A Bad Day of Fishing....

.... is still better than a good day of work. And who cares what you catch?

This post is a good one too

I second Yuval. As usual.

A fantastic post yesterday.....

from Conservative Home. Andrew Lilico asks "when should a conservative support a revolution?" and outlines the rationale in a readable and clear essay. He examines a few disparate strands in the conservative canon, and weaves them together well. His answer, reasonable enough, comes down to "sometimes, and carefully," which is unsurprising of course, but the argumentation is fantastic. 

O Blessèd Pilsner

The Bishop of Pilsen is sending some Prazdroj to the Vatican. The beer will brew for the 40 (actually 46) days of Lent; it is apparently a gift from Pilsen for being a European City of Culture in 2015. Combine that with this particular Lenten sacrifice, and one could make an argument that avoiding beer is perhaps less pious than indulging in it!

A Story of Two Trains

It is fitting, perhaps, that the great Jan Wiener and the great Arnošt Lustig went down to Sheol within a couple months of each other. Both were known and celebrated for their survival of an awful period of history, and were wise enough to realize that their continued examination of that time could profoundly influence successive generations to avoid making the mistakes of their era. It could not have been easy to carry that burden, to examine and reexamine the loss, tragedy, and heartbreak of it. It is like picking up and analyzing a hot coal, trying to determine why it glows. And the first time you encountered it was when it woke you up in your bed.

The fates of Jan Wiener and Arnošt Lustig can be perhaps traced to a story of two very different train rides. When Lustig was young, he was ushered into a cattle car bound for Theresienstadt outside of Prague; from there, he would be transported to a place whose very name sends shivers down spines and stands synonymous as the standard of the darkest of those dark times. Only the strongest could have gotten out there alive; Lustig did, only to be sent to Buchenwald, and it is bitter irony that a place like Buchenwald can be considered a place for survivors. The clicking of the rails underneath during his journeys ticked off seconds, minutes, days, lives, cultures. Jan Wiener's train ride was a little different. Upon realization that the Nazis had come to town, Mr. Wiener applied for an exit visa, vowing never to return to his native Czechoslovakia. Times were hard, and bureaucrats were scarce. A (Czech) functionary read his application and the things he intended to to take to Yugoslavia, which was consider safer.

"I'd like to take four shirts," explained a young Jan.
"You can take two."
"And I've got four pairs of shoes."
"Jew, you'll be lucky to wear out one! You can take the ones on your feet. We'll confiscate the rest anyway. You might as well pack light."

Wiener went to Yugoslavia with a small bag. From there, he started experiencing problems similar to those he was experiencing in Czechoslovakia. This time, however, he was denied an exit visa at all, and it was time to escape. His family told him to run; his father committed suicide. But how does one cross the frontier into Italy (hardly a sanctuary for people in his position)? Jan Wiener took the train too.

In Ljubljana, Wiener snuck into the train yard and identified the trains heading west. A ticket wouldn't really do any good. So he climbed under the carriage, and held on.

For 18 hours.

Under the toilet, where it was most secure, and there were the most handholds.

In Italy, he could go no longer; the dogs missed him at the border. Dogs can't smell you if you no longer smell human. He broke into an Italian's house, stole the man's rifle, and promised to send it back after the war. He did. But only after joining the RAF and raining bombs down on those who drove his father to suicide, scorched most of Europe, and drove boys like Lustig to the gas chambers.

For Lustig, the train was a rendez-vous with fate, death, injustice; for Wiener, a chance at revenge, life, justice. Neither deserved their train ride; both would hear the world's clicking rails, feel the rush of the air of the world's tunnels, and move to the rhythm of the world's wagons for the next 60 years.

Lustig and Wiener both returned to Czechoslovakia after the war. Lustig promptly joined the Communist Party (it gave him the opportunity to become a journalist) and Wiener went to jail (for opposing them). Eventually, both left for the USA, Wiener as a historian (who wrote a book on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, but whose historical experise was more accurately captured in his lectures to students about the intricacies of fascist resistance and RAF tactics) and Lustig as 68'er (who quickly became a subtle critic of the regime in the 50s). Lustig withdrew his membership, and continued to look at the world as an ironic place where the default reaction was a smile and a joke to even the most horrible circumstance; Wiener was a harder man (your correspondent remembers once in Prague when he balanced himself on a pub's bar with his hands, his feet outstretched like a gymnast, perfectly prone, after three glasses of wine, at the age of 80) and even his handshake was a sign that this is a man who would fight and disagree and persevere.

These two men, so profoundly different in their experiences of that time and so different in their demeanor, help us recognize the density of human nature. Both were appalled, and rightly so, about their formative years. They managed it the way that they could. They were both idealists, and both realists. They both survived, and used all their resources at hand to do so. The denouement of this story has largely been written; they have given their lectures, written their books, fathered their children. We treasure, and we honor their memory. They have run their race; it is for us, in turn, to transfer their wisdom to our posterity. Let us hope we are up to the task. R.I.P.

If you only read one thing today.....

it should be this piece from Conrad Black. Delicious.

Ron Paul

A friend of mine sent me the video from Ron Paul's CPAC speech with the subject "Preaching to the Choir!" He then noted that at 16:20, Dr. Paul says that "government should never be able to do anything you can't do." There are definitely worse things in politics than Ron Paul. I don't agree with him on everything, and he's certainly not a bad guy to have keeping an eye on the Fed.

However, I don't completely agree with the sentiment that "government should never be able to do anything you can't do." After all, governments are instituted among men (and women!) precisely to take care of things that we can't do ourselves, like infrastructure, national security, and a slightly less biased justice system than we would have if we had some sort of blood-feud system like we see in less, ahem, progressive nations. There are certain things that government is "allowed" to do that we as citizens cannot. Some of these things, such as the proper use of eminent domain, or punishment of criminals, are indeed probably only valid in the context of the "public" holding some priority over the private citizen. Frankly, I don't think we want too much building of roads over people's property without a clear definition of the public interest; otherwise it would be a violation of property rights. Criminals are another case of this. For as much as we all love Charles Bronson, I think we can generally agree that vigilante justice is not an optimal situation for society, even for those criminals who "needed killin'." Indeed, it is precisely when government fails to do what we expect it to do that vigilantism arises. This is not the proper functioning of limited government; it is anarchy and ultimately leads to a less free population.

On the other hand, there are things the state does that perhaps it shouldn't be allowed to do, and to be fair, I think this is more what the good doctor is referring to. If you run up a massive debt and then coerce money from people, you're considered a shakedown artist. If the state does it, it's known as winning the future. If Bernie Madoff promises to pay pensions with money he gets from people who think that money will still be around for their retirement, he dies in jail; if the state does the same thing, we call it Social Security and build its founder a memorial.

So I think Dr. Paul needs to be a little careful when he paints with so broad a brush. Certainly, I see no philosophical reason other than a symbolism of unity for a monopoly on the money supply; those folded-up portraits in our pockets are everyday reminders of our collective identity as Americans. (N.B. Obviously, one of the goals of the €uro has been to facilitate this same feeling of common enterprise in Europe. The jury is still out on how this experiment is going.) Perhaps that is a partially valid justification for this monopoly. And a single currency certainly facilitates ease of trade by reducing transaction costs substantially. At the same time, precisely because Dr. Paul recognizes that the state (and the Federal Reserve) has the ability to intervene in the markets by using monetary policy, it has a huge advantage over private individuals in capital markets; moreover, these interventions inevitably create winners and losers, as inflation is quite simply a tax on those who prudently save their money, and reward those who are already in debt. This is a perverse logic, and Dr. Paul is correct to point out that it is unfair that the state can do this.