A review by my friend Andy Duncan:

Machiavelli offers advice for imperial aggressors on how they should conquer a Muslim state:

But if once the Turk has been vanquished and broken in battle so that he cannot raise new armies, there is nothing to worry about except the ruler’s family. When that has been wiped out there is no one left to fear, because the others have no credit with the people.

So, capture Saddam Hussein and kill his sons. But once we achieve that, what do we do next with a former Muslim leader’s country:

When states newly acquired as I said have been accustomed to living freely under their own laws, there are three ways to hold them securely: first, by devastating them; next, by going there and living there in person; thirdly, by letting them keep their own laws, exacting tribute, and setting up an oligarchy which will keep the state friendly to you.

So, set up an interim appointed government and eventual elections guaranteed to keep the interim appointed government in place, with good options on the oil supply made out to your business friends. But what do we do about a possibly resentful population?

Violence must be inflicted once and for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful. Benefits must be conferred gradually; and in that way they will taste better.

Ah, yes. Gradually re-establish the water and the electricity supplies, then link in the ‘election’ of your interim appointed government to coincide with further improvements, so as to keep this government in place and suitably disposed towards yourself.

But we should avoid blaming Machiavelli for our own modern world. It is our politicians who have created it, not this wonderful Florentine writer. He was just telling it like it was. Many of his views even coincided with our own:

The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms; and because you cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow…Rome and Sparta endured for many centuries, armed and free. The Swiss are strongly armed and completely free.

His belief in the sanctity of arms would even have stood comparison with the National Rifle Association:

There is simply no comparison between a man who is armed and one who is not. It is unreasonable to expect that an armed man should obey one who is unarmed, or that an unarmed man should remain safe and secure when his servants are armed.

So next time you hear your local police calling themselves public servants, ask yourself who has the guns, and who has the power. (Read more)

http://mises.org/daily/574/Intellectual-Roots-of-Terror

Roman’s Book Report has launched.

Episode 1:

November 22nd, 1963 is a day Americans can never forget. That was the day when President Kennedy was assassinated by the (supposedly) lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. Shortly after, Oswald himself was killed on national television. Oswald’s name has been seared into the national consciousness as the ultimate traitor, but in the new memoir Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald by his girlfriend Judyth Vary Baker, the hypothetical killer actually went to Dallas to try to prevent the assassination!

According to Baker, Oswald told her early in November that Kennedy would be killed at Dealey Plaza. He knew this because he had been invited to join the assassination team, as well as an abort team that would try to interfere with the shooting. He had infiltrated the former team with hopes of exposing the players, but once events were set in motion he knew the operatives would not hesitate to kill his entire family and anyone else he knew (including Judyth) if he didn’t play along.

Vary begged him not to take part, but he insisted that the group would just get another shooter to take his place. “If I stay,” he said, “at least that will be one less bullet aimed at Kennedy.”

After Oswald’s murder, his predictions began to take place, when a number of Vary’s cohorts in the undercover biological work she was engaged in mysteriously died or were killed. Afraid for her own life, she abandoned her promising science career and raised a family, keeping quiet about her involvement in the Kennedy situation for many years.

Now, living in an undisclosed European country for her own safety, she recalls her life as a girl who wanted to become a nun, but whose amazing aptitude for science ultimately brought her into a plot to kill Castro with a cancer-causing agent. This in turn led her into a world of virulent anti-Communists, Cuban exiles, mafia figures and the CIA. Me & Lee is a memoir that blows the lid off the Lee Harvey Oswald debate, and even names some of the men responsible for the Kennedy assassination. It is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, politics or even the fates of star-crossed lovers. (Read more from lewrockwell.com)

1. Hack your shower head.
2. Fix your water heater.
3. Go to a coin shop and compare real coins to today’s tokens.
4. Work for free.
5. Publish with creative commons (no Intellectual Property).
6. Visit a courthouse, and notice how benign our “criminal class” looks.
7. Go to jail. See what it means to be completely controlled by the state.
8. If you want to improve culture, do something wonderful. Don’t blame the market.
9. Tell the truth. Ideas are more powerful than armies.

For a detailed account of the descent of an entire country into despair and barbarism read Adam Fergusson’s When Money Dies: The Nightmare of Deficit Spending, Devaluation, and Hyperinflation in Weimar Germany.

First published in 1975, republished in 2010, and made available through the Mises Institute, When Money Dies should dispel the notion that the rule of men is superior to the rule of law. Why “the rule of law”? Because it was the violation of the rule of law by governments themselves that supplanted the peaceful, liberal order of a gold-based international monetary system with one in which central banks, at governments’ behest, could print fiduciary media without limit.

The full implication of this change was seen in Weimar Germany, the German people’s first experiment with representative democracy, where civilized society fell victim to the evils of the monetary printing press. For all practical purposes, the German mark was not worth the paper upon which it was printed. Eventually the Reichsbank issued the largest denomination note ever printed in the history of the world, a one-hundred-trillion-mark note, which no one would accept for payment. Be very careful if you believe that it can’t happen today. (Read more from mises.org)

Like Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad was a great economic novelist who maintained a contemptuous distance from the “economic” novel.

. . . .

The fullest, indeed the virtually inexhaustible, expression of Conrad’s praxeology is his novel The Secret Agent (1907). Cather thought that her era was characterized by “the revolt against individualism.”[3] Conrad saw something larger: a revolt against human action as it really is. The Secret Agent attempts to explain both the revolt and what it revolts against.

I.

The praxeology of The Secret Agent emerges from Conrad’s interest in a certain group of characters — political radicals — who are engaged in plotting, or at least in ardently desiring, the downfall of the capitalist system. These people have their own theories about human action, theories that Conrad finds enticing targets for ridicule. From the ruins of their ideologies, he retrieves much that is useful by an opposing system of thought. (Read more from )

I had no idea. How interesting!

Jeffrey Tucker covers a lot in this video. History, books, anti-capitalism. Interesting commentary on Upton Singclair’s The Jungle.

He talks about America’s gilded age 1870-1900ish, and a free-market aristocracy in Rhode Island that, from what it sounds like, consciously compared itself to the government enforced European aristocracy.

His principles for great entrepreneurs:
1- don’t let school take you out of the real world
2- don’t worry about money
3- fanatical focus on task at hand
4- surround themselves with good, smart people
5- don’t plan & act now
6- compete, but don’t seek to destroy
7- look to give others what they want
8- stay away from politics & the state! Find a realm of freedom and create within it!

I’m going to get this book.

I found Vargas’s column about the Tea Parties and translated it through Google translation, which made for some garbled English, but most of it remained understandable.

Here are some excerpts, with emphasis added:

Because of his [the Tea Party's] face [is hidden(?)] below ultraconservative, reactionary, populist and demagogic, and the nonsense that can claim some of their leaders, like those who say that President Obama is a Muslim ambush that want socialism for the United States or outbursts of Mrs. Christine O’Donnell, candidate for Delaware, a former practitioner of witchcraft who has accused homosexuals have created AIDS, there are in the core of this movement something healthy, realistic, deeply democratic and libertarian. The fear of runaway growth of the state and bureaucracy, whose tentacles are increasingly infiltrated into the private lives of citizens, cutting and stifling their freedom and their initiatives, the appropriation by the public sector functions or services that society civil could take more effective and less waste of resources, the creation of striking systems of social assistance can be financed only with systematic increases in taxes, which will result in falling living standards of middle and lower classes.

These fears are not free, respond to the reality of our time and originate from problems like living in the First and the Third World. But in the U.S. have a particular resonance, as always lively touch a nerve in a country where individualism is not ever had the bad press it has in Europe, in the collectivist doctrines that have taken deep roots in its modern history. A U.S. European pilgrims came seeking freedom, to practice their religion, it was not official, to defend the right of individuals to be independent, to choose your life without any limitation other than respect for life forms others. In the purest American tradition is not the state but the citizen is responsible first of its failure or success. . . .

For a long time, this ideal design was more or less respected and worked with the extraordinary development and prosperity of the country as a result. . . .

Then, because of wars, economic inequality multiplied, reformist political action was being amended, in many ways to improve it, but sometimes for worse. And among the latter, no doubt, given that inflation elephantine bureaucracy that, as much as in Europe, has reduced the area of freedom and autonomy of the individual, resulting in shrinkage of civil society and, therefore, the responsibility of the citizen against himself, his family and social group. . . .

In modern society, where the State is God, the individual is becoming less responsible, because reality can be just him, it pushes each extra day being only a state-dependent. For almost everything: studying, heal, get a job, enjoy a safe, participate and enjoy the cultural life, retirement account with the State. The idea that that is the final destination of the evolution that has followed the situation in his country is simply intolerable for a significant part of the United States, where the idea of the sovereign individual that should not be coil or exploitation by the State. . . .

If the State is decentralized and slim, if not . . . the individual is no longer free and has become an automaton manipulated by invisible and all-powerful bureaucrats who, in the shadows of their offices, taking all important decisions concerning their fate. . . .

In many cases, they [private individuals] do better and spend less than bureaucrats. In culture, for example, here in the United States, largely, magnificent museums, operas and concerts, dance, major exhibitions, public libraries are funded mainly by civil society. True, there are tax incentives that encourage this generosity, but the main reason is a cultural tradition, not entirely disappeared, which induces people to act, take initiative to invest their money in what they think right and necessary. Unlike others, this message from the Tea Party deserves to be taken into account.

Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts

So the agitation for greater liberty is nothing but the “movement of the moment.” It’ll pass, just like Fresca and drive-in theaters.

But when it comes to ideology, it [the Tea Party] has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas.

It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon.

Um. Are you saying we should only read popular texts by living writers?

All told, the canon argues for a vision of the country where government’s role is to protect private property — against taxes as much as against thieves. Where religion plays a bigger role in public life. Where any public safety net is unconstitutional. And where the way back to prosperity is for markets to be left free from regulation.

Yes. No. Mostly. Yes.

Republican nominee for Senate in Wisconsin, asserted that the $20 billion escrow fund that the Obama administration forced BP to set up to pay damages from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill circumvented “the rule of law,” Hayek’s term for the unwritten code that prohibits the government from interfering with the pursuit of “personal ends and desires.”

This is a distortion to discredit the theory in the above mentioned books. Most libertarians/Austrian economists (Lew Rockwell) were against Obama’s interference in the BP disaster, but, and this what the NY Times neglects, advocated a 100% liability instead of the artificial cap which Obama placed on the company’s liability.

(Read more from nytimes.com)

This Mises Daily article is excerpted from chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Denationalisation of Money: the Argument Refined, by F.A. Hayek.

It tells some of the history of the world in terms of inflation:

Historians have again and again attempted to justify inflation by claiming that it made possible the great periods of rapid economic progress. They have even produced a series of inflationist theories of history,[2] which have, however, been clearly refuted by the evidence: prices in England and the United States were at the end of the period of their most rapid development almost exactly at the same level as 200 years earlier. But their recurring rediscoverers are usually ignorant of the earlier discussions.

From Marco Polo we learn that, in the 13th century, Chinese law made the rejection of imperial paper money punishable by death, and twenty years in chains or, in some cases death, was the penalty provided for the refusal to accept French assignats. Early English law punished repudiation as lese-majesty. At the time of the American revolution, non-acceptance of Continental notes was treated as an enemy act and sometimes worked a forfeiture of the debt.[3]

Only a few of the great powers preserved for a time tolerable monetary stability, and they brought it also to their colonial empires. But Eastern Europe and South America never knew a prolonged period of monetary stability.

I was struck by the clarification to Gresham’s Law given at the end. Something I’d noticed when I encountered the law in my studies:

It is a misunderstanding of what is called Gresham’s law to believe that the tendency for bad money to drive out good money makes a government monopoly necessary. . . . What Jevons, as so many others, seems to have overlooked, or regarded as irrelevant, is that Gresham’s law will apply only to different kinds of money between which a fixed rate of exchange is enforced by law. . . . Indeed, whenever inflation got really rapid, all sorts of objects of a more stable value, from potatoes to cigarettes and bottles of brandy to eggs and foreign currencies like dollar bills, have come to be increasingly used as money, so that at the end of the great German inflation it was contended that Gresham’s law was false and the opposite true.[20] It is not false, but it applies only if a fixed rate of exchange between the different forms of money is enforced.

To restate Gresham’s Law another way, bad money drives out good, IF IT FORCIBLY KEPT AT THE SAME PRICE.

Favorite parts (though the entire interview is dynamite):

@10:20 – Identification of Atrocity, and absurdity of counter argument “that’s war.”

@ 11:40 – Tom Wood’s paraphrases the surprising pro-war stance of many (but not all) Objectivists: “Collateral damage is not something to be deplored, it’s to be cheered. . . These people live in terrorist countries. . . I mean these people actually use that term, ‘Terrorist Country.’ There’s a nice individualist philosophy for you. . . To defend the good countries, we need to lay utter waste to our enemies. That’s individualism and reason.”

@ 16:30 – Absurdity of military budget.

@ 22:00 – The consequences of the military state.