Reflections  

The Nick at Nite ticket — After John Kerry embarrassed himself with a crack about the soldiers in Iraq, many remembered how grateful they were the day he lost his bid for the White House. Of course, if it weren’t for his awkwardness in front of the camera, he’d still be the perfect candidate for the TV generation: he looks like Herman Munster, talks like Thurston Howell III, and has a military record like Corporal Klinger’s. — Tim Slagle

Night of the Voting Dead — In late October, an analysis of statewide records by the Poughkeepsie Journal revealed that 77,000 dead people remain on election rolls in New York state, and some 2,600 may have managed to vote after they had died.

There is a fascinating sociological take to this. The economics literature makes clear that it is not “rational” to vote — the expected costs of voting far exceed the expected utility (see Steve Landsburg’s discussion) — yet the social pressure to vote is so great that even the dead get to the polls. — Ross Levatter

Sweet revenge — Don’t assume all public school students are ignorant of economics. There is, for example, the Candyman, who has become an institution at Ingraham High School in Seattle. In 2005 the city’s left-wing school board banned the sale of candy, which wrecked the finances of PTAs and caused the board to be very unpopular among the kids. By early 2006, an anonymous senior had gone into business for himself as the Candyman. According to a story about him on the front page of the Seattle Times, the Candyman appeared at last spring’s pep assembly in a mask, with a red-and-blue spandex costume displaying the big letters CM. To the delight of the crowd, he threw candy into the air and made a quick exit.

The Candyman is breaking the school district’s regulations, but he says he donates his considerable profits to charity. Ingraham’s principal, in an act of disobedient tolerance, has let him get away with it. When asked about his activities by Times reporter Emily Heffter, the Candyman said: “Just like Prohibition in the twenties, when demand is high and supply is cut off, there are going to emerge black, parallel markets.” — Bruce Ramsey

Bear watch — This year, the French government released five brown bears from Slovenia in the French Pyrenees, where bears were once common. Some Pyreneean shepherds, an endangered species, got angry. As I reported in an earlier reflection (“Where the wild things are secretly reintroduced,” July), the French government was forced to release the bears at secret times and places to avoid disruption.

Battle lines have been drawn. According to Reuters, pro- and anti-bear graffiti are a common sight along roadsides in the Pyrenees. In August, hikers found Palouma, one of the Slovenian bears, dead at the foot of a cliff. A wide-ranging investigation into her death has begun. Here are some of the headlines translated from the French press:

• Death of Slovenian bear Palouma probably accidental
• Palouma’s death resuscitates debate over Pyreneean bears
• Death of Palouma: “No possibility excluded”
• Pyrenees: the death of a bear
• Palouma, will she be replaced?
• Palouma’s autopsy: Nothing suspicious found
• Palouma, fallen for France

A representative of a green party in France says that if Palouma was chased off the cliff, then “it’s murder, pure and simple.”

Speaking of murder, I was surprised to learn that the tiny number of beleaguered brown bears in France kill about 300 sheep and cattle per year. But wait! Not so fast! These official statistics are wrong, says AVES France (the Association de Protection des Espèces Menacées). According to AVES, whenever a herder claims that a lamb, kid, or calf was killed by a bear, the government gives him the benefit of the doubt and pays an indemnity, hence the inflated statistics.

Senior French songster Renaud just released a musical homage to Palouma entitled “Rouge Sang” (“Red Blood”). (Yes, he’s one of those one-name guys. And no, I’m not making this up.)

Passions among the shepherds have not cooled, either. Following a violent demonstration, some of them were recently convicted of crimes and given suspended prison sentences of as long as four months.

As the French say, “A suivre . . . “ — Michael Christian

Icelandic Saga — Iceland was composed by God in his surrealist phase. On my way home from a European excursion last summer I spent some time there, and I’ve never seen a more disorienting landscape. One moment you’re in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands, among sweeping, treeless, green hills grazed by sheep and shaggy horses; a few miles later you’re in one of the stark, barren, high deserts of the American West, except that the skies are cloudy all day. Then you might as well be on one of the more obscure moons of Saturn, with vast expanses of black, jigsaw-shaped lava-rock hummocks out of a Yves Tanguy painting covered with lichens of unearthly green. Most of the island, especially once you venture onto the one-track dirt roads that take you deep into the interior, is a caveman landscape of strangely colored rock monoliths and volcanic cones, looming glaciers and steaming fissures and unexpected waterfalls. The earth seems to be speaking its original geological language while you struggle to understand a word or two.

Iceland once spoke a libertarian political language that can hardly be understood today, too. For over three centuries after the first Norse settlers arrived in the late 9th century, what is known to historians as the free state of Iceland was virtually state-free. The Althing, the world’s first parliament, where eminent Icelandic men periodically convened in a dramatic interior valley, had only legislative and judical functions. There were no permanent executive governmental institutions at all. As the American scholar Jesse Byock points out in “Viking Age Iceland,” in many ways the island was a “headless and stateless society.”

Icelanders, living on small, isolated, mostly self-sufficient farms, managed to do without the standard medieval throttling and meddling of earls, barons, and archbishops, sheriffs and soldiers, taxes and tax farmers, corvées and serfdom, though there were slaves, most of them captives seized in Viking raids on the British Isles, until roughly the end of the 11th century. Laws were often elaborate, but enforcing them was left to private individuals. Feuds and disputes were resolved, when they were peacefully resolved, through arbitration, usually by the clan chieftains and richer farmers, who exercised only an informal authority. A lawbreaker was subject to various degrees of outlawry, meaning that others could seize his property and in the more drastic cases kill him without penalty. (It was because Erik the Red was outlawed for killing someone in a feud that he sailed off to discover Greenland, from which his son Leif Eriksson made his way to North America.) As historians have pointed out, Iceland, without towns or even villages, was like a large, dispersed village, and the Icelandic sagas were village gossip. Troublemakers were punished by the neighbors, even if the neighbors had to ride over the mountain and around the fjord three days to get there. The farmers thus “denied would-be elites the crucial state function of monopolizing force,” Byock writes.

Even within the clan system there was room for individuality and choice, as an Icelandic poet and translator whom I had known in New York pointed out when we had dinner in Reykjavik. (His encyclopedia article on medieval Iceland, written some 30 years ago, is still being quoted in internet anarchist arguments.) Until late in the period, clan chieftains didn’t rule over specific territories. You could choose and change clans. You could fall in love with a pretty girl from another clan, marry her, and switch over to her clan without any ensuing Romeo-and-Juliet scenario — at least most of the time.

Life in Iceland a thousand years ago was often harsh, precarious, and violent, and no doubt remote, in its saga tales of honor and vengeance and its rural self-sufficiency, from all modern political possibilities and theories, but it still constitutes a kind of libertarian revery and perhaps a parable. What put an end to the state-free free state? The standard high-octane fuel of history and lethal poison for liberty: the lust for power. Some chieftains started biting off more than they could chew. By the mid-13th century a few of them controlled most of the country and were contending for supremacy, with bands of mercenaries fighting and plundering for them while they tried to coax the Norwegian King Hakon into intervening on their side. He shrewdly played them off against each other, until Icelanders eventually opted for Norwegian sovereignty as an alternative to overbearing local strongmen and civil war. After that most of the old freedoms gradually disappeared, as church and state imposed their authority and their taxes. Iceland’s history was wrapped up in Scandinavian history, complicated by climate change (it got a lot colder after the 14th century), oppressive trade restrictions and monopolies after the Danish kings inherited both Norway and Iceland, population decline, soil erosion, and the abandonment of many farms.

But Iceland was never invaded (despite some kidnapping raids by Algerian pirates in the 17th century and a brief Nazi bombing during World War II). It has never invaded anyone, either. The 300,000 Icelanders, free from Danish oversight since 1944, still exhibit in many ways a tough, go-to-hell independence, and despite typical Scandinavian welfare-state red-tape rules and laws and taxes (now further complicated by the country’s associate status with the EU), libertarians can still instinctively feel at home there. It’s just now going through an entrepreneurial boom, but above all the vast empty and unfenced spaces, and their haunting, surreal beauty, give you a sense of untrammeled freedom. Iceland just finished on top of a survey measuring the percentage of people in dozens of countries who reported being happy. — Eric Kenning

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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