Who Were the Sea Peoples?

One of the most prominent critics of democracy was, of course, Plato, who along the way gave us the metaphor of "the ship of state." Democracy, he argued, was akin to a ship being steered and navigated by the passengers. Different potential captains would sell themselves to the passengers by pandering to their desires rather than based upon their seamanship. Such a voyage could not but end badly, Plato thought. The argument for a mixed constitution flows pretty naturally from this metaphor, I think, although Plato did not pursue it in that direction. While it's true we don't want the passengers picking which channel to attempt or when to tack, we also don't fancy the notion of the captain essentially kidnapping the passengers and dragging them anywhere on the seven seas he wishes to go. A mixed constitution tries to balance sound seamanship and individual autonomy.

Consider the following passage: "[Some] Virginians... had openly conveyed their eagerness to alter the federal Constitution by pushing through amendments... to make the republic more democratic... Reducing U.S. senators' terms from six to two years would go far toward eliminating aristocratic pretense in that body. Direct election of the president would be an obvious improvement on the Electoral College. No longer giving judges lifetime appointments seemed a sensible move." -- Madison and Jefferson , p. 432 What is striking for me is not so much that any of these proposals are obviously wrong, but how the democratic prejudice of our age leads the authors to see them as obviously right, despite the weighty arguments put forward against pure democracy by a host of political thinkers, including many of the American founders, the latter being the very people in whose thought the authors are experts. Even someone as astute and well-read in the classics as our friend P.S...

"'Plans are all right sometimes,' I said, 'and sometimes just stirring things up is all right - if you're tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you'll see what you want when it comes to the top." -- Dashiell Hammett,  Red Harvest This was where Hammett broke with all previous detective fiction, at least what I know of it. C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey: they all carefully planned how they were to catch their criminals, proceeding according to rational schemes. Hammett's detectives had no such rational design to their actions: they merely agitated the situation and toughed it out until the truth became manifest. As such, they were pre-cursors of post-modernism.

To the Athenian tyrant? A: Get your hippie ass out of town!

Eugenius meets his good friend Mundussomnium in the forum. They greet each other warmly, and agree to continue their discussion of Mundussomnium's plans for political reform. Eugenius: So, what news of your plans for Ancapistium, Mundussomnium? Mundussomnium: Ah, I have received a great portent of its success, Eugenius! E: And what is that? M: Well, you know how replacement referees had been hired for the gladitorial contests, Eugenius? E: Certainly! M: Well, it seems the people have risen up and demanded the original referees back! It turns out that they are very keen judges themselves of who doles out justice properly, and who does so shoddily and with favoritism. E: But as I understood it, the replacement referees had done a pretty good job. But never mind that, let's assume you are correct: The people are very good judges of justice, you say? M: Yes, this shows that they are indeed. E: And your proposed regime of Ancapistium will be much more just than the current regime?...

In my yard in Pennsylvania, there is a sudden explosion of spiders that are bright orange, bright yellow, and black. I have never seen such creatures in my yard before this year. Why are they suddenly here? There are several possible answers, but among those I thought of was "Global warming: perhaps my yard was out of their range until just recently, but they have been moving north or up in elevation." And then I wondered just how spiders would know that they could move north? Were they getting weather reports? Little arachno-capitalist real estate agents were pitching them space between my fence railings? And then I realized the answer lies in marginalism: in whatever range the spiders can occupy, there must be some spiders who are just on the edge of making it: they are on marginal land, where they just scrape by. When they have their 247,000 babies or whatever enormous amount they have, those babies disperse and some of them wind up settling down between fence post...

I went to pick up my paycheck today from my pigeon hole in the mail room. There was a large envelope from Sandy in there, but no check! This was the second time my check had been missing. I went to the woman who distributes the checks and asked if I should have received one yesterday. She said, "Yes: I put it in your box myself. I recall very clearly." (She was obviously remembering the previous incident.) We went to take a look. This time I leaned over further to take a look into the nearby pigeon holes. When I did so, I saw the my check had been pushed up by the large envelope, so that it stood upright against the near wall of the pigeon hole. Until one leaned past the edge of the hole and looked back, which meant unnaturally squeezing past a large table, it was completely invisible. We both chuckled with relief. Mystery solved! But as I walked away, I wondered: how would things now be different if, when I left the room the first time, the breeze caused by my closing ...

Aristotle (in)famously held that certain people are natural slaves. But we must look closely at what he meant by that. My recollection is that he focused on those people's inability to direct their own efforts successfully. My question: Would Aristotle have considered employment as an underling in a modern corporation simply an ingenious way of managing natural slaves so that they don't feel the yoke of their slavery as much? It seems to me that the key thing for him was not their being owned, but their being other-directed in their work. If that is so, than he might look at the position of a line cook at McDonald's and think, "Yes, just as I thought: some people can only work successfully when someone else plans all of their work for them." I'm not wondering if you agree with that, I'm wondering is that what Aristotle would think today?

Let's say one admits that a general glut is possible . Furthermore, let's say one believes that prices are unlikely to fall fast enough to work off this problem swiftly, and one resists the idea that "the pain is good for us." Is the only answer government stimulus? Consider the following passage: "Unemployment develops, that is to say, because people want the moon; — men cannot be employed when the object of desire (i.e. money) is something which cannot be produced and the demand for which cannot be readily choked off. There is no remedy but to persuade the public that green cheese is practically the same thing and to have a green cheese factory (i.e. a central bank) under public control." -- J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money , Chapter 17 This, I think, is not quite right: money can be produced. Under free banking, it is produced by private banks, and their means of production is the careful management of their reser...

In 594 BC, Solon tried to persuade the struggling farmers of Athens to switch from grain cultivation to growing olives. They refused, apparently mostly because they were set in their ways. A few decades later, the tyrant Pisistratus (at the time, tyrant simply meant an unconstitutional ruler) forced the change on them, while also lending them money to tide them over until the trees would bear fruit. The farmers stopped struggling and prospered. Athens became a major exporter of olive oil, and as a side effect the leading manufacturer of pottery. In a few decades its golden age would commence. Often, private initiative achieves the best economic results. Sometimes, government economic schemes do better.

Most famous, false ideas in philosophy and social theory are not completely false, but are one-sided exaggerations of the truth. Take Marx's theory of history, for instance: there is a germ of truth in it, as class struggle often has been an large factor in the course of events, and the material forces of production are important. Where the theory goes wrong is in blowing these truths out of all proportion, and treating them as if they were the only truths about history, as if regional conflict and ethnic clashes and ideological struggles and just plain old personal factors meant nothing or next-to-nothing.

Steve Young thinks of the NFL as "revered," and apparently regards replacement refs as roughly equivalent to priests having sex with altar boys:

When I was in the UK, I quickly learned to say "loo" or "gents" instead of "bathroom," "skip" instead of "dumpster," "lift" instead of "elevator," "shop" instead of "store," and even learned to ask for tomAHtoes on my sandwich instead of tomAYtoes. But I was just trying to convince a British professor who has been lecturing in the US for many years that designating "grain" as "corn" when lecturing to an American audience was not a good idea, since Americans would almost all interpret "corn" as meaning "maize," and would think that the, say, ancient Romans had lots of maize kicking around. He wasn't buying it: apparently all English speakers can speak British, but Americans insist on using their silly "Americanisms" despite understanding proper English quite well. A colleague of mine reported something similar: a British colleague who insiste...

I am re-reading Sowell's wonderful book, Say's Law: An Historical Analysis . If you want to read a fascinating history and understand the theoretical issues at play more clearly, do pick it up. In any case, a will, as usual, comment occasionally as I read, starting here. The first thing of note is, come on, this is Thomas Sowell. He is a fairly market friendly, "right-wing" economist, and no "born again Keynesian," as I was recently accused of being. So if he says that Say came to agree with Malthus, well, perhaps he is wrong, but it's not because he wants to throw the decision to the opponents of Say's Law; he is just being honest. And when he writes, in his very first sentence, "The idea that supply creates its own demand -- Says' Law..." he is not trying to back Keynes, he is letting us know that is a pretty darned good way to summarize Say's Law. He also shows that the case made by the general glut theorists was often mis...

"But when queried about the U.S. response to a French military expedition to [Haiti], Jefferson gave the impression that he would support an occupation and that he wished to see an unofficial alliance involving France, England, and the United States. All three would come together to crush the island republic... Jefferson agreed that they would 'reduce [Haitian leader] Toussaint to starvation.'" --  Madison and Jefferson , p. 375 This was due to Jefferson's fears that freed Haitian slaves would inspire revolt amongst American slaves. So he was willing to crush and starve these newly liberated, republican slaves, living in their own country, just so his own (and those of his neighbors) wouldn't get uppity. Sometimes this stuff gets really ugly.

Scott Sumner makes two sound, non-partisan proposals that would greatly improve our tax system. The fact neither has any chance of being enacted demonstrates how bad our politics have gotten: it's special interests all the way down.

Fortuitously, I was reading Bob's material on the stability of anarcho-capitalism  at the same time I was reading Bosanquet's The Philosophical Theory of the State . The happy coincidence led me to realize that it is not really correct to call the anarcho-capitalist system proposed by Murphy or, say, David Friedman, "stateless." The state governing a territory in their systems is a federation of defense agencies. National politics occurs in whatever sort of assembly, board, congress or what have you that sets the inter-agency rules (laws). If any agency refuses to join the federation or at least abide its decisions it will find the interests of its clients continually suborned to the interests of the clients of agencies in the federation. (Murphy acknowledges as much when he writes, "Why wouldn’t the vast bulk of reasonable customers patronize defense agencies that had interlocking arbitration agreements...?") The biggest change from the current system...

Here . When two intelligent philosophers, one a theist and one an atheist, try to discuss the idea of God and naturalism intelligently, one of the atheist ideologues chimes in to chastise the atheist philosopher for even attempting the intelligent discussion.

At a local restaurant, I go to the loo. Despite the fact that there is a sit-down toilet two feet to the left, and a trash can one foot behind, someone has chucked a huge wad of toilet paper in the urinal. What is on the mind of someone who acts like this? I struggle to comprehend it.

The understanding of "Say's Law" being propounded here in a number of posts does not imply some particular view on good economic policy, as Silas and B-Murph have noted in the comments. One could admit that Say's Law, if viewed as an empirical rather than a tautological statement, has exceptions, and think: 1) So what? The government will just make things worse if it tries to intervene. 2) The government might be able to improve things, but the means it uses would be immoral, e.g., inflation or taxation (needed to pay back money for stimulus later). 3) The government can and should intervene to shorten or prevent downturns.

as far as I can detect from Fox News and the New York Post : 1) Obama was cowardly and dumb not to give the Arab spring far more support when those brave freedom fighters were struggling against dictatorships last year. 2) Obama was an idiot to have given those angry, anti-American crowds of thugs any support at all during the Arab spring last year.

I think Samuel Goldman gets this right . Hat tip to Marty Browne.

1) Say's Law was not, in the early 1800s, any specific idea. Say never gave us one sentence that states "his" law. The idea that there was a law here only coalesced slowly, and it did so around a cluster of ideas, not a single idea. (I believe Thomas Sowell counted nine different notions related to "Say's Law.") So anybody who tells you "Say's Law means X, and if you think otherwise you are ignorant"... is ignorant. 2) Given the above, there is nothing suspect about formulating Say's Law in this way or that way. Some ways of formulating it will hold no matter what. For instance, if, in this example , one could say, "As I formulate Say's Law, this conforms to it: Bob, Silas, and you overproduced fish, and underproduced leisure, so that's a sectoral imbalance!" Fair enough, but that isn't what Say meant, since when Malthus presented examples like this, Say at first rejected them. Economists at that time thought of ...

economists from both sides forget -- as soon as we start talking tax policy, that the legal incidence of a tax and its economic incidence are different?! Very bright economists who certainly know this write as if it makes no difference, and simply cite the legal incidence as if it is the economic incidence. Some discussions recognize this fact but pretend they have tracked the economic incidence: "Once these tax-induced changes in behavior throughout the economy are accounted for, the final distribution of the economic burden of taxes is called the 'economic incidence.'" But to do this you'd have to know information about supply and demand schedules that no one knows. At best we have some vague guess as to what the shape of a curve is. And tax changes do not happen while all other things are being held constant.

"Say's Law, or a crude version of it, rules out general overproduction: an excess supply of some things in relation to the demand for them necessarily constitutes an excess demand for some other things in relation to their supply... The catch is this: while an excess supply of some things necessarily mean an excess demand for others, those other things may, unhappily, be money. If so, depression in some industries no longer entails boom in others... "[T]he quantity of money people desire to hold does not always just equal the quantity they possess. Equality of the two is an equilibrium condition, not an identity. Only in... monetary equilibrium are they equal. Only then are the total value of goods and labor supplied and demanded equal, so that a deficient demand for some kinds entails and excess demand for others.  " Say's law overlooks monetary disequilibrium. If people on the whole are trying to add more money to their total cash balances than is being a...

Huff noted in a comment that Dracon of Athens only made most crimes punishable by death. I cited Professor Ian Worthington as my source for saying it was all crimes. Well, today on my ride to work Professor Worthington recanted: in the lecture on Dracon itself he now says "most crimes" rather than "all crimes." Oddly, while the penalty for, say, idleness was death, one crime that did not receive the death penalty was accidental homicide. That penalty was exile.

The place will look divine! Rastafari!

I think the thing to do is produce several years recycling in the next two weeks, to use this free service while I can.

Womi o, luku aki. Te mi kai di fou de noo a ta-ko.

It's funny how many people simply take it as a matter of course that a second negative in a sentence negates the first one, rather than intensifying it. That interpretation of a second negative seems unique to modern, pedantic English. Consider Bede: "Ne con ic noht singan!" for thon ic naht singan ne cuthe. Four negatives piled up in that one little sentence of Old English. And no one thought Bede was saying the guy could sing, but in a funny way.

ME: So, you're calling me a liar? I just made up that the gutter leaks? PROPERTY MANAGER: Who told you that? Cause I never friggin said that! I'm offended! ME: You're offended! You're offended! It's me who's friggin offended! Why the frack would I make up that the gutter's leaking? PM: I never friggin said you was making it up! This really offends me! Once we settled who was more offended, we had a nice conversation about how to fix the gutter.

As a guy who once paid $500 for a 10MB hard drive, it makes me... laugh? cry? -- I'm not sure which -- to find a 16GB iPod tossed aside on the shelf as if it were a 512KB floppy... which, of course, to Wabulon, in his programming youth, would have been an enormous data store.

As a percentage of their total population, roughly eight times as many blacks in the U.S. marry whites as do whites marry blacks. Is this evidence of racism or white privilege? Discuss.

Aristotle and his students collected extensive (book length) data on the history and structure of the constitutions of 158 Greek city-states. Do you know how many of those we have available today? One. The amount of material from the ancient world that we no longer have with us is staggering.

In the midst of my macro class today, I came up with two ideal types to help the class picture one economy in which Say's Law holds, and one in which it does not. Let's look at each. First we imagine a class dance party. We stipulate that people are only allowed to enter the dance hall in pairs, and that they agree to dance with any available partner at any point they are in the hall, and then they all leave at the same time. In that situation, no general glut is possible. Every person by entering the room is simultaneously supplying and demanding a dance partner, surely the proper way to understand Keynes's formulation of Say's Law as "supply creates its own demand." So long as there is an even number of people in the room, no one can overproduce a supply of dance partners. Say's Law holds. The dance was such a success that we plan a class picnic. Everyone is going to make a small dish, the right size for a single meal, with the idea that everyone ...

"But we don't know what it means." I was watching White Collar the other day, and one of the FBI agents said the above. It struck me as odd: what exactly would this mean? I suppose if the reversal of the algorithm you've guessed generates the code produces English words, but of obscure import, you might say the above. But their obscurity might also be taken to indicate you have the wrong algorithm, couldn't it? I suppose once you were getting grammatical English sentences for a time, your confidence that you had the right algorithm would be pretty high, but I could envision creating an algorithm that generated decoy patterns in the encoded string. (Query: Are their codes that do this?) But I wouldn't really feel certain I had "cracked the code" until I knew what it meant. Silas, what's your take on this?

These people have totally topped me:

Andrew Sullivan does a great job describing the utterly radical nature of the Netanyahu-Romney foreign policy regime-that-would-be. That regime is simply neo-Trotskyite world revolution ideology updated for the 21st century. I have lots of complaints about Obama. And I have no doubt that Romney himself is no radical: he is simply hungry for power. But to get it, he is perfectly willing to sell his soul to these radicals.

I love New York, and I love New Yorkers. It doesn't mean I don't see their (our? Am I a New Yorker yet?) faults. One of them is a ridiculous level of impatience. If you are turning and stop your car for a family crossing the side street (legally, with the walk sign!) the guy behind you will honk. "Hey, I'm in a hurry! Run that family over so I can go." Another symptom of this is that New Yorkers don't wait on the sidewalk to cross the street. Instead, they wait three feet off of the curb. That's bad enough -- it definitely makes turns more difficult -- but the worst is when they do this with their baby in the stroller in front of them. The baby is another two feet in the street past them. It's like they are using the baby as a canary in the coal mine: "Well, if the baby gets hit, I guess I should step back a little."

Since "dropping the charges" didn't work, and others from... somewhere not to be named have started to show up and make very nasty comments and threats, from now on the policy of this blog will be to never mention... well, someone... or... well, something, again. Sincerely, Gene "Anti-troll" Callahan

Our word "draconic" comes from the law system established by Dracon of Athens around 620 BC. In that penal code, every single crime received the same penalty: death! OK, that's pretty harsh.

"There was time when wise people thought the planets should revolve in circles. When observations showed incontrovertibly that they did not, the question was asked, "Why not?" People tried to figure what kept the planets from displaying perfect circles. In the end it was realized that, in accordance with the laws of motion and gravitation, there never had been any reason to expect circles. Circles were not the norm; ellipses were. "When we ask why the 'free market' in [giving] Christmas cards doesn't lead to optimal exchange, the answer is that it is not a market and there was no reason to expect optimal results in the first place. The free market, when it works, is that special case of knowledgeable voluntary exchange of alienable commodities. Only some ellipses are circles." -- Micromotives and Macrobehavior , p. 33

talkin' bout, my troll . My troll! (To be sung to the tune of The Temptations "My Girl.")

One often sees people contending that "Keynes thinks that markets don't work." Reading Schelling has clarified something for me here. That "markets work" usually means "markets equilibrate." But Schelling notes that "equilibrium" is a state of affairs where things have settled down, and not a normative appraisal: I could bring you to a state of equilibrium real quick by shooting you, but most of us would not say this has positive welfare implications. Keynes clearly thinks that markets equilibrate investment and savings. But there are two ways markets can do this if savings goes up: intended investment can go up as well, or intended investment can remain where it was, and inventories can rise. The latter process shows markets working to produce an equilibrium. It's just that it is an unpleasant equilibrium.

Since Chicago is contracting, pretty soon it should be Brooklyn. (I never accepted the " Great Mistake of 1898 .")

I am not in love with Obama as our president. But I want him to win, and I want him to win because he is the more conservative candidate . Of course, by "conservative" I mean conservative in the original sense of the term: more prudent, less prone to over-reaction, more deliberative, more respectful of precedent. (Yes, there are problems with him in this regard: think the contraception hub-bub. But it is another conservative trait not to make the perfect the enemy of the good.) By my criteria of being conservative, most of today's modern "conservatives" like Hannity and Limbaugh are revealed as angry, radical populists. And Romney is willing to cater to them in order to win office. Obama: the conservative choice.

(Hat tip Keven Vallier.)

Murray Rothbard, in his most famous paper , argued, essentially, that because human beings acting in a free market optimize, there is no possibility of an intervention from "outside" improving the outcome of that optimizing for everyone. Here is Schelling: "How well each does for himself in adapting to his social environment is not the same thing as how satisfactory a social environment they collectively create for themselves." -- Micromotives and Macrobehavior , p. 19 On a bad road, every driver will optimize his driving, given his preferences. But if the road provider offers a better road, the overall driving environment will improve. This does not prove that governments are capable of providing such improved environments. But it does illustrate a second flaw in Rothbard's argument. (I will not rehearse the first one here: it is well known, and easy to spot.)

Check out this thread . When a Mises Institute initiate has the temerity to ask what non-Austrian economic books he should read, some posters mock him for thinking of doing anything so pointless. He defends himself by saying he only reads them to be able to refute them. No sense whatsoever that there is the least possibility he might discover some of his earlier views are wrong . In order to remain a member in good standing, you must swear that you are not reading books from outside the cult-approved list to learn anything new, but only to know how to attack them.

One of the most remarkable things about the modern debate on the validity of "Say's Law" -- the key topic in macroeconomics, says me -- is that the defenders of the law never seem to address or even acknowledge the fact that, in the debate between Malthus and Say, Say acknowledged that Malthus was right . That is right , folks, by in the end, J.B. Say was no longer an advocate of Say's Law: "Yet Say changed his mind. By 1829, in his analysis of the British financial panic and recession of 1825-6, Jean-Baptiste Say was writing that there could indeed be such a thing as a general glut of commodities after all..." Even a conservative economist like Thomas Sowell points out that, per Say, Malthus won their debate. But then John Stuart Mill came along and wrote up the history of this argument as if sensible economists like his father, Ricardo, and Say had crushed the cranky argument of Malthus. Mill's towering reputation made this false history accep...

I came across a paper in an academic setting -- I'm not going to say where, because my goal is not to embarrass an individual but to comment on just how nutty things can get in academia -- that contends that white, heterosexual women have privileged "access" to roses compared to homosexuals and non-white women, and that this is a symptom of patriarchy and exclusion. Color me baffled. Can't pretty much everyone "access" roses by walking into a florist and paying for them? Are there really florists out there checking on the sexual orientation of their potential clients? If lesbian women aren't getting enough roses, shouldn't they be complaining to their lovers? How is "patriarchy" stopping black guys from buying black women roses? Is the author's point, perhaps, that white guys should be paying for roses for everyone, regardless of whether or not we are dating them? What would the lesbian couple next door to me make of it if I start ...

All of the special sciences are free to try out postulates and see how they work out for developing that science. It is not, however, the job of philosophy to blindly accept such postulates, but instead to interrogate them. For instance, while physicists may decide to consider only physically quantifiable aspects of the world as real for their purposes, that decision in no way obligates philosophers to accept that as a philosophical principle. Similarly, when an economist says "all value is subjective," that may or may not be a good postulate for economics. But social philosophy is not bound to accept this postulate merely because it works in economics. And, in fact, the social philosopher must reject it, because, while it may be a useful assumption for the economist, once it is examined without arrest or reservation, i.e., philosophically, it is seen to be plainly false. First of all, nothing at all is purely subjective, for this would mean an experience that is all sub...

With this piece of nonsense . Not letting the Israeli Prime Minister dictate US policy is "breaking with Israel" only if you think Israel should be our master. And the News repeats the lie about Iran "trumpeting" their wish to destroy Israel.

Otherwise, liars like Jennifer Rubin will have won.

First of all, they force upgrades on you. If the software detects an available upgrade, you can choose between installing it and quitting. So you have no option but to go through the upgrade nightmare if you want to keep using the software. Then, the upgrade process never works properly. This time, they didn't actually install the software like they said they would: every time I started up, they demanded I upgrade again. What I really had to do was manually run an install package, but the software didn't mention that. Now that I have the new version actually installed, it notes my (optional) online subscription has elapsed, and asks if I want to renew it. Well, I don't, but the program simply won't progress past the point of asking about this. Every single forced upgrade has been similarly awful. Does Rosetta Stone not even run through the upgrade process themselves before they force it on us?!

I was walking up the street in Carroll Gardens when I saw the mother of my friend, who we will call Johnny Vongole, on the sidewalk, upset. She was talking excitedly to a man on the sidewalk. Suddenly Johnny came bursting out of their brownstone. "What's up?" I can't hear everything his mother said, but it ended with "And he called me an animal!" "Which one?" "Black shirt and shorts?" Mrs. Vongole points to someone about a block down the street. Johnny takes off running. I spun around and followed. As I was walking, Mrs. V. passed me, walking at a very fast clip. Meanwhile, Johnny was catching up to the fellow, and was shouting at him. I could now see the guy had half-a-foot in height on Johnny, and fifty pounds in heft. He turned around, expecting to have a shouting match and a little show of bluster, and then be on his way. Johnny cold cocked him directly in the face. The guy backed up in shock. Johnny came at him again, but...

We've all seen statements like this floating around: "Say's law did not posit that (as per the Keynesian formulation of Say's law) 'supply creates its own demand.'" -- Wikipedia Now consider this quote from Say: "It is worthwhile to remark that a product is no sooner created than it, from that instant, affords a market for other products to the full extent of its own value. When the producer has put the finishing hand to his product, he is most anxious to sell it immediately, lest its value should diminish in his hands. Nor is he less anxious to dispose of the money he may get for it; for the value of money is also perishable. But the only way of getting rid of money is in the purchase of some product or other. Thus the mere circumstance of creation of one product immediately opens a vent for other products." -- J.B. Say, A treatise on political economy OK, break it down: "It is worthwhile to remark that a product is no sooner creat...

OK, I've gotten a chance to read Murphy's entire piece on why warlords won't take over ancapistan, and it does, indeed, have the problem I suspected it has: Murphy assumes an ancap society functioning the way he thinks it ought to, and then asks, "Would warlords take over that?" Well, perhaps they wouldn't, but that really just evades the more important issue, which is, "How in the world are you ever going to get to that society, given that all the evidence we have suggests warlords will take over long before we get there, in fact, the moment state authority breaks down?" This consideration is, I think, a defeasor for at least the "I would throw a switch today and shut down the state instantly if I could" crowd. But what about a gradual transition? Well, that is interesting, and you'll find my surprise answer at the end. But first some remarks on particular points Murphy makes. He writes, in reference to contractarian theories of ...

as a coordination problem .

That I get to see one of my favorite libertarians, Gene Healy: Appear on screen under his alias as Tim DeKay: Good work, Gene!

Listening to the news this morning, I thought I had the announcer say, "The presidential campaign is entering its final retch." Speak for yourself, sir.

Even when translating for students of a language in a dual-language book, presented with an obvious cognate, they do their damndest to avoid the cognate and reach for an more obscure alternative. For instance, given the Italian word "momentanee," Stanley Applebaum translates it as "ephemeral," rather than "momentary." Wouldn't seeing the cognate be a great aid to the student here? But the priority seems to fall to showing one's cleverness.

Typically it seems to go like this: RW: Man, I got a bee sting. Really hurts! ME: That's too bad. RW: Yeah, friggin' Obama. ME: Huh? RW: Well, Obama is into the environment, isn't he? ME: I guess. RW: And bees are part of the environment, aren't they! There you have it: Friggin' Obama!

My college e-mails me all sorts of important news every day. For instance, just last week I learned the rust had been flushed from the campus fire hydrants. What a relief getting that e-mail provided! Today, I received this: "When the weather cleared a bit, the winner of the both the men's 8K and the women's 5K was the United States Merchant Marine Academy. USMMA captured the first 12 finishers on the men's side..." If these marines are allowed to actually capture racers, of course they will win!

"looking at history as a succession of detached events temporally distinct, [Christ] cannot know the future; future history, actions, events generally he cannot foretell. But this is simply because, taking history in this abstract way, the future is positively undetermined, non-existent as yet, unknowable; God himself cannot know it. On the other hand, if history means the discovery of absolute truth and the development of God's purposes, the divine man will stand at the centre of it and know it past and future, from within..." -- Religion and Philosophy , p. 157

Pareto is a very interesting social theorist, but he commits an error so egregious that I am gobsmacked whenever I encounter it: he holds that all theories are "mere manifestations of psychic states."* But that proposition is, of course, itself a theory, and by its own lights, must be a mere manifestation of Pareto's psychic state. How can obviuosly intelligent people miss this when they spout such nonsense? * Pareto: Sociological Writings , p. 37

Sotto la comprensione de l'infinito non e' parte maggiore e parte minore, perché alla proporzione de l'infinito non si accosta più una parte quantosivoglia maggiore che un'altra quantosivoglia minore; e pero' ne l'infinita durazione non differisce la ora dal giorno, il giorno da l'anno, l'anno dal secolo, il secolo dal momento; perché non son più gli momenti e le ore che gli secoli, e non hanno minore proporzione quelli che questi a la eternità. -- De la causa, principio e uno

Well, practically speaking .

Little Vilfredo Loved his alfredo Eating it every day Until his doctor Acting as proctor Noted, "Not everyone feels the same way."

A very good post that basically agrees with what I wrote a few weeks ago: the author contends that God knows all possible futures, but that there is no THE future to be known.

"The Sedition Act was the most extreme manifestation of panic politics. Its unusual provision was to declare that publishing, or even verbalizing, 'scandalous and malicious' statements about the president or Congress would result in a stiff fine and imprisonment. The carefully worded statute did not, however, protect the vice president from libelous insults..." -- Madison and Jefferson , p. 334 The vice president was, of course, Jefferson, the arch-enemy of the Federalists who had passed the act.

I heard an ad on the radio this morning. Two women are riding the subway. They begin talking nervously about a man they see, looking around nervously, with his hands in his pockets. One of the gets out her phone. The other asks, "What are you up to?" It turns out her friend is calling a terror alert hotline! "And I've got the number bookmarked," she adds. (I think she means on speed dial or something, because I'm not clear on how you "bookmark" a phone number.) So, she calls the terror alert hotline so often she has it in her favorites list! Meanwhile, the guy across the car has no doubt taken out his phone to call the terror hotline as well. Why? Those two nervous looking women conspiratorily chatting across the way ! We can only be safe if we all call in terror alerts on each other all the time.

I really don't do web lectures. I either want to lay down on the couch and watch a DVD of a lecture, when I’m in passive mode, or be active on the web, where I can jump from task to task, skim a text, write when something hits me, etc. Web lectures just don’t do it for me. So, although if I did watch web lectures, Bob's might be the first I watched , I don't. So all I have to go on from his lecture is the snippets I get in text form. But this remark struck me as significant: "I think there are strong reasons to suppose that civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly State." Well, yes, a region "dominated" by ancap-style private defense agencies and judicial systems would not have civil wars, because, per the theory of these entities, they will be non-aggressive and will respect property rights. But what in the world makes one think we can get to such a world? ...

An interesting NY Times article on the division of labor in the manufacture of high-end suits .

Google Translate can (or it least can make a decent effort to) detect your "From" language when you do a translation. So you can find choose "Detect" as the "From" option and "English" as the "To" option, and see what it can make of some random bit of text from off of the Internet. I typed in some Welsh from my doctoral diploma, and the thing immediately detected it was Welsh, and got the translation largely correct. Not bad. But what would really impress me is if Google Translate could detect the "To" language: I type in a bit of English, and it figures out which of the world's 6000 languages I want it translated to.

Over at Voegelin View, I review Gordon Wood's new(ish) book.

1798: "In the House Vermont Republic Matthew Lyon responded to an insult he had received from Connecticut Federalist Roger Griswold by spitting in his face. A few days later Griswold clobbered Lyon with a cane." -- Madison and Jefferson , p. 328 Want politics that is not bitter and divisive? Get a hereditary aristocracy. (Even that is not a guarantee, but it helps.)

"Romney is the opposite of conservative, with a plan that is fiscally reckless and a foreign policy that is unnecessarily militant. Obama has done about the best that could have been done, considering the united GOP opposition in Congress. My questions about Obamacare and my disappointment that we are not already out of Afghanistan are not enough to make me embrace a candidacy that even George W. Bush would have been repelled by—and, having had time to reflect on his own record, perhaps is." -- Wick Allison , former publisher of National Review That's pretty darned close to my own view.

Umberto Eco ran the phrase "Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce" through Babelfish, from English to Italian to German to English, and wound up with the phrase, "Studies in the logic of the Charles of sanders paper grinding machines Peirce."

Is there a more duplicitous columnist out there than Charles Krauhammer, one more inclined to say whatever makes his case with no regard for the truth? Take a look at this column ., where he explains why deterrence will fail with Iran while it worked with the U.S.S.R. First we find that Iran "routinely" employs suicide bombers, including the recent bomber in Bulgaria. Well, here is what the White House said about the Bulgarian bombing : 'White House Press Secretary Jay Carney stated, "It is certainly the case that Hezbollah and Iran have been bad actors, as a general matter, but we're not, at this point, in a position to make a statement about responsibility."' But just because the White House doesn't know who was behind this yet, that doesn't mean Krauhammer doesn't know: he has super-secret insider information the White House doesn't. And in any case, how is this relevant: if Iran is using suicide bombers through proxy agents, that...

 Saturday we had some friends over. My buddy and I sat up on the porch a bit late, drinking beers and chatting. This clearly was the fault of Obama's failed presidency. Why not? Everything else is .

Brad DeLong highlights a paper that appears to do this. The conclusion? We had a Hayekian problem, but we've dispensed with that. Now we are having a Keynesian problem. Anyway, this makes the point I've been repeating: Hayek and Keynes both had sensible cycle theories, and their theories are not even contradictory. There is no reason we can't have structural maladjustments and aggregate demand shortfalls at the same time, or in succession.

There is an Obama that only Republicans can see .

is not obvious. Our friends' three-year-old daughter stayed over our house Saturday night (along with her mom and dad). In the morning, I said to her, "Who said you could sleep in my house?" (I used my most jocular voice, and I'm pretty sure she knew we were engaged in play.) She thought for a moment, then picked up a quarter from the table next to me, and handed it to me. I realized that, at her age "paying" appears to be a courteous gesture, like waving hi or shaking hands: if you want to eat someone's food or stay in their house, you hand them some money... the fact that it is their own money doesn't enter into consideration. "Paying" is not exchange yet, but a polite utterance, similar to, "May I please have some food?"

is out in a large print edition .

Daniel Kuehn adds some ideas to my list : Division of labor and its social ramifications (Smith, Durkheim, Marx) Externalities and the impact of property rights on social organization (Pigou? somebody had to have said this before him) Law of one price (Cassel, Keynes, again there have to be other earlier examples) Double consciousness (DuBois) Non-neutrality of money (Keynes, Hayek, there have to be earlier examples) Social construction of reality (Berger, Luckmann)

Every false doctrine contains a germ of truth, otherwise no one could ever come to believe it. I think Marx's postulate that value is based on labor (it was not a "labor theory of value": he explicitly postulated this) clearly falsifies reality, but its plausibility rests on the fact that labor clearly has some connection to value. Realistic "statists" have always recognized that there is a similarity between the state and a dominant gang, but also that there are many differences as well. Consider the "statist" Augustine : Regimes, including Rome for Augustine, can make at best a partial claim for justice, which makes his own claim that a just war is about punishing a transgressor questionable, or at best tentative, because the identity of the original transgressor, if such an entity can be said to exist, is unclear (something of course he realized, though did not always state explicitly) when political societies are so frequently founded in bl...

that the neighborhood health food shop has probiotics, but no amateur biotics?

I just read a restaurant review complaining that dish X at place Y is not "authentic.". What an absurd criterion for judging food! "Authentic" Irish cuisine is bland, boring and buttery. Should a restaurant be praised if it exactly duplicates the grim fare Irish peasants ate for centuries?

Man, I can't speak Spanish anymore without Italian words creeping in at every turn. At my local Mexican joint today, every time I wanted to say "is," I said "e'" instead of "esta." It is as though there is one slot in my brain for "Romance language version of 'is,'" and pushing a new item in that slot simply knocks the old one out.

Do any of you outside of New York greet people in the above fashion? Here, it's very common in a setting where you know someone well by sight but not at all by name. So, for instance, when I walk into a local deli, the owner will greet me with, "Hey boss, what's up?" I had never heard this before moving to the Big Apple.

how Protestantism lost its mind . This is vital stuff. One simply cannot understand the modern West without understanding the Reformation.

Let us try to distinguish true social cycle theories from cycle theories involving humans but not representing true social cycles. Let us define a true social cycle as one in which both the initial disruption, the subsequent adjustments, the disruptions that follow them, the adjustments that follow on, and so on, are all primarily social in nature, i.e., they are driven by human action and the social environment that gives human action its setting. Let us offer a paradigmatic case of a true cycle that is not a social cycle: the spike in the sale of sunscreen in the summer, and its trough in the winter. This cycle clearly includes human action and social factors, but the primary driver of the cycle is the earth's rotation around the sun, a distinctly non-human, non-social phenomenon. That, we will say, is a genuine cycle, but not a social cycle. The fact that farmers en masse plant corn in the spring and harvest it in late summer is another such cycle: it is obviously true that...

One thing an ideology does is fill you full of pat answers. These are rolled out whenever something that threatens the ideology happens along. For instance, when a Marxist ideologue (there are people who study Marx who are not ideologues!) is presented with an extensive case justifying a return to capital, does he carefully consider the case, and see if he should alter his views? No, he tells the presenter that he is a mouthpiece for the capitalists, and thus the Marxist ideologue doesn't have to think about the argument at all. This can take more subtle forms, one of which is to apparently address the argument being presented, while actually doing no such thing. But the ideologue and his junior followers can pull out this "response" whenever confronted by the original argument. For example, Rothbard apparently reviewed Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation , a very dangerous book for him, since Polanyi knew his Mises and Hayek fairly well. But Rothbard actua...

OK, first watch this: This is certainly a massively snafu'ed ending. Don't think for a second that I would claim the officials did a good job here! But here's what I see happening: 1) A Bulgarian official calls a foul on a Soviet player with three seconds left, giving the Americans a shot. So here's the first thing: If there were a concerted plot to steal the game from the U.S. involving all of the officials, the Bulgarian just wouldn't have called this fall. Game over, U.S.S.R. wins. Too obvious, you say? Less obvious than resetting the clock , I say! In fact, the ref could easily have called a charge on Collins there. 2) After Collins made his first free throw, the Soviet coaches try to get a timeout. They are ignored until the ball is in Collins's hands, by which time it is too late: timeouts are not permitted once the shooter has the ball in his hand. If the time out had been granted earlier, Collins might have tightened up and not hit the go-ahead ...

"This is why [Pareto] preferred the practical wisdom of the man of affairs to the predictions of the social scientists. For he had little faith in the predictive value of any sociology, including his own. To make a successful kill on the Stock Exchange, it was better to trust the hunch of the successful stock broker than the skills of the academic economist, for the same reason that the experienced traveller with no map is more likely to be able to traverse the Peloponnese than a clever fellow with a poor topographical map. Pareto emerges, not as the opponent of the use of reason in society, and still less as the fatalistic exponent of a biological determinism, but as the opponent of ideology and all its claims to be scientifically true..." -- p. 47, Introduction to Pareto: Sociological Writings

Sitting at my cafe yesterday, I heard the woman at the next table complaining about Obama. At one point, she said: "Hillary is retiring. It's because she can't take Obama anymore." The idea that that is the reason Clinton is retiring is incredibly implausible. However, this woman probably heard someone say this on Fox News, and now it is a "fact." It is similar to the "facts" that Obama is a Muslim or that he wasn't born in the U.S. These "facts" are components of an ideological barricade. They are immune to refutation by logical arguments or evidence, since their very purpose is to block out reality, as Eric Voegelin explained: The restriction of vocabulary and meanings: an ideological language has the purpose of interrupting the contact with reality, and on the other hand to admit as "reality" in quotation marks only the phantasy of the ideology. This restriction now pertains not only to words and meanings, but to who...