One such attribute is the paleo diet’s deep appreciation of traditional ways of life. While it is often parodied as the “cave man” diet, the paleo lifestyle is actually a rejection of many modern “innovations” that go against the accumulated wisdom of countless generations. Modern agriculture has been around for a relatively short span of time compared to modern homo sapiens’ existence on Earth; the Standard American Diet (SAD) is even more recent. Conservatives know that “new” does not automatically mean “better” (paging Dr. Guillotin) and that revolutionary events, like the advent of modern agriculture or refined foods, are especially likely to have negative consequences. In the same way that conservatives rail against contemporary higher education or the breakdown of the family and embrace traditional values of learning and prudence, they should also embrace the even older values of ancestral health.

The paleo lifestyle also emphasizes the virtues of self-control and moderation. While the stereotype is of a meat-eating, vegetable-avoiding neanderthal, there are many varieties of the paleo diet. What most have in common, though, is the difficulty of maintaining such a diet in the modern world. As anyone who has actually tried to both follow a paleo diet plan and have a social life and/or friends soon finds out, the world is full of temptation and vice. In many situations, the paleo practitioner has to choose between giving in to peer pressure or being labeled as “that guy,” the one who always takes the bun off of his burger or asks if there is any sugar in the salad dressing. The fortitude required to maintain such a diet or lifestyle in the face of temptation should earn praise from conservatives who often value the same personality trait when it comes to avoiding out-of-wedlock pregnancy, deficit spending, or vulgar mass culture.

Finally, the paleo lifestyle is one of the few forces in contemporary America that actually promotes traditional family values. Instead of the corporate rat-race or keeping up with the Joneses, paleo emphasizes slowing down and relaxing with close friends and family. Instead of endless hours of watching left-wing dominated television and playing violent and sexually explicit video games, paleo prescribes that children go outside and play with siblings and neighborhood friends. Instead of bowling alone (the status of bowling within the paleo community is unclear at this moment), paleo friends can go on short, intense sprints or intermittent fasts together. For adults, the sheer difficulty and annoyance of maintaining the paleo diet at most restaurants will lead them to stay home and to prepare and eat meals together as a family. In an unintended way, the high “cost” of the paleo lifestyle turns into the benefit of family togetherness and encourages the creation and perpetuation of what the great 18th century Irish conservative thinker Edmund Burke called “little platoons:”

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.

Contrary to Jordan Bloom’s misgivings about the anti-civilization aspects of the paleo diet, conservatives and paleo adherents are natural allies. Both recognize the fallen nature of our modern world and encourage the hard work, prudence, and determination necessary to maintain their respective lifestyles in the face of a hostile culture. In slightly different ways, they are both standing athwart history, yelling stop. So, to Jordan and his conservative brethren, I extend a hand of friendship and an offer to break free-range, grass-fed, GMO-free steak together.

The basic idea behind paleo is as follows. Evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers (past and present), with whom we share DNA, are healthier than those of us modern western societies. This fact might be useful to anyone seeking to achieve optimal health. It suggests that we may want to adopt, as best as we can in our modern world, some of the lifestyle habits of our healthier ancestors. Diet, physical activity, and sleep patterns are most obviously relevant. Stress management, career choices, and social lives may even be worth examining as well.

This framework is not about romanticizing the past or caveman re-enactment. Rather, it is about examining the past to generate hypotheses. While we suspect that adopting ancestral lifestyle habits will make us healthier and happier, there’s more investigating to do. Before jumping to any practical conclusions, the hypotheses that we generate are to be “tested.”

First, they should be put to the rigors of modern science, such as the principles of biochemistry and the results of actual studies. Secondly, we must consider the practicality of adopting these practices in the modern world. The lifestyle habits which find scientific support and can reasonably be implemented here and now are advocated and adopted. The rest are scrapped or modified.

As it turns out, many of these hypotheses are increasingly finding support in the science. It appears that we can indeed improve our health by avoiding grains, eating more plants and animals, exposing our bodies to sunshine, and ditching the long boring cardio sessions in favor of higher-intensity workouts and walking.

It also turns out that going paleo isn’t unreasonably restrictive. Contrary to some caricatures of paleo, cannibalism and misogyny are neither required nor recommended. You don’t have to go barefoot all the time to improve running mechanics, so long as you don a pair of minimalist shoes. And, last I checked, the local paleo Meetup groups are still letting night-shift nurses and office workers join.

Understanding paleo in this way highlights the fact that it is a best-of-both-worlds approach. The purpose is not to base our lives on some ideal historical period, but to base them on principles of health and well-being that transcend time and place. It’s about improving our lives by embracing the best aspects of both our ancestral past and the modern world.

Even further, remember that the paleo framework looks to the past to generate hypotheses. This means that paleo is only justified when it finds scientific support and produces results. At that point, all of the caveman talk becomes completely unnecessary. If paleo lifestyle guidelines produce results, then who really cares what our ancestors did and ate during the Paleolithic era?

Few in the paleo movement do care about cavemen. This is clear by the fact that the “paleo diet” does not in fact resemble the diet of prehistoric humans as closely as you might imagine. (And this is not to mention the widely acknowledged fact that there was no single ancestral diet, but many variations that shared some key features.) While starchy tubers weren’t consumed much in the Paleolithic, many embrace them as an excellent source of carbs. (Yes, while paleo shuns grains and refined sugars, it is not necessarily a low-carb diet.) Others are open-minded about dairy, provided that it is minimally processed and comes from pastured cows.

And it’s worth pointing out that most people adopt paleo lifestyle principles to become healthier and happier and enjoy better lives. Complete deprivation would defeat the purpose. That’s what the 80/20 principle is for. Unless you’re lactose intolerant or have celiac disease, there’s no reason you can’t go out for pizza or enjoy one of mom’s chocolate chip cookies every now and then.

I could go on, but I think that I’ve painted a pretty reasonable picture of the paleo lifestyle for any Umlaut readers who may have been turned off by its original hearing.

But, on the other hand, I fear that I’m putting other Umlaut readers to sleep. Perhaps, at this point, the paleo lifestyle sounds pretty boring. Well, it doesn’t have to be. Paleo isn’t just a set of rules for living a healthy lifestyle. It’s a perspective for taking a critical look at the status quo of our modern lives and world. You can adopt the diet and call it a day, and that’s great. But there is an endless supply of further exciting applications.

Feeling overwhelmed by your thousands of Facebook “friends”? Perhaps you should take Dunbar’s Number seriously and emphasize the quality over quantity of your relationships. A “friend-purge” may be in order.

Think there’s something fishy about the rat race society we live in? Turns out that most hunter-gatherer societies may have been highly egalitarian gift-economies. How about a paleo-inspired re-examination of your political convictions?

And then there’s K-12 schooling, government, shampoo, the internet, and eating 3-5 small meals per day. All of these modern staples are incredibly new from an evolutionary perspective. Am I saying we should scrap them? Not necessarily. For many of these things, it’s up to the individual to choose. But when you take the paleo perspective seriously, you can be sure that many of your choices will come from a more careful and honest process of deliberation.

At first glance, this kind of social arrangement looks like it could have been copied and pasted from the imaginative pages of For a New Liberty or The Machinery of Freedom. Indeed, liberals (classical, mind you) of all stripes embrace the decentralization of power as a go-to remedy in our toolbox to beat back the prying tentacles of the state and reestablish the primacy of the individual within society.

Any liberal enthusiasm for the society described above would quickly evaporate upon hearing the important details left out of the original description. For one, participation in these social groups is not euvoluntary at best and directly coercive, particularly towards women, at worst. In fact, the very idea of the “individual,” let alone any recognition that individual humans have dignity and rights that should be respected, is foreign to this society. People in this society are recognized and valued in proportion to the power of their social group and their position within it.

The norms of behavior that developed, while useful to maintain order, significantly infringe on an individual’s unique identity and claims. In this society, not only are you only your brother’s (legal) keeper, you are also your aunt’s, your nephew’s, your sister-in-law’s, and your second cousin’s (twice removed)…and they are all yours. This complex and contextual system of influence, history and nuance is not easily navigable by outside parties willing to trade and therefore not exactly conducive to a developed system of exchange. The collective emotions of honor and shame, rather than individual feelings of self-interest and guilt, primarily motivate action in this world. Even the seemingly amicable inter-group arbitration system is backed by the imminent threat of ceaseless blood feud, which has destroyed both clan-based societies and the dreams of star-crossed lovers on more than one occasion.

The world described is the social system of clannism, a form of governance that has marked the histories of most modern nations and still exists in much of the world that the U.S. military attempts to erect states upon today. This system is explored in great detail in Mark Weiner’s new book, The Rule of the Clan. Building upon Henry Maine’s dichotomy between Societies of Status (clans) and Societies of Contract (modern states), Weiner paints lush pictures of clan-based systems in history and today. Whisking us through vivid impressions of life with the Nuer of Southern Sudan, medieval Icelanders, and the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others, Weiner illustrates the logic of clannism in societies that completely lack states, have ineffective states, or exhibit some attributes of both.

The book is interesting enough as a series of anthropological vignettes and colorful collection of the world’s more dramatic creation and history myths (“if you liked A Song of Ice and Fire, then you’ll LOVE the Brennu-Njáls saga!”), but it also raises questions for those interested in stateless governance. In one of this month’s featured articles at the Library of Economics and Liberty, Arnold Kling reviews The Rule of the Clan and summarizes the relevant arguments:

1. A decentralized order is possible. Indeed, it is natural for human societies to achieve such an order, rather than degenerate into the Hobbesian war of all against all.

2. The natural decentralized order is, however, highly illiberal. It requires a set of social norms that bind the individual to the clan. Under the rule of the clan, peace is broken by feuds, commerce is crippled by the inability to put trade with strangers on a contractual basis, and individual autonomy is sacrificed for group solidarity.

3. In the absence of a strong central state, the rule of the clan is the inevitable result. In order to graduate from the society of Status to the society of Contract, you must have a strong central state.

Kling concludes that point 2 was most aptly demonstrated by the author and that point 3, while plausible, needs more evidence to be convincing. Weiner closes his book by warning against taking the state’s capacity for protecting a liberal social order for granted and regressing into the stifling and volatile collectivism of clannism. He raises an interesting question: We know that clan-based societies grow more liberal and less violent after they develop states, but would state-based societies grow less liberal if a decentralized order was to emerge and replace the state?

One point that Weiner did not explore in depth was the development of liberal morality that accompanied the rise of the state. Like Henry Maine, who was driven to write about the then-unappreciated distinctions between Societies of Status and Societies of Contract while immersed in the enchanting exotica of 19th century India, psychologist Jonathan Haidt first came to appreciate the deep differences between WEIRD and non-WEIRD moral systems while living among and learning from the Indian families that hosted him. There appears to be a strong association between the development of liberal states and the rise of WEIRD morality. This morality might be enough to save a modern post-state society from the illiberal byproducts of a decentralized order.

As John Hasnas has noted, we already live a large part of our lives in a decentralized order. Much of the order that we enjoy in our lives is not the direct result of government provision, but rather the product of tradition and experimentation among civic organizations and social groups. Where our ancestors’ clan identities used to broil over into honor brawls of all against all, we now channel these tensions into friendly sports rivalries, sorority philanthropic dance marathons, and company chili cook-offs. The state was probably instrumental in promoting the relative peace that allowed for the development of this new face of benign clannism, but this doesn’t mean that it hasn’t outlived its usefulness.

Consider the audience for a franchise like the Yankees as a power law distribution. The largest segment by far is really only interested in whether or not their team has won, and may not watch more than a couple of games each week. The smallest, most niche segment consumes absolutely every piece of information and rumor about the team that they can find. They frequent Yankees forums and chat rooms and get into angry fights about pointless minutia. There’s a sliding scale of obsession—devotion?—between the head and the outermost niche of the tail.

So why do they care? It’s all about belonging to a group, as well as simply living vicariously through stories. Just as soap opera audiences love to feel outraged by the scandals of fictional characters, some sports fans love to feel outraged by the scandals of professional athletes. Just as we can take comfort in being a part of a family, people take comfort in being a fan of a team, and having that in common with other fans.

Political news consumption follows exactly the same patterns. All news consumption does, whether we’re talking technology, video games, celebrities, economics—you name it, it’s all the same. It’s about group affiliation, regardless of whether it’s the Yankees vs the Red Sox, Republicans vs Democrats, or Android fanboys vs Apple fanboys. It’s also about stories with strong moral frameworks baked in—whether we’re talking the fight between the parents and husband of Terri Schiavo, the use of performance enhancement drugs in baseball, or Nintendo’s decision to pursue a general market rather than cater to their longtime fans. People get exhilarated by these stories, and by the feeling that they are a part of a group that cares about these stories.

News was never high minded in the way that people like Shirky want it to be. To defend the romantic point of view, people will drudge up a handful of examples of investigative journalism that was consequential. There are indeed specific cases, such as Brian Deer’s remarkable work exposing the fraudulent study claiming a link between vaccination and autism. But as Rolf Dobelli points out, this kind of work does not need the news. It can live in long form pieces, and in books. Especially nowadays, this kind of work can be supported and promoted directly without connecting it to the vast news apparatus which produces a sea of informational garbage every hour of every day.

And if you pooled together all of such consequential work in the entire history of the news, it would not even amount to one atom in the universe of content produced in one single year in one single segment of the news industry. News is not about being informed. It is about entertainment, about feeling good—in the broadest sense of feeling good, which includes indulging in outrage and feeling smugly superior to some other set of people.

Also included is indulging in a sense of righteousness—which brings us back to the notion that journalists are the great defenders of democracy. Certainly political junkies like to believe that they are better informed than those of us who abstain to the extent that the modern information environment makes abstinence possible. But this is at odds with everything cognitive research has told us about bias and how beliefs form and are reinforced. It is well known that presenting a political junkie with a story that contradicts their beliefs tends to make them more vehement rather than more skeptical.

When you look at everything through the lens of sports news, it all starts to make sense. Why would you ever think that some scandal in the Republican party would suddenly get people to switch affiliations? Do you think that a lifetime Cubs fan would abandon his team because he found out that Sammy Sosa was taking steroids? He’s far more likely to start reciting a list of people on other teams who did the same in order to justify his continuing loyalty.

A lot of people have worried about the fate of the news in the current technological landscape. Personally, I have not lost a single minute of sleep over it. Why should I? The stakes are no higher than if we were discussing whether or not ESPN was going to be able to make it, or People magazine. I will admit it was pretty terrible when I found out that Nintendo Power wasn’t going to make it, but I think democracy will find a way to soldier on without it.

o

“And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him. And he said unto them, I have earnestly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer: For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. And he took [a steak], and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.”

o

An account from Gombe National Park, 2002:

The chimpanzee approached the two women, and at that distance they had no time to run and were too weak to do anything to protect their child, so he took the baby from the girl’s back, and moved off into the forest. When he was next seen, by one of the researchers, he was in a tree and the baby was dead, but after eating only a little portion he left the baby on a branch, descended the tree, and moved away, apparently to avoid the observer. Luckily the male was alone with no other chimps around, and so the researchers were later able to retrieve the baby’s body.

Cannibalism by paleolithic humans is a controversial subject, though neolithic people and pre-humans both seem to have practiced it.

o

Paleo diet internet forum, 2011, in response to the question, “Is the paleo diet sustainable on a global scale?”

“This more of an argument against overpopulation than against paleo.”

Beyond observing that modern cavemen share with their prehistoric cousins, or at least their televised versions, a difficulty with copulae, both parties to the exchange buy into some weird theory; the questioner that the Australian government does “understand that grains are a ‘new’ food, but they need to push it, or face issues with the food supply.” The other responds by saying, “peak oil/gas are real issues, as is the amount of clean water over the next several generations. As bad as it sounds, the world’s population needs to be decreased significantly.”

o

One of the paleo diet’s main medical proponents today, and the author of an eponymous book, is Dr. Loren Cordain. He describes it as “the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup,” and one that our species had used for the past 2.5 million years. The problem with that assertion—and it’s one he still makes in interviews and is widely repeated in the paleo web universe—is that the human species is not 2.5 million years old. The creatures walking around on two legs back then were about four to five feet tall and had brains less than half the size of modern man.

o

Humans’ dietary habits played an underappreciated role in the development of the species. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham persuasively argued in a 2010 book that it was cooking that spurred the development of the human brain toward its unusually large size, since cooked food requires far less energy to digest. Since then, the next most important change in the human diet is the introduction of baking and fermentation; bread and beer.

Controlled fire is a much older invention than bread; claims for its first widespread use range anywhere from 125,000 years ago to more than a million, whereas baking was not widespread until the Neolithic era (though there’s some evidence Paleolithic humans ate early forms of bread, which is awkward for today’s paleo-dieteers). In terms of boosting humans’ caloric intake, they’re comparable innovations. Abundant evidence exists that they consumed legumes and starches, both of which are forbidden by the paleo diet.

o

Bread, unlike meat or vegetables, goes hand in hand with civilization. It is the embodiment of social cooperation, of order itself. A sliced loaf is the benchmark invention to which all others are compared. The typical paleo-dieteer seeks to rid him/herself of gluten, and can be identified by an inability to order anything normal from a restaurant menu, turning down hors d’oeuvres, and wearing ridiculous shoes.

o

Paleo guru and clinical nutrition therapist describes why peanuts are dangerous:

There are hypotheses, but no concrete reason for the increase in allergic response to peanuts. One theory has to do with the aflatoxin present in most of the peanuts (and wheat, rice and other major crops) in the U.S.

Aflatoxin is a poison, and it’s regulated by the FDA. Today’s peanut butter contains vastly less than it did even 20 years ago. There have been no major studies linking it to peanut allergies.

Monsanto takes on something of a demonic status among some aspects of the paleo community.

o

It’s unfair to focus on the strange nutritional ideas in some aspects of the paleo community; they don’t all share them. But in general I think it’s fair to say most paleo-dieters believe two things:

1. The modern system of mass food production is poisonous and/or corrupt
2. The paleo diet resembles the diet of prehistoric humans

Both of these things have shades of truth, but are basically dishonest.

o

Am I saying the paleo diet is for misanthropes? Not exactly, it really is a mostly harmless collection of somewhat conspiratorial nutritional advice, common sense, and a dubious exercise program (stand more at work! lift heavy things!); and some aspects are even healthy. But that rejection of bread often goes along with rejecting society is no coincidence, and if we’re being honest, it helps to explain why the diet appeals to so many libertarians. The extremely circumscribed quality of the paleo diet fits, psychologically, with the paleo diet’s other antisocial aspects, but it comes at the expense of experimentation and variety, things I’ve always thought libertarians valued. They’re not having their cake or eating it either.

For background on the FAA, air traffic controllers, and the sequester, see here, here, here, here, oh, and here. Yes, it’s been written about to death. But most journalists and commentators take one of a few perspectives: 1) The rich and connected were the only ones able to avoid the consequences of the sequester; 2) The FAA used some very sneaky budgetary practices to be one of the only agencies not meaningfully affected by the sequester; or 3) The FAA used the fact that they deal with the public in a very direct way to exert political pressure in their favor. All of these are correct. However, they’re just part of the larger incentive schemes that public choice theorists have been writing about for decades.

The best book on this issue is most likely The Politics of Bureaucracy by Gordon Tullock published in 1965, with a foreword by James Buchanan. Another classic is James Q. Wilson’s Bureaucracy. The key insight of both books is that workers in government bureaucracies are actors the same as anyone else and face and react to incentives the same way. However, the incentives are set up very differently compared to businesses, even very large ones. Those in charge of agency and department budgets have an incentive to inflate and defend it as best possible. And, unlike in business bureaucracies, there’s rarely a reason to look for ways to cut budgets.

Throw in some more insights from the public choice school—mainly about concentrated benefits and dispersed costs—and you get a much clearer idea of what happened with the FAA furloughs. What’s actually scary though is that we only got to see this commonplace practice of most government bureaucracies because of the the rare occurrence of the sequester and subsequent furloughs. This type of behavior happens constantly, and yet it’s rarely discussed.

Nothing major will change without changing the incentives that guide the behaviors of bureaucrats. Of course, trying to borrow incentive schemes from the business world is both impossible—there’s no profit and loss mechanism in the public sector—and may not be a good idea anyway. We don’t want our government to be run like a business, or else why not just have a business do its work.

Here’s an idea: let’s reward hard working government employees who discover ways to save their agency money. Here’s how it would work: An employee prepares a detailed report on how to save money. Such a report could be about anything from buying cheaper pencils to restructuring departments with overlapping workflows. The employee submits this plan to the inspector general of their agency. The inspector general for each agency (which is sadly now a rather neutered position within the federal government) sorts through the proposals, eliminates non-serious ones, and uploads them to a public website. There people can go and vote up or down on various proposals. A low-level manager, the agency head, or even the president can then choose whether a proposal has received enough public support to warrant implementation. Then, the employee or team who originally submitted the change can be awarded a percentage, say 5%, of the overall savings from the project change. The taxpayers pocket the rest.

It’s true, financial incentives are not everything, especially when it comes to one’s profession. See the work of Dan Ariely and other behavioral economists. Employees should be engaged with and passionate about their work, and many government employees are. This new program doesn’t disrupt that engagement. In fact, it might strengthen it. A policy like the one I’m proposing allows employees to take pride in their department and agency, and contribute to its improvement.

Another byproduct may be that the general public would have a new avenue to investigate how their government actually works. Now, wading through budget materials is a tedious exercise. However, through a program like the one I’m suggesting, citizens could read about specific causes they’re contributing their tax dollars towards.

This isn’t a perfect idea. But something needs to be done to help American government bureaucracies look critically at their budgets and make some hard decisions that, as it currently stands, they’re very unwilling to make.

Common estimates of the number of victims of communism range between 85 and 100 million. Besides the death toll, regimes that have claimed the communist label for their own have caused incalculable economic damage, poverty and suffering—not to speak of the debilitating effects that totalitarianism has had on culture and informal norms. I was born in the 1980s in communist Czechoslovakia, so I can’t claim to remember the height of the Stalinist terror. Yet I do have vivid memories of living in a country where foreign books and magazines were mostly unavailable, where secret police could wiretap phones at whim, where most desirable job occupations were restricted to loyal party members and where people could not travel abroad freely.

To accuse Westerners sporting communist symbols of being complicit in the crimes of communism is beside the point. For the most part, they have no desire to impose a dictatorship of the proletariat on their respective countries. But nevertheless, it is striking to see how lightly such displays are taken—particularly compared to the ostracization of symbols of other totalitarian regimes. Consider how outraged most people would be if someone chose to display a swastika or a portrait of Adolf Hitler in a public space—so why the tolerance for hammer and sickle and Che Guevara?

The culture of political correctness that is pervasive in America and increasingly so in Europe has been a subject of ridicule by many on the political Right. My feeling is that ostracizing certain forms of rhetoric and conduct—including homophobia or racism—has been largely a force for the good, in spite of the excesses it has come with. But the rise in political correctness makes the double standard applied to communism even more difficult to understand.

Different explanations are available. While many in the West have been affected by the atrocities of the Second World War, few have relatives who perished in Soviet gulags or during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In spite of a large body of scholarship, it appears that only very few people understand the magnitude of the crimes of communism, partly because of how they were perpetrated. Paul Hollander, a sociologist of Hungarian descent, wrote:

There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

And, unlike totalitarian ideologies built around ideas of racial supremacy, communism’s ideal of a classless and scarcity-less society, is not immediately repugnant—in fact, it has long appealed to intellectual elites around the world. Even the political violence, says Hollander,

 had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system.

But regardless of whether we can answer the question of why the display of communist symbols does not carry the same stigma as some other ideologies, we are justified in trying to change that—even if only out of respect for the millions of communism’s victims around the world.

Moreover, there is something to be said about that tiresome Burke quote, namely that “those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” While it is unlikely that the ideology of Marx and Lenin makes a comeback, there is value in understanding its nature and the mechanisms through which it led to the unprecedented human catastrophe we saw in the 20^th century, particularly given that most people still find it quite counterintuitive that “humans motivated by lofty ideals are capable of inflicting great suffering with a clear conscience,” as Hollander puts it.

What exactly can be done? I am no fan of cultural wars, but if I had to pick one, this would be it. Clearly, there is a hugely important place for scholarly research and proselytizing about the evils of communism, and more people should be reading books like this, this and this, and talking about them. And more people should be writing them.

And if you are, like me, bothered by the appeal of communist symbols, you might decide to take action by engaging with your local leftie wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. Try to talk some sense into them (for they know not what they do), and if that does not help, do feel free to ridicule and shame them. Otherwise, keep hiding in your Caplanian bubble.

In this month’s edition of The Freeman, one member of the creative class airs his grievances towards his comrades’ penchants for rabidly gobbling subsidies to the arts stolen from the meager pockets of the army of baristas-slash-whatevers likewise struggling to make a splash in the art world. Comedian and writer Andrew Heaton decries the regressive injustice of extracting involuntary endowments for the arts from working class people to buttress the coffers of exquisite high society taste.

Heaton is right that people are made worse off when their hard-earned money is siphoned from the monster truck rallies and Croods that they would otherwise enjoy and diverted towards a $75,000 NEA grant to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Hall so that Motown’s élite can enjoy a complete cycle of Beethoven’s works on the cheap. This criticism, however, falls on hollow nouveau aristocratic ears: they don’t care that fewer people can watch the Croods if it means that Beethoven will live on. Defenders of public arts funding argue that undirected market activity produces too many low-brow Psys and not enough high-brow Beethovens; they forget that Beethoven himself was a glorious agent of commerce and trade (and an old school pop artist, to boot).

Tyler Cowen extols the largely unappreciated virtues of capitalism as the driving force behind artistic development and dissemination in his book, In Praise of Commercial Culture. Plucking and presenting the most popular theories that drive cultural pessimism—among them conservative worries of degeneracy and decadence, gripes of capitalism’s corrupting mediocrity from the Frankfurt crowd, and multiculturalist concerns of global cultural whitewashing—Cowen demonstrates that each of them fail to recognize how commercial development assuages their artistic anxieties and expands high, low, and minority culture.

Take our friend Beethoven. His stellar musical rise was fueled by the productive powers of capitalism. The commercialization of the printing press allowed the Maestro to sell sheet music directly to middle class families and make a cozy artistic freelance living. Businessmen eager to peddle instruments to a growing middle class improved production and lowered the costs of owning a family piano, which drove demand for the sheet music that allowed classical composers to live free from the bondage of patronage. The rise of a wealthy merchant class allowed composers to work for private grants and performances, freed from the strictures of stuffy state and religious taste. Classical composers’ growing roles as businessmen in the developing music market allowed them unprecedented degrees of artistic freedom.

Classical music flourished in the fertile commercial culture of 19th century Germany and Austria without the meddling of the National Endowment for the Arts. Today, technological developments and growing wealth makes the case for government-subsidized culture all the more scant.

Not only is the market better for creative culture than most people realize, the state can be downright toxic to creative expression and cultural development. Elsewhere in the fresh pages of The Freeman, Mike Reid warns of the perils entrusting social culture to the brute purveyance of the state. The state exerts its tyranny on social culture through paternalism and imperialism. In the case of the Jarawa “primitives” of the Andaman Islands, their government’s desire to preserve their “pristine” culture resulted in laws that forcibly prevented these people from culturally assimilating. Elsewhere and more commonly, governments have enacted harebrained “culturalization” schemes to smother the traditions of indigenous people.

In the same way, when placed in a position to judge and cultivate artistic culture, the state oscillates between propping up stale established forms and attacking the avant-garde. Upon appointment as head of the state-controlled French musical Academy, composer Jean-Baptiste Lully refused to subsidize works that did not meet his particular taste; many years passed where his production was the only one bankrolled in the entire country. On the other side of the spectrum, the cool angles and industrial philosophy of Walter Gropius’s Staatliches Bauhaus was stifled by state cultural authorities in Nazi Germany. More recently, state funding for the arts has backed questionable works of middling quality for pure shock value (Piss Christ: never forget).

The areas in which the modern arts have most flourished are those that are the most commercial and free from the clumsy taste of the state. In her book The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel chronicles the explosion of aesthetic options wrought by our growing global marketplace. Today, consumers survey seas of products that deliver solid functions and the perfect forms to suit more individualized tastes—all for a fraction of ugly earlier models’ costs. Echoing these observations, social critic Camille Paglia suggests that the relative stagnation in the visual arts is a result of modern artists’ disconnectedness and disdain for commercial culture. Industrial designers are driving renaissance of style and function because they are still tapped in to the creative forces of market activity.

There is no reason to believe that the state will be a responsible steward of our culture. Our cultural history gives us every reason to believe that capitalism will continue to provide the diversity and quality of forms that we have come to take for granted. The rich should shell out to pay for their own whimsies; the art world will thrive with or without this stolen “generosity.”

There are many apparent shortcomings to Bitcoin as it exists today. One piece argues, persuasively, that Bitcoin prices appear highly sensitive to media attention. His argument is that there’s a short term positive feedback loop that happens in which some event triggers media attention, which encourages more speculation, which increases the price dramatically, triggering more media attention, and so on, until it all comes crashing down to Earth again.

I actually view all this volatility and sensitivity to attention to be a good thing—Bitcoin is being stress-tested. If it cannot adapt to the fickle nature of media-generated attention, it will never become a realiable store of value or unit of accounting—though that doesn’t necessarily mean there wouldn’t be any role for it at all.

There’s something to be learned here from the history of free banking, in Scotland in particular. One of the arguments in favor of central banks is that the pre-central bank era in the United States was plagued by irrational runs on the bank that destabliized the whole system. In The Theory of Free Banking, and elsewhere, George Selgin demonstrates that the real problem with the 19th century banking system in America was that banks were hamstrung by regulations that didn’t allow them to develop any defensive mechanisms against runs on the bank.

In Scotland in the second half of the 18th century, no such regulations existed. Banks would issue their own currency in the form of promisory notes for a specific amount of gold. If they issued more currency than they had gold to redeem, they would be just as vulnerable to runs as a more modern bank that has fewer dollars in its vault than the total value of its deposits.

And indeed, in the early days of the Scottish free banking system, many banks had to close their doors entirely, or hold on to huge amounts of gold if they wanted to continue to operate. Eventually, however, they developed a mechanism for defending against runs on the bank. It was called the “option” or “optional” clause, which anyone signed with the bank when doing business with them. It stated that the bank reserved the option to defer payment for a period, usually up to six months. This gave the bank enough time to liquidate its balance sheet to make payments, meaning that the fundamentally sound banks did not go under. In order to show customers that this option would not be invoked by default, the clause included the condition that banks had to pay the highest interest rate that was then allowed under Scottish law—5 percent. Had a higher rate been allowed, it’s quite possible the penalty would have been even greater.

As a result, Scottish banks had a big incentive to build up a lot of capital, and did so much more than modern banks do. There was no need for capital requirements, and because the optional clause plus a big balance sheet gave consumers a lot of reason to trust the Scottish banks, runs were rare and the system was able to take advantage of all of the positive aspects of fractional reserve banking.

Interestingly, the chief cause of the development of the optional clause was not a lot of runs on the banks by consumers. Instead, established banks would hoard enormous amounts of currency from new banks, and then bring them all due at once in order to try to bankrupt their competitors. The modern reaction to that sort of anti-competitive behavior would be to call in the FTC or some other regulatory body to reign it in, but that would have resulted in a far less optimal equilibrium than the optional clause made possible. Because this anti-competitive behavior put so much stress on the system, the system was forced to adapt in order to survive, and the result was a much healthier banking system overall.

Right now, Bitcoin is enduring the enormous stressor of sudden speculative interest. It’s quite possible that it will come crashing down again, and it’s also possible that such a crash will only be momentary (recently a serious crash lasted only a single night). It seems clear to me that the stressors that Bitcoin faces today will lead to the development of new defensive mechanisms in the future. Even if it is not Bitcoin itself that develops those mechanisms, a future competitor could learn from Bitcoin’s shortcomings and come up with a more reliable solution.

The notion of a distributed crypto-currency is very new, and the practice is even newer. Though a lot of thought went into Bitcoin’s design and a lot of thought has gone into criticism of it, it is ultimately rote trial and error that will get us to a more effective virtual payments system, if such a system is indeed possible.

One of the more vicious recent attacks against Dawkins was launched in late March by Nathan Lean at Salon. Lean’s article, “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia,” is one of the rare instances where the headline is less inflammatory than the piece itself. In no uncertain terms, Lean attempts to make the case that, after the 9/11 attacks,

[t]he New Atheists became the new Islamophobes, their invectives against Muslims resembling the rowdy, uneducated ramblings of backwoods racists rather than appraisals based on intellect, rationality and reason.

Lean goes on to imply that Dawkins and Harris are in it for the money (“they’ve built lucrative empires.. their books… top bestseller lists and rake in eye-popping royalties”) and lumps them together with the likes of Pamela Geller, far-right political parties, neo-Nazis, and, worst of all for readers of Salon, George W. Bush.

The second attack came a few days later, from the Al-Jazeera columnist Murtaza Haussain. In “Scientific racism, militarism, and the new atheists,” Hussain argued that Dawkins and Harris are at the “forefront of [the] modern scientific racism” and that

where once scientific racism was trotted out to justify the horrific institution of slavery, today it is produced to justify the wars of aggression, torture and extra-judicial killings of the 21st century. Scientists in the service of power, who once employed Phrenology to “prove” the racial inferiority of blacks, now enthusiastically push forward the belief that Muslims as a people lack basic humanity.

These harsh accusations were given even more airtime after the celebrated civil-liberties columnist Glenn Greenwald tweeted out a link to the Hussain piece and then, after a lengthy email conversation with Sam Harris, wrote his own Guardian article that reiterated many of the charges made by Lean and Hussain.

But none of these leading journalistic institutions of the political left expressed the same outrage when Richard Dawkins went on his Twitter tirades against Mitt Romney and his Mormon faith.

On August 8:”Romney confuses Sikh with Sheikh… Also confuses “Prophet” with “convicted conman using magic hat to read gold plates.”

Here was Dawkins on October 4: “Newsflash. In Romney administration, CIA code-breaking department to be issued with government regulation seer-stones and magic hats.”

And then on November 3, just before the election:”#election2012 Mormons need a big war for Jesus to return. Give Bishop Romney the nuclear keys.”

The only news outlets of note that covered these outbursts were the Telegraph in England and the Blaze in the United States.

When Dawkins suffered another Twitter melt-down in April and tweeted that the journalist “Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed [sic] flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist,” the Guardian ran another negative piece about Dawkins. The response on Twitter and in the media was large enough to prompt Dawkins to write a thoughtful quasi-apology about his choice of words.

Few people on the left seemed to care when Dawkins made an even more explicit argument that Mitt Romeny’s Mormonism should have kept him out of the White House: “No matter how much you agree with Romney’s economic policy, can you really vote for such a massively gullible fool? He is a Mormon BISHOP!”

This was followed by “A gullible fool can still be a good rock star. But can a gullible fool be a good President of the world’s most powerful country?”

So what is the difference between claiming that Mitt Romney’s silly religion should bar him from high public office and that Mehdi Hasan’s silly religion should bar him from serious journalism? Is it that Romney is vaguely right-wing and white, while Hasan is left-wing and, as Al-Jazeera‘s Hussain would put it, brown?

The great relish with which some of Dawkins’ left-wing detractors take in accusing him of Islamophobia, while ignoring his history of attacking Mormonism and mainstream Christianity, shows that they are more interested in scoring political points and posturing. His statements on Mitt Romney and Mormonism on Twitter show that it is religiosity itself that draws his ire, not just Islam. Dawkins may be religious hater, but he is an equal opportunity hater.