Byzantine Twilight
Mar 30[cross-posted at Liberty & Power] I’m currently in the middle of the third volume of John Julius Norwich’s Byzantine trilogy (a generally fascinating work, I should specify, since I’m about to be critical), wherein he naturally enough attempts to explain the Byzantine Empire’s gradual decline and eventual fall. His explanations invariably focus on the personal [...]
Islands of Chaos
Mar 25This Dilbert strip irresistibly reminded me of Kevin Carson’s series of posts on why Mises’ and Hayek’s arguments against the possibility of rational economic calculation under state-socialist central planning apply also to the size of the firm (see here, here, here, here, and here). The obvious corollary is that firms in a genuine free market [...]
Invade Mars, Kill Their Leaders, and Convert Them to Edison
Mar 25In his classic 1897 novel War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells took aim at complacent Victorian assumptions of human superiority over animals and European superiority over non-Europeans, portraying what it would be like for his British readers to find themselves on the wrong side of natural selection and/or military imperialism. In Wells’ portrayal, the [...]
Smoke and Mirrors
Mar 23According to Wikipedia: When Katee [Sackhoff, who plays “Starbuck”] decided to quit smoking just before shooting started for Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, the writers for the show decided to have her character also stop smoking. Both were in response to fan mail from young girls who said they wanted to be just like Starbuck [...]
Anarchy Among the Austrians
Mar 23As aforementioned, I spent last weekend at the Austrian Scholars Conference. Here’s a list of some of the presentations most likely to be of interest to readers of this blog: Irish philosopher Gerard Casey argued that recent historical research has largely confirmed Joseph Peden’s theses (see here and here) concerning the stateless or near-stateless character [...]
XXXploitation!!!
Mar 22Matt MacKenzie’s Molinari Society paper Exploitation: A Dialectical Anarchist Perspective is now online. A teaser: [S]hould libertarians be interested in exploitation? It seems to me that, as a matter of fact, many contemporary libertarians are either relatively uninterested in or suspicious of the concept of exploitation …. [I]t often involves assumptions about politics and economics [...]
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