Integrating Work and Personal Life

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

When magician David Copperfield was recently mugged at gunpoint, he successfully used his skills to conceal his valuables from the thief:

When Copperfield's turn came, [accused mugger Dwayne] Riley was bamboozled. Copperfield told Page Two he pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them. "Call it reverse pickpocketing," Copperfield said. Riley jumped behind the wheel, and the car took off.

Riley and three other accomplices were quickly apprehended and are now in police custody. (Via Fark.)

Integrating Work and Personal Life

When magician David Copperfield was recently mugged at gunpoint, he successfully used his skills to conceal his valuables from the thief:

When Copperfield's turn came, [accused mugger Dwayne] Riley was bamboozled. Copperfield told Page Two he pulled out all of his pockets for Riley to see he had nothing, even though he had a cellphone, passport and wallet stuffed in them. "Call it reverse pickpocketing," Copperfield said. Riley jumped behind the wheel, and the car took off.

Riley and three other accomplices were quickly apprehended and are now in police custody. (Via Fark.)

DC Objectivist Salon Launches Website

By Don from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

David Rehm would like to announce that the DC Objectivist Salon now has a website: http://www.dcobjectivistsalon.com. According to the site:

The DC Objectivist Salon is a group of individuals in the Washington, DC metro area dedicated to the serious study and practical application of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. (Please note that our primary focus is intellectual, not political; we simply happen to live in the vicinity of Washington, DC.)

Activities of the DCOS include: holding a monthly discussion group (usually followed by a social dinner), supporting local campus clubs to promote awareness and discussion of Objectivism in the universities, maintaining a calendar of relevant DC-area (and significant, outside) events, and eventually hosting a wider range of social activities. For more information or to participate, send a message briefly introducing yourself and your interest in Objectivism to: contact@dcobjectivistsalon.com.

The DCOS is a proud supporter of (although neither sanctioned nor supported by) the Ayn Rand Institute.

I helped David start DCOS shortly before I left for California, and one of my (few) regrets is that I'm no longer able to participate in the club. Its members are friendly, active-minded, and committed to studying Objectivism. I urge everyone in the DC area to join them, although it should go without saying that my endorsement is personal and does not necessarily represent the views of ARI.

(I should also note that David and I were inspired to start the club after seeing the success of Front Range Objectivism in Colorado--so many thanks to them!)

DC Objectivist Salon Launches Website

David Rehm would like to announce that the DC Objectivist Salon now has a website: http://www.dcobjectivistsalon.com. According to the site:

The DC Objectivist Salon is a group of individuals in the Washington, DC metro area dedicated to the serious study and practical application of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. (Please note that our primary focus is intellectual, not political; we simply happen to live in the vicinity of Washington, DC.)

Activities of the DCOS include: holding a monthly discussion group (usually followed by a social dinner), supporting local campus clubs to promote awareness and discussion of Objectivism in the universities, maintaining a calendar of relevant DC-area (and significant, outside) events, and eventually hosting a wider range of social activities. For more information or to participate, send a message briefly introducing yourself and your interest in Objectivism to: contact@dcobjectivistsalon.com.

The DCOS is a proud supporter of (although neither sanctioned nor supported by) the Ayn Rand Institute.

I helped David start DCOS shortly before I left for California, and one of my (few) regrets is that I'm no longer able to participate in the club. Its members are friendly, active-minded, and committed to studying Objectivism. I urge everyone in the DC area to join them, although it should go without saying that my endorsement is personal and does not necessarily represent the views of ARI.

(I should also note that David and I were inspired to start the club after seeing the success of Front Range Objectivism in Colorado--so many thanks to them!)

Jurists for Reform in Egypt

By from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In Egypt, there is an encouraging movement among members of the judiciary, which has some popular support, seeking greater independence from the government.

The judiciary not being independent is, of course, bad in itself. However, if you needed any further proof that the government of Egypt does not regard itself as being in the business of protecting the rights of its citizens, you got it today. According to The New York Times:

Thousands of riot police officers sealed off access to the High Court on Thursday, beating and arresting protesters who had turned out to support two judges facing a disciplinary panel because they had accused the government of election fraud.

Police beat and arrested protesters who turned out to support two judges brought before a disciplinary panel in Cairo.

The huge show of force, appearing larger even than what was deployed in the Sinai after four bombings there this week, seemed to signal that President Hosni Mubarak's government had reached a breaking point over shows of dissent.

The focus was a relatively small demonstration over the treatment of the two judges and in support of more than 80 others who had been staging a sit-in for more than a week at the stately old Judges Club to demand an independent judiciary. [link dropped, bold added]

Read the rest. 7,000 of Egypt's 9,000 judges are pressing for reforms, including the right to monitor elections.

-- CAV

Jurists for Reform in Egypt

In Egypt, there is an encouraging movement among members of the judiciary, which has some popular support, seeking greater independence from the government.

The judiciary not being independent is, of course, bad in itself. However, if you needed any further proof that the government of Egypt does not regard itself as being in the business of protecting the rights of its citizens, you got it today. According to The New York Times:

Thousands of riot police officers sealed off access to the High Court on Thursday, beating and arresting protesters who had turned out to support two judges facing a disciplinary panel because they had accused the government of election fraud.

Police beat and arrested protesters who turned out to support two judges brought before a disciplinary panel in Cairo.

The huge show of force, appearing larger even than what was deployed in the Sinai after four bombings there this week, seemed to signal that President Hosni Mubarak's government had reached a breaking point over shows of dissent.

The focus was a relatively small demonstration over the treatment of the two judges and in support of more than 80 others who had been staging a sit-in for more than a week at the stately old Judges Club to demand an independent judiciary. [link dropped, bold added]

Read the rest. 7,000 of Egypt's 9,000 judges are pressing for reforms, including the right to monitor elections.

-- CAV

USC Free Speech Event Video Available

By Don from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

For those of you who could not attend the USC Free Speech event featuring Yaron Brook and Daniel Pipes, the video is now available for free on the Ayn Rand Institute registered user webpage. (Note: It will only be available online for a limited time.)

There is no such thing as price gouging by private oil companies

By Alex Epstein:

There is no such thing as price gouging by private oil companies.

The term "price gouging" implies that oil companies and gas stations have an ability to forcibly inflict harm on us--but they do not. Any price we pay for a gallon of gasoline, we pay voluntarily, based on its value to us. If we think gasoline is too expensive, 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.

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.

Oil company "greed" is not "hurting the nation"--it is making oil and gasoline available to all of us who are willing to pay market prices. We should be grateful for that.

Alex Epstein
Ayn Rand Institute

[Ed. Note: To quote Brian Summers: "Too bad homeowners don't post their property taxes, and the prices of their homes, the same way that gasoline retailers post their prices."]

Pitt and Jolie Atlas Shrugged movie shocker

Can Mag:

Not only has Lionsgate Films picked up the reigns on the repeatedly-delayed Atlas Shrugged but they have also found a couple possibilities to star.

According to Variety, Lionsgate has picked up worldwide distribution rights to Atlas Shrugged. The project, based on the novel by Ayn Rand, has been circulating Hollywood for some time now after multiple false starts.

Not only has Lionsgate acquired the project but they also have a couple names in mind to star. Both fans of Ayn Rand's novel, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are the top hopefuls to star in the film.

The book, published in 1957, revolves around the economic collapse of the U.S. sometime in the future and espouses her individualistic philosophy of objectivism. The violent, apocalyptic ending has always posed a challenge but could prove especially so in the post-9/11 climate.

Atlas Shrugged runs north of 1,100 pages, a length that offers a considerable challenge when adapting the story to film. Because of this length, there are many who have considered turning Atlas Shrugged into a miniseries or a two-part movie.

Lionsgate Films, who like to keep their films under a $25M budget, are looking to spend north of $30M for Atlas Shrugged.

Apple’s 50 acres

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

Advocates of eminent domain often argue that it is necessary to prevent holdouts from bidding up prices as part of a large land purchase. But real estate companies have developed many strategies to deal with this problem long before governments started confiscating land on their behalf. Even if you are a brand-name company trying to build a 50 acres campus in the hottest real estate market in the country.

Apple's 50 acres

Advocates of eminent domain often argue that it is necessary to prevent holdouts from bidding up prices as part of a large land purchase. But real estate companies have developed many strategies to deal with this problem long before governments started confiscating land on their behalf. Even if you are a brand-name company trying to build a 50 acre campus in the hottest real estate market in the country.

Nucor Of Charlotte, North Carolina

Most Charlotteans are familiar with Nucor here in Charlotte. Do you know the history? From Steven Brockerman at American Renaissance: Ken immediately reduced administrative staff from twelve to two. Then he packed up the company headquarters lock, stock & barrel into a couple of vans and moved it from Phoenix, Arizona, to Charlotte, North Carolina, near the profitable grate and joist operation

Intellectual activism in defense of free speech

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

I firmly believe that there needs to be public outcry over the appallingly week defense of free speech rights in the wake of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, especially outcry directed at the Bush administration, which has refused to defend the freedom to criticize Islam without caveats or equivocation. The question is how to engineer it-and evidence the power of Objectivism in the process.

I've mentioned in an earlier post that I want to host a free speech demonstration in Washington. I have received several messages in support and I think the times demand such an act. Yet at the same time, I have several reservations.

Demonstrations are notoriously difficult to organize. I've organized three demonstrations in DC; two "countermarches" in defense of industry and technology on Earth Day in front of the White House and a protest in defense of Elian Gonzales in front of the Department of Justice. Additionally, I participated in a small demonstration in defense of Microsoft in front of the courthouse where the firm's antitrust trial was held and the ARI anti-volunteerism protest in Philadelphia.

Each demonstration that I worked on took about a month to put together. Talking points had to be formulated, participants had to be recruited, accommodations and transportation secured, signs printed and press releases and position papers issued. All the while, the burden of fundraising hung over my head as each demonstration barely paid for themselves, let alone bring in money to be used for future endeavors.

There's also another problem with demonstrations-it is next to impossible to get Objectivists to participate in them. We averaged around 50 participants for each of the demonstrations I organized. While I deeply appreciated every soul that came to march, that's still a paltry sum. I think there's a clear reason for this: many Objectivists are utterly controversy-shy. It takes both balls and a clear head to hold a sign saying that Earth Day or volunteerism is immoral or that Microsoft should not have to suffer antitrust and be able to quickly explain to non-Objectivists why. For some reason, too many Objectivists fail to possess both these attributes in sufficient numbers to bring 500 people to a protest, instead of the usual 50. (Well, that, and the "I have a job" claim that seems to exempt both physical participation in a demonstration and monetary support).

And then there's the claim of anti-intellectualism. Protests are mostly exercises in marching and chanting (that's the charge at least), so what then is the point then in participating in them. Never mind that to be in the news, one often has to make news (which means the willingness to pound the pavement in defense of one's principles from time to time). Every demonstration that I organized had clear talking points and included pre-march briefings to bring all the participants up to speed with how to communicate our message effectively to the media and the public.

So What were the dividends? The press conferences for both Earth Day countermarches were covered by C-SPAN. I was asked by a top-ten newspaper to write an anti-Earth Day op-ed. Ed Locke's speech in defense of Elian Gonzales was heavily quoted in the conservative press, and the protests received other news coverage as well. Young Objectivists who had never met anyone who shared their views in person made friendships that apparently have endured for years.

Yet if all these achievements were valued, we simply would have raised more money. What else must one do to engage in Objectivist activism that is worthy of support-unless any such activism itself is frowned upon?

I don't know anymore. In the case of the Muhammad cartoons controversy, I can't help but think that we need to go to the mattresses in defense of our free speech rights, and that even a protest manned by 50 Objectivists is an important contribution to this fight. No one is taking the administration to task for its failures on this issue. Everyone is terrified of violence if they show the cartoons, yet no one is demanding that the government do its job to protect against that threat. And if we are not free to criticize Islam-if we are not free to illustrate Islam's irrationality and barbarism-we are not free to defend our lives and address one of the central questions of our time. How can we allow this to happen without a fight?

I say we cannot. That said, I'm not sure everyone else shares my enthusiasm. So I put it to you: is a weekend event defending free speech -a mini-conference and protest march-worth it to you? What would you be willing to do to make such an event possible? How hard will you be willing to work to stand up and defend your right to free speech?

I'd like to know. Our rights deserve defending, but there's no point in issuing a call to action that will fall upon deaf ears. So please share with me where you stand.

Intellectual activism in defense of free speech

I firmly believe that there needs to be public outcry over the appallingly week defense of free speech rights in the wake of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, especially outcry directed at the Bush administration, which has refused to defend the freedom to criticize Islam without caveats or equivocation. The question is how to engineer it-and evidence the power of Objectivism in the process.

I've mentioned in an earlier post that I want to host a free speech demonstration in Washington. I have received several messages in support and I think the times demand such an act. Yet at the same time, I have several reservations.

Demonstrations are notoriously difficult to organize. I've organized three demonstrations in DC; two "countermarches" in defense of industry and technology on Earth Day in front of the White House and a protest in defense of Elian Gonzales in front of the Department of Justice. Additionally, I participated in a small demonstration in defense of Microsoft in front of the courthouse where the firm's antitrust trial was held and the ARI anti-volunteerism protest in Philadelphia.

Each demonstration that I worked on took about a month to put together. Talking points had to be formulated, participants had to be recruited, accommodations and transportation secured, signs printed and press releases and position papers issued. All the while, the burden of fundraising hung over my head as each demonstration barely paid for themselves, let alone bring in money to be used for future endeavors.

There's also another problem with demonstrations-it is next to impossible to get Objectivists to participate in them. We averaged around 50 participants for each of the demonstrations I organized. While I deeply appreciated every soul that came to march, that's still a paltry sum. I think there's a clear reason for this: many Objectivists are utterly controversy-shy. It takes both balls and a clear head to hold a sign saying that Earth Day or volunteerism is immoral or that Microsoft should not have to suffer antitrust and be able to quickly explain to non-Objectivists why. For some reason, too many Objectivists fail to possess both these attributes in sufficient numbers to bring 500 people to a protest, instead of the usual 50. (Well, that, and the "I have a job" claim that seems to exempt both physical participation in a demonstration and monetary support).

And then there's the claim of anti-intellectualism. Protests are mostly exercises in marching and chanting (that's the charge at least), so what then is the point then in participating in them. Never mind that to be in the news, one often has to make news (which means the willingness to pound the pavement in defense of one's principles from time to time). Every demonstration that I organized had clear talking points and included pre-march briefings to bring all the participants up to speed with how to communicate our message effectively to the media and the public.

So What were the dividends? The press conferences for both Earth Day countermarches were covered by C-SPAN. I was asked by a top-ten newspaper to write an anti-Earth Day op-ed. Ed Locke's speech in defense of Elian Gonzales was heavily quoted in the conservative press, and the protests received other news coverage as well. Young Objectivists who had never met anyone who shared their views in person made friendships that apparently have endured for years.

Yet if all these achievements were valued, we simply would have raised more money. What else must one do to engage in Objectivist activism that is worthy of support-unless any such activism itself is frowned upon?

I don't know anymore. In the case of the Muhammad cartoons controversy, I can't help but think that we need to go to the mattresses in defense of our free speech rights, and that even a protest manned by 50 Objectivists is an important contribution to this fight. No one is taking the administration to task for its failures on this issue. Everyone is terrified of violence if they show the cartoons, yet no one is demanding that the government do its job to protect against that threat. And if we are not free to criticize Islam-if we are not free to illustrate Islam's irrationality and barbarism-we are not free to defend our lives and address one of the central questions of our time. How can we allow this to happen without a fight?

I say we cannot. That said, I'm not sure everyone else shares my enthusiasm. So I put it to you: is a weekend event defending free speech -a mini-conference and protest march-worth it to you? What would you be willing to do to make such an event possible? How hard will you be willing to work to stand up and defend your right to free speech?

I'd like to know. Our rights deserve defending, but there's no point in issuing a call to action that will fall upon deaf ears. So please share with me where you stand.

Yale to Hire a Blogger!

By from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Yale to Hire a Blogger!

That pesky oil addiction II

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

This report out of California is interesting.

SACRAMENTO — As the statewide average price for regular gasoline passed $3 a gallon Monday, politicians and grass-roots activists pumped up their calls for new taxes on companies that produce or refine oil in California.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the California Energy Commission to investigate possible gouging by gasoline refiners, wholesalers and retailers.

"We must not rule out the possibility of market manipulation, price gouging or unfair business practices employed by oil companies," Schwarzenegger said.

Also Monday, the chairman of the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee won a first vote on his latest proposal to slap a 2% surtax on so-called windfall profits from petroleum producing, refining and sales activities.

The bill garnered the minimum four votes needed to move to its next committee.

"It's time we made these companies pay," said Assemblyman Johan Klehs (D-San Leandro), the bill's author. "They can avoid paying the tax by reducing their prices for gasoline."

Klehs' proposal, an outgrowth of a bill defeated on the Assembly floor in January, would earmark proceeds to provide tax credits to middle- and lowincome seniors to buy prescription drugs. He estimates that the tax could amount to as much as $190 million annually.

The new bill has won the endorsement of Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles). Nuñez said Monday that he was considering sponsoring his own windfall profit tax on oil company earnings in California.

"We believe oil companies are ripping us off and artificially inflating the price of gas at the pump," Nuñez said. "The 120 legislators in Sacramento ought to be as outraged as the 14 million motorists in California," he said, referring to members of the Assembly and the Senate.

Prices at the pump set a new record in California on Monday, after rising more than 17 cents in the last week, to an average of $3.068 for a gallon of regular, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Citing surging prices across the country, House Speaker J. Dennis J. Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) wrote Monday to President Bush, requesting that he order the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney general to investigate oil company profits and executive pay, as well as the factors behind tight gasoline supplies.

Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas) called for a similar probe by the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

Oil industry representatives expressed confidence that any new federal or state investigation would reveal no evidence of market manipulation.

"There have been 30 investigations in the last 20 years. In not one case has there been any evidence of wrongdoing," said Joe Sparano, president of the Western States Petroleum Assn.

He said gasoline prices were especially high in California because of a precarious balance between supply and demand. The state is served by only 14 refineries, compared with 32 in 1980.

At the same time, U.S. crude oil production has plummeted to 5 million barrels a day last year from 10 million in the 1980s, increasing the country's dependence on supplies imported from often politically unstable foreign countries, Sparano said. California currently produces about 773,000 barrels a day of crude oil. [Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times]

So here we have a story that reports that US oil production has fallen, imports are up and refineries have shut down. What about California’s 7.25% state & county sales tax that taxes people more as fuel prices rise? What about the weak US dollar that makes imports more expensive? Why is the FTC brought in to put oil companies--the actual people who produce fuel--under the lens when the government’s own misguided policies don’t even merit a cursory glance?

Why? Because businessmen are the easy villain in our culture. Self-interest is immoral and any-self-interested act is immediately suspect, while any altruistic act is immediately forgiven—even despite altruism being the source of the problem in the first place. It is altruism that causes high tax rates by giving government the moral case for massive spending and redistribution of wealth. It is altruism that blocks new energy production on the grounds that oil drilling despoils nature and nature must come first—even at the price of human suffering. And it is altruism that gives government license to threaten producers while ignoring the fact that without them, there would be no oil in the first place.

That pesky oil addiction II

This report out of California is interesting.

SACRAMENTO — As the statewide average price for regular gasoline passed $3 a gallon Monday, politicians and grass-roots activists pumped up their calls for new taxes on companies that produce or refine oil in California.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the California Energy Commission to investigate possible gouging by gasoline refiners, wholesalers and retailers.

"We must not rule out the possibility of market manipulation, price gouging or unfair business practices employed by oil companies," Schwarzenegger said.

Also Monday, the chairman of the Assembly Revenue and Taxation Committee won a first vote on his latest proposal to slap a 2% surtax on so-called windfall profits from petroleum producing, refining and sales activities.

The bill garnered the minimum four votes needed to move to its next committee.

"It's time we made these companies pay," said Assemblyman Johan Klehs (D-San Leandro), the bill's author. "They can avoid paying the tax by reducing their prices for gasoline."

Klehs' proposal, an outgrowth of a bill defeated on the Assembly floor in January, would earmark proceeds to provide tax credits to middle- and lowincome seniors to buy prescription drugs. He estimates that the tax could amount to as much as $190 million annually.

The new bill has won the endorsement of Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles). Nuñez said Monday that he was considering sponsoring his own windfall profit tax on oil company earnings in California.

"We believe oil companies are ripping us off and artificially inflating the price of gas at the pump," Nuñez said. "The 120 legislators in Sacramento ought to be as outraged as the 14 million motorists in California," he said, referring to members of the Assembly and the Senate.

Prices at the pump set a new record in California on Monday, after rising more than 17 cents in the last week, to an average of $3.068 for a gallon of regular, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Citing surging prices across the country, House Speaker J. Dennis J. Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) wrote Monday to President Bush, requesting that he order the Federal Trade Commission and the attorney general to investigate oil company profits and executive pay, as well as the factors behind tight gasoline supplies.

Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas) called for a similar probe by the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

Oil industry representatives expressed confidence that any new federal or state investigation would reveal no evidence of market manipulation.

"There have been 30 investigations in the last 20 years. In not one case has there been any evidence of wrongdoing," said Joe Sparano, president of the Western States Petroleum Assn.

He said gasoline prices were especially high in California because of a precarious balance between supply and demand. The state is served by only 14 refineries, compared with 32 in 1980.

At the same time, U.S. crude oil production has plummeted to 5 million barrels a day last year from 10 million in the 1980s, increasing the country's dependence on supplies imported from often politically unstable foreign countries, Sparano said. California currently produces about 773,000 barrels a day of crude oil. [Marc Lifsher, Los Angeles Times]

So here we have a story that reports that US oil production has fallen, imports are up and refineries have shut down. What about California’s 7.25% state & county sales tax that taxes people more as fuel prices rise? What about the weak US dollar that makes imports more expensive? Why is the FTC brought in to put oil companies--the actual people who produce fuel--under the lens when the government’s own misguided policies don’t even merit a cursory glance?

Why? Because businessmen are the easy villain in our culture. Self-interest is immoral and any-self-interested act is immediately suspect, while any altruistic act is immediately forgiven—even despite altruism being the source of the problem in the first place. It is altruism that causes high tax rates by giving government the moral case for massive spending and redistribution of wealth. It is altruism that blocks new energy production on the grounds that oil drilling despoils nature and nature must come first—even at the price of human suffering. And it is altruism that gives government license to threaten producers while ignoring the fact that without them, there would be no oil in the first place.

That pesky oil addiction

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

So President Bush makes has made a statement:

President George W. Bush pressured profit-rich oil companies to invest in new refineries on Tuesday and announced steps against any price gouging to contain gas prices that have soared while his popularity plummets.

He directed the Environmental Protection Agency to suspend federal clean-burning gasoline rules this summer that are forcing consumers to buy expensive new gasoline blends.

Bush temporarily halted shipments to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a way to get more oil on the market and try to combat prices that have soared above $3 a gallon.
But he acknowledged that Americans are in for a tough summer on the road.

"Energy experts predict gas prices are going to remain high throughout the summer. And that's going to be a continued strain on the American people," he told the Renewable Fuels Association, a group advocating expanded use of ethanol as an alternative fuel source.

Bush, his own popularity hitting a new low, is under pressure to do something about soaring gasoline prices in hopes of staving off a potential election-year problem for Republicans trying to hang on to control of the U.S. Congress.

A former Texas oil man who in recent months has advocating curing America of its addiction to oil, Bush was unusually blunt with oil companies enjoying record profits. He said they should use some of their largesse to invest in new refineries and researching alternative fuel sources.

"We expect there to be strong reinvestment to help us with our economic security needs and our national security needs," he said.

He also said he wanted Congress to take away from the oil companies about $2 billion in tax breaks over 10 years, such as subsidizing research into deepwater drilling. He said the tax breaks are unnecessary at a time of "record oil prices and large cash flows."

"Taxpayers don't need to be paying for certain of these expenses on behalf of the energy companies," Bush said.

Bush said Congress should find a way to approve permits to build new refineries a year after they are filed.

The fact that no new refineries have been built in 30 years is frequently cited as a reason contributing to soaring gas prices.

[ . . .]

Before the speech, the White House released a letter in which the federal government urged state attorneys general to vigorously enforce laws against price gouging that may have contributed to rising gasoline prices. [Steve Holland, Reuters]

I read this, and all I have are questions. What about the environmentalists who work to block the construction of new refiners? What about the environmentalists who block oil drilling in California or in Alaska’s ANWR? How is the suspension of a tax credit (effectively a tax increase) going to lower the price of gas? What about all the tax gouging that takes place when local sales taxes are levied upon gasoline? And how, if high prices and high profits are an incentive for existing firms to increase capacity and for new companies to enter into a market, does threatening these profits achieve lower gas prices?

That pesky oil addiction

So President Bush makes has made a statement:

President George W. Bush pressured profit-rich oil companies to invest in new refineries on Tuesday and announced steps against any price gouging to contain gas prices that have soared while his popularity plummets.

He directed the Environmental Protection Agency to suspend federal clean-burning gasoline rules this summer that are forcing consumers to buy expensive new gasoline blends.

Bush temporarily halted shipments to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a way to get more oil on the market and try to combat prices that have soared above $3 a gallon.
But he acknowledged that Americans are in for a tough summer on the road.

"Energy experts predict gas prices are going to remain high throughout the summer. And that's going to be a continued strain on the American people," he told the Renewable Fuels Association, a group advocating expanded use of ethanol as an alternative fuel source.

Bush, his own popularity hitting a new low, is under pressure to do something about soaring gasoline prices in hopes of staving off a potential election-year problem for Republicans trying to hang on to control of the U.S. Congress.

A former Texas oil man who in recent months has advocating curing America of its addiction to oil, Bush was unusually blunt with oil companies enjoying record profits. He said they should use some of their largesse to invest in new refineries and researching alternative fuel sources.

"We expect there to be strong reinvestment to help us with our economic security needs and our national security needs," he said.

He also said he wanted Congress to take away from the oil companies about $2 billion in tax breaks over 10 years, such as subsidizing research into deepwater drilling. He said the tax breaks are unnecessary at a time of "record oil prices and large cash flows."

"Taxpayers don't need to be paying for certain of these expenses on behalf of the energy companies," Bush said.

Bush said Congress should find a way to approve permits to build new refineries a year after they are filed.

The fact that no new refineries have been built in 30 years is frequently cited as a reason contributing to soaring gas prices.

[ . . .]

Before the speech, the White House released a letter in which the federal government urged state attorneys general to vigorously enforce laws against price gouging that may have contributed to rising gasoline prices. [Steve Holland, Reuters]

I read this, and all I have are questions. What about the environmentalists who work to block the construction of new refiners? What about the environmentalists who block oil drilling in California or in Alaska’s ANWR? How is the suspension of a tax credit (effectively a tax increase) going to lower the price of gas? What about all the tax gouging that takes place when local sales taxes are levied upon gasoline? And how, if high prices and high profits are an incentive for existing firms to increase capacity and for new companies to enter into a market, does threatening these profits achieve lower gas prices?

"Academic Freedom" In North Carolina

Here's a story: The faculty at Meredith College in Raleigh struck a blow for academic freedom Friday, and in so doing, might've cost the college $420,000 from the BB it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders." Rand continued: "In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a

"How Can I Live Without You?"

Dr. George Reisman: Without the UAW, GM would have an average unit cost per automobile close to that of non-union Toyota. Toyota makes a profit of about $2,000 per vehicle, while GM suffers a loss of about $1,200 per vehicle, a difference of $3,200 per unit. And the far greater part of that difference is the result of nothing but GM’s being forced to deal with the UAW. (Over a year ago, The

Causality In Action

Here is a fun 13-minute video showing a variety of Rube Goldberg-type machines in action. (And unfortunately, no, I don't know what the Japanese text says on the pop-up flag at the end of each machine's run.)

Exercise for the reader: How does this illustrate the Objectivist concept of causality as "the law of identity applied to action", as opposed to the standard Humean "billiard ball" concept of causality?

Hints: Consider the following from OPAR, Chapter 1

Since the Renaissance, it has been common for philosophers to speak as though actions directly cause other actions, bypassing entities altogether. For example, the motion of one billiard ball striking a second is commonly said to be the cause of the motion of the second, the implication being that we can dispense with the balls; motions by themselves become the cause of other motions. This idea is senseless. Motions do not act, they are actions. It is entities which act -- and cause. Speaking literally, it is not the motion of a billiard ball which produces effects; it is the billiard ball, the entity, which does so by a certain means. f one doubts this, one need merely substitute an egg or soap bubble with the same velocity for the billiard ball; the effects will be quite different.

The law of causality states that entities are the cause of actions -- not that every entity, of whatever sort, has a cause, but that every action does; and not that the cause of action is action, but that the cause of action is entities.

Or the following from "H Acstonus":

Causality, at least since Hume, has been conceived of as a chain of events, each antecedent event causing the other. This conception has led to confusion. While it is true that antecedent factors play a role, a proper conception of causality would have to incorporate a wider context. In Aristotle's view, cause and effect is rooted in the identity of acting things. What a thing is, says Aristotle, will determine what it does. An acorn can become an oak tree, and not a catfish, because that is its nature. The actions an entity can take are determined by what that entity is. On this view, when one billiard ball strikes another it sends it rolling because of the nature of the balls and their surroundings, not just antecedent events.

The incompleteness of modern science lies in the fact that it rests on a purely mechanistic, non-Aristotelian view of causation. Consequently it cannot be defended against critics such as Hume. Aristotle's view provides a basis for a better understanding of cause and effect, and has the potential to ground science and induction in first principles. Aristotle has the potential to provide for modern science the philosophic foundations it never had.

V For Vendetta

By from The Charlotte Capitalist (TM),cross-posted by MetaBlog

Go see V For Vendetta. I just left the theatre and I love it. "Ideas are bulletproof" -- fantastic. In the end, they were. "V", the leading character, is a great blend of focused body and mind. Over the top, yeah. Still good. The movie shows how fear is used against you and me. Stop being afraid. "Street Fighting Man" is one of my favorite Rolling Stones songs. Some minor downsides:

Free Bibles In Brunswick County

By from The Charlotte Capitalist (TM),cross-posted by MetaBlog

From Austin Cline at Agnosticism/Atheism:

The school board in Brunswick County, North Carolina, has voted to invite the Gideons into public schools to distribute free Bibles. Supporters think that this is necessary for the sake of Christians' freedom. Critics point out that it's wrong to give Christianity special support and privileges like this. To count as even vaguely legal, they'll have to do the same with any group that requests it.

...So, while this policy is being challenged (and a legal challenge is bound to come), someone should apply to the school board to distribute material on atheism, secular humanism, Wicca, Raelians, or whatever.

And don't forget this group.

A Religion, Dangerous?

By from The Charlotte Capitalist (TM),cross-posted by MetaBlog

Why the right to disagree in society is so important. From Today In History at The History Channel (April 12):

The inquisition of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei for holding the heretical belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun begins. The chief inquisitor was Father Vincenzo Maculano da Firenzuola, who was appointed by Pope Urban VIII. Galileo was forced to turn himself in to the Holy Office because standard practice demanded that the accused be imprisoned and secluded during the trial...

...On June 22, 1633, the Church handed down the following order: "We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare, that thou, the said Galileo, by the things deduced during this trial, and by thee confessed as above, hast rendered thyself vehemently suspected of heresy by this Holy Office, that is, of having believed and held a doctrine which is false, and contrary to the Holy Scriptures, to wit: that the Sun is the centre of the universe, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the centre of the universe."...

...Galileo agreed not to teach the heresy anymore and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took more than 300 years for the Church to admit that Galileo was right and to clear his name of heresy.

Woops.

Could you imagine if there was a religious group in the world today that punished people for their ideas -- ideas that may offend others? Naaahh, it couldn't happen again.

Illegal Immigration and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

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

Politicians and ideologues insist that illegal immigrants should be deported because they broke the law. But some laws ought to be broken.

By David Veksler

In 1850, the United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of a compromise between Southern slave-owners and Northern abolitionists. The law made it a duty for every law enforcement official to arrest runaway slaves. A suspected slave had no right to a jury trial or any kind of legal defense. In addition, the act of aiding a runaway slave became a criminal offense subject to six months imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.

I bring up this historical episode because of a similar injustice is occurring today. Escaped slaves who risk life and limb to come to the free states of America are captured and returned to face severe punishment (and sometimes immediate execution) from their masters.

I am referring primarily to the Cuban, but also the Chinese, Haitian, and many other immigrants who are denied entry or forced to return to dictatorships. Some are political activists seeking freedom of expression, but most simply do not wish to live as property of the state, and will do anything to live as free men and women.

These would-be immigrants have shown by their actions than they are far better Americans than most people born in the U.S. While most Americans don't even bother to vote, they abandon their entire life and culture and often risk everything to embrace the American dream. Upon coming to America, they are usually far more successful than their native born-counterparts. By any rational standard of justice, these immigrants deserve to be here far more than the millions of welfare slobs, America-hating hippies and intellectuals, and all the union workers and assorted privileged moochers who believe that their livelihood comes from a divine birthright rather than the unbridled genius and hard work of self-made men.

And yet, I see news stories in the "qurkies" section of the paper about Cubans trying to float to America in a car, or squeeze in the seat cushions of a car, as if there is something humorous about people so desperate to live in freedom that they float in open ocean in a car-twice. Or people who cross a desert with barely enough food and water to escape the crushing poverty of Mexico or Guatemala. Or people who sell their life savings and suffocate in a shipping crate for months for a chance to wash dishes in California and send a few dollars back home. I would like to ask all the native-born American citizens whether they would be courageous enough to take those kinds of risks to provide for their family.

Whether they come here to escape political oppression or simply the pervasive poverty and idleness of welfare socialist states, the immigrants who come here seeking a free, productive life are Americans-in-spirit, regardless of what some bureaucrat or politician says. Any law that claims otherwise is an abomination, a gross injustice, and should be treated in the same way that moral men regarded the Fugitive Slave Act or the Nazi Nuremberg Laws.

I do not believe the facts I mention - the plight of oppressed peoples, the risks they take, and the productive lives they lead here are in dispute. I cannot understand what sort of irrationality, what bigotry, what idiocy would make Americans deny the very legacy their nation is founded on. As an immigrant, I sympathize with Frederick Douglass, who, like me, was a persecuted minority who escaped a slave state to embrace American values and pursue the American Dream. Unlike him, I came here legally - but I'll be damned if any "law" was going to keep my out. I conclude with his words:

O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Panel on the Danish Cartoons in Chicago

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Oh, excellent:

Free Speech and the Danish Cartoons

Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad have sparked a worldwide controversy. Death threats and violent protests have sent the cartoonists into hiding and have had the intended effect of stifling freedom of expression. The reaction to these cartoons raises urgent questions whose significance goes far beyond a set of drawings.

Come ask your questions about freedom of speech, the Danish cartoons, and the issues they have raised at a panel discussion. The cartoons will be on display.

When: Tuesday, April 25th, 7pm. Doors open at 6:30

Where: Kent 107

Panelists: Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry magazine; Dr. Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute

Tickets: $2, in the Reynold's Club (5706 South University) between 11am and 2pm on April 20, 21, 24. Remaining tickets will be sold at the door. Those who find it inconvenient to purchase advance tickets on campus may email rebkna@uchicago.edu to reserve them.

For more information, check out the web site.

Panel on the Danish Cartoons in Chicago

Oh, excellent:

Free Speech and the Danish Cartoons

Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad have sparked a worldwide controversy. Death threats and violent protests have sent the cartoonists into hiding and have had the intended effect of stifling freedom of expression. The reaction to these cartoons raises urgent questions whose significance goes far beyond a set of drawings.

Come ask your questions about freedom of speech, the Danish cartoons, and the issues they have raised at a panel discussion. The cartoons will be on display.

When: Tuesday, April 25th, 7pm. Doors open at 6:30

Where: Kent 107

Panelists: Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education; Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry magazine; Dr. Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute

Tickets: $2, in the Reynold's Club (5706 South University) between 11am and 2pm on April 20, 21, 24. Remaining tickets will be sold at the door. Those who find it inconvenient to purchase advance tickets on campus may email rebkna@uchicago.edu to reserve them.

For more information, check out the web site.

The Waiter Rule

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

How can a busy CEO determine if one of his employees is genuinely nice or is a jerk merely pretending to be nice in order to suck up to the boss? According to this article, the most reliable test is how he or she treats the waiter:

Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson... wrote a booklet of 33 short leadership observations called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management...

Among those 33 rules is only one that Swanson says never fails: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person."

Swanson says he first noticed this in the 1970s when he was eating with a man who became "absolutely obnoxious" to a waiter because the restaurant did not stock a particular wine.

"Watch out for people who have a situational value system, who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with," Swanson writes. "Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles."

The Waiter Rule also applies to the way people treat hotel maids, mailroom clerks, bellmen and security guards.

...Such behavior is an accurate predictor of character because it isn't easily learned or unlearned but rather speaks to how people were raised...

Having slowly worked my way up the medical hierarchy from college student hospital volunteer to medical student to resident to fellow to attending physician, I can totally attest to the truth of this rule. Back when I was a professor at Washington University Medical School, I knew that my residents and medical students would always treat me with a certain degree of respect, since I controlled their grades for their radiology rotation. But I made a point to see how they treated the nurses and x-ray techs; the ones that treated the support staff with respect when they were still at the bottom of the medical ladder were also the ones that turned out to be the best doctors once they reached the top.

For some reason, there's a particular type of sycophantic personality that's deferential (sometimes exaggeratedly so) to their superiors, but also demands bootlicking from those below them on the ladder. Their peers generally know them for what they are, but their superiors might not always be able to tell, and hence the utility of the Waiter Rule.

Diana's observation (which I agree with) is that this type of sycophantic person is essentially a second-hander. They view others (either above or below them on the ladder) as merely a means to an end, and the key attribute they focus on with respect to other people is the power relationship. Hence, they are just another variant of what Objectivists call "social metaphysicians". (Via Plastic.)

The Waiter Rule

How can a busy CEO determine if one of his employees is genuinely nice or is a jerk merely pretending to be nice in order to suck up to the boss? According to this article, the most reliable test is how he or she treats the waiter:

Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson... wrote a booklet of 33 short leadership observations called Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management...

Among those 33 rules is only one that Swanson says never fails: "A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter, or to others, is not a nice person."

Swanson says he first noticed this in the 1970s when he was eating with a man who became "absolutely obnoxious" to a waiter because the restaurant did not stock a particular wine.

"Watch out for people who have a situational value system, who can turn the charm on and off depending on the status of the person they are interacting with," Swanson writes. "Be especially wary of those who are rude to people perceived to be in subordinate roles."

The Waiter Rule also applies to the way people treat hotel maids, mailroom clerks, bellmen and security guards.

...Such behavior is an accurate predictor of character because it isn't easily learned or unlearned but rather speaks to how people were raised...

Having slowly worked my way up the medical hierarchy from college student hospital volunteer to medical student to resident to fellow to attending physician, I can totally attest to the truth of this rule. Back when I was a professor at Washington University Medical School, I knew that my residents and medical students would always treat me with a certain degree of respect, since I controlled their grades for their radiology rotation. But I made a point to see how they treated the nurses and x-ray techs; the ones that treated the support staff with respect when they were still at the bottom of the medical ladder were also the ones that turned out to be the best doctors once they reached the top.

For some reason, there's a particular type of sycophantic personality that's deferential (sometimes exaggeratedly so) to their superiors, but also demands bootlicking from those below them on the ladder. Their peers generally know them for what they are, but their superiors might not always be able to tell, and hence the utility of the Waiter Rule.

Diana's observation (which I agree with) is that this type of sycophantic person is essentially a second-hander. They view others (either above or below them on the ladder) as merely a means to an end, and the key attribute they focus on with respect to other people is the power relationship. Hence, they are just another variant of what Objectivists call "social metaphysicians". (Via Plastic.)

Three Must-Reads on China

By from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Three Must-Reads on China

Thoughts on Privacy

By Paul from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Among the many good lectures at the recent Front Range Objectivism Weekend Law Conference was the pair of talks given by Amy Peikoff on "Privacy Rights". In a nutshell, her position (which I agree with) is that the so-called "right" to privacy does not exist as a separate right, and that cases involving privacy issues can and should instead be dealt with by traditional laws on property rights, right to contract, etc.

Diana briefly summarized Amy's views in an earlier blog post:

Privacy is a good -- like food, music, or love. So while we have the right to take the actions required to secure our privacy via judicious use of our property and voluntary contracts with others, we have no direct right to privacy per se.

However, during the Q&A and (a lively informal follow-up standing-in-the-hallway bull session), we spent a great deal of time discussing one interesting concrete hypothetical case:

Consider two neighbors Alice and Ben, each residing on their own adjacent private property plots. Alice is standing on her property, and she sees or hears events taking place in her neighbor Ben's house. Alice then publishes what she learns on her popular blog, to Ben's detriment. (For instance, she overhears Ben discussing the details of a commercial trade secret with a co-worker.) Alice does not physically step onto Ben's property; all the information she gains is from sound waves or light photons emananting from Ben's property onto her property. Can Ben successfully sue her for publishing his secret? (We'll assume that it's easily proven that Alice was the one who released the secret and that there's a provable harm.)

Under current law, there's a principle called "reasonable expectation of privacy" on one's property. So if Ben took the usual precautions to keep his conversation private (i.e., closed the windows, shut the windowshades, etc.), and Alice used unusual technical means (such as special amplifying microphones) to eavesdrop, then Alice would be liable. But if Ben carelessly left his window open such that any random passerby could overhear his conversation, then the release of information would be his fault, and Alice would not be liable.

However, Amy Peikoff argued that the concept of "reasonable expectation of privacy" was ill-founded. Nonetheless, she did support the standard of "unaided senses" as the dividing line as to whether there was a rights-violation or not. So if Ben took measures so that Alice using her "unaided senses" could not see/hear what was going on inside his house, then that should be sufficient. If Alice were then to use special equipment to gather information about the events in Ben's house and proceeded to disclose it to others, then by that standard that would be a violation of Ben's rights.

So the central question in the follow-up discussion was can one defend the "unaided senses" standard as a corollary of property rights, without having to invoke a separate right to a "reasonable expectation of privacy"? (During the conference, Amy proposed one possible defense, but we learned later that she changed her mind on its merits.)

Now there are some folks (whom my friend Andrew Breese pejoratively refers to as "photon mystics") who take the position that if any photons (or sound waves) travelled from Ben's property to Alice's, then Alice can do whatever she wants with the information contained within. If Ben doesn't like that, then it's up to him to "harden" his house with lead shielding, special soundproof walls, or whatever it takes to prevent any leakage of information. Hence according to the "photon mystic" theory, if Alice uses special technology to gather some information from the ether despite Ben's best technical efforts, then it's too bad for Ben; he has no legal recourse.

I disagree with the "photon mystic" viewpoint (although I must confess that in the past I had some sympathy for this line of argument), and I think there is a way to preserve the "unaided senses" standard without having to invoke any pre-existing "reasonable expectation of privacy". The following is my theory alone, and any errors should not be attributed to Amy Peikoff or anyone else:

My theory takes some time-tested concepts from the common law (specifically the common law tort of nuisance) and uses them to formulate some wider principles which also subsume these types of alleged privacy violations.

The current (and I believe correct) law on nuisance is as follows: If neighbors Alice and Ben are sitting on their own respective private property, and Ben is having a normal outdoor barbecue and a little bit of the smoke and cooking aroma drifts onto Alice's property, then under normal circumstances Alice cannot make a claim of nuisance against Ben for such a minor incursion of smoke onto her property.

The law correctly recognizes that in the context of normal residential life, neighbors will be routinely subjected to sights and sounds from adjacent property owners, and that's just part of life. It is not reasonable to expect Ben to take extraordinary measures to completely prevent any sights, sounds, aromas, etc. whatsover that originate on his property from impinging on Alice's property. Only when those sights/sounds/aromas cause a "substantial interference" with Alice's "use and enjoyment" of her property would this meet the criteria for the tort of nuisance and hence constitute a violation of Alice's property rights.

Hence, if Ben were to play the radio softly in his backyard at 3 in the afternoon that would be legally permissible, but Ben were to blast his backyard stereo system at 3 in the morning so that Alice couldn't sleep that would constitute nuisance.

The other significant provision of nuisance law is the way it handles the so-called "hypersensitive neighbor". Hence, if Ben played his radio at a level that that would not be a nuisance to a normal neighbor, but Alice was hypersensitive to sound and goes into seizures at that particular decibel level, then that's Alice's problem, not Ben's. Alice is the one that should take special measures to prevent painful sounds from reaching her ears in those circumstances; Ben is not required to adjust his actions to suit Alice's unusual hypersensitive state. As long as Ben keeps the sound level down to the point that it would not interfere with a normally-sensitive neighbor, then he has done his part.

So the principles here are:

<1> Ben does not need to prevent all sights/sounds/smells originating on his property for reaching Alice's property. That would be an unreasonable burden. He only needs to take measures that would be reasonable, i.e., would not cause substantial interference with Alice's use and enjoyment of her property.

<2> The standard imposed on Ben for levels of sight/sound/smell is what would bother a hypothetical neighbor Alice of normal sensitivity, not a hypersensitive Alice.

Now we can apply these principles to the cases of alleged privacy invasion, to reach the "unaided senses" standard.

Suppose that Ben is conducting business in his own house that he wishes to remain private, and he doesn't wish neighbor Alice to blab about it to the world.

Ben should not be required to "harden" his house with expensive lead shields and soundproof insulation to prevent all sights/sounds/infrared radiation originating on his property from entering Alice's property. That would be an unreasonable demand on Ben, given the context of normal life in a residential neighborhood.

Instead, if he takes reasonable measures so that a normally sensitive Alice (i.e., with her unaided senses) cannot see or hear what's going on inside Ben's house, then Ben has fulfilled his legal requirement to protect his privacy.

Furthermore, Ben is not required to protect against a hypersensitive Alice, especially an Alice that has deliberately made herself hypersensitive by employing special high-tech microphones or infrared cameras capable of penetrating normal brick walls, etc.

If Ben takes the usual protective measures against normally-sensitive neighbors and Alice deliberately makes herself hypersensitive in order to gather information about Ben, then she is causing substantial interference with Ben's use and enjoyment of his property, and hence violating Ben's property rights.

Summary: By applying the "substantial interference" standard and the "normal sensitivity" standard previously validated for the tort of nuisance, we end up with the "unaided senses" standard for these cases of alleged neighbor-to-neighbor privacy violations. But everything still falls under the general principles governing property rights, without having to invoke a pre-existing "reasonable expectation of privacy".

Comments or questions?

Thoughts on Privacy

Among the many good lectures at the recent Front Range Objectivism Weekend Law Conference was the pair of talks given by Amy Peikoff on "Privacy Rights". In a nutshell, her position (which I agree with) is that the so-called "right" to privacy does not exist as a separate right, and that cases involving privacy issues can and should instead be dealt with by traditional laws on property rights, right to contract, etc.

Diana briefly summarized Amy's views in an earlier blog post:

Privacy is a good -- like food, music, or love. So while we have the right to take the actions required to secure our privacy via judicious use of our property and voluntary contracts with others, we have no direct right to privacy per se.

However, during the Q&A and (a lively informal follow-up standing-in-the-hallway bull session), we spent a great deal of time discussing one interesting concrete hypothetical case:

Consider two neighbors Alice and Ben, each residing on their own adjacent private property plots. Alice is standing on her property, and she sees or hears events taking place in her neighbor Ben's house. Alice then publishes what she learns on her popular blog, to Ben's detriment. (For instance, she overhears Ben discussing the details of a commercial trade secret with a co-worker.) Alice does not physically step onto Ben's property; all the information she gains is from sound waves or light photons emananting from Ben's property onto her property. Can Ben successfully sue her for publishing his secret? (We'll assume that it's easily proven that Alice was the one who released the secret and that there's a provable harm.)

Under current law, there's a principle called "reasonable expectation of privacy" on one's property. So if Ben took the usual precautions to keep his conversation private (i.e., closed the windows, shut the windowshades, etc.), and Alice used unusual technical means (such as special amplifying microphones) to eavesdrop, then Alice would be liable. But if Ben carelessly left his window open such that any random passerby could overhear his conversation, then the release of information would be his fault, and Alice would not be liable.

However, Amy Peikoff argued that the concept of "reasonable expectation of privacy" was ill-founded. Nonetheless, she did support the standard of "unaided senses" as the dividing line as to whether there was a rights-violation or not. So if Ben took measures so that Alice using her "unaided senses" could not see/hear what was going on inside his house, then that should be sufficient. If Alice were then to use special equipment to gather information about the events in Ben's house and proceeded to disclose it to others, then by that standard that would be a violation of Ben's rights.

So the central question in the follow-up discussion was can one defend the "unaided senses" standard as a corollary of property rights, without having to invoke a separate right to a "reasonable expectation of privacy"? (During the conference, Amy proposed one possible defense, but we learned later that she changed her mind on its merits.)

Now there are some folks (whom my friend Andrew Breese pejoratively refers to as "photon mystics") who take the position that if any photons (or sound waves) travelled from Ben's property to Alice's, then Alice can do whatever she wants with the information contained within. If Ben doesn't like that, then it's up to him to "harden" his house with lead shielding, special soundproof walls, or whatever it takes to prevent any leakage of information. Hence according to the "photon mystic" theory, if Alice uses special technology to gather some information from the ether despite Ben's best technical efforts, then it's too bad for Ben; he has no legal recourse.

I disagree with the "photon mystic" viewpoint (although I must confess that in the past I had some sympathy for this line of argument), and I think there is a way to preserve the "unaided senses" standard without having to invoke any pre-existing "reasonable expectation of privacy". The following is my theory alone, and any errors should not be attributed to Amy Peikoff or anyone else:

My theory takes some time-tested concepts from the common law (specifically the common law tort of nuisance) and uses them to formulate some wider principles which also subsume these types of alleged privacy violations.

The current (and I believe correct) law on nuisance is as follows: If neighbors Alice and Ben are sitting on their own respective private property, and Ben is having a normal outdoor barbecue and a little bit of the smoke and cooking aroma drifts onto Alice's property, then under normal circumstances Alice cannot make a claim of nuisance against Ben for such a minor incursion of smoke onto her property.

The law correctly recognizes that in the context of normal residential life, neighbors will be routinely subjected to sights and sounds from adjacent property owners, and that's just part of life. It is not reasonable to expect Ben to take extraordinary measures to completely prevent any sights, sounds, aromas, etc. whatsover that originate on his property from impinging on Alice's property. Only when those sights/sounds/aromas cause a "substantial interference" with Alice's "use and enjoyment" of her property would this meet the criteria for the tort of nuisance and hence constitute a violation of Alice's property rights.

Hence, if Ben were to play the radio softly in his backyard at 3 in the afternoon that would be legally permissible, but Ben were to blast his backyard stereo system at 3 in the morning so that Alice couldn't sleep that would constitute nuisance.

The other significant provision of nuisance law is the way it handles the so-called "hypersensitive neighbor". Hence, if Ben played his radio at a level that that would not be a nuisance to a normal neighbor, but Alice was hypersensitive to sound and goes into seizures at that particular decibel level, then that's Alice's problem, not Ben's. Alice is the one that should take special measures to prevent painful sounds from reaching her ears in those circumstances; Ben is not required to adjust his actions to suit Alice's unusual hypersensitive state. As long as Ben keeps the sound level down to the point that it would not interfere with a normally-sensitive neighbor, then he has done his part.

So the principles here are:

<1> Ben does not need to prevent all sights/sounds/smells originating on his property for reaching Alice's property. That would be an unreasonable burden. He only needs to take measures that would be reasonable, i.e., would not cause substantial interference with Alice's use and enjoyment of her property.

<2> The standard imposed on Ben for levels of sight/sound/smell is what would bother a hypothetical neighbor Alice of normal sensitivity, not a hypersensitive Alice.

Now we can apply these principles to the cases of alleged privacy invasion, to reach the "unaided senses" standard.

Suppose that Ben is conducting business in his own house that he wishes to remain private, and he doesn't wish neighbor Alice to blab about it to the world.

Ben should not be required to "harden" his house with expensive lead shields and soundproof insulation to prevent all sights/sounds/infrared radiation originating on his property from entering Alice's property. That would be an unreasonable demand on Ben, given the context of normal life in a residential neighborhood.

Instead, if he takes reasonable measures so that a normally sensitive Alice (i.e., with her unaided senses) cannot see or hear what's going on inside Ben's house, then Ben has fulfilled his legal requirement to protect his privacy.

Furthermore, Ben is not required to protect against a hypersensitive Alice, especially an Alice that has deliberately made herself hypersensitive by employing special high-tech microphones or infrared cameras capable of penetrating normal brick walls, etc.

If Ben takes the usual protective measures against normally-sensitive neighbors and Alice deliberately makes herself hypersensitive in order to gather information about Ben, then she is causing substantial interference with Ben's use and enjoyment of his property, and hence violating Ben's property rights.

Summary: By applying the "substantial interference" standard and the "normal sensitivity" standard previously validated for the tort of nuisance, we end up with the "unaided senses" standard for these cases of alleged neighbor-to-neighbor privacy violations. But everything still falls under the general principles governing property rights, without having to invoke a pre-existing "reasonable expectation of privacy".

Comments or questions?

Wal-Mart and permission-based banking

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

Wal-Mart wants to provide banking services and the usual suspects are in an uproar.

A parade of objectors spanning American business, unions and charities are going before federal regulators to make the case against allowing Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to expand its empire into banking.

The first-ever public hearings by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on a bank application are drawing a wave of opposition to the move by the world's largest retailer.

The company insists that consumers and retail banks have nothing to fear and is pledging to stay out of branch banking and consumer lending.

Some 300 institutions operate branches in 1,150 Wal-Mart stores and the company says it doesn't want to compete with them.

Opponents are not convinced. They portray Wal-Mart's proposed in-house bank — which would handle the 140 million credit, debit card and electronic check payments the company handles each year — as leading eventually to full-scale banking with retail branches that would destroy local banks.

Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart already is too big, they say, with 3,900 stores nearly saturating the U.S. market and unrivaled dominance — accounting for 10 percent of the U.S. retail economy, according to some researchers.

"Wal-Mart is a company that does not play by the rules," Robert E. McGarrah Jr., a corporate governance official with the AFL-CIO, said in a statement prepared for Monday's hearing.

"That factor alone makes its proposed bank a threat to the taxpayers and the nation's banking system. ... Wal-Mart's record in communities across America reveals a company that ruthlessly wipes out important community businesses," McGarrah said.

In an unusual alignment, the banking industry, unions and consumer groups have come together to make the case that a Wal-Mart bank would unfairly concentrate power over retail and small-business lending in one company that is already the biggest business in many small towns and rural communities. [Marcy Gordon, AP Business Writer]

Yet again, the anti-business mentality threatens to squelch the rights of the productive. Just how does Wal-Mart “ruthlessly wip[e] out important community businesses?” By finding efficiencies and providing its customers with better values. The only question in my mind is how has Wal-Mart been able to avoid antitrust.

After all, in his famous 1945 antitrust ruling against aluminum giant ALCOA, Judge Learned Hand wrote that he could “think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel."

How could one better describe Wal-Mart’s proposed entry into banking? I predict not to far in the future, Wal-Mart will become ext Microsoft, and in this context, that will not be a good thing.

Outsourcing THAT KIND of Labor

By from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Outsourcing THAT KIND of Labor

Cool Antarctic Stuff

By from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Cool Antarctic Stuff

Yaron on Television

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

From ARI:

Dr. Yaron Brook is scheduled to appear on CNBC's "On the Money,"
tonight, April 20, 2006, between 7 and 8 pm, Eastern (4 and 5 pm Pacific), to discuss the retirement package of Exxon's CEO Lee Raymond.

Here's yesterday's Letter to the Editor on the topic:

Dear Editor:

It is only just that Exxon chairman Lee Raymond receive one of the largest retirement packages in history.

During the 12 years he ran Exxon, it became the largest oil company in the world and its stock price went up 500 percent.

The $400 million Raymond will get for his 12 years at the helm of Exxon represents about 1 percent of the $36 billion in profits Exxon made only last year. That is the largest amount of profit of any company ever--and Exxon's CEO deserves to be rewarded for that.

We should not be complaining about Mr. Raymond's compensation, but congratulating him--and other high-performing CEOs--for a job well done.

Dr. Yaron Brook
Executive Director
Ayn Rand Institute

Copyright (c) 2006 Ayn Rand(R) Institute. All rights reserved.

This release is copyrighted by the Ayn Rand Institute, and cannot be reprinted without permission except for non-commercial, self-study or educational purposes. We encourage you to forward this release to friends, family, associates or interested parties who would want to receive it for these purposes only. Any reproduction of this release must contain the above copyright notice. Those interested in reprinting or redistributing this release for any other purposes should contact media@aynrand.org. This release may not be forwarded to media for publication.

Yaron on Television

From ARI:

Dr. Yaron Brook is scheduled to appear on CNBC's "On the Money,"
tonight, April 20, 2006, between 7 and 8 pm, Eastern (4 and 5 pm Pacific), to discuss the retirement package of Exxon's CEO Lee Raymond.

Here's yesterday's Letter to the Editor on the topic:

Dear Editor:

It is only just that Exxon chairman Lee Raymond receive one of the largest retirement packages in history.

During the 12 years he ran Exxon, it became the largest oil company in the world and its stock price went up 500 percent.

The $400 million Raymond will get for his 12 years at the helm of Exxon represents about 1 percent of the $36 billion in profits Exxon made only last year. That is the largest amount of profit of any company ever--and Exxon's CEO deserves to be rewarded for that.

We should not be complaining about Mr. Raymond's compensation, but congratulating him--and other high-performing CEOs--for a job well done.

Dr. Yaron Brook
Executive Director
Ayn Rand Institute

Copyright (c) 2006 Ayn Rand(R) Institute. All rights reserved.

This release is copyrighted by the Ayn Rand Institute, and cannot be reprinted without permission except for non-commercial, self-study or educational purposes. We encourage you to forward this release to friends, family, associates or interested parties who would want to receive it for these purposes only. Any reproduction of this release must contain the above copyright notice. Those interested in reprinting or redistributing this release for any other purposes should contact media@aynrand.org. This release may not be forwarded to media for publication.

Humorless Fiction

By Diana from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I'm always amazed by attempts to denigrate Ayn Rand's works in terms like this...

In Ayn Rand's humorless apocalyptic novel Atlas Shrugged, the central characters ask: What would happen if someone turned off the motor that drives the world?

The adjective "humorless" is unnecessary since "apocalyptic" novels generally aren't full of chuckles and giggles. It's also an implicit criticism since "humorless" (unlike "serious" or "grave") suggests a lack of appropriate or even necessary humor.

Yet why oh why would anyone think that humor is such a major value that every work of fiction must be brimming with humor? Ayn Rand's other major novel, The Fountainhead, is a wonderfully satiric novel. Isn't that enough? Apparently not. Yet those who pen such criticisms would surely not ever say "Homer's humorless epic The Iliad" or "Nathaniel Hawthorne's humorless novel The Scarlet Letter." Yet Ayn Rand is routinely attacked for her supposed lack of humor -- and unjustly so.

Regarding Ayn Rand's use of humor in The Fountainhead, I highly recommend Robert Mayhew's fantastic lecture on "Humor in the Fountainhead." He gave it to FROST in January. (It was a fantastic evening, perhaps the most thoroughly enjoyable FROST lecture I've heard.) He'll be giving the lecture at NYU on April 26th. (I think non-students must register in advance.)

Humorless Fiction

I'm always amazed by attempts to denigrate Ayn Rand's works in terms like this...

In Ayn Rand's humorless apocalyptic novel Atlas Shrugged, the central characters ask: What would happen if someone turned off the motor that drives the world?

The adjective "humorless" is unnecessary since "apocalyptic" novels generally aren't full of chuckles and giggles. It's also an implicit criticism since "humorless" (unlike "serious" or "grave") suggests a lack of appropriate or even necessary humor.

Yet why oh why would anyone think that humor is such a major value that every work of fiction must be brimming with humor? Ayn Rand's other major novel, The Fountainhead, is a wonderfully satiric novel. Isn't that enough? Apparently not. Yet those who pen such criticisms would surely not ever say "Homer's humorless epic The Iliad" or "Nathaniel Hawthorne's humorless novel The Scarlet Letter." Yet Ayn Rand is routinely attacked for her supposed lack of humor -- and unjustly so.

Regarding Ayn Rand's use of humor in The Fountainhead, I highly recommend Robert Mayhew's fantastic lecture on "Humor in the Fountainhead." He gave it to FROST in January. (It was a fantastic evening, perhaps the most thoroughly enjoyable FROST lecture I've heard.) He'll be giving the lecture at NYU on April 26th. (I think non-students must register in advance.)

Free Objectivism Club Site Hosting

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We also have a directory of Objectivism Clubs. If your club is missing, let me know!

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This means that you can get an @objectivismonline.net email address and use Gmail as your mail interface. Google will manage your mail and provides the storage, so you don't have to worry about the security or reliability of the service.

To sign up, contact me or reply to this thread. I need your full name, desired email address, and optionally, a password.

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U.S. Records Drastic Decline in Death Rate

While the media obsesses with the doomsday scenario of the month, the advance of industrial civilization continues to increase our life expectancy: "In what appears to be an amazing success for American medicine, preliminary government figures released Wednesday showed that the annual number of deaths in the U.S. dropped by nearly 50,000 in 2004 -- the biggest decline in nearly 70 years"

While it is commonly believed that the increase is due to improvements in medicine, Don Boudreaux comments on a new book which theorizies that is has much more to do with economic growth:

Fogel extends Thomas McKeown's thesis that the increase in life-expectancy during the past 200 years is much more the result of economic growth and improved nutrition than the result of improvements in medicine and public health.

"Inventing a Wellsian time machine to take us all back to eighteenth-century England would be as good for our health as transporting us to the moon without spacesuits. Our bodies are simply too large to survive on the average food supplies then available."

U.S. Should Urge Israel to Eradicate the Threat from the Palestinians

By Dr. Yaron Brook:

After yesterday's horrific suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, President Bush's statement that "all parties . . . must be mindful of whatever actions they take and mindful of the consequences," is a moral equivocation between Palestinian violence and Israel's attempts at self-defense and is a moral travesty. Bush, while claiming to support Israel, is actually an obstacle to its ability to defend itself.

If the United States were serious about its support of Israel and committed to winning its own war with Islamic terrorists, it would be urging Israel to do whatever is necessary to eradicate the threat from the Palestinians. Only a commitment by Israel to victory over the Palestinians and by the United States to victory over Islamic totalitarianism will end the terrorist attacks. Indeed, to the extent Israel acts in a restrained manner, as Bush urges, the blood of future victims will be on his and Israeli leaders' hands.

Israel Must Commit to Victory Over the Palestinians

For more than a decade, Israel allowed Yasser Arafat and his regime to pretend they wanted peace with Israel while sponsoring terrorism against it. The new Hamas government shows no inclination to play Arafat's games. They have learned from Israel's recent retreat from Gaza and its weakness in response to the Intifada that no such games are necessary.

Thus, after the most recent suicide bombing against Israel--the first since the election of the Hamas government--they saw no reason to condemn the attack as Arafat did, but called it a "heroic act."

To secure its citizens, Israel must assert its right to self-defense. It must hold Hamas responsible for Palestinian terrorism and do what it should have done years ago: it must commit itself to victory over the Palestinians--crushing their government (Hamas and the PA), eliminating their terrorist infrastructure, disarming their pseudo-police and making evident to all Palestinians the horrific consequences of continued violence against Israelis. Only a long-term commitment to such a policy, to a policy for victory, a policy of active engaged warfare can secure the lives of Israelis.

Dr. Yaron Brook
Executive Director
Ayn Rand Institute

The Left as Religion

By from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The strong affinity between subjectivism and faith, two forms of whim-worship, were illustrated for me in three stories which seem, prima facie, to be all over the map with respect to the relationship between the intellectually-bankrupt left and religionists.

First, there is this article that notes a growing acceptance of open source software (OSS) among the religious. This is not so much for the reasons I use it -- because it is more economical, reliable, and customizable -- but on "ethical grounds". Unsurprisingly, these just happen to be identical to those of open source guru Richard Stallman, an atheist, who said, of remarks that some Vatican documents concerning technology and the Internet "could have been written by" him:

People who don't really know my views might think so. Since values such as access, equality, and more equitable distribution of wealth are widely understood, while few understand the concept that freedom to redistribute and change software, people often mistakenly suppose that the Free Software movement is about the former three rather than the last. And they often tell others this. The misinformation has spread widely, but it remains erroneous. I am in favor of extending access to the Internet to everyone, provided that this is done in a way that respects their freedom (i.e., with Free Software). I am in favor of equal rights, and in distributing wealth more equitably. But the primary goal of the Free Software movement is something different and more focused: freedom in using your computer, and freedom to cooperate in a community when doing so.

Here, Stallman admits that he has an altruistic ethical system like Christians do, but stresses that his emphasis has been on giving end users the ability to alter their software as they see fit. Indeed, contrary to some rumors, it is possible for commercial software vendors to sell products that work with open source software without forfeiting proprietary information. Stallman offers an objective value -- a license that permits a user to examine and change his software -- for a mixture of good (e.g., user freedom) and bad (e.g., communal ownership of the Internet) reasons.

Nevertheless, anyone who has used much OSS will note the animus against proprietary software held by many OSS users (in various forums), and indeed by Stallman himself in his alternate name for the Gnu Public License, the "Copyleft". (See the URL. I recall this having once been within the document itself, though this appears to have changed.) And Stallman makes that animus explicit.

[I]t seems to me that a sincere Christian must condemn non-free software as satanic in spirit. If you were Satan, and you wanted to corrode the bonds of society, what could be more effective than offering individuals something attractive, profitable or fun, on condition that they refuse to share it with anyone else? ... Christians should reject proprietary software because it forbids people to express love for their neighbors.

So somehow, if you wish to make money off your software by not simply giving away, say, an algorithm you invented, your desire to profit from your own efforts is "satanic" because it is a refusal to "share". This is obviously a condemnation of the trader principle.

Insofar as he is describing the similarity of his moral views on property to those of Christians, he is correct. Consider this statement from the papal encyclical Laborem exercens.

Christian tradition has never upheld [ownership of property] as absolute and untouchable. On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.

As the Sojourners and the "Crunchy Conservatives" point out, it is the economic dogmas of the left, not capitalism, which are consistent with Christian morality. It appears from this story that this realization is spreading. And so, with this story, there would seem to be a strong affinity between the left and the religionists.

Indeed, this seems doubly the case with the second story, in which it is noted that many evangelicals are becoming "green". While some evangelicals seem less committed to environmentalism than others, two quotes are relevant. First, many Christians take very seriously scriptural injunctions to act as "stewards" of God's creation.

When asked for comment on that peculiar recommendation, [Jay] Richards expressed little surprise: "Perhaps many of those who signed the Evangelical Climate Initiative were primarily concerned with the issue of whether we should be stewards of God's creation, which, of course, yes, that's non-negotiable. But the specific policy position, I don't know if everyone that signed it looked carefully and thought carefully about the consequences of that."

Never made explicit is why our creative use of nature never seems to qualify as "stewardship". (A recent papal denunciation of genetic engineering indicates that, since nature constantly changes anyway, that it is actually man's use of reason that is being condemned.) Be that as it may, Richards clearly seeks only to "limit" man's use of reason beyond a certain point. Others seem to be salivating at the prospect of stopping the Industrial Revolution in its tracks.

Joel Hunter, pastor of Northland Church in Orlando, Fla., defended his signing of ECI on moral grounds: "Whether or not the other side is right, we're still doing the right thing because we're treating the earth with respect." Mr. Hunter views the science and economics surrounding the issue as secondary: "The moral command to take care of the earth in Genesis 2:15 really doesn't need to wait on scientific conclusion. We need to do this regardless of what the science of it is. We need to take care of the earth and do what we can to stop the pollution and accumulation of greenhouse gases, because it's just the right thing to do." [bold added]

Note the explicit subordination of the facts of reality to what the Reverend Hunter regards as a biblical imperative!

It is instructive to note that, epistemologically, the environmentalist left and the "green right" are on the same page. The leftists -- including many in science -- selectively ignore or suppress evidence against man-made global warming, while dressing their propaganda up to sound scientific. The religionists simply scrap science outright. Both want to believe that agendas predicated on "global warming" are moral and worthy of implementation. In other words, both the subjectivist and dogmatists "sides" scorn objectivity in favor of whim, as noted in a recent article about the "mysterious" conversion of yet another Western youth to Islam.

It is only on the surface, however, that the dogmatist is opposed to the subjectivist; at root, the two share a fundamental similarity. In denying that there are any objective standards by which to choose how to think or act, the subjectivist makes clear that his choices are ruled by blind feelings. This is precisely also the basic policy of the religious dogmatist.

There are an infinite number of opposing religious sects. How does the religionist decide which faith to embrace, which revelations to follow and which authority to obey? Does he scientifically gather the evidence, carefully weigh it, and then adopt the conclusion to which reason and logic point? Obviously not. He feels it. He feels that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, astrology or [the environmentalist agenda], is the right faith for him.

It should, finally, come as no surprise that religionists, no strangers to staking major claims on feelings, should begin to realize that this is precisely what the left has come to -- and hope to cash in on it. As I have blogged before, the science is strongly (and increasingly undeservingly) associated with the left. It thus was really just a matter of time before someone like Ann Coulter would come along and attack (HT: Adrian Hester) science itself -- on the grounds that it is a false religion! Consider this glowing review of her latest book in Human Events.

Coulter reveals that the so-called "gaps" in the theory of evolution are all there is -- Darwinism is nothing but a gap. After 150 years of dedicated searching into the fossil record, evolution's proponents have failed utterly to substantiate its claims. And a long line of supposed evidence, from the infamous Piltdown Man to the "evolving" peppered moths of England, has been exposed as hoaxes. Still, liberals treat those who question evolution as religious heretics and prohibit students from hearing about real science when it contradicts Darwinism. And these are the people who say they want to keep faith out of the classrooms?

Liberals' absolute devotion to Darwinism, Coulter shows, has nothing to do with evolution's scientific validity and everything to do with its refusal to admit the possibility of God as a guiding force. They will brook no challenges to the official religion. [bold added]

And so we see yet more evidence of the total collapse of the supposedly rational left as an intellectual opponent of religion. In our first two examples, the left and the religionists seemed to fit hand-in-glove as religionists openly adopted elements of leftism. Here, the religionists nominally oppose the leftists -- but actually show their greatest similarity of the three stories! They share the same epistemological method. The religionists merely like their own creation myth more than that of the leftists, in whose hands evolution has effectively become a myth (link below).

The leftist's desire for a free lunch trumps the need to discover what about man requires him to have a moral code and what that moral code should be. And so the religionists, knowing that altruism also means that people may be commanded to give out these free lunches, egg on people like Richard Stallman. The desire to throttle capitalism makes any shred of pseudoscientific evidence in favor of "global warming" a cudgel by which the left can whip the public into a froth of panic -- during which legislation to ruin the economy can be passed. The religionists, seeing the opportunity to shackle independent minds everywhere, jump on the global warming bandwagon and even try to drive it themselves. The left preaches that objectivity is not really possible to man in any field, including science. The religionists take them at their word, call them heretics, and act as if they alone ever marshal facts and evidence for their beliefs.

The left, in abandoning reason, has made the choice between itself and religion into a choice between two religions, and has sold reason down the river in the process. It will be up to others to ensure that reason is offered again in the marketplace of ideas.

-- CAV

The Left as Religion

The strong affinity between subjectivism and faith, two forms of whim-worship, were illustrated for me in three stories which seem, prima facie, to be all over the map with respect to the relationship between the intellectually-bankrupt left and religionists.

First, there is this article that notes a growing acceptance of open source software (OSS) among the religious. This is not so much for the reasons I use it -- because it is more economical, reliable, and customizable -- but on "ethical grounds". Unsurprisingly, these just happen to be identical to those of open source guru Richard Stallman, an atheist, who said, of remarks that some Vatican documents concerning technology and the Internet "could have been written by" him:

People who don't really know my views might think so. Since values such as access, equality, and more equitable distribution of wealth are widely understood, while few understand the concept that freedom to redistribute and change software, people often mistakenly suppose that the Free Software movement is about the former three rather than the last. And they often tell others this. The misinformation has spread widely, but it remains erroneous. I am in favor of extending access to the Internet to everyone, provided that this is done in a way that respects their freedom (i.e., with Free Software). I am in favor of equal rights, and in distributing wealth more equitably. But the primary goal of the Free Software movement is something different and more focused: freedom in using your computer, and freedom to cooperate in a community when doing so.

Here, Stallman admits that he has an altruistic ethical system like Christians do, but stresses that his emphasis has been on giving end users the ability to alter their software as they see fit. Indeed, contrary to some rumors, it is possible for commercial software vendors to sell products that work with open source software without forfeiting proprietary information. Stallman offers an objective value -- a license that permits a user to examine and change his software -- for a mixture of good (e.g., user freedom) and bad (e.g., communal ownership of the Internet) reasons.

Nevertheless, anyone who has used much OSS will note the animus against proprietary software held by many OSS users (in various forums), and indeed by Stallman himself in his alternate name for the Gnu Public License, the "Copyleft". (See the URL. I recall this having once been within the document itself, though this appears to have changed.) And Stallman makes that animus explicit.

[I]t seems to me that a sincere Christian must condemn non-free software as satanic in spirit. If you were Satan, and you wanted to corrode the bonds of society, what could be more effective than offering individuals something attractive, profitable or fun, on condition that they refuse to share it with anyone else? ... Christians should reject proprietary software because it forbids people to express love for their neighbors.

So somehow, if you wish to make money off your software by not simply giving away, say, an algorithm you invented, your desire to profit from your own efforts is "satanic" because it is a refusal to "share". This is obviously a condemnation of the trader principle.

Insofar as he is describing the similarity of his moral views on property to those of Christians, he is correct. Consider this statement from the papal encyclical Laborem exercens.

Christian tradition has never upheld [ownership of property] as absolute and untouchable. On the contrary, it has always understood this right within the broader context of the right common to all to use the goods of the whole of creation: the right to private property is subordinated to the right to common use, to the fact that goods are meant for everyone.

As the Sojourners and the "Crunchy Conservatives" point out, it is the economic dogmas of the left, not capitalism, which are consistent with Christian morality. It appears from this story that this realization is spreading. And so, with this story, there would seem to be a strong affinity between the left and the religionists.

Indeed, this seems doubly the case with the second story, in which it is noted that many evangelicals are becoming "green". While some evangelicals seem less committed to environmentalism than others, two quotes are relevant. First, many Christians take very seriously scriptural injunctions to act as "stewards" of God's creation.

When asked for comment on that peculiar recommendation, [Jay] Richards expressed little surprise: "Perhaps many of those who signed the Evangelical Climate Initiative were primarily concerned with the issue of whether we should be stewards of God's creation, which, of course, yes, that's non-negotiable. But the specific policy position, I don't know if everyone that signed it looked carefully and thought carefully about the consequences of that."

Never made explicit is why our creative use of nature never seems to qualify as "stewardship". (A recent papal denunciation of genetic engineering indicates that, since nature constantly changes anyway, that it is actually man's use of reason that is being condemned.) Be that as it may, Richards clearly seeks only to "limit" man's use of reason beyond a certain point. Others seem to be salivating at the prospect of stopping the Industrial Revolution in its tracks.

Joel Hunter, pastor of Northland Church in Orlando, Fla., defended his signing of ECI on moral grounds: "Whether or not the other side is right, we're still doing the right thing because we're treating the earth with respect." Mr. Hunter views the science and economics surrounding the issue as secondary: "The moral command to take care of the earth in Genesis 2:15 really doesn't need to wait on scientific conclusion. We need to do this regardless of what the science of it is. We need to take care of the earth and do what we can to stop the pollution and accumulation of greenhouse gases, because it's just the right thing to do." [bold added]

Note the explicit subordination of the facts of reality to what the Reverend Hunter regards as a biblical imperative!

It is instructive to note that, epistemologically, the environmentalist left and the "green right" are on the same page. The leftists -- including many in science -- selectively ignore or suppress evidence against man-made global warming, while dressing their propaganda up to sound scientific. The religionists simply scrap science outright. Both want to believe that agendas predicated on "global warming" are moral and worthy of implementation. In other words, both the subjectivist and dogmatists "sides" scorn objectivity in favor of whim, as noted in a recent article about the "mysterious" conversion of yet another Western youth to Islam.

It is only on the surface, however, that the dogmatist is opposed to the subjectivist; at root, the two share a fundamental similarity. In denying that there are any objective standards by which to choose how to think or act, the subjectivist makes clear that his choices are ruled by blind feelings. This is precisely also the basic policy of the religious dogmatist.

There are an infinite number of opposing religious sects. How does the religionist decide which faith to embrace, which revelations to follow and which authority to obey? Does he scientifically gather the evidence, carefully weigh it, and then adopt the conclusion to which reason and logic point? Obviously not. He feels it. He feels that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, astrology or [the environmentalist agenda], is the right faith for him.

It should, finally, come as no surprise that religionists, no strangers to staking major claims on feelings, should begin to realize that this is precisely what the left has come to -- and hope to cash in on it. As I have blogged before, the science is strongly (and increasingly undeservingly) associated with the left. It thus was really just a matter of time before someone like Ann Coulter would come along and attack (HT: Adrian Hester) science itself -- on the grounds that it is a false religion! Consider this glowing review of her latest book in Human Events.

Coulter reveals that the so-called "gaps" in the theory of evolution are all there is -- Darwinism is nothing but a gap. After 150 years of dedicated searching into the fossil record, evolution's proponents have failed utterly to substantiate its claims. And a long line of supposed evidence, from the infamous Piltdown Man to the "evolving" peppered moths of England, has been exposed as hoaxes. Still, liberals treat those who question evolution as religious heretics and prohibit students from hearing about real science when it contradicts Darwinism. And these are the people who say they want to keep faith out of the classrooms?

Liberals' absolute devotion to Darwinism, Coulter shows, has nothing to do with evolution's scientific validity and everything to do with its refusal to admit the possibility of God as a guiding force. They will brook no challenges to the official religion. [bold added]

And so we see yet more evidence of the total collapse of the supposedly rational left as an intellectual opponent of religion. In our first two examples, the left and the religionists seemed to fit hand-in-glove as religionists openly adopted elements of leftism. Here, the religionists nominally oppose the leftists -- but actually show their greatest similarity of the three stories! They share the same epistemological method. The religionists merely like their own creation myth more than that of the leftists, in whose hands evolution has effectively become a myth (link below).

The leftist's desire for a free lunch trumps the need to discover what about man requires him to have a moral code and what that moral code should be. And so the religionists, knowing that altruism also means that people may be commanded to give out these free lunches, egg on people like Richard Stallman. The desire to throttle capitalism makes any shred of pseudoscientific evidence in favor of "global warming" a cudgel by which the left can whip the public into a froth of panic -- during which legislation to ruin the economy can be passed. The religionists, seeing the opportunity to shackle independent minds everywhere, jump on the global warming bandwagon and even try to drive it themselves. The left preaches that objectivity is not really possible to man in any field, including science. The religionists take them at their word, call them heretics, and act as if they alone ever marshal facts and evidence for their beliefs.

The left, in abandoning reason, has made the choice between itself and religion into a choice between two religions, and has sold reason down the river in the process. It will be up to others to ensure that reason is offered again in the marketplace of ideas.

-- CAV

PBS on “The Tank Man”

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

On June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese army’s deadly crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, a single, unarmed young man stood his ground before a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Captured on film and video by Western journalists, this extraordinary confrontation became an icon of the struggle for freedom around the world.

In one of the sections, four students at one of China’s most prestigious universities fail to identify where the famous Tianamen Square photo of the “Tank Man” is from.

PBS on "The Tank Man"

On June 5, 1989, one day after the Chinese army’s deadly crushing of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, a single, unarmed young man stood his ground before a column of tanks on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. Captured on film and video by Western journalists, this extraordinary confrontation became an icon of the struggle for freedom around the world.

In one of the sections, four students at one of China’s most prestigious universities fail to identify where the famous Tianamen Square photo of the “Tank Man” is from.

Will Colleges Admit a Problem?

By from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Will Colleges Admit a Problem?

Oprah Is Right to Reject Unearned Guilt

By David Holcberg:
What a wonderful thing to hear from Oprah that she doesn't feel guilty for being wealthy, even if others are destitute.

Neither Oprah nor anyone else who earns a lot of money is responsible for the poverty and misery of the poor around the world. High earners make their fortunes by creating products or services that others gladly pay for--not by exploiting the destitute. Would that more of them follow Oprah's example and reject any unearned guilt about their success.

USC Free Speech Event Video Available

For those of you who could not attend the USC Free Speech event featuring Yaron Brook and Daniel Pipes, the video is now available for free on the Ayn Rand Institute registered user webpage. (Note: It will only be available online for a limited time.)

Form 1040 and 'rational ignorance'

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

Today, millions of Americans will struggle to bring themselves into compliance with the Internal Revenue Code. Every year the nation goes though the same circus, juggling with its tax forms, groping to find its receipts, and trying to make sense out of a seemingly endless maze of instructions, assessments and deductions. Typically, one overhears people talking about how the whole process is something the government does to us, tormenting us against our will. Such claims forget who it is who ultimately shapes the destiny of this nation.

America is a constitutional republic. Its leaders and the laws they enact are made possible by the will of the majority. Any citizen is free to comment on the affairs of state. So why then do Americans allow themselves to suffer a tax code that is coercive, unfair, needlessly complex, and provides little clarity as to the real cost of government? Because that's precisely what the majority of Americans have chosen to accept.

A just people would demand a government that charges for services rendered and no more. They would oppose the paternalism and retribution of wealth schemes that comprise most government spending today. They would not allow their government to use coercion to pay for the protections government provides. They would demand a moral way to pay for government.

In contrast, the system we have today is a near polar opposite. The government spends money it doesn't have-which only means future taxes down the road. It takes money from producers to give to others. Its taxes are designed to do little more than hide the real cost of government-after all, who, of anyone, knows the sum total they pay the government in income, sales and excise taxes, let alone the cost of the corporate taxes that are passed on to them though the price of the goods that they buy?

What could explain such a tax system? What could explain the seeming inability to reform it even incrementally, such as through the flat tax or a national retail sales tax? Only a moral force could be powerful enough to squelch all debate with the seeming unassailability of its premise and explain the monster that we live with today. Only the morality of altruism explains From 1040.

Altruism holds that the highest moral value is to live for others, and the more that one gives the least deserving, the better. That is why the most productive are taxed at a higher rate than those who are less productive. That is why the owners of corporations-nothing more than people assembled together for a productive purpose-are double taxed.

For such a system to be sustained, two forms of ignorance are required: first, moral ignorance, and second, "rational ignorance." Moral ignorance is simply falling to recognize that you as a person have a right to live your life for your own sake. Objectivism cures that ailment rather quickly.

In contrast, "rational ignorance" is the recognition that the cost of educating oneself about an issue sufficiently to make an informed decision can outweigh the benefit one could reasonably expect to gain from that decision, and so it would be irrational to waste time thinking about it. Rational ignorance applied to intellectual activism is simply recognizing that one can't change the world by oneself, and it explains the people who come to Objectivism, but who are then are content to retreat into their own private worlds. After all, we can insulate ourselves from the world's faults most of the time and be quite happy despite the burdens we have been given.

The problem is, the boot still rests upon each of our necks. It doesn't go away and not to challenge the premise that animates it only allows it to become stronger and more threatening by default. And that's why I launched the Center-to fight back and challenge the wrong-headed premises that nevertheless dominate our lives. But to do it, I need your help. I thought Jim Woods, a long-time supporter of the Center and a frequent commenter on this blog put it quite well:

With the demands of family, work, and taxes, most of us do not have sufficient time to devote to the activism required to insure the justice necessary for our lives. Therefore, financing professional activists is as important to our long term well being as taking out an insurance policy. How much to give? Each of us has to decide for ourselves. I look at it in terms of time; if I contribute an hour of my wages/salary to CAC, then that is an hour that I worked to advance capitalism.

So thinking as Jim does, how much of your time did you spend filing your taxes? How much time did you spend earning the money it took to pay them? In contrast, how much will you dedicate to fighting for your freedom to be released from these burdens?

Or do you instead hold that the battle for freedom is just to big to be won and that there is nothing you can do help change the tide? If that be the case, it is tragic, but it reminds me of a quote by Samuel Adams in 1776, when many in his generation of Americans held a similar view.

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

I'd rather us be countrymen though. Please, make a donation in the name of your freedom today.

Form 1040 and 'rational ignorance'

Today, millions of Americans will struggle to bring themselves into compliance with the Internal Revenue Code. Every year the nation goes though the same circus, juggling with its tax forms, groping to find its receipts, and trying to make sense out of a seemingly endless maze of instructions, assessments and deductions. Typically, one overhears people talking about how the whole process is something the government does to us, tormenting us against our will. Such claims forget who it is who ultimately shapes the destiny of this nation.

America is a constitutional republic. Its leaders and the laws they enact are made possible by the will of the majority. Any citizen is free to comment on the affairs of state. So why then do Americans allow themselves to suffer a tax code that is coercive, unfair, needlessly complex, and provides little clarity as to the real cost of government? Because that's precisely what the majority of Americans have chosen to accept.

A just people would demand a government that charges for services rendered and no more. They would oppose the paternalism and retribution of wealth schemes that comprise most government spending today. They would not allow their government to use coercion to pay for the protections government provides. They would demand a moral way to pay for government.

In contrast, the system we have today is a near polar opposite. The government spends money it doesn't have-which only means future taxes down the road. It takes money from producers to give to others. Its taxes are designed to do little more than hide the real cost of government-after all, who, of anyone, knows the sum total they pay the government in income, sales and excise taxes, let alone the cost of the corporate taxes that are passed on to them though the price of the goods that they buy?

What could explain such a tax system? What could explain the seeming inability to reform it even incrementally, such as through the flat tax or a national retail sales tax? Only a moral force could be powerful enough to squelch all debate with the seeming unassailability of its premise and explain the monster that we live with today. Only the morality of altruism explains From 1040.

Altruism holds that the highest moral value is to live for others, and the more that one gives the least deserving, the better. That is why the most productive are taxed at a higher rate than those who are less productive. That is why the owners of corporations-nothing more than people assembled together for a productive purpose-are double taxed.

For such a system to be sustained, two forms of ignorance are required: first, moral ignorance, and second, "rational ignorance." Moral ignorance is simply falling to recognize that you as a person have a right to live your life for your own sake. Objectivism cures that ailment rather quickly.

In contrast, "rational ignorance" is the recognition that the cost of educating oneself about an issue sufficiently to make an informed decision can outweigh the benefit one could reasonably expect to gain from that decision, and so it would be irrational to waste time thinking about it. Rational ignorance applied to intellectual activism is simply recognizing that one can't change the world by oneself, and it explains the people who come to Objectivism, but who are then are content to retreat into their own private worlds. After all, we can insulate ourselves from the world's faults most of the time and be quite happy despite the burdens we have been given.

The problem is, the boot still rests upon each of our necks. It doesn't go away and not to challenge the premise that animates it only allows it to become stronger and more threatening by default. And that's why I launched the Center-to fight back and challenge the wrong-headed premises that nevertheless dominate our lives. But to do it, I need your help. I thought Jim Woods, a long-time supporter of the Center and a frequent commenter on this blog put it quite well:

With the demands of family, work, and taxes, most of us do not have sufficient time to devote to the activism required to insure the justice necessary for our lives. Therefore, financing professional activists is as important to our long term well being as taking out an insurance policy. How much to give? Each of us has to decide for ourselves. I look at it in terms of time; if I contribute an hour of my wages/salary to CAC, then that is an hour that I worked to advance capitalism.

So thinking as Jim does, how much of your time did you spend filing your taxes? How much time did you spend earning the money it took to pay them? In contrast, how much will you dedicate to fighting for your freedom to be released from these burdens?

Or do you instead hold that the battle for freedom is just to big to be won and that there is nothing you can do help change the tide? If that be the case, it is tragic, but it reminds me of a quote by Samuel Adams in 1776, when many in his generation of Americans held a similar view.

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

I'd rather us be countrymen though. Please, make a donation in the name of your freedom today.

Q&A with an Islamist

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

Last week, I blogged about the UK-based "Muslim Action Committee's" attempt to shut down the NYU Objectivist club's panel discussion on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. Over the weekend, Ismaeel-Haneef Hijazi, one of the group's spokesmen visited CAC's website and sent us some questions that he wants the Center to answer.

Please help us to understand your concept of free speech by answering our questions[.] [D]o u (sic) believe freedom of speech includes the following:

1) The right to insult the Queen?
2) The right to divulge state secrets?
3) The right to incite racial hatred?
4) The right to incite murder?
5) The right to incite religious hatred?
6) The right to glorify terror?
7) The right to slander people?
8) The right to promote communism?
9) The right to question the official record of the holocaust?
10) The right to demonise (sic) religious/ethic communities

After searching his name on the Internet, I found that Hijazi apparently presents his laundry list of questions to many of his opponents, seemingly to show that the right to free speech is not absolute and he and his fellow Muslims are just in their attempts to forbid the public display of images that blaspheme the prophet Muhammad.

Of course, such a position is wicked. The right to free speech is absolute. Life requires the mind and ideas are the currency of one's mind; no government may come between a man and his ideas. Yet by his questions, Hijazi seemingly seeks to conflate the expression of an idea with the initiation of force. That's why he puts "divulge[ing] state secrets," "slander" and "incit[ing] religious hatred" on his list of questions, even though each are plainly very different things.

For example, if one divulges state secrets, such as when the notorious spy John Walker gave Soviet agents the keys to decrypt US military codes in the 1970s and '80s, one is hampering the government's ability to carry out its mission of protecting its citizens. If one slanders another individual, one is telling deliberate lies for the purpose of impugning another's reputation. Both are acts of force against the undeserving.

Yet if one "incite[s] religious hatred" (as Hijazi puts his question) because one holds religion to be a philosophically bankrupt means of defining one's place in the universe and one's moral code for living, how has one harmed the rights of the religious? The religious are still free to practice their faith without any fear of anyone else. But by Hijazi and his Muslim Action Committee's reasoning, no one should be free to impugn the mystical beliefs of others.

Hijazi and his committee ignore that free debate over the validity of religion and the conduct of its adherents is of vital importance to one's life. If a person is not free to assess religion's impact upon their life and the larger culture for the mere reason that some people's sacred cows are tipped in the process, the religious are literally forcing their creed upon all our minds. The religious, nor anyone else has a right to coerce anyone's mind, yet at root, this is what the Islamists (and by definition, all mystical creeds) seek.

So now we can expose Hijazi's gimmick for what it is: an attempt to hide his ultimate aim by equating mere criticism of Islam with the use of actual force against its adherents. No one is the US has been convicted of "glorying terror" but they have been convicted of using terror to destroy lives and advance their benighted cause. No one has been convicted of "promot[ing] communism" although communists have been convicted for attempting to overthrow the government and instill a communist dictatorship. No one has been convicted for "incit[ing] racial hatred" but there have been convictions for lynching and cross-burning on private property. One can freely "insult the Queen," yet no one is free to kill her or make believe their choice of religions. And one can deny the Holocaust, but they do not have the right to inflict a new one upon anyone.

The difference in each of these comparisons is the difference between advocating an idea and the initiation of force-a distinction Hijazi and his Muslim Action Committee seeks to dissolve.

Will the West let Islamists like Hijazi succeed? I am deeply concerned for the future. No American politician has made a statement unequivocally defending free speech in the face of the Mohammad cartoon controversy. This failure to defend our fundamental rights is unacceptable, and if our government won't take a stand, we must.

Accordingly, it is my intention to give a speech showing the Mohammad cartoons and discussing their larger implications at a Washington, DC-area university within the next 30 days. If freedom of speech falls, America falls, and none of us can afford to allow that to happen.

More to follow on my activism ideas in the next day or two.

Atheism

By from The Charlotte Capitalist (TM),cross-posted by MetaBlog

Austin Cline runs a blog entitled Agnosticism/Atheism. Austin kindly highlighted my notes on "The Purpose-Driven Life" by Rick Warren. It was a ten part series. I still get hits from Austin's site. Amazingly, a very high percentage of readers go through all ten parts. I thank you Austin. I also disagree with Austin. Recently he had some unkind things to say about Ayn Rand. Austin offended

Birth Control

By from The Charlotte Capitalist (TM),cross-posted by MetaBlog

"Of Living Death" from Ayn Rand: There is a widespread popular notion to the effect that the Catholic church's motive in opposing birth control is the desire to enlarge the Catholic population of the world. This may be superficially true of some people's motives, but it is not the full truth. If it were, the Catholic church would forbid the "rhythm method" along with all other forms of

Every Religion But Theirs

By from The Charlotte Capitalist (TM),cross-posted by MetaBlog

I am not Jewish -- either from a racial or religious standpoint. If I were to become religious, I would become Jewish. The Jews value education, wealth, and living on this earth more than any other religion. While I don't agree fully with the following, for a religion, I like it very much. From The Jerusalem Center For Public Affairs: Jewish values are grounded on and derived from the idea of

Second Carnival of the Objectivists tomorrow!

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

Just a quick reminder--tomorrow, April 1st, the Rule of Reason hosts the second Carnival of the Objectivists. And you know after a week like this one, there's going to be a ton of blogs to cover.

"Easter Egg" Found in Parade Story

From time to time (read: on at least a near-weekly basis), the multiculturalists at the Houston Chronicle have to remind their loutish subscribers that Moslems are "just like us" by white-washing some aspect of the "religion of peace". Recently, for example, there was a story about an anti-cartoon "rally" in downtown Houston. A protestor was pictured with a sign that gratuitously blamed a

V For Vendetta

Go see V For Vendetta. I just left the theatre and I love it.

"Ideas are bulletproof" -- fantastic. In the end, they were.

"V", the leading character, is a great blend of focused body and mind. Over the top, yeah. Still good.

The movie shows how fear is used against you and me. Stop being afraid.

"Street Fighting Man" is one of my favorite Rolling Stones songs.

Some minor downsides: allusion to pro-anarchy, but most importantly the movie is pro-human spirit and anti-tyranny. Don't get caught up in some of the minor downsides.

Go see it. See you on Independence Day.

"Top 10 Junk Science Stories Of The Past Decade"

Reader Suzanne Stallings shares the Top 10 Junk Science Stories Of The Past Decade:

PETA’s “Milk-Stealing Ming,” for example, was depicted with his mouth attached to an unhappy cow’s udder, alongside a “wanted poster” describing his crimes and exclaiming, “cows make milk for their babies, not for maniacs like Ming.”

and...

But even if lab animals were reasonable predictors of cancer risk in humans – a notion yet to be validated – someone of average bodyweight would have to eat 35,000 potato chips (about 62.5 pounds) per day for life to get an equivalent dose of acrylamide as the lab animals.

Lots more. Be sure to scroll down to number 10 to see the biggest one.

I think we will look back at bird flu, maybe not as junk science -- it has killed people after all, in a similar vein. Hysteria driven by ignorance of the facts.

In the long run, I think we will all look back at much of late 20th century, early 21st century the way we look back at the mystic Dark Ages.

Assistance with Evasion

Do you wish to learn how to evade more effectively? Do you need assistance blanking out unpleasant knowledge? Are pesky facts impairing your capacity to believe what you please? Then you might study the evangelical Christian answer to the question "Does the Bible contain errors, contradictions, or discrepancies?" I'm sure it will be of great help.

Update: When I posted this story this morning, I completely forgot that it was Easter... but how perfect!

TAX DAY

Have you filed your taxes? Read Richard Ralston's article, Health Care on Tax Day: How Government Spending Damages Your Health.

What will you do on Tax Freedom Day on April 26? Here is an excerpt from Patrick Graham's article, When do you start working for yourself?

The highest tax burden can be found in Connecticut, which won't celebrate Tax Freedom Day until May 12.

In fact, in general the Tax Foundation found that the lower tax burdens were in the Southern states, while states in the Northeast had some of the highest tax burdens.

Just one more reason to proudly proclaim: Southern by the grace of God.

So, if you don't have your taxes done, get on it. You are quickly running out of time.

And get back to work. There are still a couple of weeks to go before you can start keeping some of what you earn. (WaltonTribune.com, 04/15/06.)

Here is an interesting historical tidbit from ShopFloor.org: The Manufacturers' Blog:

April 15 is also the anniversary of Leonardo DaVinci's birth and the day Lincoln died. McDonald's served its first hamburger on this date, so there's a manufacturing connection for you die hards. (blog.nam.org, 04/15/06.)

Every Religion But Theirs

I am not Jewish -- either from a racial or religious standpoint. If I were to become religious, I would become Jewish. The Jews value education, wealth, and living on this earth more than any other religion. While I don't agree fully with the following, for a religion, I like it very much. From The Jerusalem Center For Public Affairs: Jewish values are grounded on and derived from the idea of

Coercing the Pledge of Allegiance

This story caught my eye:

Two Northern Lebanon [Pennsylvania] school-board members object to a revised district policy that makes it optional for a student to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

[ . . . ]

"I respectfully disagree and will not support this policy," school-board member Daniel Martel said. "Every person should pledge allegiance to the flag. The Constitution allows us to have these rights. I understand freedom of expression, but I also served in the military. Some things are sacrosanct."

Fellow board member Stephen Lum joined Martel in opposing the policy. He was the only other board member to vote against it.

"My thing is the new wording. It states that a district 'may offer opening exercises.' The old policy made it mandatory for the district to offer the Pledge of the Allegiance," Lum said.

The new wording, Martel added, makes it "too easy for a student to refuse to do it. Before, they had to list the conviction that prevented them from doing it." [Chris Brown, Lebanon Daily News]

Did it ever dawn on anyone on the Northern Lebanon school-board that any attempt to coerce the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional and has explicitly been so for over 65 years. In its decision on West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), the Supreme Court of the United States held that the First Amendment protected students from being compelled to salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance in school. According to the Court:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

We think the action of the local authorities in compelling the flag salute and pledge transcends constitutional limitations on their power and invades the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control.

So neither Daniel Martel nor Stephen Lum understand the freedom of expression, the role of the Constitution in protecting that freedom, or the role of the courts in checking the power of the public officials to do whatever they want just because they win an election every few of years, but Mr. Martel served in the military.

Well so did I, but in contrast, I realized that it wasn't the Pledge that was sacrosanct, but the principle of individual rights.

Making Money By Offering Free Airfare

The controversial Irish airline Ryanair is moving towards a fascinating business model in which the airfare is free. They make money by charging for ancillary services, including baggage check-in and food, having advertisements on seat-backs, affiliate programs with hotels and rental car agencies, etc.

Already a quarter of their passengers pay zero for airfare (those fares can be found on their reservation website), and they expect that by 2010 over half of their customers will fly for free. Plus they're making a ton of money with this approach:

Even more impressive, Ryanair's $368 million in net earnings gave the airline an industry-leading 22 percent net profit margin. (By comparison, Southwest Airlines's net margin was 7.2 percent.) "Ryanair has the strongest financials in the European airline industry," says James Parker, an equity analyst with Raymond James.

...For passengers seeking distraction, Ryanair intends to offer in-flight gambling in 2007, with the airline earning a tiny cut off of each wager. [CEO Michael] O'Leary thinks gambling could double Ryanair's profits over the next decade, but he's not stopping there.

Capitalism is wonderful.

So Pathetic

If you ever wonder whether people's lives are really ruined by altruistic appeasement of the whims of others, just read "Dear Abby." For example, consider this woman:

DEAR ABBY: My problem is that my mother is a control freak. I was raised to respect my parents, but I have just about had it with her controlling ways. She wants to dictate my hair length, color and style, my weight, my love life, what car I drive, what job I have and where I live.

My mother wants me to date only doctors. She has even threatened to cut me out of her will if I "settle" (her word) for someone who doesn't have a medical degree. I was interested in a man who owned his own business, but she made me so miserable that I simply stopped dating.

I want to respect her because she is my mother, and I know she loves me. Can you help me figure out how to get her to back off and let me live my life my way? By the way, I am 41. -- PEACEFUL REBEL IN OHIO

DEAR PEACEFUL REBEL: I'll try. Start by talking with a licensed mental health professional, preferably one who specializes in helping young adults to "individuate" from controlling parents. Once you have a firm grasp of who you are, and what your proper boundaries are, you will be able to confront your mother. After that, you may want to consider relocation, because your mother is off the charts, and she's not likely to change.

The problem is not that the mother is an irrational control freak -- not really. The daughter could cut off relations with her, or even just walk away when her mother becomes overbearing. (For examples of that, even if far too late, see this sad column.) More likely than not, the daughter doesn't do that because she doesn't have a real self -- and so she lacks the moral strength required to do battle with her mother, even though she's fighting for her very life. Instead, she capitulates, asking Abby only how she might change the irrational mother she's so sure really loves her. (That's why I like Abby's recommendation of therapy.)

Even a moderate egoist, I think, would be incapable of such psychopathology. It is altruism, with its ideal of sacrificing your own values for the sake of others, no matter how undeserving, that sucks people into these lives not worth living.

Global Chicanery

A Religion, Dangerous?

Why the right to disagree in society is so important. From Today In History at The History Channel (April 12):

The inquisition of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei for holding the heretical belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun begins. The chief inquisitor was Father Vincenzo Maculano da Firenzuola, who was appointed by Pope Urban VIII. Galileo was forced to turn himself in to the Holy Office because standard practice demanded that the accused be imprisoned and secluded during the trial...

...On June 22, 1633, the Church handed down the following order: "We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare, that thou, the said Galileo, by the things deduced during this trial, and by thee confessed as above, hast rendered thyself vehemently suspected of heresy by this Holy Office, that is, of having believed and held a doctrine which is false, and contrary to the Holy Scriptures, to wit: that the Sun is the centre of the universe, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the centre of the universe."...

...Galileo agreed not to teach the heresy anymore and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took more than 300 years for the Church to admit that Galileo was right and to clear his name of heresy.

Woops.

Could you imagine if there was a religious group in the world today that punished people for their ideas -- ideas that may offend others? Naaahh, it couldn't happen again.

Free Bibles In Brunswick County

From Austin Cline at Agnosticism/Atheism:

The school board in Brunswick County, North Carolina, has voted to invite the Gideons into public schools to distribute free Bibles. Supporters think that this is necessary for the sake of Christians' freedom. Critics point out that it's wrong to give Christianity special support and privileges like this. To count as even vaguely legal, they'll have to do the same with any group that requests it.

...So, while this policy is being challenged (and a legal challenge is bound to come), someone should apply to the school board to distribute material on atheism, secular humanism, Wicca, Raelians, or whatever.

And don't forget this group.

Massachusetts poised to betray freedom in medicine--thanks to the conservatives

The Massachusetts proposal [update: law] for universal healthcare is a boondoggle. Rather than admit that the problems with healthcare in America are the caused by the government's interference with the personal choices of its citizens, the Massachusetts proposal mandates that every state resident and every employer purchase health insurance regardless of whether they want it or not. Yesterday, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney pitched his heath care plan at the Wall Street Journal. According to Romney:

I assembled a team from business, academia and government and asked them first to find out who was uninsured, and why. What they found was surprising. Some 20% of the state's uninsured population qualified for Medicaid but had never signed up. So we built and installed an Internet portal for our hospitals and clinics: When uninsured individuals show up for treatment, we enter their data online. If they qualify for Medicaid, they're enrolled.

Another 40% of the uninsured were earning enough to buy insurance but had chosen not to do so. Why? Because it is expensive, and because they know that if they become seriously ill, they will get free or subsidized treatment at the hospital. By law, emergency care cannot be withheld. Why pay for something you can get free?

Of course, while it may be free for them, everyone else ends up paying the bill, either in higher insurance premiums or taxes. The solution we came up with was to make private health insurance much more affordable. Insurance reforms now permit policies with higher deductibles, higher copayments, coinsurance, provider networks and fewer mandated benefits like in vitro fertilization--and our insurers have committed to offer products nearly 50% less expensive. With private insurance finally affordable, I proposed that everyone must either purchase a product of their choice or demonstrate that they can pay for their own health care. It's a personal responsibility principle.

Sure, it's a personal responsibility principle of the "I mandate, you pay" variety. Romney is no dummy though and he has an answer to this point.

Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate. But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian.

So why not end the free ride that government made possible in the first place and let individuals make their own healthcare choices--and live by those choices accordingly? Why not encourage people to save for their healthcare, for starters, by not taxing healthcare savings?

That option doesn't even show up on the radar. Offered instead are subsidies for the poor. According to Romney:

Another group of uninsured citizens in Massachusetts consisted of working people who make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to afford health-care insurance. Here the answer is to provide a subsidy so they can purchase a private policy. The premium is based on ability to pay: One pays a higher amount, along a sliding scale, as one's income is higher. The big question we faced, however, was where the money for the subsidy would come from. We didn't want higher taxes; but we did have about $1 billion already in the system through a long-established uninsured-care fund that partially reimburses hospitals for free care. The fund is raised through an annual assessment on insurance providers and hospitals, plus contributions from the state and federal governments.

Oh, so it's not a tax--it is an "assessment" matched with a "contribution." The taxpayer can now rest easy. Romney continues:

To determine if the $1 billion would be enough, Jonathan Gruber of MIT built an econometric model of the population, and with input from insurers, my in-house team crunched the numbers. Again, the result surprised us: We needed far less than the $1 billion for the subsidies. One reason is that this population is healthier than we had imagined. Instead of single parents, most were young single males, educated and in good health. And again, because health insurance will now be affordable and subsidized, we insist that everyone purchase health insurance from one of our private insurance companies.

And so, all Massachusetts citizens will have health insurance. It's a goal Democrats and Republicans share, and it has been achieved by a bipartisan effort, through market reforms.

Bipartisan market reforms? He's kidding, right? Mandating more government interference in the market is hardly a market reform. And since Romney notes the "bipartisan" support for his plan, it is interesting to note his citation of one of the architects of his plan:

We have received some helpful enhancements. The Heritage Foundation helped craft a mechanism, a "connector," allowing citizens to purchase health insurance with pretax dollars, even if their employer makes no contribution. The connector enables pretax payments, simplifies payroll deduction, permits prorated employer contributions for part-time employees, reduces insurer marketing costs, and makes it efficient for policies to be entirely portable. Because small businesses may use the connector, it gives them even greater bargaining power than large companies. Finally, health insurance is on a level playing field.

Rather than craft trivial measures, why isn't the conservative Heritage Foundation blasting this proposal for its fundamental faults and arguing for the free market in medicine? Why? Because the conservatives do not stand for the free market and they never have.

The free market works because it recognizes that if we are to prosper, we must take it upon ourselves to create the values we needs in life and it leaves us free to choose our path accordingly. The free market rewards us for our wise choices and does not burden us with claims for the unearned.

The Massachusetts plan does the exact opposite. It fails to address the existing cost of government interference in medicine. It disconnects individuals from the costs they incur. It fails to properly address the problem of poor people being provided free care at the expense of others. The plan's entire premise is predicated on the argument that everyone "needs" healthcare regardless of whether they work to obtain it and thus "need" is a mortgage upon the lives of the responsible and hardworking. It mandates that an entire costly and coercive system be built under the guise of "personal responsibility" and "market reform."

At root, the Massachusetts plan is nothing less that a morally bankrupt and practically inefficient attempt to socialize medicine. That such a plan is being championed by conservatives yet again reveals just how useless the conservatives are in protecting individual rights and advancing capitalism.

It is time to disarm Iran.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who themselves admitted two years ago that Iran has an "impressive" nuclear power infrastructure, still haven't adjusted the silly "Doomsday Clock" by which they profess to gauge the threat of nuclear war. Nevertheless, the world has today moved much closer to a nuclear weapon being used offensively by a totalitarian regime. Iran's messianic President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced today that his nation has successfully enriched uranium, a crucial step towards building a bomb.

Being a scientist, I am unfortunately very familiar with the products of our modern higher education system, many of whom seem to know more and more about less and less as they "progress" in their quest for greater knowledge. Yes. Some very intelligent people can somehow tell when a country is nearly ready to build a bomb, but can't decide that such a development is a threat to civilized human beings! Such people are nearly beyond hope. I am not writing for them, but for anyone who is open to the idea that we might have to act militarily against Iran. We'll start by reviewing some well-documented things Iran's elected (and undeposed) leader is known to have said.

About September of last year, Madman Mahmoud made quite a stir at the United Nations.

[Ahmadinejad] often raises the topic [of preparing for the return of the Mahdi, at the end of the world], and not just to Muslims. When addressing the United Nations in September, Ahmadinejad flummoxed his audience of world political leaders by concluding his address with a prayer for the Mahdi's appearance: "O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace."

On returning to Iran from New York, Ahmadinejad recalled the effect of his U.N. speech: "[O]ne of our group told me that when I started to say 'In the name of God the almighty and merciful,' he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself. I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink. And they were rapt. It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic." [links dropped, one link added]

Ahmadinejad wasn't drugged, or joking, or hamming it up for the world stage. In fact, he has indulged and acted upon such fantasies at home as well.

When he was still mayor of Tehran in 2004, for example, Ahmadinejad appears to have secretly instructed the city council to build a grand avenue to prepare for the Mahdi. A year later, as president, he allocated US$17 million for a blue-tiled mosque closely associated with mahdaviat [The return and rule of the Mahdi. --ed] in Jamkaran, south of the capital. He has instigated the building of a direct Tehran-Jamkaran railroad line. He had a list of his proposed cabinet members dropped into a well adjacent to the Jamkaran mosque, it is said, to benefit from its purported divine connection.

Oh yeah, and more recently, the news reported a bit more on what he and his pals have said.

"At this historic moment, with the blessings of God almighty and the efforts made by our scientists, I declare here that the laboratory- scale nuclear fuel cycle has been completed and young scientists produced enriched uranium needed to the degree for nuclear power plants Sunday," Ahmadinejad said.

"I formally declare that Iran has joined the club of nuclear countries," he told an audience that included top military commanders and clerics in the northwestern holy city of Mashhad. The crowd broke into cheers of "Allahu akbar!" or "God is great!" Some stood and thrust their fists in the air.

How's all that for "impressive"? Oh yeah. And I haven't even touched that whole "Holocaust never happened but the Jews would have deserved it so let's make it happen" schtick. Really. Just what does it take for those bozos at the Bulletin to reset their silly clock? I suggest we keep time for ourselves instead.

And, being a scientist, I spend my working days surrounded by liberals and leftists. The latter are definitely sympathetic to the enemy, but a few of the former are belatedly realizing what's going on. Hearing "We might have to drop something on them," recently from a Kerry voter was music to my ears, except that we need to bump up the volume just a bit.

Many liberals, who would agree with my caution about the political goals of the religious right seem oddly unconvinced -- despite the near-daily occurrence of violent acts by Moslems -- that Islam might be even half the threat that fundamentalist Christianity is! So let's put the Iranian theocracy into context by considering Islam's historical record in additon to its current state. (HT: TIA Daily)

In our own time there is a reluctance to consider the true and emerging nature of Islam, what the faith teaches and its doctrines. For tactical reasons, many politicians in the West call Islam a religion of peace; some say it is a religion hijacked by extremists and others maintain that Sufis (a small minority sect) represent the true nature of Islamic pacifism.

Very recently, however, MEMRI reports that an Islamic scholar Dr. Kamel Al-Najjar challenged these suppositions by restating the obvious: intellectuals, who call for a condemnation of violence among Moslems and an openness in Islam, do not understand the history of this religion.

According to Dr. Al-Najjar, Islam was tolerant during only one brief period in its history. Islam was humane and tolerant when it was relatively weak, during the so-called Mecca period. Later Koranic verses call on Muslims to fight anyone who does not convert to Islam: "And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out." The "verse of the sword" and other warlike verses were said to abrogate tolerant verses of the Mecca period. [bold added]

They not only have a religion that preaches violence over there, but the Iranians also actually believe it. In fact, they believe it to the point that their leader openly talks about seeing lights and feeling auras without fear of being removed from office and sent to an asylum, where he arguably belongs. This is a people with a medieval mindset who will soon have nuclear weapons at their disposal unless WE stop them. What we eventually had to do to to rid ourselves of Saddam Hussein might be an accurate gauge of the value of protracted diplomatic efforts.

These are the facts, and yet, as Robert Tracinski of TIA Daily recently pointed out:

Over the weekend, the mainstream media finally caught on to the fact that US military strikes against Iran are actively being planned and considered, and for the most part, the MSM has tried to make this sound like a crazy, impractical idea. They are trying to stop US action against Iran before it begins.

If considering the above facts has convinced you that attacking Iran is necessary, or if you were in no need of convincing, I think that Tracinski offers some sound advice for you.

Now is the time for a war mobilization by all of us whose contribution to the war effort is made with a keyboard instead of a rifle. Many of us having been saying for years that Iran is the ultimate enemy in the War on Terrorism -- and now war with Iran is openly being considered and debated. This is the moment we have been waiting for. This is the time for us to make the case for war with Iran.

Use whatever medium is open to you: blog entries, letters to the editor, phone calls, e-mails, and letters to your congressman and to the White House, one-on-one debates with friends and coworkers. Make the case that war with Iran is not just "thinkable" -- it is mandatory. We need to attack Iran, not just to keep it from developing nuclear weapons, but to topple the largest remaining state sponsor of terrorism, and to discredit Islamic rule.

Let's roll.

-- CAV

Updates

4-14-06: Cox and Forkum have a good roundup on Iran and note how the anti-war/pro-Islamic left plan to wage their battle in favor of American inaction.

And, in yesterday's TIA Daily, Robert Tracinski said the following.

In response to my "mobilization alert" yesterday, a TIA Daily reader noted that some of the reporting on US military planning for a strike against Iran has been overblown, and that routine war-planning has been portrayed as evidence of an imminent attack. The war planning has actually gone a bit further than the routine -- e.g., negotiations to line up British military support for action against Iran -- as TIA Daily has covered.

But this reader has a point: a US attack on Iran is not inevitable. The report below, for example, gives us evidence in the opposite direction, portraying the talk about war planning as just a gimmick in the diplomatic game, to put pressure on the Iranians, in a "war of words" instead of a "war of action." And that is precisely why we need to mobilize.

...

Since September 11, there has been a small number of people (inside and outside Objectivist circles) arguing that Iran is America's most important enemy in the War on Terrorism, and that we won't win the war until we topple the regime in Iran. But up to now, direct American action against Iran has not been part of the mainstream political discussion. It has not been "on the table." Now it is -- and this is our big opportunity.

Snake Oil by Government Decree

Massachusetts has, unfortunately for its citizens, decided to force them to buy overpriced health insurance for themselves and subsidize it for those who cannot afford it outright. The Ayn Rand Institute correctly pointed out today in a press release that the new plan is a massive violation of individual rights.

(1) [The plan] violates the rights of individuals, who will be forced to buy health insurance even if they don't want to.

(2) It violates the rights of employers, who will be forced to offer health insurance to their employees or pay them a $295 annual fee.

(3) It violates the rights of taxpayers, who will be forced to foot the bill for other people's health insurance.

Even the most superficial amount of consideration reveals that this is a prescription for massive failure -- consistent with the nature of any systematic violation of individual rights. Let's take a quick look for ourselves.

The program will be very expensive at the outset because it fails, of course, to address any of the problems (all caused by government regulations) that have caused medical insurance rates to skyrocket in the first place. One fawning article basically admits as much.

The initial projection is that once the program is fully running, the premium subsidies for low-income families will cost $725 million a year. The Bush administration pitched in by allowing the state to apply federal Medicaid funds toward that bill. But if premiums rise faster than expected, the state still might be unable to afford sufficient subsidies to keep insurance within reach of lower-income families -- especially since it has not dedicated any specific source of revenue, such as a cigarette tax hike, to the plan. [bold added; Thanks, Mr. Bush, for making us all pay for Massachusetts's stupidity.]

This means that, unassisted by the feds, Massachusetts, with a population of about 6,350,000 will have had about $115.00 of additional per capita tax burden, on top of its $2,815 per year (already the nation's seventh-highest) -- for just the low-income subsidies! If costs remain steady. But remember: This plan does absolutely nothing about why these costs are rising!

The longer-term danger is that the program might grow unaffordable not only for individuals, but for the state, if healthcare costs keep rising at their current rate.

Another writer, Sally Pipes, notes that this plan has already been tried and has already failed.

An innovative approach would deregulate the individual market and allow insurance companies to design policies that are attractive to the non-needy uninsured.

In a blast from the past, Massachusetts law does just the opposite. It protects all existing government mandates and regulations while creating a bureaucracy to distribute new taxpayer subsidized insurance products that have no deductibles. This is the same health plan design threatening General Motors Corp.'s viability and bankrupted its suppliers. [bold added]

And part of why this will happen occurs earlier in the first article.

[T]he plan advances just as many priorities of the left. It includes a significant government role through the subsidies to poor and working-poor families. Though the initial payment would be modest ($295 a year), the legislation would require employers not currently providing insurance to contribute to care for their workers. Most important, through the new state exchange it would protect the idea that insurance should share risk between the young and old, the healthy and sick.

In her article, Sally Pipes cuts through the left-wing feel-good rhetoric to explain what "share the risk" really means.

Individual health insurance is not always a good deal in Massachusetts, thanks to state-imposed community rating regulations that require companies to charge the sick and healthy the same rates. The result: Some people elect not to purchase it.

In other words, if you live in Massachusetts and are healthy, if you are stupid enough to buy health insurance, you will basically pay the premiums of someone who is sick. No wonder they're having to force people to buy such plans!

The plan sounds -- except for some unimportant details about its funding and implementation -- very similar to a plan, for "Universal Health Care Vouchers" (UHVs), I blogged long ago. Most of the criticism I leveled at that plan applies to the Massachusetts plan. For example, such plans, by promising government subsidies, remove the restraint prices place on demand and inevitably lead to government rationing.

(Fellow Objectivists may entertain themselves by glancing back at my old blog entry and seeing that I have been able to simply substitute new terms (bracketted) into the same argument I made then. UHVs and this plan are, after all, simply two specific examples of the same general concept. I am merely supplying a new set of specific measurements.)

[S]uppose people start visiting the doctor at the drop of a hat since they're only out a copayment [beyond their high, state-mandated rate, and they understandably feel entitled to "get their money's worth".] Or suppose that nothing is done about the malpractice crisis. Or drug liability. What then? Either the [rates and taxes for subsidies] will be raised (even for those who don't milk the system for all it's worth) or services will have to be cut (again, for everyone). ...

...

And speaking of what ["risks" get "shared"]: By what standard is something judged worthy of coverage? Would the [state] mandate coverage of life-saving gastric bypass surgery for the morbidly obese or cancer treatment for heavy smokers, passing the costs of their unhealthy habits on to the rest ... ? If not, why not? ...

Because this plan is supposed to be [nearly] "universal" and the only way to make this happen is for the government to confiscate some people's money to pay for other people's medical care, whether that means visits to the doctor for mild headaches or a lung transplant made necessary by a lifetime of three packs a day. Up to a point, that is: The amount people are willing to be [forced to pay for their own premiums and be taxed for those who cannot. The end result of a public outcry for a lower premium and tax burden will be a government-mandated reduction in what the premiums will pay for.]

...

There is no free lunch. Medical care, like any other good, exists in limited quantities. As a result of this scarcity, we have a choice. We can allow government functionaries to ration it for us, resulting in lower quality, higher (if hidden) costs, and a loss of control over our own medical decisions. Or we can attempt the real reform of excising the cancer of government control once and for all from the medical industry, giving ourselves individually the best medical care our own money can buy on the open market.

Now that I think of it, there is no essential difference between the plan in Massachusetts and that of Emanuel and Fuchs. The chief differences are merely: (1) exactly when and how you are to part with your money to pay for what the government says you should get for health insurance, and (2) what the bureaucratic agency that decides whether you will get treated for something will be called.

Ironically, just as our nation seems ever closer to nationalizing the medical industry, "the poor", always the supposed "beneficiaries" of such programs, can be seen voting -- with their feet -- against another massive, failed attempt by the government to provide a necessity to all. Blacks and Hispanics across the country are taking advantage of voucher programs whenever they can to flee public schools!

In Minneapolis, public school officials now admit that black flight is a serious problem; the district enrollment is projected to be down to 33,000, from 48,000 in 2000, a 30% decrease, largely due to black students escaping to charter schools.[1] The Washington D.C. school district has lost 10,000 students in five years; 25% of D.C. students are now enrolled in charter schools.[2] A Rand Corporation study of charter schools in Texas and California discovered that in both states black students are significantly more likely to move to charter schools than are white students.[3] Although school choice opportunities are not necessarily snapped up instantly (growth in some voucher programs has been more gradual than originally expected), over time the momentum is unambiguously one of black flight away from public schools.

The ultimate answer to our failing educational sector would be, not vouchers, but outright privatization. However, the mass defection of black customers from "free" schools ought to serve as a lesson to those who think the government should run all hospitals as well.

If, after decades of trying, our government still can't magically provide a good education to many of our children, what makes advocates of socialized medicine believe the government can magically provide medical services? Do they really care? And why should we believe them?
-
-- CAV

Mob Rules in France

By Debi Ghate:

By withdrawing proposed legislation designed to grant French employers slightly more freedom to hire and fire employees--a right that in a truly free society employers would possess without the blessing of special legislation--France has more fully subjugated itself to mob rule.

Governments of free nations are supposed to protect the individual rights of their citizens--no matter whether ten people or a million threaten to trample them. By caving in to the protestors' cries and screams, the French government has completely abandoned its key function and declared that, if you can be loud and demanding enough, you can decide what the laws of France should be, no matter whose rights are violated. France continues to abandon individual rights, and as result, it can expect more riots, protests and violence as the mob learns that it rules.

Illegal Immigration and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

Politicians and ideologues insist that illegal immigrants should be deported because they broke the law. But some laws ought to be broken.

By David Veksler

In 1850, the United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act as part of a compromise between Southern slave-owners and Northern abolitionists. The law made it a duty for every law enforcement official to arrest runaway slaves. A suspected slave had no right to a jury trial or any kind of legal defense. In addition, the act of aiding a runaway slave became a criminal offense subject to six months imprisonment and a $1,000 fine.

I bring up this historical episode because of a similar injustice is occurring today. Escaped slaves who risk life and limb to come to the free states of America are captured and returned to face severe punishment (and sometimes immediate execution) from their masters.

I am referring primarily to the Cuban, but also the Chinese, Haitian, and many other immigrants who are denied entry or forced to return to dictatorships. Some are political activists seeking freedom of expression, but most simply do not wish to live as property of the state, and will do anything to live as free men and women.

These would-be immigrants have shown by their actions than they are far better Americans than most people born in the U.S. While most Americans donÂ’t even bother to vote, they abandon their entire life and culture and often risk everything to embrace the American dream. Upon coming to America, they are usually far more successful than their native born-counterparts. By any rational standard of justice, these immigrants deserve to be here far more than the millions of welfare slobs, America-hating hippies and intellectuals, and all the union workers and assorted privileged moochers who believe that their livelihood comes from a divine birthright rather than the unbridled genius and hard work of self-made men.

And yet, I see news stories in the “qurkies” section of the paper about Cubans trying to float to America in a car, or squeeze in the seat cushions of a car, as if there is something humorous about people so desperate to live in freedom that they float in open ocean in a car–twice. Or people who cross a desert with barely enough food and water to escape the crushing poverty of Mexico or Guatemala. Or people who sell their life savings and suffocate in a shipping crate for months for a chance to wash dishes in California and send a few dollars back home. I would like to ask all the native-born American citizens whether they would be courageous enough to take those kinds of risks to provide for their family.

Whether they come here to escape political oppression or simply the pervasive poverty and idleness of welfare socialist states, the immigrants who come here seeking a free, productive life are Americans-in-spirit, regardless of what some bureaucrat or politician says. Any law that claims otherwise is an abomination, a gross injustice, and should be treated in the same way that moral men regarded the Fugitive Slave Act or the Nazi Nuremberg Laws.

I do not believe the facts I mention – the plight of oppressed peoples, the risks they take, and the productive lives they lead here are in dispute. I cannot understand what sort of irrationality, what bigotry, what idiocy would make Americans deny the very legacy their nation is founded on. As an immigrant, I sympathize with Frederick Douglass, who, like me, was a persecuted minority who escaped a slave state to embrace American values and pursue the American Dream. Unlike him, I came here legally – but I’ll be damned if any “law” was going to keep my out. I conclude with his words:

O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Massachusetts Bill Mandating Universal Health Insurance Violates Rights

From the Ayn Rand Institute:

The Massachusetts bill mandating universal health insurance is a massive violation of rights:

(1) It violates the rights of individuals, who will be forced to buy health insurance even if they don't want to.

(2) It violates the rights of employers, who will be forced to offer health insurance to their employees or pay them a $295 annual fee.

(3) It violates the rights of taxpayers, who will be forced to foot the bill for other people's health insurance.

The Massachusetts bill should be repealed--not emulated by other states considering similar legislation.

Wal-Mart and permission-based banking

Wal-Mart wants to provide banking services and the usual suspects are in an uproar.

A parade of objectors spanning American business, unions and charities are going before federal regulators to make the case against allowing Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to expand its empire into banking.

The first-ever public hearings by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on a bank application are drawing a wave of opposition to the move by the world's largest retailer.

The company insists that consumers and retail banks have nothing to fear and is pledging to stay out of branch banking and consumer lending.

Some 300 institutions operate branches in 1,150 Wal-Mart stores and the company says it doesn't want to compete with them.

Opponents are not convinced. They portray Wal-Mart's proposed in-house bank — which would handle the 140 million credit, debit card and electronic check payments the company handles each year — as leading eventually to full-scale banking with retail branches that would destroy local banks.

Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart already is too big, they say, with 3,900 stores nearly saturating the U.S. market and unrivaled dominance — accounting for 10 percent of the U.S. retail economy, according to some researchers.

"Wal-Mart is a company that does not play by the rules," Robert E. McGarrah Jr., a corporate governance official with the AFL-CIO, said in a statement prepared for Monday's hearing.

"That factor alone makes its proposed bank a threat to the taxpayers and the nation's banking system. ... Wal-Mart's record in communities across America reveals a company that ruthlessly wipes out important community businesses," McGarrah said.

In an unusual alignment, the banking industry, unions and consumer groups have come together to make the case that a Wal-Mart bank would unfairly concentrate power over retail and small-business lending in one company that is already the biggest business in many small towns and rural communities. [Marcy Gordon, AP Business Writer]

Yet again, the anti-business mentality threatens to squelch the rights of the productive. Just how does Wal-Mart “ruthlessly wip[e] out important community businesses?” By finding efficiencies and providing its customers with better values. The only question in my mind is how has Wal-Mart been able to avoid antitrust.

After all, in his famous 1945 antitrust ruling against aluminum giant ALCOA, Judge Learned Hand wrote that he could “think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened, and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel."

How could one better describe Wal-Mart’s proposed entry into banking? I predict not to far in the future, Wal-Mart will become ext Microsoft, and in this context, that will not be a good thing.

Common Sense: Only for Sports

I am all for spectator sports as a celebration of excellence, but often find myself annoyed with sports coverage in the media. On the one hand, the facts of a sporting event are usually far more straightforward than those of, say, the war or the economy, and so biased reporting is usually not a problem that keeps important facts away from the audience. On the other hand, since sports concretize

An Important Question

I'm presently in the middle of reading Robert Mayhew's excellent anthology Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem. I've never been much of a fan of Anthem, but the essays in the anthology are giving me an enormous new understanding of and appreciation for the work. Although I read Anthem in February, I eagerly anticipate reading it again as soon as I finish the anthology.

My friend Lin Zinser had the same experience with the also excellent anthology Essays on Ayn Rand's We the Living. Although I've always loved We the Living, I also gained a much greater understanding of it by reading the anthology.

Unfortunately, I've heard that neither of these two anthologies are selling terribly well: they've only sold a few hundred copies. That's quite distressing to me. After all, they are excellent works. The essays are well-written, interesting, and illuminating -- not just of Ayn Rand's literary methods, but also of her philosophy. They are stellar examples of good scholarship on Objectivism. So Objectivists and fellow travelers who don't buy and read these books are missing a fantastic opportunity to understand and appreciate Ayn Rand's fiction and philosophy so much more deeply and thoroughly than ever before. Moreover, the better these anthologies sell, the more receptive publishers will be to future works on Objectivism by Objectivist scholars. (That's of great interest to me, obviously!)

From what I hear from other quarters, this kind of lack of interest isn't unique to these anthologies. Although The Objective Standard is doing very well in its subscriptions, the journal has fewer than expected Objectivist subscribers. (That does mean more than expected non-Objectivist subscribers -- and that's great news!) Like Robert Mayhew's anthologies, The Objective Standard is a fantastically interesting read. (I'm in the middle of reading the first issue now too.) So I'm puzzled as to why subscriptions haven't been snatched up by Objectivists and fellow travelers in droves. (Unlike lecture courses, these works are not expensive.)

So here's what I'd like to know: If you haven't bought these anthologies, why not? Have you not heard of them? Are you just uninterested in reading essays on Ayn Rand's fiction? Have you just not gotten around to buying them? Are you unsure of their value? Are you living in a hut without two pennies to rub together?

Despite that last, I am asking a serious question here: I really do wish to know why so few of the many thousands of people with a serious interest in Ayn Rand's fiction and philosophy have bought Dr. Mayhew's excellent anthologies or subscribed to The Objective Standard. So I'd very much appreciate if those of you who haven't purchased the volume would indicate your reasons for not doing so in the comments or via private e-mail. Also, since I'm sure that NoodleFood readers are a more studious bunch than most, I'd like to ask those of you with a local club to inquire with your members as to whether they've bought the anthologies -- and if not, why not. Then tell me what you find out, if you please. Also, if you've read and enjoyed the volumes, please encourage those people to buy and read them!

This question is of great personal interest to me. In a few years, I'll be free from the burdens of graduate school to write what I please. I'd very much like to write on Objectivism for those already familiar with Ayn Rand's fiction and philosophy -- at least part of the time. However, if that's like shouting into a black hole, then I may as well concentrate my efforts upon more interested and appreciative audiences.

(In case anyone is wondering, I have not revealed any confidental information in this post.)

IMMIGRATION REFORM

What's going on with the debate on immigration reform? Could it be true that the majority of Americans want closed borders? If this is really the case, I hope the situation will change in the near future. Both Pat Buchanan and "Gustav W. Bush" have ancestors from foreign countries...

I recommend you to read Harry Binswanger's white paper (Immigration Quotas vs. Individual Rights: The Moral and Practical Case for Open Immigration) on open immigration.

Related: My posts, IMMIGRATION, GREEN CARD LOTTERY, THE BUSINESS ASPECT OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, FORBES ON IMMIGRATION and THE LAND OF OPPORTUNITY.

Here is an excerpt from Nicholas Provenzo's post, Welcome to the Second Carnival of the Objectivists!

American-in-spirit Martin Lindeskog recalls his one-man counter protest of the ant-war left in Sweden. Would someone please get this man a green card and bring him to America so he doesn't have to suffer these imbeciles any more. (Rule of Reason, 04/07/06.)

[Editor's note to Nicholas Provenzo: Thank you! :)]

Mucho Caliente


Tag: immigration.

Googling for Proles

Q&A with an Islamist

Last week, I blogged about the UK-based "Muslim Action Committee's" attempt to shut down the NYU Objectivist club's panel discussion on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. Over the weekend, Ismaeel-Haneef Hijazi, one of the group's spokesmen visited CAC's website and sent us some questions that he wants the Center to answer.

Please help us to understand your concept of free speech by answering our questions[.] [D]o u (sic) believe freedom of speech includes the following:

1) The right to insult the Queen?
2) The right to divulge state secrets?
3) The right to incite racial hatred?
4) The right to incite murder?
5) The right to incite religious hatred?
6) The right to glorify terror?
7) The right to slander people?
8) The right to promote communism?
9) The right to question the official record of the holocaust?
10) The right to demonise (sic) religious/ethic communities

After searching his name on the Internet, I found that Hijazi apparently presents his laundry list of questions to many of his opponents, seemingly to show that the right to free speech is not absolute and he and his fellow Muslims are just in their attempts to forbid the public display of images that blaspheme the prophet Muhammad.

Of course, such a position is wicked. The right to free speech is absolute. Life requires the mind and ideas are the currency of one's mind; no government may come between a man and his ideas. Yet by his questions, Hijazi seemingly seeks to conflate the expression of an idea with the initiation of force. That's why he puts "divulge[ing] state secrets," "slander" and "incit[ing] religious hatred" on his list of questions, even though each are plainly very different things.

For example, if one divulges state secrets, such as when the notorious spy John Walker gave Soviet agents the keys to decrypt US military codes in the 1970s and '80s, one is hampering the government's ability to carry out its mission of protecting its citizens. If one slanders another individual, one is telling deliberate lies for the purpose of impugning another's reputation. Both are acts of force against the undeserving.

Yet if one "incite[s] religious hatred" (as Hijazi puts his question) because one holds religion to be a philosophically bankrupt means of defining one's place in the universe and one's moral code for living, how has one harmed the rights of the religious? The religious are still free to practice their faith without any fear of anyone else. But by Hijazi and his Muslim Action Committee's reasoning, no one should be free to impugn the mystical beliefs of others.

Hijazi and his committee ignore that free debate over the validity of religion and the conduct of its adherents is of vital importance to one's life. If a person is not free to assess religion's impact upon their life and the larger culture for the mere reason that some people's sacred cows are tipped in the process, the religious are literally forcing their creed upon all our minds. The religious, nor anyone else has a right to coerce anyone's mind, yet at root, this is what the Islamists (and by definition, all mystical creeds) seek.

So now we can expose Hijazi's gimmick for what it is: an attempt to hide his ultimate aim by equating mere criticism of Islam with the use of actual force against its adherents. No one is the US has been convicted of "glorying terror" but they have been convicted of using terror to destroy lives and advance their benighted cause. No one has been convicted of "promot[ing] communism" although communists have been convicted for attempting to overthrow the government and instill a communist dictatorship. No one has been convicted for "incit[ing] racial hatred" but there have been convictions for lynching and cross-burning on private property. One can freely "insult the Queen," yet no one is free to kill her or make believe their choice of religions. And one can deny the Holocaust, but they do not have the right to inflict a new one upon anyone.

The difference in each of these comparisons is the difference between advocating an idea and the initiation of force-a distinction Hijazi and his Muslim Action Committee seeks to dissolve.

Will the West let Islamists like Hijazi succeed? I am deeply concerned for the future. No American politician has made a statement unequivocally defending free speech in the face of the Mohammad cartoon controversy. This failure to defend our fundamental rights is unacceptable, and if our government won't take a stand, we must.

Accordingly, it is my intention to give a speech showing the Mohammad cartoons and discussing their larger implications at a Washington, DC-area university within the next 30 days. If freedom of speech falls, America falls, and none of us can afford to allow that to happen.

More to follow on my activism ideas in the next day or two.

Singing the Triangle Shirtwaist song

In an op-ed in the Statesman Journal, Tom Chamberlain, the president of the Oregon AFL-CIO uses the 1911 Triangle shirt factory fire to claim we owe our lives to unions and government regulations. Here's the setup:

It has become fashionable in certain circles to say that unions and government regulations are unnecessary nuisances, sand in the gears of the economy. The invisible hand of capitalism would take care of all our problems, if we would just let it alone.

It's a free country, and the talking heads on Fox News have a right to say whatever they like. But this week, if they have any sense of decency, they should be silent. For Saturday is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Sept. 11, 2001, was not the first time that New Yorkers watched in horror as people jumped to certain death to avoid a more terrible death by fire. On March 25, 1911, dozens of workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory made the same grim choice. They were blouse-makers ("shirtwaist" was an early term for "blouse") -- mostly women, mostly recent immigrants. They worked six days a week, for as little as $7 a week. They worked in a crowded tinderbox of flammable material. And 146 of them died that day.

They died because there was no sprinkler system. They died because the flimsy fire escape quickly collapsed. They died because only some of them were able to make it through the single open door before it was blocked by fire -- and the other door, which could have led to safety, had been locked by the owners. The owners said that they had lost perhaps $25(!) worth of company property to employee theft, so they needed to watch all the employees leave, through a single door.

Here's the cashing-in:

There was a law against locking employees in -- but it wasn't enforced. They had a union -- but no law required the employers to recognize and negotiate with that union on issues such as wages, hours and safety.

But the Triangle tragedy shocked the conscience of New York and of the nation. And as David Van Drehle writes in his excellent book, "Triangle: The Fire that Changed America," New York's corrupt Tammany Hall political machine decided that there had to be some response to the public outrage. The New York legislature passed laws requiring fireproof stairways, functional fire escapes, open doors that swing outward, sprinkler systems and fire drills. And, having been forced to face the conditions in which factory workers labored, they went beyond safety to pass a bill limiting the work week to 54 hours.

Years later, politicians who served in that same New York legislature expanded on those ideas at the national level. Robert Wagner, as a United States senator, passed the Wagner Act, requiring employers to recognize unions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- whose Labor secretary, Frances Perkins, had witnessed the Triangle fire -- passed minimum-wage and maximum-hour legislation.

We take all of these things -- safety laws, labor laws -- for granted today. But they were not given us by the invisible hand. They were the product of hard work and much suffering.

Consider for a moment how Chamberlain joins his progressive ancestors in hijacking an appalling tragedy to smear the free market and justify government regulation.

Chamberlain argues that Triangle's owners were so obsessed about loss that they locked all the doors of their factory in order to secure it from theft, but the loss caused by the fire and the death of 146 employees--well, that's just another day at the office. Chamberlain argues that the Triangle refused to negotiate with its worker's union, yet he fails to mention the massive 1909 union strike that first began at the Triangle factory and that came to include 20,000 garment workers never made workplace safety an issue, or that the union itself elected to drop the issue of worker representation. If the "invisible hand" failed to compel Triangle's owners to protect for fire, it also failed to compel the worker's union to make a point of it.

Might the Triangle fire have more to do with the simple fact that an industrial accident on the scale of such a disaster had never occurred before? After all, the Triangle factory was state of the art for its era, with its high ceilings, well-lit workspace, modern plumbing and electric-powered machinery. In fact, the building itself was repaired and is still in use today as part of the campus of New York University.

I propose a different interpretation of the Triangle disaster. The Triangle fire was one of the first of a new breed of accidents--the industrial accident--and defending against it required a new type of thinking to protect both lives and investments. Chamberlain argues that subsequent safety laws protect workers, but he forgets that at best these laws create minimum standards and provide a false sense of security. It is businessmen themselves and the engineers they employ--specifically safety engineers--that helped to create the safe workspaces we enjoy today.

Why? Because safety is in one's self-interest. By failing to foresee that textiles are flammable and that a basic respect for their investment and the lives of their employees demanded they take certain steps to mitigate the risk of fire, Triangle's owners allowed their factory to be destroyed and exposed themselves to both criminal and civil liability from their negligence. How many other businessmen got the message after the Triangle fire and took their own steps to protect themselves and their employees from fire?

We'll probably never know, because the Triangle case has been hijacked by the left as means to justify everything from the minimum wage to the number of hours an employee may work in a week, as Chamberlain plainly evidences in his op-ed.

Yet Chamberlain forgets that if the government can miracle a zero-harm environment, why have two space shuttles been destroyed under its management? Why have medicines that have been approved by the FDA later been recalled while effective medicines sit stalled in the FDA's regulatory queue? Why does Chamberlain seem to endow government regulators with omniscience, yet fail to recognize the incentive a businessman has to protect his own investment, or the incentive an employee has to quit an unsafe workplace and find another job?

Why? Because union leaders like Chamberlain want power--and not the power one gets by economic negotiation, but the power one gets from political pull. That's why, almost 100 years after the fact, this union boss still sings the Triangle song.

Anaheim, Shmanaheim!

Privatize the WTC Site

A New York Times op-ed I encountered today starts out like this ...

The effort to rebuild the World Trade Center site continues to go nowhere. The planned memorial lacks start-up money and faces public indifference. Those behind the proposed museum have not shown that they have any clear idea how to represent the memory of a day of murder, pain and loss. And most important, there is no real government-business-real estate coalition supporting the commercial plans of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease.

We've reached a stage where the state and local government, so often the causes of delay, are the only players with the ability to move things forward. It is time for them to invoke their trump card: the takings clause of the United States Constitution. [bold added]

Needless to say, my immediate reaction was: "The hell we should use the takings clause!"

The op-ed continues meandering drunkenly through the mixed-economy quagmire that is the debate over what to do with the World Trade Center site, now vacant going on five years. Until, that is, the end, when it names, without knowing it, one of the major causes of the inordinate delay.

Four decades ago, the 12 blocks that form the trade center site were taken through eminent domain from a group of electronics merchants and other small-business owners. That was David Rockefeller's idea, and his brother Gov. Nelson Rockefeller made it happen. Now it is up to Governor Pataki to give Mr. Bloomberg a similar opportunity. Ground zero does not belong to the Port Authority or the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation or Larry Silverstein. It is our property. We should get it back. [bold added]

A query at Jeeves reveals that the current "owner" of the site is the Port Authority, and that Larry Silverstein holds a 99-year lease on the land worth $3.2 billion.

No wonder things are such a mess! And since it's public property, every Tom, Dick, and Harry -- meaning every special interest group with lots of cash and every busybody with too much time on his hands -- gets to have a say in what happens at the WTC site. This is how a multiculturalist tribute to our enemies nearly got built -- by people with no stake in the property -- on the grave site of our countrymen in the first place! And this is, in part, why office space at least equal to what was lost isn't already under construction now.

The other part of why the towers haven't been built back taller than ever is because of the uncertainty caused by our President's halting and tentative prosecution of the current war. Are we safe enough to rebuild yet? It is the task of our government to protect the lives and rights of American citizens. It will not do this by not fighting the Islamists, or by paying to rebuild the site with confiscated money (which would be better spent on our defense), or by continuing to hold the land.

The solution to this dilemma involves no "government-business-real estate coalition". It involves our government doing what it is supposed to do and butting out of what it isn't supposed to do. You, Uncle Sam, guard the perimeter, and let the Larry Silversteins and Donald Trumps decide what to do with the billion-dollar commercial real estate. They want to make money, so I'm sure that things won't be stalled for long. Just get out of their way.

Rather than being seized by the government -- again -- the World Trade Center site should be auctioned off to the highest bidder. It should become private property whose owner can do with it as he sees fit. If George Soros buys it, let him try to lease out whatever office space he builds there after desecrating the site with whatever "culture complex" he decides to build. (He would make it clear once and for all where the left stands in the war, inadvertently doing us patriots a great service. And there would be no lasting damage because the site would still be private property when he sells or dies.) If someone decent wins the auction, he won't have to listen to all the multiculturalists and other Islamofascist sympathizers before he rebuilds. And he would have every incentive to build goodwill by accepting input from the families of the victims for a proper memorial.

I fully agree with Michael Hurd when he, too calls for privatization of the site in a very good article at Capitalism Magazine.

[L]eave it to the private sector to rebuild, and keep the government (and advocates of public ownership ...) out of it. The people who died in the Towers were engaged in productive work -- not for any particular cause other than the advancement of their own lives. Whatever their ideological views might have been, they were capitalists in practice.

And I fully agree with Diane Duarte that the proper way to memorialize the dead would be for life to return to the site in the form of commercial development.

A monument to productive ability would celebrate the lives these people lived, not the way they died. It would be a tribute to them, not to the despicable thugs who killed them.

What would be the form of a memorial to productive ability? Certainly not chunks of stone, a hole in the ground, or a pile of dirt. The most likely form would be a sculpture incorporating one or more human figures, and the only appropriate setting for such a sculpture would be within a new business complex.

The quickest way to achieve this end is not, as Dennis Smith proposes, the same mixed-economy shenanigans as usual -- you know, that got us into this predicament in the first place. It is a return to the much freer America we used to be.

It is not a plot of land we need to "take back", but our respect for life, liberty, and property. When we do that, the rebuilding will take care of itself.

-- CAV

Domestic Security Secures our Demise

by Felipe Sediles

In recent months, Congress has raised concerns over the president's use of warrantless wiretaps and his approval of a proposed take-over of major U.S. sea ports by a U.A.E.-owned company. In the case of warrantless wiretaps, the president is criticized for the excessive use of power. In the case of his permissive handling of the ports deal, the president is criticized for the failure to use power.

The president's critics never seem to be satisfied, yet they never identify a principle that should guide his use of power: Should his powers to protect our security be open-ended, or should they be restricted? If restricted, restricted by what principle? This question needs to be answered to settle any of the ongoing post-9/11 debates about the proper use of the homeland security department, the Patriot Act, immigration restrictions, border security, airport security, cockpit security, intelligence reform, etc.

Furthermore, while it is important to define the president's proper powers concerning domestic security, it is even more important to realize that domestic security measures are not our best means of securing our freedom against foreign terrorists. What is needed is a foreign policy that aggressively pursues them and their state-sponsors.

In practice, the strategy of securing our freedom with domestic security has led to an unprecedented growth in the state's policing powers. The president enjoys the freedom to grant warrantless wiretaps, to use secret military tribunals with lower standards of proof to try suspects of his own choosing, to indefinitely detain immigrants, and to limit intelligence briefings to Congress by exercising greater secrecy. With the recent renewal of the Patriot Act, law enforcement agencies will continue to enjoy the freedom to conduct espionage with impunity and to conduct secret, essentially warrantless records searches, physical searches, among many other things.

The president often justifies his powers by citing the Congressional authorization given to him on September 18th, 2001 authorizing the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." Furthermore, the Patriot Act authorizes the FBI to engage in certain investigative activities provided that they are "for purposes of protecting against terrorism."

Many have raised concerns over the threat these new law-enforcement powers pose to the very freedom they are intended to secure. Some of these concerns are not legitimate, but some are. The legitimate concerns demonstrate that, in the long-run, no amount of police-state powers will prove adequate for preserving our freedom.

Some fear that these police-state powers unjustifiably infringe on our civil liberties. Posing as defenders of freedom, these critics confound civil liberties with fundamental rights, demanding that civil liberties be preserved at all cost. But civil liberties are derivatives of fundamental rights--they are not fundamental themselves. Take trial by jury as an example. The principle underlying trial by jury is procedural: because man has a fundamental right to life and liberty, the state cannot punish him for a crime until objective evidence of his crime has been identified. This is because under normal, peacetime circumstances, trial by jury improves the chances that a suspect's fate will be reviewed by at least one objective observer. Under normal circumstances, high standards of evidence are required because it is worse to punish an innocent man that to fail to punish a guilty one.

In order for the state to be able to implement these procedures, it must have the time to find people that are able to be jurists, the time to collect high levels of evidence, the time to present every shred of relevant evidence in trial, etc. In a time of war, however, such extensive procedures become a threat to the freedom they are meant to uphold in a time of peace. When the loss of a single second of time could result in the loss of many lives, governmental actions must be expedited, for the sake of protecting the fundamental rights to life and liberty that civil rights are designed to protect. This same consideration justified warrantless searches and wiretaps, secret trials, and any number of emergency powers--provided that these powers are temporary and their purpose is clearly defined.

But are the president's current powers temporary or delimited to a clearly defined purpose? The answer is "no," and it is here that critics of the president raise a legitimate concern.

The president's powers allegedly deriving from the September 18th, 2001 resolution exist "in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States." It does not specify which terrorists must be stopped or how many of them must be stopped until their threat has been removed with satisfaction. In essence, it leaves open the possibility of an open-ended, ongoing "War on Terrorism," motivated by little more than the potential for attacks. Without a clear objective, the "War on Terrorism" will become permanent and the president's emergency powers will become dictatorial.

Of more pressing concern, however, is that any genuine threat these new police-state powers pose to our freedom pales in comparison to the danger of relying on such powers for the preservation of our freedom from foreign threats.

Consider what the guaranteed long-term success of such a policy requires. In a world where there are major foreign governments such as those of Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, supporting those who are plotting to circumvent these measures (to say nothing of Iran's attempt to acquire nuclear weapons), America is simply too big and too free for police-state powers to prevent every possible attack. The state would have to have everyone wiretapped, check every single container that enters our ports, detain every single person at our borders, have cameras on every street corner, etc. The continuance of this policy, while foreign threats are allowed to exist, will most certainly fail to prevent all future attacks.

In order to end the threat of future attacks and to delimit the life and scope of new police-state powers, we must therefore demand a war declaration, not further open-ended law-enforcement measures. Rather than worrying about how and when we place individual terrorists on trial, Congress must place regimes who support terrorists "on trial," declare them to be enemies of the United States, and demand their unconditional surrender as the objective of war. At this point the proceedings would be a mere formality: we are already in a de facto state of war with multiple regimes, so Congress has the duty to make it a speedy trial.

If we declare war, some emergency domestic security measures will be required. But we will have no legitimate reason to fear them, as long as they do not violate fundamental rights and as long as we know when the emergency will come to an end. Congressional critics of the president should realize that our Constitution gives them the power to rein in the president through a war declaration. Thus, if we are to protect our liberty from an unlimited, ever-encroaching police-state--and from foreign enemies who would impose their own police state on us--nothing short of a clear, confident declaration of war will suffice.

The Transformation of "Jihad Jack" and John Walker Lindh

A person's switch from subjectivism to religious dogmatism is no paradox, because the two are an expression of the same basic philosophy.

By Christian Beenfeldt

Like the 2002 case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, the current case of Australian "Jihad Jack" Thomas--who was charged with being a terrorist "sleeper" agent, convicted of having received money from al-Qaeda and sentenced to five years imprisonment--raises the same question that baffled the world during the Lindh trial: How can a freewheeling Westerner morph into a fanatical Islamist?

Like Lindh, Thomas started out at what appears to be the opposite end of the spectrum from a hard-line religionist--he was a beer-loving punk rocker--and then, like Lindh, he deliberately sought out radical Islam, travelling to a far-away terrorist training camp where he embraced religious dogmatism and obtained instruction in suicide bomb tactics.

How is this transformation possible? The freewheeling, "anything goes" type and the religious dogmatist are of course both familiar in today's culture--and they are generally considered to be diametrically opposed. But are they really?

Consider the typical "progressive" leftist, with his non-judgmental relativism. He is the embodiment of subjectivism: he holds that there are no absolute principles, that truth is "in the eye of the beholder," and that "what's right for you might not be right for me." He is the exponent of the belief that nobody can have objective knowledge or objective grounds for evaluating another person's beliefs or actions. On the premise that moral values are merely subjective preferences, he feels that there is no factual basis for moral judgment.

Thomas betrayed a residue of this sentiment when he stated that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." And Lindh's Marin County parents certainly typified this philosophy with their non-judgmental attitude towards his early affinity for nasty rap music and his later conversion to radical Islam.

The religious dogmatist, on the other hand, dismisses the "truth is relative" chorus of the subjectivists and has no qualms about making moral judgments. His philosophy, he says, espouses the unquestionable truth and advocates absolute standards of right and wrong.

It is only on the surface, however, that the dogmatist is opposed to the subjectivist; at root, the two share a fundamental similarity. In denying that there are any objective standards by which to choose how to think or act, the subjectivist makes clear that his choices are ruled by blind feelings. This is precisely also the basic policy of the religious dogmatist.

There are an infinite number of opposing religious sects. How does the religionist decide which faith to embrace, which revelations to follow and which authority to obey? Does he scientifically gather the evidence, carefully weigh it, and then adopt the conclusion to which reason and logic point? Obviously not. He feels it. He feels that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, astrology or whatever, is the right faith for him.

As Thomas himself describes his conversion to Islam, after agreeing to fast for the month of Ramadan: "I just felt a link from all the prophets of Adam and Noah and Moses and Abraham and all the prophets coming from one God and Confucius and Buddha and all the people being messengers and all my whole world came together." He continued to follow his feelings to radical Islam, to terrorist training, and to the adoption of "Jihad" as his first name.

So while the religionist may claim to uphold absolute truths, his beliefs are as arbitrary and baseless as those of the subjectivist. Thus, the paradoxical conversions of Jack Thomas and Walker Lindh--from subjectivist to religious dogmatist--aren't so paradoxical after all; in both cases, the switch was merely from one form of emotionalism to another.

What neither the subjectivist nor the dogmatist can fathom is the need for an objective approach--a method of seeking truth, acquiring knowledge, and defining moral standards, not by indulgence in emotions, but by a process of reasoning based on factual evidence alone. In every issue and area of its life, a mind on this premise is moved not by arbitrary whims, but by logical arguments that are grounded in directly perceivable facts.

What is needed, then, to avoid raising the "Jihad Jacks" and "American Talibans" of the future, is for our culture to reject emotionalism in all of its varieties--whether in the form of anything-goes subjectivism or of emotion-driven faith in mystical dogmas--in favor of the rational alternative: objectivity.

Christian Beenfeldt, MA in philosophy, is a guest writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.

Pro-Test

Luka Yovetich sent me this NY Times article on Laurie Pycroft, a 16 year old geeky British blogger fighting animal rights terrorists with the help of some Oxford University undergraduates, under the banner of "Pro-Test."

The shift from geekiness began on Jan. 28, as Mr. Pycroft watched animal rights demonstrators in Oxford marching to protest the planned testing facility. He tucked in behind them chanting, "Build the lab!"

"They got quite hostile," he said. So he went to a stationery store and bought a large square of cardboard and a pen and wrote: "Support Progress. Build the Oxford Lab." When he started waving the sign on the street, someone compared him to excrement. Another person tore the sign apart, he said. He went home and shared his experience on his blog. The result was a new movement, called Pro-Test.

Young Mr. Pycroft's has since received more than his fair share of death threats. Here's a bit more about his views:

"I have always believed that humans should ethically and morally come above animals as far as science is concerned," he said. "I believe that if a human can be saved by animal research, all the evidence I have seen points to it being extremely useful."

That belief is not rooted in religion, although Mr. Pycroft recalled verses in the Book of Genesis that support his belief. "I'm strictly atheist," he said. "Reading the Bible is the strongest advertisement for atheism."
...
In his campaigning, Mr. Pycroft has drawn a "distinction between people who just disagree -- they have a full right to protest -- and the animal rights terrorists" who have threatened scientists and damaged buildings.

But the response from his adversaries has been remarkably personal -- ad hominem, as Mr. Pycroft likes to say, using the Latin phrase for an argument that attacks the speaker rather than the issue.

Best of all, he's making a difference:

John Stein, a professor of physiology at Oxford, told Pro-Test's first demonstration on Feb. 25: "This is a historic day. We are drawing a line in the sand." And Tipu Aziz, a prominent neurologist, told the Pro-Test rally, "We are seeing a return of reason."

The good doctors conducting medical testing to advance human knowledge need a whole lot more moral support than they're getting these days. Just think about it: Your life may someday depend upon medical testing done -- or not done.

Uncle Sam's Profiters

The editorial board of the McAllen Texas Monitor takes a stand against the so-called "eco-capitalists."

They are being hailed in some circles as "capitalists with a conscience" — as bold, visionary, see-beyond-the-horizon risk-takers, helping to finance a clean energy revolution that will wean the country from fossil fuel dependency.

But most of the those who are pumping money into the alternative energy sector — and investing heavily in ethanol, wind and solar power — are just shrewd people, who understand that it’s hard to go wrong when Uncle Sam is helping hedge your bets and guarantee a return on investment.

We’ve seen a spate of news stories breathlessly reporting the sudden craze for "green" investing. "Wall Street wakes up to find ethanol shedding Midwest roots and gaining hold as alternative fuel," was how The Baltimore Sun headlined one.

"Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently invested millions in it," the story began. "Morgan Stanley is a huge player. And scores of venture capitalists are starting to take a look as well. We’re talking corn, not cyberspace."

We’re not impressed. Ethanol manufacturers and wind and solar power providers are among the safest investments in the world right now, given the lengths government is going to to prop them up, and forcibly carve out a market niche for them, through mandates, subsidies and regulatory actions.

"The alternative fuels gold rush is being driven by continued instability in the Mideast, rising gas prices and a presidential appeal to reduce the nation’s addiction to oil," reports the Sun. Only later does the story acknowledge that "the (ethanol) industry’s growth trajectory is all but written into the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which requires the U.S. to use 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuels annually by 2012, or nearly double the amount of ethanol produced today." No wonder investors are putting their money behind what the story calls a "sure thing."

Real eco-capitalists exist. But no one should trumpet the wave of investing in ethanol production facilities, wind companies and makers of solar panels as a breakthrough. These investors aren’t being bold, but are playing it safe, understanding that Uncle Sam is standing ready to virtually ensure their return on investment. So please, let’s not make these investors into heroes.

Because they are not. "Eco-capitalists" is a misnomer--"eco-looters" and "pull-profiteers" would be a better description of this new incarnation of a very old idea.

'Footlose' (sort of) comes to life

Remember the 1984 Kevin Bacon film Footlose, the movie about the big-city kid in a small town who was forbidden from dancing like a white boy by the powers that be. Well, it seems a similar story has taken a big-city twist.

Shall we dance? In New York it depends on where we hear the music. A state judge on Monday dismissed a lawsuit that sought to force the city to allow private, social dancing in restaurants, clubs and bars.

State Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman found that the city's license requirements for cabarets--places that have food and drink and allow personal recreational dancing--are constitutional.

A group calling itself the Gotham West Coast Swing Club and several people said that because the city's cabaret law barred them from dancing with other people it unconstitutionally infringed on their right of free expression.

The plaintiffs also contended that the city's application of zoning laws was arbitrary and capricious and deprived them of due process. They said they should be allowed to dance in any bar or restaurant they wanted to.

The judge disagreed. He said dancing is not constitutionally protected expression and the city has the right to regulate circumstances under which eating and drinking places can let patrons dance. [AP]

It never ceases to amaze me the power that we have given our government to control the mundane. Must we really regulate swing dancers? Who's next, jitterbugers? Lindy hoppers? Are we going to permit our goverment to add a whole new dimension to the Lambada?

Smart Institutions, Foolish (Grand)stands

Borders' Capitulation Is a Victory for the Islamic Totalitarians

By David Holcberg:

In another victory for the Islamic totalitarians, Borders and Waldenbooks stores decided not to stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine, which contains the Danish cartoons of Muhammad.

The motive for their decision is clear. "For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority," Borders Group Inc. spokeswoman Beth Bingham said.

Borders' capitulation is a powerful reminder of the Islamist threat under which we live. It is also an ominous sign of a pervasive fear taking hold of our society: the fear that Muslims will lash out violently against those who criticize or ridicule Islam. Our right to free speech is under attack by our enemies and they are succeeding in silencing our writers, editors, publishers, artists and bookstores.

Our government must do everything in its power to make sure we are safe to exercise our right to speak, denounce and offend anyone, especially those who today seek to subjugate us to Islam and its taboos.

Advocating the extermination of the human race -just another day at an American university

You can't make this stuff up:

Dr. Eric R. Pianka, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Texas and lizard expert, gave as speech at the University of Texas in Arlington to the Texas Academy of Science in which he endorsed airborne Ebola as an efficient means for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population. Pianka received an enthusiastic and prolonged standing ovation. Later he received more applause from a banquet hall filled with more than 400 people when the president of the Texas Academy of Science presented him with a plaque naming him 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist.

I quote here an eyewitness account of the speech, but I suggest you read the whole thing:

.... Professor Pianka began his speech by explaining that the general public is not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell us....
One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, "What good are you?"
Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, "We're no better than bacteria!"
Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. ..He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.
Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number. ... War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

...AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs. After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, "We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that." When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

I live in Arlington, and judging by the glowing reviews of his students, I am rather worried that one of them might decide to implement his scheme. I can only hope that they will volunteer to be first in the extinction.

(Edit: a number of people have reported that the story is inaccurate - Dr Pianka does not advocate killing 90% of the planets population - he merely states that it would be a "good thing for the planet." Sorry - I didn't mean to give the impression that environmentalists are some kind of man-hating terrorists, trying to destroy industrial civilization.)

Scientists Shouldn't Waste Time on Medical Prayer Studies

By Dr. Yaron Brook:

The Harvard medical study showing that prayer has no effect on recovery from heart surgery is shocking," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "It is not shocking that prayer has no medical effects--what's shocking is that scientists at Harvard Medical School are wasting their time studying the medical effects of prayer.

Science is a method of gaining knowledge by systematically studying things that actually exist and have real effects. The notion that someone's health can be affected by the prayers or wishes of strangers is based on nothing but imagination and faith. Such blind belief represents the rejection of reason and science, and is not worthy of serious, rational consideration. What's next? A study of the medical effects of blowing out birthday candles?

Every minute these doctors spend conducting this sort of faith-based study is one minute less spent on reality-based research--research that actually has hope of leading to real medical cures.

Copyright © 2006 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Why It's Important To Agree On The Fundamentals

Every so often, folks who learn about the political positions of Objectivists and Libertarians will ask why Objectivists are so careful to distance themselves from Libertarians, despite the seeming similarity of the political views they advocate.

Objectivists respond that the political positions they advocate are grounded on an entire philosophical system (starting with metaphysics and epistemology, then working up to ethics and politics), whereas Libertarians in general start from an entirely incompatible philosophical base (or bases).

Hence, Objectivists will not gain any real benefit from an alliance with Libertarians, despite their apparent agreement in the derivative field of politics because of their profound disagreement on fundamental philosophy.

Although I've already discussed this issue at length in a different essay, I recently ran across a concrete non-political example of the same principle in action.

Yesterday at the medical conference I'm attending here in Hawaii, we discussed a case of a woman from a small village in Guatemala who had been suffering from rapidly worsening seizures. The superstitious villagers wanted to "make a hole in her head and let the evil out". Since she didn't especially relish that idea, she fled Guatemala and escaped to the US. The first thing she did after landing at the airport in New York City was to make her way to the NYU Medical Center. The hospital arranged some emergency funding for her case, and after a series of tests including a brain MRI scan, they found the source of a problem -- a certain type of benign brain tumor.

The neurosurgeons treated her appropriately and she has done well since.

Some might argue that the NYU neurosurgeons and the villagers agreed in their recommended course of action -- after all, both parties wanted to "make a hole in her head and let the evil out". But of course, this seeming agreement on the derivative issue is totally undercut by their radical disagreement in fundamentals, including their respective metaphysics and epistemology on the nature of seizures, health, human biology, and (ultimately) in the nature of the world.

Certainly, the NYU neurosurgeons had nothing to gain by working with the medicine man from the Guatemalan village.

And that's why it's important to agree on the fundamentals.

(As always, there are the usual interesting side issues on the merits of ad hoc alliances, etc., but I'll save those for a different time.)

Atheism

Austin Cline runs a blog entitled Agnosticism/Atheism. Austin kindly highlighted my notes on "The Purpose-Driven Life" by Rick Warren. It was a ten part series. I still get hits from Austin's site. Amazingly, a very high percentage of readers go through all ten parts. I thank you Austin. I also disagree with Austin. Recently he had some unkind things to say about Ayn Rand. Austin offended

Birth Control

"Of Living Death" from Ayn Rand: There is a widespread popular notion to the effect that the Catholic church's motive in opposing birth control is the desire to enlarge the Catholic population of the world. This may be superficially true of some people's motives, but it is not the full truth. If it were, the Catholic church would forbid the "rhythm method" along with all other forms of

Three on Immigration

Chicago Objectivist Society Announcements

Reminder: April 3rd, is the deadline for early registration for James Valliant's lectures on Ayn Rand.

For full details and to sign up visit:
http://www.chicagoobjectivists.org

The Distraction of Pettiness

The Practice of History

Over the past few years, as any reader of NoodleFood knows, I've grown increasingly (if not fanatically) interested in history. Right now, I'm still working my way through ancient Greece, mostly focusing on the history, literature, and philosophy produced in that era. For the moment though, I've had to set aside those readings, as well as those on 20th century communism, due to the demands of graduate school. Hopefully this summer, I'll be able to dive into the ten to fifteen books that I'd still like to read on communism, as well as some earlier Russian literature, that of Leo Tolstoy and Fodor Dostoyevsky in particular. (I'm actually listening to Anna Karenina now.) And once I finish my survey of ancient Greece, I'll move onto ancient Rome.

In the meantime, I'm taking Scott Powell's First History for Adults course. After four classes, I'm very impressed with his thoughtful and innovative approach to the teaching of history. So I have high hopes for the course as a whole.

Scott Powell's basic method of teaching history is in the form of a "causally integrated narrative." On that approach, history is a story of logically integrated facts. Since the basic purpose of studying history is to understand how the past changed into the present, facts are selected for that story based upon their impact upon the world.

Perhaps the closest I've seen to that approach in my readings of history is Tibor Szamuely, author of The Russian Tradition. He is a clear and engaging writer with a reasonably firm grasp of the way in which ideas move history. Toward the end of The Russian Tradition, in a chapter on "The Marxist-Populist Dialectic," he has a delightful passage on the proper practice of history:

The history of the spread of Marxist and the growth of the Marxist movement in Russia has been described with a wealth of detail in a number of excellent specialist studies. The full story requires no re-telling. The historian's difficulty here is caused, as so often happens, not by the dearth but by the over-abundance of historical material. History is not simply an agglomeration of data, and the historians task is not that of gathering as many facts on some given topic as he possibly can. The writing of history involves, above all, the art of selection. There is nothing invidious about this. 'The historian is necessarily selective,' as E. H. Carr pointed out in his 1961 McCaulay Lectures: every work of history, however limited the theme and comprehensive its treatment, is the protect of ineluctable selection. The historian alone must decide which of the mass of facts at his disposal merit inclusion in his story, and which (the vast majority) are to be discarded as insignificant. It is a question not of bias but of judgment.

The 'pre-history' of the Bolshevik Revolution offers relatively fewer problems in this respect than most other topics in modern history. The study of Russian Marxism has become a flourishing field of academic research for one reason only: because of its bearings upon 1917. Without the Russian revolution, these records would have remained to moulder untouched by human hand, never even achieving the status of historical facts. As with any historical experience, the growth of Russian Marxism was a multi-textured, complex process of intricate pattern. At the time it was impossible to foretell which line of development (if any) would emerge triumphant. The same considerations would apply, I imagine, to a study of the obscure doctrinal sects in the first-century Roman Palestine: apart from their role in the rise of Christianity they possess no intrinsic importance. Today we know which of the tortuous criss-crossing threats of Russian Marxism lead to the greatest revolution of our time. I therefore offer no apology for limiting my account to an analysis of that particular line of development.

(Please note that Dr. Szamuely is not saying that the Bolshevik Revolution was good in describing it as "the greatest revolution of our time." He's merely saying that it was important and momentous.)

At least in some general sense, a "causally integrated narrative" is the basic method of history advocated by Dr. Szamuely above -- and practiced in The Russian Tradition. Consequently, that book is required reading, along with East Minus West = Zero: Russia's Debt to the Western World, 862-1962, for anyone who wishes to understand why communism held Russia in a death-grip for so many decades, why Russia is slipping back into autocracy under Putin, and why business investment in Russia today is not even smart enough to be idiotic. Oh, and both books also explain why Ayn Rand hated Russia so very much -- and why she was right to do so.