Tweet [1]
Traditions, customs, and noncoercive “authorities” to which people give recognition and respect and deference only can sustainably emerge and intergenerationally survive when they arise out of the free actions and chosen forms of personal and societal interactive conduct of the human actors themselves. It is what Adam Smith called “the system of natural liberty” with its evolved institutions of free exchange that generates the workings of the market’s “invisible hand” of mutual gains from trade in all their varied forms inside and outside of the marketplace.
David Mikics decries the illiberal mentality, and intellectual and ethical disintegration, of the New York Times [3]. (HT Tom Palmer) A slice:
Stalin’s most celebrated victims were themselves used to humiliation and self-abasement. As Robert Conquest writes in his indispensable book The Great Terror, “Their surrender was not a single and exceptional act in their careers, but the culmination of a whole series of submissions to the Party that they knew to be ‘objectively’ false.” Conquest tells of a former member of the Soviet Supreme Court who was informed by an interrogator, “Well, the Party demands that you, as a Bolshevik, confess that you are an English spy.” The man responded: “If the Party demands it, I confess.”
These days we repeatedly confess our racism and misogyny, suppressing any sense that we are perhaps not as sinful as we are told. Maybe we haven’t harassed, demeaned, or insulted anyone—but the very impulse to defend ourselves indicates our guilt. After all, we are all part of “the system,” and only a thoroughgoing racist would dispute the idea that the system is guilty.
Julian Simon would applaud this excellent essay by Joakim Book [4].
Jeffrey Tucker reminds us of the unsavory, racist origins of minimum-wage legislation [5].
Ethan Yang is justly impressed with Richard Epstein’s great 1995 book, Simple Rules for a Complex World [7]. (This book is my favorite of all of Epstein’s works.)
Here’s an important truth shared by Arnold Kling [8]:
Government money has played a role in the decline of quality in academia. Programs like the GI bill and student loan programs have swelled the ranks of college students. Programs like the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities have dumped huge amounts of money into higher education. The net effect has been harmful.
Today is the 80th anniversary [10] of Duke Ellington’s recording of the great Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train [11].”