The ‘true story’ of how Dr. King kept Uhura on Star Trek

(I added the exclamation point because I’m not a Trekkie, although I do remember watching the show when it came on. They are among the memories I have of my father, who watched it with me.)

HT: Anastasia Uglova

“Although world population has increased by about 80% over this time (World Bank 2009), the number of people below the $1 a day poverty line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006. In the past 36 years, there has never been a moment with more than 1 billion people in poverty, and barring a catastrophe, there will never be such a moment in the future history of the world.”

From “Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income” by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Copyright Voxeu.org; © voxEU.org)

HT: Bruce Barlett

The Wilson Quarterly has an excellent short article, “Rediscovering Central Asia,” by S. Frederick Starr, that offers an overview of contributions to human culture that emerged from Central Asia and some speculation on the causes of its decline. A prime culprit, the intellectual influence of Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad ­al-­Ghazali, author of The Incoherence of the Philosophers. (Al Ghazali’s book was rebutted by Abū ‘l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Rushd, usully known just as “ibn Rushd” or as “Averroes,” in his The Incoherence of the Incoherence, but it seems that, however fine ibn Rushd’s philosophical responses were, his view lost out, with terrible consequences for Islamic civilization.)

The Washington Post put it well: “Russia’s Yegor Gaidar championed freedom

I heard Deirdre McCloskey make this argument recently in Berlin, where I attended two conferences on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is going to be a very interesting book: “Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Industrial Revolution“

A surprisingly interesting critique of the “Pledge of Allegiance” (to a flag…ugh!) from Michael Lind: “The Pledge of Allegiance is un-American: Shouldn’t the government pledge allegiance to the people rather than the other way around?”

I’m looking forward to the new Cambridge University Press book on Poverty and Morality (William A. Galston and Peter Hoffenberg eds., Cambridge University Press, 2010), in which I have a rather long essay on classical liberalism and poverty. All the jots and tittles have been added, graphs and charts sent, etc., etc. I consider the tradition of classical liberal thinking and work in economic and institutional history, ethical philosophy, intellectual history, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. It was enormously fun to write. (And I’m not only looking forward to seeing my own name in print, as enjoyable as that may be, but to reading the other contributions, from other ethical perspectives.)

It should be available for pre-ordering soon. (Not in time for Isaac Newton’s upcoming 367th birthday, unfortunately, but for the 368th, for sure!)

I’ve been extremely busy lately (meaning work until 4 am frequently, plus travel) and have been behind on some writing projects, but I am really, really pleased that I brought along on my trip to China James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. It’s a remarkably interesting treatment (I’m only a bit more than 100 pages into it at present, so I’ve got more stimulating reading ahead of me) of the nature of “ungoverned” regions of the world, with a focus on various hill peoples of Asia. To put it in a nutshell, he argues that the traditional view of such ungoverned people is that they are holdovers from previous civilizations, or representatives of how people lived before states, etc., etc. Scott looks at them in a very different way: they live in ways that have enabled them to elude capture or domination by the state, and those ways of life (including agriculture, settlement patterns, kinship systems, religion, etc.) have been deeply influenced by the proximity of predatory states. They have, in effect, evolved in ways that elude being ruled by states. When you think about it for a few minutes, it certainly seems a more fruitful way of understanding such peoples and their ways of life than the dominant mode. And it should tell us something, as well, about the likely success of the Pakistani government in extending its writ throughout the Northwest Frontier Province or of the Afghan government extending its writ from border to border of the territory of Afghanistan. (That said, Scott’s thesis should not be confused with fantasies or romantic notions about how the most wonderful thing imaginable is to live without a state; some — not all — forms of statelessness, such as those that have emerged among groups that have avoided being captured by states, are remarkably brutal and savage, and there are some stateless populations [think contemporary southern Somalia] who are fare worse off by most criteria, including freedom, than people who live under relatively limited government.)

Freedom Dinner 2009 – Video from Atlas Global Initiative on Vimeo.

My colleague Austin Petersen (with some input from me) did a lot of work to produce this. (Note the flag with the bananas on it. Bananas were a symbol of freedom in the East Bloc, where they were almost impossible to obtain. In fact, westerners would sometimes try to throw bananas over such walls, as gifts to the imprisoned populations.)

Still reads well: “Why Socialism Collapsed in Eastern Europe”

(I gave it as a lecture at a Cato University summer seminar on political economy in California during the summer of 1990, after having spent a good bit of 1989 and 1990 in Central and Eastern Europe.)

An excellent piece on how a tyranny crumbled: “Filming a Revolution”

Conny Rakow on her memories of the opening of the Wall.

It’s in German, but this short film the message of this little film should be clear to all.

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:

Tom Palmer – “Anarchism, Limited Government & Liberalism: A Modest Case for Sacking the State” from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.

It was a rather informal chat that covered a number of topics in history, sociology, political science, economics, and moral theory. I haven’t had a chance to watch through it, but I had nightmares afterwards that I had misspoken on an important matter, that is, on the absolute incomes of the lowest decile of income in the least economically free and the lowest deciles in the most most economically free. I said, I think, that the latter was something like $17,000, when it should have been more like $7,000 for the most free. That’s a big difference! (Still the lower number is a huge multiple of the incomes of the lowest decile in the least free, which was my point, but misspeaking like that is an embarrassment; I have asked the organizers to check it and post the correction. I will try to check it myself, now that I have some fast internet access.) The stats for the latest report (http://www.freetheworld.com/2009/reports/world/EFW2009_ch1.pdf ) show the percentage of total national income ranges from 2.4 to 2.6 (that is, not much difference) between the least and the most economically free, whereas the average incomes for the lowest decile in the least free countries is $896 and for the most free it’s $9,105.

More at Ben Lewis TV

My friends David Beito and Linda Royster Beito have published an important new book, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (University of Illinois Press, 2009).

It was just reviewed in the Wall Street Journal: “Demanding Rights, Courting Controversy
A flamboyant civil-rights leader —doctor, orator, activist—finally gets his due,” by Mark Bauerlein. After noting that Howard has received much too little attention in the histories of the civil rights movement (“A flamboyant Second Amendment, ­anti-communist capitalist doesn’t please journalists and historians searching for civil-rights martyrs.”), Bauerlein notes,

“Black Maverick” … makes room for exactly such a figure, and rightly so. That Howard made an important contribution is unquestionable. Three months after the Till murder, he lectured in a ­Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., the guest of ­26-year-old pastor Martin Luther King. He spoke of shootings, the FBI and a ­freedom march on ­Washington, D.C. One woman in the audience remembered years later Howard’s vivid ­description of the Till killing. Her name was Rosa Parks, and four days after Howard spoke she answered a Montgomery bus driver, “No.”

Jason Talley interviewed me recently for his MotorHomeDiaries.com project. It was fun! (I was wearing a bit of Tracht that day.)

Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice, by yours truly…at a whopping 34% discount off of the cover price.

The official release date is June 23.

(Note: the Amazon description says “300 pages,” but it ended up at 518. But fear not…that’s for 33 separate essays, plus the introduction.)

NOTE: It was brought to my attention that Laissez Faire Books will also carry this title. I am a big fan and was remiss in not promoting their good work. If you’re in the market for books, you really ought to visit their site.

The most despised of the despised in a thoroughly evil regime. Slaves, treated as objects, overlooked because they were not considered human, who provided military intelligence that led to the overthrow of their masters.

The print story on CNN: “Slave in Jefferson Davis’ home gave Union key secrets“

Robert Higgs: “Instead of stimulus, do nothing – seriously”

(A good example of the wisdom of the Chinese idea of “Wu Wei” — “active inactivity,” aka laissez faire).