The Objectivism Online Meta-Blog

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Paul recently posted the following alert to my OActivists list:

Currently, the federal government does not allow people to carry concealed weapons in National Parks. The Dept of the Interior is considering changing that rule so that if you have a valid permit to carry in your state, then you can also carry in a National Park located within that state.

(Currently, one can do so in a National Forest but not a National Park.)

The Fed Gov is currently requesting public comments in support or opposition of this measure.

The proposed rule change can be found here: General Regulations for Areas Administered by the National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

You can leave a comment in support of those rule changes.

Here's the comment I submitted:

As a concealed carry permit holder in Colorado, I strongly support this change in rules to allow the carrying of firearms in national parks as state law allows.

The ban on firearms in national parks disarms honest, law abiding citizens, thereby preventing them from protecting themselves if attacked. Meanwhile, the criminals know that park visitors are easy pickings, precisely because they are disarmed.

The standard claim that allowing concealed carry will result in more violence and crime is plainly false -- as empirical data from the 36 states with shall-issue concealed carry laws proves. Morally, the government ought to allow people to protect themselves from criminals in emergency situations when the police are not on hand.

Please do implement this change in rules.

After I wrote that, I saw that others noted that the rule should allow a concealed carry permit holder from any state to carry in any national park. That's right, and I wish I had thought of that!

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Recently, there have been a couple of high-profile articles featuring excerpts from the forthcoming book by Fareed Zakaria, international editor for Newsweek, entitled The Post-American World.

One article can be found here at the Newsweek site: "The Rise of the Rest".

The second article from Foreign Affairs is mirrored here: "The Future of American Power".

The New York Times has just reviewed the book here: "A Challenge for the U.S.: Sun Rising on the East".

These articles have already gotten a lot of attention on the blogosphere, and I anticipate the book will also be widely discussed. The basic premise is that the current era of American dominance in the world will soon come to an end, yielding to other powers such as China and India, much as the British dominance in the 19th century ended in the early 20th century (fortunately yielding to the United States.)

Zakaria does recognize important differences between the two situations, and he makes a number of correct observations with respect to specific issues and challenges facing the US. For instance, in the Newsweek article, he correctly points out that the US benefits greatly from energy of hard-working immigrants seeking to better their lives. In the Foreign Affairs article, he correctly notes that onerous government regulations threaten to harm the vitality of our capital markets, to the detriment Americans in a global economy.

However, he also makes some serious errors. For instance, in the first article, he argues that the key in the international arena is to work on stabilizing the "global system" and ensuring that "China, India, Russia, Brazil all feel that they have a stake in the existing global order", to lessen the dangers of "war, depression, panics, and breakdowns". In the second article, he blames our "dysfunctional" political system, and argues that politicians of both major political parties must "compromise" in order to address major issues such as "health care, Social Security, tax reform".

Overall, he doesn't quite manage to tie all his points into a single unifying theme. Hence, I think this is an excellent opportunity for interested Objectivists to set forth their own arguments on the source of American greatness, what happened to erode it, and how we can recover it.

For example, here is the LTE I sent to Newsweek in response to their article:

American decline is far from inevitable. America rose to greatness because it was founded on the principle of individual rights for all men (albeit imperfectly implemented). The resultant boom in American prosperity and power was the result of a capitalist system that allowed men and women to freely use their reason to better their lives. China and India are prospering because they are starting to allow partial capitalism into their economies as well.

If America wants to remain a vibrant, prosperous country, we need to abandon our current path towards European-style welfare statism and return to laissez-faire capitalism. The government should confine itself to protecting the individual's right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and barring the initiation of force between men. If we reaffirm that basic principle, America can continue to remain a shining example of freedom and prosperity for the rest of the world.

Paul Hsieh, MD
Sedalia, CO

Obviously, much more could be written on this subject. And Objectivists have a number of important and unique ideas to contribute to this discussion.

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In "The Art of Fiction" (Ch 10), Ayn Rand speaks of dramatizing a scene versus narrating it. While narrative is indispensable, important parts must be dramatized. This makes them concrete to the reader. If supported only by narrative, they remain "floating".

Worse still, narrative can sometimes contradict the concretes. Rand says: "Whenever you make estimates in narrative... ...be sure that the action and dialogue support your estimate. If you say that a man's conversation is sophisticated—show it. Otherwise, do not make the estimate."


A good salesman understands this. Even a rookie salesman won't say something as abstract as "this car is good"; but, even saying "this car is fast", or "this car is silent", or "it's economical" is a little "floating". One has to help the customer concretize what that means. Concretes: "even today, a full tank of gas will only cost you $25", "this uses half the fuel of your current car, in a year that'll save you $1,500 on gas", etc.


A silicon valley venture-capitalist got so tired of sales-pitches that were long on narrative that he laid down what he described as the "no adjectives" rule. Here is a little of what this investor said:

I hate adjectives. I don't want to hear that one of the company founders is a "fantastic sales exec." I want to hear that she was Presidents Club the last twelve years running.

I don't want to hear that the product is "revolutionary and paradigm-shifting." I want to hear about the specific features of the product that are differentiated and how.

I don't want to hear that the company has "massive market traction." I want to see a graph of progressive quarterly sales and a giant sales pipeline.

How's that for everyday philosophy.

By Nicholas Provenzo from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Add this to the horror file:

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it's come to that.

"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring." [David R. Baker, San Francisco Chronicle]

And if that story astounds you, just wait until you read this (hat tip: Noodlefood):

Jim Porter, chief technical analyst for one of the UK's largest banks . . . uses heliocentric magi astrology to predict the direction of the international financial markets. Millions of pounds worth of commodities, shares and currencies are traded on his command. His decisions may affect the value of your pension, your home, and perhaps decide whether or not you have a job tomorrow.

When I spoke to him late last year, he told me that the position of the planets indicated a 3.2 percent fall in the American markets. The following week they duly fell 3.5 percent.

"My attitude is that if you can test it, and it works, then it's just another tool that you can use to predict the direction of the markets," he says.

"I have tested it and astrology works. Used with other techniques it can give you confidence, and the more confidence you have, the bigger the risks you can take." [Danny Penman - www.newsmonster.co.uk]

Wow. If I had my money in a UK bank, I'd be searching high and low to make sure it wasn't in this guy's bank.

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Via Arts and Letters Daily is an article about a pair of academics enjoying their day in the sun as proponents of the latest rage in political philosophy (and trauma care), libertarian paternalism. I've commented on this idea before.

What this article caused me to think about was how difficult endemic confusions about the nature of capitalism and the purpose of government make it even to intelligently discuss many valid discoveries and ideas unearthed by academics.

For example, the following is a really clever way to increase the safety of certain stretches of road:

"You see that?" Richard H. Thaler asks as we ride down picturesque Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Thaler knows the route well. He travels it every day on his commute home from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he is a professor of behavioral science and economics. At the moment, he is excitedly jabbing his finger toward an approaching curve in the road, telling me that it is the scene of numerous accidents caused by drivers who fail to sufficiently reduce their speed. Then he directs my attention to a grid of lines that appear on the road ahead of us: Evenly spaced at first, as we near the apex of the curve, the lines begin to bunch closer together, which makes us feel like we are speeding up.

As Thaler taps the brakes and gently steers into the bend, he explains how the tightly spaced lines trigger an instinct [sic] that causes drivers to slow down. With evident glee, he notes that Chicago is effectively exploiting -- to society's [sic] benefit -- one of the many ways in which human perception is flawed. Or, as Thaler puts it, drivers are being "nudged" toward safety. [bold added]

For the sake of argument, I merely note before going on with this that man does not possess instincts and that the notion of "benefit" cannot apply to "society", except as a collection of individual men.

The interesting thing here is that this creative use of road markings really is a good idea, and it would likely see legitimate use in a fully free society -- by private firms interested in lowering their liability for automobile accidents on the roads they own or operate and, perhaps, improving their reputation for building and maintaining safe roads.

Unfortunately, everyone is so used to the government owning the roads, and so used to it often footing medical bills that few so much as bat an eye when they hear of the government looking for ways to psychologically manipulate people into doing its bidding. Indeed, in this limited context, it is hard to argue productively against the government taking advantage of such knowledge about human perception.

But more unfortunately, the fact remains that the fundamental nature of the government is that it is the social institution that possesses the sole monopoly on the use of force. This is proper, when the government is delimited to its only legitimate role, protecting individual rights. Sadly, the government has progressively moved away from its proper function over the last few decades.

It is bad enough that the government owns and operates basically all the roads. It is worse that we also have longstanding precedents of it dictating how we are to dispose of our own property and live our own lives, because these precedents are being subordinated to how various busybodies who would substitute their judgement for our own would have us live our lives.

The article puts this attitude too perfectly not to quote it:

[Libertarian paternalism] is a corrective to the longstanding assumption of policy makers that the average person is capable of thinking like Albert Einstein, storing as much memory as IBM's Big Blue, and exercising the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi. That is simply not how people are, they say. In reality human beings are lazy, busy, impulsive, inert, and irrational creatures highly susceptible to predictable biases and errors. That's why they can be nudged in socially desirable directions. [bold added]

This is even more insulting than an argument Ayn Rand rightfully slammed some "pro-capitalists" for making in "defense" of capitalism: that we aren't good enough for a dictatorship!

This leads us to the third -- and the worst -- argument, used by some "conservatives": the attempt to defend capitalism on the ground of man's depravity.

This argument runs as follows: since men are weak, fallible, non-omniscient and innately depraved, no man may be entrusted with the responsibility of being a dictator and of ruling everybody else; therefore, a free society is the proper way of life for imperfect creatures. Please grasp fully the implications of this argument: since men are depraved, they are not good enough for a dictatorship; freedom is all that they deserve; if they were perfect, they would be worthy of a totalitarian state. ("Conservatism: An Obituary", in Capitalism:The Unknown Ideal, pp. 198-199)

Whatever the libertarian paternalists think -- if they do -- of man's moral stature, they clearly regard man as too stupid for freedom.

And so if individuals can't be left up to charting their own courses, what might a "socially desirable" direction look like? No surprise here:

What does a peculiar pattern on the road have to do with fixing the nation's health-care woes, protecting the environment, ... and increasing donations to charity?

Ideally, nothing. Except that the premise that the government should run everything is taken as an unquestioned axiom by so many today. In other words, these velvet-gloved pragmatists are helping the Left achieve what they have been trying to do for decades, but have failed to accomplish every time they have been open about it: Have the government run every aspect of our lives. This is made to look good by such things as the road-striping cited above, which distracts many from the fact -- if they have an inkling of it -- that the government running everything is, ultimately, detrimental to the survival of man as the rational animal.

It will come as no surprise that our featured libertarian paternalists are advising the far-left Obama campaign.

Regardless of how unobtrusive-seeming libertarian paternalists manage to make government interference in our lives, the fact remains that the government has no business eliminating our choices (as it does under medical experiments being conducted without patient consent in America), dictating our choices (as it does under certain "opt-out" organ donation schemes in Europe) or "nudging" us towards any kind of behavior at all.

The purpose of the government is to protect us from having our choices removed by other people, not to violate our rights by doing just that, through stealth or otherwise.

-- CAV

By David Holcberg from The Ayn Rand Institute Stories,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Right to Sell and Use "Medical" Marijuana
By David Holcberg (Ottawa Citizen, April 25, 2008)

Just as the government has no right to dictate what foods we ingest or what books we read, it should have no right to dictate what drugs anyone takes, even if the user is acting irrationally, so long as he does not violate the rights of others.

And in the case of people with terminal diseases, where the use is eminently rational, forcefully preventing them from using drugs that might alleviate their pain and improve their well-being is unconscionably immoral.

By Greg from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ready to engage your brain and get serious about understanding Rand's philosophical system? The Objectivism Seminar is about to go through Leonard Peikoff's presentation of the entire philosophy in Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR)!

Whether you are new to Rand or a veteran student of Objectivism, our sessions will be valuable to you: we'll go through the entire system, with the experienced folks refining their understanding and ability to articulate and apply the ideas, while the newer folks grapple with the ideas and ask all the right questions. So please don't be shy about jumping in -- the reading and meeting load is light, and you'll be working with a great group of people!

We'll begin the weekly sessions for OPAR on Sunday May 18, 7:30pm Mountain time, reviewing and discussing about two sections per meeting. I'll almost always be moderating to keep us on track. And as we go, each section will have two volunteers at the helm of the discussion (maybe you!): one reviewing the material, and one playing Devil's Advocate to stimulate productive engagement. Everyone else can join in as desired to flesh out our picture of important elements and connections, explanations and applications, and to bring questions and concerns for us all to grapple with.

For more information you can read the original Invitation to The Objectivism Seminar, and you can visit the www.ObjectivismSeminar.com site to get geared up for the journey!