Shakespeare? Et tu, price gouger?

Wow.  So Shakespeare actually used his capital to speculate in food and commodities. 

Excerpt:  

William Shakespeare was a 'ruthless businessman' and tax dodger, researchers have claimed. 

Although he wrote plays that championed the rights of the poor and the needy, archived documents show the playwright was actually a wealthy landowner repeatedly dragged before the courts and fined for illegally stockpiling food and threatened with jail for evading taxes.

He 'stored grain, malt and barley for resale at inflated prices to neighbours and local tradesmen' at a time when Europe was suffering famines, the academics said, and channelled the profits into land purchases. 

They added that Shakespeare did all he could to 'avoid taxes, maximise profits at others' expense and exploit the vulnerable – while writing plays about their plight'. 

And his approach of 'combining both illegal and legal activities' meant he could retire after a working life of only 24 years.

Researchers at Aberystwyth University carried out an academic study looking into Shakespeare's 'other life' as one of Warwickshire's biggest landowners and have uncovered the less than savoury side to Britain's greatest playwright. The allegation he exploited famine has also led to suggestions that his Coriolanus, for years regarded as a plea for the starving poor, was in fact his way of trying to expunge a guilty conscience.

Note the allegedly dastardly thing he did.  Shakespeare stored grain when food was plentiful, and sold it when there was famine and shortage.  What a BASTARD!  It would have been much more moral to do nothing to ease the food shortage, right?  Um...wait, that can't be right.  It would appear t hat he increased the food supply when there was a famine.  Tell me again why that's bad?

There's more.

Grateful nod to M. Kaan. 

Finding the Marble in the Oatmeal

Talking with Robin Hanson is a little like drinking from a fire hose. In my latest doorside chat, we discussed the role of books. Specifically, we discussed the role they would occupy in the future. Clearly, with the rise of cheap computing, the very large share of information won't be printed on pulped wood much longer. What purpose then books a score years hence? Two generations? A millennium?

Me being me, I pumped these thoughts into the hydrant of euvoluntary exchange. It strikes me that the decline of the bound volume bears only superficial similarities to other defunct technologies. The printed word, if you'll forgive a modicum of poetic earwax, permits communion with ancestors distant in ticks of the calendar and turns of the cartwheel. Books bend our mind's eye to the lyrics of ages long gone across hill and sea, through darkest jungle, into the beating heart of civilizations now in ash and dust, lending fleeting glimpses of hearts and minds long laid to their eternal rest. The buggy whip, the sextant, the flint axe and the oil lamp might occupy places of fondness in the cockles, but none of the day-to-day items that have fallen out of use boast the same civilization-forwarding characteristics as the printed volume.

Tomorrow's information abundance permits the reader, should she choose, to guzzle as much unfiltered knowledge as can fit through the hose-et-nozzle of her attention as she can handle, perhaps much much more. Quaint tomes harboring musky odors will sit unread on shelves as identity emblems signaling conformity with the rough grain of history. Knowledge is a super-euvoluntary commodity: without it, humanity snuffles the forest floor for edible roots, picking lice and constructing crude toys from the bones and feces of slain animals. Without the lights of generations past, there is no holly jolly Christmas.

The book is the earthly vessel of this intergenerational super-euvoluntary exchange. It has laid claim to totemic reverence in Western Civilization since before even the first movable type. Libraries are temples, are they not? Home libraries are shrines. People are unlikely to abandon their shrines, even if they are filled with trashy Harlequin Romances and 101 Tasteless Knock Knock Jokes anthologies. Their purpose is to spray their owner's guests with the essence of her intellectual and cultural identity. Unless a suitable substitute comes along, folks--ordinary folks--probably won't be queuing up to abandon this.

People who build steam locomotives in the backyard or raise horses have hobbies. People who will continue to collect books long after their instrumental use has waned are cultured. Maybe this is an important distinction, maybe not. Either way, I can't imagine the stock of books changing all that much over the next century, even if the flow dries up considerably.

 Reference:

Things That Are in the Cradle

Source: timesunion.com  /  via: iheartchaos.com

The three folks you see to the left were found to be hoarding 135 cats in a small trailer in the New York town of Halfmoon early last week. Neighbors were alerted to the situation by virtue of the piquant aroma therein produced.

I'm not generally of the notion that animals have rights in the same way that people do. Animals have severely diminished moral agency and cannot be held legally accountable for their actions. I do however believe that animals are due some measure of care and that domesticated animals that are not granted by their owners or stewards a sufficiency of comfort have been maligned. I am of the opinion that pet ownership (and livestock management, though I'm less familiar with how modern husbandry is conducted) is a reciprocal arrangement. In return for companionship, the human agent agrees to provide for the welfare of the brute agent. Failure to do so represents a breach of an implicit contract.

So with that said, what's the deal with animal hoarding? It's egregious (and here I refer you to the Latin root of the word "egregious", translating roughly to "outside the herd"... see what I did there?) mostly because it's gross and weird. Our friends in the photograph on the left might be otherwise useful and productive members of society, but simply by virtue of having more than a few pets, they have merrily traipsed past the threshold of normal into a manse reeking of ammonia, dragging home dead mice and coughing up matted hairballs. The euvoluntary question is to what extent was the welfare of the animals in danger? How do the alternative arrangements for the kitties compare?

Now, this specific story offers little evidence one way or another (and that's striking on its own merits), but I forward to you the proposition that it doesn't really matter in terms of public opinion. I suggest that people find pet hoarding prima facie offensive. It's assumed that anyone deranged enough to keep over a hundred cats in an apartment or a trailer, regardless of the health and welfare of the animals, must not be taking adequate care of them.

I do hope that the adoptable animals find good homes and the borderline (if any) animals are rehabilitated. I'm not sure what opinion to have on these people though. I hope the gentleman in the middle continues what must be a storied career as a Flea Market Santa and that the ward there on the bottom pursues his dream of becoming a steampunk barnstormer, but let's hope that the followup to this story isn't as tragic as it might have been.

Questions for discussion:

• What are the limits on euvoluntary pet ownership? A safe, happy, comfortable home is euvoluntary. How about declawing? How about tail bobs or ear clipping? Are ridiculous dog outfits euvoluntary? Forced breeding? Consider the following: it's legal to eat your pets so long as you don't abuse them first. 
• What is the maximum acceptable clowder size? I've never met anyone who had more than three cats at once (though Mrs. verpetas did meet a crazy cat lady when working for the 2001 Lithuanian census... oh, the stories she did tell), but would five be nutty? Ten? Is it a function of residential square footage?
• Are there different rules for species and breed? I can imagine comfortably sharing living space with a couple of cats and, say, an iguana, but trying to do the same with a couple of horses and a camel to be slightly more challenging.
• Most importantly (for the Hayekian crowd), how important exactly is the role of local knowledge and discretion in cases of animal abuse? There is no national-scale animal welfare regulatory agency. Animal Control is de facto considered to be a local public good, and I don't see how it's any more or less congestible than, say, education or housing, yet Congress sees fit to have Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development. Why have animal rights lobbies been so impotent?

Which one do you suppose is the ringleader? My money is on the matron, but I'm prepared to entertain arguments to the contrary.