I don’t know much about cars. What I do know has come about through necessity as problems have arisen. This is my own fault, but I must plead that there have been mitigating circumstances. By the time I was old enough to understand cars, they were already unfriendly to hobbyists. The advance of technology and regulation has made hands-on experimentation almost non-existent. For most of my life what I knew about the internal combustion engine came from boring drawings distributed by the local public school #69. There was one exception, our high school physics teacher, who would tell us spectacular stories about stuff blowing up, which makes it a little more interesting.
Lack of knowledge can do a couple things. First, there is cluelessness, at which time one thinks everything is just fine and you don’t need to do a whole lot, except maybe change the oil. Ignorance is bliss. Then you get bitten in the nose by a huge problem that comes up because your car wasn’t properly maintained in all the details. This happened to me in October 2007. I was home for a family funeral when my aunt asked my father what that horrible noise from my car was. I thought they were nuts. The car made some noises, but I didn’t think there were any severe problems. My dad listened to it and said take it to the mechanic and be prepared to spend money—lots of money.
The mechanic had my car for two or three weeks. Saturns, the brand I drive, are notoriously difficult to get parts for, and so things took awhile. The engine also needed to be torn apart. New timing chain, new engine mounts, a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember anymore. But I do remember that it cost $1500. That’s a lot of money for a restless artist like me. Luckily I had recently gotten a bunch of gigs that gave me the money I needed to get this work done. I remember standing at an ATM with a friend of mine in mid October, looking at my unusually high bank balance. I said, “Something is gonna happen and I’m gonna have to part with all this money.” And it did. I learned not to tempt fate with comments like that.
You’d think that getting the car back after such a thorough job would re-instill confidence in my outlook on cars. Instead, the whole episode fired up my OCD, and every little noise I heard scared the hell out of me. This is the second consequence of ignorance. One afternoon I was driving down Oregon Ave. and I heard the most awful brake noise ever. After I stopped, though, it kept going. I looked up and saw that it was a plane landing at the airport. Not only that, valves tapping can sound a lot like a bad timing chain (to my untrained ear, anyway), so that always had me compulsively listening to the engine. In the wake of the major repair, the engine was running a lot more quietly, and so I heard a lot of extraneous noise.
I shared all this one day with Jeffrey Tucker, who is an astute observer and advisor on things both profound and mundane. “Michael, you’re a carpochondriac,” he said. It’s true. I have terrible anxiety about cars but little of the knowledge to deal with it. This means that I often take to Google to sort out the issues that need attention and the ones that don’t. This is dangerous, a little bit like going on WebMD with a headache. I’m the kid in Kindergarten Cop that says, “Maybe it’s a tumor.” I always gravitate toward the worst case scenario—a problem which is probably diagnosable outside the specific subject of cars.
Wednesday, on the way back from Atlantic City (where I lost a small amount of money playing roulette; just call me Dostoyevsky) the low coolant light came on. This hasn’t happened in years. I probably should have had the coolant completely replaced a while ago, but this is one of those maintenance things that can get lost in the daily grind, given the hidden nature of much auto maintenance. Last night on the way home from rehearsal, I heard a sound of rushing liquid under the dashboard. This has happened from time to time for awhile, but only for the first acceleration or two, first thing in the morning. I never looked into it; most of the time I wondered if I was just nuts and was hearing things. Last night it was bad enough that I Googled it. It can be a sign of low coolant, which seems harmless enough. However, it can also be a symptom of a damaged or blown headgasket. This worries me, since this sound happened occasionally well before the low coolant light ever came on. The good news is that the oil on the dipstick looks normal. Oil with a creamy consistency is bad news.
With all this weighing on my mind, I did what any reasonable person would do: I went for a long run, and I just let my mind crank out ideas. If this is the end of this car, I’ve got options, none of which involves getting a new car. Options are good; they get you out of doomsday territory, which is not a very happy place to be.
I stopped in to my mechanics’ shop earlier today and told them the cliff notes version of this story. They seem less than half as concerned as I am, but then again their knowledge comes from years on the job and not from a couple of frantic internet queries. They have a game plan in place and don’t seem to be ready to pronounce the car dead yet.
Why do I obsess on the worst? Maybe there’s a part of me that has a death wish for this car. I’m tired of the anxiety it causes me, not to mention the money I spend to keep it going. If we get through this little bump in the road, there’s the inspection, which is due in May. My car is 12 years old, and one of these days I will need a major fix to keep it in line with these ridiculous emissions regulations. With the economy in the tank and people driving cars longer, I wonder how long it will take for pressure to mount for some of these regulations to be relaxed. Fat chance. Passengers are being digitally examined just to get on an airplane and few people are even making a peep about it. We like misery.
But forget the car death wish. Maybe this is the impetus to put automobiles on my list of new hobbies to be explored. Over the years I’ve learned to admire car mechanics. They get a bad rap, but the good ones are fantastic. They can hear the difference between valves tapping and a timing chain on the brink. They can chase down problems step by step in machines that often seem to have minds of their own. They’re like doctors, really, or maybe philosophers. There was a time in my life when I had been reading too much Richard Weaver when I thought all this was just boring stuff on the sensate level. I was a bit too much like Niles and Frasier Krane. But the best philosophers were also concerned with matters of science, as well they should be. This really can be fascinating stuff, especially when you have a good mechanic like mine who believes that an informed customer is a good customer. So they explain everything to me. As a result I know a lot more about cars than I used to, but still not enough to keep carpochondria from being my first reaction to a problem.
“Do you have a soulmate?” the shrink asked Will Hunting. A soulmate, someone who challenges you. ”Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Frost, O’Connor, Kant, Pope, Locke…” replied the precious brat.
“That’s great; they’re all dead.”
“Not to me they’re not.”
This is one of my favorite scenes from Good Will Hunting. Both characters have a point. The written word can be inflexible, and it lacks the dialectic that is so crucial to learning in many situations. On the other hand, even if a book is a thousand years old or more, it is still alive. The author might well have something to say to us today. Given our poor track record for following the good advice of scribes, it isn’t difficult to find an old book that’s useful today. This is one of the reasons why reading is as important to me as food, clothing, and water. If I don’t frequently sit down and soak in the wisdom of great writers, I feel like I forgot to brush my teeth. It is good to have such enhancing activities; they help us more gracefully to wend through the mysterious space between angels and animals that Man occupies.
Every January, I like to share a list of the best books of the past year—books that I’ve read. Listening to someone talk about the books they’ve read can be annoying, but please be assured that I realize most people couldn’t care less how much I’ve read, and that’s largely how it should be. It’s not about me; it’s about the books and my desire to share great ideas with other people. For other readers, this is an excellent way to maximize effort. No one wants to read a bad book, so recommendations are key. I have left out a lot of books that are very deserving of mention. Perhaps others can speak on their behalf. I will stick to these:
Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind
When this book was published in the 1980′s it was alternately praised and lambasted as another conservative prophecy of doom. Any close reading of Bloom’s work, however shows that this reaction was hasty if not illiterate. Bloom, for instance, laments the collapse of the American family but adds that he isn’t necessarily calling for a return to the 1950′s Leave It to Beaver bliss. Bloom, in fact, defies categorization. This is because he is a thinker and a man of the arts. He is, in a word, human.
Bloom is most famous for his critique of the modern university, which a friend of mine quite accurately says is a monastery gone bad; but to me some of his most striking observations have to do with relationships. He scratches his head at the cold nature of romance in the youth of the 1980′s: after years as lovers, two students would part ways with a handshake, and Bloom would be rendered speechless. In this context the author, who was apparently no sexual prude, sharpens his knives for the modern hookup culture, which he says ruins the aura of real love.
Of particular interest to me is Bloom’s critique of rock music, which he considers to be decadent. Good music should be an integrating force and not a fragmenting one. ”To Plato and Nietzsche,” he writes, “the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul—to make them serve a higher purpose, an ideal, to give man’s duties a fullness. Bach’s religious intentions and Beethoven’s revolutionary and humane ones are clear enough examples. Such cultivation of the soul uses the passions and satisfies them while sublimating them and giving them an artistic unity. A man whose noblest activities are accompanied by a music that expresses them while providing a pleasure extending from the lowest bodily to the highest spiritual, is whole, and there is no tension in him between the pleasant and the good. By contrast a man whose business life is prosaic and unmusical and whose leisure is made up of coarse, intense entertainments, is divided, and each side of his existence is undermined by the other.”
Bloom’s volume is a dense one, and I would only be doing violence to it to try to say too much more than I already have, since every word he writes is important. He might well sound like a noisy gong to most modern readers because he will prove impossible to pigeonhole into some ridiculous worldview or cause. Bloom’s argument is not that we need to be more conservative or more liberal, or more or less religious, or even necessarily more decorated with degrees. I think what he really wanted was a fuller realization of the potential of humanity. He was, incidentally, an advocate of the Great Books Program, and so I dedicate this post to his memory.
Bertrand Russell: The Problems of Philosophy
One of the things that all the warring world views of humanity have in common is that their practitioners think their system can solve all the world’s problems. If only everyone would listen to what So-and-So says, there would be peace on earth, a chicken in every pot, a case of beer in every fridge, and five computers in every home. The best of the So-and-Sos, of course, are cautious of such naivete. The problem is that usually it’s some follower of the So-and-So that implements the realization of the philosophy, and these people are usually wearing blinders.
This arrogance, it seems to me, comes from a failure to understand the limits of human reason, and that, to me, is the most important contribution of this work of Lord Bertrand Russell. He begins his work with a discussion of appearance and reality, using a table as an example. We can see a table, and touch it, but does the table exist outside our ability to perceive it? In other words, does it have an existence of its own? This eventually leads to a discussion about Idealism, which holds that reality owes its existence to human thought, a notion that Russell rejects.
Nonetheless, Russell is no Randian Objectivist and courageously faces the limits of ratiocination, the process of human reasoning. Some questions, for instance, can only be solved through inductive reasoning, as indeed many scientific experiments are conducted. The more an experiment is repeated successfully, the more likely it is that the conclusions are true. This kind of reasoning is imperfect but is often as close as we can get.
Somewhat different from inductive reasoning is a priori reasoning and general principles. 2+2=4 is an example of a priori reasoning; even if one doesn’t know the answer to this equation when he starts, he usually has the tools and the knowledge of general principles to come to the right conclusion. This is a sturdy form of reasoning, as long as one’s premises are correct, but in many areas of human thinking it is impossible to know this for sure. Because of this, Russell rejects the use of philosophical techniques for fields such as theology.
After so much talk of the limits of philosophy, one might wonder, “What’s the use?” We modern men in particular like to have definite answers to everything; we are fundamentalists even in matters of whether or not the tree makes a noise in the forest if there is no one there to hear it fall. Russell, however, sees much of the value of philosophy coming precisely from its uncertainty. He says, “The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason.”
Philosophy, in other words, makes us more thoughtful.
The well-known filmmaker Jean Renoir has written a riveting account of the life of his father, the famous painter Pierre-August Renoir. As a musician, I’m fascinated with visual artists precisely because they use entirely different faculties than I use. Oddly enough, though, what sticks with me are Renoir’s criticisms of modern life. He was old enough to remember simpler, pre-industrial times, and he despised the centrally planned Paris that was poured with concrete. Renoir in general hated modern life—the ugliness, the pace, the utilitarianism.
A conscientious capitalist who loves beauty is compelled to pause when reading a book like this to re-examine his ethical beliefs. We would be fools to pretend there hasn’t been a downside to industrialism. One could argue, for instance, that the Southern black slaves were being freed just as the Northern white servants were about to be imprisoned: Many people feel stuck as a cog in the technological wheel, cubicle dwellers who are paid to leave their creativity and ingenuity at home. And without an agrarian culture, one’s options are limited. A landed man is a free man; a man in an apartment with rent and utilities to pay is on rather a tight leash.
Why support capitalism, then? Leaving aside the usual caveat that the modern west is not a free market but rather a partially-free mercantilist one, there are some things to be considered. Firstly, much of the leisure that gives us the free time to criticize modern life is a direct result of the industrial revolution, as are such things as extended life spans—hardly things to be lamented. But beyond this, I still choose capitalism, because in its essentialness, capitalism is freedom. I’m not talking about the capitalism of the corporatist racket; I’m talking about the capitalism of free exchange, the mutuality between merchant and customer. It’s a system that allows everyone to say yes or no.
And it allows those committed to the arts to say yes or no—donors, consumers, and practitioners. In, for instance, a socialist economy, man is not free to decide how much he will work and how much he will play. The decision is made for him; he owes his time to the State. In freedom, he can choose the best possible road, taking into consideration all the variables in front of him; not only those that can be measured, but those that cannot be. For those who have not heeded the advice of Bertrand Russell, constructive leisure time is not important; they would rather work 60 hours a week to pay for the extra car in the garage. For others, they want just enough money to survive; to them, living well is broader, deeper, and higher than one’s income level.
No one can deny that the arts have suffered in our times. But fundamentally this is not a crisis of being helpless in the face ineluctable historical or economic forces; rather, it is a crisis of choice. Most of us have chosen money, forgetting that man cannot live on bread alone. Shame on us.
One final thought on Renoir: There seems to be no genius where there is no suffering. Renoir was surprisingly sane for a creative person. (I’m allowed to say this, since I’m a crazy person who does his best, at least, to be creative.) His pain in life was physical, taking the form of arthritis. There are pictures of him in which the malformation of his hands is obvious. It’s a great mystery how he was ever able to hold a brush with an organ that had basically devolved into a glorified claw. It’s beautiful. It’s inspiring. It takes away all my excuses.
Seneca: The Shortness of Life
Seneca (whose full name has something like umpteen words in it) was perhaps the most famous of the Stoic philosophers, who were essentially ancient precursors to the prudent American Puritan. That’s not all bad; in small doses admonition to responsibility can be a good thing.
Seneca adjures his readers to keep their death always in mind. Dark, I know, which is why I liked it. Seneca’s point, though, is to a constructive end; it is not his desire to induce a John Donne-like bout of depression. All resources are limited, including the space in which our lives exist. Each of us has an unknown amount of time. For this reason, we often hear that life is short. Seneca, on the other hand, says that life is long if you know how to use it. Seneca would ask each of us, “What are you doing right now, and why?” We often waste time in our lives on things that we don’t really want to do, on tasks that are not only distasteful, but utter distractions from our real goals.
Putting his advice to use, of course, means learning how to say no. Leonard Bernstein’s mother once quipped that it was a good thing he wasn’t a woman, because he never learned how to say no. Bernstein, however, was a genius, and geniuses tend to be able to master superhuman schedules. Most of us, on the other hand, need to make very careful decisions. As the world gets more and more antisocial, people seem to become more and more demanding all the same. We have forsaken affection for expectations, and this is not a good thing. It can be difficult to cut out the underbrush of one’s schedule, but take courage, and remember your death. As Boobus Americanus Primus said, “One today is worth two tomorrows.”
G.K. Chesterton: The Everlasting Man
I read a lot of literature about religion, works that I agree with and that I disagree with. It is a fascinating subject, and an important one. For much of this work I have turned to an early 20th century Englishman, G.K. Chesterton, whose book The Everlasting Man is as fresh and as relevant as anything that could be written by Joseph Ratzinger (whose excellent Introduction to Christianity I also read this year), Karen Armstrong, or Richard Dawkins. (Dawkins tries too hard; it gets old after awhile.)
It is common in Western Christian discourse to tackle The God Question with various kinds of philosophical proofs and theological parsing. Mystics reject this approach, but so do other more “down-to-earth” thinkers, such as G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, as an author of a number of novels, sees The God Question in terms of a history, that is, a story, an adventure. He says, for instance, that while the idea of a man being damned may be an unattractive one, the idea that man is damnable is quite obviously true, and accounts for mankind’s constant struggles against failure. Hell is simply a reflection of our own ability to sabotage ourselves.
Against the historical materialism of many of the thinkers of his day, Chesterton applies the notion of immutable human nature to the question of the existence of God. Why, for instance, did supposedly pre-human animals feel the need to create art in the caves? What was the purpose of this art? I’m having a hard time remembering the full argument, and I don’t have the book with me, but if you are interested in philosophy and religion, this is a good book for you.
Peter Ackroyd: The House of Doctor Dee
I should call this book, “The Token.” I’m not much of a fiction reader, but I try to do a little every year. I have a couple of friends that I’ve put in charge of getting me the right fiction books. One in particular is good at picking out contemporary English authors who show us that not everything written today needs to be a sleazy Danielle Steele novel.
In this book, a young chap inherits an old house owned by his deceased father. It’s a cute little dwelling, consisting of mismatched parts built at different times. The house turns out to be haunted by a ghost of a former owner, one Doctor Dee, a sixteenth century practitioner of black magic. There are many fascinating erudite references in the book to stroke the egos of intellectually vain jackasses like me, but what I remember the most is the shiver that went up my spine in sections of this story. If ghosts exist, I’m afraid of them. And even if they don’t, I’m still afraid of them. Ask me what happened once on Big Round Top in Gettysburg.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: Democracy: The God That Failed
It’s common for a modern American history course to go like this: Once upon a time, there were these evil men called kings, who used and abused their subjects to their hearts’ content, and the world was dark and dreary with no sense whatsoever of the idea of human dignity. Then along came America, and they set the whole world free with equal rights and democracy. The peasants rejoiced, and all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our government.
This narrative, of course, is largely unquestioned; it is scripture to most people. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, certainly one of the foremost anarcho-capitalist thinkers of our time, pops this balloon of naivete unapologetically in his book, Democracy: The God That Failed.
He begins with a careful examination of monarchical government and the several advantages that it held. A king could not forcibly tax, and he could not forcibly conscript soldiers. Those mercenaries that modern political scientists like to insult came at a high price; military commanders were therefore rather hesitant to risk their troops’ lives unnecessarily. Many battles were conceded as soon as one side or the other took the high ground. Wars were not, for the most part, fought in population centers but out in the fields, away from the citizenry, who considered war to be the irrelevant sandbox fighting of the oligarchy. In a monarchical system, class divisions were in the forefront of awareness, making the population healthily wary and skeptical of the brainchildren of the royalty. Kings also had a harder time being looters. Since they planned to pass their kingdoms on to their posterity, they did everything they could to increase the value of the area through approaches comparatively friendly to businessmen. And finally, for all the talk about the absolute rule of kings, they were beholden to the natural law. New measures were expected to be elucidations on natural law. There was no place for positivism, and where a king stepped out of line, there were powers in place to remove him if necessary.
Hoppe contrasts life under Kings and Queens with life under Congresses and Presidents. The modern democratic nation-state forcibly taxes—Isn’t it ironic that after rebelling against a tax, the Americans put taxation provisions into their new founding document?—and it has forcibly conscripted soldiers. Total warfare has resulted from the enemy’s desire to cripple the whole economy, since forcible taxation renders everyone a contributor to the military effort. Class divisions in the modern nation-state are blurred, though one could argue that during this depression they have begun to make a comeback. But by and large the fact that any of us can apply for a job with the government makes us forget that there are the rulers and the ruled. While kings ruled for life and passed their property on to their children, thereby creating an incentive to nurture the land, elected officials only rule for a short time, which creates an incentive to loot. And while kings were bound by natural law, the modern nation-state maintains that justice is decided by a majority vote, natural law be damned.
Hoppe is not a monarchist and admits that there were problems with monarchies. Like modern constitutional governments, the royal system decayed at least partly because of its own arrogance: ”Divine right” ceased to be the idea that the king owed his power to God and became the idea that the king could call upon God to justify any of his decisions. This was the beginning of positivism. But clearly democracy leaves a lot to be desired, and this is where Hoppe begins his appeal on behalf of what he calls the natural order, which is what many of us call anarcho-capitalism, the system of a common law ethic built on private property rights and the free market–without the existence of a monopoly on violence, otherwise known as government.
Usually I like to list ten books, but this year I just didn’t have ten that I could recommend unreservedly, owing to one factor or another, few of which reflect on the actual quality of the books. I would like to thank the friends who pointed me in the direction of some of these works. They know who they are. Cicero said that if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. In my case it might be appropriate to replace the garden with a microwave, but in any event I’m quite glad to say that my cup runneth over.
In times like ours, when fair is foul and foul is fair, the proponents of good causes can often lead a dour existence and indulge in a crankiness which, if less than charming, is certainly understandable given the long odds they face. Unfortunately this doesn’t do much for their causes, since people—even smart people, or, rather, especially smart people—don’t want to hear how dumb their ideas and tastes are. What every good cause needs, then, is a force of positive energy, a source of joy to show the followers that cause x is not only worthwhile, but necessary for human growth and happiness.
Meet Jeffrey Tucker, the happy anarcho-capitalist. Libertarians, like philosophers and artists of all stripes, are not exactly known for their joie de vivre. We are seen as party-poopers, twits who are too attached to their intellectual ideas and not willing enough to “get with it”—“it” being some fad that has gotten swept up into the Zeitgeist. The insufferably officious late William F. Buckley once chided us for worrying about stop signs when there were evil Russian peasants to murder. I wonder, though, what Bill Buckley would do with the writings of Tucker, who, rather than get into complicated syllogisms like Murray Rothbard, or rather than writing ridiculous Objectivist creeds like Ayn Rand (who is only thought to be libertarian anyhow), simply finds the absurdities of the State and laughs at them, even when the autobiographical details show that he has suffered under its iron fist (though perhaps in these inflationary times the State’s fist is now comprised of zinc). Tucker has every right to be bitter, but instead, he makes merry, and this is to his credit. I would even say that this book presents a model of how to live a fulfilling, rounded life as an anarcho-capitalist.
It is impossible to read Jeff Tucker’s work and not come away loving life more. Here is a man with a wide range of interests and intense curiosity. I know this because I’ve known the author for a number of years now, so don’t expect this to be an unbiased review. No writer is unbiased anyway; the sooner we take the masks off the more we’ll benefit. Lou Holtz, in his account of Notre Dame’s last national championship in football, said that the difference between where you are now and where you are five years from now is the people you meet and the books you read. In Jeff Tucker, I have someone who is now in both categories. Jeff got me into running, Chartreuse, and shaving without cream. (The latter subject is covered in the book.) Now, after reading Bourbon for Breakfast, I have a few more things to do, such as figure out how to take that environmentalist wacko washer out of my showerhead.
To cover every subject in this review that Tucker covers in the book would be onerous, so I’d like to select my favorite subjects and start with one of the most pressing issues of our time: toilets. About ten years ago, I took a new job, and shortly after my arrival noticed a sign above the toilet in the office: “Please do not throw any paper towels into the toilet. We have already had problems with this toilet. Thank you.” The sign seemed to suggest that said toilet was relatively new and not performing up to its expected capabilities. More and more, I’ve noticed these signs over the past decade. They are commonplace now. Someone could make a lot of money by mass-producing a sign which says “Caution: Toilets don’t work as well as they used to.” Etc.
I never realized the culprit until I read Tucker’s articles on it. The U.S. government, during the environmentally crazed days of the early nineties, passed legislation requiring toilets to use no more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush. This, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is not enough to get the job done, unless it is one of those jetpack toilets that sprays dirty water all over the bathroom. Tucker relates some of his own experiences with this State-imposed health crisis and rightly points out that if there is any effort on which resources should be liberally spent, it is on safely getting rid of human waste, which is one of the deadliest substances known to history.
Advocating the safe removal of crap from our toilets doesn’t exactly require a wellspring of political courage, but another topic that Tucker addresses does: child labor laws. When modern man thinks of child labor, he thinks of practical slavery, but the laws in this country didn’t come about until the early twentieth century, and then, as Tucker recounts, had a number of curious exceptions built into them, child actors most notable among them. Commoner children could only work if they were making Christmas wreaths or something. Moreover, these laws were conceived while the necessity for child labor was receding into American history; in other words, it was the prosperity created by capitalism, and not the benevolence of the State, which freed children from the necessity of sitting at a sewing machine for twelve hours a day, since adults were making more money and no longer required the extra household income.
Less honorable forces were at work, too: Women’s labor groups, for instance, disliked the cheap competition offered by the children. Many, including a number of church organizations, opposed the new child labor laws because they regarded it as the nationalization of children (what has happened since with respect to public education proves that they were right), and at least one congressman prophesied that the lack of work would make future generations lazy. Well, now! Tucker carries this ball the whole way to the goal line in “Generation Sloth,” which is a discussion on the dearth of working skills in some of the current generations. Of course, we don’t want to get too Protestant and think that work is the be all and end all of existence—and how curious it is that in such a Protestant country laziness has taken over—but there is more than enough food for thought in these chapters. One practical consequence of it all is that you cannot pay a neighborhood kid to fix your computer.
Anarcho-capitalists are not well understood by the general public and are often lumped in with all the apologists for the corporatist pigs. This misconception is even easier to pull off these days owing to the vague illiterate socialism that seems to control the mainstream public discourse. Tucker reveals the lie in all this when he discusses one of his foremost passions: Intellectual Property. He is one of the first libertarians, perhaps second only to Stefan Kinsella, who has come out against these supposed “rights” and shows exactly how the whole IP concept is inimical to a libertarian worldview which respects private property rights and free exchange. Tucker admits that past libertarians had not thought much about this issue and that the default position was in favor of IP, but the new trend is reshaping libertarian opinion in this area. Offering items for free online which would normally be controlled by IP, such as books, Tucker insists, is actually better for everyone in the long run, including the author. I have personally witnessed Jeff transform the viability of causes with this approach, and every time a book is offered for free online, its sales at the warehouse skyrocket at the same time. The trouble these days is that the publishers have everyone, including the writers themselves, under their thumbs, and so books and ideas—perhaps ones deemed too dangerous?—are left to squander while the giant book corporations refuse to put items back in print but demand to hold onto the “rights” to the material. There is a long history here, which Tucker recounts succinctly.
A hinge in Tucker’s thought occurred when he read Michelle Boldrin and David Levine’s book, Against Intellectual Property. In this work they lay out the case for a freer dissemination of ideas. It looks like something that ought to be added to my reading list, though I must offer a minor caveat based on what I’ve seen so far, and it concerns music, which happens to be my field of choice. The authors posit that IP law is behind the stagnation in classical music over the past several decades. This is entirely possible. Musicians tend to be very territorial in their work in ways that are self-defeating. A good example of this is the recent policy change by the American Guild of Organists, which now hides its job openings behind password protection, making it impossible for non-members to see one of the benefits of membership. Twelfth century models like this are bound to fail. All the same, I’d only add that the musical community itself often does everything it can to discourage normal people from liking classical music. The fact that the term “classical music” makes us think primarily of stuff that is older than most countries rather than some of the truly great music of the past decade that has come from the pens of men like James MacMillan and Bo Holten is the foremost problem. Add to that a pompously pious stern demeanor and you have the perfect recipe for total system failure. The classical musical world is a caricature of itself.
On a more detailed note, Boldrin and Levine blame IP laws for the dearth of great music in England since 1750. I am in no position to judge the laws in England of this time period, but I will say that much great English music has been written since 1750. Could more have been written? Quite possibly, but this is one quibble I must make. Every time someone tries to assert that there have been no great English composers since Henry Purcell, I just want to scream, “Ralph Vaughn-Williams!” And that’s only for starters. The twentieth century in particular saw a musical blossoming in those rainy lands; several of the composers, such as Charles Villiers Stanford, took after Brahms. “No great music after 1750” is the kind of thing a musicologist would say so that he doesn’t have to study a school of composition that he doesn’t like. It’s almost as laughable as the idea that anyone would actually want to listen to Purcell.
Speaking of Vaughn Williams, however, I will add a story here that strengthens Boldrin’s and Levine’s case. John Weaver, organist, composer, and professor for many years at both Juilliard in New York and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, has written a wonderful little jazz arrangement of Vaughn Williams’ famous melody which is sung to the text For All the Saints. He can’t get it published because—so I’ve been told by a reliable source—the heirs of the original composer find the piece to be objectionable and refuse to grant the necessary permission. I can’t think of a reason why these heirs wouldn’t benefit from such a publication, and yet they use the IP laws to commit censorship.
Of course, laws of all sorts are used to harass people, and in the section on crime, Tucker gives us some pretty unpleasant glimpses of this ugliness. There was a fateful stop sign in Jeffrey’s subdivision, mysteriously removed after causing much heartache and wallet damage, which serves as the main antagonist. God only knows how many times he’s run this stop sign. I’m tempted to take a pilgrimage to this fateful intersection. Maybe we could raise money to erect a marker in memory of this red octagon which extols the virtues of liberty and the advantages of a rolling stop when no one else is around. (I might add that South Philadelphians, including the cops, have perfected this art.)
Tucker begins this portion of the book by describing the harrowing experience of being arrested for failing to pay a ticket for running the aforementioned stop sign. He forgot to pay it, no further notices were sent, and the next thing he ever heard about it was a dreadful knock at the door. A probe into corruption on the part of local officials, which included FBI involvement, adds an interesting, if unsurprising, twist to the story, and the experiences of jail which he reports explode any myth of the accused being innocent until proven guilty. In jail, you are an animal, as far as the Persons-in-Charge are concerned, and most people in the public go along with this attitude because they think they themselves will never be arrested for anything.
After discussing the pokey, Tucker moves on to a date in court to fight what is presumably a different ticket. As he awaits his hearing, Tucker witnesses one poor person after the next being ushered in front of the judge to plead their case, only to lose big. A particularly appalling example comes to us in the person of a woman who stole a pack of lunchmeat from Wal-mart. For this petty theft she was fined $800 and had her license suspended. In addition, she was banned from Wal-mart for life. Interestingly, this was one of the few real crimes on the docket that day—some other poor chap lost his license for awhile for “public drunkenness,” even though he wasn’t anywhere near a steering wheel—but it was handled in perfectly unreasonable fashion. The sad part is that the State has virtually stripped private business owners of the ability to handle these kinds of things in a more discrete and reasonable fashion. Public access laws, for instance, prevent Wal-mart from banning this lady for a more reasonable time period, like a year or two; instead, they are forced to take the case to the State, which goes about blowing the crime out of proportion. One wonders if this is an intended or unintended consequence of public access laws. Anyone who thinks these laws are necessary needs to talk to a bar owner, who is one of the few businessmen left with much discretion over who patronizes his establishment. “We don’t really get all the government that we pay for,” says Tucker, “and thank goodness. Lord protect us on the day that we do.”
One of the things that everyone should know about Jeffrey Tucker is that he’s always pushing the people around him to become better than they are. In fact, there is a Facebook group called “Everything I Needed to Know about Life I Learned from Jeffrey Tucker.” One area in which I need to improve is dress. Tucker’s remarks on this subject make me feel like a veritable slob; he contrasts the sharply dressed hobo on a park bench during the Great Depression with the polo-clad, cubicle-bound nincompoop of the past two decades. I want to be better at this, but the effort is just overwhelming sometimes, and I feel like I’m trying to climb the proverbial greased pole that H.L. Mencken talks about. Just the other day I ruined a shirt while ironing it. It wasn’t the classic mistake of leaving the iron in one place for too long; it was far more complicated than that. But it made me feel like a failure much like the inability to drink copious amounts of alcohol in the evening makes Tucker feel like a failure. (This subject is also covered in the book. The time to try this, he says, is when you are young and your body can handle it.) It turns out that Jeff was in clothing retail and knows quite a bit about how to dress and how the clothes should fit, and he even knows how to find good deals on sharp outfits. Read his advice carefully. I just might have to follow through on this. In the meantime, I plan to sound him out on why nine out of ten articles of clothing these days would do better as washrags. I’ve noticed, for one thing, that even smaller-sized clothing assumes that the wearer will have a potbelly and a wide posterior, making me look like a floating cloud of whichever color it is that I’m wearing.
Tucker closes this compendium with a number of reviews of books and movies. The depth of his comprehension is sometimes astounding; he can remember more from watching a movie once than many can from watching it ten times, and his book summaries are so excellent that he might want to watch out for the IP police. Tucker’s discussion on Garet Garrett’s novel The Driver got my undivided attention. The story features Henry Galt, a Wall St. financier who tries to wrest control of a failing railroad company. This might not seem like much, but it’s certainly more exciting than late twentieth century novels about public housing projects. A motif in the book is, “Who is Henry Galt?” Tucker notes that many have speculated that Garrett’s novel inspired Ayn Rand’s character John Galt. I think that’s putting it mildly, or perhaps putting it in a way that will keep all concerned parties out of court.
By now many are probably wondering what the title, Bourbon for Breakfast, has to do with any of these subjects. On a basic level, and perhaps most importantly, it seems to indicate a worldview, an approach that would be sanctioned by diverse characters such as Richard Weaver, Joseph Pieper, and Murray Rothbard: the idea that leisure is an important part of a life well-lived. Tucker sat down at breakfast one morning with a Bible scholar friend who offered him some coffee—and then offered him some bourbon to go with it. Mornings, to this man of Hebrew and Greek letters, were for contemplation, and not to be rushed. Contemplation, or leisure, is necessary for freedom. It keeps one’s mind from falling into a trance on the treadmill of the corporatist State. More than that, though, a morning drink says, “I will celebrate; I will enjoy life and not let the taskmasters run me down.” The State gives us to-do lists, but the morning drinker asks the real questions about life and reminds us of how good we really could be. The morning drinker, unlike a messianic bureaucrat, doesn’t take life or himself too seriously. He knows that if there is tragedy, there is also comedy, and sometimes the best way to ward off a demon is to laugh. Nor does he feel the need to preach endlessly about the big, abstract issues. He realizes that to know what the government is really like, we only need to observe how its agents act around toilets, stop signs, and stolen lunchmeat.
Of course, the idea of contemplation can become a double-edged sword, especially in the hands of the hopeless, who can turn isolation into pure anti-social misery. Under the supervision of Jeffrey Tucker, though, it is a fountain of energy. I don’t know how he accomplishes everything that he does. I’ll grant that I’m a bit envious of the way he tackles seemingly lost causes with all the enthusiasm of a champion fighter; I myself, when it comes to expending energy, am like a finicky, health-conscious old woman in a buffet line. There are days when I’m tempted to give up, to sign back up with some kind of limited government program, to find a local Kiwanis Club and live my life getting along just fine with Boobus Americanus. But after reading this book I am just as convinced as ever that the struggle for a free society is not only worthwhile, it is worth engaging with a sense of joy and wonder and love of life. In fact, it is the only way we will win the battle of ideas.
