Friday, February 27, 2009

Critical Thinking: The Forgotten Discipline

A stack of 3-by-5 index cards sits on my desk next to my computer keyboard. Thirty-six of them, give or take a few. On the front of each index card is written the name of a particular type of logical fallacy; on the back is written its definition. All of the names and definitions are from this site. It's not an exhaustive list, but it's large enough to capture the flavor of the most commonly encountered types of logical fallacies. Here are the three main categories under which my index cards are organized:

  1. Fallacies of Ambiguity: Appear to support their conclusion only due to their imprecise use of language (Examples: Accent fallacy, equivocation)
  2. Fallacies of Presumption: Do not contain any logical reasoning errors, but begin with a false (or at least unwarranted) assumption and so fail to establish their conclusion (Examples: False dilemma, complex question, circular reasoning)
  3. Fallacies of Relevance: Attempt to support their conclusion by offering considerations that simply don't bear on its truth (Examples: Ad hominem, genetic fallacy, appeal to authority, appeal to popularity)

The index cards are always sitting here right where I can see them, because I need a constant reminder that I should always try to be in a critical state of mind whenever reading or writing. But I often forget. Critical thinking and logical argumentation are disciplines, and discipline is hard. It is dangerously easy to be persuaded by slick and artfully worded, but ultimately fallacious, arguments if one is not continuously on the lookout for cracks in their logic. And it is just as easy to write fallacies without realizing it. I do it quite often. But I'm trying to learn and improve as I go along, and these index cards on my desk help me to do that.

For an entertaining collection of real-world examples of various logical fallacies, complete with source citations, check out the Fallacy Files. Once you familiarize yourself with the most common fallacies, you will start to notice them everywhere -- maybe even occasionally in the works of some of the world's brightest thinkers.

What better way to defend one's liberty than to train oneself to recognize and refute fallacious arguments used to attack it?

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Men's Style and the Return of the Gentleman

Those who understand that man's outer and inner worlds tend to mirror each other may have noticed an example in the decline of Western civilization over the past century or so: the scourge of the male gender known as "business casual" attire.

Business casual has emasculated men by weakening a critical aspect of their day-to-day existence: their outward appearance. As Justin Shubow wrote in his astute review of The Suit (a parody of Machiavelli's The Prince) by Nicholas Antongiavanni:

The chief effect of business casual has been to strip men of the most aggressively masculine item in the Western wardrobe: the necktie.

Shubow's review inspired me to read The Suit. Although I quickly grew tired of the parodic Machiavelli-esque prose and don't necessarily recommend it, the book is peppered with surprisingly useful wardrobe advice. It refers to classic books by reputable masters of men's style such as Alan Flusser and Bruce Boyer. Flusser's first book on the basic principles of men's style, Clothes and the Man, was published in 1985 and can be read online for free here. In 2002 Flusser then published Dressing the Man, an attractive coffee table book filled with photographs that expands and elaborates on the basic principles outlined in Clothes and the Man.

I bought Dressing the Man and have started reading it, and although I'm only on the third chapter (out of 13), I can safely say I enjoy it so far. It is packed full of principles of menswear and tidbits of information to which I had never been exposed. There is a whole world of men's style out there -- not flash-in-the-pan fashion, but rather classic, enduring style -- that I'm sure most men have not discovered.

Far from being a skill that is only appropriate for gays and metrosexuals, classic men's style was widespread among Western -- especially American -- men in the 1930s, even among the middle class during the Great Depression. Its more advanced and subtle concepts were exemplified by the best-dressed royalty and celebrities in Western culture such as the Duke of Windsor, Fred Astaire, and Cary Grant. In those days, exquisite style in men's clothing was considered a hallmark of masculinity.

Cleanliness and classically stylish clothing should not be mistaken as pretension. If the man exemplifies manners, class, confidence, and self-control, his clean and stylish clothing should be seen for what it is: an outward reflection of his inner self. And if his inner self happens to need a bit of scrubbing and polishing, improving his outward appearance is likely to provide him with even more motivation to do so. As Jeff Tucker of the Mises Institute points out in this article:

Elevated dressing causes people to behave better. Crime might fall. Manners would begin to come back. People might clean up their language. They might listen to better music and read better books. Something resembling civilization might return.

Our rude, uncivilized, inconsistent society is practically crying out for the return of the classic Gentleman. If Cary Grant were alive today, he would be wearing a suit, tie, and pocket handkerchief.

Monday, February 23, 2009

"Watch Out, They're Trying to Sell You Something!"

  • "I don't know, man, this article about the benefits of having emergency supplies makes some good points, but at the bottom of the article there are a bunch of links to companies selling emergency gear. The web site is just trying to scare people into buying the stuff so it can make a few bucks."
  • "Yeah, she seems to give some good advice about the need to buy some gold and silver coins to hedge against inflation, but at the end of her newsletter she gives information on how you can buy them through her coin company. She's just hawking her merchandise."
  • "Collection plates in church? Telethons for Jesus? What a scam. How distasteful to mix money with matters of the spirit."
Has someone ever cautioned you along those lines? Have you ever given someone such a warning? Oh, those crafty entrepreneurs... they're always trying to make a buck.

Think about it for a moment. In America, aren't we all trying to make a buck? Don't we all need to make a buck? Don't we live in a market economy, where aside from ascetic monks who beg for food on the outskirts of town, each and every one of us has some service to sell or some merchandise to hawk? If so, why do anti-establishment information sources and their self-advertising get such a disproportionate amount of flak simply for selling stuff, while Obama's latest speech to the nation is supposedly far more virtuous than the mere peddling of wares? At least when someone is trying to sell something, they're usually up front about it. You either buy it or you don't -- end of story. It's the people who are giving away something for "free" -- the people who claim to be above the base, selfish act of economic trade -- who make me wonder what their deal really is. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden,

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me -- some of its virus mingled with my blood.

Perhaps people who have 9-to-5 jobs in Cubicle Land and despise them (which is a heck of a lot of people) are so cynical that they think (a) making money and (b) making a positive difference in the world must always be mutually exclusive activities. What a sad, jaded attitude to take regarding human action. Yes, some people spend most of their time making money. Yes, other people spend most of their time trying to make a positive difference in the world. And yes, still others actually manage to do... both.

Are you still with me? Or did I just blow your mind?

Believe it or not, doing good in this world is not always a losing proposition. It can often be profitable -- sometimes very profitable. Some people have actually figured out how to combine a moral spirit with an entrepreneurial aptitude (either by cultivating both within themselves, or by teaming up with others), and they have made a very comfortable living engaging in voluntary trades with people who believed -- and still believe -- that their lives have been improved because of these trades. The success of these "moral entrepreneurs" sets an example worthy of praise by those who see value in human action inspired by human spirit.

Let the anti-establishment "gold bugs" make a living by selling us gold coins that we want to buy. Let the prophets of the dangers of centralized government feed their families by selling us emergency supplies that we wish to purchase. Let the preacher live in a house instead of a cardboard box by providing spiritual services that his congregation is willing to pay for. Let's not automatically criticize people who successfully combine morality with good business sense, as if the mere combination of the two is an inherent violation of reason and humanity.

Despite its ostensibly altruistic motives, Big Government is selling something: you -- down the river, that is. In the name of liberty, I advise you not to buy.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Behold, a Pale Rider. . .

I love a good Western film once in a while. What guy doesn't enjoy watching a stoic, badass gunslinger take out a whole gang of bad guys using just his six-shooter and fast draw?

Recently I watched the Western Pale Rider hoping to see some classic Eastwood rugged individualism and great gunfights. Indeed I did. Unfortunately, one small detail of the film kind of ruined it for me. It was just a little too. . . leftist. I expect to see obvious leftist preachiness in newer Hollywood flicks, but in a tough Clint Eastwood Western? Sacrilege.

Subtle political messages are typically injected throughout any given Hollywood film, but the explicitly stated ones are usually short, often only a sentence or two. Typically one hears them in the culminating monologue of the film, in which the plot is "wrapped up" into one neat little package. Or, in the case of action-packed films, the explicit political message tends to pop up in the motivational speech given by the hero right before the big fight. For example, in Pale Rider, a settlement of poor panning miners is being harassed by goons hired by a rich, powerful landowner named Coy LaHood who owns a successful hydraulic mining operation nearby. LaHood, ever the rapacious capitalist, is terrorising the poor panning miners in order to make them leave so he can claim their land. A mysterious "pale rider" named Preacher (played by Clint Eastwood) arrives to defend the poor miners from LaHood and his cronies. Near the end of the film, just before the culminating showdown with the bad guys, the Preacher -- who is practically worshipped by the oppressed miners -- delivers a leftist monologue to his poor, defenseless flock:

The vote you took the other night showed courage. You voted to stick together. That's just what you should do. Spider [one of the panning miners who was murdered by LaHood's goons] made a mistake. He went into town alone. A man alone is easy prey. Only by standing together are you going to be able to beat the LaHoods of the world. No matter what happens tomorrow, don't you forget that.

Clint, say it ain't so! Such a collectivist, pro-majority-vote, anti-capitalist speech would have made even Marx and Lenin proud. In my eyes, after that monologue Preacher's individualist aura faded fast. Another scene in the film preaches environmentalism: Preacher and one of the panning miners pay a visit to LaHood's hydraulic mine and are visibly disgusted by the powerful jets of water eroding the hillsides in order to obtain gold from the gravel. The way the scene is directed makes it clear that despite the fact that the hydraulic mine is on legally owned private property, the capitalist miners in their rapacious quest for gold are evil for raping Mother Nature. Not to worry, though -- Preacher and the poor panning miners later blow up the "ugly" hydraulic mine with dynamite, rescuing Mother Nature and thus restoring justice to the world. (Granted, LaHood and his goons had committed plenty of nasty crimes against the panning miners to justify the dynamite attack, but the implication was that the dynamite was primarily in retribution for the "crimes" against the environment. The showdown with LaHood and his crew came later.)

I suppose it's inevitable that films contain various subtle and overt political messages. The world is a political place. I guess my beef with Hollywood is that if a particular Western film has to carry a political message, can't it occasionally be of a more libertarian type? After all, the Western frontier with its decentralized communities and lack of formal government was basically a vast unplanned social experiment in libertarian self-organization that was remarkably successful. Instead of always using Hollywood Westerns to depict the old West sensationally as a chaotic dog-eat-dog welter of lawlessness, how about once in a while telling a great, inspirational story about what the frontier was really like? As Thomas Woods explains in his book 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask:

As an avalanche of scholarly work continues to demonstrate, the "wild" West in fact reveals the resilience and adaptability of the private sector, even in the production of so-called public goods like legal services, dispute resolution, and law enforcement. This is exactly the opposite of what we have traditionally been taught about the western experience. We are supposed to conclude that discord and violence must result in the absence of formal government and accept the old West as a cautionary tale of what happens when Hillary Clinton and Bob Dole aren't around to keep everyone in line.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Cash Is King

My friend Zach pointed out to me that the U.K. is taking steps to become a cashless society (it already has the dubious honor of being the leading surveillance state in the European Union). Naturally, the U.S. is not far behind.

I'm obviously a fierce advocate of free markets, so why do I so strongly oppose the idea of a cashless society? If cashless transactions are faster and more efficient than cash transactions, won't their widespread adoption translate into greater overall production and therefore greater prosperity for all? Not necessarily.

In order for a free market to work properly, it must be free of government interference. Any interference causes market distortions, often referred to as "unintended consequences." (Incidentally, the term "unintended consequences" assumes that the stated noble purpose of the interference is true, while the consequences are unexpected and unfortunate. In other words, the term assumes every government official says what he means and means what he says when interfering with the free market. A bit of a stretch, I'd say, human nature being what it is. But strangely enough, unless one makes that naive stretch, one is automatically labeled a "conspiracy theorist." Go figure.)

If we lived in a truly free market, I'd say, "Awesome! Give me the option of cashless transactions so I'll never accidentally 'leave my wallet at home' again. Who needs privacy? Privacy from whom?" If businesses can guarantee privacy to the consumers, what's not to love about the speed and efficiency of cashless transactions? Consumers would lose their anonymity only in a limited sense, because it would be illegal for businesses to exchange their customers' information with other businesses without the customers' express approval. Think doctor-patient confidentiality.

But alas, we do not live in a free market. In the West, we live in societies where quasi-socialist, quasi-fascist governments are packed full of bureacrats who make careers out of dreaming up bigger and better ways of interfering with the market. In societies like these, "cashless society" would not imply merely having the option of electronic transactions; it would imply that non-electronic transactions would be illegal. There would be various bogus reasons put forth by the bureaucratic elite to justify outlawing non-electronic transactions; my guess is that it would be vaguely related to "national security." We can't have terrorists running around making naughty purchases anonymously with cash. After all, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance -- by the State, not by you.

The danger is that if the market puts a largely cashless financial infrastructure in place (as it already appears to be doing), it can easily be coopted by the government to be used as the ultimate tool of social control. Some "crisis" or "emergency" occurs, and with a single stroke of the Executive pen, suddenly your every transaction is now accessible by government bureaucrats. Every purchase, every sale. What and where you eat. How much gasoline you use. What books you read. How much toilet paper you use. How much money you borrow from or lend to friends and family. Are you prepared to live in that kind of a world? If not, then don't follow the U.K.'s example. Keep using cash.

Cash is king. Using paper cash instead of credit or debit has a couple of positive effects:
  • Cash gives you privacy since it is anonymous.
  • Cash can be used anywhere, any time -- even during a power outage or natural disaster.
  • Cash cannot be frozen or confiscated by a click of a government bureaucrat's mouse.
  • Cash represents money that is not in a checking account, meaning the bank cannot pyramid fraudulent loans on top of it and thereby contribute to inflationary booms. The more cash you have in your hands, the less fraud the bank is able to commit.
Hail to the cash, baby!

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Government Begins Banning "Unsafe" Children's Books

"Unsafe" = published prior to 1985.

This article reports that the U.S. federal government has begun recommending that children's books published before 1985 should not be considered safe due to lead pigments in some inks, and in some cases they might even be illegal to sell. It's just one of the countless regulations buried in the 500-page law with the obligatorily vague and euphemistic title Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

Children's books. . . interesting. Quite interesting.

There is a text in the Bible that provides ancient wisdom about the importance of what children learn at a young age. Proverbs 22:6 (NIV) reads, "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it."

And then there have been some people who have said some downright disturbing things about educating children.

The Communist Party in the U.S. in 1919 seemed to recognize the importance of children's education. Their party slogan that year: "Give us one generation of small children to train to manhood and womanhood and we will set up the Bolshevist form of the Soviet Government." (R.M. Whitney, Reds in America, 1970, p. 55)

Hitler also knew the importance of education. In a speech he delivered in 1939, he proclaimed, "When an opponent declares: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'" (William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1960, p. 249)

The famous philosopher and elitist Bertrand Russell commented, "Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine from a very early age to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves to be happy, because the government will tell them that it is so." (John Steinbacker, The Child Seducers, Educator Publications, 1970, p. 76)

Even Lenin also had a thing or two to say about education: "Only by radically remolding the teaching, organization and training of the youth shall we be able to ensure that the efforts of the younger generation will result in the creation of a society that will be unlike the old society, i.e., in the creation of a communist society." (Gary Allen, "Red Teachers," American Opinion, Feb 1970, p. 1)

Congress passed this book-banning law last summer, supposedly as a result of the "scare" over lead paint found on toys manufactured in China. Not to get too conspiratorial here, but do you really believe that's all there is to this story? As the quotes above suggest, having access to children's minds at the youngest age possible is one of the highest priorities of any would-be totalitarian regime.

As Orwell wrote in his dystopian novel 1984, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." In that novel, remember the pub conversation Winston has with the old man who can almost remember what life was like before the totalitarian government took charge, but whose senile memory keeps failing him? Think about how that ties in to the banning of pre-1985 children's books by the federal government. Is it inconceivable that it doesn't want us to be distracted by "old fashioned" ideas and values that would impede its transformation of the U.S. into a socialist state?

Monday, February 16, 2009

Do Machines Really Put People Out of Work?

This is the first of many posts I plan to make that will discuss common economic fallacies and prevalent misconceptions about libertarianism.

My purpose in writing these "fallacy" posts is to compile over time an "Austro-Libertarian Q&A" or "Snappy Answers to Silly Economic Fallacies." When it comes to discussing economics and politics with real people in real time, the other person's questions often come at one quickly, so one had better be prepared to fire back an answer just as quickly. Luckily, I don't think that's as hard as it sounds.

If a person asks you a question quickly, it is usually because the person is in "knee-jerk mode": he is simply parroting a sound bite he heard on The O'Reilly Factor, NPR, the New York Times, or in his college economics textbook. Ideas that are parroted rather than carefully built up from first principles are much more likely to be fallacies than true statements. And although it may seem like there are 1,001 different fallacies out there, most of them are actually variations on a surprisingly small number of themes. Just compile and memorize a list of the main fallacies, discover and memorize their refutations, then have fun shooting the fallacies down whenever you come across them.

On to the main topic of this post. . .

Fallacy: Machines and other forms of technology put people out of work.

My favorite passage from the chapter "The Curse of Machinery" from Henry Hazlitt's wonderful introductory book Economics in One Lesson has got to be this one, where he purposely constructs a ridiculous example by pushing the anti-machinery sentiment to its logical conclusion:

Why should freight be carried from Chicago to New York by railroad when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?

Murray Rothbard makes a similar point in his book For a New Liberty:

If technology were to be rolled back to the "tribe" and to the preindustrial era, the result would be mass starvation and death on a universal scale. The vast majority of the world's population is dependent for its very survival on modern technology and industry. The North American continent was able to accommodate approximately one million Indians in the days before Columbus, all living on a subsistence level. It is now able to accommodate several hundred million people, all living at an infinitely higher living standard -- and the reason is modern technology and industry. Abolish the latter and we will abolish the people as well.

That is what we might call the "big picture" or "forest" view of technology's effect on the economy. Its truth is hard to deny. Where people seem to trip up is when they start thinking about particular situations involving particular technologies and particular people who lose their jobs because of them. Hazlitt tackles this problem (among many others) in his book:

Joe Smith is thrown out of a job by the introduction of some new machine. "Keep your eye on Joe Smith," [certain] writers insist. "Never lose track of Joe Smith." But what they then proceed to do is to keep their eyes only on Joe Smith, and to forget Tom Jones, who has just got a new job in making the new machine, and Ted Brown, who has just got a job operating one, and Daisy Miller, who can now buy a coat for half what it used to cost her. And because they think only of Joe Smith, they end by advocating reactionary and nonsensical policies.

In another part of the chapter, Hazlitt uses the example of a coat manufacturer to elaborate on why in the long-term, automation produces social benefits:

. . .it may seem [that] labor has suffered a net loss of employment [from automation], while it is only the manufacturer, the capitalist, who has gained. But it is precisely out of these extra profits that the subsequent social gains must come. The manufacturer must use these extra profits in at least one of three ways, and possibly he will use part of them in all three: (1) he will use the extra profits to expand his operations by buying more machines to make more coats; or (2) he will invest the extra profits in some other industry; or (3) he will spend the extra profits on increasing his own consumption. Whichever of these three courses he takes, he will increase employment.

In other words, the manufacturer, as a result of his economies, has profits that he did not have before. Every dollar of the amount he has saved in direct wages to former coat makers, he now has to pay out in indirect wages to the makers of the new machine, or to the workers in another capital-using industry, or to the makers of a new house or car for himself, or for jewelry and furs for his wife. In any case (unless he is a pointless hoarder) he gives indirectly as many jobs as he ceased to give directly.

I would even suggest modifying Hazlitt's example slightly to point out that if the manufacturer is indeed a "pointless hoarder," long-term social benefits will still result since his "hoard" represents a decrease in the amount of money in circulation, which drives down prices since each unit of money will now buy more in terms of goods and services.

Hazlitt goes on to acknowledge that yes, we should keep at least one eye on "Joe Smith." He is a real person and has been thrown out of a job by a new machine. Perhaps he can find a new (hopefully even better) job, but perhaps he can't. He may have spent most of his life developing a particular skill which the market no longer demands. He has lost that investment in himself just as some employers lose their investments in obsolete machines or processes. "Joe Smith" was previously skilled and paid accordingly, and practically overnight he has now become an unskilled worker whose pay -- at least initially -- will probably be much lower. And what if he is an older fellow? He will face the added challenge of competing for jobs with much younger, stronger, healthier, and faster unskilled workers. But although we must not forget "Joe Smith," neither must we forget the astounding increases in living standards across society that are enabled by the creation and use of technology.

But what about poor "Joe Smith," you persistently ask? Don't we need a government in order to alleviate his suffering, given that he has fallen on hard times? I will have much to say about that in future posts.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Hey, Establishment: Blog You!

I had been considering starting a blog for a while, but an article by Jeffrey Tucker on LewRockwell.com was what finally spurred me to stop procrastinating. Here is a quote from the article:

If it is precision and analytical rigor in ideas that you want – and you value this more than anything else – you have to turn to the old masters, the tenured professors who have turned over a field a millions times in their heads and explored every angle. You study the great books with patience and care.

That’s not the only way to learn, however. Another way is through sheer reckless discovery and abandon, at your own pace and in your own way. Make your thoughts live and you have a chance to inspire others to do the same.

It’s the same with any field. You can discover music at the conservatory through theory classes taught by masters. Or you can go to concerts and let the living thing itself wash over you and through you, forming impression and emotions and spawning new ways of understanding.

There is a role for both, in my view.

The second, reckless but evangelistic, way to learn and share knowledge is called the live blog. It began with concerts and events. People attend and blog their impressions as they look and listen.

It is a great way to help the writer gain conceptual clarity about an event and its significance. It is also enormously fun for the reader to read. You feel like you are both at the event and that you are touring the impressions of a single person in attendance.

You can do the same thing with a book, and produce something that is really very new, a running account of the progress of the book and your own interpretive response to it. The idea is not to provide a thoroughly accurate account of the contents but rather to document your own response to the content as you read, chapter by chapter or even page by page.

While Tucker is referring specifically to "live blogging," I think some of his points also apply to blogging in general. Blog posts tend to follow a format referred to in psychology and literature as stream of consciousness: the writer's thoughts are presented more or less "raw," in the order in which they occur to him, rather than the more carefully edited and systematic organization of articles, essays, and books.

My prior reluctance to start a blog was based mainly on the idea that my posts would not be sufficiently polished or exhaustively researched. I thought that if each of my posts was not a self-contained article worthy of being published, my blog would just contribute to the Internet's "intellectual clutter" commonly ridiculed by the establishment media since blogs first started becoming popular. (In a typical case of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," the establishment has since created its own blogs.) But after reading Tucker's article, I suddenly saw an analogy between the apparent "noise" of the blogosphere and the seeming "chaos" of competition in the free market. As a firm advocate of free markets, I thought, I want to be a part of this!

In fact, the blogosphere is a subset of the free market that deals with the sharing of ideas. Just as one can find all sorts of physical products in the free market that are high quality or shoddy, safe or dangerous, vicious or virtuous, one can find blog posts that are well-researched or based on rumor, informative or vacuous, squeaky-clean or filthy. And just as the preferences of the consumers ultimately determine which products fetch the highest prices in the free market, the preferences of the blog readers ultimately determine which ideas bubble to the surface by being the most heavily referenced and linked. The marvelous power of "spontaneous" coordination of the free market arises because of, not in spite of, the welter of competition, so it seems reasonable that this property should also apply to the competitive ideas within the blogosphere.

In short, competition is a good thing. The real reason the establishment media ridicules blogs (except its own, naturally) is not because Joe Average's blog confuses and misleads the public, it is simply because the establishment hates competition. This blog is my competitive entry into the marketplace of ideas, so think of it as my way of sticking it to the establishment with low, low prices. I will not be undersold!

Most of my posts will relate somehow to the theory and practice of radical libertarianism and Austrian economics. I may occasionally "live blog" books as I read them, as Tucker recommends in his article. It sounds like an excellent idea. Once in a while I may post something completely off-topic, but you'll have to forgive me for that -- this is a stream of consciousness, after all!

The establishment is turning the entire world into a circus and blaming us, and people are very confused about what's going on. I'll tell you what's going on. The Age of Ignorance is coming to an end. Liberty is here to kick ass and chew bubble gum. . . and it's all out of gum.