Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Some facts: "one-tenth of the English population in 1800 was slowly starving to death" (p. 120) "A few eggs, a cow for milk, a potato ground, all mattered. But over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries self-provisioning came under serious attack. A padlock was placed on nature's larder. First, the Waltham Black Act of 1723 was pivotal: traditional wage supplements such as gleaning and sweeping, and the collection of firewood from the forests, became criminal offenses; items of a 'base nature' -- rabbits, hares, fish -- were redefined as private property, and their capture became a felony; finally, the game laws were strengthened... Second, enclosure contributed to a class of 'landless labourers' without farming strips for growing household provisions, and they likewise suffered from a contraction of common lands upon which a cow might be kept or firewood harvested..." (p. 121) Finally, relatives height rankings in the British Isles aro...

by hiding the fact it exists! That is the thrust of the new ad campaign for the new Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge: what is terrible about the fact that your are texting instead of watching your daughter's ballet recital is not that you are doing that, but that she caught you! If you are looking at baseball scores when you are supposedly on a date, that is OK: just don't let your date figure that out! This is how capitalism "fixes" the problems created by capitalism!

I was reading Larry White's chapter on The Road to Serfdom from his  The Clash of Economic Ideas .  (Looks like a very good book, by the way.) I was struck again by how libertarians and socialists are usually talking past each other when they discuss "capitalism." White notes that many on the left regarded fascism and Nazism as a "capitalist" reaction to the rise of socialism. Hayek disputed this, and said that both movements had more in common with socialism than with capitalism. Well, what does one mean by "capitalism"? If you mean an economy with very little government involvement, then Hayek is certainly correct: the fascists and Nazis were perfectly willing to intervene heavily in the economy. But if by "capitalism" one means "that system of political economy being supported by those who own capital," then the socialists had a point: these movements certainly had the support of many business owners, who thought it was...

"History shows, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the growth of capitalism and the growth of government go hand in hand. Capitalism and big government are not, as in the popular imagination and the economic treatises, things opposed; rather, the one grows on the back of the other, and the more you get of one, the more you will need of the other.” -- John Médaille