HEALTH & MANNERS 37 Dress Like the Great Depression

March 9, 2009

A conspicuous cultural change we can look forward to is a dramatic change in men’s dress style. Guys, you might as well get ahead of the curve. The free-fall economy means a boon for better fashion for men who intend to survive the onslaught.

We will be highly fortunate if the second Great Depression turns out to be as stylish as the first, in which even the bums sleeping on the park benches looked better than the average workers and even CEOs today.

I am looking at this guy in a Depression-era photo. I see the 1¾ inch cuffs on his trousers, the snappy crease in his pants, the great hat, and the woolen trousers. And the shoes: leather and laces, resting on a solid foundation. If I found any of his clothes in the vintage shop, I would snap them up and be ready for today’s tight job market, which seeks serious men, not goofs in sweats and polos.

The boom times led to great shabbiness. Workers have lived in wrinkles and jeans. The guy with the shirt with buttons is derided by others—“You going to a wedding or something?” We were all encouraged to look up to the slobwear of hotshot traders and stock jobbers and the others, who revel in the fact that they look like heck all of the time. Even the billionaires have looked like hobos (who themselves looked pretty great in the 1930s).

The idea behind shabby vogue was to give the impression that you don’t really care what others think. You are the cutting edge, the smasher of idols and conventions, a person who doesn’t give a flip about how society judges such artificial external superficialities as pant creases and ties and things. Your value is in your very person, the fact of your existence on this planet. In the boom times, the message of fashion is “It’s all about me!”

Now all of this has come into question. How much value did this jeans-clad generation really add? How much of it evaporated? How much was illusion all along? Maybe all this hype about intellectual capital is poppycock, and what matters is what one actually does, and not only for oneself but for others, such as customers and bosses and fellow workers.

As Trevor Kaufman, the guru of “CEO Casual,” told the Wall Street Journal in an article written at the top of the boom, “A suit has become something you wear when you’re asking for money.”

Uh, right.

In the bust, your clothes need to send a different message. There are fewer resources to spare. Everyone is conserving. The goal of your life becomes different. You are no longer permitted to pretend that your very existence is a blessing to the world. Instead, you must add more value to the world than you take from it. This is especially true in your work life.

In fact, this should be your professional motto: I can add more value to this firm than I take from it.

This is what every employer—who these days is reluctant to hire and reluctant to promote and pay—is actually seeking. No more fluff in the workforce. No more fluff in fashion either.

Right now, with unemployment moving into the double digits, it is becoming a dog-eat-dog world in labor markets. You must stand out. You must find ways to show that you are not expendable, that tossing you out would do more harm to the company than good. You must show that the company will risk losing more revenue by sending you away than by keeping you.

Clothing reflects this. There is no sense in disadvantaging yourself in this struggle.

Just have a look at what all men in the Great Depression wore. They were smashing. The suit. The hat. The shoes. The ties. Everything was well put together, among all races and classes of men. This isn’t just because all this stuff was intrinsic to the culture. Men in all times and all places have had the option of looking ridiculously unkempt. The point is that these men were under pressure to perform, to show that they were valuable, to demonstrate on sight that they were desirable commodities as workers.

So let us plunge back in time to examine modern needs in light of historical precedent, with some tutorial along the way.

Let’s start with the suit. It should be made of wool. It should be gray or blue. It should not have that strange Euro fit but rather have the loose-but-neat fit of the traditional American suit, which was never designed to show off your body, but rather your character.

Thus must it be sturdy and serious. The jacket can have two buttons, three buttons, or four buttons. When you are standing, all but the bottom button should be buttoned. You need to work on the habit of unbuttoning these buttons when you sit down and rebuttoning them when you stand up. Yes, you have to do this each time. Try it consciously over the course of a day and it becomes habit. The only exception might be at dinner, during which it is permissible to keep the coat buttoned.

Never take your jacket off, no matter how much you want to, no matter how hot it gets, no matter how much people plead with you to do so. The jacket is part of your clothing, and gentlemen don’t take their clothes off in public.

Just so that we are clear, the sport coat and pants combination is not a suit. In other words, a blazer and khakis don’t work. A suit has a jacket and pants, and sometimes a vest, that match. The fabric and color of the top and the bottom are the same.

You can buy great suits in thrift stores or on eBay, but you have to have a sense of what you are doing. If you don’t, you have to go to a nice men’s store, where you will have to pay the big bucks. However, you can get by on two or three suits, essentially forever. Wear one on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and the other on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Shirts, always worn with an undershirt during the bust (because people who really work also really sweat), should be white, blue, or light tan. Everything else is a risk. It can be straight collar or button-down. Lose the fancy “collar bars” and things until you are CEO. They look pompous most of the time.

For fit, the pants length should grace the top of the shoe, and the cuffs should be more than 1¼ inches but less than 2 inches. The shirtsleeves should fall ¼ to ½ an inch below the jacket.

Now consider the shoes. They should lace up. They should have leather soles if possible. Loafers are for loafers, and you don’t want anyone to think you are among them.

And hats! This might be the most exciting of the restorations of our time. Men haven’t really worn them since the 1960s, and that’s not just because JFK didn’t wear his. It’s really because we don’t get out much anymore. We go from the house to the car to the office and hats don’t serve that much function anymore.

And I hate that I even have to say this, but hats are not to be worn indoors. The only exceptions are large public spaces: malls, train stations, airports, and hotel lobbies. Otherwise, they are always off: restaurants, homes, offices, elevators, etc.

However, the hat serves more than a pure utility function. It is a thing of beauty. It is as valuable, in this sense, in the hand as it is on the head. A hat changes everything about a man. It elicits notice and respect, and the man with a hat knows this: he is complimented on it constantly. And let’s just tell the truth here: it raises you above the rabble quicker than any other article of clothing.

There are two general colors of hats: browns and blacks. You choose your hat the same way you would choose your socks, by picking up on general hues and themes. They are made of wool and sometimes pelts (fancy stuff). They can be stiff or crushable. You know the style that is right for you by trying it on. Different head shapes require different styles, so I’m not sure that online shopping can really work here.

In any case, despite our indoor culture, the new Great Depression stands a good chance of finally smashing the legacy of JFK: the hat might be restored.

Please note one final point: dressing up doesn’t mean adopting a stuffy personality with a stiff way about you, or walking around like a tin man. Good clothes provide the freedom to express yourself in other ways. You can be casual-acting and normal-behaving, and it is all the more important to be this way when you are dressed up. You can still move about normally, and do all the things you would otherwise normally do.

Clothes on a man should look and seem comfortable no matter what they are. You must be confident enough to wear them as if you belong in them. The more you can look like your clothes are in fact no big deal, just part of your life, the more compelling the message will be.

The way you dress can make all the difference. If it doesn’t work to boost your professional life, you can always count on looking fantastic when you march on the White House and protest against its occupants for robbing you blind in the name of saving you.

38

Protectionism and My Stuffy Nose

December 26, 2007

There I stood at the pharmacy counter, with a head cold, sniffing away, and begging for some product that contains pseudoephedrine, which works like a magic nose unclogger. The stuff you can get off the shelf now contains the similar-sounding drug called phenylephrine, but it might as well be a placebo. It just doesn’t work, and most everyone knows this.

You can still get the good old stuff from the pharmacist but you will be suspected for this grave action. The government, you see, says that people have been buying the old stuff and turning it into methamphetamine. This is why Congress and the administration passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, which rations the amount you can buy and requires that you prove your identity and sign a special form.

And, yes, this act is now part of the monstrosity called the Patriot Act.

“Thanks Bush” I muttered as I signed the form under the glare of the pharmacist who has been trained to treat me like a possible criminal.

It’s remarkable, really. Two years ago, buying Mucinex was no different from buying toothpaste or shampoo. Today, it is a big deal and you get on some government list as possible suspects. And yes, they do arrest people for buying too much, as the stuffy-nosed William Fousee of New York found out earlier this year.

The data that demonstrate a national crisis of meth usage seems pretty darn thin to me, with reports of increased workplace positive tests balanced by reports of decreased usage among the young.

In any case, one has to wonder about a national law that would so dramatically affect the health of millions in order to stop some guy from making meth in his basement. In the name of saving us from ourselves, the government has made it far more difficult for us to stay feeling healthy.

Laws are passed for a reason. If not health, what possible motivation could the government have had for imposing this law? Possibly to create a national database of the stuffy nosed? Not likely.

Let’s follow the money a bit. It seems that most all pseudoephedrine is manufactured in China and India, and very cheaply, much more cheaply than it can be made in the United States or Europe. What that means is that these companies don’t have lobbyists in Washington who can make an effective case for their product.

Contrast this was phenylephrine, the world’s largest manufacturer of which is located in Germany. The company is called Boehringer-Ingelheim, according to MSNBC. It developed the drug in 1949 for use in eyedrops. In the last two years, virtually every manufacturer of cold medicine has changed its formula to include the Boehringer drug. Some continue to make the old formula available but only with special access.

Is it possible that the move against wonderful pseudoephedrine and in favor of useless phenylephrine was really a form of protectionism in disguise? That it was really about rewarding a well-connected company at the expense of companies without connections?

If that sounds cynical, take a look at this (http://www.fecwatch.org). It seems that our friends at Boehringer Ingelheim are rather interested in American politics, with 73% of their donations going to Republican candidates for federal office. You can see here that Boehringer even has a PAC, located in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Someone with more time than I have ought to check to see how the people it supported for Congress voted on the act that resulted in a massive shift toward their product, and has nearly kept its competitive product off the market.

Oh, and look here (http://www.opensecrets.org). It turns out that this company spent $1.85 million on lobbying in 2005, and this was a huge upsurge over all previous years.

The following year it spent $922,000, and spending declined further in 2007.

And here is the Boehringer 2006 annual report, (http://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/corporate/download/ar/summaryreport2006.pdf), which triumphantly announces that “the phenylephrine business continued growing at a high level.” (Their 2007 report is not yet online.)

Now, before you call me a crazed conspiracy theorist, consider this amazing coincidence. The main company that stands to benefit from a law—passed in the name of the patriotic war on drugs—that effectively marginalizes in its main competition and gives a boost to its inferior product spent millions in lobbying and campaign donations in the very year that the law was passed. There is no record of any substantial spending before the push for the law began, and spending has been declining since the law passed.

So let me go out on a limb here and say what any reasonable person would strongly suspect. The reason you can’t get Mucinex and Sudafed that work without jumping through hoops isn’t really about stopping basement meth users. It is really about the racket going on in Washington in which the law is used to benefit influential producers in cahoots with the political class at the expense of less influential producers and the American people, who should have the freedom to choose.

Remember: there is a story like this behind just about everything government does. If you comprehend that, you can understand why people like Albert Jay Nock said that the state is always and everywhere the enemy.

39

Bush’s Fowl Play

November 9, 2005

In a classic case of News of the Weird, President Bush gave a press conference the other day to announce yet another central plan to deal with yet another disaster—this time an impending disaster, or so he claimed. It seems that some birds are catching a flu called Avian Influenza or, more commonly, the bird flu. It causes ruffled feathers and a drop in egg production. It can kill a chicken in two days flat. Scary.

The Chicken Littles at the White House got wind of this and decided to hatch a plan for dealing with the eventuality that it will wipe out whole cities inhabited by people. That’s people, not birds. Bush wants $7.1 billion from you and me, in emergency funding no less, to protect us from the wrath of this disease, which, he says, could sweep the country and kill 1.9 million people and hospitalize another 9.9 million. Part of the money will go for “pandemic preparedness,” and part will go to individual states so they can cobble together their own plans for our health and well-being.

As part of this plan, there is a website, pandemicflu.gov, which is also a helpful link if you haven’t so far believed a word you have read. Here you can click around and find the Mother of All Flu Reports: The National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza. Be assured that “the federal government will use all instruments of national power to address the pandemic threat.” That includes FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, and a hundred other concrete palaces in DC.

In this report you will find what you must do: be “prepared to follow public health guidance that may include limitation of attendance at public gatherings and non-essential travel for several days or weeks.” The government, meanwhile, will establish “contingency systems to maintain delivery of essential goods and services during times of significant and sustained worker absenteeism.”

Yes, we are really supposed to believe that the government will “maintain delivery” of “essential goods and services.” Your job is to sit in your house and wait. Let’s just say that government has a credibility problem here.

Also, the Bush administration has a role for the military to do for the flu what it did for terrorism in Iraq: “Determine the spectrum of public health, medical and veterinary surge capacity activities that the U.S. military and other government entities may be able to support during a pandemic.” Remarkable what the military can do, from spreading democracy to liberating the oppressed to curing the sick—that is, when it is not making people sick or killing them for their own good.

Just to show that this isn’t merely a perfunctory line, Bush went out of his way in his press conference to defend the role of the military. “One option is the use of a military that’s able to plan and move,” he said. “So that’s why I put it on the table. I think it’s an important debate for Congress to have.”

Now, should this mass death come about, our future would be rife with many uncertainties. But one thing we can know for sure: any attempt by government to manage the crisis will add calamity to disaster. It will be 9-11 plus New Orleans plus a few other amazing failures all rolled into one.

And the worst part of government failure will present itself: rather than make a mess of its own responsibilities, the government acts to prevent people from doing what they should be doing to deal with the crisis. “Stop in the name of the law” isn’t just a slogan from cop shows; it is the sum total of everything the government does.

The Bush administration, however—which is supposedly staffed by people learned in the wisdom of classical conservative thought and informed by revelation from America’s traditional religious heritage—is just darn sure that the government is the best and only means to handle a crisis such as this.

A dazzling display of absurdity and chutzpah—that’s what the Bush press conference on the flu was. Even if the flu does come, and taxpayers have coughed up, the government will surely have a ball imposing travel restrictions, shutting down schools and businesses, quarantining cities, and banning public gatherings.

It’s a bureaucrat’s dream! Whether it will make us well again is another matter. And why should individuals on their own have no incentive to deal with disease? Why should the private sector have no reason to make cures available if they exist? Why are we to believe that the government would somehow do a better job at this level of crisis management than the private sector?

None of these questions have been asked, much less answered.

So I’m reading along in The New York Times, and it casually says this: “This bird flu has infected about 120 people and killed 60. But the virus has yet to pass easily among humans, as is necessary to create a pandemic. Experts debate whether it ever will, but most believe that a pandemic flu is inevitable someday.”

Well, as Roderick Long often says about such contingencies, anything can happen. Men from Mars could land in capsules and plant red weed all over the world. The question we need to ask is how likely is it and who or what should address the problem should it arise.

The World Health Organization provides a link to data about human infection. It says the following: “Although avian influenza A viruses usually do not infect humans, several instances of human infections have been reported since 1997.”

So we’ve gone from hundreds of infections to “several.” And when you look at the specifics, most were not human-to-human infections but people in closer contact with sick birds than most anyone ever is. And even among them, most patients recovered. For example: “A (H9N2) infection was confirmed in a child in Hong Kong. The child was hospitalized and recovered.” In another case in Canada, infections resulted in “eye infections.” Among those who did die, it was not a clear case of Avian, though the site offers the following odd phrasing: “the possibility of person-to-person transmission could not be ruled out.”

For this, we get a presidential news conference? As far as I can tell, the prospect of millions dying from bird flu is pretty remote. If it does happen—and anything can happen—why must government be involved at all? Economists might invoke a public-goods rationale: pandemic disease protection is a service that can be consumed by additional consumers at no additional cost and the beneficiaries cannot be excluded from the good once it has been produced, and thus this service will not be produced in sufficient quantity in the private sector.

The point is so farfetched that it makes a case for Randall Holcombe’s theory of the theory of public goods: “it is in the best interest of the those who run the government to promote public goods theory” and so the best way to understand the theory is as a justification for the legitimacy of the programs the government wants for itself. It is a tool the government uses for its own benefit.

What about the private-sector alternative? It will manage it as well as can be expected. The price of vaccines will rise and draw more producers into the market. Businesses will establish their own rules about who can come and go. Private charities will deal with sickness. It isn’t a perfect solution but it is an improvement on dispatching the Marines or having the government provide “essential goods and services.”

What’s more, the problem of the bird flu isn’t even news, since the incidents of human infection are several years old. Why does the Bush administration choose right now to make such a big showing of its preparations for mass death by bird?

Could it be that it is running out of other pretexts for expanding power? Terrorism is getting boring, floods come only rarely, communism is long gone, the China “threat” is no longer selling, the Middle East is dull, global warming is just too silly, and people have gone back to ignoring most anything that comes out of Washington. Meanwhile, the regime is desperate to be liked again, and forever relive its salad days after 9-11.

That still leaves the question of why so many public health officials seem so hopped up about the bird flu, even though the data doesn’t come anywhere near supporting their frenzy. The answer is buried somewhere in those gargantuan budget numbers. Someone somewhere is going to get that $8 billion, and it is not going to be you or me.

What’s remarkable is how little comment the bird flu plan provoked. We seem to have reached the stage in American public opinion where hysterical frenzies by government and totalitarian plans to take away all liberties are treated as just another day. We see the president telling us to fork over billions, and we turn the channel. Was it this way in the old Soviet Union or East Germany when the state newscasts went on every night about the march of socialism? Has crisis management become the great white noise of American life?

It is a serious matter when the government purports to plan to abolish all liberty and nationalize all economic life and put every business under the control of the military, especially in the name of a bug that seems largely restricted to the bird population. Perhaps we should pay more attention. Perhaps such plans for the total state ought to even ruffle our feathers a bit.

40

What Men Want

August 10, 2005

You know why so many men walk around with sloppy hair? We hate haircuts. You have to drive there to get one, which represents decline, because if you know about Figaro from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville,” the barber came to your home (but then he also pulled out your teeth and passed on furtive notes arranging encounters of various sort, etc.).

In any case, you have to drive there to get a haircut and you would rather be doing a thousand other things. Then you wait. Wait! Oh sure, there was probably a time when men would meet at the barbershop to talk about the crops, the harvest, the rain, fishing, or whatever. No one wants to talk about that stuff anymore.

Now they talk about sports. It can be very intimidating. I used to read the sports page before my haircuts so that I could say something, anything, if only to prevent the men from muttering about the odd bird in the bow tie after I left.

One time, though, I really messed up. I noticed that no one was in the barbershop and said, hey, what’s going on? The barber said there was a game going on in Auburn right then. I said yeah? And then warming up to the idea of sports talk I said: “who we playin’?” His answer was devastating and exposed my affectation immediately: “Alabama.” (If you don’t understand why this answer would be humiliating, you know even less about sports than I do.)

There was once a charming old-world Texas frontier town with a barber whose trade went back generations. He was the only one in town. But woe for the people who had the misfortune of getting a haircut the day I was there. Arriving mid-morning, it was noon before my time came and then he had to step out to get a bite to eat. He didn’t come back for an hour. By this time, I was so demoralized that I had to wait it out. My hair was finally cut—after several naps, major depression, suicidal thoughts—at around 2 p.m. I was too defeated to complain.

If there had been anything to talk about with those other cobweb-covered men, it was done after 10 minutes. In any case, the truth is that there is nothing anymore to talk about in barbershops. You learn nothing, nothing that you can’t get from Google in half a second. We have nothing to gain from these strangers, and we have no interest in telling the barber the ins and outs of where we are from, what we did on our vacations, and like that. Why should we?

We don’t “get to know” the guy who processes our one-click Amazon order. The modern age allows us to pick and choose our associations very carefully, and this should extend as far as possible. Even our doctors have speeded up, thanks to urgent care clinics that have liberated us from the family doctor who is glad to waste a half a day of our time at his convenience.

In any case, what the world needs very badly, I have just found: the three-minute haircut. Can you imagine? You drive up and park and walk in and sit down. Becky Boss at Fantastic Sams in Westerly, Rhode Island, gets the job done in three minutes for men and five for women, and it is a great cut! Not a lot of fussing and poking and flicking your precious locks around. She understands that your time is costly. And her speed helps her get customers in and out.

You can leave your car running! And what a great sense of life this Becky Boss has. No unanswerable questions about whether you would like her to use scissors or an electric razor: she just does what is best. We are not expected to conjure up a panoply of preferences that we don’t really have, e.g. do we want it “blocked” in back or “shorter on top.” She sees what needs to be done and does it. The critical thing is that she knows what really matters: your time. There is just enough time for a first impression and you are gone.

So I’m wondering why there isn’t a chain that advertises three-minute haircuts. I guarantee that it would do very well. Every guy dreads getting his haircut. For that matter, women report that the longer a “stylist” takes with their hair, the more worried they become—and the worse the cut ends up.

Someone told me about a place where you can get your oil changed and get a hair cut at the same time, which seems like a step in the right direction. But still, you don’t need your oil changed as often as you need a haircut. So the three-minute haircut is still the answer.

Let’s say the haircut costs $12. That’s $4 per minute that the barber earns. That’s $240 an hour, or $1,920 a day, and $9,600 a week, and—wait for it—$480,000 per year, plus tips! You can be a millionaire in two years, and that’s with two weeks of vacation each year! Yes, yes, there are also taxes and the costs of doing business, but the point stands.

I’ve seen the future and it works!

41

The Shaving Cream Racket

April 22, 2006

Look, I’m the last guy to trash a consumer product. I’m disinclined to blast the manufacturers of a beloved bathroom gel as deceivers who make money off people’s ignorance and perpetuate the problem they are supposedly solving, or charlatans who deliberately hook people on some chemically produced gunk solely for the sake of profiting from repeated uses.

But someone has to say it: shaving cream is a racket.

Why don’t people know this? It’s just part of the lost knowledge of our time. Wean yourself from it for a week, and you will find that your shaves will be closer, unbloody, and quick. Imagine a full shave in less than a minute, with no cuts, gashes, or discomfort. It is within your grasp.

You won’t have the face of a tenderized chicken breast. Your skin will be solid and robust. You will feel the same revulsion I do as you encounter that long row of shaving products at the drug store. You too will feel pity on the seventh eights of the human race that does not understand this simple point.

Why is the world hooked on this stuff? Here’s what happens. Early on in a person’s life, when whiskers and stubble begin to appear on the skin, the young teen is presented a razor and a can — a can with a squirting top that releases a foam. It is a charming little foam. The child is taught to rub it on and then shave it off.

Oh how funny looking it is when the foam is on us! And how fun to zap it off. We are left with clean and smooth skin. Pure magic. But the magic doesn’t last.

It never occurs to this child — so innocent, so naïve, so trusting — that he or she has been hooked into a lifetime of shaving hell. That foam, that sweet looking puff of magic, is in fact the great enemy of a good shave — black magic that relies on perpetuating dependency and ignorance.

The problem is this. Shaving cream does something evil to the skin. It somehow weakens the pores and makes the top layer mushy and unresponsive. The kid comes to believe that somehow the foam is essential to the experience. Without it, surely the razor would leave a trail of blood.

But then strange things start to happen. Red lumps appear. The shaved skin comes to feel sort of strange, oddly sensitive to temperature changes and ever more vulnerable to being sliced and diced.

People think: oh I need a new razor! So they go out and buy ever more fancy brands, with multiple blades, pivoting heads, strange lubricants, and push-out tools to deposit the hair remains in the sink.

They don’t consider that it might be the shaving cream that is the source of the trouble.

Why don’t people imagine this possibility? Because shaving cream seems so frothy and innocent, the glorious barrier that stands as a guard or shield between your skin and the sharp blade. The cream is our valiant protector, so surely that is not the source of the problem!

In fact, it is not our protector. Shaving cream is destroying your skin, turning it into a whining, pathetic, dependent, beaten, insipid layer of pasty pulp. Your skin has become the fatted calf that has been killed, the lamb slain on the altar, the virgin sacrificed in some ancient cannibalistic ritual of an uncivilized people.

Of course the problems persist — and get worse.

There are many attempts to avoid them along the way. People try aftershave, more and more and more of it. Pretty soon, they are tossing handfuls of the stuff on their skin, putting alcohol all over tenderized and sliced up skin. Then they become attached to that too. But it is not enough. The redness and pain are still there.

There are those who believe in hot lather. They buy fancy machines and rise extra early to warm them up. There are those who make the leap toward electric razors that swirl and buzz around in a creepy sort of way. There are those who believe the key to shaving is time: I’ve heard the preposterous claim that a good shave should take 12 minutes.

Stop the insanity!

The core problem is shaving cream itself, and the solution is a radical one: throw it out and never buy it again. It is destroying you and making your skin weak and sickly.

But you say: surely if this were true, it would be common knowledge. Not sure. There are many thing that are true — the state is a parasite on society, private property would solve most social problems, rock music is tedious and stupid — but are nonetheless not generally known or applied. The truth that shaving cream is a racket should be added to this.

Many problems in the world cannot be solved by one person. But this one can. You can begin the process of letting your skin become normal again. You can restore your skin’s health. It won’t take longer than a week or so. Stick with it and you will see what I mean.

The first stage of freedom uses only a razor (double blade is fine) and a bit of baby oil or mineral oil. While in the shower or soon after you get out, put some oil on the skin area you want to shave. Then shave it. The end.

At first, it won’t feel right. You might cut yourself. It will be scary. Your skin might hurt a bit. It might swell up. Why? Because you have turned your skin to mush for decades of shaving cream use. It needs time to recover from this. You need to do this for days.

This is your first day of relief from shaving cream hell. Your skin is recovering. Do the same the next day. And the next. And the next. After 5 days, normalcy will be almost returned.

After a week, you can even give up the oil and use only warm water. You will find that you will be able to shave ever more swiftly and with ever more abandon. A man can shave his whole face in 20 seconds without a single abrasion.

My freedom from shaving cream began twenty years ago after a friend uttered to me the great truth that shaving cream is a racket. Ever since I have exulted in my knowledge and felt deep pity on the rest of the world for languishing in unknowingness.

To my knowledge, this is the first and only time that this great truth has been revealed. May this short article serve as a hinge of history.

42

How To Dress Like a Man

July 16, 2003

Guys, here is your one-article guide to dressing, based on many years in the rag business and a lifetime of observing the sheer ubiquity of error.

There are two general types of men’s clothing.

First, there are clothes for public consumption: clothing in which to present yourself to others and thereby convey an elevated message about yourself. These are types of clothes you wear to work, to the store, out on the town, at a wedding, at church, at parties, or wherever people are going to see you. The primary objective here is that you look presentable, that you be civilized, a gentleman and not a beast.

The other type of clothing is that which serves a pure functional purpose: that is, that which you wear for yard work, fixing your car, an evening at home, a Saturday washing the house or cleaning, or just knocking around the park with kids. Everyone knows what type of clothes these are. They can all be bought at Wal-Mart or thrift stores, and they are made of cotton.

The great dressing error of our time is to confuse the two. Or more precisely: people think that it is perfectly okay to present yourself to others in clothes which serve a purely functional purpose. They say this is fine because it is comfortable—as if the only thing that matters in life is comfort. Well, it is also comfortable not to shave and not to bathe, and we have a word for people like that: slobs. If you don’t want to be a slob, you have to live with a bit of discomfort.

If men could absorb that simple lesson, the world would be a much more beautiful place in which to live. Elevated dressing causes people to behave better. Crime might fall. Manners would begin to come back. People might clean up their language. They might listen to better music and read better books. Something resembling civilization might return.

Now the next step: how do you look presentable? For a man, it is a snap. Your full wardrobe need not take up more than 12 to 18 inches of closet space. You need:

• one or two suits in blue or grey

• a blue or black jacket or sports coat

• a jacket for Summer (khaki or blue cotton or, if you want to be really fancy, seersucker)

• a tweed jacket for Winter

• year-round grey wool trousers (light or dark or both)

• a few pairs of khakis

• Three white and three blue shirts

• a selection of ties

That’s all. That will get you through a lifetime, replacing them with something similar when these wear out. Mix as necessary. If you have chosen well, just about any jacket will go with your trousers. Just about any shirt will go with any jacket. Ties should be chosen with an eye to color, making sure that the tie stands out and does not blend in with either jacket or shirt or trousers. Men’s clothes should not “match”; they should go together, which is something else entirely.

But, you say, I’ll look the same all the time! Right. This conveys an impression that you are a wise and stable person, not prone to flights of fancy and fits of fashion. There is a practical aspect here. You don’t really want to wear clothes that cause people to comment: hey, that is a really nice forest-green, window-pane, double-breasted, peak-lapel, side-vent hunting jacket with leather patches! The next time you wear it, the comment will be: oh, you wore that last week! No, you don’t really want people to zero in on your clothes as if they have an existence apart from you and your character. Clothes should not make the man; they should be the man.

As for adjustments, there are many things you can do to vary your wardrobe. The main trick here is obvious: you can switch ties around (only two knots are permissible: the four-in-hand or the half Windsor.) You can wear suspenders. You can have button-down shirts or plain collars. You can stick a linen handkerchief in your pocket. You can add a hat. All these things can make a world of difference, and make you look just different enough to make it appear that you have a huge wardrobe, but not so different day to day that you come across as a loon.

Is this an expensive undertaking? Not in any way. Unless you have some size issue at work, most of this can be purchased at a thrift store. The other day I bought a pair of grey wool trousers and a pair of olive wool trousers at $3 a piece. The same items were available at a local men’s shop for $90 and up. Down with retail! Sports coats are the same: unless you have some size issue to deal with, most are available at thrift stores. Shirts? Same. A buck a piece. Another option is the wonderful shirts from Lands’ End. Why spend $65 for a Gitman when you can spend $25 at Lands’ End?

Note that wearing a sports coat is not dressing up. A sports coat and trousers are casual wear. It is mostly what you should be wearing to light parties, to most jobs, to the store. It is perfectly presentable for public consumption. But do not be deceived into thinking that you are “dressing up” when you wear them. A sports coat and trousers are the official uniform of a man who is just going about the business of life. When someone says, come casual!, this is what you wear.

Jackets can have two, three, or four buttons. They can have side vents, center vents, or no vents at all. Avoid double-breasted until you have everything else. Americans do not wear hard shoulders! Nor do Americans wear those crazy drop-lapel sexy-style models that Bill Clinton wore. Do not buy these under any circumstances. They are ridiculous. Finally, always prefer natural fibers over synthetics.

Suits are trickier. You can get them at thrift stores, but they are harder to come by. You can also see eBay, which has an amazing selection of suits that you can buy for $20 and up. If this doesn’t work, you have to go retail, and here you have to spend $450 and up for a decent suit. The worst thing to do is go to a department store and buy a $200 suit from the likes of JCPenney. These look horrible and they will fall apart. If you can’t go thrift or eBay, prepare to spend. It is worth it. A special note for older men: wear suits most or all of the time, and always ties. Ultimately, it is the only thing an older man looks good in.

If you are wearing a suit, you are dressed up but you are not formal. For formal wear, you need a dinner jacket and black tie. That is another subject entirely. These days, most people don’t need formal clothing. If you do need it once or twice in a year, it is worth it to buy the whole package. Don’t spend a lot of money! On formal occasions, guys all look the same anyway, and you don’t wear it enough to wear it out. You can get away with spending $150 in some discount formal shop. But I digress.

On shoes, there are only two brands that qualify as quality shoes: Allen Edmonds and Alden. All others are junk. Good shoes are expensive. Prepare to pay. The best possible shoe is the shell cordovan from Alden, starting at $440 and up. So it is. They last a lifetime. If you don’t have the money, go to the military supply store and pay $10 for some used military oxfords. They look great! Ultimately, you need: a black shoe, a burgundy shoe, and a casual shoe (this, again, leaves aside shoes that go with functional wear). That’s all. As for loafers, they are aptly named. The normative men’s shoe should have laces.

This takes us to the issue of fit. Most people buy their shoes too small. Get a half size bigger than you think. Shoes should not hurt your feet. Don’t believe your shoe will stretch. It should be right when you wear it out of the store.

Fitting a shirt is not hard. Measure your neck with a tape measure. A shirt should not be too loose around the neck (you should not be able to stick your whole hand in your collar!) nor should it be too tight (when you turn your head, your shirt should not turn with it). The sleeve length should be such that the cuff hits that bone at the top of your hand some four inches above your thumb.

Do I really need to say it? No short-sleeve “dress shirts” in public, ever! Also, do I really need to say this? Shirts are not supposed to be worn against the skin. Wear a T-shirt, please.

Jackets: most men wear them too tight! Resist the temptation to get them taken in. They should be loose and comfortable. Jacket sleeve length: men tend to wear them too long! One-quarter to one-half inch of your shirt cuff should show below the jacket. You should measure this standing in place.

It doesn’t matter what your life activities are: fit is fit! I once had a drummer tell me that he needs his jacket sleeves long in order for them to look right as he plays his cymbals. Well, if so, I should make mine long to change a lightbulb! This is nonsense. There is only one way a jacket fits: properly.

Trousers: they are not supposed to fit like jeans! They are supposed to be loose and even billowy by blue-jean standards. Do not have the seat taken in. Do not have the back leg taken in. Just wear them as they come. The length of leg should hit the top of your shoe. It should not break too much. Cuffs should be 1.5 inches, no less. Older men can get away with larger cuffs but not younger men.

Socks: nothing fancy, please! They should be blue, black, grey, or tan. Anything else, like argyles or other patterns, is too fussy for a gentleman. They conjure up an image of a guy rifling through a sock drawer try to find just the right sock for the occasion. This is an awful image. Socks should appear to be put on without any effort or thought. But: never wear a sock that is a lighter color than your jacket. No time to explain why. Just trust me on this point.

Finally, never underestimate the power of the iron. The iron is the ultimate tool for dressing well. It puts the crease in your trousers and takes the wrinkles out of your jackets. It flattens the placket on your shirt and puts a point in the cuffs of your pants. Your iron should come out frequently, almost daily in fact. If you are not ironing, you are not dressing well.

Yes, there is much more to say, but this article contains just about all you will ever need to know to look better than most every man in the world. Follow my advice and do your part to save civilization.

43

Do People Secretly
Think You’re a Pig?

December 1, 2007

You don’t want to read this article. But you should and must. It contains some dreadful truths that are universal but no one is willing to talk about them because the subject is so uncomfortable.

I would like to reveal a universal prejudice—it is a cruel and judgmental attitude that is written on the hearts of people in all times and all places—that might very well wreck your life, but which you can deal with rather easily.

The subject is table manners. No biggie, right? Who cares about how one holds a fork or cuts a steak or eats soup? All this is merely Victorian frippery, irrelevant in our days of social liberation.

Here’s the truth. You are being judged every time you lift fork to mouth. And not just judged: you are watched with an eagle eye and mercilessly and horribly criticized in the minds of those around you. They are forming extreme opinions about you. Missteps are being chronicled in the personal histories others carry around in their minds.

What’s more, the assembly of facts that people hold in their minds concerning your table manners rises to the top. It is more important than what you say, because table manners seem to reveal some inner secret about you, your background, your class, your rearing, your parents, your attentiveness and self-awareness. People are perversely interested in your secrets, particularly those you reveal inadvertently. No, people will not admit it. But they are lying. You are how you eat.

It comes down to this. You can be wearing a $2,000 suit. You can speak with incredible erudition. You can have the whitest teeth, the best jokes, the coolest haircut, and looks of dazzling beauty. But bad table manners wipe it all away.

Worse: the better you look and sound, the higher the standards are for your manners and the more severe people will be toward your slipups. Why? Because people will figure that all the other externals are nothing but a put-on. You will be a living, breathing hoax.

I know that these truths are hard to take. The first thought might be: hey, don’t impinge on my eating freedom! I’ll eat how I want!

Ok, that’s fine. But then you have to live with the consequences. It’s the same with dress and language. You can cuss like a congressman, use a vulgar word at the table, stink to high heaven, and wear sweats to a dinner party. For that matter, you can staple your face with 100 metal rings, and stretch your earlobes to your shoulders—but then you have to live with the social fallout. People will shun you. You will be an outcast.

It’s not only that. Are you really happy knowing that people who have eaten with you carry around an image of you in their heads that has you eating like a pig? It doesn’t take much to cause this: stacking your artichoke leaves upside-down, for example. So even if it doesn’t hurt your career (which is does!), are you really happy knowing that people think ill of you?

Fine, you say, but first let’s discuss this.

At some point in your life, you will be required to eat in front of someone whom you want to impress. It could be a future employer. It could be a present manager higher up in the pecking order. It could be the dean, your pastor, a potential client or donor. It could be a possible future in-law. Don’t think that eating alone in a fast-food place protects you. Someone could be watching. That someone might later find himself or herself in a position to do you a favor.

So let’s say you blow it on one of these occasions. There will be no announcement. No explanation. No one will take you aside and say: “Next time, eat your soup by moving the spoon away from your body.” No one says: “I like Jane, but she needs to brush up her table etiquette.”

You will never know the reason for your failure. But neither will you ascend. You will only rise as high as your manners place you in the social hierarchy. Again, people are horribly and secretly cruel: they will condemn not only your character but your whole family history. It’s not just your reputation that stands in the balance but that generation’s.

And remember that you only have one chance to get it right, and then you die and your legacy is established for all of history. Your legacy does not need to be less than it could, all because you never put your napkin on your lap.

These are brutal facts, terrifying ones, even. But it’s better that you know now rather than blow your one chance to get it right. Remember the quotation attributed to Oscar Wilde: “The world was my oyster, but I used the wrong fork.”

There are many guides to table manners out there. But we live in a blogging culture in which all information must be instant and short. So here are the five essential things you must do no matter what:

1. Hold your fork and spoon properly. There is only one way: balance them between the first knuckle of the middle finger and the tip of the index finger; the thumb steadies the handle. There are no variations on this, no issues of personal style, and no regional permissions. For some things, such as cutting with the other hand, there are other variations that require turning the fork over. If you are unsure, default to the orthodox way.

2. Put your napkin in your lap after you sit down to dinner. Do not forget.

3. Don’t smack. This is easy, right? Apparently not. Smacking is incredibly and disgustingly common. People must suppose that others don’t hear it. But they do, and it’s awful. There is only one way in the known universe to prevent smacking: keep your lips closed when there is food in your mouth, no matter what.

4. Eat at the margin, not the aggregate. Don’t cut all your steak up before you begin eating. Don’t butter your whole roll. Prepare each bit separately.

5. If in doubt, wait for others. Don’t start eating anything until everyone has been served.

There: that’s five hard-core rules. There are a hundred others that you can pick up in time, and it is good to read a book, so that you know for sure that you are doing it right. But you do not want to look like an obsessive rule keeper. Equally important to obeying rules is to look like you are not even thinking about them. You must look comfortable, happy, and relaxed. What’s more, this is the only way to be in order that you can be delightful at the table.

Okay, so you are jolted a bit, and offended by this article. You are tempted to forget that you ever read it. You are free to do so. But others are also free to think of you as uncouth, ill-trained, low-born, and poorly raised, and to treat you with all those assumptions in mind.

Yes, there are probably great men and women of the past who ate like pigs. They succeeded despite it. Why take the chance that you will happen to be among them, when minding manners is so little to ask?

44

Ten People I Would Like To Meet

August 1, 2005

Blog memes can be annoying, so this is no attempt to start one. It is merely an interesting exercise that yields interesting information about both the subjects and the person doing the choosing.

The idea is to choose ten people who you would most like to meet in all of history, five men and five women. To make it more challenging, let’s exclude family and primary religious figures such as JMJ, etc., and exclude elected politicians and bureaucrats just because their profession is such an obviously shoddy means toward achieving immortality.

The idea isn’t to meet them to pester them with some question, like asking Socrates precisely what he was teaching the youth, or Shakespeare whether he really is Shakespeare. Nor is it about some time-travel thing that allows you to ask Kennedy who he thinks shot him.

No, the idea is to meet these people as you might meet anyone today in a casual setting in which you have a few minutes to visit, just to see what impression he or she makes. The goal is to discover what it is like to be in their presence, to hear their voices, to look in their eyes, observe how they manage the space, to engage in polite introductions and small talk and, perhaps, to convey to them what their lives and work have meant to you.

Here are my choices.

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). In this conductor and composer we have a mind and an imagination that surpasses human understanding, and yet at the same time his art reveals a grinding human struggle. His nine symphonies contain enough depth and meaning to captivate a person for an entire lifetime, since it’s my view that it takes ten years to come close to fully grasping even one of them. You sense that if you did succeed in fully grasping all nine, you would know all that it is possible to know about life, death, love, joy, sadness, and the entire range of human emotion and experience. A non-practicing Catholic Jew in Vienna, he drew from all the cultural sources within himself to cultivate the capacity for truly universal expression—it came, but only with intense work and deep pain. He was known more as a conductor in his time than a composer, which is an astounding fact. By the way, I just heard Mahler’s reorchestration of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. Presumptuous, yes, but somehow with Mahler, it seems right. There are many photographs of him available: dashing, deeply intelligent, far seeing.

Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973). Murray Rothbard puzzled many times how it is that the 20th century gave us this man who seemed destined to resist all the evil of his times, and stand on principle despite every pressure to compromise. He paid a huge price. He was educated in security and spent his early career accumulating a European-wide reputation for pioneering contributions to economic science. He refuted socialism. He integrated money into macroeconomics. He put the whole of the social sciences on a new epistemological basis. Then the tables turned. Positivism advanced, and the liberals began to cave and support the state. The Nazis advanced. He was run out of his native country, run out again of his sanctuary in Geneva, and ignored by academia in the U.S. He had every reason to give in, give up, or regret his fate. But he never did. It’s as if his internal constitution would never permit him to relent. This is why he was so hated, feared by some, and also respected. God bless people like this. All accounts report that he had Old-World manners, inner cheer, and surprising warmth. Can you imagine meeting him?

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). Yes, I know this seems to violate the rule against including elected officials, but I plead two considerations: his presidency is the least important thing about him, and he only agreed to it because the Hamiltonians were in the process of completely shredding what was left of the founding ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence, and they had to be stopped. He didn’t mention his presidency in his chosen tombstone inscription! All that aside, has American history given a greater gift to humanity than the mind and thought of Jefferson? He was best as a radical libertarian in every sense: secessionist, revolutionary, decentralist. His faith in the capacity of people to organize their own affairs remains the driving force behind political revolutions the world over. His stature seems to grow larger as time goes on. He was a polymath and yet he strikes me as a humble man—not at all the person whom public-school kids study. His letters reveal a very careful writer with no pretensions but an explosively creative intellect who wanted to somehow make a difference in human history on behalf of liberty. He seems so much larger than life itself. To meet him would somehow prove that he really did exist.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). The least important thing to know about Oscar is what everyone knows, and how tragic that is. Here is what really captivates me. He wrote plays and books in the late 19th century that were snappy and edgy and funny and triply ironic—and the same plays and books sound just as contemporary and snappy and ironic in 2005. Few writers have ever made humor timeless, but he did. His works are for the ages. And they are all “adult” in the right sort of way: you have to be a certain age to comprehend all the meanings and implications. To read him is to be in the in-crowd, part of a private crowd that knows what’s what. He flatters you that way. Also, he had a huge range. The Picture of Dorian Grey is as serious a story of the corruption of the soul as has ever been written. His poetry is wonderful. It is said that he had not an ounce of malice in him. I believe that. His teeth were slightly yellowed, and this embarrassed him so he tended to speak with his hands across his mouth. You might think that would be an impediment to communication but no: all reports are that no one in London for generations could so completely captivate a roomful of people. People just adored this amazing man. Star quality doesn’t quite describe it. He had god-like ability to enthrall and charm. This was a good man and a great talent. Legend has it that his last words were: “Either these curtains or I have to go.” Funny, but not true. His last words were the Act of Faith. May the special interests leave him alone and may he one day be appreciated for the artist he was.

Juan de Mariana (1536–1624). Ah, the Spanish Jesuit priest-theologian-economist who famously advocated the right of an individual to kill the tyrant-king or any despot. His argument was that when a ruler steals, loots, and kills in a way contrary to the natural law, it is in accord with justice to do what is necessary to unseat him. Natural law supersedes state law. Don’t feel bad for the despot: power corrupts and with that corruption come risks. As for the worry that good kings would be killed unjustly under this idea, Mariana offered up all history to show that is not the pattern: good rulers are not killed and far too many despots rule. After his book appeared, two French tyrants were slain: Henry III and Henry IV. A mild hysteria against him followed, the Jesuits repudiated his book, and it was burned by order of the Parliament of Paris in 1610. But this book wasn’t his most egregious act. The book that really did him in was the one that condemned inflation as theft (he was a great monetary economist). At the age of 75, he was condemned to prison for life. All reports indicate a man of amazing personal fortitude, as unrelenting as he was brilliant.

Mother Cabrini (1850–1917). Shorter than five feet and always dressed in her habit, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini was one of the great entrepreneurs of the 19th century, the Bill Gates of charitable work of her time. From her earliest days she had wild ambitions to be a missionary to the world’s poor, starting in China. Instead, the pope sent her to the United States. She founded the Missionary Sisters of the Poor, but this was resisted on grounds that women can’t be missionaries. She wrote to Rome: “If the mission of announcing the Lord’s resurrection to his apostles had been entrusted to Mary Magdalene, it would seem a very good thing to confide to other women an evangelizing mission.” Well, what could Rome do but agree? And so it seemed throughout her life. She overcame resistance everywhere she went and eventually created a vast network of hundreds of orphanages, schools, and hospitals in the Northeast, the South, and even the Far West. She was both worldly and holy, an amazing businesswoman and pious saint. Her business sense was particularly shrewd: she was once donated some gold mines in Colorado, but rather than sell them she sent some sisters there to run them properly.

Clara Schumann (1819–1896). I picture her as a graceful yet powerful personality, with beauty that flows from the inside. Certainly everyone who knew her adored her. Her musical brilliance first struck me when I read a letter to her from Brahms in which he bemoaned the fact that he was doomed to make a living as a piano teacher whereas she could grow rich from performing the piano. She had far more invitations than she could accept. Imagine how many virtuosic pianists there were in her time, and yet she dominated the field with masterful performances that drove the likes of Brahms to unemployment! She made innovative contributions to piano pedagogy as well, in her position at two German conservatories of music. She was of course married to Robert, and inspired his grandest compositions, but she is also the reason for the melodies behind many pieces of music from her time. Aside from that, she bore and raised seven children and wrote many creative works for piano. What a mysterious power she must have had, the kind of person who walks into a room and fills the entire space but is not entirely aware of it.

Saint Cecilia (third century). She was a Roman aristocrat who became a Christian and found herself in an arranged marriage to a pagan and refused to consummate it. Her piety converted him, and so an angel appeared and they were crowned with roses and lilies. Later he was killed for his faith, and his brother too. Roman prefect Turcius Almachius had her condemned to death, first by suffocation, from which she escaped, and then by decapitation, which did not work even after three attempts. The executioner freaked out and ran away. Cecilia lived three days and served the poor. The only problem is that none of this is likely to be true. Yet here is what we do know. She lived and was martyred, and her intervention has been credited with supporting the arts and music since her death. There is usually some basis for such stories, either supernatural or biographical. I would not be surprised to find that there was something about her that called her to some massive role in history long past her death. What it is I would like to know.

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968). Now here is a wonderful writer, and a true American! The daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder Lane, some people believe that she had more to do with the Little House series than is generally acknowledged. Her writing career began in 1910 and lasted until her last years. She wrote biographies, as well as stories for dozens of papers, and lived a varied and exciting life. Her book The Discovery of Freedom is a classic of libertarian apologetics. I’ve yet to read her novels (the ones she took credit for) but I would like to. I like this passage: “Give me time and I will tell you why individualism, laissez faire and the slightly restrained anarchy of capitalism offer the best opportunities for the development of the human spirit. Also I will tell you why the relative freedom of human spirit is better—and more productive, even in material ways—than the communist, Fascist, or any other rigidity organized for material ends.” How dashing she must have been. I’ve heard reports, though, that she was rather shy.

Bette Davis (1908–1989). If she had never made a movie, one senses that she would have made her mark on history somehow. This was a remarkable woman with the greatest range in her personality. No one so fully dominates the screen as does. One almost feels sorry for her co-actors; they seem to shrivel and dry by comparison. Her voice, her eyes, her walk, her presence and stamina, they all combine into a very powerful on-screen personality. She most famously played ruthless women but this was just a matter of the division of labor because she was just as great in other roles. She is obviously very smart, and must have had an explosive personality. I once met Gary Merrill, to whom she had been married. Actually I was sort of forced to spend several days with him because of circumstances of time and place, and I certainly had the impression that he never really recovered from whatever he went through with her. In any case, how unforgettable it would be just to be in the same room with her.

So that’s my list, subject to change, even as soon as tomorrow.

45

The Gay Adoption Conundrum

July 8, 2003

Closely linked to the issue of gay marriage is the issue of gay adoption. The subject raises the stakes in the current national controversy, and, as usual, state intervention complicates the picture enormously.

Below I argue for the political intuition of both the Left (that gay couples shouldn’t be prohibited by law from adopting) and the Right (legalization raises the specter of children placed by courts in ethically dysfunctional environments and otherwise used as political footballs). I conclude that the social, cultural, and religious conflicts associated with gay marriage and adoption are best resolved through laissez-faire.

In a painfully circuitous column on gays and marriage, Jonah Goldberg writes: “I remain unconvinced that marriage is a ‘fundamental right’ and therefore immune to government regulation.” Rather than try to sort out the myriad confusions in this sentence, let us just state the obvious: marriage and family, like the ownership of property, precede the state. They are rooted in the freedom of association and the right of contract. They need no state to exist. In a state of anarchy, there would still be property, marriage, and family.

Historically, religious institutions and clan, not the state, had the strongest claim to adjudicating matters involving marriage, though in a free society the decision to marry is the individual’s. (The Catholic Church has long recognized the right of the individual in the choice of a spouse, for example, and the sacrament of marriage itself is confected not by the priest but by the couple.) The state took over this power and has made a mess of it. It should be restored to private institutions, and be none of the state’s business.

So should gays be permitted to marry? Michael Kinsley is right: government should get out of the marriage business. This answer flows directly from the general embrace of the principle of free association: people should be permitted to do whatever they want provided they aren’t violating anyone’s rights. They do not have the right to expect the Church, employers, or anyone else to recognize their choices as valid and morally legitimate, of course. If people have a problem with the idea of two men or two women being married—as would practically everyone throughout the whole history of world—there is an easy solution: don’t recognize it as a marriage.

We do this all the time in life. I love music but I don’t recognize rap, heavy metal, and Christian contemporary music as genuinely musical. I think they’re junk and I’m glad to say so. In fact, my opinion is that anyone who listens to this stuff is doing harm to himself, and, in the broadest possible sense, is debasing the culture. But to listen to this music is not harmful to anyone but those who choose to do so, so I am not within my rights to prevent it. As for the culture, I do not enjoy the right to shape it according to my own views of what constitutes beauty and art and truth. (If I did I would force everyone to listen to 16th century liturgical music, properly performed.)

So it is with gay marriage. If you think it’s a hoax, nothing prevents a free person in a free society from saying so, just as nothing prevents anyone from calling a union of two persons or more of whatever sort a “marriage.” If you don’t like that, and believe that society requires an overarching coercive authority to impose the family structure, you do not have much faith in the orderliness of human choice, you are not a liberal in the classical sense, and you won’t like the rest of this article. Suffice it to say that the traditional family structure is not a legal artifice; it is an outgrowth of tendencies in human nature, and it is not going to disappear because some men in Texas shack up and call themselves married.

The existence of the state, as well as its benefits and legal rights associated with marriage, add a layer of confusion. The very presence of legal marital protections and benefits cries out for the state to define what constitutes a legitimate marriage. By itself this is a dangerous power. If the state can define a marriage, it can dictate the workings of the marriage and family too. It can police the raising of children, kidnap kids, prevent them from working for wages negotiated by contract, limit or mandate family size, and a host of other interventions.

That marriage should be privatized is clear enough, but it leaves out a crucially important consideration: children. This factor is the main concern of those who would legally prohibit marital unions among gays. The worry is that once the state permits gays to define themselves as married, nothing stands in their way of adopting and raising children—a fact which gives rise to important concerns about the health of children in a setting that in all times and all places has been considered ethically objectionable by the dominant social ethos.

But let’s be precise about what in particular seems troubling about this to the point that many believe the force of law should prevent it. It can’t be merely the desire for all children to grow up in perfectly stable and moral home environments. Everyone knows children who are raised in less than ideal circumstances, from single-parent households resulting from death or divorce, to poverty, to cases of neglect. As sad as these cases are, hardly anyone thinks that the state should correct every one of them by imposing idealized circumstances, and properly so.

We look at such cases, feel bad about them, but recognize them as part of life—essentially private tragedies (I’m leaving out cases of severe physical abuse, of course). It’s true that children need both mothers and fathers, and it is absurd to pretend that anything less is just as good. But when this doesn’t happen, we help where and when we can but don’t necessarily believe that the state should actively intervene to crush all less-than-ideal family settings.

What’s more, it cannot be ruled out that a stable home with two responsible parents of the same sex would be a better setting for raising children than an unstable home with parents of different sexes or a single-parent household. In fact, most people these days know of gay parents with children, and they haven’t led to any sort of social calamity. Such families are surprisingly bourgeois in terms of their internal life, and the effects of such parenting on the kids. Perhaps this isn’t surprising; the desire to raise an adopted child may reflect a desire for normalization and regularization on the part of gays.

None of which suggests that people should or should not approve of gay adoptions. In all societies everywhere, such cases have always existed under a cloud of some degree of social disapproval and they always will. The only question of any political relevance is whether the state should actively intervene to prevent them or whether this is an issue that should be dealt with through non-violent means. As it is, there is nothing the state can or should do about single people having and raising children outside of a conventional marriage (of course it should not be subsidized by the state either). So it is unclear why adoptions should not be similarly permitted as merely the consequence of voluntary choice.

A main problem that inchoately exists here is the sense that gay adoptions would be somehow foisted on society via the court system, as an imposition, just as the courts are working to grant gays many special preferences in the law (e.g. the alleged right not to be discriminated against). We can easily imagine state adoption agencies, and those licensed by the state, adopting a rule of “non-discrimination” between gay and non-gay households, a completely preposterous rule but one that would be lobbied for by organized gay activists. Political pressure to relent in any such discrimination for or against gays would be intense.

Foreseeing an adoption system as politically poisoned as the current foster-care system, many people suspect that the demand for the right to marry and adopt is merely a ploy to have the state intervene yet again against bourgeois values. This is not an unreasonable assumption. The state adoption agencies in question, if they are permitted to choose gay parents, will not be wholly concerned about the well being of children or the desire of the donor mother. The children will be placed with a variety of other bureaucratic and political considerations in mind.

Even now, the entire adoption process is fraught with interventions that impede its development. Adoptive parents cannot purchase parenting rights, so there is no market as such. Agencies are hindered in their ability to make contracts in all directions. Private services, including those that would pay mothers to carry children to term, are either forbidden or crowded out by public services. The first step to clarity, then, is to abolish all these interventions and not impose new ones, legislating neither for nor against additional rights for gays. The entire problem could be left to (unregulated) private organizations.

How would adoption work in a free society in which gays were permitted to call themselves married? The donating parent is a contracting party and would only give up a child provided certain conditions were met. That the child grow up in a regularized family environment is a minimum expectation that most all donating mothers (and fathers) would ask. If her child were to be raised by a two-person, single-sex household, she would surely have to approve it. In general, who is in a better position to want the best possible environment for a child than the mother?

In a free society, there are no grounds to prevent women who bear children from arranging peaceful exchanges and cooperative arrangements concerning the parenting rights they own from the outset. If a woman conceives a child, she owns the parenting rights and can choose to give them away or sell them as she wishes. In this case, it is highly likely that the mother would seek conventional families to adopt her child. It might be that single-sex, two parent households would face a dearth of available children for adoption. Certainly they would have to pay a high price for the rights, given that we could expect far fewer mothers to approve these conditions than more conventional families.

It’s true that gays have a higher income than non-gays and could well afford the price. But there is another price tag to consider in a free market: the mother herself would be in a position to earn money from contracting with parents over parenting rights. Donor agencies concentrating on non-gay parenting might find themselves in a position to outbid the donor agencies concentrating on gay parenting.

In fact, we might expect that agencies and donors would have every incentive based on deep moral conviction to outbid the offers of pro-gay adoption agencies, and convince risk-averse mothers-to-be that their child should be adopted by non-gays. Each side would have every incentive to make the strongest possible case for or against gay adoption, thus providing an environment in which the research and findings on prospects for gay parenting would receive maximum encouragement and exposure.

We can see, then, that the free market might end up seriously discouraging gay adoptions, simply because mothers who relinquish parenting rights would likely prefer non-gay to gay parents. Would households in which gay couples raise adopted children continue to exist? Most certainly, but the crucial thing here is that all parties would have to agree to the arrangement. Would there be abusive settings and morally objectionable environments for kids? Certainly, but those exist now, whether the families are gay or non-gay.

Under the principle of laissez-faire, all parties would have every reason to want to continue to monitor the arrangements once they are agreed upon. Moreover, the experience of present and future gay adoptions would have a big influence on their prevalence in the far future. The feedback works here too: gay parents would have every reason to do the best possible job so as to improve the reputation of gay parenting.

Of course those who object on moral grounds would continue to be free to decry such arrangements, just as gay parents would have every reason to dispute their claims. This solution doesn’t solve every problem but neither does freedom itself. Freedom at least takes politics out of the question, which is the first step toward finding the truth in an atmosphere of peace.

Thanks to Stephan Kinsella, Walter Block, and Joseph Stromberg for their comments.

46

Madmen and Government Regulations

August 18, 2009

The AMC’s Madmen, themed around New York advertising executives in the 1960s, captivates viewers for its plots, fashions, shocking levels of political incorrectness, and, most of all, and with the way it draws viewers so closely into a world of the early 1960s that they never knew.

It seems like time travel, like all of this is really happening. It’s so realistic that 20-something bloggers constantly talk about how “dead on” the show is, as if they would even know. The whole show has become such a culture phenom that it defines for the whole generation the way it views the postwar/pre-Woodstock era of America.

Having some affection for those fashions and times, I was prepared to like the show, and there is no question that the production values are the tops. But hidden inside the show turns out to be another agenda, which seems designed to glorify the regulatory state that came after the times featured in the show.

A few specific instances. Everyone is smoking, mostly chain smoking, and mostly indoors. It gives today’s viewers a sense of creeps to observe the extent of it, as if everyone is working on making an early grave for themselves. And you get a sense of what must have been an overwhelming stench of stale smoke. Hardly anyone can watch scene after scene of this without a sense of discomfort, even to the point of feeling grossed out.

A hidden aspect of watching this is to think: thank goodness for the bans on smoking today and thank goodness for the warnings on cigarettes that tell consumers what these people didn’t know.

The ubiquity of cigarettes is only the most conspicuous aspect of the overall feeling of danger and creepiness that appears in scene after scene. There is daytime office drinking to an extent that would surely raise questions in the context of modern workplace regulations.

The treatment of women in the movie is egregious and shocking, with every office girl getting ahead by slutting around and dressing mainly to please the men. They are overtly treated like toys, not humans or professionals. Harassment doesn’t quite describe it. It is nothing short of ghastly.

Was this really the plight of professional women in those days? Well, the message goes, thank goodness for laws against discrimination and also laws against sexual harassment. If we took even one step away from the regulatory seizure of American business life, we would surely be back in this Hobbesian jungle of booze, abuse, and early death.

But a woman in the show can avoid this hell by choosing instead to be a “housewife,” which means making the perfect home for her hubby, and otherwise standing around gossiping with the neighbors and going to tea and growing increasingly lonely and desperate. Meanwhile, her working husband at the office is carousing around and sleeping with the office girls while she pretends not to notice, since—what other options does she have?

Here again we get a picture of a wild world of patriarchal domination and savagery before the federal government tamed it.

This theme appears in scene after scene. The kids in the house are constantly doing dangerous things like wearing plastic bags on their heads, since this was of course before federally mandated warning labels appeared telling us not to do this. Mothers, you see, are way too stupid to know to tell their kids not to suffocate themselves with plastic bags, which is why we need a Consumer Products Safety Commission.

The same is true with cars. And with drinking. And seatbelts. And every other thing big and small you can think of. Every high-profile federal intervention is given a subtle endorsement because we are shown in high relief the sheer awfulness of the world before Leviathan took over our homes, businesses, and public and private lives in every respect. Without them, we would surely be blow-drying our hair in the tub.

This was the constant theme I observed in the several episodes I watched. I’m sure others can think of examples that appear in every episode. It is a Hobbesian tale that posits the inability of society to improve itself without the helping hand of the master.

The truth behind most of the regulations we have today—laws against discrimination, harassment, safety rules, and even smoking—is that there was already a social and cultural movement against the dangers featured in Madmen. This support for change was effectively nationalized by the federal government in the form of coercive rules, rather than permitting social, economic, and cultural pressure to bring about its own noncoercive solutions to social problems.

It is easy to forget while watching the show that this is, after all, fiction: a story made up by writers and producers with themes chosen by them for a purpose. Call it a libertarian-induced paranoia if you want, but I strongly suspect that a part of the agenda of this show is to propagandize for the regulatory world that came after, as if it, and only it, saved us from an eternity of grave social injustice and mortal danger to our lives and dignity.

I’m still waiting for a show about the real madmen of the era, those who imagined that fastening a noose around the whole of business culture was the only way to get us to behave in a civilized way.

47

Avoiding Austro-Flamewars

December 18, 2009

Digital media—particularly “social” media like forums, wikis, blogs, and tweets—have forced all people, including intellectuals, to engage each other as never before in human history.

And yet, people have discovered that to know others is not necessarily to love them. Conflicts and confrontations are a regular feature of daily discussion, which is all fine; but sometimes these can become personal and hysterical, and lead to lifelong hatreds.

People who frequent forums and other such venues know all about this. It is often the “noobs” who are at the forefront of the flamewars, getting their feelings hurt and lashing out, creating a spiral to the bottom. More experienced users learn to distinguish substantive discussion and argument from personality clashes.

At the Mises.org forums, for example, the periodic flamewars involve claims that a post or comment is too brassy, or too studied, or too far afield. This may or may not be true, but from where do we draw these impressions? And what standard is available to decide what is and what isn’t tolerated?

I’ve noticed three personality types based on three archetypes or muses in Austrian history and tradition: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Murray N. Rothbard. This thought occurs to me as I reflect on a type of complaint that comes to us often about Mises Dailies, as well as controversies that come up in blog comments and discussions, many of which concern the proper style and tone (and content) of a site such as Mises.org.

The complaints run something like the following:

“Mises would never endorse such inflammatory rhetoric, and he was no anarchist. He must be turning in his grave after the article you ran yesterday.”

“How can you run an article on the Fed that sticks to only economic analysis without pointing out the insider scam artists who are getting away with robbery on a gargantuan scale?”

“The site’s recent obsession with [fill in the blank] is a huge departure from anything the Austrian economists of the past talked about.”

The points here are not completely invalid, though surely not every article has to say everything or be everything. There are times for power-elite analysis and times for advancing pure economic understanding. There are times to denounce war and times to reflect on methodology in the social sciences. The Austro-libertarian perspective is vast and varied, with implications for the whole world of ideas.

And it is true that articles here can be rather speculative (Block on private roads, Kinsella on intellectual property, French on the downside of bank deregulation), but there is nothing wrong with pushing a paradigm further down the road. Nor is there anything wrong with passion in defense of freedom.

Is there really a need to choose one approach to prevail? Why can’t they all work together, provided people can be tolerant toward different temperaments?

These three types generally follow the styles and approaches of these great thinkers — however different they might be. Let’s examine the prevailing models and see which one you might fall into.

Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973)

He was a gentleman of the old school, born into prewar Europe, a brilliant student in every area, with courtly manners that he retained until his death. He faced immense trials in life (two wars, economic depression, two migrations, and relentless professional upheaval) and yet never lost his foundational commitment to reasoned, calm, and relentless argument as the right approach to changing society. Even when he was witness to amazing banking scams, he resisted naming names to focus only on the facts and logic.

His dedication to truth as he saw it was intransigent from the moment he read Menger’s Principles until his death. His style was firm, dedicated, and forceful—but always of the Old World. He also retained his commitment to 19th-century-style liberalism—despite the totalitarian trends of the 20th century and despite the growing radicalism of his own later students. His method was systematic argument in the form of large treatises in which logic was the engine, and his system of thought was revealed book by book over the course of his lifetime.

He believed that the ideas that people hold were ultimately more powerful than their personal interests. I think of him as the pure intellectual, full of discipline and rigor, but perhaps a bit impersonal. The old-world ways of burying the personality for the sake of science prevailed in his practice. And this was true to the point that when Jörg Guido Hülsmann was writing his biography, he became amazed at how little documentation he found on any personal issues. Mises lived the purest life of the mind, Guido suggests.

Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992)

Hayek was a colleague of Mises’s who adopted a different style and approach, first in Austria as a teacher faithful to the master and then later in London as the popularizer and systemizer of Mises’s business-cycle theory. His battles with the Keynesians and the Fabians, however, imparted to him a strong sense of the importance of presentation in the war of ideas. He was temperamentally disposed to seeing his opponent’s point of view; he crafted his message in a way that was not merely true but also, in his view, convincing.

He was not a system builder so much as a curious and brilliant scholar who took on topics one at a time throughout a long life, a man whose positions on issues evolved in unpredictable ways. He was a dedicated proponent of the gold standard who later (regrettably) suggested that some reinflation after a crisis might be necessary and (wisely) later came to the radical defense of an immediate end to all central banking.

He penned compromises with the welfare state in one book and later argued the “extreme” view that no forms of intervention can improve on the natural evolution of the social order. He spoke about the common law and the merit of evolved tradition, on the one hand, and in other writings took a strictly libertarian view about property and the state. Then just when you think that Hayek was a bit of a softy, you find an old interview with him on national television holding a hard line on the topics of inflation and unemployment.

Part of what makes Hayek interesting is precisely this sense of struggle that you get in his writings, the sense that he is not presenting a finished package but working through topics in light of his scholarly understanding—as led by evidence and reflection. In this way, he leaves some very interesting surprises. Of all the Austrians, he was strongest against “intellectual property” and, before Rothbard, he might have been the most sympathetic to the idea of a stateless society as a viable option. He never stopped learning and never stopped his intellectual struggle.

Murray Rothbard (1926–1995)

Rothbard was a system builder of a different sort, but more open, more enthusiastic and spirited, a researcher whose theoretical apparatus seems to have been largely in place from the time he put pen to paper, and certainly by the time he finished his large treatise on economic theory. He took his economics from Mises and his libertarianism from Chodorov and the old American liberals, and knitted it all into a dazzling system of thought.

He had this remarkable capacity for teasing out the best from the thoughts of all ages, devouring books like snacks, and putting what he found into a model that applies in our times and all times.

The resulting outlook provided the perfect tableau for historical studies, and here, in my view, is where Rothbard’s work really takes flight. There were no taboos, no unthinkable thoughts, no unspeakable phrases, no preconceptions, no sacred cows. He was a discoverer whose books take the reader through wild rides of villains and heroes, frauds and truth speakers, tragic victims and triumphant struggles. Even the longest-dead characters in history were still alive in Rothbard’s mind.

As for his rhetorical style, it was pure fire. Progress meant breaking the model. He was committed to science but he was also ebullient in a way that is uncharacteristic of great scholars. Fun doesn’t quite describe it. Just his presence in a room made the entire event entertaining for everyone. He was quick to laugh and he did so often and uproariously, and the juxtaposition between radical theory and outrageous fun was irresistible.

Fighting the enemies of liberty was, for him, a gallant and thrilling adventure, and fighting for liberty was pure joy. He had a way of regarding every moment of life as something of historic importance. He could turn a drab academic meeting into a memorable occasion, writing about it later the same way that others might write about wars and revolutions. This is far from Hayek, far from Mises, but completely captivating and thereby essential to the Rothbardian way.

Three in One

So there we have it: the three tendencies of the Austro-libertarians I’ve seen online. We might sum up the dominant traits as reasoned, reflective, and radical. That’s not to say that each of these three thinkers did not embody all of these traits. We are speaking here of large tendencies stretching over three long lives, about dominant characteristics that one might take from each thinker.

Nor is it the case that people working within this tradition must always fall into a single category. Some days, we feel as radical as Rothbard, others as reasoned and cool as Mises, and others as speculative and searching as Hayek. Sometimes it depends on whom we have most recently read. Great thinkers tend to have this effect on the world, transferring not only their ideas but also their temperaments to those who are influenced by them.

Yes, there are tensions from time to time, but Mises.org communities are proof that all three types can get along just fine, so long as no one is prepared to purge the others, or otherwise push one style, one approach, one method at the expense of the others. We can look at other figures in the history of the school, people like Hazlitt or Hutt, or at modern thinkers like Salerno or Hoppe, and see that they too embody a variety of these approaches.

It is a hopeless task to attempt to impersonate anyone, and Mises.org mavens cannot and should not do this for Mises or for Hayek or for Rothbard. We can only learn from them and be inspired by them. To draw insights from all sources is to create the kind of diversity that makes for a vibrant and productive intellectual paradigm and an endlessly fascinating website erected in the defense of liberty.

48

How to Improve the Culture

December 28, 2009

The culture is going to hell in a handbag, we’ve been told for hundreds of years, and the free market gets a large share of the blame. The observation stretches from Left to Right and everywhere in between. It is universally agreed that letting markets run loose runs roughshod over all the finer things in life, from books to arts to clothing to manners.

Mises himself traces this ideological tendency to 19th-century critic John Ruskin, who “popularized the prejudice that capitalism, apart from being a bad economic system, has substituted ugliness for beauty, pettiness for grandeur, trash for art.” The same argument appears today in conservative periodicals, every week, as a built-in bias; everyone knows that markets have unleashed a race to the bottom.

One response might be to say, This is not decline at all but just difference. Whether it’s opera or rap, frescos or graffiti, black tie or grunge, it doesn’t really matter. Culture takes different forms in different times, so get used to it.

I’m not really satisfied with that answer, mainly because of my own cultural biases. My tastes in music predate Bach. Dancing to me means ballet. Popular fiction I find insulting in every way. Kids, in my view, should spend their time mastering piano rather than gaming on computers.

I admit that it would not be impossible for me to be mistaken for a snob.

And yet, I would like to offer a contrary view—but not in the form of a big theory. Rather, consider some cases of cultural entrepreneurship that made a real difference by the same means through which every innovation comes about: risk taking, hard work, and marketing.

Let’s begin with dance. Some ten years ago, I found myself at a ballet recital for young people. I had expected something like we used to see on GE commercials: little girls in tutus dancing to Tchaikovsky. Instead, the girls danced to ridiculous rock music and danced without discipline at all, flailing around this way and that. It was clear that they were learning no technique at all. And yet the parents were wild for it.

I’m not against jazz and rock dance but to do it right requires a foundation in ballet, which is the fundamental language of all dance in the West. Those amazing dancers you see on Fosse—they knew ballet first. But in these self-indulgent times, no one cares about discipline and hard work. Everyone wants to jump right into the fun thing even if it looks stupid.

I left that recital despairing that another epoch of goodness had passed into the night, replaced by a state of permanent slop. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, a 20-something dance entrepreneur showed up in town and opened a new studio, pricing her teaching below the competition. Through good will, efficiency, low prices, and smiles all around, she attracted a slew of new customers.

But this wasn’t just any ballet entrepreneur. She had an attachment to the old ideals, old music, and old pedagogy. This is what she emphasized and pushed. At the first recital after one year of operation, the parents of the students all enjoyed the recital with new standards: the classical training, the old-world music, great attention to costumes, and all the trappings everyone once expected in real ballet. The parents cheered to the high heavens the glories of these kids and the program.

And so, voilà! In one year, thanks to one entrepreneur with a vision and the dedication to carry it out, the local culture is massively and dramatically improved—the Old World and its high standards carried on toward the future. I looked back at my previous despair with embarrassment. It turns out that there was nothing inevitable about cultural decline. All it takes is one person to make the change.

Let’s move on to the subject of children’s choirs. Since the ancient world, children’s choirs have been the incubator of great musicians for the future. But today? It’s a disaster. If there are choirs at all, they are taught pop tunes, bad technique, American Idol approaches, all of which end in creating would-be stars who never really do the hard work necessary for serious music-making in any field. The result is inevitable: a musically ignorant culture, and no real choirs at all.

But right here in my own town a woman decided to change that with a civic chorus of children. In the first year there were 25, and in the second that doubled, and then a chorus of older children was split off. They wear concert clothing and sing all the classic repertoire, even music in Latin. They have a rigorous schedule of rehearsals, very much like sports team practices. They learn technique and discipline. The parents love it! And the choir is singing all over town in a wonderful way.

To be sure, the director does not make the big bucks. She works extremely hard, giving private lessons and working with parents and spending far more time on this project than the payoff would seem to dictate. But she does it anyway because she has a passion for it and she is living out a dream.

Because of this one cultural entrepreneur, the community is changed.

Now, in both cases, we see that it could have gone the other way. If these two people had not come along with the desire to raise the standards and provide a valuable service, another generation’s cultural education would have been missed. Instead, they both acted and took a risk. As a result, their legacy on this earth will outlive them.

Another case in point concerns a new immigrant family from India who opened a wonderful new Indian restaurant in a town overrun with fast-food chains and chicken-finger shacks. Everyone I know has long bemoaned the lack of great foreign cuisine here. It’s the first point cited as evidence that this backwoods place has been given over to the capitalist pigs.

Then one day it was there: an Indian restaurant as good as any that one would find in any major city in the world, with a vast and varied menu and all the ambience one would want. And what made it possible? Not the overthrow of the capitalist order but rather the risk, hard work, and dedication of a single entrepreneur. Again, there was no guarantee that this would happen. It was a choice that was made by one individual. He and his family decided to open the restaurant.

Mises’s fundamental point about the cultural critique of capitalism was that capitalism makes more of everything available to the consumer. That means more trashy novels and rotten music, but it also means more great literature and high-level music, all of which is accessible as never before.

But today, cultural entrepreneurs are seriously inhibited in their innovations by high taxes, regulations, and mandated benefits. This produces fewer attempts to improve our world than there would otherwise be. Some markets are hobbled to the point of near inaction, such as the education market, and others are less vibrant than they would otherwise be.

So what we need is not the overthrow of private property but more freedom for cultural entrepreneurship, and more individual initiative to do more than complain that the world is not conforming to your own values. The next time someone complains about what the market is doing to the culture, ask that person what he or she has done to enter the market and make a difference. And ask what that person has done to make the world freer for those who seek to make the world a more beautiful place.