The state makes a mess of everything it touches. Examples from the book include how and why the “hot” water in our homes became lukewarm and what can be done about it, and how traffic-law enforcement became a racket for extracting wealth from the population to feed the overlords. FULL ARTICLE by Jeffrey A. Tucker
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I really want to read your book now.
Nice article Jeffrey. My preference would be for some of your favorite Serrano ham and eggs.
http://lizziee.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/eggs-benedict1.jpg
Now enter the omniscient bureaucrat who is concerned for my arteries. I might not be so incensed if a actually thought that they were output oriented. However, they are not.
Growing up in England after WWII, I could drink beer with my lunch or dinner in a restaurant as long as I was with my parents. Alcoholic consumption was at home was at the entire discretions of the parents. In France, parents would routinely serve wine (diluted with water) to 8 year old children. In the US, you would be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Needless to say, the US is the one with the alcohol addiction problem.
The problem with an interfering bureaucracy is that it becomes an end in itself.
“Needless to say, the US is the one with the alcohol addiction problem.”I disagree. I think both Europe and America in general drink too much. My European relatives drink no more and no less than us – which is to say they drink a lot.
The research shows that quantities of consumption are similar but Europeans drink regularly, with meals for example, whereas people in the US tend to binge drink. The latter is more destructive.
The drink to meals thing is more of a southern european thing(the wine belt). The “vodka belt” and “beer belt” areas have a more binge drinking culture
OMG I’m reading this while sipping on coffee with Bailey’s Irish Cream added to it, a delightful concoction that I have started consuming every morning, which does not impede the quality of my work one bit. But I work at home, which is why I can get away with it.
If you can get your hands on it I highly recommend a little-known creamy liqueur called “Amarula”. It makes Bailey’s taste like the over-sweetened artificial nonsense it really is
Sir, I will try it, thank you.
Tucker: “We believe, for whatever reason, that drinking hard liquor in the morning is unseemly, contrary to social norms, something to hide, a habit of the lower classes that is dangerous or even evil.”
Some folks–of both high and low estate–imbibe with reckless abandon during social-drinking hours, and for them the morning-after, shakes-abating, eye opener becomes a necessity rather than a choice. This group’s routine and even daily AM bourbon–or scotch or gin or beer or wine or vodka–is what gives the morning drink its less-than-salubrious reputation. Fear of becoming one or being adjudge one by others is probably the main reason for the condemnatory prevailing ethos. However, it is clear that those who dare to take an AM drink by choice rather than necessity are a minority unaffected by majority opinions or that of the “statist quo,” which is a lovely, useful play on words indeed.
Tucker: “We all need to be part of the project of reimagining freedom — of living outside the statist quo — else we will go the way of many societies and civilizations before us: host to a massive apparatus of power and imposition that strangles the growth and ingenuity of people, leading to a stasis that hardly anyone notices until it is too late.”
A prophetic warning, I fear. Having just completed reading another LvMI tome, Ludwig von Mises’ MEMOIRS, I was struck by the many similarities between the vicious political atmosphere and predominating statist tendencies in his native Austria during the 1920s and 1930s, and conditions in the United States today. Mises struggled with all of his towering intellect and woefully few allies to save Austria from itself, but to no avail. Wisely anticipating the events of March, 1938, when German troops were welcomed into Vienna, Austria ceased to exist as an independent nation, and its residents few remaining civil rights were all forcibly extinguished, Mises–a Jew–had wisely departed his homeland for the safety of Switzerland.
No less an intellectual giant than F.A. Hayek said of Mises and Austria in an introduction to MEMOIRS, “[H]e fought against an intellectual wave which is now subsiding, not least because of his efforts, but which was much too powerful than for one individual to successfully resist. That they had one of the greatest thinkers of our time in their midst, the Viennese have never understood.”
It seems to me that the intellectual wave of statism only seemed to be subsiding when Hayek wrote those words in 1977. A rejuvenated wave has become a tsunami in 2010, threatening to inundate the United States. Standing virtually alone against a tidal wave of ignorance in academia are the heirs to Mises’ legacy, which is Austrian economics and the relatively small group of scholars associated with and/or published by the LvMi. Although their numbers may be substantially greater than Mises and his few allies, and no evil equivalent of Hitler is currently visible on the horizon, I fear that the imperceptible stasis you warn of, Mr. Tucker, has grown in lock step with statism, eroding the vigilance and self-reliance (aka, God dependence), which nourish freedom.
I look forward to reading this. I probably will wait until it’s available in a free, electronic version, say .PDF, but that is up to Jeff. I’ll support Mises.org when I can, though.
The PDF is here
http://mises.org/books/bourbon_for_breakfast.pdf
Thanks a ton. I’m really enjoying it.
Those of us who think that private property should be beyond, or outside, the state could adopt the name ‘Ectocratist’. Ecto is Greek for ‘outside’, crat- means ‘rule’ or ‘system’. We might need a new word to define ourselves, and this is usually what we mean- that some parts of ourselves, like our property, are not for the public. Ectocratism would be the belief, and an ectocracy would be a state that limits itself to public property, leaving private property alone.
Jeffrey Tucker was in jail?? Detsils plz. Please post them.
What a lively discussion about the role of the state.
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