Thorstein Veblen and The Icelandic Commonwealth

The first of two quick notes on my recent stuff elsewhere on the web:

Here's Thorstein Veblen's description of the Icelandic Commonwealth, from his book An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation as existing in a quasi-anarchist form, where the government lacked most of the usual functions, such as defense, and coercive power. I sent this passage (which I discovered while proofreading the book in Distributed Proofreaders) in to Roderick T. Long, who had written about Iceland in a similar vein here and here; he hadn't seen it, and neither had David Friedman (the other libertarian most well-known for seeing Iceland as a model of anarchy).

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