Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Many people have a hard time accepting that, when it comes to politics, as in the rest of our practical lives, "we see now through a glass darkly." They wish for a "politics of perfection" (or "politics as the crow flies") that is simply not available in this world. For instance, David Gornoski suggests that , in politics, we should not "settle for hiring any person to represent you who leaves even one nonviolent person confined in a cell you yourself wouldn’t place there." With only a little extrapolation, we can see that this implies, "No one should accept any legal regime in which they disagree with so much as a single decision made by the legal authorities." But in a fallen world, no such legal regime is possible. Our choice is not between an imperfect legal regime and a perfect legal regime, but between an imperfect legal regime and no legal regime. Eric Voegelin lays out the reasons why : "The first of these reas...

Showing the complete arbitrariness of libertarian property rights arguments by presenting an ad hoc, desperate attempt to avoid the obvious consequences of the position: I wanted to push back against Steve Landsburg casually saying that libertarian property rights theory doesn’t work. I thought Rothbard probably handled this type of thing, but I was pleasantly surprised to see just how specific it was. Here’s Rothbard: Consider the case of radio waves, which is a crossing of other people’s boundaries that is invisible and insensible in every way to the property owner. We are all bombarded by radio waves that cross our properties without our knowledge or consent. Are they invasive and should they therefore be illegal, now that we have scientific devices to detect such waves? Are we then to outlaw all radio transmission? And if not, why not? The reason why not is that these boundary crossings do not interfere with anyone’s exclusive possession, use or enjoyment of their property....

Here .

Here : "In the first place, the overriding fact of parent–child relations is that the child lives on the property of his parents." There you have it folks: the "overriding fact" of the parent-child bond is that the child is sort of a free-loading tenant of the parent.

On display, for instance, here . Milton Friedman, for instance, knew that he was not "consistently anti-interventionist." That is because he thought being anti-interventionist in all cases was a bad thing . When he thought interventions were bad, he was against them, and when he thought interventions were good, he was for them. Imagine boasting that you are "the only consistently anti-rest" ideology, or "the only consistently anti-medicine" ideology. Being consistently against something is only going to be impressive to people who think that something is always bad. Since Rothbardians are trying to convert people who do not think intervention is always bad, boldly stating that they are uniformly against it only makes them appear fanatical.

I'm reading a review of Capital, the State, and the Monetary Mode of Power in The Review of Political Economy , and I am really struck by how similar the Marxist view of credit creation is to that of the 100%-reservists: basically, it is a way of bestowing claims to goods upon certain (undeserving) people. This certainly is not an argument against either the Marxist or Rothbardian view... in fact, some people might be encouraged that someone arrived at the same finish line from a different starting point. But I wonder how many people in either camp are aware of this similar conclusion?

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.)

it's tough love. Ed Feser on why harsh rhetoric can be quite appropriate at times: Sometimes, "breaking the spell" of a powerful rhetorical illusion requires equal and opposite rhetorical force (if I can borrow Dennett’s phrase). When you treat an ignorant bully arguing in bad faith as if he were a serious thinker worthy to be engaged respectfully, you only reinforce his prestige and maintain the illusion that he might be onto something. You thereby make it easier for people to fall into the errors the bully is peddling.

"To sum up Keynes: arrogant, sadistic, power-besotted bully, deliberate and systemic liar, intellectually irresponsible, an opponent of principle..." -- Murray Rothbard

Murray Rothbard never cared if an argument he offered was sound, but only about whether it seemed to make his opponent look stupid. Consider, for instance, his "reductio" of the Keynesian multiplier: Social Income = Income of (insert name of any person, say the reader) + Income of everyone else. Let us use symbols: Social income = Y Income of the Reader = R Income of everyone else = V We find that V is a completely stable function of Y. Plot the two on coordinates, and we find historical one-to-one correspondence between them. It is a tremendously stable function, far more stable than the “consumption function.” On the other hand, plot R against Y. Here we find, instead of perfect correlation, only the remotest of connections between the fluctuating income of the reader of these lines and the social income. Therefore, this reader’s income is the active, volatile, uncertain element in the social income, while everyone else’s income is passive, stable, determined by ...

Out on Staten Island, at the New York Political Science Association annual meeting: UPDATE: Murphy wins: I've have removed the photo from my presentation! Yes, the picture is very disturbing... but then, so is the text. And another:

And quite rightly, too . Polanyi has a lot to offer. Rothbard's review of The Great Transformation is the single worst book review I have read in my life. (I still crack up at Brian Doherty trying to defend Rothbard's contention that Polanyi exhibited a "worship of the primitive," since Brian had to admit that, in a several-hundred-page book, he could not find a single quote that backed the contention, but still, if you read between the lines carefully enough, and use your imagination ...)

Imagine a situation in which the people, or, we might say, the market, had chosen a particular medium for money. But a central state is established with the purpose of shoving its own preferred money down the people's throats, whether they want it or not. Nevertheless, the people manage to circumvent the central government's attempt to impose its money on them, and use their preferred form anyway. Who are these Rothbardian heroes? Well, they were the ordinary people of the new United States, who, when the central government attempted to thwart their desire for paper money, by imposing gold and silver money upon them, ran an end run around the Feds: Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution had prohibited the states from printing bills of credit, but the needs and desires of all the protobusinessmen and domestic traders were too great to be stymied by a paper restriction. So the states, under popular pressure, got around the constitutional prohibition by chartering banks, h...

This is the most interesting essay of this collection so far. Wood states a bold thesis to begin: We have repeatedly pictured the Founders, as we call them, as men of vision -- bold, original, open-minded, enlightened men who deliberately created what William Gladstone once called "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the hand and purpose of man." We have described them as men who knew where the future lay and went for it... In contrast, we have usually viewed the opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, as very tame and timid, narrow-minded and parochial men of no imagination and little faith, caught up in the ideological rigidities of the past  -- inflexible, suspicious men unable to look ahead and see where the United States was going. The Anti-Federalists seen forever doomed to be losers, bypassed by history and eternally disgraced by their opposition to the greatest Constitutional achievement in our nation's history. But maybe...

It was very interesting to me to hear the explanation given by a prominent Rothbardian for the persistence of "statist" beliefs: it is because the state pays intellectuals to make the case for its existence, and they then spread those ideas to the populace: Plato and Hobbes were just paid off, or they would have been anarchists. The funny thing is that, as with the Marxists, this analysis does not apply to them : I'm sure the fellow does not believe that he just holds Rothbardian ideas because he gets paid to do so, despite the fact he does get paid to do so.

"With all social relationships in a free state presumably dependent on mutual trust, it is not surprising that the courts of eighteenth-century Massachuseyys treated instances of cheating and deception far more severely than overt acts of violence." (p. 107) This is an interesting contrast with Rothbard's theory of crime in The Ethics of Liberty .