2. Cervantes and Economic Theory

¹Cf. Cesare de Llolis, Cervantes: Reazionario (Rome: Fratelli Treves, 1924). Stagings of Cervantes's tragedy Numancia, for example, would emphasize its appeal to patriotism, nationalism, honor, and the Spanish martial character. I offer a more nuanced interpretation in Darío Fernández-Morera, “Cervantes and Islam: A Contemporary Analogy,” Cervantes y su mundo III, K. Reichenberger and R.A. Lauer, eds. (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2005), pp. 123–57. Online at: http://books.google.com/books?id=NQz5W94fbysC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA137&ots=WAirwAnr1G&dq=christians+enslaved+cantigas&ie=ISO-88591&output=html. See also Darío Fernández-Morera, “The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise,” Intercollegiate Review 41, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 23–31. Online at: http://www.isi.org/journals/archive/issue.aspx?id=f6e1ad61-8699-46229d66-3d4aac01b072.

²Cf. the later works of Américo Castro, for example, and his disciples.

³See, for example, Ludovik Osterc, El pensamiento social y político del Quijote (Mexico: Ediciones Andrea, 1963).

⁴For a sample, see the self-consciously daring www.chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i21/21a01.htm. For Marxist polylogism and other premises and vocabulary inherited by contemporary academic research, see Darío Fernández-Morera, American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1997); for Marxist polylogism in general see Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957; reprinted Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1985); Human Action (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998). For an example of the continuing wide use of Marxist terminology and premises at the highest levels of the language and literature profession, see the 1986 Modern Language Association Presidential Address by J. Hillis Miller in PMLA 102, no. 3 (May 1987): 281–91. For a good treatment of Cervantes from the point of view of the Marxist (“materialist”) premises of practitioners of “Cultural Studies,” see Carroll B. Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Johnson's previous work on the Spanish Golden Age included Freudian approaches, when Freudianism was still fashionable.

⁵Representative is Ruth El Saffar, “Voces marginales y la visión del ser cervantino,” Anthropos 98–99 (1989): 52–62.

⁶For the former, see Dmitri de Merejkowski, “Cervantes,” Hispania (Paris) 4 (1921): 97–124; G.K. Chesterton, “The Divine Parody of Don Quixote,” Daily News (1901); reprinted in A Handful of Authors, Dorothy Collins, ed. (New York and London: Sheed and Ward, 1969), pp. 24–27; W.H. Auden, “The Ironic Hero: Some Reflections on Don Quixote,” Horizon 20 (1949): 86–94; reprinted in Cervantes, Lowry Nelson, Jr., ed. (Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 73–81. Particularly impressive is Fernando Rielo, Teoría del Quijote: Su mística hispánica (Madrid: Porrúa, 1982). For Erasmianism in Cervantes, see among others Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes (Madrid: Hernando, 1925). The best general work on Erasmianism in Spain is Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l'Espagne (Paris: Droz, 1937), which has been variously reprinted and translated. Walter Kaiser's Praisers of Folly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963) is a very readable positioning of Cervantes within the Erasmian Praise of Folly tradition.

⁷Gay writer Fernando Arrabal, in Un esclavo llamado Cervantes (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1996), considers Cervantes a bisexual, a marrano (of Jewish converso family, an idea that Américo Castro, himself of converso ancestry, popularized in Cervantes's studies). Arrabal also affirms that Cervantes was a liar about being a cripple: he never lost the use of his left hand, as generally believed, though he was on the verge of having it cut off to punish him for homosexuality, but escaped in time. Kryzstof Sliwa's new and monumentally documented biography shows that there is no foundation for the speculation (of twentieth-century, not seventeenth-century origin) regarding Cervantes's converso ancestry or homosexuality: Kryzstof Sliwa, Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2005).

⁸Similarly, international law is associated by many with Northern Protestants like Hugo Grotius, rather than with earlier Catholic Spanish founders like Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto.

⁹H.M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism: A Criticism of Max Weber and His School (Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973); Murray Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1 (Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 1995); Jesús Huerta de Soto, “New Light on the Prehistory of the Theory of Banking and the School of Salamanca,” Review of Austrian Economics 9, no. 2 (1996): 59–81; Alejandro A. Chafuén et al., Cristianismo y libertad (Buenos Aires: Fundación para el Avance de la Educación, 1984); Chafuén, Christians for Freedom: Late Scholastic Economics (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986). For the Italian city states, see Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 84–117.

¹⁰R. Trevor Davies, The Golden Century of Spain (London: Macmillan, 1937; reprinted Harper & Row, 1961), p. 78.

¹¹Huerta de Soto, “New Light.”

¹²Many members of the lower nobility (hidalgos) had to work for a living or starve. See David A. Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Spain (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 91. It is generally ignored that the nobility, like the Church, was subject to some types of taxes, such as the alcabala and the millones. The nobility was not a homogenous or monolithic class. Neither was the middle class. I avoid the term “the bourgeoisie” because it bundles together many dissimilar individuals and activities and is therefore inexact, and because it dehumanizes people. After the extermination of tens of millions of so-called “bourgeois” under Marxist regimes throughout the world, the use of this term is more than offensive. Anti-bourgeoisism is as hideous as anti-Semitism. For the logical problems of the term “bourgeoisie,” never even considered by Marxism, see Mises, Human Action and Theory and History as well as Benedetto Croce, My Philosophy (New York: Collier, 1962).

¹³The only other viable candidate to be Cervantes's birthplace is Alcázar de San Juan. See among others Manuel Rubio Erguido, Desagravio a Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Alcázar de San Juan: Mata, 1978).

¹⁴Among those who thought Cervantes studied with the Jesuits are F. Rodríguez Marín and W. Krauss; see Castro, El pensamiento, pp. 280, 320, n. 133.

¹⁵Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism.

¹⁶For this and the following, see Juan de Mariana, Del Rey y de la Institución Real in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1950), vol. 31, pp. 559ff.

¹⁷Juan de Mariana, Discurso de las cosas de la Compañía, in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 31, p. 604.

¹⁸Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith; Huerta de Soto, “New Light”; Chafuén et al., Cristianismo y libertad; Chafuén, Christians for Freedom.

¹⁹A recent study of numismatics even considers Don Quijote one of the “primary numismatic resources” for the study of this subject in the Golden Age. See David Brian Fiero, “Don Quijote: A Numismatic and Economic Analysis. Literary Images of Coinage, Wealth and Poverty,” www.lib.umi.com/dissertations/fullcit. This otherwise interesting study is marred by the persistence of materialist (Marxist) assumptions and perspectives.

²⁰Cervantes, Don Quijote, pt. I, chap. ix. I cite Don Quijote by part and chapter numbers.

²¹Ibid., pt. II, chap. lxii.

²²This and the following in Domingo de Soto, De Iuistitia et Iure (Mardrid: IEP, 1968), bk. IV, chap. 3, pp. 105–06. My quotations of the Spanish Scholastics reproduce the translations in Chafuén, Christians for Freedom.

²³Alexander Zinoviev, The Radiant Future (New York: Random House, 1980). I have examined this novel in relation to Marxist theory in my American Academia.

²⁴Tomás de Mercado, Summa de Tratos y Contratos (Seville, 1571), bk. II, chap. ii, pp. 18–19.

²⁵For an expose and a critique of Lenin's astonishingly primitive views on economics, see Mises, Theory and History, p. 328; and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), pp. 188–89. For the fundamental problems of Marx's “economics” and its theoretical unviability, see Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Unresolved Contradiction in the Marxian Economic System,” reprinted in Shorter Classics of Böhm-Bawerk (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1962), vol. I, pp. 199–302; idem, “The Exploitation Theory and Its Common Offshoot” in Capital and Interest (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1959), pp. 422–32; Mises, Human Action; Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (New York: William Morrow, 1985); David Gordon, Critics of Marxism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1986). These books are purely theoretical discussions that do not touch on the failed practical applications of Marx's economic ideas in many different countries by many different bright people and under conditions ranging from industrial societies (e.g., Germany) to peasant ones (e.g., China and Cambodia) and everything in between (Russia, Poland, and so forth).

²⁶Francisco de Vitoria, De Iustitia, Beltrán de Heredia, ed. (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Asociación Francisco de Vitoria, 1934), vols. I–II, chap. 66, art. 2, p. 324. Vitoria does not say it, but implicit in his assertion is that forcefully taking money away from people (say, through taxation) to give it to others (redistribution) stops people from having the chance of giving their own money out of their volition and therefore stops people from being truly liberal, hospitable, and generous. This is a purely moral argument that does not even take into account the practical or utilitarian objections to redistribution made by scholars like Mises and F.A. Hayek, and that is not mentioned in Bertrand de Jouvenel's classic moral critique, The Ethics of Redistribution. See Mises, Human Action; Socialism; F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1990). Only Hans Hoppe comes close: see Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism: Economics, Politics, and Ethics (Boston: Kluwer, 1989), pp. 178–210.

²⁷Darío Fernández-Morera, “Cervantes and the Aesthetics of Reception,” Comparative Literature Studies 18 (1981): 405–19; reprinted in James Person, ed., Literature Criticism: from 1400 to 1800 (Detroit: Gale, 1994), vol. 23.

²⁸Cervantes, Don Quixote, Walter Starkie, trans. (New York: Signet, 1964), pp. 1049–50. Unless, as indicated here, all translations are mine.

²⁹These rights, then, become unquestioned when their violation happens to affect Cervantes, the real, flesh and blood author of the book Don Quijote. One is reminded of deconstructionist literary critics like Jacques Derrida, who in their academic or “theoretical” writings reject the existence of real authors in literature, but determinedly resort to legal means when they think that their own real-life property rights are threatened. Nor do these critics who deny the author and prefer to speak of, say, the “lyric voice,” rather than the author's voice, ever pass on their own authorial royalties. For Derrida's fierce protection of his property rights as an author, see Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. ix–x. Wolin's savaging comments summarize my point: “To begin with, there are the ironies of engaging Derrida in a dispute about the prerogatives of ‘authorship.’ Who, after all, has done more to call into question our inherited conception of integral authorial authority than Jacques Derrida? But in this case [Derrida's prohibition to have reproduced in Wolin's book his article defending Heidegger against attacks for having favored National Socialism] he invoked the entitlements of authorship in the most conventional and, one is tempted to say, ‘pre-critical’ fashion. Is Derrida himself the only one left to whom the notion of unimpeachable authorial prerogative still applies?”

³⁰Darío Fernández-Morera, “Cervantes' Theory and Practice of the Modern Novel,” CIEFL Bulletin Double Issue 15, no. 2 (December 2005) and 16, no. 1 (June 2006): 49–65.

³¹The first sentence of his most enduring work, El conde Lucanor, declares proudly that the book was made by don Juan, son of the Prince don Manuel. For his worries about the correct transmission of his works and his penchant for including himself in his writings, see José Manuel Blecua, Don Juan Manuel: El conde Lucanor (Madrid: Castalia, 1969), pp. 16, 45.

³²The Arcipreste, also writing in the 1330s, emphasizes in the introduction to his Libro de Buen Amor that what he writes is not only a new book (este nuevo libro), but also his book and no one else's. See the repetition of the possessives mi and suyo in the title, “Libro de Buen Amor, Oración qu'el Açipreste fizo á Dios, quando començó este libro suyo,” and later in the introduction (por ende comencé mi libro en el nobre de Dios).

³³It contains this magnificent, touching tercet:

Y en dulces varias rimas se llevaron
mis esperanzas los ligeros vientos,
que en ellos y en la arena se sembraron.

This consciousness of his literary genius is echoed in Cervantes's great play Pedro de Urdemalas, in the praise bestowed on Pedro de Urdemalas's Protean creativity by other characters and by Pedro himself in verses redolent of those in the Viaje del Parnaso:

Bien logrado iré del mundo
cuando Dios me lleve de él,
pues podré decir que en él
un Proteo fui segundo. (Jornada III)

³⁴Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (Grove City, Penn.: Libertarian Press, 1994), p. 224. This is a translation by James Dingwall and Bert F. Hoselitz of Menger's 1871 work, with a valuable introduction by F.A. Hayek written for the reprint of Menger's book by the London School of Economics.

³⁵This character does not believe in character in fiction, loyal as she is to deconstructionist and post-structuralist theory. So she would not believe in herself, one may assume. She calls herself a “semiotic materialist.” See David Lodge, Nice Work (New York: Penguin, 1989), p. 21.

³⁶Or squatters' rights. See Alejandro Nieto, Bienes comunales (Madrid: Revista de Derecho Privado, 1964), pp. 124–32; and Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel, La reconquista española y la repoblación del país (Zaragoza: CSIC, 1951), pp. 127–62. One may suspect that the right of presura would have an impact on the mentality of poor Spaniards facing vast empty and unused land during the Conquest of America. Squatting played a part, too, in the colonizing of the American West by the white man.

³⁷Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain, 1516–1659, James Casey, trans. (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 157.

³⁸Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993), pp. 828–829; Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pp.188–210; Terry Anderson and Donald R. Leal, Free Market Environmentalism (San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1991), pp. 3, 7, 20–34, 61–81, 122–125, 147–150, 165–167; Arthur Seldon, Capitalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 86, 126, 129–33, 237–38, 327; and Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, June Abbott, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).

³⁹For this and the following, see Judith Richards, Lotte Mulligan, and John K. Graham, “‘Property’ and ‘People’: Political Usages of Locke and Some Contemporaries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (January-March 1981): 29–51.

⁴⁰Don Quijote, pt. II, chap. xxvi.

⁴¹Ibid., chap. xxix.

⁴²Mises, Bureaucracy (Spring Mills, Penn.: Libertarian Press, 1983); and de Jouvenel, Ethics of Redistribution.

⁴³See “The Collapse of the Hercules of Europe” in Charles Adams's eye-opening masterpiece For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization (New York: Madison Books, 1993), pp. 185–98.

⁴⁴One can see these effects still at work today in Europe, where even a lower value-added tax rate than that of Golden Age Spain makes the cost of living higher than in the U.S. and general business competitiveness lower.

⁴⁵Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, p. 79.

⁴⁶Ibid.

⁴⁷Tax rolls from Extremadura, for example, include the cream of the local nobility. See David A. Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Castile (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 222.

⁴⁸Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, p. 80.

⁴⁹Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Spain, p. 91. The millones also taxed the church.

⁵⁰Ibid., pp. 225ff.

⁵¹Ibid., pp. 224–25.

⁵²In Evanston, Illinois, until a few years ago, the city added the total of a household's expenses on, say, electricity, plus the usual taxes and fees, and then taxed this total, which already included taxes.

⁵³Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, cited in Adams, For Good and Evil, p. 196.

⁵⁴Huerta de Soto, “New Light,” pp. 60ff. Huerta de Soto shows the complicity in fraudulent practices between the bankers and Charles V.

⁵⁵Trevor Davies, Spain in Decline: 1621–1700 (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 159.

⁵⁶He of course used the expression “best blood.” See Adams, For Good and Evil, p. 189.

⁵⁷For the inherent lack of productivity of the public sector see Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, pp. 791–807. This is true of the public sector as an economic whole but also of the individual public employees:

government bureaucrats do not pay taxes; they consume the tax proceeds. If a private citizen earning $10,000 income pays $2000 in taxes, the bureaucrat earning $10,000 does not really pay $2000 in taxes also; that he supposedly does is only a bookkeeping fiction. He is actually acquiring an income of $8000 and paying no taxes at all. (ibid., p. 791)

⁵⁸Thus, in Cervantes's Exemplary Novel, El licenciado Vidriera, the main character makes an unsuccessful effort to gain employment in the government (the royal Cortes') bureaucracy.

⁵⁹Adams, For Good and Evil, p. 189.

⁶⁰Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, pp. 66–70; Bartolomé Bennassar, La España del Siglo de Oro (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1983), p. 209.

⁶¹I apply to Spain the ideas on so-called business cycles and economic depressions of Austrian School economists like Rothbard in Man, Economy, and State and Mises in Human Action.

⁶²De Iustitia et Iure, bk. III, qu. VI, art. VII, fol. 98.

⁶³Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un Príncipe Político-Cristiano in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid: Editions Atlas, 1947), vol. 25, p. 191.

⁶⁴Mariana, Del Rey, p. 469.

⁶⁵Pedro Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de Monarquías (Madrid, 1619), cited in Chafuén, Christians for Freedom, p. 66, n. 19.

⁶⁶Chafuén, Christians for Freedom, p. 67.

⁶⁷Ibid.

⁶⁸See Mises, Human Action; “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism,” in Planning for Freedom (Spring Mills, Penn.: Libertarian Press, 1980), pp. 18–35; and Bureaucracy.

⁶⁹Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, cited in Adams, For Good and Evil, p. 196.

⁷⁰Chicago journalists like John Kass have made a living out of reporting on government corruption at the city and state level. See, for example, Kass's regular columns during 2003 in the Chicago Tribune on Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and on George Ryan, ex-governor of Illinois (imprisoned for corruption). Among his many columns one can cite John Kass, “U.S. attorney's independence pays dividends,” Chicago Tribune, December 21, 2003.

⁷¹Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982); Albert J. Nock, Our Enemy, the State (Delevan, N.Y.: Hallberg, 1983); Antony de Jasay, The State (London: Basil Blackwell, 1985); and Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism.

⁷²Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1942), p. 198, 198, n. 11.

⁷³Don Quijote, pt. II, chap. lviii (Starkie translation, p. 935).

⁷⁴Cf. Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World.

⁷⁵Don Quijote, pt. I, chap. xxii (Starkie translation, p. 213).

⁷⁶Ibid.

⁷⁷Ibid., pt. II, chap. xvii.

⁷⁸Ibid., chap. lx.

⁷⁹Liberty, in libertarian thought, must be preceded not by more state authority, as Marx, Trotsky and other Marxists proposed—according to them this would be only a temporary increase in authority of course—but by less. The most “poetic” formulation of this brutal Marxist view is probably Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), p. 170:

Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction.

⁸⁰Don Quijote, pt. I, chap. xiv.

⁸¹One phrase in this speech even calls to one's mind one of the libertarian defenses of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution when she observes that beauty in an honest woman is like a sharp sword, which does not wound those who do not come close—guns do not kill people, people kill people.

⁸²Don Quijote, pt. II, chap. lxx: “Nadie se puede obligar a lo imposible” (“no one can force himself to do the impossible”—that is, love someone one does not love).

⁸³Ibid., pt. I, chap. x.

⁸⁴Ibid., chap. ix.

⁸⁵David D. Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism (New York: Open Court, 1989), chap. 44.

⁸⁶Don Quijote, pt. II, chap. xi.

⁸⁷Martín de Riquer, Cervantes en Barcelona (Barcelona: Sirmio, 1989), p. 95.

⁸⁸Thomas Szasz, The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996); The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). According to libertarian Szasz,

Mental illness is a metaphor (metaphorical disease). The word “disease” denotes a demonstrable biological process that affects the bodies of living organisms (plants, animals, and humans). The term “mental illness” refers to the undesirable thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of persons. Classifying thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying the whale as a fish. As the whale is not a fish, mental illness is not a disease. Individuals with brain diseases (bad brains) or kidney diseases (bad kidneys) are literally sick. Individuals with mental diseases (bad behaviors), like societies with economic diseases (bad fiscal policies), are metaphorically sick. The classification of (mis)behavior as illness provides an ideological justification for state-sponsored social control as medical treatment.

See http://www.szasz.com/manifesto.html Among other Szaszian libertarian views are the following:

Abolition of involuntary mental hospitalization. Involuntary mental hospitalization is imprisonment under the guise of treatment; it is a covert form of social control that subverts the rule of law. No one ought to be deprived of liberty except for a criminal offense, after a trial by jury guided by legal rules of evidence. No one ought to be detained against his will in a building called “hospital,” or in any other medical institution, or on the basis of expert opinion. Medicine ought to be clearly distinguished and separated from penology, treatment from punishment, the hospital from the prison. No person ought to be detained involuntarily for a purpose other than punishment or in an institution other than one formally defined as a part of the state's criminal justice system.

Abolition of the insanity defense. Insanity is a legal concept involving the courtroom determination that a person is not capable of forming conscious intent and, therefore, cannot be held responsible for an otherwise criminal act. The opinions of experts about the “mental state” of defendants ought to be inadmissible in court, exactly as the opinions of experts about the “religious state” of defendants are inadmissible. No one ought to be excused of lawbreaking or any other offense on the basis of so-called expert opinion rendered by psychiatric or mental health experts. Excusing a person of responsibility for an otherwise criminal act on the basis of inability to form conscious intent is an act of legal mercy masquerading as an act of medical science. Being merciful or merciless toward lawbreakers is a moral and legal matter, unrelated to the actual or alleged expertise of medical and mental health professionals.

⁸⁹Don Quijote, pt. I, chap. xxii (Starkie translation, p. 212).

⁹⁰Walter Block, Defending the Undefendable: The Pimp, Prostitute, Scab, Slumlord, Libeler, Moneylender, and Other Scapegoats in the Rogue's Gallery of American Society (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1991), pp. 19–21.

⁹¹Borrowing George Bernard Shaw's witticism, the difference would be one of price, not of kind.

⁹²Block, Defending the Undefendable, p. 21.

⁹³Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (New York: Libertarian Review Foundation, 1973). Heavily influenced by Rothbard, see Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

⁹⁴For this and the following, see Documentos cervantinos hasta ahora inéditos, D. Cristóbal Pérez Pastor, ed. (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1902), vol. II, pp. 453–537.

⁹⁵Martín de Riquer, Cervantes, Passamonte y Avellaneda (Barcelona: Sermio, 1988), pp. 131–32. The play was written in Naples, then under Spanish control, and within the literary circle of the Argensola brothers, literary enemies of Cervantes. The real Cervantes married a woman more than ten years younger. It seems the marriage was not a happy one. In one of his Exemplary Novels, El celoso extremeño, Cervantes describes the problems of a very jealous old man who marries a much younger woman. In his entremés El viejo celoso, Cervantes again portrays the humorous problems of a very old man who marries a very young woman.

⁹⁶Miguel de Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares (Madrid: Juventud, 2000), p. 457.

⁹⁷Don Quijote, pt. II, chaps. xx–xxi.

⁹⁸Ibid., pt. I, chap. iv.

⁹⁹Ibid., chap. lxii.

¹⁰⁰Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. I, bk. II, chap. ii.

¹⁰¹One might go further and posit a certain affinity between Don Quijote and the Barcelona printer, who are otherwise different men—one in a daring pursuit of glory and the other in a daring pursuit of profit, who nonetheless share an adventurous, enterprising spirit alien to both country gentlemen and un-businesslike city people—an affinity between, on the one hand, the Alonso Quijano who decides to stop being a timid country squire to become a bold knight and go out into the world and do things, and on the other hand the printer in Barcelona, who has gone out into the world and made a risky investment and created a business to improve his condition and that of his family and, in the process, that of the world he lives in. For as Smith, who had read Don Quijote, also points out, there is a palpable difference between the temper and disposition of a country gentleman and that of a businessman: “A merchant is commonly a bold, a country gentleman a timid undertaker.” (Wealth, vol. I, bk. III, chap. iv. Smith mentions Don Quijote and Sancho in several places, though not in relation to economics. See Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, J.C. Bryce, ed. [Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Classics, 1985], pp. 34, 124, 132).

¹⁰²Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Sian Reynolds, trans. (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 729–34.

¹⁰³De Iustitia et Iure, bk. VI, chap. ii, sec. 2, p. 194.

¹⁰⁴During his time as a tax collector, irregularities in his handling of funds and bookkeeping landed him in jail temporarily.

¹⁰⁵Cervantes's bravery at Lepanto is attested by witnesses who confirm he was sick with fever, but went on deck saying he would rather fight for God and King than stay in bed and received several wounds. See, for example, Angel Valbuena Prat, ed., Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Obras Completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967), p. 11.

¹⁰⁶In this play, much admired by Goethe, Schlegel, and Shelley, Scipio tells his officers first and his assembled army later that

El esfuerzo regido con cordura/allana al suelo las más altas sierras/.... Si el esfuerzo y cordura no se halla/ que todo lo previene y lo barrunta,/poco aprovechan muchos escuadrones,/ y menos infinitas municiones./ Si a militar concierto se reduce/cualquier pequeño ejército que sea,/ veréis que como al sol clare reluce/ y alcanza las victorias que desea;/pero si a flojedad él se conduce,/ aunque abreviado el mundo en él se vea,/ en un momento quedará deshecho,/ por más reglada mano y fuerte pecho. (act I, ll. 13–14, 101–12)

Notice the words cordura (judgment, prudence), concierto (concert), and reglada (ruled), my emphasis. Later in the play Cervantes again has Scipio insist on the need for reason in war.

¹⁰⁷Don Quijote, pt. I, chap. vi.

¹⁰⁸See, among others, Burton W. Fulson, Entrepreneurs Against the State: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America, 1840–1920 (Reston, Va.: Young America Foundation, 1987). Anyone familiar with the cultural revolution that took place in Silicon Valley, California in the late 1970s and early 1980s will recognize this type of “madman.” The Computer Revolution, as momentous as what Gutenberg accomplished five hundred years before, was the result of self-interested entrepreneurs.

¹⁰⁹Don Quijote, pt. I, chap. xi.

¹¹⁰Ibid. (Starkie translation, pp. 117–18).

¹¹¹Ibid., chap. lii.

¹¹²Already in the nineteenth century, F. von Wieser recognized that private property is necessary in a world where scarcity is a fact. See Economic Thought, James A. Gherity, ed. (New York: Random House, 1969), p. 315. For modern explanations of the problem, see Mises, Human Action, pp. 93, 236–37, 525; Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, pp. 28, 280–84, 568, 848; and Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pp. 189–210.

¹¹³Chafuén, Christians, pp. 96, 155, 174. This is the reason why Marx paired abundance with perfect communism and therefore without private property: he realized one cannot have one without the other; and his reasoning is echoed in Trotsky's now melancholy-sounding but once optimistic observations on the future of compulsory because socialist labor. See Trot-sky, Terrorism and Communism, p. 144.

¹¹⁴Mises, Human Action, p. 236.

¹¹⁵Don Quijote, pt. II, chaps. liv, lxv.

¹¹⁶This basically uncontested interpretation started at least as early as Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes, pp. 280–89.

¹¹⁷Don Quijote, pt. II, chaps. xlv, xlvii, xlix, li, liii.

¹¹⁸In old Spanish barato also meant “joke.”

¹¹⁹Don Quijote, pt. II, chap. xlix.

¹²⁰Ibid., chap. li.

¹²¹Ibid.

¹²²Vassberg, Land and Society, pp. 188–191.

¹²³Ibid., p. 192.

¹²⁴Raymond de Roover, “The Concept of the Just Price: Theory and Economic Policy,” Journal of Economic History 18 (December 1958): 418–34; Chafuén, Christians, p. 106.

¹²⁵Chafuén, Christians, p. 109.

¹²⁶Ibid., p. 108.

¹²⁷Anyone who has observed the results of price fixing in, say, gasoline sales, will see the problems without studying economics. For an examination of the results of price fixing in production and wages see, among others, Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, pp. 778–796. Good fictional descriptions of the resulting social disintegration are Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Zinoviev's The Radiant Future.

¹²⁸Henrique de Villalobos, Suma de la teología moral y canónica (Barcelona: 1632), p. 344; Chafuén, Christians, pp. 109–10.

¹²⁹Don Quijote, pt. II, chap. li

¹³⁰Vassberg, Land and Society, p. 195.

¹³¹Ibid.

¹³²Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, p. 68.

¹³³Vassberg, Land and Society, p. 195.

¹³⁴As some psychologists and political scientists assert. See psychologist Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (New York: Ecco, 2004), who also cites the work of psychologists like David G. Myers and political scientist Robert E. Lane, who argue that increased affluence leads to lesser well-being! “The more we are allowed to be masters of our fate, the more we expect to be” (Schwartz, “When It's All Too Much,” Parade, January 4, 2004, p. 5).

¹³⁵In his otherwise frequently cloudy rambling in his terrifying book Terrorism and Communism, Leon Trotsky got at least this right: “For the Liberal, freedom in the long run means the market” (p. 140).

¹³⁶How this relationship and Sancho's feelings compare to the often (certainly not always) unconditional love of a father towards a son is difficult to ascertain. Biological issues that are by their very nature less affected by rational choices come into play in a relationship between parents and children. Nonetheless, it is obvious that parents choose a certain behavior towards a son because it makes them feel better than if they did not. They are therefore choosing what to them at least is best. This “to them,” a subjective valuation, is fundamental to Misesian praxeology and Austrian economics, and it takes care of one of the objections frequently made against “economic theory,” namely that it only takes into account “rational choices.” In Austrian economics and Misesian praxeology, choice is subjectively motivated and therefore not necessarily and certainly not always “rational” in the sense that it can be universally regarded as sound or actually beneficial. But in any choice we make, rationally or irrationally, objectively or subjectively, we are still choosing something that we prefer or value more, over something that we do not prefer or that we value less. Otherwise we would not choose it. The relationship between parents and son, however, is not the kind of relationship that exists between Don Quijote and Sancho, though one could reasonably argue that this relationship, as it evolves, gradually resembles one between father and son. But in Don Quijote and Sancho the relationship is the result of free choices, not of biology. They are not born father and son. They freely choose each other. Enemies of capitalism think that pointing out that human beings trust each other and are cooperative proves capitalism's meanness and lack of applicability to human relations. Notice these typical statements: “This outcome [an experiment with Game Theory in which the subjects trusted and cooperated with each other] does not just flout proverbial wisdom, it thumbs its nose at economic theory.” (Ken Grimes, “To trust is human,” New Scientist 178, no. 2394 [10 May 2003]: 32). This sort of statement overlooks the fact that capitalism is indeed based on trust and cooperation. Without them it could not exist. Capitalism is a benevolent system that by preconditioning the existence of a free exchange of values, which requires cooperation and productivity, allows human beings to flourish. One of the greatest examples of human trust is what one sees on Wall Street, as brokers make bids and sales based entirely on trusting that what is bid or sold is indeed being bid on or sold and backed by what the bidder or seller says it is backing the bid or sale with. It is all trust, since at the very moment of the bidding or sale there is nothing tangible to be exchanged. It all “will” happen, presumably. The benevolence of capitalism shows in the fact that owning and being free to keep or give away, which are essential to capitalism, are also preconditions for being truly generous and liberal. As I believe Vitoria suggested in the sixteenth century in Spain, liberality ordered by law and therefore coerced is no liberality (see my comments on Vitoria in the text of this essay).

¹³⁷Don Quijote, pt. II, chap. lxxiv.

¹³⁸In contrast, collectivist approaches to life try to curtail an individual's control over his property by various means, from inheritance taxes to the outright abolition of inheritance rights. I wish to take advantage of this last footnote to thank my dear friend Margaret Schmidt for her insightful comments during my writing of this essay.