The Culture: What the President won't be talking about tonight . . .

. . . and why Objectivists need to think long and hard about it.

Tonight is President Bush's State of the Union address, where the president will lay out his agenda for the next year. According to Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes, it won't be the "ownership society."

When running for re-election in 2004, and again last year as he campaigned for Social Security reform, President Bush repeatedly advocated an "ownership society." It was a bold concept aimed at producing a historic shift in power from Washington bureaucrats to individual Americans. But "ownership society" is not a phrase you're likely to hear from him tonight in his State of the Union address. Instead, he is expected to take a more conventional--and politically palatable--approach. His domestic agenda for 2006 includes easing the burden of rising health-care costs, trimming entitlement spending, increasing economic competitiveness, promoting measures to spur energy independence and making his tax cuts permanent. "No one will come away from the speech with ownership society on their lips," a White House official said. [Wall Street Journal]

So not unlike President Clinton's State of the Union addresses, President Bush is expected to rely upon the "micro-initiative" to sell his agenda. How pathetic.

The State of the Union address offers a president a unique opportunity to communicate directly with the American people. It gives a president the chance to explain the reasoning for his political agenda in as much detail as the strength of his voice will permit. So why not use it to make a case for private ownership that would otherwise go unheard? Why not use it to elevate the argument against statism?

Why not? Because that is not what this President believes.

President Bush has had two major policy thrusts in his administration: the "ownership society" and the "forward strategy for freedom." Both on their face sound noble, yet both have proven to be utter disasters in execution. Despite the nice title--the "ownership society" died before it even went public. By failing to directly challenge the altruistic moral premise of programs like Social Security and government-controlled healthcare, the case for the "ownership society" was never able overcome the inertia these programs enjoy. For goodness sake, Bush has created new entitlements--not repealed them. You can't defeat your enemy by adapting his arguments--especially his moral arguments.

The "forward strategy for freedom" has also come to be a miserable failure. The base premise made sense: free nations don't attack one another. In execution, it has relied upon a fantasy. The president's "forward strategy for freedom" holds the Middle East can be transformed by democratic elections made possible by the blood of American solders. Never mind that nowhere in human history did open election precede the protection of individual rights by a people. Never mind that not nearly enough jihadists have died to discredit militant Islam as a cultural force. And never mind that Hamas was just democratically elected by the Palestinians and that the Iraqis voted themselves into a theocracy. These are just inconvenient facts to be belied by true believing neo-conservatives-and unfortunately, more than a few Objectivists.

Yet despite the outrage of many of us, there is little we can do about our nation's flawed strategy in the near term. The reason President Bush is in power and we are not is because President Bush's views reflect the dominant philosophy, and we (as of yet) do not.

So just what then can Objectivists do in the realm of politics?

Perhaps first would be to admit the utter failure in "Anti-Bushies for Bush" as an Objectivist mantra. There was a lot of debate during the last presidential election in Objectivist circles over who to vote for. The spread went 80%-20% pro-Bush, dominated mostly by "Anti-Bushies for Bush" who could not stomach Kerry as a leader.

I always thought it ironic though that Objectivists who could not abide a Kerry White House nevertheless adopted a key component of Kerry's political philosophy: the position of supporting a thing while simultaneously opposing it. I think one would be hard-pressed to found anyone open to receiving Objectivism who would be taken in by such a position. If Kerry didn't deserve our support, neither does Bush-he is an intellectual nightmare and a proponent of new bad ideas. And if ideas matter, Bush's ideas ought to exclude him from receiving anything from us, whatever it may be in our power to give.

And I'm not saying I don't understand who some people get taken in by Bush. I've been taken in by the man in the past and if you read some of my writings, you'll see just how many times I responded to something he said in a speech only to be let down with him again and again and again. It's been five years now. I'm sick of it.

I think the far more successful stance for Objectivists to take would be to position themselves as what we truly are: uncompromising intellectual radicals for a new philosophy of reason and individual rights. It's that simple.

Objectivists reject the status-quo of sacrifice and self-abnegation, both as individuals and as a nation. Communicate that effectively and we will swell our ranks--get sidetracked and we will fail as a movement.

Yes. He really said that!

I occasionally read an article that makes me especially grateful that Ayn Rand was so dedicated to the cause of individual rights. I wonder, with the education I had up to the point I encountered her writings, whether I would have been able to untie the following tangle of contradictions so easily without having made her acquaintance.

No copyright, no publishing revenue. No revenue, no new books. If Google is to have a second stage of life, it will have to accept the reality of intellectual property. After all, Google has accepted the reality of China.

If it sounds to you like that the author, William Rees-Mogg, has just equated censorship with copyright, you have a good ear. That is exactly what he did!

Let's see how he got there. We will see, in the process, what is wrong with the above paragraph. You will notice that as I go along, I will frequently refer to the concept of "individual rights". This concept is conspicuously absent from Rees-Mogg's argument, and if you aren't used to thinking about individual rights, his argument will therefore sound semi-plausible.

Rees-Mogg starts out with an admission: He claims that current efforts by Google to index scholarly texts as threatening the whole notion of copyright, and that his business depends on copyright being protected.

When I write about Google I have to declare an interest. I am the chairman of a small academic publisher; Pickering & Chatto was founded in 1820 and refounded in 1983. We publish scholarly texts and depend on our copyright for the sales of our books. Google threatens that copyright, along with the whole copyright structure of authors, editors and publishers of printed books and, indeed, e-books.

Since copyright is protected by the government, if Google actually does violate copyrights, there is a remedy already in place to any predations Google may undertake. Given that Rees-Mogg has just noted (in his title) that Google accepts censorship, I would be suspicious of his motives. Very suspicious. The businessman doth protest too much.

However, copyright is not the only problem raised by the success of Google's wonderful search engine. Along with copyright, and the revenue based on it, there are the issues of political and social censorship. Google has been forced by the Chinese Government to agree to political censorship. There will be only minimal reports of Falun Gong, Tiananmen Square or Tibet on Google's China service. The majority of Google's Chinese customers will not be told what the rest of the world knows on the subjects.

Rees-Mogg prevaricates. The Chi-Comms did not "force" Google to do anything. Google willingly submitted to government censorship without a fight. Note that Rees-Mogg slips in the qualifiers "political" and "social" for censorship. He has a reason for this, as we shall see soon enough.

Here again, I must declare an interest. I have been a quasi-censor. I accept that there should be some social censorship of the internet. In 1989, before the internet became important, I agreed to be the first Chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council. We were not formally censors -- we had no powers -- but we did study and discuss what would be appropriate to show on television, including the limits for sex, violence and bad language, and the need for the protection of children.

The issue of what is appropriate for children to see on television is certainly a valid concern -- for their parents. Efforts to get the government involved in the infringement of free speech are often done in the name of the "welfare" of children. Just ask the news media in Venezuela some time.

But we can cut Rees-Mogg some slack for the moment. There is nothing wrong with a private group doing something like rating the appropriateness of shows for young audiences in an effort to help busy parents. Indeed, a private broadcasting corporation would be entirely within its rights to "censor" the shows it airs since it is not obligated to show anything.

Furthermore, unlike the government, which can legally use force against citizens, such a corporation is unable to prevent someone from seeing whatever it chooses not to show. That is the essential difference between private censorship, which derives from property rights and violates no one's right to free speech, and government censorship, which always violates the right to freedom of speech and can often violate property rights as well.

Surely, all Rees-Mogg wants is private censorship, isn't it?

On most public issues I come down on the libertarian side, but I accept the need for some social protections. Indeed, I think it important that editing in the public interest should be done by reasonably liberal-minded people. They must accept criticism and suspicion of their work. Censors are always unpopular and sometimes ridiculous, but they may be necessary. [bold added]

"Editing in the public interest", eh? The hallmark of anything being done in "the public interest" is that it is manifestly not being done in someone's self-interest. Oh. So Rees-Mogg does accept government censorship for "social protections", as if the ability to speak freely is not the greatest "social protection" we have against tyranny, and so long as "liberal-minded people" like himself are doing the censoring! (Those who support tyranny would do well to stop indulging in the fantasy of themselves as benevolent dictator. The body- and spirit-crushing realities of dictatorship always have an ugly way of conforming to some thug's most perverse desires.)

By what standard is government censorship to be judged "necessary"?

Google, and other global operators on the internet, does in fact accept the principle of social censorship, however little they like it. There is an obvious example in paedophile pornography, which is almost universally banned, at least in theory. There are also types of adult pornography, such as "snuff" films, in which real murders are, or purport to be, shown; nobody defends them. I do not know how its security systems work, but I do not think that snuff films would get through Google's safeguards. They would not certainly not be compatible with its famous motto, "Don't be evil".

So is shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater no longer an "obvious" example of something not protected as free speech? Or does pedophilia make it easier to equivocate between legitimate restrictions on what can be said (i.e., things that violate someone's rights) and theTrojan Horse of "social censorship"? Child pornography at some point involves violating the rights of a child, who cannot give informed consent to pose in pornography. Snuff films, as documentaries of murders, by their nature can serve only as evidence in a trial, involving as they do, the violation of someone's right to live.

To refer to the fact that child pornography and snuff films are illegal as "social censorship" is doubly wrong. (1) It ignores the fact that one man's rights do not supercede another's. And (2), it uses the name of a violation of the rights of one man to refer to what is actually a protection of the rights of another! This would be like pointing out that policemen sometimes have to kill criminals, and saying that sometimes it is necessary to have "social murder".

And where does Rees-Mogg go in his Trojan Horse?

The real difficulty comes in the area between social and political censorship. Most of us are agreed that child pornography should be banned, both because it necessarily invokes the abuse of children and because it may feed an addiction to paedophile conduct. Most of us are agreed that there should be no censorship of political information or political criticism.

Note that he said nothing about "rights", which exist whether or not "most of us agree" that they do, and whether or not a government chooses to protect them.

Google may have felt there was no commercial alternative to agreeing to the Chinese request. That was the only way it could remain in the Chinese market. Nevertheless Google itself regrets the compromise it believes that it had to make.

If Google truly "regretted" its "compromise", it would have stopped doing business in China or at least done something about renegotiating the terms under which it operated there. No. Google feels like making a quick buck at the expense of its independence and in direct contradiction to its stated, older policies of not censoring search results or "do[ing] evil".

This censorship is also damaging to China's reputation. No regime that cannot afford to have its policies examined can be really secure. Nothing could be more absurd than to see the great world power of China shrinking back from the spectacle of Falun Gong like a timorous old lady shrinking back at the sight of a mouse. It devalues China. In any case, the Chinese are clever people, operating with world networks, and with millions of computers. Attempts at this sort of censorship are bound to fail.

"Attempts at this sort of censorship are bound to fail." And if they do, the tanks will roll. The inability of an oppressive regime to wage a successful war against the reality that it cannot control everybody all the time will not stop it from trying. This is so much pap designed to soothe the reader. Here's a translation you won't get at google.cn: "Even those evil Chinese censors won't really work, so why not let a 'liberal-minded' 'quasi-censor' like me have my say over Google in the realm of what I feel to be copyright?"

And, now that "social censorship" has been equated with the banning of child pornography and "political censorship" dismissed as so much harmless fluff, Rees-Mogg cashes in on the confusion. (In fact, now that "social censorship" has served to smuggle in the notion that governmental censorship is OK, Rees-Mogg admits that he sees it and "political censorship" as merely different points on a morally grey continuum!)

Midway between social and political censorship, there arises the issue of terrorism. I am sure that terrorists could use Google as an element in their training schemes. Indeed, many of them must already have done so. Yet, in principle, governments have every reason, and surely every right, to try to make the terrorists' task more difficult. Presumably the CIA has inserted its probes, human and electronic, into Google. Where terrorism is relying on Google information, the CIA is justified in doing so. Terrorism attacks liberty in two ways, by its frontal assault and by the legitimate reaction of governments. Google cannot be immune to this process.

Yes. Our government collecting information to prevent terrorists from blowing us to bits is, in Rees-Mogg's mind, not so different than what the Chinese are doing when they seek to stifle political dissent. He does throw the term "liberty" in twice, but this is not because he relates it to copyright. The first time is just to cause panic in the audience long enough, he hopes, to make us not see this crucial difference. And the second time, he insinuates that a proper response of our government somehow "attacks" liberty" with the implication being that little "attacks on liberty" (e.g., censorship) are a normal function of the government.

Again, the CIA is protecting individual rights. The Chi-Comms are violating them. Even if the technology employed by both were identical, that would mean nothing. Why each did this would be what is important. This is a black-and-white difference. There is no continuum of moral grayness between the actions of the CIA and those of the Chi-Comms.

And, for the final cashing in: Rees-Mogg, who either fails to understand the concept of rights entirely or hopes no one else does, paints a portrait of dire doom should Google -- not a government entity -- somehow "abolish" copyright.

Copyright is the other great issue. It is an issue that extends well beyond Google and well beyond publishing. Copyright is the basis for the remuneration of invention; indeed, the only other substantial basis for financing invention, in all areas, is government expenditure, and that is much less effective. If there were no copyright, there would be no money to finance newspapers (a quickly muted hoorah from the Liberal Democrats), books, films, recorded music, new drugs or the development of the internet itself. Copyright is the mother of invention. No copyright -- no revenue -- no innovation.

But how would Google end copyright?

Yet there is a conflict of interest between search engines and the right to intellectual property. Google plans to put whole libraries on to its system, and offer free copying rights to its users. Searches would throw up key passages in all the books in a library. Google requires owners of copyright who do not want their books to be copied and extracted to inform the company that they do not agree to this copying. But that is the opposite of the normal procedure in which the copier has to approach the copyright holder. The danger -- put simply -- is that people will not buy books; they will wait to download them free from Google.

There is indeed a strong tradition among internet users that as much as possible on the internet should be free, and that nothing should be censored. As ideals, these may seem reasonable enough. The issue in the case of literary copyright turns on this question: is the free communication of free information more valuable to society than the financing of future publications? Would we benefit by having free J. K. Rowling in the present at the cost of having no J. K. Rowling in the future?

This scenario is absurd. I assume that British law has some species of "fair use" for short passages of books. For longer passages or entire books, that can get very inconvenient and very expensive very quickly. Who wants to sit around while the printer -- if it doesn't jam, run out of paper or ink, or otherwise malfunction -- spits out the 900 pages of his "free copy" of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix? And who wants to read that thing in loose-leaf form? Furthermore, I am sure that even a country that can produce someone as befuddled as Rees-Mogg has legal provisions to stop some publishing house from mass-producing books from Google results. I haven't even addressed the flip side of Rees-Mogg's argument: That the ease of finding and sampling from some otherwise obscure books might even increase their sales.

This is not to pooh-pooh the idea that there could be legal issues raised by Google's penetration into and potential mastery of Rees-Mogg's domain, but I think his concerns are overblown. And worse, by equating copyright with censorship, he has injured his own cause:

No copyright, no publishing revenue. No revenue, no new books. If Google is to have a second stage of life, it will have to accept the reality of intellectual property. After all, Google has accepted the reality of China.

If copyright is to survive, people like Mr Rees-Mogg need understand the reality of China. And to do that, they must first rediscover individual rights. A society that confuses censorship and copyright will soon not have to worry too much about copyright -- and I don't mean that in the way Rees-Mogg hopes.

-- CAV

The Joy Of The Super Bowl

Republican Spending

Intellectual Activism: A Military for the Mind

I sent this letter to the Daily Northwestern in response to the article on "less intelligent" service members. (And yes, I crib a little from a piece I wrote three years ago. My goodness, I've now become self-referential!)

TO THE EDITOR:

According to college opinion writer Henry M. Bowles, III ("Military has no place at universities," January 24, 2006) the military should not seek to fill its ranks with men and women of intelligence and ability because "less intelligent people are better equipped for most military positions, and have far less to lose." By his essay, Bowles has revealed what many leftists think, but choose to keep close to their chests: those in the forces that defend our country and our way of life are cretins, not heroes.

The irony of this position is that the left that has consistently relied upon appeals to mindless obedience as part of its ideology. Consider for example the 19th century socialist ideal espoused by Elbert Hubbard in his famous pamphlet "A Message to Garcia." There, Hubbard cast the perfect man as one who acts without any question toward the goals he has been given by his superiors.

Yet have such individuals ever thrived in our nation's military? Is an effective solider mostly muscle and little mind? Not if the history of the fighting men and women Bowles smears in his essay is examined.

Consider for example the difference between the US Marine Corps and the Japanese Army during WWII. The men of Japanese Army were literal serfs, duty bound to sacrifice their lives for their racial collective and God-man emperor, where the ranks of the Marines were composed of free men acting in defense of their own liberty. The ultimate reason the Marine fought was his own self-interest. The ultimate reason a Japanese fought was the renunciation of his self-interest. This distinction guided every aspect of how the war was fought and who prevailed.

The American fighting man, then and now, is not just someone who unquestionably does what he is told ala the "Message to Garcia" ideal. Instead, he understands the larger threats to his well-being, appreciates the need to work in concert with other men to defend his values, follows the lawful orders of the team he voluntarily joins, and acts independently when the situation demands. The American military man is at his best when he understands first and then acts appropriately. This model, when adhered to, has allowed the US military to endure every hardship, overcome every obstacle and prevail over every enemy.

So far from the mindless drones Bowles seeks to caricature, an armed force that wins victories is comprised of people of both intelligence and independence. That Bowles does not find these men and women when he looks at the ranks of America's military can only speak to his intelligence--or lack thereof.

Nicholas Provenzo
South Riding, Virginia

World Fascist Forum

Our Mixed Economy Redux

The Meaning of Censorship

What does Google's collusion with the Chinese government to censor its search results mean? It's the difference between fact and illusion.

$250 Billion Doesn't Buy What It Used To

Intellectual Activism: If I had been president . . .

In a Marine Corps veteran's forum in which I participate, it was recently asked what we would have done had we been president on 9/11.

This was my answer:

I would have declared the enemy to be militant Islam and the states that allow militant Islam to exist.

I would have sought a congressional declaration of war against each of these states and attacked them as a whole.

I would have ruthlessly destroyed each of these Islamic governments and the larger institutions that made these governments possible. I would have dethroned their kings and dictators, leveled their capitals, shattered their mosques, humiliated their mullahs and ayatollahs and eviscerated their ability to project force.

I would have had the US quit the UN, on the grounds that a world forum that includes tyrants is no forum of value to a free nation. I would have acted as if the United States had an unquestionable right to exist--and that no one's religion or ideology gives them just cause to attack us.

Under Islam, it is held that fire belongs only to Allah. Had I been president, I would have taught the Islamic world--and anyone else who seeks to threaten our people--that fire belongs to the United States of America.

In short, I would not have been that impotent coward of a president who now desecrates the most prestigious and important political office in our land.

First Question for NoodleFood

So here's our first "Question for NoodleFood," courtesy of Ergo:

I'm reading Plato's Theaetetus now. And in the dialogue, Socrates askes, "What is knowledge? How does one define knowledge?" Then he goes around arguing against definitions like knowledge is perception or that knowlege is understanding.

My own thoughts on this were: in order to even ask the question, "what is knowledge", shouldn't one have the implicit understanding that one KNOWS what to ask?? Doesn't that then lead us to an infinite regression? Knowing about what it would mean to know? And how does one know that? etc. etc.

What is the Objectivist definition of knowledge? Did Rand explicitly define knowlege or say what it is?

I'd look in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand for any detailed discussions of the nature of knowledge. Perhaps most on point is Ayn Rand's comment in Chapter 4 of IOE that "the concept 'knowledge' is formed by retaining its distinguishing characteristics (a mental grasp of a fact(s) of reality, reached either by perceptual observation or by a process of reason based on perceptual observation) and omitting the particular fact(s) involved."

The central fact captured by the concept "knowledge" is that of awareness of reality, i.e. consciousness. As an axiomatic concept, "consciousness" cannot be further analyzed in terms of other concepts, as the problematic attempts to define it as "justified true belief." It is also self-evident, not to mention unable to be denied without contradiction.

If I understand your infinite regress problem, your worry is that we cannot inquire about the nature of knowledge without at least some knowledge of the object of our inquiry. (In a more general form, that's the problem raised in Plato's Meno supposedly solved by the theory of recollection.) In fact, we must have a great deal of knowledge before we can even form the concept "knowledge," let alone refine it to a sharp philosophical point. More generally, a great deal of awareness of reality must proceed any introspection of our mental processes, since we must have some content upon which to introspect.)

To put the point another way, we do not start our investigation of the nature of knowledge from the point of knowing nothing. In fact, we could not do so, since then we would be blindly groping in the dark. (Heck, we wouldn't even be blindly groping, since we wouldn't be conscious!) More precisely, we wouldn't have the data required to even form the relevant concepts, that data being a range of instances of knowledge and contrasting instances of ignorance or error or doubt. So we have lots of knowledge before we ever consider what knowledge is. We are aware of the world, both perceptually and conceptually, from our earliest years, even though we haven't yet introspected to form the concept "knowledge." And even once we've formed the basic concept, we can come to better understand the nature of knowledge by further introspection. For example, from our earliest childhood, we might understand that bears and penguins and birds are all kinds of animals, meaning that our knowledge actually is hierarchical, without explicitly understanding yet that all knowledge is hierarchical. Then years later, we can reflect upon such actual hierarchies in order to come to the explicit conclusion that knowledge is hierarchical.

Ultimately, I think that your worry may boil down to something like: How can we validate the senses when we must rely upon the senses in the very attempt? How can we validate reason without relying upon reason? The answer is that we can't -- and that we need not do so. Any attempt to prove the validity of the senses does rely upon the validity of the senses, but so does any attempt to deny their validity too. The same applies to reason, in that the very demand to "prove" reason presupposes that reason is authoritative. The validity of reason and the senses are inescapable and self-evident facts -- and that's how we establish them. As Dr. Peikoff says in OPAR:

"Why should I accept reason?" means: "Why should I accept reality?" The answer is that existence exists, and only existence exists. Man's choice is either to accept reason or to consign his consciousness and life to a void.

One cannot seek a proof that reason is reliable, because reason is the faculty of proof; one must accept and use reason in any attempt to prove anything. But, using reason, one can identify its relationship to the facts of reality and thereby validate the faculty.

Similarly, any investigation of the nature of knowledge will depend upon a wide range of fact that we already know. That's not a problem though, since the skeptic who denies the possibility of knowledge can only do so on the basis of the great deal of knowledge that he already has. We simply cannot understand knowledge from the vantage point of total ignorance -- and the demand that we do so is illegitimate. The concept "knowledge" works that way precisely because the axiomatic concept "consciousness" is at its core.

Admittedly, these are rather mind-bending issues. If you want some further details, I'd recommend the lengthy discussion of hierarchy in the first few lectures of Objectivism: State of the Art.

Further thoughts, Oh Gentle Readers?

China Needs Flash Mobs

The Chinese government wants to have its silicon chips and eat them, too. It wants to harness the vast promise of lightning-fast information exchange brought by the Internet while at the same time controlling the flow of information, something it admits it can't do without the Three Stooges. (No, not Larry, Curly, and Moe. The other Three Stooges: Larry, Sergey, and Bill.)

In the meantime, the government's efforts at physical control of the Chinese populace ever more closely resemble a man trying to hold the lid of a boiling pot down with his bare hands, as I have blogged before.

First, via Matt Drudge, I encountered a news story about China's admission that there is a problem which took the form, of course, of a threat to its own citizens. And then, in TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski pointed out an even better story on the situation there, from which I quote two paragraphs.

These "sudden incidents" or "mass incidents," in official parlance, are presenting Chinese officials with a serious problem that goes beyond the negative image of China they project to the outside world. The sheer numbers are noteworthy. In August 2005, the country's public security minister, Zhou Yongkang, announced that some 74,000 such events had taken place in 2004, an increase from 58,000 the year before. According to Zhou, 17 of the 74,000 involved more than 10,000 people, 46 involved more than 5,000 people, and 120 involved more than 1,000 participants. But many believe the actual figures are higher.

...

Of even greater significance is the fact that in August 2005 the People's Liberation Army Daily warned the country's two million soldiers that they would be severely punished if they participated in demonstrations. This warning, doubtless prompted by recent demonstrations in Beijing by demobilized soldiers demanding better pensions, suggests that China's leaders are worried not only about the grievances of displaced peasants, but also about disaffection among rank-and-file members of the military. [bold added]

It's always a good sign when a dictatorship has to start worrying about its own army.

But something about the official terminology used to describe these protests that have the Chi-Comms worried jogged my memory. "Sudden incidents?" Reminds me of an old internet fad a few years back, the flash mob. And what's really ironic is that the lead paragraph in the Wired News article even evokes the Chinese peasant uprisings!

There were no peasants waving torches or pitchforks in this crowd, no procession up a winding, eerie mountain road to flush out the monster who'd been terrorizing their town.

The mob that gathered in Manhattan on Tuesday night was looking for something they referred to (without explanation) as a "Love Rug." Or at least that's what the couple of hundred people who gathered in Macy's department store told a bemused salesman, who may or may not have believed he was dealing with a commune of carpet-craving eccentrics.

The crowd of people was participating in the Mob Project, an e-mail-driven experiment in organizing groups of people who suddenly materialize in public places, interact with others according to a loose script and then dissipate just as suddenly as they appeared. [bold added].

I have been lucky enough not to have to fight for my freedom against a regime like that in Beijing, so I risk sounding both clueless and presumptuous in kibbitzing about how best to overthrow this regime. But flash mobs (or some variant thereof) sound like they'd be a good diversionary tactic in any upcoming revolution of the Chinese "proletariat". If similar methods aren't being employed already....

Here's hoping that the Chinese people show their slavemasters what "sudden" really can mean.

-- CAV

The Value of Non-Objective Art

The Culture: More campus wierdness

It's funny--the Northwestern fiasco reminds me of a lot the time I had taken from me in college by having to study under the professorial version of Mr. Henry M. Bowles, III.

For example, I took this one class where the professor viewed all of existence though a feminist lens--that is, the Marxist theory that life is nothing more then a perpetual struggle between the genders for power and control. I was given an assignment where I had to review an essay written by a feminist author who maintained that the Columbine massacre was caused by "a crisis in masculinity"-that is, football.

Huh? I thought it was because the shooters were friggin' moonbats.

So here's what I wrote:

In their op-ed "The National Conversation in the Wake of Littleton is Missing the Mark," Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally (2000) hold that the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, where two teenaged students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 12 other students and a teacher before committing suicide is the result of patriarchy. Katz and Jhally argue that Harris and Klebold's rampage is "not a crisis in youth culture but a crisis in masculinity." If it were not, the authors ask, "why are girls, who live in the same environment, not responding in the same way?"

According to Katz and Jhally, the gender distinction forming men's violent tendencies is shaped by media, arts, sports and other social institutions that produce "a stream of images of violent, abusive men and promotes characteristics such as dominance, power, and control as means of establishing or maintaining manhood."

Yet Katz and Jhally's argument falls flat for the simple reason that Harris and Klebold committed suicide; their rampage was about nihilism and psychopathic contempt for all life-- and not the supremacy of men. Patriarchy, however wrong-headed, at least aspires to empower men; Harris and Klebold, as they drew their weapons upon themselves in their final act of violence, empowered no one.

In "The Depressive and the Psychopath," Dave Cullen (2004) makes a key identification in understanding the motives of the killers. Noting the FBI's analyses of the psychology of Harris and Klebold, the year they spent planning their attack and the failed propane bombs the pair manufactured in their attempt to explode the school and produce a death toll exceeding several hundred, Cullen remarks:

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

The Columbine massacre was not about the conflict between geeks and jocks in high school or the tendency of some boys to rough up their perceived lessors. It was about wholesale elevation of death for the sake of death. Accordingly, a more plausible theory to explain what led Harris and Klebold to choose murder is that they were the consummate achievement of a philosophic and educational system that promotes whim-worship over cognitive ability.

For years, the proponents of progressive education have controlled America's educational institutions. The hallmark of progressive education is the view that children should discover or construct their own knowledge; one thinks of the famous progressive chestnut that the mission of the educator is not to teach school subjects, but "to teach Johnny." In understanding human division, the progressive philosophy of education maintains that the cause of social strife is the unwillingness of an individual to sacrifice his convictions to the group. Glen Woiceshyn (1997) of the Ayn Rand Institute observes that philosopher John Dewey, the founder of progressive education, maintained that it is the insistence on distinctions such as "true versus false" and "right versus wrong" that generates social conflict. Interpreting Dewey's thought, he says, "If only children did not hold strong ideas, disagreement and conflict would evaporate in the sunshine of social harmony. Truth, therefore, is socially fractious - while ignorance is bliss."

Yet without clear instruction in how to think and how to perceive reality objectively--including the recognition that others have rights--Woiceshyn argues that children are vehicles out of control.

"Which feelings will guide [the child]? The fear and anxiety generated by ignorance and cognitive incompetence? The frustration and rage felt when his desires aren't immediately satisfied? The self-hatred that gets subconsciously projected at others? The false security offered by a gang? The desire to control others by force because of an inability to control reality?

What definitely won't guide him is reason - which is why violence is on the rise."

In understanding the violence that animates the seemingly innocent, it is not enough to observe that the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre were boys, or that they played violent video games, or that they listened to dark music. Millions of boys do the same things. One must examine the basic foundation of Harris and Klebold's thinking-the very philosophic choices that they made and that were made for them by others.

My grade for this essay: Zero. Zip. Nada. Why? I was supposed to "review" the article (that is, agree with its arguments), not refute the author's claim with actual facts. Yeah, right. It was too late for me to drop, so I ended up with a C+ for the semester. Still graduated with honors though. :-)

I'm glad that an individual like Mr. Henry M. Bowles, III is getting nuked while he is still in his embryonic stage. Hopefully it will be the slap to the head that will inspire him to get his "dope straight" as we would say in the Marines--or at least remain silent when confronted with his "less intelligent" peers.

Clinton and McCain

The Voice of Reason: Where Science Ends and Faith Begins

NB: This essay is the first installment in a new op-ed program at CAC.

‘Intelligent design’ is not science; it is faith, and it must be treated as such

Advocates of “intelligent design” are gearing up their fight to teach the controversial theory now that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III has ruled that the religious-based explanation for the formation of the universe and human evolution may not be taught in Pennsylvania public schools. The debate over intelligent design is important, because at root is the idea of “certainty” and the method by which scientific truths are established.

Proponents of teaching intelligent design in the public schools argue that evolution is a “theory” and ask why shouldn’t their theory be allowed equal time in a science class. The problem with this position is that a scientific theory and an intelligent design theory are two very different things.

To explain facts, scientific theories rely on observation for support. For example, to explain the origin of species, evolutionary biology draws upon field data from the ongoing changes that occur among populations of organisms, fossil data from plants and animals that no longer exist, data regarding the temporal and geographic distribution of genetic markers, and experiments that attempt to replicate the conditions of species-change in the laboratory. Some facts have yet to be explained fully. For example, we are not yet sure how some of the simplest parts of living things originated nor precisely how spoken language evolved.

Admitting the unknown facts regarding human origins, however, doesn’t mean that the explanations aren’t out there, waiting to be identified. The unknown is the unfinished business of evolutionary biology, a business in which today’s most promising grade school students might one day play a part in completing. Properly speaking, evolution is a “theory,” but it is entirely based on evidence, and an important part of scientists’ jobs is to identify how what is known can be used to discover what is not yet known.

Contrast the theory of evolution with the theory of intelligent design. The proponents of intelligent design argue that the world is simply too complex (or too “perfect,” implying that there could be an imperfect reality) to explain the origins of life and human intelligence. These proponents argue that ultimately only the intervention of a creator can explain man’s existence. Thereafter, there is no unfinished business for the researcher because an intelligent designer is not subject to further observation and experiment.

To evaluate this idea, it is useful to draw a parallel: imagine a scientist trying to find a cure for cancer through such reasoning. Like the origins of life and language, cancer is complex; it behaves strangely, and its nature is hard to pin down. Should the scientist then conclude that only God’s intervention causes cancer? Obviously, no real scientist would draw that conclusion, and it would be absurd to teach an intelligent design theory of cancer. Instead, researchers assume that the cause of cancer is ultimately caused by the interaction of the materials that make up our observable physical world, and they are working to discover what those interactions are so that they can control them and thereby discover a cure for the disease.

Philosophically, the proponents of intelligent design are wrong because they assume the existence or “primacy” of a consciousness that shapes the universe when no such evidence exists, or is even possible. None of the advocates of intelligent design can point to God and say, “Look there—you can see Him” and not rely upon faith to justify their claim. This is why intelligent design theory—whether applied to the origins of life or cancer—is not scientific. It eschews observation, experimentation and any kind of natural causality. What it attempts is to deny the essential process of science—explaining the complex and unknown by means of investigating the less complex and better understood. Because intelligent design theory is simply an article of faith, disconnected from the observation of reality, it should neither be taught in the science classes of public schools (which must maintain a separation of church and state) nor even in the science classes of religious schools that attempt to prepare the scientists of the next generation.

The theory of creationism and intelligent design may be worthy of study, possibly in a class on intellectual history. History, the field of study that examines the ideas held by men and how they act upon those thoughts, might properly document the fate of the theory of intelligent design, its proponents and its cultural effects. However, this hypothetical curriculum must in no way change how science is taught. Competing faiths may belong in a history class, but in science class, only competing scientific theories deserve attention.

How Not to Promote Religious Tolerance

Optional Values

A while back, a NoodleFood reader asked me for references on the issue of optional values. Since I just listened to it for the first time, I thought I should mention that Leonard Peikoff's two lectures "Integration as the Essence of Personal Identity" has some rather interesting discussion of the psychological mechanisms by which a person forms his optional values. Dr. Peikoff also discusses the issue in Understanding Objectivism, albeit in more philosophic terms. And Craig Biddle's God Said has some good practical advice about cultivating and pursuing optional values.

In my experience, some Objectivists -- although certainly not the above-named lecturers -- seem to misunderstand the nature of optional values in various ways, often in thinking that an individual person should be indifferent between optional values. In fact, optional values are real values promoting human life, although they are not necessary to human life universally. So one person might lead a fantastic life with children, hiking, knitting, chocolate ice cream, and computer games, while another can live a fantastic life with a wholly different set of optional values. In other words, a wide range of optional values can properly fill up and fill out a perfectly moral life, with a person's choice of career and spouse as the most important. And those choices of optional values are not arbitrary, but based upon the unique facts about a person's life, some chosen and some not.

Frankly, I'm not sure that I'm as clear on this topic as I'd like to be, as I sense some thorny epistemology lurking in the background, particularly a danger of severing abstractions from concretes about which Tara Smith has rightly warned me. In any case, anyone interested in the topic should check out the lectures mentioned above.

Intellectual Activism: ‘Lost Liberty’ Lunacy II

Logan Darrow Clements’ “brilliantly conceived public relations stunt” made the AP wire again:

Angered by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that sided with a Connecticut city that wanted to seize homes for economic development, a group of activists is trying to get one of the justices who voted for the decision evicted from his own home.

The group, led by a California man, wants Justice David Souter's home seized for the purpose of building an inn called "Lost Liberty Hotel."

They submitted enough petition signatures — only 25 were needed — to bring the matter before voters in March. This weekend, they're descending on Souter's hometown, the central New Hampshire town of Weare, population 8,500, to rally for support.

"This is in the tradition of the Boston Tea Party and the Pine Tree Riot," organizer Logan Darrow Clements said, referring to the riot that took place during the winter of 1771-1772, when colonists in Weare beat up officials appointed by King George III who fined them for logging white pines without approval.

What? Clements new ideal for intellectual activism is an actual riot? The actions of an angry mob is now the tool of choice in order to communicate Objectivist principles to the mass of America? Amazing.

It gets even better:

State Rep. Neal Kurk, a Weare resident who is sponsoring two pieces of eminent domain legislation in New Hampshire, said he expects the group's proposal to be defeated overwhelmingly.

"Most people here see this as an act of revenge and an improper attack on the judicial system," Kurk said. "You don't go after a judge personally because you disagree with his judgments."

So the state legislator who proposed the law New Hampshire residents need in order to be protected from the Kelo ruling also thinks Clements’ stunt is “improper”?

What is it going to take for Clements to give his ridiculous anti-intellectual antics a rest? Nobody wants this—at least nobody with a rational clue about them.

My 10 Favorite Comic Artists

Optional Values

A while back, a NoodleFood reader asked me for references on the issue of optional values. Since I just listened to it for the first time, I thought I should mention that Leonard Peikoff's two lectures "Integration as the Essence of Personal Identity" has some rather interesting discussion of the psychological mechanisms by which a person forms his optional values. Dr. Peikoff also discusses the issue in Understanding Objectivism, albeit in more philosophic terms. And Craig Biddle's God Said has some good practical advice about cultivating and pursuing optional values.

In my experience, some Objectivists -- although certainly not the above-named lecturers -- seem to misunderstand the nature of optional values in various ways, often in thinking that an individual person should be indifferent between optional values. In fact, optional values are real values promoting human life, although they are not necessary to human life universally. So one person might lead a fantastic life with children, hiking, knitting, chocolate ice cream, and computer games, while another can live a fantastic life with a wholly set of optional values. In other words, a wide range of optional values can properly fill up and fill out a perfectly moral life, with a person's choice of career and spouse as the most important. And those choices of optional values are not arbitrary, but based upon the unique facts about a person's life, some chosen and some not.

Frankly, I'm not sure that I'm as clear on this topic as I'd like to be, as I sense some thorny epistemology lurking in the background, particularly a danger of severing abstractions from concretes about which Tara Smith has rightly warned me. In any case, anyone interested in the topic should check out the lectures mentioned above.

The Poor Rich

I thought that I was playing the world's smallest violin in my post about The Poor Poor, but I just found an even tinier violin on which to play a mournful tune while reading this article by Daniel Gross on the struggling young people unable to afford whatever their heart desires just out of college. Happily, the author reviewing Anya Kamenetz Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time To Be Young and Tamara Draut's Strapped: Why America's 20-and-30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead has about as much sympathy as me for these self-pitying young women.

About Generation Debt, Mr. Gross writes:

In Kamenetz's book, there are plenty of poor, self-pitying upper-middle-class types, disappointed that they can't have exactly what they want when they want it. Sure, it's tough to live well as a violinist or a grad student in New York today; but the same thing held 20 years ago, and 40 years ago. To improve their lot, twentysomethings have to do the same things their parents should be doing: saving more, spending less, building skills that are marketable, and aligning aspirations with abilities. It's tough to have a bourgeois life at 26.

Kamenetz also makes cavalier statements about economics and career development. "The job market sucks," she proclaims. It may not be as good as it was in the 1990s, but suck is a pretty strong term. She complains that a $700 personal computer, a necessity for any young person, is expensive. Huh? Computing is incredibly cheap. The first PC I bought, that crappy, tiny Mac, cost $2,000 in 1990 dollars.

Kamenetz complains that: "No employer has yet offered me a full-time job with a 401(k), a paid vacation, or any other benefits beyond the next assignment. I have a savings account but no retirement fund. I can't afford preschool fees or a mortgage anywhere near the city where I live and work." Of course, Kamenetz doesn't have kids to send to preschool. And chances are, by the time she does, she'll be able to afford preschool fees. Most people in their 20s don't realize that their incomes will rise over time (none of the people I know who have six-figure incomes today had them when they were 25), that they will marry or form a partnership with somebody else, thus increasing their income, and that they may get over having to live in the hippest possible neighborhood.

Look. It's tough coming out of Ivy League schools to New York and making your way in the world. The notion that you can be--and have to be--the author of your own destiny is both terrifying and exhilarating. And for those without marketable skills, who lack social and intellectual capital, the odds are indeed stacked against them. But someone like Kamenetz, who graduated from Yale in 2002, doesn't have much to kvetch about. In the press materials accompanying the book, she notes that just after she finished the first draft, her boyfriend "proposed to me on a tiny, idyllic island off the coast of Sweden." She continues: "As I write this, boxes of china and flatware, engagement gifts, sit in our living room waiting to go into storage because they just won't fit in our insanely narrow galley kitchen. We spent a whole afternoon exchanging the inevitable silver candlesticks and crystal vases, heavy artifacts of an iconic married life that still seems to have nothing to do with ours." The inevitable silver candlesticks? Too much flatware to fit in the kitchen? We should all have such problems.

And does her fiance have one of those crap temporary jobs all the drones in her generation are destined to hold forever? Not really. He's a software engineer at Google.

I'm particularly unsympathetic to complaints about inadequate salaries from people who live in New York, since it's an exorbitantly expensive place to live. That's not exactly some well-kept secret, so if a person chooses to live there, then he/she must regard the expense as worth the benefits. And in that case, their complaints ought to fall on deaf ears.

More generally though, I'm aghast by the presumption of such adult children that they ought to be able to gain their independence from their parents without any reduction in their lavish lifestyle, as if the world owes them whatever standard of living in which they were raised. It's long past time for such spoiled brats to grow up, I think.

O’Reilly Factor Debate Contest

Attention all worthy debaters looking for some exposure. Bill O'Reilly is challenging anyone to come debate him on his show on any topic of their choosing! Do you want to expose some of his views?, say like that America is founded on the ten commandments? Email your debate topic and why you think you're a good debater to OREILLYCONTEST@FOXNEWS.COM. Again, convince him why you think you're a good debater, and include a phone number, an address, and an age. Six contestants will be chosen. I can't help but think that this is an outstanding opportunity.

Matriotism

Intellectual Activism: A call for nominations

I had a vision yesterday: it's awards season and the Center needs to do its share to honor the deserving. We're a small group though and we need to give credit in a way that stands out from the rest. Accordingly, I propose three new awards and ask for your help in finding worthy candidates.

Award #1: The Tonya Harding Award for Achievement in the Advance of Antitrust. The "Tonya" should identify that special someone, perhaps a lawyer, politician, academic, or looting businessman who though their actions last year have busted up some knees in the name of "protecting competition." Had this tribute been around a few years back, US District Court Federal Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of Microsoft fame or Timothy Murris of the FTC would most certainly been nominees.

Award #2: The Hypocritical Capitalist Award for Making a Lot of Money While Undermining the System that Made it All Possible. The "Hippy-Capitalist" should bring attention to the businessman or woman who does the most to undercut (or perhaps misdirect) the moral case for capitalism, yet makes a pile of money for themselves regardless. For this honor, its going to be hard to beat Microsoft's Bill Gates, who along with his wife Melinda, have given millions of dollars in handouts to relieve African poverty while simultaneously ignoring the fact that Africa's woes are caused by dictatorship, tribalism and the absence of the rule of law. There are other businessmen and women out there who are at least deserving of Honorable Mentions, and I ask your help in finding them.

Award #3: The Looting Politician Award for Unprecedented Generosity with Other People's Money. Lastly, the "Lootie" should honor the political leader whose leadership has been crucial to out-of-control government spending and outrageous government spending. Ex-majority whip Tom Delay is a strong contender for arguing that there was absolutely no fat in the federal budget, as well Alaska Senator Ted Stevens of the "Bridge to Nowhere" fame.

I ask for ROR visitors to help me with this project by finding the most worthy candidates. Together, I think we could have a lot of fun with this. Nominations will close January 29th.

Our Mixed Economy at Work

Eliminate the Iranian Threat

Yaron Brook:
As Iran removed UN seals at some of its atomic research sites and proceeded with its nuclear program, German newspapers report that the United States is coordinating with NATO for a possible military action against Iran.

As the fatherland of Islamic totalitarianism, Iran should have been our main target in this war.

In taking military action, our goal should not be to bring Iranians the vote, but to destroy the Iranian regime and the cause it fights for. We must instill fear in every person who aids or fights for Islamic totalitarianism.

We have ignored the Iranian threat for far too long. When we did the same with Afghanistan and bin Laden, we lost the Twin Towers. We can't afford to keep appeasing Iran and risk losing New York.

Intellectual Activism: ‘Lost Liberty’ Lunacy

Like most of you, I was appalled at last summer’s Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London, where a 6-5 Supreme Court upheld a local government’s authority to use eminent domain to size private property for economic development. In the face of a patently unjust ruling, the best tactic to adopt now would be to support efforts in the states to pass anti-eminent domain legislation and state constitutional reform. That is, unless you are former California gubernatorial candidate Logan Darrow Clements.

A little bit of a Clements refresher: back in 2003, Clements ran for governor as part of California’s notorious recall election. Clements ran on the Atlas Shrugged platform (as in Ayn Rand’s epic novel was his literal electoral platform). Needless to say, Clements didn’t do to well, placing 131st out of 135 candidates and earning exactly 274 votes (out of the nine million votes cast). Observing Clements’ candidacy at the time prompted me to remark:

I do not know Mr. Clements; I can speak nothing to his intelligence or character. But as a political scientist, I can speak to his judgment: there was no point to his candidacy. It was, truly, an exercise in futility. Clements had zero chance of beating Gary Coleman, let alone winning. Yet by running, Clements made the classic libertarian error—he placed political activism before political philosophy.

After that post, Clements stopped by the Rule of Reason to denounce me as a “hater” and a “destructionist.” Oh well. One can try . . .

So now back to the Kelo decision. Imagine then my utter amusement last summer when I heard about an attempt to seize one of United States Supreme Court Justice David Souter's New Hampshire properties and turn it into the "Lost Liberty" hotel. Who was the architect of such a devilish poly? None other then Logan Darrow Clements.

Recognize for a moment that Clements has now taken his antics to a whole new level. First, Justice Souter didn’t even write the Court’s opinion. Justice Stevens did. Was Clements simply unable to locate Justice Stevens’ property holdings? Do the Court’s other eminent domain supporters get a pass from Clements’ wrath as well?

Second, when did it ever become appropriate to threaten a justice in response to a decision of theirs that you disagree with? I don’t care how bad Kelo’s reasoning is: you don’t get to play ‘lynch the Justice’ because you don’t like the way they rule.

Third, (and most importantly) Clements’ effort took attention away from the real fight, which is passing anti-eminent domain bills in the states. Clements’ visceral and mindless activism got him a heap of press—more in fact, that the Institute for Justice’s real effort to change the eminent domain laws. That’s not just bad—that’s disgusting.

Yet even these problems did not stop nationally syndicated Objectivist newspaper columnist and Intellectual Activist editor Robert W. Tracinski from noting in his e-mail newsletter that despite Clements’ Libertarian groundings, the “Lost Liberty” hotel was a “brilliantly conceived public relations stunt.” Brilliantly conceived? Clements’ plan is an utter abomination. A strategy of “just deserts” doesn’t address larger philosophic problems—it evades them in the name of 'activism.'

So now, a little more than half a year after the Kelo ruling, where does Clements’ “Lost Liberty” hotel stand? From what I was able to reconnoiter, it doesn’t stand at all. Clements’ seems to have been able to raise some money for his ploy, and he apparently has a thousand or so pledges from people promising to visit the “Lost Liberty” hotel should it be built. He’s sponsoring a ballot initiative to force the local New Hampshire town to give him Justice Souter’s property, and he even has a toady running for town council to help him along. Talk about taking a joke to its absurd extreme.

That’s not to say that they thing will ever be built though. New Hampshire is the “live free or die” state, and I suspect the locals are not going to appreciate a California activist trying to loot their neighbor’s property—not one bit. In fact, a July 2005 University of New Hampshire poll finds 93% of New Hampshire residents oppose the Kelo decision. What, is Clements’ aiming to sway that last seven percent?

Needless to say, I will not be visiting Clements’ “Lost Liberty” hotel if it ever gets constructed. Clements’ is misdirecting legitimate outrage over the Kelo decision toward what now is becoming an exercise in rank democracy. Yes, we all know that eminent domain abuse is outrageous. Those seeking justice don’t resolve the problem by joining in on the abuse though publicity stunts—they solve it by passing better laws.

The Culture: The Greenspan Legacy

This gem of a quote appeared in Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein’s article on the legacy of Alan Greenspan:

Greenspan summed up the trade-offs behind his deregulatory philosophy in a series of unusually lucid speeches in London in 2002, on the eve of being knighted by Queen Elizabeth. "The extent of government intervention in markets to control risk-taking," he said, "is a trade-off between economic growth and its associated potential instability, and a more civil but less stressful way of life with a lower standard of living."

Good grief. It sounds to me like Greenspan was a man who never filed his own tax return or ever had to comply with a government regulation.

The real Greenspan legacy is the story of how a man went from someone who wrote an expose of antitrust in “Capitalism the Unknown Ideal” to a man who concluded that government intervention in the economy produces “a more civil but less stressful way of life.”

Weekend Conference on Law, Individual Rights and the Judicial System

As I've mentioned before, Front Range Objectivism's Weekend Conference on Law, Individual Rights and the Judicial System will be held on March 4th and 5th in Denver. It promises to be a fantastic conference. Here is the full text from the online brochure, minus the online registration form:

Weekend Conference on Law, Individual Rights and the Judicial System
March 4-5, 2006, Denver, Colorado

Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. — Ayn Rand

The American legal system is in real trouble. Many solutions have been offered–limitations on tort damage awards, restrictions of intellectual property rights, limits on class action suits, increases and decreases in various criminal penalties, and even changes in the Senate confirmation procedure for Supreme Court Justices. Many of the reforms sought do not address the fundamental issues involved, and therefore will ultimately fail. But how does one decide whether a particular reform is appropriate?

To establish and preserve a free society, citizens must recognize, as the foundation of that society, the principle of individual rights. Rights are "the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context" and provide "the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society" (Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights").

The fundamental question to be asked in evaluating any of the proposed reforms to the legal system is whether this change better ensures and protects individual rights, and, if so, how. This weekend conference, the first to focus on the application of Objectivism to legal issues, will seek to bring a richer understanding of individual rights to four topics: 1) judicial interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, 2) property rights as they relate to eminent domain, 3) unenumerated rights, and 4) the right to privacy. These lectures relate to some of the most significant legal issues in America today.

The Schedule

"right">10:15 - 11:15

Saturday, March 4
8:45 a.m.		Lin Zinser – Opening Remarks
9:00 - 10:30		Tara Smith – Why Originalism Won't Die
10:45 - 12:15		Dana Berliner – Reading Public Use Out of the Fifth Amendment, Part I
12:15 - 1:30		Lunch on your own
1:30 - 3:00		Eric Daniels – Unenumerated Rights, Part I
3:15 - 4:45		Amy Peikoff – Is There a Right to Privacy? Part I
5:00 - 7:00		Social Hour – Cash Bar
Sunday, March 5
9:00 - 10:00		Dana Berliner – Reading Public Use Out of the Fifth Amendment, Part II
Eric Daniels – Unenumerated Rights, Part II
11:30 - 12:30		Amy Peikoff – Is There a Right to Privacy? Part II
12:30 - 1:30		Buffet Sandwich Luncheon (included)
1:30 - 3:30		James McCrory, Steve Plafker, Michael Conger – Panel Discussion

About the Speakers and Lectures

Tara Smith, PhD, will open the conference with a lecture on Why Originalism Won't Die: Common Mistakes in Competing Theories of Judicial Interpretation. In the debate over judicial interpretation of the Constitution, the theory of Originalism (advocated by Antonin Scalia, among others) has been subjected to seemingly fatal criticisms. Despite the exposure of flaws that would normally bury a theory, however, Originalism continues to attract tremendous support. What explains its resilient appeal? Why do many continue to regard it as the most reasonable basis for judicial interpretation? This lecture will answer these questions by identifying the fundamental weakness of the leading alternatives to Originalism and by demonstrating that the heart of Originalism's appeal–its promise of judicial objectivity –is illusory. All camps in this debate, we will see, suffer from serious misunderstandings of the nature of objectivity.

Dana Berliner, JD, of the Institute for Justice, will present two lectures on Reading "Public Use" out of the Fifth Amendment: A Look at the Use of Eminent Domain for Private Parties in the United States. Eminent Domain, the power of government to take private property, is limited by the U.S. Constitution to "public use" and requires "just compensation" when property is taken. Without a proper understanding of the importance of property to individual rights, fuzzy language and exceptions have eroded the limitations on this governmental power. Part I will trace the history of the law of eminent domain, its inclusion in the Constitution, its subsequent interpretation by courts and other branches of government, and the relationship of the public use issue to the debate about "judicial activism" in the courts.

Part II will focus on more recent developments in the issue of eminent domain, covering the development and litigation of the Kelo case at the U.S. Supreme Court, focusing on both the litigation strategy and the constitutional analysis in the majority, concurring and dissenting opinions. Ms. Berliner will also discuss the subsequent popular and political backlash, and show the difficulty of implementing philosophically consistent policy in legislation.

Eric Daniels, PhD, will discuss Unenumerated Rights: From Calder v. Bull to Lawrence v. Texas. The Founding Fathers intended to create a government to secure individual rights. They listed and laid out numerous rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but they also added the Ninth Amendment to guarantee "unenumerated rights." What are these rights? How can they be protected? Has this been a successful means of protecting individual rights?

These two lectures will explore the history of the framing of the Ninth Amendment and the implementation of unenumerated rights in major court decisions from the Founding to the present. They will explore how individual rights–both enumerated and unenumerated–have fared under the changing philosophies of interpretation and theories of jurisprudence that American courts have embraced.

Amy Peikoff, JD, PhD, will give two lectures entitled Is There a Right to Privacy?, in which she will explain why she opposes the current legal recognition of a right to privacy. In the first lecture, she will discuss the history of the right to privacy in the United States, including descriptions of the cases in which a right to privacy has been recognized, and summaries of the main arguments given in favor of such a right. In her second lecture, Dr. Peikoff will present what she thinks is the proper approach to the legal protection of privacy, an approach based on Ayn Rand's philosophy.

The conference will conclude on Sunday afternoon with a panel discussion by Jim McCrory, Steve Plafker and Michael Conger, officers of TAFOL, The Association For Objective Law, seeking to provide an integrated perspective on the issues discussed throughout the weekend sessions. These lectures, presented over one weekend, March 4 - 5, 2006, promise to be a unique experience, applying Objectivism to the philosophy of law.

About the Conference

If you...

• Wonder how to analyze legal issues from an Objectivist perspective,
  
• Are curious about how to properly interpret the U.S. Constitution,
  
• Want to better understand the Supreme Court's decisions on abortion, education, voluntary sexual acts, and eminent domain,
  
• Need CLE credit and would enjoy lectures devoid of the usual statist bias, or
  
• Want to combine a weekend of intellectual stimulation, preceded or followed by a few days of skiing in beautiful Colorado

The conference will be held at the Sheraton Denver West Hotel in Lakewood, CO, a suburb of Denver. There is a special room rate of $79 per night, plus $10 for each additional person. Make hotel reservations by February 13 (at guaranteed rates) with Sheraton Denver West, 303-987-2000, reference code FRCO3A. An airport shuttle to the hotel costs approximately $28.00 per person.

To register for the conference by mail (with payment by check), please use the form on the brochure. To register for the conference online (with payment by credit card, bank transfer, or PayPal), please fill out the form at the bottom of the online brochure. For more information, contact Lin Zinser at lin@zinser.com.

Conference prices:

• Student: $75 (by Feb. 11), $150 (after Feb. 11)
  
• Regular: $225 (by Feb. 11), $300 (after Feb. 11)
  
• Attorney CLE: $300 (by Feb. 11), $375 (after Feb. 11)

be a fantastic weekend -- well worth a trip to Denver. And please note the hefty price discount for registration by February 11th!

Just so that you know, the whole of NoodleFood -- Paul, Don, and myself -- will be present together at this law conference for the first time ever! (Paul has actually never met Don in person.) Our good friend Greg Perkins -- the author of the fantastic Axiomatic article on the failure of the libertarian objections to intellectual property -- will also be flying in from Boise to attend.

A Review of The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics

Casey Fahy e-mailed me this morning to alert me to a fantastic review by Peter Cresswell of James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics (PARC). It's perhaps the most passionate book review I've ever read -- and thus perfectly appropriate to its subject. It's also a delight to read, so I'm pleased to strongly recommend it. Those who've already devoured PARC are sure to particularly appreciate its stubborn refusal to mince words. To whet your appetite, let me just quote one bit from the opening. Peter writes that The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics is:

... a book by author James Valliant--a San Diego prosecuting attorney--that examines the monstrous duplicity of her biographers, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, across almost the entire eighteen years of their time as associates of Rand. It is impossible both to admire Ayn Rand and to read this book unmoved. Valliant the attorney is out to convict, but Valliant the author makes abundantly plain--well beyond reasonable doubt--that Nathaniel Branden exploited Rand sexually and romantically, and that both Brandens exploited her professionally and emotionally, and did so consciously and fraudulently. To this day the Brandens continue with the deception, only now with us as dupes.

To put their story in a nutshell, in order to advance themselves by association with Rand they pretended to be what they were not, and in the end they both got burned by it. All else is obfuscation.

The scale of their duplicity is vast: it stretches almost from the time they first met Rand to the time of her death, and extends even after that with biographies and memoirs published after her passing that, as Valliant shows conclusively, are mired in contradiction and embroidered with tissues of self-serving lies. Rand was and still is a meal-ticket for both Branden, B., and Branden, N.; they have both done their best to consume her for their ends, and to dishonestly denigrate the philosophy and the woman they once claimed to represent.

All true.

The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics reveals with crystal clarity the ongoing-to-this-day dishonesty, exploitation, injustice, and malice of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden in their dealings with Ayn Rand. In so doing, it completely undermines their portrayals of Ayn Rand as a vengeful philosophical tyrant. Even better, Ayn Rand's journals reveal her heroic benevolence, patience, and honesty in her attempts to right the relationship.

In my own case, I realized that Nathaniel and Barbara Branden were evil before reading PARC, just based upon Nathaniel's dishonest smears of Objectivism in his Benefits and Hazards essay and Barbara's disgusting psychologizing in The Passion of Ayn Rand. However, I didn't know just thoroughly dishonest, manipulative, and unjust they were and are until I read James Valliant's book. It was an eye-opener, even for me.

Like so many other people, reviewer Peter Cresswell was "persuaded reluctantly" to read PARC, yet he says that is "very happy" that he did. And he read it honestly, as his review shows.

Others dare not be so honest.

Bob Bidinotto has praised Barbara's The Passion of Ayn Rand for years. He contributed a quote to its back cover, describing it as "an epic tale of soaring ecstasy and searing pain, of unbelievable triumph and unspeakable tragedy." Yet just about the time that PARC was published, he decided that he's not so interested in Ayn Rand's life after all. On SoloPassion, he wrote:

My alleged "silence" about the controversy caused by your book, Mr. Valliant, has been anything but -- as my many, many posts on SOLOHQ can easily demonstrate to anyone with your proven dedication to research. Rather, as I made clear again and again, its contents simply don't interest me. The Brandens's accounts of her intimate life hold no interest for me, and neither does yours. The whole point of Mr. Fahy's post here is that such disinterest constitutes "evasion." Baloney. Years ago I finally had a gutful of all the arguments about Ayn Rand's person and private life. At some point, the poking and picking at the details, rumors, and gossip surrounding the intimate relationships of a dead woman became unseemly, even morbid.

Ed Hudgins demonstrated a similar lack of interest in the book, despite the fact that his organization regularly invites Nathaniel and Barbara Branden to speak at conferences and the like. Although willing to read criticisms of the book, he's not all that interested in reading the book itself. He said: "Robert -- Great to have you back posting on SOLO! How are you doing? Very thoughtful analysis of the Valient/Rand book. I've only glanced at it since I'm more interested in the ideas rather than personality issues, but I'll give the AR entries a read."

These two men know full well that Jim Valliant's book is a bombshell regarding the moral characters of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. They have seen many, many reports of people dramatically changing their judgment of the Brandens upon reading PARC on SoloHQ and SoloPassion. Moreover, these men are the top brass of The Objectivist Center, an organization supposedly devoted to Ayn Rand's philosophy, but with strong ties to both Nathaniel and Barbara Branden.

Yet they're not interested in the book. It's irrelevant to them. They do not care to learn that two people so intimately involved with their organization for so many years are thoroughly corrupt and dishonest. They are unconcerned that these people are the major source of vicious lies about Ayn Rand's life. They aren't bothered by the fact that Nathaniel's criticisms of Objectivism as encouraging repression are the figments of his own twisted psychology. They are happy to present these people as experts on Objectivism, even though they're still just pretending. They do not even care that they are aiding and abetting the Brandens' in their vengeful quest to destroy Ayn Rand and Objectivism by offering them a seemingly respectable platform from which to do so.

In short, Ed Hudgins and Bob Bidinotto are determined to tolerate the evil of the Brandens, come hell or high water, yet too cowardly to even learn precisely what they are doing. As Casey Fahy said ever-so-colorfully in the comments on the review: "In reality, those who cling to the dirty bathwater of the Brandens are willing to throw the baby out just to keep wallowing in their filth for another bit of pseudo-Objectivist flattery from the false idols they have chosen to worship."

In my view, Jim Valliant's case against Nathaniel and Barbara Branden in The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics is so overwhelming that no honest person can read it without dramatically changing their judgment of the Brandens for the worse -- and of Ayn Rand for the better. Moreover, a person who accepts any part of the Brandens' portrayal of Ayn Rand, yet refuses to read the book is either dishonest, irresponsible, or a coward. There's just no excuse for self-inflicted blindness -- particularly not from people with any measure of trust in or contact with the Brandens.

And yes, that includes those who attend TOC Summer Seminars, claiming that TOC's involvement with the Brandens isn't important. As PARC shows, Nathaniel Branden is determined to destroy Ayn Rand and Objectivism by whatever dishonest means he can -- all because Ayn Rand dared to reject him after discovering his years and years of immorality concealed by deception. Such a person ought never speak under the banner of a supposedly Objectivist organization, particularly not with his reputation as some kindly grandfather of Objectivism. Any supposedly Objectivist organization willing to give him a platform ought to be boycotted -- by every person who sincerely values Ayn Rand's philosophy. The issue is just that serious: it's like attending a "Freedom Summit" with Uncle Joe Stalin as the keynote speaker.

So please do read The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics -- sooner rather than later. No honest man will regret the few hours spent.

Playing Hardball with Free Speech

Intellectual Activism: Incentives . . .

Antirust law creates huge financial incentives-for the people who file antitrust suits. Consider the case of Lloyd Constantine's recent award of $220 million dollars as lead plaintiffs counsel in the Visa International Service Association/MasterCard Inc. antitrust suit. Constantine sought $609 million plus expenses, but had to settle for the smaller figure after Judge John Gleeson of the Eastern District of New York ruled that his request was "absurd." Don't feel too bad though-Constantine and his henchmen have found the will to carry on.

The firm has left its old offices and sublet grander quarters from New York's Davis Polk & Wardwell. Two weeks after he got the money, Constantine gathered the firm together in those offices and handed out checks. An employee in the mailroom got $50,000. So did a paralegal who had worked for the firm for a single year. ("She practically gave up a year of her life. She must have billed 3,000 hours," says Constantine.)

As for himself, Constantine won't say how much he got. And while he's careful to play down the importance of money -- "Before I got this fee, I had everything I needed. I don't need a hell of a lot more now," he says -- there have been changes. Constantine bought his wife a 1921 Steinway grand piano, for example. Also, she recently left her job as general counsel of News America Marketing, a subsidiary of The News Corp. Limited, and is looking for something new. Perhaps teaching, or something in the nonprofit world, taking a pay cut made possible by Visa. [Law.com]

What young law school student is going to read that article and conclude that they want to be a moral defender of capitalism? Precious few I suspect-and proof that of all the looting in the world, it's the legalized variety that offers the best incentives.

So what to do? I doubt too many people who actually make money (that is, who actually create the thing of value that they later sell on the market, over looting it) will look at a case like the Visa/MasterCard antitrust case and conclude that it was a feat of justice. Yet by their inaction, they tacitly support its outcome. Why? Because these people do not grasp the moral basis of capitalism. I've been trying to think of a new name for this kind of thinking-the "anti-inductive mentality" comes to mind. It shouldn't be rocket science for someone to figure out that when a person creates something, they own it. Case closed, period. This is clearly not the situation today.

So yet again, I am reminded that the tipping point in this battle is moral and epistemological. Look forward to some new campaigns out of CAC to help underscore this truth. After all, we have some incentives of our own we can put on the table . . .

Intellectual Activism: Incentives . . .

Antirust law creates huge financial incentives-for the people who file antitrust suits. Consider the case of Lloyd Constantine's recent award of $220 million dollars as lead plaintiffs counsel in the Visa International Service Association/MasterCard Inc. antitrust suit. Constantine sought $609 million plus expenses, but had to settle for the smaller figure after Judge John Gleeson of the Eastern District of New York ruled that his request was "absurd." Don't feel too bad though-Constantine and his henchmen have found the will to carry on.

The firm has left its old offices and sublet grander quarters from New York's Davis Polk & Wardwell. Two weeks after he got the money, Constantine gathered the firm together in those offices and handed out checks. An employee in the mailroom got $50,000. So did a paralegal who had worked for the firm for a single year. ("She practically gave up a year of her life. She must have billed 3,000 hours," says Constantine.)

As for himself, Constantine won't say how much he got. And while he's careful to play down the importance of money -- "Before I got this fee, I had everything I needed. I don't need a hell of a lot more now," he says -- there have been changes. Constantine bought his wife a 1921 Steinway grand piano, for example. Also, she recently left her job as general counsel of News America Marketing, a subsidiary of The News Corp. Limited, and is looking for something new. Perhaps teaching, or something in the nonprofit world, taking a pay cut made possible by Visa. [Law.com]

What young law school student is going to read that article and conclude that they want to be a moral defender of capitalism? Precious few I suspect-and proof that of all the looting in the world, it's the legalized variety that offers the best incentives.

So what to do? I doubt too many people who actually make money (that is, who actually create the thing of value that they later sell on the market, over looting it) will look at a case like the Visa/MasterCard antitrust case and conclude that it was a feat of justice. Yet by their inaction, they tacitly support its outcome. Why? Because these people do not grasp the moral basis of capitalism. I've been trying to think of a new name for this kind of thinking-the "anti-inductive mentality" comes to mind. Why? Because it shouldn't be rocket science for someone to figure out that when a person creates something, they own it. Case closed, period. This is clearly not the case today.

So yet again, I am reminded that the tipping point in this battle is moral and epistemological. Look forward to some new campaigns out of CAC to help underscore this truth. After all, we have some incentive of our own we can put on the table . . .

U.S. govt sues Google for your porn queries

The Justice Department is suing Google after it refused to turn over “all Google queries for a week and for 1 million Internet addresses.” No warrant or reasonable cause was needed – this is for the state’s “research” needs. MSN, Yahoo, and AOL already capitulated without a fight. If there was ever a cause for a fight over due process, it’s this, not the anti-terrorism BS.

Btw, Google permanently records all my search queries as part of my Google account, which includes a year of Gmail emails, my address book, and credit card info for my ad accounts.  To hell with phone calls and letters – if there are any secrets about me, my Google accounts hold them.  If this is up for grabs without a warrant, what isn’t?

Maryland Lawmakers vs. Wal-Mart

Maryland's lawmakers have acted arbitrarily and unjustly in passing a law designed to force a single company--Wal-Mart--to increase its health benefits. The government has no place dictating to companies what health benefits they offer, period--let alone targeting a single scapegoat company for punishment.

This arbitrary exercise of power by Maryland's lawless lawmakers against one of America's best companies should be repudiated by everyone who believes in justice, rights, and the rule of law.

Dr. Yaron Brook
President of the Ayn Rand Institute
Irvine, CA

[Ed. note: also see Russell Roberts comments on the law.]

Katrina Killers, Keystone Chief

The Myth of "Price Gouging"

By: Alex Epstein

There is no such thing as "price gouging" by private businesses.

Many consumers are angry about alleged price gouging at the pump, and politicians are listening. States with anti-"price gouging" laws are investigating and prosecuting complaints, while Washington is discussing a federal anti-"price gouging" law. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist promises that "if the facts warrant it, I will support a federal anti-price gouging law."

But there are no facts that could warrant such a law, because there is no such thing as "price gouging" by private businesses.

The term "price gouging" implies that gas stations have an ability to forcibly inflict harm on us--but they do not. Any price we pay for a gallon of gasoline--whether $1 or $3--we pay voluntarily, based on the value of the gasoline to us. If we think we are spending too much on gasoline, we are free to drive less, to buy more fuel-efficient cars, to use carpools or busses, or to travel by bicycle or on foot. Gas station owners cannot force us to buy gasoline; they can only offer us a trade, which we are free to accept or reject.

But, one might ask, without anti-"price gouging" laws won't owners of gasoline charge the absolute highest prices they can? Absolutely, and they have every moral right to do so--just as consumers of gasoline have every right to pay the lowest prices they can find. Gas station owners are not our servants. They are producers who spend money, exert effort, and assume risk to bring a product to market. They own the gasoline they sell, and like any property owner they should be free to set the terms of sale.

Since we pay the lowest price that we can find for gasoline (and never more than it is worth to us), and gas stations sell gasoline for the highest price they can get (and never less than it is worth to them), the price of gasoline is a reflection of mutually beneficial trade--the essence of proper interaction under capitalism. For a gas station owner to charge what the market will bear is no more "gouging" than it is for a computer programmer--or a cashier--to negotiate for the highest salary he can get.

Since the prevailing price of gasoline is the result of trade, it reflects not the arbitrary "greed" of gas station owners, but the facts of the market: the producers' costs, competition, and what customers are willing to pay. The reason that gasoline prices are higher after a natural disaster, for instance, is that the fact of relatively scarce supply leads various purchasers of oil and gasoline to compete to buy it, and bid up its price. Those who buy it are those who value it most, to the extent they value it most--like highly efficient factories overseas, or Americans providing for their most crucial transportation priorities.

Anti-"price gouging" laws prevent producers and their customers from trading at mutually beneficial prices--sacrificing their interests to the interests of those who wish to avoid the "hardship" of paying prices higher than they are used to. By what right can the government force producers to set artificially low prices and prevent consumers from bidding up the price to get the gasoline they are willing to pay for? By what right can the government demand that factory owners be deprived of the oil they are able to pay for--and their customers of the cheap products they happily purchase at Wal-Mart?

Anti-"price-gouging" laws are a particularly vicious form of price controls. Like all price controls, they deprive businesses of earned profit, promote shortages, and discourage future production. But they also forbid the indefinable: "unconscionable" prices, the meaning of which cannot be known until after the ruling of some bureaucrat. This added uncertainty discourages producers from being in business, period--especially in times of emergency, when "gouging" claims are most rampant. If a federal "price gouging" law is passed, will gas station owners do everything possible after the next natural disaster to remain open for business--will private contractors from other states rush to bring generators, food, and debris-clearing equipment? Or will they not bother for fear that the prices they set will be declared "unconscionable"?

The real threat to individual rights and justice is not the so-called price gouging of free individuals, but the price-control gouging of a coercive government. We must fight this threat by asserting, unequivocally, that gas station owners have a right to charge whatever prices they choose.

Alex Epstein is a junior fellow 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.

Government Should Not Regulate Space Tourism

In response to the new proposal of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to regulate space tourism, Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, said: "If we want to encourage space tourism, the last thing we want is for the government to regulate it."

"Safety concerns," said Dr. Brook, "should be addressed by those who are actually developing this cutting-edge technology. It is up to their potential customers, not government officials, to evaluate the risks involved."

Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, has appeared hundreds of times on radio and TV shows, including FOX News (The O'Reilly Factor, Your World with Neil Cavuto, At Large with Geraldo Rivera), CNN's Talkback Live, CNBC's Closing Bell and On the Money, and C-SPAN.

Chimp Art

Heh:

A German art expert was fooled into believing a painting done by a chimpanzee was the work of a master. The director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider, suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay. "It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour," Dr Schneider confidently asserted. The canvas was actually the work of Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp at the local zoo.

While Banghi likes to paint, she is not able to build up much of a body of work as her mate Satscho generally destroys her paintings before they can get to the gallery. But this one survived long enough to give Dr Schneider a red face. "I did think it looked a bit rushed," she told Bild newspaper.

That's funny, but in an awful kind of way. So prepare yourself for a bit of a rant...

The postmodernists indignantly defend modern art as expressive of some deep conceptual meaning and value inaccessible to the uncultured riffraff taxed to support it. If they were at all honest, the multitude of stories like this one would impel them to rethink their views. After all, what abstract meaning or significant value can some claimed work of art possess if equal to the random smears of a mere beast?

Oh, I know that the postmoderns have plenty of rationalizations -- that interpretation is all subjective, for example. While such rationalizations may fool some honest folks, none manage to completely conceal the pretentious charlatanism of the whole enterprise of modern art. Most sensible people, I suspect, are so wearied by the steamroller of our postmodern culture that they even cannot rouse themselves to righteous indignation.

In fact, the revelation of such "mistakes" in the art world should be treated like a discovery that a widely-respected wine expert cannot tell the difference between Pinot Grigio and urine -- or that a prominent dog trainer routinely mistakes Poodles for Dobermans -- or that a doctor confuses fingers with toes. Unfortunately, we cannot yet run the charlatans out of town, but at least we can mock their supposed expertise at every turn.

(Also, Paul suggests the following quizzes to test yourself on similar modern art: "True Art or A Fake?" and "Art or Crap?".)

Interesting Politician in Ohio

"Blink" and Your Subconscious

Supreme Court On Suicide

Since 1997 Oregon physicians have been permitted by statute to help their patients commit suicide. On Tuesday the Supreme Court upheld this controversial law, reaching the right result for the wrong reasons. By basing its decision on legal technicalities, the Court managed to avoid addressing the real issue: an individual's unconditional right to commit suicide.

More from Tom Bowden at The American Chronicle here. Am I pro-suicide? Uhhh...No. Do I defend the right of the individual to make his or her own decisions about their life in the context of individual and property rights? Yes.

The Catholic response:

Physician-assisted suicide is not an act that directly ends the suffering of a patient. Rather, this act deliberately takes the life of a person who receives his or her life as a gift from God. Physician-assisted suicide represents a fundamental violation of this gift and of human dignity.

Translation: "It's not your life. It's God's." Sounds like Terry Schiavo all over again. No matter how bad someone's life is, it must be sustained."

Tom adds:

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed, for the first time in the history of nations, that each person exists as an end in himself. This basic truth--which finds political expression in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--means, in practical terms, that you need no one's permission to live and that no one may forcibly obstruct your efforts to achieve your own personal happiness.

But what if happiness becomes impossible to attain? What if a dread disease, or some other calamity, drains all joy from life, leaving only misery and suffering? The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise--to declare that society or God must give you permission to kill yourself--is to contradict the right to life at its root. If you have a duty to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right.

Thanks Tom.

The Vanderbilts

I recently bought a slew of used books, mostly classic fiction, at a good used bookstore in Denver. While passing by the "Business and Economics" section of the store, a yellow hardcover with "The Vanderbilts" in big letters on the spine caught my attention. I paused to take a look, as I very much enjoyed the dramatic story of Cornelius Vanderbilt told by historian Eric Daniels in his 2003 lecture Vanderbilt and American Free Enterprise. Although the book was a bit pricey, I was sold after reading just the first paragraph of the preface:

This is a history of the Vanderbilt family, with a record of their vicissitudes, and a chronicle of the method by which their wealth has been acquired. It is confidently put forth as a work which should fall into the hands of boys and young men--of all who aspire to become Captains of Industry or leaders of their fellows in the sharp and wholesome competitions of life.

No modern book would dare to start in such a fashion! Not only do those two sentences foreshadow a positive spin on the rapacious robber barons, the book is also clearly intended to inspire young people to such low money-grubbing!

As it turns out, the book is a reprint of The Vanderbilts and the Story of Their Fortune, originally published in 1886. I can't wait to read it.

Basketball and Self-Interest

Global Treeing

Political Realignment?

Rights and Reason: 'Abuse of Popular Belief'

Here's another story that caught my eye by Phil Stewart at Reuters:

Forget the U.S. debate over intelligent design versus evolution.

An Italian court is tackling Jesus -- and whether the Roman Catholic Church may be breaking the law by teaching that he existed 2,000 years ago.

The case pits against each other two men in their 70s, who are from the same central Italian town and even went to the same seminary school in their teenage years.

The defendant, Enrico Righi, went on to become a priest writing for the parish newspaper. The plaintiff, Luigi Cascioli, became a vocal atheist who, after years of legal wrangling, is set to get his day in court later this month.

"I started this lawsuit because I wanted to deal the final blow against the Church, the bearer of obscurantism and regression," Cascioli told Reuters.

Cascioli says Righi, and by extension the whole Church, broke two Italian laws. The first is "Abuso di Credulita Popolare" (Abuse of Popular Belief) meant to protect people against being swindled or conned. The second crime, he says, is "Sostituzione di Persona", or impersonation.

"The Church constructed Christ upon the personality of John of Gamala," Cascioli claimed, referring to the 1st century Jew who fought against the Roman army.
A court in Viterbo will hear from Righi, who has yet to be indicted, at a January 27 preliminary hearing meant to determine whether the case has enough merit to go forward.

What's wrong with this case? Cascioli is attacking the right to hold a private view. If it's permissible for a government to rule on religion on the basis of "Abuse of Popular Belief," then it's permissible for a government to rule on politics, ethics, or any other realm it desires. Did marketing sway you to buy that car on the promise that it would increase your feeling of prestige or personal satisfaction? Abuse of Popular Belief. Did Atlas Shrugged sway you away from religion and toward Objectivism? Abuse of Popular Belief.

There is a reason government must stay out of the realm of ideas, and that is that no man may presume to think for another. Men like Cascioli are only acting against the dawn of a future age of reason, by undercutting the very intellectual freedom that would make such an age possible.

Tonight

Paul just reminded me that tonight will be The Night of January 16th!

Doctorate of Death

Peril on the Home Front

The Democrat Offensive

Waiting For the Democrat Napoleon

New Book on Ayn Rand

Novelist Erika Holzer has a new book: Ayn Rand: My Fiction-Writing Teacher. I don't know much about her, although she seems entirely too friendly with The Objectivist Center. Yet she doesn't seem to be one of the Ayn Rand bashers, based upon this interview with Front Page Magazine.

So has anyone read the book? Is it worth reading? And what about her fiction?

Political Corruption and Knowledge

Stephen Schwartz on Moderate Moslems

Good News

The Positive Feedback of Capitalism

At RealClear Politics is a review by Robert Samuelson of the book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Benjamin Friedman.

Friedman, a Harvard economist, has written a hugely provocative book ... arguing that rapid growth is morally uplifting. "Economic growth -- meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens -- more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy," he writes. Further, the opposite is true. Poor growth feeds prejudice, class conflict and anti-democratic tendencies.

This sounds good, but it quickly becomes clear that the author of the book accepts altruism, a type of morality incompatible with economic growth (i.e., capitalism -- I set aside the question of whether Friedman explicitly discusses "capitalism".). Note how government intrusion into the economy in the form of child labor laws sneaks into a list of actual improvements.

Look at history, he says. In the United States, exploding economic growth after World War II coincided with a broad expansion of rights for women, blacks and the poor. During the prosperous Progressive Era, from roughly 1895 to 1919, the "idea of mass high school education first took hold." In 1912, the federal government created a Children's Bureau to discourage child labor. In the same year, Congress passed the 17th Amendment switching the election of senators from state legislatures to popular vote. In 1919, it passed the 19th Amendment giving women the vote. [bold added]

And if the next paragraph is an accurate characterization of Friedman's views, it goes a long way in explaining why Samuelson finds so many holes in the book's central argument.

People, Friedman argues, instinctively compare themselves to "two separate benchmarks: their own (or their family's) past experience, and how they see people around them living.'" When living standards rise rapidly, more people feel optimistic, unthreatened and tolerant. Economic growth isn't mainly about greed. [bold added]

I'm chalking the term "instinctively", which would altogether preclude morality, to sloppiness. But for an economist to make the point that people hope to live more comfortable lives out of one side of his mouth, but say that prosperity is not all about "greed" out of the other, he has to be someone who misunderstands or morally condemns greed.

Take tolerance for example. It is common, when there are economic disparities between two racial or ethnic groups, for members of the less-prosperous group to regard the more prosperous group as having prevented them from achieving prosperity. Conversely, the more prosperous group fears that the ambition of the less-prosperous will endanger its material well-being. When there is greater prosperity in general, both sources of tension lessen.

In fact, with more opportunity for all, it becomes clearer that one's effort is what matters, not what ethnic group one belongs to. In other words, for the poor to advance, it is not necessary that the more prosperous become "less greedy" and the success of the previously downtrodden is more easily understood as nonthreatening and, in fact, beneficial to those who were already prosperous. Not only is economic growth caused by greed, it makes the central role of greed clearer as individuals grow to appreciate the fact that life is not a zero-sum game, and that one man's success does not entail another's loss. But to a committed altruist, this point is lost entirely.

And if tolerance is an unexplained byproduct of this mysterious, greedless system of capitalism "economic growth", then so will child labor laws be regarded as phenomenon of the same order and moral import. Might capitalism have raised living standards to the point that adults could support their families? Were such laws really necessary, then? But this author (at least from what this review implies) fails to give credit where credit is due -- to capitalism -- and instead appropriates it for the woozy idea that prosperity causes people in general to feel more altruistic, so such laws get passed.

But altruism as such is only the half of the limitations in this analysis. The other half is the failure to appreciate the role of ideas in history, and this explains why Friedman's thesis falls apart later on. America and Europe did indeed make tremendous advances under capitalism while Germany, in an era of low prosperity, became a Nazi dictatorship.

One problem is that Friedman's meticulous scholarship unearths much contrary evidence. In the United States, the Great Depression didn't diminish democracy; instead it "fostered a broader commitment to opportunity and mobility for all citizens.'" Britain passed momentous reforms (unemployment insurance, old-age pensions) from 1908 to 1911, a period of weak growth. Among poorer countries, many (Chile, South Korea, China) achieved rapid growth under authoritarian regimes, though Chile and South Korea are now democratic.

Yes. The Great Depression was worldwide and different countries reacted to it differently. Why?

For the second time in less than a month, I find myself quoting the same passage from Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallels.

"It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole ... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual....

"This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture.... The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call-to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness-idealism. By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men."

These statements were made in our century by the leader of a major Western nation. His countrymen regarded his view point as uncontroversial. His political program implemented it faithfully.

The statements were made by Adolf Hitler. He was explaining the moral philosophy of Nazism.

Now, ask yourself how many Americans really believe that "national unity" is more important than his freedom. Isn't our nation all about protecting that freedom? And might this little difference between the national characters of Germany and America have had something to do with how each reacted to the Great Depression? If one of these countries sounds like it is not "all about greed", it's Germany.

And if the course of a nation is shaped not just by economics, but by the ideas held by its people, might there be many ways for these factors to interact with one another? The acceptance by its people of the notion that the state should run insurance and pension programs is why Britain passed "momentous reforms" during "a period of weak growth". That's no great mystery, but how did South Korea move from an authoritarian regime to a freer form of government? That's an interesting question which requires a proper understanding of the moral basis for capitalism.

I don't plan to address that question, but I will sketch out how I might answer a question provoked by this book review: Does the prosperity achieved by capitalism increase a nation's overall level of morality? It certainly cannot make an individual more moral since we all have free will, but, as I pointed out in a comment on a post awhile back (and alluded to in my example on tolerance above), having many examples of people being rewarded for their efforts doubtless would make it easier for anyone growing up in such an environment to reach an implicit grasp of the idea that rational self-interest pays.

[Could] a community with similar values to mine could make it easier for me to raise my children properly someday[?] Certainly, I think that would be the case. Indeed, your point reminds me of a [question I got]... awhile back on whether I thought freedom might be infectious. Those issues are both related.

I advocate a code of morality called rational egoism, premised on the idea that man's life is an end in itself, and that "the good" is that which furthers man's life and "the evil" is that which injures it. A child growing up in a capitalist, rational society would have many more examples of people acting morally and succeeding in life to learn from in such a society. In a society like ours, he will have many fewer examples to follow and learn from. ...

So to answer your question: It would certainly be easier to raise one's kids in a better environment. (And even in our current culture, for all its faults, there are better and worse environments than I had. It's not like I grew up in the projects, for example.)a

In the sense that capitalism provides a child with a huge set of complex examples of (moral) cause and (practical) effect, he will have an easier time developing a morality of rational self-interest, or at least of overcoming the handicap of having been taught a flawed moral code.

This is the kind of understanding missing in the book being reviewed and in the review itself. I suspect that the book will provide a great deal of interesting empirical data about how prosperous societies develop, but that it is mis-integrated and thus fails by a long shot to live up to its promise. This is why a book review that starts out with a bang ("[R]apid growth is morally uplifting[.]") ends with a whimper ("The immediate dilemma involves the welfare state.). The welfare state poses no dilemma. It must be destroyed.

-- CAV

OPEN THREAD POST: EGO PODCAST

I have been talking with Prodos and he is preparing for the start of a podcasting network. I will participate as a host, an assistant to the producer, and a mentor for future podcasters. I am planning to have the following types of guests:

• Fellow bloggers and Objectivists.
• Entrepreneurs and businessmen.
• Inventors, artists, and authors.

If you want to be interviewed, or if you have a suggestion of a guest or topic, please feel free to comment on this post, or send me an email. [Editor's comment: I welcome you to "The Age of Egocasting"! ;) Via collision detection, Ed Driscoll, InstaPundit.]

For more on podcasting, read Glenn Reynolds's post. On a lighter note, check out the French Maids who are giving a lecture on how to create a video podcast. [Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog.]

US Should Have Welcomed Cuban Escapees

Dear Editor:

Sending back to Cuba the 15 Cuban escapees who landed last week on an abandoned bridge in the Florida Keys was like sending escaping Jews
back to Nazi Germany or escaping slaves back to the Southern plantations. Cuba is a brutal dictatorship based on the Marxist principle that individuals have no rights, that their lives are the state's to dispose of. As these refugees demonstrated, Cubans don't even have the right to leave the country.

The U.S. government should have given asylum to these Cuban refugees who risked their lives to live in freedom. The decision to send them back to the prison-island may be their death sentence. And our government should put an end to the unconscionable "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy that sends freedom-seeking refugees back to a totalitarian dictatorship.

David Holcberg
Ayn Rand Institute
Irvine, CA

The Poor Poor

A fairly good article in the Christian Science Monitor reports on the prevalence of household appliances in American homes. It reports that over 98% of all households today have a television, refrigerator, and stove. Almost 60% of households have computers, compared with less than 20% ten years ago. The article notes that...

...nearly 13 percent of Americans have incomes that place them below the official poverty line. But what does that mean in terms of their daily lives? The fact that 95 percent of them may have a refrigerator tells only part of the story.

The Census report also compares, from 1992 through 1998, people's perceptions of whether basic needs were being met. More than 92 percent of Americans below the poverty line said they had enough food, as of 1998. Some 86 percent said they had no unmet need for a doctor, 89 percent had no roof leaks, and 87 percent said they had no unpaid rent or mortgage... Two-thirds of those in poverty had air conditioners in 1998, up from 50 percent in 1992.

Isn't capitalism great?!? Consider that poverty used to mean not earning enough to buy one's daily bread... and now it means "not enough money to buy the very latest gizmos." (And that's despite all the poverty perpetuated by the welfare state!) The article continues:

"In terms of the items people have ... it amazes me the number of people who are at or near the poverty line that have color TVs, cable, washer, dryer, microwave," says Michael Cosgrove, an economist at the University of Dallas in Irving, Texas. That's not to ignore the hardships of poverty, he adds, "but the conveniences they have are in fact pretty good."

With all the material abundance of poverty in modern America, I have trouble conjuring any feelings concern for those supposed "hardships of poverty." Yet some still manage to do so:

Personal computers have grown increasingly ubiquitous. Where fewer than 20 percent of homes had them in 1992, nearly 60 percent did in 2002 (more than own dishwashers). That doesn't mean all have equal access to PC-enabled economic empowerment. "What good is a computer without Internet access?" asks Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. In this networked age, he's only exaggerating a bit. While high-speed Internet access is spreading, the potential rise of free wireless networks in cities could help many low-income Americans, he says.

So over the next few years, any reasonably well-off American will be expected to feel guilty about the great new gap between "the haves" and "the have-nots" -- where "the haves" are magically blessed with high speed wireless, while "the have-nots" must suffer with the all the slow pains of dial-up. Please, let me get out my world's smallest violin: I'll play a tune or two.

(Also, Will Wilkinson has some good comments on the discussion of the impact of increased wealth on happiness from the article.)

Charlotte Street Naming Fight: Martin Luther King Or Stonewall

Charlotte's conservatives are on the wrong-side of Stonewall Street versus Martin Luther King Boulevard. Let's take away, for the sake of this discussion, that all roads should be privately owned and thus named by the owners. Since government does name the roads, we need to look at which name is most appropriate.

Also, I am not going to address the cost changes to businesses and individuals which will be significant.

Finally, I am also going to not address in detail the whole idea of naming airports, streets, and monuments for political leaders. I don't like the practice.

This focus is upon Martin Luther King versus Stonewall Jackson.

Of Martin Luther King, Dr. Edwin Locke says:

What should we remember on Martin Luther King Day? In his "I Have a Dream" speech Dr. King said: "I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

This statement means that in judging other men, skin color should be ignored--that it should not be a factor in evaluating their competence or moral stature. It follows that skin color should not be a factor in taking actions toward other people, e.g., hiring and admitting to universities.

That is a good thing. Martin Luther King fought against racism.

The Stonewall side is arguing for keeping the memory of Stonewall Jackson:

Critics of the plan said the pulse of the city originally got its name from the confederate war hero Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. They believe the city should respect this historic figure.

"This is happening all over the United States. It's no accident," said Steve Poteat, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and an opponent of the change. [WCNC].

Stonewall Jackson was a leader of the Confederacy which sought to maintain the slavery of blacks. So the argument comes down to: Who is more worthy of recognition? A man who fought to end racism? Or a man who fought to continue slavery?

If I supported the practice of naming streets after political leaders, I'd support the guy who fought to end racism.

As an addendum, I want to emphasize what Dr. Locke writes about what has happened since Dr. King:

What has happened in the years following King's murder is the opposite of the "I Have a Dream" quote above. Color blindness now has been replaced with color preference in the form of affirmative action. No amount of rationalizing can disguise the fact that affirmative action involves implicit or explicit racial quotas, i.e., racism.

I agree.

Dr. Robert Mayhew in Denver

On Friday January 20th, Dr. Robert Mayhew will be speaking at the University of Colorado at Boulder on "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Greek Justice: Homer to the Sermon on the Mount." (Yes, that is his fantastic talk from 2005 OCON that will not be offered for sale!)

Boulder Campus Talk by Dr. Mayhew

Date: January 20th, 2005

Time: 7:30 pm

Location: Math 100, University of Colorado at Boulder

Dr. Mayhew on "The Rise and Fall of Ancient Greek Justice: Homer to the Sermon on the Mount":

The traditional ancient Greek conception of justice is best captured by the idea of helping friends and harming enemies. This conception of justice is improved by later thinkers (like Aeschylus), reaches its climax in Aristotle's moral philosophy--and is utterly rejected by Jesus, who told the pagan world: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you." This lecture surveys this history, covering (in addition to the above mentioned figures): the Sophists, Aristophanes, Euripides and Plato. Throughout, Dr. Mayhew will underscore the contemporary relevance of the clash between Greek justice and the Christian alternative.

Then, on Saturday January 21st, Dr. Mayhew will be speaking to FROST on "Humor in The Fountainhead" in Arvada, Colorado. (That's a northern suburb of Denver.)

Front Range Objectivism Supper Talk with Dr. Mayhew

Date: January 21, 2006

Time: 6:00 pm (Social Hour), 7:00 pm (Buffet Dinner), 8:00 pm (Lecture and Q&A)

Location: West Woods Golf Club, 6655 Quaker Street in Arvada, Colorado

RSVP: Please RSVP by January 18th to Lin Zinser at lin@zinser.com or 303.431.2525. Mail check to FROST to 8700 Dover Court, Arvada, CO 80005.

Cost: $50 for dinner and lecture ($30 for students)

Dr. Mayhew on "Humor in The Fountainhead":

Ayn Rand said that humor did not play a major role in her novels nor in the lives of her heroes. This is certainly true of The Fountainhead, an earnest work of reverence for man the hero. There are, however, humorous touches in most of Ayn Rand's fiction--including The Fountainhead, her most satirical novel. In this lecture, Dr. Mayhew will examine the nature and role of humor in The Fountainhead, and why humor is more prevalent in this novel than in Atlas Shrugged. (Some of this material has appeared elsewhere, but most of it is presented here for the first time.)

For those unfamiliar with all the fabulous works of Robert Mayhew:

Dr. Mayhew is Professor of Philosophy at Seton Hall University. He is the author of Aristotle's Criticism of Plato's Republic, The Female in Aristotle's Biology, and Ayn Rand and Song of Russia and the editor of Ayn Rand's Marginalia, The Art of Nonfiction, Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living, Ayn Rand Answers, and Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem. Dr. Mayhew received his Ph.D in philosophy from Georgetown University in 1991.

Two talks by Robert Mayhew in my own back yard: It's like a second Christmas!

The Soviet World of American Communism

I'm presently reading The Soviet World of American Communism by Harvey Klehr, Kyrill Anderson, and John Earl Haynes. The book exposes the sordid details of the intimate, subservient relationship between the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), particularly focusing on the CPUSA's height around the 1930s. It does so largely by analyzing (in proper historical context) documents stored in the Russian archives which were briefly made available to scholars after the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of those documents consist of communications between the USSR-controlled Comintern and the CPUSA.

The authors state their thesis early in the introduction:

As we shall see, these documents demonstrate that at every possible period of the CPUSA's history, the American Communists looked to their Soviet counterparts for advice on how to conduct their own party business. But there was more to it than that: these documents show that the CPUSA was never an independent political organization. There were moments when it was less strictly controlled by Moscow than at others, but there was never a time when the CPUSA made its decisions autonomously, without being obliged to answer to or--more precisely--without wishing to answer to Soviet authority (4).

The book is tightly integrated around this thesis: every section illuminates some further aspect of it. The evidence for this thesis is so clear and overwhelming that a mere article could prove it easily, so the purpose of the book must be understood as revealing the particular kinds of control that Moscow exerted over the CPUSA.

Perhaps the most interesting case is that of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact. The authors write:

There are few more telling illustrations of the loyalty of American Communists to Stalin than their reaction to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. There was never any question that the CPUSA would support the pact; the only problem seemed to be an initial confusion over how to show that support, for the Comintern had not given the rest of the Communist world any advance warning, nor had it laid the groundwork for the Soviet Union's abrupt reversal of policy (71).

At the time of the pact, American Communists had allied themselves with various New Deal leftists under the banner of anti-fascism -- with Moscow's consent, of course. When Moscow suddenly allied itself with Nazi Germany, American Communists didn't really know what to say. So they made all sorts of untoward comments -- like that "German fascism has suffered a serious blow" and that the pact was "a wonderful contribution to peace" (73).

Moscow wasn't pleased with that spin, so it issued proper ideological marching orders to CPUSA leader Earl Browder. In a fairly lengthy letter, Browder was told that he was "a captive of tenets that were correct before the European war but are now incorrect" since "the war is bringing about such radical changes in the entire international situation... that compel Communists of all countries to make a radical shift in the tactics of Comparties" (81). As might be expected, the particular reasons offered for that "radical shift" are no more than vague, hollow rationalizations. Yet the inadequacy of the explanation was not so important to the American Communists: they simply wished to tow whatever line Moscow demanded of them.

And tow they did. Although ordinary membership declined somewhat after the pact, almost 90 percent stayed. The dues-paying membership was even more loyal. As the authors conclude, "These figures suggest that antifascism, sometimes said to have been a defining characteristic of rank-and-file Communists, was less important to them than loyalty to the Soviet Union" (73). As for all those anti-fascist alliances the Communists had made with New Deal leftists, they "collapsed when the Communists insisted that the groups support the pact" (71-2).

In short, American Communists weren't anti-fascist at all. They were opportunistic enemies or allies of fascism -- as Moscow dictated. The relevant principle is the one I discussed in this post on Christian libertarianism:

...Peter Schwartz has a nice discussion of why the devout Christian who refrains from killing because of God's command "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is not actually opposed to murder in his lecture on "Contextual Knowledge." Such a person is actually in favor of obeying God's will; that's the principle that governs his actions. So if God told him in a revelation to murder, he would do so. In refraining from killing other people, he is not acting upon any opposition to the moral evil of murder, but only upon his commitment to conform to God's commandments. (By way of contrast, a more worldly Christian's opposition to murder would be based upon common sense reasoning about the evil of destroying an innocent human life. So even if he believed that God commanded him to murder, he could not do so.) Obviously, the same applies to "Thou Shalt Not Steal" -- and any other vaguely libertarian Biblical commandments.

In the case of the American Communists, they were in favor of obeying Moscow -- and nothing else. The exact same analysis about motivating principles applies to the supposed campaigns for free speech by American Communists. As Tom Palmer recently wrote under the perfect title of "An Effective Campaigner for the Legal Rights of People Who Agreed With Him to Speak and Organize":

Frank Wilkinson has died. He was, according to the obituary writer at the New York Times, a campaigner for "free speech" and for "antipoverty" efforts. Um, right. It's not until the eighth paragraph of the obit that we learn that he was for more than three decades a member of the Communist Party, which did a great deal to suppress free speech and to promote poverty, and that he worked with a variety of Communist Party front groups, all of which were -- all of the time -- entirely opportunistic and subservient to the interests of the USSR.

My colleague David Boaz collects these things. Sometimes he brings them to my attention. It's a regular feature that obits laud life-long Communists as "free speech" champions (although invariably the cases in which they were involved were entirely opportunistic, and involved defending only those who toed their line), or as "civil rights" champions, or as "peace campaigners." I wonder (well, not for very long) whether the New York Times would describe the Nazi marchers in Skokie as "free speech" champions, or the opponents of going to war with Hitler as "peace campaigners."

Sure, the American Communists were in favor of pro-Communist speech. They were also in favor of shipping people off to the Gulag for speaking out against Communism, often with a nice bout of degradation, torture, and false confession beforehand. That means that they were advocates of Communist speech, not free speech. The NY Times should be a bit more savvy about such distinctions, particularly given their own sordid history with that dishonest apologist for Soviet mass murder, Walter Duranty. Apparently, that's too much to ask, despite decades of overwhelming evidence of the unspeakable evils of Communism.

The Communist version of "free speech" reminds me of an old joke:

An American tourist to the USSR says to his State Guide: "In my country, I have the right to stand in front of the White House and shout 'Down with Ronald Reagan!' Can you do that here?" She replies, "Why yes, I can stand before the Kremlin and shout 'Down with Ronald Reagan!' too."

See, the Soviet Union really did support free speech!

At least Nero didn't set Rome ablaze.

As long as the cause of death is heat stroke, I guess you could say that I'm blogging in the "dead of the winter" here in Texas....

The week before last, while I was out of state, I noticed news stories about wildfires in Texas. Living in the normally humid, southeastern corner of the state, I wasn't too terribly concerned for my own house, but I did follow the stories a little bit. Even so, I was surprised on my return by what I saw on freeway signs on the way home from the airport. Usually, the signs report travel times or road conditions, but then and now they flash something like "STATEWIDE FIRE DANGER", followed by "BURN BANS IN EFFECT".

I doubted that there was much danger in the Houston area until yesterday, when I read this story in the Houston Chronicle. Brazoria County lies just south of Houston.

An outdoor burning ban in Brazoria County got off to a blazing start when a grass fire consumed about 120 acres and a marsh fire burned 500 to 700 acres.

Grass in most of Texas is so dry, said Mahlon Hammetter, of the Texas Forest Service, "that virtually any source of a spark can start a wildfire."

The hot exhaust of a small tractor is being blamed for the fire near the Suncreek Ranch subdivision in Rosharon on Thursday.

That fire started at noon, about 30 minutes after Brazoria County Judge John Willy ordered that there be no outside burning in unincorporated parts of the county.

In another case, what had been planned as a contained marsh fire at the San Bernard National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Brazoria County became an uncontrolled fire Thursday when it jumped a fire control line. [bold added]

Hmmmm. Reminds me a bit of the "fallacy of self-exclusion" here, as in, "Don't play with matches -- unless you're with the government."

If there is a burn ban in effect, why is anyone deliberately starting marsh fires? This reminds me of the huge fires that burned out of control near Los Alamos a few years back. Although a similar planned fire (called a "controlled burn") was believed directly responsible at the time, it turned out that a fire fighting tactic called a "backfire" was the immediate cause.

Of course, a backfire wouldn't have been necessary had a controlled burn not been initiated under dry, windy conditions in the first place,as the link above states.

The investigators' findings do not change the fact that the National Park Service, by igniting the fire, set in motion the chain of events that led to the disaster. At a press conference in Santa Fe last week, Babbitt said that the Park Service was taking full responsibility for the blaze.

Thank heavens the government is looking out for all of us patsies out here who don't know when not to burn things outside. Sheesh!

-- CAV

Updates

1-9-06: Corrected typos.

Thomas Paine and Common Sense

Copyright Absurdity

I like Coldplay, so I'd be inclined to buy their new album X&Y -- but not under these conditions. Boing Boing has the scoop, including an image listing all the insane DRM (digital rights management) rules. Here's the gist:

Coldplay's new CD comes with an insert that discloses all the rules enforced by the DRM they included on the disc. Of course, these rules are only visible after you've paid for the CD and brought it home, and as the disc's rules say, "Except for manufacturing problems, we do not accept product exchange, return or refund," so if you don't like the rules, that's tough.

What are the other rules? Here are some gems: "This CD can't be burnt onto a CD or hard disc, nor can it be converted to an MP3" and "This CD may not play in DVD players, car stereos, portable players, game players, all PCs and Macintosh PCs." Best of all, the insert explains that this is all "in order for you to enjoy a high quality music experience." Now, that's quality.

I wonder how Coldplay feels about their fans getting all these rules set down for them by the music label? I wonder if most fans who read these rules will be wise enough to blame corporate, or whether they'll just decide to dig up a band whose label treats them like customers, not crooks? It's amazing how the labels always seem to come up with new ways of screwing artists: if they're not cheating them out of royalties, they're systematically alienating their fan-base.

I've ripped my entire CD collection to MP3, so it'll be rather chilly day in hell before I start buying CDs that I can only use in "hard copy." As far as I'm concerned, refusing to accept returns for this seemingly-normal-but-actually-almost-useless CD is a form of fraud worthy of a big fat lawsuit.

I have no pirated music in my music collection, nor would I illegally download music. I buy at least one CD a month through yourmusic.com. I routinely buy individual songs from iTunes. So why are so many record labels determined to presume that I am a copyright criminal? Why are they so eager to presume that of everyone?

These kind of dishonest antics, not to mention dangerous debacles like Sony's hidden rootkit, seem designed to alienate honest customers while doing little to prevent piracy. That's not a good long-term strategy.

Two Looks at Recovering New Orleans

Christian Capitalism

Orson Olson recently pointed me to this NY Times review of Rodney Stark's book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. The basic thesis of the book is clear, even if not new:

"The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians," [Stark] argues in this provocative, exasperating and occasionally baffling exercise in revisionism. Capitalism, and the scientific revolution that powered it, did not emerge in spite of religion but because of it.

The book wholly dismisses the Greeks and Romans:

Mr. Stark's pugnacity often gets the better of him. He is contemptuously dismissive of Greece and Rome, which he describes as technologically incompetent, morally bankrupt (all those slaves) and too stupid to develop polyphony in music. Also, the Roman roads were lousy. To use one of Mr. Stark's favorite formulations, so much for Virgil, Horace and Euripides. When Greece and Rome are described as "great civilizations" in sneering quotation marks, you know that an argument has turned into a rant.

But Stark's view of the Dark Ages clearly takes the cake:

The most persuasive chapters in "The Victory of Reason" describe the early stirrings of free-market enterprise and scientific experimentation on the monastic estates that spread throughout Western Europe after the ninth century. It was during the so-called Dark Ages that Christian monks, throwing off "the stultifying grip of Roman repression and mistaken Greek idealism," developed innovations like the water wheel, horseshoes, fish farming, the three-field system of agriculture, eyeglasses and clocks. "All of these remarkable developments can be traced to the unique Christian conviction that progress was a God-given obligation, entailed in the gift of reason," writes Mr. Stark, who has described himself in interviews, surprisingly, as not religious in any conventional sense.

Given the disturbing rise of religion in this country, this book seems worth reading, if only by the principle of "know thy enemy." If the Christians are able to take credit for all wonders of Western civilization, those wonders will not last long.

Review of Loving Life

Ari Armstrong recently posted a nice review of Craig Biddle's Loving Life. His concluding paragraph really captures the value of the book:

Biddle's book is a concise yet rich introduction to Objectivist ethics. Page for page, it's the most helpful book devoted to the subject that I've read. Biddle regularly formulates principles I thought I already knew in a new and sometimes startlingly clarifying way. Biddle discusses some very sophisticated ideas, yet never do they seem dry or merely "academic," for they are means, as Biddle writes, of loving life.

All true!

Also, Ari's article "The Season for Reason" contains an excellent lengthy discussion of the false alternative between religion and subjectivism. (I'm delighted to see Ari making good use of the insights from Leonard Peikoff's The DIM Hypothesis, since it was my pleasure to lend the course to him! I hope he continues to find the ideas illuminating in his political activism. Certainly, the course added a rich new layer to my philosophical understanding of the world -- and I'm sure that I have much more to mine from it. I'm particularly glad that both Paul and I have heard it, since we can now condense a vast array of judgments about some idea -- often one commonly found in TOC circles -- into the mere statement of "Oh, that's just so D1.")

Ari's Colorado Freedom Report is well worth reading, more so all the time. (Many of the articles are not specific to Colorado politics.) If you'd like to subscribe to the e-mail alert (with quick summaries of and links to new articles), just send Ari an e-mail with a request to join. If you like what you read, please consider a donation.

We Are Running Out Of Land

The Inevitable Downfall of the Con Man

While I was in Maryland a few weeks ago, my father and I discussed the emerging Jack Abramoff scandal. (Abramoff is the Washington lobbyist who bought off Doug Bandow -- and others.) A few days ago, my father sent me this lengthy article from the Washington Post on "The Fast Rise and Steep Fall of Jack Abramoff."

Even if you're not interested in the details of the scandal, the article is well worth reading as a case study of the ways in which the psychology of the can man impels him to concoct ever-more-loony schemes until the whole charade is finally exposed. Manipulators like Abramoff cannot ever run off to Tahiti to enjoy their ill-gotten gains in quiet comfort. Even given sufficient funds, they could not be content with such a life. Although they are often outwardly in pursuit of money, such is merely the material form of their basic desire for power and influence over other people. Yet that desire cannot ever be satisfied, since it conflicts with basic facts of reality.

However the con man derides his victims, he knows that his deceptions do not permit him to control others. They might be deceived at present, but they are still autonomous, rational beings capable of discovering the facts and exposing his schemes. The manipulator must evade those facts in order to maintain his all-important self-image as a puppetmaster. He must "prove" his control over others by more frauds, even though every one increases his risk of exposure. He cannot abandon that quest, not even by lounging on the beach in Tahiti, without eroding the whole rotten foundation of his self-esteem.

Certainly, Abramoff sometimes had millions of dollars at his disposal, yet he never retired, not even when his life started to spiral downhill. (Since he wasn't reality-oriented, his money disappeared very, very quickly in that downhill spiral.) Ultimately, he was caught in a sure-to-fail fraud in which he merely pretended to pay some millions of dollars owed for a property. (Unsurprisingly, someone noticed.) So that scheme was exposed, that revealed another, then another, and so on. Given that his pursuit of money was merely a reflection of a much deeper desire for power over others, Abramoff could not have done anything with his ill-gotten gains except pursue more of the same.

Jack Abramoff is an unusual case, but only in the scale of his operations. He's a greatly magnified version of a petty swindler -- and so he illustrates the necessary disasters of a fraudulent life ever so clearly.