertarian Studies: "Radio Free Rothbard," available in PDF and HTML.

Cross-posted to the Libertarian Standard.

Steven Johnson v. Libertarianism 101, if not 2.0.

Here’s the opening of Johnson’s article:

It’s no surprise that George Packer — one of the most gifted writers in the business — has hit upon a fascinating topic in his latest New Yorker piece: the emerging politics of Silicon Valley.… But for all the richness of the subject matter, in this case I think Packer has failed to capture the complexities of the Silicon Valley scene, in part because he’s using older conceptual frames that don’t adequately explain the phenomena he’s observing.

I’ve asked Scott to clarify the 101 versus 2.0 distinction, but I take his point to be that Johnson’s implicit image of libertarianism is out of date.

I see it less charitably. I see Johnson’s portrait of libertarianism as an attempt at a straw man, an indulging of the prejudices of his left-leaning readers. The irony is that Johnson’s accusing George Packer of the same move he himself makes: using older conceptual frames that don’t adequately explain the political philosophy he and Packer are both supposedly addressing.

When I say that Johnson attempts a straw man, I mean that he believes the caricature he draws is obviously indefensible, but the supposedly cartoonish opinions of his buffoonish straw libertarian can be defended with greater reason and vigor than Johnson imagines:

Yes, people who work in the tech sector today (particularly around the web and social media) believe in the power of decentralized systems and less hierarchical forms of organization. But that does not mean they are greed-is-good market fundamentalists. For starters, almost all of them recognize that their industry itself arose out of government funding (see ARPANET), and some of the most celebrated achievements of the digital culture (open source software, Wikipedia) involve commons-based collaboration with no conventional definition of private property whatsoever.

We have to do some translating here, but I don’t think any one of these moves is a stretch:

• To believe "greed is good" means believing that self-interest and the profit motive can lead to beneficial results for society as a whole, so long as property rights are enforced and coercion is absent.
• A "market fundamentalist" is someone who believes voluntary exchanges will produce better results than will the initiation of force and that therefore any government regulation that undoes or prevents peaceful and voluntary exchanges is unjustified both ethically and economically.

I guess that makes me a greed-is-good market fundamentalist. But how in the world does that put me at odds with "commons-based collaboration with no conventional definition of private property"? Does Johnson not know how popular both the open-source movement and Wikipedia are among self-labeled libertarians? Does he not know that Wikipedia was founded by a self-labeled libertarian, inspired by an Austro-libertarian professor‘s teaching of F.A. Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”?

His best evidence that Silicon Valley techies aren’t libertarians is the claim that "almost all of them recognize that their industry itself arose out of government funding (see ARPANET)." And even that point is weak in at least two ways:

1. Making the best of an existing system does not mean you endorse the cause of that system — or does Johnson assume that there are no libertarian tax attorneys, no policemen who are actually anti-crime, and no psychologists who oppose insanity? Stephan Kinsella is the leading libertarian theorist in opposition to so-called intellectual property. (See his monograph Against Intellectual Property.) He’s also a practicing patent attorney.
2. Johnson is clearly implying that the actual history of the Internet is the only possible history of the Internet — that the free market would never have taken us into the Information Age.

As Tim Swanson writes in his article about the related issue of space exploration,

In the end, regardless of what the state did or did not fund or invent, the take-away principle is the unseen. While everyone with a TV has been able to see the hordes of chemical rockets dramatically blast into the cosmos over the past decades, they were similarly unable to see the productive opportunities foregone and ignored via the reallocation of scarce resources.

Here’s what I wrote about the subject in the Journal of Libertarian Studies:

Pro-regulators and advocates of market intervention like to cite the Internet as an example of an infrastructure that required massive central funding and government planning — something the free market couldn’t have produced. Austrians usually counter this claim with the following question: Why should we consider the actual historical timing of the Internet’s emergence as the optimal timing for such a technology? What is seen is the blessings of a global information age; what remains unseen is the opportunity costs of coercively diverting funds from voluntary exchange to military R&D.

But there is another important fallacy behind the Internet argument. Because things did develop in a certain way does not mean they could only have developed in that way. Did the Internet become a reality because of government intervention, or did it come about despite government intervention? When exploring counterfactuals, we’re left to theory and conjecture, but radio history offers us strong evidence that government suppressed more technology than it promoted.

Wireless Internet technology is called Spread Spectrum because it sends multiple narrow signals across a wide band, or "spread" of radio frequencies. The technique is also called "frequency hopping" as a single message will move pseudo-randomly from frequency to frequency within the available band. The first patent for this technology was issued in 1941 to Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood actress, and George Antheil, the avant-garde composer. Lamarr and Antheil never saw a penny because the government classified the technology. By the time the technology was declassified, their patent had expired. Spread Spectrum was independently "reinvented" by government-funded scientists in the 1960s.

Frequency hopping, and radio encryption in general, is a short step away from digital radio. Digital radio is an even shorter step to widespread digital networks.

Could we have had decentralized, nationwide digital networks decades earlier without government intervention into radio technology? We’ve already seen that the trajectory of radio content resembled the Internet before intervention; now we have at least the suspicion that the underlying technology could have developed toward a similar infrastructure. You can’t dismiss the idea as mere counterfactual guesswork without recognizing that the government-was-necessary-for-the-Internet thesis is also counterfactual guesswork.

We can’t know what the opportunity costs have been from eighty years of regulatory central planning, but we can know that the cost has been profound.

Here’s love-interest Dana teasing Casey for this quirk:

Casey: How am I conversationally anal-retentive?

Dana: Let me answer that question in four parts, with the fourth part first and the third part last. The second part has five subjects —

One of the reasons my wife found this routine funny was that it reminded her of me. I never did quite the same thing (and was therefore never quite as amusing as an Aaron Sorkin–created character), but I do find it helpful to communicate structurally. Not everyone does.

In high school, our American-history teacher was infamously dull. He spoke in a monotone, almost like the Ben Stein character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I’d been dreading 11th-grade American history since I’d first been warned about him in 9th grade. But when I finally sat in his class, I loved it. He communicated in outline form, all the information pre-organized for us. He wasn’t charismatic or entertaining, but if you happened to find his subject interesting, then what he had to say was both fascinating and easy to absorb. At least if you find it helpful to think structurally. Not everyone does.

Jeffrey Tucker recently tweeted a video of Dr. Stephen Davies, program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies and education director at the Institute for Economics Affairs in London, giving a talk at the Mercatus Center on different views of history. This was my introduction to Davies, and I spent the long weekend listening to his lectures (after converting a bunch of them from YouTube to MP3). I am immediately a fan, and I marvel that I didn’t know Davies’s name before a few days ago.

His talks are funnier and much more entertaining than the lectures of my high-school American-history teacher, but no less fascinating and no less structured. If you’d like a brief example of the sort of structured communication I’m talking about, check out this 10-minute interview he did with AfricanLiberty.org. He’s asked three questions, and he answers each one in outline form.

Questions:

1. Is there a link between a lack of economic freedom and underdevelopment in Africa?
2. What part did colonialism play in the history of Africa?
3. What part did the slave trade play in the history of Africa?

I’ll address the second part first …

The impact of colonialism was, says Dr. Davies, quite negative, but not in the way people generally suppose.

The common notion is that colonial powers profited significantly by looting Africa of its raw materials. That is not true.

You need to remember, first of all, that direct rule of Africa does not start until the 1890s. Until the Berlin Conference at the end of the 1870s, most of the European powers only had control of the immediate coasts and not very far inland at all. It’s only at the beginning of the 20th century that you begin to get significant control of the interior exercised by colonial powers, starting in places like the Congo with the appalling policies of King Leopold. So we’re talking about a policy that only lasted about 70 years.

Secondly, African colonies were not particularly profitable (if indeed they were profitable at all) for the European powers. The great European overseas profits in the 19th century were not made by investing in Africa but largely by investing in the United States — also in Russia and certain parts of Asia.

The damaging effect of colonialism on Africa does not come about through exploitation or the creation of a peripheral economy, as is commonly supposed.

The real damage arises from these things:

First, the way in which the Berlin Conference leads to Africa being carved up on a totally arbitrary basis, establishing borders that have no relationship with (a) demographic, (b) geographical, (c) economic, or (d) political realities. So entire large African nations such as the Kingdom of Kongo are carved up between three states:

1. Congo-Brazzaville,
2. the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and
3. Angola, in roughly equal proportions.

Similarly, completely separate and distinct political entities such as the Kingdom of Buganda are lumped in with lots of other territories to form a completely artificial entity, in this case the British Crown Colony of Uganda.

This creates political entities that are fundamentally unnatural and unstable, and this is the main reason, in Davies’s opinion, it has proved so difficult to construct stable, orderly systems of government and law. "In the aftermath of independence, you’re dealing with totally arbitrary and unnatural entities."

The second damaging effect of colonialism is the way in which colonial governments (not always deliberately) undermined traditional, indigenous institutions and forms of governance and rule of law, and replaced them with either (a) legal codes imported from Europe, or, even worse, (b) a leadership consisting of Africans who had been educated in very misleading and mistaken ideas — socialist ideas — at institutions such as the Sorbonne and LSE.

So when independence came, the Europeans handed over not to indigenous people and indigenous institutions (whether market-based or otherwise) but to deracinated elites who had been brought up in the doctrines of socialism in Paris or London. "And the combination of that with the completely arbitrary demarcation of borders was disastrous."

Finally, the third really disastrous legacy of colonialism was the introduction of the standing-army principle, which created an institution totally contrary to African traditions, that gave predators enormous power and access to the means of violence on a large, organized scale — and disarmed the majority of the population, leaving them at the mercy of the predators.

You can watch the video to hear what Davies has to say about present African economic policies and the impact that slavery had on African history.

• I & thou & them
• Revelation 6 and the Great War
• Parthian shot
• lukewarm
• how do you spell Laodicean?

Here’s my summary:

It’s not an ebook if you can’t read it on your iPhone.

She also explains why there is no automated process for converting PDF files to ebooks. (And there won’t be, until artificial intelligence improves significantly.)

For the full story, read her post.

Notice the appeal to a progressive theory of history: if the government cuts spending on a favorite program, communities will revert to an earlier stage of history.

Conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, and all other skeptics of the so-called progressive agenda have long been smeared as reactionary, backward, even Neanderthals.

Today the model is so well established that we rarely question it: what’s old is bad; what’s new is good. We must continue to move forward. Don’t let them take us backward to the bad old days.

Our libertarian forebears deserve some of the blame. They were the English Whigs, and the Whig theory of history is the precursor of the current progressive model. Opponents of the old regime of kings, nobles, and a privileged priesthood — of a strict feudal caste system and ever-centralizing coercive authority — the liberals of the day (we now call them classical liberals) saw science, reason, and free markets as the way forward out of medieval oppression and superstition. What’s more, the Whig theory saw this social and political progress as inevitable: we would learn ever more through science and reason, abandoning superstition and the coercive authority that depended on backward thinking.

But then, in the 19th century, the progressives split on the question of private property. (See my post "liberté, egalité.…") The opponents of property were called socialists. For a while at least, the defenders of property continued to be called liberals, but the socialists took over the language of progress, and it’s their model that we seem to be stuck with: government management and regulation take us forward; spontaneous order and individual freedom are for cowboys and cavemen.

In the opening chapter of For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray Rothbard writes,

One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez-faire libertarians had long been known as "liberals," and the purest and most militant of them as "radicals"; they had also been known as "progressives" because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers. The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words "liberal" and "progressive," and successfully managed to tar their laissez-faire opponents with the charge of being old-fashioned, "Neanderthal," and "reactionary." Even the name "conservative" was pinned on the classical liberals.

The same editorial that cast the end of mandatory recycling as a return to the "Wild West" of 19th-century America went on to make these claims:

• recycling is cleaner than garbage
• recycling trims energy use
• recycling creates jobs
• recycling keeps tons of waste from ending up in landfills

The political establishment of Wisconsin may have bought it (or they may have had less noble reasons to pretend to buy it), but when applied to present-day recycling programs each of these claims is either outright false or based on a falsehood.

Mandatory recycling causes more pollution and consumes more energy. The jobs "created" by such programs are typical of all politically manufactured jobs: they are the visible result of the less visible economic destruction in the private sector. (On this point, see 19th-century classical liberal Frederic Bastiat’s "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen" or Henry Hazlitt’s update to Bastiat: Economics in One Lesson.) Recycling may in fact keep tons of waste out of landfills, at least at first, but (1) that is not necessarily a good thing, and (2) 40 percent of all recycling ends up in landfills anyway. The history, economics, and overall virtues of landfills deserves its own article; we do not have the space for it here.

But our current model of recycling isn’t the only one. In fact, the "bad old days" of the 19th century offer us a free-market version of recycling that was cleaner, more efficient, and completely voluntary.

As Floy Lilley wrote in "Three Myths about Trash,"

Private recycling is the world’s second oldest, if not the oldest, profession. Recyclers were just called scavengers. Everything of value has always been recycled. You will automatically know that something is of value when someone offers to buy it from you, or you see people picking through your waste or diving into dumpsters.

Steven Johnson writes about the complex network of scavengers in 19th-century London in The Ghost Map (2006). His opening chapter describes the filth and dangers as well as the spontaneous complexity of this market-driven system. He also makes some economically naive statements and judges it "the correct response" that modern-day Westerners would tend to "fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste." I take him to task for these things in my blog post "dirty work" and explain why I think modern-day, free-market scavenging would not be a move backwards. From our current circumstances, it would count as progress.

(By the way, Doug French’s article "What the Turks Can Teach Us about Recycling" tells us about the interesting case of modern-day scavenging in Istanbul, which stands in between the developed and undeveloped worlds.)

But The Ghost Map takes an interesting turn in its last chapter.

All the characters of the Victorian underground economy — the mud-larks and toshers and costermongers — may have largely disappeared from cities in the developed world, but everywhere else on the planet their numbers are exploding.

Squatter cities lack most of the infrastructure and creature comforts of developed metropolitan life, but they are nonetheless spaces of dynamic economic innovation and creativity.

He even makes a point right out of Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City:

The squatter communities are not, by any measure, sinkholes of poverty and crime. They are where the developing world goes to get out of poverty.

Johnson doesn’t exactly take a radical turn. "Governments will obviously need to play a role," he writes of the sanitation challenges faced by these extralegal cities. (The need for a government role is so obvious, apparently, that he feels no need to justify the assertion.) But that "obvious" qualifying clause is for an interesting and unexpected statement: "There may be new technologies that enable the squatter communities to concoct public health solutions on their own…"

It inspires some hope in me when thoroughly mainstream authors begin to embrace spontaneous order and recognize that the solutions of the future may have to come from bottom-up organization.

I look forward to a time in the 21st century when the top-down, central-planning impulse of so many environmentalists seems as quaint and misguided as the 20th century’s Prohibition Era seems to us now.

Recall that Prohibition was the product of last century’s so-called Progressive Movement.