Mises.org Available as a Torrent Download!

Anti-Statism, Education, Technology
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute has issued the second release of all of the content on their website as torrent files. This means that you can download all of the content available on Mises.org (as of June 15, 2010) by downloading various torrent files and opening them up with your torrent client (e.g., uTorrent, Vuze, or Transmission). This is great both for those who read Mises.org or listen to the media from that website. Thank you David Veksler, Jeffrey Tucker, and everyone else at the Mises Institute who made this possible!

The benefits of this are enormous. All of the information, wisdom, and knowledge on Mises.org is available for $0 to the general public, via Torrent download.1 This directly contradicts what Statists would have us believe is the nature of the free-market — people exploiting each other to succeed. How then do they explain the Mises Institute? The Mises Institute is a truly philanthropic organization, which helps thousands through education: education through peace and persuasion, not “education” at the barrel of a gun.

This will help the Mises Institute, its patrons, and Mises.org readers in numerous ways. Instead of having to navigate to the page or Media section of Mises.org and use browser plugins or spiders, those with a thirst for knowledge and understanding of economics and the free market can simply download everything they want through one torrent file. It also saves the Mises Institute tons of bandwidth, because people downloading torrents simultaneously share in the upload burden by seeding the file (if you download the file, please try to seed until your upload:download ratio is 1.2, this is normal Torrent etiquette). There is a dynamic carryover effect to torrenting: one person might only seed for a few weeks, but dozens of people who leeched from him might seed for a few weeks as well. Thus, there is a kind of digital compounding or interest-effect. Contrary to what you might think — and contrary to what advocates of intellectual property and particularly copyrights would tell you — this will not hurt Mises.org sales of books, but rather boost them, as explained by Jeffrey Tucker.

We can also think of this as a kind of grassroots, guerrilla intellectual resistance. The entire Mises.org media, book, journal, and PDF library will be distributed to thousands of hard drives around the world, will be shared by thousands of people. It can’t shut it down simply by shutting down the Mises Institute anymore. This has two benefits: (1) People can access Mises.org content even if the Mises.org website is down, provided they have the torrents; (2) If the US government wanted to shut down Mises.org, it would still face the distributed world-wide torrents, which would be almost impossible to shut down by a central authority.

So for those of you who are interested, please download: Help Mises.org and yourself at the same time. Download the books, pdfs, journal articles, videos, and mp3 files; listen to, watch, or read them; enjoy the overwhelming amount of knowledge you can have at your fingertips. This is truly a great example of Austrian economics at work: both parties clearly gain something from the interaction ex ante and almost certainly ex post too!

The Mises.org blog announcement:

Mises Torrents 2.0 Available

It’s been about a year early since the first public release of torrents containing all the document and media content on Mises.org. The Mises Institute staff adds new content frequently, so it is time for version 2.0.  Here are the 2010 torrents: Mises Media (132 GB), Books (8.6GB), Journals (4.1 GB), PDFs (324 MB), and ReasonPapers (1.4 GB).

For more files and details see the original announcement.  If you are new to BitTorrent, install the uTorrent client, open the links above, and you’ll be on your way.

If you downloaded an earlier version of this content, please do not re-download everything.  In both uTorrent and Vuze, you can get just the missing files.  In uTorrent,  start the download and let it create the placeholder directory, then stop it.  Overwrite the placeholder directory with your existing files, then “Force Re-Check.”  You can do the same in Vuze –  just enable the option to “Truncate existing files that are too large” under Options->Files.  Then resume.

By my best calculations, we seeded last year’s torrents to thousands of computers worldwide and served over 4 terabytes from our servers alone.  Please help us spread the word and make this release even bigger.

Join the discussion and post a comment

  1. I would like to thank Manuel Lora, Michael Barnett, and Geoffrey A. Plauche for their helpful insights and comments on this blog post. ↩

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…and this is bad because?

Education, Nanny Statism
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Over 2,400 tax-feeders-in-training are threatening to go ‘on strike’ by skipping classes today in protest over the MTA’s plan to cut NYC students’ free usage of the subway & bus system, which is an annual subsidy of at least $214 million (assuming they only use it twice a day to travel between home and school.)

Students decry the hardship and indignity of having to actually pay for something which might cut into their costly cell phone, video game and designer-jeans budgets. The strange thing is that I can’t see the downside here — in fact I’d like to think of this as a ‘win-win’ situation.

…and this is bad because? Read Post »

Was it worth it?

Democracy, Education, Finance, Vulgar Politics
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Well, as predicted (by me), in pursuit of one of Connecticut’s US Senate seats, Peter Schiff wasted a lot of time and money, and was forced to refrain from making several television appearances on financial news programs (due to campaign laws). He placed an embarrassing third:

Former professional wrestling maven Linda McMahon capped an improbable entry into politics Friday night when she captured the Republican Party endorsement for the U.S. Senate during a raucous Republican convention at the Connecticut Convention Center.

McMahon edged former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons after dozens of delegates switched their votes at the conclusion of the first ballot. She received 737 votes to 632 for Simmons and 44 for economist Peter Schiff.

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Was it worth it? Read Post »

Future of Freedom Fund

Anti-Statism, Education, Private Security & Law
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Besides traditional activism such as politics and writing and speaking, on occasion intellectual entrepreneurs try to find more innovative and creative ways to work for a free society. Examples  include various forms of “new libertarian nation” projects (like Patri Friedman’s Seasteading Institute, and the Free State Project), as well as the idea of subscription-based patrol and restitution advanced by Guillory and Tinsley, or Stephen Fairfax’s ingenious proposal presented at Austrian Scholars Conference 2010, “Returning Gold to the Consumer Marketplace” (discussed here).

Along these lines, I’ve been fascinated with an idea I got when I read about an utterly fascinating legal squabble way back in 1996 or so when I lived in Philadelphia. This concerns the infamous Holdeen Trusts, and a series of cases and legal disputes centered around same. An article about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer caught my notice because it concerned the efforts of an eccentric millionaire New York lawyer, Jonathan Holdeen, to set up a series of trusts that would one day totally wipe out taxes, at least in Pennsylvania (see also The Holdeen Funds, by Rajan Mylavaganam, below).

Holdeen set up a labyrinth of trusts in Pennsylvania in the 1940s and 1950s, lasting for hundreds of years, with the accumulated trillions of dollars to be eventually used to endow and completely fund the operation of the government of Pennsylvania. He chose Pennsylvania, believing that that state’s laws were most favorable to the validity of such trusts. Holdeen “modeled his plan somewhat after that of the thrifty Benjamin Franklin who limited himself to two hundred years (1790-1990).” (Holdeen v. Ratterree, 270 F.2d 701 (2d Cir. 1959); see also Holdeen v. Ratterree, 190 F.Supp 752 (N.D. N.Y. 1960); In re Trusts of Holdeen, 486 Pa. 1, 403 A.2d 978 (1979).)

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Movie Review: Ninja Assassin

Education, Fiction Reviews (Movies), Pop Culture, Statism, The Basics
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First of all, I found the title of the movie to be redundant from the get-go. The action scenes are mostly way over the top. The gore insanely so. Swords and other blades slice through body parts, even cutting men in half at the waist, as if they were hot knives slicing through butter. Ninja stars fly from hands like they are being fired from a machine gun. They even have chemtrails. Blood fountains and splatters by the bucket load. Our ninja hero takes dozens of lethal wounds, losing gallons of blood, and not only lives to tell about it but keeps on fighting. There is a bit of super-speed blurred movement and mind-over-body self-healing, so the movie is something of a fantasy action thriller. We’re treated to the cliché of the hero being down for the count, about to be killed, when someone he cares about is attacked and suddenly he discovers renewed vitality and determination and, inexplicably, an unbelievable (that’s saying a lot for this movie) leap in skill level.

For all that, I found Ninja Assassin to be entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour–inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of  elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization” (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being – not the other way round.

Cross-posted at Is-Ought GAP.

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