{"id":61247,"date":"2018-05-25T01:40:11","date_gmt":"2018-05-25T07:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=61247"},"modified":"2018-09-05T09:53:41","modified_gmt":"2018-09-05T15:53:41","slug":"a-blast-from-my-publishing-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2018\/05\/a-blast-from-my-publishing-past.html","title":{"rendered":"A blast from my publishing past"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"BYU's<\/a>
We were at BYU\u2019s Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies again yesterday afternoon. I always enjoy being there. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some time ago, on a whim, I discovered \u2014 to my delight and also somewhat to my horror \u2014 that my very first \u201cserious\u201d publication is available on the web:\u00a0 \u201cThe Future of Capitalism: Manifest Destiny on the New Frontier.\u201d The Freeman<\/i> 27\/3 (March 1977).<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t even thought about that possibility until that night, and I hadn\u2019t read the piece in many years.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m delighted because, well, the power and reach of the web astonishes me and because seeing the article again reminded me of pleasant times.\u00a0 Among other things, it won me a substantial cash prize, especially for that period, as well as an all-expense-paid two weeks in the United Kingdom in 1976 that included participation in the biannual meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society,<\/a> which was held that year at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland.\u00a0 For a week there, I got to rub shoulders with such people as Friedrich von Hayek,<\/a> Martin Anderson<\/a>, and Milton Friedman.<\/a>\u00a0 This was a heady experience for somebody in his early twenties.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I remember one late-night session in the hallway of a St. Andrews dorm where some of us argued U.S defense policy with Murray Rothbard,<\/a> who coined the phrase \u201canarcho-capitalism\u201d and, for that matter, pretty much embodied it.\u00a0 He was contending that America didn\u2019t really need federal-government military forces, but that \u2014 on the analogy of the privateers who served the role of an American navy during the Revolutionary War \u2014 free associations of citizens could, if they wanted, band together and purchase\u00a0ICBMs<\/a> of their own.\u00a0 (I\u2019m not altogether sure that he was joking.\u00a0 I envisioned a neighborhood in West Covina deciding to take out, say, Alhambra or South Pasadena over a bad call in a high school football game.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I spent a couple of hours used-book shopping in St. Andrews with the future Nobel laureate George Stigler<\/a>, and devoted one morning to a walking tour of the town and of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews<\/a> with the journalist and business historian John Chamberlain<\/a>, whom I greatly admired.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Another morning, we boarded a bus and headed off to Kirkcaldy, to pay our respects at the site where\u00a0Adam Smith<\/a> wrote his great book on The Wealth of Nations<\/i>, which had been published precisely two centuries before, in 1776.\u00a0 (I still have the cameo portrait of Smith that was given to all of us at the meeting that year.)\u00a0 When we arrived, Professor von Hayek stood before us to make some formal remarks and to place a wreath on our behalf.\u00a0 But nobody had actually brought the wreath.\u00a0 So, after returning that evening, we went out on the ramparts of the ruined castle of St. Andrews, and he tossed the wreath into the sea, confident, he said, that the \u201cinvisible hand\u201d<\/a> \u2014 students of economics and readers of Adam Smith will catch the reference \u2014 would take the wreath where it needed to go.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

One evening, my next-door neighbor in the university dorm where we were staying \u2014 an economist from Colorado, I think, whose name I\u2019ve forgotten \u2014 suddenly dragged me off to a late-night gathering of something called \u201cThe Invisible Hand Society.\u201d\u00a0 There were about ten of us there, including Milton Friedman and a few others.\u00a0 He had warned me at the last minute to put on the Adam Smith necktie that each attendee at the Invisible Hand Society was supposed to wear.\u00a0 This was lucky for me, because one poor soul showed up without it and was immediately fined ten pounds by the chair.\u00a0 (And he had to pay.)\u00a0 At one point, each of us in the room had to tell what we had done during the past year for the cause of the free market.\u00a0 I felt hopelessly inferior, because I was just an undergraduate student (in classics, no less), and all I had done was to write my essay.\u00a0 But that was deemed sufficient, and I passed.\u00a0 Another member of the group reported that he had debated John Kenneth Galbraith<\/a> at Princeton.\u00a0 He was fined twenty pounds for mentioning Galbraith\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The main point of that meeting seemed to be alcohol and bonhomie, but it brings me back to the essay.\u00a0 I say that finding it online is a bit horrifying, as well as a delight.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Well, as I say, it was probably my first \u201cserious\u201d publication \u2014 that is, apart from articles in my high school and college student papers and the annual journal of the BYU Honors Program \u2014 and the prose strikes me as a bit overwrought, over-earnest, pompous.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

A couple of things in it amuse me, though.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

First, there\u2019s a reference to California\u2019s \u201cNew Politics governor.\u201d\u00a0 That was Jerry Brown (aka in those days as \u201cGovernor Moonbeam\u201d).\u00a0 Could anybody have imagined then that he would go on to become mayor of Oakland and state attorney general, and that he would then be reelected governor again in 2011?\u00a0 (I had feared, to be honest, that he was going to be president of the United States.)*\u00a0 The state \u2014 my home state \u2014 may well deserve what\u2019s happening to it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Second, I note that I referred to Mao\u2019s remark that political power flows from the barrel of a gun.\u00a0 Some time back, I commented somewhere that taxes differ from tithes in that the former are mandatory, compulsory, forced, while the latter are voluntary.\u00a0 One of my more extreme critics challenged the distinction on the grounds that Mormons<\/a> are pressured by fear of damnation into paying tithes \u2014 his challenge seems to me the most transparent kind of equivocating sophistry, by the way \u2014 and confidently alleged that I had stolen the idea that taxes are extracted by coercion, backed ultimately by guns, from some right-wing radio host (or something like that) of whom I\u2019ve never heard.\u00a0 (This guy is always confident about my motivations and the sources of my ideas, and, curiously, his explanations always make me look stupid and dishonest.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure that\u2019s just coincidental.)\u00a0 But, in fact, I got the idea from Mao, and there he is, cited already in this old 1976 paper \u2014 thirty-six years ago \u2014 to that general effect.\u00a0 What distinguishes the state from, say, General Motors or Walmart is that, at least in a properly constituted society, government has a legal monopoly on the use of force \u2014 and such force should be used very sparingly.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 Even I myself found some things about the young Governor Brown quite endearing, though.\u00a0 When Democratic Governor Brown appointed the newly elected Republican S. I. Hayakawa, a noted semanticist and college president, to the U.S. Senate a few days early, in order to give him a jump in Senate seniority, the two emerged from their meeting to a bank of reporters.\u00a0 The first question was \u201cWhat were you two talking about?\u201d,\u00a0 presuming that they had been discussing matters of policy.\u00a0 \u201cWe had a great conversation about Ludwig Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus<\/i>,\u201d Governor Brown replied.\u00a0 And, in fact, his answer may have been true.\u00a0 Now, how many pairs of American politicians could you say that<\/i> about?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Posted from Jerusalem, Israel<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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