Minor Thoughts from me to you

$29 in paperback

Tyler Cowen references an interesting sounding book, in his Equine Markets in Everything post.

Circa the late nineteenth century, in urban America:

Even the wastes of horses were commodified.  The collection of urban manure had old, even ancient roots.  Again, the process is most easily documented in New York City.  Before 1878, individuals roamed the street and picked up manure.  In that year the Common Council supposedly sold an exclusive license to a William Hitchcock, who sold the street sweepings to farmers for fertilizer.  Street sweepings varied in quality and were worth more if from an asphalt street than if from a gravel street or a dirty alley.  They were always worth less than stable manure, a purer product.  The older pattern of individuals collecting street manure for urban gardens never fully went away, and as late as the first half of the twentieth century neighborhood children in the Italian American neighborhood of East Harlem did a thriving business collecting horse manure from the streets for backyard gardens in the area.

That is from Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century, an excellent book from 2007.  I am sorry it took me so long to discover this work.  It has wonderful sentences such as:

Stables rarely make it into the histories of the built environment, although they constituted a substantial part of that environment.

How can you go wrong with that?  There is a good economics on every page of this book.

Brendan O'Neill offers some historical context about whether or not we should immediately believe all rape accusations.

Automatic belief of rape accusations was a central principle of the KKK’s war on rape, too. This was one of the things that most shocked Ida B Wells, the early twentieth-century African-American journalist and civil-rights activist. ‘The word of the accuser is held to be true’, she said, which means that ‘the rule of law [is] reversed, and instead of proving the accused to be guilty, the [accused] must prove himself innocent’. Wells and others were startled by the level of belief in the accusers of black men, and by the damning of anyone who dared to question such accusations, which was taken as an attack on the accuser’s ‘virtue’. The great nineteenth-century African-American reformer Frederick Douglass was disturbed by the mob’s instant acceptance of accusations of rape against black men, where ‘the charge once fairly stated, no matter by whom or in what manner, whether well or ill-founded’, was automatically believed. Wells said she was praying that ‘the time may speedily come when no human being shall be condemned without due process of law’. No, rape suspects aren’t lynched today. But, as we can see in everything from the destruction of Bill Cosby’s career to the demand to banish from campus students accused of but not charged with rape, they are often condemned on ‘the word of the accuser’ and ‘without due process of law’. Now, as then, ‘I believe’ is the rallying cry of crusaders against rape, and now, as then, such ‘automatic belief’ reverses the rule of law.

It's always tempting to go with what we "know" to be true, without worrying about pesky things like standards of evidence, due process, and the right to confront your accuser. But throwing those things out doesn't increase justice. It just opens minorities up to abuse from the majority.

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Horace L. Gold, the first editor of Galaxy, published this ad in Galaxy 1 (October 1950).

(Image taken from Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased.)

First Story

Jet's blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing…and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.

"Get back from those controls, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last space trip."

Second Story

Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rimrock…and at that point a tall, lean wranger stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.

"Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts."

Sting

Sound alike? They should—one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you're welcome to it! YOU'LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!

What you will find in GALAXY is the finest science fiction…authentic, plausible, thoughtful…written by authors who do not automatically switch over from crime waves to Earth invasions; by people who know and love science fiction…for people who also know and love it.

David Friedman shares an interesting tidbit.

…In the early 20th century, a common pattern was for engaged couples to have sex with the understanding that if the woman got pregnant they would get married; evidence from several late 19th century European cities suggests that about a third of brides were pregnant. One problem was the risk of that the man, having gotten the sex, would dump his fiancee instead of marrying her. One solution to that, in U.S. law, was the tort action for breach of promise to marry. In a society where marriage was the main career open to women and the fact that a woman was known not to be a virgin substantially reduced her marriage prospects, seduction could impose substantial costs and result in a substantial damage payment.

Starting in 1935 in Indiana, U.S. states started altering their laws to abolish the action for breach of promise. Women responded, by Brinig's account, by requiring a down payment from their fiancees in the form of an expensive ring—which forfeited if the fiancee terminated the engagement. Think of it as a performance bond.

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Maria Popova, at brain pickings, has this fascinating look at the history of why we say "please" and "thank you".

In English, “thank you” derives from “think,” it originally meant, “I will remember what you did for me” — which is usually not true either — but in other languages (the Portuguese obrigado is a good example) the standard term follows the form of the English “much obliged” — it actually does means “I am in your debt.” The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from “mercy,” as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your benefactor”s power — since a debtor is, after all, a criminal. Saying “you’re welcome,” or “it’s nothing” (French de rien, Spanish de nada) — the latter has at least the advantage of often being literally true — is a way of reassuring the one to whom one has passed the salt that you are not actually inscribing a debit in your imaginary moral account book. So is saying “my pleasure” — you are saying, “No, actually, it’s a credit, not a debit — you did me a favor because in asking me to pass the salt, you gave me the opportunity to do something I found rewarding in itself!” …

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it remains undeniable that black Americans in the age of Emmett Till would have given almost anything to live in a country in which the racism required decoding by the arbiters of taste. The progress has been swift and remarkable. The last thing that black Americans were worried about in the 1950s was “dog whistles.”

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Michael Totten asks the question that I've been wondering about:

Kim almost certainly isn’t serious, but what if he is? How would we know? His attention-seeking theatrics are identical to the behavior of a lunatic hell-bent on blowing the region apart. If war breaks out next month, everyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention to the Korean Peninsula will slap their forehead and see, with the clarity of hindsight, that every warning we could possibly need, want, and expect was right there in front of us.

After listening to the latest Common Sense podcast, I don't think Kim is serious. Totten doesn't either. But then, no one thought Hitler was serious either (except Churchill).

Im trying to avoid invoking Godwin's Law on myself. However, I have been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and it does give you that extra bit of horrified paranoia. They're probably not serious. But what if they are? Of such thoughts are neoconservatives made.

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Rand Paul, speaking at Howard University, passionately appealed to African Americans to support liberty minded Republicans.

The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism.

Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.

Big and oppressive government has long been the enemy of freedom, something black Americans know all too well.

We must always embrace individual liberty and enforce the constitutional rights of all Americans-rich and poor, immigrant and native, black and white. Such freedom is essential in achieving any longstanding health and prosperity.

As Toni Morrison said, write your own story. Challenge mainstream thought.

I hope that some of you will be open to the Republican message that favors choice in education, a less aggressive foreign policy, more compassion regarding non-violent crime, and encourages opportunity in employment.

And when the time is right, I hope that African Americans will again look to the party of emancipation, civil liberty, and individual freedom.

It's a long speech but it is well worth reading.

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This is a story that's ripped right from the script of a future Castle episode. Max Colchester writes, at the Wall Street Journal, about two reenactors who are fighting over the opportunity to portray Napoleon during a 200th anniversary reenactment of the Battle of Waterloo.

Mr. Samson is sorry that he is slightly less than an inch taller than Napoleon was. But he dismisses claims that Mr. Schneider is the spitting image of the general, saying that his rival's face is too thin to represent the older Napoleon. "Also he doesn't have the right embroidery on his saddle."

Mr. Schneider points out that, at 5-foot-7, he is exactly the same height as Napoleon. He also shares the French leader's distinctive nose. Napoleon "was born in 1769 and I was born in 1969," he says. "All of this makes my job easier."

But Mr. Schneider has been hampered by legal problems. He currently spends two days a week in jail near Williamsburg after pleading guilty to driving under the influence in 2008. He has taken 2013 off from traveling to Europe for re-enactments.

The American hopes to return in 2014, in time to be exiled to Elba. Napoleon was sent to the island off the Italian coast in 1814 after his army was defeated and he abdicated. Mr. Samson says he also wants to be exiled to Elba.

This, folks, is nerdery of a high level. I tip my hat to both gentleman (even as I snicker a bit).

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Very cool.

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Steven Horwitz published a Cato Briefing Paper on Herbert Hoover, our President who was the exact opposite of a laissez faire non-interventionist.

Politicians and pundits portray Herbert Hoover as a defender of laissez faire governance whose dogmatic commitment to small government led him to stand by and do nothing while the economy collapsed in the wake of the stock market crash in 1929. In fact, Hoover had long been a critic of laissez faire. As president, he doubled federal spending in real terms in four years. He also used government to prop up wages, restricted immigration, signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, raised taxes, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—all interventionist measures and not laissez faire. Unlike many Democrats today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's advisers knew that Hoover had started the New Deal. One of them wrote, "When we all burst into Washington ... we found every essential idea [of the New Deal] enacted in the 100-day Congress in the Hoover administration itself."

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Gabriel Kolko reviews the history of the New Deal and shows how President Hoover laid the groundwork for everything that President Roosevelt did, during the Great Depression. Compared to Hoover, FDR was just an amateur at centralizing government control of the economy.

Hoover’s initiatives did not produce economic recovery, but served as the groundwork for various policies laid out in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal.”  As Secretary of Commerce under the preceding Republican presidents, he had been particularly active in creating trade associations in hundreds of industries, and these associations were to become the backbone of the National Recovery Administration, the first New Deal.

... Roosevelt himself contributed little, perhaps nothing, to the formulation of the New Deal, most of which had existed in an early form in the trade associations. Trade associations wanted federal governmental protection from other members of the industry who competed too energetically—which classical economic theory declared was a good thing. Labor costs are equalized when labor is organized or child-labor outlawed; this became an issue when some codes, particularly in textiles, were formulated.

All this just shows what has been known for a long time: there is no difference between the parties and firms’ use of federal regulations to make money. Labor unions can therefore emerge as many things, including as a form of intra-industry struggle. The coal, apparel, and textiles industries are good examples: Northern textiles were for limits on child labor, the Southern textile industry (which used children as cheap factory hands), against federal control of it.

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This is a fascinating piece of history, from Svetlana Savranskaya.

Long after the world thought the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended, with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's withdrawal of his medium-range nuclear missiles announced on October 28 -- and two days after President John F. Kennedy announced the lifting of the quarantine around Cuba -- the secret crisis still simmered. Unknown to the Americans, the Soviets had brought some 100 tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba -- 80 nuclear-armed front cruise missiles (FKRs), 12 nuclear warheads for dual-use Luna short-range rockets, and 6 nuclear bombs for IL-28 bombers. Even with the pullout of the strategic missiles, the tacticals would stay, and Soviet documentation reveals the intention of training the Cubans to use them.

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Interesting article. I look forward to what else the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) discovers.

[N]ew information gives a clearer picture of what happened 75 years ago to Ms. Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, where they came down and how they likely survived – for a while, at least – as castaways on a remote island, catching rainwater and eating fish, shellfish, and turtles to survive.

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Avik Roy dives into the recent history of healthcare reform and details the bipartisan plan that the Democrats killed, in order to pass a partisan plan of their own.

Hence, a bipartisan health-care agenda at the federal level will necessarily look quite different than one at the state level. If liberals had bothered to ask, they could easily have elicited bipartisan support for a proposal that did the following: (1) set up the Obamacare exchanges for those under 400% of FPL; (2) applied the Ryan reforms to Medicare and Medicaid (or, alternatively, folded in Medicare and Medicaid acute-care into the PPACA exchanges); (3) equalized the tax treatment of employer-sponsored and individually-purchased insurance; and (4) not increase taxes or the deficit.

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My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: It Was Okay

Since I've started reviewing books, I've been trying to force myself to review a book based on what it's meant to be rather than on what I wish it was. After all, that's the only way to be fair to the author. So it was with this book. I was hoping for a narrative of the life of Andrew Jackson. Instead, I got an analysis of the man and the times he lived in. I was annoyed at first but I forced myself to evaluate it fairly. I think I'm glad that I did.

The title of this book was deliberately chosen. Jackson was an orphan who felt alone much of his life. In reaction to that (as the book makes clear), he valued family highly and would go to any length to protect and defend family. For Jackson, the nation was but an extension of his own family. He loved his country and would go to any length (including invading Florida, risking war with France, evicting the Indian tribes, and suppressing free speech) to protect and defend it. He was very much the "American Lion", defending his pride.

Meacham’s intent with this book was not to exhaustively document Jackson’s life. Nor was it even to exhaustively document Jackson’s years as President. Instead, Meacham drew on newly available letters and papers to sketch a potrait of Jackson’s personal life and his relationships with his closest friends and family members.

While this approach has some advantages in humanizing “The General”, it also has some downfalls. Meacham does provide a thumbnail sketch of Jackson’s early years and his path to the White House. Regrettably, I feel that it’s cursory enough that it fails to fully setup the drama that was to follow.

For instance, I was really hoping for a look at the actual events of Jackson's life. For instance, how did he campaign for the Presidency? How did Presidential campaigns work, day to day, during the early 1800's? The book just glossed right over those details, mentioning only that Jackson won or lost a given election.

This became important when you consider that a central battle of the first two years of Jackson’s presidency involved Major Eaton, the Secretary of War. Jackson staked his entire Presidency on the question of whether or not people around him were loyal to Major Eaton. Eventually, the entire Cabinet was sacked over the question: the first time that had happened in American history.

I spent much of this portion of the book wondering why Jackson was being so incredibly loyal to Eaton. I later grew to realize that Eaton had been quite a central figure in Jackson’s earlier life and in winning the Presidency. Because Meacham passed over those years so quickly, I failed to understand (until much later) just how important Major Eaton was to General Jackson.

This flaw weakened the book, in my opinion.

I did learn quite a bit from this book (and may write more later on my impressions of Jackson and his age) but I felt that it would have benefited from more detail and more background information, both about Jackson and about the age Jackson lived in.

Over at HISTalk, Doctor Sam Bierstock gives a fascinating (and somewhat disgusting) history of how our presidents died in office.

Over the next two months, Garfield was subjected to repeated probing of the wound with unsterile fingers and instruments, non-aseptic incisions to drain abscesses, and other invasive procedures in an effort to locate the bullet, which was, in fact, located harmlessly in fatty tissue behind the pancreas. Eventually, the original three-inch deep wound was converted to a twenty-inch long contaminated, purulent gash stretching from the president’s ribs to his groin.

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Amity Shlaes on what sparked the job growth of the 1980's.

The era didn't start well. The mid-1970s were a dead period. Then suddenly, from 1977 to 1978, new private capital devoted to venture capital increased by 15 times, to $570 million in 1978 from $39 million the year before.

In 1977, public underwritings of firms with a net worth of less than $5 million amounted to a meager $75 million. By 1980 that figure was $822 million, as Michael K. Evans, founder of Chase Econometrics, points out. The venture-capital boom continued down the decades, serving computing, technology, biotech and many other areas.

But what caused this boom? Three policy changes. The first was a [capital gains] tax cut for which this newspaper campaigned. ...

A second policy change came in pension law. ...

A third factor, and one that ensured the boom would continue, was a law ... [that] clarified murky intellectual property rights so that universities and professors, especially, knew they owned their own ideas and could sell them. ...

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Carl Haub, senior demographer at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., has estimated that 106 billion humans have been born since Homo sapiens appeared about 50,000 years ago. That means that the richest one percent in history includes 1.06 billion people. There are currently 6.2 billion humans alive, leaving approximately 100 billion who have died. Who among the dead was rich by today's standards? Not many. Royalty, popes, presidents, dictators, large landholders, and the occasional wealthy industrialist, such as Andrew Carnegie and Leland Stanford, were certainly rich. All told, it is difficult to imagine more than 20 million of these people since ancient Egyptian times. This leaves 1.04 billion wealthy alive today, or 17% of the world's population.

The poor in the United States, by contrast, live on up to $23.50 a day. Except for the few hundred thousand who are homeless, the Americans whom the U.S. government defines as poor live exceptionally rich lives. In most ways, their lives are better than those of kings and queens just 200 years ago. Consider the quality and quantity of our food, clothing, refrigerators, televisions, washing machines, stereo systems, and automobiles. King Louis XIV of France had a greenhouse so he could eat oranges. The poor in this country can eat an orange every day, regardless of season. King Edward III of England could summon the royal musicians to play music. The poor in this country have a wide variety of music at their command, 24 hours a day, played note-perfect every time. Edward III lived in a dark, smelly, cold castle. Even the worst houses in this country are more comfortable and have electric lights, too. Care to live without showers and flush toilets? The kings of England and France had to. Next time you see a Shakespeare play in which kings and princes cavort, remember that royalty in Shakespeare's day had rotten teeth, terrible breath, and body odor that would make you keel over.

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Paul Ryan, with a very, very good speech on the importance of the Constitution and on the primacy of the rule of law, in our political and economic system.

We can strengthen our defense of liberty if we remember to keep in mind those who are struggling to make ends meet. What makes our Constitution such an extraordinary document is that, in making the United States the freest civilization in history, the Founders guaranteed that it would become the most prosperous as well. The American system of limited government, low taxes, sound money and the rule of law has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed.

I want to talk today in particular about the last of those – the rule of law, which is absolutely essential to all the other benefits of our system, to the prosperity and freedom of our country, and to the well being of all Americans, especially the most vulnerable.

What is the rule of law? When the Declaration of Independence cited as justification “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” the Founders were channeling Aristotle, who wrote that the rule of law in principle means that, quote, “God and intellect alone rule.”

Aristotle defined the law as “intellect without appetite,” by which he meant justice untainted by the self-interest of those in power.

The great difficulty we encounter in striving to meet Aristotle’s ideal was best summed up by James Madison: “if men were angels, no government would be necessary. And if angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

But, as Madison reminded us, men are no angels, and government is “administered by men over men.” Grounded in a proper understanding of human nature, our Founders tackled this challenge head-on with a brilliant Constitution and a healthy separation of powers, binding all men to the same set of laws and preventing any one man or group of men from gaining enough power to declare themselves above the law.

Do read the whole thing.

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