The Objectivism Online Meta-Blog

A Calvin Coolidge Film

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

At the New York Sun is an article about the making of the first biographical film about Calvin Coolidge, a President I have long thought underrated, particularly since reading some time ago about how Progressive Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt drastically reversed many of his economic policies to help precipitate the Great Depression.

Aside from providing a rare portrait of an often overlooked President, the film strikes me as interesting in a couple of other ways based on the professed outlook of its maker, a self-described "'liberal' filmmaker":

"Why Coolidge?"

"Read his autobiography -- 250 pages, large print."

I did, and was intrigued. I moved on to his speeches, all of which he wrote himself. A master at delegating duties, Coolidge was not one to delegate beliefs. His speeches read like lay sermons to the American public, revealing fundamental values and ideals any small "d" democrat should embrace. I was hooked.

Intriguing, no? This writer has wondered whether Coolidge was as pro-freedom in the social realm as in the economic.

Having said that, the more I look at the article, the less certain I am that John Karol appreciates Coolidge for the right reasons. For example, he says the following about Coolidge just before praising his release of some who'd been imprisoned under Woodrow Wilson's wartime legislation -- Coolidge even called them "political prisoners" -- and his refusal to use executive privilege to prevent investigations of a scandal that might reach his administration.

Others may disagree, but I can't imagine Coolidge rising to political bait like flag burning, the Pledge of Allegiance, gay marriage, or school prayer. In my opinion, he would have viewed these "hot-button" issues as inappropriate, having nothing to do with presidential business.

Does Karol merely disagree (as I do) with Bush's stands on these issues -- or does he not fully appreciate the fact that part of the presiden't job is to help ensure that Americans remain free in all these areas? After all, if religious fundamentalists threaten to violate our rights on such issues, they do become "presidential business". Is Karol a member of the Old Left or the New? It will be interesting to learn which, and regardless of his evaluation of what Coolidge did in the social sphere, it will be interesting to learn about it.

Regardless, it is clear that Coolidge's tax cuts will be praised at least in part for the wrong reasons, although Karol's looking for what he deems praiseworthy does confirm my suspicions that Coolidge was not consistently pro-freedom on this issue:

New Deal historians maintain that the tax cuts of the 1920s reversed the progressive tax policies of Woodrow Wilson. Far from it. Exemptions increased so much that by 1927 almost 98% of the American people paid no income tax whatsoever. When Coolidge left office in 1929, wealthy people paid 93% of the tax load. During Wilson's last year in office they had paid only 59%. [bold added]

In one respect, having a liberal make this film will offer the following advantages: (1) There will be no effort to sweep such matters under the rug; and (2) if Karol tries to pass off a progressive tax (or any tax) as "pro-free market", he will do so less credibly than, say, a conservative filmmaker.

Having said all that, I do have one big reservation: Some of its favorable reviews, coming as they do from the likes of religious conservative Michael Medved and leftist Michael Dukakis, make me wonder whether I will find disappointment in Coolidge or in the objectivity of the film. Nevertheless, barring a strongly negative review from someone whose opinion I value, I am intrigued enough that I plan to watch this one.

-- CAV

"Hot Gas" Myopia

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

Editor's Note: This blog entry is based in part on an article that appeared in the print edition of the Houston Chronicle yesterday, but which has already been pulled from the web.

Dennis Kucinich, child prodigy, has already grasped the concept of "thermal expansion" at the tender age of 51 and he's making sure that all the adults out there who buy gasoline know it!

It is a little known industry secret that the amount of gasoline, when you fill up in the summer is less than the amount in the winter in terms of weight and energy. [And furthermore, p]eople are paying for gasoline they're not getting.

To get the science out of the way: Matter -- all matter, and not just gasoline -- expands as its temperature increases. Since a gallon is a measure of volume, this obviously means that at a higher temperature, there will be less fuel in a gallon because each molecule (which has a constant mass) effectively takes up more space. If you heat a balloon, it will expand. The same thing occurs in liquids and solids. (There are some exceptions. Water expands slightly as it freezes because the crystal structure of solid ice takes up slightly more space than unorganized liquid water molecules of near the same temperature.)

As Kucinich and every news article on this subject I have encountered are quick to point out, the oil industry has known about this for decades. Obviously, there is a vast conspiracy by Big Oil to gyp us all out almost a dime (not adjusted for government inflation of the money supply) per gallon six months of the year in some places (if we assume, as the Houston Chronicle's misleading graphic implied, that gasoline really does reach 90 degrees Fahrenheit in its underground storage tanks)!

As the articles are slower to point out, not only do temperatures vary far less underground (where gasoline is usually stored at service stations) than under the sun, but since fuel dispensing standards are tightly regulated by the government already, the notion of a vast conspiracy, at least by the oil companies, is patently absurd.

On that score, Kucinich should consider whether municipalities across the nation are systematically overcharging for water -- which he may be surprised to learn is also measured in gallons -- during the summer.

There is a legitimate point buried here, and it is this: Insofar as the government has, as part of its proper role (of protecting individual rights), the task of providing a means of settling disputes among parties to contracts, it is important that those who trade liquids agree to some standard of measuring said liquids. While the government itself need not be involved in defining such standards, they would need to be legally defined somewhere and that meaning be understood among all parties involved in such transactions.

But that is not what Kucinich is doing here, despite the fact that many consumers, addled by years of government "education", will doubtless be surprised to learn that the mass of gasoline in a one gallon volume does indeed vary slightly over the year. Not only does he ignore the fact that the government sets the standards for measuring gasoline volume and imply that business is evil by conveniently ignoring government sales of liquid commodities, he fails to take many other far greater factors into account when he focuses on (and exaggerates) the small decrease in the number of pounds of gasoline we buy per gallon in the summer.

To wit:

• Gasoline shortages (alternate link) induced by government regulations that prevent the building of new petroleum refineries -- and strain the capacity of those we already have by forcing them to cater to an artificially fractionated market via the mandate that they produce over 60 "blends" of gasoline. With tighter supply comes (effectively) increased demand and higher prices.
• Inflation, (alternate link) in which everything costs higher in terms of absolute dollar amounts, thanks to the government deliberately increasing the money supply. (If we're going to talk about "less bang for the buck", I would suggest that we start here instead.)
  
• Environmental restrictions on oil drilling (same article as above and here) which keep us from exploiting our own oil reserves as fully as possible -- even though we were the world's third-largest oil-producing country as recently as 2005!
  
• Decades of appeasing foreign violations of the property rights of oil companies, which together with our refusal to extract our own oil, have put Americans at the mercy of OPEC.
• Gasoline taxes, which alone accounted for a whopping 42 cents per (non-temperature-adjusted) gallon in 2002.
• Government-mandated blending of ethanol (alternate link) into gasoline, which one economist estimated in 2005 adds 35-40 cents to the price of each (non-temperature adjusted) gallon.
• Other government regulations (same link as above) that add to the overhead of various stages of the petroleum industry. Notably, an industry estimate by Shell (cited in the Houston Chronicle) for Kucinich's own proposal to shift American service stations from selling gas by volume to selling it by weight is that doing so would cost "$20,000 to $30,000 per" service station.

And on top of that last point, Hugh Cooley of Shell Oil rightly indicates that, "If gasoline were temperature-adjusted at the retail level, ... the market would adjust prices to take that into account as well. In other words, if retailers sell 'larger' gallons, you should expect they would charge more for (those) 'larger' gallons." Even if the goal of this lame proposal could be realized at the wave of the wand, Kucinich wouldn't save us a cent.

Leaving aside the fact that Dennis Kucinich clearly does not understand that it is not the proper role of the government to run the economy.... If he had a grain of the intelligence he attempts to project by pretending to be some expert in physics -- or an ounce (temperature-adjusted or not) of integrity -- he would stop nattering over how heat might cost some of us perhaps a quarter or so at fill-up time a few weeks out of the year and instead consider really addressing high gasoline prices. Doing so, he would see the hand of the government, and he would realize that he needs to get it off the throat of our energy industry.

Since it is not worth waiting for him to reach the age of 102 before he grasps the immorality and impracticality of statism, I suggest we work to stop him in his tracks now.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: (1) Two minor edits. (2) Added note on foreign policy.

Pipes on Iraq

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

Recently, on HBL, Harry Binswanger made a vital connection concerning the question of what our country should do about Iraq: that the question is really only a distraction from the real issue, which is, "What are we going to do about Iran?"

Given Iran's role in aiding international terrorists, inspiring other Islamic totalitarians the world over, and killing our men in Iraq, Binswanger's reasoning is, as I understand it, that what we do about that threat relegates any question concerning whether we should stay within Iraq or leave it to a question of what is best for us, militarily, within that greater context. If we elected to stay in Iraq after pummeling Iran, our job there (assuming we had a good reason to stay) would become far easier. And if we left, one of our main enemies will have been been defeated. Our leaving would hardly be taken as cowardice.

After considering that line of reasoning, it is interesting to look at Daniel Pipes' answer to the Iraq question in FrontPage Magazine. But before doing this, I must state that I find that the following assessment flies in the face of everything our President has done since toppling Saddam Hussein's regime: "President George W. Bush is right to insist on keeping troops in Iraq."

Why? Because everything we have done in Iraq has been in lip-service (at best) to protecting American interests and in fact to performing the impossible: claiming to give "freedom" and "democracy" (but merely handing political power) to a people whose culture will not permit freedom to exist for long, except by accident.

With a turn towards a rational policy of self-defense, one could reasonably keep troops in Iraq (just as invading Iraq could have served our nation's self-defense). However, I have seen no solid evidence that our President is pursuing a military victory over our foe -- the Islamic totalitarians -- whom he has still never even named. As far as I can tell, no such turn has occurred, and our President is keeping our troops in Iraq for the wrong reasons.

With that out of the way, Daniel Pipes outlines one of the more reasonable proposals about what we should do about Iraq that I have seen recently. He proposes that we salvage the Iraq war by "stay[ing] the course, but chang[ing] the course".

In part, America's credibility is on the line. The country cannot afford what Victor Davis Hanson notes would be its first-ever battlefield flight. The cut-and-run crowd deludes itself on this point. Senator George Voinovich (Republican of Ohio) holds that "If everyone knows we're leaving [Iraq], it will put the fear of God in them," to which Jeff Jacoby sardonically replies in the Boston Globe: sure, "Nothing scares al-Qaeda like seeing Americans in retreat."

The troops should remain in Iraq for another reason too: Iraq offers an unrivaled base from which to influence developments in the world's most volatile theater. Coalition governments can use them to:

• Contain or rollback the Iranian and Syrian governments.
• Assure the free flow of oil and gas.
• Fight Al-Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations.
• Provide a benign presence in Iraq. [some formatting changes]

Note how unsatisfying this is. Iran, the elephant in the room is mentioned -- as if having an elephant in the room is a normal thing. Every single aspect of this proposal would be better addressed by moving ruthlessly against Iran. Except, possibly, the last, and it needn't be addressed so long as America's interests are served. Moreover, if we fail to do anything more against Iran militarily, I don't see much of a difference between this proposal and what we are doing now.

As much respect as I have for Daniel Pipes, I must say that this article shows that there is no substitute for the goal of victory as a way to cut through the fog when contemplating predicaments like Iraq.

-- CAV

Environmentalists Against "Buying Green"

Irvine, CA--With organic food in every grocery store and hybrid cars on every stretch of freeway, "green consumerism" has become commonplace. But a backlash against such allegedly "earth friendly" shopping is arising; critics within the environmentalist movement are condemning the trend as superficial and contradictory. Says one environmental activist: "green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase."

"This criticism is extremely revealing about the true nature of environmentalism," said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute. "For decades, many environmentalists have insisted that protecting the environment is not incompatible with industrial civilization. To make their ideology more palatable, they regularly promise that living 'sustainably' doesn't have to come at too great an economic cost or personal hardship. But when people finally begin to come on board and make allegedly 'pro-environment' choices, they are condemned as 'light greens' and 'eco-narcissists.'

"The truth is that environmentalism is not compatible with human flourishing. It does demand economic destruction and unbearable hardship. The claim that its goal is to protect the environment for the sake of mankind is a Big Lie. Its goal is to protect nature, not for man, but from man--to preserve an untouched environment as an end in itself, no matter what cost or hardship that imposes on human beings.

"Anyone who thinks that 'eco-chic' is consistent with the principles of environmentalism had better think harder about the true nature of the ideology they are trying to support. What environmentalism truly demands is sacrifice to nature--the rejection of our modern, industrial civilization in favor of the decidedly un-chic, unglamorous hardship of a primitive, pre-industrial, stone-age existence."

### ### ###

Dr. Lockitch has a PhD in Physics from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and is a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). He writes and edits for ARI and is a professor in the Objectivist Academic Center, where he teaches undergraduate writing and a graduate course on the history of physics. His writings have appeared in publications such as the Orange County Register and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Conflict

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In rehearsal for Cyrano last week the director took a moment to give us a quick, amusing lesson in acting. When the phone rings with bad news, he said, then you should be happy when you answer the phone. When the phone rings with good news, you should be depressed.

By coincidence, I was struggling this weekend with a scene in my play in which a man learns his father has been killed. At first I had the man enter tentatively, unsure of what to say to a woman about the drunken night they just had. Then I remembered the director's lesson and had the man enter bubbling over with happiness, jabbering away about last night -- then the woman tells him the news. Much more interesting that way, especially since the audience knows the father has been killed and they're waiting to see how the man reacts.

By using the contrast of happiness to shock and grief, we can see more clearly what the news means to the character. If the character comes on sad and then learns of his father's death, we can't see it as clearly.

The conflict in the scene helps the actors, also. Instead of just serving as voice of exposition, the woman reacts to the man's happiness. Her job of telling him about his father's death becomes much harder. Every happy utterance burbled by the man becomes more unbearable for the woman. The actress has more to do.

I was writing a scene once, many years ago, that had the worst dialogue I had ever written. I couldn't figure out why. I struggled with the scene, rewriting the dialogue, but nothing worked; it was all flat and dull. After some months passed, when I had forgotten the dialogue problem, I looked at the scene again and realized it needed more conflict. So I rewrote the scene with conflict and suddenly the dialogue sparkled. I was not trying to write better dialogue, just more conflict, but better dialogue resulted. Conflict makes everything better (in drama, not in life).

Why is conflict necessary in drama? Because drama is, as Aristotle said, the imitation of an action. Human action is goal-oriented. Conflict shows how much a character wants the goal he is pursuing. Without conflict the action has no meaning and is not dramatized.

Say a story has a character get in his car, drive to the store and buy milk, the end. You could say that's the imitation of an action, something that happens all the time, but it's not a story. The action is meaningless. People buy milk. So what? But if his girlfriend has told him he better not be late for one more date and as he is buying milk on the way to her house he is hijacked by robbers who want him to be their getaway driver, then you've got the beginning of a story (doubtless a comedy).

If you want to make your drama better, make things worse for your characters.

Question for NoodleFood

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I've had a miserable waste of a day, thanks to a horrid migraine. So I'm going to let you folks answer this "Question for NoodleFood" from Jeff Montgomery:

My question is: what is a proper capitalist assessment of offshoring and immigration with regard to jobs?

Because I work in the IT industry, this topic comes up a lot. There are actually 2 issues I have in mind: offshoring, where companies hire workers that are located overseas, and hiring temporary foreign workers on US soil (H-1B visa). On the one hand, I can hardly blame employers for wanting to reduce costs by hiring in this manner, and if someone can truly do my job for less, I can't very well stand in their way. However this involves relations between countries and our government's job is to protect us, so I may be missing something. And there is the potential for huge losses of American jobs here depending on what is allowed (or if hiring ever becomes totally unrestricted). How does one properly assess the benefits and losses and apply the principle of individual rights to these issues?

Well, I can't resist one quick comment: The proper function of the government is not to "protect us." If that formulation were right, then a big fat welfare and nanny state would be just and proper. The purpose of the government is, in fact, to protect our rights. Americans do not have a right to a job. They do not have a right to force companies to hire them when those companies would prefer to hire foreign workers. Rather, Americans have the right to trade, contract with, and employ whoever they please, whether American or not. That freedom is not merely the only proper application of rights, it's also in everyone's interest. It is an important source of economic productivity via the specialization of labor. For details on the philosophic roots of opposition to outsourcing, I recommend this op-ed on outsourcing by Onkar Ghate.

Your Papers, Please

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Earlier this year, under “Chertoff the ‘Crime Czar’” (April 7) I remarked:

“The strongest evidence that the U.S. is not only losing the “war on terror,” but will be struck again with perhaps greater force, is the siege mentality of those charged with protecting the nation. Instead of destroying the states that sponsor terrorism, the U.S. is conducting the ‘war’ as though the enemy was some kind of super-Mafia gang whose members had to be detected and deterred. All we need do, goes the thinking, is identify the bad guys and keep them from entering the country. It elects to fight enemies dedicated to destroying this country with the methods suitable to Eliot Ness in his pursuit of bootleggers.”

I might have added that the “enemy” also includes Americans and harmless foreign visitors flying the American skies.

On my way back from the OCON conference on July 16th, I had a three-hour layover at Dallas-Ft. Worth airport (DFW) before boarding my flight to Richmond. This airport is one of the most traveler-unfriendly airports in the country. There are four main terminals – A, B, C, and D – and if one is unlucky enough to taxi up to terminal A and one’s connecting flight is at terminal D, one must rush through the throngs to find the “Sky Link” train to take to D. If one’s connecting flight is at terminal B, the same grueling exercise is necessary; on a map of DFW, A is adjacent to B, but actually not connected to it. At least, I couldn’t find a short crossover to it indicated in the bewildering array of signs.

So one boards the train and perhaps seven stops later, one arrives at the connecting terminal. Then one must find the right gate, and that could be in one of three directions and is usually a five to ten minute hike at a near run. With luck, one’s connecting flight gate hasn’t been changed.

I don’t know the financial history of DFW, that is, who or what paid for this “multiplex” abomination. But I’m betting that the Sky Link train was built with some Federal funds, and that the rest of this locked-down prison received a big share of state and Federal loot, as well, to make it so “modern.”

I confess a contempt for Texas in general. I lived there once. Its native boosters posture as really free, proud, independent individuals – “Howdy, pardner!” – whose ancestors were at the Alamo and all that. But, thanks to pork barrel politics, Texas is one of the biggest pigs at the Federal teat. The Lone Star state degenerated into the Lone Statist state, and taxpayers from Maine to Idaho are helping those “rugged” loners buy the ten-gallon hats that are as phony as the vaunted Texan “independence.”

DFW is also smoker hostile. What accounts for that must be the Bush family influence and the pull of other native anti-smoking evangelists. Unlike many other airports in the country, such as the Cincinnati airport, which provides several smokers’ lounges in its terminal complete with wall-installed lighters, DFW forces smoking travelers to make a decision: “quit” for perhaps hours before boarding a connecting flight, or go outside, if you can find an exit close to your connecting gate. That’s Texas hospitality for you.

The catch is: go outside, and go through the TSA’s pickpocket alley again. Even with a boarding pass. Which brings me to my main subject: the Transportation Safety Administration, and how futile, invasive, abusive, corrupt, and costly it is.

The TSA is futile on three counts: if Islamic terrorists strike the U.S. again, they won’t be coming through its airports. They are already here, or will find other ways into the country. Any Islamists with killing on their agenda will know that they are on various national and international watch lists (not that these are very effective anyway) and that their profiles must practically include their shoe sizes as well as their education history and national origin. They are going to poison a reservoir or run an oil tank truck through a shopping mall or the like, or work quietly to assemble the parts for a “dirty” bomb to detonate in some major city’s business district or seaport –and not to try to turn commercial aircraft into missiles again. Simply put, they are going to bypass the TSA and any other barriers erected by Homeland Security.

(The denizens of Washington D.C. needn’t worry about anything bad happening there; the Islamists have too many good friends in Congress, the White House, and the State Department whom they wouldn’t want to risk hurting or killing. So, all the security arrangements in Parasite City intended to deter terrorist attacks – the blockaded streets and surveillance and the like – are quite pointless.)

The TSA is futile because if President Bush dealt properly with this country’s enemies – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan – it would not be necessary. When this country was genuinely in a declared war with two formidable enemies in the 1940’s, air travel was not made miserable by any kind of federally imposed policy of search and seizure. Knock out or overthrow our current enemies, and their fellow travelers and jihadists in the U.S. and Europe would scurry back into their holes of anonymity, grateful that they weren’t vaporized or caught in the imam and mullah roundups. And all those power-happy unemployables waving their wands and picking through purses and feeling one’s rolled-up socks at our airports would have to find honest, productive work elsewhere.

The TSA is futile, because I got through three lighters and several packs of matches right under the noses of its thugs. I put them in the gray basket in which one is supposed to put one’s shoes and all pocket paraphernalia, including belts (women’s jewelry goes into what looks like white bedpans). Four times my basket went through their much-touted metal or illegal substance detectors, and all four times the baskets came down the ramp, their contents untouched, unscrutinized, unmolested. There is a way to fool the machines and the mini-minds that run them, which I will not divulge here. So much for the severity and thoroughness of airport security.

But a new, absurd TSA rule is: no bottled water can be brought through “security.” The water must be consumed or emptied out before a bottle can pass. Then one can fill it at a water fountain inside the terminal. Which obviates the purpose of buying spring water. What do these geniuses think anyone is going to take onboard? Nitro? Or some other, unstable, colorless, odorless liquid that won’t blow up in one’s backpack or purse on the way to the airport?

The TSA is abusive and invasive. At DFW I had my smoke, came through “security” again, then stopped to watch the unemployables put some Russian- or Polish-speaking tourists through hell. The irony is that everyone in this group was wearing an “I love America” shirt or sweater. Two were carrying small American flags on sticks. (The sticks somehow didn’t qualify as potential weapons, I guess.) One woman, who was at least 75, was made to walk through the X-ray four or five times. Each time she activated the alarm. Finally, they took her aside and repeatedly waved a wand over every inch of her body, including through her hair and between her toes. In the meantime, she was made to stand with her arms in the air. The unemployables just couldn’t figure it out.

I approached the TSA goon nearest me. “It’s the sequins,” I said.

“Huh?” the goon said, turning to me with suspicion.

“What’s setting off the alarm in the wand too is the metal in her sequins. Those sparkling things on her pullover sweater that say ‘I love America’?” I almost added “stupid,” but I wanted to see this woman’s humiliating ordeal ended, and held my tongue.

“Sir, please stand outside the security area,” answered the goon with all the patronizing officiousness of a school crossing guard.

But the goon then had a powwow with his colleagues. The woman was told to remove her sweater. She did, and walked through the X-ray again. No alarm. She was allowed to keep the sweater. Big-hearted Texans, I guess. Welcome to America, land of the free, home of the searched.

The TSA is corrupt. I have yet to see a TV special report on what happens to all the private property confiscated from passengers’ personal effects and luggage by the TSA. Its value by now must be in the billions. I’m certain it isn’t “destroyed,” and that a whole new racket has sprung into existence to “dispose” of that property. The TSA and its otherwise unemployable employees must have a vested interest in it since they’re the ones who steal it and must stow it somewhere.

But, this is a job for John Stossel and 20/20.

A brief news report on ABC last night featured an interview with a TSA official who said that “someone” is testing airport security by sending fake “bombs” through it, such as bricks of cheese with wires stuck in them. Frankly, these are either pranks or jihadists just ribbing the TSA.

The TSA is costly, not only in terms of taxpayer dollars to run and staff it and in terms of all the property that is confiscated that disappears into the black hole of corruption, but, far more importantly, in terms of abridged or surrendered rights. Are Americans growing too inured to the TSA’s legalized shakedowns? I think many of them are. The Bush administration has adopted a siege policy; most Americans have accepted and tolerate the role of being suspects.

Back in Washington D.C., Jihad Watch reports that Democrats want to remove from a Homeland Security bill a provision that protects Americans from lawsuits if they report suspicious activity on the part of Muslims and the Muslims are subsequently inconvenienced by the authorities. Doubtless Congressman Keith Ellison, Muslim and Democrat from Minnesota, is one of those who oppose the provision. Recall that Ellison, like Rosie O’Donnell, suggested that 9/11 was staged by President Bush as a ruse to seize power and blame the Muslims for the attack, just as the Reichstag fire in 1933 was staged by Hitler as an excuse to seize power and blame the Communists for the fire. He made the analogy, I didn’t.

On June 27th, several senior White House officeholders attended the rededication of the Islamic Center in Washington on its 50th anniversary. That was bad enough. Several of these “dignitaries” were women, including Fran Townsend, assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Karen Hughes, Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (another Texan and longtime crony of Bush’s). The Getty Images photo of the American dhimmis shows all the women wearing headscarves.

The White House itself has chosen to cozy up to such Islamic organizations as CAIR and MPAC, while Douglas Farah’s Counterterrorism blog reports that Bush has even extended a hand of friendship to the Muslim Brotherhood, the grandfather of most Islamic jihadist gangs. Through third parties – chief of whom is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, an unemployable of elevated rank – it is dealing with Hamas, and has publicly announced its support of Palestinian Fatah.

Yesterday, July 24th, Bush’s envoys had their second round of talks with Iran, but not about the Americans being held hostage by Snake Eyes Ahmadinejad. To demand their release would be too tactless, you know. But the spineless, Christian character of Jimmy Carter is held to be a model of moral behavior to be emulated. (But, don’t forget Ronald Reagan, who did nothing to retaliate against the murder of over 200 Marines in Lebanon.) Why accuse Iran of killing American soldiers in Iraq when its leader is open to negotiation? That would only make Ahmadinejad angry.

In the meantime, all over America, arrogant unemployables in spiffy rent-a-cop style uniforms are closely examining the contents of women’s purses and nebnosing through men’s briefcases in search of threats to the “homeland.”

And, in the meantime, I keep thinking of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who so badly wanted to chastise the Barbary States for enslaving American citizens and seizing American property in the Mediterranean, and who each finally got his chance in 1805 and 1815. Neither Jefferson nor Madison elected to put Americans through a security wringer to ensure that the Islamists of their time didn’t slip into the “homeland” to sabotage all the canal-building projects.

They sent the U.S. Navy to the source of the problem, and that was the end of that.

Mount Olympus

By Edward Cline from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Very likely it is a common occurrence: attending an OCON induces in me, from the first day to the closing banquet, a state of mind that permits me to forget the “outside” world for a while, at least in a selective sense. It is out there, but I feel no compulsion to read a newspaper or watch TV news or don mental “body armor” to deflect the slings and arrows of Christians, Muslims or statists or maintain the hide of a rhinoceros when dealing with my fellow men. It is Galt’s Gulch for a week and a half, regardless of its venue. It is safe to say that most attendees, and even most OCON speakers, look forward to the respite such a conference promises, to be immersed, for all too brief a time, in a social and intellectual milieu in which one doesn’t need to fight or be in a constant combative mode. The “ominous parallels” of the outside world are left behind.

This year’s conference celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It was held, appropriately, in the high reaches of the Rockies, about an hour and a half’s drive from Ouray, the little town that served as a model for Galt’s Gulch, where in the novel the “best and the brightest” – and the most rational – retreated from a cannibal world they chose no longer to “serve.” The official attendee count was 515, the largest attendance ever.

This is not to say there weren’t sour notes. Mountain Village, where most of the attendees stayed and which was a ten-minute gondola ride up the “hill” from Telluride, apparently reneged on its contract with ARI, so that lecture rooms and other facilities were abruptly not available because of renovations (although I observed no renovations being done in the hotel). This resulted in many of the events, including breakfasts, lunches, meetings and lectures, having to be held inside a circus-size tent erected in the plaza outside the conference center.

The other gaffe was the lunch arranged in Ouray itself. The staff at the Elks Lodge where it was to be served underestimated the appetites of some 300 Objectivists who were bussed there, leaving many attendees to find their own midday meals in town. I don’t think many attendees complained; everyone on the side trip seemed to be happy to tread the streets where Ayn Rand and Frank O’Connor walked in 1948. I hope ARI is refunded some of its money on both counts.

I went separately with some friends to Ouray that same day, arriving about two hours ahead of the bus convoy. When we parked, I immediately noticed a hand-made wooden sign in a shop window: “Galt’s Gulch, Colorado: Elevation 7,705 ft.” I went inside and asked the girl clerk about it. She knew the significance of the sign – her father, the shop’s owner, had read Atlas years ago – and said that only five of them had been made. All she knew was that some Objectivists were expected to visit the town. I warned her that she should expect to be mobbed and that she would sell every one of them, even at the posted price of $145 each.

When we returned to Ouray at the end of the day from our jeep safari to 11,700 feet, the shop window now sported an “Ouray” sign. The girl told me, with a residue of happy incredulity, that not only had she sold every one of the “Galt’s Gulch” signs (“we were wall to wall people!”), but that she had taken orders for dozens more, and had spoken with someone with ARI to make smaller reproductions of the sign for sale through ARI. As Felix Leiter once remarked to James Bond, “Nothing propinks like propinquity.” Especially in the fellowship of trade.

The main attraction of the conference was Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s six-lecture presentation, from his forthcoming book, on his DIM theory (Disintegration, Integration, Misintegration), of how to evaluate philosophical, cultural and political trends. Tore Boeckmann, Darryl Wright and Shoshana Milgram talked about the uniqueness of Atlas Shrugged as a literary work and as a philosophical phenomenon. Optional courses covered mathematics, economics, American and British history, the history of science, Plato’s Laws, property rights, the giants of law from Babylonian times up to the 19th century, and great plays. Dr. Milgram’s talk was especially fascinating; she discussed the literary origins of John Galt.

A highlight for me was Dr. John Lewis’s “The Meaning of Victory: 1945,” in which he presented the U.S.’s policy of dealing with a vanquished Imperial Japan. The principles he explicated in those lectures could just as easily have been applied to Nazi Germany, and were to a limited extent – except that the underlying irrational philosophy that governed Hitler and German culture has not been eradicated root and branch, as it was in post-war Japan by MacArthur. Dr. Lewis might agree with me that the de-Nazification of Germany should have been broadened to include a program that “de-Kantized” Germany. But, that would have been a task for a philosopher, and none practicing at the time had the proper credentials.

The same principles and policy could have been applied to a defeated Iran and Saudi Arabia, the chief state sponsors of Islamofascism, our most immediate international threats today, had our political leaders ever chose to acknowledge them and acted on that knowledge. Which is not likely now. Most of the anti-intellectual rubes, short-rangers and power-seekers in Washington want to throw in the towel in the “war on terror” and focus more on how to bring full-scale socialism to the U.S., among other statist dreams.

Coming back to the “real world” – one that we didn’t need to take seriously for a week and a half, or at least have to contend with at every corner – was as depressing an experience as I guess it was for Dagny Taggart, when John Galt dropped her off in the middle of nowhere after spending a month in “Atlantis.”

At least she didn’t need to undergo a body frisk and a baggage check.

Announcing A Special Installment of “A First History for Adults:” The Islamist Entanglement

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Free Lecture on “The State of History”

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

On Libertarianism and Other Non-Fellow-Travellers

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Francisco Gutierrez, who I know from Front Range Objectivism, recently posted a good statement on why he no longer identifies himself as a libertarian. Some of you might have met Francisco at OCON. He was one of the 50 (!!) people from Colorado in attendance, out of a total of over 500 (!!).

Gus Van Horn also has a clear and brief explanation of the problem with publishing in a forum like The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, as well as some comments on libertarianism in a recent round-up.

Finally, since I can't afford the time required to write a real blog post about this topic, I do recommend reading Mike (of The Primacy of Awesome) on how the secular Rudy Giuliani will help entrench even more religious fundamentalists in our judiciary by appointing more strict constructionists.

A New Mascot for the Dems!

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

Rich Lowry writes an interesting column about efforts on the part of Congressional Democrats to derail legislation that would prevent civilian tipsters (like those who called in the Islamofascist Six) from being gratuitously sued in return for their trouble.

Because we can't have police everywhere, civilian tips are indispensable. A video-store clerk alerted authorities to the Fort Dix plot after he saw a tape of men in Muslim attire firing guns — but not before he wondered, "Should I call someone or is that being racist?" Debra Burlingame points out that an airline employee who checked in two of the 9/11 passengers didn't ask for a special search of them because "I was worried about being accused of being 'racist.'"

If the King amendment doesn't make it into law, people in such agonizing situations will have to worry not just about being called racist, but about being sued if their suspicions prove unfounded. The King amendment garnered 304 votes in the House and 57 in the Senate, but a majority of Democrats voted against it in both houses, and now key Democrats are trying to keep it out of a House-Senate conference committee.

This perfidy should hardly surprise anyone coming as it does from the Democrats, who object to our war effort not for proper reasons (i.e., for its being too misdirected and too feeble), but for too closely resembling a real war effort for their tastes.

What is more interesting to this hawkish commentator is not just the fact that the Democrats find themselves in a position to thwart this legislation at all, but that we are having to discuss such a measure as the King Amendment in the first place.

Another blogger recently stated that, "The most astonishing development after September 11, 2001 was the Democrat Party tying their political fortunes to America's defeat." He is right on one level -- in the sense that no party could afford to openly oppose the war effort after the Islam-motivated atrocities of September 11, 2001. But Myrhaf is wrong on another -- in the implicit assumption that the course charted by the Republicans so far can lead to anything but America's defeat.

As John Lewis, whose "'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism" remains required reading for anyone serious about ending this threat, recently pointed out in a talk of his that I attended, that America's military is unstoppable -- when it is presented with an actual, rational goal.

Nation-building in a Moslem country without either separating religion and state or removing the destabilizing influence of its theocratic neighbor -- while we should really be talking about annihilating that very neighbor (Iran) instead does not constitute such a goal, if it constitutes a goal at all. This is a scheme without a definition for victory, but with plenty of opportunity for America to be symbolically defeated, as the terrorists strove to do with their target selection on that infamous day. In a sense, the Democrats were shrewd to tie their hopes to our defeat.

We are fighting wars we should not be fighting and not fighting wars we should. And further, rather than proudly assert our right to defend ourselves, we proclaim that our forays into Afghanistan and Iraq are for the good of their citizens. Besides exporting our welfare state, we are at home slowly imposing a garrison state rather than retreating from a level of governmental involvement in our personal lives that is already far too high.

There is no need to belabor Democratic opposition to the war abroad, which, given that many who poll against the war do so because they want it fought more vigorously, one can argue that the weak-kneed Republican effort has done something they could never accomplish on their own: made this opposition into a viable political strategy. What this story does is expose the same Republican weakness (and willingness to exploit it by the Democrats) at home.

Just take the case of airport security. The Republicans, just as much the "party of small government" as they are the "pro-victory party", have done nothing to further the cause of the property rights of those involved in private aviation, a tack I have noted would -- in conjunction with a proper declaration of war -- eliminate many of the legal difficulties we are seeing the likes of CAIR take advantage of. As I stated about the circumstances of a lawsuit related to an incident of vigilantism by an airline passenger:

[M]any [Moslems and] people who look [Middle Eastern] are in fact dangerous. Furthermore, our governments are being prevented from effectively monitoring them by regulations that prevent "profiling" various minorities. Worse still, the legal climate for airlines to refuse service to such suspicious characters -- or even demand compliance with such reasonable requests as certain types of dress -- is hostile at best. And when the government fails to do its job of protecting individual rights, ordinary citizens become more likely to take the law into their own hands.

...

Yes. The particular passenger who "arrested" Stein may have been too high-strung. And yes, what he did (i.e., impersonate a police officer) was illegal. But this entire episode could have been prevented by a proper recognition of property rights by the government as well as an unleashing of the powers of law enforcement from the absurd constraints of multiculturalism. Why? Because [Seth] Stein would have been more believably pronounced "safe for flight" before he ever boarded the plane. [italics added now]

There is nothing wrong with the King Amendment -- as a stopgap measure to protect Americans from frivolous lawsuits. But to pass the American people such a band-aid while ignoring the deep wound of statism as it continues to fester is to ignore the home front of this war.

The greatest weapon possessed abroad by totalitarian Islam is our nation's reluctance to wage an uncompromising and ruthless war. Within America, it is our government's constant meddling in the affairs of ordinary citizens, which "civil rights" lawyers will be more than happy to turn against the very people they are supposed to protect.

The Republicans are obviously not working to rectify either situation in any fundamental way. The resulting ineffectiveness is what allowed the Democrats to get their foot in the door during the last congressional election. Ironically, though, the Democrats quite often still manage to make the Republicans look almost good by comparison, which may ensure a stalemate for quite some time. Perhaps, rather than continuing to employ a donkey as a mascot, the Democrats should consider a goat instead.

Having said that, I will leave by stating yet again the way out of the stalemate: Support freedom at home, while remembering the actual purpose of war, which is to remove our enemy as a threat. That is, protect individual rights by rolling back the welfare state at home, and by actually defending America abroad.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.

Proposed Ban Deficient in "Vitamin F"

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

In an ARI press release, Alex Epstein notes that the government's filthy hand, after lifting our wallets, is trying to pry itself into our very mouths!

Congressmen are haggling over which flavors of cigarette to ban. Nearly all agree that chocolate, strawberry, almost any other conceivable flavor be banned, but there is a furious debate as to whether clove-flavored cigarettes should be a permitted exception.

"The very existence of such a debate," said Alex Epstein, junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, "the fact that the government is dictating anything related to what flavor cigarettes may or may not be produced and consumed is an ominous indicator of the state of liberty in America.

...

"There is no realm that is off-limits to such a government. Once we accept the government's right to ban flavorful cigarettes, by what principle will we resist when anti-obesity activists try to ban our favorite, tasty, high-calorie foods? Or when 'investor advocates' ban us from making government-designated 'risky' investments? Americans should assert their rights, take responsibility for their own lives, and demand an end to the paternalistic state." [bold added]

Needless to say, many of those who favor such meddling probably are guilty of a form of context-dropping I think of as the "dictator fantasy", in which they imagine that the government will intervene only in those areas they want it to -- and to force people to act only in the ways they want.

In this case, supporters will imagine that the government will act only to promote good (physical) health, while not, say, banning something else (such as a type of music) they love. I would suggest that such people consider the possibility that some busybody somewhere is working overtime to find an excuse palatable enough to "sell" such an intervention to the general public.

In other words, I would advise such people to do the following: Consider the idea that whatever you like will be deemed, correctly or not, "harmful" by the state, which will then try to ban it. Consider further, the likelihood that the government will wrongly label something as harmful or wrongly make it illegal. No matter which side of the abortion debate you land on, for example, the government has, at one time or another, enforced a law you strongly disagree with.

The state is clearly not infallible, but it alone of all social institutions can tell people what to do. This is the virtue -- which our public seems to be forgetting very quickly -- of government limited to the protection of individual rights. This protection is what each of us needs so we can use our own rational judgement freely to live our lives as fully as possible.

And this fact points to the final irony in this trivial-sounding squabbling over flavors, which is identical to that I observed when other politicians were reported to be debating whether to ban trans fats:

Not in any way to condone what ... [the] fitness fascists [are doing, but they] have a point. Lots of people do make stupid choices. But the government telling them what to do is a violation of individual rights, and would-be dictators like Rivera are destroying one necessity of life, freedom, in the name of promoting another, good health. We need both to survive....

Would you "trade" the ability to breathe air for the ability to drink water? I didn't think so.

But the "trade" of freedom for health is exactly the same kind of fool's bargain. Too bad the government forces food manufacturers to label for nutritional content while neglecting to provide similar warnings with proposed legislation. If it did, the flavor police would have to admit that their idea would cause a potentially lethal deficiency of "Vitamin F". That is, it deprives man of an essential condition for his survival: Freedom.

-- CAV

Liberate American Energy Producers, Neuter OPEC

Irvine, CA--A recent Reuters report quotes a top OPEC official declaring what price the cartel seeks to bring about: $60 to $65 per barrel, he says, is "appropriate."

"It is taken for granted," said Alex Epstein, a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, "that OPEC, a despicable cartel of tyrannical regimes that coercively limits their oil production to raise prices, can manipulate our energy future on a whim. But such a state of affairs is completely unnecessary; it is a product of U.S. environmental regulations that strangle domestic energy production.

"In a free energy market, the response of competing producers to OPEC-influenced high prices would be to eagerly cultivate new oil sources in America--such as the many untapped sources of oil in Alaska and on America's coastlines--and to vigorously seek to produce truly practical alternative sources of energy, such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Such actions would drive oil and energy prices down, and with them OPEC's ability to manipulate prices.

"However, thanks to environmentalist policies, America's energy market is anything but free. In the name of preserving pristine nature at human expense, our government has rendered huge oil and natural gas deposits off-limits, has strangled coal production for decades, and has demonized and practically prohibited the pursuit of nuclear power.

"It is only because America has for decades throttled domestic energy producers that the looting dictators of OPEC continue to wield major influence over our energy supplies. It is time for America to liberate itself from the shackles of OPEC by liberating energy production from the shackles of environmentalist policies."

Celebrating Income Inequality

By Alex Epstein

Democrat and Republican candidates for President are debating one another on nearly every issue--but nearly all are united on one thing: America faces a crisis of "income inequality." The rich are getting richer, the refrain goes, while the poor and middle class are held back by stagnating wages, lousy schools, and growing healthcare costs. The solution, we are told, is more government intervention: spend more on education, provide "universal healthcare," and force employers to raise wages through minimum-wage increases and union protection legislation.

But all of this outcry is based on a false premise--that income inequality is bad. While some of the problems critics point to are legitimate concerns, income inequality is not. Income inequality is a natural and desirable part of a free, prosperous society.

Criticisms of income inequality are always couched in a certain type of language. For example, it is claimed that wealthier Americans "command" an "unfair share" of our "national wealth." Such language implies that American wealth is a communal pie that belongs equally to all of us.

But it is no such thing.

The vast wealth that exists in America has been created--through the productive activities and voluntary arrangements of individuals. And individuals do not necessarily create the same amount of wealth. Compare the value brought into existence by the entrepreneur whose productivity software is eagerly bought by millions--and the checkout clerk at a store that sells it. Such vast differences in productivity--which can be caused by vast differences in ability, work ethic, interests, skills, and choices--are the root of vast differences in income.

Because all wealth is created, it rightly belongs to those who earn it (or their chosen beneficiaries)--and no one can rightly claim to deserve wealth earned by others. If someone wants to make more money, he is free to enter a new field, gain new knowledge, start a business, or do anything else to enable himself to create more value.

It is often implied that the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else--that if some get big slices of pie, the rest get only crumbs. But the exact opposite is true. Since wealth (including pie) is created, there is no limit to how much can exist--and the wealth of others cannot inhibit us from creating and enjoying our own. Further, the wealth creation of the richest Americans makes us far more productive and well-off.

Consider how the wealthiest individuals in any free economy, businessmen, make their money. The job of a businessman is to orchestrate productive enterprises that efficiently coordinate people, resources, and tools to create valuable products. Businessmen profit when they bring out valuable products at desirable prices; thus, they are continually making more, better, and cheaper products for everyone to purchase. Businessmen profit when they make others more productive; thus, they are continually seeking to create new jobs that can add to their bottom line, and providing their workers with as many productivity-enhancing tools and technologies as they can. Businessmen's pursuit of profit has been the driving force behind the incalculable increase in our standard of living over the last 150 years--and economic history shows that the freer they are left to make money, the greater the increase in productivity and wages at all levels.

What then explains the poor educational opportunities, growing healthcare costs, and stagnating wages that are real problems for many Americans?

Government policies based on the same egalitarian mentality that denounces "income inequality." In the name of giving citizens "equal access" to education and medicine, the government has virtually taken over these fields, placing crippling controls on both producers and consumers. In the name of equalizing income, it enforces minimum-wage and anti-firing laws that make it difficult for eager newcomers to enter the job market. In the name of saving us from the alleged evils of rich, Big Business, it enforces endless regulations that apply to every business, decreasing the productivity of all and making it hard for new business ventures to succeed.

In America, equality should mean only one thing: freedom for all. If business and wages were deregulated, we would see a dramatic rise in economic opportunity. If education and medicine were left free, with America's businessmen, doctors, and educators liberated to offer education and medicine at all different price points, we would see quality and price improvements like those for computers or flat-panel television sets. But these benefits of freedom require that we recognize the moral right of each individual to enjoy whatever he produces--and recognize that none of us has a right to something for nothing.

Alex Epstein is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Contact the writer at media@aynrand.org.

The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality - Part III

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

MIND-BODY INTEGRATION

This is part 3 of a 6-part essay on the Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here. This section contains material drawn from two of my earlier essays: The Psycho-Epistemology of Acting and Mind-Body Integration. Those essays are not necessarily prerequisites for reading this one, but reading them may be helpful in understanding some of the ideas I present here.

In part 2 of this essay, I presented the example of an artist who derives great pleasure from the use of his hands despite their accidental flaws, and I asked the questions: Why does the artist value his hands in particular? And why is it that he takes such pleasure in looking at his hands, even though their individuating characteristics (size, shape, etc.) are non-essential?

In order to answer these questions, one must introspect further to discover the relationship between automatized perceptual data, automatized physical motions, automatized concepts, and automatized evaluations. Once this relationship has been established, I will have laid the groundwork for explaining why man treats sexuality as a value. But first, let us consider some examples of the automatized mind-body connection in the subconscious.

For decades, self-help gurus have noted that if one forces himself to sit up, smile, and take a deep breath, it can immediately improve his mood. There appears to be a connection between the automatized motions associated with an emotion and the emotion itself. When one forces himself to sit up and smile, he is effectively telling his subconscious that he is calm and comfortable, and the subconscious responds with the corresponding emotion.

Similar examples can easily be found through observing the relationship between one's own emotional and physical states. I find that, when my lover and I are fighting, if I lower the tone of my voice and force the grimace from my face, it calms me down immediately. Kelly also picks up on this non-verbal communication. As I sit here and type this, I can force myself to experience (some degree of) anger simply by contorting my face and body into the kind of form they would be in if I were enraged. This rage has no outlet or object, so it is merely a shadow of the true emotion, yet this example still illustrates a subconscious connection between mind and body. I encourage the reader to experiment with this, as it may seem counter-intuitive.

Consider another example. If one detects the smell of honey in the immediate vicinity, he may begin to think about the taste of honey or remember instances when he has eaten it, even before he is focally aware of the fact he is actually smelling it. Or, one could begin to sing a song to himself, only to discover that the song had been playing in the background all along. This indicates that the subconscious actively integrates perceptions, memories, and emotions outside of one's focal awareness.

One final example: If one ponders a happy memory, like the first time he kissed his lover, he may experience a shadow of the happiness he felt at that time, along with the physical manifestation of that happiness. If he feels happy in the moment, his mind may naturally wander to memories of happy occasions. Kissing one's lover in a passionate way may bring to mind memories of their first kiss.

These examples demonstrate how the subconscious can integrate perceptions, physical motions, ideas, memories, evaluations, and emotions. In my essay Mind-Body Integration, I argue that the mind treats these elements as related units, and that one's "subconscious provides him information related to whatever his mind is focused on at any particular time." If the perception of a certain entity is connected in the subconscious to certain ideas or memories, then one can expect that when he perceives that entity, his subconscious will respond with the related units (whether they are ideas, memories, emotions, etc.)

Now let us apply this principle to the example of the artist and his hands. If my hypothesis is correct, then in his subconscious the artist's automatized perceptions of his hands are integrated with the automatized physical motions his hands perform; are integrated with his automatized knowledge of the values his hands create; are integrated with his automatized evaluations (and emotional responses) generated by the attainment of his values. When the artist perceives and/or uses his hands, his subconscious provides his focal awareness with the related units, which include positive value judgments -- and therefore positive emotions.

This kind of emotional feedback is essential in the same way and for the same reasons as psychological visibility. (I provide a skeletal explanation of psychological visibility in the 'Background' section of my essay The Morality of Monogamy, but for a full explanation, see Branden's Psychology of Self Esteem or his article on the Muttnick Principle published in The Objectivist). In perceiving oneself creating values, some of the concretes (like the artist's hands) become symbolic of a host of abstract values. While it may may be impossible to hold a great number of abstractions in one's focal awareness at any particular time (per the Crow principle), they can be experienced through the direct perception of an entity which is related to many other values in the subconscious. This is why the artist derives pleasure from perceiving his hands, and why he values his particular hands more highly than any other pair of hands on Earth.

In the 2nd part of this essay, I argued that the artist is justified in highly valuing his particular hands despite their accidental flaws. The units integrated by his subconscious relate to his particular hands, not anyone else's. While the artist may be able conceptually to evaluate the relative advantages of another man's hands over his own, the artist cannot actually use someone else's hands, and thus only his own hands can serve as perceptual symbols of his values.

This principle can apply to other individuating elements of self, both physical and mental. For instance, I am a big fan of the Carolina Panthers, and I love being a Panthers fan. I chose the Panthers based on nothing more than geographical proximity -- they were the closest football team to my hometown of Greenville, SC. Yet I value the Carolina Panthers much more highly that any other football team. Certainly it is not more ethical for a football team to make its home in the Carolinas, or New York, or some other city. But while my choice was initially based on a trivial factor, proximity, over time my subconscious has integrated the concept of the Carolina Panthers with countless perceptions, experiences, and emotions related to my love of the game. I argue that it is entirely legitimate for me to value the Panthers more highly than any other sports team on Earth, and the elation I feel when watching them play is justified.

In conclusion, I believe it is legitimate to value individuating elements of self which are morally optional, provided that one's particular attributes fall within a range -- a range determined by one's hierarchy of values.

In part 4 of this essay, hopefully coming up next week, I will argue that one's sex is a significant factor in determining the range of physical motions possible to him (especially compared to members of the opposite sex), and that one's sex is integrated with many individuating aspect of self, which causes him to experience sexuality as a value. Stay tuned.

--Dan Edge

Ward Churchill, Begone!

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Thank goodness:

TO: CU-Boulder Students

FROM: Office of the President

SENDER: officeofthepresident@cu.edu

DATE: 07/24/07

SUBJECT: Communication from President Hank Brown on the Board of Regents Vote

Dear Students of the University of Colorado,

The Board of Regents today voted to accept my recommendation to dismiss Professor Ward Churchill from the faculty.

I made the recommendation for the good of the university. CU's success depends upon its reputation for academic integrity. A public research university such as ours requires public faith that each faculty member's professional activities and search for truth are conducted according to the high standards on which CU's reputation rests.

We are accountable to those who have a stake in the university: the people of Colorado who contribute $200 million annually in tax dollars, the federal entities that provide some $640 million annually in research funding, the donors who gave us more than $130 million this year to enhance academic quality, the alumni who want to maintain the value of their degrees, the faculty and staff who expect their colleagues to act with integrity, and the students who trust that faculty who teach them meet the high professional standards of the university and the profession.

Given the record of the case and findings of Professor Churchill's faculty peers, I determined that allowing him to remain on the faculty would cast a shadow on our reputation for academic integrity.

Throughout the case, we have adhered to shared governance procedures as determined by the CU Faculty Senate Constitution and Bylaws and adopted by the Board of Regents. During the course of two-plus years, Professor Churchill presented his position in writing, in person, with his attorney and with witnesses of his choosing. He was afforded full due process.

More than 20 tenured faculty members (from CU and other universities) on three separate panels conducted a thorough review of his work and found that the evidence shows Professor Churchill engaged in research misconduct, and that it required serious sanction. The record of the case shows a pattern of serious, repeated and deliberate research misconduct that falls below the minimum standard of professional integrity, including fabrication, falsification, improper citation and plagiarism. No university can abide such serious academic misconduct.

Professor Churchill fabricated historical events and sought to support his fabrications by manufacturing articles under other names. His publications show more than just sloppy citations or using the work of others without crediting them. The Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct found multiple instances of falsification, fabrication and plagiarism. Any student engaging in such a wide range of academic misconduct would be seriously sanctioned. We should hold our faculty to a high standard of professionalism

While Professor Churchill's peers on the faculty panels were unanimous in finding research misconduct, views on the appropriate sanction varied. Some faculty recommended dismissal while others suggested a less severe penalty. My obligation as president is to recommend to the Board of Regents an appropriate sanction that is for the good of the university.

Some on the Boulder campus and beyond claim Professor Churchill was singled out because of public condemnation of his writing about September 11, 2001. They see this case as a referendum on academic freedom. The university determined early in the process that his speech was not at issue, but that his research was. The prohibition against research misconduct extends to all faculty, regardless of their political views. We cannot abandon our professional standards and exempt faculty members from being accountable for the integrity of their research simply because their views are controversial.

Professor Churchill's activities not only run counter to the essence of academic freedom, but also threaten its foundation. Academic freedom is intended to protect the exploration and teaching of unpopular, even controversial ideas. But that pursuit must be accompanied by the standards of the profession. Academic freedom does not protect research misconduct. After his research misconduct was identified, Professor Churchill did not admit any errors or come forward to correct the record, as is expected in the profession.

CU's most important asset is its academic reputation. Professor Churchill's actions reflect poorly on the University of Colorado, but we will not let the research misconduct of one individual tarnish our reputation. Our faculty members take pride in their work and demonstrate their respect for the high standards of their profession and this university day in and day out. Professor Churchill's research misconduct is an affront to those who conduct themselves with integrity.

We will remain accountable to those who have high expectations of Colorado's flagship university. And our faculty will remain true to high professional standards to ensure our reputation for academic integrity remains intact.

Sincerely,
Hank Brown
President

I think I'd like to throw a party!

The Flavor Police

Irvine, CA--Congressmen are haggling over which flavors of cigarette to ban. Nearly all agree that chocolate, strawberry, almost any other conceivable flavor be banned, but there is a furious debate as to whether clove-flavored cigarettes should be a permitted exception.

"The very existence of such a debate," said Alex Epstein, junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, "the fact that the government is dictating anything related to what flavor cigarettes may or may not be produced and consumed is an ominous indicator of the state of liberty in America.

"The purpose of a government is to protect our freedom to live our lives according to our own judgment. This necessitates leaving us free to choose whether, what, and how much to smoke--whether we choose to rationally enjoy cigarettes in moderation or make the mistake of smoking too much--just as we are free to choose how to conduct ourselves in eating, marriage, child-rearing, and business, even though mistakes in those realms are legion. Individuals should be absolutely free to consume whatever flavor of cigarette they regard as most enjoyable.

"On the principle of individual freedom, those who are concerned about the hazards of smoking have every right to work to persuade--but not force--others to choose not to smoke. But the anti-smoking movement and today's paternalistic government reject the principle of individual freedom. On the premise that individuals are incapable of governing their own lives, the government dictates to us what we may or may not do in an ever-expanding number of realms: from medical treatments to retirement planning, to what kind of cooking oil we may consume, to forbidding flavorful cigarettes.

"There is no realm that is off-limits to such a government. Once we accept the government's right to ban flavorful cigarettes, by what principle will we resist when anti-obesity activists try to ban our favorite, tasty, high-calorie foods? Or when 'investor advocates' ban us from making government-designated 'risky' investments? Americans should assert their rights, take responsibility for their own lives, and demand an end to the paternalistic state."

Failure in Black America

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

Myron Magnet of City Journal has written a lengthy, but very perceptive article on what I think of as the death spiral of America's black culture, a phenomenon he correctly indicates as being not merely political (i.e., reinforced by the welfare state), but also cultural.

Does all this matter? Well, we all see the world through the spectacles of our culture and subgroup; we depend on belief and prejudice to understand our experience; we slip into the manners and rituals of our culture as a way of knowing who we are and how we should behave. Imagine yourself one of the vulnerable kids that rap sings about, born in a project to an uneducated, teen single mother, possibly put into foster care, surrounded by gangs and gangstas, attending an unruly school that teaches -- if it teaches anything -- that you are a victimized minority in an unjust country that doesn't want you to rise, and that you should nevertheless have high self-esteem because you are fine just as you are. No one gives you a book that opens up the world of possibility beyond your cramped existence. Meanwhile, through the headphones that you always wear pulses the beat of rap, driving out thought and underscoring the message of anger, hatred of the oppressor policeman, and resentful entitlement that the lyrics convey. You go home and watch rap videos on BET. You dress like a gangsta, talk like a gangsta, behave like a gangsta.

In other words, if black youths once had to face a life of persecution as sacrificial victims to white racism, black youths must now face an ordeal that is even harder in a spiritual sense: a life of debilitation due to thorough indoctrination with altruism and as recipients of altruistic sacrifice. Both aspects of such an upbringing make one scorn the attitudes and action necessary for a fully human existence.

I am currently reading Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality 1890-2000, by Adam Fairclough, on whose cover this image of a civil rights demonstration appears. Most of the men in the line are wearing placards that read, "I am a man."

If one thing has struck me in my reading so far, it has been that despite generations of mistreatment, inequality before the law, and the small (but real) mortal danger posed by lynching, the spirit of black Americans was never broken.

It is this spirit which makes this picture so moving: These men are confronting injustice, meeting it eye to eye, and asking only to be treated as equals.

And, alas, it is this spirit which seems to be broken today as one reads the article, especially as one reads about the abject poverty in spirit exemplified by so much of rap music and gangsta culture, which Magnet sees as both symptoms and reinforcing factors of this cultural decline.

What I would have liked to see more of in this analysis is an explicit naming of the ultimate villain in the misfortunes suffered by black Americans throughout history: The morality of altruism, which was used to justify their slavery in the first place (e.g., George Fitzhugh: "[S]ome were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them, and the riding does them good.") and is now used both to excuse underachievement and to justify massive welfare programs and proposals for "reparations". Only when this villain is named does the shift in black culture really make sense: Whereas the black man was once fighting altruism, he has now accepted it, having apparently been duped by his becoming a recipient of sacrifice rather than the sacrificed. Sadly, neither position is enviable.

While it is easy to see how slavery and second-class citizenship are harmful, it is not as obvious why learned attitudes of entitlement and the so-called "social safety net" are perhaps even more harmful. As the data brought up by this article (as well as its references to Theodore Dalrymple, who has studied the British underclass) should illustrate, these cultural and political forces conspire, as I have discussed before, to permit the black underclass to "escape the ultimate consequences of their chronic dereliction". In other words, the natural incentives for rational self-interest are removed from the equation during one's formative years in such milieux.

The loftier benefits of civilization praised by this article, the courage of countless otherwise ordinary men during the civil rights era, and even rule of law came into existence because men whose minds were focused on the purpose of living their lives saw these things as worthy of obtaining for themselves. To sever the very basic mental association between one's own effort and one's ability to live a life proper to man thus endangers his life -- whether that danger is posed by slavery itself or by a lifetime of essentially having scorn for self-improvement beaten into one's head.

Ayn Rand's famous protagonist, John Galt, once said, "I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." Although this oath is a rejection of the morality of altruism (and its political consequence, collectivism), its last clause is also, and more deeply, an identification of the fact that it is not possible to live as a man -- by attempting to live as a parasite. This is part of what the more "dystopian" aspects of that novel were meant to show, and that is what is playing out right now in black America.

The liberation of black Americans will remain incomplete until reason and egoism replace whim and altruism as major components of their culture.

-- CAV

Socialist healthcare failing in Canada

By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog

NY Times:

Canada remains the only industrialized country that outlaws privately financed purchases of core medical services. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other politicians remain reluctant to openly propose sweeping changes even though costs for the national and provincial governments are exploding and some cancer patients are waiting months for diagnostic tests and treatment.But a Supreme Court ruling last June — it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists — appears to have become a turning point for the entire country.

“The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services,” the court ruled.

Share This

OAcademics

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Now that OCON is past, I'm posting one final announcement about my new OAcademics list before opening it for business tomorrow:

The OAcademics mailing list is a private forum for Objectivist academics to discuss teaching, research, coursework, dissertations, job prospects, publication, and all other aspects of life in (or after) academia. The list is basically a means of sharing knowledge and experience as ever more Objectivists enter academia.

The list isn't limited to philosophers. All Objectivists in academia, whether professors or graduate students, are welcome. Future academics, i.e. those in the process of applying to graduate school, may also join.

No subscriber is obliged to participate in list discussions. However, I do make two requests:

(1) That subscribers post the syllabi from the courses they teach (including the list of readings) at the beginning of every semester so that others may consult them in the process of their own course development.

(2) That subscribers post any significant announcements about their work, e.g. the successful defense of a dissertation, an article accepted for publication, a fabulous new teaching job, leaving academia to hunt bears in Alaska.

These are strong recommendations but not ironclad obligations.

The list is not moderated. Posts should be polite, friendly, and reasonably relevant to life in academia.

Messages will be archived, but those archives will be available only to other list members. List members should not forward list messages to anyone else or post them to any other forum without permission from the author(s).

If you have any questions, please e-mail Diana Hsieh, the list's owner and administrator, at diana@dianahsieh.com.

To subscribe, enter the relevant information on the web interface. Also, please feel free to forward this post (or a link thereto) to anyone you think might be interested in joining the list.

John Lewis in Hebrew

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

John Lewis sent me this great bit of news this morning:

I am proud to note that my article, "No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism," has been transmitted into Hebrew. It appears in Nativ: A Journal of Politics and the Arts, vol. 20, n. 3.116 (May - June 2007). Nativ is published by the Ariel Center for Policy Research. From its website: "The Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR) is devoted to incisive research and discussion of political and strategic issues concerning Israel and the Jewish people."

The article is published by permission of The Objective Standard, from its 1.4, Winter, 2006-2007, pp. 39-63. This is the English abstract, as it appears in Nativ:

"No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism"

In the face of rising threats to their freedom and rights, Americans today are uncertain about what a proper foreign policy should be. This uncertainty arises from the philosophical influences of pragmatism and altruism, which have misguided American leaders for 50 years, and have made it difficult for Americans to evaluate their leaders and to evaluate their actions. As a result, Americans have failed to forthrightly confront rising threats, and have not properly supported allies ˆ in particular, Israel. We have, as a result, emboldened and empowered the worst threat to the West in centuries.

This article uses the historical example of American policy towards Shintoism in post-1945 Japan, in order to show that a proper policy today would first identify Islamic Totalitarianism as the political threat facing the West, and would then direct American resources towards ending the political imposition of Islamic Law, beginning with the Islamic State of Iran. By identifying the advocates of political Islam ˆ those who would impose Islamic Law by force ˆ as the true enemy, Americans could destroy its state manifestation wherever it appears, and then offer an intellectual alternative to jihad. This is the only way to end the threat posed by Islamic Totalitarianism, and to re-establish a proper basis for freedom across the globe.

Excellent!

No Comment Necessary

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Wal-Mart To Test Bible Action Figures In 425 Stores:

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) said Tuesday it will test sales in some stores of biblical action figures whose makers say they are aimed at Christian parents who prefer their children play with Samson, David or Noah rather than with a comic book character or Bratz doll. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien said the toys made by One2believe, a Valencia, Calif., company, will be offered in 425 of Wal-Mart's 3,376 discount stores and Supercenters.

One2believe Chief Executive David Socha said his products were part of a "battle for the toy box" with dolls and figures that he said carry negative messages. "If you're very religious, it's a battle for your children's minds and what they're playing with and pretending. There are remakes out there of Satan and evil things," Socha said.

Wal-Mart's O'Brien said the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer believes there is demand for faith-based toys. The toy line will be on some Wal-Mart shelves starting in August, mainly in the Midwest and South but also in California and as far northeast as Pennsylvania, O'Brien said. "It is a test. It's not a national rollout," O'Brien said. The toys, based on biblical stories, include a 3-inch figure of Daniel in the lion's den, a 12-inch talking Jesus doll and 13-inch Samson action figure.

Wal-Mart has always carried some faith products, mainly stationery, books and music, but this is the first line of toys with a faith theme, O'Brien said. "I think there is an interest in faith-based toys and we are testing it in our stores," O'Brien said. It is a leap in scale for One2believe, which so far has mainly sold its figures directly to churches and ministries and through its Web site, Socha said.

(Via Ari Armstrong)

In my youth, I played with many toys at other children's homes, but I never played with a "biblical action figures." I was an explicit atheist from an extremely young age -- around 4 or 5, when I first heard about God -- so I would have been aghast at any religious toys. The simple fact is that none of the kids I grew up with were religious in that serious kind of way. Obviously, that's no longer true.

Similarly, none of my high school classmates would have dreamed of putting off college to do missionary work in the third world in a million years. Yet, this morning in Starbucks, Paul and I overheard some high school girls talking about a classmate doing just that. They were surprised that the boy in particular would choose that, but they obviously regarded the activity as a relatively normal break between high school and college.

The anecdotes are piling up almost as fast as the Christian stores are opening their doors.

It Takes A Giant

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Look at how spending has increased in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor in 2003:


Unlike President Bush, who has contempt for book larnin', Schwarzenegger talked for years about how much Milton Friedman meant to him. Then when he got into power he did the same thing Bush did as President -- he became a big spender. It's almost as if he used free market ideas to gain power, then once in power he abandoned them. As Governor he has acted according to the opposite premise, the premise of state intervention in the economy.

My first conclusion was that unlike Reagan, Schwarzenegger really is as dumb as he looks. But he is a highly capable man who has succeeded now in three different careers, body building, acting and politics, and he is surrounded by the best advisers taxpayers' money can buy, so something other than stupidity must driving the Governor's statism.

The only explanation I can see is pragmatism. A politician in power comes under tremendous pressure from a thousand directions at once. Every pressure group wants its piece of the taxpayers pie. The Democrats pull in 10 different directions while the Republicans pull in 10 other directions. The media have their agenda. The one thing every faction has in common is that it wants the state to intervene in the economy for its sake.

It takes a strong commitment to principle to keep from giving a little to this faction and a little to that faction, and what the hell, let's buy some good press by increasing the budget for x and the powerful Chairman of the Way and Means Committee promised he would support y if I would just throw some money at z...

Arnold Schwarzenegger might have been impressed by the individual arguments for freedom in Milton Friedman's writing, but he obviously never grasped the principles behind the arguments. In applying those principles in action, he has been a complete failure. He has gotten lost in the forest of pressure groups and voices crying "Spend, spend spend!" Without an understanding of principles such as individual rights, he has no map out of the forest.

It takes a man of uncommon integrity and understanding of the principles of liberty to govern well in today's welfare state. To shrink the budget and dismantle the regulatory state would take a giant. Schwarzenegger and Bush are no giants.

Trends

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Here are trends (or issues) I think we should keep track of in the next 5-10 years. Since I'm speculating about the future, I'll probably get much wrong, but I want to get it on record now so I can look back at this two, five, 10 years in the future and see what I got right or wrong. I'm hoping this will make me a better analyst of current events.

1. The war. Will we get serious about destroying the states that sponsor terrorism?

2. The defeatism of the Democrats. The most astonishing development after September 11, 2001 was the Democrat Party tying their political fortunes to America's defeat. If America is victorious, the Democrats will suffer because they have made it clear that Iraq is Bush's war, not theirs; if America is defeated, the Democrats will prosper. It must be the first time in America's history, perhaps in world history, that a major political party wants its own country to lose a war.

3. The retirement of the Baby Boomers. Talkin' 'bout my g-g-generation -- unfortunately. When the Baby Boomers go on Social Security and Medicare, what will happen? Will an economic crisis ensue?

4. The rise of religion. The black hole of nihilism and radical subjectivism must be filled by something; a vacuum of values and beliefs is psychologically unbearable. People are turning to the same thing they've turned to since Plato criticized the sophists: mysticism.

5. The development of the New Left. Since the '60s the New Left has worked its way into every aspect of our culture, from hairstyles to political correctness to recycling to the feminization of Hollywood (women are always with it, men are always befuddled). How does the New Left react to the rise of religion? Does it resist or co-opt?

6. Collectivism vs. Individualism. Will volunteerism turn into mandatory national service? Will the state continue to expand and control more and more aspects of the individual's life?

7. Environmentalism. This is closely tied to #6 and #5. Will the environmentalists succeed in using the bogeyman of global warming to enact massive regulations on industry?

8. Romanticism. Will the revolt against modern art begin in the next decade?

9. The Information Revolution. How do the Internet and digital technology change life? For life will change -- oh, it will! The changes will be so many and so huge that I wouldn't even try to speculate here. Whatever I guessed would be a pale ghost compared to the reality to come.

10. Life extension. How does science extend life? How much? How soon?

11. Mars. Will we get to Mars within 10 years? Probably not.

12. The spread of Objectivism. Recently there have been excellent write-ups on Ayn Rand's philosophy in Israel and Colorado. The next 10 years might not be enough time. But once the Baby Boomers are dead, I see a rational philosophy taking off like a rocket.

Have I missed anything?

UPDATE: Added #11.

Ska (and More) Sunday

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

Inspired by some recent comments (and needing something to listen to last night while I tried to figure out an annoying computer problem anyway), I found some examples of music I like on the web and have decided to include a few in a post.

Most of this music is ska, a form that originated in Jamaica during the late fifties/early sixties and pre-dates reggae, its more famous offshoot. Although ska goes in and out of popularity in "waves", it has popped up in various forms all over the world. (I even own a CD by a Czech group called Sto Zvirat, a live recording of whom you can listen to here.)

Enjoy the below list. Unless I state otherwise, it's ska.

The Specials

During its "Second Wave" of popularity, a major ska revival occurred among "skinheads" -- a group I must emphasize was decidedly against racism -- in Great Britain.

During this time, some musicians attempted a fusion between the punk rock and ska styles. The only band I think was really able to pull this off well was The Specials, who re-gouped during the 1990s. All I could find in the way of YouTube videos was from their earlier material, which, although it is good, is not as good as their later material, which I think shows more musical maturity and takes better advantage of Neville Staples's voice.

The below video of "Ghost Town", although not of one of my favorite songs, captures some of the band's "bounciness" and energy.


The Selecter

Another second wave British band, The Selecter, featured the beautiful vocals of Pauline Black, who sometimes had to dress as a man to sneak into some of the clubs for gigs. (She would sometimes dress in the same fashion for taped performances as in the second video.) As you will see, this ruse would probably have barely worked long enough or well enough to get her onto the stage, after which point ....

What were they going to do? Kick her her out?

Anyway, here's "On My Radio":


Of the two Selecter videos I have chosen, the above is much better, being notable for its very artistic use of black and white and its better sound quality. The second is "Missing Words". I include it only because I really like the song. Its audio is a little muted.

Laurel Aitken, and Bad Manners

This video featuring "Sally Brown" and "Skinhead" I'll have to listen to a few more times to make up my mind about it since it features a band I've never heard before, The Loafers, backing up Cuban-born vocal legend, Laurel Aitken. "Sally Brown" is often covered by ska bands, including by yet another second wave British band, Bad Manners, whose cover of "Wolly Bully" I like. (If you like that, take a listen to "Just a Feeling", too.)

The Adjusters

Here is yet another new discovery. The Adjusters, an American Third Wave band performs "Our Town". I own one album of this band, but this song is new to me.

The Pepper Pots

And here's another new group for me, The Pepper Pots, who hail from Spain at least according to one commenter. (Although they do sign off in Spanish. I'm not so sure about that, but I'll have to Google it later on.)


The song is, "I Can't Wait No More".

Some Non-Ska

I wouldn't call this "ska", but I still like Shaggy's remake of an old ska classic, "Oh Carolina". If I recall correctly, this made the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, but first (and longest) in Britain.

And finally, I'll toss out some more non-ska links: First, are a couple of reggae favorites from Jimmy Cliff, "Many Rivers to Cross", and "The Harder They Come". The last is jazz -- Jane Monheit singing "Please Be Kind".

-- CAV

How Not to De-Fang the AMT

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

In recent years, the Alternative Minimum Tax has become the bane of an increasing number of tax payers due to the fact that its income threshold is set at a fixed number of dollars while our government has been busy making these dollars worth less every year through inflation.

At the above link, I stated that I was unsure whether I was more unhappy about the AMT remaining on the books unchanged or the Democrats trying to "fix" it.

I had forgotten about a third, even more unsavory scenario: conservatives completely throwing in the towel and dickering with the Democrats on how to use the AMT "constructively". The below passage follows a proposal to reduce (but not abolish) the AMT by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit (which would further entrench it and the income tax as a feature of domestic policy, as if either measure needs it):

[C]ashing out categorical programs would minimize the market distortions that they create. The Section 8 housing-voucher program, for instance, encourages low-income households to cluster in those neighborhoods where landlords are willing to accept them. More broadly, getting rid of categorical programs would pass responsibility for life decisions from the government to low-income households themselves. Why, after all, should we tell the poor how to spend the assistance that we give them? Why not, instead, simply augment their incomes directly -- tying the assistance to a work requirement, but otherwise trusting them to know what's best for them? Let's take steps to ensure, as Clinton put it, that those who work are not poor. That we can do so in a way that helps provide middle-class tax relief makes the prospect all the more compelling.

Or we could at least let the Democrats hang themselves while arguing for a real alternative -- to altogether stop taking money from those who make the plenitude of capitalism (and opportunities for the poor) possible in the first place, and return "responsibility for life decisions from the government to [income-earning] households themselves. Why, after all, should we tell the ["rich"] how to spend" their own money?

Oh. But that would require keeping in mind the "forgotten man" of income redistribution, the producer, and challenging the morality of altruism, which is unfortunately shared by all on the left and far too many on the right.

Often, I have complained about the right touting government regulation of the economy as capitalism. This article is not quite guilty of this sin, but it is illustrative, I think, of the general slippage of the conservative movement away from even pretending to fight for capitalism to coopting the welfare state.

If this article is any indication, many conservatives have stopped worrying about the propriety of the welfare state and settled for being the side in favor of a more "efficient" welfare state.

-- CAV

Sanctimonious Vandalism

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

A few months ago, I blogged an incident in which numerous people took a Craig's List advertisement as sufficient excuse to steal property from and vandalize a house.

Today, I have read about an incident which is even worse in some respects -- the open and widespread approval by his neighbors of the destruction of a man's new vehicle by environmentalist vandals:

On a narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington, where Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm, one man bought a flashy gray Hummer that was too massive to fit in his garage.

So he parked the seven-foot-tall behemoth on the street in front of his house and smiled politely when his eco-friendly neighbors looked on in disapproval at his "dream car."

It lasted five days on the street before two masked men took a bat to every window, a knife to each 38-inch tire and scratched into the body: "FOR THE ENVIRON."

...

[A]s [Gareth] Groves ponders what to do with the remains of his $38,000 SUV, he has been the target of a number of people who have driven by the crime scene in his upscale neighborhood and glared at him in smug satisfaction. [link dropped]

It is little wonder that followers of a movement that damns man for the sin of exercising his natural ability to alter the environment would have so little concern for something integral to someone's ability to do so, namely the protection of his property rights. Fortunately, a few embers of the Enlightenment still glow: at least one Greenish neighbor who disapproved of the Hummer incident was decent enough to be upset by it.

The Craig's List looters, at least, did not take the event of their own barbarity as an occasion for moral preening. In that respect, at least, they are somewhat more decent than those who sympathized with the ecoterrorists: At least they knew on some level to be ashamed of themselves. And I suspect that somehow, the looters didn't exactly congratulate each other during or after the festivities -- or leer at the victim for days afterwards.

-- CAV

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About History (But Were Afraid to Ask)

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Homeschoolers and history teachers cannot afford to wade unknowingly into this ideological arena. They will either present their students with a body of knowledge, the significance of which they cannot validate, or fall prey to a slanted presentation whose aim is to inculcate values that they would not otherwise chose to transmit. In these approaches history does not serve its actual purpose, which is to demonstrate the causes and consequences of ideas in the world.

History can be a science. It can be an invaluable science. For that to happen, however, history has to be restored to its proper role in the education of young minds, and that requires an awareness among history providers–whether experts, or moms taking over for the experts who aren’t doing their job–of how things went wrong in the first place.

“The State of History” is the first installment of a monthly lecture series, courtesy of HistoryAtOurHouse. Interested parents, homeschool teachers, and educators can sign up by contacting seminars@historyatourhouse.com.

Further information on the lecture series, including the sure-to-be-controversial ‘Lies a Liar Told Me About My Teacher!” (coming in August) can be found at: www.historyatourhouse.com/main/freeseminars.html.

Competition

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Jerry Kirkpatrick links to the chapter on competition in Human Action by Ludwig von Mises. As always with Mises, the chapter has profound identifications that at first seem simple and obvious, but after some thought one sees the brilliance of Mises -- especially when you consider that economists of other schools completely miss the "simple truth" that Mises writes.

Take these thoughts on competition:

In a totalitarian system, social competition manifests itself in the endeavors of people to court the favor of those in power. In the market economy, competition manifests itself in the fact that the sellers must outdo one another by offering better or cheaper goods and services, and that the buyers must outdo one another by offering higher prices....

In a free market businesses compete against one another for the consumer's money. But when the state intervenes in the economy, businesses must also compete in currying favor with those in power; if they do not, then the state might pass laws that harm or even destroy a business.

Why do corporations give large donations to both major political parties? Those donations are protection money. When a party gets a large sum of money from a company, it knows that if it regulates that company out of business, the party will also suffer. These considerations are part of the politician's thinking.

Although we hear leftists denounce "dog eat dog capitalism," we rarely hear anyone in power denounce the competition to buy their favor. That is what power is all about -- having people grovel before you for your mercy.

What would you rather have, corporations working overtime to make you happy so that you'll direct your money their way? Or corporate lobbyists in Washington, D.C. kissing the asses of John McCain and Hillary Clinton?

Modern Speech

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Virginia Postrel links to a piece by Meghan Daum in which she wonders why more women seem to talk like little girls these days. Bob Corff, a speech coach quoted in the article, makes a broader point about men and women:

Corff thinks a high-pitched voice that rises at the end of sentences signifies a lack of accountability for one's words. He also pointed out that in a culture that tends to have a hair-trigger reaction to even the mildest form of dissent, speaking with authority can be a dangerous prospect. "Years ago, people prided themselves on communicating," Corff said. "Today, they're afraid they'll get in trouble for saying the wrong thing. When your speech dies away or goes up at the ends of phrases, you're saying, 'I'm not sure what I mean,' and sometimes people feel safer that way."

I've noticed both the high-pitched, chipmunk voices in supposedly grown women and the rising inflection at the end of every sentence in both sexes.

The Betty Boop voices are probably bound up in the female sex's desire to attract men. They have the perverse idea that talking like a child is more attractive, and it probably is for many young men. A woman who talks like a confident, grown-up woman can be intimidating to a man of low self-esteem. Perhaps the women who speak girly talk are women of low self-esteem seeking someone at their level.

Ayn Rand made a fascinating comment in one of her question and answer sessions that the idea that a woman loses sexual interest when she ages is a holdover from the middle ages. In the middle ages, when people did not live long, a woman was getting old at 20. As capitalism extends life, I certainly hope our culture revises its thinking about mature women being sexually desirable. It would be a shame if women spent four fifths of their lives being ignored by men. With the current generation of young women talking like Helen Kane, we seem to have taken a step backward. 

The habit of making statements sound like questions is, I think, tied into our increasing conformism and the decline of the virtue of independence. When someone turns a statement into a question, he is signaling, "I'm not making a flat statement of what I think, but if you give me a sign you agree, then we'll go with it." This is a person who is more interested in agreement and getting along with other people than in identifying the facts of reality.

Somehow I can't hear John Galt saying, "Er, A is A? Like, existence exists?"

The Psycho-Epistemology of Sexuality - Parts I and II

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Following are the first two parts of a six-part essay on the psycho-epistemology of sexuality. I will try to post the next four parts over the next four weeks, and then publish a complete, edited version of the paper a few weeks later. I am open to feedback on the separate sections and will answer questions as they arise, but I intend to execute the original outline as planned. This paper is as much for writing practice as it is for philosophical exploration. Critiques of writing style and editorial suggestions are also welcome.

THE PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY OF SEXUALITY

Introduction

To the men: Imagine standing next to your ideal lover, looking into her eyes, wrapping your arms around her, picking her up in the air, and kissing her deeply. To the women: imagine being the one desired, lifted, and kissed. These are the moments when one has a deep experience of his sexuality. They are the times when you love being a man, and love reveling in your masculinity. Almost all of us have felt this way at some point.

But where does this feeling come from? Man generally derives pleasure from the achievement of values. What values are achieved in the act of kissing a lover? If there is a set of (philosophical) values shared between two lovers, then love-making can be a celebration of those values. But one also experiences a pleasure that is related directly to his gender. When a man picks a woman up off the floor and kisses her, he not only experiences his lover as a valuable human being, but as a valuable woman. And by reflection, he experiences his man-ness as a value.

There is a set of traits that are considered masculine, and a separate set of traits that are considered feminine. Most men are proud of their masculine traits, play them up, and act to gain additional masculine traits (like lifting weights to gain bigger biceps). Women do the same with feminine traits (like getting manicures). Men and women generally treat expressions of sexuality as a value.

If a value is "that which one acts to gain and/or keep" (Rand, Atlas Shrugged), then in what way can one's gender be considered a value? Certainly it is no more valuable to be a man or a woman. Men and woman are completely equal from an ethical standpoint. From this perspective, it would appear that experiencing one's gender as a value is irrational.

Some have argued that masculinity and femininity are culturally based. Men have traditionally opened doors for ladies, so over the years this has become a "masculine" act. This would imply that the pleasurable experience of sexuality is based on irrational premises left unchecked in the subconscious. Masculinity and femininity become a psychological disease, disseminated through osmosis from the culture. If this is the case, then the rational man should stamp out any hint of so-called "masculinity" in his psyche, and strive for a "gender neutral" image of self.

If the man (or woman) inside of you emphatically rejects this conclusion, then I agree completely. This is an appropriate reaction to an absurd conclusion.

In this paper, I will argue that it is valid to value one's gender and other individuating elements of self that are morally optional. I will argue that the experience of sexuality is a natural, rational result of man's physiological and psychological makeup. Finally, I will explain why sexuality is experienced most deeply in the context of a romantic love relationship.

Individuating Elements of Self - The Shower Principle

I contend that it is rational to value individuating elements of self. An individuating element of self is an aspect of one's self, physical or mental, that makes an individual unique. This includes both the particulars of one's body (like facial structure, skin tone, or hair color) and the particulars of one's personality (like sense of humor, taste in music, or personal style).

That one values individuating elements of self is evident through introspection. I value my face because it is my face; I value my voice because it is my voice; I value my sense of humor because it represents what is funny to me. All of these individuating elements are morally optional within a range. It is not inherently more valuable to have brown hair rather than blond, to have green eyes or blue, to be white or black. But I would not want to change my hair, eye, or skin color -- I love the way I look, just as I am. It is not inherently more valuable to prefer Beethoven to Bach, ice cream to chocolate bars, or jeans to khaki. But I would not want to change my music collection, the contents of my fridge, or my ideal wardrobe -- I love my personal preferences, and treasure them over all others.

Why is it that I value the particulars of my body and mind? While in the shower one day, I conducted a thought experiment that clarified this issue for me. For this reason, I christen it "The Shower Principle":

Consider the example of a normal, rational man who values his life. He values his particular life, here on earth. This does not imply that every aspect of his life is positive. He abstracts away the negative elements and focuses on the positive values in life. One could say that he values his life in general.

Assuming the man is a good person with a healthy self-esteem, he values his self (his self being the sum of his physical and mental existence). He acts to preserve both his mind and body, because both are necessary for his survival. He values these elements of self in general -- but this does not imply that every particular aspect of his mind and body are positive. He may have a congenital heart defect, or some leftover psychological problems from his childhood, or perhaps he has not fully integrated some aspects of his philosophy into his life. But in general he is a good person, with a good mind, and a good body. He focuses on the positive elements of his particular mind and his particular body, and he values these elements of his self in general.

Now, let us break it down further. The man values his body as a matter of course. He values his particular body because it is his particular body that supports his life. Suppose the man is a painter. He loves using his hands to create beauty on canvas. The man highly values a particular aspect of his body: his hands. This does not imply that every aspect of his hands are perfect. Maybe he has some scarring on his fingers from a bloody fight in his past. Maybe he is starting to develop arthritis, and has to take Advil to dull the pain. But he abstracts away these negative elements, and focuses on the positive. He values his hand in general. And he values his hands in particular.

This man loves his hands (love being the emotional response to values). He likes to look at them and watch himself using them as a creative force. He has chosen to focus on this particular value because of the way he views its integration with other positive elements of his life, like his painting. He understands the curves, strengths, and capabilities of his hands to a far greater degree than most people. Though his hands have scarring and occasional pain, he values his own hands much more highly than anyone else's. This man loves his particular hands, despite their accidental flaws.

So why, exactly, does the artist value his hands in particular? Why is it that he takes such pleasure in looking at them, even though their individuating characteristics (size, shape, etc.) are non-essential? It is because his subconscious integrates the perception of his hands, the automatized motions they perform, and his evaluation of the things they create. His emotions then respond to this integrated, psycho-sensual unit.


Thanks for reading. Part three of this paper, Mind-Body Integration and Psycho-sensual Units, should be published either next week or the following week.

--Dan Edge

The Plays of Roswitha

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ask any fairly literate person about the history of playwriting and you'll get a list that is something like:

Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson...

Euripides died around 406 BC; Marlowe and Shakespeare were born in 1564 AD. That is a gap of almost 2,000 years!

There were a few great playwrights in Classical Civilization after Euripides, notably the Greek Menander (ca. 342–291 BC), the father of romantic comedy, and his Roman emulators, Plautus and Terence. The Roman stoic Seneca (ca. 4 BC–AD 65) wrote some gory tragedies that were influential in the Renaissance but are read only by scholars today.

After Seneca the record is pretty much darkness until the Middle ages, when guilds started performing religious dramas and then the Renaissance, when writers were fired by enthusiasm for all things classical to write new plays. This new interest in drama led to the glories Renaissance England, the Golden Age of Spanish drama with Calderon and Lope de Vega and the neo-classicism of Corneille, Racine and Moliere in 17th century France.

It is a long dark age between 1st century AD Rome and the Middle Ages. Drama was more devastated by the Dark Ages than philosophy, history, science or any other intellectual field. I think this was due to two factors -- Augustinian Christianity's hatred of earthly pleasure and the fact that drama depends on thriving theatres, which need a certain amount of wealth that can be spent on them. It was not until the Renaissance that the West had enough wealth and the will to spend it on secular theatres.

The darkness makes Roswitha's story all the more astonishing. (Wikipedia calls her Hrosvit, but I'll use the spelling that is easier to my english reading eyes.)

Hrosvit, also known as Hroswitha, Hrotsvit, Roswitha, and Hroswitha of Gandersheim, (c. 935 to c. 1002) was a Monastic Christian poet who lived and worked in Gandersheim, located in present-day Lower Saxony. She wrote in Latin, and is considered by some to be the first person since antiquity to compose drama.

It is inspiring that this woman who lived at the beginning of the Middle Ages was so delighted by the comedies of Terence that she decided she had to write her own. Following the integrity of her vision she ended up writing dramas that are unlike any that came before or after her. She is a unique voice in the history of drama and for that alone she deserves credit as an innovative, original playwright. Because she dramatized her metaphysical value-judgments, Roswitha must be considered an artist who was true to her vision and certainly not a hack, although her clumsy technique keeps her from being a dramatist of genius.

You see, she faced a problem when she sat down to write. She wanted to emulate the Roman models she had read, but as a devout Christian and a nun she did not want to write anything immoral or pagan. She solved the problem, creating drama for her time, the Middle Ages. Her plays, as I noted, are unlike any others. They are also the most horrifying plays I have read.

What would a nun in the 10th century write about? What would a devout Augustinian Christian think is important? Roswitha's great theme, which can be seen in all of her six short plays, is the evil of sex. Her plays are typically about a woman who wishes to renounce this world and become a nun -- to Roswitha this is the moral ideal. But this woman is tempted by an evil man or by Satan to have sex. The plays are about this conflict.

To give an example of Roswitha's worldview, in two of the plays a woman who has had sex is locked in a small, dark cell, "no larger than a grave" for years -- and this is considered a joyous, happy occasion! The woman, who has renounced her evil ways and wishes to live a good life, enters the cell voluntarily and happily. Other characters react with cheers, praising the Lord, because the woman no longer will be tempted by the evils of this world, and gets to sit in silence in her dark jail cell and pray to God.

Before I go any further, I must say that I do not recommend anyone searching out these plays to read. They're not fun. They're disgusting, really. And yet, they were written by a woman in good faith, so to speak, a woman who strove and succeeded to dramatize her moral ideal and her view of the universe. What makes the plays disgusting is the nature of her philosophy.

The plays do have one value. They show, as do no other documents I know of, the soul of the Dark and Middle Ages. If you have just read histories of this period, you have an intellectual understanding of it, but you have not really seen it before your eyes. Roswitha's plays concretize the sense of life of the Middle Ages; they show what it means to be an Augustinian Christian. They bring the religious hatred of worldly pleasure to life and let you experience this way of thinking. As much as modern playwrights love to shock -- epater les bourgoises -- none of their plays is as disturbing as this nun's.

After reading the plays of Roswitha I have a better understanding of the evil -- no other word suffices -- of the evil of religion.

I will look at of the plays of Roswitha in more detail in another post.

Ashland Outdoes Antioch

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

Awhile back, I noted with some mirth that the famed leftist bastion, Antioch College (of the amusing "student survival guide"), had closed its doors, and recently, I reacted to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning the dismissal of John Lewis from Ashland University as follows:

Regarding the full article, this looks like a clear-cut case of abridgment of academic freedom on the part of Ashland University, and one of dubious legality.

Apparently, a full review of all the evidence (available through links) by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) shows that my impression was correct:

Lewis' contracts dating from August 22, 2005 to May 18, 2007 all stated that "six hours per semester [were to be] reassigned for research funded by Anthem Foundation grant," and in fact the Anthem Foundation fellowship money was used to pay half of his salary throughout this period. Lewis was therefore not only free to pursue Objectivist scholarship, but was contractually required to do so from the fall semester, 2005, until the end of the 2007 academic year.

Lewis, who received rave reviews from students and superiors year after year, applied for tenure in the fall of 2006. But on January 26, 2007, Ashland informed Lewis that his application for tenure was denied. [An excerpt of the letter explicitly naming Dr. Lewis' personal philosophy as the reason for his dismissal follows. -- ed]

...

While the Faculty Rules and Regulations do indeed require that professors support Ashland's mission, there was no reason for Lewis to assume that Objectivist scholarship was opposed to Ashland's mission. Those same Rules and Regulations also state that "[t]he teacher is entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results subject to the adequate performance of his or her other academic duties" and that "[w]hen [a professor] speaks or writes as a citizen, he or she should be free from institutional censorship or discipline." Ashland has therefore explicitly made academic freedom a condition of professors' employment.[bold added]

Even if I weren't an Objectivist, I'd be loathe to apply for an academic position at Ashland University after this episode.

Ayn Rand's philosophy has been enjoying increased respect and visibility in Academia lately among non-Objectivist academics. Even some Christians find value in what she has had to say pertaining to their areas of academic specialization. Will Ashland fire them next if they have the temerity to express such agreement?

And what other points of view, philosophies, or personal convictions will Ashland suddenly realize are inimical to its mission? Everyone else in the world -- except, apparently, the search committee that hired John Lewis in 2001 -- was hip to the fact that Objectivism was an atheist philosophy, and well before the death of its creator nearly two decades before. The folks at Ashland may have been born yesterday, but, boy, they've been up all night thinking about how atheist philosophies detract from their mission!

Academics -- the good ones anyway -- work long hours and accept personal privation as the price they have to pay for the chance to pursue the truth about the field that most strongly resonates with their interests. The ability to follow that path, wherever it takes them is what they find so attractive about the prospect of earning tenure. Apparently, Ashland no longer has use for such people on its faculty.

In other words, Ashland has just announced to anyone worth his salt that it may call itself a University, but that it is not, in any meaningful sense of the term. If you care about your field, but your inquiries take you somewhere that Ashland regards as against its mission, you would have two choices as a member of Ashland's non-tenured faculty: (1) Pretend that what you discovered does not exist; or (2) Pronounce the verdict of your mind and get fired.

So Ashland's mission -- for the purposes of any academic job hunter out there -- can be summarized as "to wage war against the mind". At least Antioch, by closing its doors, will not dishonor the truth like Ashland, nor will it stand in the way of free inquiry. In that respect, Ashland has succeeded in becoming worse than no school at all!

-- CAV

Ouray

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

As promised yesterday morning, here are a few photos from the OCON 2007 bus trip to Ouray, Colorado, whose claim to fame among fans of Ayn Rand is that it inspired the valley hideout known as "Galt's Gulch" in Atlas Shrugged.

The tour started with a trip to the spectacular Box Canyon Falls nearby. After a couple hours taking in the scenery and enjoying good conversation, we went to the Elk Lodge in downtown Ouray for lunch and then spent some time in Ouray itself. The pictures below will follow that chronology. As always, click on the image for a better view.


The park surrounding Box Canyon Falls offers two main trails to the falls. As you might expect, one leads to the top of the falls and the other to the bottom. I took the trail to the top first, and got this nice view of Ouray on the way up.


This shot focuses on the lone house overlooking Canyon Creek that you can spot in the preceding photo.


Okay. Now, climb out of that barrel! We're below the falls now, and looking up at a lone tree I spotted growing in some crag.


There is really no way to do these falls justice in still shots, as you can see here. There is simply no way to get everything in at once.


I thought this pool below the falls was pretty, too. This part of the day was quite hot, but this close to the bottom of the falls, it was almost chilly between the combined effects of shade and mist.


Here's a snapshot of the central business district downtown main drag of Ouray. Not much to see but shops and restaurants that cater to the tourist trade. A few of us settled at a Mexican place down the way to sit for a spell.


Oh yeah. I guess there was this. (Look for in the window's upper right for the sign that reads, "Galt's Gulch\ Elev. 7,706 ft.") Apparently, you could buy a similar sign or order one inside. I heard that this shop had four on hand and rather quickly sold out.

-- CAV

Be Proud, America: Don't Recycle

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In "Piece Of Crap," Neil Young sings,

Tried to save the trees
Bought a plastic bag
The bottom fell out
It was a piece of crap

Does buying a plastic bag, even one that is not a piece of crap, to use over and over again while shopping save the trees? No. The trees do not need saving because corporations that use tree products understand that if they do not plant new trees, they will suffer a scarcity. Trees are not in danger of disappearing precisely because humans find them useful.

It's the same thing with cows. Why is the cow not an endangered species? Because people eat them.

We live in a time when recycling is pushed on us by the government as moral and necessary. Children are taught throughout their government schooling to recycle. It is assumed that good people sort out their garbage, saving various scraps and containers to be reused.

In California, where I live, government propaganda for recycling says something like, "Recycling. It's good for the bottle. It's good for the can." Apparently, some people find this argument sound or at least clever. Me, I wonder how anything can be good for inanimate objects. It strikes me as very sloppy thinking.

The whole recycling movement is worse than sloppy thinking; it is nonsense. It not only does NOT conserve resources, it wastes them!

In fact, if the environmentalists and the government completely ignored resources and left everyone alone to pursue his own self-interest, then resources would be conserved more efficiently than when bureaucrats tell everyone what to do.

How can that be? If people just consume and consume like pigs, then we'll run out of everything, won't we?

No, we won't. What saves resources is the pricing system in a free market. It works like this. When a resource becomes more scarce, its price goes up. This price rise has two effects: 1) consumers buy less, which helps to conserve the resource; and 2) producers seek ways to produce more in order to cash in on the higher price, which helps to create more of the resource.

In a free market there is never a permanent scarcity of something humans value.

So why do environmentalists and our government spend billions of dollars (of money taken from taxpayers) on campaigns that urge people to waste their precious time recycling? If efficient conservation of resources were their goal, they would shut their programs down, go back to their desks and twiddle their thumbs as they let the market work. Conservation is not their goal.

The purpose of recycling is to make free individuals sacrifice for the collective.

The New Left project is ambitious: they want to transform America from a capitalist nation to a socialist one. In order to do this they must first change the way people think. Americans are accustomed from their 18th and 19th century heritage of individualism and freedom to living for themselves in a free market. This way of thinking must go, and recycling is a way to get people used to sacrificing for the collective. If you could find an honest environmentalist, I suspect he would use the word "conditioning" to describe the process.

With recycling they establish the premise that moral action lies not in acting for one's self-interest, but in sacrificing for the collective. The rest of the welfare state depends on taxation, which is forcibly taken from individuals. Recycling, however, depends on individuals taking action on their own volition for the collective. As such, this program is tremendously important to collectivists -- far more important than conserving trash. Recycling is a revolutionary assault on the American spirit of individualism.

The campaign against global warming -- or climate change or global cooling or whatever it's called now -- is another campaign to get individuals to sacrifice for the collective. Environmentalists hector people to turn down their thermostats, use certain light bulbs, on and on.

These programs can be thought of as "softening" people, getting them used to the idea that they must not be selfish, that they must live their lives for "the planet." It accustoms individuals to follow well-meaning, benevolent leaders such as Al Gore in service to the state because selfish action leads to destroying "the planet."

Recycling is an assault on the virtues of productiveness and independence. But more, I think it is aimed at destroying the virtue of pride. Proud individuals do not waste time sorting out their trash to make politicians happy. They do not endure make work in order to get the moral approval of the collective. Recycling is a way to get individuals to humble themselves for "the greater good."

Once people accept the premise that morality lies in sacrificing for the collective -- and when they live by that premise in their actions -- then statists can proceed to expand the state, increase the weight of our chains and eventually create a dictatorship. It's the old story about the frog: throw him in boiling water and he jumps out, but put him in cool water and turn up the temperature one degree at a time and pretty soon that frog is cooked. Recycling and the campaign against global warming are ways of turning up the heat.

My “Top Ten” Books on European History: #10

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

On Ashland University

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ashland University's insanely unjust treatment of John Lewis was recently detailed in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Tenure Shrugged. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has posted some further details (correcting some small inaccuracies in the CHE article, as far as I understand) here: Ashland University: No Objectivists Need Apply.

Notice that the source of Dr. Lewis's troubles were (1) neocons and (2) evangelical Christians. From what I understand, the run-of-the-mill liberal faculty were rightly shocked and outraged by his treatment by Ashland.

Also, I might as well mention that I was quoted in the Chronicle's introduction to its three articles on Objectivism in academia:

The articles in this special Chronicle report are about a different group of scholars: those who believe that Rand created a true and complete philosophical model, which must be widely spread or else civilization will perish. These scholars believe that the road to cultural renewal runs through the philosophy department: If the public adopts the correct metaphysical and epistemological beliefs, then peace, justice, and prosperity will naturally follow. (In this respect, the famously anti-religious Randians are oddly similar to Catholic philosophers in the Thomist tradition.)

"The serious study of Ayn Rand's work­ -- in and out of academia­­ -- is only in its nascent stages," wrote Diana Mertz Hsieh, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, on her blog in 2005. "If stillborn, our culture is doomed. ... It's not just some academic game: It's literally life and death."

In case you're wondering, I've not blogged because I've been at OCON in lovely Telluride. I've enjoyed myself well enough, although I'm eager to return to real work on my dissertation and to preparation for my fall "Intro Phil" class. I probably won't return to regular blogging for another week.

ARI in DC

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Yesterday afternoon, Yaron Brook announced that, thanks to the generosity of a donor, Ayn Rand Institute will open a satellite office in Washington, DC, likely in 2008. That east coast office will help ARI more easily and effectively advocate cultural and political change.

Hooray!

John Brunner

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In Reflections and Refractions Robert Silverberg writes about the sad life of the science fiction writer John Brunner.  At one time he was at the top of his field -- then everything went wrong.

He was a golden boy from the start.  He sold his first novel, Galactic Storm, in 1952 at what seems to me the remarkably young age of 18.  He was prolific and energetic during the 1950's and 60's.  Silverberg writes,

His early work was always competent and professional, and sometimes a good deal more than that; but when he was about thirty he found his mature voice, and gave us a string of significant books like Squares of the City and The Whole Man, and then in 1969 the huge and masterly Stand on Zanzibar, which brought him his first and only Hugo Award. He seemed to build on that triumph in the years immediately following, with such important and well received books as The Jagged Orbit and The Sheep Look Up and Shockwave Rider, in which he invented the concept of computer viruses at a time -- 1975 -- when the computer concept itself was still largely unfamiliar to most people. He was only about forty then; and it appeared that he was staking a claim for himself in the science fiction world as the natural successor to the aging Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke.

It was not to be. Something went wrong in John's life.

What went wrong, in my words, was that he had built a fan base writing science fiction -- and then he found the desire to write something else. He decided around 1975 to write a massive historical novel called The Great Steamboat Race. He worked on it for five years from 1976 to 1981 that were a tremendous drain on his finances. The book finally appeared in 1983 and it sank without a trace.  It was a disastrous failure.  Brunner was never the same again.

In the summer of 1983 he commented that his books were all out of print and no publisher was interested in his future work.  In 1986 he received another blow when his wife Marjorie died.  In 1987 he was only 53 but he looked like an old man.

Because of a genetic predisposition to hypertension and strokes he had to take a blood pressure medication that interfered with his concentration and made it impossible to write.

He began to seem like a lost soul, haunted, despondent.  In an astonishingly sad convention speech... he spoke openly of the collapse of his career and expressed the hope that some publisher might offer him proofreading work to do as a way of paying his bills.

But he had not given up.  After all, he was John Brunner; he had won a Hugo Award. Why couldn't he make a science fiction comeback?  He got an idea for a major new novel he hoped would restore his position in the field and pay off his debts.  All he needed to do to write was stop taking that damned medication.

So he stopped the medication and resumed writing.  At the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland on August 25, 1995, he suffered a massive stroke and died at the age of 60.

The Green Juggernaut

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

This carbon impact survey hosted by MSN and sponsored by Phillips and Chevy has been floating around the Objectivist blogosphere of late. The survey asks questions like what kind of car you drive and how many airplane flights you take a year, and then computes how many tons of carbon dioxide you generate per year. The page also includes a link to "Conservation International," just one of the thousands of pro-green groups that exist and whose board of directors includes individuals such as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, actor Harrison Ford, Queen Noor of Jordan, former Starbucks CEO Orin Smith, Rob Walton of Wal-Mart, and media mogul Barry Diller.

One clearly gets the sense that the pro-industry and technology side of the debate is getting absolutely creamed by the greens. I mean after all, why is Chevy giving even one cent of support to the green lobby? Why isn't there a survey that examines survey-takers support for regulations that will lead to the downright roll-back of industrial civilization? After all, global warming is a phantom menace, but government intervention in the economy is an actual, well-established threat to human prosperity and happiness.

I think it is time to resurrect CAC's Campaign in Defense of Industry and Technology. The question that I have is how are Objectivists going to earn enough support to be able to achieve anything worthwhile? Consider the floor open to discussion and debate.

Why Study European History, Part 3

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Galloping Goose

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

In my last posting, I ended by rushing off to catch the gondola to an 8:30 session of C. Bradley Thompson's superb course "American Slavery, American Freedom", on the struggle for the abolition of slavery -- an episode of American history with particular relevance to Objectivists. I got to the class only 30 minutes of time left because the free gondola lived up to that saying about getting what you pay for -- as well as my dimmest views on public transportation.

I was running a little as it was, and got to the station to see a huge line of people. The gondola would move intermittently (without taking passengers) for about twenty minutes as new people joined the line and others gave up. Nobody offered an explanation of what was going on to the crowd.

I finally realized that if I were to get to Mountain Village in time to hear any of the concluding lecture, or at least to be in time for the next lecture of Leonard Peikoff's course on the DIM Hypothesis, I would have to find other means of transport. I knew of a shuttle bus that ran a circuit between Telluride and Mountain View, so I looked for it.

I did eventually find the right bus, but not before learning from its driver that the Galloping Goose -- which unfortunately dilutes the heritage of rugged individualism of the town it serves by touting that it runs on biodiesel -- does not go to Mountain Village.

At the time, I felt the perverse urge to find a nearby hippie and ask whether the name of the Galloping Goose was due to the manufacture of its fuel from goose entrails, but resigned myself to an inward chuckle instead. And I did wonder: "Where, exactly, did that name come from, anyway?"

The answer came in the form of a curious sight I encountered on an early morning tour of Telluride.

Ever since attending a scientific conference in the beautiful city of Brugge (Bruges), Belgium in 2000, I have made it a practice to take my sight-seeing photos early in the morning to avoid the hassle of crowds and traffic, and to enjoy the magnificent feeling of having a whole town to myself. And so, that's what I did yesterday morning after answering some comments here, and before assuaging my new-found "gondola anxiety" by heading up the mountain an hour early to make sure I wouldn't miss the tour bus to Ouray, which I'll blog later.

But back to the Galloping Goose. No, today's politically correct affronts to Telluride's proud heritage of mineral exploitation are not named for the goose entrails which may or may not fuel them. They are named after the curious vehicle I found displayed in a cramped courtyard near a large public building (the Town Hall if I remember correctly).

It was not possible to get the whole thing in one shot, so here's the best I could do for a side view:


Click the image to see it full-sized.


And here is a front view. The full-sized image will be a little blurry. If I have time to shoot it again, I'll replace it.

A plaque next to the Galloping Goose reads:

In 1930, the Rio Grande Southern Railroad went into receivership for the second time. The railroad's chief mechanic, Jack Odenpaugh, tried to make the line profitable again by designing the unique Galloping Goose hybrid vehicle. A combination of truck and train, these "geese" were powered by a truck engine and rode on rails, complete with cow catchers wired across the front. The "geese" ran on gasoline, and carried both freight and passengers. the system ended service in 1951.

This is just one of the sights in Telluride, whose history offers more than initially meets the eye. The town receives a quarter of its electricity from the nation's second-oldest hydroelectric generator, located above some falls and beneath a private residence. And then, of course, is its long history of mining, to which I hope the museum up the street from where I am staying does justice.

For more, mainly photos, on the (real) Galloping Goose -- or Geese -- visit this site.

And as for the mostly-missed lecture by Dr. Thompson, although I wondered whether walking in so late would be worthwhile, what I saw of it was, which should tell you how good the course was. Fortunately, the course seems to be drawn heavily from Thompson's anthology of Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader, which I bought and eagerly look forward to reading.

-- CAV

Robert Heinlein and His Antithesis

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Today marks the centennial of Robert Heinlein's birth. He was the world's greatest science fiction writer. His closest competitors, Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke, could match Heinlein only in science; in plot, character and style they were by far his inferiors.

John Derbyshire posted a piece Heinlein wrote in the '50s on the goodness and nobility of man. It ends with what could be viewed as the thematic statement of Golden Age science fiction:

I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching oversized braincase and the opposable thumb—this animal barely up from the apes—will endure, will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets—to the stars and beyond—carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage, and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.

With almost fiction-like irony, the world is celebrating the opposite of Heinlein's view of man in a series of concerts called Live Earth. Their aim is to regulate the economy because the humans that Heinlein glorified are supposed to be affecting the climate. The evidence that the climate is warming is questionable; the link to man's activities is not proven, but is an arbitrary assertion with our current knowledge; and it has not been proved that if the earth is warming it would necessarily be a bad thing. The movement to regulate the economy to stop global warming is not based on science, but on politics and superstition.

I turned Live Earth on and watched a moment. Madonna was onstage in London. She thanked Al Gore for alerting us that time is running out. She said this event was not just entertainment, it was a revolution.

So the revolution has begun, led by the likes of Snoop Dogg and Metallica.

The world will ever be in conflict between science and superstition. Today superstition is in the ascendant on both the left and the right. Heinlein's vision of man would take us to the stars; Live Earth would keep man in chains and mired in the mud.

On Sanctioning the Sanctioner Sanctioners

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Soon after discovering Objectivism, I learned of "the Split" which occurred between the leaders of the ARI and David Kelley's group. At the time, it seemed so important that our high school study group stopped everything we were doing to research this issue -- we wanted to choose the right side from the beginning. My friend Chris McKenzie printed out over 100 pages of text related to the Split, and we dived in. After reading many of the essays, letters, and other Split-related documents, I tentatively agreed with the ARIan philosophical perspective on all the main points.

After several years of studying Objectivism in more detail, I revisited the Split again in order to gain a more in-depth understanding of the epistemological and ethical issues involved. Once again, I found that I sided with the ARI camp on all of the important philosophical disputes. In summary, I concluded that Objectivism is a closed system, that Kelley's understanding of epistemology as applied to ethical judgment is severely flawed, that "toleration" (in the sense Kelley describes it) is not a virtue, and that granting sanction to one's ideological enemies is a dangerous game.

Regarding this last point, however - the issue of sanction - I have never been fully satisfied with my understanding of how to apply the principle. I agree that it is counter-productive to sanction those who misrepresent one's ideas, but the question remains in my mind: What constitutes sanction?

To "sanction" a person, group, or idea is to grant it a degree of legitimacy. One dictionary website defines sanction as "encourag[ing] or tolerat[ing] by indicating approval." It is unethical to publicly encourage, tolerate, and approve of one's enemies.

One does not need explicitly to voice his approval in order to grant sanction -- it is often given implicitly. For instance, one could argue that joining a political party grants sanction to the ideology underlying the party's platform, or that engaging in serious debate with a thoroughly dishonest opponent grants a degree of legitimacy to the opponent's arguments. But how far does this go? I will first consider a few clear examples, then present some borderline cases for analysis.

In my view, publicly supporting a political party clearly sanctions that party's ideological platform. "Public support" can include speaking at party-sponsored events, joining the party, helping raise funds for the party, and other similar activities. If ideas move history, then popular and well-funded ideological movements are a force to be reckoned with. To be clear, I do not believe it constitutes sanction to cooperate with members of a political party to accomplish a specific goal, like getting a particular bill passed through Congress. However, publicly promoting a political party as a whole is sanction, and one should be careful not to grant implicit support to ideological movements that oppose his values.

As an example of a form of support which is clearly not sanction, consider the act of buying an apple from a street vendor in Manhattan. One does not implicitly sanction the philosophical beliefs of the street vendor by doing business with him. Within the context of this interaction between buyer and seller, one implies his approval only of this particular transaction. Apples are not ideas, and purchasing one does affect the course of history on a grand scale. Even if the street vendor is an unethical person, one is not in a position to know it, nor does he need to.

Now consider a few personal examples that are much less clear to me:

Ironically, the Split between ARI and TOC has led to debate about whether and to what degree one ought to "tolerate" Kelleyites. Kelley's ideas, particularly in epistemology, are indeed destructive to Objectivism -- and he leads an ideological movement dedicated to spreading those ideas. Here is a clear case in which an Objectivist should withhold sanction from TOC. This would rule out joining TOC or directly donating money, of course, but how far does it go?

Harry Binswanger offers part of his answer in the Loyalty Oath for his product the HB List. According to the Loyalty Oath, the HB List "exclude[s] anyone who is sanctioning or supporting the enemies of Ayn Rand and Objectivism." Note he excludes, not only Kelleyites, but also those who sanction Kelleyites. The question remains: what constitutes sanction in this context? I found that Dr. Binswanger is very strict in his answer to this question.

Several years ago, when I ran the MSN group Objectivist Singles, I was denied membership to HBL because at one point my site contained a link to a TOC website. I notified Dr. Binswanger that at the time, no link to the TOC actually existed -- the member who had posted the link was banned for bad behavior, and his posts were all deleted. However, I told him, I did not in principle disallow links to TOC-related websites. On Objectivist Singles, the Split and other contentious issues were off-limits because I thought they were not appropriate topics for a singles site, but my rules allowed members to link to whatever other websites they chose. Dr. Binswanger wrote back and politely thanked me for my honesty, but denied my membership to HBL. In his view, I was sanctioning the sanctioner sanctioners.

The Atlasphere is another interesting borderline case regarding sanction. The site's owner Joshua Zader is most definitely a Kellyite, and to boot is a supporter of some kooky new age ideas. However, these negative elements do not seem to heavily influence Zader's management of his product. The Atlasphere is unique in its catalogue of thousands of Rand admirers from all over the world. It offers enormous potential value, particularly for Objectivists looking for friends and potential lovers. Does one sanction TOC by perusing The Atlasphere? How about becoming a paying member? How about writing an article for its blog? How about working for The Atlasphere?

Another recent example: a poster on Objectivism Online believes that "Even if [Nathanial Branden's] books have value, [he still doesn't] think Objectivists should buy them." I disagreed in this particular instance because I so highly value Branden's The Psychology of Self-Esteem. But I can see where this poster is coming from. Nathanial Branden has spent years and years campaigning against Objectivism in general and Ayn Rand in particular. If Jim Valiant is even 50% correct in his evaluation of Branden in PARC, then Branden deserves the ostracism he has received in Objectivist circles. So, is it morally optional to buy Branden's books? Ought one buy them used if possible? In general, how much time should one spend on making sure that his ideological enemies do not get a penny of his money?

I have friends who tried not buying any goods from China, in order not to grant sanction to this socialist, totalitarian state. This only lasted a few days. It was simply too difficult to avoid buying Chinese products. One would be sacrificing a great deal in order to stay China-free. I think of this whenever I hear people discouraging others from buying great books because they don't want the authors to benefit.

There is a sliding scale here, but the lines are not clearly marked.

I must wrap up this blog post, since it is already a day late (I like to publish on Tuesdays). I can leave you only with more questions, since I think it will be some time before I fully understand the answers: How can I make sure that I do not inadvertently sanction hostile ideological movements? When dealing with groups like TOCers and Libertarians, what kinds of interactions constitute sanction? How much of this is morally optional, how much is optimization, and how much is morally obligatory?

--Dan Edge

The Holy Scriptures of the United States of America

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Tomorrow is the 4th of July. I am a very patriotic American, and this week's blog post is dedicated to the three documents that together define the true spirit of America: the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

I was fortunate enough to actually see these documents last year at The National Archives in Washington, DC. All those who value freedom should make the Mecca to the Archives at least once in their lives. It is nothing short of a religious experience. Seeing the documents up close was overwhelmingly emotional for me. Here lie the writings of some of the greatest giants ever to walk the Earth, whose ideas truly changed the world. When stepping into the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom, where the documents are displayed, one is compelled to stand a little straighter, hold his head a little higher, and walk with confidence and grace. When I left the dimly lit room, I sat down on one of the chairs immediately outside to reflect on what I had seen and to sign the guest book. "This is one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had," I wrote. "One feels he must be worthy even to share the same room with these documents."

If you have never read America's holiest scriptures, there is no better time to do so than on the 4th of July. The Founding Fathers were not only great intellectuals, they were men of action. On July 4th, 1776, they performed one of the most profound acts of bravery the world has ever seen. They declared war on the greatest military power of their time in the name of life, liberty, property, and the sanctity of the individual. Take the time to read them tomorrow (particularly the Declaration of Independence) and honor the principles they represent. And if you're going to be doing the same things as me, have fun at the beach!

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

--Dan Edge

Live from Telluride

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

Sort of...

Since my wife has used our dual-boot laptop for most of its existence, I have little experience using it at all, let alone on the road for blogging purposes. Getting my host's DSL to work with my machine was one bump in the road, which the other -- the odd behavior of my normal browser of choice, Firefox -- didn't help me figure out any more quickly. (For what it's worth, Firefox will say, for example, "Connecting to umptysquat.com..." ... forever. Without loading anything.)

But the Konqueror browser works just fine. For Konqueror. So I'll run with it as best I can, unless some helpful soul out there has any good ideas concerning what might be ailing Firefox.

As I said before, blogging will be irregular this week and, on top of that, my connection and this computer are both slower than I am used to, so I will be hard-pressed to keep up with my usual pace. Besides. I'm on vacation in a beautiful place I've never been before, and attending OCON 2007, the Objectivist Summer Conference. [Hmmm. I've just noticed: No "compose mode" in Blogger with Konquerer. This means: I have to hard-code HTML links and text formatting, and have no spell check function. Not that I'm a bad speller, but: Oy.]

I almost didn't make it here. I'm a scientist, and therefore, not exactly well-heeled at this point in my career. And Telluride is quite expensive. Were it not for my in-laws helping me find lodging here with some of their friends, this trip just wasn't going to happen. I am having a wonderful time and I am very grateful to them. This may be my last chance to attend a conference for a long time.

With that, I post a few pictures I have managed to take so far. Click an image to expand it.


This is just one of the magnificent views from where I am staying.


Each day, I take a gondola ride over a mountain to Mountain Village, the actual site of the conference. Here, you can make out the gondola at the upper right.

The gondola departs from a station in a section of town I have nicknamed "The Lunatic Fringe" due to the fact that it's on the fringe of town and in honor of the house you see in the foreground with the anarchist symbol and "No Trespassing" sign (not visible) posted in front of its doorstep. I walked by the place once around mid-day to see what looked to be a few burned-out hippies lounging on its front porch. Or rednecks. Whatever.


Here is the kind of view of Telluride one gets from the gondola.


This is a shot from near the end of Yaron Brook's "State of the Institute" presentation. At the end of a fascinating talk about the efforts of the Ayn Rand Institute to give Objectivism greater penetrance in our culture, he went through a couple of slides of the sort of headlines we Objectivists are working hard to see in the papers some day. This one shows: "Reinstated Gold Standard Precedes Massive Growth of U.S. Economy" [subtitle: Inflation No Longer a Factor] in The Boston Globe, "Supreme Court Rules 'Faith-Based Initiatives' Unconstitutional" in the Los Angeles Times, and "Iran to Adopt American-Style Constitution a Decade After Being Defeated by the U.S. [subtitle: U.S. Troops to start leaving Teheran] in The New York Times.

In addition to the postcard-quality scenery and some really good presentations, I have had the pleasure of meeting in person quite a few people I had hitherto known only through blogging, including Paul and Diana Hsieh, and Greg Perkins of Noodle Food; Craig Biddle and John Lewis of The Objective Standard; and Scott Holleran, whose Box Office Mojo reviews I have cited from time to time.

And with that brief journal/postcard, I am off to run the gauntlet of gondola and anarchist compound for another round of OCON 2007.

-- CAV

Ashland University reenters the Dark Ages

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

Yesterday, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on Dr. John Lewis' recent travails at Ashland University (subscription required). For those who are unaware, here is a brief recap: After initially denying Lewis tenure this spring because Lewis supports Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, Ashland reversed itself, granting Lewis his tenure, but only the condition that he offer his resignation. Ashland acknowledged that Lewis has a superlative research and teaching record and did not proselytize his views in the classroom, yet the mere fact that Lewis is an Objectivist was enough to disqualify him from teaching at Ashland.

If this strikes you as odd, it gets even better: Ashland accepted money from the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship so Lewis and former Ashland professor C. Bradley Thompson could concentrate on Objectivist research.

Ashland's conservative leaders argued that Lewis threatened the University's Judeo-Christian mission. This claim is disingenuous; Lewis teaches classical history, not religious morals and as his spring talk at George Mason attests, Lewis is an outspoken advocate for religious and philosophic freedom and against religious tyranny. Are Ashland's standards such that it cannot tolerate an advocate for reason, tolerance and individual rights on its faculty?

And what will Lewis' dismissal mean for other Ashland faculty who fail to sufficiently toe this newly emboldened Christian line? For example, this Ashland professor teaches (or should I say dares to teach) a course on the Bible as literature. He explicitly states that his course will "read the Bible as a literary text, similar to other writings from the ancient and classical world, operating under the assumption that the Bible is a human document, an anthology of writings put together by human beings over time" (emphasis mine). Does this professor now have to fear that Ashland University's holy warriors will force him to resign too?

In my view, Ashland University's decision to force a professor like John Lewis' to resign means that this university has relegated itself to being little more than a Bible college for politically correct Republicans. If that is their wish, so be it, yet I wonder just how many of its faculty and students have signed up for that mission.

A Revolution in Homeschooling Education Begins!

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Impending Labor Crisis

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

From time to time, I have looked at the immigration debate and noted that one of the biggest "problems with immigration" cited by more xenophobic conservatives, the "strain on social services", is not properly part of the immigration debate at all. If we didn't have a welfare state to begin with, this problem would not exist -- if, that is, it really exists at all: The cost savings we realize due to cheap labor doubtless at least helps prop up our statism-crippled economy in more ways than one.

But all that may change in the next couple of decades. According to economist Robert S. Dunn, Jr. of George Washington University, our mass influx of immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean may soon effectively stop altogether.

According to the World Bank's 2007 Annual Development Indicators, in 1990 Mexico had a fertility rate of 3.3 children per female, but by 2005, that number had fallen by 36 percent to 2.1, which is the Zero Population Growth rate. That is an enormous decline in the number of Mexican infants per female. The large number of women currently in their reproductive years means that there are still quite a few babies, but as this group ages, the number of infants will decline sharply. If this trend toward fewer children per female continues, there being no apparent reason for it to cease, the number of young people in the Mexican population will decline significantly just when the number of elderly is rising. As labor markets in Mexico tighten and wage rates rise, far fewer Mexican youngsters will be interested in coming to the United States. Since our baby boomers will be retiring at the same time, we could face a severe labor shortage. [bold added]

We will thus no longer be able to realize the savings of cheap, plentiful labor -- but all things being equal, we will still be saddled with a bloated welfare state.

The current immigration debate is thus shown to be worse than fruitless because both sides agree on the premise that should be under intense debate: whether we should have a welfare state at all. Instead, we are given a false alternative: fence out or expel these potential new welfare recipients -- or simply make them into citizens, hoping they will vote to perpetuate the welfare system they presumably came to take advantage of, and then pander to them.

The real immigration problem (i.e., which isn't really caused by the welfare state or a deficient foreign policy) is that we make it unnecessarily difficult for hard-working people who want and deserve a chance to prosper to come over here and work. The current massive influx of illegal immigrants is masking this problem at the moment, but it would seem that it won't be doing so forever. We should be discussing how to make open immigration possible -- not how to compound already overly restrictive rules.

-- CAV

Sick o' Socialism

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

In the Wall Street Journal is an article that attacks the central theme of Sicko, namely the idea that socialized medicine will actually benefit patients. Although I would prefer to see, in addition, a little indignation at the idea that physicians deserve slavery for all their trouble along with a rousing defense of individual rights, the article does at least offer some food for thought. New to me was how common privatization has become in Europe:

Market reforms are catching on in Britain, too. For six decades, its socialist Labour Party scoffed at the very idea of private medicine, dismissing it as "Americanization." Today Labour favors privatization, promising to triple the number of private-sector surgical procedures provided within two years. The Labour government aspires to give patients a choice of four providers for surgeries, at least one of them private, and recently considered the contracting out of some primary-care services--perhaps even to American companies.

Other European countries follow this same path. In Sweden, after the latest privatizations, the government will contract out some 80% of Stockholm's primary care and 40% of total health services, including Stockholm's largest hospital. Beginning before the election of the new conservative chancellor, Germany enhanced insurance competition and turned state enterprises over to the private sector (including the majority of public hospitals). Even in Slovakia, a former Marxist country, privatizations are actively debated.

Although it is important to remember that such moves may fail -- because they are not necessarily moves toward actual capitalism -- the take-home message is unmistakable: If socialized medicine is so great, why are Europeans fleeing "paradise" in droves?

This will not save us in the long run. An uncompromising and proud stand for the individual rights of physicians and patients will ultimately be required for that. But such arguments might at least buy us some time to make the better ones that will carry the day.

-- CAV

Updates

6-29-07: Corrected a typo.

Marginalizing Freedom

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

Today, the Houston Chronicle published an article titled, "Marrriage Class Law Has Counselor in its Corner", as a follow-up to the recent "accidental" passage of a law that imposes penalties on couples who do not take marriage counseling classes before they wed.

The article is remarkable for two things. First, it shows the depths to which the conservatives have sunk in their attempts to take over the welfare state. Second, it exposes the left as just as eager to pander to religionists as the right!

Consider the desultory way the article introduces its topic, treating prescriptive law the way papers once reported on the weather -- as something man is powerless to change. That isn't terribly surprising coming from a major media outlet, which is to say, from the left.

Nor is it surprising that the paper would also let a supporter of this law get away with holding it out as capitalism. After all, the left -- accidentally sounding correct regarding this law -- feels that this law is bad. It also feels that capitalism is bad, so why not conflate the two?

The marriage bill might be the most obvious example of "nanny state" efforts to affect behavior, which traditionally have been associated with liberal Democrats. Other such laws, passed by the majority-Republican Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry, take aim at such "deadly sins" as gluttony and sloth.

[Tim] Louis and others likely to teach marriage education classes argue that it's proper for government to nudge couples into instruction that could improve their lives and benefit potential children by decreasing the number of single-parent families.

It's also good for business.

"The exciting thing about this bill is it creates demand," said Louis, a senior vice president at Family Services of Greater Houston. "I suspect there will be a lot of interest in people offering this particular type of service where before there was no demand for it." [bold added]

Yeah. And one could say that the National Socialists in Germany "created demand" for train tickets. What an exciting time that must have been to run a railroad! Once again, the idea of a market arising in response to the government violating the rights of the people it should be protecting may look a little like capitalism, but it is not, in fact, capitalism.

And just in case you thought that this man, being a businessman, was an outlier among the conservatives, and that his desire to have people accept this law as a legitimate part of a free-market economy was confusion on his part, recall this:

The marriage bill might be the most obvious example of "nanny state" efforts to affect behavior, which traditionally have been associated with liberal Democrats. Other such laws, passed by the majority-Republican Legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Rick Perry, take aim at such "deadly sins" as gluttony and sloth. [bold added]

And get a load of this:

The government has an interest in promoting marriage and discouraging divorce, Louis and his contemporaries say, because broken marriages often lead to poverty and greater reliance on social programs.

Michael Smalley, a clinical psychologist at Smalley Marriage and Family Center in The Woodlands, said government has long encouraged healthy behavior in other realms.

He points to "click it or ticket" seat-belt campaigns, "no swimming" signs and anti-smoking efforts. [bold added]

Got all that? The conservatives are quite happy to accept as time-honored precedent various leftist initiatives when doing so will give them cover to impose their religious dictates on the public. And, in case you were wondering, opposition to large welfare expenditures does not equal support of capitalism, principled opposition to the welfare state, or even a desire to shrink the welfare state.

But where things really get interesting is the feeble voice raised in "opposition" to this law -- and from which direction it can be heard:

That kind of talk that makes people like Kathy Miller, director of the Texas Freedom Network, nervous about government's interest in private lives.

"The thing that might be overlooked here is Texans want lawmakers to focus on issues like good public schools, good jobs, safe streets," she said. "They don't want the government dictating how they talk to their husbands and wives and how much they exercise. It really does start to look like a nanny state or a busybody state." [bold added]

"It really does start to look like a nanny state or a busybody state." Yawn. Is this really the best anyone can do? Where is the moral indignation over rights being trampled underfoot? The alarm at yet another blow against personal freedom?

You get neither because Ms. Miller is a religious leftist. Her organization's web site is currently advertising at the top and center of its main page a talk by the Reverend Jim Wallis, founder of the Sojourners, an organization that, like the religious right, hopes to inject religion into politics. Assuming her distaste for the marriage law is real on some level, she can't work herself up into a lather over the nanny state since she knows, deep down, that that is exactly what she wants, too.

You will note that the reporter said nothing about her organization's objectives, and simply passed Kathy Miller off as "nervous about government's interest in private lives" -- as if the government, thanks to past efforts of the left, having one hand in our back pockets and another trying to cover our mouths somehow had nothing to do with our "private lives" until the religious right came along.

Have journalists become, overwhelmingly, too lazy to unearth a single voice in the wilderness crying for freedom for such articles? Or can they hear only the chirping of crickets? I am very disappointed either way. The political debate is dominated by cries for control over our daily lives, differing only in what way our lives will be controlled, while the Kathy Millers of the world make opposing tyranny look like the activity of an amiable dunce -- something to smile at, but not take so seriously.

-- CAV

Go Forth and Integrate

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

When Paul posted this story about the exciting discovery of a new method of converting blood types...

Scientists have developed a way of converting one blood group into another.

The technique potentially enables blood from groups A, B and AB to be converted into group O negative, which can be safely transplanted into any patient.

The method, which makes use of newly discovered enzymes, may help relieve shortages of blood for transfusions.

...he joked to me, "Well, now the Objectivist epistemology is toast!"

Leonard Peikoff used the example of the incompatibility of blood types in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand to illustrate the principle "since a later discovery rests hierarchically on earlier knowledge, it cannot contradict its own base" (173). So the irony would be downright gooey if this new technique actually overturned our prior understanding of the incompatibility of blood types. Of course -- and hence the joke -- the new technique is based on that prior knowledge, meaning that it is actually a perfect example of the principle at work.

However, Paul's comment did have a more serious point, namely that Dr. Peikoff's fine example has become something of an Objectivist bromide, overused (and misused) by other Objectivists, such that the principle might seem to rest largely on that single example. The same thing happens with Ayn Rand's various furniture concepts (e.g. coffee table, desk, table, bookcase, furniture) as examples of a low-level hierarchy of concepts. Those examples have been so overused that sometimes it seems like the Objectivist theory of concepts is good for nothing but forming concepts of furniture! (One side-effect is ignorance of the difficulties of forming some low-level concepts, e.g. those those of species of living organisms.)

As I tell my students, if you can't construct your own examples, then you really don't understand the abstract principle in question. Using Ayn Rand's own examples might be legitimate in some contexts, e.g. when introducing Rand's own views to those unfamiliar with her work. However, the re-use of standard Objectivist examples often seems to stem from haste (i.e. inadequate time to think of a new example), laziness (i.e. unwillingness to exert the effort to develop a new example), or timidity (i.e. fear of using a misbegotten, half-baked, or problematic example).

However, the root problem is that of inadequate connections between abstractions with concretes. A person who really understands some abstract point should have a wide range of clear examples thereof within relatively easy mental grasp. That "shutttling" between abstractions and concretes is a particular specialty of Yaron Brook: when speaking of some abstraction, he is never at a loss for concrete examples. So what he knows, he really knows. It's damn impressive.

Developing those connections between abstractions and concretes does not require scholarly study or special training. It just requires consciously adopting a policy of identifying all kinds of phenomena in conceptual form as you go about life. So you make a conscious mental note to yourself: "Oh, that's an instance of X" or "That's like Y in Z respect." (Remember to include internal mental states as well as phenomena out in the world.) If you do that regularly, you'll find yourself with a wide range of examples to draw on in discussion, with firmer grasp of the abstraction, and with a greater capacity to make new integrations.

If you have a terrible memory like me, you might also want to write down the better examples. (That's one of the reasons I blog: it helps me remember interesting concrete instances of abstract principles.) For example, the recent discovery about converting blood types mentioned above is not merely an instance of the principle that new knowledge cannot contradict its own base, it's also an instance of Francis Bacon's dictum "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." The discovery of a method of altering those blood types would be impossible without the acceptance of the incompatibility of blood types as metaphysical fact.

I'm not as consistent about this policy of conceptualization as I'd like to be. So I'm facile in some areas and bumbling in others. That's one reason why I've chosen to blog about it: the process of writing this post will help remind me to implement the necessary standing orders!

Worship of Death

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This bit of history confirms (yet again) that Christianity doesn't have a monopoly on horrifying death worship:

Scattered throughout Northern Japan are two dozen mummified Japanese monks known as Sokushinbutsu. Followers of Shugendo, an ancient form of Buddhism, the monks died in the ultimate act of self-denial.

For three years the priests would eat a special diet consisting only of nuts and seeds, while taking part in a regimen of rigorous physical activity that stripped them of their body fat. They then ate only bark and roots for another three years and began drinking a poisonous tea made from the sap of the Urushi tree, normally used to lacquer bowls. This caused vomiting and a rapid loss of bodily fluids, and most importantly, it killed off any maggots that might cause the body to decay after death. Finally, a self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. His only connection to the outside world was an air tube and a bell. Each day he rang a bell to let those outside know that he was still alive. When the bell stopped ringing, the tube was removed and the tomb sealed.

Not all monks who attempted self-mummification were successful. When the tombs were finally opened, some bodies were found to have rotted. These monks were resealed in their tombs. They were respected for their endurance, but they were not worshiped. Those monks who had succeeded in mummifying themselves were raised to the status of Buddha, put on display, and tended to by their followers. The Japanese government outlawed Sokushunbutsu in the late 19th century, though the practice apparently continued into the 20th.

Ugh. (Via Paul.)

Middle East Watch: Egypt

By Scott Powell from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Nurse Gives Rectal Exam to Sicko

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

Over at RealClear Politics is what I hope proves to be merely the first volley of an all-out carpet bombing of Michael Moore's latest agitprop, Sicko, in which he ignores the abject failure of socialized medicine everywhere it has been tried as he attempts to convince his audience that it will somehow "work" if tried in America.

The article is by Helen Evans, director of Nurses for Reform, an organization of European nurses "dedicated to consumer-oriented reform of European health-care systems". Its title is, "What Michael Moore left on the cutting room floor", and its first three paragraphs should pique the interest of anyone who has even the remotest concern for his health:

Michael Moore's denunciation of America's health-care system is about to hit the silver screen. In the film's trailer, a desk attendant at a British hospital smiles while explaining that in Britain's National Health Service, "everything is free." But for free hospital care, Britons pay an awfully high price.

Just ask the nearly 1 million British patients on waiting lists for treatment. Or the 200,000 Britons currently waiting merely to get on NHS waiting lists. Mr. Moore must have missed those folks.

Curiously, though, many American policymakers seem to think that a government-managed, NHS-style system is the answer to all of America's health-care woes. Before heading down that road, however, America's leaders ought to actually investigate Britain's experience with state-sponsored medical care. [bold added]

Miss Evans knows that for nurses everywhere to have a better shot at saving lives, she must first perform a post mortem on the system Michael Moore would foist upon his countrymen. And so she does, describing, among other things, the high rate of infections acquired by patients as a result of checking into hospitals, the results of shortages within the system, and rationing -- the final, predictable result of any attempt to provide necessities by government decree.

Her picture is very bleak, although even she had to leave out a few details, such as the fact that smokers in Britain will be denied certain surgeries altogether or made to wait longer for treatment they "still likely" may get if they do not quit. In addition, some physicians there are already also denying treatment to drinkers and the obese. Perhaps she ran into space limitations -- or maybe she wondered whether the full truth, being stranger than even Moore's most outlandish fictions, might strain her readers' credulity.

And then she necessarily also had to leave out Cuba, which Moore famously visited during the making of this propaganda piece in defiance of American law. I needn't discuss the Cuban system in any detail either, since the following news excerpt from The Chicago Tribune (blogged here) just about makes doing so at all unnecessary.

Medical procedures for show may be new to audiences in the States, but they're old hat in Latin America:

Some Cubans express resentment at the resources being poured into Mision Milagro, complaining that foreigners get better medical treatment than they do. Other Cubans seethe as they watch foreign patients driven to and from hospitals in new Chinese luxury buses while they wait for hours for scarce public transportation. [bold added]

Mision Milagro, by the way, is a program financed by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, which is being used to gain popularity for socialism by providing free eye operations to the poor throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Needless to say, their friends and relatives will see their improved vision when they return, but will remain blind to what life is really like for those who already live under socialism -- unless, of course, they succeed in imposing it upon themselves, at which point it will be too late for most of them.

Government officials want two things: (1) to have life and death power over others and (2) to appear to be all-powerful to everyone else. Is it any wonder then, that they universally ignore those they can take for granted, while pulling out all the stops for those not yet under their power? Specifically, is it really any surprise that Cuba and Venezuela are collaborating to put on Mision Milagro? Or that they do it at the expense of decent care for Cubans and Venezuela's coffers? Why the hell would anyone in his right mind accept what a medical system, run by a politician who doesn't govern him, does at face value? And, for that matter, why would he want a government official in charge of his medical care?

For all their disdain of capitalism, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Michael Moore don't just epitomize the very worst imaginable caricature of hucksterism any of them could possibly impute to capitalism: They remind us that snake oil salesmen, needing consenting victims, are harmless by comparison.

If Mision Milagro sounds like a bait-and-switch scheme, Sicko should sound like false advertising at best. Unfortunately, your health is at stake, and the funny thing about the government is that unlike in the case of a lousy business, you're not free to go elsewhere.

-- CAV

Paper Blasts Gore

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

There is a must-read column in the Chicago Sun-Times that basically consists in a roll call of claims of impending doom due to global warming by Al Gore -- each of which has been refuted by scientific evidence. You know it'll be good when it opens like this:

In his new book, The Assault on Reason, Al Gore pleads, "We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth." Gore repeatedly asks that science and reason displace cynical political posturing as the central focus of public discourse.

If Gore really means what he writes, he has an opportunity to make a difference by leading by example on the issue of global warming.

And, for a taste of what you'll find on parade:

Gore claims global warming is causing more frequent and severe hurricanes. However, hurricane expert Chris Landsea published a study on May 1 documenting that hurricane activity is no higher now than in decades past. Hurricane expert William Gray reported just a few days earlier, on April 27, that the number of major hurricanes making landfall on the U.S. Atlantic coast has declined in the past 40 years. Hurricane scientists reported in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters that global warming enhances wind shear, which will prevent a significant increase in future hurricane activity.

Hmmm. Might global warming, like almost anything else we encounter (or cause) in nature, have benefits as well as drawbacks? Son of a gun!

The end of the article rather charitably asks, "Will [Gore] rise to the occasion? (i.e., of "lead[ing] by example in his call for an end to the distortion of science"). Given that some of the doomsday scenarios he foisted on the American public in An Inconvenient Truth had been shown false before he released the movie, probably not. But that's not the only reason I am confident that Gore will disappoint.

The only thing I would have added to this column is based on something I have noted here before:

... In the misnamed "global warming" debate, both sides agree that the government ought to "do something" about climate change. This fundamental premise is almost never questioned or even named.

But laymen all over the place are arguing themselves blue in the face over whether climate change is occurring and, if so, how. Unfortunately, this second debate would remain (properly) confined to scientists if more people understood the proper role of government, namely the protection of individual rights. Not setting the Earth's thermostat.

... [T]he real purpose of the loudest faction in this debate is to extend government controls over the lives of ordinary citizens using any expedient excuse. The excuse du jour happens to be called "global warming".

In other words, there is a debate (i.e., concerning the proper role of government) which should be going on, but isn't -- that is furthermore being concealed from view by a poorly-presented scientific debate. But then, that is one of the major purposes of making such a big deal of the scientific debate.

So what would I have added? This: Given that Al Gore has been unmasked as biased in his scientific views, it might be worth considering whether he is similarly biased in his opinions regarding political philosophy. Generally, when one perpetuates a fraud like this, one hopes to gain something.

Whatever that might be in the case of Al Gore, he clearly sees big government (i.e., the wholesale misuse of government to violate individual rights) as the means towards that end since he consistently calls for government "solutions" to the various doomsday scenarios he pushes.

If Al Gore's science is flawed, his political philosophy is fair game, too. To fail to make note of that is to let one of the greatest charlatans of American politics get away with the greater of his two swindles!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected title.

Thoughts on China

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I have returned from my first business trip to China earlier this month. It was an eye-opening experience, as I got to see first hand the progress that has been made there, and better understand what is occurring in the country. The particular issue of how to deal with China is important to me. My job just became global and so I have product responsibility for some products that are sold in China. I have discussed this topic multiple times on Objectivist forums, here, here and here. It was the response to my posts on this topic by the moderator of The Forum that was behind my reason to leave it permanently. Of all of the ethical issues, beyond those in my personal life, this is probably one that is most critical to me, professionally.

When I returned home I was surprised to find two cover articles that echoed the feeling and perspective I soaked in during my visit. One was in the Atlantic, by military columnist James Fallows entitled "China Makes, The World Takes", describing the nature of China's Economic Development Zones, and the other in National Geographic describing the "boom towns" that have popped up all through those same zones. These are fantastic concretized descriptions corroborating what I saw. But more importantly, they give a ground level look at how capitalism is penetrating China today. I highly suggest them.

The standard Objectivist response to China seems to be something along the lines of "China is a rights-violating, cesspool of a Communist dictatorship. It is clearly our enemy. We should do everything in our power to isolate it and see it collapse completely as we did with the Soviet Union." Rand was certainly hostile to Communism, for good reason, and openly advocated the complete isolation of Soviet Russia. In contrast, when I discuss a country such as India with Objectivists, I get a much more favorable response to dealing with that country, even though it is openly socialist and in many ways still more backward than China.

I have problems with this position. First, while this isolation strategy contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, I am not convinced that the aftermath in post-Soviet Russia has left us in a secure position. Russia is largely a nationalist, ganster, nuclear state, and its future course is could hardly be called stable. Second, the isolation strategy belies the current state of China. That is, maybe in 1972, when Nixon began thawing Chinese relations, the proper course would have been to continue advocating isolation. But I was all of 4 years old then and I am only now in a position to take actions that actually have ethical bearing on China. Today's China is hardly Nixon's China, and that is the point.

Anyone who continues to advocate that embargo of China is the best course of Westernizing it has absolutely no understanding of what good things are actually occurring there, and the scale on which it is occurring. The first thing to understand is that China is not a single country uniformly inching toward a market economy while preserving its Communist ideology. It is really two Chinas. One that is advancing slowly, remaining nominally socialist, and the other that has jumped headlong into a "wild west" form of proto-capitalism. The story of the second begins in 1980, when the Chinese government established its first Economic Development Zone in Guangdong province in the Shenzhen area, next to what was then estranged, and very capitalist, Hong Kong. Since that time, four other national zones have been established in China and the Shenzen area has been expanded into the whole Pearl River Delta. In addition, 15 free trade zones, 32 state-level economic and technological development zones, and 53 new- and high-tech industrial development zones have since been established.

These zones are booming, and the rural population is flocking to them. When you look at a map of the development zones, it appears rather small, until you realize that much of China's 1.3billion population is concentrated on the coast, and that the zones have swallowed up all of the coastal provinces from Shandong, just north of Shanghai all the way down to Guangdong, surrounding Hong Kong. I did a quick calculation of population, and counting the five provinces and the municipalities, this is about 330 million people, all of whom are now living in a semi-free economic state. That is more than the population of the United States! According to James Fallows, the Shenzhen area by itself contains a larger manufacturing workforce than the entire manufacturing workforce of the U.S.! Estimates are that 140 million rural Chinese have moved into these zones, and another 40 million are expected in the next five years.

What's going on in these zones? It's very simple: wild-west, capitalistic, manufacturing; everything from high-tech electronics to bra rings. It is estimated that at this pace by 2020, 25% of the world's manufacturing capacity will be in China. Make no mistake folks, this is wild-west capitalism, not too un-reminiscent of the boom towns of the American Industrial Revolution. And it appears to be working. Is there corruption? sure; crime? yes; pirating? of course; is it all done under the auspices of Communist "national planning"? yup. But what seems to be lacking is: tyranny. That is, the government largely stays out of day to day affairs. Certainly they take a cut off the top, primarily in two forms: at the beginning of the process by selling "land use rights", the closest thing to property rights, and thus making land available for development, and then through an ongoing company income tax (which at 15-30% is lower than that of the US - but that is another post.) Beyond that, very little. Witness James Fallow's question to an expatriate in Shenzhen who runs a company that specializes in helping foreign companies navigate the process of outsourcing to a Chinese company.

Government policy and favoritism may play a big role in China's huge road-building and land-development policies, but they seem to be secondary factors in the outsourcing boom. For instance, when I asked Mr. China [expat Liam Casey] which officials I should try to interview in the local Shenzhen government to understand how they worked with companies, he said he didn't know. He'd never met any.

Witness, a person who runs a local Chinese company specializing in helping other companies establish Chinese supply. He's not helping them cut through bureaucratic red tape. There isn't much. Instead, in this wild-west boomtown, where factories spring up daily, and there are no local directories telling you which factory has the "Good Housekeeping" seal of approval, this man specializes in knowing which factories can do what you need, and which can't. This absence of government intrusion is not the earmark of a totalitarian government, rather of a mixed economy.

The result is an economic boom, the likes of which has not been seen probably since the industrial revolution. I witnessed this first hand. I drove from Shanghai to Suzhou, two hours by car on a super highway littered with factories and new construction. Never once during that drive was I out of sight of a construction crane. A colleague of mine who began traveling to China a decade ago said that this road was unimproved in 1999 and the land was all farmland. Two hours drive! This simply can't happen voluntarily without some element of capitalism being present in the structure of these zones. Is it perfect capitalism? No, but I don't think it qualifies as tyranny.

Clearly a quarter of China's population now lives in a mixed economy. What are the fundamental aspects of that life? They keep what they earn. If they save enough, they can start a business of their own. Hustle drive and hard work pays off. It infuses the population with an energy and a hope that I found contagious, almost like Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century. Conditions can be Spartan, but make no mistake, people are there voluntarily because this life offers far more opportunity and hope than their previous lives did.

"In the movie version of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seemstress, two teenaged men from the city befriend a young woman in the mountain village where they have been sent for rustication during the Cultural Revolution. One day the young woman unexpectedly leaves. She has gone to "try her luck in a big city," her grandfather tells them. "She said she wanted a new life." The new life is [in Economic Zone] Shenzhen.

Multiplied millions of times, and perhaps lacking the specific drama of the Balzac tale, this is the story of the factory towns."

Witness the ideas scribbled by workers on the walls their dormitory in Lishui.

"Find success immediately."
"Reflect on the past, consider the future."
"Pass ever day happily! A new day begins from right now!"
"Face the future directly."
"A person can become successful anywhere.
"swear I won't return home until I am famous."

I have no illusions about the possibility of reversals in China's progress. The Chinese government has built a system of contradictions. Proper grounding and acceleration of this progress requires the right ideas, and ideologically China is adrift. It is possible that the government will reverse course, or that there will be civil unrest in the poorer, nominally Communist provinces. But to advocate for the destruction of what has happen via a policy of isolation makes no sense. It is a step backwards on a path that is already built in the right direction.

Once one understands the magnitude of what has happened and the level on which it has happened, one cannot help but consider that there are now significant barriers to a direct reversal that are strengthening every day. Most notably, a quarter of the population now sees concretely the effect of a free market, and of property rights. I have significant doubts that they will allow that to be taken away quietly. Second, I have to believe that the government, like all governments of mixed economies, see the benefits of allowing such areas to continue to exist. That is, they realize they have created a golden goose, and knowing what life was like before having it, they are hesitant to do away with it so easily. Is this principled capitalism? No, but then no mixed economy is. Instead China lives in the same sort of government parasitism of all mixed economies where the government maintains it support by appearing to improve the lot of the people, and then preserves its power and influence by skimming off the top of the productive capacity of the people. It is a self-interested but Machiavellian relationship. While China has super-power aspirations, it is much more likely to thread that path carefully rather than risk losing it in a direct confrontation. I believe that China is becoming less of a threat because has its existence highly intertwined with the U.S. economy. Unlike protectionist Japan after WWII, who chafed at foreign investment and set up local companies that would one day compete with American companies, China works to serve the U.S. market. With access to American markets necessary to fuel its economic growth, China has made significant concessions in its economic structure in order to gain Most Favored Nations status and WTO membership. Those compromises are significant victories in the effort to eliminate the Chinese threat. If its economy is a golden goose, then favorable relations with and access to U.S. markets feeds that goose.

So maybe instead of the Cold War isolationist strategy, barring contact with our enemy and supplying dissidents with weapons, the proper stance on China should be to acknowledge the uniqueness of the situation and the capitalist values it has achieved, and work to arm its people with the proper ideas so that they can continue that progress. It is China's people after all that have to recognize and fight for the continuation of their progress. Maybe they need ideas in their current state more than they need weapons.

China's manufacturing economy remains a small factory, commoditized output, fragmented economy. The next step in China's path to capitalism will be consolidation, the creation of companies that will be capable of competing on the basis of more than just manufacturing, the building of the first companies capable of becoming true multi-national corporations. But to do this, they will need several things: adding protections for human rights most notably for intellectual property, establishing a functioning legal system, and educating management talent. It is business management talent that is sorely lacking in China right now, but this is what will open the doors to the next level of introduction of Western ideas. Today, the Chinese workingman understands concretely the potential created when he is able to keep what he earns. Tomorrow, the Chinese businessman, if he is to have any hope of running a successful multi-national must understand what conditions are necessary for running a successful business. He must understand this to be able to fight to hold onto it.

China is a complex case, and it is most certainly not a fait acompli, but I believe that if one understands the nature and scale of what has already occurred then the basis for the standard Objectivist response that isolation is the only course is not so clear cut. Certainly we must continue to advocate for change in China based upon proper philosophic principles just as we do here in the U.S. But the path between the present state and future success may have more than one road.

Why Does Liberal Talk Radio Fail?

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

On HBList Joseph Kellard asked, "why does liberal talk radio consistently fail (when not funded by government), while free-market conservative talk radio prevails?"

It's a good question. Recent studies have showed, as I recall, that 90% of talk radio is conservative. Liberals such as Mario Cuomo and Jim Hightower failed at talk radio. Air America has financial troubles. The predominance of right-wing talk radio has some liberals wanting to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

It has been said that conservative talk radio just mirrors America. The people are conservative, therefore talk radio is. If this were true, then why do elections indicate we are nearly a 50-50 nation? Why does right-wing radio prevail even in places such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles, where Democrat politicians succeed and conservatives are nowhere to be seen?

It has been said that the MSM is predominately liberal, thus talk radio is a reaction to it. People tune in to hear politically incorrect statements that one would never see in newspapers and television. This might explain some of right-wing talk radio's success, but not all of it. Again, elections would indicate that much more of the country agrees with the liberal MSM than is reflected in radio -- so why can't this point of view find a place in talk radio?

Here is my answer. Talk radio is a forum for opinion, which means rational, logical argumentation meant to persuade. In order to argue well, one must subscribe to and have confidence in reason. One must believe that rational argumentation is not a waste of time. Liberals, succumbing to two centuries of nihilistic modern philosophy, no longer believe in reason.

The Old Left had associated reason with socialism. By the 1960's socialism was discredited and the irrationalist New Left arose to replace the Old Left. By the time socialism received its final death blow in the late '80s-early '90s, the left had concluded from its failure that reason doesn't work.

In the meantime, the 1972 landslide defeat of McGovern by Nixon was a turning point for the Democrat Party. As New Leftists they realized that they could not campaign proudly and openly as who they are and win the Presidency. Since then the only two Democrat Presidents have been Southern governors who campaigned as moderates.

The left's philosophic loss of confidence in reason and the Democrats' bitter experiences with the American electorate have made them cynical about argumentation. To them it is about manipulating the prejudices and irrationality of the American people. They believe that when the right talks about God, guns and gays it stirs up emotions in Americans that overwhelm their capacity to think rationally. Same thing with patriotism. Al Gore's new book argues that right-wing talk is an "assault on reason."

When a faction no longer believes in the efficacy of reason -- despite the title of Gore's book -- what fills the void? Lies, smears and character assassination. Since the advent of Borking, we have seen the left rely more and more on ad hominem argumentation. It has become a regular Democrat tactic to release smears about Republicans late in October before elections. This recent post by James Wolcott, in which he smears Republican presidential candidates as animal abusers, is typical.

In recent years it has been bewilderingly difficult to understand exactly what the Democrats in Congress are fighting for. They attack Republicans, but they don't crusade for anything. I believe the roots lie in that traumatic 1972 election, in which they learned that openly fighting for big government is not the path to success.

After the 1972 election the Democrats did manage to defeat Nixon anyway by using the liberal media to mire him the Watergate scandal. This is another lesson that leftist baby boomers have not forgotten. Since then they have put enormous resources not into fighting Republican ideas, but into catching them in scandal. They had no answer to Reagan's conservative ideology, but they made the most of the Iran-Contra Scandal. Since day one of George W. Bush's Presidency they have struggled overtime to mire him in scandal. The best they've done is the ginned-up Scooter Libby trial. I take such meager results as evidence that Bush is the most honest, least corrupt President of my lifetime. (Bush's problem, in both domestic and foreign affairs, is that he follows his Christian morality too devoutly.)

There is another related reason the left does not thrive in a medium of opinion. Collectivism and statism are at war with reality. Setting morality aside (which the left has learned never to do, as the prevailing morality of our culture, altruism, is on their side), big government is not practical. The conservatives, as altruists, cannot make a moral argument against the welfare state, but they can argue its impracticality all day long, and this fills a lot of air time on talk radio. Liberals are crushed when the debate is about practical results. (Al Gore's crusade to destroy the economy in order to prevent global warming is currently being demolished by rational scientists. The left's best hope is to intimidate their opponents into silence by announcing that they have a consensus and anyone who disagrees is a wacko. When a scientist's career depends on government money, such a tactic is powerful.)

So liberals cannot be honest about who they are and cannot argue that their programs are practically better than their opponents'. They look at the American people with contempt and believe reason is useless with them. Is it any wonder they fail before radio microphones?

All liberals can argue for is the morality of altruism, because 2,000 years of Christianity have made the west equate altruism with morality. Unfortunately for the left and the right, arguing for self-sacrifice makes boring radio. It is about as interesting as a Sunday sermon or a pious lecture in political correctness. No ratings there. For the left that leaves ad hominem attacks and scandal mongering, which might entertain for a few minutes.

An hour is a long time to fill with talk when you really believe, deep down inside, that the only answer is force.

UPDATE: Revision.

The Plot to Shush Rush You

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

Bradley A. Smith, who a year and a half ago wrote an excellent article (blogged here) on attempts to throttle talk radio and blogging through campaign finance "reform", follows up with an article that, incredibly, is even more compelling.

It isn't just that campaign finance reform threatens talk radio or blogging, or that it might eventually affect Joe Six-Pack. It's that it already does, as Smith illustrates very well with the first of several harrowing examples:

In February 2006, Norm Feck learned that the city of Parker, Colorado was thinking about annexing his neighborhood, Parker North. Feck attended a meeting on the annexation, realized that it would mean more bureaucracy, and concluded that it wouldn't be in Parker North residents' interest. Together with five other Parker North locals, he wrote letters to the editor, handed out information sheets, formed an Internet discussion group, and printed up anti-annexation yard signs, which soon began sprouting throughout the neighborhood.

That's when annexation supporters took action -- not with their own public campaign, but with a legal complaint against Feck and his friends for violating Colorado's campaign finance laws. The suit also threatened anyone who had contacted Feck's group about the annexation, or put up one of their yard signs, with "investigation, scrutinization, and sanctions for Campaign Finance violations." Apparently the anti-annexation activists hadn't registered with the state, or filled out the required paperwork disclosing their expenditures on time. Steep fines, increasing on a daily basis, were possible. The case remains in litigation.

Should Americans care about what's happening in Parker North? They certainly don't seem to. A LexisNexis search finds just three stories, all in Colorado papers, that mention the dispute. That's it: no commentary by columnists, no national network reports, not even coverage by a single major blogger on this application of campaign finance law to the most basic community political activity. The lack of interest is in a way understandable, since campaign finance reform, whether on the state or federal level, is at once forbiddingly complex and seemingly irrelevant to most citizens' lives. People tend to see reform as affecting only the powerful -- lobbyists, big corporations, "fat cats" -- not ordinary Joes. With some notable exceptions, even conservatives, who overwhelmingly believe that the First Amendment protects one's right to spend money on a candidate, don't pay much attention.

Smith goes on to discuss the atmosphere of palpable anxiety among those only slightly higher up in the political food chain. Says one accountant who volunteered to work as a campaign treasurer, "No job I have ever undertaken caused me more stress than this one. I was frightened and concerned every day that I would do something wrong."

In fact, even ordinary speech is being regulated -- by assigning it a cash value:

... [I]f an executive instructs his secretary to type a fund-raising letter, the FEC values the contribution not at the cost of typing the letter, but at the amount of money that the letter raises. This move dramatically expands the reach of campaign finance laws: not only can the FEC limit funds that can be used for speech, but it can limit speech itself by assigning it a monetary value. And it opens the door to all kinds of mischief: for instance, the FEC could determine that a posting on a popular blog was worth thousands of dollars.

Economic controls do not just breed other economic controls. They breed controls on all other spheres of human activity because all spheres of human activity are interrelated. As I have said before:

One will not achieve freedom for the mind by instituting slavery for the body. One must understand that freedom is indivisible -- like the human beings who need it to survive.

We see here that the chickens of our nation's long standing failure to respect property rights are coming home to roost -- in the form of the words out of our mouths being regarded as property, and thus subject to regulation. In order for us to continue to enjoy government protection of our right to freedom of speech, we must also insist on unbreached protection of property rights.

Smith correctly names the objective of campaign finance "reform":

Such an intrusive regulatory regime is but a logical step toward the holy grail of campaign finance reform: a fully regulated, taxpayer-funded system of political speech. Richard Hasen, an oft-quoted expert on campaign finance whom the media regularly portray as a moderate voice for reform, has proposed limiting citizens' financial participation in politics to a government-provided voucher, and prohibiting any other private funding of political speech. Edward Foley, a former Ohio state solicitor and director of Ohio State University’s influential election-law program, has made a similar proposal. Both experts would extend their regulations even to newspaper editorial pages. Hasen explains that he's trying to solve the "Rupert Murdoch problem" -- just in case you had any doubt about whom he's got in his sights.

This puts it mildly. If people are already being admonished for placing political decals on their own unsold ad space, then this goal will clearly require full socialism or at least speech only by government permission.

If the article has a major flaw, it is that it goes too easy on conservatives. That John McCain sponsored the odious measure known by his name is noted, but the significance of a conservative sponsor is hidden behind his being dismissed as "unconventional". That President Bush signed it into law is forgiven too easily by assigning his blame to the Supreme Court, which has plenty of blame of its own already.

We are in serious trouble. The left wants to stamp out freedom of speech and the right doesn't seem to understand why freedom of speech is important. The first is serious, but not insurmountable while we can still speak. The second indicates a fundamental failure to understand the role of reasoned debate at best and complicity at worst. Read on for why complicity gets my vote.

If, as Smith says, "[m]any a tax- and regulation-prone politician, stymied by real political debate," wants campaign finance reform, the fact that conservatives are "historically uninterested in mobilizing against 'reform,'" seems quite curious. Wouldn't conservatives stand to win big (as shown by some ballot initiatives Smith himself cites) if they'd stand up for freedom of speech? I, for one, am not prepared to believe that this hasn't dawned on them.

Given that so many who want to inject religion into politics wish to impose restrictions (e.g., decency laws) of their own on freedom of speech generally, I wouldn't put it past many conservatives to be salivating at the prospect of further regulations on freedom of speech.

It does not take much imagination to see such types waiting for the chance to use such laws creatively for their own nefarious purposes. The left opposes freedom of speech merely on pragmatic grounds -- because it would keep them out of power. The right is worse: It opposes freedom of speech on moral grounds -- and they'll sacrifice some short-term goals in order to see it get snuffed out to the point that they can force America to live up to its standards of "decency". And this is the only way this goal can be achieved, given that there is no basis besides faith for Christian morality. Reasoned debate only impedes the acceptance of arbitarary marching orders.

The only way to prevent the enemies of freedom on the left and on the right from destroying our nation's ability to hold an informed, intelligent discussion of the issues of the day is to fight for consistent protection of the rights to freedom of speech and to property, since the latter provides the means for the dissemination of the former.

-- CAV

Berliner on Independence Day

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

Make it a point, preferably before you celebrate Independence Day, to stop by Capitalism Magazine to read this classic editorial on the meaning of this holiday by Michael Berliner, "Put the 'Independence' Back in Independence Day".

Why? For one thing, since the fight for freedom never ends, it is important to step back for a moment to understand more deeply or remember the full importance and glory of what it is our forefathers fought for. For another, doing so enhances one's ability to fully enjoy this celebration. In addition, two points in particular sorely need to be known and understood (for both reasons) far more widely than they currently are, and I think this editorial explains both quite well.

First is the fact that our Founding Fathers put their lives on the line to free themselves from a tyranny that is mild by today's standards:

"Independence Day" is a critically important title. It signifies the fundamental meaning of this nation, not just of the holiday. The American Revolution remains unique in human history: a revolution--and a nation--founded on a moral principle, the principle of individual rights. Jefferson at Philadelphia, and Washington at Valley Forge, pledged their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor." For what? Not for mere separation from England, not--like most rebels--for the "freedom" to set up their own tyranny. In fact, Britain's tyranny over the colonists was mild compared to what most current governments do to their citizens. [bold added]

The second is why they did so:

Political independence is not a primary. It rests on a more fundamental type of independence: the independence of the human mind. It is the ability of a human being to think for himself and guide his own life that makes political independence possible and necessary. The government as envisaged by the Founding Fathers existed to protect the freedom to think and to act on one's thinking. If human beings were unable to reason, to think for themselves, there would be no autonomy or independence for a government to protect. It is this independence that defines the American Revolution and the American spirit. [bold added]

You'll hear no belittling of fireworks or barbecues coming from here, but trust me, both are far more meaningful and enjoyable when one fully appreciates what it is that they celebrate.

One need not be an American citizen or even to have ever stepped foot in America to have something to celebrate today: America's Founding Fathers showed the world once and for all that it is possible to win the fight for freedom.

If you recognize the importance of the moral virtue of independence and fight for the freedom that makes it possible, you are an American in spirit, and I wish you a happy Independence Day!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Rewrote second paragraph.

Flags and John Adams

By Kendall J from The Crucible & Column,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I just put out my flag for the 4th of July. A small gesture that I always do with a bit of reverence to mark what is probably one of the most important days in the history of mankind. It is not the first day a man was able to live freely, nor was it the first day that his right to do so was proclaimed, but it was the first day that the principle was declared to be the founding basis of government.

The Declaration of Independence laid down the principle that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men." This provided the only valid justification of a government and defined its only proper purpose: to protect man's rights by protecting him from physical violence.

Thus the government's function was changed from the role of ruler to the role of servant. The government was set to protect man from criminals—and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government—as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power.

-Ayn Rand

More than any other Founding Father, this day is due to John Adams, probably the premiere intellectual father of the United States, and the one who fought most adamantly to see this declaration passed. Here are some of his thoughts on the importance of this day [written in the days leading up to July 4]

The object if great which we have in view, and we must expect a great expense of blood to obtain it. But we should always remember that a free constitution of civil government cannot be purchased at too dear a rate, as there is nothing on this side of Jerusalem of equal importance to mankind.

Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measure in which the lives and liberties of millions, born and unborn are most essentially interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.

The second day of July 1776 [the date the Declaration was voted on and a majority was for. Revisions would take another two days.] will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.

May you recall the import of this day and have a very happy 4th!

Put the 'Independence' Back in Independence Day

By Michael S. Berliner

America's cities and towns will soon fill with parades, fireworks and barbecues, in celebration of the Fourth of July, the 231st birthday of America. But one hopes that the speeches will contain fewer bromides and more attention to exactly what is being celebrated. The Fourth of July is Independence Day, but America's leaders and intellectuals have been trying to move us further and further away from the meaning of Independence Day, away from the philosophy that created this country.

What we hear from politicians, intellectuals, and the media is that independence is passé, that we've reached a new age of "interdependence." We hear demands for mandatory "volunteering" to serve others, for sacrifice to the nation. We hear demands from trust-busters that successful companies be punished for being "greedy" and not serving society. But this is not the message of America. It is the direct opposite of why America became a beacon of hope for the truly oppressed throughout the world. They have come here to escape poverty and dictatorship; they have come here to live their own lives, where they aren't owned by the state, the community, or the tribe.

"Independence Day" is a critically important title. It signifies the fundamental meaning of this nation, not just of the holiday. The American Revolution remains unique in human history: a revolution--and a nation--founded on a moral principle, the principle of individual rights. Jefferson at Philadelphia, and Washington at Valley Forge, pledged their "lives, fortunes, and sacred honor." For what? Not for mere separation from England, not--like most rebels--for the "freedom" to set up their own tyranny. In fact, Britain's tyranny over the colonists was mild compared to what most current governments do to their citizens.

Jefferson and Washington fought a war for the principle of independence, meaning the moral right of an individual to live his own life as he sees fit. Independence was proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence as the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." What are these rights? The right to life means that every individual has a right to his own independent life, that one's life belongs to oneself, not to others to use as they see fit.

The right to liberty means the right to freedom of action, to act on one's own judgment, the right not to have a gun pointed at one's head and be forced to do what someone else commands. And the right to the pursuit of happiness means that an individual may properly pursue his own happiness, e.g., his own career, friends, hobbies, and not exist as a mere tool to serve the goals of others. The Founding Fathers did not proclaim a right to the attainment of happiness, knowing full well that such a policy would carry with it the obligation of others to make one happy and result in the enslavement of all to all. The Declaration of Independence was a declaration against servitude, not just servitude to the Crown but servitude to anyone. (That some signers still owned slaves does not negate the fact that they established the philosophy that doomed slavery.)

Political independence is not a primary. It rests on a more fundamental type of independence: the independence of the human mind. It is the ability of a human being to think for himself and guide his own life that makes political independence possible and necessary. The government as envisaged by the Founding Fathers existed to protect the freedom to think and to act on one's thinking. If human beings were unable to reason, to think for themselves, there would be no autonomy or independence for a government to protect. It is this independence that defines the American Revolution and the American spirit.

To the Founding Fathers, there was no authority higher than the individual mind, not King George, not God, not society. Reason, wrote Ethan Allen, is "the only oracle of man," and Thomas Jefferson advised us to "fix reason firmly in her seat and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God." That is the meaning of independence: trust in your own judgment, in reason; do not sacrifice your mind to the state, the church, the race, the nation, or your neighbors.

Independence is the foundation of America. Independence is what should be celebrated on Independence Day. That is the legacy our Founding Fathers left us. It is a legacy we should keep, not because it is a legacy, but because it is right and just. It has made America the freest and most prosperous country in history.

Michael S. Berliner is co-chairman of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

Why Study European History, Part 2 (excerpt)

By 1hfa from Powell History Recommends,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Real Disgrace: Washington's Battlefield "Ethics"

By Elan Journo

Americans rightly admire our troops for their bravery, dedication and integrity. The Marines, for instance, are renowned for abiding by an honorable code--as warriors and as individuals in civilian life. They epitomize the rectitude of America's soldiers. But a recently disclosed Pentagon study--little noted in the media--has seemingly cast a shadow over our troops.

The study of U.S. combat troops in Iraq finds that less than half of the soldiers and Marines surveyed would report a team member for breaches of the military's ethics rules. Military and civilian observers have concluded from the study that more and stricter training in combat ethics is urgently needed.

But instead of reinforcing the military's ethics, we must challenge them. The Pentagon study provides evidence for a searing indictment not of our soldiers but of Washington's rules of engagement.

Consider the waking nightmare of being a U.S. combat troop in Iraq: imagine that you are thrust into a battlefield--but purposely hamstrung by absurd restrictions. Iraqis throw Molotov cocktails (i.e., gasoline-filled bottles) at your vehicle--but you are prohibited from responding with force. Iraqis, to quote the study, "drop large chunks of concrete blocks from second story buildings or overpasses" as you drive by--but you are not allowed to respond. "Every group of Soldiers and Marines interviewed," the Pentagon study summarizes, "reported that they felt the existing ROE [rules of engagement] tied their hands, preventing them from doing what needed to be done to win the war."

And the soldiers are right. In Iraq, Washington's rules have systematically prevented our brave and capable troops from using all necessary force to win, to crush the insurgency--and even to protect themselves. As noted in news articles since the start of the war, American forces are ordered not to bomb key targets, such as power plants, and to avoid firing into mosques (where insurgents hide) lest they offend Muslim sensibilities.

Having to follow such self-effacing rules of engagement while confronting sniper fire and ambushes and bombs from every direction, day in and day out, must be utterly demoralizing and unbearable. No one should be surprised at the newly reported willingness of combat troops to defy military ethics, because such defiance is understandable as the natural reaction of warriors made to follow suicidal rules.

When being "ethical" on Washington's terms means martyring yourself and your comrades for the sake of murderous Iraqis, it is understandable that troops are disinclined to report "unethical" behavior. It is understandable that troops should feel anger and anxiety (as many do), because it is horrifically unjust for America to send its personnel into combat, deliberately prevent them from achieving victory--and expect them to die for the sake of the enemy. It would be natural for an individual thrust into the line of fire as a sacrificial offering to rebel with indignation at such a fate.

How can we do this to our soldiers?

The death and misery caused by Washington's self-crippling rules of engagement--rules endorsed by liberals and conservatives alike--are part of the inevitable destruction flowing from a broader evil: the philosophy of "compassionate" war.

This perverse view of war holds that fighting selfishly to defend your own freedom by defeating enemies is wrong; but fighting to selflessly serve the needs of others is virtuous. It was on this premise that U.S. troops were sent to Iraq: Washington's goal was not to defend America against whatever threat Hussein's hostile regime posed to us, as a first step toward defeating our enemies in the region--principally Iran, the arch sponsor of Islamic totalitarianism. Instead the troops were sent (as Bush explained) to "sacrifice for the liberty of strangers"--spilling American blood and spending endless resources on the "compassionate" goal of lifting the hostile and primitive Iraqi people out of poverty, feeding their hungry, unclogging their sewers. The result of this "compassionate" war is thousands of unnecessary American deaths, and the preservation and emboldening of the enemies we most need to defeat: Iran and Saudi Arabia.

We must put an end to the barbarous sacrifice of American troops, now. It is past time to abandon Washington's self-sacrificial rules of engagement, and its broader policy of "compassionate," self-sacrificial warfare. Instead of subjecting troops to more intensive "ethics" training, we should unleash them from the suicidal militarily ethics of self-sacrifice.

Elan Journo is a junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (http://www.aynrand.org/) in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Contact the writer at media@aynrand.org.

When Two Evils Compete

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As recent as two years ago I thought the Democrat Party was on a highway to hell. I thought it was about to lose the middle and collapse to nothing but its leftist base. The main reason was the war. Like many Americans, I was appalled by the left’s reaction to 9/11. They did not understand that we were at war, they blamed America for being attacked and they wanted us to do anything and everything except wage war. It seemed to me that all the Republicans had to do to capitalize on the left’s suicidal anti-Americanism was fight the war and defeat the enemy.

The second reason I thought the Dems were about to go the way of the Whigs was that glorious moment in the 1990’s when Bill Clinton, a Democrat President, declared the era of big government over. Socialism had lost its esteem; no one outside of Cuba and North Korea believed in it anymore. All the Republicans had to do to capitalize on this was decrease government spending, lower taxes and begin dismantling the mixed economy.

It turned out that the two things the Republicans needed to do -- defeat the enemy and decrease the government -- were the two things President Bush would not do. His premises made him do the opposite of what he should have done. Compassionate conservatism is the welfare state only worse: the welfare state with religion mixed in. (What genius thought up THAT?) In foreign policy neoconservatism is the idea that America should be a benevolent empire building democracies around the world. Bush ended up increasing the size of government at home and giving up the war abroad to focus on nation building in Iraq.

I no longer believe the Democrat Party is about to implode. Quite the contrary, I have never been so unsure about the future of the Republican Party. They have abandoned everything Barry Goldwater stood for and embraced religion, big government and neoconservative nation building. What is there to keep me voting Republican? Nothing. I look at both parties in horror now. My votes will mostly be calculations on how to achieve gridlock or some situation in which the government will get the least amount done. The best we can hope for is time for the philosophy of Ayn Rand to spread through our culture before we descend into dictatorship. This is the dire situation we are in today. If I believed in the myths of religion I would damn the politicians of both parties to hell for abandoning liberty.

John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira believe demographics favor the Democrats. I didn’t read the whole essay -- it’s quite long -- but I have my doubts about their argument. The only vital, growing ideology right now is religion and that favors the Republicans. Socialism is dead and environmentalism looks more and more like a joke. The Democrats have nothing that people can believe in and fight for. This comes out in their day to day politics, in which they give no reason to vote for them, but instead attack the Republicans as incompetent, corrupt, whatever.

What I see for the near future is both parties being kept alive by the impracticalities and failures of the other party. (And if this doesn’t turn America into a nation of cynics, nothing will.) The death of the Democrat Party that I thought was imminent was forestalled by the titanic failure of the Bush Administration. Power will continue to bounce back and forth between the parties because people are on any given election day more disgusted with and terrified by one party than the other.

People have nothing to vote for in our era, but much to vote against. We live in an age in which evil abounds in politics and good is hard to find. This cannot go on forever. Sooner or later people will get sick of voting for the lesser of two evils. Then perhaps the people will revolt. Or maybe not -- maybe a choice of evils is all the American people deserve.

Tell you what, this is sheer speculation, but I think things will get very interesting in the next 5-15 years. The great thing about politics: it's a show that never ends.

More on the Benevolent People Premise

By Dan Edge from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

My last blog post on the Benevolent People Premise sparked a discussion over on Objectivism Online. Inspector (of Capitalist Paradise) and Kendall (of The Crucible and Column) challenged me to concretize this concept further. This is an edited version of a post I wrote in response to them:

----------------


In my view, The Benevolent Universe Premise (BUP) - and my proposed species of it, The Benevolent People Premise (BPP) - are psychological dispositions, not standards of judgment. A BUP or BPP is a psychological derivative of one's metaphysical value judgments. One does not judge a particular aspect of reality based on the BUP. And one does not judge individual men based on the BPP.

So, how are these psychological dispositions formed? As in the case of metaphysical value judgments, they are usually formed in childhood. This is why one with a terrible childhood has a much more difficult time attaining a BUP or BPP. And its not as though one can snap his fingers and change his entire psychological make-up the minute he discovers a rational philosophy. It often takes years of living virtuously and experiencing the emotional rewards of such a life.

In my experience, there are several positive psychological elements that go along with and compliment a BPP: a healthy self-esteem, a reverence of Man (in the sense Rand used it), a knowledge of the great potential values offered by individual men, and a positive sense of one's own efficacy in judging and communicating with others. These positive psychological elements are not gained from merely studying a rational philosophy. In order to earn self-esteem, one must have evidence of his own efficacy in dealing with reality. He must have a list of accomplishments to which he can refer that prove his value to himself. Similarly, one does not develop a reverence for Man outside the context of actual men and their potential. One develops this reverence by seeing men who actually embody the greatness of Man. We all have heroes, whether it be Rand, or Aristotle, or Washington, or Galt, or one's father, or whatever. In identifying his heroes, one also begins to discover the great potential value that can be derived from dealing with other men. As one grows, he actually begins to pursue and attain these values, whether they be material (eg, money), mental (eg, knowledge), or spiritual (eg, love). Through experience, one can learn how to judge and deal with other men effectively. He learns how to make the most out of his interactions with them. Over time, this leads to a sense of efficacy in his ability to derive value from others.

I offer that the psychological sum of all these elements is a BPP. Each time I meet someone new, these psychological elements are at work: The person could embody the greatness of Man; I know through experience that men can offer great potential value to my life; I believe that I have significant values to offer them in return; and I am very confident in my ability to judge and communicate with them. Since I judge others honestly and rigorously, the potential that a new person could be a great disvalue to me is relatively low. So at worst, the new person is not a threat to me. At best, they could be a source of great value. If that's not a reason to be enthusiastic, friendly, and respectful, then I don't know what is!

These same elements apply to the BUP as well -- I could easily replace the examples I used to apply to dealing with the universe instead of dealing with other men. In order to form a BUP, one must have good self-esteem, a knowledge of the great potential values in the universe, experience actually deriving values fro the world, and a positive sense of his own efficacy in dealing with reality.

As it stands, I think my classification of the BPP as a species of the BUP is valid, though it will take some more chewing.

Thanks for reading,

--Dan Edge