Fleeting Freedom: The Indecent Assault on Broadcasters

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Don Watkins, former NoodleFoodler, recently published an excellent op-ed via the Ayn Rand Center on prohibitions on indecent speech. Here it is:

Fleeting Freedom: The Indecent Assault on Broadcasters

The fleeting expletive case before the Supreme Court is about more than broadcasters' ability to air dirty words--it's about whether "community standards" should be allowed to override free speech.

By Don Watkins

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments Nov. 4 in the so-called fleeting expletive case, Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, it's clear that much more hinges on its outcome than broadcasters' ability to air dirty words.

The FCC has had the power to fine broadcasters for "indecent" speech for decades. But following Janet Jackson's infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction in 2004, the government declared all-out war on indecency. Congress increased the maximum penalty per infraction tenfold, from $32,500 to $325,000; the FCC started issuing fines left and right; and Congressman James Sensenbrenner went so far as to recommend jail time for broadcasters who violated "indecency" guidelines. At the same time, the FCC began issuing fines for fleeting expletives. Suddenly a star's offhand comment on live TV could cost broadcasters hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In the midst of all this, one question never got answered: just what is "indecency"? The Supreme Court had defined it as speech that "depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities and organs in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards." But which Americans count (and don't count) as part of the community? Why are they king? And how are broadcasters to divine their supposedly shared standards? In response to these unanswerable questions, the FCC issued a hodgepodge of rulings in specific cases and told broadcasters, in effect, "You figure it out."

Multiple uses of expletives in Martin Scorsese's PBS documentary The Blues? Indecent, said the FCC. Multiple uses of those same expletives in the movie Saving Private Ryan? Not indecent. Suggestion of teenage sexual activity on CBS's Without a Trace? Indecent. Graphic discussion of teen sexual practices on Oprah? Not indecent. Bono's use of the "F-word" during the 2003 Golden Globe awards? Even the FCC wasn't sure about that one. Initially it said the word was not indecent, but later changed its mind and started handing out the fleeting expletive fines at issue in FCC v. Fox Television.

So what is a broadcaster to do? Engage in self-censorship, cutting any material that regulators might declare indecent.

Defenders of the war on indecency admit that the FCC's regulations are murky. But without such restrictions, they say, Americans will be helpless against the stream of offensive programming pumped into their homes: either we allow the government to wield arbitrary power over broadcasters, or we give broadcasters arbitrary power to subject us to filth.

What this argument ignores is that broadcasters' power is not arbitrary. They must earn their market by offering programming Americans choose to consume. We choose to buy a TV (or not). We choose to pay for cable (or not). We choose which channels we and our children watch. Broadcasters can't force us to watch offensive programming any more than an author can force us to read an offensive book.

This is the meaning of free speech: people have the right to say whatever they want, no matter how offensive--and we remain free to listen or not. We don't have to abide by the opinions, prejudices, and errors of our neighbors, but can judge for ourselves whether something is true or false, art or trash, insightful or indecent.

But once the government becomes the enforcer of "community standards," no speech is safe. How long until, say, the Bible Belt declares that the theory of evolution is offensive, corrupts young minds, undermines community values, and must be suppressed? This question is not academic. Bolstered by the indecency precedent, efforts are already underway to regulate "excessively violent" broadcasts.

And if the government can suppress speech "the community" allegedly deems offensive, then why can't it force broadcasters to engage in speech "the community" allegedly regards as good? In fact, it already does so: Univision was recently fined $24 million for failing to air a sufficient amount of educational children's programming. On the anti-indecency movement's premises, judging the value of programming is not the prerogative of broadcasters, who decide what to air, or viewers, who decide what to watch--it's the prerogative of "the community" (and its self-appointed spokesmen).

This is what is at stake in FCC v. Fox Television. The question is not whether fleeting expletives are indecent, an issue that individuals have a First Amendment right to decide for themselves. It's whether the Constitution grants government the power to trample on freedom of speech, using non-objective laws to dictate what we can say and hear on the airwaves. The Supreme Court should take this opportunity to respond with an emphatic "No!" Anything less would be indecent.

Don Watkins is a writer and research specialist at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."

The Anti-Mind Stench of myBO

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

If you're tired of having a full head of hair, mosey on over to this -- oh, how shall I refer to it? -- this youth mobilization page of the Barack Obama Campaign and watch the video. If there's anything more annoying than clueless, indoctrinated children sanctimoniously parroting bromides about "educating" their parents on politics, I don't know what that is.

But I am a little concerned that we'll find out soon enough if their Pied Piper has his way. Be that as it may, the kid threatening to withhold future help with text messaging from his grandparents if he doesn't get his way takes the cake, but I really had to gut it out to get that far.

This page, about what the Obama Campaign calls "The Talk", is worth taking a look at as an example of just how low Obama is willing to stoop to get elected, not to mention how little confidence he must have in the merits of his positions as seen by the eyes of well-educated adults with some life experience under their belts. It should tell you something that he has this much contempt for your opinion, and this much determination to get elected anyway.

(Having said that, one could just as well say the same thing about John McCain, given his contempt for freedom of speech.)

At the same time, the advice of the Obama Campaign on how children can help him get elected is actually rather clever. And there's more of that on yet another youth mobilization page, "Kids for Obama". The kid's kit practically invites ridicule by having children set up "myBO" pages. But I'm obviously mean-spirited for pointing that out. Maybe that's part of the point.

It also gives me pause to consider that this is likely yet another taste of how Obama intends to govern. There will be no debate, but we will be hounded day in and day out about how "important" his agenda is. And Obama will be manipulating the guilt-strings from afar, equating his left-wing agenda with what our kids (or the disadvantaged) need by means of the widespread acceptance of altruism in our culture.

It is amazing to me how quickly some people turn their rational minds off after the first hint that their considered disagreement might be selfish! Obama clearly knows this and intends to use it. Too bad that selfishness is virtuous. America will need lots of it to survive the next few years regardless of who wins the Presidency.

On that score, these little political reeducation ambushes remind me of the following passage from We the Living, in which Irina considers why the communists constantly call on ordinary people to attend political meeting after political meeting:

Do you know what I believe? I believe they're doing it deliberately. They don't want us to think. That's why we have to work as we do. And because there's still time left after we've worked all day and stood in a few lines, we have the social activities to attend, and then the newspapers. Do you know that I almost got fired from the Club, last week? I was asked about the new oil wells near Baku and I didn't know a damn thing about them. Why should I know about the oil wells near Baku if I want to earn my millet drawing rotten posters? Why do I have to memorize newspapers like poems? Sure, I need the kerosene for the Primus. But does it mean that in order to have kerosene in order to cook millet, I have to know the name of every stinking worker in every stinking well where the kerosene comes from? Two hours a day of reading news of state construction for fifteen minutes of cooking on the Primus? (313) [bold added]

Obama may or may not hope to reeducate America in the same way that the communists ran Russia, or, God forbid, that Bill Ayers' Weather Underground has discussed (HT: Andy Clarkson and HBL), but he shares the same fundamental contempt for rational debate. The only questions, should he be elected, will be whether he will follow the implications of his statist philosophy that far, and, if so, whether he thinks he can get away with it.

Those of us who don't need spine transplants will have to fight hard and constantly to keep our next President in check. This is true no matter who wins, but it is easier to grasp with Obama.

-- CAV

Abortion Is a Woman's Right

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Last week, I sent out the following op-ed on abortion -- particularly focusing on Colorado's Amendment 48 -- to the various Colorado papers:

Abortion Is a Woman's Right

Colorado voters face a stark moral choice in this election: vote yea or nay on Amendment 48. That ballot measure would grant fertilized eggs the legal standing of persons--including "inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law"--in the state constitution.

If fully implemented, almost all abortions would be outlawed in Colorado, including in cases of rape, incest, and fetal deformity. Any woman who terminated a pregnancy would be guilty of murder, subject to life in prison or the death penalty. To take the birth control pill, which might sometimes prevent the implantation of an embryo in the womb, would be a criminal act. Miscarriages might be investigated by zealous prosecutors.

Roe v. Wade would not necessarily protect women against these ominous legal controls. Rather, Amendment 48 might be used to challenge that landmark case--or to inspire a nationwide movement for a similar federal constitutional amendment.

Despite its draconian effects, this proposed amendment has gathered solid support from Colorado voters. A recent poll shows that 39% favor it, 50% oppose it, and 11% are undecided.

Why such strong support? Over the past two decades, the religious right has effectively waged a holy war on abortion. Abortion is the murder of an innocent human life, they say. It violates the God-given right to life of a "preborn child." It is part of a "culture of death." So most Americans regard abortion as morally wrong except when a pregnancy threatens the woman's mental or physical health.

Yet the religious right's attacks on abortion are completely and utterly wrong. They evade the true meaning of the biological facts of pregnancy.

Opponents of abortion claim that embryos and fetuses have the same right to life as babies because they are distinct, living human beings. Undoubtedly, an embryo or fetus is alive, not inert matter. It's also human--not canine or hippopotamus. Yet every distinct, living skin cell a person washes off in the shower also contains human DNA. A tumor is human tissue distinct from its host. The embryo or fetus is different: it might develop into a born baby. Yet the differences between an embryo or fetus and that born baby are vast.

In the early stages of pregnancy, the embryo has nothing in common with an infant except its DNA. Its form is similar to the embryos of other mammals; it cannot survive outside the womb; it lacks any kind of awareness. To call that clump of cells a "person" is sheer nonsense.

Even when more developed, the fetus is not a biologically separate entity capable of independent action, like a baby. It exists as part of the woman carrying it, wholly contained within and dependent on her. It goes where she goes, eats what she eats, and breathes what she breathes. It lives as she lives, as an extension of her body. It is not yet an individual human life; it is not yet a person.

That situation changes radically at birth. A baby lives a life of its own. Although still very needy, he maintains his own biological functions. He breathes his own air, digests his own food, and moves on his own. He interacts with other people as a creature in his own right, not merely as a part of a pregnant woman. His life must be protected as a matter of right.

So a woman has every right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy--for any reason. If an abortion will protect and further her own life and happiness, then she ought to pursue that option with a clear conscience.

Amendment 48 would obliterate the moral right of every pregnant woman to control her own body. It is based on sectarian religious dogma, not objective facts. Please vote "No" on 48.

Diana Hsieh is the co-author of "Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life: Why It Matters That a Fertilized Egg Is Not a Person," an issue paper available at http://www.seculargovernment.us.

I haven't checked the various papers to see where it has been published, but I do know that the Pagosa Daily Post published it on October 23rd. They then published a a lengthy reply on October 27th. (I won't reproduce it here; it's too long and too wrong.) On the 29th, they published a great letter in reply by Gideon Rich of Armchair Intellectual:

Van Horn Opinion Misses the Point
Gideon Reich

Steve Van Horn's rebuttal in the Post to Diana Hsieh's excellent article on abortion shows a complete lack of understanding of the one crucial concept in the abortion debate: Individual Rights. Far from being mythical supernatural endowments implanted at conception, or social conventions subject to popular vote, rights derive from a human being's nature as a rational being. His existence requires the free exercise of his rational faculty to sustain his own life.

A "right," as Ayn Rand pointed out, "is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context." Thus, the freedom of action that ought to be guaranteed to an individual is the freedom to think and act without interference from others in society for the achievement of his goals, as long as he respects the right of others do the same.

The very first requirement for such a freedom to apply is that the "individual" in question actually be a separate individual in a social context -- not a mere potential that is part of another actual individual. As Ms. Hsieh has eloquently shown, the unborn fetus, to say nothing of the embryo or zygote, has not met that requirement.

The pregnant woman, on the other hand, clearly has -- and has every moral right to act accordingly.

Thank you for writing such an excellent letter, Gideon!

Is the US adopting Islamic financial practices?

By noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Saudi cleric Abd Al-'Aziz Fawzan Al-Fawzan says so, according to an interview transcribed by MEMRI.

"America is Collapsing, According to the Same Scenario of the Russian Collapse"

Abd Al-'Aziz Fawzan Al-Fawzan: "A few years ago, the Socialist Communist system ended in a devastating collapse, and it was followed by the Soviet republics one after another. Russia gave up its competition against American hegemony, and the United States became the unipolar leader ruling the world.

"Now, Allah be praised, America is collapsing, according to the same scenario of the Russian collapse.

[...]

"This tremendous economic power, which is unparalleled in history, was bound to collapse one day because it is based on injustice.

[...]

"Will the West acknowledge the collapse of capitalism? I am convinced that they will not. We are used to their obstinacy and arrogance. They always turn the facts upside down...

Interviewer: "But they will have to admit..."

Abd Al-‘Aziz Fawzan Al-Fawzan: "Now they have begun to adopt the principles of Islamic economy – only they do not call it "Islamic." The prohibition on short selling, the prohibition on the expanding and the selling of debts – this is Islam!" [...] [Full interview here]

I think our Saudi cleric friend is on to something here. The prohibitions on certain market transactions do draw upon the history of faith-based bans on money-lending and the like. And while not explicitly religious, the ban on short selling is a stunning example of altruism in action (as well as a brazen assault on self-interest). I guess if America can't be an Islamic republic, it can be made to be as poor as one.

'GOV HOLDS HIS 'RAND' OUT IN $$ PLEA TO DC'

By noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Or so says the New York Post.

Invoking the novelist Ayn Rand, Gov. Paterson yesterday sounded a conservative message of tax cuts, business development, and fiscal restraint before Congress - even as he sought billions of federal dollars to help the state cope with its massive looming deficits.

. . . Paterson cited Rand, a libertarian icon, and her best-seller "The Fountainhead," noting the novel proclaimed that "our country, the greatest country in the world, was founded on the basis of individuals, where people were encouraged to adventure, not to be complacent; to be daring, not dormant; to prosper, not to plunder."

He went on to say that a failure to live by those principles, combined with a lack of transparency and governmental oversight, had "brought us to the point where our nation faces a downturn in its economy only rivaled by the Great Depression."

The aericle goes on to describe how Paterson then proceeded to ask for more federal money for New York.

I have to admit, I simply find it amusing that Ayn Rand's name got a mention in a New York Post headline. I don't know where Patterson is getting the idea that Rand advocated federal favors for the states, but hey, it's still a New York Post mention and as everybody knows, the Post is the world's greatest newspaper, ever. And there you have it.

End the FCC's War on Free Speech

By Don Watkins from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

End the FCC’s War on Free Speech
October 29, 2008

Washington, D.C.--On November 4 the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations. At issue is whether the FCC can declare “fleeting expletives” indecent and fine broadcasters for violations.

“The government should put an end to the non-objective ‘indecency’ laws that permit the FCC to dictate what Americans can say and hear on the airwaves,” said Don Watkins, a writer for the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

“The Supreme Court has defined ‘indecency’ as speech that ‘depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities and organs in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards.’ But which Americans count--and don’t count--as part of the community? Why are they king? And how are broadcasters to divine the community’s supposedly shared standards?

“As the history of the government’s anti-indecency regime has shown, these questions are unanswerable. The only way for broadcasters to play it safe is to engage in self-censorship, cutting any material regulators might declare indecent.

“And once the government becomes the enforcer of ‘community standards,’ no speech is safe. How long until the courts start rubber-stamping the Bible Belt’s efforts to suppress the theory of evolution on the grounds that it is offensive, corrupts young minds, and undermines community values?

“It’s time for the government to stop telling Americans what we can say and hear on the airwaves, and to protect our constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.”

### ### ###

Don Watkins and other Ayn Rand Center experts are available for interviews on this topic.

Contact: Larry Benson
E-mail: media@aynrandcenter.org
Phone: (949) 222-6550, ext. 213

For more information on Objectivism’s unique point of view, go to ARC’s Web site. The Ayn Rand Center promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

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William Blackstone (Part 1) - Laws come from Nature

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

William Blackstone (1723 - 80) was a eminent English jurist. In the introduction to his "Commentaries on the Laws of England", he briefly speaks of the philosophy underlying law. He appears to be influenced by John Locke. On reading his description of the philosophy of law, I imagine a man struggling toward the ideas later expressed in Rand's "The Objectivist Ethics" essay, but not getting there. Instead, he wanders back into conventional wisdom.

Here's a synopsis of these two pages.

Blackstone has a deist notion of God: He created the universe, and set things in motion; and, that's about it. This is not an interfering God. This is not a God who will change things to help us out. being perfect, He won't even change his own plans. To us humans, then, what is relevant is the will of this God as expressed in his design of the universe. Blackstone sums it up thus: "This will of his maker is called the law of nature". The best way to read the commentary is to keep that one statement in mind as the encapsulation of Blackstone's view. Whenever he speaks of God's will, he is talking about the laws of nature.

Blackstone traces natural law from inanimate objects, to animals, and then to the "noblest of all ... beings". Given the laws of nature, other laws are not arbitrary. Inanimate objects react within certain immutable laws of nature. Lower animals follow the laws of nature, too. They cannot think or choose in the way humans can. Yet, unlike inanimate objects, their actions are animated by an end: their own subsistence. " ..., such laws must be invariably obeyed, so long as the creature itself subsists, for its existence depends on that obedience." Reminds me of Rand identifying life as the end behind all goal-directed action.

I'll describe how Blackstone proceeds to humans, in another post. For now, here is the text that I have described above:

Introduction: Section 2

… when the Supreme being formed the universe, and created matter out of nothing, he impressed certain principles upon that matter, from which it can never depart, and without which it would cease to be. When he put that matter into motion, he established certain laws of motion, to which all movable bodies must conform, And, to descend from the greatest operation to the smallest, when a workman forms a clock, or other piece of mechanism, he establishes at his own pleasure certain arbitrary laws for its direction; as that the hand shall describe a certain space in a given time; to which law as long as the work conforms, so long it continues in perfection, and answers the end of its formation,

If we farther advance, from mere inactive matter to vegetable and animal life, we shall find them still governed by laws; more numerous indeed, but equally fixed and invariable. The whole progress of plants, from feed to the root, and from thence to the feed again; --- the method of animal nutrition, digestion, secretion, and other branches of vital economy; --- are not left to chance, or the will of the creature itself, but are performed in a wondrous involuntary manner, and guided by unerring rules laid down by the great author.

This then is the general signification of law, a rule of action dictated by some superior being; and in those creatures that have neither the power to think, nor the will, such laws must be invariably obeyed, so long as the creature itself subsists, for its existence depends on that obedience. But, laws, in their more confined sense, and in which it is our present business to consider them, denote the rules, not of action in general, but of human action of conduct: that is, the precepts by which man, the noblest of all sublunary beings, a creature endowed with both reason and freewill, is commanded to make use of those faculties in the general regulation of behavior.

Original text via Posner Memorial Collection (CMU). Audio-recording at Librivox.

Rush Limbaugh Tells Pro-Choice Republicans To F*** Off

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In his October 24, 2008 radio show, Rush Limbaugh essentially told Republicans who believe in abortion rights that they should leave the Republican Party:

Good Riddance, GOP Moderates

...We flushed 'em out. We found out they're not really Republicans and they're by no means conservatives, and now they're gone. Now the trick is to keep 'em out.

...The minute you say that conservatism includes people who are pro-choice, you've destroyed conservatism because conservatism stands for "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness." Without life, there is nothing else here, and if we're going to sit around indiscriminately deciding who lives and who dies based on our own convenience, that's not conservative. Individual liberty. The essence of innocence is a child in the womb who has no choice over what happens to it. Sorry. If we don't stand up for that person, if the government doesn't, then nobody will. And if we allow ourselves to get watered down by a bunch of people who are embarrassed over that position, they're not conservatives.

No problem, Rush. I've already sent the following message to numerous Republicans at the local, state, and national level:

I used to support the Republican Party because I believe in individual rights, free markets, a strong national defense, and the right to keep and bear arms.

However, the Republican Party alliance with the religious right on "social issues" like stem cell research, abortion and gay marriage has turned off many former supporters such as myself.

Americans have a right to practice their religion as a purely private matter, and I defend everyone's right to do so.

But the government should not force one group's religious views on everyone. Hence, I no longer have a home in any political party. To paraphrase a quote from Ronald Reagan, "I didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republican Party left me."

Given that Rush Limbaugh has just confirmed that they don't want members like me, I'm happy to oblige him.

If the Republican Party wants to become the party of the Religious Right, then they will lose big in 2008. And they will deserve to do so.

Update:An Objectivist friend has also contacted us privately to point out that in another show, Limbaugh spoke out to defend individual rights, but as part of a pro-McCain plea. As our friend notes (quoted with his permission):

And let's not forget that his impassioned defense of individual freedom (which I heard part of, and which by itself was quite good) was made in defense of voting for JOHN MCCAIN... you know, the guy who blames the financial crisis on greedy Wall Street, who dismisses those who pursue profit instead of "service," who thinks the First Amendment deserves scare quotes, who supports cap and trade, who opposes drilling for oil in Alaska, whose hero is Teddy Roosevelt, who chose religious nut-job and anti-intellectual populist Sarah Palin as his running mate, etc., etc., etc. What a sin it would be to elect that kind of nightmare in the name of *capitalism*!

If McCain and Limbaugh were the only "defenders" of individual rights against the likes of Obama, then our country would be in sorry shape. Fortunately, there are better defenders out there...

Fleeting Freedom: The Indecent Assault on Broadcasters

By Don Watkins from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Fleeting Freedom: The Indecent Assault on Broadcasters

The fleeting expletive case before the Supreme Court is about more than broadcasters’ ability to air dirty words--it’s about whether “community standards” should be allowed to override free speech.

By Don Watkins

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments Nov. 4 in the so-called fleeting expletive case, Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, it’s clear that much more hinges on its outcome than broadcasters’ ability to air dirty words.
  
The FCC has had the power to fine broadcasters for “indecent” speech for decades. But following Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction in 2004, the government declared all-out war on indecency. Congress increased the maximum penalty per infraction tenfold, from $32,500 to $325,000; the FCC started issuing fines left and right; and Congressman James Sensenbrenner went so far as to recommend jail time for broadcasters who violated “indecency” guidelines. At the same time, the FCC began issuing fines for fleeting expletives. Suddenly a star’s offhand comment on live TV could cost broadcasters hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  
In the midst of all this, one question never got answered: just what is “indecency”? The Supreme Court had defined it as speech that “depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities and organs in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards.” But which Americans count (and don’t count) as part of the community? Why are they king? And how are broadcasters to divine their supposedly shared standards? In response to these unanswerable questions, the FCC issued a hodgepodge of rulings in specific cases and told broadcasters, in effect, “You figure it out.”
  
Multiple uses of expletives in Martin Scorsese’s PBS documentary The Blues? Indecent, said the FCC. Multiple uses of those same expletives in the movie Saving Private Ryan? Not indecent. Suggestion of teenage sexual activity on CBS’s Without a Trace? Indecent. Graphic discussion of teen sexual practices on Oprah? Not indecent. Bono’s use of the “F-word” during the 2003 Golden Globe awards? Even the FCC wasn’t sure about that one. Initially it said the word was not indecent, but later changed its mind and started handing out the fleeting expletive fines at issue in FCC v. Fox Television.
  
So what is a broadcaster to do? Engage in self-censorship, cutting any material that regulators might declare indecent.
  
Defenders of the war on indecency admit that the FCC’s regulations are murky. But without such restrictions, they say, Americans will be helpless against the stream of offensive programming pumped into their homes: either we allow the government to wield arbitrary power over broadcasters, or we give broadcasters arbitrary power to subject us to filth.
  
What this argument ignores is that broadcasters’ power is not arbitrary. They must earn their market by offering programming Americans choose to consume. We choose to buy a TV (or not). We choose to pay for cable (or not). We choose which channels we and our children watch. Broadcasters can’t force us to watch offensive programming any more than an author can force us to read an offensive book.
  
This is the meaning of free speech: people have the right to say whatever they want, no matter how offensive--and we remain free to listen or not. We don’t have to abide by the opinions, prejudices, and errors of our neighbors, but can judge for ourselves whether something is true or false, art or trash, insightful or indecent.
  
But once the government becomes the enforcer of “community standards,” no speech is safe. How long until, say, the Bible Belt declares that the theory of evolution is offensive, corrupts young minds, undermines community values, and must be suppressed? This question is not academic. Bolstered by the indecency precedent, efforts are already underway to regulate “excessively violent” broadcasts.
  
And if the government can suppress speech “the community” allegedly deems offensive, then why can’t it force broadcasters to engage in speech “the community” allegedly regards as good? In fact, it already does so: Univision was recently fined $24 million for failing to air a sufficient amount of educational children’s programming. On the anti-indecency movement’s premises, judging the value of programming is not the prerogative of broadcasters, who decide what to air, or viewers, who decide what to watch--it’s the prerogative of “the community” (and its self-appointed spokesmen).
  
This is what is at stake in FCC v. Fox Television. The question is not whether fleeting expletives are indecent, an issue that individuals have a First Amendment right to decide for themselves. It’s whether the Constitution grants government the power to trample on freedom of speech, using non-objective laws to dictate what we can say and hear on the airwaves. The Supreme Court should take this opportunity to respond with an emphatic “No!” Anything less would be indecent.
  
Don Watkins is a writer and research specialist at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

 

Quick Roundup 374

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

Visualizing Bureaucracy

HBLer David Hayes recently went to the Law Library of the Library of Congress to do some research on the scope of government regulations -- with ruler and camera in hand:

The Code of Federal Regulation (abbreviated CFR) is the collection of regulations passed by Federal agencies in the United States.

...

Viewers of a John Stossel television program on the ABC broadcast network on October 17, 2008, saw Stossel demonstrate that the pages in a single title, when removed from the binding and then attached end to end, rolled out the whole length of a football field and then halfway back again. (Read story, view video) The present web page demonstrates just how much shelf space the regulations occupy when the pages are in their binding and on shelves.

The CFR is spread across ten shelves at the Library of Congress. ...

Be sure to stop by for photos and measurements. Hayes then tackles the United States Code, the laws actually passed by Congress.

All told, the USC of year 2000 occupies 73 inches of shelf lineage. ... When the laws of the United States were codified as the United States Code in 1925, all of the titles combined occupied a single volume.

The next time someone tries to pull a Greenspan, remember these pictures. We are a far cry from capitalism.

More on This from Reisman

In a lengthy post, economist George Reisman provides even more evidence that we do not live under capitalism. As a recent commenter pointed out, he has one of the best quotes regarding the Walter Duranty Alan Greenspan Media's coverage of the financial crisis:

It seems that so long as anyone manages to move or even breathe without being under the control of the government, laissez faire allegedly continues to exist, which serves to make necessary yet still more government controls.

Indeed.

A Nation of Obama, Not Laws?


A friend recently told me about this 2001 video (edited transcript) of Obama, a law professor, denigrating our Constitution for not prescribing "what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf."

Obama may soon be sworn to uphold the Constitution, but here he is -- through ignorance of the nature of individual rights or treachery -- decrying it as a "charter of negative liberties". Too bad that the only way for the government to help one man (aside from defending his individual rights) is to violate the individual rights -- that is, to harm -- another.

Meanwhile, Myrhaf gives us a preview of what life may be like under an Obama regime:

The most benevolent and revered One has been embarrassed recently by Joe the Plumber and the broadcast journalist Barbara West. Both people had the poor judgment to ask Obama or Biden tough questions. Now Joe the Plumber and Barbara West's husband are being investigated. This is what life under Obama will be -- anyone who does not toe the line will find himself subject to intimidation and character smears.

I would add only that past history has already shown us that his supporters had better hope it is convenient for him to pretend to be grateful.

-- CAV

Hosannas for Obama by The New York Times

By noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Granting that The New York Times is still the nation’s newspaper of record, in spite of its notorious left-liberal bias, its commitment to fabricating news when not reporting much news fit to print, and its abandonment of all pretence of objective journalism, it would be fair to claim that it speaks for presidential candidate Barack Obama, for the Democrats, for most Republicans, and for every collectivist and altruist who ever wished he was in charge of “running” the country so that he could pilot it in his own preferred direction.

For decades the paper has served as the unofficial house organ of Big Brother, vetting and approving in the best “democratic” tradition and with few reservations every federal program that answered the needs and demands of virtually every parasitical group that has voiced them. On October 24 it endorsed Obama and explicated the reasons why the South Side Chicago Messiah should govern the nation. What follows are rebuttals to some of the paper’s main editorial assertions, together with an explanation of each as a form of line-item veto:

 “The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership.” True, the U.S. is battered and drifting, but why is it battered and in which direction has it been drifting, and for how long has it been in that condition? The absence of a competent captain can be arguably plotted as far back as JFK and can include him and every president since him, including Bill Clinton and the two Bushes. The direction has been towards fascism, the “f” word no one dares let escape from his lips or onto the front or editorial page lest it send the electorate into a panic or at least alert its more discerning members to the means and ends of proposed policies (modern journalists consistently exercising the rule of thumb that if one refuses to identify a thing, it can’t exist or isn’t real). George W. Bush is merely the latest anti-intellectual, morally rudderless captain, one who has charted the course of his ship of state, not by calculating longitude and latitude by the position of the stars, but rather by consulting his political horoscope, a ghost, and a popularity poll.

 “After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.” Grueling? One supposes it must be grueling, flying around the country on someone else‘s dime and going hoarse repeating the same banalities to crowds of awestruck, dumbed-down Americans whom one is certain he secretly despises. Ugly? The campaign has been not so much ugly as enervating in the dishonesty of all the candidates and in the absence of any discussion of fundamental political and moral issues. And, as far as Senator Obama having proven that he is the right choice, that is because the Times agrees with his plans to reinvent America as a European-style welfare state, even though Obama’s rhetoric is deceptively vacuous -- deceptively, because Obama is a master of Orwellian double-speak. Ergo, he is the right choice.

 “Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong.” And the Times has apparently succumbed to that urge. The paper accuses McCain of “running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism.” Here the paper confesses that it is the one-eyed man leading the halt and the blind, because Obama’s campaign has been nothing but a theme of partisan division (those damned Republicans will just give you four more years of Bush!), class warfare (soak the rich, or anyone making more than $250,000 a year), and racism (I am posing as “black” even though I’m about 90% “Arab” or more or less Semite).

 John McCain, on the other hand, cannot be credibly accused of running an “ugly” campaign, which instead has been meek, mild and wall-flowerish. McCain has stubbornly refused to hammer Obama with the facts of his sordid record of service to the worst of the masses before he entered the Illinois senate and after that. If his advisors and speech writers had any imagination, McCain would have at some point said something like, “Senator Obama is William Ayers’ vengeance on a country they both hate and wish to destroy through ‘change.’ Barack Obama in the White House would be more destructive than any bomb assembled by Ayers and his fellow terrorists years ago.”

 McCain has not once insinuated that he actually shares Obama’s political philosophy, that America, not Washington, is in need of change, and that the best vehicle of change is Washington. He and Obama view themselves as modern versions of Plato’s guardians, ready to inform the ignorant minions below of the best course of action and the best direction to take, not as individuals, but en masse. McCain cannot hurl stones at Obama’s glass house in respect to corruption, being beholden to special interests, and his own brand of national socialism without inviting a barrage of stones hurled in reply. If the Times had any perceptive editors imbued with a smidgen of honesty, the paper would have pointed this out a year ago and endorsed neither man.

 However, the Times has an odd notion of what is “ugly.” “Ugly,” to the paper, is naming issues and engaging in ideological dispute. The few times McCain has ventured to broach Obama’s Marxist, socialist background, including Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, the Weatherman terrorist, and his association with ACORN and un-probed connections with some Islamists, he has been slapped down by the news media, and has backed off. If “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher had not spoken back to Obama outside Toledo, Ohio and questioned the meaning of his rhetoric, and if Obama had not committed the revealing gaffe of replying to Joe that he wants to “spread the wealth,” McCain would have had little else to say for the balance of the campaign. By the criteria of the Times, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and most of the Founders engaged in “ugly” campaigns for liberty and against tyranny.

 “The American financial system is the victim of decades of Republican deregulatory and anti-tax policies.” No, it is a victim of regulatory and tax policies proposed, endorsed, and supported by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades -- nay, for nearly a century. The trouble began with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 with the power to “manage,” “fine tune,” and manipulate the economy according to the crisis of the moment, in conjunction with Treasury Department policies and the eclectic agenda of whoever occupied the White House or sat in Congress.

 “Both candidates talk about repairing America’s image in the world. But it seems clear to us that Mr. Obama is far more likely to do that -- and not just because the first black president would present a new face to the world…Mr. Obama wants to reform the United Nations, while Mr. McCain wants to create a new entity, the League of Democracies -- a move that would incite even fiercer anti-American furies around the world.” Like a high school ingénue, the Times obviously is concerned about whether or not the world likes America. There was a time when most of the world respected it, if not from admiration, then from a knowledge that America was not a country to be toyed with. That is not what the Times means. The Times means that America should aspire to be just another one of the guys, a socialist paradise that cares for its citizens and entertains no presumption of superiority because it is still freer and better off than other countries.

 It would be interesting to know how Obama would “reform” a club of tyrants, looters, medieval monarchies, dictatorships, slave states, and ninety-pound collectivist weaklings, when they are all living off the largesse of American productivity and tax revenues and so see no need for reform. The United Nations can be best reformed by America leaving it and evicting it from American soil to headquarter in friendlier climes, but doubtless Obama would simply offer it more money in exchange for more smiles. McCain’s League of Democracies idea is equally harebrained. Apparently neither he nor the Times has any acquaintance with the League of Nations and just how efficacious it was in putting the cuffs on Hitler, Mussolini, and other tyrants.

 “The next president will have the chance to appoint one or more justices to a Supreme Court that is on the brink of being dominated by a radical right wing. Mr. Obama may appoint less liberal judges than some of his followers might like, but Mr. McCain is certain to pick rigid ideologues.” The Times, of course, does not define what it means by a “radical right wing,” but implies that such a movement is scary and undesirable. It has eluded the paper’s editors all these decades that there is nothing “radical” about the right wing; it is religious and traditionalist, on a par with Ralph Kramden’s Raccoon Lodge or Groucho Marx’s Knights of Pythia. And, what are “liberal” judges if not left wing, and very rigid in their own ideology?

 “Under Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the justice system and the separation of powers have come under relentless attack. Mr. Bush chose to exploit the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, the moment in which he looked like the president of a unified nation, to try to place himself above the law.” This is all true, except that the “tragedy” of Sept. 11 was a declaration of war by Islamists, which Mr. Bush admitted but did nothing about except to commit the country’s blood and treasure to spreading “democracy” in places that were already practicing it in theocratic and secular tyrannies, and in the meantime laying the groundwork for a thorough-going police state in this country.

 But, to the Times, President Bush placing himself above the law somehow differs morally from Mr. Obama wishing to place himself above the law. It is not known what McCain thinks of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, except that he believes in violating the freedom of speech, but Obama has stated in public that he regrets that the Founders placed limitations on government power, and that these limitations are a fundamental flaw. Obama’s campaign has telegraphed how his administration would deal with any newspaper or radio station that questions his character, record, affiliations, or intentions. For the time being that action is limited to harassment, intimidation, and black-listing. With the cooperation of a Democratic Congress, Obama would employ not only a revived Fairness Doctrine, but other legislative and extra-legislative means as well, to silence free speech and make virtually every political utterance a “hate crime.“

 For the Times to express concern about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is laughable, since the paper would applaud their being finally torn up and the pieces tossed into its notion of the dust bin of history, and replaced with an Obama-style “social contract,” which would be indistinguishable from a McCain one.

 “This country needs sensible leadership, compassionate leadership, honest leadership, and strong leadership. Barack Obama has shown that he has all those qualities.” Well, John McCain has also shown that he has them. Woe to anyone who states that he doesn’t want leadership, but to be left alone to live his own life. The Times does not go into much detail -- just as neither Obama nor McCain has dared go into much detail, but they are on the same path -- about where that leadership would lead the country. But all indications, and all evidence, comprehended by cool observation not swayed by raw emotion but by a rigorous fealty to facts, make it certain that it would be to a place the Times would too late disapprove of: censorship and totalitarianism.

But perhaps the Times would not mind that at all. It would, after all, be the newspaper of record, serving for other newspapers and the news media as the touchstone of official and correct thinking, not to be questioned or deviated from, and taking its guidance from its imperious masters.

Just like Winston Smith’s Times in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Pragmatism vs. Cultural Change

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

Glenn Reynolds pens a column in Forbes on the current presidential contest between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Its title will strike a familiar chord this election year: "Is This The Best We Can Do?" Fellow Objectivists who skim through it as I did on first encountering it will then see familiar-sounding words:

There have been a lot of structural suggestions: Term limits, a ban on senators running for president (which would probably do more for the Senate than for the White House, really) and various campaign-finance schemes that look pretty iffy in light of recent experience. Term limits might shake up our gerrymandered Congress a bit and bring in some new blood, but would they bring in the right kind of new blood? That's less clear.

Yes. These kinds of suggestions are, as I have often said, attempts to treat symptoms rather than the disease. This is starting to sound interesting! If you're on the same page with me, you might begin to perk up a little bit.

So while I remain open to suggestions for structural reform, I think that we may need a change in the culture.

Yes! Finally! Could it be that a prominent non-Objectivist out there has finally become hip to the ideas that (a) the broader culture drives supply in electoral politics via demand, (b) the problems we are having with pandering and vote-purchasing in politics will not go away until something about our culture changes for the better, and (c) it is time to challenge the dominant approach of blind pragmatism (with an unquestioning acceptance of altruism's guiding hand)?

Well, at least you didn't have to wait too long for the other shoe to drop!

It's no surprise that a lot of our best political leaders distinguished themselves outside of politics before they ran for office. Perhaps we need to be encouraging an ethic of public service among our most successful, in the hopes that we'll get more people with real-world experience and proven ability at doing something besides raising money and looking good on TV. Could we do better? We're unlikely to do worse. [bold added]

As he might put this himself: I mean no disrespect towards Professor Reynolds, but has he been paying any attention to this year's candidates or to the popular culture?

From sportscasts attempting to make "role models" of athletes not because of their discipline, but because they "give back" to the community, through calls by both presidential candidates for some form of mandatory national servitude, all the way to Alan Greenspan laying the blame of the financial crisis on capitalism, our culture is not just saturated with calls for an "ethic of public service". It's drowning in them.

We'll be lucky after four years of whichever flavor of statist wins not to have our best and brightest forced into politics. Reynolds will then have his wish answered, but our politics will still be a mess. Simply getting better people into government will not get us out of our current mess.

How do I know this? The clues come from several other points Reynolds makes earlier on to the effect that we ought to have better candidates running for office, perhaps even than we did at America's founding: We have a much larger talent pool from which to draw candidates. Our populace is better-educated, on the whole. (For the moment, let's accept this point for the sake of argument.) Politics is a low-paying, high-pressure job with huge time demands and, as such, it drives away the talented. It has become expensive to win office, and one has to be charismatic to do so.

It is certainly true that all these things would conspire to give us mediocrities running for office year in and year out, but what kind of person would want a career in politics anyway? And what kind of person would we want, instead?

To answer those questions, one must do something Reynolds never does in his piece: consider the nature of the job. Elected officials are serving in our government. Perhaps we should spend some time -- as did our Founders, who mysteriously had better officials and government -- considering the proper purpose and function of government.

What is government? What is it for? What does it do? How does it do it? Not one of these questions comes up, and yet we're carrying on a discussion of how to get a better field of candidates as if we were all on a corporate search committee. Except that the government doesn't pay too well. And for some reason, the United States hasn't restructured or spun off a few states to become more manageable. And it has a Constitution, at least for the moment. Why?

These unusual properties of the job of a government official all relate to the nature of the government as it is today, although one needs to know further whether we have a proper government in order to know whether any given aspect of the job would normally be a factor -- or whether there are other factors or qualifications we ought to consider, but haven't.

I am not going to discuss the proper nature of government at length here, today. (Ayn Rand has done that already, and far better than I could, anyway.) I will note that the government is the only social institution that can legally wield physical force -- the delegated retaliatory force of self-defense of the citizens -- and its only proper purpose is the protection of individual rights.

In contrast to the electorate at the time of America's founding, an astounding percentage of the population today does not grasp the nature or purpose of government. This means that, as voters, they will demand -- and get -- candidates committed to misusing government force for other purposes at the expense of the protection of our freedom. The Founders were aware that such a day could come and deliberately made it difficult for the government to actively do things beyond its proper function. They called it "checks and balances".

In that light, the very idea of calling for a more "competent" government officialdom should cause the spine of anyone who values his freedom to tingle. Competent? To do what? Make the trains run on time? Even if they can make you board those trains to somewhere you don't want to go? Our problems are not because our government is run by incompetents, but because it is frequently doing the wrong thing, although not, so far, to the degree of running trains to an Auschwitz.

In addition to calls for "better" officials putting the cart before the horse, it is worth noting that, due to government meddling in the economy, there is a vast misconception -- shared by Reynolds -- that our government officials need to be Renaissance men.

Why? Their proper job description is actually rather simple.

This argument has surface plausibility due to the unnecessary complexity of the mixed economy. (Thus, it is also related to the notion I elaborated on earlier that voters need to be near-omniscient to make good electoral choices) But this argument is wrong, and often reflects an inability by those who hold it to think in terms of principles. As I said before:

Heinlein has it half-right that figuring out how to vote requires an "enormous" amount of time. It does take time, it is true, to master the principles on which our nation was founded. However, once one does this, these principles greatly simplify how one approaches any subsequent election, even in today's context of massive government intrusion. Anyone who thinks that each election requires enormous amounts of study before one can vote intelligently does not understand the cognitive role of principles. [bold added]

"Protect my individual rights, and do not violate them," is the basic principle by which I would want a government official to act. Yes, he would have to have some idea of what individual rights are, but it would not matter one jot whether he were a Creationist, a global warming hysteric, an animist, a Moslem, or (usually) uncomfortable thinking about scientific concepts, so long as what he did in office was guided by that principle. And, under a proper government, his power to adversely affect my life would be greatly diminished compared to what it is today.

We do need cultural change, but what Reynolds calls cultural "change" is just more of the same. What needs to change about our culture is for more people to understand the nature of individual rights and the proper role of the government. Each, incidentally, entails a discovery of proper ethical principles -- which, incidentally, actually run counter to the altruism Reynolds prescribes.

Until that happens, we will remain in an inherently unstable mixed economy that will alternately drift and lurch towards totalitarianism. The government will increasingly attempt the impossible: replace the minds of millions of individuals with bureaucrats and inflexible rules in order to run an economy for 300 million plus. This will cause problems, which the government will expand to attempt to "fix" ad infinitum.

The government can not run the economy and should not try. There is no such thing as a government official competent for that job, and that is a job I frankly want to remain undone because I have work of my own to do and want politicians out of my way. And there is nothing wrong with me wanting to live my own life as I see fit. In fact, that is good.

-- CAV

PS: I highly recommend Tara Smith's "The Menace of Pragmatism" from the latest issue of The Objective Standard. You may read its first paragraphs for free here, with the option of purchasing the article. She discusses many issue I either briefly alluded to here or simply did not have time to discuss at all.

Detroit needs a bankruptcy

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In an attempt to bribe Michigan voters, both parties supported some government aid for the auto companies. Finally, a $25 billion package was approved. This is the last thing the auto companies need.

The U.S. auto companies are encumbered with costly union agreements and a complex dealer network. They cannot walk away from these obligations as long as they are regular, functioning companies. The U.S. auto industry needs a bankruptcy to clean house. If they are not viable, let them shut down. Let some of their assets disappear, let some of their employees move to other industries, let other car companies buy some of their factories and employ some of their people.

Ronald Reagan was stupid enough to bail Chrysler out many years ago; now, the government has repeated the mistake.

Now, GM wants to buy Chrysler but doesn't have the money. They say the cash they're getting from the government is not enough for such a purchase. So, GM is lobbying for the government to help them buy Chrysler. Sigh.

Free Speech Versus Campaign Finance

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ari and Linn Armstrong recently wrote an excellent column for the Grand Junction Free Press on the clash between campaign finance laws and freedom of speech. Ari was kind enough to give me permission to repost it here, and he also sent me a version with links added. Also, below the column, you'll find the full text of his interview with Eric Daniels.

Also, if you're not reading Ari's blogs -- AriArmstrong.com (on faith and politics) and FreeColorado.com (on politics and culture) -- you should be.

Time to speak out for free speech

by Linn and Ari Armstrong

Free speech is under assault in America by state and federal governments, despite constitutional protections.

Both major presidential candidates are enemies of free speech. In 2002, John McCain rode the McCain-Feingold campaign censorship law through Congress. Among other things, the law prohibited select groups from running certain political ads before elections, though the Supreme Court struck down some of the worst parts of the law. Barack Obama wants federal controls on media ownership, his spokesperson told Broadcasting & Cable.

Some conservatives want more censorship over pornography. Many on the left call for censorship of the radio by forcing broadcasters to air certain views; supporters laughably call their scheme the "Fairness Doctrine."

Here in Colorado, various activists have faced legal threats for daring to exercise their rights of free speech. For example, in 2006 Becky Clark Cornwell put up yard signs and protested a plan to annex her community of Parker North into the city of Parker in Douglas County.

A supporter of annexation filed a legal complaint against Cornwell and others, claiming they had engaged in "illegal activities" under Colorado's campaign censorship laws.

Lisa Knepper of the Institute for Justice (IJ), a civil rights group that defended Cornwell and her neighbors, said that, while the U.S. District Court ruled the group could not be penalized, the court "failed to change the law to prevent such abuses of campaign finance law in the future, so we're appealing to the 10th Circuit."

ABC's 20/20 featured Cornwell in an October 17 story about the campaign finance laws. Cornwell said "the lawsuit was used in an effort to shut us up about the annexation, to scare us enough and clobber us with these laws so that we wouldn't talk about it any more."

20/20 paid people to try to fill out Colorado's campaign forms. Nobody did so successfully. One subject said, "A regular citizen cannot read this legalese." Another said, "I'd rather just not get involved in the political process if I have to go through the nonsense that I had to go through today."

Steve Simpson, the IJ lawyer defending the Parker North residents, said he's also defending the Independence Institute, which was sued over its criticisms of Referenda C and D in 2005. Simpson is awaiting a decision from the Colorado Court of Appeals. He said "it would be impossible" for the Independence Institute, a think tank, to comply with the reporting requirements as an issue committee, because the group gets funds for general purposes and spends them on a wide variety of issues.

Even though we've condemned Amendment 48, which would absurdly define a fertilized egg as a person in the state constitution, we were displeased to see that a fellow named John Erhardt sued the Amendment 48 campaign for petty violations of the campaign censorship laws. Erhardt gloats on his blog, "So, while the fine of $150 won't break their campaign, they did have to spin their wheels to defend this."

Diana Hsieh, co-author of the paper "Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life" at SecularGovernment.us, said the advocates of 48 "should be free to advocate their views -- not bogged down in opportunistic legal action by opponents... I want opponents of Amendment 48 to be spending their time arguing against the substance and philosophy of it, not playing campaign finance dirty tricks."

Finally, Douglas Bruce has taken flak in the media [one and two] for mailing a flyer against Amendment 59 and Referendum O through a nonprofit group, Active Citizens Together, without filing the legal paperwork that some think applies.

It's past time to rethink the validity of the campaign censorship laws, along with all the other restrictions on free speech. We checked in with Eric Daniels of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, and he offered a refreshingly consistent defense of our rights.

Daniels said, "Free speech means the right (not privilege) of individuals to express their opinions without government censorship of any kind, whether by hindering speech through regulation or through restricting it through prosecutions after the fact."

We don't even like requirements to report contributions. People have a right to speak anonymously. There's no clear way to distinguish between advocacy and education. And, the voters can demand disclosure with their votes.

Daniels agrees: "If politicians wish to disclose the source of their financing to the public, they are free to do so... The electorate can indeed decide through voting whether to support candidates who do or do not disclose their financing. Contributing money to a political candidate or to supporters or opponents of a ballot measure should properly be a matter between the private parties themselves."

Government should not abridge "the freedom of speech, or of the press." Politicians have gotten away with doing just that for far too long. If we wish to retain and restore our other liberties, we must above all fight for our rights of free speech.

Linn is a local political activist and firearms instructor with the Grand Valley Training Club. His son Ari edits FreeColorado.com from the Denver area.

Full Interview with Eric Daniels

Note from Ari: My purpose in contacting Daniels was not to cover familiar ground, but to elicit responses about some of the most difficult implications of free speech. Until I thought more carefully about the matter on October 23, talked with another friend about it, and contacted Daniels, I wasn't sure about my position on the matters of campaign-finance disclosure and campaigns by foreigners. Now I am sure. I am for freedom, not controls.

Daniels's answers follow the questions in italics:

Briefly, why do you think free speech has come under attack by both right and left in recent decades?

Fundamentally, the reason free speech is under attack by both is because both fail to understand the nature of individual rights. The majority opinion in politics today holds that rights are gifts from the government that allow individuals to do some things as long as they do not upset certain vested interests. In the case of free speech, politicians believe that you should be allowed to say what you want as long as it does not, for example, offend religious or ethnic groups or as long as what you say is not backed by too much money, or as long as what you say meets some vague notion of community standards. But that is not free speech. Free speech means the right (not privilege) of individuals to express their opinions without government censorship of any kind, whether by hindering speech through regulation or through restricting it through prosecutions after the fact.

Should the law require disclosure of campaign-related expenses? I'm leaning no. People have a right to speak anonymously. There's no clear way to distinguish between advocacy and education. And, the voters can demand disclosure with their votes. Do you agree with this? Explain.

I do not think the law should require public disclosure of campaign- related financing. If politicians wish to disclose the source of their financing to the public, they are free to do so. Likewise, if they choose to keep their donors' identities to themselves, they should also be free to do so. The electorate can indeed decide through voting whether to support candidates who do or do not disclose their financing. Contributing money to a political candidate or to supporters or opponents of a ballot measure should properly be a matter between the private parties themselves. It does not matter how much a person gives or how much air time he buys, voters always remain free to take the message for which he has paid in the appropriate context. No one forces the voters to believe or discredit any given message, they do so of their own will.

Should the law prohibit campaign contributions from foreign entities and people? For instance (Diana Hsieh raised this example), if the U.S. were going impose a tariff on British goods, should British citizens be able to campaign against it in the U.S.?

Giving money to a political campaign is an issue of individual right -- that is, the donor who has earned his wealth has a right to give it to whatever candidate he chooses, and the candidate has a right to accept money from anyone he chooses. Foreign citizens or political action committees have just as much right to speak as do Americans. Again, if there is some belief on the part of voters that foreign influence is unduly affecting some candidate, the voters retain the right to demand that the candidate disclose the source of his funding or face losing their votes.

Is there anything else we should know about free speech in the modern era?

Even though much of the recent controversy about free speech is tied to speech about political issues, it is important to remember that we have the freedom of speech not just because it facilitates a robust discussion of public policy (which is the unfortunate modern interpretation), but because it is a right of each individual to express his ideas in the manner he chooses and to reach whatever size an audience his rightly-earned wealth will allow.

Conservative Media

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I suspect that many conservatives would regard this video interview of Joe Biden as an example of what journalism ought to be:



In fact, it's nothing of the sort. It's blatant partisanship, not objectivity.

I've never thought much about the proper standards of journalism -- until I began fighting Colorado's Amendment 48. So here are my preliminary thoughts: Journalists should ask difficult questions, particularly of politicians. However, those questions should be fair -- not loaded with presumption and innuendo. So a journalist should allow a person to state his basic views, then dig deeper by asking some tough questions. The goal should be to expose the person's views for what they are -- good, bad, or ugly.

Thoughts?

Gun Control Advocates Speak Out

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I feel their pain:

Around the World Wide Web 80

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

1. George Reisman on the notion that laissez-faire capitalism is responsible for the latest economic crisis.

2. Renee Katz of Adventures In Existence has a You Tube page of her own. Somehow she survived 12 years of lower education with her ability to think independently intact. Maybe there's hope.

3. This magician/comedian is hilarious.

4. The most benevolent and revered One has been embarrassed recently by Joe the Plumber and the broadcast journalist Barbara West. Both people had the poor judgment to ask Obama or Biden tough questions. Now Joe the Plumber and Barbara West's husband are being investigated. This is what life under Obama will be -- anyone who does not toe the line will find himself subject to intimidation and character smears.

5. Interesting insight into the mind of Bill Ayers by Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who infiltrated the Weathermen.

If you read the whole interview, it becomes apparent that, at least to Grathwohl, Ayers is an egoist — but one who placed others at risk, counting on them to do much of the dirty work. Grathwohl notes that oftentimes Ayers left the heavy lifting to the women in the movement, while he himself wanted nothing more than to be in charge.

Power at all cost. Attack by proxy. A sense of entitlement. The arrogant notion that of course he should be in charge of the revolution and the refiguration of the country and all its citizens. A cadre of sycophants willing to follow his lead, oftentimes without question. A complete and utter disregard for the bourgeois rules of the “Establishment” — be it the law, the courts, or the principles upon which this country was founded.

Sounds to me like he built Obama into a polished, improved (in the Alinsky sense), multicultural likeness of himself — and has taught him to play the system and build his own army of political golems.

It remains to be seen just how radical Obama is, but if the worst fears of the right turn out to be justified (and if Obama wins next week), then we'll be living through the most remarkable political story our our time: a leftist radical gains the ultimate power in America in order to destroy capitalism. That's pretty damned dramatic.

6. Michael S. Malone is embarrassed to call himself a journalist.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why is this happening?

Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country...

Journalists in the tank for Obama because of the self-interested desperation of a dying industry? Could be.

Quick Roundup 373

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

Audacity, yes. Hope, no.

This article at Daily Kos tells us a lot more about its author's ignorance of economics and the requirements for human life than anything else.

In the midst of a long rant against a caricature of capitalism inspired by Alan Greenspan's final sell-out of Ayn Rand, "Devilstower" -- why would one stow a devil? -- reveals an understanding of Objectivism that rivals in sophistication the tank top pictured in the next section of this roundup:

Chief Disciple Greenspan carried this torch for the next half-century and beyond. Pro-business conservatives (not surprisingly) found great comfort in a philosophy that said squeezing every dime out of the system was not only fair, but the only moral solution. Not long after the publication of his essays in Rand's book, Greenspan was invited to become an advisor to the Nixon administration. When Ford replaced Nixon, Greenspan became the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. And when Reagan took power, Greenspan was no longer the voice crying in the wilderness, he was the very center of the establishment. Objectivism and Conservatism had united in Market Fundamentalism, and that force was on a jihad against regulation of any kind.

"Chief disciple": If you have any firm convictions -- Greenspan doesn't, but we'll get to that -- you must be a mindless religious zealot. Reason can't lead to certainty. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I'm rational and that I am certain about nothing!

"Squeezing every dime out of the system": If material wealth isn't a fixed quantity, its production does not require anything besides brute muscle, and businessmen are just useless parasites, even if customers keep voluntarily rewarding the most efficient ones by trading with them. What makes "the system" work? Orders from government bureaucrats!

"Jihad against regulation": Never mind the fact that Greenspan -- a government regulator -- was attempting to exercise some control over the economy, we need much more regulation than we had, even under him.

If any decent analogy between religion and Greenspan's actions deserves to be drawn, it is that Greenspan was a hypocrite and Devilstower a true believer. But even that analogy is flawed since altruism, the religious morality, basically requires its proponents to violate it in order to survive.

The most remarkable thing to me about this whole tawdry affair is that Greenspan was cheating on a moral code that actually promotes life when practiced because, apparently, the approval of the masses is more important to him even than his own life!

If ever there was a gift horse that needed looking in the mouth, Greenspan's betrayal of Rand to the left is that horse. But the left is committed to the code that Greenspan was actually following, so that won't happen.

Devilstower saves his most egregious blunder for the end: "John Galt is dead. We can only hope he stays buried." To bring up a point of Ayn Rand's philosophy Devilstower conveniently ignores, if he has heard of it at all: In order to live, one must be free to engage in productive work, actually do that work, and enjoy the fruits of that work. A major point Rand made in Atlas Shrugged (It's a book.) is precisely that man must have freedom to benefit from living in a society with other men. Government regulation -- even from an alleged proponent of this idea -- abridges that freedom.

But Devilstower hasn't time for books. "John Galt -- farmer, miller, baker, shopkeeper -- stay dead, while I step over your corpse. I smell that pie Alan told me about!"

The Left's jihad against economic freedom will deliver us to a world where their mistaken vision of economics will become true: There will be only a limited "pie" available for everyone to eat, and we will have to fight tooth and nail over it -- or beg for it from a government official, as long as he isn't Greenspan.

That's what they call "hope" over on the Left.

Redneck Fashion

Some kinds of "creativity" deserve ridicule. This is one of them.

If someone hasn't told this woman about Goodwill by now, it might be because of a fear of ending up with even fewer teeth in his head than she doubtless has! (HT: the older of my brothers)

Honesty from the Left!

Well, okay. I'm calling a cup with a drop in it half-full.

In a sarcasm-laden blurb, The Village Voice does at least note that Yaron Brook of The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights denounced Alan Greenspan, and even provides a link to the story.

However, among other things, the blurb accuses Brook and his fellow Objectivists of being cultists. Coming from the left, that's easy to discount as psychological projection. How many readers will actually click through, much less read, much less critically evaluate the denunciation? The author obviously didn't!

In fact, stripped of the insults, the blurb actually has a decent summary of why Greenspan's words weren't even worth the paper they were printed on. And yet, it still attacks Greenspan, Brook, and capitalism. Why?

This blurb is an inadvertent confession. Just as we saw a Kossack confess that he equates certainty with dogmatism above, we also see a major liberal media outlet admit that the left does not care about the truth, specifically about its implications. Most glaringly, we have a leftist outlet saying, "We know that there is reason to believe that Greenspan was not an advocate of laissez-faire since he has basically just been called "King of the Regulators". But we want more regulation anyway."

And what did that just get us?

Now that I think about it, this is honesty about a journalistic fact being used to distract from dishonesty on a much larger scale. I'm sure that even Alan Greenspan would tell you, when asked, that the sky is blue.

-- CAV

OList Mailing Lists

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A few days ago, I realized that I ought to occasionally post a reminder about my various OList mailing lists. So without further ado...

OList.com is the home of three specialized e-mail lists for Objectivists, all to help promote Objectivist ideas in the culture at large:

• OActivists: OActivists is an informal e-mail list for Objectivists committed to fostering positive cultural and political change. Its purpose is to facilitate and encourage effective advocacy of Objectivist ideas in non-Objectivist forums by facilitating communication with other Objectivist activists. Posts to the list alert subscribers to opportunities to speak out, recommend sources of information, discuss effective arguments and principled strategies, reproduce op-eds and letters written by subscribers, announce events, and more. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.
  
  
• OBloggers: OBloggers is an informal mailing list for Objectivist bloggers. Its basic purpose is to facilitate communication about matters of mutual interest, such as upcoming events, posts of interest, best blogging practices, and the like. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.
  
  
• OAcademics: OAcademics is a forum for Objectivist academics to discuss teaching, research, coursework, dissertations, job prospects, publication, and all other aspects of life in (or after) academia. The list is basically a means of sharing knowledge and experience as ever more Objectivists enter academia. Click here for a full description of this list and its membership requirements.

Please feel free to join if you're interested, provided that you meet the criteria for membership.

Hsieh LTE in The Economist

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The October 23, 2008 edition of The Economist has printed another LTE of mine, this time on Massachusetts' health care "reform". This one is in the print edition (as opposed to my first LTE there which was online-only.)

They did minor editing, but kept the central meaning intact. The letter is the 4th one down:

Freedom to choose

SIR – The Massachusetts system of "universal" health care remains afloat only because of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support ("In need of desperate remedies", October 18th). One reason costs are so high in Massachusetts is that individuals are forced to purchase benefits they neither need nor want. Under any system of mandatory insurance, the state must necessarily define what constitutes an acceptable insurance policy, meaning that individuals are buying insurance on terms influenced by lobbyists and bureaucrats, rather than based on a rational assessment of their needs. If the federal government adopts the Massachusetts system on a national scale, it would merely multiply those problems fifty-fold.

Dr Paul Hsieh
Co-founder Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine
Sedalia, Colorado

Flemming Rose at Duke University on Thursday

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Notice of a Special Event: A Lecture by Mr. Flemming Rose, editor of Jyllands-Posten, publisher of the Danish Muhhamad cartoons, on "Free Speech in a Globalized World."

When: Thursday, October 30, 2008, 7:00 PM

Where: Page Auditorium, Duke University (directions)

In September 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons depicting the Islamic figure Muhammad with images of terrorism. The newspaper’s publishers stated that they wanted to bring issues of free speech and censorship forward into public awareness. The result was a firestorm of protest, ordered by clerics some weeks after the publication, that highlighted the seriousness of this issue. Over one hundred people were killed in the ensuing riots.

This event will be a unique opportunity to hear the cultural editor of this publication explain the decision to publish these cartoons, the issues at stake in the decision, and the meaning of the protests and the violence that followed. A Q&A will follow the talk.

Flemming Rose is a journalist with long experience in European, Russian, and American issues. He has been awarded the "Free Speech Award" from the Danish Free Press Society.

Web Site: www.committeeforfreespeech.com

Contact: John Lewis, Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science, Duke University, john.d.lewis@duke.edu

UCLA Health Care Debate

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The UCLA Objectivist Club will be sponsoring the following debate on October 30, 2008, "Universal Health Care: The Cure or the Disease?":

Universal Health Care: The Cure or the Disease?

Thursday, October 30, 2008 (7:00pm - 9:00pm)

UCLA Campus: Moore 100

Health care has been an important issue in politics, especially in the last several years. Amidst much specific policy analysis and political quibbling over superficial issues, the fundamentals have been ignored: What are the underlying philosophic and economic considerations? Is universal health care moral? Does it achieve its stated goal? Is there an ethical and practical alternative?

Come hear Professor Mark Kleiman (UCLA Department of Public Policy) and Dr. Peter LePort, M.D. (Ayn Rand Institute Board of Directors) answer your questions about the issue of universal health care.

7:00pm: Opening Statements
7:30pm: Q & A with the Audience

Transportation Information

Parking is available for $9, available for purchase at the Parking Information Kiosk at Westwood and Strathmore.

Parking Structure 6 is in close proximity to the event location.

Please allow 30 extra minutes to secure parking and walk to the venue. Doors open at 6:30pm.

Media should contact Arthur@ClubLogic.org to RSVP for parking and priority seating

Unfortunately, I live in Colorado and won't be able to make it. But I encourage anyone in the Southern California area with an interest in health care policy to attend!

Savoring Ayn Rand's "Red Pawn"

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Savoring Ayn Rand's "Red Pawn" by Dina Schein is an excellent literary analysis of a great story that is little known. It's one of the best stories I have ever read, which is remarkable because it is not a novel or a short story or a script, but a treatment Ayn Rand wrote to sell the story to Hollywood. It was her first sale.

The movie was never made because it takes place in Soviet Russia and, although politics is not the subject of the story, Rand portrays communism honestly. An honest movie about communism was not possible in the 1930's, Hollywood's "red decade." Almost 80 years later, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but the movie still has not been made. Now the problem is more likely to be that filmmakers in our present culture would not know what to do with a great romantic story. In the '30's MGM, with its stable of glamorous stars and great directors, might have done the story justice; one cringes at what today's Hollywood would do to this story.

It would be criminal to spoil the plot here, so I won't say a thing about it, except that it is great drama. Rand follows her own teaching in The Art of Fiction to create an intense value-conflict that builds to stunning climax. You can read the story in The Early Ayn Rand. Certainly, you should read it before you consider listening to Dina Schein's lectures.

Dr. Schein analyzes the plot, characters and theme of "Red Pawn." She looks at how to analyze fiction, so the listener learns not just about "Red Pawn," but also about how to think about fiction in general. The course is especially useful to fiction writers, as Dr. Schein looks at Ayn Rand's fiction writing process. There are also some excellent tips for screenwriters.

I sometimes think of Ayn Rand's teachings on fiction writing as my secret weapon that most writers know nothing about. After a century of naturalism, writers have forgotten how to use value-conflicts to build a suspenseful plot that culminates in a climax. They know about conflict, but they give it little thought beyond something like, "the bad guy wants to destroy the world and the good guy wants to stop him." And it would be the better ones, who want to write an exciting plot, who think that much. Without a conscious understanding of value-conflicts, it's easy for a plot writer to get bogged down in trivia or sidetracked by nonessential matters.

Bureaucratizing Wall Street

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I heard a radio morning show in which the DJ's and their callers were outraged over a Wall Street firm that received bailout money from the US government, then sent its executives to a posh spa for a retreat that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Everyone was outraged over this irresponsible behavior. To the people on this show, here was evidence of the fundamental cause behind the financial crisis: corporate greed. The fat cats only care about themselves and that's why America is in trouble.

My reaction is different. Let's say you give a man $10, and he spends it irresponsibly. He buys cheap wine and cigarettes and spends the night in foggy dissipation. It seems to me you can reach one of two conclusions:

1. I should not give this man any more money.

2. In the future I must watch this man carefully to make sure he spends the money I give him well.

Private individuals should choose #1. Once you give someone money, it is his property. You have no power to force him to do what you want with the money. If you continue to give money to someone who wastes it, whose fault is that?

The government always chooses #2. Unlike private individuals, the government has the power to force people to act as it wishes. Not only will it watch how Wall Street spends the money the government "invests," but it will pass laws dictating what can and cannot be done with the money. With the money will come regulation.

As Ludwig von Mises explains in his brilliant little book, Bureaucracy, government has to use regulation because it is not driven by the pursuit of profit.

In the private sector, everyone pursues one goal: make a profit. A chain store does not need a bookshelf full of regulations directing store managers on how to pursue profit. Within a few simple rules such as employee uniforms and corporate image, the individual store manager is left alone to solve the problem of making a profit.

In the public sector, however, functions such as police, courts and military are not motivated by the pursuit of profit. Thus the government must write books of regulations telling employees in detail what they must do in every situation.

To the extent to which government subsidizes the financial sector, that sector becomes a government agency. Its function becomes part private and part state. Wall Street firms that take government money will have two purposes: to make a profit and to do what the government wants.

Supposedly, the government is spending a trillion dollars to keep firms from going bankrupt. In theory all this money should go toward the pursuit of profit. But watch how this government involvement grows in the coming years. The government is not driven by the pursuit of profit, but by other concerns, such as altruism, collectivism and the public good -- not to mention giving money to pressure groups in order to buy votes. Government will force Wall Street to cater to its concerns, not just to pursue a profit.

Look for a big push in the coming years to turn corporations into mini-welfare states. This trend goes back to the 1940's, when employers sought to get around confiscatory income taxes by giving employees "free" health insurance. Tying insurance to work was a disastrous unintended consequence of high taxes.

Making corporations do welfare state functions is the fascist way to socialism. Mises, writing in 1944 when the Nazis still existed, describes the totalitarian end of turning entrepreneurs into bureaucrats:

The Nazis have succeeded in entirely eliminating the profit motive from the conduct of business. In Nazi Germany there is no longer any question of free enterprise. There are no more entrepreneurs. The former entrepreneurs have been reduced to the status of Betriebsführer (shop manager). They are not free in their operation; they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the Central Board of Production Management, the Reichswirtschaftsministerium, and its subordinate district and branch offices. The government not only determines the prices and interest rates to be paid and to be asked, the height of wages and salaries, the amount to be produced and the methods to be applied in production; it allots a definite income to every shop manager, thus virtually transforming him into a salaried civil servant. This system has, but for the use of some terms, nothing in common with capitalism and a market economy. It is simply socialism of the German pattern, Zwangswirtschaft. It differs from the Russian pattern of socialism, the system of outright nationalization of all plants, only in technical matters. And it is, of course, like the Russian system, a mode of social organization that is purely authoritarian.

It's hard to imagine America getting this bad, but according to Mises it's just a matter of time before interventionism ends in totalitarian control of the economy. Intervention leads to crisis, which leads to further intervention, which leads to further crisis, which leads to... you get the idea.

"Socialism of the German pattern" has an added, irresistible benefit to politicians: they evade responsibility. They dictate to corporations what welfare state programs they must enact, but when things go wrong, the politicians blame the greedy corporations. As long as the corporations are driven in part by the profit motive, they are immoral to altruists. With each new crisis, the capitalists, "blinded by greed," will always be blamed, as noble altruists such as Hillary Clinton and John McCain preen about how they just want to help the little guy.

But there will be other unintended consequences of forcing entrepreneurs to behave like bureaucrats -- so many that it would take a book to be comprehensive. To look at just one more, Mises writes,

To say to the entrepreneur of an enterprise with limited profit chances, “Behave as the conscientious bureaucrats do,” is tantamount to telling him to shun any reform. Nobody can be at the same time a correct bureaucrat and an innovator. Progress is precisely that which the rules and regulations did not foresee; it is necessarily outside the field of bureaucratic activities.

The virtue of the profit system is that it puts on improvements a premium high enough to act as an incentive to take high risks. If this premium is removed or seriously curtailed, there cannot be any question of progress.

The more capitalists are forced to follow regulations, the less progress and innovation we will have.

This trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street will prove to be more costly than just the money involved. The financiers should have declined the money, saying, "No thanks -- we can't afford it." The greatest cost will be our liberty.

Recap #15

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This week on Politics without God, the blog of the Coalition for Secular Government:

• Monday, October 20, 2008: The Individual and Rights by Diana Hsieh
  
• Tuesday, October 21, 2008: Amendment 48: Ritter's Faith-Based Strategy Backfires by Ari
  
• Wednesday, October 22, 2008: Rocky Recycles Burton's Evasions on Amendment 48 by Ari
  
• Thursday, October 23, 2008: Abortion Warning from South Dakota by Ari
  
• Friday, October 24, 2008: More Religious than the Religious Right: The Chalcedon Foundation by Gina Liggett
  

And this week on We Stand FIRM, the blog of FIRM: Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine:

• Monday, October 20, 2008: UK Physicians Paid To Not Send Patients to Hospitals by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Tuesday, October 21, 2008: Hsieh LTE in The Economist by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Wednesday, October 22, 2008: Physician Disempowerment in Canada by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Thursday, October 23, 2008: Business Week on HSAs by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Friday, October 24, 2008: Update on "Never Events" by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Saturday, October 25, 2008: Hsieh LTE on MA Plan in The Economist by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Sunday, October 26, 2008: UCLA Health Care Debate by Paul Hsieh, MD
  

Goodbye, GOP

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I listened to a lot of talk radio yesterday. Both Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt emphasized Obama's pro-choice in abortion stand in hopes of motivating the religious right to vote. Hewitt spent his entire show taking calls only from Catholics in battleground states, hoping to use Cardinal Rigali's message to Pennsylvia Catholics to get out the vote on the religious right. Limbaugh even expressed the wish that those who support abortion leave the party.

There was nothing from them about the creeping fascism that economic interventionism is bringing us. Clearly, both men see the Republican Party as a party of religious values first. Economic liberty, which they would both say they support (Limbaugh especially, as Hewitt views free market "extremism" as an electoral loser), is a secondary consideration.

It was a depressing experience. Here we are, nearing election day, and the Republican propagandists are getting serious. Time to motivate the troops! And so, both Hewitt and Limbaugh end up talking about how Obama wants to "kill children in the womb." Yes, we should never vote for Democrats because they want to kill children.

As a farcical ending to a disgusting day, I listened to as much of Michael Savage as I could take. The man is a conspiracy theorist. When you step back and analyze what Michael Savage says, he sounds remarkably stupid. He brought up the militia movement of the '90s, which he thinks was a good thing, and told his listeners in ominous tones that the movement was destroyed by the government. He thinks the bailout came because of a secret agreement between the politicians and their friends on Wall Street to give them hundreds of billions of dollars stolen from Main Street.

Savage also is hot on the foolish story about Obama's birth certificate. Because the certificate is not the original, but a copy, Savage thinks it is fake and that Obama was actually born in Kenya and is thus not eligible to be President of the USA.

So what if Obama's birth certificate is a copy? That's all I have. I had to pay money to the county in Kansas where I was born to get the copy. It's good enough to get me a drivers license, passport and social security card.

So here are three of the most influential propagandists of the right, with two of them telling their listeners Obama is "against life" and the lunatic third one screaming that Obama was born in Africa. Is it any wonder this country is going down the drain?

I intend to respect Rush Limbaugh's desire and leave the Republican Party. I will reregister as an Independent. It's not the party I joined 20 years ago. As Reagan once said about the Democrats, I didn't leave the party, the party left me.

Economic Freedom Is Threatened By Both Obama and McCain

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Nick Provenzo of Rule of Reason writes:

A short op-ed I wrote for Fox News' Fox Forum on the threat either a McCain or Obama presidency poses to freedom is the featured commentary for the weekend. I argued that both Obama and McCain are "equally dangerous for economic freedom in America" and that "on every question, both men share the same corrupt moral premise, differing only in degree and their particular focus."

I encourage you to leave a comment there adding your own thoughts. The URL is:

http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/10/25/opposingviews_1024/

I also encourage you to write a comment! You can also give it a "thumbs up" via StumbleUpon. Here's Paul's comment:

Thank you, Nick, for a well-argued essay!

Dr. Malcom G refers to a superb lecture by Leonard Peikoff entitled, "Health Care Is Not A Right" from 1993.

There's an updated (2007) version of his talk available at the website for Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine at:

"Health Care Is Not A Right"
http://www.westandfirm.org/Peikoff-01.html

To add to Nick's point, the biggest problem in modern American politics is the failure to recognize what individual rights are.

Rights are freedoms of actions (such as the right to free speech), not automatic claims on goods and services that must be produced by others. Individuals are legitimately entitled to services such as health care that they purchase with their own money, are promised by prior contractual agreements, or are given to them via voluntary charity.

Otherwise, government programs to guarantee health care as a "right" must necessarily violate someone's actual rights - either the rights of those compelled to provide medical care or the rights of those compelled to pay for it. Such programs then become just another form of state-sanctioned slavery or theft.

Both McCain and Obama suffer from this faulty understanding of individual rights. Both would use the power of government to trample on legitimate rights (such as the right to free speech) as well as to attempt to guarantee false entitlement "rights".

Unless Americans reaffirm the proper conception of rights as freedoms of actions (and concomitant limitations on government powers), then we'll continue our current downhill slide. A civilization will collapse if citizens decide that they can vote each other goodies from the government trough, at the expense of those who produce such goods.

The Romans learned this lesson the hard way. The big question is whether Americans will also learn this lesson before it's too late.

Paul Hsieh, MD
Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM)
http://www.WeStandFIRM.org

If you post a comment, you're welcome to repost it in the NoodleFood comments.

Greenspan Recants

By noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The headlines chortled around the world: "Greenspan at the Capitol: A hero no more" -- "Greenspan takes a hit" -- "Greenspan: I was wrong about the economy, sort of..." -- "Ex-Fed chairman concedes 'mistake'" -- "House panel heaps blame on Alan Greenspan for financial crisis" -- "Greenspan 'shocked that free markets are flawed."

Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, managed to sneer, drool and look sanctimonious at the same time. "My question for you is simple," he asked a subdued Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve. "Were you wrong?"

Greenspan answered meekly, "Well, partly."

Greenspan was interrogated by the House committee on October 24. He said he was wrong that deregulation and free markets were the most efficacious means of sustaining a viable economy.

"Badgered by lawmakers, the former Federal Reserve chairman found himself denying the nation's economic crisis was his fault on Thursday but conceding the meltdown had revealed a flaw in a lifetime of economic thinking and had left him in a 'state of shocked disbelief.'"

The question is: How would he know that free markets and deregulation of them would be the most efficacious means of sustaining the economy? He abandoned the free market when he became head of the Federal Reserve. Perhaps when he chose to accept that job, he imagined he could save free enterprise from the depredations of the government. Now he knows the consequences of compromise.

"Greenspan, who stepped down [as Federal Reserve chief] in 2006, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a 'mistake' in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions....

"He said the boom in subprime lending occurred because of the huge demand for investment opportunities in a global economy, and he blamed the crash on a failure by investors to properly assess the risks from such mortgages, which went to borrowers with weak credit...On the billions of dollars of losses suffered by financial institutions because of their investments in subprime mortgages, Greenspan said he had been shocked by the failure of banking officials to protect their shareholders from bad loan decisions.

"'A critical pillar to market competition and free markets did break down,' Greenspan said. 'I still do not understand why it happened.'"

Greenspan called the role of self-interest and rationality "a flaw in the model...that defines how the world works."

The true "flaw" in Greenspan's thinking is that it was not a "free market" he and Congressional policies were "managing" or "mismanaging," but one defined by government intervention. The government decided that individuals with weak credit should be able to borrow money to buy homes. The only way it could persuade banks and other private institutions to loan that money was with force or the fear of it. Reason and rationality flee when force becomes a factor in men's decisions, to be replaced with the pragmatism of punishment-avoidance or a risk-free shot at easy money.

The "critical pillar" that Greenspan claims broke down was missing from in foundation of the subprime lending orgy: the principle of the trader.

Writing about the dangers and mechanics of the welfare state, Ayn Rand, Greenspan's former protégé, noted in The Ayn Rand Letter, in her article, "A Preview," that

"...Altruism feeds the first need [in this instance, the need of the poor for subprime mortgages], statism feeds the second [in this instance, the need of power-seekers, such as Paulson, Bernanke, Waxman et al.]. Pragmatism blinds everyone -- including victims and profiteers -- not merely to the deadly nature of the process, but even to the fact that a process is going on."

Which would explain why Greenspan was so "shocked."

As Fed chairman, Greenspan defended subprime mortgages from regulation or oversight. He should have been the first to oppose the idea that the government should make them possible. Chickens are not coming home to roost on Greenspan's shoulder, but turkey buzzards gathering to pick at the corpse of free markets. And the most gleeful buzzard was Henry Waxman.

"You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime-mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?"

Not a word was whispered by any of the Committee members on the possibility that perhaps the government should not have been encouraging and guaranteeing bad mortgages to any private financial institution, and that if any blame for irresponsibility is to be assigned to any quarter, it should be to the ideology subscribed to by a multitude of Congressmen, including Waxman, who endorsed the policy. Their statist ideology has "pushed" them to regulate the economy for the past century. While looking for a scapegoat or someone to blame, Congress, a succession of presidents, and innumerable bureaucrats and regulators will search everywhere but in their own houses and in their own ideologies.

Greenspan, in the past, and while being given the third degree by the House committee, forgot that ideologies that are "partly" right and "partly" wrong must be, in practice, entirely wrong, and that, in the long run, the "wrong" premises will become the leitmotif of that ideology.

During that interrogation, Greenspan recanted his belief in free markets:

"...[H]e defended the Fed's ability to detect economic trends, saying it was better than that of the private sector. 'If all those extraordinarily capable people were unable to foresee the development of this critical problem...I think we have to ask ourselves why is that?...And the answer is that we're not smart enough as people. We just cannot see that far in advance.'"

That lack of omniscience is the practical reason why he should never have accepted the job of chairman of the Federal Reserve. And, apparently, all throughout his career, he either never made the connection between the moral and the practical, or he discarded the connection as mere "ideology" because it stood in the way of his "good intentions."

Thus, Greenspan handed the Democrats and sundry statists of all persuasions what they need to impose more government controls on an economy already crippled by their past policies. What Waxman asked was what Ayn Rand might have called a "package deal" question, which Greenspan failed either to detect, question or qualify in his answer. Waxman, a career statist and point man in the House for the total welfare state, got what he and others on the House committee sought: a putative repudiation of free markets, and, by necessity, of freedom.

No sympathy should be wasted on Greenspan. He did what John Galt in Atlas Shrugged refused to do even at the point of a gun and under physical torture: he agreed to become an economic dictator of the country. Nor was he threatened with torture or death as Galileo was when he was forced by the Church to recant his theory of the solar system. Of all the economists who have advised various administrations over the last century, Greenspan had the least excuse for advocating statist economics.

When he accepted the appointment by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 to become Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan "legitimatized" or sanctioned the idea that the government should "manage" the economy with "rational" interventions. Now he may see the true "flaw" in his "good intentions" and what those intentions have inexorably wrought: a greater destruction of freedom and wealth than he admits he could have imagined.

Now he may understand how and why it could have happened.

My election commentary posted at Fox News

By noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A short op-ed I wrote for Fox News' Fox Forum on the threat either a McCain or Obama presidency poses to freedom is the featured commentary for the weekend. I argued that both Obama and McCain are "equally dangerous for economic freedom in America" and that "on every question, both men share the same corrupt moral premise, differing only in degree and their particular focus."

I encourage you to leave a comment there adding your own thoughts.

Alan Greenspan, Coward and Traitor

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

Yesterday, I got wind through several people, including a commenter here, of some testimony by Alan Greenspan, who once, decades ago, was an Objectivist, but has long since demonstrated through his words and deeds that he is not now and has not been for quite some time.

Regarding his status as an alleged advocate for capitalism: Most glaringly, the very acceptance of a job with the Federal Reserve years ago would cast doubt on the firmness of his grasp of the nature of capitalism or of his sincerity as an "advocate" of capitalism or Ayn Rand's ideas.

Consider what Ayn Rand herself said about capitalism:

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control. ("What Is Capitalism?" Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 19.)

And now consider what Greenspan himself said of the importance of having a gold standard -- rather than the fiat money, the value of which he took charge of manipulating. As you read this, recall that he never advocated for a return to the gold standard while he was in office:

Gold and economic freedom are inseparable, . . . the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and . . . each implies and requires the other.

...

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold . . . .

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. (Alan Greenspan, "Gold and Economic Freedom," Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 96.) [bold added]

And yet, the news media portray Greenspan as an advocate of capitalism and a "disciple" of Rand every chance it gets, as the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, did yesterday even as Greenspan removed all doubt that he is anything but a capitalist:

Fed watchers said they were stunned by Greenspan's mea culpa. For his whole adult life, the former Fed chairman has been a devotee of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, who celebrated free-market capitalism as the world's most moral economic order and advocated a strict laissez-faire approach to government regulation of the marketplace.

This is completely wrong. Let's rephrase it:

Fed watchers claimed to be stunned by Greenspan's mea culpa. For his whole adult life, the former central banker and one-time advocate of the gold standard has been regarded, largely due to his former association with Ayn Rand, as an advocate of capitalism. Although he never publicly broke with Rand, his career has benefited from the association even though it has required him to do things greatly at odds with his earlier published views from that period.

Or, not to put too fine a point on this: "Greenspan is a pragmatist coward who hides behind Ayn Rand's skirt when it suits his purposes, and sells her out when it suits his purposes." Obviously, he would rather the United States continue racing towards statism than admit that he played a big part, through keeping interest rates very low for many years, in precipitating the current financial crisis.

And the fact that he is getting away with it so easily -- where are the bloodhounds? -- was explained very eloquently by a remarkable J'accuse recently written against the media's coverage of the financial crisis by one of their own, Orson Scott Card (HT: Dismuke):

This [crisis] was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of congressmen who support increasing their budget.) [bold added]

Incredibly, Card notes that Greenspan was among those who warned against the loose lending practices that helped cause the crisis. And yet now, he has changed his tune:

Asked by committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, whether his free-market convictions pushed him to make wrong decisions, especially his failure to rein in unsafe mortgage lending practices, Greenspan replied that indeed he had found a flaw in his ideology, one that left him very distressed. "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right?" Waxman asked.

"Absolutely, precisely," replied Greenspan, who stepped down as Fed chief in 2006 after more than 18 years as chairman. "That's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence it was working exceptionally well." [bold added]

Perhaps Greenspan needs to be reminded of the title of the book in which his defense of the gold standard appeared: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Or perhaps Greenspan, realizing that most people are unaware that a central bank is incompatible with capitalism, took advantage of the convenient fact named by that title, while betraying the inconvenient one.

Re-read that last excerpt, and remember it the next time the media calls Greenspan a capitalist. He is not. And he has finally admitted it himself!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected typos.

Mr. Greenspan = Dr. Stadler

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Gun Van Horn gives Alan Greenspan a much-needed ass-kicking for his repudiation of free markets. And here's the Ayn Rand Institute's press release on it:

Greenspan Has No Free Market Philosophy
October 24, 2008

Washington, D.C. --Opponents of the free market are giddy at Alan Greenspan's declaration that the financial crisis has exposed a "flaw" in his "free market ideology." Greenspan says he is "in a state of shocked disbelief" because he "looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity"--and it didn't.

But according to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, "any belief Greenspan ever had in truly free markets was abandoned long ago. While Greenspan long ago wrote in favor of a truly free market in banking, including the gold standard that such markets always adopt, he then proceeded to work for two decades as leader and chief advocate of the Federal Reserve, which continually inflates the money supply and manipulates interest rates. Advocates of free banking understand that when the government inflates the currency, it artificially increases prices and causes booms in certain sectors of the economy, followed by inevitable busts. But not only did Greenspan lead the inflation behind the .com bubble and the real estate boom, he blamed the market for their treacherous collapses. Greenspan should have recognized that what he wrote in 1966 of the boom preceding the 1929 crash applied here: 'The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market--triggering a fantastic speculative boom.' Instead, he superficially blamed 'infectious greed.'

"Should it be any shock that Greenspan now blames the free market for today's meltdown--rather than the Fed's policies, which fueled an inflationary housing boom, which rewarded reckless lenders and borrowers from Wall Street to Main Street? Greenspan didn't mention the word 'inflation' once in his testimony.

"Whatever Greenspan's economic philosophy is, it is not anything resembling a free market."

I can't possibly express the depth of my disgust at Alan Greenspan. Well, let me try. By continuing to associate himself with the free market ideas of his former mentor, even while thoroughly contradicting them in word and deed as Fed Chairman, and then publicly repudiating them based on a government-created financial crisis, the man has done more damage to Objectivism than Barbara and Nathaniel Branden.

Way to go, Alan. You've done what I thought impossible. Dr. Stadler has nothing on you.

Hey, Did You Know Libertarians Run the Government?

By Paula Hall from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Yes! It's true! Libertarians have been running the country for years. How do I know?

I know because Jacob Weisberg, the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Slate Group (which publishes the online magazine), has just penned an article describing for us immature Ayn Rand naifs how it is that the financial collapse killed libertarianism.

A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little...

Utopians of the right, libertarians are... convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.

To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven't you people done enough harm already? We have narrowly avoided a global depression and are mercifully pointed toward merely the worst recession in a long while. This is thanks to a global economic meltdown made possible by libertarian ideas.

[Emphasis in original.]

That's all by way of introduction. He follows with a bunch of haphazard facts strung together in a string of non sequiturs that I've become bored with, they're so ubiquitously offered as proof the financial crisis was caused by the "free market." So forgive me if I don't quote here the "facts" the article supposedly marshals in support of its conclusions (check out the full article if you're not easily nauseated). Weisberg concludes with slap at, of all people, Ayn Rand:

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school.

This article is yet another gob-smacking exercise in tortured rationalization of the avoidance of uncomfortable facts by someone steeped in the rhetorical method not of thrust-and-parry, but avoid-and-slime. Weisberg first avoids the facts that 1) Libertarians have never run the American government, 2) it's a non sequitur to declare that financiers and corporate-welfare statists who run to the government for a bailout believe in the free market (!) and 3) Libertarianism has been rejected wholesale, outright, and damn near shrilly by Ayn Rand and the philosophy of Objectivism. Weisberg then slimes principled Objectivists as "immature" and "ideologues," and by playing on the flat ignorance of most of the public of the tenets of Objectivism. (Not to mention trotting out that tired when-are-you-going-to-grow-out-of-it smear.)

I would label this a serious example of the pot calling the kettle black except that there is no "kettle." There's definitely a "pot" -- Weisberg's beloved regulatory state has failed. There is no "kettle"; there has never been a free market upon which to blame the current financial crisis or any so-called "market failure," and I defy Weisberg and his ilk to identify when that state of affairs has subsisted.

I'm not up for reinventing the wheel this morning, so I'll just send everyone to the new Repeal The Bailout site for an excellent compilation of Objectivist thought leadership on the current economic situation and offer some closing thoughts on Weisberg's article.

Perhaps the biggest thing Weisberg evades is that we Objectivists who advocate for a truly free market are entirely principled on this: we hold that if you regulate any aspect of the economy, to any degree, it is not free. (I mean, really -- you'd think that someone calling Objectivists "ideologues" would jump at the chance to point out how just how "utopian" we are about what we're saying.) He seems to pay lip service to this fact but then proceeds brazenly to avoid even the most elementary logical implications of the principled consistency of Objectivism.

If she could, I'm sure Ayn Rand would be rolling over in her grave at the willful ignorance of those who persist in equating Libertarianism, which has rightly been repeatedly discredited, with a philosophy so diametrically opposed to it. But let's accept for a fleeting moment and for the sake of Weisberg's "argument" his nonsensical conflation of Objectivism and its true free market principles with Libertarianism. Weisberg must nevertheless be charged with his unapologetic evasion of the fact that he's celebrating the demise of a Libertarian hegemony that has never existed.

The man is deliriously dancing on an empty grave.

Totalitarian Islam and the Threat to Free Speech

By Yaron Brook from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

PRESS ADVISORY
AYN RAND INSTITUTE
2121 Alton Parkway, Suite 250, Irvine, CA 92606

October 15, 2008

Totalitarian Islam and the Threat to Free Speech
A panel discussion at American University

What: A panel discussion on the nature of totalitarian Islam and its threat to free speech, followed by a Q&A

Who: Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute; Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum; and Flemming Rose, cultural editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten

Where: Ward One, Auditorium One, American University, Washington, D.C.

When: Thursday, October 23, 2008, at 6 pm

Admission is FREE and open to the public.

Description: What is the nature of totalitarian Islam--is it limited to terrorism or is it a broader movement? Are non-Muslims its only victims? Who precisely is the enemy? Does the West bear responsibility for creating this movement? What policies can defeat it?

Defenders of Islam around the world have striven to silence critics with threats, protests and acts of violence. How should the West respond to demands for censorship, as in the Danish cartoon controversy? 

Panelists will address these critical issues in a lively discussion.

Bios:

Dr. Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute and a recognized Middle East expert who has written and lectured on a variety of Middle East issues. Dr. Brook has discussed the Israeli-Arab conflict and the war on Islamic totalitarianism on hundreds of radio and TV programs, including FOX News, CNN, and a C-SPAN panel of experts on terrorism.

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum. Abroad, he appears weekly in Israel’s Jerusalem Post, Italy’s l’Opinione, Spain’s La Razón and monthly in Canada’s Globe and Mail. His Web site, DanielPipes.org, is one of the most accessed Internet sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Islam. Mr. Pipes has appeared on ABC World News, CBS Reports, Crossfire, Good Morning America, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, The O’Reilly Factor, The Today Show, the BBC and Al-Jazeera.

Flemming Rose is a Danish journalist, author and the cultural editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. In September 2005 Mr. Rose commissioned a series of cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad. He was concerned about the tendency toward self-censorship in Europe and some Muslims’ insistence on special treatment of their religious sensitivities in the public domain, which he wanted to bring forward for debate. The backlash from Muslims around the world caused an international crisis and the Danish government experienced its worst foreign policy crisis since the Nazi occupation during WWII.

For more information: e-mail media@aynrand.org

Please note: The above event is organized, hosted and sponsored by an individual campus club. Although ARI provides financial support, educational materials and speakers for eligible student clubs, campus clubs are organizations independent of ARI. ARI does not necessarily endorse the content of the lectures and sessions offered.

 

Protect Citizens

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

Protect Citizens
By David Holcberg (USA Today, October 13, 2008)

No law should place the well-being of whales above that of humans. Even if, as environmentalists allege, the use of sonar threatens the lives and health of marine mammals, no law should prevent the Navy from using this crucial military technology.

The fundamental purpose of government in a free society is the protection of the individual rights of its citizens. If the Navy judges that sonar experiments off the coast of California are "critical to the nation's own security," and that they might increase its ability to detect such potential military threats as hostile submarines, it should do these experiments. Our national defense and our very lives may depend on it.

This attack on our Navy's ability to defend us from foreign threats is yet another example of environmental laws being used to sacrifice our interests for the alleged "rights" of animals. Once again, environmentalists are showing whose side they are on, and it is not humanity's.

Government Found Guilty of Assaulting the Economy

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

Government Found Guilty of Assaulting the Economy
By David Holcberg (International Herald Tribune, October 11, 2008)

You don’t have to be a professional detective to realize who the main culprit is in today’s financial crisis. The government’s fingerprints are all over the crime scene.

The government had the motive (the widely lauded goal of promoting "affordable housing"); it had the means (the Fed’s control of interest rates and the money supply, Fannie and Freddie, the federal Community Reinvestment Act, the "too big to fail" bailout policy); and it had the opportunity (courtesy of voters who think the government should have the power to regulate and interfere with the free market and manage our entire economy).

Of course, the government can’t be arrested or put in jail, no matter how damning the evidence against it. But we should not shy away from pronouncing the "Guilty" verdict.

The Road to Fascism

By Yaron Brook from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Road to Fascism
October 16, 2008

Washington, D.C.--The government has announced that it plans to use $250 billion to buy ownership stakes in various U.S. financial institutions. According to the New York Times, nine major U.S. banks have already been forced into the program. “The chief executives of the nine largest banks in the United States . . . were each handed a one-page document that said they agreed to sell shares to the government, then Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said they must sign it before they left. . . . ‘It was a take it or take it offer,’ said one person who was briefed on the meeting, speaking on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private. ‘Everyone knew there was only one answer’”--even though at least one institution, the relatively healthy Wells Fargo, wanted to say no.

According to Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, “In herding banking executives into a room and making them an offer they couldn’t refuse, the Paulson regime took its latest and most disturbing step yet on the path to state control of the economy.

“If fascism means coercive state control over nominally private property, then there is no more chilling sign of creeping fascism in America than government’s encroachment on the lifeblood of the U.S. economy--its financial institutions. While the government assures us it will be a ‘passive investor,’ merely funneling cash into the banking system rather than dictating how banks function, this is a lie. Not only does the money come with strings attached--such as restrictions on executive compensation, dividend payments, and the types of investments banks can make--but politicians are already promising a web of further controls. As John McCain recently noted, ‘We will not merely inject billions of dollars into companies and walk away hoping for the best. We will require that those companies be reformed and restructured until they are sound assets again, and can be sold at no loss--or perhaps even a profit--to the taxpayers of America.’

“The Paulson shakedown is the latest in a rapid-fire series of government bailouts and interventions over the last several months. Our leaders claim that this virtual takeover of markets is economically necessary. But it was government control of financial markets that spawned the financial meltdown in the first place: an inflationary boom brought on by the Fed’s easy-money policies, a campaign to promote home ownership that encouraged risky loans, regulations that pushed banks to become dangerously over-leveraged, etc., etc. The response to the crisis should be to restore freedom and to disentangle government from the economy. Instead, the same mentality and the same central planners that created the financial crisis are being given far wider reign to manipulate and distort markets. We must tell our government to reverse this fascist course--now.

### ### ###

Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. He is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and a contributing editor of The Objective Standard. His articles have been featured in major newspapers such as USA Today, the Houston Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Providence Journal and the Orange County Register. Dr. Brook is often interviewed on radio and is a frequent guest on a variety of national TV shows, having appeared in the new Fox Business Network, FOX News Channel, CNN, CNBC, and C-SPAN. Dr. Brook, a former finance professor, lectures on Objectivism, capitalism, business and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

To interview Dr. Brook or book him for your show, please contact Larry Benson:
949-222-6550, ext. 213
media@aynrandcenter.org

For more information on Objectivism’s unique point of view, go to ARC’s Web site. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

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McBama vs. America

By Craig Biddle from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

PRESS ADVISORY
AYN RAND CENTER FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
555 12th Street NW, Suite 620 N, Washington, DC 20004

October 16, 2008

McBama vs. America

Who: Craig Biddle, editor and publisher of “The Objective Standard”

What: A talk examining the presidential candidates’ platforms and showing that their aims are at odds with the American ideal of individual rights. A Q&A will follow.

Where: Hilton Costa Mesa, 3050 Bristol Street, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

When: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, at 7:30 pm

Admission is FREE.

Description: While John McCain and Barack Obama struggle to distinguish themselves in terms of particular promises, it is crucial for Americans to recognize that these candidates are indistinguishable in terms of fundamentals.

In this talk, Craig Biddle, editor of “The Objective Standard,” examines the candidates’ platforms, identifies essential similarities among their proposals, and shows their aims to be manifestly at odds with the American ideal of individual rights. Mr. Biddle then zeros in on the purpose of government presumed by the candidates’ goals, shows this purpose to be an expression of a particular moral philosophy shared by these men and by most Americans, and demonstrates that this morality is the root cause of the abysmal alternative we now face. Finally, Mr. Biddle specifies the moral principles that Americans must grasp if we want to generate future candidates who will return government to its proper purpose of protecting our rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Bio: Craig Biddle is the editor and publisher of “The Objective Standard” and the author of “Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It.” In addition to writing, he lectures and teaches workshops on ethical and epistemological issues from an Objectivist perspective.

For more information on this talk, please e-mail media@aynrand.org.

###  ### ###

Mr. Craig Biddle is available for interviews now and after his talk.

Contact: Larry Benson          
E-mail: media@aynrand.org          
Phone: (949) 222-6550, ext. 213

The Ayn Rand Center (ARC) is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

For more information on Objectivism’s unique point of view, go to ARC’s Web site.

Please note: ARC does not necessarily endorse the content of the lectures and sessions offered.

Jail Time for Blasphemy Under Religious Constitution

By Tom Bowden from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Jail Time for Blasphemy Under Religious Constitution  
October 21, 2008

Washington, D.C. --“The 20-year jail sentence for blasphemy handed down to Sayad Kambakhsh in Afghanistan this week is the kind of outrage to be expected under any constitution that enshrines Islam as the state religion and the Koran as the supreme law of the land,” said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

A council of mullahs acting under court authority had originally decreed capital punishment for Kambakhsh, a 24-year-old journalism student charged with possessing anti-Islamic books, starting un-Islamic debates in class, and downloading and distributing Internet articles saying that Muhammad ignored women’s rights. That death sentence, which was endorsed by Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament, has now been overturned on appeal.

“In 2006, mobs of clerics were clamoring for the death of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan whose ‘crime’ was converting to Christianity,” Bowden said. “And now, Sayad Kambakhsh faces two decades in jail unless an international outcry embarrasses Afghanistan’s government into lifting the sentence.

“Criminal punishment of blasphemy is fundamentally unjust and outrageous, and ad hoc protests offer no long-term solution. If Islam’s stranglehold on Afghanistan’s government is to end, that nation must adopt an American-style constitution protecting individual rights, including freedom of speech and religion. The strict separation of church and state erects an institutional barrier to religious persecution, as American history shows.

“But a nation that exalts mystical dogma and tribal allegiances cannot be expected to think in such terms. ‘The guy should be hanged,’ said an 18-year-old student at the American University in Kabul, at the time of Kambakhsh’s death sentence. Added a Muslim cleric: ‘He should be punished so that others can learn from him.’ For such people, freedom is an intolerable obstacle to the overriding goal of enforcing Islam.

“When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, its stated policy was to promote ‘democracy.’ That policy has now achieved its exact aim. The Afghan government reflects the democratic will of the people. The people want to punish blasphemers, and their constitution allows them to do so lawfully.

“Bush’s policy was based on his delusional belief that Afghans are as freedom-loving as Americans. But what they truly value is religion. Sayad Kambakhsh is living--at least for now--proof that religion injected into government is hostile to freedom.”

########

Mr. Bowden is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, focusing on legal issues. A former lawyer and law school instructor, who practiced for twenty years in Baltimore, Maryland, his op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Daily News, and many other newspapers. Mr. Bowden has given dozens of radio interviews and has appeared on FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes.

Thomas Bowden is available for interviews on this topic.

Contact: Larry Benson
E-mail: media@AynRandCenter.org
Phone: (949) 222-6550, ext. 213

For more information on Objectivism’s unique point of view, go to ARC’s Web site. The Ayn Rand Center promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

Frontline Heats Up Global Warming Alarmism

By Keith Lockitch from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Frontline Heats Up Global Warming Alarmism
October 22, 2008

Washington, DC --On Tuesday evening, PBS premiered Heat, a Frontline documentary exploring the economics and politics of climate change. After travelling the world interviewing corporate CEOs and political leaders, Frontline correspondent Martin Smith argues that a “huge and concerted push from government” is necessary to prevent a major catastrophe.

But according to Keith Lockitch, fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights: “A huge push from government on climate change would be a major catastrophe.

“One thing the documentary shows pretty clearly is the repeated failure of government economic intervention--especially in the form of policies aimed at centrally planning energy production, such as government subsidies for corn ethanol. These have distorted world food markets by diverting billions of taxpayer dollars away from investments that market participants would have freely chosen and into the production of corn for burning up in our gas tanks, with the resulting distortions to world food prices causing food riots and starvation.

“Government policies aimed at severely restricting carbon emissions would inflict a major blow to the economy. Industrial-scale energy is an indispensable, life-saving value, and currently there is simply no practical way to produce abundant carbon-free energy. Nuclear power could generate substantial amounts of electricity, but environmentalists have consistently fought it tooth and nail. And even nuclear can’t fuel the internal combustion engines of the world’s 800 million oil-powered vehicles.

“The more important point is that there is no need whatsoever to restrict carbon emissions,” said Lockitch. “The scientific jury is still out on the extent of man’s contribution to global warming. But even if we are causing large-scale changes to the climate--this is not a planetary emergency. If individuals on the free market can smoothly absorb the major transitions that occurred in moving from the horse and buggy to the automobile or the rapid population growth that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, they can adapt to large-scale climate change. The freer we are from the burdens of government intervention, the more we can continue to produce wealth, economic growth, and the means of adapting to whatever changes occur, if any.

“The irony is that the very policies that people are pushing for in the name of fighting global warming--such as a massive expansion of government control over the production and consumption of energy--would severely reduce our ability to cope with nature. This would inflict upon us an economic catastrophe far worse than anything the climate could deliver.

“The real threat we face is not the possibility of large-scale changes to the climate, but the much more dangerous possibility of drastic government policies enacted in the name of climate change.”

### ### ###

Dr. Lockitch has a PhD in Physics from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. His writings have appeared in publications such as the Orange County Register and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Dr. Keith Lockitch is available for interviews. To book him for your show, please contact Larry Benson: E-mail: media@AynRandCenter.org
Phone: (949) 222-6550, ext. 213

For more information on Objectivism’s unique point of view, go to ARC’s Web site. The Ayn Rand Center promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

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Greenspan Has No Free Market Philosophy

By Yaron Brook from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Greenspan Has No Free Market Philosophy October 24, 2008 Washington, D.C.

--Opponents of the free market are giddy at Alan Greenspan's declaration that the financial crisis has exposed a "flaw" in his "free market ideology." Greenspan says he is "in a state of shocked disbelief" because he "looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity"--and it didn't.

But according to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, “any belief Greenspan ever had in truly free markets was abandoned long ago. While Greenspan long ago wrote in favor of a truly free market in banking, including the gold standard that such markets always adopt, he then proceeded to work for two decades as leader and chief advocate of the Federal Reserve, which continually inflates the money supply and manipulates interest rates. Advocates of free banking understand that when the government inflates the currency, it artificially increases prices and causes booms in certain sectors of the economy, followed by inevitable busts. But not only did Greenspan lead the inflation behind the  dot-com bubble and the real estate boom, he blamed the market for their treacherous collapses. Greenspan should have recognized that what he wrote in 1966 of the boom preceding the 1929 crash applied here: ‘The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market--triggering a fantastic speculative boom.’ Instead, he superficially blamed ‘infectious greed.’

“Should it be any shock that Greenspan now blames the free market for today's meltdown--rather than the Fed's policies, which fueled an inflationary housing boom, which rewarded reckless lenders and borrowers from Wall Street to Main Street? Greenspan didn't mention the word ‘inflation’ once in his testimony.

“Whatever Greenspan's economic philosophy is, it is not anything resembling a free market.”

### ### ###

Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. He is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and a contributing editor of The Objective Standard. His articles have been featured in major newspapers such as USA Today, the Houston Chronicle, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Providence Journal and the Orange County Register. Dr. Brook is often interviewed on radio and is a frequent guest on a variety of national TV shows, having appeared on the new Fox Business Network, FOX News Channel, CNN, CNBC, and C-SPAN. Dr. Brook, a former finance professor, lectures on Objectivism, capitalism, business and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

To interview Dr. Brook or book him for your show, please contact Larry Benson:
949-222-6550, ext. 213
media@aynrandcenter.org

For more information on Objectivism’s unique point of view, go to ARC’s Web site. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”

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Some Pre-Election Humor

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

No matter which candidate floats to the top on or after Election Day, we're inaugurating a real stinker in January.

Anyone who cares about America and understands the danger each candidate presents knows that there is a herculean task of cultural activism ahead. Before we will see an election cycle that includes candidates offering real progress towards greater freedom, many, many Americans will have to be taught or reminded of the nature and importance of individual rights. I won't belabor this point further today.

The bright side is that we know what the baseline is and what needs to be done. We also aren't, like so many Republicans in the (septic?) tank for McCain -- or kids deluded by the O-bomb -- emotionally invested in any way whatsoever in the fortunes of either political candidate. This means that, as a small fringe benefit, we can enjoy all of the political humor out there, excepting the two jokes that have somehow made it onto the top of the ballot, of course.

A couple of items came to my attention this morning. One of them is a column over at RealClear Politics by Steven Stark titled, "Long National Nightmare", but bylined by RCP as, "What If All the Pundits Are (Gasp!) Wrong?.

There was Wilson over Hughes. And, of course, Truman over Dewey. But there's never been a surprise in presidential politics like the one that awaited Americans this morning, who woke up to discover that, somehow, John McCain had been elected president over Barack Obama.

...

Meanwhile, the tsunami of youth support for Obama never materialized. Instead, it was the over-65 crowd who turned out as if the election were a five-o'clock dinner special, and who voted in record numbers for their fellow senior citizen.

"It was fear of the known versus fear of the unknown -- and fear won out," quipped one McCain aide.

Be sure to read all the way to the punchline, and remember it if truth turns out to be stranger than fiction come the day after Election Day!

And then we have a short video at YouTube that I learned about through HBL.


Look! It's two Democrats on an Escalator!

The challenge I pose to my readers today is this: Can you top these?

-- CAV

The Blogging Experience

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

Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic monthly (and his blog The Daily Dish) has a wonderful article in this month's issue on the ephemeral experience of being a blogger. This vibrant article captures some of the emotion and the experience of this unique occupation. Some of my favorite snips:

On the dialogue between blogger and commenter,

Readers tell me of breaking stories, new perspectives, and counterarguments to prevailing assumptions. And this is what blogging, in turn, does to reporting. The traditional method involves a journalist searching for key sources, nurturing them, and sequestering them from his rivals. A blogger splashes gamely into a subject and dares the sources to come to him.

...

Not all of it is mere information. Much of it is also opinion and scholarship, a knowledge base that exceeds the research department of any newspaper. A good blog is your own private Wikipedia. Indeed, the most pleasant surprise of blogging has been the number of people working in law or government or academia or rearing kids at home who have real literary talent and real knowledge, and who had no outlet—until now.

and on the unique improvisational "vibe" of blogging,

To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.

The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.

I try to explain blogging to my friends and colleagues who are not aware of the medium and they usually don't get it. Andrew captures the feeling wonderfully!

Thou Shalt not Lie

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Michigan's "Proposal 2" that will allow some stem-cell research. I've noticed "No on 2" lawn-signs at some catholic churchs and schools. Both sides are running TV ads.

Strikingly, the religious side has not organized their ad-campaign around their moral argument. Instead, it's full of blatant lies and smears. The thrust of their campaign is that the state will spend tax-dolalrs on this research. This is completely untrue, except in the sense that the state probably spends tax-dollars on various types of research. Why the lies? I assume the Christians know they have their own votes wrapped up; so the campaign is aimed at the independent voter.

Today, I read about the Christians in Colorado doing the same thing on a proposition there.

I suppose it is good news that the Christians think they need to lie and evade in order to get their way. I suppose it also makes them more vulnerable to attack.

Objectivist Round Up #67

By noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Welcome to the October 23rd, 2008 edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. This week presents insight and analyses written by authors who are animated by Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. According to Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"About the Author," Atlas Shrugged, Appendix.

So without any further delay (and in no particular order), here's this week's round-up:

Kevin McAllister presents Network Neutrality posted at Logical Disconnect, saying, "Having built networks for years nothing makes my blood boil more than the clamoring for "freedom" through government oversight."

Paul McKeever presents Banking and Morality: 100% Reserve versus “Fractional” Reserves posted at Paul McKeever, saying, "the issue of the ethics of reserve requirements in bank lending has been largely neglected in the Objectivist literature. This is a response to a YouTube advocate of libertarian/anarcho-capitalist "free banking" who thinks Objectivists ought not to condemn the fractional reserve system, and who thinks that everything would be fine if we just got rid of central banks."

Guy Barnett presents Give Peace a Chance? posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "Are Jewish-Arab rock bands the key to peace in the Middle East?"

Rob Abiera presents My latest LTE posted at The Morality War, saying, "My effort to take advantage of an opportunity to counter the message that the economic crisis was caused by selfish greed comes to naught when my letter to my local paper is returned unread because it's over the word limit!"

Noah Stahl presents The Latest Diplomatic Tactic: Make-Believe posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "The U.S. has just taken North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terrorism. What is the reason for this significant change in policy?"

Adam Edwards presents No Lament for Libertarians posted at Monopoly On Reason.

Adam Edwards presents Do Not Vote posted at Monopoly On Reason.

Dan Edge presents Is Barak Obama a Socialist? posted at The Edge of Reason, saying, "In this blog post I address the question of whether or not Obama can properly be labeled a socialist, as is the common charge."

Ari Armstrong presents Amendment 48: Burton's Equivocation posted at AriArmstrong.com, saying, "Kristi Burton, sponsor of the measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person in Colorado's constitution, continues to ignore the relevant biological facts and the legal implications of the measure."

Myrhaf presents The Myrhaf Endorsement: Abstain posted at Myrhaf, saying, "Here is an explanation of how I will vote."

Paul Hsieh presents Force That Isn't Force posted at NoodleFood, saying, "A prime example of conceptual "package dealing"."

Brandon Byrd presents Getting Rand Wrong posted at NoodleFood.

Diana Hsieh presents Diana Hsieh in the New York Times posted at NoodleFood, saying, "The Coalition for Secular Government makes a brief appearance in a a New York Times "On Religion" column about Colorado's Amendment 48."

C. August presents Goodbye Gridlock posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "With a looming supermajority from the Left, are we about to see a new New Deal play out with Obama as the 'new and improved' FDR?"

C. August presents Obama's Greenmail and Growing Glaciers posted at Titanic Deck Chairs, saying, "While a President Obama has plans to use the threat of disastrous EPA regulations to blackmail Congress into passing cap-and-trade, there is growing physical evidence that the globe isn't about melt. Would anyone care to lay odds on whether that will have any impact?"

Peter Cresswell presents Nasty, brutish - and as stupid as a political journalist posted at Not PC, saying, "When alleged economist Paul Krugman Paul Krugman got a Nobel award for earlier more rational work, most of us knew the prestige of the Nobel would be used to promote his current theme: the alleged horrors of economic freedom; and his favourite prescription: the need for bigger, more interventionist government. Who would have thought the leaders of bigger, more interventionist governments would embrace his prescription so quickly!"

Edward Cline presents Ayn Rand Avenged posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "Answering the engineered takeover of the economy by the federal government is an unprecedented cultural phenomenon: People who read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged years ago and dismissed it but now see the parallels are filled with trepidation. All are now realizing that “the end is near.” But, the end of what?"

Nicholas Provenzo presents CAC dukes it out at Opposing Views posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "It is my pleasure to announce that the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism has been enrolled as an expert at Opposing Views."

Doug presents Book Review: The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care by David Gratzer posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care is an excellent resource on health care economics and the history of health care policy."

Rational Jenn presents The AJC Gets It Dead Right posted at Rational Jenn, saying, "I think I'm finally figuring out that most politicians don't use words to express actual ideas. I know--I'm a little slow on the uptake here."

Kendall Justiniano presents My Hero Anna Schwartz posted at The Crucible & Column, saying, "Milton Friedman's co-author of the influential "A Monetary History of the United States" weighs in on the financial crisis and makes so many good points that she hits not a double or a triple, but knocks it out of the park for a... a... what do you call it when you get to fifth base? I love you Anna!"

Tom Stelene presents If Prager Knew What He Was Writing About: A Reply to "If There Is No God" posted at Al-Kafir Akbar!.

That concludes this edition of the Objectivist Round-Up. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.


Technorati tags: objectivist round up, blog carnival.

Immigration Flowchart

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This interesting flowchart of US immigration procedure has been making the blog rounds lately.



When I sent it to one of my physician friends who was born in Canada but is now a US citizen, he replied (quoted with his permission):

Thank you for sending this. The entire process took me nine years and about $15k. The time, energy and money spent on becoming an American citizen was the best investment by far that I ever made. I have far more freedom to pursue my intellectual and career goals in the USA compared to any other country.

Also our [child] would likely not have survived if [my wife and I] had not had access to the home fetal monitoring technology developed by Michael Katz in San Francisco. The home fetal monitoring picked up premature labor several times including the preterm labor before delivery. The doctors were able to give steroids to improve lung maturity and delay the Caesarian section. This technology would never have available in Canada.

I shudder at how our life might have turned out if we stayed in Canada.

I think the USA has a moral obligation to liberalize immigration. If someone wants to work and someone wants to hire him and they are not shmucks or scoundrels we should allow them to make their own choice.

I completely agree.

For those who are interested in a more detailed discussion of this topic, I highly recommend Craig Biddle's article in the Spring 2008 issue of The Objective Standard entitled, "Immigration and Individual Rights".

Quick Roundup 372

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

Can I Abstain from Endorsing?

Myrhaf recently endorsed abstaining during the next presidential election. Diana Hsieh and Craig Biddle also recommend abstention.

My position was probably closest to Diana's until a few days ago. As she put it, "McCain is particularly revolting. So if I vote for anyone, I'll vote for Obama. He's beyond awful, but I have some reason to hope that he'll be ineffectual."

But the more I learn about Obama, particularly with the prospect of his party gaining an iron grip on Congress, the more frightening that prospect looks to me. In particular, I'm hearing more and more about the possibility that the "Fairness" Doctrine will be reimposed.

Now we have two candidates who have demonstrated hostility to freedom of speech, the original reason I said I could not vote for McCain. There remains the matter of it being better to have an actual socialist (rather than a professed or assumed pro-capitalist) being the one to impose such laws, so I can see there being an argument to vote for Obama, but it increasingly looks like my freedom will be at the tender mercies of chance no matter who wins. I am losing sleep over what the next few years might bring. Everything I love is going to be under active attack after Bush, who has started things early with his "bailout", leaves office.

The prospect of voting for either man is extremely revolting to me.

I walked past a line full of ne'er-do-wells the other day at the grocery store and noticed that they were there for early voting. (And I just now recall several odd encounters with people trying to strike up conversations with me out of the blue over high food prices during previous trips to the same store. Suddenly, all this makes sense to me now.) Leftists whine all the time about people too lazy to show up to vote being "disenfranchised". At the risk of sounding like one of them, it is I who have been disenfranchised this time around.

Thus the struggle to restore individual rights begins against the ironic backdrop of a line that includes many black voters who will be casting ballots for a black Presidential candidate -- who wants to impose slavery on everyone.

I am beginning to wonder whether the very act of voting in this election risks lending moral sanction to an obscene pretense.

The Problem with Licensing

Brian Phillips has posted an interesting piece against state-mandated licensing over at Houston Property Rights Live Oaks:

[L]icensing is nothing more than legalized thuggery. Coercion is used to prevent entry into a profession and impose higher costs on consumers. If a contractor beat up a competitor at the paint store he would be charged with battery. If he took money from a customer he would be charged with theft. The nature of his actions do not change simply because he uses government coercion in the form of licensing as his proxy.

This is in addition to the fact that it fails to achieve its alleged purpose, the protection of consumers from incompetents.

Licensing may have affected me personally, as the spouse of a physician. Because my wife, a medical resident, spent time performing basic research between licensing exams, she would have faced review due to the amount of time between her exams by a board for one of the residencies she had been looking at.

There was no way to have this decision made before she started her residency. Since an unfavorable decision could have potentially ended up causing her to be arbitrarily kicked out of her residency, she had to take this threat to her career into account when she ranked the schools she interviewed. One could argue that in our case, (assuming she would have ranked this program higher than her current one) licensing caused our cost of living to be dramatically higher for the next several years than it might otherwise have been.

A Viral Phenomenon

Some time ago, after several fruitless hunts at airports for wireless Internet connections, I googled "free public wi-fi" and found the following very interesting article:

While on vacation last month, I kept spotting "Free Public WiFi" ad-hoc nodes wherever I went, particularly in airports.

Finally, my wife mentioned that she was in her office building the other, opened her notebook looking for connectivity and saw "Free Public WiFi". She connected to it, but was unable to get anywhere.

So what are these things? In doing a search, I found some references in security-related discussion groups to the phenomenon, and lots of instances of people spotting these, even on airplanes. But didn't see what I was afraid I'd find -- that this is some kind of virus or spyware that sets up an ad hoc network as a trap.

It appears to be a manifestation of a feature of Windows that I wrote about earlier this year. When Windows connects to a network, it retains that network's name, or SSID, then broadcasts its as an ad hoc network, essentially inviting a connection. You can find more details here. Microsoft has said it will fix this in the next XP service pack; it's unclear if Windows Vista behaves this way.

So why do you see so many of these? My theory: It's viral, but not a virus!

I once even spotted one of these nodes during a flight....

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected name of Brian Phillips' blog, which he renamed today. (It will remain Houston Property Rights in the sidebar until the next time I do a batch of template edits.)

The Long View of the US Economy

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Despite all of the recent economic turmoil, it's important to keep a long-term perspective. If the currently semi-free US economy is allowed to function, we will still be in pretty good shape. The following graph of GDP per capital over the past 200 years shows how the US economy has done. Even the Great Depression and WWII can be seen as fairly minor blips in the overall upward trend.



However, the one thing that we can do to screw things up is to impose massive new regulations. This sort of self-inflicted damage could harm the long-term future economy far more than any particular stock market crash. Hence, it's important to continue to defend and advocate for the free market.

(Graph via Center for Global Development and Will Wilkinson.)

Mackerel Economics

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

According to the October 2, 2008 Wall Street Journal, the unofficial prison currency in the US is no longer the cigarette, but rather the mackerel:

There's been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say. That's when federal prisons prohibited smoking and, by default, the cigarette pack, which was the earlier gold standard.

Prisoners need a proxy for the dollar because they're not allowed to possess cash. Money they get from prison jobs (which pay a maximum of 40 cents an hour, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons) or family members goes into commissary accounts that let them buy things such as food and toiletries. After the smokes disappeared, inmates turned to other items on the commissary menu to use as currency.

...[T]he mack is a good stand-in for the greenback because each can (or pouch) costs about $1 and few -- other than weight-lifters craving protein -- want to eat it.

It's interesting that these prisoners understand the need for a stable objective medium of economic exchange far better than the US government which is incarcerating them, even though few of those prisoners have studied articles such as, "Gold and Economic Freedom" in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal which explain the importance of a gold standard.

In light of the recent Wall Street bailout inflicted on us by government officials based on bad economic theories, here are a couple of conclusions one might draw:

1) Perhaps it's the US economy that is based "fishy" premises, not the prison economy.

2) Perhaps more US government officials need to spend some time in a federal penitentiary -- they may learn an important lesson about sound money (as well as some well-deserved lessons on other subjects.)

(Via Marginal Revolution.)

The Legend of the Seeker

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

My friend Bill Perry (officially known as William E. Perry) sent me the following bit of news about "The Legend of the Seeker," an upcoming miniseries based on Terry Goodkind's first novel. I've not read any of Goodkind's work, but Bill tells me that he's an Objectivist.

Terry Goodkind's first novel Wizard's First Rule is the basis for the mini-series "The Legend of the Seeker." The Sam Raimi of Spiderman fame is the executive producer. The series is syndicated so times and stations vary, but it is on WGN, so most cable systems will have it.

The series starts the weekend of November 1, but an introduction with footage from the first episode starts October 18. It is called "The Making of a Legend" and is hosted by Lucy Lawless. Local listings for the introduction and the series are available here.

While Goodkind was not an Objectivist when he wrote the novel he has been closely involved in the production and I'd anticipate that the non-Objectivist portions have been fixed. I have read all of the novels and have followed the publicity about the making of the mini-series and am extremely excited about watching the upcoming series. Even if you haven't followed the series I'd recommend watching for anyone who likes fantasy shows, or even Objectivists who aren't really fans of the genre. I wasn't before I discovered the series.

I'm definitely planning to watch it!

Rate this Blog

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

If you like NoodleFood, rate it for Blogged.com:

A Message to Young People

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

If you're not like totally into politics? I mean, if you can't like name both the Vice-Presidential candidates, or if you can't name even the Presidential candidates, or if you're uncertain as to what I'm talking about here, don't worry about it. It's totally cool. Only geeks keep track of that stuff anyway. But here's the really cool part: you should not worry about it. Forget about it, man. Play video games and watch TV. And when the voting day comes -- I won't bother you with the date, because it's better you remain vague about it -- just stay in bed. Don't worry about voting. It's cool. You can leave that to other people. Who cares?

Don't listen to those self-righteous poseurs who tell you that you have a responsibility to vote. You don't have to vote if you don't want to. It's called freedom. And forget that stuff about how you won't have the right to speak out for the next two years if you don't vote today. You can say whatever you want, but mostly you have better things to talk about anyway, so blow off those idiots.

Don't let any of those clowns make you feel guilty for not voting. The opposite of what they say is true: if you don't vote, you are serving your country. You are helping America if you don't vote, because only informed citizens should vote. You don't want all that hassle of learning about the candidates and the issues. There's nothing wrong with that. Really. Just stay home, put on some tunes and fire up the bong. Fuck voting.

This has been a public service announcement.

My Hero Anna Schwartz

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

Anna Schwartz co-authored "A Monetary History of the United States" with Milton Friedman. While the monetarists have their own issues, she gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal this week on the financial crisis, "Bernanke is Fighting the Last War, and it is superb. She made five key points that echoed themes I've been discussing in the past weeks.

First, the current Federal policies are not addressing the fundamental cause of the confidence problem. That cause is distressed balance sheets which can only be fixed by write down and recapitalization.

This is not due to a lack of money available to lend, Ms. Schwartz says, but to a lack of faith in the ability of borrowers to repay their debts. "The Fed," she argues, "has gone about as if the problem is a shortage of liquidity. That is not the basic problem. The basic problem for the markets is that [uncertainty] that the balance sheets of financial firms are credible."

So even though the Fed has flooded the credit markets with cash, spreads haven't budged because banks don't know who is still solvent and who is not. This uncertainty, says Ms. Schwartz, is "the basic problem in the credit market. Lending freezes up when lenders are uncertain that would-be borrowers have the resources to repay them. So to assume that the whole problem is inadequate liquidity bypasses the real issue."

Second, bank failures are not the end of the world, and in fact are part of the restructuring process that is needed.

In fact, by keeping otherwise insolvent banks afloat, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have actually prolonged the crisis. "They should not be recapitalizing firms that should be shut down."

Rather, "firms that made wrong decisions should fail," she says bluntly. "You shouldn't rescue them. And once that's established as a principle, I think the market recognizes that it makes sense. Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich." The trouble is, "that's not the way the world has been going in recent years."

Third, the idea of "systemic risk" as a Doomsday scenario is bogus, and only propagates the "too big to fail" mindset.

Instead, we've been hearing for most of the past year about "systemic risk" -- the notion that allowing one firm to fail will cause a cascade that will take down otherwise healthy companies in its wake.

Ms. Schwartz doesn't buy it. "It's very easy when you're a market participant," she notes with a smile, "to claim that you shouldn't shut down a firm that's in really bad straits because everybody else who has lent to it will be injured. Well, if they lent to a firm that they knew was pretty rocky, that's their responsibility. And if they have to be denied repayment of their loans, well, they wished it on themselves. The [government] doesn't have to save them, just as it didn't save the stockholders and the employees of Bear Stearns. Why should they be worried about the creditors? Creditors are no more worthy of being rescued than ordinary people, who are really innocent of what's been going on."

Fourth, regardless of market forces that reacted during the buildup, one of the underlying causes was loose money policy at the FED. Anna, as a monetarist obviously focuses on this as a primary cause, but I can forgive that. I like this development, not so much for it's errors, but because of the fundamental idea that seemingly unexplainable phenomena are explainable. That mysterious "booms" are not so mysterious.

How did we get into this mess in the first place? As in the 1920s, the current "disturbance" started with a "mania." But manias always have a cause. "If you investigate individually the manias that the market has so dubbed over the years, in every case, it was expansive monetary policy that generated the boom in an asset.

"The particular asset varied from one boom to another. But the basic underlying propagator was too-easy monetary policy and too-low interest rates that induced ordinary people to say, well, it's so cheap to acquire whatever is the object of desire in an asset boom, and go ahead and acquire that object. And then of course if monetary policy tightens, the boom collapses."

And finally, on Alan Greenspan's role in the mess,

The house-price boom began with the very low interest rates in the early years of this decade under former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

"Now, Alan Greenspan has issued an epilogue to his memoir, 'Time of Turbulence,' and it's about what's going on in the credit market," Ms. Schwartz says. "And he says, 'Well, it's true that monetary policy was expansive. But there was nothing that a central bank could do in those circumstances. The market would have been very much displeased, if the Fed had tightened and crushed the boom. They would have felt that it wasn't just the boom in the assets that was being terminated.'" In other words, Mr. Greenspan "absolves himself. There was no way you could really terminate the boom because you'd be doing collateral damage to areas of the economy that you don't really want to damage."

I have an entire post on the revisionist perspective that Alan Greenspan has himself put to his decisions and actions. However, every time I sit to write it, I get too infuriated to finish it. This particular account made my blood boil as it shows in his own thinking the pragmatist and sell-out he has become. And in the end in doing so he's become capitalism's worst detractor.

Thanks Anna for saying what had to be said!

CAC dukes it out at Opposing Views

By noreply@blogger.com (Nicholas Provenzo) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

It is my pleasure to announce that the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism has been enrolled as an expert at Opposing Views. According to their website:

Opposing Views helps you uncover all sides of the issues you care about most. Here at http://www.opposingviews.com/, experts go head-to-head on real-life concerns, debating news and events, addressing the questions that keep you up at night. We introduce the questions, the experts present their cases (and disagree with each other), and you leave ready to make well-informed decisions and take action.

Each section of http://www.opposingviews.com/ is a channel, including politics, society, health, money, and religion. Our point/counter-point format gives each expert a chance to state their information and opinions on an issue. Meanwhile, the other side objects by calling out the flaws in that information, and then states their own side. Opposing Views brings together the information on the issue, the evidence on each side and their counter-points.

The hundreds of known and credible experts, opinion leaders and advocate groups include: the Obama Campaign, the McCain campaign, the National Rifle Association (NRA), People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), The Sierra Club and Amnesty International, as well as individuals who are authorities on issues of current consumer interest. Collectively, these partner organizations already have been cited as authorities on their topics.

I am excited because this allows us to present Objectivist arguments before our opponents in a respectful and well-run forum visited by thousands of readers every day. Our first debate on the question of a nuclear Iran is already live and can be seen here.

Book Review: The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care by David Gratzer

By noreply@blogger.com (Doug) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care is an excellent resource on health care economics and the history of health care policy. The author is a free market economist, a physician and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This book has been endorsed by Milton Friedman so should be of appeal to free market advocates. Like much of Friedman's works, Gratzer's arguments sometimes come off as pragmatic and lack the sound moral arguments for laissez-faire capitalism that only Objectivism can provide. However, like Friedman, Gratzer provides many compelling economic arguments and offers a wealth of useful facts.

Dr. Gratzer persuasively argues that the fundamental problem with U.S. health care is too much government regulation. To argue this, Dr. Gratzer first notes how the employer-based health coverage arose as an unintended side effect of a tax law, which allowed employers to write off health care expenditures for their employees. Moreover, Dr. Gratzer argues that both Democrats and Republicans have both essentially offered more government regulation as the solution to health care, which has not worked. The Democrats, such as the LBJ Administration, promoted enormously inefficient programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The Republicans, have promoted bureaucratic HMOs, which have led to similar large-scale inefficiencies.

Driving this point further, Dr. Gratzer greatly details the harmful economic consequences of government regulations in health care. For example, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) forbids hospitals from denying any patient for emergency care. The economic reality is that this leads to hospitals suffering economic losses by being forced to treat patients, regardless of if they can pay for the care, which ultimately leads to the closing of hospitals. Furthermore, insurance mandates, such as benefit mandates, rating mandates and bans on out-of-state insurance, restrict competition and lead to higher insurance premiums. Dr. Gratzer also thorough analyzes the harmful economic consequences of the FDA, Medicare, Medicaid and much more.

This book also dispels many common myths about the quality of U.S. health care. For example, statistics are often cited to argue that Canadians and/or Europeans have higher life expectancies than U.S. citizens. Dr. Gratzer argues that such studies mistakenly compare statistics on *health* when they should be on *health care*. There numerous lifestyle habits that differ between cultures, such as frequency of exercise and diet, which effect health. Dr. Gratzer proposes examining statistics on cardiac arrest patients, to see which country offers better treatment. In these respects, Dr. Gratzer argues that the U.S. system is clearly superior to its universal health care counterparts.

As one can infer, Dr. Gratzer proposes free market solutions to fix American health care. Specifically, he proposes drastically reducing the various regulatory excesses that he delineates throughout his book as well as embracing Health Savings Accounts. As always, Dr. Gratzer corroborates his arguments with real-world success stories, such as the success of Whole Foods' adoption of HSAs for its employees.

I highly recommend this book to all Objectivists with an interest in economics, health care policy or general intellectual activism on matters of politics.

If you enjoyed the above review, please rate it as helpful on Amazon.com. My Amazon version of this review can be found here. The more helpful ratings I receive, the higher my visibility is on Amazon.com. You can access all of my reviews on Amazon.com here.

Is Barack Obama a Socialist?

By noreply@blogger.com (Dan Edge) from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The charge that Barack Obama is a socialist comes from several different sources: journalists, politicians, and many Objectivists among them. "Socialist" is used as a negative pejorative term, meant to associate Obama with bloodthirsty savages like Josef Stalin and Chairman Mao. Most who make the charge do so in an attempt to differentiate Obama from John McCain, ostensibly to advocate a McCain presidency. McCain may be a Big Government Republican with a Neo-Con running mate, the argument goes, but at least he's not an outright socialist like Obama.

But does the term apply?

Before one can answer that question, he must first determine what socialism is. (Note that this process is very different from determining what the meaning of the word "is" is.) So what is socialism? The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines socialism this way:

"1: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

2 a: a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b: a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state

3: a stage of society in Marxist theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done"

Socialism is a political-economic system in which the government owns and controls all property. This theory is based primarily on the work of Karl Marx, an influential German philosopher who has achieved iconic status in communist countries. Marx believed that capitalism was part of a historically inevitable series of political-economic systems that would eventually result in a classless, stateless society of communes. Socialism, he thought, was a transitionary system between capitalism and communism in which the working classes (the proletariat) would violently revolt against the wealthy (the bourgeoisie), and establish a dictatorship in which the government owned and distributed all property.

So in asking whether Obama is a socialist, one is really asking: Does Obama believe that the government should own and distribute all means of production? Does he believe that rule by the proletariat is historically inevitable? Is he planning for a violent overthrow of the incumbent capitalist system?

One could argue that the answer to the first of these questions is "yes." Obama is pushing for higher taxes and more government controls. He wants to take money from the bourgois to give it to the proletariat. But a desire for bigger government does not make one a socialist. There are many different belief systems which advocate government control over property: Facism, Sharia Law, and other forms of theology, just to name a few. All these political systems are collectivist and statist, but they are not all socialist. Socialism is something very specific, as outlined above.

My conclusion is that Obama is not a socialist, any more than McCain is a socialist. Though their rhetoric differs (in non-essential ways), they both advocate some mixture of statism and capitalism. Both will increase the size of the federal government. Both support government intervention in the banking system, as we saw a few weeks ago. Both support welfare, Medicare, and Social Security. Both support reducing "emissions" to save Mother Earth. On nearly every major policy issue, Obama and McCain are indistinguishable.

Why do I make this point so strongly? Well for one, because it makes no sense to base one's vote on misapplied terminology. The term "socialism" is being tossed around as if it's synonymous with statism. Socialism is an emotionally charged word which incites visions of the dictatorships in U.S.S.R., North Korea, and China. If you are planning to vote against Obama simply because you think him a "socialist" while McCain is not, then I advise you to reconsider.

Also, as rational men we should be specific in our identifications of ideologies and their adherents. If Ayn Rand was right, and I believe she was, then it is ideology (philosophy) which moves the world. Properly identifying ideological movements is critically important to determining in what direction a nation is moving. In my opinion, socialism is dead, and has been dead for decades. No one believes in the historical inevitability of communism any more. No one believes that the proletariat will initiate a violent overthrow of government all over the world. These ideas have been so thoroughly discredited (and even demonized in the U.S.), that no one in the Western World takes them seriously any more.

But that does not mean that statism is dead. Statism is alive and well, but in the U.S., it still lacks an integrated, organized ideological movement to serve as its vehicle. Some have argued that the Neo-cons, with their "compassionate conservatism," now qualify as the most integrated movement advocating statism. I don't know if this is true or not, but it is definitely something we should be thinking about. Throwing the "socialism" charge around only muddies the issue further.

--Dan Edge

Individualist at Last?

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

Via Arts and Letters Daily is a remarkable article by economist Glenn C. Loury in which he recounts a failure from an earlier episode of his life that has caused him much anguish over the decades since. In the midst of fighting for civil rights, he betrayed a friend at a meeting of the Black Panther Party.

So there we were, at this boisterous, angry political rally. A critical moment came when Woody, seized by some idea, enthusiastically raised his voice above the murmur to be heard. He was cut short in mid-sentence by one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge, who demanded to know how a white boy got the authority to have an opinion on what black people should be doing. A silence then fell over the room. "Who can vouch for this white boy?" asked the brother indignantly. More excruciating silence ensued. Now was my time to act. Woody turned plaintively toward me, but I would not meet his eyes. To my eternal shame, I failed to speak up for my friend, and he was forced to leave the meeting without a word having been uttered in his defense.

Loury's friend had grown up with him in his neighborhood, and was of fractional black African descent, but did not have dark skin or African features. He had, however, like many such people at the time, decided to openly declare himself as black.

As with many other attempts to break free from tyranny, the struggle by American blacks to achieve equality under the law has been a mixed bag, as I have discussed at some length here before. Many things blurred the essential nature of this struggle, but I think a major factor was the fact that it was a war fought on two fronts:

At the beginning of the Civil Rights Era, blacks in America faced two major problems. One problem was moral in scope, and that was racism on the part of most whites, particularly in the South. The other problem was legal: Poor treatment of blacks was legally codified into what are known as Jim Crow Laws.

And, on top of that, American society at large has always been massively confused if not wrong outright about what constitutes a proper morality, and increasingly confused about the proper role of government. It is one thing to fight for the legal protection of the individual rights of blacks. It is quite another to impose a sort of retaliatory Jim Crow on everyone else to "make up for" past injustice.

This article gives a snapshot of how rife with ethical confusion the civil rights movement has been and remains. Are we individuals or parts of racial collectives? I have long thought that an underappreciated hangover of white racism has been that blacks never got to become accustomed to being treated as, or thinking of themselves as individuals at all times.

This lingering effect, along with common misconceptions about ethics and politics was already making this just rebellion a blind one. Loury now sees the irony of that moment, when, in the name of civil rights, his friend was being subjected to a race test:

The indignant brother who challenged Woody's right to speak was not merely imposing a racial test (only blacks are welcome here), he was mainly applying a loyalty test (you are either with us or against us), and this was a test that anyone present could fail through a lack of conformity with the collectively enforced political norm. I now know that denying one's genuine convictions for the sake of social acceptance is a price society often demands of the individual, and all too often we willingly pay it.

Given Loury's context then, he should have vouched for his friend, but the proper response would have been for both to leave. There were many legitimate reasons the for people like Woody to openly identify as black then, but promoting supremacy of a different color was not one of them.

I don't agree with everything Loury says as he grapples with his past failure, but he makes some very good points that desperately need to become common in any discussion of civil rights today:

Growing into intellectual maturity has been, for me, largely a process of becoming free of the need to have my choices validated by the brothers. After many years I have come to understand that, until I became willing to risk the derision of the crowd, I had no chance to discover the most important truths about myself or about life -- to know my calling, to perceive my deepest value commitments, and to recognize the goals most worth striving toward.

The most important challenges and opportunities that confront any of us derive not from our cultural or sexual identities, not from our ethnic or racial conditions, but from our common human condition. I am a husband, a father, a son, a teacher, an intellectual, a citizen. In none of these roles is my race irrelevant, but neither can identity alone provide much guidance for my quest to adequately discharge these responsibilities. The particular features of one’s social condition, the external givens, merely set the stage of one's life. They do not provide a script. That script must be internally generated; it must be a product of a reflective deliberation about the meaning of this existence for which no political program or ethnic category could ever substitute. [bold added]

Or, as Ayn Rand once put it so perfectly: "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

In writing this article, which I am sure will draw him some flak, Dr. Loury is finally doing what I submit he really should have done at the time. He has left that meeting of bigots and joined America as an individual man. As a fellow individual, I thank him and welcome him.

-- CAV

The Power of the Fourth Branch of Government

By Gina Liggett from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Imagine this: Your yoga instructor will no longer be doing as many Chataranga Dandasanas in yoga class because the EPA has determined that allowable C02 emissions would be exceeded due to proper yoga breathing.

Imagine this: Your household will be restricted in their consumption of pinto beans due to the potential over-production of intestinal gases with a corresponding excessive release of colonic C02 into the atmosphere, exceeding EPA standards.

We haven't even considered the potential impact of feeding cheese to your dog, or those statistically-higher ambulance runs made from nursing homes. We're talking C02 excesses in the...in the....parts per something!

Front Range Objectivism hosted a fascinating supper talk on October 18 by John Lewis, PhD, visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University and research scholar and writer in history and classics. His talk was entitled, "A Call to Action: Understanding and Defeating the EPA's Plan for Environmental Dictatorship." From his talk I drew several disturbing conclusions concerning the sweeping powers delegated to the Enviromental Protection Agency as a result of a recent Supreme Court ruling.

As background, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007, in Massachusetts et al. v the EPA, ruled in favor of a consortium of environmentalist-friendly plaintiffs, delegating to the Environmental Protection Agency the responsibility of regulating C02 emissions under the Clean Air Act. The plaintiffs argued that man-made C02 emissions (and other greenhouse gases) are the primary cause of "global climate change," and that to avoid worldwide disaster action must be taken. The EPA established an "Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" to allow public comment, advising the public of the widespread impacts this would cause to our society and economy. Dr. Lewis argued that, even as lay persons, we can judge and reject the claims of imminent worldwide catastrophe raised by the plaintiffs in this case. (I'm including the link to the comments to the EPA made by Dr. Lewis and scientist Paul Saunders.)

From the talk, three issues struck me as particularly important about this case: the scientific, the political and the constitutional.

First the scientific. The Supreme Court ruling used the widely-reported conclusions of the United Nations-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the scientific basis for regulating C02. The panel's basic conclusion: "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."

What's concerning about this conclusion from a lay person's observation is the fact that global climate over the eons has changed not just dramatically, but extremely: ice ages, deserts that used to be jungles, plains once covered by oceans, gigantic shifts in northern ice patterns but the opposite occurring in the southern hemisphere, etc.

As far as the validity of the science, the IPCC conclusions were based primarily on computer modeling involving many variables. And much of the data is bad, as in faulty measurements of ground temperature. Then then there's Al Gore's infamous inversion of the C02-temperature relationship: Ice core data actually indicates that over the millennia global temperature increase comes before C02 rise by several hundred years. Finally, as every lay person knows from experience, the best of climatologists can't even predict the local weather very well, let alone weather change on a global scale projected decades into the future.

On to the political. The IPCC is essentially a governmental entity that works by political consensus, like most U.N. endeavors. In fact, as Dr. Lewis pointed out (and as I have learned elsewhere), the conclusions were haggled out first, line-by-line, by bureaucrats. This is not at all proper to the standard method of producing a scientific paper.

There are many respected scientists from such fields as oceanography, climatology and astronomy that study the impact of the oceans and the sun and other factors in global temperature change and C02. Many claim that their input was either dismissed, suppressed or ignored by the IPCC, even when they were initially involved as expert reviewers. And there are many other scientists who simply claim that nobody can get a handle on something as vastly complex as global climate change at our present state of knowledge. But this input is exed-out in the IPCC and the Supreme Court ruling because of politics, not good science.

Finally, Dr. Lewis responded to a question concerning the Constitution and the very disturbing and ever-growing power of the emerging "fourth" branch of government: those rule-making regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services. These are composed of unelected civil employees who have been delegated the power to write detailed rules and regulations impacting rights of property, contract, privacy, and more. Operating behind the scenes, they have enormous power to control our businesses and lives.

And with the new Supreme Court ruling, the EPA will have no choice but to somehow figure out--despite the fact that climate science is really in its infancy--how to regulate all of the C02 emissions we put out. Just imagine the onerous responsibility, tremendous power and grave consequences involved...

And remember, don't sigh too deeply, just grunt.

Quick Roundup 371

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

Blogworthy things seem to have come in pairs today....

Two Roundups

Last week, Rational Jenn posted the 66th Objectivist Roundup and Mike N posted a weekend roundup of his own.

Two from Amit Ghate

Amit Ghate has recently posted a couple of the kinds of short, sweet examples that can come in handy during conversations about politics.

First, he links to "Barstool Economics", which very nicely demonstrates all at once: (1) the disproportionate burden our progressive tax code places on the rich, (2) the degree of dependence the welfare state has on this demonized demographic , and (3) how much of the population is freeloading on the rich through income redistribution. Although this doesn't directly address the fundamental problem of taxation -- that it violates individual rights -- the enterprising interlocutor should have no trouble steering things that way! (Also, through his link, I was reminded of the existence of Doug Reich's blog, The Rational Capitalist, which is now listed in the sidebar.)

Second, he does his best imitation of Virgil in Dante's Inferno, showing us a nearly perfect example straight from the the hell of Lew Rockwell of Libertarians being merely anti-government, rather than pro-individual rights. The title says it all: "The Enemy is Always the State". Too bad we need the state -- a proper government, to be precise -- to protect the individual rights on which our lives in a society depend.

Two Issues Sites

I have mentioned Diana Hsieh's Coalition for Secular Government here before and I link to its blog, Politics without God, on the sidebar, but until today, I hadn't listed the main site on my resources page. Now it's there, under "National Organizations" on the right hand side.

Also, thanks to her blog, I have learned about Tony Donadio's micro-site, Repeal the Bailout, and have also added it to the resources page.

Two Veterans Come in off the Bench

Martin Lindeskog, whose blog loads a little more quickly these days, reports that Cox and Forkum recently posted a cartoon about the bailout on their web site. Quoth Allen Forkum:

In defense of this socialist expansion, Bush gives us a classic A-is-non-A denial of reality: "These measures are not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it." Clearly the man doesn't even know what the "free" in "free market" means. And unfortunately neither do McCain and Obama.

After seeing a headline this weekend in which Bush reportedly urged something to the effect that we should keep our economies free, my initial reaction was, "Too late!" This was followed swiftly by, "This man clearly doesn't know what the hell he is talking about."

Two Blegs

1. I remain swamped by the Eternal Cross-Country Relocation from Hell, but want to do some blog upkeep soon. If anyone has noticed any hyperlinks that no longer work or whose sites are no longer being maintained, particularly on the Resources page, I'd be grateful for the time a heads-up would save me.

2. Are there any Kung Fu movie aficionados out there? I'm not really the action movie type, but I have the urge to watch one, and I don't know diddly about this genre. Fortunately, I've had pretty good luck soliciting advice here before....

Being There II?

And speaking of movies, the following recent comment about Barack Obama by Myrhaf caused me to become curious enough about the Peter Sellers movie, Being There to rent it.

It becomes theatre of the absurd when you consider what Obama did during the bailout. He did what always does: nothing. The guy is like the Peter Sellers character in Being There.

He certainly hit that one on the head! The movie, at least, was hilarious. Its real-life sequel, if the election gives us one in an Obama Presidency, will, like most sequels, disappoint.

-- CAV

The Myrhaf Endorsement: Abstain

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Interventionism (or the mixed economy or the welfare state), with bipartisan support, has America in bad shape right now. The government just voted a $1 trillion bailout of Wall Street, money to be handed out per Treasury Secretary Paulson's discretion, making him in effect America's economic dictator. Social Security is heading toward a crisis.

Look for the government to inflate the hell out of the dollar in an attempt to manage this crisis without cutting spending or raising taxes. Inflation is a hidden tax, the politicians' favorite tax. Due to widespread ignorance of economics, Americans don't understand that inflation is created by the government printing more dollars. People feel the pinch of rising prices in their wallets and they blame those greedy capitalists who keep raising prices because they are unpatriotic and just in business for their own good. This popular anger at capitalists is music to the socialists' ears.

We are very much in the position of the Weimar Republic right now. Government intervention is causing crises, yet Democrats such as Barney Frank are saying, "The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it." The crises will expand and intensify as the government pours gasoline on the fire. America is setting itself up for that which followed the Weimar Republic: a fascist dictatorship.

Since America is the richest and most powerful nation in the world, it would likely drag the rest of the world into dark times with it. If you think depression would devastate America, a nation in which poor children's number one health problem is obesity, imagine how hard times would hit poor countries. We could be on the edge of worldwide starvation, war and the other horsemen of the apocalypse. Parts of Africa could go medieval.

This is the context as we Americans ponder how we should vote. Here is my explanation of how I will vote.

Recently, John Lewis sent an email to the Obloggers group containing this information:

In July the federal Environmental Protection Agency issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which details their plan to force Americans to reduce emissions of CO2 and other so-called “greenhouse gases.” This follows on an Executive Order signed by President Bush, which was made possible by a U.S. Supreme Court decisions ruling that CO2 is a “pollutant.” (!)

This plan will strip the American people of their freedom, and place them under the control of a single, all-powerful, federal agency. Industrial permits, furnace regulations, auto emissions testing, building permits, transportation, and food production—all will fall under the boot of the EPA. Environmentalists will use lawsuits to pressure the EPA to tighten an ever-shrinking noose around the neck of every American.

This is the first and only time I have heard about this Executive Order signed by the Republican Bush. The statutory framework now exists for the EPA to dictate to every American how much CO2 he can emit. Such a broad Executive Order gives the EPA the power to control virtually every aspect of our lives, from how much we produce to how much we travel to our heating and air conditioning to our very exhalations of breath. The limits on the EPA's power will be determined by what they think they can get away with before people revolt. Using the time-tested frog-cooking method, they will start modestly and ratchet up the controls a notch at a time.

I submit that if Bush were a Democrat president, we would have heard about this totalitarian Executive Order from right-wing radio talk shows, right-wing bloggers and Fox News. The Republicans would be screaming that leftists want to destroy our freedom -- and they would be right. But Bush is a Republican, so we hear nothing. The Democrats have no reason to publicize this Executive Order because they support it; government control of every aspect of every citizen's life is The Way Things Ought To Be. Republicans have no interest in attacking Bush because it weakens their party. Talkers such as Limbaugh and Hewitt focus like a laser beam on the Democrats and, with occasional exceptions designed to counter criticism like this, they ignore Republican folly.

Gus Van Horn has detailed Bush's Statist Legacy. The first two items alone would be enough to vilify him among Republicans, were Bush a Democrat:

• Sixty-eight per cent. That is how much total federal spending rose under Bush. That is more than double the growth in federal spending over the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency.
• Bush was aided and abetted by a Congress dominated by Republicans until 2006. Juicy spending bills were passed on everything from farm subsidies to health (up 44 per cent) and education (up 47 per cent). After all, Bush had run as a "compassionate conservative"; he introduced the largest new entitlement since the Great Society programs of the 1960s: a prescription drug benefit for seniors that will add a US$1.2-trillion liability over 10 years.

And don't forget that Bush, a Republican, outlawed the incandescent light bulb, a dictatorial law that is richly symbolic. I like to think that 100 years from now Bush will be remembered as the man who outlawed the light bulb.

The Ayn Rand Institute calls the recent bailout of Wall Street The Road to Fascism:

The government has announced that it plans to use $250 billion to buy ownership stakes in various U.S. financial institutions. According to the New York Times, nine major U.S. banks have already been forced into the program....

According to Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, “In herding banking executives into a room and making them an offer they couldn’t refuse, the Paulson regime took its latest and most disturbing step yet on the path to state control of the economy.

“If fascism means coercive state control over nominally private property, then there is no more chilling sign of creeping fascism in America than government’s encroachment on the lifeblood of the U.S. economy—its financial institutions. While the government assures us it will be a ‘passive investor,’ merely funneling cash into the banking system rather than dictating how banks function, this is a lie. Not only does the money come with strings attached--such as restrictions on executive compensation, dividend payments, and the types of investments banks can make—but politicians are already promising a web of further controls. As John McCain recently noted, ‘We will not merely inject billions of dollars into companies and walk away hoping for the best. We will require that those companies be reformed and restructured until they are sound assets again, and can be sold at no loss—or perhaps even a profit—to the taxpayers of America.’

Note that Paulson, Bush and McCain are all Republicans. Republicans, not Democrats, are driving this fascist power grab of America's financial institutions.

This is the most important reason we should not vote for a Republican for president: When Republicans expand state intervention in the economy, no one cares. Poor, hapless Democrats! When they try to get away with a fraction of what Republicans can get away with, those same Republicans scream bloody murder. Yes, the Republicans are laughable hypocrites -- but their hypocrisy is the only thing that stops Democrats from erecting a socialist tyranny. That's the way partisan politics works in America.

Republican presidents do more damage than Democrat presidents. Among the last four presidents, the only one that did not expand government spending was the Democrat, Bill Clinton. The Republicans all spent money like drunken sailors in a Texan whore house.

This year the Republican candidate is John McCain. He gives us even more reasons not to vote Republican. Craig Biddle writes,

On the domestic front, McCain promises to “take on” the drug companies, as if those who produce and market the medicines that improve and save human lives must be fought; he promises to ration energy by means of a cap-and-trade scheme, as if the government has a moral or constitutional right to dictate how much energy a company may purchase or use; he promises to “battle” big oil, as if those who produce and deliver the lifeblood of civilization need to be defeated; he promises to “reform” Wall Street, as if those who finance the businesses that produce the goods and services on which our lives depend are thereby degenerate; he seeks to uphold the ban on drilling in ANWR, as if the government has a moral or constitutional right to prevent Americans from reshaping nature to suit their needs; and so on.

And on foreign policy,

McCain promises to “respect the collective will of our democratic allies,” as if America has no moral right to defend her citizens according to her own best judgment; and he promises to finish the “mission” of making Iraq “a functioning democracy” even if it takes “one hundred years,” as if the U.S. government has a moral or constitutional right to sacrifice American soldiers to spread democracy abroad.

Ryan Calhoun at The Dirty Kuffar reminds us that McCain is willing to reinstate the draft.

McCain has stated time and again that the only time he would support a draft would be "if World War III broke out".

As bad as Republicans are these days, McCain is even worse. He is an ideological nationalist and collectivist. He disdains the free market. He sneers at the pursuit of profit. He believes the essence of morality lies in the individual sacrificing for something greater than himself.

Another reason it would be preferable to have a Democrat president is clarity. When Republicans like Bush expand government, we do not get clarity. Instead, Democrats blame the free market rhetoric of the Republicans for the latest crisis. Thus we get talk about Reagan's "trickle down econonmics" as the cause of the meltdown in September. Under a Democrat president, the destructive policies of government intervention become clear.

By the logic of my argument I should be endorsing Obama here because Democrats are not as effective at destroying liberty in America as Republicans. I can't do it. I've never voted for a Democrat in my life, and I'll be damned if the first one I vote for is a far left radical who has allied himself with anti-Americans and then lied about it when his alliances became politically inconvenient.

Obama, a social metaphysician who prides himself on being a "blank screen" on which others can project what they want to see, is not a fringe character in the Democrat Party. He is the party. He represents most of the base. The entire party leadership has been as radicalized as Obama. If the "Reagan Democrats" understood how far left the party is (if they did not depend on the MSM for their news), they would run from the party.

It is possible that Obama, like McCain, is worse than the average politician in his party. There is the possibility that Obama is an ideological radical who -- with full, explicit consciousness -- is hiding his true intentions in order to gain power and then use the presidency to advance socialism in America. I don't think he can get far without a mandate, but I can't entirely dismiss this suspicion. But if this is true, it makes Obama only a more exaggerated version of all Democrat candidates, for every one of them since the landslide defeat of McGovern in 1972 has lied about how far left he is.

But even if we go just by what he has promised, which would add another trillion dollars to the federal budget, that alone makes him unworthy of our vote.

In voting for the lesser of two evils, there is only so much evil a voter should be asked to swallow. I will feel better about myself not voting for either Obama or McCain. Whichever one is elected, things will get worse. There are arguments for and against both men; they come out to a wash. Who knows which candidate would end up marginally worse than the other?

More important than the presidential vote is your Senate and House vote. It is important that we get Republicans in the legislature. They're the only ones that would slow down an Obama presidency. Perhaps they would moderate McCain's worst statist excesses.

I realize there is risk in my thinking. It depends on the Republicans maintaining their role as a vigorous opposition party. Fewer Republicans have the stomach for fighting every year. At some point, the party might conclude, "We're all socialists now." If so, we'll get to dictatorship a little faster than otherwise. Right now their opposition to Democrat presidents is our last hope.

Go to the polls on November 4th. Vote Republican in everything but president. Don't vote for president. Perhaps a large bloc of abstaining voters will send a message that our two major parties need to give us better candidates for whom to vote.

Getting Rand Wrong

By Brandon Byrd from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As someone who takes ideas seriously, I've always found it frustrating when philosophers take it upon themselves to offer judgments on subjects they haven't bothered to devote serious time and attention to studying. The charge that philosophers (academic or otherwise) sometimes judge where the epistemically virtuous would fear to comment isn't new. (For instance, it isn't rare to hear someone claim that speculation from the philosophical armchair is a poor method of settling some contentious issue.) What makes this phenomenon -- the venturing of unwarranted opinions -- especially pernicious in the case of philosophers is that philosophers are supposed to be the guardians of rationality, revering the mind by sacrificing hasty conclusions at the altar of the well-formed argument. Philosophers are supposed to love wisdom and shun mere belief; when they make assertions that betray culpable ignorance, they sin against their profession as well as the truth.

I don't know what it is about Ayn Rand that makes many philosophers think they can get away with saying whatever they damn well please about her without having studied her work carefully and honestly. I suspect that the real explanation has less to do with Rand and more to do with personal biases on the part of her critics. But whatever the cause, the phenomenon is nevertheless real. It isn't just that many philosophers dislike Rand. We philosophers are an opinionated bunch; we dislike all sorts of things. Rather it's that many philosophers will attribute all sorts of nonsense to Rand without actually considering what she has to say.

To offer an example, below is a passage from Rosalind Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics. This work, published relatively recently by Oxford University Press, is intended to be used as a textbook on, unsurprisingly, virtue ethics.

"We can interpret Thrasymachus, and more obviously Nietzsche and Rand, as saying that, rather like hive bees, human beings fall, by nature, into two distinct groups, the weak and the strong (or the especially clever or talented or 'chosen by destiny'), whose members must be evaluated differently, as worker bees and the drones or queens are."

Um... what? Anyone with even a cursory familiarity with Rand's ideas will realize that she believes no such thing. Rand's philosophical anthropology -- her theory of human nature -- does not recognize a distinction between types of human beings. Her ethical theory evaluates individuals on the basis of their choices, not their unchosen attributes, and she appeals to a univocal standard of moral evaluation -- not to distinct standards for distinct types.

Hursthouse does not provide any sources that might justify her 'obvious' interpretation of Rand's philosophy. But this totally wrongheaded interpretation of Rand was good enough for her editors and peer reviewers at OUP (as well as the numerous philosophers who gave her editorial comments on the final manuscript). Apparently that group of distinguished professors found nothing objectionable in Hursthouse's characterization of Rand. Of course, realizing Hursthouse's error would have required reading Rand.

(On a grimly ironic note, the above passage comes from chapter 11 of On Virtue Ethics. The chapter title? "Objectivity.")

Hursthouse isn't the only person who presents Rand's views incorrectly in a way that betrays ignorance. Chandran Kukathas's entry on Rand in the otherwise excellent Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy is another example. No, Kukathas... Rand didn't think that integrity was "at the root of the idea of freedom," her "real concerns" were not "the defence of the value of integrity (to the point of self-sacrifice) in the face of evil and moral despair," and The Virtue of Selfishness was not a novel.

So far, we've seen a philosopher attribute views to Rand that she 'obviously' didn't hold, and we've seen another philosopher misunderstand the fundamentals of Rand's politics and misconstrue her central concerns. But Gerald Dworkin, a professor of philosophy at UC Davis, has recently exemplified yet another way of getting Rand wrong: saying that her ideas lead to catastrophe.

The forum in which Dworkin makes this charge is Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog -- a blog featuring "news and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture... and a bit of poetry." The blog is run by Brian Leiter, currently John Wilson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, and Director of Chicago's Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values. Leiter is also the editor of The Philosophical Gourmet, which ranks the top philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. I read Leiter Reports semi-regularly, as it is a good source of professional news related to academic philosophy (faculty hires, moves, deaths, retirements and whatnot). In addition to this valuable material, the blog also features occasional leftist cultural commentary of more dubious value. Of extremely dubious value is Dworkin's post "Blame it on Ayn Rand" in which he claims Rand is a cause of our economic troubles. Dworkin doesn't really provide much of an argument for this claim, so I'll attempt to provide him with a charitable reconstruction (a courtesy I'm not so sure he deserves... but for the sake of argument...).

Dworkin quotes a recent New York Times article on Greenspan's involvement in the current financial crisis. (That article seems to get Rand wrong too; Rand didn't have "a resolute faith that those participating in financial markets would act responsibly" but that's beside the point.) The article implies that Greenspan's positions on regulation -- specifically the regulation of derivatives markets -- were causally relevant factors in producing the recent financial crisis. Why did Greenspan hold his positions on regulation? Here, Dworkin invokes Keynes:

"...the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

(I can't resist noting that Rand held a similar view to Keynes about the importance of philosophy in history, though her insight was deeper than Keynes. Rather than viewing history as being primarily driven by political philosophy, Rand viewed metaphysics and epistemology as being much more influential. For more on Rand's insights here, consult the title essay of For the New Intellectual, as well as the title essay of Philosophy: Who Needs It. Peikoff develops Rand's insights on the philosophical motor of history in Ominous Parallels, the epilogue to Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and in his forthcoming book on how epistemology shapes society.)

Greenspan was a student of Rand, and Rand argued for the principled separation of the state and economics, and thus for an absence of government interference in voluntary economic exchanges. She was a categorical opponent of governmental regulation in financial markets. Greenspan opposed regulation of derivatives markets. The current financial crisis was supposedly brought on by an absence of regulation in these markets. Thus Dworkin claims that Rand is "an important cause of the catastrophe we are in."

Let us examine this argument.

This argument gets its force from the claim that Greenspan was practicing what Rand preached. In an update to Dworkin's post, Leiter snarkily remarks that "Greenspan was not only a friend of Rand's, but a lifelong devotee of her ideas and her 'philosophy,' such as it is." While it is true that Rand and Greenspan were friendly toward one another, it is demonstrably false that Greenspan was "a lifelong devotee of her ideas." It doesn't take a hell of a lot of legwork to discover this; thanks to Google, I didn't even have to leave my armchair.

In The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan's recent autobiography, Greenspan discusses the important formative influence Rand had on his intellectual development. In his discussion, he talks about how Rand encouraged him to look beyond mere economic data and more deeply into the values and ideas that move history and influence human action (including economic action). She was credited with broadening his perspective on the world and helping him reject logical positivism. He even describes himself as "writing spirited commentary for [Rand's] newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte...". But this enthusiasm was not to last; Greenspan's autobiography claims that Rand's philosophy has inherent contradictions, and that his "fervor receded."

So Greenspan isn't an Objectivist. His policies, as we shall see, reflect this fact.

We're in the midst of a recession, teetering (some might say) on the precipice of a depression. What were Rand's views about recessions and depressions? Well, Dworkin doesn't say. His blog post doesn't even bother to discuss which of Rand's ideas were supposed to get us into this mess. He doesn't explicitly discuss her ideas at all. If one consults Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal to discover her views on the causes of recessions and depressions, one is directed to the works of Ludwig von Mises. It is important (for getting Rand right) to recognize that while Rand found Mises's economic analyses convincing, she had substantial philosophical and methodological disagreements with him. Mises was a Kantian who viewed economics as a primarily deductive enterprise (and thus was inclined toward epistemological rationalism). He also attempted to do economics in an ethical vacuum, divorcing economic analysis from any underlying normative framework. Rand, of course, rejected Kantianism, rationalism, and a strict division between morality and economics. But despite his errors, Rand thought that Mises's economic theories represented a significant achievement.

At this point, I don't want to provide a lengthy, detailed summary of Mises's views on the business cycle. I may write something in the near future about the causes of our current economic woes, but I'll hold off for now. The following short summary should provide a general indication of the economic views Rand found most convincing.

The most salient aspect of the Austrian theory of the business cycle is that implicates central banks as the fundamental cause of depressions and recessions. Ah! The plot thickens! Wasn't Greenspan the head of our central bank? He was indeed. How do central banks cause recessions?

In a free market, the interest rate (the price of money) is determined by the law of supply and demand. Roughly, the supply of loanable funds that banks have (our savings) determines the interest rate, when taken in conjunction with the overall demand for money and the riskiness of potential debtors. Central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, distort this market mechanism by setting artificially low interest rates (interest rates below the market rate). What happens next? I defer to Wikipedia:

Low interest rates tend to stimulate borrowing from the banking system. This expansion of credit causes an expansion of the supply of money, through the money creation process in a fractional reserve banking system. This in turn leads to an unsustainable "monetary boom" during which the "artificially stimulated" borrowing seeks out diminishing investment opportunities. This boom results in widespread malinvestments, causing capital resources to be misallocated into areas which would not attract investment if the money supply remained stable. A correction or "credit crunch" -- commonly called a "recession" or "bust" -- occurs when credit creation cannot be sustained.

Loose monetary policy by central banks leads to people taking on more debt than they otherwise would. Artificially low interest rates allow more credit to be extended to risky borrowers. In our current case this lead to skyrocketing real estate values, since there was an increased demand for houses (made possible by banks extending credit to more and riskier debtors). This effect is obvious enough in the case of commercial banks, which more than doubled the amount of real estate loans they made (thus allocating large amounts of resources into the real estate market -- allocations that wouldn't have occurred in a free market for money and credit.

And then there's the welfare state. Don't let's forget about Fannie and Freddy. The former is a holdover from the New Deal; the latter is a "government sponsored enterprise" created by the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1976, and designed to increase home ownership. Both of which did their part to screw us all by spurring on the housing bubble... and they were able to borrow money at a (de facto, if not de jure) subsidized rate in the marketplace because the public viewed them as being low risk (since the state would presumably bail them out, should the need arise).

All of a sudden, everyone's in debt and no one wants to lend. Small wonder. Small wonder that risky investors are defaulting on their mortgage payments. Small wonder that the derivatives markets are screwing up (I'd argue that we can only make sense of the kerfuffle in the derivatives market in light of monetary policy). Small wonders that major financial institutions are losing their credit rating because they took on too many risky debtors.

We frequently hear that that the market got drunk. What was it drunk on? Cheap credit. Who was the man behind the bar? You can probably guess.

In May of 2000, the Fed Funds rate was 6.5%. By June of 2003, Greenspan had slashed it to 1%, and it stayed there for more than a year (and remained ridiculously low for much longer). Would Rand have found this type of monetary policy commendable (or even tolerable)? Of course not. She'd read her Mises. Moreover, she regarded central banking as morally repugnant and politically unnecessary.

There's much more to be said about our current credit crunch and how to evaluate it in light of Rand's moral and political philosophy. But it should now be evident that Dworkin (and Leiter) are wrong on all counts. They were wrong about Greenspan; they were wrong about Rand. Their errors on these subjects betray a culpable ignorance. One needn't do much research to figure out Greenspan's real views on Rand, or Rand's views on economics. Twenty minutes with Google and Wikipedia would probably have gotten the job done. If a philosopher is going to assert, in a public forum, that another philosopher's ideas lead to disaster, then they have an obligation to carefully consider that thinker's ideas, to understand them, and to show how (in practice) they would result in catastrophe. When a philosopher fails to do that, they do a disservice not only to the thinker they criticize, but also to the truth, to their profession, and to themselves.

Academic philosophers often get Rand wrong. They often have only themselves to blame.

Social Security's Trust Fund

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Social Security's Trust Fund is a fiction. Basic problem: it is not a fund in the first place.

Joe Sixpack (or is it Joe Plumber?) might create a "home down-payment fund". He does this by putting aside some money and not spending it. The bank is his "lock-box". Imagine that he did something else: he loaned the money to himself and treated the IOUs written to himself as if they were a fund! For all his protestations that he owes money to himself, we would have to tell him that he has spent it, and the fund is fiction. The same with social security.

So, it really irritates me when newspapers who ought to know better, gloss over this, and pretend that this fiction is real. For instance, this New York Times story says:

If no changes are made, the Social Security trust fund is projected to deplete its reserves in 2041 and will begin paying out more than it collects in benefits even sooner, starting in 2017.

Both these dates are bogus. Firstly, there is no fund. Secondly, Social Security has already reached the point where collections are much neared payout levels than "fund" accounting would show. That second fiction is maintained through another ruse: over the original IOUs that Joe Sixpack wrote to himself, each year he write brand new IOUs to pay himself interest! The New York Times adds this fictional interest to the fictional inflows, to calculate a total collection that is significantly larger than it really is.

Summary: The first step toward reforming social-security is to be honest about what it is, and not to use terms like "fund" and "interest" that only obfuscate.

Appendix: Detailed numbers:

The Social Security administration (see page 2 on this PDF), shows the following for 2007:

• "Fund" Income $ 772 billion
• Outflows $ 624 billion
• Surplus = $ 158 billion

However, about $95 billion of the inflows were fictional "interest" on the fictional "fund". Subtract that, and one gets an inflow of about $677 billion and the surplus comes down to $53 billion. (Aside: Out of these non-government receipts, $18 billion comes from "taxation of benefits". This is money that is taken from retirees who had the wsdom to get rich enough not to depend totally on social security.)

Goodbye Gridlock

By noreply@blogger.com (C. August) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In the current political and ideological climate, where increasing statism is the major trend, the ideal situation in Washington is gridlock. Because nearly every action taken by the government makes things worse and further attacks our freedoms, a gridlocked Congress and Executive is the best we can hope for.

We have consistently had some amount of gridlock since the mid-60s, with either a mixed majority in Congress, a president of a different party than the Congressional majority, or at least, as in the Clinton era, a Senate capable of filibustering.

It seems that's about to change.

Democrats are poised to take the presidency, and make major gains in both houses of Congress. It now appears that a liberal supermajority -- making even a Senate filibuster impossible -- is not only possible but likely.

A frightening editorial in the Wall Street Journal details what we might expect from such a supermajority:

A strongly Democratic Congress is now likely to lay the final flagstones on the path to government-run health insurance from cradle to grave.

...Democrats could cause the economic downturn to last longer than it otherwise will by enacting regulatory overkill like Sarbanes-Oxley.

A tax-and-regulation scheme in the name of climate change is a top left-wing priority.... Without the GOP votes to help stage a filibuster, Senators from carbon-intensive states would have less ability to temper coastal liberals who answer to the green elites.

A liberal supermajority would move quickly to impose procedural advantages that could cement Democratic rule for years to come. ...the Fairness Doctrine is likely to be reimposed either by Congress or the Obama FCC. A major goal of the supermajority left would be to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.

This is just a sampling of the terrible possibilities our country will face if the Democrats become filibuster- and veto-proof. I find it necessary to state here that I would be equally concerned if a religious conservative president was elected when Republicans were poised on grabbing a supermajority. Neither party is a friend of liberty. But we have historical precedent to show us what happens when the Left takes over completely.

The WSJ article ends with the following chilling paragraph:

In both 1933 and 1965, liberal majorities imposed vast expansions of government that have never been repealed, and the current financial panic may give today's left another pretext to return to those heydays of welfare-state liberalism. Americans voting for "change" should know they may get far more than they ever imagined. [bold added]

As I mentioned elsewhere, it is possible that Obama could play FDR to Bush's Hoover, and we could see a New New Deal in the coming years. Laws that were passed in the 1930s are still hurting us today, and helped lay the groundwork for the current financial crisis. Hopefully America will retain enough of its sense of life and core respect for individual rights -- its very American-ness -- through the next 4 or 8 years to come out on the other side, ready to rebuild.

Key to the rebuilding effort will be laying the ideological foundation now, by loudly and consistently making the case for capitalism as the only moral and practical political system.

As Ed Cline's Sparrowhawk series demonstrated, it was the revolution in men's minds, decades before any shots were fired, that made the American Revolution possible. As the drumbeat of statist attacks on liberty grows louder and louder, nothing short of that type of philosophical revolution will be enough to combat it.

Law Promotes Discrimination

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

Yesterday morning, I spotted a story on complaints and legal actions taken by various Moslems for the sake of ending "discrimination" by employers who do not accommodate their frequent (and constantly changing) schedule of five daily prayers.

Requests by Muslims to pray at work have led to clashes with employers who say they cannot accommodate the strictly scheduled prayers.

The conflicts raise questions about religious rights on the job. Muslims say they are being discriminated against and are taking their complaints to the courts and the federal government. Employers say the time out for prayer can burden other workers and disrupt operations. [bold added]

Except for a badly-titled comparison of the number of such complaints by religious group, the article is even-handed in tone. It presents what an average person would see as both sides of the issue, that of the offended Moslems and that of the businessmen. The second excerpted paragraph is a good example. Few would read the article and complain of media bias, or at least that the reporting was compromised by any kind of political agenda.

Unfortunately, in spite of what appears to be an honest effort to tell the story, this article completely fails to cover the story correctly because it accepts an old, widespread, and gravely mistaken premise in modern American politcs: Namely that the violation of property rights is justifiable for the purpose of ending racial, ethic, or religious bigotry on the part of some individuals.

This is nothing new. I have written about this problem at length before, and will not belabor it again now, although my main point bears repeating:

I abhor racism, but I must respectfully disagree. Forbidding behavior that is immoral, but does not violate the rights of someone else, is far from being "a good idea". The purpose of government is to protect the rights of individuals from being violated by the initiation of force (or the threat thereof) from other individuals. Nothing more. Nothing less.

To apply this to the topic at hand, whether an employer allows religious considerations to affect his personnel decisions is of no concern to a proper government. His business is his property, and if he wants to not employ someone just because he is Moslem (or just because he isn't), that's his right -- and his problem, if that employee is best for the job.

And no one is entitled to employment under a proper government. One striking thing about the kinds of cases in this story is that one can easily imagine how having an employee who drops everything to pray at multiple times a day (that vary over the year) can render that employee (and others) less productive. News bulletin: Employers hire people to do things. Praying is usually not one of them.

But there's something else here that I find interesting. The law under which these incidents are being brought to court will have the paradoxical effect of making it even harder to decide to hire Moslem employees! Consider the combative attitude of entitlement expresseed by one attorney:

"They shouldn't be forced to choose between their job and their religion," says Rima Kapitan, an attorney who represents Muslim workers in Grand Island.

Pardon me, but nobody "forced" anyone to make such a choice here. A Moslem who can't pray at Company A is perfectly free to seek employment at Company B. What is really happening here is that some Moslems are working to force employers, through nonobjecive law, to make hiring decisions that conflict with their very livelihoods!

Moslems already make the largest number of complaints about religious discrimination in the workplace. The increased likelihood that employers of Moslems will be sued or have to make who knows what accommodations any time a follower of that religion claims to be "offended" (which the cartoon riots show can be over almost anything), will make any employer with a grain of sense not want to touch a Moslem, no matter how qualified, with a ten foot pole.

If Moslems were truly concerned about their employability, they would support the full government protection of property rights. But some clearly do not, and place other considerations above the requirements for their life on earth (which include the protection of individual rights), as a famous series of atrocities in September 2001 eloquently illustrated.

If a Moslem wants to damage or end his life by appeasing Allah, that is his right -- and his problem. We should repeal all laws that violate individual rights -- such as federal anti-discrimination law -- that are harmful enough to begin with, and that can be commandeered through legal jihad to force us to obey Allah's alleged commands.

-- CAV

Ayn Rand Avenged

By noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Answering the engineered takeover of the economy by the federal government is an unprecedented cultural phenomenon: People who read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged years ago and dismissed it but now see the parallels are filled with trepidation. The people who read Granville Hicks’ review of it in The New York Times in October 1957 and agreed with his estimate of the novel, a work whose literary value he also denied, can no longer think that it was a “parable of buried talents.” People who read the novel decades ago and never questioned its truth are issuing warnings about the parallels between the novel and current events. And people who have read the novel only recently are seeing its plot unfold before their very eyes. All are now realizing that “the end is near.” But, the end of what?

For the time being, the end of freedom. Hopefully, that time will be short. But if Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson can demand that bankers sign a “gift certificate” under the threat of blackmail or extortion -- like the one industrialist Henry Rearden in the novel was compelled to sign -- then the real world plot is advancing chapter by chapter to a climax whose timetable and resolution will depend on how much freedom Americans are willing to surrender and how much they are willing to endure servitude and impoverishment in the name of “stability,” “community” or “patriotism.”

In editorials, columns, and letters to the editor, Rand is suddenly being remembered as a philosophical soothsayer. The occasion? Chickens coming home to roost. Justice rearing its awful head. The bankruptcy of not only government-regulated economies and government policies, but of their altruist and collectivist foundations. Everything Rand ever said and wrote about the perils of statism is coming to pass.

Is it the Erinyes or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping over the earth, wreaking carnage and tribulation among the wicked and innocent alike, leaving a trail of conquest, famine, slaughter, and death?

What unleashed them? The irrational. The quest for the unearned. A murderous envy for man the free, volitional being. A hatred of existence.

What can defeat the Four Horsemen? What can satisfy the Furies to send them back to the underworld? Objective reality, reason, self-interest, and capitalism (also known as: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics). Anyone who has subscribed to Objectivism and remained consistent with its tenets is now in the place of the novel’s hero, John Galt, watching the chaos engulf the earth. That person and many others like him will not be much touched or harmed by the Horsemen. It is not their Apocalypse, but that of those who conducted their lives by denying objective reality, denigrating reason, damning self-interest, and condemning capitalism; that of anyone who did not concern himself with cause and effect, or with thinking in principles, or who complained about selfishness, and accepted the second-hand mantra that free minds and free markets were unfair, unconnected, or unnecessary to his existence.

The instances of the letters and articles that say “I told you so” are too numerous to cite here. Two, however, are noteworthy. One letter, by Iwan Price-Evans, appeared in the Daily Telegraph (London).

“…[I]t is startling how prescient was her novel Atlas Shrugged. There is the socially responsible banker who went bust because he gave loans to those who needed them, rather than to those who could afford them. There’s the government regulation and takeovers to ensure that failed businesses keep going. There’s the unthinking desire to cling to ‘stability,’ and the consensus that it is a global problem and everyone must pull together for the common good.

“All is in denial of reality, a rejection of reason. Result: the rational is distrusted; men are guilty of being ‘unfair’ if they value competence and ‘unfeeling’ if they refuse to indulge failure. The individual is subordinated to the national, and the national to the international. If Rand is right thus far, what of the years ahead? Perhaps the motor of the world is stopping.”

The second instance was a startling essay on the bailout in the October 2nd edition of The Virginia Gazette, “We should all go on strike,” by a local entrepreneur, Matthew Webb. Obviously influenced by Atlas Shrugged, Webb opens with:

“We should not have passed the bailout. Why? First, the sky clearly was not falling, at least until they did pass it, and the market has since plunged.

“Second, the market would have taken care of itself. We needed to correct this the real way, which was to let anything that really doesn’t have value be valued as such….

“Third, the government is the last entity qualified to run something as complicated as this bailout package. Name one department of government that is well run. You can’t!”

This argument would not fly with Paulson and Company. They would reply that they are trying to “do good,” and so must operate on a “higher plane” of money management -- the higher plane being the ether of nothingness, impenetrable by the likes of Mr. Webb and Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher of Ohio -- because there is nothing to penetrate. The Webbs and the Wurzelbachers of the world do not count in the Paulson and Company calculations for power, nor are they even visible.

Attached to the revised bailout bill sent by the Senate back to the House were numerous pork barrel appropriations. The more notorious ones included money for Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s constituent, Star-Kist, subsidies for Puerto Rican rum producers, and subsidies for racetracks. Mr. Webb reveals another one:

“…[B]uried in the bill is the Bicycle Commuter Act (H.R. 807, S. 2635). The bill provides a tax benefit to employers who offer cash reimbursements to employees to defray costs of riding to work. Bike commuters can use the money to pay for bicycles, accessories, safety equipment, insurance, and locker or shower fees….It’s a green initiative….”

Environmentalism, of course, is now a religion questioned by neither Democrat nor Republican. It is primarily an ideology. And for all the anti-intellectualism displayed by Congress, it and the Bush administration clung to the “green” ideology. “The goal,” said Nancy Koehn, a historian at the Harvard Business School, “is to get the engine of capitalism going as productively as possible. Ideology is a luxury good in times of crisis.”

Of course, the best way to get the engine of capitalism going again is for the government to vacate the economy and swear off any and all intervention, instead of pouring molasses into its fuel tank.

Among his suggestions for “going on strike” Webb has three important ones:

“Abolish the withholding tax, where they take your money before you even see it, so you don’t think it’s actually yours….Abolish the Federal Reserve….We now see what happens when the fox rules the henhouse….Amend the Constitution so that bailouts of any private entity or industry are forbidden.”

None of that is possible today, except through a major revolution by the American people. The original Revolution was, after all, a kind of strike by the American colonists, and it was answered by the Crown with force.

My sole reservation with Mr. Webb’s essay is that the “stakeholding” device, by which Paulson demanded that the nine largest American banks sell the government “shares” in their assets, is not, as he claims, an instance of communism. It is actually fascism, by which a government goes into “partnership” with nominally private businesses, with those businesses or banks, however, taking their marching orders from the government. This is what was practiced in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

And which is now practiced in the United States, Britain, and most of Europe.

And, of course, Henry Paulson and Bernard Bernanke of the Federal Reserve are not alone in promoting fascism. There is Nancy Pelosi, who on the day that Congress passed the bailout, announced her own suggested contribution to the regimentation of Americans to lock-step them in a march in Obama’s or McCain’s “new direction.” Just as Hitler “stimulated” a moribund German economy by pouring money into government sponsored projects and buying off the “lower” classes with special benefits, Pelosi, according to the Associated Press on October 8, wants to create a $150 billion economic stimulus plan.

“….Pelosi said Wednesday that a $150 billion economic stimulus plan is needed now because of the faltering economy and she may call the House into session after the election to pass it….Pelosi said a stimulus package would create jobs by investing in public works, increasing food stamp benefits and extending unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless.”

All that is needed now for Pelosi, Obama, Paulson, Bernanke et al. to consolidate their power grab and scrap the Constitution completely is the equivalent of a Reichstag Fire.

The motor of the world is sputtering to a stop. There is no “perhaps” about it.

On Vitamin D

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Wowee, via Free the Animal, I found a fascinating story on Vitamin D in Canada's Globe and Mail: Vitamin D casts cancer prevention in new light. Here's the first section:

For decades, researchers have puzzled over why rich northern countries have cancer rates many times higher than those in developing countries -- and many have laid the blame on dangerous pollutants spewed out by industry.

But research into vitamin D is suggesting both a plausible answer to this medical puzzle and a heretical notion: that cancers and other disorders in rich countries aren't caused mainly by pollutants but by a vitamin deficiency known to be less acute or even non-existent in poor nations.

Those trying to brand contaminants as the key factor behind cancer in the West are "looking for a bogeyman that doesn't exist," argues Reinhold Vieth, professor at the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto and one of the world's top vitamin D experts. Instead, he says, the critical factor "is more likely a lack of vitamin D."

What's more, researchers are linking low vitamin D status to a host of other serious ailments, including multiple sclerosis, juvenile diabetes, influenza, osteoporosis and bone fractures among the elderly.

Not everyone is willing to jump on the vitamin D bandwagon just yet. Smoking and some pollutants, such as benzene and asbestos, irrefutably cause many cancers.

But perhaps the biggest bombshell about vitamin D's effects is about to go off. In June, U.S. researchers will announce the first direct link between cancer prevention and the sunshine vitamin. Their results are nothing short of astounding.

A four-year clinical trial involving 1,200 women found those taking the vitamin had about a 60-per-cent reduction in cancer incidence, compared with those who didn't take it, a drop so large -- twice the impact on cancer attributed to smoking -- it almost looks like a typographical error.

While that doesn't sound like a randomized, controlled study, it's still highly suggestive. For more on the importance of Vitamin D, you can check out the
the relevant posts from the Heart Scan blog.

I've been taking supplemental Vitamin D for a few months. My physician recommended that I increase my dose at my last visit, based on some new research on its importance to bone health. Given what I've read about its wide-ranging effects on health, I think that I might want to get my levels tested. Plus, according to the Heart Scan Doc, unpredictable variation between individuals makes testing a necessity:

It's probably the number one most common question I get today:

"How much vitamin D should I take?"

Like asking for investing advice, there are no shortage of people willing to provide answers, most of them plain wrong.

The media are quick to offer advice like "Take the recommended daily allowance of 400 units per day," or "Some experts say that intake of vitamin D should be higher, as high as 2000 units per day." Or "Be sure to get your 15 minutes of midday sun."

Utter nonsense. ...

[V]itamin D requirements can range widely. I have used anywhere from 1000 units per day, all the way up to 16,000 units per day before desirable blood levels were achieved.

Vitamin D dose needs to be individualized. Factors that influence vitamin D need include body size and percent body fat (both of which increase need substantially); sex (males require, on average, 1000 units per day more than females); age (older need more); skin color (darker-skinned races require more, fairer-skinned races less); and other factors that remain ill-defined.

But these are "rules" often broken. My office experience with vitamin D now numbers nearly 1000 patients. The average female dose is 4000-5000 units per day, average male dose 6000 units per day to achieve a blood level of 60-70 ng/ml, though there are frequent exceptions. I've had 98 lb women who require 12,000 units, 300 lb men who require 1000 units, 21-year olds who require 10,000 units. (Of course, this is a Wisconsin experience. However, regional differences in dosing needs diminish as we age, since less and less vitamin D activation occurs.)

Let me reiterate: Steroid hormone-vitamin D dose needs to be individualized.

There's only one way to individualize your need for vitamin D and thereby determine your dose: Measure a blood level.

Nobody can gauge your vitamin D need by looking at you, by your skin color, size, or other simple measurement like weight or body fat. A vitamin D blood level needs to be measured specifically -- period.

I've also just begun taking high quality cod liver oil and butter oil, based on the recommendation of Weston A. Price and others. (I got my supply here.) Given the cost of the butter oil, I'm definitely looking for noticeable results -- as I've heard other people report. I'm particularly hoping for an improvement to my dental health, as I'm very prone to cavities and inflamed gums. That would be huge for me.

Israel and Hezbollah

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

StrategyPage reports this little news tidbit regarding Israel and Hezbollah (look at the October 4, 2008 entry, towards the end of the webpage):

Israel has announced that, if there is another round of Hezbollah rocket attacks from southern Lebanon, all the villages that the attacks come from will be destroyed. Hezbollah is ignoring the UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon and again installing rocket storage areas in the basements of homes, or nearby. The locals are threatened with violence or death by Hezbollah if they resist, so Israel is now playing by the same rules and letting the villagers know that, yes, they are in the crossfire if the rockets go off again

Now I don't know whether Israel's political leadership will actually follow through with their promise. But at least they are articulating the right principle. If Israel is attacked again by Hezbollah, then they have the moral right to strike back and end the threat even if it involves the deaths of Lebanese civilians in those villages where the rockets are coming from.

If those civilians were coerced by Hezbollah into storing those rockets in their homes, then the moral fault for their deaths lies with Hezbollah, not with Israel. If those civilians were willing, then they are active participants and cannot claim to be "innocent civilians".

And it also means that if Lebanese civilians genuinely don't want Hezbollah forcing them to act against their own self-interest, then they will have to stand up and oppose Hezbollah and fight instead for a better Lebanese government that protects their rights (rather than violates those rights and puts them in harm's way).

Of course, if another conflict were to break out between Israel and Hezbollah, I expect the usual unjust condemnation of Israel by the Western press decrying those "innocent civilian casualties" in Lebanon. And American politicians (of both political parties) will put intense diplomatic pressure on Israel to stand down. And Israel will eventually knuckle under, bringing them one step closer to national suicide.

America does not have to fight Israel's wars -- that's not our job. But the one thing we can do is to give Israel our moral support -- in particular affirming with words and deeds that it has a right to defend itself. That more than anything else could reshape Middle East politics in a positive direction and put America's enemies on notice that there will no longer be "business as usual".

Unfortunately, I don't expect this sort of leadership from either McCain or Obama. And if Israel does eventually go under, it won't be long before we're next...

Two Cheers for Divided Government

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

There's been a lot of buzz on the blogosphere lately regarding this chart in the October 14, 2008 New York Times showing that since 1929, the stock market has done far better under a Democratic President than a Republican President (even if you exclude the Herbert Hoover years).

The annualized rate of return under Democrats was 8.9% where as under Republicans was 4.7% (excluding Hoover) and 0.4% (including Hoover).



However, this article in the Wall Street Journal shows that although the figures are true, the stock market has actually done best under a divided government -- and specifically when the President is a Democrat and the Congress is Republican.

This makes sense to me. Under a divided government, each party tends to moderate some (although not all) of the worst excesses of the other party. Furthermore, a divided system seems to work better with a Republican Congress restraining a Democratic President, rather than the other way around. For a variety of reasons, Republicans are better in the opposition than in power and will then sometimes even fight for fiscal responsibility. On the other hand, when we've had a Republican President and a Democratic Congress, the President often tries to be "more altruist than thou" in outspending the Democrats, so as to avoid looking mean and selfish.

Yaron Brook once said that we've seen the least growth in government when we've had this pattern of divided government with a Democratic President and Republican Congress. It's good to know that this also is the best combination for the stock market and economic growth.

Unfortunately, it seems pretty unlikely that we'll have that particular combination in 2008. But depending on how the next 2 years turns out, we could easily see this relatively desirable combination in 2010 (just as Democratic control of both branches in 1992 turned into the "better" divided government in 1994.)

Who Is Barack Obama?

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

We know that young Barack Obama came under the influence of the ideas of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky was a communist who taught, as I understand it, that socialists should become part of the capitalist power structure in order to destroy it from within.

(I have my doubts as to how effective this theory is. Once you become part of the power structure, and your livelihood, your mortgage payments, your future and your children's future all depend on that structure, would you want to destroy it? The system changes radicals before they can change it. Gaining power in our mixed economy would turn communists into fascists. At worst, socialists would work to destroy everything but their power and their 401k's.)

The still unanswered question about Obama is: what does he want? Does he secretly intend to destroy capitalism from within? Or does he want power to further the welfare state like your garden variety Democrat? How radical is he?

We know one disturbing thing about Obama. He is willing to lie in order to gain power. He said Ayers was just a guy in his neighborhood. That was a lie. He said he did not know Jeremiah Wright was an anti-American radical. Larry Elder writes,

In "Dreams from My Father," Obama talks of attending the "Audacity of Hope Sermon" (pages 292-293). There is an audio book in Obama's own voice reading this passage. Obama hears Wright speak of Hiroshima and Sharpeville as examples of acts of injustice....

What is Sharpeville? In 1960, the South African apartheid government shot down unarmed protestors, killing 69 black men, women and children. Most of the dead were shot in the back, and nearly 200 more were wounded.

Obama felt no sense of outrage to hear Hiroshima and Sharpeville mentioned in the same breath. Indeed, he was so inspired by the sermon that he uses the sermon's title -- "Audacity of Hope" -- for his second book, and as the theme of his campaign!

I would have run from Wright. Only an anti-American radical would liken Hiroshima to Sharpeville. Obama forged an alliance with the man, then lied about it when Wright became politically inconvenient.

Rush Limbaugh made an interesting observation of Obama yesterday. Obama is being praised for keeping his cool in the debates. Rush said Obama is not cool, he is cold. This is true. He keeps his emotions so controlled that he comes off passionless and reserved. It makes him hard to read. He seems to have made a conscious decision to create a persona of "presidential temperament," which is a front intended to reassure voters that he is no wild-eyed radical. It makes me more suspicious that he is hiding his true intentions -- which brings us back to my original question. What does he want?

I've linked to this several times, but we would do well to remember it:

His mild-mannered style has thrown off even some angry black radicals, who want him to speak out more forcefully about the legacy of U.S. racism and economic inequality.

One is Princeton professor Cornel West, a militant black and self-described socialist. Reportedly, West was reluctant to join the refined Obama's presidential campaign until Obama took him aside and explained to him that he had to walk a rhetorical tightrope to reassure whites. West is now solidly on board his campaign as an adviser.

Another thing worries me. We have seen in Obama's campaign a brazen new approach to political success that seems to be working (Obama's election as President will be the fruit of this new approach). Here's how it works. Obama will lie and depend on the MSM to let the lie rest uncontested. Then he will accuse his opponents of lying, which is taken up by the MSM and the left side of the blogosphere. Finally, Obama's opponents are smeared as racists or full of hatred if they stand in the Messiah's way.

The lies and smears are part of the totalitarian contempt for reason on the left that has been around a long time, but never before have we seen a candidate so willing to lie (and so good at it) coupled with a media so willing to make his lies the accepted "narrative." The left believes that the truth is irrevelant; politics is the conflict to establish your narrative over your opponent's narrative. The next step will be shutting up conservative talk radio and developing a brown shirt force to use force and intimidation against all those capitalists too blinded by greed to understand that they exist as sheep to be sacrificed to the state.

(The foolish George W. Bush has given statist Presidents a new tool to use in any ginned up "crisis":

On October 17, 2006, President Bush signed into law the John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007. The new law allows the President to declare a “public emergency” at his own discretion, and place federal troops anywhere throughout the United States. Under this law, the President also now has the authority to federalize National Guard troops without the consent of Governors, in order to restore “public order.” The President can now deploy federal troops to U.S. cities, which eliminates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. In short, Bush can now declare Martial Law anytime he pleases.)

Another troubling trend has been the collapse of the conservatives. As altruists they are intellectually helpless against any expansion of state power framed as helping the needy among us. Every year fewer conservatives bother to oppose big government. The more voters depend on government handouts, the harder it is for politicians to advocate any cut in spending.

The trends on the left and the right indicate that we are entering a new period in America. This new period will see the spread of state power and the death of our freedoms, one by one.

Whether or not Obama consciously wants to destroy freedom in America -- and I think that as a "blank screen" he has become more a mixed economy Democrat than any communist -- the welfare state is doing it anyway, crisis by crisis.

Diana Hsieh in the New York Times

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I'm pleased to report that I make a small appearance in the just-published New York Times column "On Religion," written by Samuel Freedman: For Atheists, Politics Proves to Be a Lonely Endeavor.

The column focuses on Colorado's Amendment 48, particularly on the difficulty of mobilizing secular voters in opposition to this faith-based measure. I appear toward the end, as part of a gentle criticism:

With their trust in the power of reason, atheists might also be ill-equipped for the gritty work of retail politics -- the phone banks, the door-knocking, the car pools to the polls. If nothing else, they are coming late to the craft.

As founder and leader of a Colorado-based coalition for secular government, Diana Hsieh has written a detailed position paper attacking Amendment 48. Other atheist activists have written letters to the editor and participated in online forums about the ballot measure. Relatively few, however, have thrown themselves into the get-out-the-vote operations that conservative Christians, for instance, have excelled at.

"We need to get more of our people out," said Ms. Hsieh, 33, a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Colorado. "It's just not the strategy I've taken. I'm a policy-wonk type. Going to talk to people outside the grocery store is just not going to be my strong suit."

It's true: my battle is philosophical. Support for Amendment 48 is rooted in the deeply-held but false belief that "life begins at conception." (By that, people mean that a new person, with the right to life, is created at conception.) Recent polls show that, of likely Colorado voters, 41% believe that "life begins at conception" and 39% support Amendment 48. The overlap is not coincidental. So as I said in a recent press release for the Coalition for Secular Government:

To effectively combat measures like Amendment 48, the whole 'pro-life' ideology must be challenged at its root... Reproductive rights must be defended on principle, based on the objective facts of human nature. With regard to abortion, the fact is that a fetus or embryo is only a potential person so long as encased within and dependent on the woman. Once born, the infant is a new individual person with the right to life. That view ought to be the basis for the laws of a free society. Any alternative -- any attempt to grant rights to the embryo or fetus -- would violate the rights of pregnant women.

While I don't dispute with the importance of "retail politics" for winning elections, the defeat of the religious right in Colorado will require sustained philosophic arguments about the nature, source, and scope of rights. I'm pleased with what I've been able to do on that score so far. And once I finish my Ph.D at Boulder this spring, I'll be able to do far more than I can now. Nonetheless, I hope to never stand outside a grocery store arguing abortion with random passersby!

Finally, I must mention that it was a pleasure to discuss these issues with Samuel Freedman. He was sharp, fair, and interested in my views. His column reflects that -- and I am very appreciative.

Right-to-Work Laws, Again

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

On FRODO (the discussion list of Front Range Objectivism), someone objected to my opposition to Colorado's Amendment 47 -- a "right-to-work" measure that would forbid private businesses from requiring union membership as a condition of employment -- on the grounds of "freedom of choice" and "natural rights."

My reply is of general interest, as I think the legitimacy of "right-to-work" laws can be confusing. I wrote:

The idea that people have some kind of natural right to work for another person -- without regard for their employer's terms -- is completely ridiculous.

If my employer says that he's only willing to hire me if I cut my hair short, put in 10 hour days, donate money to ARI, or join a union, that's his right. And it's my right -- precisely because I'm a free person, not a slave -- to refuse employment under those terms.

To say that he is obliged to hire me, even though I don't meet his terms, would make him my slave.

That's why "right-to-work" laws are wrong. They are yet another violation of the right to contract -- in a misguided, typically conservative attempt to make existing pro-union laws more "fair." But in fact, freedom requires the repeal of those unjust pro-union laws -- not passing even more unjust regulations to "level the playing field" or "protect choice."

My view here is the definitive Objectivist position. In the June 1963 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter, Barbara Branden addressed the issue of "right-to-work" laws:

What is the Objectivist stand on "right-to-work" laws?

As advocates of laissez-faire capitalism, Objectivists are opposed to any legislation that abridges the freedom of production and trade. We are, therefore, opposed to the "right-to-work" laws.

The "right-to-work" laws prohibit employers and unions from contractually agreeing to and stipulating a closed and/or union shop. As such, these laws clearly represent an infringement of the rights of the parties involved; these laws rest on the principle that the government has the right to prescribe the terms of contractual agreements-which is a Statist concept. In a free society, an employer who voluntarily negotiates with a voluntary union, may sign any agreement with the union that he wishes. Although it is doubtful whether a closed and/or union shop agreement would ever be economically wise, that choice is the employer's to make. No one's rights are infringed by such an agreement; a worker does not have a "right" to a job with a given employer; if he does not or cannot meet the employer's terms, he is free to seek employment elsewhere.

Many "conservatives" champion "right-to-work" laws on the ground that today unions are so powerful they can virtually compel an employer's agreement to a closed and/or union shop. It is true that unions have such power. But they acquired it only by virtue of legislation, which had the effect of forcing men into unions whether they wished to join or not and of forcing employers to deal with these unions. Unions did not and could not achieve, in a free society, the monopolistic, destructive power they possess in today's "mixed economy." The guilty party is not unionism as such, but government controls.

The solution lies, not in passing new laws, but in repealing the laws that caused the disaster in the first place.

The defenders of freedom do not serve their own cause by trying to fight their battle on the enemy's terms, that is, by deciding that the solution to the evil of government intervention in the economy is more government intervention.

Ari Armstrong has more on his blog.

New Web Site: Repeal the Bailout

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A most welcome message from Tony Donadio, posted to OActivists last week:

In response to last week's passage of the financial bailout legislation, I've taken the liberty of acquiring the domain name repealthebailout.net and creating a rudimentary website. It can be found here:

www.repealthebailout.net

Right now, it's more or less just a skeleton, consisting mainly of links to various articles on the subject. However, I have a strong suspicion that last week's bailout isn't the last one we're going to be facing, and that the website may continue to be relevant for some time to come. I plan to try to update it steadily as my (unfortunately limited) time allows, both with original material and with new and timely links.

I'm interested in feedback and thoughts on what I've (hastily) thrown together so far, so please feel free to respond to me (preferably directly, so as not to clutter the list) if you have any. I'm also interested in new and useful links as well as original contributions if you have any to offer or suggest.

Thanks -- Tony Donadio

Tony has done a fantastic job with Repeal the Bailout. Kudos to him! Please do point people to it in any writing you do about the financial crisis, e.g. in e-mail discussions, comments on news stories, comments on blogs, and the like.

Such small sites focused on some current issue -- like my even smaller Vote No on 59 -- are relatively easy to create, maintain, and promote. They can get a steady stream of search traffic, as shown by the stats of No on 59. (See the visits and referrals.) They're an effective and enduring form of activism for just a few hours of your time.

Notably, because of Vote No on 59, Ari Armstrong was interviewed by the local news for a segment on Amendment 59 on Tuesday. It was shown at 5:30 and again at 9:00; you can watch it here. (The reporter called me due to the web site, and I pointed her to Ari, as he's more knowledgeable than me.) That's an unusually good result, but certainly possible in a busy election season! In the meantime, over 100 interested Colorado voters each day are reading why they should vote "No" on this permanent tax hike.

You can make a difference -- if you speak out!

Pro-Life Feminist?

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Today, the Christian Science Monitor published an excellent letter to the editor by William Stoddard, a much-valued NoodleFood commenter. As published, it reads:

Regarding the Oct. 14 Opinion piece, "Amid Palin hype, a pro-life feminist's dilemma": "Pro-life feminism" is a contradiction in terms. A woman who would deprive other women of control over their own bodies, by legally compelling them to carry pregnancies to term against their will, is not a credible advocate of women's rights.

Abortion is not an easy choice for any woman, and it would be a good thing if the need for it were minimized through conscientious use of contraception. But the claim that a fetus is a person under the law has intolerable implications. A fetal "right to life" would define doctors who perform abortions, and women who undergo them, as murderers. This would be the case even for women who became pregnant through rape, or who were carrying profoundly defective children.

The law should protect the pregnant woman's right to decide what to do. Any other policy is opposed both to feminism and to the broader concept of individual rights.

William H. Stoddard
San Diego

Unfortunately, it's not available online yet. (It was definitely printed today, as I have a hard copy in front of me. Paul subscribes, as it's a great little newspaper.)

Typical American Voters?

By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Ben Smith received this email from a Republican consultant who ran a focus group that watched an ad attacking Obama:

Reagan Dems and Independents. Call them blue-collar plus. Slightly more Target than Walmart.

Yes, the spot worked. Yes, they believed the charges against Obama. Yes, they actually think he's too liberal, consorts with bad people and WON'T BE A GOOD PRESIDENT...but they STILL don't give a f***. They said right out, "He won't do anything better than McCain" but they're STILL voting for Obama.

The two most unreal moments of my professional life of watching focus groups:

54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

I felt like I was taking crazy pills.  I sat on the other side of the glass and realized...this really is the Apocalypse. The Seventh Seal is broken and its time for eight years of pure, delicious crazy....

If these people are at all representative of the thinking among the American electorate at large...

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Faith-based Politics Costs Colorado Republicans

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The following op-ed by Ari Armstrong was released by the Coalition for Secular Government as a non-exclusive op-ed yesterday. It has a similar theme as his earlier CSG op-ed, With Palin, McCain Ignores Colorado Warning. This version includes some additional links for reference, added by Ari.

Faith-based politics costs Colorado Republicans
by Ari Armstrong

Colorado is known for its Western values of independence and economic liberty. So why do Republicans, the supposed champions of those values, keep getting trounced?

Republicans can blame wealthy Democratic donors, but in large part Republicans have beaten themselves by pushing a faith-based agenda of banning abortion and stem-cell research, discriminating against homosexuals, and directing welfare dollars to religious groups. They have subverted the law to religious doctrine and weakened the wall between church and state.

Republicans also have alienated freedom-minded independents and Republicans. Polls released by Pew show most Americans, and half of conservatives, now oppose church involvement in politics. As Ryan Sager shows in his review of 2005 Pew data, the Interior West holds a "live and let live" philosophy, with 53 percent of residents saying homosexuality "should be accepted by society" and 59 percent saying "the government is getting too involved in the issue of morality." [See the appendix of Sager's The Elephant In the Room.]

Yet the GOP panders to its evangelical base at the expense of political victory.

This year, Republicans passed a resolution at their state convention calling for the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Eighteen Republican candidates signed the Colorado Right to Life survey, saying they want to ban abortion as the will of God and outlaw stem-cell medical research.

The same candidates also endorsed Amendment 48, which would define a fertilized egg as a person in Colorado's constitution. This would lay the ground to ban all abortion except perhaps to save the mother's life, ban the birth control pill and other forms of contraception that may prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, and ban most fertility treatments. Women would be forced to bring a pregnancy to term, even in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, and health risks.

True, some of these candidates, such as Congressman Doug Lamborn and congressional candidate Mike Coffman, live in safe districts for Republicans. But Libby Szabo, a candidate for state senate in District 19, does not. Her opponents have hammered her over her answers to the survey, making sure to link her views to the GOP.

Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, the incumbent in a Republican district, has managed to fall behind challenger Betsy Markey in some polls [one and two]. Musgrave wants to outlaw abortion, and she is most well known for sponsoring a constitutional gay marriage ban.

Republican Bob Schaffer is trailing Mark Udall in the polls in the U.S. Senate race in part because of Schaffer's faith-based politics. Udall has written, "I fully support the continued separation of church and state in this country." He opposes bans on abortion and stem-cell research. Schaffer, evoking God's will, said abortion is "always wrong."

Republicans should have learned their lesson when they lost the governership to the Democrats in 2006, when Bob Beauprez touted his faith-based politics and selected a running mate of the same cloth, Janet Rowland. Like Beauprez, Rowland wanted to outlaw abortion and maintain faith-based welfare.

Yet the GOP continues to actively push its anti-abortion agenda. A recent flyer "Paid for by Colorado Republican Committee" urged recipients to vote for a presidential candidate who opposes abortion and who will appoint Supreme Court justices to outlaw it.

But some who are pro-choice across the board are fighting back. Diana Hsieh founded the Coalition for Secular Government, which issued a paper that she and I wrote titled, "Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life." Diana's husband Paul wrote to Dick Wadhams, head of the state GOP, "Although I'm pro-free market, pro-strong national defense, and pro- gun, the position that the CO GOP has taken against abortion is a clear breach of the principle of separation of church and state." Doug Krening wrote to Republican officials, "I have been a Republican for my entire voting life, but cannot endorse the GOP currently because of it's explicit endorsement of religion in government."

On September 11, Amanda Mountjoy, chair of the Colorado Republican Majority for Choice, hosted a banquet with 240 participants to oppose Amendment 48. Former Senator Hank Brown told the crowd, "At the point that we give up supporting and defending individual freedom and choice, we give up the very core of this great party."

Colorado Republicans have two options. They can respect the separation of church and state and defend individual freedom and choice, or they can continue to lose and deserve to do so.

Ari Armstrong is a writer for the Coalition for Secular Government and the editor of FreeColorado.com.

Vote No on Amendment 48, Colorado!

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I've just overhauled the Coalition for Secular Government's web site on Amendment 48: Vote NO on Amendment 48. Please feel free to forward the announcement below to anyone you think might be interested in it.

Announcing the Coalition for Secular Government's new web site on Colorado's Amendment 48:

http://ColoradoVoteNo48.com

Amendment 48 is the ballot measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person with full legal rights in the Colorado constitution. (Read the full text.) If passed and implemented, it would pose a grave threat to the life, liberty, health, and happiness of the women and men of Colorado.

• Amendment 48 would make abortion first-degree murder, except perhaps to save the woman's life. First-degree murder is defined in Colorado law as deliberately causing the death of a "person," a crime punished by life in prison or the death penalty. So women and their doctors would be punished with the severest possible penalty under law for terminating a pregnancy -- even in cases of rape, incest, and fetal deformity.
  
  

• Amendment 48 would ban any form of birth control that might sometimes prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus -- including the birth control pill, morning-after pill, and IUD. The result would be many more unintended pregnancies and unwanted children in Colorado.
  
  

• Amendment 48 would ban in vitro fertilization because the process usually creates more fertilized eggs than can be safely implanted in the womb. So every year, hundreds of Colorado couples would be denied the joy of a child of their own.

Amendment 48 would have severe legal consequences for Colorado. Men and women would be legally bound to sacrifice themselves for the sake of a zygote -- even before it implants in the womb, even before it develops any recognizable human form, even before it has any capacity for awareness. The people of Colorado would be forced to sacrifice themselves based on the faith-based fiction that zygote is the equal of a born baby.

The common claim that "life begins at conception" cannot justify Amendment 48. The fact that something is human and alive does not make it a person. Every cell in our body is both human and alive, yet we don't worry about giving blood for testing or scraping off a few skin cells in a fall. A fertilized egg is distinctive because, in addition to being alive and human, it might develop into a born baby given the right conditions. What supporters of Amendment 48 cannot show, however, is that a potential baby has the moral status of an actual baby. The difference between them is enormous.

An embryo or fetus is wholly dependent on the woman for its basic life-functions. It goes where she goes, eats what she eats, and breathes what she breathes. It lives as an extension of her body, contained within and dependent on her for its survival. It is only a potential person, not an actual person. That situation changes radically at birth. The newborn baby exists as a distinct organism, separate from his mother. Although still very needy, he lives his own life. He is a person -- and individual. His life must be protected as a matter of right.

Consequently, when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy she does not violate the rights of any person. Instead, she is exercising her own rights over her own body -- likely in pursuit of her own health, well-being, and happiness. Amendment 48 would destroy those rights in Colorado.

For a detailed analysis of Amendment 48, download and read the Coalition for Secular Government's issue paper by Ari Armstrong and Diana Hsieh: "Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life: Why It Matters That a Fertilized Egg Is Not a Person."

Amendment 48 is based on sectarian religious dogma, not objective science or philosophy. It is a blatant attempt to impose theocracy in Colorado. Please vote NO on 48!

For more information, visit Vote NO on Amendment 48.

The Coalition for Secular Government advocates government solely based on secular principles of individual rights. The protection of a person's basic rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness -- including freedom of religion and conscience -- requires a strict separation of church and state.

What We Need Now is Some Good Old-fashioned "Collusion"

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

The last debate starts in an hour or so. I can't do it. Really. I'll be ill if I try. After watching the last several weeks of incredible resurgence of statism with government intervention in the economy, it really doesn't matter what the candidates say.

I was tempted for a while to vote McCain, just because the economic crisis is so bad, and potentially will be so devastating if mishandled. My hope was that there was some semblance of basic economics somewhere in his camp. However, after reading about what Roosevelt promised regarding monetary policy and what he actually did after elected (which you can find in this publication: The Great Myths of the Great Depression) it's clear to me that a vote for a pragmatist who says he's for the free market, and consistently bashes it in word and deed is no vote at all. The Republicans are slaves to religion and a pragmatist like McCain will go wherever his handler lead him, and a Democratic Legislative and Executive can only do no good. There is no choice this year. I'm sitting this one out. I'll use the time to pen a few letters to my congressman, and maybe some Letters to the Editor.

Today I read of the heavy handed tactics used by Treasury on our nine largest banks. I read of force used to take ownership rights in banks in exchange for capital. Forced used on both good banks and bad banks alike, and capital thrust upon good banks that didn't need or want it. You should read some of the account here. It is chilling.

The only difference between Hank Paulson and Hugo Chavez is that Paulson "feels badly" about what he's done. Our uniquely American statism takes the form of a seemingly, concerned, reluctant paternalism.  Here, instead of the stern dictator, we have the "reluctant father." Never mind that both have to punish their misbehaving children, in exactly the same fashion.

But I digress. On to the topic at hand.

Megan McCardle almost had me last week, but not this week. She's all concerned about something in the market called "systemic risk," and thinks that this is cause for some form of government regulation of the financial markets. For those of you who don't know finance, systemic risk is risk that an entire financial system is subject to. It is said to be the risk that you cannot eliminate through diversification. This concept however has become the basis for similar thinking as it's cousin in the environmental movement, namely The Doomsday Scenario. Last week this senario was posited for the commercial paper and money markets.

The thinking is that these systemic risks threaten the very existence of the financial markets, and because the markets move so fast that it is possible the once they near this point, that it will be impossible to stop the financial system from imploding. Therefore one needs to regulate the markets in such a way that they stay away from these systemic "cliffs." While markets do move quickly, and can get themselves into trouble, it is fallacious to then posit that the outcome is catastrophic, and that it even can be mitigated by government action.

I'm not suggesting that such risk doesn't exist, but I am seriously questioning that idea that one can mitigate it by regulation. Forgetting for a second that governments themselves are subject to systemic risks, that their meddling can in and of itself be a systemic risk through their unintended consequences (as is the case in this crisis), and that systemic risks are in part unmitigatable because the are unforseeable (which makes one wonder how one regulates against them). The argument that caught me off guard was her thoughts on why governments are uniquely qualified to do the damage control when a crisis hits.

In her discussion on the crisis with Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism (whose blog I have come to rely on for its up to the minute detailed information on this crisis, and who is "gobsmacked" at the Paulson bailout. For her take on why the bailout won't work see her BloggingHeads with McCardle - 18:00. It's quite good.) Megan posits (bold mine),

One of the core issues here, I think what the government is really good at in doing this kind of regulation is first of all it's great at transparency and it's really good at coordination. And so some of the things that people are suggesting, like Luigi Zengales is saying 'look just force people to do an equity transfer' and the reason you want the government to do this is that anyone who does it by themselves sends a bad signal to the market, but if you force everyone to recapitalize at once, then there's no signaling of [balance sheet problems].... But the government is really good at that stuff, when you have a collective action problem in the financial markets which you often do. (passage starts at 38:30, the whole discussion of systemic risk starts at 28:00)

My first response to this was "hmm, ok, yes government can generate broad, unified action." It is of course telling that she uses the word "force" since that is the mechanism by which government accomplishes "unified" action. And it is true that this crisis needs such action. I spent a day noodling on that problem, until one of my favorite capitalists, J.P. Morgan, gave me the answer. Back to my post of last week, Morgan's answer to the crisis of 1907 was to bring all bankers together, turn out balance sheets, and restructure them with capital infusions and write-downs.

In a sense the action required here is the same, a unified action, involving all main banks, restructuring through write-downs and capital infusions. A free market could do this on it's own. Treasury might be able to do it, but it inherently requires nationalization. So why isn't the free market acting? Why is government supposedly better at such action? Because if bank heads do this today, it goes by the term collusion, and it is patently illegal, but it should not be! Government is better at it because it has made the act of doing it illegal for all but itself. Also, for the CEO who has managed his bank poorly, the free market option means he will lose his firm. Such a person, acting pragmatically, would rather hold out for a government bail-out, even if he risks bankruptcy. Implied government action creates that moral hazard that prevents these free market led negotiations!

A "collective action" problem is better handled by the free market, but today, such action is illegal. It should not be. The truth is that instead of Henry Paulson forcing good banks to accept nationalization, it is the good banks who should be presiding over the recapitalization of their more poorly-run brethren.

Lasseiz faire!

Gathering Storm Clouds

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

If Obama is President, with a Democratic house, what economic damage would be added to our woes? I think such a government would focus on changes that do not increase the deficit too much. Within that theme, there are lots of bad possibilites:


Social security: Obama wants to raise the tax. This will fund the system, which recently slipped into deficit. On paper, this will also show the so-called "fund" increasing, thus appearing to push social security problems further into the future. With the recent stock-market collapse, alternatives like privatization would be laughed at. So, politically, there's a good chance this will pass. Also, the Dems might claim this is friendly to retirees. Florida is going to be important in 2012.


Unions: Democrats have been trying to push through a "card-check" system that would make it much easier for unions to move into companies like Walmart. In addition, there may be some subtle moves toward protectionism. These would likely be selective, seeking to protect unions in Ohio and perhaps in Michigan. With the dollar already low, U.S. exports are looking more attractive around the world; chance are the government will make some small protectionist moves and claim that the growing exports are their doing! Instead of restrictions on imports, expect hidden subsidies for U.S. companies -- something that will not be too cut-and-dried if other countries protest to the WTO. Expect things like the recent $25 billion guarantee to auto-companies.

Carbon Cap and Trade: Some scheme seems almost certain, since both candidates are pushing for it. The government might try to combine this with giving special offsetting favors to industries in Ohio (and maybe Michigan). Carbon caps can be structured to give existing companies a monopoly advantage. So, expect ertain businesses and unions, to be supporting the environmentalists.


Health Care: The government is going to try to push something through. They probably won't mess with the current employer-sponsored scheme for a while, but we can expect at least some tax on businesses that do not provide health-care. Perhaps they might come up with some rules that raise costs on places like Walmart, by claiming that Walmart let's the government subsidize their health-care costs. I don't think Obama will push to take over private insurance. The country is not ready, and he won;t want those costs on the budget in his first term.

Summary: Those are the most obvious moves that I could think of. The theme will be: important changes, but nothing that requires a tough political fight; only things where today's left-tilting electorate has been well-prepared.

I figure one might as well prepare one's activism and one's portfolio for these things today!

PajamasMedia Discussion of Atlas Shrugged

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The widely-read group blog Pajamas Media has reposted the Dr. Helen Smith essay on Atlas Shrugged and "going John Galt".

It's also been linked to by Instapundit, so it's going to get lots of traffic.

Here's your chance to comment!

The Power of Fiat Money

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

Once again, all I need do is head to the main page of the New York Times to find a headline that reads like the punchline of a bad joke. This time it's, "U.S. Investing $250 Billion in Banks". Unfortunately, this is no joke, this is where it starts, and things quickly go even further downhill from there.

Before we take a look at this travesty, let's briefly consider how loans and investments are supposed to work. Jim has what he thinks is a great idea. It could be that he feels financially secure enough to buy a house. It could be that he has an invention he'd like to mass produce and sell. Whatever. Jim's problem is that in order to put this plan into action, he needs more money now than he actually has.

Ned, on the other hand, has lots of extra money sitting around that he has no immediate need for. Ideally, Jim and Ned are free men. Jim can dream and invent to his heart's delight, and Ned can wallow in his pile of money all he wants, so long as neither threatens, robs, or harms the other. Jim can't just take Ned's money, and Ned can't compel Jim to come up with something useful to do with his capital, the extra cash.

But they can trade to mutual benefit. Jim can offer to pay Ned a portion of his later profits in exchange for borrowing his capital now and paying it back later. That's interest. If Ned lends Jim the money, both will be richer at the end of the day because Jim will now own something he did not have the means to obtain on his own and Ned will have even more money sitting around.

But remember: Both men are free. Ned can decide that Jim isn't yet financially secure enough to own a house -- or that his idea for a new whirligig won't sell very well. Ned can turn him down, causing him to seek another lender or delay or abandon his plan. Or Ned can agree with Jim that he's ready for that house, or that there is a vast, untapped demand out there for whirligigs. If both are wrong, Ned loses his money.

That last sentence encapsulates the visible downside to lending, and it is this easily graspable fact that, like Frederic Bastiat's broken window, is getting all the attention. The invisible upside that is being ignored is that the only person losing his shirt here is Ned. Tom, Dick, and Harry all saw what Ned didn't, turned Jim down, and still have their cash. And that's the way it should be. In a free society, that's also the way it is. Whether they decide to lend Ned a hand after he makes a mistake is their decision to make.

In a free society, the consequences for one man's failure are his, and his alone to bear. That's not the way it is now.

Now, we have Slow George and Payola Hank who -- after encouraging countless Neds to make loans for houses to countless Jims and predictably causing more bad loans to be made than there would have otherwise -- coming onto the scene promising to bail everyone out!

This money will ultimately either be taken from Tom, Dick, and Harry through taxation or inflation. And all the Neds and Jims out there who made bad decisions will have learned nothing but that they have a "backstop". Now, when someone makes a bad investment decision, everyone loses! That's bad enough.

Now, let's look at the story. It's worse.

"The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it," Mr. Paulson said, who offered some details of the plan along with the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila C. Bair.[links dropped]

This is bad, but nothing new yet.

But the power of fiat currency to remove rational judgement from the economy is apparently boundless. Look at what happens when all the nations in a global economy can screw around with monetary units!

After ticking off a list of new government measures to "stabilize" the economy, the article informs us that the government is going to start buying shares of major banks who will, naturally, accept greater government control as part of the "bargain" and that we are in a race with Europe to see whose government will start attempting to manage the whole financial sector first!

On Monday, big banks agreed to take investments totaling about $125 billion. Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase will receive $25 billion each. Bank of America, which is acquiring Merrill Lynch, and Wells Fargo, w