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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

The little boy came gamboling up to me when I was just over the ridge. He was big for three, small for four, and cute by any measure. Brown hair, blue eyes and a smile as quiet as firecrackers.

I was cutting across the park on my way to the library, and I’d come a little closer to the playground than I had wanted to. Unaccompanied adults have no business being at the playground. It spooks the parents, and it ought to. For myself, while I like kids well enough, I don’t much like what comes with them these days…

“I’m Shotterman!” said the little boy. He struck a menacing pose. He was wearing little blue shorts and a black Mickey Mouse tee shirt. He had Spiderman sneakers on his tiny feet.

“Hi, Shotterman,” I said. “What are you?”

“Huh?”

“What are your powers, Shotterman?”

“Oh,” he said. “I can shoot.” He cocked his finger. “Pshew! Pshew pshew! Pshew!”

“Shotterman!” I announced. “Strange visitor from another planet with an uncanny aim and accuracy. Shotterman! Able to compete for marksmanship prizes on five continents.”

Shotterman laughed with delight, as I knew he would. This was entertainment he thoroughly understood.

And here’s a little something I understood: He (more…)

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer — made famous by Senate Bill 1070, which requires Los Angelenos, expatriate Canadian basketball players and huffy has-been musicians to act like idiots in public — observing that a state-wide ban on texting-while-driving will have zero impact on texting-while-driving.

I figure I violate about 300 traffic laws on a typical day — with no consequences, obviously. I’m not being reckless, just efficient, and the cops don’t waste their time on me — which assumes they’re even paying attention. Meanwhile, the City of Phoenix already has a texting ban, which I violate at will, also without consequences.

If you have cultivated the habit of thought, you might stop to think about how many laws you routinely violate. The logical next step would be to wonder if everyone else is just like you: Scrupulously obeying laws that hinder them in no way and breaking all the others.

After that, you might be so bold as to entertain the notion that laws among civilized people are redundant, while laws among the uncivilized are meaningless. And who knows where that kind of thinking might lead you…

I wrote this eighteen months ago, when this economic recession was just getting started. I looked at it again tonight and found nothing in it that I wanted to change. I have more to say on the subject of a long recession, perhaps a depression, but this is a very good place to begin to look for optimistic portents. –GSS

 
Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think (more…)

From The Atlantic, an explication of economist Paul Romer’s idea to build modern-day Hong Kong-like enclaves to promote development in poverty-stricken counties:

When Romer explains charter cities, he likes to invoke Hong Kong. For much of the 20th century, Hong Kong’s economy left mainland China’s in the dust, proving that enlightened rules can make a world of difference. By an accident of history, Hong Kong essentially had its own charter—a set of laws and institutions imposed by its British colonial overseers—and the charter served as a magnet for go-getters. At a time when much of East Asia was ruled by nationalist or Communist strongmen, Hong Kong’s colonial authorities put in place low taxes, minimal regulation, and legal protections for property rights and contracts; between 1913 and 1980, the city’s inflation-adjusted output per person jumped more than eightfold, making the average Hong Kong resident 10 times as rich as the average mainland Chinese, and about four-fifths as rich as the average Briton. Then, beginning around 1980, Hong Kong’s example inspired the mainland’s rulers to create copycat enclaves. Starting in Shenzhen City, adjacent to Hong Kong, and then curling west and north around the Pacific shore, China created a series of special economic zones (more…)

Do you want to hear some really bad news? I mean dauntingly bad, horrifyingly bad, news so bad you could spend days or even weeks ruminating on it, worrying about it, desperately praying for it not to be true.

Are you ready? Here goes:

While you might have heard that the national debt in the United States is approaching $14 trillion, the actual unfunded liability of all American governments exceeds $125 trillion.

Stupefying, ain’t it?

And stupefying is precisely the right word, since news like that brings out the stupid in people. Nothing enervates the chicken in Chicken Little like a weather report predicting falling skies. If you find yourself in the business of selling advertising or shrieking treacly books or quack nostrums to Chicken Little, it behooves you to hire yourself some weathermen. Worked for Al Gore, didn’t it?

Am I being cynical? Not so much. Mainly I’m just being old.

I am an old libertarian. Not an old man, I hope, though of course I’m not getting any younger. But I have been a very radically committed libertarian since I was 19 years old, and an anarcho-capitalist since I was 24. I have been swimming in this ocean for 30 years, where many folks all (more…)

Do you want something to cheer about? Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom is the number one best-seller at Amazon.com right now:

It gets better. The Federalist Papers is at number fourteen.

I think a lot of people are annoyed that the free country they still remember clearly has somehow vanished right from under their noses. It’s very inspiring to see them searching for it so assiduously. My read is that this is very different from 1994…

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Reasons to be cheerful, part zero: The ground we stand upon is firm and the lever of the human mind grows ever stronger.

I need to take this someplace else. I am madly off-topic here more often than not, this for the past couple of years. I think I may be in the third act of this spectacle of ideas I have made of my life, and I can’t even say, yet, if it’s a farce in three acts or a tragedy in five. I would prefer an epiphany, to say the truth, a symphony, a grand opera composed of nothing but the simplest and most obvious of abstractions, an idiot’s guide to what every last idiot among us has always known forever, has never once doubted, and has always, always betrayed — until now.

But that’s why I’m cheerful, I think, despite everything. There is still so much time left to us, amidst the crush of on-rushing events. I am thrice lucky, I know it: I can see and I can understand what I am seeing. I can think and I can transcribe my thoughts. And I live in a time when the thoughts of everyone in human history who ever thought (more…)

Countries that pursue policies of economic freedom have rich populations. Countries that obstruct free enterprise have poor populations. The relative wealth or poverty of a given population is strongly correlated with and can be readily predicted from the level of economic oppression in that political economy. This is easily understood from Austrian and Classical economic theory, but it’s stunning to see how relentlessly the theory is borne out in the real-life experiences of the countries of the earth:

This map is from The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom.

Interestingly, relative wealth and poverty are also very fairly correlated with perceptions of the local population of the integrity or corruption of government officials.

This map is from Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

What’s especially striking is to look at the two maps together: Government corruption is correlated with economic oppression. This is not really surprising, but it seems to tell us everything we need to know about wealth and poverty: The closer a given country is to being a slave-state, the closer to starvation the people of that country will be.

Theodore Dalrymple reflects on how the imposition of a Marxist redistributionist policy impoverishes what had been a self-sustaining economy:

I next spent a few years (1983 to 1986) in Tanzania, a country that presented another experiment in treating poverty as a matter of maldistribution. Julius Nyerere, the first—and, until then, the only—president, had been in charge for more than 20 years. His honorific, Mwalimu—Teacher—symbolized his relation to his country and his people. He had become a Fabian socialist at the University of Edinburgh, and a more red-blooded one (according to his former ally and foreign minister, Oscar Kambona, who fell out with him over the imposition of a one-party socialist state) after receiving a delirious, orchestrated reception in Mao’s China.

One can say a number of things in Nyerere’s favor, at least by the standards of postindependence African leaders. He was not a tribalist who awarded all the plum jobs to his own kind. He was not a particularly sanguinary dictator, though he did not hesitate to imprison his opponents. Nor was he spectacularly corrupt in the manner of, say, Bongo of Gabon or Moi of Kenya. He was outwardly charming and modest and must have been one of the only people to (more…)

In a comment to my post on the NAR’s most recent attempts to rape the taxpayers, Michael Cook set forth a number of subtle economic fallacies. I am not picking on Michael. He is simply repeating Marxist propaganda that is ubiquitous, more’s the pity. But I thought it were well to take these claims apart, to illustrate how these kinds of fallacious arguments are used to frustrate human liberty. I’m taking this to a separate post because the comments thread on the original post is already wildly off topic.

So: Start here, quoting from Michael’s comment:

The very capitalist machine everyone here loves was bolstered by the use of slaves.

This is simply false, not alone simply by definition. The first word in “free enterprise” is “free.” Transactions in a free economy are always mutually-voluntary. If someone is being coerced, what is occurring is a crime, not an honest trade. Every modern economy we can speak of is in some way a form of socialism — a criminal conspiracy harnessing the power of the state to advantage certain people at the expense of the others. Slavery is of a piece with this pattern, although it predates modern economies by many millennia. Moreover, it was (more…)