Claire Wolfe: The Quality of a Free Man (cited by Rational Review News Digest)

James Leroy Wilson says some things that I have attempted to say about, for example, highways:

Perhaps a genuinely free market would have seen the development of organic economies driven by local production and less on mass production and trade. People might have less of what they didn’t need anyway, and lead quiet, simple, but happy and stress-free lives. Or perhaps the free market would have taken us to unimagined technological heights and a prosperous and peaceful planetary economy.

I find both possibilities appealing. And that is why, ultimately, I can’t advance a libertarian worldview that exalts one vision over the other . . . .

Leftovers from September: Trapped in New Orleans: First By the Floods, Then By Martial Law

Still getting the hang of Wikipedia.

Anything in nature, technology or mythology that can be represented with an image can be put on a shield, and probably has been; and the Wikipedia article “Charge (heraldry)” is bloated with examples. Is anyone wiser for knowing that an aloe plant appears in the arms of the North-Eastern Transvaal Tennis Association?

There seemed to be a tacit consensus that “show don’t tell” was not the best policy here, so beginning on June 14 I took a chainsaw to it, my guiding principle being that the layman is more interested in knowing what charges occur frequently, and thus contribute to heraldic style, than in either an exhaustive catalog of exotica or the minutiae of blazon. When I stopped for breath on June 17, the article was a quarter of its former size, and I had added some brief passages on general principles.

Alas, I had not examined the article’s recent history. The bloat did not happen by accident, and much of it, apparently, is the diligent work of one person. Today he reverted the article to his version of June 13, with the note “rv [revert] a lot of what is in essence vandalism”.

I have twice raised the question: “In what country was the battle of Waterloo fought?” Waterloo is now in Belgium, but that state was created fifteen years later. Well, I finally bothered to go looking for an answer to the question . .

Waterloo was fought nine days after the end of the Congress of Vienna, during which the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which included what we now call Belgium, was created.

It appears that I precipitated the exposure of a multiple hoaxer on Wikipedia.

In Line of succession to the British Throne I noticed that “The Earl of Amersham” had been inserted and, four minutes later, removed. Curious, I looked up Earl of Amersham and found it fishy on two points: the title was said to be created in 1964 (since 1960 only three non-royal Brits have been made peers other than life barons) and the genuine but extinct title Earl Roberts was attributed to Amersham’s son.

I tagged Earl of Amersham as a likely hoax, and within hours . . . well, you can read for yourself.

Why (you may ask) does an American anarchist know enough about British aristocracy to spot the hoax? I’ve been fascinated by heraldry since I found Moncreiffe & Pottinger’s Simple Heraldry Cheerfully Illustrated in my hi-skool’s library circa 1974; and one can’t study heraldry without picking up some knowledge of dynasties and such.

Heinlein’s Starship Troopers has a teacher say that all wars are caused by population pressure.

Did Europe have a lull after 1348?

Mom is in town, and yesterday we went to the Arts & Crafts exhibit at the de Young.

One of the wall placards says, “The problems caused by free trade and the Industrial Revolution had been recognized since the 1830s . . . .”

The part about free trade is easy to debunk: the first triumph of the British free trade movement was the repeal in 1846 (motivated in part by the Irish famine) of the protectionist Corn Laws.

The plight of the working classes before that is familiar from Oliver Twist (1837–9) and A Christmas Carol (1843), but since I can’t see how industrialization itself could cause it, I prefer to blame the Inclosure Acts which dispossessed small landholders and thus depressed wages (while the Corn Laws kept food prices high). The new industrialists naturally took advantage of cheap labor, but one cannot reduce wages by offering employment.

Once upon a time I linked to a website that will show you the relative frequency of a given surname in each of These United States. Apothecary’s Drawer cites one that does the same for counties(?) of Great Britain.

Sherwood is mainly found in Yorkshire.