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.

Read on for the solutions!

Historic vs. Historical

The meanings of “historic” and “historical” are just close enough that it’s hard to distinguish them — and just far enough apart that you get silly results if you mess them up.

“Historical” is the broader of the two, and it refers to anything in the past. “Historic” is narrower, and it refers only to past events that were important in history. Antony and Cleopatra had a “historic romance.” Your novel about the pirate and the duchess is just a “historical romance.”

So sentence #1 should be

Anna swooned into Rodrigo’s muscular embrace when he declared their love to be “historic.”

I spent all of Saturday in the tub, reading a historical romance about a Spanish pirate and a Dutch duchess.

If you find it hard to remember which is which, Grammar Girl has a mnemonic for you:

You can remember the meanings of these two words by thinking that “ic” is “important,” and they both start with i, and “al” is “all in the past,” and those both start with a.

When the Singular is Plural

You form the singular possessive of almost every word by adding ’s, even if the word ends in s, as for Mises. But what about those strange nouns that already use their plurals as their singulars?

Chicago 7.19 notes that

when the singular form of a noun ending in s looks like a plural and the plural form is the same as the singular, the possessive of both singular and plural is formed by the addition of an apostrophe only. If ambiguity threatens, use of to avoid the possessive.

politics’ true meaning

economics’ forerunners

this species’ first record (or, better, the first record of this species)

Thus, sentence #2 should be

Economics’ reputation as a “dismal science” can be traced back to Thomas Carlyle.

Or you could also say,

The reputation of economics as a “dismal science” can be traced back to Thomas Carlyle.

This rule also applies to plural names that are used in the singular, like the United States:

The United States’ flag is red, white, and blue.

An Em Dash of a Pause

Authors often try to mark a pause or skip a beat in a sentence with an ellipsis,

He was friendly, but he remained apart, aloof … an outsider.

But in fact an ellipsis indicates an omission, something removed from a quote — an outcast. We need to use an em dash to mark a pause:

He was friendly, but he remained apart, aloof — an outsider.

The Dismal Science vs. Slavery

Stephen Mauzy writes that “one hundred and sixty years ago, historian Thomas Carlyle educed ‘the dismal science’ epithet to describe economics.” We have all heard the expression “dismal science,” and many of us know Carlyle coined the term. But do you know the context?

Someone on the Mises scholars list commented on the source of the expression:

I keep seeing the term “dismal science” applied to economics in the popular press. It appears as well as in a recent Mises Daily article in a context that suggests that the term reflects negative or unwelcome prognostications by economics. More ignorant writers [such as Diane Coyle recently did in The Soulful Science] attribute the coining of the term to Thomas Carlyle as his reaction to reading T.R. Malthus’s exposition of the population principle.

This is just a reminder that Eric Crampton informed all of us on this list in December, 2001, of David Levy’s book How the Dismal Science Got Its Name (University of Michigan, 2001). There, David explains that Carlyle coined the term in an article titled “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” in Fraser’s magazine in December 1849. He was reacting to the opposition of classical economists to black slavery. Carlyle was a proponent of such slavery and an opponent of the free-market economy.
I propose that anytime someone applies this term to economics the response should be “What? You’re in favor of the slave society and opposed to a market economy?”

Just for Fun

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Is there something you’d like to contribute or see covered in Editing for Liberty? Post a comment! Cartoons, quips, and contributions to “Spot the Error” are especially welcome.

1. I hope the book serves to help turn the tide against the destructive antihuman-progress thinking so prevalent in today’s world.
2. Jon and Mark . . . found a box! . . . Jon had nothing to say about it.
3. Enjoyment is not as an important function for courting as it is for dating.

Read on for the solutions!

When Not to Close a Prefix

Our trusty Chicago Manual of Style tells us that normally compounds formed with prefixes are closed, that is, there’s no hyphen between the prefix and the rest of the word. For example, we could talk about the “antihuman sentiments of the aliens.” But last week we saw that sometimes we need to keep the hyphen to avoid confusion (as in prostate vs. pro-state).

In this week’s sentence #1 we have a prefix (anti) before a compound term (human-progress, which is hyphenated because it’s a compound adjective modifying thinking). In this situation, the compound formed by the prefix should not be closed. CMoS 7.85 (section 3) tells us that

[a] hyphen should appear, however … before a compound term, such as non-self-sustaining, pre–Vietnam War.

This means that sentence #1 should read

I hope the book serves to help turn the tide against the destructive anti-human-progress thinking so prevalent in today’s world.

Chicago Style vs. Publishing on the Web: The Problem of Ellipses

Technically, sentence #2 is correct according to Chicago style. CMoS has you put a space before each ellipsis point (see CMoS 13.51). But this system can cause problems on webpages, because it means that an ellipsis could get broken up between two lines:

Jon and Mark . . . found a box! . .
. Jon had nothing to say about it.

Therefore, instead of using three dots (“. . .”), we use the single-character ellipsis symbol (“…”). That way, the wrap on websites can’t break it up.

Note that, for the same reasons, we put no space between a sentence’s closing punctuation and its ellipsis. So for web publication, sentence #2 should be

Jon and Mark … found a box!… Jon had nothing to say about it.

Trimming and Rephrasing

Sentence #3 is clearly wrong. Believe it or not, it comes from a Chicago Q&A. The person who asked the question knew that the sentence was clearly wrong but had been staring at it for ages and felt like it had addled her brain. Her correction — which the Subversive Copy Editor (who writes the answers for the Q&A) agreed with — was to move the “an” (and to change it to “a”) so that the sentence reads

Enjoyment is not as important a function for courting as it is for dating.

You may have easily made that correction while reading the sentence (because you hadn’t been staring at different versions of it for a while), but the obvious change is not, in fact, what I want to focus on here. After agreeing with this correction, the Subversive Copy Editor points out that the “as … as” construction “is not always clear or economical. It would be better to trim and rephrase.” She changes the sentence to

Enjoyment is less important for courting than for dating.

Speaking from recent experience, I think this advice to “trim and rephrase” is really pivotal. When you are faced with a sentence that leaves you feeling like your brain has turned into pudding, it’s time to copy and paste that sentence onto a blank page so that you can trim and rephrase it. I suggest flagging the sentence in the manuscript, finishing your copyediting, and then going back to the sentence later — once your brain feels more like its gray-matter self.

Just for Fun: Are There Squirrels in the Manuscript?

Though as copyeditors we may think that our main job is looking at spelling, grammar, and word choice, we often get surprised by weird formatting in the books and articles we are preparing. I could begin a rant here about how some authors format (or don’t format) their manuscripts, but that would be hypocritical of me. I cringe at the thought of what my dissertation formatting must have looked like: tabs at the beginning of paragraphs, headings that aren’t really headings (just lines bolded and put in a bigger font), em dashes made of double hyphens, two spaces after the end of sentences, etc. When I was writing it, I had no idea what a powerful friend MS Word could be (when it wasn’t crashing on me and losing pages of my thesis).

All this is to say that the Subversive Copy Editor’s amusing 2010 blog post on this topic, “Checking for Squirrels,” still really speaks to me and might speak to you too.

Is there something you’d like to contribute or see covered in Editing for Liberty? Post a comment! Contributions to “Spot the Error” are especially welcome.

Today on Politico, telecom industry lobbyist Steve Largent displays the usual timid, statist pace of radio-spectrum privatization. He’s asking for the release of about one fifth of 1 percent of the total spectrum over the next 10 years. This, he predicts — through the usual magical math — would add 350,000 American jobs and, the real carrot for legislators, “Boost government revenue by $36.7 billion.”

Government revenue aside, it certainly would be good to pry more of the radio spectrum away from the state’s claws. But is it possible to pry it all away? Could we actually assign property rights in radio waves? Could we do away with state intervention in the radio spectrum entirely?

BK Marcus answers yes, yes, and, emphatically, yes. Read his radical and scholarly article to see how much further freedom and private property can take us.

1. During the debate, his prostate stance became obvious.
2. Obama claimed that Kenya’s failure “is in its ability to create a government that is transparent and accountable. One that serves its people and is free from corruption.”
3. Lack of spending by the private sector is causing companies to layoff workers.

What Kind of Stance Is That?

Sentence #1 should not be commenting on the debator’s anatomy. Normally, following Chicago Style, you should close up words that have prefixes separated by hyphens: prowar, antistate, etc. But there are two circumstances when you should not: (1) if it causes an ugly double i or double a, as in antiimperial or extraabnormal (which should be anti-imperial and extra-abnormal), (2) or if it risks a semantic misreading.

For instance, if you were trying to explain that you have approved of esoteric Greek knowledge ever since you received a certain card in the mail, you should say you were pro-gnosis post-card, not prognosis postcard. And when anarchists denounce their opponents for being prostate, a hyphen is needed to avoid anatomical ambiguity. Sentence #1 should read:

During the debate, his pro-state stance became obvious.

(Special thanks to Mike for flagging this one!)

Misframing a Quote Can Change the Meaning

In our second Spot the Error sentence we have an author who says exactly the opposite of what he meant. Obama was in fact saying that Kenya had shown its inability to create a government that was transparent and accountable, but the way the quote was cut and introduced gives his words the opposite meaning. Removing a little more of the Obama quote and clarifying the introductory sentence helps give the right spin here:

Obama claimed that Kenya’s failure is its inability “to create a government that is transparent and accountable. One that serves its people and is free from corruption.”

Verb versus Noun

Sentence #3 is an example of how a compound noun has become closed but the related compound verb has not. Layoff is indeed the noun — for example, the company announced massive layoffs. The verb, however, is to lay off. Sentence #2 should read

Lack of spending by the private sector is causing companies to lay off workers.

Here are some other cases where the noun is closed and the verb is open:

• lookup / to look up
• setup / to set up
• breakup / to break up

As layoff shows, not all such noun-verb pairs will end in up, but they probably will end in a preposition (or rather, a particle).

Name That Reference

Who is the author of this oft-misquoted sentence?

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

As Mike points out, this quote has become popular in a distorted, zombie version:

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

Can you guess who wrote the original? See our mystery writer’s letter to Thomas Cooper Washington.

Is there something you’d like to contribute or see covered in Editing for Liberty? Post a comment! Contributions to “Spot the Error” and “Name That Reference” are especially welcome.

Mensa logo

Wonderful developments in education are on the horizon.

Mensa, the international association for people much smarter than I am, has just accepted its newest member: a toddler with an IQ of 154. Calgary’s Anthony Popa Urria is now almost three years old. Before he was one, he could sound out the English alphabet. He can now speak English, Spanish, and some Romanian, and he enjoys afternoons spent studying his giant atlas.

Of course, the question now turns to the proper education of this budding genius in diapers, and his parents are stumped. IQ isn’t perfect, but it is a rough measure of academic ability. Many schools recognize giftedness at around IQ 130, meaning the gifted students are smarter than 98 percent of all children. At IQ 154, Anthony is smarter than 99 percent of those gifted children.

Although genetics has an influence on intelligence, there is no natural geographic clustering of supersmart children like Anthony. Kids like him are born here and there around the world, often to ordinary folk like the Urrias. In effect, they are born isolated from their intellectual peers.

The Urrias might be able to homeschool for a short time, but Anthony’s potential could soon outstrip his parents’ abilities.

Private schools for children with abilities in Anthony’s range are very rare and very expensive. Their price is driven up, not only by the rarity and intellectual voracity of their pupils, but also by the ubiquity and financial voracity of the state.

A few years ago, then, it would have been the absurd and yet inescapable fate of an outstanding genius child like Anthony to be taught by people innately stupider than he is.

One of Anthony’s best options for a public school inside the country might be for his family to travel to Southern Ontario to join the Peel District’s “Gifted Education Program” (GEP). It starts gifted assessment and programming years earlier than most other schools, and it has dedicated classrooms for what it calls “enhanced” learners.

But in 2009, almost half of the children in GEP’s primary-school program said that it was not geared to their needs. And almost two-thirds of the kids in secondary school had the same complaint [PDF, see page 8].

This is not just a case of disgruntled adolescents; the teachers agree in nearly the same proportions that GEP is not properly suited to its students.

And among primary-school teachers in the program, almost four out of ten said they were not “confident” teaching gifted students. And why should they be? The teachers all get standardized training for the purpose of teaching standardized curricula to standardized children. The goal of public education is not to foster individual excellence but, as Robert Murphy puts it, “to produce acquiescence in the status quo.”

This quest for acquiescence is especially damaging to gifted kids, who often play down their abilities in order to cope with the jealousy of peers and teachers.

Sadly, the parents of those gifted children whose needs are being met can’t pay their successful teachers any more than they do the useless ones. That would be called bribery.

If a gifted adult did want to accept the fixed wages and teach in this environment, they would have to pass through the same teacher-training program as everyone else. Having worked in such a university education faculty for several years, I can tell you that the general opinion among most instructors is that the upper-year courses are not very difficult.

Joan Freeman, the British psychologist who tested Anthony’s IQ, warns that the gifted want “high vitamin learning,” and that when educators deny them such challenges, “that way lies boredom” [PDF]. What is the chance that a young adult genius who wants to teach child geniuses will make it through the university’s gauntlet of mediocrity with his love of learning intact?

Because parents cannot pay directly for the education they want — or, more accurately, because they must pay for mass education whether they want it or not — the market signals from gifted children and their parents are obstructed and distorted before they can get to a truly gifted teacher, someone really suited to teach a boy like Anthony.

So for decades, parents like the Urrias have found themselves sending exceptional children like Anthony into the care of ordinary teachers like those at Peel.

But this pathetic state of affairs is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Entrepreneurial ventures leveraging new technologies are pulling down the geographic, political, and financial walls between Anthony and a proper education.

Salman Khan

The Khan Academy consists of over 3,100 short video lectures on math, science, and other subjects. Salman Khan, a hedge-fund analyst, started making the videos and posting them on YouTube as a way to tutor his young relatives and friends. As his videos’ popularity grew, Khan recognized this as an opportunity to be involved in the education of the world; he quit his day job and began teaching online full-time.

In the Khan Academy, each student can choose to pursue different topics at different paces, by the simple expedient of choosing what video to watch next. This is an unprecedented customization of curricula. Furthermore, there are peer-to-peer chat and tutoring services built in. A brilliant child can easily find someone on his own level to help him in any given subject. As soon as he surpasses them, he can move on.

The Khan Academy once raked in $2,000 a month in ad revenues, but it is now completely funded by philanthropy, including by Google’s latest commitment of $2 million. Anthony Urria’s parents wouldn’t have to pay a dime or even put him on a bus in order to get him an education from a provider like Khan.

Khan doesn’t have the proper “education” degree required to be a schoolteacher. His degrees from MIT and Harvard are in mathematics, engineering, and business administration. So how do we know if this guy can teach? The best proof that Khan can is simply that the students keep coming back — his YouTube channel has 324,000 subscribers and 144,000,000 video views to date. The gatekeepers of formal education have been unceremoniously sidestepped.

Let’s do a brief comparison: What happened to Peel’s Gifted Education Program when nearly two-thirds of its secondary students said it didn’t meet their needs? Nothing. The teachers kept their jobs. The tax monies destined for the school district kept on flowing. And the kids stayed in the program, because it’s better than their alternative: mainstream classrooms or private schools their parents can’t afford.

What would happen to the Khan Academy if two-thirds of its viewers suddenly felt it didn’t meet their needs? Those viewers would instantly cease to use the Khan Academy. And, presumably, Google might become a little concerned about its investment. If the academy still depended on ad revenues, they would slow to a trickle.

The Khan Academy itself is now entering into partnerships with government educational monopolies. But the technological barrier has been overcome, and the free-market business model is already in place. Children can now be taught by anyone with a computer and a brain. And those with the best brains and software platforms will attract the most children, the most ad revenues, and the biggest donations from companies eager to be associated with their work.

A global market in education is coming soon, whether the reigning monopolists like it or not. It’s cheap, it’s fast, and it’s completely international. Google’s grant to Khan is “to support the creation of more courses and … to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.” So the academy will get even bigger and become accessible in wide swaths of South America, China, and India.

Almost certain to follow on the heels of these developments is increased specialization and division of labor in teaching. For instance, an instructor in New York who might excel at explaining long division will soon be able to coordinate with kids in New Brunswick, New Zealand, and New Delhi who have just that need. And at last — at long last — it will be possible for some distant genius, perhaps living in Calcutta, who would be wasted as a teacher of ordinary children, to guide the development of a high-IQ kid in Calgary like Anthony.

The natural geographic isolation of genius children from their intellectual peers is soon to be overcome. And heaven only knows what miracles of human achievement will come within reach thereafter.

1. There is one good thing about Marx: He was not a Keynesian.
2. The shadow minister, Chris Bryant, tabled a motion referring allegations about the hacking of MPs’ phones to the standards and privileges committee. (Guardian)
3. What this means is that if a religious group purchases land, fair and square, with the intention of constructing a religious building, they are well within their rights to do so.

Read on for the solutions!

Colons and Capitalization

Many writers believe that the initial letter of a statement that follows a colon must be capitalized. In fact, it should be lowercase unless the colon is introducing two or more sentences (CMoS 6.61). So sentence #1 should read as follows:

There is one good thing about Marx: he was not a Keynesian.

But if Rothbard, the author of this quip, had believed there were actually two good things about Marx, then the capital (das capital?) could have been appropriate.

There are two good things about Marx: He was not a Keynesian. And he liked soap operas too.

On the Table: American English vs. British English

Does anything seem a little off about our second Spot the Error sentence? (Other than the reference to the shadow minister, which, I’ll admit, puts fantastic images of faceless politicians, in large black hats and capes, sneaking around Westminster in my head.)

What exactly did Chris Bryant do?

It turns out that to table has a different meaning in British English than in American English. For Americans, if something is “tabled,” it is postponed, whereas in Great Britain this phrase has pretty much the opposite meaning: to table means to formally present (to put on the table).

Sentence #2 is an example of what we need to be careful about when preparing articles from across the pond. If something seems a little off about the use of a word, look it up or check English Language and Usage, a great resource that Stephen W. Carson shared with us.

Sentence #2 should be adjusted as follows:

The shadow minister, Chris Bryant, proposed a motion referring allegations about the hacking of MPs’ phones to the standards and privileges committee.

Fair and Square: It’s Not Just an Aside

For our sentence #3, we have a common expression that we’ve all heard — fair and square — but what is the grammatical role of this expression in a sentence? As Mike recently discovered, it’s an adverb. And as an adverb, it can’t be separated from what it’s modifying by a comma. The sentence should read

What this means is that if a religious group purchases land fair and square with the intention of constructing a religious building, they are well within their rights to do so.

Blog Post Recommendation

Check out John E. McIntyre’s erudite and entertaining advice to a student considering a career in copyediting. It includes such gems as “Shun the Luddites.”

Is there something you’d like to contribute or see covered in Editing for Liberty? Post a comment! Contributions to “Spot the Error” are especially welcome.

In the market for information, we do not see the kinds of conflicts that are rampant in other black markets. There are no turf wars between gangs for the right to offer the latest pop hit or blockbuster movie; there are no robberies committed by would-be users who need the money to get their fix. The vast majority of copyright violators go about their business without harming anyone.

In fact, those who upload, host, and share illegal content are not in any significant danger at all. What sets the black market in information apart from other black markets? Why is it nonviolent?

Technology

Perhaps the most easily recognizable reason why we do not see violence associated with sharing illegal content has to do with technology. Let’s briefly examine the most common method for downloading illegal content: BitTorrent. BitTorrent works, not by hosting the vast amounts of downloadable content in a single place, but merely by connecting users with the thousands of others who are sharing the file.

Searching for desired content takes only a few moments. There are numerous websites that host torrent files, including many that can boast high community standards of quality and security.

Because the torrent files are themselves very small, users download them instantaneously. How quickly the content is obtained is a function of how many “seeders” there are to share the file(s), as well as the speed of the user’s internet connection. Combine a popular (and therefore well-seeded) file with good bandwidth, and it takes a user only seconds to acquire a song, and only minutes to acquire an entire film.

In other words, the black market for information is generally efficient, anonymous, convenient, and safe. The costs to the user are negligible: bandwidth and hard drive space are cheap and plentiful. BitTorrent websites, and the content they make available, are free to access. Labor is but a few clicks and keystrokes, and — as mentioned above — it hardly takes any time.

Determining the quality of the digital product is usually a trivial afterthought, especially for that content in greatest demand. The community at large serves as a guard against broken files or malware, with certain torrent communities offering layers of security by restricting membership or verifying content before it is offered to the public.

Products in other black markets, in contrast, are notoriously inconsistent with respect to their quality — with many such products posing serious health risks.[1] Checking for quality is itself an inconvenient or even dangerous task, since the mere possession of the good is a crime and users must keep their consumption a secret.

Another important feature of the black market in digital content is its flat hierarchy. Most black markets are characterized by the importance placed on power and rank. These hierarchies distort by exaggeration the importance — and profits — of suppliers and well-positioned middlemen, while those lower in rank suffer most of the hardships for far less pay. Money flows “up” the chain of command to those with the most power, while the grittier aspects of the business flow “down” to those on the streets: dealers, users, money collectors, and the like.

The BitTorrent logo

Finally, one of the chief advantages enjoyed by consumers of illegal information is the connectivity of the Internet, which ensures that distribution costs are minimized. There is no place of business for those offering the latest movie, and therefore there are no turf wars. There is no distribution network to finance, and therefore no middlemen looking for a cut of profits. There are no palms to grease. There are no equivalents to pimps or pushers. Entering or leaving the trade poses no risk to the person from rival dealers or angry consumers.

When one compares all of the above technological advantages to the black markets in virtually every other good, it is no wonder that the latter are dangerous, seedy enterprises. Far from enjoying negligible costs and few risks, there are substantial costs and life-threatening risks associated with doing business in other illegal goods. The state has made it so that these black-market entrepreneurs risk everything to participate. Not only must they evade or bribe government agents, and live under the constant threat of being caught, but because competition cannot be done openly, would-be black market entrepreneurs face the threat of violence from their competition — and even colleagues — as well.

Information and Praxeology

The technological advantages of sharing information point us to an important praxeological principle that also explains the nonviolence of this black market. Unlike the goods people exchange money for, information is nonscarce. Being nonscarce, it is a nonrivalrous good and, as such, it is free.

In fact, as Rothbard points out, nonscarce goods cannot even be economized — that is, they cannot be made the object of human action.[2] To see the relevance of this point to illegal movie downloads, consider another nonscarce good: air. For the most part, air remains only a part of the general conditions of human action and does not factor into the economizing of means to achieve ends. One can breathe as much air as he likes without exhausting its supply or decreasing the amount (or quality) of air left for everyone else.

It takes special circumstances to make air a scarce good and thus something that acting man must economize. For example, one might decide to dive to the bottom of the sea with the assistance of oxygen tanks — and thus face decisions on what to do with the limited amount of air available. Or, if the earth were to become polluted enough, the world’s breathable air supply could itself become a scarce good and an ongoing concern in human affairs.

We should observe that air, since it is a physical good, is scarce in principle but may be considered nonscarce insofar as its supply and ubiquity exceeds all of the potential uses to which acting persons can put it. But ideas and information are not physical goods, and therefore they are not only nonscarce in practice but also nonscarce in principle. It is impossible to diminish their supply or reduce their quality.

If information cannot be made the object of human action, and illegal digital content is but information, how is it possible for there to be a black market for it? What is it that really happens when users obtain illegal digital content? It is clear that no ideas are altered, exchanged, or diminished. Instead, the black market in information is simply individuals cooperating in order to manipulate their own private property — namely, altering the physical state of their computers in certain patterns. We term these patterns “songs,” “movies,” and the like, informally treating them like physical objects. But at no point does copying a pattern inhibit anyone else’s ability to enjoy that same pattern. It turns out that copying is not theft.

If the content in question were not merely information — if the content was itself only a scarce, physical good — then there is no doubt the black market for that good would look radically different. Suppose that there was no way to copy DVDs or transfer their contents to another medium. Any illegal copies of films would have to be sold on the black market. But with this reimagined black market would come all of the limitations we have already discussed: the restricted number and quality of goods, the need to avoid authorities, the inevitable establishment of turf and turf wars, and so on. The market for illegal movies would quickly resemble that for other black markets: shady, marginalized, and dangerous.

Yet hubs of pirated content on the Internet do not function like the streets and back alleys of other black markets. A user need not pay money to acquire some quantity of a forbidden good. Indeed, the user’s own private property remains secure throughout his interaction with others. The only thing being exchanged between dealers and consumers is access to certain patterns of information — in the case of torrents, the file that coordinates downloads and uploads.

What is nonscarce cannot itself be homesteaded or owned. Since the use of a pattern requires a consumer to already possess the proper media, people entering the black market for information have no need to fight with others, because there is no scarce thing to fight over.

And so we have reached the crux of the matter: the black market in information is nonviolent primarily because its goods are of a different kind than those of all other black markets. All of the technological advantages enjoyed within the black market for information stem from this feature of its products. The information is nonscarce, free, and easy to share — one need not even give over any property to participate. Should it be so surprising if there is a flourishing supply to meet the demand?

Conclusion: Intellectual Property and the State

In this article, we have avoided speaking of the state as much as possible in order to examine the nature of digital content in its own right. We have seen that it is nonscarce and free, and thus easy to share and consume.

Unfortunately, the state will not — to use a cliché — let information be free. But can legislation alter the laws of the universe? Ideas are not scarce, and neither can one make them scarce by claiming they are “protected.” Nothing but chaos has emerged from the onslaught of intellectual-property laws.

Intellectual-property legislation attempts to turn nonscarce, unownable information into a scarce, ownable thing. It imputes to information a government-mandated and regulated property right that is then assigned, by bureaucratic means, to individuals and corporations. All of this, as Stephan Kinsella explains, violates legitimate rights (including the rights of innocent third parties).

The purpose of the market is to improve the human condition in the most effective way possible. Through improvements in technology and resource management, we manage to produce more with less. In other words, the purpose of the market is to make useful things relatively less scarce. With information, that goal is already here.

Indeed, in information and ideas we possess the “holy grail” of the economy: a universal, free good. Sadly, the state has taken this magnificent human triumph away from us via intellectual-property laws. Intellectual property is thus a tragic regression in human affairs.

Written with Manuel Lora, this article was originally published at Mises Daily.

[1] For an excellent discussion on the effect criminalization has on the quality of goods, see Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007).

[2] Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001), p. 4.

There was a time when a jet-setting playboy was pictured as having a stewardess or two on his arm. On TV, one guy would be trying to get some other guy to be the necessary second guy for a double date: “They’re stewardesses, Bob — stewardesses!”

Today? To be a “flight attendant” is just a profession like any other, sexless and devoid of meaning beyond passenger management.

Several theories immediately come to mind, such as the observation that everything is in decline, due in part to the campaign to eradicate conspicuous signs of sex differences from mainstream commercial culture (thereby forcing it all into the red-light district).

Or we might come up with a more economically sophisticated answer, such as supply and demand. More passengers means more stewardesses, which means less exacting selection standards, which means moving lower toward the hump of the bell curve.

Here’s an answer that most people would never think of: price fixing.

Yes, it’s possible that there are fewer attractive stewardesses for the same reason that there are fewer nuts in a Baby Ruth, or rip-off “toy” “surprises” in my childhood box of Cracker Jack: namely, that the inflation of the money supply, in addition to raising prices, has reduced quality available per dollar.

Let’s review the basics.

A price ceiling, when legal prices are not allowed to rise to their market-clearing level, causes shortages. There are more buyers at the legal price than there are sellers. Only the most efficient producers can afford to produce the controlled goods, because only they still have a margin between their costs and the legal price. Less efficient producers stop producing the controlled goods, steering those resources to where there’s more profit, or at least less risk of loss. Price ceilings explain bread riots and the so-called oil crisis of the 1970s. (No, it wasn’t French aristocrats or Arab sheiks at fault.)

A price floor, when legal prices are not allowed to fall to their market level, causes gluts. There are fewer willing buyers than there are willing producers at the inflated prices. For agricultural goods, the result is that the government buys up all the surplus with coercively acquired funds. This hurts domestic taxpayers and foreign farmers. It also steers resources away from the goods people actually want, thereby hurting consumers as a whole. A too-seldom recognized form of price-floor fixing is the minimum-wage law. Unemployment is a labor glut. The same economic laws apply.

So that’s the review of basic price fixing, but the above summary assumes uniform goods at established quantity and quality.

With many goods, quality can vary significantly, and not always in easy-to-measure ways. If people are used to paying 25¢ for a Baby Ruth, to use Rothbard’s example, then the Baby Ruth company is going to be loath to raise the price to 50¢, even if inflation has doubled all their input costs [PDF].

What they do instead is cut whatever costs they can to keep the price at a quarter. Maybe they cut the number of peanuts in half, dilute the chocolate with cheaper vegetable oil, and make the candy bar 10 percent smaller. The product looks the same on the outside, and many people won’t notice the difference on the inside. But fans of the Baby Ruth chocolate bar will know that the quality has fallen.

In my case, it wasn’t the falling quality of the candy I noticed, but the ever-crummier toy surprise in a box of Cracker Jack. Grownups would tell me about the whistles and decoder rings their childhood boxes of Cracker Jack had contained. Meanwhile, I watched plastic toys become cardboard-and-plastic toys become pure cardboard crapola.

Those are inflation examples, but similar dynamics are at work under a legislated cost ceiling of 25¢ for candy.

If price ceilings drive quality down, do price floors drive quality up?

In a sense, yes.

Suppose you used to be able to employ three unskilled, fresh-off-the-boat immigrants to perform a job at $1/hour each. And suppose a skilled craftsman for that job can do the same work as three unskilled men, but he charges $5/hour. Some people will employ the more expensive, higher quality craftsman, and others will employ the three less expensive, lower quality unskilled workers. Historically, the craftsmen don’t like the unskilled competition, so they launch a minimum wage campaign: how dare anyone pay less than $4/hour?!

With the new price floor on labor, the three marginal workers are all unemployed, while the demand rises for the “higher-quality” labor product of the craftsmen.

It’s not exactly the same thing with sexy stewardesses, but it’s very close. According to Tom DiLorenzo’s Mises University lecture on monopoly and competition, when the airlines were all cartelized, it was illegal for them to compete with each other on price.

The result was that (1) only a certain jet set could afford to fly with any regularity, and (2) the airlines competed for these wealthier passengers not by cutting costs and lowering prices, but with comfy seats, free booze, and stews who looked like fashion models.

Once the industry was deregulated, however, the inefficient giants went out of business, and the survivors found that they had to compete by cutting costs and lowering prices. At cheaper airfares, we unwashed masses started to fly more often, and airline flights became commoditized. Get me from here to there. I’ll pack my own lunch and bring my own booze, thank you very much. If I want to stare at unattainable fashion models, I can bring a magazine.

There are plenty of people who will see this as an inherent failure on the part of the market — Just look at how small the bag of peanuts is! Can you believe they charged me for that tiny bottle of scotch? — but more people can travel more conveniently for less money.

If you want something fancier, you can pay for a first-class ticket. The fact that so many people don’t fly first class tells us those dollars are better spent elsewhere.

I guess that leaves us free marketeers leading a lonely cheer for average-looking flight attendants.

An earlier version of this article was published on Mises Daily.

For illustration, Ikeda asks us to imagine a “genius caveman.” What if some wonderfully precocious prehistoric person dreamed up the iPad? If he knew exactly what he needed to build the device, down to the last line of code, could he bring it off?

For a look at the limitations of a big-brained ancestor, give Ikeda’s column a read.

1. “‘The old tax is the good tax’.”
2. Mattel bought The Learning Company (TLC) for $3.5 billion in 1999.
3. Several Tea Party congressmen were recently called “terrorists” by powerful Democrats.
4. Internet and e-mail providers are being pressured to keep their clients from illegally downloading material.

Punctuation and Multiple Sets of Closing Quotes

The wording in the Chicago Manual of Style about the position of closing punctuation when you have both single and double quotes is sometimes ambiguous: is the punctuation before only the final closing quotation mark (as in sentence #1, above) or is it before both closing punctuation marks? But the example in Chicago 13.28 makes it clear:

“Don’t be absurd!” said Henry. “To say that ‘I mean what I say’ is the same as ‘I say what I mean’ is to be as confused as Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. You remember what the Hatter said to her: ‘Not the same thing a bit! Why you might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’”

So, although the quotation marks will blend into an odd-looking threesome, sentence 1 should be

“‘The old tax is the good tax.’”

The Political Tea Party

Although it is an established movement on the American political scene, the “tea party” is not an official group or party. So unless you are talking about a specific organization, like the Tea Party Express, tea party should remain lowercase (contra sentence #3).

Several Tea Party congressmen were recently called “terrorists” by powerful Democrats.

Capitalization of Business Names

When I came across sentence #2, my first instinct was to uncap the The in “The Learning Company” — when you mention a company name, it’s like mentioning a newspaper name, so the the is not treated like it’s part of the title (the Washington Post, the LA Times, etc.). But what made me hesitate here is that this company’s abbreviated name is not “LC” but “TLC,” meaning that the is part of the company’s official name. Does that mean the article should be capped?

Fortunately, CMoS (paragraph 8.67) reassures me that my first instinct was right:

The full names of institutions, groups, and companies and the names of their departments, and often the shortened forms of such names (e.g., the Art Institute), are capitalized. A the preceding a name, even when part of the official title, is lowercased in running text. Such generic terms as company and university are usually lowercased when used alone (though they are routinely capitalized in promotional materials, business documents, and the like).

Thus, sentence #2 should read

Mattel bought the Learning Company (TLC) for $3.5 billion in 1999.

(This rule also applies to groups like the Tea Party Express.)

Closing Words

Although CMoS indicates that it should be e-mail (as in sentence #3), we prefer to close it (email). The dictionaries will probably catch up to this convention in a few years. As Mike’s list of tips explains, “Over time, new words tend to move from open or hyphenated to closed, and the older forms start to look antiquated.” See also CMoS 7.79. Other closed words that you might frequently see include businessman, website, and healthcare.

Just for Fun

Well, I guess this might be considered fun. Test your proofing skills with this quiz of often-confused words! Warning: you fail if you get more than 2 wrong!

Grammar Underground

Although I haven’t been reading it weekly, there is a neat grammar and writing blog that I recommend. June Casagrande’s Grammar Underground has covered topics like collective nouns, apostrophe imposters, and tips for writing better sentences. She also has a neat podcast (check out today’s episode on the “sneak peak,”) and her  Snobservations are highly amusing (I particularly recommend snobservation #35).

Is there something you’d like to contribute or see covered in Editing for Liberty? Post a comment! Contributions to “Spot the Error” are especially welcome.