What I saw of the Oklahoma ice storm

On the way down to my Uncle Bill's funeral I ran into freezing drizzle, starting south of Des Moines. The defroster, while it was heating the cab to about 100°, couldn't keep the ice off the windshield. I had to slow way down to give it a chance to keep up. When I got down to 35 mph, and had stopped for the third time to scrape it clear (and Liina said, "I gotta go potty!"), I decided we'd just take a motel for the night.

So we stopped at the Super 8 in Bethany, Missouri. I had seriously considered stopping at The Sundowner Motel in Cameron, because it was the first motel I ever stayed in, and I was almost overcome by nostalgia for it. But, finally, I was convinced that the temperature was going to continue to drop faster than I could head south, so I'd never get ahead of the weather...another thing that worried me, was that somebody with more of an angle to their windshield, and, therefore, less trouble seeing through it, would be driving overconfidently and rear-end me...and "I gotta go potty" was the last straw.

The next morning the drizzle continued, but with warmer temps, the defroster could keep up. The roads were always okay - their ice treatment, Iowa's and Missouri's seems to be very effective, though, even so, I had to be careful to stay in the ruts as I neared Carthage, Mo.

So that was the experience that told me not to try to drive home on Tuesday.

Here are the pix I took Sunday, after things had been sitting for several hours in warmer weather.

All right, that's nothing like my Mom's pix of the Ferris coming through the Duluth Entrance about the same time of year after a storm in the mid-70's (or my buddy Dutch's mom's pix of his dad's boat, the McCurdy, which came in right behind the Ferris - both of 'em looked like they were made of icicles).

I want to reiterate, this is the worst that Muskogee saw. Tulsa and Oklahoma City got the full brunt of the big storm. (Though Muskogee was hit by one equally as bad last year, though more localized.) I took these pix of my Mom's yard on Sunday:

Sorry about the scrap lumber. It wouldn't be there if it were my place. And it wasn't when Mom was ambulatory, either. I need to spend some time there next summer. I need to go down there with my list of things to do.

Here's the front yard:


Muskogee wasn't hit at all by the big storm, thank God.

My boss wasn't sounding very sympathetic when I call and told her that I wasn't going to drive up through it. Though, when I talked to her today, she told me that, after she talked to me she listened to the news and found out that it was, indeed, a big deal. As I hinted, I wouldn't have thought of it as much of a deal, myself, if I hadn't tried to drive through a minor precursor of it a couple days before.

Packers 34, Vikings 0

Awesome!

I want to know how San Diego did, though. I was thinking that, after the Vikes womped them last week, the Packers were in for some $#!# this week. But nope. The Vikes absolutely rolled over and let Favre and the boys have their way with them. Of course, I had to watch every minute of it. Hadda make sure they'd hold the shut-out. They tried to give up a TD toward the end of the fourth, but Bollinger decided to toss the capper to our guy.

Here's what else we've been up to this weekend:




I bagged up about half that pile.

One more?

Hazlitt's One Lesson

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Nine-tenths of the economic fallacies that are working such dreadful harm in the world today are the result of ignoring this lesson. Those fallacies all stem from one of two central fallacies, or both: that of looking only at the immediate consequences of an act or proposal, and that of looking at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of other groups.

It is true, of course, that the opposite error is possible. In considering a policy we ought not to concentrate only on its long-run results to the community as a whole. This is the error often made by the classical economists. It resulted in a certain callousness toward the fate of groups that were immediately hurt by policies or developments which proved to be beneficial on net balance and in the long run.

But comparatively few people today make this error; and those few consist mainly of professional economists. The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the "new" economics, is to concentrate on the short-run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole.

The "new" economists flatter themselves that this is a great, almost a revolutionary advance over the methods of the "classical" or "orthodox" economists, because the former take into consideration short-run effects which the latter often ignored. But in themselves ignoring or slighting the long-run effects, they are making the far more serious error. They overlook the woods in their precise and minute examination of particular trees. Their methods and conclusions are often profoundly reactionary. They are sometimes surprised to find themselves in accord with 17th-century mercantilism. They fall, in fact, into all the ancient errors (or would, if they were not so inconsistent) that the classical economists, we had hoped, had once for all got rid of.

It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the good economists present their truths. It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it. But the basic reason for this ought not to be mysterious. The reason is that the demagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group. As far as they go they may often be right. In these cases the answer consists in showing that the proposed policy would also have longer and less desirable effects, or that it could benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The answer consists in supplementing and correcting the half-truth with the other half. But to consider all the chief effects of a proposed course on everybody often requires a long, complicated, and dull chain of reasoning. Most of the audience finds this chain of reasoning difficult to follow and soon becomes bored and inattentive. The bad economists rationalize this intellectual debility and laziness by assuring the audience that it need not even attempt to follow the reasoning or judge it on its merits because it is only "classicism" or "laissez faire" or "capitalist apologetics" or whatever other term of abuse may happen to strike them as effective.

Aliina said, "I really like you, Daddy!"

Well! I had to answer, "I really like you, 'Liina!"

So she raised me, "I love you, Daddy!"

I called, "I love you, 'Liina!"

She laid her cards on the table, "We love each other!"
We had to split the pot.

At least, I think I got my fair share. Did she ask me to do something? I'm sure I did it! What do you need, dear?

Happy Birthday Jon, Denise and Heather!

All those people were in my classroom in, I think, first, fourth and fifth grades. Denise was in the grade ahead, so we had to have a combined class for that to work.

Denise, my cousin, is the oldest, you would think, "obviously," but Jon is a full year older than Heather. I don't know why they let Heather into our class - I suppose, because she could already read, or something - but she fit in just fine. Somehow or other, by fifth grade, we were all part of a clique, along with Bonnie, Tim and, sometimes, Jane.

It's funny, but I don't remember any of us being particularly introverted back in those days. I know I had episodes of wallowing in self-pity, but only a couple.

Ugh! Trying to write in spare moments doesn't work. I'll get back to ya.

A few words on my latest readings

I've been reading the Jack Reacher stories by Lee Child. Action/Mystery stories. Good stuff. Keep ya up all night. Reacher, the almost larger than life hero, is a "liberal" but his sense of justice is spot on and he acts directly, but wisely.

I read Aladdin and the Magic Lamp to Rosie. Quite a bit different from the Disney movie. Sindbad the Sailor was in the same book. It too is quite different from the movie Sinbad the Sailor that I saw in a seedy theater once.

Rosie gave up on Oliver Twist as hopeless. It's certainly not a laugh a minute, like The Pickwick Papers. We also read Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception. Next is Robert Silverberg's Gilgamesh The King. Be gettin' to that in a minute.

Now I'm reading That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis, after having read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra - all on The Probligo's recommendation. Very enlightening stuff: pretty deep theology, delivered entertainingly. Since I'm not done with the last book of the series, I'm still not sure where there's a vision of a utopia that I'd actually want to aim for in them.

And I'm also working on The Betrayal of the American Right, by Murray Rothbard and Freedomnomics, by John Lott. I'll get links for those after I put the kids to bed.

The White Man's Burden

by Rudyard Kipling.

Like it or not, you should know it.

Take up the White man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild --
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden --
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times mad plain.
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden --
The savage wars of peace --
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden --
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper --
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead!

Take up the White man's burden --
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard --
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: --
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
"Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden --
Ye dare not stoop to less --
Nor call too loud on freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden --
Have done with childish days --
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Seems to me that, as Kipling presents the matter here, the value gained is insufficient to justify the price paid.

Not to mention the assumption that White Men should be doing these things.

This fellow has other thoughts on the matter.

Well, I ran 18.6 miles yesterday.

I didn't exactly burn up the roads (and trails). Took me 3 hours and 39 minutes. I was stopped by traffic a number of times, I stopped at a convenience store for 5 or so minutes to buy an energy drink (I wonder what the lady thought of me dripping all over the place, or if she got it that it wasn't all rainwater), and a couple times I just needed to stop and reset, I was draggin' my ass so bad.

By the way, 18.6 miles is a full 30K. The important thing was to go the distance. Once again, I ran the first half too fast and couldn't maintain the pace after that. When I checked it out on MapMyRun I found out I had my mental mile-markers in the wrong places.

Ah, well. Same route next weekend, plus another 1.4 miles.

I got this important bit of trivia from ETR

"[T]he largest lake on an island in a lake on an island is Crater Lake on Vulcano Island in Lake Taal on the island of Luzon in the Philippines."

I can't figure out where to put the link to a picture of all that, so I'll put it here.

And, since it's a volcano, it's not unlikely that there may one day be an island in that lake too.

Post #100! I have to celebrate family values.

Here's my daughter as the Grinch:

We're going to have to make sure she pays attention in Sunday School.

She's getting taller:


Finally I caught her twice in a row when she wasn't smiling. She's a very smiley girl. But I'm not going to try to prove it right now. Usually I post a pic of the older girl's dance recital this time of year. Well, I expended all my photographic efforts videoing the thing this year, but here's a picture of the aftermath:


So those are the loves of my life. Minus the gal who isn't interested in being made famous via the Blogosphere.

Here's something I want to remember

The brain and the memory work awesomely fast; they also work best for comparatively short periods of time. The more you can do during that time, the more likely you are to retain it. Time and again, our experience shows that it is not necessarily the people who take the longest over a task who do it best, but those who approach it with energy, enjoyment and a brisk clarity of purpose.

Brain Train: Studying for Success, by Richard Palmer. I'm reading it free on Questia. He's defending speed reading. Hopefully he'll tell me how to do it pretty soon. I don't have all day.

Name That Tune!

A work in progress:

Physiocrats are posers as libertar-EE-ans
Objectivists hate us 'cuz we let in cretins
Conservatives hate us too for the same thing
Liberals think we're all of the Right Wing

Once you get the hang of it, feel free to try to lend a hand.

Have a quote or two from Randolph Bourne:

Under the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, any person knowing about a man’s unlawful detention may apply for a writ ordering the jailer to “have at the Royal Courts of Justice the body of” the prisoner.

Whoops! That's a good quote, but it comes from Habeas Corpus to the Rescue, a rather gripping account of the salvation of a Polish defector to Britain in 1956, by Alexander T. Jordan, British journalist. Emphasis mine.

Here's a paragraph of Bourne's The State:

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.

[Bourne died in the flu pandemic of 1918; he starts talking about WWI in the next paragraph.]

Here is the opening salvo of The War and The Intellectuals:

To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world's people. And the intellectuals are not content with confirming our belligerent posture. They are now complacently asserting that it was they who effectively willed it, against the hesitation and dim perceptions of the American democratic masses. A war made deliberately by the intellectuals! A calm moral verdict, arrived at after a penetrating study of inexorable facts! Sluggish masses, too remote from the world-conflict to be stirred, too lacking in intellect to perceive their danger! An alert intellectual class, saving the people in spite of themselves, biding their time with Fabian strategy until the nation could be moved into war without serious resistance! An intellectual class, gently guiding a nation through sheer force of ideas into what the other nations entered only through predatory craft or popular hysteria or militarist madness! A war free from any taint of self-seeking, a war that will secure the triumph of democracy and internationalize the world! This is the picture which the more self-conscious intellectuals have formed of themselves, and which they are slowly impressing upon a population which is being led no man knows whither by an indubitably intellectualized President. And they are right, in that the war certainly did not spring from either the ideals or the prejudices, from the national ambitions or hysterias, of the American people, however acquiescent the masses prove to be, and however clearly the intellectuals prove their putative intuition.

And, from A War Diary:

The kind of war which we are conducting is an enterprise which the American government does not have to carry on with the hearty cooperation of the American people but only with their acquiescence. And that acquiescence seems sufficient to float an indefinitely protracted war for vague or even largely uncomprehended and unaccepted purposes. Our resources in men and materials are vast enough to organize the war-technique without enlisting more than a fraction of the people's conscious energy. Many men will not like being sucked into the actual fighting organism, but as the war goes on they will be sucked in as individuals and they will yield. There is likely to be no element in the country with the effective will to help them resist. They are not likely to resist of themselves concertedly. They will be licked grudgingly into military shape, and their lack of enthusiasm will in no way unfit them for use in the hecatombs necessary for the military decision upon which Allied political wisdom still apparently insists. It is unlikely that enough men will be taken from the potentially revolting classes seriously to embitter their spirit. Losses in the well-to-do classes will be sustained by a sense of duty and of reputable sacrifice. From the point of view of the worker, it will make little difference whether his work contributes to annihilation overseas or to construction at home. Temporarily, his condition is better if it contributes to the former. We of the middle classes will be progressively poorer than we should otherwise have been. Our lives will be slowly drained by clumsily levied taxes and the robberies of imperfectly controlled private enterprises. But this will not cause us to revolt. There are not likely to be enough hungry stomachs to make a revolution. The materials seem generally absent from the country, and as long as a government wants to use the war-technique in its realization of great ideas, it can count serenely on the human resources of the country, regardless of popular mandate or understanding.

Oh, I forgot to mention that all these links came from Foundation for Economic Education President Sheldon Richman's article Illiberal Means, Illiberal Ends, now also linked in the title bar here. Read that. And when you've finished that, read the Ralph Raico pdf that he links.

V for Vendetta: preliminary notes for a review

Wikipedia article. Actually belies, somewhat, the notion that the Norsefire regime is intended as a direct outgrowth from the Thatcher government.

I prefer Spooner and the early Herbert Spencer to Bakunin. Hell, I prefer Nietzsche and Stirner to Bakunin.

I like what Moore says about the movie, "[The movie] has been "turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.... It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives—which is not what the comic V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England."

I haven't read the graphic novel. I think I will.

Update Mon. 5/21/07: Got it Saturday, read it by 5:00 Sunday - it is illuminating. Moore is right. It seems hard to believe that the movie is actually a milk-toast (must I use a "que"?) version of the story, but, yeah, it does cut out the harder edges of the fascism and anarchism in the movie. And in doing so in the case of the latter, eliminates the need for V's important distinction of the difference between anarchy and chaos.

As I say, I'm not sanguine with the Bakuninist idea that the current society must be destroyed before we can rebuild a better world, but in the case of a totally fascist world, as presented in V, I can see it.

One of the funny ironies is that they show the decapitation of a fascist state. Where have we seen that before? If you're going to be wishy-washy about it, you wind up in Iraq.

The flaw in the Bush invasions, is that the rebuilding has been undertaken using collectivist, centralized control methods. I'd like to think that they were trying not to make the mistakes in privatizing that were made in the former Soviet Union, but simply retaining centralized control of Iraq's resources hasn't proven too efficient either. Any more than it did for the Soviet Union.

A Moral, by God!

Ooh! I wish I had more hay to make out of a title like that. If you think you can, go to it! Consider it an assignment.

No, I'm just basking in the afterglow of a Donald Hamilton novella published as a serial in Collier's in Dec. 1953-Jan. 54, called "Smoky Valley," which can be downloaded in four parts (pdf) for free here. I hope I'm not causing any trouble for Mr. Martinez by publicizing the fact in my small way here.

The moral may be found in this passage, which I don't think is too much of a spoiler:

He had destroyed a way of life, and he would have to build another in its place. He had no enthusiasm for the task, but he knew that it was his. A man could not meddle with human lives without taking responsibility for the result.

People online like to use "[snip]" to indicate what I'm doing here.

He said, "I know no gentle way of fighting, Miss Wilkison. I tried to make that clear at the start, but no one would lesten. I couldn't risk my men's lives by being choosy in my methods, or in the people I asked for help....

Whoops! A bit too much of a spoiler right here. Back to the moral.

"For the most part, Miss Wilkison," he said, "those are decent people who want no more than to be let alone. I'll have no trouble with them, or they with me, Miss Wilkison."

There's never been a clearer expression of The Cowboy Way.

Donald Hamilton taught me to speak "English, not gobbledygook." If I can convert one person into a fellow fan of his, I would feel that I have repaid him a debt I feel deeply. For instance, it would make me very happy if someone could tell me where that "gobbledygook" quote is from. And, yes, I doubt if Hamilton ever ended a sentence with a preposition. Somebody else taught me that. "The best writers of the English language have been ending sentences with prepositions since time immemorial." I quote that from memory, so it may be a little off. Too bad I don't remember who said that.

I think I'll lard up a post with pictures.

Not sure if Image Shack with appreciate me at all, but hey!

Here's a hint of the weather a week ago, on Easter:


Speaking of Easter, what do you make of this?


I think we're going to have to do some reprogramming.

Anyway, Thursday we get:


You can't see it, but the little one was holding that umbrella for good reason. It was snowing to beat the band.

Then Friday:

She wants me to fix the snowman, naturally. We did eventually find enough snow around the yard to stand him upright again, but...

Yesterday (No, that's not the same snowman):


Today I was out in shorts and a T-shirt sliding down the slide with Lina and teaching Rosie how to throw a football. I didn't bother with the camera though, sorry.

April in Minnesota.

I hear they got the real thing in Kansas yesterday, but we sure didn't. It must have something to do with the elevation there. We're at about 1000 ft here, they're about 4500 ft. It looks flat as a board from here to there. Go figure.

slug·ging percentage (slŭg'ĭng)

n. Baseball.
A player's total number of bases reached on hits divided by official times at bat, expressed as a three-digit decimal and used as a measure of batting power. Also called slugging average.

I can never keep that in my head.

Wait! Walks are completely excluded? So it's a completely different stat from on base percentage which includes walks and is divided by plate appearances rather than at-bats.

Ho ho! I love baseball!

Poetry that doesn't rhyme!?

What kind of a philistine are you?!

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900.

7. When I read the Book

WHEN I read the book, the biography famous,
And is this, then, (said I,) what the author calls a man’s life?
And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life?
(As if any man really knew aught of my life;
Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or nothing of my real life;
Only a few hints—a few diffused, faint clues and indirections,
I seek, for my own use, to trace out here.)

Oh, go "find" yourself!

People have been begging to know what my favorite song is.

The one I find myself singing or whistling the most often is:

Here Comes The Sun
(George Harrison)

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's all right
Little darlin' it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darlin' it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's all right
Little darlin' the smiles returning to their faces
Little darlin' it seems like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's all right
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes
Little darlin' I feel the ice is slowly meltin'
Little darlin' it seems like years since it's been clear
Here come the sun, here comes the sun
And I say it's all right
Here come the sun, here comes the sun
It's all right, it's all right

©1980 Southern Music/Northern Songs.

From the album "Flaming Schoolgirls"

Oh, whoops! I didn't notice I was on Joan Jett.com. Oh well, I like Joan Jett, too. Not as much as I like George Harrison. Though I'd probably refuse to sleep with George if he asked me to.

Especially these days.

I'm still reading Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism

The title bar links to it.

It's wonderful to read a summary of everything I've been studying for the past ten years. He treats the major figures of Libertarianism fairly and honestly, dealing in depth with the ideas and personalities of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman and also covers Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, Leonard Read, F.A. (Baldy) Harper and a ton of other interesting characters.

When I'm done with this book it'll take a special place on my shelf with Charles Sprading's Liberty and the Great Libertarians [see FEE's review here] and Jim Powell's The Triumph of Liberty, the books that show the growth and development of the ideals of individual freedom from ancient times to today. If I had Gibbon and Macauley and Rothbard's histories, they'd be up their too. (I read Macauley's History of England online, and people I respect push the others.)

Doherty may well be the best writer of the lot, though. He breaks up the heavy going philosophical and economic theory with an occasional, well-chosen anecdote.

Since Omni pushed me into it, I'll share a couple paragraphs from the book. The first describes the "prickliness" of libertarians, but isn't properly an anecdote. The second shows the principle in action (anecdotally).

P. 19:

Like obscenity, libertarianism is something I know when I see, and other libertarians feel the same way. Many a movement libertarian's favorite pastime is reading others out of the movement for various perceived ideological crimes. As Fred Smith, head of the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, says, "When two libertarians find themselves agreeing on something, each knows the other has sold out." Libertarians are a contentious lot, in many cases delighting in staking ground and refusing to move on the farthest frontiers of applying the principles of noncoercion and nonaggression; resolutely finding the most outrageous and obnoxious position you could take that is theoretically compatible with libertarianism and challenging anyone to disagree. If they are not of the movement, then you can enjoy having shocked them with your purism and dedication to principle; if they are of the movement, you can gleefully read them out of it. Libertarians (not all libertarians, certainly, and not even many) have advocated on libertarian principle private ownership of nuclear weapons; the right of parents to starve their children; and that, if you fell off a building and grabbed onto a flagpole and didn't have the explicit permission of the person who owned the balcony, you ought to let yourself fall rather than violate their property rights by crawling to safety.

Actually, I suppose those illustrative vignettes are almost anecdotes. I think that passage of the book is destined to become the most famous.

The anecdote I had in mind to illustrate the claim made above isn't nearly as funny as the passage, so, since I closed the book on it accidently and opened on a better anecdote, I'll give you that one (it doesn't illustrate that point):

P. 255:

The Circle Bastiat boys [Murray Rothbard, Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico and a couple others in the 1950s] were also pranksters who liked to disrupt other people's realities for their own amusement and occasionally for moments of libertarian Zen wisdom. When talking to young socialists, they enjoyed turning some of the socialists' predictable rhetoric back on them, for example, soberly explaining that socialism might have been all right in the primitive conditions of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. But in today's complex, modern machine era, surely they could see that we must have laissez-faire--it's just the irresistable motion of history, the inevitable wave of the future, no point in fighting it.

And they had more of the right of it in saying that, as well.

Doherty puts this breezy facility with words to work (so you don't have to) in his explanations of Rand's epistemology and Austrian economics, and his portrayal of Friedman brought me to read him back into the movement. (See page 300.) I think Doherty's like me, he loves Libertarianism and libertarians (not to mention Liberty), and hates hate; knows that we can't "all just get along," but prefers to present forgivable humans rather than demons to destroy. The real demons are bad policies, not the people who come up with them.

I just found myself compelled to say one of those

things that could only come out of the mouth of a parent: "No biting the xylophone!"

Go ahead! See if you can work that one into your next conversation! I'll bet you have to cheat.

Want to see my snowbanks?



And here's a picture I call Bunny and Moomoo:

Time Will Run Back, a couple excerpts

"But I'm still bothered, chief, and I'm sure most people are still bothered, by the huge profits made by a few enterprisers. Surely such huge profits aren't necessary in order to get them to produce the right goods!"

"Your trouble, Adams, and the trouble of these people you speak of, is that you and they still persist in looking only at the winners of the biggest prizes. You assume these to be typical; you forget about the offsetting losses of the losers. Let's look at a lottery. Let's say that the man who runs the lottery sells 1,000,000 goldgrams worth of tickets, and hands out 900,000 goldgrams in prizes, keeping 100,000 goldgrams for himself."

"Very reasonable of him," said Adams sarcastically.

"I'm not interested in him for the moment," continued Peter. "I'm talking about the subscribers to the lottery. Collectively they must lose money."

"Collectively they lose 100,000 goldgrams."

"Right, Adams. But each individual who subscribes dismisses this collective result from his mind, if it ever occurs to him. He subscribes precisely because he hopes that he, individually, will be a winner. He is not interested in the fate of the other subscribers. Now if the people outside of the lottery looked only at the winners of the huge prizes and thought these were typical, and forgot about the huge mass of losers, and if they began to talk as if these winnings were made at their - the outsiders' - expense, they would be talking the same way you are talking about profits under our new free enterprise system."

"But aren't these big profits, chief, at the expense of workers?"

"You will usually find, Adams, that the enterprisers who make the biggest profits pay the highest wages. If the profits of the successful enterprisers are at the 'expense' of anybody, I should say that they were mainly at the expense of the unsuccessful enterprisers who made the poor guesses and misdirected labor and capital....And why should you assume that the high profits of the successful enterprisers are any more at the expense of their own workers than at the expense of the owners of their borrowed capital, or of the consumers?"

Adams seemed lost in thought.

...
These two quotes come from different conversations. I felt the need to mention that. BTW, Adams is uncomfortable with calling Peter Uldanov, dictator of Wonworld, by his first name, as but he feels comfortable with "chief." Once you've read the book, you can point out how the previous sentence is inaccurate, but then you'll also know why. Shh.

"...Then it wouldn't be very accurate, chief, to call your new system a 'profit' system?"

"Certainly not in a declining or even in a stationary economy. It is of course, a profit-seeking system. But then I suppose there is a sense in which all of us are seeking 'profit' under any conceivable system. We speak. We speak of spending a 'profitable' evening when we mean merely that we have enjoyed ourselves. We say that reading a book has been 'profitable' when we mean that we have been instructed by it. 'Profitable' action of any sort is merely action that achieves, or partly achieves, the end we are seeking, regardless of whether that end is self-regarding or not.... I can't understand this unpopularity of 'profit' except as envy of the successful. Why should there be any more stigma attached to the word 'profit' than to the word 'wage' or salary'? Why should one form of income be considered less honorable than another? Why should the people who are afraid to take risks begrudge the rewards of those who have taken them successfully?"
...

I mentioned that you can download the book for free from Mises.org, and that I'd tell you how to buy a copy after the excerpts. Actually, I forgot that I can make the title into a link on this blog, so that's what I've done.

I don't suppose the boys would mind if I posted the blurb from the Mises Print on Demand Store:

A novel by Henry Hazlitt, first published in 1951 and revised in 1966. The plot line explores the economic theories of capitalism and socialism. It begins in a fully socialist society in which the new leader begins to rethink the economic basis of the system. Slowly, piece by piece, he dismantles central planning and replaces it with a market system. All the while, the characters engaged in a Socratic-style discussion about the implications of money, exchange, ownership, markets, entrepreneurship, and more. Hazlitt was well equipped to be a fiction writer. He was literary editor of The Nation for 3 years and the successor to H.L. Mencken at the American Mercury. This novel is an excellent introduction to the problems of economic systems, and can be a great benefit to young people who are curious about the meaning of economic analysis. It is, in fact, suitable for all ages.

There was one other bit that I thought was awesome. Let's see if I can find it...

Oh, here! From page 290-1 of the pdf:

"Precisely, Adams. We must absolutely forbid coercive monopoly. Perhaps that was the central evil of state socialism. The state's monopoly of power, and its monopoly of production. But we must do more than fight monopoly and encourage competition. We must draft our laws in such a way as to raise the level of competition. We must so draft them that a man who seeks his personal profit cannot attain that selfish goal except by promoting the public welfare."

"And how are we going to do that?"

"We must forbid him, Adams, to do anything that injures the public welfare. Therefore we must forbid theft, fraud, deceit and all misrepresentation of goods. We must illegalize every form of force violence, extortion, intimidation, coercion. We must compel men to keep their contractual promises, to pay their just obligations and to fulfill their contracts. The corollary to private property is private responsibility. We must not allow a private industry to thrive at the cost of killing or maiming its workers, or injuring consumers of its products, or menacing the public health, or polluting public streams, or polluting the air, or smudging whole communities with the residue of smoke. We must force every industry to pay the costs of the injury it inflicts on the person or property of others."

That's actually the earliest of the excerpts. Perhaps it would be better salesmanship on my part to place that one first. But I'm just too lazy.

How to exorcise a ghost

A taste of The Pickwick Papers:

'What strange things these are you tell us of, Sir,' said Mr. Pickwick, minutely scanning the old man's countenance, by the aid of his glasses.

'Strange!' said the little old man. 'Nonsense; you think them strange, because you know nothing about it. They are funny, but not uncommon.'

'Funny!' exclaimed Mr. Pickwick involuntarily.

'Yes, funny, are they not?' replied the little old man, with a diabolical leer; and then, without pausing for an answer, he continued--

'I knew another man--let me see--forty years ago now--who took an old, damp, rotten set of chambers, in one of the most ancient inns, that had been shut up and empty for years and years before. There were lots of old women's stories about the place, and it certainly was very far from being a cheerful one; but he was poor, and the rooms were cheap, and that would have been quite a sufficient reason for him, if they had been ten times worse than they really were. He was obliged to take some mouldering fixtures that were on the place, and, among the rest, was a great lumbering wooden press for papers, with large glass doors, and a green curtain inside; a pretty useless thing for him, for he had no papers to put in it; and as to his clothes, he carried them about with him, and that wasn't very hard work, either. Well, he had moved in all his furniture--it wasn't quite a truck- full--and had sprinkled it about the room, so as to make the four chairs look as much like a dozen as possible, and was sitting down before the fire at night, drinking the first glass of two gallons of whisky he had ordered on credit, wondering whether it would ever be paid for, and if so, in how many years' time, when his eyes encountered the glass doors of the wooden press. "Ah," says he, "if I hadn't been obliged to take that ugly article at the old broker's valuation, I might have got something comfortable for the money. I'll tell you what it is, old fellow," he said, speaking aloud to the press, having nothing else to speak to, "if it wouldn't cost more to break up your old carcass, than it would ever be worth afterward, I'd have a fire out of you in less than no time." He had hardly spoken the words, when a sound resembling a faint groan, appeared to issue from the interior of the case. It startled him at first, but thinking, on a moment's reflection, that it must be some young fellow in the next chamber, who had been dining out, he put his feet on the fender, and raised the poker to stir the fire. At that moment, the sound was repeated; and one of the glass doors slowly opening, disclosed a pale and emaciated figure in soiled and worn apparel, standing erect in the press. The figure was tall and thin, and the countenance expressive of care and anxiety; but there was something in the hue of the skin, and gaunt and unearthly appearance of the whole form, which no being of this world was ever seen to wear. "Who are you?" said the new tenant, turning very pale; poising the poker in his hand, however, and taking a very decent aim at the countenance of the figure. "Who are you?" "Don't throw that poker at me," replied the form; "if you hurled it with ever so sure an aim, it would pass through me, without resistance, and expend its force on the wood behind. I am a spirit." "And pray, what do you want here?" faltered the tenant. "In this room," replied the apparition, "my worldly ruin was worked, and I and my children beggared. In this press, the papers in a long, long suit, which accumulated for years, were deposited. In this room, when I had died of grief, and long-deferred hope, two wily harpies divided the wealth for which I had contested during a wretched existence, and of which, at last, not one farthing was left for my unhappy descendants. I terrified them from the spot, and since that day have prowled by night--the only period at which I can revisit the earth--about the scenes of my long-protracted misery. This apartment is mine: leave it to me." "If you insist upon making your appearance here," said the tenant, who had had time to collect his presence of mind during this prosy statement of the ghost's, "I shall give up possession with the greatest pleasure; but I should like to ask you one question, if you will allow me." "Say on," said the apparition sternly. "Well," said the tenant, "I don't apply the observation personally to you, because it is equally applicable to most of the ghosts I ever heard of; but it does appear to me somewhat inconsistent, that when you have an opportunity of visiting the fairest spots of earth--for I suppose space is nothing to you-- you should always return exactly to the very places where you have been most miserable." "Egad, that's very true; I never thought of that before," said the ghost. "You see, Sir," pursued the tenant, "this is a very uncomfortable room. From the appearance of that press, I should be disposed to say that it is not wholly free from bugs; and I really think you might find much more comfortable quarters: to say nothing of the climate of London, which is extremely disagreeable." "You are very right, Sir," said the ghost politely, "it never struck me till now; I'll try change of air directly"--and, in fact, he began to vanish as he spoke; his legs, indeed, had quite disappeared. "And if, Sir," said the tenant, calling after him, "if you WOULD have the goodness to suggest to the other ladies and gentlemen who are now engaged in haunting old empty houses, that they might be much more comfortable elsewhere, you will confer a very great benefit on society." "I will," replied the ghost; "we must be dull fellows-- very dull fellows, indeed; I can't imagine how we can have been so stupid." With these words, the spirit disappeared; and what is rather remarkable,' added the old man, with a shrewd look round the table, 'he never came back again.'

'That ain't bad, if it's true,' said the man in the Mosaic studs, lighting a fresh cigar.

Apparently Dickens hated paragraph breaks, but he was a hell of a storyteller anyway. And he provides practical advice, too.

Interesting article

Christianity and Modern Economics, by John B. Clark.

Click the first page link offered, and the "Next Page" button to continue reading.

I believe I'll try to translate these two paragraphs

from Mises' review of Rothbard's Man, Economy and State into non-technical English. Primarily for the benefit of my own understanding, and secondarily for the benefit of anyone else who happens by.

For the casual reader, Word gave me this summary which you might read instead and skip the two 'graphs:

Mathematical equations, says Rothbard, are appropriate and useful where there are constant quantitative relations among unmotivated variables; they are inappropriate in the field of conscious behavior. In a few brilliant lines he demolishes the main device of mathematical economists, viz., the fallacious idea of substituting the concepts of mutual determination and equilibrium for the allegedly outdated concept of cause and effect. The positivist slogan, "science is measurement," in no way refers to the sciences of human action; the claims of "econometrics" are vain.

Let the machine do what it can do, says I.

As long as I'm doing that, I see we've got a Flesch-Kincaid Reading Level of 16.0. I'll try to knock it down to around 10.0.

The mathematical economist attempts to ignore the difference between physical phenomena, on the one hand, the emergence and consummation of which man is unable to see the operation of any final causes and which can be studied scientifically only because there prevails a perceptible regularity in their concatenation and succession, and praxeological phenomena, on the other hand, that lack such a regularity but are conceivable to the human mind as the outcomes of purposeful aiming at definite ends chosen. Mathematical equations, says Rothbard, are appropriate and useful where there are constant quantitative relations among unmotivated variables; they are inappropriate in the field of conscious behavior. In a few brilliant lines he demolishes the main device of mathematical economists, viz., the fallacious idea of substituting the concepts of mutual determination and equilibrium for the allegedly outdated concept of cause and effect. And he shows that the concepts of equilibrium and the evenly rotating economy do not refer to reality; although indispensable for any economic inquiry, they are merely auxiliary mental tools to aid us in the analysis of real action.

The equations of physics describe a process through time, while those of economics do not describe a process at all, but merely the final equilibrium point, a hypothetical situation that is outside of time and will never be reached in reality. Furthermore, they cannot say anything about the path by which the economy moves in the direction of the final equilibrium position. As there are no constant relations between any of the elements which the science of action studies, there is no measurement possible and all numerical data available have merely an historical character; they belong to economic history and not to economics as such. The positivist slogan, "science is measurement," in no way refers to the sciences of human action; the claims of "econometrics" are vain.

The first thing I need to do is chop up these long, Germanic sentences. Then do something about the vocab...

Philistine Philosophy from Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Actually, it's bourgeois philosophy, but I like the aliteration. Sorry I let this blog sit so long. This is from Hoppe's introduction to Murray Rothbard's The Ethics of Liberty (which is also available online here):

Rothbard sought and found support for his contention regarding the possibility of a rational ethic and the reintegration of ethics and economics based on the notion of private property in the works of the late Scholastics and, in their footsteps, such "modern" natural-rights theorists as Grotius, Pufendorf, and Locke. Building upon their work, in The Ethics of Liberty Rothbard gives the following answer to the question of what I am justified doing here and now: every person owns his own physical body as well as all nature-given goods which he puts to use with the help of his body before anyone else does; this ownership implies his right to employ these resources as one sees fit so long as one does not thereby uninvitedly change the physical integrity of another's property or delimit another's control over it without his consent. In particular, once a good has been first appropriated or homesteaded by "mixing one's labor" with it (Locke's phrase), then ownership of it can only be acquired by means of a voluntary (contractual) transfer of its property title from a previous to a later owner. These rights are absolute. Any infringement on them is subject to lawful prosecution by the victim of this infringement or his agent, and is actionable in accordance with the principles of strict liability and the proportionality of punishment.

It's much later, but if I add this things will be clearer:

Inspired in particular by the nineteenth-century American anarchist political theorists Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker and the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari, from the outset Rothbard's anarchism took it for granted that there will always be murderers, thieves, thugs, con artists, etc., and that life in society would be impossible if they were not punished by physical force. As a reflection of this fundamental realism — anti-utopianism — of his private-property anarchism, Rothbard, unlike most contemporary political philosophers, accorded central importance to the subject of punishment. For him, private property and the right to physical defense were inseparable. No one can be said to be the owner of something if he is not permitted to defend his property by physical violence against invaders and invasions. "Would," Rothbard asked, "somebody be allowed to 'take the law into his own hands'? Would the victim, or a friend of the victim, be allowed to exact justice personally on the criminal?" and he answered, "of course, Yes, since all rights of punishment derive from the victim's right of self-defense" (p. 90). Hence, the question is not whether or not evil and aggression exist, but how to deal with its existence justly and efficiently, and it is only in the answer to this question that Rothbard reaches conclusions which qualify him as an anarchist.

The classical liberal answer, from the American Declaration of Independence to Mises, was to assign the indispensable task of protecting life, liberty, and property to government as its sole function. Rothbard rejected this conclusion as a non sequitur (if government was defined by its power to tax and ultimate decision-making [territorial monopoly of jurisdiction]). Private-property ownership, as the result of acts of original appropriation, production, or exchange from prior to later owner, implies the owner's right to exclusive jurisdiction regarding his property. In fact, it is the very purpose of private property to establish physically separate domains of exclusive jurisdiction (so as to avoid possible conflicts concerning the use of scarce resources). No private-property owner can possibly surrender his right to ultimate jurisdiction over and physical defense of his property to someone else — unless he sold or otherwise transferred his property (in which case someone else would have exclusive jurisdiction over it).

There have been some things missing from the Classical Liberal answers I've been studying. This book promises to provide them.

But I think I'll have to stop quoting from Mr. Hoppe's brilliant summation, lest I tread upon his copyright. The link is the title bar.

I urge you to read it.