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.

I just stumbled upon Gary Johnson’s website, via his Facebook page. The updates are pretty good.

If you’re a student and would like to understand better just what is happening today, as government expands in all directions, and what you can do about it, apply for a Bastiat Scholarship to attend Cato University 2010.

Now I spent a lot of time reading Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and many scholastic thinkers, and I’ve learned a lot from them, but it’s remarkable to hear someone quote from them as if there were no, um, advances in knowledge about psychology, sexuality, or other matters over the past 800 years or so. (“The only intelligible end of the reproductive organ is reproduction, and insofar as the organ is utilized toward that end, it is a rational human act, a free act, an act of the free will, the rational appetite. Insofar as the sexual organ is utilized for instrumental reasons, it’s not an intelligible act, but rather a purely animalistic act.” Um, right. The part on the extraction of the intelligible species would have gotten an “A” in a history of philosophy class, or at least a “B,” but the study of perception and thought has come a long way since St. Thomas’s wonderful “On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Averroists.”)

For standing up against bigotry: “SFL Causes CPAC Controversy” and “SFL Controversy Video”

ISFLC Introduction Video from Students For Liberty on Vimeo.

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.

Thomas Walls has created a special page on Mercy Corps for friends of liberty to donate to help the people of Haiti: Van Libète | Vent de Liberté. I’m an enthusiastic donor. Thank you, Thomas!

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

The Central Asian Free Market Institute, which was founded in April of 2009, has released its 2009 Accomplishments, in Russian and in English. Financial support is much appreciated! (They are working hard to spread the ideas and policies of liberty in Central Asia, and recently helped to estalish an affiliate, the Tajik Free Market Center, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. I am hoping to work with them and the recently-established [December 10, 2009] Afganistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization to organize jointly libertarian schools in Tajik and Dari next year.)

I just remembered, after Tyler Cowen’s very generous comments on my book Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice that I had criticized his views in this podcast: ““The Nature of Liberty: A Response to Tyler Cowen,” Cato Institute Podcast, March 22, 2007

NOTE: The podcast in which Tyler made his remarks is here, and the essay in Cato Unbound is here.

P.S. I got several (three) abusive emails (with the usual obsessive sexual references: you can find the type on the Mises.org blogs) from the followers of a certain cult expressing faux surprise and mockery because I would disagree on something with a person who said nice things about my book. It’s a sign of the dogmatic and religious mentality that disagreement is seen as a form of personal animosity. In my view, reasoned disagreement can be one of the fruits of friendship.

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’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.)

I recommend visiting a new project, Commerce 21, which offers European liberals more opportunities and resources to advance freedom.

Commerce21 (http://www.commerce21.org) is a new online forum dedicated to those who share the principles of individual liberty, free market and the rule of law. Its aim is to give an online space for dialogue where young libertarians from Europe at large will be able to discuss, socialize, learn and exchange ideas and best practices to advocate liberty.

Commerce21 is a free and integrated platform that provides a lot of forum categories (Events, Action, Politics & Society, International, Science & Technology, Economics & History, Business, Books, Arts and Culture, Chit Chat Café, Arts in Liberty) where you can exchange ideas and start thinking about actions to promote them.

Commerce21 was created on November 9, 2009 by Liberaux.org, an independent and non-partisan organization which has been running a forum in French for libertarians since 2002.

It’s definitely worth a visit.

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.

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.)

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:

Thanks to a lot of hard work from friends in Russia…..Free to Choose.

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.

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.

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!