Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
When I’m in Arizona for Halloween, as I was this year, the night is always a blast. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were in action and there was a great street presence both in terms of yard decorations and people (both kids and adults) in costume.
However, the big talk in the neighborhood among the adults is always about the candy. Everyone has their favorite and each has their own way of getting it.
1) Twix and Snickers
2) Sour gummy candy
3) Twizzlers
His bottom three candies?
1) Milky Way
2) Candy Corn
3) Swedish Fish
This might be one of the few times since the Bush Administration that I have actually agreed with something in The National Review, though I would amend his list by removing Twizzlers and replacing it with the 100 Grand Bar. Furthermore I would remove Milky Way from the bottom and replace it with Dum-Dums.
Yes, I am old enough to remember actually getting candy cigarettes in my bag. When I told the kids about this they were horrified.
However, as far as a means of getting your hands on the sweet stuff, yes, much like Wright we would loot the kids’ bags while they were sleeping.
When they got older and they started to catch on, we had to up our game. So we taught them about taxation and tariff policy, by deducting an immediate 20% of all candy brought into the house with an extra 5% surcharge on chocolate and gummies. I would also teach them how to play cards and we would use their candy as chips. Good times.
Maybe there’s a treatise waiting to be written modeling government on parents and their kids’ Halloween candy; after all, just like we would take the candy and have the kids think they were getting something out of the experience, isn’t the government doing the same with you and taxes?
Playing fast and loose with the definition of “ode,” this was an annual Independence Day tradition on the long-neglected blog. The original was posted July 4, 2002. Most years a change or addition was made. This is the most recent incarnation.
Scenes from “John Adams” showing the meeting of the Second Continental Congress, at which the vote for independence from Great Britain is conducted, and the public reading of the Declaration of Independence. [Original video with both scenes is now a dead link, new videos have been found.]
The Declaration formally proclaimed our independence – the Battle of Yorktown won it.
Through these fields of destruction Baptisms of fire I’ve watched all your suffering As the battle raged higher And though they did hurt me so bad In the fear and alarm You did not desert me My brothers in arms
Dire Straits, “Brothers in Arms”
“Then I will live in Montana, and I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck, or possibly even a recreational vehicle, and drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?”
Vasili Borodin (played by Sam Neill), The Hunt for Red October
“‘We hold these truths to be self-evident… That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights… That among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness… That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men …’. And this paper that from the French Revolution on the whole West has copied, from which each of us has drawn inspiration, still constitutes the backbone of America. Her vital lymph. Know why? Because it transforms the subjects into citizens. Because it turns the plebes into people. Because it invites, no, it orders the plebes turned into citizens to rebel against tyranny and to govern themselves. To express their individualities, to search for their own happiness. (Something that for the poor, for the plebes, means to get rich). The exact contrary, in short, of what the communists used to do with their practice of forbidding people to govern themselves, to express themselves, to get rich. With their practice of installing His Majesty the State on the throne.”
Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride
“With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
Martin Luther King
“There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance.”
“The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden – that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“Funny that the same people to whom diversity is a holy word so often bemoan diversity of opinion as divisive. But in a democracy, politics are naturally divisive: you vote for this candidate and someone else votes for that one; you vote yes (or no) on a proposition and other citizens disagree. What’s not divisive? Saddam and his 99.96% of the vote. That’s how it went during the previous Iraqi election — an illustration of the Latin roots of the word fascism, which actually means a bunch of sticks all tied together in one big unhappy unified bunch, and not (despite what many assume) any variation from p.c. received-wisdom regarding gay rights, affirmative action, bilingual education, etc. This election was different because it was divisive, which means it was better.”
“It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something…That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”
Sam Gamgee (played by Sean Astin), Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers
“[W]e recognize that we are living in the middle of the most overwhelmingly successful experiment in human history. Not perfect. Just the best place in the world to live in, that’s all.”
“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered! My life is my own.”
Number Six (played by Patrick McGoohan, “The Prisoner” TV series)
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.”
Theodore Roosevelt
This Tea Party protest sign illustrates Roosevelt’s musings on patriotism – and the powers of the citizen as exercised via the ballot box:
“So this Jefferson dude was like, ‘Look, the reason we left this England place is ’cause it was so bogus. So if we don’t get some primo rules ourselves – pronto – then we’re just gonna be bogus, too.”
Jeff Spiccoli (played by Sean Penn), Fast Times at Ridgemont High
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”
Alexis deTocqueville, Democracy in America Vol. 2
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”
While Christmas is officially a celebration of the birth of Jesus, for much of the Western world December 25 has come to be a celebration of family and community. No other time of the year is so thoroughly saturated with images pointing to our highest hopes for such relationships – and no other time of the year so effectively highlights the difference between our ideals and the world as it really is. Jesus came to Earth to bridge not only the chasm between humanity and God, but also that rift that separates people from each other. Christmas reminds us that we live in a broken world, and it seeks to encourage us by showing us through religious and even many secular trappings how that brokenness can be fixed.
(A repeat post from 2018. I don’t know if I posted it anywhere but the original milblog.)
You just know, as surely as the sun rises in the east, that when Thanksgiving Day rolls around (and Columbus Day as well) the usual malignant scolds will be hard at work, planting turds in the harvest-festival punchbowl. They have become pinch-faced, joyless neo-Puritans, ruthlessly seeking out any hint of happy celebration and thankfulness for bounty of harvest and generous fortune, jumping on any display of human fellow-feeling – even just having a pleasant time doing things that make the heart glad – insisting that such occasions and people are to be condemned as earnestly as Savonarola ever did, piling up works of art to be burnt in the public square. As HL Menken observed, “It’s the haunting fear of such people, that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” It is their grim, chosen, killjoy duty to stamp out such emotions and celebrations, wherever they may be found. So sayeth the current crop of student activists: “Thanksgiving is a celebration of the ongoing genocide against native peoples and cultures across the globe!”
Which is a breathlessly sweeping condemnation. Let’s just pound it in relentlessly, with trip-hammer insistence: We actual or spiritual descendants of Pilgrims are Bad, Bad People, Who Stole Everything From the Indians, and Celebrating Thanksgiving is As Bad as the Holocaust, Almost!
The 20th century practice of allowing elementary school children to dress up as Indians or Pilgrims these days, reenacting a peaceful feast and celebration of a bountiful harvest together seems in the eyes of the censorious to be about on par with dressing up as SS officers and concentration camp inmates. Never mind that dumping on the poor Pilgrims for three hundred years and a bit of warfare with various Indians rather misses the point of – you know, celebrating a bountiful harvest – as well as grandly oversimplifying history. Never mind the fact that Indians in North America warred on each other with keen enjoyment and no little inventive brutality for centuries. Never mind that according to some accounts, the Wampanoag village and fields adjacent to the Plymouth colony were abandoned, as an epidemic of some kind had depopulated the place two or three years previously. And never mind …
Oh, never mind. Isn’t it more nuanced – or is nuance out of style among the ill-educated inhabitants of the educational-industrial complex – to consider that on that long ago Thanksgiving, two very different peoples, whose descendants would be at each other’s throats for three hundred years, were yet able to join together for a great feast, to be courteous and friendly with each other, for at least a little while?
Can we not settle at table with friends and relations, and simply enjoy a good meal, and appreciate those blessings which we have received, deserved or no? At the very least, can we just smile gently at the censorious scolds and ask them to pass the cranberry relish?
Have a happy Thanksgiving Day. Tell the scolds to get bent. Be happy and have another slice of pumpkin pie that will annoy them more than anything.
Through these fields of destruction 
