In Beijing with Li Ziyang, author of The Power of the Market

My colleague Jude Blanchette and I had a very fruitful meeting with some remarkable Japanese libertarians this evening. More meetings tomorrow!

I also discovered earlier today an interesting review from July 11 of this year of Realizing Freedom. I had the pleasure of being able to discuss the ideasa with the author of the review this evening; he had read my book in an Amazon Kindle edition….on his iPhone; now that is dedicated.

The full text, translated from French into Arabic, of “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen” is now available online: “ما يرى وما لا يرى”

The French text is available here (in full facsimile) and here (as html), and the English here.

Congratulations to my colleagues at Minbaralhurriyya.org (The Forum of Liberty), a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Bastiat is coming out in a lot of other languages, as well, as part of our “Bastiat Legacy” project: AtlasNetwork.org/BastiatLegacy, which includes short videos on themes dear to Bastiat (also translated into numerous languages), essay contest, seminars, summer schools, and more.

My interview on Fox Business while here in Berlin. (It’s a part of a whole program on Milton Friedman’s legacy.)

The conference hall of the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Kabul for the presentation of the Dari edition of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity
Presentation by me on the foundations of prosperity and peaceful cooperation
Presentation by Prof Nasrullah Stanikzai on the relations between law and economics

I’m in Kabul and just saw that my review in Reason of The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott is now online. It’s quite relevant to the policies that the Bobama administration is trying to promote here. (It turns out that mountain people often resent outsiders telling them what to do. Go figure.) Here’s the review.

Lots of meetings lined up in several cities in Afghanistan. More later, after they’re over and I’m on my way to a neighboring country.

Jeffrey A. Miron presented his book Libertarianism, from A to Z at a forum at the Cato Institute, and I presented the comments, including a little history of the term “libertarian” and my criticisms of Jeff’s appeal to “consequential libertarianism.”

The full video of the book forum is available here.

Campus Progress on “Behind the New Student Libertarian Movement”

I’m very pleased to be associated with the motivated and serious (yet fun loving!) young folks at Students for Liberty. (By the way, they’re sponsoring a great book with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation on The Economics of Freedom: What Your Professors Won’t Tell You, which includes an essay contest with….real money prizes.

From my presentation on Saturday at McGill University in Montréal on the history of liberty. (Sponsored by the outstanding Institute for Liberal Studies.)

I finished and submitted my review of James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and now I’m working on my response to an essay by David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan on “Conceptions of Freedom,” which is drawn from their quite provocative new book A Brief History of Liberty and will be run this week in Cato Unbound. Then I will return to reviewing the copy-editing for my article on “Poverty and Morality” for the volume Poverty and Morality: Religious and Secular Perspectives, ed. by William A. Galston and Peter Hoffenberg (set for release September 30, 2010, by Cambridge University Press). Assuming I am not laid low by a cold (horrible sore throat now), I’m off to Istanbul, Ankara, and Sofia on Wednesday.

The Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization with which I work has just published their first book, a Dari edition of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I found Fooled by Randomness interesting and provocative (even when scoring points against people I know) and a nice followup to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success.

Rethinking the Great Depression: A New View of Its Causes and Consequences, by Gene Smiley

Smiley’s book I found very helpful, especially concerning the “depression within the depression.”

Among the books I’m enjoying now is Robert Gellately’s Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, which I bought in the Warsaw Airport during a layover between St. Petersburg and Munich.

Gellately helps to make clear the central role of Lenin in the development of the totalitarian terror-state and undoes the myth of “the Good Lenin.”

(I’ve just finished a review of James C. Scott’s remarkable book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. I’ll post a notice when it’s published.)

A nicely done video on the enduring legacy of Ayn Rand. I’m not a follower (I’m more eclectic in my views), but I find much to admire in her work, including the insight regarding the morality of socialism: it’s not the case that people are not good enough for socialism; socialism is not good enough for people. It’s rather promising that her works continue to sell so briskly and that “Ayn Rand Is In.” (I try to expand on some of her insights in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice, especially in the chapters on moral philosophy. The long chapter on Rawls moral theory deals with the moral implications of a right to withdraw, a right that is at the core of Atlas Shrugged. It was a major part of my dissertation at Oxford on “A Cosmopolitan Theory of Justice.”)

The FAZ, one of the most influential newspapers in Europe, reviewed my book Realizing Freedom and Detmar Doering’s very good Traktat über die Freiheit. The reviewer, Professor Michael Zöller, is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bayreuth. In the review, which is favorable to both books, he refers to my essay “Twenty Myths About Markets” (in Realizing Freedom) as a “Vademecum [Handbook] for dragon slayers.” He cites approvingly both my and Doering’s attempts to provide a coherent account of liberty that does not load it down with qualifiers; Doering notes that many contemporary formulations of freedom suggest that freedom of movement requires, for its proper enjoyment, not merely the absence of human hindrances to movement, but a Ferrari, and my essay “Freedom Properly Understood” in Realizing Freedom takes aim at such views, including Amartya Sen’s, which seeks to redefine freedom as “the expansion of the ‘capabilities’ of persons to lead the kind of lives they value – and have reason to value,” which I point out requires us to justify our choices to others, rather than simply having the right to make them. Zöller writes,

“In his other essays, Palmer bursts one intellectual balloon after another, be it the common opposition between the state as oriented to the common good vs. society as the expression of self-interest, or the theory of justice of John Rawls, the most influential attempt to expand the definition of freedom. Palmer picks to pieces the so-called Difference Principle, which Rawls used in putting both individual freedom and the equal distribution of opportunities and goods in one and the same social contract.”

I update and comment on matters on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/RealizingFreedom

I have just received the PDF of the Dari (the Persian spoken in Afghanistan) version of the book Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by the outstanding economic educators James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee. The new think tank, the Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization, will also publish in Dari Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law and “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” David Boaz’s Libertarianism: A Primer, and other books. Translations into Pashto are underway. I was in Afghanistan in June and in December and I am very, very happy to be associated with such outstanding libertarians.

I’m also pleased to say that just north of Afghanistan, the Tajikistan Free Market Centre has been started, is honing its business plan, and is preparing to unveil their website and their first projects. (That thanks to the great work of the Central Asian Free Market Institute, headquartered in Bishkek, which provided assistance to their Tajik neighbors after the Fall Free Market School in Issyk Kul. I lectured at the school, and gave a series of lectures in Tajikistan, in Dushanbe and Khudjand, in February of last year.)

Anyone who’d like to provide financial support for these brave people is welcome to contact me.

NOTE: If you click on the link for the Central Asian Free Market Institute, you can get their very impressive 2009 report, in either English or Russian. Please note that the group was formally started in April of last year and had a really brilliant first (partial) year. I’ve gotten several donations for CAFMI already today, so if you’re interested, you won’t be alone. (I’ll bundle them and send them, with no “fee” or “charge” for wiring the money. A dollar donated to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation for CAFMI will be a dollar in their account or spent on projects, equipment, and the like that they designate.) This is a very impressive group of young libertarians and they’re doing a lot to promote freedom in a region that has known very little of it.

I’ve finished a careful reading of James C. Scott’s really fascinating, deeply insightful (and occasionally oddly not-very-insightful) book The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. I’ll be reviewing it shortly.

I also read a few other books lately, including Malcolm Gladwell’s really fun Outliers: The Story of Success. His writing is so elegant and enjoyable that you have to catch yourself and not be swept away into his conclusions just because of the sheer pleasure of the reading. (I was not convinced of several of his points, notably the discussion of the relationship between intelligence, achievement, and “threshold effects,” especially on pp. 77-90. He might be right, but I was not convinced. The other material on the role of sheer luck in having access to opportunities, however, was quite persuasive.) Another very pleasurable book on luck that I’ve been reading in little bits of down-time standing in lines and the like (but haven’t finished yet) is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.*

Besides some other works I’m working through, I’m hoping to get through Ian Carter’s A Measure of Freedom, which should be helpful for a project on the development of metrics of liberty.

*I admit that I bought the Gladwell and Taleb books from a street cart in Shanghai. I rather suspect that they are pirated editions, which I find dodgy, so I considered (for a few seconds) sending small payments to the authors and to their publishers, but decided instead that I’d buy clearly non-pirated editions in the US.

Peter Klein, “On the Term ‘Religion’“

Two former officials in the government of Vicente Fox have come out in favor of ending the drug war, which is causing enormous harm in Mexico.

Their book, El Narco: La Guerra Fallida (“Narco: The Failed War”) was reviewed January 1 in the Los Angeles Times, “Book takes Mexico drug war to task.”

I met Castenada in Mexico in 2008 at a Cato Institute event, where he made a brilliant case against the current policies. He’s a very impressive thinker.

(Note: I also had discussions in Afghanistan about the disastrous impact of US and European drug policies on that country. The US government is causing tremendous harm worldwide through its drug policies. It’s time to end them. Now.)

I’m expecting the sales of Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice in la Francophonie to shoot up! It was reviewed at Contrepoints (in French). Alex Korbel posted a shorter, English version on the book’s Amazon page.

The Chinese edition of the book should be out early this year.

David Boaz has an interesting post at Cato@Liberty: “Ayn Rand Is In“