PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

TOM MAGUIRE

THE BLOGOSPHERE & THE MEDIA --

THE CALIFORNIA BEAR FLAG LEAGUE

"SAVE AMERICA:

Posted at the LiveJournal Anti-War Community blogsite:

MORE QUESTION-MARKS, FEWER EXCLAMATION POINTS
a strategy for "reaching the lost" in our beleaguered nation

Last night I was .. ambling around the politico-blogosphere and .. I spent about an hour on a couple of ultra-conservative blogs .. [At last] I finally found something I can do [to end the war] .. For a certain time slot every day .. I'm going to completely forget Alternet, Buzzflash, DemocraticUnderground.com .. And spend an hour on conservative weblogs, reading and responding to their audiences ..

.. you need a different approach to befriend a neocon than you need to engage him or her in debate. The way to do this is ASKING QUESTIONS .. [But they] have to be questions of the type not designed to force them to confront their error, but instead to just talk honestly about why they think the way they do. Start with the blogs, then see if you can get some of them to exchange email which will be unseen by their conservative blog-buddies and thus give them more space for honesty ..

4. Gates to start your journey: A good place to start: http://polipundit.com. THIS MAY HURT YOUR BRAIN TO LOOK AT but put on the armor and venture into this hostile territory anyway because it's just too important not to. Sidebar on /prestopundit/ is good for links to branch out, and worthless in every other way, since it doesn't have comments enabled (cowards!)

These blogs should give you more maps to other "enemy" camps than you should ever care to see. It does show the depth of their entrenchment, though - if you live in California - ESPECIALLY in Berkeley or San Francisco, or in any other ["leftist"] stronghold (SeaTac comes to mind, there are others) you forget we are in a DIFFERENT COUNTRY ALTOGETHER than these people live in.

5. What you see on these pages will frustrate you. It will make you sad, angry, and most of all FEEL HELPLESS. Do not allow the emotions to guide you in these lands or you will fall flat down before you even get your bearings.

6. Repeat: ARMOR yourself. You are entering these places as essentially an ambassador from [Leftistan] and will likely be shot on sight as soon as your colouring shows, before anyone realizes you're there to help those among them who might be hurting .. You are there to offer something to those who would want it and when you first engage them, that thing is two ears and a brain, NOTHING more ..

I have said enough now. I would like to hear any "field reports" you care to send me. My @ddress is monde@*****.org. That's the name I go by - Monde, which means 'World' in French. (And yes, it was my name before all the French-hating, and I know this is a liability for me in their lands, but I care about being honest with them so I decided to stop using the aliases.)

Wishing you the best of luck and love,
Monde

DANIEL WEINTRAUB --

After a century of relying largely on newspapers as self-proclaimed objective gatekeepers to the world of politics, Americans during this election season may be getting a sneak preview of the changing of the guard. Internet sites, especially independent but openly ideological Web logs, or blogs, are increasingly challenging the mainstream media for the hearts and minds of American readers ..

Hugh Hewitt drew more than 30,000 readers in an hour when he "live blogged" the first presidential debate, summarizing each question and answer while adding his instant analysis in real time. He has lately been posting "symposium" topics each weekend and inviting other writers to file responses on their own blogs, to which he links from his site. Markos Moulitsas Z�niga .. has 8 million unique monthly visitors to his left-leaning "Daily Kos". Moulitsas has been focusing of late on the presidential election, but he also tracks Senate and congressional races and regularly invites commentary from his huge audience. Last week, facing a deadline for his regular column on American politics in the Guardian of London, Moulitsas asked his readers what they thought he should say. Nearly 500 responded ..

It's impossible to know at this point how all of this will evolve. But it's not hard to imagine a future army of self-employed Internet journalists, writing with a well-advertised point of view, connected intimately to their readers, sharing their sources and changing, forever, the way the world interprets politics.

THE SKY

STEVE LEVY

Also worth a look -- today's Bleat. Quotable:

how do they vote? .. you�ll find that most journalists drift to the left. They range from traditional Democrats to moderate-to-indifferent Democrats to fiercely partisan Democrats to DINOs who might well be Republicans if the idea of voting GOP didn�t make them feel as if Mom would rise shrieking from the grave and accuse them of making FDR cry. There are a few Republicans in any newsroom, but they harbor the love that dare not speak its name.

CITIZEN SMASH

CHEAP ENTERTAINMENT.

THE TOP 125

And here is The Truth Laid Bear blog rankings by average daily traffic. PrestoPundit is consistently in the top 125 without linkage from big guns like InstaPundit or Lucianne (I'm not on Glenn's blogroll, which seems fixed in time, circa May 2003). With linkage from Glenn or Lucianne or Hugh or Andrew, traffic shoots through the roof. Right now with Ra^thergate, the election and the continuing Swift Boat controversy I'm holding steady in the 2,000 - 3,000 daily visit range, most of that traffic now coming from browser bookmarks, rather than blog links. If you're a PrestoPundit regular -- or even if your new -- I'd appreciate your email letting me know what you think .. what you like or don't like about the site. It goest without saying that reader input is a very helpful thing.

PrestoPundit is currently ranked #324 according fellow blogger linkage with inbound linkage from 227 other sites. I'd like to thank those who've linked, I will be updating my own links soon, and I'd welcome those who'd like to add a link.

One of the funnest things a blogger can do is send a (mini) tidal wave of traffic to a new blogger with a trickle of regular readers. Last week I gave a Prestolaunch to The Discerning Texan and I couldn't have been more tickled. It looks like he's also gotten new linkage from other sites. Good. One of the things I like about the blog is that he's always got great cartoons I haven't seen elsewhere, and of course today he's got another one.

UPDATE: Who doesn't love fan mail? Kathleen writes:

I thoroughly enjoy your blog and now go to it first before even checking out Drudge.

I found your page during Ra^thergate, and having been reading it ever since. It's excellent, and I've put a link to you on my page.

DIGITAL BROWNSHIRT NEWS

Who needs National Socialist Radio, anyway?

ANDREW VS. TINA --

what would you rather be doing - writing a fun blog that makes a difference, or appearing on an unwatched and largely unwatchable cable news chat show?

BETSY

NOW PAYPAL

This is getting out of hand folks.

LOTS OF

For example, she links to this excellent piece by Ross Mackenzie, "The Ra^ther Memos: On Operative Double Standards in the Mainline Press." Quotable:

Dan Ra^ther's outrageous display of ideological irresponsibility has highlighted yet again the double standards and has driven yet another - the final? - nail into the coffin of the once-proud mainline press.

YOU WON'T

PATTERICO

CRACK LA TIMES REPORTER

MY WIFE'S IDEA -- THE OFFICIAL:

"I'd Ra^ther be blogging" T-Shirt.

RE:

Tom Maguire emails:

It's a team sport, baby! And right now, we are the best team in baseball.

"I AM OFFICIALLY A PAJAMA-BLOGGER."

Subject: making a difference

Hi Greg,

My name is Lori Talbott and I wanted to express my appreciation to you for the credit to Lori from Texas for the Ra(th)ergate name. It has been an awesome experience to be a part of history in the making. Being from Texas and a mom of six kids, I had been searching for a way to make a difference in campaign 2004. Texas is a "wrapped" state as for electoral votes, so involvement on the local level would not have been a good buy of my time. Involvement on a level outside of Texas was an impossibility. Now, I am officially a pajama-blogger (per J. Klein) that can make a difference from the comfort of my own living room.

Thank you for all that you have done in past years to lay the foundation for this type of forum whereby "common" people like me (per THK) can contribute. It is one thing to have "free speech" as a constitutional right: It is another to have a venue for that speech to be freely heard.

Best Regards,

Lori

GET THE VERY LATEST

BETSY'S PAGE

My husband also saw Candy Crowley on CNN talking about how [John Kerry] was avoiding the press. If the media starts running stories on this, he'll have to give in, won't he?

WHAT A LITTLE DRUDGE CAN DO.

THE POWER OF

THE LA TIMES

OVER 100,000 PAGEVIEWS

I'd like to thank InstaPundit, Luciane.com, Hugh Hewitt, Michelle Malkin, KerrySpot, The Corner, BeldarBlog, Memeorandum, 2Blowhards, KerryHaters, Betsy'sPage, Patterico, and a host of others I'll be adding though the day.

100,000 visits.

The revolution will be blogged.

Business & Econ Blogging.

Taking Hayek Seriously.

Blog Profile.

Blogosphere vs. Democrat Party News (aka "professional journalism").

New Blog.

Bear Flag League.

ICANN'T.

StepInside!.

Dont' worry - Don't Register.

Bear Flag Review.

4th Estate.

New Blog.

PrestoPundit gets a BLOGOPOLY game piece!

Got to Love It. Aaron the Rantblogger proudly does a Google search.

Bear Flag Review. It's a California Bear Flag Review. Enjoy.

Capitalism. It's Monday. Here's your Carnival of the Capitalists.

BlogLand. Xrlq declares Bill Quick a Blogtard. It all got started with an examination of Justice Scalia's interpretation of the Constitution ..

I've added the (mostly English language Laissez-faire Blog put out by the Liberanimus Institute in Bologna Italy to my blogroll. You'll find there a tasty sampling of classical true liberal views and events from Italy, American and around the world. Take a peek.

Virginia Postel is right. Marginal Revolution is on a roll.

So here it is. My first guest blogging at the Libety & Power blog. I knew this would be fun.

InstaPundit sells out. I'm guessing that Reynolds is already pulling in at least $10,000 a year from Amazon sales alone, based on the Hayek Center Bookstore's very small but consistent stream of Amazon bookstore earnings.

Although blogospherians well know that the Blogfather does it for pleasure rather than profit, we here at the Hayek Center happily endorse Glenn's participation in the reward system of the market as it bankrolls even those who would do it for nothin'.

UPDATE: If you check out Glenn's Amazon code, it's pretty clear that his Amazon earnings accrue to his wife's charity. If he's pointed this out before, I've missed it.

Kevin is converting his excellent Truck and Barter blog into a team blog focusing on economics -- folks who might be interesting should drop him a note.

Truck and Barter makes the Washington Times in a story on student bloggers. Cool. Here is Kevin's full interview with the WashTimes reporter.

SoCalLawBlog does the first Bear Flag Review of 2004. Cool.

A highlight -- Dale Franks blogs Michael Crichton's Caltech Michelin Lecture "Aliens Cause Global Warming" on the topic of "consensus science" which Franks headlines "WOW! This is Important!". He's right. Don't miss it. Imagine a modern Popper or Hayek writing on the nonsense of global warming "science"/politics. Wonderful. As Franks says, "You really, really need to read the whole speech, especially if you, like me, are concerned about the increasing politicization of science."

fraterslibertas.com has the 2003 blogosphere awards pretty much covered.

They're Blogolicious! Bruce Bartlett on the best of blogoland:

There are thousands of blogs, but a few have risen to the top of the heap as must-reading for me every day .. As someone who writes mainly about economics, I naturally gravitate toward those with an economic bent. One of the more interesting is written by Brad DeLong, a liberal economist at the University of California at Berkeley www.j-bradford-delong.net . Although I disagree with almost all of his political commentary -- he served in the Clinton Treasury Department and hates George W. Bush with a passion -- he often makes interesting observations about obscure economic points.

DeLong has become something of a "left coast" version of Paul Krugman, the famously Bush-bashing Princeton economist and New York Times columnist. As such, his comments about the economy tend to be echoed on other websites and in the major media. Therefore, if one is interested in knowing what the liberal line is going to be on some current economic topic, Brad's website is a good place to look.

Another liberal blogger I read regularly is Max Sawicky, an economist with the union-backed Economic Policy Institute www.maxspeak.org. Max and I went to Rutgers together, which allows us to maintain a civil discourse despite being poles apart politically. I find Max interesting because he is unafraid to represent a far left, almost Marxist, viewpoint that is unfashionable even in the Howard Dean wing of the Democratic Party. But he is a good enough economist to be moved by the data, which is rare among ideologues.

Going over to the right side of the political spectrum, I enjoy a website maintained by my friend Don Luskin www.poorandstupid.com. He is the self-appointed watchdog of Paul Krugman. Every time Krugman publishes a column or appears on television, I can depend on Don to dissect it within hours, point out errors of fact, and note critical details left out and Krugman's undisclosed biases. For example, Luskin noted that when Krugman attacked the administration's policy toward Enron, he never disclosed that he had been a consultant to the scandal-plagued company, about which he even wrote a puff piece in Fortune Magazine.

Another economic blogger is Steve Antler, a professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago and the owner of a furniture manufacturing business www.econopundit.com. He combines real-world experience with technical economics. One thing Antler does that I find particularly interesting is that he subjects common economic claims about things like the relationship between economic growth and employment to rigorous econometric analysis. I turned him on to the Fair Model, a publicly available econometric model maintained by Yale economist Ray Fair fairmodel.econ.yale.edu, and Steve has made good use of it.

Two economists at George Mason University in Virginia, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, established a joint blog last year, in which both comment almost every day www.marginalrevolution.com. They don't limit themselves to topical subjects or even to economics and often discuss cultural matters, history, technology and lots of other things that I probably wouldn't otherwise have any reason to read about.

A more specialized economics blog is maintained by Stephen Bainbridge, a professor of law at UCLA www.professorbainbridge.com. He often illuminates fine points of corporate law that I find very helpful in a day when various corporate scandals seem to fill the paper daily. He also has a great love of fine wine, which he discusses frequently and knowledgably.

Two other law professors also publish blogs that often deal with current economic topics. One is by Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee www.instapundit.com and the other is by Eugene Volokh, also of UCLA www.volokh.com. Reynolds is widely admired for his amazing productivity -- he seems to post interesting commentary on all manner of things 24-7. Volokh is not as prolific, but compensates by having many guest bloggers who add to his site's output.

Bear Flag Leaguers take three of the top spots in Wizbang's 2003 Weblog Awards. Xlrq's motorcycle crash pays off big with a come-from-behind win in the "large mammal" category.

Right Wing News has the Best Blog of the Year award posted -- and a host of other blogosphere awards. Bear Flag Leaguer Citizen Smash made the list of top bloggers. No surprise there. Congratulations Mr. Smash.

Good advice about SPYWARE and how to fight it. The Bear Flag League has joined the fight, and a posting by Right on the Left Beach sent me there.

UPDATE: Xrlq has links to sites explaining everything you ever needed to know about spyware.

If you've had trouble visiting PrestoPundit or the various other Hayek Center web sites yesterday or today, my apologies. The Hayek Center server has been hit with a DOS attack over the last two days. With luck this too will pass.

Nick Denton is making several thousand dollars a month with his various blogs -- and that's not even counting his new sex blog, which pulled in a million plus visitors in its first week.

Still working on my first 100,000 here at PrestoPundit, perhaps because you'll find a lot more Hayek than sex -- althought the two have been known to get friendly at this site.

"The left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information" is D E A D -- with libertarians and conservatives now kicking butt in the culture wars. Example -- 22% of Americans now get most of their news from FoxNews. And then there's the Internet ..

The Internet's most powerful effect has been to expand vastly the range of opinion--especially conservative opinion--at everyone's fingertips. "The Internet helps break up the traditional cultural gatekeepers' power to determine a) what's important and b) the range of acceptable opinion," says former Reason editor and libertarian blogger Virginia Postrel. InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, agrees: "The main role of the Internet and blogosphere is to call the judgment of elites about what is news into question."

But there's much more to the cradle strangulation of the Left's media monopoly. A long and good article on today's media revolution.

PrestoPundit -- 50,000 unique visitors and counting ..

Citizen Smash

George Mason economist Tyler Cowan has his own blog. Definitely worth a blogroll. Cowen has been know to confuse the economics of Murray Rothbard for the economics of Friedrich Hayek -- but we'll forgive him for that, and point out that he's one of the more -- how shall we say -- "culturally literate" economists out there (if that isn't some sort of logically impossible statement).

Dan Drezner's top five Leftie blogs.

Calpundit's top ten conservative blogs.

Wendy McElroy has joined the Liberty & Power blog team.

History News Network has a new blog called Liberty & Power. It's a group blog whose members include Thomas Fleming, author of the Illusion of Victory and the New Dealers' War, Jeff Hummel, author of Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, Stephen Davies, author of works on the history of the private provision of services, feminism, and history, David Hart of Liberty Fund, as well as Charles Nuckolls and Scott O'Bryan.

Hayek-l'er Jason Soon has moved to London and is blogging from the LSE library. Cool.

Quotable:

the blogger -- "journalism's new equivalent of the posse"

-- Paul Greenberg

Randy Barnett -- legal scholar -- and Nick Schulz -- PrestoPundit junky -- are blogging over at The Corner. Some of their tasty recent postings:

Randy Barnett --

Even in the realm of Legal Abstraction--a wondrous realm close to Nirvana, and up the road from Shangri-La--it helps a lot to be defending a correct position. As Isaac Penington said in 1651: "Those who are to govern by Laws should have little or no hand in making the Laws they are to govern by.� This is true both of legislatures and judges, and requires a �dead� constitution interpreted according to its original meaning to accomplish. All the dead constitution thesis means is that �the Constitution should remain the same until it is properly changed� and neither legislatures nor judges may change it on their own. This is really what my forthcoming book, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty is all about.

Nick Schulz --

When Ronald Reagan was President he used to claim -- with some justification -- that he didn�t cut spending as much as he would have liked to since Democrats in Congress controlled the purse strings. Well, now Republicans control the purse strings in Congress. But the current Republican White House isn�t making the House GOP�s efforts to curtail spending any easier. CATO�s Tad DeHaven alerts Corner readers to this telling Official Statement of Administration Policy[PDF] which blasts House members for not approving even more spending for such federal jewels as the Mentoring of Middle School Students program and the Mentoring Children of Prisoners program. (Inquiring minds: Do Children of Prisoners who are also Middle School Students qualify for two scoops of federal raisins with these programs, or just one?)

Randy Barnett --

This morning in The Corner, Peter Robinson writes: �Next week I'll be shooting a couple of episodes of Uncommon Knowledge, one with Judge Robert Bork, another with Paul Johnson, the English historian. Within his field, each knows everything.� During his Senate confirmation hearing, Judge Bork revealed that there was one thing about which he knew nothing, The Ninth Amendment:

I do not think you can use the ninth amendment unless you know something of what it means. For example, if you had an amendment that says �Congress shall make no� and then there is an ink blot and you cannot read the rest of it and that is the only copy you have, I do not think the court can make up what might be under the ink blot if you cannot read it.

Years later, I was on a Federalist Society panel moderated by Judge Bork. During his introduction, he noted my books on the Ninth Amendment and remarked, �seems like something I should read.� Indeed. In your interview, Peter, you night ask him what he now thinks it means. If he says it refers to state statutory and common law rights (the answer he gave in The Tempting of America)�BUZZ�wrong answer. (The correct answer: natural �liberty� rights.)

Anyway, check it out yourself. Lots more there, including Peter Robinson, the former Reagan speech writer. I really think group blogs are a big part of the future of blogging, and I've talked to a few folks about starting a liberal / Hayek / human science themed group blog at the Hayek Center. If any of you folks have some thoughts, suggestions or ideas, send me a note or leave a comment.

Worth quoting:

In a way blogs are very old-fashioned .. [they are] are reproducing something people thought for a long time we had lost, the discussion in the public sphere by the ordinary people.

-- Glenn Reynolds in a USA TODAY feature story on blogging.

HE'S BAACK! And it turns out the sharks didn't get a tooth in him.

Jonah Goldberg, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, Nick Schulz, and Dave Kopel on the impact of blogging on the news and opinion business. (via Virginia Postrel)

Some very nice folks have linked to PrestoPundit. These are also very interesting folks. I'd encourage everyone to take a peak some of the following:

EconLog
Truck and Barter
BusinessPundit
Dean's World
Tom Palmer
Virginia Postrel

More in a bit.

Dean's World has an interesting post on blogrolls and the "gift economy". Worth reading.

A BBC reporter blogs Brazil -- including audio of the mating call of the Brazilian frog fish.

Of monkeys, voodoo and crazy-man posting -- traffic tips for bloggers. Quotable:

I know how to get a ton of traffic: post a lot of crazy stuff about monkeys, voodoo, weird crime & other oddities. We learned this doing Tabloid.net in the 1990s, and back when a significantly smaller percentage of Americans were online -- say, 1997 -- we had 100,000-visitor days on a regular basis. We also worked 17 hours a day & didn't make any money to speak of, so I no longer believe a lot of traffic is the key to the kingdom. Getting a lot of regular traffic takes hard work. Glenn Reynolds is smart & funny & writes well & has interesting views, but more than all of that he's a hard worker. He posts like a crazy man. I love going to his site in the morning to see how much stuff he posted on a dozen topics.

(via Joanne Jacobs)

The blog revolution -- in Iran.

The blogosphere -- the no weenie zone.

The Top 50 political blogs (Alexa rankings):

1) Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish: 7,203 2) Instapundit: 9,228 3) Poynter Institute: 9,973 4) James Lileks: 14,740 5) Little Green Footballs: 14,740 6) Talking Points Memo: 19,193 7) The Agonist: 19,444 8) The Smirking Chimp: 21,486 9) The Command Post: 24,233 10) Daily Kos: 26,404 11) The USS Clueless: 29,934 12) Blogs Of War: 35,245 13) Dean's World: 36,210 14) Scrappleface: 36,277 15) Howard Dean for America: 37,052 16) Lt. Smash: 37,486 17) Jim Romenesko's Obscure Store & Reading Room: 39,903 18) Right Wing News: 42,802 19) This Modern World: 43,879 20) Maxspeak: 49,274 21) Nick Denton: 55,259 22) Stand Down: 57,756 23) Buzz Machine: 58,426 24) Matthew Yglesias: 59,599 25) The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: 59,935 26) Taegan Goddard's Political Wire: 61,223 27) The Truth Laid Bear: 62,166 28) Spinsanity: 63,680 29) Matt Welch: 68,220 30) Talk Left: 72,312 31) Cold Fury: 72,485 32) Oliver Willis: 72,774 33) Samizdata: 75,067 34) Warblogs:CC: 75,182 35) Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing: 75,195 36) A Small Victory: 76,482 37) Vodkapundit: 80,019 38) Ken Layne: 82,306 39) Moxie: 82,688 40) Virginia Postrel: 89,783 41) Asymmetrical Information: 90,134 42) Winds Of Change: 90,308 43) Rachel Lucas: 97,302 44) Rantburg: 99,742 45) Overlawyered: 104,341 46) Tacitus: 107,176 47) Amish Tech Support: 109,438 48) Gary Hart: 118,274 49) The Volokh Conspiracy: 136,650 50) Unqualified Offerings:136,929

Compiled by RightWingNews. Don't miss his methodological explanation and caveats.

UPDATE: RWN missed a few, including Karen DeCoster at somewhere in the top 10, and The Agitator at somewhere in the top 20. And of course PrestoPundit.com in the top 50 with a bullet.

Great story with the details on how one newspaper reader with a little help from the internet and the blogosphere exposed Maureen Dowd's fabricated Bush quote. With this great quote from Glenn Reynolds:

Uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds sees the emergence of online group fact-checking in a parallel to Russia's post-Soviet glasnost. "People are appalled, saying it's the decline of journalism," he told me. "But it's the same as when Russia started reporting about plane crashes and everyone thought they were just suddenly happening. It was really just the first time people could read about them."

(via Instapundit)

Randy Barnett has just joined The Volokh Conspiracy. This is a major addition to both the Conspiracy and the blogosphere. Barnett is the author of the perhaps the most important work in post-Hayekian jurisprudence produced in the past decade The Structure of Liberty: Justice and the Rule of Law.

Here is a bit from Chapter Two of the book:

"The problem of knowledge in society is ubiquitous. So are the means by which we cope with it. Perhaps this is why the knowledge problem is so easily overlooked as a problem in need of a solution. The particular problem of knowledge that I am interested in here concerns the knowledge of how to use physical resources in the world.

All human beings are confronted with a multitude of ways that they may use physical resources, including their own bodies. The challenge of making good choices regarding the use of resources would be difficult enough in an "atomistic" world where one's choices had no effect on the choices of others. Since this is not our world, the problem of a person or association making knowledgeable choices among alternative uses of physical resources is compounded by other persons and associations striving to make their own choices. Indeed, given the number of possible choices persons might make, the number of persons making choices, and the physical proximity of each to the others, it is remarkable that the world is not in complete chaos. The world is not in chaos, I suggest, because concepts and institutions have evolved to harness the diverse knowledge about potential uses of resources ins a manner that contributes to harmonious and beneficial interaction.

In this chapter, I discuss what I call the "first-order problem of knowledge." This is the problem of knowledgeable resource use that confronts every person in any society. No one has placed greater stress on this particular knowledge problem than Friedrich Hayek. As he explains:

"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated from but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources--if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by those "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality [1]."

Hayek's account does not assume that everything that people believe is true. Rather, it maintains that (a) there are many things each of us believes that are true and (b) access to these truths by others is severely limited. The limited access to each of these different kinds of knowledge gives rise to a problem of knowledge that every human society must cope with in some manner or other.

[1] Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society," Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 77-8 (emphasis added). For additional discussion of the knowledge problem see Don Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980)."

ArgMax has a new pair of binoculars and a new job at OMB Watch.

Will Grub plus the blogosphere topple Google?

Eugene Volokh fields questions on academic blogging. Snippet:

I used to read the stories that the editors of the L.A. Times, the N.Y. Times, or the Wall Street Journal think are worth reading. Now I read blogs -- such as InstaPundit, Mickey Kaus's Kausfiles on Slate, Andrew Sullivan, during the war The Command Post, and so on -- and read the stories (in a wide range of newspapers and magazines) that the bloggers think are worth reading. Blogs provide a much wider range of editorial judgment to choose from, and it turns out that I like the editorial judgment of some bloggers more than I like the editorial judgment of some newspaper editors.

Daniel Drezner considers the pros and cons of academic blogging:

I think the piece underemphasizes the scholarly reason for blogging. Picking apart the scholarship of a Michael Bellesiles or a John Lott is a rare occurrence. More important is the way blogs can engage an audience outside the small world of students and colleagues. At their best, scholar blogs can function as what Hayek called "second-order intellectuals," applying abstruse theories to real-world problems. They can open a window on the inner workings of ivory tower, debunking stereotypes of academics as detached from the real world. At their worst, no one reads them and you get denied tenure for engaging in such base pursuits.

LewRockwell.com has a new blog. Pro-freedom, anti-government, anti-war, anti-empire politics served up hot.

John Hawkins explains the real dynamics of a blogosphere story

Jason Soon at Catallaxy Files has a note up giving out top blog awards. I'm too modest to mention any of the winners, but I must respond to Jason's now repeated complaint against the name of my blog -- it just ain't Hayekian enough he says. In honor of that complaint I've added one of my rejected blog titles to my current banner slogan -- "MEME-O-MATIC". So my response is .. it could have been worse!

OK, let see now. Bill Bennett doesn't write his own books. Rick Bragg doesn't write his own news stories. Hmmm .. could it be we've uncovered the secret of Instapundit at last!? Naahhhh.