As I mentioned here, I've been celebrating the tenth anniversaries of my first two books in my"Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy": Marx, Hayek, and Utopia (which was published 10 years ago today) and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (which, though my second book, was published 10 years ago, this past Sunday).

In any event, over the last few days, I've had a number of new posts to Notablog, including links to an interview conducted by Sébastien Caré and an interview conducted by Sunni Maravillosa.

Today, Ed Younkins also posted his review of my book, Total Freedom (which was published five years ago); the review has generated some discussion at SOLO HQ.

In the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch, David R. Henderson recalls the key role played by economists in ending the draft. Henderson was a direct participant in this debate. He has some fascinating information about the hands-on role of Milton Friedman (pictured above) and many other leading lights in the field.

When we consider the message of this book in conjunction with the June report issued by Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron on the costs of marijuana prohibition it becomes crystal clear that the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs is, if nothing else, a colossal waste of money.

The closest I have ever gotten to the secret and inner Tolkien was in a casual conversation on a snowy day in Shelbyville, Kentucky. I forget how in the world we came to talk about Tolkien at all, but I began plying questions as soon as I knew that I was talking to a man who had been at Oxford as a classmate of Ronald Tolkien’s. He was a history teacher, Allen Barnett. He had never read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, he was astonished and pleased to know that his friend of so many years ago had made a name for himself as a writer.
“Imagine that! You know, he used to have the most extraordinary interest in the people here in Kentucky. He could never get enough of my tales of Kentucky folk. He used to make me repeat family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that.”
And out the window I could see tobacco barns. The charming anachronism of the hobbits’ pipes suddenly made sense in a new way...
"Practically all the names of Tolkien's hobbits are listed in my Lexington phone book, and those that aren't can be found over in Shelbyville. Like as not, they grow and cure pipe-weed for a living. Talk with them, and their turns of phrase are pure hobbit: 'I hear tell,' 'right agin,' 'so Mr. Frodo is his first and second cousin, once removed either way,' 'this very month as is.' These are English locutions, of course, but ones that are heard oftener now in Kentucky than in England.
"I despaired of trying to tell Barnett what his talk of Kentucky folk became in Tolkien's imagination. I urged him to read The Lord of the Rings but as our paths have never crossed again, I don't know that he did. Nor if he knew that he created by an Oxford fire and in walks along the Cherwell and Isis the Bagginses, Boffins, Tooks, Brandybucks, Grubbs, Burrowses, Goodbodies, and Proudfoots (or Proudfeet, as a branch of the family will have it) who were, we are told, the special study of Gandalf the Grey, the only wizard who was interested in their bashful and countrified ways."

I've admitted that I found all of that fascinating, largely because, like Davenport and Barnett, I'm a Kentuckian, but when I first read this I was wondering how much of it should I discount because Davenport was also a Kentuckian. I've read and discounted some of the claims that English and Scots-Irish immigrants settled in remote pockets of mountainous eastern Kentucky and preserved 18th century folk culture and language largely unchanged into the 20th century. But Lexington and Shelbyville are in the lush bluegrass central part of the state. They've never been isolated in ways that the mountain communities have been.
So, I thought I'd just toss these claims out for discussion by those who know more about The Lord of the Rings than I do. What would a well-informed historian do when confronted with this kind of evidence? Did Davenport discover the hobbits, living unbeknownst in central Kentucky or was his own provenance over-reaching?
...ClioWeb's Jeremy Boggs sends this via e-mail:"I'm from far southwest Virginia, Wise county to be exact, and I remember a few Baggins last names in the phone book. I went to Morehead State U. (in Morehead, Ky, my freshman year) and also remember a guy named Boffins. AND I remember a rather elderly man back home saying"eleventy-first" instead of one-hundred eleven, but I never thought to tie it to Tolkien's work until your post. Really interesting, I'll have to look into it more."

I'm not terribly impressed with the results. In particular, the disproportionately low concentration of Goodbodies, Tooks, and Proudfeet relative to the rest of the country is disappointing.
Worse still, I found 123 entries for Goodbody, 81 for Took, and 541 for Proudfoot in the British listings at Infobel UK. There are ten British entries for Gamgee, compared with no legitimate-looking listings at all in the US. There are also 58 British Boffins, but only twelve in America and none in Kentucky.
Some of those are business names, but that was disheartening. I was only slightly encouraged by finding a scarcity of Bagginses in the UK; there were just two likely-looking British listings, compared with one in Kentucky.
That does not in any way disprove the account we have from Barnett via Davenport. It merely means I haven't done anything to corroborate it.

File this blog entry under the category of"Self-Promotion." I suspect I'll be forgiven a bit of that by my L&P colleagues, who know my admiration for Ayn Rand.

On this date, ten years ago, my book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical was published by Penn State Press. It was actually my second book, but it arrived four days before the publication of my first book, Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, by SUNY Press. These books, together with my Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (also published by Penn State Press), make up my"Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy."

So, this week, I'll be looking back at Notablog, at L&P, and at SOLO HQ, which publishes one of my retrospective pieces today, entitled"Ten Years After." There will be interviews posted to different sites throughout the week, and additional pieces will be published into the Fall 2005 semester.

Thanks to those readers who have given me their support, even if they didn't always agree with my conclusions.

My long-time friend and partner in Austrian crime (and L&P contributing editor) Pete Boettke has a nice new entry at The Austrian Economists blog. Pete is addressing James Buchanan's contributions to political economy (and runs down a great list of Buchanan aphorisms that generations of grad students have tried to take to heart). Specifically, Pete talks about the varieties of socialism that have been threats to economic and political freedom over the last 100 years. He notes that the 21st century version of socialism has a new twist to it, according to Buchanan:

But Buchanan claims in his essay "Afraid to Be Free: Dependence as Desideratum" that the new threat in the 21st century comes in the form of:

(4) parental socialism --- where the individuals invite the government to meddle in their lives to protect them from themselves and provide security in their lives from the vagaries of a life left to their own making.

That's my emphasis, which is to distinguish this form of socialism, which involves individuals asking to be saved from themselves (parental) from forms where elected leaders or self-appointed elites simply believed they had to save others from themselves (paternal). Pete argues that Buchanan believes parental socialism has arisen because:

Autonomy is losing its appeal. The learned helplessness we have acquired by living in a political culture of preferential treatment and protection from ourselves may have left the modern mind incapable of accepting the responsibilities of freedom. We are instead afraid to be free.

I think there's much truth to this, but I want to take it a step further. It's not just the political culture that creates this demand to be saved from ourselves, but other aspects of the culture as well. In particular, I want to talk about parenting and the family.

Part of the unwillingness and inability of many (especially young) adults to take responsibility for their own lives comes from being raised by parents who protected them from either having to choose (by doing it for them) or accepting responsibility for the outcomes of the choices (by trying to constantly bail them out of situations of their own making). In addition, too many parents operate in a climate of fear, where they will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that nothing "bad" ever happens to their children. Think of the parents who will only allow their child to play on a playground full of soft rubber equipment and mats so that the horror of a scraped knee or bruised shin will never be experienced. Or consider the way better-off parents have taken quickly to getting children diagnosed with learing disabilities the moment school gets tough or they are unable to live up to parental expectations. Although some such disabilities may be real, it can also be a convenient way of excusing self-responsibility. Consider further the umbilical cord of the cellphone, with so many college students constantly connected to parents - and not because just the parents want that connection, but because the students themselves often cannot make a decision without parental involvement and help. As this wonderful piece from Psychology Today terms it, we're fast becoming "A Nation of Wimps."

Having worked with incoming college students closely for four years, the future scares me. We have too many students arriving at college unprepared for the sorts of decisions they will have to make and for taking responsibility for the results. For example, a group of our students, in the wake of the alcohol-related death of a fellow student, demanded that the university provide a "drunk bus" from campus to the village so that they could drink heavily and not have to worry about getting home. Their argument was that they should be able to do whatever they want and that WE should be making sure it doesn't kill them. This is "parental socialism" at its core.

We also have students who are unprepared for failure, having been cushioned from it for 18 years by parents who believe that any negative outcome for their kids reflects some sort of failure on their part. My own diagnosis of much of this cultural problem is that too many parents want trophy kids and that the over-psychologizing of parenting has frozen parents into mortal fear of doing something "wrong" and damaging kids for life. Think of the vast literature on potty training. Ask people who parented before the 1960s about whether they needed a manual to train their kids, or feared deep psychological damage if they did it "too early" or "wrong." They will, rightly in my view, laugh in your face. (The psychologist-columnist John Rosemond is excellent on this issue and many others, though I don't agree with him on everything. See in particular his Bill of Rights for Children, which captures his approach well.)

I once said to a group of students that the sign of a good parent is that he or she is unafraid to make his or her children cry (e.g. by saying no and sticking to it). They were horrified. For thousands of years, humans made it to adulthood fully functional despite a world much scarier than that of the 21st century. It's a fascinating question why we've invented this culture of "safety" and fear around our children. Perhaps with the demise of real fears (childhood illnesses, widespread grinding poverty in the West, and children being killed while working), we create new ones, in a sort of "dark side" parallel of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. One test of this hypothesis would be whether or not these sorts of parenting practices and views of responsibility are directly correlated with a society's wealth. My own casual empiricism about my own students (both across differences in income within the US and between US students and those coming from poorer regions outside the US) suggests the hypothesis is correct.

And those of us who teach know these kids - they don't know how to react to a poor grade and work to improve it; they take all criticism (from faculty and peers) of their ideas or skills as being personal (or being the result of faculty political bias, rather than consider the possibility that they need to do better); and faced with personal crises, they are frozen into complete inactivity. And they expect their parents to make it all right. Once again, the cultural roots of parental socialism in a nutshell.

I don't consider myself a Randian or an Objectivist of any stripe, but this issue is an example of ol' Ayn being right on the mark in emphasizing the linkages between cultural practices, philosophical ideas, and the political-economic order. I invite, no I urge, Chris to chime in here and make this argument better than I can. It seems to me it's precisely the sorts of things he's talking about in the last few chapters of Total Freedom.

The challenge for those of us who cherish economic and political freedom is enormous. Without changes in the culture, specifically the culture around parenting, it will be increasingly difficult to convince people that a free society is a good society. As Chris and others have said, recognizing the central role of culture in this way inverts a famous feminist slogan; in this analysis, the political is often the personal.