Category Archives: Editing for Liberty

In Mark Bowden’s account of the SEAL Team Six mission that killed Osama bin Laden, he uses a very clever form of the old passive-voice-for-government-violence trick.

The passive voice, for those who need a refresher, is a way of organizing a sentence that downplays the actor and emphasizes that which is acted on. For instance, in the classic passive sentence “Mistakes were made,” the emphasis is on the mistakes. But who made them?

I noted in “The Voice of Tyranny” that the passive voice is especially useful for diffusing responsibility for state violence, as in “the protestor was struck in the head.”

In his account of the SEAL raid on bin Laden’s Abottabad compound, Bowden uses the active voice when the SEALs shoot bin Laden or anyone who is clearly an enemy combatant, but he uses the passive voice every time the SEALS put a bullet in a woman or anyone who might be considered an innocent bystander.
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A libertarian author writes,

I confess I was lured to your site when I should have been writing and editing something else. 

It was the zombie quote article.

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The reporting on a violent incident at the Occupy protests last year reveals the linguistic lengths to which newspapers can go to hide responsibility. The National Post said it best:

Scott Olsen, 24, a former U.S. Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, was struck in the head by a tear gas canister fired on Tuesday by police trying to prevent protesters from reclaiming a public square.

Olsen was standing about 30 feet from the police barricades at Occupy Oakland when the cops launched tear gas and fired bean-bag rounds into the crowd. The hit to Olsen’s forehead knocked him down on the concrete and fractured his skull.

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Can You Spot the Error?

1. Firstly, the ratio between demand and supply varies at different points in time, because personal circumstances and future expectations are constantly changing. Secondly, we systematically underrate our “future needs” as well as the “means to meet them.”
2. For the further development of the Austrian School, Capital and Interest (Die Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzinstheorien, 1884) was to be trend-setting in two ways.
3. The Austrian position is supported by the fact that many things have been used as money throughout history in various parts of the world: commodities such as salt, clam shells, and animal skins.
4. On the face of it, the solution sounds rather reasonable and has the support of a very popular Congressman.
5. The Supreme Court could still be relied on to uphold the constitution and safeguard the civil liberties of individual citizens.

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Spot the Error

1. Insurance companies must compete for clients, while the client must bare the fiscal responsibility of his actions.
2. Whaling is still as prevalent today as anytime in history, due to the close cultural and religious associations the fish has with various indigenous groups of Ainu, Inuit, and the Basque people of the Bay of Biscay.
3. Obama seems hell bent on expanding the US welfare state at any cost, and of course no welfare state debate is complete without bringing up the Scandinavian countries as the perfect example of massive statism bringing prosperity.
4. But mass production, if applied to anything beyond the simplest kind of article, depends not only on division of labor and multiple operations, but also on uniformly accurate, interchangeable parts.

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This week I worked on a couple of classic books that were converted from scans or old PDFs using optical character recognition (OCR). OCR is the computerized process that “reads” an image of a text and outputs actual machine-encoded text that can be republished in a new format.

OCR is what allows us to take a faded old manuscript, rescue the text, and make a sleek new ebook out of it. But the process is far from perfect.
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Can You Spot the Error?

1. I have to pay the electrical bill.
2. Each of these policies came out of the idea that society could and should be engineered from the top-down to give rise to efficiency, community, and prosperity.
3. The correspondence between three factors of production . . . as taught by the classical economists is untenable.

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Coin of Emperor Basil I (reigned 867–886 AD)

Can You Spot the Error?

1. At some point, Basil also began sleeping with his wife, since she bore him two more sons after Michael’s death.
2. Under market conditions, such dismal performance would unquestionably have a substantive impact on a company’s bottom line; after all, if an airline agreed to bring its passengers to Maui but instead brought them to Midland, a rational observer would expect the business to flounder soon after.
3. The elimination of such antiproperty-rights laws will make people more self-reliant and thus less dependent on government.

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Mises (1881–1973)

Can You Spot the Error?

1. Obama came into office without a strong set of economic ideas, as former Presidents Reagan and Clinton did.
2. Since Mrs. Jefferson moved to Baltimore in the 1990s, she was not aware of the underlying complexities.
3. Murray Rothbard and other economists of the Austrian school have rejected the concept of indifference and have developed an approach based on Menger’s law of diminishing marginal utility and von Mises’s axiom of action.

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Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)

Can You Spot the Error?

1. I spent all of Saturday in the tub, reading a historic romance about a Spanish pirate and a Dutch duchess.
2. Economics’s reputation as a “dismal science” can be traced back to Thomas Carlyle.
3. He was friendly, but he remained apart, aloof … an outsider.

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