Regulators usually use a light touch on the world of sport. There is the occasional grandstanding Congressional hearing about steroids, and the odd murmur of antitrust violations. But that’s usually the extent of it. Things were different in medieval Scotland:
James I legislated in 1428 in an attempt to stop people from playing football because it distracted them from archery practice[.]
Worth noting: this is James I of Scotland, not the King James who commissioned the famous Bible translation. That man was King James I of England, and simultaneously King James VI of Scotland. Nearly two centuries separated them, though both were members of the Stuart royal family.
How far removed are we from our proto-human ancestors? Not as much as one would think. Richard Wrangham has a creative way to illustrate that in the beginning of his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human:
Although the australopithecines were far different from us, in the big scheme of things they lived not so long ago. Imagine going to a sporting event with sixty thousand seats around the stadium. You arrive early with your grandmother, and the two of you take the first seats. Next to your grandmother sits her grandmother, your great-great-grandmother. Next to her is your great-great-great-great-grandmother. The stadium fills with the ghosts of preceding grandmothers. An hour later the seat next to you is occupied by the last to sit down, the ancestor of you all. She nudges your elbow, and you turn to find a strange nonhuman face. Beneath a low forehead and big brow-ridge, bright dark eyes surmount a massive jaw. Her long, muscular arms and short legs intimate her gymnastic climbing ability. She is your ancestor and an australopithecine, hardly a companion your grandmother can be expected to enjoy. She grabs an overhead beam and swings away over the crowd to steal some peanuts from a vendor.
Evolution may happen at glacial pace from our perspective. But if you zoom out a bit, it happens incredibly fast. Interesting stuff.
Human history is a complicated tale. There are many ways to tell it. One is as a story of progress — from caves to huts to highrises. Another is regress — from harmony with nature to clanging, polluting machinery that destroys it.
Conflict is another common theme. Illiberals have spent the better part of the industrial era spinning tales of class struggle and racial or national conflict.
Competition is a less severe theme that many liberals like to stress. When church and state compete for power, the people are either left alone, or they can flee whichever is more oppressive. States that are numerous, small, and close have to have friendly, liberal policies, or else risk becoming little more than empty spaces.
Equality is still another. Many people think that rich and poor are less equal than before; look at income data. Others think that people are more equal than before. Slavery, monarchy, and titled nobility are largely things of the past. Status has (mostly) been replaced by contract.
History is much too complex for such simple conceits to explain everything. But all of them have at least some value for understanding where we came from, where we are now, and where we might be headed in the future.
There is one more aspect of history that has fascinated scholars from Thucydides to Lord Acton. That aspect is freedom. Like the others, it neither pretends to nor does explain everything.
But it does have one advantage. It ties together all the above narrative possibilities and more. Progress, regress, collective, individual, conflict, cooperation, more equality, less equality — they’re all there. And they all matter.
In my opinion, no living scholar synthesizes those disparate parts into a coherent whole better than Tom Palmer. The video below is a shortened version of a lecture that I have had the privilege of seeing a number of times over the years, with the added bonus of top-notch production values. This amateur history buff continues to learn from it to this day.
It’s 26 minutes long, which is about as long as an average sitcom. It is also far more rewarding, and at least as entertaining. If you have some spare time, it is well worth foregoing an episode of I Love Lucy to watch it. Click here if the embedded video doesn’t work. And do keep an eye out for part two.
In the short run, absolutely. But — this matters — not in the long run, according to Michael Shermer, appearing on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show. Click here to watch.
Throughout history, most societies have been based on status. King, noble, and peasant. Brahmin and untouchable. Mandarin and coolie. One of liberalism’s crowning achievements is tearing down those old status societies and replacing them with contract societies. In a liberal society, all people have equal rights, and must deal with each other as equals. No man is forced to grovel before a duke or a king. He may look him in the eye now.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are far richer than I am. But if one of them wrongs me, I get my day in court. They might have better lawyers with shinier suits than me. But we are still equals before the law.
This was a novel phenomenon in the 18th century, mainly confined to England and the Netherlands, and even far more imperfectly than today. Here’s how Isaac Newton’s funeral looked through French eyes:
Having come from a nation where aristocracy and clergy held a monopoly on power and privilege, Voltaire marveled at a society where a scientist was buried with the honors of a king.
When church and state compete against each other, the people are mostly left alone, and prosper. When they work together, well:
The conflict sketched in these pages appears as a war between light and darkness. We exclaim that altar and throne formed a sinister conspiracy against the progress of humanity.
Thomas Erskine defended Thomas Paine after authorities decided to persecute him for the radical ideas contained in his Rights of Man. Here, Erskine tells a story that explains to Paine’s prosecutors why someone who threatens force during an argument is almost surely wrong:
You must all remember, gentlemen, Lucian’s pleasant story: Jupiter and a countryman were walking together, conversing with great freedom and familiarity upon the subject of heaven and earth. The countryman listened with attention and acquiescence while Jupiter strove only to convince him; but happening to hint a doubt, Jupiter turned hastily around and threatened him with his thunder. ‘Ah, ha!’ says the countryman, ‘now, Jupiter, I know that you are wrong; you are always wrong when you appeal to your thunder.’
For thousands of years, no human traveled faster than a horse. Napoleon’s armies were no mobile than Caesar’s. That changed almost overnight with the automobile and then the airplane. Despite that rapid progress, flight times from New York to London have barely budged in 50 years.If anything, it’s slower now that the Concorde is out of service.
That could change in the next 15-20 years with the dawn of space tourism. A spacecraft has to travel about 17,000 miles per hour to stay in orbit. A partnership between KLM airlines and a wealthy Formula One mogul hopes to make first-generational suborbital crafts that can reach 2,200 miles per hour, with an eventual goal of hitting 13,750 miles per hour.
Caesar and Napoleon would be astonished. Hopefully this venture doesn’t experience the crony capitalism problems that NASA has had with a similar project.
Whether you love the New Deal or loathe it, its policies were not entirely new. FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, set the precedent. History remembers him as a laissez faire president; a do-nothing who simply let the Great Depression happen. This requires an odd definition of “laissez faire” and an even stranger understanding of “do-nothing” to actually be true.
A new Cato paper from St. Lawrence University economics professor Steve Horwitz takes a closer look:
In fact, Hoover had long been a critic of laissez faire. As president, he doubled federal spending in real terms in four years. He also used government to prop up wages, restricted immigration, signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, raised taxes, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—all interventionist measures and not laissez faire. Unlike many Democrats today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisers knew that Hoover had started the New Deal. One of them wrote, “When we all burst into Washington … we found every essential idea [of the New Deal] enacted in the 100-day Congress in the Hoover administration itself.”
It turns out that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. The true story of the game’s origins is actually quite mundane — it evolved over time as a messy, Hayekian spontaneous order. No one person can claim to have invented the modern version of baseball.
The story of how Abner Doubleday was given his mythical status, however, is immensely entertaining. Apparently it came from a crazy person — literally — who wrote a letter to the founder of Spalding sporting goods. Spalding spread the story because he wanted people to believe that baseball was a uniquely American game, invented by an American. People were eager to believe him; some still are.
Joe Posnanski tells the tale well, as he does with everything he writes. Read the whole thing. It will make you laugh, and you will learn something about how easy it is for tall tales to become accepted fact. Lessons abound for the public policy world.
