Science Daily recently reported on a study that finds “Preserving just 4 percent of the ocean could protect crucial habitat for the vast majority of marine mammal species, from sea otters to blue whales.”

The article, based on the research at Stanford University and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (as published in the The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), shows that all 129 marine mammal species “can be represented in only 20 critical conservation locations [covering] 10 percent of the species’ geographic range.” Of the 20 critical conservation locations, the authors identify that “preserving just 9 of the 20 conservation sites would protect habitat for 84 percent of all marine mammal species on Earth”

Though the researchers do not suggest privatization as a means toward conservation, the reader should recognize the potential benefits. It also should be noted that the privatization of even 4% of our massive ocean yields an extremely large piece of territory–about the size of the United States and Mexico combined. Nevertheless, the study suggests that complete ocean privatization need not be the short-term goal of the libertarian ocean conservationist. The ownership allocation of just 4% of the ocean might indeed be enough to protect their interests.

Article taken from Examiner.com
By Howard Portnoy

TSA Takes Toy Away From Mentally Challenged Man

We can all sleep easier tonight knowing that Drew Mandy’s plastic toy hammer is in the trash rather than terrorizing passengers and crew on the plane he and his parents boarded for Walt Disney World.

If you’re looking for someone to thank for depriving a mentally challenged 29-year-old of his much-beloved security blanket, look no further than the Transportation and Security Administration.

Members of this feckless bunch sprung into action at Detroit Metro Airport when they first laid eyes on Mandy, whose parents say has the mental capacity of a 2-year-old. They singled him out for a special pat-down, which makes perverse sense of a sort: Special pat-downs for people with special needs.

Security personnel sensed they had sniffed out a troublemaker when they asked Drew to place his feet on a yellow shoe line, and he failed to comply. His father intervened, explaining that his son didn’t understand what they were asking, but the TSA ordered David Mandy to back off, explaining, “Please, sir, we know what we’re doing.”

They proceeded to pat Drew’s pants down, questioning the padding they found, which turned out to be his adult diapers. When the agents asked Drew to take his hand and rub the front and back of his pants so they could swab it for explosives, his dad tried again in vain to explain that his son suffered severe retardation, but the stalwart TSA refused to be deterred.

It was then that agents spotted the “weapons” Drew was attempting to smuggle onto the flight: a ball and a six-inch plastic hammer.

“My son carries his ball and his hammer for security. He goes everywhere with [them],” explained his father.

But the TSA wasn’t falling for that. One of them took the hammer and tapped the wall, observing, “’See, it’s hard. It could be used as a weapon.”

Drew’s parents were told they could make arrangements to ship the toy to their destination. Since that would result in their missing their flight, however, David Mandy reluctantly tossed the toy instead, remarking, “It just killed me to have to throw it away because he’s been carrying this like for 20 years.”

While the TSA is busy harassing passengers who pose no legitimate threat, those who do meantime are boarding planes with increasing frequency. In March, a man with a history of psychiatric problems sneaked past security and onto a plane at JFK airport in New York. A week earlier, another passenger boarded a plane at the same airport carrying box cutters—the very “weapon” used by the 9/11 hijackers to commandeer four planes.

Understandably upset, Drew Mandy’s father wrote to the TSA and received a conciliatory response that noted among other things that the 800 TSA agents at Detroit Metro Airport would be retrained as a result of their mishandling of Drew’s case. Retrained? How about training them to do their job correctly in the first place?

In case you’re feeling bad about Drew’s losing his hammer, the story has a happy footnote. Drew’s mother, having evidently learned long ago how to suffer fools, had a second hammer secreted in her backpack. It passed through the airport’s eagle-eyed security without a hitch.

This is a great video on intellectual property rights and information ownership.

Finally, after years of rumors and wait it’s here

A recent article at The Daily shows a video of an Amish farmer trafficking contraband from his farm in Pennsylvania to a busy street in Manhattan. The article goes on the explain that,

“he wasn’t selling them anything they planned to smoke, snort or inject. Rather, he was giving them their once-a-month fix of raw milk — an unpasteurized product banned outright in 12 states and denounced by the FDA as a public health hazard, but beloved by a small but growing number of devotees who tout both its health benefits and its flavor.”

“Unpasteurized milk is increasingly popular among foodies and health nuts for both its taste and its supposed nutritional benefits. But government authorities take a hard line, warning that unpasteurized milk may contain salmonella, E. coli and bacteria that can lead to typhoid fever and tuberculosis.”

According to the FDA,

“Raw milk is inherently dangerous and it should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose”

In 2008 a police raid was commenced on the Manna Storehouse, a Mennonite-run co-op in Lorain County, Ohio. According to reports, the family was held at gunpoint while agents searched the premises for unpasteurized dairy products. Yet, as all wars on supply reveal, the price adjusts and a black market thrives.

Here is a wonderful video demonstrating the possibilities of a voluntary society. See V for Voluntary for more videos by Niels.

Introducing Doublespeak Dictionary: Your Guide to the Euphemisms, Dysphemisms, and Other Linguistic Contrivances of the State – by Leslie Starr O’Hara

The Doublespeak Dictionary satirizes the marked difference between the ideal of “We the People” and the reality of “We the Elite”, while offering an insightful glimpse into the clockworks of the totalitarian mind. Ever irreverent but never irrelevant, Leslie Starr O’Hara’s first book serves as a subversive and humorous but timely reminder that the Emperor has no clothes.

Here’s what some luminaries of the libertarian community have been saying about The Doublespeak Dictionary:

This is really a MAGNIFICENT book. I never thought I’d be MESMERIZED by a dictionary. Aren’t they supposed to be BORING? Not so, not so, at least not so for this one. Every entry of O’Hara’s had me at the edge of my seat, yelling (yes, out loud), “Way to go, girl,” “Go get ‘em babe” and other statements not fit for the back cover of a book. My prediction is that this book will give a much needed shot in the arm to one liner comedians, to those who create political buttons, and bumper stickers. Many of her entries are short enough, and pithy enough, for such treatment. Warning: DO NOT read this book on a full stomach! You will be rolling on the floor in laughter. And, as a doctor (they don’t call me Doc Block for nothing), I prescribe against so dangerous a practice. This is really hot stuff. I literally couldn’t put down this book.

-Walter Block, Ph.D., Austrian school economist, anarcho-capitalist-libertarian philosopher, Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Chair in Economics and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans and Senior Fellow with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Author of Defending the Undefendable and The Privatization of Roads and Highways.

Other reviews can be seen here

From article,

Kelli Space, 23, graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with a bachelor’s in sociology — and a whopping $200,000 in student loan debt. Space, who lives with her parents and works full-time, put up a Web site called TwoHundredThou.com soliciting donations to help meet her debt obligation, which is $891 a month. That number jumps to $1,600 next November.

Regardless of your stance on student loan justice, the question that is never raised is who in their right mind would give a $200,000 loan to a twenty year old sociology major in absence of federal subsidies and government shelters for student loans? College is no longer an investment in your future; it’s 21^st century indentured servitude!

The Mises Academy presents Lecture 1  of Nullification with Thomas E. Woods for your viewing.

Sign up for Nullification here.  All upcoming classes at the Mises Academy can be viewed here

 We all have a price, or so I’ve been told. Whether we do or not is probably a function of our individual ethical threshold. It is no different within our prison systems or for the individuals behind badges. Like contraband, drug paraphernalia, sharp objects and the various other illegal objects that make it into our prison system on a daily basis, prison systems can’t seem to keep cell phones out of the jail cells. It’s reached a point now where prison systems are seeking outside assistance from mobile phone companies, asking them to jam mobile phone signals by flooding the prison systems with airways.

The question that comes to mind is why citizens and jail officers would risk their jobs and freedom to sneak mobile phones and other items into prisons? The answer is of course found within the basic economic models of scarcity. Items like contraband and mobile phones may sell from anywhere between 3 to 10 times their street value within the walls of our prison system.  Indeed, a friend of mine who works within the local jails has been offered $35.00 for a pack of cigarettes. The lesson that won’t be learned is of course, if we can’t keep illegal items out a fully secured prison facility, with 8×10 jails cells, how in the world can we expect to keep these items out of a nation with over 9,000 miles of border?

Brick and mortar institutions of higher learning, while still in their early stages, are dying. You need only look at your recent Wall Street Journal or Financial Times newspapers for an example of discouraged companies refusing to hire overpriced labor. Colleges are simply churning out graduates who demand wage compensation for skills they haven’t developed.  As an example, look at the unemployment rate of MBA’s in 2009 versus 2007.

Unemployment Rate among US MBA Graduates

(% of students without job offers three months after graduation)

1. YALE UNIVERSITY, SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

in 2009: 8%

in 2007: 6%

2. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, OLIN BUSINESS SCHOOL

in 2009: 8%

in 2007: 4%

3. HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

in 2009: 8.8%

in 2007: 3%

4. STANFORD UNIVERSITY, GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

in 2009: 10%

in 2007: 3%

5. MIT, SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

in 2009: 12.8%

in 2007: 2%

6. UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, SMITH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

in 2009: 13%

in 2007: 2%

7. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, BOOTH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

in 2009: 13.5%

in 2007: 2.4%

in 2007: 2%

Yet, in spite of all the headlines about MBA programs needing reform, MBA enrolment is still increasingly high.

The question that is never asked among these debates is why companies require degrees instead of skills? Or more specifically, why do companies still believe that degrees translate into skills? Aside from the glut of college students via the government-vehicle of cheap credit and the problem embedded in signaling education, at some point in time consumers must ask what it is they receive from these brick and mortar institutions that they couldn’t receive free through internet.

For example, students of my discipline, mathematics, may learn math from the comforts of their home, in a series of progressive youtube videos (starting from arithmetic and ending at second semester calculus) from wonderful free sites like Khan Academy . Furthermore, these students may purchase the previous edition of their math textbook (usually only a few years old) for roughly 1/10^th of its original price. Or, the more ambitious student may receive the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the professors at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology; having access to online textbooks, lecture notes, problems, examples and video lectures all for free at MIT OPEN. Or, even here at the Mises Institute, students may study under the classical liberal tradition at The Mises Academy for about the cost of a college textbook.

The point is simply that the internet is changing the way we educate ourselves in subjects like mathematics, and employers and institutions of higher learning are lagging behind. There is still, and, simply, may always be demand for physical classrooms (but even this is need of reform)

Pictures taken from the Murray N Rothbard Collection located at Mises Library (courtesy of Dante Bayona)

According to a recent article at The Wall Street journal,

“Regulators’ appetite for calorie counts is about to extend beyond restaurants to thousands of other places that offer food, including airplanes, movie theaters and convenience stores”

Convenience Stores? As if proper labeling will help consumers choose between glazed donuts, chocolate glazed donuts or bagels with cream cheese at 6:00 am in the morning.

Of course, what is not mentioned is the fact that larger convenience store chains can more easily label their calories then smaller mom-and-pop stores. Therefore, even if the consumers gain slightly, the large chains gain more.

“Everybody’s going to be a little bit better informed, and that’s a good thing,’ said Lou Sheetz, executive vice president at Sheetz Inc., an Altoona, Pa., convenience store chain with 380 outlets in six states. The chain is preparing to post calorie information at kiosks where customers order food. ‘In all likelihood, it’s going to have a negative impact on those items that had a higher calorie count than people thought,’ said Mr. Sheetz. But that will be offset by higher sales of healthier items, he predicted.”

So what’s next on the Food Labeling Act we ask, the nutritional information of bugs at PetCo?

Nutrition Information for: Grasshopper

“Between the years of 1911 to 1915 John Maynard Keyes was the principal reviewer of German Books for Economic Journal (see footnote 12, here)” It was during this time frame that “Maynard”, as Rothbard often referred to him, reviewed Mises path breaking 1912 book Theory of Money and Credit  to which his primary response was “it is critical rather than constructive, dialectical and not original”

Though it may sound quite odd that Keynes would utter such words about one of the most rigorous treatises on money to ever appear in print we would later read about how horrible Keynes’ German actually was.

In his book John Maynard Keynes: Critical Responses Robert McCann states “That he could not speak German with any fluency is well attested by those who heard him once open an English lecture to a German audience with a brief apology in German” and “He [Keynes] read German indeed, but not with any great facility, and he said on one occasion that he never comprehended through the medium of German an idea that was new to him”            

Given the above accounts of Keynes we might say that he ranks at a level 2 on the ILR scale for language proficiency

• able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements
• can handle with confidence most basic social situations including introductions and casual conversations about current events, work, family, and autobiographical information
• can handle limited work requirements, needing help in handling any complications or difficulties; can get the gist of most conversations on non-technical subjects (i.e. topics which require no specialized knowledge), and has a speaking vocabulary sufficient to respond simply with some circumlocutions
• has an accent which, though often quite faulty, is intelligible
• can usually handle elementary constructions quite accurately but does not have thorough or confident control of the grammar.

So why would an educated individual such as Keynes, who clearly lacked the command of the German language formally engage in offering critical responses for books in German? I will leave you with what McCann calls a “characteristic quotation” to display Keynes’ pretensions pursuit to truth.     

“In writing a book of this kind the author must, if he is to put his point of view clearly, pretend sometimes to a little more conviction than he feels. He must give his own argument a chance, so to speak, nor be to ready to depress its vitality with a wet cloud of doubt”

Of all things you might consider this quote applied to, Keynes was actually speaking to his writings on probability.

Recent credit card legislation, among many things, proposes to reform the market for gift cards

According to an article at Forbes the new rules include

* Limits on expiration dates The money on your gift card will be good for at least five years from the date the card is purchased. Money added or loaded on to the card must also be good for at least five years.

* Replacement cards. If your gift card expires and there is unspent money, you can request a replacement card at no charge.

* Fees. The law bans dormancy, inactivity and service fees on gift cards unless there has not been any activity for twelve months and the issuer clearly discloses all fees on the packaging. In those cases, consumers can only be charged one fee per month. Last month, Congress passed legislation to extend the effective date for the disclosure requirement until January 31, 2011, for cards issued prior to April 1, 2010.

Yet, as always, what are the unintended consequences?

As reported in The Atlantic  behavioral economists offer clues

In an experiment, Shu and Gneezy first surveyed 80 undergraduates, asking how they would feel about a gift certificate for a slice of cake and a beverage at a local café and how likely they were to use it. Forty-two survey participants were asked to consider a certificate good for three weeks, and 38 were asked about a two-month certificate. More than two-thirds of the group with the longer deadline said they would use such a coupon; only half of the group with the shorter deadline said they would.

Shu and Gneezy then ran the experiment in real life, with a different group of 64 undergraduates. Half the participants got certificates good for three weeks and half for two months. Both groups were far less likely to cash in their cake coupons than predicted. And contrary to predictions, the shorter deadline encouraged more indulgence. Ten out of 32 people redeemed the three-week certificate; only two of 32 used the two-month pass. Those who redeemed their certificates said they’d enjoyed themselves, while those who didn’t said they regretted letting the deadline slip. They gave reasons like “I was too busy and ran out of time” or “I kept thinking I could do it later.” The pressure of a shorter deadline encouraged people to stop procrastinating and enjoy themselves.

Similarly, Shu and Gneezy found in surveys (as we all know from our own experiences) that tourists with limited time are more likely to visit local attractions than are residents, who presumably can go whenever they want. In fact, residents tend to make their tourist-like visits when they have out-of-town guests or when they’re about to move away. With no immediate reason to hit nearby landmarks, locals put off for tomorrow what they might enjoy today.

“What I think is happening,” Shu told me, “is that when people think about the future, they’re very focused on the gains and the positive outcomes. The benefits are really appealing when they’re far off in the future, and people just don’t see the costs at all. Whereas if it’s tomorrow, the benefits are similar but the costs are huge and in their face.” A Saturday at the museum sounds great until you have to leave your errands undone and find a place to park. You wind up sticking to your routine, even though you’d be happier breaking it.

As pointed out by David Gordon in his book The Essential Rothbard, Rothbard objected to the view that a contract could be derived that allowed one to voluntarily enslave themselves to another individual given the fact that the will is inseparable from the body and thus not transferable.  For understanding purposes we may say that the body was first homesteaded by the will and cannot, yet, be alienated.

Rothbard states,

“Unfortunately, many libertarians, devoted to the right to make contracts, hold the contract itself to be an absolute, and therefore maintain that any voluntary contract whatever must be legally enforceable in the free society. Their error is a failure to realize that the right to contract is strictly derivable from the right of private property, and therefore that the only enforceable contracts (i.e., those backed by the sanction of legal coercion) should be those where the failure of one party to abide by the contract implies the theft of property from the other party.” Ethics of Liberty page 133

The problem with this theory is that it doesn’t take into consideration that, although the will may be inalienable, it doesn’t mean that a contract can’t be derived in order to enforce servitude.  Take for example an individual that voluntarily enters into a contract that states, at some point in time, if they relinquish their servitude, they may be viewed as a trespasser and subject to whatever penalty predetermined. Now, in this contract the will was never transferred, since such a transfer is currently scientifically impossible, but the right to trespass was contracted, conditional upon the fact that servitude is delivered. If, for some reason, such servitude is relinquished than the slave becomes a trespasser subject to whatever penalty advertised.  Therefore, although the will cannot be contracted away, it is still within reason that a contract may be devised under such a theme as “trespassers will be shot” in order to maintain voluntary slavery.      

]]> http://blog.mises.org/13503/on-rothbardian-contracts/feed/ 61 http://blog.mises.org/13492/announcing-gordon-and-dilorenzo-academy-adds/ http://blog.mises.org/13492/announcing-gordon-and-dilorenzo-academy-adds/#comments Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:55:01 +0000 Jeremiah Dyke http://blog.mises.org/?p=13492

This online course taught by economist Robert P. Murphy explores what is for many libertarians, the ultimate logical extension of libertarianism: the private provision of security.

The course will explore the following weekly topics:

Week 1: The Private Production of Law and Judicial Rulings

Week 2: Private Law Enforcement and Military Defense

Week 3: Common Objections

Week 4: Historical Applications

The course will include:

• weekly live video-broadcast lectures
• a hyperlinked syllabus of readings (no material purchases required)
• live chats
• discussion forums
• weekly quizzes and a final exam (for those who want to take the course for a grade)

Professor Biography:

Robert Murphy is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute. He runs the blog Free Advice and is the author of Chaos Theory, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, the Study Guide to Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, theHuman Action Study Guide, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.

Read one of his numerous Mises Daily articles.

Today I met a charming young girl whose business card reads

“Campaign for Liberty Coordinator: offering servicers as a public speaker, political activist and web designer.”  

The young girl went on to tell me that she has been involved in Austrian Economics for about two years now and hopes to continue her learning with an online course at the Mises Academy. I mentioned that Bob Murphy will be conducting a Principles of Economics class this coming September that may be of interest to her. She smiled, but said she wanted something more rigorous than a principles course; she wanted something to “really challenge me”.  

This charming young girl just turned 17.

Welcome to Mises University

Every morning, in sweltering heat, 250 students cram into little shuttles and ride to an intellectual wonderland. From high school students to PhD candidates; from engineers and economists to film majors, everyone waits in anticipation for the next speaker to guide their intellectual tour

Lectures on Marginal Revolution, Value, Utility and Price, Praxeology: The Austrian method, The Division of Labor and Social Order, The Origin and Nature of Money, Capital and Interest and finally Entrepreneurship and Nullification are but a summary of day one. Each lecture spanning an hour or more in length.

What indeed look like model students, exhaust their hands over notepads trying to capture every last bit of information the professors verbalize. For an educator it is quite an amazing spectacle to see such inner ambition within a lecture hall; a lecture hall that could not have accommodated such a large crowd if not for the generosity of a great entrepreneur James M. Wolfe.  

Yet, the students you meet here at Mises University are unlike those you would meet anywhere else. They are confident yet inquisitive; they are highly intelligent and opinionated even though most have never met an Austrian Economist within the walls of their home university.

The students congregate in small circles of smash-the-state conversation, indeed, “smash-the-state” is actually the name of the wireless network shared throughout our dormitory.  Freedom to express ones opinion and critique others is implicit. Yet, unlike the dialog you may find within the walls of your local college, conversations here are snappy. There is little time wasted on conversational formalities, opinion arrive at their premises quickly and are debated at length (sometimes hours into the night). By and large, we libertarians may spend the majority of a political conversation defining terms whereas the conversation here guides quickly from topic to topic.   

When not in conversation, the students huddle around the book store or the economics library thumbing through the variety of titles.

If you are lucky, you may catch a moment of a professor’s time as they walk throughout the rooms, yet, once cornered, the professors must tackle an ensemble of subject matter. Tonight, I watched in glee as Walter Block, operating as a human-libertarian-calculator, responded as the nearly 20+ students surrounded him firing off their questions on topics spanning from sociobiology to private protection agencies to strategies for liberty.

 Mises University 2010 is thus far incredible