(Thanks to Marc Gallagher)

(Thanks to Minnesota Chris)

Writes Chris Connolly:

Saints win and DC shuts down for three days. The old saying holds true: the Saints won’t win the superbowl ’til hell freezes over.

Chris Connolly

The Big Lie that the airport body scanners would show an image that could not be reproduced has been exposed. From Heathrow Airport across the Pond, we get this:

Claims on behalf of authorities that naked body scanner images are immediately destroyed after passengers pass through new x-ray backscatter devices have been proven fraudulent after it was revealed that naked images of Indian film star Shahrukh Khan were printed out and circulated by airport staff at Heathrow in London.

What we have to understand here is that the authorities knew all along what was going to happen, but they lied in order to get the public to fall into this trap. Of course, since the British government requires all flyers to go through this humiliating strip search, there is little doubt that this will happen again and again. (Hat tip to Drudge Report)

In the Texas Republican primary, according to the latest poll, Ron Paul-supporter Debra Medina has 24%, Kay “Bailout” Hutchison has 28%, and Rick “Gardasil” Perry has 39%. Medina, with almost no money but two successful debate performances, is closing in on Kay. Indeed, Medina is up 8 points just since the last poll. (Thanks to Thomas Luongo)

The three best-read: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on global depression; census despotism; and Jack Douglas on middle-class rage against the government.

In the latest installment of and about the Tea Party movement, Meghan McCain has declared that she has ideological differences with that movement–she is a self-described “progressive Republican,” after all.

I wonder what what means? As a friend said, “You want to have married, gay couples flying bombing missions to kill brown people?” Maybe that’s also the definition of “normal” Democrats, too.

Writes Deb Tiedemann:

Has the mayor of King, North Carolina, been learning at the feet of Rahm “Never-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste” Emanuel?

Here we have a typical seasonal event: a winter storm hits Stokes County, North Carolina, downing trees and power lines. Residents are unconcerned, as power is restored 5 hours later. Besides, most homes have wood-fueled or natural-gas-fueled fireplaces for backup heat in the event of lengthy power outages. But what an opportunity for the pathologically power-hungry politicians! Mayor Jack Warren issued the following “emergency restrictions due to severe weather” at 1:00 p.m. the day the storm hit:

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY
12:00am-5:00am curfew
No sale, consumption, transportation, or possession of alcoholic beverages during the state of emergency in the City of King
No firearms, ammunition, or explosives to be sold, purchased, or carried
Restricted access to areas as deemed appropriate by law enforcement officers and/or city officials

Thank goodness for citizen-reporters like Sara. View the mayor’s power-grab, watch the man-on-the-street interviews, and read the blog here.

Palin is campaigning in Texas for Rick “Gardasil” Perry. Most of her talk is boring Republican boilerplate. But catch this YouTube, about 20 seconds in, where she mentions Texas seceding from the union, in order to deny it, and is thrown off her pace by the huge cheers. And this is from a Republican crowd. Chris Matthews tried to blame her for the popular reaction, but she gets no credit.

As Eric and Bill have noted, we’re snowed-in in the mid-Atlantic. The snow started in DC late Friday morning and, with another foot or so due tomorrow afternoon, I don’t know when we’ll be able to get out of the house by car.

Of course, we’re just sitting here waiting for the county to come by and plow our street. We’re on a short block with 8 houses — I can see freedom on the major road at the top of the hill — so we’re very low priority for the county. And, apparently, the large snow drifts mean only big earth-mover plows will work, and they don’t fit under the low wires at the bottom of the street.

So what would life be like if our street were private, or, at the very least, snow plowing services were not “provided” (if that term even applies when you’ve been snowed in for 3 days and counting) by the city or county? This is the 7th wealthiest county in the nation, so it’s not like people couldn’t afford this service. I’m in no rush — I’m getting ahead on work, the university is closed, and I’m getting to spend lots of time with my daughter — but my husband is getting behind on work and the companies’ clients are probably not happy that only four people made it to the office today. A neighbor closer to the corner dug himself out with a shovel well enough to get his 4WD to freedom. If enough of us really needed to get out, would we be able to afford the plowing service? Would there be enough plows to have cleared all of the streets by now? Who knows, but I’d love to see that day.

One thing that I am in a hurry for is for a tree branch that has fallen on the power lines coming to the house to be cleared. The utility monopoly is unlikely to get to this soon — even if the roads were cleared. We have power, and the news says there are “thousands” without power — so we’re low priority. Again, there’s no price mechanism to allocate the high-voltage tree-clearing resources.

OK, bash Palin for notes on her hand, MSM, but riddle me this. How did your hero get a gig teaching law at Chicago sans any significant scholarly publications?

The three best-read: Gary North — not planning to retire, are you? Marc Faber — inflation, depression, war, by Gwen Robinson; and Karen De Coster — the caveman diet.

Federal government shuts down.

HT: Gene Berkman

In Clyde Wilson’s brilliant commentary on the history of nullification today he points out that “Civil War” historians have behaved in their typically dishonest way by claiming that there was something peculiar — even crazy — about South Carolinians who nullified the 1828 Tariff of Abominations.  They (the distorians) insinuate that protectionism is so self-evidently virtuous that South Carolina’s early nineteenth century free traders either were too stupid to recognize their own self interest or were simply nuts.

This of course is par-for-the-course nonsense coming from our “Lincoln scholars” and the like.  As Clyde points out, South Carolina wasn’t the only state to oppose the Tariff of Abominations.  Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama also issued proclamations against it and in favor of free trade, while the plundering protectionist state legislatures of Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Indiana, and New York issued resolutions in support of that abominable policy of plunder.  See the rather mainstream book, The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, by Chauncy Boucher.

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest skyscraper and symbol of the crazed boom, has closed indefinitely, just one month after it opened. Mark Thornton, call your office.

Skills for the real world?

Joshua Tabor, a soldier stationed at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Washington, decided to punish his 4-year-old daughter for failing to correctly recite the alphabet.

As his daughter ‘squirmed’ to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.

Police went to Tabor’s home after he was arrested after being seen walking around his neighborhood wearing a Kevlar military helmet and threatening to break windows. When they arrived, Tabor’s girlfriend told them about the alleged torture and the terrified girl was found hiding in a closet, with bruising on her back and scratch marks on her neck and throat.

Asked how she got the bruises, the girl is said to have replied: ‘Daddy did it.’

Tabor admitted to police that he chose the CIA torture technique because his daughter was terrified of water.

See this great clip of Christopher Walken on SNL in 2000. A role model! (Thanks to Al Sledge)

I only saw a small part of the Super Bowl, but the commercials were awful. The government’s census propaganda, featuring Ed “Global Warming” Begley, was merely stupid. But the Audi ad heralded a green police state. One is reminded that National Socialists, German and American, are environmentalists.

UPDATE from Scott Evans:

I’m sure that most of us liberty-lovers found the Audi commercial to be the most offensive and sickening thing ever to hit the airwaves.  Not that I have ever had the desire to own one, but I can say with 1000 percent certainty now that I will NEVER EVEN CONSIDER buying an Audi!

The census commercial, on the other hand, was pathetic, as lame and nonsensical — indeed, downright illogical — as the agency that funded it. If this is the BEST the fedgov can do in terms of pro-census propaganda, then I think we have at lot less to worry about than we thought.

I rarely go on Facebook but still noticed that supporters of the military are quite active. Here is a page with 125,419 members: Let’s Find 1,000,000 Supporters For The U.S. Army.

I have a better idea: let’s not.

Update: someone has now created ”Let’s find 1,000,000 supporters of America leaving Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Coverage of the “big game” is a mixture of voluntary acts between consenting adults and utter statism. Sure, Katrina was a tragedy but then we see folks asking for others to help them at gun point. And then, speaking of guns, we have Plaxico Burress, who is being kept against his will for a victimless non-crime. Then we see the Prez defending his interventions in banking and money.

And of course right before the game we will see everyone bow (cover your heart, citizen, and feel the power of the state!) at the flag and recite the hosannas to the empire and the “heroes” who keep us safe.

Oh well, just another day in the land of the weird.

(Yes, the scare quotes around “big game” are intentional and show the silliness around and ridiculous level of pattern socialism. No offense, the litigious and IP-supporting NFL)

Butler, thanks for that very revealing post regarding Paul Johnson, a learned man who can’t seem to keep his own opinions at bay while producing countless semi-scholarly works on just about anything.

What Johnson doesn’t mention is this: for most of history (but not recently), most of the world’s civilizations have recognized that man is not perfectible. Aristotle, after long and learned descriptions of moral actions, knew that the truly moral man, the spoudaios, was rare — in fact, he’d never met one!

That changed a couple of hundred years ago.  Modern man – Western man — believes (a real act of faith) that man is indeed perfectible. All the true believer needs is more power to force man to be perfect. In that, all tyrants are Rousseau’s godchildren — they all long to “force us to be free.”

Christians gave the  pre-modern (as opposed to postmodern)  West the simple explanation for the fact, duly observed by Johnson, that mankind has  not progressed morally since its beginning: every individual, is fallen from the perfection that God wants for him. This world, and the people in it, will never be perfect, no matter how many people are killed to achieve perfection by “advanced” imperialist governments run by smart guys, whether we hate them (Soviet Russia, National Socialist Germany) or love them (My Country ‘Tis Of Thee.) Johnson’s central problem is this: his critical analysis ends when he deals with historical figures he happens to agree with.

To “TP” someone’s house has long meant decorating the trees and bushes in their yard with rolls and rolls of toilet paper. When I hear of the “Tea Party” policies, this image immediately comes to mind. I suspect that a number of otherwise thoughtful people are attracted to this movement out of frustration – if not desperation – spawned by the Republocratic parties. As I watched as much of Sarah Palin’s babbling as my sensibilities could stand, I could not help but wonder – as I did during the 2008 presidential campaign – whether the political establishment had paired the McCain/Palin nitwits as added insurance for the election of Obama.

As I listen to any of these Tea Party people express their dreams for a Tea Party presidency, I am drawn to H.L. Mencken’s classic assessment of what seems to drive them: “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

British historian, Paul Johnson, was interviewed extensively on C-SPAN this morning. A viewer called to ask him whether, in his view, the world was “going to hell.” Johnson answered that he thought life on the planet had made a general improvement, materially, in the past two to three thousand years, but then added that, morally, humans had made no real improvement; that on a moral level, we are on about the same level as humans were during the times of Julius Caesar; that we needed to focus our attention on improving the moral realm of our behavior.

He was later asked his opinions about recent events in the Middle East, and answered that he largely agreed with the actions taken by the United States and Great Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan. I did not hear him suggest how any moral improvement was to take place as long as humans can support the continuation of a war system whose logic has remained unchanged since the time of Julius Caesar. Perhaps it will be left to some other persons, in some other place, at some other time, by some other means, to address the moral dimensions of how we are to live!

Apparently, to love science is to love the state — “Science Friday” on Talk of the Nation was dedicated to the pros and cons of the proposed federal science budget. The pros: “we” got more money! The cons: “we” didn’t get enough more money. (Apparently, Obama’s fiscal conservatism where non-discretionary funds would be frozen does not include the NIH, et al.)

Early last week, The Lancet (a medical journal) retracted the 1998 paper that allegedly linked the MMR vaccine to autism. This is actually a very interesting story with more to it than you might initially suspect.

The lead author in the Lancet study is not an “anti-vaccine quack.” On the contrary, he had earlier filed for a patent for a vaccine. (Note: He may be a quack — I can’t judge this very well either way — but he wasn’t anti-vaccine.)

The paper, by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and others, stated very clearly that while they found a correlation of the MMR vaccine with autism, their study “did not prove an association between [the vaccine] and the syndrome described.” So where did the MMR-autism link come from?

Dr. Wakefield made a statement during a press conference that he thought measles, mumps, and rubella vaccinations should be done separately. The media — gotta love ‘em — ran with the story.

This all came to a head this week because at the end of January, England’s General Medical Council (as far as I can tell, it is a national form of America’s individual state medical boards) concluded a hearing on Dr. Wakefield’s conduct during the study.

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There are good people in the Tea Party movement, and it is important to try to reach out to them, but by and large—like conservatism itself—it is a militaristic bunch, upholding highly paid bureaucrats as the “best and the brightest,” whether they are tasering or bombing, and slavering over torture and death. Of course,  TP fanatically backs the wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Iran. Only a terrorist would dissent. Sarah Palin’s speech in Nashville was typical: War, cut spending, war, skin ‘em alive, war, cut taxes, war, war, war. So it’s no surprise that Ron Paul’s warmongering primary opponents in Texas, according to the Dallas Morning News, are riding the TP wave like water bugs, or hoping to. Thank goodness, as Jesse Benton points out, Ron has $1,926,607 on hand. His four TP opponents have only a net $13,281 among them, a hilarious fact the Dallas newspaper somehow failed to mention.

Writes Felix Moreno:

I’ve always found the best gauge of a magazine’s bias is its ads. The Economist tends to feature job ads for international orgs IMF/UN/WB….as well as govt. development agencies…and then throw in a few govt. subsidized airlines, etc. So it’s pretty clear what its constituency is: Brussels & Washington bureaucrats.

Writes Anthony Ajamian:

It isn’t often that I get mail from a public sector entity. When I do, I usually get that sinking feeling in my stomach. After all, with so many laws on the books I’m sure I broke a couple dozen of them this morning when I went out onto my porch to have my routine cigarette and a cup of coffee.

Imagine my surprise when the DMV sent me a notice congratulating me. I panicked, figuring if the DMV congratulated me I must have done something to wrong a neighbor, a friend, or some other  innocent. As luck would have it, I ended up being eligible to renew my permission slip to drive by mail or over the internet. Goody gumdrops, happy days in California are here again.

Figuring I’d be a fool to voluntarily punish myself by going to wait in line for hours on end and deal with obnoxious workers who feel that they have the right to more of my money. (See the public sector outcry over pay cuts in California last year. The horror of downsizing.) I kept reading.

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1.  Who Put the Underbomber on the Plane? by Kurt Haskell;

2. US Agrees to Timetable for UN Gun Ban;

3. The Precarious State of Their Union, by Peter Schiff;

4. Will Obama Lie Us Into Another War?, by Pat Buchanan;

5. The Inflationary Hurricane, by Gary North;

6. Selecting Guns for Your Bug Out Bag;

7. The Pro-Life Assault on Ron Paul and the Constitution, by Laurence M. Vance;

8. Body Language: The Tell-Tale Signs That Betray Us All, by Celia Walden;

9. Jesse Ventura Takes the Soaring Interest in Conspiracy Theory to TV, by Daniela Perdomo;

10. Top 10 Ways To Avoid Tax-Attention, by Kelly Phillips Erb.

It is Sunday morning, and for a while (until mid-week) skies are clear and the sun is shining. (It was near zero this morning, so we are having our usual spate of cold temperatures). Despite the fact that Garrett  County got the most snow of anyone in this storm (30+ inches), we also dug out more quickly than did places that received less snow. (I know LRC readers will be shocked to read this, but all of the snow removal outside U.S. 40 and the county roads was done privately.)

Anyway, here is the link to some new morning-after pictures. Remember, you are looking at snow cover of nearly three feet!

Yes, we are getting ready to go to church this morning!

But her post-speech interview was even more galling than the speech written for her.

When asked what needs to be done, she said, “we need to rein in spending.” She didn’t say how and, I swear, if she had said by ending “waste, fraud and abuse,” I would have spit out my Irish whiskey. These are meaningless cliches meant to dupe the conservative masses. If you can’t specify cuts, you’re a fraud.

And Sarah, “Tea Party” evokes the American Revolution, not the term “taxed enough already.” That slogan is a typical manifestation of the conservative rear-guard action mentality. You can rarely win anything playing defense. I learned that lesson playing ping pong.

It seems that many of the socialist agricultural co-operatives (called a kibbutz)  in Israel are finally discovering the superiority of capitalism.

Once again, Ludwig von Mises has been proven right. (Yawn)

[Thanks to Sandy Ikeda]

In April of 2001, the CIA helped the government of Peru shoot down a plane containing two Christian missionaries mistaken for drug smugglers. One of the missionaries and her baby girl died in the plane crash. (Her missionary husband and son survived.) Of course, no criminal charges were ever filed against any of the agents involved in this tragic mistake. Here’s the CIA’s spin on the matter:

‘This was a tragic episode that the Agency has dealt with in a professional and thorough manner…Unfortunately, some have been willing to twist facts to imply otherwise. In so doing, they do a tremendous disservice to CIA officers, serving and retired, who have risked their lives for America’s national security.’

Someone using recreational drugs in the United States is a threat to “America’s national security”?

[Thanks to Rolf Lindgren]

Pure neocon drivel so far. Nothing about making government smaller.

She is more interested in fighting for the liberty of Iranians than Americans.

She is clueless about the tea party movement. It’s populist and its core concern is economic freedom. She blew a great opportunity.

Also, Sarah, I see you are having trouble reading the speech written for you. Here’s a tip: Courier font, 14 point type, triple-spaced. Works like a charm.

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Funny to watch the establishment’s reaction to the reappearance of the idea of state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws.  This isn’t allowed, of course — the right of Ivy Leaguers to impose their theories on the country shall not be infringed.

The extremely conventional Sanford Levinson trots out all the old arguments.  My book on this subject, slated for mid-June release, answers all of them many times over.  But especially dishonest is Levinson’s by-the-books argument that Virginia and Kentucky found no support for their arguments in 1798.  What he leaves out, of course, is that the vast bulk of the states that protested the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions expressly affirmed, in their very replies to those states, their own support of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which they considered perfectly constitutional!  The fact that a bunch of states that were dead wrong objected to Virginia and Kentucky is supposed to make us rethink nullification?  And within 10-15 years, many of these states, too, were speaking of the right of state interposition.  In 1820 the Ohio legislature passed a resolution indicating its support for the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, whose principles “have been recognized and adopted by a majority of the American people.”

Much, much more can be said against Levinson.  But even the tiny bit I’ve said here, at least a portion of which you’d think an honest person might acknowledge, is absent from his article.  You may hesitate to believe me — I mean, an establishment historian leaving out the relevant facts? — but it’s true.

Bozeman, Montana Police Officer Mark Ziegler responded to a shoplifting call at the local IGA the evening of January 29. On his arrival he learned that a man had filled his pockets with food, pencils, and “maybe things for his kids.”

Ziegler arrested the man, wrote him a ticket for theft, then released him — after asking why he had been stealing. He learned that the 32-year-old unemployed father was desperate to feed his family. Ziegler asked for the man’s phone number and told him, “Give me 15 minutes.”

The officer then ran to Walmart, bought a few dozen frozen pizzas — at his own expense — and delivered them to the man’s house.

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I have been watching bits and snatches of the “Tea Party Convention” on C-SPAN. My initial response is much the same as Gertrude Stein’s impression of Oakland: “There is no there there.” My suspicion is that this group may be but a neo-con/Establishment inspired effort to neutralize widespread popular disaffection with the political system; to attract attention away from a frontal critique of the state (e.g., Ron Paul, LRC, some Leftist commentators) and into a kind of mushy, make-believe “reform” movement reminiscent of Frank Chodorov’s observation concerning those who want “to clean up the whorehouse, but keep the business intact.” I have thus far heard no principled, fundamental assessment of the state from these tea-partyers, but only a lot of superficial jabber about “taking back America.”

The snow has stopped falling and we are pretty much dug out, except that our van still lies buried somewhere in the driveway. I have posted a number of photos on my blog, and if you want to see them, click here. Thanks to the guys on the plow trucks and helpful friends and neighbors who have turned this disruptive blizzard into, well, just another snow day in Garrett County.

The one irony is that I won’t be able to do any cross-country skiing out my back door until some snowmobilers cut some tracks, as I cannot ski drifts of three and four feet.

My speaking tour of St. Louis has been postponed for one week. Here is the new and now correct itinerary:

Feb 22. St. Louis, MO 63130. Washington University Law School. Corner of Throop Drive and Snow Way, noon–2p.m. topic: “The Male/Female Wage Gap”; room number, tba; Contact: Stephen C. Cassarino sccassarino@wulaw.wustl.edu, 860-384-9374.

Feb 23. St. Louis, MO 63108. St. Louis University. 3701 Lindell Blvd. (intersection of Lindell and Spring); noon–2pm, room number, tba; Topic: “The Cause and Cures of the Current Economic Crisis”; contact: Luis Hess, hesslf@gmail.com, 281-954-4377; Joseph Blewitt, jblewitt@gmail.com

In the latest saga of the never-ending marriage of big business and big government, the Fascist Bureau of Investigation wants internet service providers to keep the records of all websites visited by all of their customers for two years.

As usual, one of the reasons is: “…a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography…” Ah, yes—it’s always about protecting the children. As I’ve written before, “protecting children” is “the last refuge of a scoundrel” for the 21st century. But there is good news: “…the bureau was not asking that content data, such as the text of e-mail messages, be retained.” Not asking yet. Eventually, that request too shall come to pass. An executive at Verizon said, “if you were do to deep packet inspection to see all the URLs, you would arguably violate the Wiretap Act.” But when did violating its own laws ever stop the gunvernment from doing what it wants?

By the way, the idea of the gunvernment requiring the storage of communications records of customers is not new. There is already a 1986 law in place that requires phone companies to keep certain customer phone records for 18 months—the perfect precedent for this new Orwellian scheme being proposed by the FBI.

[Thanks to Travis Holte]

I write to you from 2,630 feet upon on the Allegheny Plateau, and I have four-to-five-foot high drifts in our yard! Our Subaru almost is buried, and this snow is going to stay around for a while! Our road is a county road, which means that state trucks don’t throw down salt and other chemicals (that contaminate our wells), but the county trucks heroically have been coming up and down Pocahontas Road and at least making it passable. (I notice that at least one heroic local guy has been making the rounds with his own plow, thus showing that it is not just government that keeps our road from turning into a big snow drift.)

The good thing about this is that Washington, D.C., is paralyzed, which means the bureaucrats cannot steal from us for a few days. We in Garrett County, Maryland, will be moving about within a day (and we expect to go to church tomorrow). Our county flag has four symbols on it, and one of them is a snowflake, so we tend to take snowstorms in stride.

An Orwellian term for government school cop. Well, your child can still get shot to death while a cop is on the premises. TV Report from Madison, AL:

Time to pull the plug?

(Thanks to Minnesota Chris)

Writes Blair MacGregor:

Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly taped a segment together for a three-part series.

At around 34 minutes in, Jon mentions the hypocrisy in Fox’s treatment of anti-war protesters and their glowing remarks re: the tea party protesters. Jon then segued into general neocon hypocrisy that we all know and love in regards to the deficits and then mentioned Ron Paul, asking why Fox didn’t treat him better when he was calling out W and Co. for their fiscal irresponsibility?

O’Reilly’s response? A half-hearted sideswipe and a desperate attempt to change the subject matter.

They know. It’s more obvious to me than ever before that there was a coordinated, deliberate effort by Fox News to pass Ron off as a kook, etc. You saw it in the ‘07-’08 debates, in news clips, opinion pieces, etc.

Today my high school Economics students began viewing the terrific three-part PBS series, Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy. The first episode, “The Battle of Ideas,” pits John Maynard Keynes against Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek.  But not before seeing that brilliant Hayek vs. Keynes Rap.  They loved it!  Earlier in the week they received an essential background preparation by watching the excellent Mises Institute videos, Money, Banking and the Federal Reserve and Liberty and Economics: The Ludwig von Mises Legacy.  Mises, his seminar, and the Austrians are briefly discussed in Commanding Heights.

Note to Randroids:  Later in the course my Economics students will once again (for the 16th year) be asked to analyze the major characters in The Fountainhead, describing the archetypal virtue (e.g., integrity) or symbolic evil (e.g., lust for power) they represent.  Students will also compare and contrast Howard Roark from that classic film with the character portrayal of Preston Tucker from Tucker:  The Man and His Dream.

I have created a monster. I just posted a reading list on free market anarchism on this blog, and I have been inundated with notes saying, in effect, “Moron, how could you not have included x, y, and z on your list?” You are an ignoramus on this subject. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Previously, I only attached a small sample of this magnificent literature mainly, but not entirely, limited to shorter works. I now offer a much longer listing in this regard, long enough to choke the proverbial horse. I doubt, now, that I have left much out but, if I have, let me know; I’m always willing to learn. I don’t necessarily agree, fully, with everything mentioned below, but they will all be of interest in this regard. Anyway, here goes:

Anderson, Terry and Hill, P.J. 1979. “An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 3: 9-29

Benson, Bruce. 1988. “Legal evolution in primitive societies.” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 144, 772–788.

Benson, Bruce. 1989a. “The spontaneous evolution of commercial law.” Southern Economic Journal, 55, 644–661.

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Several people have already written to me, asking for the bibliogrphy I sent to Brian Stewart, in response to the nice letter of inquiry he had sent to me. Like a senile old poop, I neglected to include that material. So, here it is:

Higgs, Robert. 2009. “Why We Couldn’t Abolish Slavery Then and Can’t Abolish Government Now.” August 20; http://www.lewrockwell.com/higgs/higgs128.html

Read the rest of this entry »

From The Telegraph:

Archduchess Regina von Habsburg, who died on February 3 aged 85, was the wife of Dr Otto von Habsburg – formerly Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and latterly a highly respected member of the European parliament; had history taken a different turn, she would have been Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary.

Dr. von Habsburg befriended Ludwig von Mises, who served as his political and economic advisor. (Thanks to Matthew Robare.)

Lew, it isn’t helping Olbermann that even some of the left has turned on his smearmongering.