Carl Elsener, the great-grandson of Karl Elsener, the man who, in 1884, invented the Swiss army knife, explains how 9/11 hit his business.

“"It was an absolute catastrophe for us," Elsener says."Until then our knives had sold very well both in duty free shops and on board planes. Most airlines sold them, including British Airways. Then suddenly this distribution was closed. It was zero. The merchandise came back to us. This was really very hard." Under new airline regulations, passengers could no longer carry the Swiss army knife in their hand luggage. Those who didn't comply had their knives confiscated - and they weren't returned at the other end.

“The effects were sudden, and devastating. Sales of Swiss army knives dropped by 40% almost immediately.”

Read here how Elsener’s firm is fighting to sustain its sales in the face of state regulation and against cheap imitations from China. I found it an inspiring story of entrepreneurship.

One last thought. “Last month it [Victorinox] registered the deep red colour of its Swiss army knives as a patent.” That sounds more like a trademark to me.

How's this for a Fourth of July blog? In December 1964, Malcolm X appeared in a debate at the Oxford University Union to speak in favor of the motion that"extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." (hear audio here)

Of course, Barry Goldwater had first uttered this phrase earlier that year at the Republican National Convention. His speech was written by Karl Hess, a future chair of the Libertarian Party.

Today the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography celebrates the life of John Adams. So, you ask, What is Adams doing in a *British* national biography? Well, as you may remember, he was once a citizen of King George III, and the new ODNB includes Americans from first settlement to independence. Truly inclusive.

Then read Lenni Brenner’s appreciation of Jefferson, Breaking the Chains of Monkish Ignorance and Superstition: Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July, where inter alia he delivers some telling criticisms of Christopher Hitchens’ new book Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

In conclusion, I quote from Brenner’s essay, where he tells a nice story about Jefferson:

“In 1791, Benjamin Banneker, a free black, sent Jefferson a copy of the Almanac he had written, and called upon him to acknowledge black intellectual equality. Jefferson truthfully replied:"I thank you, sincerely, for your letter of the 19th instant, and for the Almanac it contained. No body wishes more than I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of men; and that the appearance of the want of them, is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa and America. I can add with truth, that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced, for raising the condition, both of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as far as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances, which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your Almanac to Monsieur de Condozett, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and Member of the Philanthropic Society, because I considered it as a document, to which your whole color had a right for their justification, against the doubts which have been entertained of them.

“History's tragic contradiction deliberately closed with a courtly,"I am, with great esteem, Sir, your most obedient servant."”

Naturally the imagery of a mushroom cloud found a place in the article. Americans all understand and many react viscerally to the image of a mushroom cloud. Hardly anything serves more effectively to marshal public fear and thus to cause people to clamor for the protection their government purports to provide.

The rest of the story is described as follows in James Bamford's excellent book A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 324-25.

As if the entire event had been scripted, administration officials had all agreed days earlier to appear on the Sunday talk shows that same morning. Once the cameras clicked on, they made generous use of the allegations contained in the article, now free from worries about releasing classified information. It was a perfect scheme—leak the secrets the night before so you can talk about them the next morning.

In separate appearances on Meet the Press, CNN's Late Edition, Fox News, and CBS's Face the Nation, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld each played essentially the same role in this made-for-TV farce.

Bamford concludes:

The series of events produced exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group [WHIG] had been set up to stage-manage. First OSP [the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] supplies false or exaggerated intelligence; then members of the WHIG leak it to friendly reporters, complete with prepackaged vivid imagery; finally, when the story breaks, senior officials point to it as proof and parrot the unnamed quotes they or their colleagues previously supplied.

As I read Bamford's account of these events, I could not help recalling Karl Kraus's immortal quip:"How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe those lies when they see them in print."

Even if the minimal state is the uniquely justifiable one, it may seem pale and unexciting, hardly something to inspire one or to present a goal worth fighting for. To assess this, I turn to that preeminently inspiring tradition of social thought, utopian theory, and argue that what can be saved from this tradition is precisely the structure of the minimal state.

What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or to do to establish such an apparatus.

My old friend Todd Zywicki over at Volokh has more details including a link to a Washington Times article that features some hard-hitting quotations from Sanders and Waters.