Pun Salad

Just a cartoon from Mr. Ramirez:

Also of note:

• 

  So far, it's been an awesome trip, man. I'm in the process of (a) watching my portfolio at Fidelity; and (b) reading the book 1929 from Andrew Ross Sorkin, (Amazon link at your right.) And then I read this brutally honest article from Arnold Kling: The Value of Nothing.

  For the WSJ, T.J. Stiles writes,

  The 19th-century mental architecture of finance was concrete, built directly on the physical world. A share stood for a set amount of tangible stuff, which limited stock volume and value.

  Until very recently, people thought of the economy in tangible terms. In 1900, the price of gold in the United States was fixed at $20.67. The government stood ready to buy or sell gold at that price. It could only issue dollars to the extent that they were backed by gold.

  Today, the government can issue as many dollars as it needs to close the Budget deficit. Anchored to nothing, the value of a dollar is a consensual hallucination. We accept payment in dollars because other people accept payment in dollars. People are accustomed to receiving a particular amount of dollars each pay period, keeping a lid on inflation in spite of the ever-increasing supply of money.

  Disturbingly, the term "consensual hallucination" keeps popping up in Arnold's post. (Credited, even more disturbingly, to William Gibson in Neuromancer.)

  Arnold's bottom line:

  We are telling ourselves that we are wealthy. The government has borrowed money from us, and we expect to get paid. We own shares of stock, and we think that we can always sell them for a good price. It will all turn out fine in the end. Unless it doesn’t.

  Have a nice day.

  Still, what are you gonna do?

  (Andrew Ross Sorkin has plenty of examples of 1929's citizenry asking the same rhetorical question.)

• 

  What in the world ever became of sweet Jane? Nick Gillespie usually does the interviews for Reason, but Sam Fakahany of the Freeman turns the tables and interviews Nick: Nick Gillespie’s Long, Strange Trip.

  FREEMAN: One thing I’ve been thinking about is that we at FEE are inheritors of a radical tradition. We just celebrated our 80th, and I don’t think the liberty movement realizes—or, rather, I think we sometimes forget—that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. I’ve been rereading Radicals for Capitalism, and the late Brian Doherty spoke a lot about how libertarians always had this “bad-boy image,” that we reveled in our ideas being seen as wacko. But I’m not sure that’s true in the 2020s. When people say there’s no market for libertarianism, I think it’s because the big ideas—the ones Reason covered over the years, the ones FEE was founded to propagate—are now fully embedded in the mainstream.

  GILLESPIE: When did FEE start?

  FREEMAN: FEE started in 1946.

  GILLESPIE: You know, I think you’re right. Many of the basic libertarian principles that seemed to be insane and outlandish, especially when FEE started, are now completely accepted and taken for granted, or taken as the background and the starting point for conversation. And what’s interesting is that this tends to be more on the economic side than on the cultural side. We can talk about the cultural side in a minute, but you know, the early FEE pamphlets that made a splash featured arguments by people like Milton Friedman and George Stigler against rent control… The idea that in the late ’40s someone would be saying things like, “Well, rent control actually causes more problems than it solves. You can let markets decide not just what rental prices should be, but what the volume of housing should be…”

  Go back and look at people who are identifiably libertarian in the modern sense, Hayek and Mises in particular, and you’ll see that they were arguing for the basic idea that the market will produce a ton of stuff and bring, you know, sugar and salt and milk and eggs and butter to supermarket shelves, and in constantly better and more interesting and more varied ways. Nobody argues against that anymore. Even China has state capitalism; they don’t have state socialism anymore. And whatever else you can say about Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists, they generally agree that markets and free enterprise deliver a lot of goods. [What they argue] is that the distribution of this unbelievable bounty isn’t done properly. But that’s a fundamentally different argument from what proto-libertarians were encountering 100 years ago, or even 50 or 60 years ago.

  At the end of the ’90s, there was an economic show on PBS called The Commanding Heights, and it basically said that the 20th century was a battle between the ideas of Keynes and Hayek; they represented, respectively, a completely planned, heavily regulated economy, and more of a free market economy. I can still remember, I was watching this—I was living in Ohio at the time, I was on an exercise bike, and I literally fell off the bike when I heard the narrator say, “This was the battle of ideas in the 20th century, and Hayek won.” I was like, Wow, that’s pretty impressive.

  Another book I'm currently reading is (ye gods) an 824-page biography of Hayek. That only goes up to 1950! (And again, Amazon link at your right.) And, as I read, it's going into the Hayek/Keynes debate. Spoiler: see above for how it worked out.

• It never hurts to be reminded… An excellent article from Timothy Harper: The Past Is a Guide — and It Points Toward Freedom. (NR gifted link)

  One hundred years ago, to celebrate America’s 150th birthday, President Calvin Coolidge gave a now severely underappreciated speech in which he responded to the new political movement of the time: progressivism. Progressives argued that social progress required abandoning the — as they viewed them — outdated principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Coolidge responded that those principles were universal and final.

  “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final,” Coolidge said. If one were to abandon the Declaration’s principles, “the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.” Justice Clarence Thomas, in a recent speech celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, summarized Coolidge’s point: “Progressivism . . . is retrogressive.”

  True in 1926, true today.

• Back in my day, Buddhists just set fire to themselves. So I was surprised by nearly every word in this headline: Buddhist Chaplain at Tufts U. Resigns After Being Arrested in Prostitution Sting.

  Tufts Buddhist Chaplain Ven. Vineetha Mahayaye was one of seven men arrested on Saturday by the Boston Police Department’s human trafficking unit for allegedly attempting to pay for sexual acts. Mahayaye resigned from his position at Tufts, which he had held since December 2024, on Monday.

  Mahayaye, 32, pleaded not guilty and is set to appear in court on Sept. 2 on a misdemeanor charge of sex for a fee.

  Mahayaye allegedly responded to an advertisement posted by undercover BPD officers on a website frequented by sex traffickers, along with four of the other accused men. The advertisements were created as part of a larger sting operation called Operation Red Card, aiming to crack down on sex trafficking in preparation for World Cup games held in the Boston area.

  A 2025 article in the Tufts Daily profiles Vineetha in happier days. It contains the sentence:

  After 2 1/2 years spent living in the cave, Mahayaye felt ready to leave the forest.

  And also, I guess, felt ready for some nookie.