State interference in education usurps the child’s rights and displaces the custodial role of the parents in exercising those rights. That the state would seize the custodial rights from the parents demonstrates that it has its own interests in mind. The state must resort to force because neither the child nor the parents want the natural arrangement to be overturned. Because the state rests on compulsion its activity extinguishes the very basis for the development of the personalities of children, which is freedom.

Brad DeLong, self-professed Keynesian and social democrat, writes an excellent review of Jame’s Scott’s Seeing Like a State. He points out that Scott doesn’t seem to understand the intellectual roots of his own ideas: those roots are Mises and Hayek.

This is a very good review and very much worth reading.

Not only did interbureaucratic red-tape prevent “nearly two dozen water-dropping helicopters and two massive cargo planes” from partaking in extinguishing the numerous brush fires this past week, but FEMA actually staged a press conference earlier this week — passing it off as if it was the real deal.

Remember that Citigroup, Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. have formed a superfund to bail out troubled structured investment vehicles (SIV). The US Treasury Department and Henry Paulson “back” this plan. What it amounts to is another move on the part of the Wall Street-government partnership to garner market “confidence,” salvage credit markets, and bail out the banks.

Of course, chaos is the entrée. As of yesterday, here is the response from the Department of Homeland Security ...No additional comments needed. This dispatch says it all. from: U.S. Department of Homeland Security Multiple Wildfires Los Angeles - San Diego, CA Executive Summary #5

I am quite impressed with the article on the Mises Institute on Wikipedia. It has come into its own in recent months and does a great job of detailing the extent of the work done at 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, AL. I also enjoyed the interview with Lew Rockwell that the article links to where he reveals that on his twelfth birthday a friend of his father’s gave him Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and thus his future was set in stone. 12?

Murray Rothbard on the immediate postwar period: For a while the postwar ideological climate seemed to be the same as during the war: internationalism, statism, adulation of economic planning and the centralized state, were rampant everywhere. During the first postwar year, 1945–46, I entered Columbia Graduate School, where the intellectual atmosphere was, oppressively, just more of the same.

The Columbus Dispatch has an article about Bob Munley, a truly evil criminal. His crime? Producing and bottling tea, unregulated and at home nonetheless. And, state regulators can’t have that. So much for Liberty. Any risk associated with his tea is accepted by the consumer. Funny, you can purchase and consume FDA-approved drugs that are lethal, yet woe to him who dares sell tea made at home.

I don’t intend a live blog of Garrett’s book Harangue (1926)—about half finished—but I did want to share these observations on the socialist movement of the 1920s, in the words of one of the characters who treats the whole movement with some distance. Elsewhere, Garrett treats the problem of how and why the wealthy “buy” socialist ideology as a means of distinguishing themselves from the bourgeoisie. Here we have the anatomy of the movement as this one character understands it: