I’m quoted in Sheldon Richman’s excellent article “The Washington-Wall Street Kabuki Dance” in CounterPunch.
Oh, and I hereby coin (at least I’m not aware of anyone’s using this before) the phrase “left cop, right cop” for the phenomenon Sheldon is talking about.
Since returning from Prague, I’ve been wrestling with an email crisis (my university randomly deleted all my past emails; they keep saying they’ll have them back “any day now,” and in the meantime I’ve been scrambling to figure out what the hell I’m doing, given that, as it were, a large part of my brain is missing). That’s why I haven’t had time to blog about my Prague trip or Chomsky response yet.
Today, though, I’m off to APEE for our anti-capitalist fest. Später, gator.
I’m in the middle of a break at the ASC, finishing up some last-minute business at the office.
Tomorrow I’m off to anarchise in Prague, and will thus be largely (though probably not entirely) incommunibloggo until the 24th.
Whilst awaiting my return you can relieve the unbearable monotony by clicking on this pretty picture of Čertovka, a section of Prague on the Vltava’s west bank near the Karlův Bridge. I imagine the real thing looks a bit more wintry just now.
In other news, my promotion from Associate to full (or fool?) Professor came through this week!
On Friday the 12th I’m off to Prague for the PCPE (which means I’ll unfortunately miss most of the ASC here in Auburn, though I do plan to drop in on the first day, the 11th).
The PCPE doesn’t actually start until the 19th, but its coinciding with my spring break means I can spend a little extra time, so once I arrive in Prague I’ll be off by train to spend a (frustratingly brief) couple of days in Vienna, thus making this trip doubly Austrian.
I’ve been to Prague before, but this’ll be my first trip to Vienna. I’ve wanted to see Vienna for a long time; even before Mises, Hayek, and Wittgenstein entered my life, it was the city of Die Fledermaus and The Third Man (to pick two rather different visions of the city). When I first started the Austro-Athenian Empire, I’d been to neither Austria nor Athens; by next week I’ll have seen both!
After Vienna, back to marvelous Prague and the PCPE, where I’ll be giving a paper on Platonic Pitfalls for Austro-Libertarians – in which I sadden Rothbardians by venting my heresies on fractional-reserve banking and the productivity theory of wages, but then cheer them up with some anarchy at the end. (Readers of my blog have seen most of this stuff before.)
After that I’ll be staying over a couple of extra days for still more anarchy, i.e. to give a talk on the 23rd at the CEVRO Institute (a college run by a free-market think tank and headed up by libertarian activist Josef Šima, who’s also one of the organizers of the PCPE) on Why Classical Liberals Should Prefer Anarchy Over State Power. (No prepared text, but I’ll probably cover much of the same territory as in my ten objections talk.) I’ll return to the u.s. on the 24th.
Two upcoming Alabama philosophy events (one more upcoming than the other):
Hilton Pensacola Beach Gulf Front Hotel
Why, you may ask, is the Alabama Philosophical Society going to be meeting in Florida? I’ll give you a hint. (And the disparity is even worse for our undergrad majors, whom we like to take to these events.)