Anyone who knows me well also knows that I revere my father. Two years ago, on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, I wrote a short remembrance of him as a tribute to the most important man in my life, the kind of man who might well inspire others, as he inspired me. In view of how greatly I esteem my father, someone might infer that I do not have a great deal of appreciation for my mother (Doris Geraldine Higgs, née Leiby, May 14, 1917 – May 25, 1980). Such an inference, however, would be a mistake. Although my mom was in many ways a different sort of person than my dad, she also had a great influence on her younger son (Bobby Larry, as she called me). As I have reflected on my relationship with her, I have come to believe that in an extremely important regard she influenced me in exactly the same way that my dad influenced me―which is to say, she gave me an appreciation of the joy of working, and of doing one’s work readily and well, rather than grudgingly and carelessly.

Most important, perhaps, mom set a good example: she was a hard worker in her own daily life. Because the town in which she grew up had no high school and her father would not allow her to leave home to continue her education, she had no schooling beyond the eighth grade. When she was sixteen years old, she married my father (who was eight years older), and during the forty-four years of their marriage (ended by his death in 1977), she kept house as if being a good wife and mother constituted a vital and worthy occupation.

Even if she had other things to do, she prepared three full meals (each almost always from scratch) every day. Meal preparation might be a fully integrated production process, starting with killing a chicken, then plucking and gutting it, and cutting it into pieces for frying.  I sometimes brought home fish or crawfish I had caught or a cottontail rabbit I had shot, and, with my help in cleaning, shelling, or skinning, as the raw material required, she cooked them for supper. (I also raised rabbits for our table.) After each meal, she washed and dried the dishes (though after supper my dad often dried) and swept the kitchen. She cleaned the entire house daily, keeping it neat and spotless even though we lived in a dusty rural area during most of the years when I was growing up. Monday was laundry day for her, which meant that she labored in the garage with her old-fashioned wringer washer, hanging the damp clothing and other items on the clothesline to dry, and later gathering and carefully folding them and, for items such as shirts, sheets and pillow cases, ironing them before putting everything away in its proper drawer.

Cooking, cleaning, and washing, however, hardly composed the whole of her work. As a young woman, she had “felt the call” to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and by the time I was four or five years old, she had become the pastor of a backwoods Pentecostal church somewhere beyond McAlester, Oklahoma, the town near which we lived at the time. Later, after we moved to California in 1951, she was again a pastor at several different churches in succession. This ministry demanded a great deal of work from her, for preparing sermons, conducting services several times each week (sometimes every night, when a “revival meeting” was going on), and attending to the spiritual and personal needs of her congregation in times of sickness, bereavement, and other troubles. Her natural compassion and sincere sympathy, as well as her religious faith, served her well in this calling.

Although being a full-time housewife, mother, and pastor might have been enough, or even too much, for most women, she found time for a great deal of additional activity―her secret was that no matter what task she tackled, she worked very fast. She crocheted and embroidered decorative items, especially doilies and pillowcases, for our home. Once each week, for several hours, she met with other ladies at the church to make quilts in a team effort to help support the church. (I still have some of these beautiful works of folk art.) She tended a large vegetable garden in the spring and summer, as well as her beloved roses and other flowers. At certain times of the year, she went out to the cotton fields, which in those days still required a great deal of hand labor, to work with gangs of laborers in “chopping” (weeding) and “picking” (harvesting) cotton.

Because as a young boy I went everywhere she went―I can’t recall ever having a babysitter, as such, although I sometimes spent time at a neighbor’s house with my friends―I accompanied her in her work outside the house. The earliest such experience had to do with picking cotton, when I was perhaps four or five years old. I was too little to have my own sack, so I would go ahead of her in the row, plucking out the fluffy lint and building up a little pile in the row. When she had picked her way up to my pile, she would deposit it in her sack, and I would move farther ahead of her to repeat the process, again and again. I loved this work. Besides enjoying the picking itself, in good-natured company with a group of other pickers, I had a fine time tossing unopened bolls at other kids, who naturally tossed bolls back at me. By the time I was six years old, I had persuaded mom to make me a sack of my own, which she did by using a potato sack, attaching a strap that I could place over one shoulder, in the standard manner for cotton pickers. When my little sack was stuffed full, I would take it to the scales, have it weighed, collect my per-pound payment, dump the contents of my sack into the trailer (sometimes adding a swan dive into the cotton if it had piled up high in the trailer), and return to the field to fill it again. As I got older, my sacks got bigger. By the time I was ten or eleven years old, I had graduated to the standard 12-foot sack the adults used, and I was able to pick as much as 200 pounds or so in a day. By the late 1950s, however, picking machines had displaced hand pickers almost completely in our area of California, so my cotton picking with mom ended when I was about twelve or thirteen years old.

Mom also took me on a variety of ad hoc work outings. In the late summer, we would visit peach and apricot orchards at which the commercial harvesting had ended, notwithstanding that a great deal of fruit remained here and there on the trees. It was going to rot unless someone took the trouble to collect it, so the owners allowed anyone and everyone to come into the orchards to pick it without charge. We would bring home big boxes filled with fruit, which my mom would can for our consumption during the following year. We would also go along the banks of the San Joaquin River where wild blackberries grew profusely and pick great quantities of them. Again, the haul would be canned and―best of all―made into my mom’s mouth-watering blackberry cobbler. Also along the river, in season, we found and picked wild mustard greens, a delicacy in my mom’s taste, though intolerable in mine.

Mom taught me to drive a car. When I was ten years old, I began to drive on the country roads, and when I was fifteen, she took me to get a driver’s license (six months before I had reached my sixteenth birthday, which in those days was permitted because I had taken a driver’s education course in school). She cringed but did not prevent me from getting my first shotgun at age ten. With my little .410 single-shot gun and an endless expanse of game-rich fields, sloughs, and marshes as my hunting ground, I became a great hunter, in my own mind, at least. (I confess that I was considerably more careful with the gun than I was with the car, and the end result tested my dad’s patience on more than one occasion.) Mom taught me how to dress, how to “behave,” how to write a check, and how to carry out a thousand other tasks an adult must master. I learned how to cook by watching her and helping with simple jobs in the kitchen, such as cleaning fish and grinding cabbage with the hand-cranked grinder to make coleslaw. Sometimes I helped with the dishwashing after supper.

Starting when I was fourteen, during school vacations in the summer, I worked full-time in regular jobs, alongside the men, first on the ranch where we lived and later at a local box factory. My parents did not demand or even suggest such employment―”you’ll have plenty of time to work later,” they said―but I had learned from their examples to value earning my own way. So, from my sophomore year in high school onward, I did not need to take any money from them, although I continued to receive my room and board from them, as always.

When I was a kid, mom allowed me to roam far and wide across the countryside, and my boyhood was occupied not only with attending school and playing on school sports teams―and with working, as I’ve described―but also with exploring, fishing, hunting, and swimming in the canals. In the evening, when supper was ready, I was often still outside somewhere, and my mom’s voice would ring out across the darkening fields to call me in, “Bobby Laaaaaaareeee.” In my memory, I hear it still as clearly as I heard it then.

Any boy would be fortunate, as I most certainly was, to have such a mother: loving, kind, gentle, compassionate, good-humored, hardworking, dedicated to her family and loyal to her friends, at home in her world, and at peace with her place in it.

Independent Institute Senior Fellow Bruce Benson discusses his 2010 book, Property Rights: Eminent Domain and Regulatory Takings Re-Examined, in a twenty-minute podcast produced by Kosmos available here. The interview was conducted by Jeanne Hoffman last October, but it is as timely as ever.

Topics in the interview include: the use of the courts and voter referenda to limit government takings; takings for public use versus takings for private use; constraints on regulatory takings; the hidden costs of government takings; and the Kelo and Poletown court decisions.

A detailed summary of the book (which features thirteen chapters by seventeen scholars) is available here.

Kosmos, a project of the Institute for Human Studies, describes itself as “an online community where classical liberal academics can meet and share ideas and research.” Visit KosmosOnline.org.

Obama has reportedly signed a secret order authorizing CIA operations in Libya, where the agency is there “to gather intelligence for military airstrikes and to contact and vet the beleaguered rebels battling Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, according to American officials.” Al-Qaeda, a great enemy of the Libyan regime, has also offered assistance to these rebels, whose commander has admitted ties to the terrorist group implicated in the 9/11 attacks—you know, that terrorist group that drew the United States into perpetual war with the Arab world back in 2001.

This would not be the first time the U.S. government found itself associated with al-Qaeda, even if by a degree or two of separation. Indeed, the anti-Soviet fighters supported by the United States in Afghanistan eventually formed the core of this organization. Then of course there was the U.S. support of the al-Qaeda-connected Kosovo Liberation Army in Clinton’s war with Serbia. More recently, there are credible allegations that the U.S. has been covertly supporting Jundallah, a Sunni revolutionary group in Iran, which also has likely al-Qaeda ties.

One irony in all this is that the U.S. waged its largest post-Cold War military operation, the one in Iraq, with two major national-security pretenses. One was the elusive WMD threat. The other was Saddam Hussein’s supposed link to al-Qaeda. The U.S. tried desperately to find such a link, and the best they could do was torture false “intelligence” out of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi and later cite it at the United Nations. This “evidence” was absolutely crucial to the Bush administration’s case for war, even though it had no credibility whatsoever, given the extreme torture used. Isn’t it crazy that the U.S. government went to war with Iraq, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, largely with the excuse that Saddam had al-Qaeda connections—and this is the best they could come up with—meanwhile, U.S. intelligence probably has far more plausible and substantial al-Qaeda connections than Saddam ever did? Certainly, its allies in Libya seem to.

President Obama announced what this article called an “ambitious goal” of reducing oil imports by one-third by 2025.  He’s setting a goal to be accomplished 14 years from now, when at most he will be in office for less than six  more years.  Even if President Obama is re-elected, and his successor serves two terms, 2025 comes after that, so we’re talking a goal the president wants accomplished at least three presidential administrations out.

If the president actually wants to set a policy goal over which he has control, he should set and announce goals for oil import reduction for 2012, so we can see by the next election if he has accomplished his goal, and for 2016, so that we can judge whether, if he gets re-elected, he accomplished his longer-run goal.  To set a goal for future administrations leaves the president completely unaccountable.  Sure, he can put policies in place now that may have impacts that last beyond his term, but it makes no sense for him to set goals for his successors.

The federal government has been setting goals for reducing energy imports since the oil embargo of 1973.  After that embargo, we established the Federal Energy Administration and embarked on “Project Independence,” which would reduce the nation’s oil imports to zero by 1985.  I am looking at the Federal Energy Administration’s Project Independence Report, dated November 1974, right now, which explains how we can achieve the goal of energy independence by 1985.  Gerald Ford was president when this report was released, but the goal of energy independence by 1985 was missed during Ronald Reagan’s second term.  Then as now, administrations were setting goals for their successors rather than themselves, and we are further away from energy independence than ever.

If presidents set policy goals for their successors, we should call them on it.  My request to the president: Tell us what you hope to accomplish during your term on office, not what you hope your successors can accomplish.

Because the population stands by its government and war machine, despite years of continuing murder, torture and unspeakable spectacles of inhumanity like this. If you don’t have the stomach to see the photos, here’s a bit of prose from the Rolling Stone feature to digest:

[A] review of internal Army records and investigative files obtained by Rolling Stone, including dozens of interviews with members of Bravo Company compiled by military investigators, indicates that the dozen infantrymen being portrayed as members of a secretive “kill team” were operating out in the open, in plain view of the rest of the company. Far from being clandestine, as the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by “pretty much the whole platoon,” according to one soldier who complained about them. Staged killings were an open topic of conversation, and at least one soldier from another battalion in the 3,800-man Stryker Brigade participated in attacks on unarmed civilians. “The platoon has a reputation,” a whistle-blower named Pfc. Justin Stoner told the Army Criminal Investigation Command. “They have had a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it.”

Despite the provocative title of this blog, “they” don’t really hate “us.” Much of the Muslim world still looks fondly upon American culture. As Ivan Eland noted in 2003:

If the U.S. government really wanted to find out what the people in Islamic countries really thought about America, rather than commissioning a study, it would have been much cheaper to have asked John Zogby, a prominent pollster and study group member, and other prominent independent pollsters for the results of their numerous polls in those nations. Those polls show that people in those countries like American culture and political and economic freedoms, but despise U.S. foreign policy toward the Islamic world.

Somehow many in the Muslim world have been generally able to separate the American people from our government, even more charitably than many Americans seem to distinguish foreigners from their rulers. It is so easy for the common victims of U.S. wars to become dehumanized, whether by rogue soldiers or an indifferent political culture. While the premeditated slaughter described in the Rolling Stone story is widely seen as immoral, most of the inevitable deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands in America’s elective wars are dismissed as “collateral damage.”

Foreigners should be forgiven if they resented “the American people” far more than they actually do. Most of us seem to care nothing of the atrocities committed in our name. Even worse, many of us actively support the politicians and military who bring these horrors to other people. We implicitly celebrate these acts of slaughter in parades for veterans. We “support our troops.” We name streets and buildings after presidents who ended the lives of literally millions of innocent people. In the name of humanitarianism abroad, we enlist the help of a state that jails without trial, claims the right to do anything to anyone on earth, and has tortured hundreds or thousands of detainees to death.

Senior Fellow Charles V. Peña was interviewed by Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox Business Channel’s “Freedom Watch” to critique President Barack Obama’s speech on and launching of U.S. military interventions in the war in Libya.

See also Charles Peña’s new article on the war in Libya, “The Libya Folly”.

I would never have been a suffragette, and have rather been disappointed with women choosing to engage in the fundamentally anti-liberal realm of politics. I would have preferred seeing women holding and pursuing the more principled path of securing equal rights for everyone, protected against every infringement by the State.

For I am thoroughly committed to the proposition that each and every human being has been equally endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, and it is a fact of history that one government after another has violated those rights, only varying in degree.

The so-called Women’s Movement has to me been a deeply disturbing exercise in increasing the role of the State, impoverishing not only women but everyone. I had hoped that women would demonstrate superior judgment in pursuing change rooted in adherence to the principles of rights. They have instead been broadly co-opted, joining the ranks of the oppressors, in politics and the military, pursuing political action to garner special favors at the expense of the less politically savvy.

And the result has been an incredibly disappointing stream of women endowed with the political power to inflict varying degrees of harm on not only their fellow citizens, but, increasingly, on people globally.

I haven’t read it, nor will I, but I understand that Donald Rumsfeld, in his memoir Known and Unknown, lays much of the blame for the errors in Iraq at Condoleezza Rice’s door, calling the decision to give her an operational role on Iraq a “grievous mistake.” Secretary Rice was clearly not alone in pushing bad policy, but it would have been refreshing to have had a woman in a position of power fighting against war and torture.

Unfortunately, War-Mongering Women cross party lines, and according to numerous press accounts, Hillary Clinton followed the new normal for female Secretaries of State and was the key to “convincing” President Obama to move from strong words to military action in Libya:

The change became possible, though, only after Mrs. Clinton joined Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and Susan Rice, Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had been pressing the case for military action, according to senior administration officials speaking only on condition of anonymity.

The women went beyond merely advising, however, and were active in making possible the arrangements necessary for unleashing American military might beyond a “no-fly zone.” Mrs. Clinton was reportedly key in lining up the Arab nations’ agreement to be involved militarily, while Ambassador Rice told President Obama she could help get a tougher U.N. resolution that would “authorize a fuller range of options, including the ability to bomb Libyan government tanks…”

How much better were all women to heed the message of, for example, the Independent Institute book, Freedom, Feminism, and the State: that government is the enemy of freedom and equal rights—historically, especially, for women, but, truly, for all. How tragic that women have instead been corrupted in joining the ranks of those visiting death and violence at home and abroad.

Set your DVRs or tune in live tonight when Independent Institute Senior Fellow Charles V. Peña joins Judge Andrew Napolitano to respond to President Barack Obama’s remarks on Libya. Mr. Peña is former Senior Fellow with the George Washington University Homeland Security Policy Institute, an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project, co-author of Exiting Iraq, and author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

Freedom Watch will be airing live on Fox Business tonight:

• Monday, March 28th at 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. Eastern
• Monday, March 28th at 8:00 and 11:00 p.m. Pacific

See also Charles Peña’s new article on the war in Libya, “The Libya Folly”.

UPDATE:
We have also be posted a video of the interview on The Beacon here.

Ask a group of economists what the leading academic journal in economics is, and an overwhelming majority will say the American Economic Review.  The Review is 100 years old this year and the lead article in the February 2011 issue, co-authored by six well-respected academic economists, is titled “100 Years of the American Economic Review: The Top 20 Articles.”

First, I am happy to say that my very favorite article ever published in the Review, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” by Friedrich Hayek, which appeared in 1945, made the list.

The oldest article in the list is the 1928 article by Charles W. Cobb and Paul H. Douglas, “A Theory of Production,” which all economists will recognize.  It took 18 years before the first of the top 20 articles was published.

What really struck me is that the most recent article on the list, Robert J. Shiller’s “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?” appeared in 1981, 30 years ago!  In a journal just 100 years old, no articles in the past 30 years made the list of the 20 top articles.

Is this a sign that economic science is stagnating?  Another possibility is that despite its reputation, the most important advances in economic science now appear in other journals.  Here is an excellent article by Meir Kohn, Dartmouth economist, who offers a critical analysis of modern economic theory, which is consistent with the hypothesis that economic science is stagnating.

Kohn does see signs of advancement in economics, but outside the mainstream paradigm.  If articles published in the American Economic Review represent the mainstream, the authors of the “Top 20” article would have to conclude that if significant advances in economic science have taken place in the past 30 years, they haven’t been published in the profession’s most prestigious journal.

From the third volume of John C. Wright’s fascinating, but difficult, sci-fi series, The Golden Age:

Dimoedes said, “Aren’t men right to fear machines which can perform all tasks men can do, artistic, intellectual, technical, a thousand or a million times better than they can do? Men become redundant.”

Phaethon shook his head, a look of distant distaste on his features, as if he were once again confronted with a falsehood that would not die no matter how often it was denounced. In a voice of painstaking patience, he said: “Efficiency does not harm the inefficient. Quite the opposite. That is simply not the way it works. Take me, for example. Look around: I employed partials [sort of lesser clones] to do the thought-box junction spotting when I built this ship. My employees were not as skilled as I was in junction spotting. It took them three hours to do the robopsychology checks and hierarchy links I could have done in one hour. But they were in no danger of competition from me. My time is too valuable. IN that same hour it would have taken me to spot their thought-box junction, I can earn far more than their three-hour wages by writing supervision architecture thought flows. And it’s the same with me and the Sophotechs [super-intelligent computers].

“Any midlevel Sophotech could have written in one second the architecture it takes me, even with my implants, and hour to compose. But if, in that same one second of time, that Sophotech can produce something more valuable — exploring the depth of abstract mathematics, or inventing a new scientific miracle, anything at all (provided that it will earn more in that second than I earn in an hour) — then the competition is not making me redundant. The Sophotech still needs me and receives the benefit of my labor. Since I am going to get the benefit of every new invention and new miracle put out on the market, I want to free up as many of those seconds of Sophotech time as my humble labor can do.

“And I get the lion’s share of the benefit from the swap. I only save him a second of time; he creates wonder upon wonder for me. No matter what my fear or distaste for Sophotechs, the forces in the marketplace, our need for each other, draw us together.”

If only today’s protectionists and Luddites could grasp this most basic point.