Sundries

-- Friedrich Hayek's personal copy of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, complete with Hayek's own penciled commentary and annotations, will be up for auction at Sotheby's later this month. Such a doubly concentrated dose of the rationality of a free-market economy and the irrationality of the thought that human beings can plan an economy might be enough to overcome the ignorance of public officials who think otherwise. But there's only one copy and there's a whole lot of ignorant administrators and legislators.

-- Jesse Singal, writing at Reason, suggests that we not feel as though some kind of justice was done when a young adult fiction fan mob succeeded in getting writer Kosoko Jackson to pull his debut novel. We might tend to feel that way because Jackson was a part of a similar effort that wound up causing first-time author Amélie Zhao to pull her book. Both of them, it seems, were insufficiently woke. Singal is right, of course. All of the wonderful schadenfreude covers up the fact that books are being pulled for some weird reasons, protested by people who may not even have read them. That Jackson finds himself hoist on his own petard is not cause for amusement. OK, not much amusement. OK, first feel upset about the censorship and then you can feel some amusement.

-- SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon Crew capsule into orbit to rendezvous with the International Space Station. It carried a fully-monitored test dummy named Ripley in order to record what kinds of g-forces and other stresses a real flight crew would have and make sure those weren't dangerous to flesh-and-blood folks. It'll be nice if SpaceX succeeds with this project and we can stop hitching rides into space on Russian Soyuz craft. In fact if we keep it up, one day we'll be able to lament the state of modern technology by truthfully saying, "If we can put a man on the moon...," which is something we can't do right now.