Happy Halloween!

Here's a classic:

This Halloween should be fun - we moved this summer and are in an apartment complex with lots more kids than in the last one - so we should have trick-or-treaters. I plan on watching Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, which I've always loved for the atmosphere.

- My supervisor from GWU shares this link explaining taxes to children using Halloween. Pretty funny - even covers lock-box myths and Social Security taxes.

- This also reminds me of another sign I saw at the rally: "Burn Witches, not Korans"

- David Henderson reflects on the over-sensitivity to safety and Halloween. Of course I agree with him on this, but I have to say - part of the fun of Halloween was flaunting parental safety measures - staying out later than we were supposed to, wandering much farther than we were supposed to. Not that that's a reason for being absurd about the night's festivities, but from a kid's perspective the "rules were meant to be broken" attitude enhanced things.

- Here are some old links of mine: Poe on economics and Lovecraft on the nature of human fear.

And speaking of Poe, here's one of my favorite renditions of The Raven (by Christopher Walken):

Setting the bar ridiculously low...

Apparently all you need to do to be a libertarian is oppose government book-burning. Or at least that seems to be the message of Jeff Riggenbach's labeling of Fahrenheit 451 as a "libertarian book". There's no point in getting too caught up in the semantics - Bradbury's classic is certainly consistent with libertarianism. But it seems odd to call it a libertarian book.

Anyway - it's a very good review by Riggenbach - it makes me want to go back and reread it. Its been years for me, as I imagine it has been for most people.

Still, I think we need to be careful about this. With that kind of attitude practically every American is a libertarian. Libertarian simply becomes "pro-liberty", and all the things that make libertarianism unique get washed away. It also ends up confusing people. It's like how some less informed conservatives and libertarians are actually shocked to hear that George Orwell was a socialist. You only get shocked by something like that when you get fed a juvenile, misleading ideological taxonomy.

Was Bradbury himself a libertarian? I honestly still don't know. The Atlantic wrote about an LA Times interview of his recently, and some of his remarks leaned libertarian:

"There is too much government today"... but it went on in the next sentence to something way too cozy with democracy for a lot of libertarians:

"We've got to remember the government should be by the people, of the people and for the people" followed by some curmudgeonly (albeit somewhat endearing) Ludditism:

"We have too many cellphones. We've got too many Internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now" to a decidedly non-Luddite, non-libertarian sentiment I can applaud:

"He [president Obama] should be announcing that we should go back to the moon. We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever."

So maybe he's a libertarian, maybe not. My guess is he's probably got a few libertarian slogans and ideas but isn't what a libertarian would call "libertarian". Ultimately that doesn't really matter - the point is if all it takes to be libertarian is opposition to book burning, it seems to me you're setting the bar pretty low!

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I sent an email to Riggenbach just asking about his thought processes on that and whether he knew anything about Bradbury's personal politics - if he responds with anything interesting I'll post it here.

*****

And speaking of book-burning... we've got our own budding fascists down in Florida.