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.

I'm just here to destroy some comment spam.

Don't mind me.

The Gospel According to Clayton Makepeace

I’m amazed that so many folks have a hard time admitting they like money. I love money. In fact, I believe the guy who first translated I Timothy 6:10 needed glasses: I’m sure it should have read, “The LACK of money is the root of all evil.”

If money is evil, time is evil … freedom is evil … your very life is evil. Because all money is, is a physical manifestation of time.

You’ve got two choices of how to spend each day. You can spend it doing what you want to do, or doing what someone else – a client, for example – wants you to do.

So when you work, you’re selling your scarcest resource: Chunks of your life. You only have so many minutes on this planet and you’ve agreed to trade some of them in return for money.

Now, you can sell your life for peanuts if you want. Me? I’m looking for the highest bidder. That means making sure every minute I spend working brings me the maximum number of simoleans possible.

That lets me provide a great life for my wife, kids and grandkids. It lets me donate to charity. It lets me BUY BACK chunks of my life later on and have the freedom to do whatever I please. It means when I’m 96 years old and pooping in a diaper, I won’t be a burden to anyone.

Awesome! Genius!

Oh, before anybody goes off on me, let me include his next paragraph:

So my goal list has only one item on it: Make more money. So long as I’m not violating a personal ethic, or a law, or a regulation, or hurting someone else, I’m going for the moolah.

Kinda reminds me of "...And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

I'm really looking forward to that lightening bolt, aren't I?

I just turned Comment Moderation back on.

I was getting a flood of spam comments. I won't require you to verify that you're real, I'll do that myself. The system will notify me when you've commented so I'll get to it quickly.

Apparently I can't go back and delete those comments, so if anybody needs any Viagra there's a link around here somewhere for you.

I just finished reading Little Men to my daughter.

It's definitely bourgeois, but if anyone calls it philistinish, why I'll... I'll... Well, I don't know what.

Actually, I suppose the Avant Garde would call it philistinish. It's the height of Victorian literature.

My daughter could read Alcott's books herself, of course, but I think we get much more out of it this way.

If you want to inculcate good family values in your children, you can't do better than read Luisa May Alcott to them. She does a wonderful job of making old-fashioned morals interesting and entertaining.

This passage, which loses its poignancy by being ripped from its context, almost makes me question Ethical Egoism (though, I assure you, I could reinterpret things to suit my favored system). It's an impromptu eulogy given for a beloved character:

"Let me tell you a little about John Brooke, and you will see why men honor him, and why he was satisfied to be good rather than rich or famous. He simply did his duty in all things, and did it so cheerfully, so faithfully, that it kept him patient and brave, and happy through poverty and loneliness and years of hard work. He was a good son, and gave up his own plans to stay and live with his mother while she needed him. He was a good friend, and taught Laurie much beside his Greek and Latin, did it unconsciously, perhaps, by showing him an example of an upright man. He was a faithful servant, and made himself so valuable to those who employed him that they will find it hard to fill his place. He was a good husband and father, so tender, wise, and thoughtful, that Laurie and I learned much of him, and only knew how well he loved his family, when we discovered all he had done for them, unsuspected and unassisted."

Mr. Bhaer stopped a minute, and the boys sat like statues in the moonlight until he went on again, in a subdued, but earnest voice: "As he lay dying, I said to him, 'Have no care for Meg and the little ones; I will see that they never want.' Then he smiled and pressed my hand, and answered, in his cheerful way, 'No need of that; I have cared for them.' And so he had, for when we looked among his papers, all was in order, not a debt remained; and safely put away was enough to keep Meg comfortable and independent. Then we knew why he had lived so plainly, denied himself so many pleasures, except that of charity, and worked so hard that I fear he shortened his good life. He never asked help for himself, though often for others, but bore his own burden and worked out his own task bravely and quietly. No one can say a word of complaint against him, so just and generous and kind was he; and now, when he is gone, all find so much to love and praise and honor, that I am proud to have been his friend, and would rather leave my children the legacy he leaves his than the largest fortune ever made. Yes! Simple, generous goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us. Remember that, my boys; and if you want to earn respect and confidence and love follow in the footsteps of John Brooke."

This suffers terribly from the lack of context and looks like heavy-handed moralism, but is there anybody who could condemn the way this man led his life? It's definitely the sort of thing I'd tell my kids about a friend in the same situation. I hope not to have to, I know a couple guys who live by their principles to the same degree.

Come to think of it, they're both my brothers-in-law, as Mr. Brooke was to Father Bhaer, the eulogist here.

And I had a hand in fixing both of them up with my sisters. So I have one thing to be proud of, at least. (Though the guy I directly fixed up with the younger sister was quite the diamond-in-the-rough when I did it.)

[I still need to find a guy for the third sister. But I didn't do the first two on purpose, so I can't let that weigh on me or the magic won't work.]

Anyway, Ms. Alcott is every bit as engaging a storyteller as the other authors we've read, L.M. Montgomery, C.S. Lewis, J.K.Rowling [It's the initial thing, must be! We'll have to read J.R.R. Tolkien next.], Rose Wilder Lane and her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder (Roger MacBride has convinced me that Laura didn't do it alone).

Basic Knowledge of Knowledge

All abstract knowledge of reality begins with our only direct point of contact with reality: perceptual observation. For example, the first concepts formed by a child are those formed directly from perceptual data; they are what philosopher Ayn Rand, the first philosopher to fully identify the hierarchical nature of knowledge, called “first-level concepts.” A child looks out at the world, perceives entities, and integrates his perceptions into these first-level concepts—concepts such as “cat,” “dog,” and “horse.”

Using these first-level concepts, a child is able to form simple generalizations such as “cats meow” or “dogs bark.” From these early concepts and generalizations, and with further observation, he is then able to form more abstract concepts (concepts further removed from the perceptual level) and to make more abstract generalizations. For example, noting the essential similarities between cats, dogs, and horses, he is able to form the concept “animal.” He does not look at the world and see “animals”; he looks and sees cats and dogs and the like—from which observations he is able to form the corresponding first-level concepts. Then, having formed these abstractions, he is able to form the broader abstraction of “animal.” Eventually, having made countless observations, and having grasped a complex range of concepts and relationships on various levels of abstraction, he is able to form generalizations such as: “All animals are mortal.”

A concept or generalization is more or less abstract according to its cognitive distance from the perceptual level. Concepts and generalization exist in a hierarchy, from the perceptual level to the highest level abstractions.

Highly abstract concepts presuppose a very long chain of prior conceptualizations. This is why, for example, so much knowledge must be gained for students to learn calculus.

There's more and more to come from her on this. The title bar is a link, btw.

All right, Omni. You win.

Comments are now reopened to the general public.

Spammers will be deleted.

Mundanity of mundanities!

All is mundanity!

I spent the day picking up a shed from Menard's. Then I had to make a perfectly level spot to put it in. As the sun was setting I was screwing in the last screws in the floor.

Oh, no! That's just the first step. Now I have to put the shed on top of it.

I got my exercise loading the shed into the truck alone, hauling it from the truck to the back yard alone, loading 30 50# (approx. 44 KG* for my friends overseas) bags of gravel into my truck back at the store - this time I had help (funny, they promised to help with the shed and no one showed up, while for the gravel nobody promised me anything and there they were), and I hauled that from the truck to the back of the back yard. Alone again. (Naturally).

After that it was just nitpicky stuff - fitting the pieces together, and mastering the art of screwing their cheap-@$$ screws in without breaking them. I can't claim to be there yet.

They claim that one man can put up the shed in four hours. They neglected to mention any of what I spent my whole day doing.

My back is killing me.

*Correction in comments.

Wisdom for entrepreneurs from Mises and Masterson

Mises quote from The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, an exerpt of which may be found on the Mises Blog:

...[T]he human mind has always been deluded by the image of an unchangeable existence. The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.

The psychological reasons for this tendency are obvious. Every change alters the external conditions of life and well-being and forces people to adjust themselves anew to the modification of their environments. It hurts vested interests and threatens traditional ways of production and consumption. It annoys all those who are intellectually inert and shrink from revising their modes of thinking.

Conservatism is contrary to the very nature of human acting.
...
The moral corruption, the licentiousness and the intellectual sterility of a class of lewd would-be authors and artists is the ransom mankind must pay lest the creative pioneers be prevented from accomplishing their work. Freedom must be granted to all, even to base people, lest the few who can use it for the benefit of mankind be hindered.

Amen, brother.

And Michael Masterson, from his ETR article, "My Door Is Open, But Nobody's Coming In," "Yes, you can succeed by doing it alone ... but why bother?"