Today I noticed another meaningless coincidence while reading Jim Henley’s blog. After watching Lucy Liu get scalped onscreen for the second time this weekend, I came home and checked my email and a few blogs, finding a post by Jim that’s all about scalping . . .

I don’t remember exactly when this was, but the first time I heard about scalping I was baffled to find out that it was illegal in many places. I was too young to know anything about economics or property rights theory, but I just didn’t get why you couldn’t sell something that you owned to somebody else who wanted to buy it. Libertarianism didn’t come along until much, much later, but this may have been the first time I realized that governments could and did pass laws that were clearly absurd.