Jeffrey Schaler, author of Addiction Is a Choice and editor of Szasz Under Fire, has written an excellent article on the controversy around Tom Cruise and his remarks against psychiatry. It's here.

By the way, Tom Cruise and Tom Szasz met when Szasz was honored for his defense of civil liberties. Here's a picture from the occasion.

Steve Davies is our after dinner lecturer tonight, giving a wonderful talk on what he calls"The Age of Funk." This talk explores the way in which human life has never been better than it is right now and then compares that to the various chicken littles on both sides of the political spectrum who are constantly telling us how bad things are. It's really an extended riff on Easterbrook's The Progress Paradox.

He just made the huge point that many children prior to the 20th century were not raised by both parents - women frequently died in childbirth and men at work, leaving children to be raised by stepparents, especially stepmothers. The modern obsession with the problems of single parenthood or stepfamilies is hardly new. The mom-dad"traditional" family that we've invented in our nostalgia frequently didn't exist back then either. Yes, now it's due to divorce more often than death, but the breaking up of the marital dyad and the consquent adjustments to new parenting arrangements are hardly only post-war phenomena. It's always been the case that children have had to deal with changes in family form/structure.

It's worth asking whether it's worse for children of divorce today to have, potentially, 4 parents, ideally, interested in their welfare, two of whom are their biological parents, or worse historically, when there would be two parents, at most, only one of whom was biologically related. Is divorce worse than the death of a parent? Are two remarriages better than one? Interesting questions.

Alert readers will have noticed an addition to the L&P blogroll: Lynne Kiesling's Knowledge Problem. According to her bio,"Lynne Kiesling is a senior lecturer in economics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on regulation and technological change, and other issues in regulation and privatization. Dr. Kiesling also serves as director of the Applied Energy Research Program at the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science, home of Vernon Smith, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner in Economics. The Applied Energy Research Program seeks to expand the use of experimental economic research in the establishment and implementation of regulatory policy, particularly electricity policy, at both the state and federal levels." In addition, let me add, having just spent a week teaching with her at an IHS summer seminar, that she's a terrific teacher and a supercool person. Readers are invited to check out her blog.

I should also mention that the other economist I worked with this past week, Frank Stephenson, who is also terrific, is already on our blogroll! He blogs on the group blog Division of Labour.

The other faculty I worked with (Elizabeth Hull and Mike Allen) were great, but don't seem to have blogs. You'll just have to read them in print!

This is fun. Glen and I can carry on a conversation sitting next to each other without talking! Interesting that he pointed out that natural law is compatible with consequentialism. I just read a paper at the History of Economics Society meetings that argued that one effective way of understanding Hayek is that he was strongly influenced by the natural law tradition. In particular, the paper argued that spontaneous order theory can be seen as a version of natural law.

I have to admit that I used to love the sorts of deductivist natural rights arguments James is putting forward, until they got beat out of me as an undergraduate. My latter-day consequentialism doesn’t find these as interesting or persuasive as my earlier-day quasi-Randianism.

And I swear, if James makes one more haggis joke... and now he's decided to pick on me as the example for his "heavily-armed" economist mugger. Oops, now he's had me shoot Glen! The good news for me is that Glen's will left me his spot on Agoraphilia.

Cross-posted at Agoraphilia, along with Glen's original post.

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Libertarians are divided over the Supreme Court's recent decision to allow states to exercise expanded powers of eminent domain: should the Court have struck down the offending statute in the name of property rights, or let it stand in the name of federalism?

I think each side is partly right and partly wrong; in an article on LRC today I explain why.

I wrote a brief reflection piece at Notablog on the terror attacks in London. Here's an excerpt:

Suffice it to say, we have been told by the leaders of the"coalition of the willing" that"we" have to"take the war to the terrorists" and fight"over there" so that"we" don't have to face death and destruction"over here." Or as President Bush put it:"Either we take the war to the terrorists and fight them where they are ... or at some point we will have to fight them here at home."

Well,"home" is now London.

And fighting terrorists"where they are" does nothing to stem the tide of their ever-increasing numbers.

Read the whole post here.

“When Adam delved, and Eve, span, who was then the Gentleman?”
Radical slogan of the English Revolution

Judaism traces lineage through the Mother. It’s easy to see why!

The latest birth statistics in the US for 2002, show that 23% had a foreign born mother, exceeding the old high of 1910. One out of ten were from Mexico, and 59% overall were Hispanic. Out of 4 million births in 2002, 915,800 were Hispanic. In some places, like an urban county outside of Atlanta, foreign births accounted for 41.3% of all births.

Boy, the Old South was never like this! A New South is certainly rising again, and, a New America is in the offing. And, as our beloved President has put it, "no child will be left behind."

Data source, The Miami Herald, 7/8/05

RAH RAH RAH 98 Down, 2 to Centennial!Robert Anson Heinlein (b.7/7/1907-d. 5/8/88) was known as the"Dean of Science Fiction Writers." Heinlein won four Hugos for best novel with Double Star (1956); Starship Troopers (1960); Stranger in a Strange Land (1962) and the libertarian classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, five years later.

Before writing SF, Heinlein attended the University of Missouri and the Naval Academy at Annapolis, graduating in 1929. He served five years in the Navy, retiring from active duty after contracting tuberculosis (illnesses would follow him throughout his life). After his Naval discharge (as a lieutenant), he studied physics and mathematics at UCLA.

His first story, "Life-Line", appeared in the August, 1939 edition of Astounding Science Fiction. Heinlein would write stories in large quantity, often using pseudonyms in order to prevent two stories from the"same" author being published in the same edition of a magazine.

Heinlein's work possessed three essentials: well-designed plots, vivid characters and good scientific arguments. He was scientifically precise, and he mixed hard and soft SF and fantasy in various doses, showing that he could create good stories in any area of speculative fiction.

During the WWII, Heinlein temporarily abandoned SF, working on research for high-altitude pressure suits (much like space suits) and radar at the Navy Experimental Air Station in Philadelphia.

Following the war's end, he devoted himself exclusively to writing. From 1948 to 1962 he wrote fourteen"juvenile" SF novels. The last of the Heinlein juveniles holds special interest; Podkayne of Mars (1962) shows a Venus colonized principally by Brazilians, a planet of capitalism carried to an extreme, where, in order to get anything, one has to grease a lot of palms.

Along with the juveniles, Heinlein wrote several adult novels during the 1950s that can be considered veritable gems of"Golden Age" of science fiction, such as The Puppet Masters (1951); Double Star (1956) and The Door into Summer (1957).

One of the juveniles, Space Cadet (1948) was made into a television series, shown between 1951 and 1956; while Rocketship Galileo (1947) served as inspiration for the film Destination Moon (1950), the first film to deal scientifically with the problems of space travel and which influenced many adolescents who would become--years later--the scientists and engineers of NASA. For this and other works, he was posthumously awarded the NASA Medal for Distinguished Public Service.

Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) was adopted by many in the 1960's as an integral part of the"flower" generation. With the incredible and unexpected success of Stranger in a Strange Land (it became the best-selling book in SF history), Heinlein had essentially a free hand to write whatever he wanted to.

He revisited his Future History universe and described the"lives" and loves of Lazarus Long (perhaps most prominent of cult-figure characters among Heinlein's fans) in Time Enough for Love (1973). He"invented" inter-universe travel and the concept of"World-as-Myth" (each fictional universe runs parallel to and is as real as our own, and our own universe is a fiction created by an author from another universe). These concepts allowed the meeting of characters from several of his books (universes) and from those of other authors in the novel Number of the Beast (1980). Heinlein analyzed these themes in his final The Cat Who Walks through Walls (1985) and To Sail beyond the Sunset (1987).

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1967), is considered his greatest libertarian work, with intelligent computers, an anarchist professor, Bernardo de la Paz (loosely based on Robert LeFevre), a revolution on the Moon, radical individualism and libertarian themes influenced many libertarians (myself included) in the 1960's-80's. TANSTAAFL, a term from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, became a libertarian watchword--"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch."

Just a thought.

Just Ken
CLASSical Liberalism

How much does the US government really believe in the principles of Free Trade?

In another example of unilateral diplomacy, the government has announced it intends to keep control of the Internet and the whole process of DNS addresses, rather than allow it to go international as was once agreed upon. Read the article here.