I’ve been quite busy for the past weeks, but I had a slow-ish day today, so I clarified my remarks about why Johan Norberg’s book Financial Fiasco is a good read, and much better than Meltdown by Tom Woods.

*”With the YouTubes to prove it!”

My dinner tonight. Hot pot…half Sichuan and half Malay Satay. And it was very, very good!

I’ve got two more days in HK to get a lot of reports and other projects finished, then off to Beijing, where I’ll speak at Peking University and Fudan University on the importance of free trade, with special reference to the US and China (i.e., I will bash the idiotic decision to impose punitive tariffs on the importation of tires made by Chinese firms). Tomorrow I’ve got some meetings in HK and then a talk sponsored by the Lion Rock Institute.

I’ve been extremely busy lately (meaning work until 4 am frequently, plus travel) and have been behind on some writing projects, but I am really, really pleased that I brought along on my trip to China James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. It’s a remarkably interesting treatment (I’m only a bit more than 100 pages into it at present, so I’ve got more stimulating reading ahead of me) of the nature of “ungoverned” regions of the world, with a focus on various hill peoples of Asia. To put it in a nutshell, he argues that the traditional view of such ungoverned people is that they are holdovers from previous civilizations, or representatives of how people lived before states, etc., etc. Scott looks at them in a very different way: they live in ways that have enabled them to elude capture or domination by the state, and those ways of life (including agriculture, settlement patterns, kinship systems, religion, etc.) have been deeply influenced by the proximity of predatory states. They have, in effect, evolved in ways that elude being ruled by states. When you think about it for a few minutes, it certainly seems a more fruitful way of understanding such peoples and their ways of life than the dominant mode. And it should tell us something, as well, about the likely success of the Pakistani government in extending its writ throughout the Northwest Frontier Province or of the Afghan government extending its writ from border to border of the territory of Afghanistan. (That said, Scott’s thesis should not be confused with fantasies or romantic notions about how the most wonderful thing imaginable is to live without a state; some — not all — forms of statelessness, such as those that have emerged among groups that have avoided being captured by states, are remarkably brutal and savage, and there are some stateless populations [think contemporary southern Somalia] who are fare worse off by most criteria, including freedom, than people who live under relatively limited government.)

I recommend visiting a new project, Commerce 21, which offers European liberals more opportunities and resources to advance freedom.

Commerce21 (http://www.commerce21.org) is a new online forum dedicated to those who share the principles of individual liberty, free market and the rule of law. Its aim is to give an online space for dialogue where young libertarians from Europe at large will be able to discuss, socialize, learn and exchange ideas and best practices to advocate liberty.

Commerce21 is a free and integrated platform that provides a lot of forum categories (Events, Action, Politics & Society, International, Science & Technology, Economics & History, Business, Books, Arts and Culture, Chit Chat Café, Arts in Liberty) where you can exchange ideas and start thinking about actions to promote them.

Commerce21 was created on November 9, 2009 by Liberaux.org, an independent and non-partisan organization which has been running a forum in French for libertarians since 2002.

It’s definitely worth a visit.

Here is how to contact them. It’s important to defeat the foolish legislation being considered in the Senate. The current mess of regulations, subsidies, and perverse incentives is not good, but it could be made a lot worse by this Rube Goldberg legislation, which is a triumph of muddled thinking.

Clear, to-the-point, non-abusive letters do make a difference. They are counted and politicians do pay some attention to what their constituents think.

Lobsters at the Rainbow Seafood Restaurant on one of the islands off of Hong Kong, where I dined last night with colleagues and friends

The conference at which I had the privilege of being discussion moderator was quite enjoyable, partly for the chance to spend time with and learn so much from leading Chinese libertarians. I’ve got a “down day” with no obligations, so I’ll catch up on reports, correspondence, and planning documents. (And I’m looking forward to visiting a Sichuan restaurant recommended by friend Bretigne Shaffer, who used to live and work here.) Then I’ll have some meetings and a presentation at the Lion Rock Institute before heading to Beijing and Shanghai for some meetings and lectures at Peking University and Fudan University on the importance of free trade (and the utter stupidity of President Obama’s tariffs on Chinese-made tires).

What I saw when I looked out my hotel window
I’m moderating a Liberty Fund conference here in Hong Kong and my clock is turned upside down. But thanks to not sleeping on the 15 hour flight yesterday, I managed to sleep last night and am now having my coffee and preparing to go and get some breakfast and start a busy day. It’s great to see good friends from various cities in China here in HK.

Freedom Dinner 2009 – Video from Atlas Global Initiative on Vimeo.

My colleague Austin Petersen (with some input from me) did a lot of work to produce this. (Note the flag with the bananas on it. Bananas were a symbol of freedom in the East Bloc, where they were almost impossible to obtain. In fact, westerners would sometimes try to throw bananas over such walls, as gifts to the imprisoned populations.)

We had a great party yesterday with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation!

Here’s some of the celebrations in other languages: Russian ( a comment on the importance of the event from Vladimir Bukovsky), Hindi, Bahasa (and a video from Sascha Tamm), Chinese, and Portuguese. I could provide more, but I have to rush to pack for my flight to China early tomorrow!

Ciao for niao

Still reads well: “Why Socialism Collapsed in Eastern Europe”

(I gave it as a lecture at a Cato University summer seminar on political economy in California during the summer of 1990, after having spent a good bit of 1989 and 1990 in Central and Eastern Europe.)

David Boaz in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer: “When government slippery slope goes vertical“

An excellent piece on how a tyranny crumbled: “Filming a Revolution”

Conny Rakow on her memories of the opening of the Wall.

It’s in German, but this short film the message of this little film should be clear to all.

My long-time friend Tibor Machan with “Thoughts on Objectivism and Ayn Rand” from London.

laconf09, Tibor Machan: “Thoughts on Objectivism and Ayn Rand” from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

www.Guominliyi.org

DoiMoi.org

(I hope you like the small video on DoiMoi.org of my friend Sascha Tamm, which I made with my flip camera in the Steinbräu brewery and pub in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.)

My talk to the Oxford University Libertarian Society on “Anarchism, Limited Government, and Liberalism: A Modest Case for Sacking the State”:

Tom Palmer – “Anarchism, Limited Government & Liberalism: A Modest Case for Sacking the State” from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.

(I had not had a chance to listen to it before, but I think it stands up well. I can now see — or hear — from my gravelly voice how sick I was at the time. I am now recovering from a nasty upper respiratory tract infection I got on the road; maybe it was the 35-hour travel time I endured from Central Asia to Santa Barbara, followed by about 30 hours in that city, and then another 25 or so hours to get to Cairo, where I got a nasty case of food poisoning before heading to London and then Oxford.)

Mirsulzhan Namazaliev on the proposal to have URLs in alphabets other than Latin: “Attack of the alphabets: will Cyber-Cyrillic threaten global online unity?“

Hat tip: Jude

I have been working with colleagues on some videos and other work on the Fall of the Berlin Wall (to be celebrated November 9 at the Atlas Freedom Dinner), and I remembered I had some old photos, which I rummaged around and found and then scanned. I was in West and East Berlin a few times (and was just in both recently, with a conference on Adam Smith’s moral theory on the east side of where Die Antifaschistische Schutzmauer once stood). So here are a few old shots from my trips in the 1980s:

(You can click them for more legible versions. In order: me [above] expressing my view of communism — from the western side; one of my transit visas from a train trip from Bavaria to West Berlin across the DDR; cross commemorating the murder of Heinz Sokolowski, 48 year old East Berliner killed November 11, 1965, after 7 years of imprisonment, shot when fleeing; me in the early 1980s before the Brandenburger Tor; a shot of a “normal” section of the wall near the Brandenburger Tor; my lunch bill from the Palast der Republik, on Marx-Engels Platz — I had a bottle of something and a trout)

And two shots I just found in another box: one from the winter of 1989 in Central/Eastern Europe (not sure where, but I had bought the coat, which I still have, in Vienna) and one from Prague during the Revolution: