Quick Hits

Lawrence White recently wrote a paper (.pdf) debunking many of the myths alleging that a gold-standard economy is simply not feasible. I highly recommend the paper. At Marginal Revolution, (h/t: FSK), a blog I used to read but which became inundated with posts about Ethiopian cuisine and vacation pictures, Tyler Cowen responds:

My main worry with the gold standard is simply the pro-cyclicality of the money supply and for all its talk of money demand the paper doesn’t much address this concern. For instance would you really want a contracting money supply in today’s environment?

Perhaps I’m reading this a bit out of context, but to my knowledge, spanning about seven centuries for which we have reliable data, there has never been a global contraction in the supply of gold. Never. Fiat money of course, is a different story. If Cowen fears that a commodity-based currency would lend itself to contraction, I think he’s mistaken.

At Democracy Sucks, Stephan answers the critics who say, “there aren’t any real world examples of anarchy“:

“But I prefer democracy to anarchy”

It doesn’t matter what you prefer, since whether other people consent to it is not up to you. Nobody can own another person, so clearly its wrong to impose that choice on another person.

The free market is only a suggested (but highly probable) alternative to government, it doesn’t really matter what happens after government collapses, so long as self-ownership rights are respected. You can go and live in a socialist commune, you can go and start your own business, you can go off and live in the mountains. Just don’t impose democracy and governance on other people without their prior consent.

Could you claim adverse possession against the State? Of course, they’d want to contest your claim in a court of their choosing, and you would lose. But this defeat would ultimately demonstrate that the State claims to be the unequivocal owner of all land within the arbitrary confines of their imaginary borders, and that you, the alleged landowner, are really just a feudal tenant. I have been meaning to write a brief post about this for quite some time, although not related to adverse possession. Instead, it seems like one ought to be able to make a lump sum payment against all future property taxes, effectively creating a sovereign freehold. That property would never again be subject to taxation, unless a future owner chose to submit to government. This may not work terribly well in a subdivided area, but if you have rural property with your own well, and run a septic tank which is cleaned and maintained privately, you could probably generate enough power to maintain a pretty decent living on your own.

Vin Suprynowicz opines on the sad state of public education in America. George Washington, he says, was not a genius by any stretch of the imagination, yet he rose to command an army which defeated an empire, and presided over the freest nation ever governed.

There were no “school projects” gluing together pictures clipped out of magazines when Washington was 11. He immediately took up geometry, trigonometry, and surveying. Before he turned 18, Washington had been hired as the official surveyor for Culpepper County.

“For the next three years, Washington earned the equivalent of about $100,000 a year in today’s purchasing power,” Mr. Gatto, the former New York state Teacher of the Year, reports.

How much government-run schooling would a youth of today be told he needs before he could contemplate making $100,000 a year as a surveyor — a job which has not changed except to get substantially easier, what with hand-held computers, GPS scanners and laser range-finders? Sixteen years, at least — 18, more likely.

George Washington attended school for two years.

“We know he was no genius, yet he learned geometry, trigonometry, and surveying when he would have been a fifth or sixth grader in our era,” Gatto reminds us.

Vin argues that the current education system could never produce another George Washington, and he’s right.

You may have noticed a recent trend here, that I’m often saying something like, “I’ve been meaning to blog about such-and-such a topic for quite sometime.” I regret that I can’t post at will… Much of the time, I can only hack together some quick comments and references for the reader—like this post and others like it. I do try to hold myself to at least one or two quality, full-length posts a week. Sometimes it’s more than this, sometimes less.

Sometimes I start drafting what I think will be a relatively short and easy piece to write, and before too long, I’m off on several tangents, and exhausted. These posts usually develop into two or more separate posts. Often, it takes quite a while for a post to finally coalesce into something I deem worth of publishing.