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.)

Mirsulzhan Namazaliev on the proposal to have URLs in alphabets other than Latin: “Attack of the alphabets: will Cyber-Cyrillic threaten global online unity?“

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.

Nobel Peace Prize winner President Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan and has made no additional moves, beyond what the Bush administration had planned, for any withdrawal from Iraq. He has done nothing to move the world, much less the US, toward peace. It seems he got the “I’m not a Republican” award. This has got to be the greatest cheapening of an international award since, um, Henry Kissinger got it for “peace in the Vietnam.”

Note the CNN comment:

Unlike his predecessors, Obama was selected not for substantive accomplishments, but for his “vision” and inspiring “hope” at the beginning of his presidency.

BBC: “Russian tower plans cause alarm”

Unesco has warned the building of the skyscraper, which would tower over the city’s Neva river and surrounding low-level buildings, could mean St Petersburg is added to the agency’s list of endangered world heritage sites.
“We’re hoping the (federal) decision to build it won’t be taken,” said Grigory Ordzhonikidze, the secretary-general of Unesco’s Russian commission.

It may be a while elephant, but it’s pretty clear that threatening to add St Petersburg “the agency’s list of endangered world heritage sites” will not, in the Russian climate, help with any plans for saving the beauty of old St Petersburg. This is certainly not a matter for the UN. (That said, it’s almost certainly going to be a temple to the new Russian state socialism, as it will house Gazprom.)

(Note: Not to say I agree with everything in the video, but it sure is a clever idea. I just wish a version had been done under the Bush administration some time ago.)

Guominliyi.org

The Financial Times: “US tyre duties spark clash”

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Millions of people around the world are alive because of the achievements of Norman Borlaug. Few of them will ever hear his name, even though many, many more will hear of George Bush and Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin and all the other expropriators with puffed-up egos who rule us, and who invariably claim for themselves all the credit for the work that was actually done by scientists, farmers, truck drivers, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, construction workers, and the other varied occupations of great societies. (Of course, by simply limiting their power — no easy task that! — and providing the rule of law, they help to make it possible for people to cooperate, and for the people to produce wealth. So they do have a role, but no more than clearing away obstacles created by their predecessors and creating frameworks for peaceful cooperation.)

The Daily Telegraph: Norman Borlaug

Don Boudreaux on Borlaug at Cafe Hayek: “Dark Green Day“

Washington Post: “Gunning for the District: For some gun advocates, securing the right to keep and bear arms at home wasn’t enough”

IF TOM PALMER and his fellow plaintiffs have their way, they’ll soon be carrying loaded handguns through the streets of the nation’s capital.

Mr. Palmer, three other individuals and the Second Amendment Foundation sued the District last week, arguing that city laws that “ban registration of handguns to be carried for self-defense by law-abiding citizens” are unconstitutional. Mr. Palmer, a resident of the District, is asking Judge Henry Kennedy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to strike down the prohibition. The lawsuit also asks Judge Kennedy to nullify laws that prohibit non-District residents from registering their weapons and obtaining handgun carry permits. The plaintiffs are represented by the same lawyer who argued successfully last year before the Supreme Court against District laws that essentially prevented residents from keeping functional firearms at home for self-defense. They now argue that the right to keep and carry firearms for self-defense extends beyond the home and that licensed owners can be prohibited only from carrying handguns into “sensitive places” such as schools or government buildings.

I got in to France yesterday, after a pretty awful flight (I had a two-year old terrorist next to me, who screamed and threw things for the entire flight to Paris). After a meeting and dinner with colleagues from India, Ghana, Morocco, and France, I managed to get a bit of sleep. I’ll be at the European Resource Bank here in Marseille, then go to Aix-en-Provence after that for the Summer University of the New Economics (the theme this year is “Markets and Morality”) and a Liberty Fund conference on “Universal Values and Cultural Pluralism,” with participants from China, Ghana, France, Lebanon, Morocco, Russia, Iraqi Kurdistan, the US, the UK, Brazil, Kyrgyzstan, India, Jordan, Malaysia, and Turkey.

It’s wonderfully sunny and hot here today, as it is most days. (You can just about see my hotel from the photo above; it’s very cheap and very basic, but hey, it’s Provence!)

CNN: “U.S. report: Chavez moving to silence media critics”

Chavez’s government defended the draft of the bill, as well as the recent closure of the broadcasters, as being within the law.

The radio stations that were ordered off the air were all violating the law, either by operating with expired broadcasting concessions, failure to renew such licenses or illegally holding a concession, the Venezuelan government’s fact sheet said.

According to the document, “neither the regularization of the situation of radio and television (stations) that have been operating outside the law in Venezuela, nor the development of a law to clearly regulate subsequent imposition of liabilities in the case of serious media abuses are measures that limit freedom of speech in Venezuela.”

The Students and Young Professionals African Liberty Academy for 2009 is over. I wish I had been there this year, but it looks like my good friends did a great job. (I will see two of them at a Liberty Fund conference in France this month.

I’ve been reading again József Eötvös’s simply brilliant two volume work The Dominant Ideas of the Nineteenth Century and Their Impact on the State (two boring flights from Buffalo, New York to DC today helped). I’ll write up something on his ideas later, but for now, I was amazed at how prescient he was about the future of Europe. (If you buy it, don’t forget to get the second volume, on “Remedies.”) I wish his other books were also available. I read Die Nationalitätenfrage some years ago (I translated some important passages in my book Realizing Freedom) and wish it would be made available in an English edition…or even put back into print in German. (I read a photocopy I made from an original from 1865.)

I’m a plaintiff in a new lawsuit filed in the District of Columbia by Alan Gura, the really, really smart lawyer who argued the case that won our right to own firearms and vindicated the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Here’s the AP Story: “Gun owners sue DC for right to carry weapons“

Yesterday’s Cato University seminars were great, and today looks like it’s off to a good start, as well. Tibor Machan is currently lecturing on the role of individual rights as bulwarks against tyranny and domination. (His book Individuals and their Rights is quite good on such matters.)

I’m on a train at the moment (how the world has changed; I can publish my thoughts while traveling on a train) and finishing up Gianfranco Poggi’s The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction in preparation for one of my lectures later this week at the Cato University. It’s a very interesting and enlightening book, marred only occasionally by too many unthinking concessions to Marxism (regarding class antagonisms, for example), although he rejects the overall Marxist perspective. I’ve also enjoyed reviewing my old dog-eared copy of Alexander Rüstow’s Freedom and Domination: A Historical Critique of Culture, John Kautsky’s The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, and other works. One of my goals for the lecture is to combine such sociological/historical investigations with sound economic analysis, as a preface to Robert Higg’s lecture on the fundamentals of public choice economics.

There will be more than 200 participants in this year’s Cato University, thanks to the hard work of my colleagues at the Cato Institute and, I suspect, to the enormous relevance of this year’s topic: “Economic Crisis, War, and the Rise of the State.”

The team at CheragheAzadi.org (the Persian-language Lamp of Liberty) is pushing out a steady stream of articles, commentaries and books on liberty for readers of Persian, including increasing numbers in Iran. Libertarianism: A Primer, by my colleague David Boaz, is now available in Iran and other countries where Persian is spoken, as well as Common Sense Economics, by James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and Dwight Lee, the essays of Frédéric Bastiat, On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, and other books. In addition, native speakers/writers of Persian are contributing hard-hitting and insightful articles on freedom, focusing on current events in Iran and the region, which are then featured on Cheragheazadi.org and on such influential and widely read sites as Gooya. It’s a part of the work of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity.

I just got my own copy of James Tooley’s The Beautiful Tree. I’ve known James (and his work) for a long time and I’m a great fan, so I’m really looking forward to reading it. What James Tooley and the teams he leads are doing is nothing short of inspiring and one of the most impressive acts of true philanthropy being undertaken today. Their efforts are neatly synopsized here.

If you oppose war, poverty, predatory class rule, and nationalistic chauvinism and support peace, prosperity, equality before the law, and harmonious relations among nations, you should become a fan of free trade by joining the Facebook Fan Page of the FreedomToTrade.org campaign.