My long-time friend Tibor Machan with “Thoughts on Objectivism and Ayn Rand” from London.
laconf09, Tibor Machan: “Thoughts on Objectivism and Ayn Rand” from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.
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(I hope you like the small video on DoiMoi.org of my friend Sascha Tamm, which I made with my flip camera in the Steinbräu brewery and pub in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.)
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My talk to the Oxford University Libertarian Society on “Anarchism, Limited Government, and Liberalism: A Modest Case for Sacking the State”:
Tom Palmer – “Anarchism, Limited Government & Liberalism: A Modest Case for Sacking the State” from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.
(I had not had a chance to listen to it before, but I think it stands up well. I can now see — or hear — from my gravelly voice how sick I was at the time. I am now recovering from a nasty upper respiratory tract infection I got on the road; maybe it was the 35-hour travel time I endured from Central Asia to Santa Barbara, followed by about 30 hours in that city, and then another 25 or so hours to get to Cairo, where I got a nasty case of food poisoning before heading to London and then Oxford.)
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Mirsulzhan Namazaliev on the proposal to have URLs in alphabets other than Latin: “Attack of the alphabets: will Cyber-Cyrillic threaten global online unity?“
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Hat tip: Jude
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I have been working with colleagues on some videos and other work on the Fall of the Berlin Wall (to be celebrated November 9 at the Atlas Freedom Dinner), and I remembered I had some old photos, which I rummaged around and found and then scanned. I was in West and East Berlin a few times (and was just in both recently, with a conference on Adam Smith’s moral theory on the east side of where Die Antifaschistische Schutzmauer once stood). So here are a few old shots from my trips in the 1980s:
(You can click them for more legible versions. In order: me [above] expressing my view of communism — from the western side; one of my transit visas from a train trip from Bavaria to West Berlin across the DDR; cross commemorating the murder of Heinz Sokolowski, 48 year old East Berliner killed November 11, 1965, after 7 years of imprisonment, shot when fleeing; me in the early 1980s before the Brandenburger Tor; a shot of a “normal” section of the wall near the Brandenburger Tor; my lunch bill from the Palast der Republik, on Marx-Engels Platz — I had a bottle of something and a trout)
And two shots I just found in another box: one from the winter of 1989 in Central/Eastern Europe (not sure where, but I had bought the coat, which I still have, in Vienna) and one from Prague during the Revolution:
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I did not know her as well as some of my colleagues, but on the few occasions that our paths did cross, I was impressed by her mixture of strength of character and elegance. My colleague Ian Vasquez has a note on the death of Nien Cheng.
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I have been busy lately with a lot of projects (I’m involved in launching new libertarian ventures in Vietnamese, Chinese, and Urdu, for example, as well as raising funds and working on other projects), so I have neglected posting some wonderful pics from projects my colleagues have been organizing. Here’s a nice shot from the conclusion of the Minbaralhurriyya.org Summer School (on the theme “The Arab World: New Solutions to Old Problems”), held in Arabic in Harissa, Lebanon in September. It was one of fourteen summer schools in thirteen countries we organized this year.
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The Cato book forum on the two fascinating new Ayn Rand biographies will be on Book TV on Sunday, November 8.
If you’re in Oregon (or just the Northwest), check out the Freedom Seminar in Portland, November 14, with Larry Reed and Sheldon Richman.
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For libertarians who read Hindi, that is! Available at Azadi.me. (And if you’ve ever wanted to read about Ayn Rand in Hindi, here you are.)
A project of the Centre for Civil Society and the Atlas Global Initiative!
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Among the many books I read during my recent travels, I strongly recommend Johan Norberg’s truly excellent diagnosis of (and prescriptions for) the financial crisis: Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis. It’s far better than the other works I’ve read, not only because Norberg is a smart guy, a meticulous researcher, and a good writer, but because it’s an exercise in economic analysis and financial journalism, with no religion thrown in. (As an example of the latter, the book Meltdown by Thomas Woods insists, contrary to the evidence, that the artificially induced boom resulted in a lengthening of the capital structure through overinvestment in too many “long-term projects.” [p. 68] In fact, what we saw was a bubble in housing, which is not a “long-term project” that will “bear fruit only in the distant future,” but a speculative investment in a durable consumer good, with an additional twist: the low refinancing rates and the inducements to refinance led many to treat their homes as ATM machines and withdraw cash to finance, not “long-term projects,” but consumption. But Mises and Hayek explained a previous boom-and-bust cycle in terms of a lengthening of the capital structure, so we must believe — we must, a priori! — that all boom-and-bust cycles must — they must! — follow the same process. That’s religion, not analysis. Woods embeds some information on the deliberately induced housing bubble and the policies of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc. in a populistic treatment of the crisis; setting aside the religion, it’s ok, but it does not compare well with the much more rigorous and financially sophisticated treatment offered by Norberg.)
Norberg’s book is outstanding. I encourage people to buy it, read it, and recommend it. (I also recommend the writings of John Cochrane of the University of Chicago; this interview of Cochrane by Russell Roberts is a good place to start.)
Lastly….a quick plug for Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice, which contains some essays (e.g., “The Role of Institutions and Law in Economic Development,” “Twenty Myths About Markets,” “Infrastructure: Public or Private”) that may help to make sense of complex economic and political phenomena. At least, John Stossel (then of ABC News) thought so:
“Tom Palmer has the ability to make the complex understandable and to go to the heart of the most difficult problems. He is a valuable resource for journalists and others in search of historical and economic scholarship and philosophical insight, especially about the impact of government intervention and the reasons for respecting the freedom and responsibility of individuals.”
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