Recent reading: Julian Sanchez (and those whom he links, and so on) on the specter of conscription. Will Wilkinson‘s argument (from last summer) is especially readworthy.

Debra of Wolfesblog reports:

the federal government (you know, the guys who swear they’re doing ‘everything possible’ to protect the beef supply) does not allow such private testing for mad cow disease.

Perhaps that should read “to protect the beef suppliers“.

Micha Ghertner responds to the charge of libertarian utopianism:

Neither Barnett nor Friedman exhibits the kind of wishful thinking that Belle Waring lampoons in her much cited blog post. If anything, they argue for just the opposite. It requires a certain level of optimism for people like Richard Epstein to believe that with only the proper constitutional constraints, government abuse of power could be held in check. It is the pessimism of people like Barnett and Friedman, their unbridled skepticism, that leads them to reject the utopian belief that government can ever be adequately restrained.

On another hand, here’s Sasha Volokh:

We debate the form of the ideal end stage as part of the debate over whether to take any further steps in its direction. . . .

The main argument for utopianism is similar to the argument in favor of thought experiments and hypotheticals in philosophy . . . . These hypotheticals are totally unrealistic, but if you don’t have an answer for them, it’s unclear how coherent your answers are going to be in all the realistic cases. Thought experiments and hypotheticals are unrealistic because they strip away all the realistic elements which are, in fact, irrelevant to the case at hand.

Similarly, why worry about whether there’s going to be taxation in the ideal libertarian society? Because in our day-to-day life, we have to make judgments about whether moderate step A is better than moderate step B. . . . Some of the questions in the debate — is some eminent domain O.K.? — even happens to be important today . . . .

There’s also an anti-libertarian argument in favor of libertarian utopianism. Many people spout slogans of any stripe because slogans sound good. “Taxation is theft” sounds great, and so does “A man’s home is his castle.” Also, “property is theft” and “from each according to his ability . . .” sound good on the surface. A lot of people will break down and embrace some sort of moderate politics if you push them hard enough and make them commit to their ideal world. Most utopias are pretty ugly if you force people to not just wish for a pony but also confront the real-world consequences of their utopianism.

Finally, I recently found these remarks from Hayek:

Modern man prides himself that he has built [our] civilization as if in doing so he had carried out a plan which he had before formed in his mind. The fact is, of course, that if at any point of the past man had mapped out his future on the basis of the then-existing knowledge and then followed this plan, we would not be where we are. We would not only be much poorer, we would not only be less wise, but we would also be less gentle, less moral; in fact we would still have brutally to fight each other for our very lives. We owe the fact that not only our knowledge has grown, but also our morals have improved – and I think they have improved, and especially that the concern for our neighbor has increased – not to anybody planning for such a development, but to the fact that in an essentially free society certain trends have prevailed because they made for a peaceful, orderly, and progressive society.

(“The defense of our civilization against intellectual error” in What’s Past Is Prologue, tributes on the 70th birthday of Leonard Read, 1968)

What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”

(Individualism and Economic Order, 1949)

We locked you up in jail for 25 years and you were innocent all along? That’ll be £80,000 please (cited by Joshua Burton)

One might be reminded of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, in reverse: there, the man interrogated by mistake got a refund of the service charge.

Having got the initial howl of outrage off our chest, it may occur to us that the charge is against compensation received by some such victims; but wouldn’t it have been figured into the settlements?

In 1997 I decided that the symbolic pleasure of spitting in the wind was not worth putting my new home address on record. So, in defiance of any number of Hollywood talking heads who admonish us (with surprising accuracy) that it’s not important how we vote so long as we do our bit to legitimize the incumbents, you won’t see me wearing an “I Voted” sticker today.

Brad Edmonds: I Still Owe the Military Nothing

Truman bombed Japan because the Japanese demanded as their only condition of surrender that the emperor remain emperor. They continued to demand this after both bombings, so Truman just gave in. The bombings were for nothing. And with no retaliation for Truman or the US to fear, Truman still stopped, and gave the Japanese what they wanted. They didn’t even have rifles.

2025: The link is dead, but here is another. And that piece seems to be a sequel to this one.

Mike Lorrey reports:

. . . the Vermont town of Killington, VT is considering the possibility of seceding from Vermont . . .

Well that’s a relief. If the Michigan town of Killington, VT were to debate seceding from Arizona, that would be silly.