I wish I could be excited about this. But I found part 1 so lackluster that I haven’t even bought the dvd yet, despite having spent decades fantasising about an Atlas film. (I’ve probably missed my chance to get the now-recalled dvd box with the blurb praising “Ayn Rand’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice.”) Rand is such an intensely cinematic writer, and the film over and over turns away from her cinematic choices (even in cases where constraints of time and budget would have permitted following them) in favour of something less interesting.

Still and all, I’m mildly pleased that the project will continue. I guess I prefer a completed mediocre Atlas adaptation to an uncompleted mediocre Atlas adaptation.

And if this is what I was writing at the height of my Randian period, I suppose it’s no surprise that I ended up drifting from apostolic purity.

The politerati are all aflutter because GOP party hack Reince Priebus compared our President Incarnate to Francesco Schettino, the cruise ship captain who’s been charged with manslaughter in connection with the recent shipwreck off the coast of Italy.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Priebus’s counterhack on the Democratic side, called it an “unbelievable comparison,” opining that “for the RNC chairman to compare the president of the United States to someone who has been charged with manslaughter shows a dramatic level of insensitivity to the families of those victims.”

I agree. After all, Obama is guilty of actual mass murder against the civilian population of Pakistan. To compare him to someone charged with the lesser offense of manslaughter is dramatically insensitive to the families of Obama’s victims.

Notebook D is probably not the ideal place to start with Warren; Equitable Commerce and True Civilization are better entry points. But Notebook D remains important and valuable; among its most interesting features is Warren’s account of his views on marriage and the family, and in particular his narrative of the way in which he applied his anarchistic principles to the education of his children. Read Part 1, from 1840, and Part 2, from 1860 and 1873.

perhaps it seems obvious that it is in the interests of poor people to have an extremely powerful and pervasive state; perhaps it seems obvious that it is in the interests of rich people to have a tiny powerless state. however, looking at the thing squarely, this is the opposite of obvious. it seems obvious because people keep repeating it or always conceive the terrain this way. but it’s just wackily false with regard to reality. who needs the state more: you know, robert rubin or rodney king?

Read the celý piroh. (CHT Charles.)

These two pieces are especially important as the first critiques ever published (AFAIK) of the idea that the legitimate functions of government could and should be turned over to market mechanisms.

As Rothbard notes, this is an odd claim coming from “one of the great founders of the conquest theory of the State.” Dunoyer’s suggestion that democratic elections provide all the competition that’s needed in the market for security also sits oddly with his earlier interest-group analysis of electoral politics.

A summary of this meeting was published in a subsequent issue of the Society’s organ, the Journal des Économistes. I have now translated and posted this summary, which bears the title “Question of the Limits of State Action and Individual Action
 Discussed at the Society of Political Economy.”