The Free Market Runs on Love

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Thu, 24 Jul 2003 12:00:00 GMT
From muth:
"President Bush said that he will not send troops to Liberia until he gets some bogus intelligence from the CIA to justify it." -- Jay Leno
and:
"Democratic presidential candidate Dick Gephardt has fallen short of his campaign fund-raising goal by a million dollars. The goal was to raise a million dollars." -- Jay Leno

I recorded my rendition of the chorus of the Engineers Drinking Song as engineers.mp3 (62K). Enjoy!

I fired last night and this morning my new Gamo PT-80 Pellet Pistol. Good fun! It makes a little more noise than Aguila Colibri .22 rounds, but not much; no hearing protection required. I made an indoor trap for it last night by filling a cardboard box full of magazines. I put the magazines in vertically first, so that the pellet would hit the front of the nearest one and go through them. Instead, it bounced off and hit the wall. Then I stacked the magazines lying flat so that the pellet would go between two magazines or into the pages of one. That worked well. Penetration was only an inch. Three foot pounds (6.5 grains at 410 feet/second) doesn't do much.

George Potter at SunniMaravillosa.com - Micropiece - glorious celebration of the free market! [claire files message board]

When he left, smiling at me as if he'd found a kindred spirit, we shook hands. His shake was firm and warm and honest. "It was a fine thing to meet you, George," he said to me, "and I hope we meet again soon."

I had to fight tears.

That is the proper way to be a rabblerouser. By treating people as people. By engaging their hearts and souls. By approaching them as human beings and not potential converts. Walking up wild-eyed and tossing pamphlets and yelling slogans simply gets you written off as a nut. You'll never change a person's mind that way, unless they are as crazy as the slogan shouter in the first place.

It happened fairly regularly. Nice conversations got started, I'd see an opening, and I'd introduce my anti-statist opinion. I'd always introduce it as a point where they agreed. I'd never contradict or incite argument. I'd word my response in a way that was non-threatening but thought-provoking. I considered it a triumph to plant a seed and leave them thinking. I'd snuck up on them, after all, below their threshold, placed herein a market friendly point and rousing the rabble the best I could.

Of course, some people are unreachable.

...

Ignoring flame and the possibility of explosion, the truckers set to that car like men possessed. One arrives with a sledge hammer and shatters a back window because the doors are jammed shut. Men actually crawl into that car and out -- retrieving three scared, screaming, but mostly unhurt children. The hammer gets put to work on a front window, and two men drag the unconscious driver out next.

A man driving by screeches to a sudden stop and pulls -- of all things -- a fire extinguisher from his trunk, hurriedly dousing the growing flames before they spread to the passenger, who seems to be trapped inside, a living crying conscious body prisoned by twisted metal, unreachable by any easy access point.

By this time, two truckers have taken matters into their own hands and blocked the highway by parking their rigs and trailers across the road -- effectively halting traffic.

All this happens in the space of about four minutes.

Kim du Toit - National ID Cards -- The Response - Kim received a huge volume of reader mail about this topic. He links to the mail and then gives his opinion. [kimdutoit]

Dave Winer's DaveNet - On Beauty in Women - thoughts on leafing through an in-flight magazine. The world depicted in the glossy mags is a fraud. The real world is much more beautiful. Its imperfections make it so. Thanks, Dave.

Gene Callahan at anti-state.com - The Libertarian Case Against Fractional-Reserve Banking - Mr. Calahan believes that there's nothing morally wrong with fractional reserve banking as long as the bank's customers know the nature and inherent risk of its business model. [anti-state]

George Paine at Warblogging - House Votes to Ban PATRIOT Act Secret Searches - I believe that Mr. Paine is referring to H.Amdt.292 of H.R. 2799, "An amendment to prohibit the use of funds from being available to seek a delay under Section 3103a (b) of title 18 United States Code." So if this amendment survives the Senate version of the bill, and the f.b.i. wants to search your house and tell you later, they can't spend any money on the telling. [warblogging]

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