Quotulatiousness

November 25, 2019

How to Be an Epicurean

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, Michael Gibson reviews a recent book on Epicureanism by Catherine Wilson:

The Atomic Age had its anxieties, but Hugh Hefner believed he had a good diversion. “We aren’t a family magazine,” he announced in the first issue of Playboy in 1953. “We enjoy mixing up cocktails, an hors d’oeuvres or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” By the 1960s, the music had grown louder, the colors more lurid, the conversations steamier. When Hefner died in 2017, he was considered either a hero of hedonism or an object lesson in the period’s squalid obsessions. Run a Google search today on Hefner, and you’ll often find the word “Epicurean” to describe him. Is this fair to Epicurus, the man who set forth the philosophy starting in 306 BC?

Marble bust of Epicurus. Roman copy of Greek original, 3rd century BC/2nd century BC. On display in the British Museum, London.
Photo by ChrisO via Wikimedia Commons.

For 23 centuries now, Epicureans have struggled mightily against variations of the Hefner caricature. If pleasure is the highest good, the goal of the best life, must we all strive to live in pajamas, smoking a pipe in a decadent Hollywood Hills estate? Though he didn’t live in a mansion off Sunset Boulevard, at the end of the fourth century BC, at the age of 32, the philosopher Epicurus founded the Garden, a school removed from Athens’s monuments of power and politics. An inscription at the entrance read: “Stranger, here you will do well to stay; here our highest good is pleasure.” (In Chicago, Hefner’s door bore an inscription: Si Non Oscillas, Noli Tintinnare, or “If you don’t swing, don’t ring.”)

Leading life in a modern Garden is the subject of Catherine Wilson’s latest book, How to Be an Epicurean: The Ancient Art of Living Well. There was always an air of Peter Pan-like anarchy at the Playboy Mansion, but as Wilson shows us, life in the Garden was quite different. Her book is a spirited tour and defense of Epicurean philosophy, as reconstructed by the fragments Epicurus left behind in tattered papyrus and as set forth in the epic poem De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things,” by the Roman poet Lucretius.

What did these pleasure-seekers believe? They start with the elementary particles, atoms — tiny, colorless, without smell, shaped this way and that, indestructible, reshuffling themselves infinitely into all the marvelous forms we see, including ourselves. Their forms get swept away by time, only to recombine again into something new — possibly another universe. Blurred in this haze of metaphysics, most atoms fall straight downward into the void, but a few swerve, and from these deviations arise our free will and all that we see. At the California Institute of Technology, physicist Richard Feynman began his lectures by wondering what single sentence would be passed on to future generations, if, in a cataclysm, all scientific knowledge was destroyed. His answer: “The atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms.”

With the Epicureans, we have a historical test of Feynman’s thought. The world is made of nothing more than atoms in the void, but where did that take the ancient Greeks and Romans who believed it? Wilson begins with these basic building blocks because she asserts that mistaken beliefs about nature are the source of our deepest fears and hang-ups: death, punishment in an afterlife, failure in this one, lust for power, greed, jealousy, unrequited love, and status-jockeying. “Epicurean philosophy might be said to be based on the notion of the limit,” Wilson writes. By understanding the atom and the void, by knowing that the soul is mortal and the gods indifferent, that all things pass and are forgotten, we might then liberate ourselves from the grinding weight of superstition and the vanity of ambition and pursue pleasure without guilt.

November 5, 2019

The three ways human beings can organize themselves

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith relates the time he took a week-long seminar with Robert LeFevre:

I already considered myself a libertarian — of the Randian variety — when I first met Bob in 1972, at a seminar he delivered in Wichita, Kansas, sponsored by the Love Box Company and the local 7-up bottlers. I spent five magical 8-hour days in a motel basement meeting room, with about forty other people, listening to Bob’s moral, historical, and economic observations. Nearly half a century later, I can still remember large swatches of them, virtually verbatim. Bob reminded me of Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t agree with everything the Wzard of Libz said and thought (most notably, Bob was a Gandhian pacifist, while anyone who knows me or my work will tell you that, I, decidedly am not.)

But it was Bob’s unique view of history that won me over and changed my life. There are only three ways, he said, for human beings to organize themselves: (A), one guy tells everybody what to do; (B), everybody tells everybody else what to do; and (C) nobody tells anybody what to do. The last, he insisted, is the very definition of libertarianism.

Inevitably, Bob was an advocate of (C), and so was I, once he had rid me of the cob-webs in my head and the myth of “limited government”, which, he pointed out, somehow never manages to stay limited. Option (A), he suggested, was the way that the world had turned for ten thousand years or longer.

(B) is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of sociopolitical arrangements. It encompasses various forms of collectivism, including socialism, fascism, and the most dangerous of all, democracy, under which you are encouraged to believe that you’re free, but your neighbors can vote to control your life and impoverish you any time they want. As Robert A, Heinlein (a friend of Bob’s) put it, “‘Vox populi, vox dei‘ usually means ‘How the hell did we get into this mess?'”

The violent transition to (B) in 1776 accomplished two important things. It may yet prove to be a pathway to real liberty (no, I’m not holding my breath). In terms of what I’ve written here, it also pissed off all the right people. It schmussed humble pie in the face of the insane King George III and the rest of his inbred, slithery, pampered ilk. And when British General Corwallis surrendered his sword to George Washington, the band (where the hell did that come from?) played a little ditty called “The World Turned Upside-down.”

Most of history since then, according to Bob, has been a series of attempts — the War Between the States, public schooling, World War I, the Federal Reserve banks and the income tax, World War II, the United Nations, communism’s rise in Europe and Asia, the overpopulation and Global Warming hoaxes, the Silicon Valley commisars, the socioeconomic war on the Productive Class — by the pre-Revolutionary elites (who all seem to be related to each other) to regain the power they once wielded over the rest of the human race.

Aside from what I’ve written in The Libertarian Enterprise about the political significance of gun ownership, if you want to see who’s really on what side, take a look at the war on cattle and red meat. For centuries, the aristocrat class have hunted, and they have dined lavishly on animal protein, while trying to forbid the peasantry — us deplorables — the same rights and forcing them to subsist on boiled turnips. There’s a good reason for this: meat is mind. If you remembver nothing else of what I’ve said here, remember that: meat is mind. It contains certain components that let you build a strong and efficient nervous system (look up myelin), creating uppity peons, the last thing any right-minded upper cruster wants.

For decades, these creepy, perverted parasites have been sneaking up on us, falsely calling themselves “Progressives”, hoping to reverse the American Revolution and everything it has meant to humanity. Since socialism was invented in the early 19th century by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, they’ve made more and more of what they regard as “progress”. By the beginning of the 21st century, they thought their victory was inevitable — until it was rudely snatched out of their blood-soaked hands by those uppity meat-eating peasants, eventually led by Donald J. Trump. The patricians and their surrogates are the swamp Trump wants to drain.

October 5, 2019

QotD: Individual liberty

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil, in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.

August 27, 2019

So much for nil nisi bonum

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The old Latin phrase De mortuis nihil nisi bonum encourages us to only speak well of the dead. The recent death of libertarian billionaire David Koch has brought forth a torrent of vituperation from many people in media and politics, as James Piereson and Naomi Schafer Riley record:

David Koch speaking at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Columbus, Ohio, 21 August 2015.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

“Yesterday David Koch of the zillionaire Koch brothers died … of prostate cancer. I guess I’m going to have to reevaluate my low opinion of prostate cancer.” That was Bill Maher last Friday night, joking before his approving audience. Maher went on to say, “The Amazon is burning up. I’m glad he’s dead.” Maher is not known for his kindness toward those with whom he disagrees. In that sense, he reflects the thinking of a growing number of progressives and leftists who openly despise conservatives and libertarians. David Koch, along with his brother Charles, have for decades been targets of harsh rhetoric from the far Left.

What is it about David Koch that inspired such hatred? “We live in the world that he helped build, and it is on fire,” wrote Sarah Jones in New York, denouncing Koch’s “monstrous legacy.” In Esquire, Charles Pierce writes: “Except for his surviving brother, Charles, no man had a worse effect on American politics since the death of John C. Calhoun. Every malignancy currently afflicting us can be traced in one way or another into their wallets, and that’s not even to mention the lasting damage they’ve done to the planet as a whole.”

This is the kind of language that religious cults reserve for heretics and apostates — and in many ways, David and Charles Koch were blasphemers to the liberal orthodoxy. They believed in smaller government and thus criticized the welfare state, excessive taxation, and a great deal of government regulation. At the same time, they criticized America’s wars abroad, along with high levels of defense spending, and were sympathetic to the causes of gay rights and gay marriage. They were consistent in their views across a range of issues, antagonizing liberals but also vexing conservatives. The claim that David Koch was a reflexive right-winger is a caricature of his beliefs.

The Kochs believed in smaller government. Whether it was gay marriage or land wars in Asia, they consistently argued that less government intervention would produce freer and happier people. Their support for drug legalization and abortion rights irked plenty of conservatives, but it drove few over the edge as their support for lower taxes and greater school choice did for liberals. Perhaps nothing irked liberals more, though, than the Kochs’ fight for less environmental regulation. Blaming Charles and David Koch for singlehandedly destroying the rainforests or raising the temperature of the earth seems to be a common theme among critics — an attribution of immense power beyond the capacity of any man or family or company.

May 10, 2019

QotD: Defining freedom

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Freedom is not a synonym for the right to vote in fair and open elections. Fair and open elections with a wide franchise might – might – be a useful instrument for promoting freedom. But contrary to much shallow thinking, the right to participate in such elections is not itself “freedom”. Freedom is the right to choose and act as you please, with this right bound only by the equal right of every other peaceful individual to do the same. (Or to quote Thomas Sowell, “Freedom … is the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.” I would add that freedom requires also elbow room from the rampaging presumptions – and from the enviousness, ignorance, myopia, and even the good intentions – of one’s peers and, indeed, from those of everyone.)

In practice it is sometimes difficult to identify the detailed locations of the boundaries that best ensure equal freedom for everyone. This reality, however, neither renders the goal of equal freedom of choice and action for everyone less desirable nor makes this definition of freedom less serviceable.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-04-23.

April 26, 2019

“Rose Wilder Lane may be the most controversial woman nobody’s ever heard of”

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

NPR‘s Etelka Lehoczky interviews cartoonist Peter Bagge about his new book, Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story:

Journalist, novelist and polemicist Rose Wilder Lane may be the most controversial woman nobody’s ever heard of. Today she’s known primarily for her turbulent collaboration with her famous mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, on the Little House on the Prairie books. But Lane’s story doesn’t end there — far from it. A fire-breathing libertarian, she denounced Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and grew her own food to protest World War II rationing. From the 1920s through the 1960s she wrote one of the first libertarian manifestos (1943’s The Discovery of Freedom), hobnobbed with Ayn Rand, penned six novels and amassed a 100-plus-page FBI file. In Credo: The Rose Wilder Lane Story, cartoonist Peter Bagge illustrates Lane’s hurly-burly life in his own inimitable way.

Lane isn’t the first controversial woman Bagge has chosen to write (and draw) about — he published books on Margaret Sanger in 2013 and Zora Neale Hurston in 2017. In an email conversation, he told me why he decided to focus on these particular women.

“I was ready to do a book-length comic-book biography, and while reading about people’s life stories I noticed there were women during the years around the world wars who pretty much did exactly what they wanted,” he says. “It struck a note in me just because there’s been — and it isn’t just with women, it’s with everybody these days — this obsession with safety. You know, ‘I don’t feel safe,’ or, ‘Because of how I identify myself, there are people trying to hold me back.’ These women never, ever stopped for a single second in doing what they wanted to do. In the back of my mind I thought this would be something of a demonstration of how people could be and — I would argue — should be.”

March 18, 2019

Reconciling the libertarian and anti-immigration wings of Maxime Bernier’s PPC

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Post Millennial, Brad Betters looks at how the PPC’s libertarian ideals co-exist with skepticism about current government immigration plans:

While there are many patterns of abuse in the mass media’s everyday coverage of Maxime Bernier — i.e. the constant comparisons to Donald Trump, the failure to actually engage with his policies, quoting those who accuse him of “pandering”, while failing to quote his supporters (although there is the occasional exception) — one that jumps out is the routine questioning of his ideological bona fides.

Being ideologically inconsistent is a serious charge for many among Bernier’s base. While not a concern for liberals and progressives (they just want power and results), it is for many conservatives, even if it means becoming “beautiful losers”, as one US conservative commentator put it years back.

Recently, the National Post’s John Ivison referred to Bernier’s party, the People’s Party of Canada (PPC), as being plagued by a “fundamental contradiction” in that it’s “led by a libertarian free-marketer and supported by anti-globalists.”

Although vague, Ivison is no doubt, at least in part, referring to the PPC’s call to reduce immigration levels. His Post colleague Stuart Thomson was more express, calling Bernier’s immigration position “a diversion from his ideological playbook” — a criticism repeated by Global News’ West Block host Mercedes Stephenson among others.

In calling to reduce immigration, Bernier is being perfectly faithful to free-market thought. Importing workers from abroad, if high enough, can lead to supply shocks in the domestic labour market, weighing down and distorting wage rates in the process — indeed, economists are mystified why wages in Canada have flatlined despite years of growing GDP.

For large employers, these expansions can lead to giant windfalls and a chance to avoid facing market discipline — i.e. by not innovating or offering the wages needed to draw in new workers. Markets which are expanded artificially are not “free”, and profits pumped-up with the help of government we usually call ‘subsidies’: two things free-marketer libertarians revile.

Equally reviled among libertarians is ‘big government’; something that goes hand in hand with mass immigration. Large populations with diverse languages, cultures, and religions serve as a perfect excuse for new government programs and bureaucratic meddling: from government-funded language instruction, translators, and signage, to more housing and educational and job-training initiatives for unprepared newcomers.

Overlaying all this is the array of government watchdogs mandated to ensure immigrating visible minorities get the requisite (i.e. ever-increasing) amount of cultural sensitivity and achieve economic parity with old-stock Canadians.

February 27, 2019

QotD: When progressives took over SF publishing

Filed under: Books, Business, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I sold my first novel in the late 90s. Most Americans might not be that sensitive to the “climate” but I was. I had after all grown up in a socialist (at best, during the better times) country where to graduate you had to present the proper progressive front. I knew the signs and the hints and social positioning of “further left than thou.” For instance, my first SF cons, as an author, in the green room, I became aware that “a conservative” was a suitable, laughter inducing punchline for any joke; that all of them believed the Reagan years had set us on course to total dystopia; that the US was less enlightened/capable/free than anywhere else; that your average Republican or even non-Democrat voter was the equivalent of the Taliban.

As for Libertarians, I will to my dying day cherish the dinner I had with my then editor to whom I was describing a funny incident at MileHi where for reasons known only to Bob, I found myself in an argument with someone who wanted to ban the internal combustion engine. My editor perked up and (I swear I’m not making this up) said “Oh, a Libertarian.” At which point my husband squeezed my thigh hard enough to stop me answering. But yeah. That was a not uncommon idea of a libertarian. If it was completely insane and involved banning something, then it was a libertarian.

I once overheard the same editor talking to a colleague and saying that if she got submissions across her desk and they were – dropped and horrified voice – somewhat conservative she recommended they try Baen.

Which the other editor (from a different house) agreed with, because after all, they weren’t in the business of publishing conservative works.

This immediately put me on notice that in the field if you were a conservative (I presume libertarians were worse, or at least they seemed to induce more mouth foaming. And though I was solidly libertarian and – at the time – might have qualified as a Libertarian, I suspect if faced with my real positions they would have classed me as conservative, because my positions were self-obviously not left and that’s all it took.) there was only one house that would take you, and if what you wrote/wanted to write wasn’t accepted by then, then you were out of luck.

After that I lived in a state of fear

I imagine it was similar to living in one of the more unsavory periods of the Soviet Union. You saw these purges happen. Whisper-purges. You got the word that someone was “not quite the thing” or that they associated with so and so who associated with so and so who was a – dropped voice – conservative. Suddenly that person’s books weren’t being bought and somehow people would clear a circle around them, because, well, you know, if you’re seen with a – dropped voice – conservative they might think you’re one too. And then it’s off to Never-Never with you.

I found a few other conservatives/libertarians (frankly, mostly libertarians) in the field, all living in the same state of gut clenching fear.

We did such a dance to test both the reliability and discretion of the other before revealing ourselves that we might as well have developed a hanky code. [Blue for true blue Conservative, white for pure Libertarian, red for the blood of our heroes, brown for OWL (older, wiser libertarian), purple for squishy conservative, powder blue for Brad Torgersen. (The powder blue care bear, with the bleeding heart… and the flame thrower.)]

Conventions were nerve wracking because I watched myself ALL the TIME. And you never knew how much you had to watch yourself. Suddenly, out of the blue, at a World Fantasy the speaker, a well known SF/F writer went on about Dean Howard, our next president. The room erupted in applause, some people stood to clap, and I sat there, frozen, unable to actually fake it to that point but too shocked to even put a complaisant expression on my face.

Sarah Hoyt, “Say Goodbye To The State Of Fear”, According to Hoyt, 2017-03-11.

February 4, 2019

A thumbnail sketch of Mad Max and the PPC

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Anthony Daoud, in an article examining the political loyalty implications of party defections, floor crossings, and resignations, provides a quick outline of Maxime Bernier and his new-but-growing party:

Does Bernier even need an introduction? It seems like everybody in Canada knows about him, and his popularity will undoubtedly grow after appearing on the Rubin Report, a libertarian Youtube show.

He left the Conservative Party and created the People’s Party of Canada, which advocates for smaller government, lower levels of immigration, and more free-markets (including abolishing supply management) according to the party’s website.

In a email to supporters, the PPC proudly proclaimed that it reached its first million dollars in total donations since the party’s founding in September.

Whether Bernier’s party will win any electoral district other than Beauce (his own) is incredibly unlikely, but he can definitely do some damage to the Conservatives’ prospect of victory, since he is already polling at nearly 3%.

What may be the most intense conflict in politics right now is not even taking place in parliament but between the CBC’s Wendy Mesley and the PPC leader. In an interview, she miserably failed at her attempt to link Bernier to a Koch brothers’ conspiracy.

Even more recently, the Quebec politician took the “beef” up a notch when he called for Mesley to be fired after she said Christians in Canada are attempting to sway political landscape, as if they were some sort of foreign interference in our democracy.

Truthfully, the PPC may never come establish themselves as a long-standing party, but more than anything, it could mean that politicians will begin to feel like they can simply leave the party they were elected to represent and literally “do their own thing” once in parliament.

January 11, 2019

QotD: Libertarian “co-ordination”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… advocates of liberty are about as good at coordinated action as a bunch of cats. I pretty much laughed myself (physically) sick when I read that the Sad Puppies “strictly enforced slate voting.” Not only did the numbers completely deny this (the only lockstep voting was no award) but the idea of anyone on our side doing anything “lockstep” just about… Giggle, snort.

If you told most people on our side “you have to do it this way, it’s the only way” you’d get “Who’s gonna make me, you and whose army?” And if you said “you have to do it this way or we’ll kill you,” you’re still likely to get “You’re not the boss of me.” We should have “Stupidly individualistic” stamped on our foreheads.

So long, coordinated marches like what the left (they of the collectivist will) executed are really impossible for us.

On the other hand… On the other hand, we seem to do pretty well in our long uncoordinated march of building under and building around and building over.

We might all be marching in different directions and to the tune of a different kettle of fish, but the other side is so profoundly incompetent, that even so we can still replace the moribund institutions they took over.

It’s just going to take a little while. Not a hundred years, but probably twenty. Not three generations, but one and a half.

In the end we win, they lose, but you can’t stop when your ankles first start hurting.

The last mile of the long march is always the hardest one, but the goal is almost in sight.

Sarah Hoyt, “The Long March”, According to Hoyt, 2015-12-20.

November 12, 2018

Reason magazine at 50

Filed under: Business, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Reason, the top libertarian magazine in the United States, if not the world — I’ve been a subscriber for something like thirty years now. To mark the occasion, Matt Welch recounts the story of the magazine’s founder, Lanny Friedlander.

The New Republic was launched in 1914 by three of the most famous intellectuals of the Progressive era: Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and Walter Weyl. National Review was introduced in 1955 by an oil tycoon’s son named William F. Buckley, already notorious for provocative books criticizing Yale and defending Joseph McCarthy. The Weekly Standard was founded with Rupert Murdoch’s money 40 years later by former Dan Quayle speechwriter William Kristol, whose legendary magazine-editor father Irving was considered the godfather of neoconservatism. Prestigious journals of opinion often emanate from prestige.

Not so Reason. The magazine you are reading was the brainchild of a 20-year-old Boston University student nobody had ever heard of named Lanny Friedlander, who stapled together and mailed out the first mimeographed issues from a hopelessly disorganized room at his mother’s brick house in Brighton, Massachusetts. You will search in vain for any editor’s note in the history of The Nation or Mother Jones with a lead like this opening line from Friedlander in January 1970: “I drive a delivery van for a living.”

From these inauspicious beginnings, Reason has grown to a magazine with a circulation of over 40,000, averaging more than 4 million visits online per month and producing videos that were watched 48 million times on YouTube and Facebook in the last year — in addition to a practical-minded public policy shop that helps reform public pensions, privatize government services, and build better highways. Almost all of that achievement took place after Friedlander exited the scene. In 1970, after two thrilling but erratic years, Reason‘s founder sold the publication’s thin assets and thicker liabilities for less than $3,500 to the industrious California-based trio of systems engineer Robert W. Poole Jr., libertarian lawyer Manuel S. Klausner, and neo-Objectivist philosopher Tibor Machan. (Their significant others, who also joined the partnership at the time, were eventually bought out.) In 1978, they launched the foundation that publishes the magazine to this day.

By the time both Reason and the modern libertarian movement began to flourish, one of the key architects of both had fallen off the grid, never to return. Yet Friedlander’s distinct vision is still visible, in the form of the magazine’s lowercase, sans-serif logo, its willingness to gather in various strains of libertarianism for examination and debate, and a certain natural sympathy for outsiders, eccentrics, dreamers. “He was bold, amazingly gifted, socially uncertain,” recalls Mark Frazier, then a high school student who helped with paste-up and other tasks on some of those early editions before moving on to a long career in the free cities movement. “He followed a compass that set many different things in motion.”

Who exactly was this sui generis spark, how was he able to rise above the 1960s and ’70s din of short-lived libertarian-world newsletters, and why did he flame out so fast? These elusive questions have haunted a succession of Reason captains. Upon Friedlander’s death in 2011, Nick Gillespie, editor in chief of the magazine from 2000 through 2007, wrote that in the absence of any information, he had “started thinking of Lanny as libertarianism’s answer to Syd Barrett, the mad genius founder of Pink Floyd who got something great started and then couldn’t or wouldn’t live in the world he did so much to create.” Even people who knew Friedlander in the flesh are hazy on details, tending to project onto his sparse canvas the arc of their own life journeys.

A closer examination on the occasion of this 50th anniversary begins to fill out the picture of Reason‘s starkly minimalist origin story. Lanny Friedlander was an Objectivist who believed in big-tent libertarianism, a student protester who reviled other student protesters, and an anti-war/anti-draft activist who volunteered for the Navy. He was professionally charismatic and personally introverted, an exacting truth seeker and unreliable narrator, a systemic thinker and disheveled coordinator. (“The printed format of this issue,” he wrote when announcing the magazine’s first offset-press edition in September 1969, “does not represent a guarantee that the next issue will also be printed.”) He will likely be remembered most for his striking sense of art direction — Wired co-creator Louis Rossetto, who first encountered Reason as an undergrad at Columbia University, said in 2011 that the publication “was my gateway to good design” — yet when describing himself, Friedlander preferred the term “writer/intellectual.”

November 3, 2018

Freedom’s Fighters with Tim Worstall

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Adam Smith
Published on 1 Nov 2018

Every month the Adam Smith Institute hails one of those who have fought the good fight for freedom over the decades. In this month’s Dr Madsen Pirie interviewed our blog maestro Tim Worstall, who visited the UK from his rather sunnier climes in Portugal.

October 8, 2018

Debunking state education rankings

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest issue of Reason, Stan Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly explain why you should ignore those “authoritative” rankings published by U.S. News and World Report and others:

You probably think you know which states have the best and worst education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It’s an understandable conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous “Best Schools!” lists. It’s also wrong.

The general consensus on education, retold every few news cycles, is that fiscally conservative states are populated by cheapskates. In those necks of the woods, people are too ignorant to vote in favor of helping their illiterate and innumerate children. Intelligent people understand that high taxes and generous pensions for public school teachers are the recipe for an efficient and smoothly functioning education system. If skinflint voters would just lighten up, the story goes, they too could become erudite and sophisticated.

Paul Krugman rehashes this narrative regularly in his New York Times column, frequently bemoaning the country’s purportedly miserly education budgets. Increasingly, he perceives libertarian barbarians at the gates of state governments, brandishing axes for dreaded spending cuts. In April, he wrote that “we’re left with a nation in which teachers, the people we count on to prepare our children for the future, are starting to feel like members of the working poor.… One way to think about what’s currently happening in a number of states is that the anti-Obama backlash, combined with the growing tribalism of American politics, delivered a number of state governments into the hands of extreme right-wing ideologues. These ideologues really believed that they could usher in a low-tax, small-government, libertarian utopia.”

In Krugman’s view, which reflects the education establishment’s view as well, those attempting to keep the size of government in check are a danger to your child. To support this claim, education wonks and activists point to state rankings in U.S. News, Education Week, or WalletHub — outlets that grade states according to a few key measures, such as graduation rates, education spending, and test scores. When education is discussed in the news, these rankings are often cited to illustrate the havoc that restrained budget growth and right-to-work laws can wreak.

Indeed, such rankings do seem to show that the highest-quality state educational systems tend to be in big-spending states in the Northeast or Upper Midwest. These places apparently honor and respect teachers, while Southern states inexplicably abhor them. But the cheapskates in cheap states get their just deserts: Sophisticated northern jurisdictions grow ever smarter, while stingy conservative backwaters sink into ever-lower depths of ignorance. The solution is obvious: Pay up or your kids will suffer.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: Traditional rankings are riddled with methodological flaws.

September 29, 2018

‘We Are Always on the Verge of Chaos:’ The PJ O’Rourke Interview

Filed under: Books, Economics, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 28 Sep 2018
The libertarian humorist talks about his new book, how to drink in war zones, and why the Chinese are more American than most U.S. citizens.

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

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For the last 45 years, no writer has taken a bigger blowtorch to the sacred cows of American life than libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke.

As a writer at National Lampoon in the 1970s, he co-authored best-selling parodies of high school yearbooks and Sunday newspapers. For Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications, O’Rourke traveled to war zones and other disaster areas, chronicling the folly of military and economic intervention. In 1991, he came out with Parliament of Whores, which explained why politicians should be the last people to have any power. Subtitled “A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government,” this international bestseller probably minted more libertarians than any book since Free to Choose or Atlas Shrugged. More recently, O’Rourke published a critical history of his own Baby Boomer generation and How The Hell Did This Happen?, a richly reported account of Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 presidential victory.

O’Rourke’s new book, None of My Business, explains “why he’s not rich and neither are you.” It’s partly the result of hanging out with wealthy money managers and businessmen and what they’ve taught him over the years about creating meaning and value in an ever richer and crazier world. It covers everything from social media to learning how to drink in war zones to why the Chinese may be more American than U.S. citizens. He also explains why even though he doesn’t understand or like a lot of things about modern technology, he doesn’t fear Amazon or Google, especially compared to people who are calling for Socialism 2.0.

I sat down with O’Rourke to talk about all that, the good and bad of Donald Trump, and why being an “old white man” just isn’t what it used to be (and why he’s OK with that).

Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Mark McDaniel. Intro by Todd Krainin.

Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar used under a Creative Commons license.

September 16, 2018

Maxime Bernier and the People’s Party of Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne says there’s room in Canadian politics for Mad Max’s new party:

In principle, there is room for a new party in Canadian politics; arguably, there is a need for one.

That the established parties have tended to pander to narrow and particular interests, rather than the broader public interest, is well documented, as is the result: an ever-expanding state devoted almost wholly to redistributing income, not from rich to poor, but from taxpayers to well-organized and well-cultivated client groups (notably the state’s own employees). In the same way the state redistributes from consumers to producers, from west to east, young to old, and so on, in the service of neither efficiency nor justice nor even raw numbers but just whoever frightens politicians the most.

Which over time — people learn — has come to include everybody. We subsidize everything that moves in this country, and charge ourselves higher taxes to pay for it, then demand more subsidies to offset the burden of taxes. And the fruit of all this frantic attempt to redistribute from everybody to everybody? A nation brimming with grievance and resentment, every part of the country convinced the rest are making out at its expense.

A party that proposed to end the money-go-round — to wean the country’s business class, in particular, off the public teat, to shut down the “regional development” spigots and bust up the cartels that, behind our protectionist walls, are permitted to genteelly pick our pockets — would therefore be a signal addition to our politics. If it chose to frame this critique not as a fairly straightforward application of Economics 101 but as a radical determination to govern “for all Canadians,” so be it.

And if it made life difficult for the established parties, so much the better. The market for ideas thrives on competition and choice as much as any other. The cartelization of our economy is in part a reflection of the cartelization of our politics. A more robustly conservative party, in particular, less burdened by the Conservatives’ crippling self-doubt, would be a welcome addition, even if I don’t like all of its ideas: millions of Canadians do, and it is wrong that they should go unrepresented.

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