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

Medical Guesswork (Business Week)

The navel and the WTO antidote, by Sauvik Chakraverti

a slightly naughty chuckle

When Bigots Become Reformers: The Progressive Era’s shameful record on race (Reason)

Arnold Kling: Bleeding-Heart Libertarianism

an annoying conversation that every libertarian has sooner or later, in template form (Degrees of Freedom)

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.

When economists draw supply-demand charts, they put the independent variable (price) on the vertical axis and the dependent variable (quantity) on the horizontal, contrary to the usual practice in physics and pure mathematics. It’s surprisingly hard for me to adjust my thinking to that: causality ought to go the other way, dammit.

In the popular press, I think, the independent variable is horizontal if it is time, otherwise (e.g. in bar charts comparing several populations) usually vertical.

What other conventions are Out There?

Gunnerkrigg Court, a newish cartoon-strip set in a decidedly weird boarding school.

This is too good to leave buried in the comments: Loituma perform “Ievan polkka”

Sheldon Richman: Capitalism vs Capitalism

Something Positive: It’s entirely possible that you’ll appreciate this joke more than I can.

You don’t need me to tell you that MC Escher laid down some killer grooves. It’s high time someone made a movie of his last work: Snakes on a plane!

Will Wilkinson spanks someone or other at The New Yorker for worrying too much about income inequality and disregarding the psychological benefits of autonomy.

Everyone’s doing it, and now David Friedman is doing it.

What’s wild is that my bookmark chooser showed me his home page, with a prominent link to “My New Blog”, about eleven hours after his first post.