Eric Daniels is presenting two NEW lectures on American business history to the Chicago Objectivist Society. The two lectures will be presented back-to-back. Each lecture will be 1.5 hours plus a 30 min Q&A and a lunch break in between.
Lecture #1: *Sears Roebuck Co: The Commercial Revolution in American Business*
Americans today live in unparalleled abundance. Millions of durable luxury goods--everything from cars and cell phones to laptops and plasma televisions, from gourmet espresso makers to custom-made business suits--are easily within our reach. How did the United States ever achieve such a standard of living? How do these goods contribute to more productivity?
This lecture will explore how Richard Sears, Julius Rosenwald, and Robert Wood overcame persistent harassment by government bureaucrats and built Sears, Roebuck Co. into one of the world's greatest retailers. American wealth today owes its very existence to the heroic achievements of great businessmen, entrepreneurs, and managers of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. By innovating and creating new forms of business, business heroes like these revolutionized the way that Americans purchased consumer goods, thereby improving the lives of every American and making possible the enormous growth and development of American business today.
Lecture #2: *Banking and Finance in American Capitalism*
Business in America depends on a vital, but often over-looked, business--banking. As Americans in the nineteenth century struggled to build a modern economy, banks played a crucial role in facilitating that development. Few Americans today realize the importance of banking as a business in the spectacular growth and economic achievement of the nineteenth century.
Throughout its past, Americans have harbored mixed feelings about banks--from overt hostility to warm embrace. The varying attitudes produced an uncertain legal and political climate for bankers. During the nineteenth century--the freest period in America's banking history--enterprising heroes emerged to lead the industry and push it to new heights. At the pinnacle of this breed stands J. P. Morgan, one of the leading financiers of American business. This lecture will examine the tumultuous history of banking in America and investigate the life and achievements of Morgan--including a demonstration of the critical need for banking to be left free from government interference.
Cost:
$80 per person ($50 for full-time students) *If paid before Nov 3rd*
$115 per person ($85 for full-time students) *After Nov 3rd*
Time & Location:
Saturday, December 3rd:
1:00-3:00pm
1 hour lunch break
4:00-6:00pm
The course will be held in downtown Chicago at the Loyola University Campus. More specific information will be provided to registrants.
Registration:
Send an email to info@chicagoobjectivists.org with an RSVP and pay online at: http://www.chicagoobjectivists.org
To pay by send an e-mail to info@chicagoobjectivists.org requesting further instructions.
If you’ve been following the net news, you know that the thug regimes of the UN are trying to seize control of the Internet’s DNS. The latest threat is that the net will "fall apart" within months if the U.S. does not turn over control. What does this mean?
Hidden behind the claims of "multilateralism" and "sharing of best practices" is a thinly veiled threat that if states are not given the power to censor the Internet multilaterally, governments wishing to censor the internet will split off their DNS networks to censor content unilaterally to establish isolated networks.
What’s mostly ignored in the news stories is that ICANN has been successfully managing DNS system without almost any interference from the U.S. Almost, but not quite none – the DOJ has delayed the issuance of some root domains, namely .XXX.
The real question we should be asking is - why does the Internet need to be under the control of any regime – unilaterally or multilaterally? If a private organization has done a good job so far (and they have), why not officially hand over the DNS system to them?
By Onkar Ghate
As the world eagerly watches the Iraqi constitutional referendum, the Bush administration and its intellectual supporters herald the occasion as a historic step toward freedom in the Middle East and security for America. This view betrays an appalling ignorance of the nature of freedom and the requirements of our national self-interest.
Politically, as America's Founding Fathers understood, to be free is to possess the ability to exercise one's rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. To be free means that no other men, whatever their number or position, can coercively prevent an individual from taking the steps rationally required to support his life. It means no one can force him to accept beliefs or dogmas, control what he can or cannot say, seize the material wealth he has produced and earned, or dictate the goals he must live for.
A constitution is valuable only if it strictly delimits the power of government to that of protecting each individual's rights. History demonstrates that government is, potentially, the worst violator of man's rights. A proper constitution declares off-limits any governmental action that would trespass on an individual's rights, no matter whether that action is proposed in the name of the king, the common good, God, or public morality.
The draft Iraqi constitution, however, grants virtually unlimited power to the state.
As liberals have demanded in America for over a century, private property will be eviscerated. Although the proposed constitution nominally protects property rights, it explicitly allows that private property can be seized by the government "for the public interest." By contrast, public property "is sacrosanct, and its protection is the duty of every citizen." (In practice, this means that if the government takes a citizen's money, business or home, he must stand aside--and then defend with his life what the government has stolen from him.) The state will dictate whether an Iraqi can sell land to foreigners. It will manage the oil. It will provide to its hapless citizens "free" education and health care, "a correct environmental atmosphere," and work "that guarantees them a good life."
The government will also, as conservatives have long dreamed for America, enforce religious morality. "Islam," Article 2 declares, "is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation: No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." Experts in Islamic law will sit on the Supreme Court. The state will guarantee protection of motherhood and the "ethical and religious value" of the family. Citizens will have freedom of speech, of press, of assembly--so long as no one says or does anything that violates "public morality," i.e., the dogmas of Islam.
And as if to leave no doubt that the state can exert total control over the individual's life, Article 45 adds that the government can restrict or limit "any of the freedoms and liberties stated in the constitution . . . as long as this restriction or limitation does not undermine the essence of the right or freedom." Of course, part of the essence of any right or freedom is that it is inviolable.
We in America had no reason to expect freedom from the drafters of Iraq's constitution. Like many of our own intellectuals on the left and the right (some of whom were advisers in Iraq), Iraqi intellectuals are either tribal or religious collectivists (or both). Whichever the case, they deny the individual and his rights. The tribalists deny material independence to the individual and seek to control his every economic step. The religionists, more numerous and powerful, deny spiritual independence to the individual and seek to dictate his every conviction and purpose in life. It is no accident that the draft constitution is both "keen to advance Iraqi tribes and clans" and eager to promote Islam. Freedom's intellectual preconditions do not exist in Iraq.
In the long term, whether Iraq's religious collectivists seize the machinery of state by a protracted, bloody civil war or by the ballot box will make no difference to America's security.
Nor did we have any reason to think that our self-defense requires, at the price of our soldiers' lives, "imposing freedom" on Iraq or the Middle East. It is true that free nations pose no threat to us. But neither do semi-barbarous nations when they and their citizens are demoralized--when they know that taking up arms against us guarantees their devastation. This is the lesson America's military should have taught the Islamic totalitarians and their legions of collectivist supporters and sympathizers in the Middle East after 9/11--indeed, after Iran's embassy takeover in 1979. But this is not the lesson conveyed by Operation Iraqi Freedom, which espouses Bush's "calling of our time": selflessly to bring freedom to those hostile to the idea.
Freedom is an intellectual achievement, which requires disavowal of collectivism and embrace of individualism. Sadly, no matter what the referendum's result, this is not what we are witnessing in Iraq.
Onkar Ghate is Dean of the Objectivist Academic Center at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the ideas of Ayn Rand--best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and originator of the philosophy of Objectivism.
Dear Editor:
A cabal of countries, including Cuba, Syria, China and Iran--now backed by the European Union--is demanding that control of the Internet be surrendered to the United Nations.
These and other thug-nations restrict their own citizens' ability to receive and broadcast news and grievances from inside their blood-soaked walls. China, for instance, currently has many individuals jailed for being "cyber-dissidents" and it engages in massive censorship of the Internet. It recently passed a law mandating that only "healthy and civilized" news may be read by its citizens--to be determined, of course, by the same "civilized" officials who brought us Tiananmen Square.
This world-wide web of tyrannies, hiding behind the veneer of technical complaints, now seeks to control not just what its own citizens are able to see and say on the Internet, but what every individual on the face of the planet is able to see and say. If the UN is given control of the Internet, we can expect free trade and freedom of speech to be crushed.
The Internet was created in and by the land of the free, America. It has now become the object of an alarming power-grab by the world's dictatorships and their puppet, the UN. America must not surrender its citizens' freedom to the mercy of a debating society for dictators.
Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA
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