Hsieh OpEd: "Polis vs Polis on Cars and Health Care"

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The December 28, 2008 Boulder Daily Camera has published my latest OpEd on health care. Interestingly, the first online comment in response was from Congressman-elect Jared Polis himself.

Here's the OpEd:

Polis vs. Polis on cars and health care

By Dr. Paul Hsieh
Sunday, December 28, 2008

Boulder's Congressman-elect Jared Polis recently took a bold stand against a federal bailout of the automobile industry, correctly arguing that that the car manufacturers' problems should be handled by the private sector, not the government. Coloradans should urge him to apply the same principles to the issue of health care reform.

In the Dec. 10 Wall Street Journal, Polis wrote: "Our United States Congress... now finds itself poring over 'business plans' submitted this week by Ford, GM and Chrysler. People who have never before in their lives seen -- no less implemented -- a business plan are now trying to decide if these companies will succeed by means of a 'capital infusion' with... [taxpayer] money. Something is wrong with this picture."

Polis is absolutely correct on this point. As a successful businessman himself, he knows that government cannot and should not be manufacturing cars.

His argument applies even more strongly to the issue of health care. Although he campaigned on a platform of government-run "single payer" health care, he should recognize that government cannot and should not be running health care.

Similar socialized medical systems in other countries are consistent failures, leading only to harsh rationing and long waiting lists. In Canada's "single payer" system, a woman who feels a lump in her breast might wait months for the surgery and chemotherapy she needs. In contrast, a Boulder woman could get the care she needed in a few days.

Furthermore, whenever government attempts to guarantee "universal health care," it must also control it. Government then decide who gets what health care and when, not doctors and patients. In single payer systems, far from being a "right," health care becomes just another privilege dispensed at the discretion of government bureaucrats.

A 20-year old Canadian snowboarder who hurts his knee on the slopes might wait almost a year for an MRI scan, if the government does not consider it an "emergency." Yet such a delay in proper diagnosis and treatment could result in a permanent crippling arthritis by age 30. A Colorado snowboarder with the same injury could receive the necessary scan and surgery in a few weeks, avoiding such a life-long disability.

Finally, single payer health care necessarily interposes the government into the doctor-patient relationship in the name of cost control. According to the Telegraph, Great Britain's National Health Service paid bonuses to primary care physicians who reduced the numbers of referrals to hospital specialists -- thus forcing those doctors to choose between their oaths to their patients or the government which pays their salaries.

This corrosive effect on the doctor-patient relationship is one of the worst evils of single payer health care. The evil is not that it allows a few doctors to act badly, but rather that it takes good doctors and encourages them to become bad physicians willing to betray their patients' best medical interests.

The fundamental flaw behind single payer systems (or any other form of "universal health care") is the assumption that health care is a "right" that must be guaranteed by the government. Health care is a need, not a right. Rights are freedoms of action (such as the right to free speech), not automatic claims on goods or services that must be produced by another. There's no such thing as a "right" to a car -- or a tonsillectomy.

Individuals are legitimately entitled to health care that they purchase with their own money, are promised by prior contractual agreements, or are given to them via voluntary charity.

Any attempts to guarantee an alleged "right" to health care must necessarily violate the genuine rights of others -- such as the physicians who are forced deliver health care on the government's terms (rather than their own) and the taxpayers who are forced to pay for others' health care against their will.

Socialism doesn't work for car manufacturing, and won't work for health care. Congressman-elect Polis correctly understands that the government should not be running the auto industry. If Coloradans value their lives and their health, they should urge him to apply that same understanding to health care and to support free market reforms, instead of a "single payer" system. After all, it is their own future health care at stake.

Dr. Paul Hsieh of Sedalia is co-founder, Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine

U.S. Should Help Crush Hamas

By Elan Journo from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

U.S. Should Help Crush Hamas

December 30, 2008

Washington, D.C.--In response to the Hamas bombardment of Israel, Washington must encourage and help Israel to annihilate that Islamist group, once and for all.

The failure to wipe out Hamas on previous occasions has encouraged Palestinian terror groups. It teaches Islamists that their terrorist war will be rewarded, that their quest to destroy Israel--and ultimately America--is achievable.

To put an end to Hamas’s brazen aggression, the jihadist group must be defeated. It is proper and necessary for America to aid and bolster Israel, its one true ally in the Middle East, in the face of a common enemy.  

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Bush's Pro-Democracy Strategy Is Pro-Terrorism

By Elan Journo from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Bush’s Pro-Democracy Strategy Is Pro-Terrorism

December 29, 2008

Washington, D.C.--The acts of war by Hamas against Israel are precisely what people should expect from Bush’s so-called democracy strategy in the Middle East.

The administration campaigned for elections in the strongholds of various Islamist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that it should have worked to destroy. In the Palestinian territories, Bush insisted that Hamas be allowed to participate in the 2006 elections--and the jihadist group won a landslide. Thanks to that political victory, Hamas gained an unearned legitimacy for its vicious war to exterminate Israelis and Westerners. Winning power with the aid of their enemy confirmed for these Islamists that the West will abet its own destroyers.

America’s self-defense entails crushing Islamic totalitarianism--not ushering its jihadists into political office and galvanizing them to redouble their war against us.

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Caroline Glick on Multiculturalism and Islamic Terrorism

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

Syndicated columnist and blogger Caroline Glick wrote an excellent weblog entry a few weeks ago connecting multiculturalism to the recent Islamic terrorism attacks in Mumbai.

First, she openly identifies Islamic Totalitarianism as the enemy of the United States, Israel and India:

In the aftermath of the Mumbai massacres, it is hard to imagine that there is anything as pernicious as the jihadists who sought out and murdered non-Muslims with such cruelty. But there is. Their multicultural apologists, who enable them to continue to kill by preventing their victims from fighting back, are just as evil.

The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts throughout the world, were motivated to kill by their adherence to totalitarian Islam. Totalitarian Islam calls for the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of all other non-Muslims.

The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts from Gaza to Baghdad to Guantanamo Bay, have been defended, and their acts and motivations have been explained away, by their allies and loyal apologists: Western multiculturalists. Multiculturalism is a quasi-religion predicated on both moral relativism and a basic belief in the inherent avarice of the West - particularly of the US and Israel. Multiculturalists assert that Westerners - or, in the case of India, Hindus - are to blame for all acts of violence carried out against them by non-Westerners.

Afterwords, she starts to cite several explicit examples of how multiculturalism leads to moral paralysis (although Glick does not use that specific term.

IN THE case of the Mumbai massacres, the jihadists' multicultural defenders began justifying their actions while they were still in the midst of their torture and murder spree. In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria [best-selling author of The Post-American World] hinted that Indian Hindus had it coming.

"One of the untold stories of India," he explained, "is that the Muslim population has not shared in the boom the country has enjoyed over the last 10 years. There is still a lot of institutional discrimination, and many remain persecuted."

She then takes a few shots at the media in general for the similar evasions:

Then too, the multicultural media suppressed the fact that the jihadists were targeting Jews. Outside of Israel, it took the media nearly two days to report that the Chabad House had even been taken over by the jihadists. And once they did finally report that Jews were being targeted, they made every effort to downplay the strategic significance of the jihadists' decision to send a team off the beaten path simply to butcher Jews.

Emblematic of the Western media's attempts to play down the story was The New York Times. Two days into the hostage drama, the Times opined, "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."

JEWS WERE not the only ones who had their identity obscured. The jihadists did too. For almost an entire day, major news networks in the West suppressed the fact that the murderers were Muslim jihadists, claiming oddly, that they could also be Hindu terrorists. This was odd not because there are no Hindu terrorists, but because the perpetrators referred to themselves from the outset as "mujahideen," or Islamic warriors.

She continues with another example that I think is also worth quoting:

Once the jig was up on their attempts to hide the identities of the perpetrators and their victims alike, the jihadists' multicultural enablers started blaming the victims. For instance, on Sunday, The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by University of Chicago law professor Martha Nussbaum attacking Indian Hindus. After blithely dismissing the atrocities that were still under way while she wrote as "probably funded from outside India, in connection with the ongoing conflict over Kashmir," Nussbaum focused her ire against India's Hindus. Recalling the gruesome and apparently state-sanctioned violence against Muslims in India's Gujarat state in 2002, Nussbaum cast the jihadists as nothing more than victims of a Hindu terror state which has been victimizing Muslims for no reason since the 1930s.

Caroline Glick's analysis of the whole situation is also very good. For instance,

HE ATTACKS in Mumbai and the multiculturalists' rush to minimize their significance exposed two disturbing truths about the global jihad. First, they showed that the jihadists are quick studies. With each passing day, their capacity to attack grows larger....THE SECOND truth about the global jihad that the Mumbai attacks exposed is that there is nothing that jihadists can do to make the multiculturalists stop defending them.

Glick has written an excellent analysis of terrorist attacks in Mumbai. For those of you who enjoyed the excerpts that I quoted, I again highly recommend that you read the entire post. I only wish that more commentators would recognize the connection between multiculturalism and Islamic terrorism.

The Consequences of Defining Fascism by Non-Essentials

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

Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism is definitely worth reading. The book contains an extensive amount of intellectual and political history. Unfortunately, the thesis of the book is off target. In Liberal Fascism, Goldberg strives to argue that fascism is more of a liberal phenomenon than a conservative phenomenon. To build his case, Goldberg extensively documents the state policies of Mussolini's fascist Italy, Hitler's Nazi Germany and then compares them to the policies of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, the demands of the 1960s counter-culture, JFK, LBJ and Hillary Clinton. Goldberg does indeed make a very persuasive case that these Democratic administrations did indeed contain significant fascism elements.

Despite writing a pretty good book, Goldberg comes off as very evasive since he deliberately overemphasizes fascism from the political left while he intentionally overlooks fascism from the political right. For example, Goldberg does not discuss conservative attempts to ban contraceptives, limit immigration or curb abortion rights even though these are clear cases of conservative fascism. I can elaborate on this point further, but it has already been done in Ed Cline's book review and on my Amazon book review. This is unfortunate, since it suggests that fascism is a partisan phenomenon. However, the truth could not be farther from the case.

Instead, I wanted to focus on the negative consequences of Goldberg failing to develop a consistent, non-partisan conceptualization of Fascism. I think this is best illustrated by Goldberg's dithering interview on The Daily Show. You can view the interview here.

Goldberg does make some decent points. However, about two minutes in to the clip, Goldberg starts to get himself into trouble. He cites a decent example of fascism from Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village, which is Clinton's idea of state-funded 24/7 feeds about how to properly raise children. Stewart clearly misses the point, as he sarcastically quips "you mean, instead of a ticker showing the sports scores?" Obviously, the underlying premise of Stewart's joke is that Clinton's big deal and that Goldberg is making a mountain out of a mole hill.

Does Goldberg draw the essential distinction that Clinton's example would be state-controlled media that is funded through mandatory taxation while a sports ticket is funded through private media and is not regulated? No, Goldberg just passively nodes, implicitly sanctioning Stewart's conflation.

Furthermore, at 5:10 into the video, the interview cuts to a scene where Stewart derisively asks Goldberg to explain "how organic food is fascist." Does Goldberg immediately eliminate the confusion by indicating that organic food is not fascist but state-imposed organic food (e.g., by banning or heavily taxing non-organic foods) would be fascist? No, instead Goldberg clumsily tries to explain how the Nazis were obsessed with organic foods. Stewart, seeing the absurdity in Goldberg's logic, mockingly suggests that Goldberg should conclude that moustaches are fascist, since Hitler had a moustache. Goldberg comes off looking like a partisan hack and Stewart gets a lot of laughs at Goldberg's expense.

This is just another anecdotal example as to why classical liberals in the Republican Party desperately need a rational philosophy to defend against Statism (including to purge it as well as religion from their own party.) Goldberg, in particular, needs to be able to define fascism by essentials, instead of attempting to frame it as a partisan phenomenon.

If anyone is curious, a good definition is a slight modification of the entry to that in The American Heritage Dictionary (1982). (thanks to Ed Cline for digging up the American Heritage definition up in his book review.)

"Fascism - A philosophy or system of government that is marked by stringent social and economic control with a strong centralized government that is usually headed by a dictator and often a policy of belligerent nationalism."

The Dark Knight and Unearned Guilt

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

I saw The Dark Knight on DVD the other day. Although I think it is a very good action movie, one of the underlying messages in the movie really left a bad taste in my mouth. For those of you who have seen the movie or do not mind plot spoilers, I invite you to read my reflections below.

::::::::::::::::::::: Plot Sequence Spoilers below ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Blaming Batman for that which he is mitigating
I did not like how Batman accepted blame for much of the mayhem that The Joker waged. Recall from the movie that the Joker demands that he will continue to kill innocents until Batman reveals his identity. While it is fairly obvious that the Joker is not going to relent in his nihilistic and sadistic on Gotham if he is appeased, Batman is nevertheless blamed by civilians, law enforcement, news reporters, the Joker and even his loyal butler Alfred for the civilians casualties and the chaos that ensue at the Joker's hand.

As a plot element, it is perfectly fine if Batman initially accepts such guilt only to later realize his error and to properly refute these unjust charges by the end of the movie. However, this realization never occurs. Instead, the movie ends with Batman accepting that he is responsible for much of the chaos in Gotham and concludes that it is his duty to continue to fight crime anyway even though much of the city blames him.

Harvey Dent does seem to protect Batman from these charges to some degree, largely through his actions of literally claiming to be Batman, resulting in his immediate incarceration. However, since Harvey Dent breaks down by the end of the film and embarks on his own killing spree, his moral defense of Batman is not portrayed as solid. After all, who is he to say anything on this matter? He literally transmogrified into a monster and starting slaying people in the name of a perverse concept of justice that is detached from reality.

Who is really responsible for the crime in Gotham city?
Batman is not responsible for the people who the Joker has killed. The Joker and his thugs are responsible for their own murderous actions. In fact, Batman was Gotham's only hope to stopping the Joker. Furthermore, blaming Batman is self-defeating for the residents of Gotham city, since the extent that Batman is blamed influences the extent that he has the incentive to stop protecting them from the ruthless criminals who used to run their city.

The movie suggests that Batman's existence "forced" the fearful mobsters to turn to a monster such as the Joker, since they had no other alternative to combat Batman. However, this ignores the fact that these mobsters want to exert just enough power that they need to bring Gotham city to its knees. Batman's existence certainly required that they accumulate even more destructive power to pursue their vicious ends. However, the goal of the mobsters never changed. If anything, this illustrates why organized crime should be eradicated swiftly and completely. Such crime families should never be allowed to fester, lest they seek to escalate their offensive capability.

If only Batman could also intellectually defend himself
I think The Dark Knight would be a better movie if Batman eventually realizes that he does not deserve the guilt that is imposed on him. Batman could have taken a defiant and principled stance, explaining to the world how he is not the cause of the crime but the exterminator of it. He could remind Gotham city's residents as to how miserable and crime-ridden the city was before he embraced the role as a crime-fighter. Batman could have identified the inspiration that he has given the city, including how even common police officers disguise themselves as batmen so as to both boost their courage and strike fear in the wicked. Unfortunately, none of this has happened, which makes the ending of the movie depressing rather than uplifting.

The world needs more heroes
Unfortunately, we live in an age where politicians are devoid of principles. If Barack Obama were running for mayor of Gotham City, he would insist on meeting with The Joker with no "preconditions" and leaving all options (e.g., appeasement, compromise, freezing his assets or a law enforcement crackdown) firmly on the table. John McCain, being no better, would saunter around as if he is somehow a tough guy since he would meet with The Joker with a few nominal preconditions. Furthermore, John McCain would probably divert millions of tax dollars to crackdown on some lesser crime family so that he can boast of his crime-fighting success because he is preventing that particular family from falling under the influence of the Joker.

Given these depressing realities, we can use definitely more movies where honest and incorruptible heroes triumph over evil while refusing to accept any unearned guilt. Overall, I still recommend seeing The Dark Knight as it is a very good action movie qua action movie. However, this theme of accepting unearned guilt is a stain on the movie that cannot be ignored and it did detract from my enjoyment of the film.

George Bailey’s Wasted Life

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

I first saw Director Frank Capra‘s It‘s a Wonderful Life (1946) years ago in New York City, in one of the city’s many “revival“ theaters that featured “oldies,” or movies made before 1965. It was in the Thalia Theater, a small, run-down but comfortable, smoker-friendly Art Deco theater on the Upper West Side. Right around the corner, on Broadway, was the palatial New Yorker Theater, which also featured “oldies,” in which I also educated myself in the art of movie-making and story-telling.

I remember not liking It’s a Wonderful Life (IAWL) that first time, and my animus for it grew every time I saw it after that, chiefly because the life of George Bailey, the anti-hero, was not my life. George, played by Jimmy Stewart, had grand ambitions, but surrendered them to the needs of others. I had grand ambitions, as well, but never surrendered them. For all the American character of the film, I regarded it as distinctly anti-American.

For years I toyed with the idea of writing an answer (or a literary antidote) to IAWL, just as I would someday actually write a literary answer to Dashiell Hammett’s detective novel, The Maltese Falcon (as well as to the Humphrey Bogart film of it). But I had other literary projects to tackle, and an answer to Capra’s film remained far, far in the rear of my priorities, even though his postwar film was becoming something of a cultural “icon” and was being hailed by critics an American “classic.”

In a manner of speaking, Wendell Jamieson beat me to the idea in The New York Times, in his December 18, 2008 article, “Sorry, George, It’s a Pitiful, Dreadful Life.” In it, although he still confesses a fondness for the film, Jamieson projects an alternative destiny for Bedford Falls, George’s home town.

For those who are not familiar with the story, it is about the life of George Bailey, who wishes to become an architect or engineer and build skyscrapers and bridges and planned cities and the like. As a young man, every time he is about to go off to college or see the world beyond Bedford Falls, something happens to keep him home. After his father’s death, he feels obligated to take over the Bailey Building and Loan Association, and so winds up helping the “little people” buy their own homes (echoes of the recent “bailout“ crisis will remain unspoken here). He never leaves town. He is blind-sided by his feckless brother Harry, he marries a calculating, ambition-killing woman (presaging Lillian Rearden from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged) played by Donna Reed, has children, lives in a drafty mansion, and becomes a pillar of Bedford Falls society not because he has accomplished anything, but rather because he is so selfless. He has become a walking vehicle of Kantian maxims.

Then, on Christmas Eve and after VE Day, his chronically sodden Uncle Billy, who also works for the building and loan, misplaces an $8,000 deposit, which is handily snatched up by the “evil” town banker, Henry F. Potter, George’s financial nemesis who wants to “own“ the town. George cannot cover the loss, of course, and never learns who stole the money. But Potter, who is on the building and loan’s board of directors, initiates criminal charges against him. Facing scandal and prison, George snaps, chews out Uncle Billy, his wife, his kids, and others, and contemplates suicide. Then an angel is sent to teach George a lesson. The angel, played as a kind of half-wit, shows George what would have happened to Bedford Falls had he never been born, granting him that wish in answer to a tossed off remark by George to that effect.

Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville, a kind of upstate New York Las Vegas before Vegas was not much more than a literal desert watering hole, alive with gambling and dance halls and raucous taverns. His friends are impoverished by Potter, one of them, a cop, tries to shoot him, his mother doesn’t know him, the town flirt becomes a prostitute, and his wife a spinster working in the town library. George, of course, learns the lesson and is brought back to the present, grateful and full of Christmas cheer. He knows now that he “made a difference” in others’ lives by abandoning his ambition. He reunites with his family, and the whole town comes to his rescue by chipping in to cover the $8,000 loss. He is hailed by his war-hero brother as the “richest man in town” -- “rich” in all his friends.

What astounded me about Jamieson’s article is that he found Pottersville a far more interesting and exciting place to live than sleepy, dull Bedford Falls. “…Pottersville, with its nightclubs and gambling halls, would almost certainly be in much better financial shape today. It might well be thriving.” Thriving, that is, as a competitor of Saratoga Springs, a resort and horse-racing town not very far away from fictive Bedford Falls. “What a grim thought,” Jamieson asks in his article. “Had George Bailey never been born, the people in his town might very well be better off today.”

Jamieson also points out that, after consulting with a county district attorney, George still would have been liable for the $8,000 larceny, regardless of how he made restitution to the building and loan. “I mean, if someone robs a bank, and then gives the money back, that person still robbed the bank, right?”

Right. And Teddy Kennedy should have served time for involuntary manslaughter, and both of the Clintons should have donned prison jump suits for their many and various episodes of malfeasance.

Bosley Crowther, in his review of IAWL for The New York Times on December 23, 1946, was not so forgiving or imaginative. He liked certain aspects of the film, and credited the principal cast for its performance, but “Lionel Barrymore’s banker [Potter] is almost a caricature, and Henry Travers’ ‘heavenly messenger’ [Clarence the angel] is a little too sticky for our taste.” Crowther expresses his main objection:

“Indeed, the weakness of this picture, from this reviewer’s point of view, is the sentimentality of it -- its illusory concept of life. Mr. Capra’s nice people are charming, his small town is quite beguiling and his pattern for solving problems is most optimistic and facile. But somehow they all resemble theatrical attitudes rather than average realities.”

To Crowther, IAWL wasn’t “realistic” or “naturalistic” enough. Apparently, the theme and moral of the story were too pat, too syrupy, too simplistic, too predictable, and not convincingly delivered. But, then, any story in which an angel appears and determines the course of events cannot be at all realistic. One could also say that about any “happy ending” predicated on the triumph of altruism and selflessness, except in such instances as the fate of Catherine Halsey, Ellsworth Toohey‘s niece in The Fountainhead, and then it is a tragedy. And, like Jamieson, he does not question the altruist moral of the story, but accepts it as an unquestionable measure of the good. While Crowther found the film “emotionally gratifying,” it didn’t “fill the hungry paunch.” Jamieson, on the other hand, concludes his review by recounting his first viewing of the film in 1981:

“Fifteen years old and imagining myself an angry young man, I got all choked up. And I still do.”

The altruistic moral of the story is as uncontroversial to Crowther and Jamieson as having cream with one’s coffee: Others have a moral claim on one’s life; to do the “right thing” is to “give back” to others, to the community, to society, to the nation, now called volunteerism or community service. I regard IAWL as anti-American because it touts the virtue of selflessness, when being free to pursue one’s ambitions without any obligation to serve one’s fellow men was the implied moral cornerstone of this country’s founding.

Altruism is a tenacious, poisonous morality, even for those who do leave their own Bedford Falls to pursue their ambition. Look at billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who are now devoting their lives and fortunes to “giving back” in the best George Bailey tradition. It is penance for being successful, and an unconscionable crime. Crowther was wrong in his estimate of the film. A nagging compulsion to serve the public remains the “average reality” in too many Americans today, just as it was in his time.

Its journey as a non-blockbuster in 1946 to its current status as a cultural icon could serve as a measure of the continuing loss of the country‘s sense of life and the fading of its vision as a nation of selfish, non-sacrificing, benevolent individuals. In 1990, IAWL was deemed by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.” It was nominated for five Oscars but won none, being buried by The Best Years of Our Lives, released also in 1946, and which featured no angels but touted selflessness and sacrifice in a more “realistic” manner. It won seven Oscars. The American Film Institute rated IAWL third only to The Lord of the Rings in the fantasy genre, but definitely ensconced in the top 100 American films.

Ayn Rand, who testified before the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1947 about the Communist influence in Hollywood, wished to testify against The Best Years of Our Lives, but was only given a chance to speak about Song of Russia. What she would have said to the committee appears in Journals of Ayn Rand.* Song of Russia was an obvious wartime propaganda vehicle, but The Best Years of Our Lives was a film about the lives of servicemen returning from the war. Rand considered its collectivist “message” far more insidious and effective than that of Song of Russia.

“Nobody has ever been endangered by being offered poison in a bottle bearing a label with a skull-and-crossbones. Poison is usually offered in a glass of the best wine -- or, modern version, in a quart of the milk of human kindness.”

That criticism could just as well be applied to IAWL, except that instead of the milk of human kindness, its poison was offered in a tall glass of holiday eggnog. Interestingly, Rand wasn’t the only person to see the communist influence in Hollywood. The FBI regarded IAWL as communist propaganda. A memo to Director J. Edgar Hoover in May 1947 begins:

“With regard to the picture "It's a Wonderful Life", [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a "scrooge-type" so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists.

“In addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”

Frank Capra once said that IAWL “was the story I had been looking for all my life. A good man, ambitious. But so busy helping others, life seems to pass him by. Despondent. He wishes he had never been born. He gets his wish. Through the eyes of a guardian angel he sees the world as it would have been had he not been born. Wow! What an idea. The kind of idea that when I get old and sick and scared and ready to die -- they’ll say, ‘He made The Greatest Gift.’”

“In a 1946 interview, Capra described the film’s theme as ‘the individual’s belief in himself,’ and that he made it to ‘combat a modern trend toward atheism.’”**

It was a belief in himself as a capable servant of society that Capra is speaking of, not anything so offensive as individualism and self-confidence. The union of and alliance between left-wing collectivism and religion, a phenomenon we are witnessing today (such as in the presidential campaign, articulated by both major candidates) began longer ago than anyone could have imagined.

Jimmy Stewart in a 1977 article summed up his own estimate of the film:

“…[T]here is nothing phenomenal about the movie itself. It’s simply about an ordinary man who discovers that living each ordinary day honorably, with faith in God and selfless concern for others, can make for a truly wonderful life.”

My own “answer” to It’s a Wonderful Life would have seen George Bailey escaping Bedford Falls and leaving all his hapless, parasitical beneficiaries of his selflessness to their just fates. But, some years ago I realized that I could write such a story only if I made the fate of the residents of Bedford Falls the chief story line, not George Bailey’s life and achievements beyond that “one-horse town.” It was just not interesting enough a story in which to invest any creative energy.

There is, however, one specific episode in my rendition of the film I would have definitely included: George elopes with the town flirt and sex siren, Violet Bick (played by Gloria Grahame), spurning Mary Hatch. I leave the rest of the story to your imagination.

Happy New Year.


*Journals of Ayn Rand, New York: Dutton, 1997. Edited by David Harriman. Pp. 367-386 for a full accounting of her HUAC testimony and her article on The Best Years of Our Lives for the Motion Picture Alliance.
**It’s a Wonderful Life: A Memory Book, by Stephen Cox. Nashville: Cumberland House, 2003.

2009 Clemson Summer Conference on Atlas Shrugged and the Moral Foundations of Capitalism

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

I am excited the announce the 2009 Clemson Summer Conference on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and the Moral Foundations of Capitalism. This event is a three-day workshop for college students. Students attend lectures, participate in small group discussions, and have free time to discuss and debate the ideas presented in the formal sessions. Throughout the three days of sessions, students have ample opportunity to speak one-on-one with faculty and ask them questions in a more informal setting.

The conference will be held on May 29th - May 31st. Students will arrive on Thursday, May 28th and will depart on Monday, June 1st. Please note that full scholarships are available to conference attendees. Graduate students are also invited to apply (I attended as a graduate student) but preference for scholarships will be given to undergraduates.

This year's faculty includes four Ayn Rand Institute intellectuals:
* Dr. Andrew Bernstein (Professor at Marist College)
* Dr. Eric Daniels (Professor at Clemson University)
* Dr. Onkar Ghate (Dean of Objectivist Academic Center)
* Dr. Brad Thompson (Professor at Clemson University)
* a to-be-announced expert on economics.

The tentative schedule includes:
* Individual Rights, Law and Capitalism (3-day class)
* Ethics and Capitalism (3-day class)
* Economics of Capitalism (3-day class)
* History of Capitalism (2-day class)
* Group discussions on Atlas Shrugged
* Roundtable discussion on Capitalism

Please note that the deadline to apply is in March 5th.

Speaking from personal experience, I think this conference is a wonderful opportunity to enhance one's understanding of the philosophy of Ayn Rand as well as on the proper moral defense of laissez-faire capitalism. Even those of you who are already well-read on Objectivism will find this conference very beneficial. In addition to the educational benefits, you will have three days to interact with the faculty as well as have the opportunity to make several new friends who share your values.

You can learn more about the conference, including how to apply, here: http://business.clemson.edu/BBTCENTER/cci/conferences.html

A New Dog

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I am utterly desperate for a dog. I miss Kate terribly, and I miss Abby now more than ever. Mostly, however, I miss the presence of a good farm dog in our lives. I miss being a pack leader. I miss being welcomed home by a wagging tail. I miss my faithful companion for feeding the horses. I miss the security of the sharp alarm bark. I miss the diligent licking of plates. I miss the silly games and antics. I miss talking to the best of listeners. I miss having my doggie friend at my side.

Paul and I adopted Kate and Abby as adults from a shelter. This time, I've said that I want puppy. I've also said that I wanted to buy a dog from a breeder, so as to avoid (as much as possible) the kind of genetic problems suffered by both Kate and Abby. (Kate had very bad hip dysplasia; Abby developed degenerative myelopathy. Both diseases are common in German Shepherds, thanks to the AKC's focus on form rather than function.)

However, after reading this Sports Illustrated article (with pictures) on what happened to Michael Vick's dogs -- and perusing the web site of the Front Range German Shepherd Rescue -- I'm rethinking that decision. We might get a rescue dog instead.

In addition to their inherent excellent qualities as dogs, Paul and I found great pleasure in knowing that we had rescued Kate and Abby. Kate was obviously pampered in her previous home, but her orthopedic problems were quite serious. Another family might not have been able to afford the hip replacement surgery and pain management that enabled her to live so well for so long. Abby was not well-treated by her prior owner: she had been pretty seriously neglected by a [something unprintable] only interested in breeding her. She was 20 pounds underweight when we adopted her, and her behavior clearly indicated that she'd only been sporadically fed and watered. So by the kind of life we offered Kate and Abby, we helped them reach their full doggie potential. We saved them. And in turn, they rewarded us with their utmost loyalty. They were truly excellent dogs.

Undoubtedly, I want a young dog. And we're set on another German Shepherd: we like the steady temperament and strong loyalty that characterizes the breed. So perhaps we should aim for a German Shepherd between six months to a year, so that we can test for hip dysplasia before adopting him/her.

The terrible part is that I can't possibly spare the time for a new dog until the dissertation is done. So Paul and I will have to endure life without a dog for a few more months. That won't be fun. However, the prospect of rescuing another dog feels like the right course. It feels like we'll be honoring all that Kate and Abby were to us and all we were to them -- and I like that thought very much.

Hsieh LTE in Christian Science Monitor

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The December 17, 2008 Christian Science Monitor featured an article on the internal debate within the Republican Party entitled, "Young Republicans seek a new kind of party".

I sent them the following LTE in response, which they published in the December 22, 2008 issue:

GOP's 'social conservatism' alienates young Republicans

In regard to the Dec. 17 article, "Young Republicans seek a new kind of party": I voted Republican in 1996, 2000, and 2004, but not in 2008, because I was finally fed up with the ever-increasing influence of the religious right on the Republican Party – especially on issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage.

If the GOP returned to affirming individual rights, limited government, and fiscal responsibility, then I would be glad to support it again.

But as long as they support the toxic "social conservative" agenda of the religious right, then they will continue to alienate many young and independent voters and lose elections. And deservedly so.

Paul Hsieh
Sedalia, Colo.

Symposium on Atlas Shrugged at UT Austin

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Mark your calendars:

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: Celebrating the Best Within Us

Please join us for a symposium offering contemporary perspectives on Ayn Rand's magnum opus, both as philosophy and as literature. Speakers include Dr. Allan Gotthelf (University of Pittsburgh), Dr. Shoshana Milgram (Virginia Tech), Dr. Onkar Ghate (Ayn Rand Institute), and Jeff Britting (Associate Producer of the Academy Award-nominated documentary "Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life"). All sessions will include question periods, and an open reception with the speakers will be held immediately afterwards.

Date: March 4, 2009
Time: 4:00-6:30pm
Location: The University of Texas at Austin - ACES Auditorium (ACES 2.302)

For details, visit www.UTBBTChairObjectivism.com or email objectivism@austin.utexas.edu.

For those of you in Colorado rather than Texas, the Philosophy Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder will be hosting a debate between Dr. Onkar Ghate and Dr. Michael Huemer on the Objectivist ethics on March 2nd from 7:30 to 9:00 pm in the Old Main Chapel, as part of its Think! series. I'm the graduate student promoter/organizer of the series, so I'll be posting more details on this debate when I have them settled. It should be an excellent event.

Jefferson vs. Plato

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

If one is searching for the causes of today’s moral crisis, it is the premises of giants one should examine, not those of midgets. One should begin with Plato and graduate to his contemporary champions.

Thomas Jefferson the political philosopher is to be heeded more than is Jefferson the moral philosopher. The best thinkers of his time could not imagine a morality based on egoism and self-interest, except if it solely meant deriving personal pleasure or satisfaction from performing altruistic actions. Nor could he imagine it, even though he was intellectually acute enough to articulate the necessity of individual rights and of a government instituted to protect them.

Given the virtual monopoly that Christianity and altruism in his time exercised over the whole realm of morality, a morality of individualism could not be validated without discarding a millennium of mysticism, altruism and self-sacrifice. It was not just the doctrine and ubiquity of Christian morality that proved an insuperable barrier; I believe it was a psychological barrier, as well. Those barriers were non-existent to novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, who did perform the feat. In political philosophy, Jefferson was a radical; in moral philosophy, he was as confused as the best of his intellectual peers, resulting in his expressing not so much a conventional position on God, morality, and social relationships, as an eclectic one.

And, today, it is the moral philosophy of altruism, allied with its companion political philosophy of collectivism, that is responsible for erasing or nullifying the political philosophy of reason and capitalism bequeathed to us by giants such as Jefferson. We have also inherited their errors. This fact is no more evident than the recent presidential election. One candidate, John McCain, admired trust-busting, nature-worshipping Teddy Roosevelt and portrayed himself as his successor; Barack Obama admires Franklin D. Roosevelt, the consummate welfare-statist and hopes to emulate his policies on an even vaster scale. To the candidates, and to the news media, the Founders and their ideas were absolutely invisible.

On that note, I was startled to encounter a letter by Jefferson to John Adams (July 5, 1814) in which he criticized not only Plato but his advocates in and out of academe. Recounting his return from Poplar Forest, his other home in Virginia, he writes:

“Having more leisure there than here [Monticello] for reading, I amused myself with reading Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? How the soi-disant Christian world indeed should have done it, is a piece of historical curiosity.”

Further on, Jefferson chides Plato‘s uncritical admirers:

“With the Moderns, I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school, and few, in their after-years, have occasion to revise their college opinions. But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities, and what remains?”*

In this and in other letters, Jefferson is mercilessly censorious of Plato and especially of his defenders, those who in the 18th century and up to this day conferred upon the Greek the laurels of eternal wisdom and indeed the status of sainthood.

“In truth, he is one of the race of genuine Sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first by the elegance of his diction, but chiefly by the adoption and incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity. His foggy mind is forever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen thro’ a mist, can be defined neither in form or dimension. Yet this which should have consigned him to early oblivion really procured him immortality of fame and reverence.”

Jefferson then makes a tentative connection between Plato’s doctrines and those of Christianity, but does not pursue it beyond some criticisms of the Church. He criticizes the established Church (and by implication, most organized churches) but does not delve very deeply into why theologians found Plato’s thoughts attractive and useful. He does not explore the possibility that perhaps it was Platonism that gave substance to Christian doctrine and made possible Christianity.

“The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ leveled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from its indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment to their order, and introduce it to profit, power and preeminence. The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained.”

That is a fair distillation and indictment of the history of the Catholic Church, and of all sects and denominations that followed its de-politicization in Europe and the various violent and pacific schisms before, during and after the Enlightenment. In contradistinction to Plato’s view of man, Jefferson concurred with Aristotle’s eudaimonia, or the rational pursuit of happiness by men, entailing integrity, courage, and honesty, and including non-sacrificial friendships.

I do not pretend to be a Biblical scholar, but my own readings on the history of Christianity (which only lately included Christopher Hitchens and his company of literary atheists) led me to conclude that the Bible was a work-in-progress for about one and a half millennia, with unknown, tongue-in-cheek theologians cadging elements from Judaism and Greek mythology, embellishing the life of Christ in The Gospels by adding the Virgin Birth, miracles, the Resurrection, and so on, episodes that defied epistemology and metaphysics. Jefferson was a man who credited the evidence of his senses to comprehend reality, and despised clerics who brow-beat their congregations into belief and obedience with hocus-pocus sermons on the unknowability of God and his purposes, except through unreasoning faith. Rationality has always been an unwelcome auditor of any established creed or religion.

The homilies of Jesus, he is saying, easily understood by the common mind -- and which one could accept or reject without much argument -- did not require a priesthood or an organization to propagate them. Professional mystics, being confidence men, could not profit by exploiting mere homilies. They had to fabricate an elaborate, reason-resistant system of mysticism, and of whose ‘secrets” and “mysteries” they were the Platonic “guardians,“ thus guaranteeing their constant employment by the unthinking, the credulous and the gullible. So they borrowed liberally from Plato and Judaism (and perhaps from a few other semi-rational Greek thinkers) to weave an impenetrable doctrine. They turned simple “faith” into a spiritual pyramid scheme -- into “nonsense that can never be explained.”

Jefferson might have added in his letter to Adams that Christian priests and theologians projected God, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, the Trinity, and angels, among other extrasensory manifestations, as “semblances of objects,” half-seen through the mists of doctrine, and were things that existed in another dimension as manifestations of Plato’s “Forms.”

It is interesting to note also that Islam, over a period of centuries, as it was congealing into a rigid, no-questions-permitted theology (and one far less “Sophisticated” than Christianity), borrowed liberally from Judaism, the Greeks, from Christian doctrines, and doubtless from whatever pagan creeds Mohammed’s warrior/missionaries wiped out in Arabia. From where I sit, Islam retained Jehovah or Yahweh, the unpredictable, psychopathic deity of the Hebrew and Christian Old Testament (at the time, very likely the only Testament), and redubbed him Allah. The Koran and other associated Islamic holy texts underwent much the same ad libitum evolution as the Bible, with Mohammed‘s life subjected to the same grandiose and incredible embellishment as Christ‘s. The historical Christ promulgated pacifism and universal “love” and “tolerance’: the historical Mohammed was a career butcher who demanded universal submission to Islam.

I mention Islam here only because it is as much a nemesis now as is Western-style statism or collectivism. But, I digress. What is the relationship between Platonism and modern politics, or more specifically, between Platonism and tyranny? Why didn’t Jefferson see that relationship? Because, when it came to that branch of inquiry, he was not radical. As he could not imagine a morality based on a non-altruistic, rational selfishness, he could not imagine one that did not include God. Here are some of his remarks on the “moral sense” in a letter to Thomas Law of June 1814:

“If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such being exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasonings in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D’Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.” **

What that foundation might have been tested Jefferson’s reasoning, and he failed. He resorted to citing what others equally wrong had said, such as French philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius’s contention that a “moral sense” of the altruistic good could be inculcated in all men through education.

Interestingly, in that same letter, Jefferson dwells on egoism.

“Self-interest, or rather self-love, or egoism, has been more plausibly substituted as the basis of morality. But I consider our relations with others as constituting the boundaries of morality. With ourselves we stand on the ground of identity, not of relation, which last, requiring two subjects, excludes self-love confined to a single one. To ourselves, in strict language, we can owe no duties, objection requiring also two parties. Self-love, therefore, is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue, leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others…..” [Italics Jefferson’s]

Again, it required a mind, specifically, Ayn Rand’s, that was not shackled by altruism , or was a prisoner of intrinsicism, or hobbled by logical fallacies to assert that selfishness indeed must be a virtue if men are to own their own lives and live free of duty to others. Jefferson never denied, and neither did his intellectual mentor, John Locke, that men owned their own lives, but, like Locke, he left unchallenged the implication that selflessness and self-sacrifice were the “natural,” intrinsic, or “instinctual” enemies of egoism, bestowed on men by God, and thus were ineffaceably “moral.”

Why could not Jefferson have detected his own errors? Because he was as much a victim of his unchecked premises as anyone else of his time. He was Aristotelian in his politics, but not in his morality. Leonard Peikoff, in The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America (1982), gives the best explanation:

“The tragedy of the West…lies in the fact that the seeds of Platonism had been firmly embedded in philosophy almost from its beginning, and had been growing steadily through the post-Renaissance period. Thus, while the revolutionary achievements inspired by Aristotelianism were reshaping the life of the West, an intellectual counterrevolution was at work, gradually gaining momentum. A succession of thinkers was striving to reverse the Aristotelian trend and to resurrect the basic principles of Platonism.”***

Peikoff then explicates Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and moves on to Georg W.F. Hegel (1770-1830). As he demonstrates so clearly, Kant developed his philosophy in order to save religion from the Enlightenment; Hegel, his successor, developed his in order to advocate the State as God and save it from freedom. And whether one is discussing Plato, Kant or Hegel, the connection between the notion that the State is all, and the notion that individuals are interchangeable manqués and subsumed under the State who owe their existence and allegiance to it, is one which Jefferson and his peers could not make. Their altruistic premises, combined with their intrinsic ones, confounded their most earnest inquiries.

A search of Jefferson’s published papers does not indicate that he was even aware of Kant or Hegel. There are no references to either of them in the correspondence between him and John Adams, nor in that between Jefferson and any of his other correspondents. Doubtless Kant’s Critiques were discussed in the many French salons frequented by Jefferson and Adams in France during and after America’s fight for independence, but I have been unable to find even a passing reference to them. It took a generation or so for Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies to infiltrate and ultimately corrupt Western philosophical inquiry and become so firmly embedded, so their ignorance of Kant and Hegel is understandable.

In conclusion, and without gainsaying Jefferson’s other achievements, the Aristotelian in him may have held contempt for Plato, but in the end he was unable to refute him.


*The Adams-Jefferson Letters, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (1959), pp. 430-434. In his reply, Adams concurs with Jefferson’s estimate of Plato, and is even more voluble in his criticism, seeing Plato as an original and premier enemy of liberty and property.
**Jefferson: Writings, The Library of America, “The Moral Sense,“ p. 1335-1339.
***Chapter 2, “The Totalitarian Universe,“ p. 23.

Underwriters Laboratories

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Decmeber 17, 2008 Christian Science Monitor has a terrific profile of Underwriters Laboratories. This is the private organization that performs safety certifications of an enormous range of consumer products, including extension cord, washing machines, and even bulletproof glass.

Here are few excerpts from the article:

Every product they test is at the request, and the expense, of its manufacturer, who seeks out UL not because it has to -- no federal law mandates safety tests for most items -- but because it's cheaper and easier than a product-injury lawsuit, Drengenberg says. In fact, most retailers won't stock a product if it hasn't been safety tested. But it's all voluntary, a tidy case study of the free market at its best: bottom-line drivers of consumer good.

..."We have one weapon in the factory... The UL mark," says [tester John] Drengenberg. So UL guards it carefully, through a rigorous documentation process. Every product tested is photographed, all of its parts cataloged, and every test performed described in detail. If it passes, the manufacturer puts it on the assembly line -- but at some point during production, a UL inspector will show up, unannounced, for a spot-check, making sure the company is using all the same parts UL saw on the prototype

This is an excellent concrete example of how such private certification agencies could thrive and succeed in a free market, because they meet a rational consumer demand for trustworthy and independent product safety certification.

In a truly free market, comparable private agencies can and should replace the current alphabet-soup of costly inefficient government bureaucracies such as the FDA, OSHA, NTSB, etc.

Recap #23

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

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

• Monday, December 15, 2008: Abortion Rights are Pro-Life by Diana Hsieh
  
• Wednesday, December 17, 2008: A Profile in Influence: The Family Research Council by Gina Liggett
  
• Friday, December 19, 2008: Evangelicals Leverage Downturn by Ari
  

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

• Monday, December 15, 2008: Knope Translates Insurance Double-Speak by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Tuesday, December 16, 2008: New Insurance Option by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Wednesday, December 17, 2008: Polis Vs. Polis by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Thursday, December 18, 2008: Poem: 'Twas the Night After Single Payer by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Friday, December 19, 2008: Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries by Paul Hsieh, MD
  

This week on FA/RM, the blog of Free Agriculture - Restore Markets:

• Monday, December 15, 2008: FDR's Farm Policies by Monica
  
• Monday, December 15, 2008: Will NAIS Make Food Safer? by Monica
  
• Tuesday, December 16, 2008: Exemption to Cow Fart Tax in the Works by Monica
  
• Tuesday, December 16, 2008: Review of "Mad Sheep" by Monica
  
• Wednesday, December 17, 2008: USDA Motions to Dismiss Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund Suit by Monica
  
• Wednesday, December 17, 2008: What NLIS Has Done to the Australian Cattle Industry by Monica
  
• Thursday, December 18, 2008: Whole Foods -- A Monopoly? by Monica
  
• Thursday, December 18, 2008: Yet Another Reason to Oppose NAIS by Monica
  
• Thursday, December 18, 2008: Abolishing USDA Inspection Laws by Monica
  
• Thursday, December 18, 2008: Another Update on Manna Storehouse Raid by Monica
  
• Saturday, December 20, 2008: Government Nutritional Guidelines, aka Pure Bunk by Monica

Quick Roundup 387

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

Oppressing the Smallest Minority

Andrew Dalton, who has been posting some good stuff lately, comments on a real travesty. The adoptive couple of a child whose drug-addled mother was declared unfit is being forced to send the child to foster care instead simply because he is 1/8 Amerindian:

If you read the comments, you will find a few Native American activists supporting the law and the legal action. Of all the various distasteful varieties of leftists, I have found this variety to be the most obnoxious -- soaked in tribalism, mysticism, environmentalism, and Noble Savage mythology (ironically, a colonists' invention).

My only quibble with Dalton is his use of the term "Native American", but I'll leave it in so search engines can help people learn of a more explicit individualist perspective when this more trendy term for "Amerindian" gets plugged in.

Having a fair amount of Amerindian ancestry, I became curious for a time some years ago about Amerindian culture, and went to a few events put on by some local Indian tribes. It was interesting, but I never felt so out of place anywhere in my life.

If treating individual human beings such as this child and his loving adoptive parents like mere tribal property is an example of the culture these laws are misguided attempts to preserve, then I must say that I am proud to have felt so little affinity for the culture at these events.

Waiting for the Lowest Bidder

President Bush claims that, "I didn't compromise my soul to be a popular guy." That declaration raises more questions than it answers, both on the matter of what he did compromise it for, whether he has one left, and, what he might be waiting for, after having compromised everything else.

Perhaps it means he hasn't yet heard that John Walker Lindh's parents have asked him for a pardon.

If Bush pardons Lindh, expect him to talk about what a great "virtue" forgiveness (search term: "moral blank check") is, and recall the true nature of sacrifice, the basis for his moral code:

"Sacrifice" is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less “selfish,” than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. [Ayn Rand in "The Ethics of Emergencies," The Virtue of Selfishness, 44.]

To forgive this traitor would be perhaps the most morally obscene way Bush could end his Presidency, but it would symbolize it quite eloquently, from the half-fought War We Should Have Won Already, to the ban of the Edison Bulb, to nationalizing our financial sector after huge increases in federal spending.

If I had more time, I'd consider starting a betting pool on whether Bush issues such an obscene pardon.

Surrendering the High Seas

The United States easily has the most powerful Navy in the world. We could almost instantly wipe the Somali pirates off the face of the earth, and yet we have not done so.

It thus comes as no surprise that the Chinese are preparing to fill that power vacuum.

Interesting GTD Idea

I've been too busy getting things done to write a post on Getting Things Done lately, and I don't use index cards in my particular implementation. But I know that some of my readers might find this post intriguing.

As an advocate of David Allen's GTD practice, I constantly look for ways to improve my productivity and organize the million things around me. Inspired by Merlin Mann's hipster pda, I set out to create my very own version I called mind.Depositor. [links dropped]

This has superior functionality to the hipster pda and has the added, underappreciated benefit of looking professional, like my solution. I insert half-sized paper (or folded printouts with punched holes) inside what used to be a leather telephone directory from Blue Sky for my "analog interface".

Mr. Warren Goes to Washington

The left is about to learn just how religious Barack Obama really is on Inauguration Day:

Pro-life pastor Rick Warren will give the invocation at President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. It makes a whole lot of sense. Even though Warren and Obama disagree on the life issue, they do see eye to eye on many social justice issues. This move is also classic Obama because it is a signal to religious conservatives that he’s willing to bring in both sides to the faith discussion in this country. Obama has never shied away from that. [bold added]

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Barack Obama plans to "transcend" left and right: by adopting the worst elements of both.

But remember, McCain was basically going to do the same thing, although without at least being honest about it.

Market Success

Via Amit Ghate comes the following excellent point concerning market "failure": "If an x-ray machine detects a tumor, would this be an example of x-ray success or x-ray failure?"

The whole post is excellent. Go there!

Good Reading, Bad Foundation

Myrhaf makes some encouraging observations about Joe the Plumber. Notwithstanding, the following comes from the Plumber's new web site: "When Freedom of Religion somehow excludes One Nation Under God, the essence and ideals of our freedoms are seriously in danger." Whatever gains individualism makes will yield significant improvements, to be sure, but individualists will have our work cut out for us for quite some time. America was not founded on Christian principles, and it cannot survive if such principles become integral to its government.

-- CAV

Religion, Fertility, and Values

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

A pair of interesting articles caught my eye this morning.

The first considers the fact that religious fervor correlates with increased fertility the world over, and notes that at least one researcher holds that something about having a large family may predispose a couple to become more religious, even as something about being religious predisposes a couple to have a large family.

Nobody knows exactly why religion and fertility tend to go together. Conventional wisdom says that female education, urbanisation, falling infant mortality, and the switch from agriculture to industry and services all tend to cause declines in both religiosity and birth rates. In other words, secularisation and smaller families are caused by the same things. Also, many religions enjoin believers to marry early, abjure abortion and sometimes even contraception, all of which leads to larger families. But there may be a quite different factor at work as well. Having a large family might itself sometimes make people more religious, or make them less likely to lose their religion. Perhaps religion and fertility are linked in several ways at the same time.

Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, has suggested several ways in which the experience of forming a family might stimulate religious feelings among parents, at least some of the time. She notes that pregnancy and birth, the business of caring for children, and the horror of contemplating their death, can stimulate an intensity of purpose that might make parents more open to religious sentiments. Many common family events, she reasons, might encourage a broadly spiritual turn of mind, from selfless [sic] care for a sick relation to sacrifices [sic] for the sake of a child's adulthood that one might never see. [bold added]

Setting aside the determinism that saturates the first paragraph -- Sorry, but family size does not "make" someone religious. -- and the altruism that infects the second, there is an interesting point to be had here. Raising children is both very demanding and very rewarding. The decision about whether to have children is all about values.

Secularization brings with it, albeit inconsistently, the idea that one's life is one own, and an obvious corollary to that is a heightened sensitivity to the time and money commitments that are part of having children. Many women put off or forgo children in order to have rewarding careers, for example.

It is probably more straightforward to see how secularization might correlate with decreased overall fertility. (It does not cause it, but it allows us to understand the individual choices behind the trend.) Less straightforward is the connection (in terms of personally-held values versus religious dictates) between having many children and being more religious.

The second paragraph above, as well as an article about the emotional appeal of Barack Obama, of all things, help us see what might be going on here:

The researchers say elevation is part of a family of self-transcending emotions. Some others are awe, that sense of the vastness of the universe and smallness of self that is often invoked by nature; another is admiration, that goose-bump-making thrill that comes from seeing exceptional skill in action. [Dacher] Keltner says we most powerfully experience these in groups -- no wonder people spontaneously ran into the street on election night, hugging strangers. "

Keltner is an evolutionary psychologist who holds that such emotions serve a role in turning human beings into collectives, a view I disagree with, and which I think hampers our understanding of emotions generally, and particularly the higher emotions. Nevertheless, he is right to point out that higher emotions are very much entangled with various forms of collectivism. Why?

As I have noted before, the higher emotions are very commonly associated with religion. This is first because religion is a precursor to philosophy (historically and in the sense of intellectual development). Secondly, it is because so much of modern philosophy, being actively engaged in attacking values, plays right into the hands of religionists. who claim that only faith can allow man to have purpose, reach his highest potential, and be at one with the universe. (Just saying that last phrase will mark me as a loon to many ears for that reason, and because too many people let religionists define terms like "universe" for them.)

Emotions are, as Ayn Rand pointed out, instantaneous reactions to our values (which are ultimately shaped by our beliefs). Aside from religious injunctions such as "Go forth and multiply," deciding to have a child and raising him involve many higher emotions, and often, over a very long period.

If the only worldviews that promote higher emotions are the religious, this would make religion an even stronger motivation to have children. Similarly, if experiencing such emotions awakens a desire to do the right thing (as it ought), where will a parent turn? Some variant of nihilism -- or the religious "alternative"? Religion is wrong, but given such a choice, I do not blame a parent for making it.

-- CAV

Police on YouTube

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The December 17, 2008 New York Times reports on the variety of reactions that NYPD police officers have to being videotaped while performing their official public duties in this interesting article, "Officers Become Accidental YouTube Stars".

The article notes that videotaping police is entirely legal, as long as it doesn't interfere with the performance of their duties. And some police officers correctly recognize that fact:

"People tape all the time," said an eight-year veteran of the department, a female officer in Downtown Brooklyn who, like other officers questioned for this article, spoke only on the condition of anonymity because she is not authorized to speak to reporters. "It makes you uncomfortable, but that's their right. You can't stop them from taping."

Unfortunately other NYPD officers hold the following mistaken view:

An officer directing traffic in Brooklyn asserted that it is illegal to tape police officers. "If I know that he's taking video, I'm going to walk up to him and stop him," the officer said.

Or in another encounter:

...[A] man asks an officer if he may film him, and the officer replies, "You going to post them on the Internet? Then I'm going to have to break your camera over your face." But he and other officers laugh, as does the cameraman, who eventually walks away. The video had 19,370 views as of Tuesday evening.

Provided that citizens don't interfere with official police duties, this sort of transparency is a good thing. It can protect innocent civilians from police misconduct as well as protect honest police officers from wrongful claims of misconduct.

Given that it is perfectly legal for citizens to observe and truthfully write about any actions that police officers perform in public view while "on the job", it should be (and is) similarly legal to record their official actions on video.

Update: As a concrete example, here's a related news story about an apparent assault by an NYPD officer caught on video:



Note that the bicyclist was originally charged with "resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstructing government administration." After the video surfaced, those charges were dismissed.

Columbus and Isabella

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

Shocking!

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

Despite an “impartial” and “transparent” process, it turns out that there is a high correlation between Congressional power and science grants.  Must be a “a case of correlation but not causation” one commentator writes.  There’s no way that politics could corrupt the scientific process (as long as Democrats are in power, at least.)

Holy worthless paper, batman!

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

Full report. From: The New Clarion.

Credentials for Activism, Part 2

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Back in November, I posted a question about activism: "What's the importance of credentials when writing or arguing for a cause?"

In the comments, Steve Simpson of the Institute for Justice was kind enough to write a lengthy reply. I'm reposting it here, with his permission, because I thought it contained particularly good advice that I wanted to make sure that all NoodleFood readers saw:

This is a very good and very important question, so I figured I would chime in and offer some thoughts from the perspective of someone who is a professional activist of sorts and has some experience in this area. I'm a lawyer at the Institute for Justice; in addition to litigating, we do quite a bit of writing and public speaking about our cases. So I have some experience in the area of "getting heard." (How's that for credentialing myself up front?)

On the importance of credentials, I would say: if you have them, flaunt them (because they are way to get yourself heard, not because they matter to the truth or falsity of your ideas). If you don't, don't worry about it. As Diana pointed out, you shouldn't pursue an advanced degree just to credential yourself as an activist. It's much more important to focus on gaining the knowledge and the advocacy skills to be an effective activist than it is to try to become "credentialed" in some way. There are lots of people in the activist/policy world with no more than a bachelors degree (or less) who are regularly quoted and published.

So if you want to be an effective activist, there are two things off the top of my head you can and should do. First, and most importantly, develop and hone your knowledge and advocacy skills. The good news is that the sky is the limit, and if you are interested in activism you already have the motivation. Pick an area in which you are interested and learn a lot about it, then start writing letters to the editor, op-eds, and talking and arguing with everyone you can about it. I think it makes the most sense to focus on a particular area rather than on something broad like philosophy in general, because you are much more likely to have pertinent information and to gain some expertise and experience if you focus more narrowly. You don't have to devote your life to the area; it's more a matter of setting priorities for a given period of time. For instance, for the next 6 months, I'm going to focus on health care, or the financial mess, or some idiotic environmental policy, etc., as opposed to the decline of western civilization, why the republicans and the democrats are stupid, etc. (Don't get me wrong; there's nothing wrong with gaining broad knowledge. It's just not enough if your interest is activism).

You'll also need to practice your advocacy skills, primarily writing. There's a lot to say about this, so I will just say learn to write short, punchy, and informative letters and op-eds. Brevity is key if you want to get published, as is clarity of thought and expression. Practice, practice, practice. Write a letter to the editor every day. Focus on one or two points in everything your write. Edit ruthlessly.

Second, although credentials are not terribly important in getting published (or just heard), some sort of a "hook" often is. There are two main types of hooks--news hooks and what I'll call "experiential" hooks (by the way, never use words like "experiential" in your writing). A news hook is simply something that is happening in the news that makes a particular letter or article or point of view relevant. Sometimes they are obvious, but often they aren't. Never assume that because others have not made a particular connection or have a particular insight it isn't worth writing about.

An experiential hook is something that indicates that you have relevant experience or knowledge that connects you to what you are talking about. For good or ill, news organizations love to feature "relevant" voices on any subject. So Paul's voice in health care is relevant because he's a doctor, and Diana's is relevant on the amendment she opposed because she set up a group that opposed it. But there are many possible hooks of this sort, so be creative in thinking of relevant experiences you've had that might make your view stand out. Maybe you are a businessman who has specific knowlege on the impact of taxes and regulation; or someone who was in the military and can offer an informed perspective on conscription or the war. Also, again for better or worse, news organizations love contrast and seeming contradictions. So, for instance, an african american who oppose affirmative action will be more likely to get published than a white guy who does; and a gay person who supports the boy scouts' right to keep out gay people will be more likely to get published than a straight person. These are just examples to convey the point; there are many other possibilities here that go beyond immutable characteristics. For instance, if you are young or in college, write an article about why young people should not be encouraged to vote because so many of them are vacuous and uninformed. Or when national service comes back in vogue, write an op-ed about how you and many of your peers would prefer to let homeless people ladle out their own crappy soup while you try to live your lives and be happy and productive. The point is, there are lots of "hooks" like this that you can find to make your views stand out from the crowd and get published. Be creative, be entrepreneurial, and never, ever give up.

Thank you, Steve!

Are Principles Optional?

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

Years ago, I read the book, Is Reality Optional?, by Thomas Sowell. Yesterday, President Bush, who must own stock in the companies that sell merchandise that counts down the time remaining in his term, reminded me of it by saying one of the most nonsensical things I have ever heard a man utter:

I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system to make sure the economy doesn't collapse.

To someone who understands the nature of principles, and hence their practical value, the only context in which this can make any sense is the explanatory.

What do I mean? As human beings, we are distinct from other animals in possessing the faculty of reason. This faculty allows us to make superior use of sensory data than other animals because it allows us to conceptualize this material, and able to use it effectively henceforth, including seeing complex relationships between existents to form higher-level concepts.

For example, where a dog or cat will be able to respond to and use illumination from a flashlight, the sun, or a fire, only man is able to understand, in part through the concept of "light" what each of these has in common. Knowing about, "light", man can both try to find alternate sources, and form higher-level, related concepts, such as "day", and "time", as he does when he considers the fact that the sun, a major light source rises and sets with regularity. Without reference to the concept of "light", one would be unable to guide an effort to obtain more of it when needed, much less explain what all his knocking about was for.

Principles are simply the highest level of abstraction, as Ayn Rand once explained in her essay, "The Anatomy of Compromise":

A principle is "a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend." Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by means of principles that one can set one's long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it. [bold added]

What, then would "free market principles" be? On the one hand, they would be a conceptual understanding of what, exactly, a free market is in both the positive sense of knowing what it is (and thus seeing that it requires the protection of the individual's right to form and act upon his best judgment in the course of his daily life), as well as in the negative sense of knowing what it isn't (e.g., socialism, fascism, slavery, or feudalism) and thus what would endanger or destroy it.

To take a lower-level example, if I own a dog, and know the principles of animal care, I will avoid letting Fido slurp up antifreeze, no matter how thirsty he is, because I know that antifreeze is poison, even though Fido, having only instinct and a perceptual awareness of reality, does not. Even apparent violations of such principles, such as letting a stranger wound Fido with a knife, are seen not to be such when we consider that the stranger is a veterinarian and he is conducting surgery. We are still, in that case, applying the principles of proper animal care, even though "don't cut Fido with a knife" would ordinarily apply.

Now, let's consider what Bush said. First of all, we do not live under capitalism, but in an economy that mixes free market elements with elements of state control. There is no "free market" to save. One can only move our (inherently unstable) economy towards having more or less freedom, whether one be actively doing so or attempting to muddle through the latest crisis caused by the statist elements of the economy. So Bush has just admitted that he does not even know what a "free market" even is. (Hint: If it is a "system" at all, it is self-organizing beyond the government apparatus necessary to protect individual rights.)

Bush does, apparently, realize on some level that he has been acting as a statist, for he finds himself having to excuse his administration's behavior over the past few months. (Actually, he should apologize for his whole term.) Although he does not really know what a "free market system" is, even he knows that what he has been doing entails government intrusion into the economy.

He knows that, but apparently does not realize that such government intrusions as such make the market less free and, therefore, less able to recover, because the individuals who make up the free economy are constrained by government regulation or rendered less effective because government distortions in the economy are making them badly-informed actors. In short, Bush is compounding the government's violation of individual rights for the expressed purpose of "saving" capitalism, and the implied purpose of protecting our individual rights!

This is different than, say, a pro-capitalist President who inherited the mess we now have, finding some temporary or one-time form of government intervention necessary to avert a financial disaster, and explaining that he does so only reluctantly, and that he will, in the meantime, continue to work to increase our freedom in any other way he can.

But then, a pro-capitalist would know what capitalism is, what it requires (full government protection of individual rights), and why statism and anarchy are inferior, and dangerous to the survival of the people he is sworn to protect. He would know these things because he would rely upon free market principles when thinking about the economy. And he would know that if he doesn't rely on such principles -- if he "abandons" -- them, he will have no way to decide what action is best for the discharge of his office.

But Bush is no pro-capitalist. He admitted as much yesterday, and furthermore, has confessed in word and deed that he just has some mild emotional attachment to some nearly meaningless conception of "free markets", which he regards as optional and, ultimately, unimportant. After all, if statism is so powerful (which it isn't) that it can "save" capitalism, why save it? Worse, he has also admitted that he sees no connection between principles and reality. To Bush, a principle is just something you pay lip service to when you want to look good to yourself or others.

This is not a concerned pet owner taking his beloved pet to the vet. This is a kid grabbing the nearest jug of antifreeze because he wants to feel good about "helping" the dog he should have watered first thing in the morning.

-- CAV

Cromwell's speech to the "rump parliament"

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The stock-market is down 40%, with middle-class savings decimated, and the finger (sadly) pointed at "Wall Street". On top of this, news just broke of an unprecedented financial scandal, where Bernie Madoff seems to have confessed to a $50 billion fraud! And, the governor of Illinois is accused of blatantly auctioning a senate seat.

These are dangerous times, because uninformed public anger at such events can be harnessed by a demagogue. Imagine Oliver Cromwell, giving his famous speech today:

20 April 1653

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter'd your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil'd this sacred place, and turn'd the Lord's temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress'd, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!

Cromwell did not turn out well.

BOSTON TEA PARTY 1773

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

How did you commemorate the 235th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party? [Editor's note: I had a cup of tea and sent a mental thank-you note to the Sons of Liberty.] Here is an excerpt from kempite's post, 235 years later and all that the tea party was about is forgotten:

Our freedom and individuality has been the key to our greatness but unlike the people of colonial America, today, Americans are giving up their freedom and relinquishing their individuality to a controlling authority that they want to give greater control to.

Instead of demanding "no taxation without representation" we are accepting of the practice. (NJ Voices Public Blog, December 16, 2008.)

Next time I am visiting Boston, I will go to the Old South Meeting House. I have been to the Boston Tea Party Ship & Museum before. I will also go to the statue of Samuel Adams and then have a beer with his namesake. [Editor's comment: Have you had Samuel Adams Hallertau Imperial Pilsner?]

Related: My post, SEATTLE ESPRESSO PARTY?

Quick Roundup 386

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

Central Planning Snake Oil

Brad Harper emails me regarding the latest anti-capitalist screed that should include Alan Greenspan as co-author, this one posted by Donald Cohen of The Huffington Post. It is a long litany of anti-capitalist cliches that takes advantage of Greenspan's betrayal of principles at every opportunity.

No blow is too low for Cohen. He even implies early on that capitalism is racist, as if all "landmark civil rights legislation" were perfect -- or all capitalists opposed all of it, or doing a better job of protecting the rights of all individuals. Good thing most of us don't deal in stereotypes anymore....

I don't have time to discuss it in much depth this morning, but suffice it to say that I find his droning about "Free Market Fundamentalism" especially ironic, given the context in which we learn of Cohen's own proclivities, which he summarizes for us as follows:

Greenspan's awakening signals a turning point for American capitalism. It's the beginning of the end of the fundamentalist free market epoch, underlined by calls from Democrats and Republicans alike for greater regulation, far more government oversight and even public ownership of private capital. [bold added]

Perhaps Cohen was too busy sopping up -- confiscating? -- the saliva from his keyboard to notice that yesterday, on the same page as his piece, his own site listed the following feature: "Poll: 37% of Americans Unable to Locate America on Map of America". [Note: A couple of commenters help out a busy blogger by informing me that the article is a spoof. Nevertheless, I feel safe holding up the government education monopoly as an example of how things turn out when the government runs them.] Does Cohen think the government can do a better job running everything than it does education, or is a dumbed-down demographic simply his target audience?

And, more to the point, does Cohen never discuss why he favors the government violating individual rights because he is afraid of being known as the traitor to America that he is, or does he think he can get away with it, courtesy of generations of school children mentally crippled by government planning of what should have been their educations?

New Agriculture Site

Monica of Spark a Synapse has started a new web site, FA/RM, advocating a return to freedom specifically in the agricultural sector. In light of the above example of left-wing calls for even more government control of the economy right on the heels of its most recent demonstrated failure, I think her latest post at the blog of her new site is worth a read. It is a fictionalized account of how government might run the automobile industry, but it will sound familiar to anyone who has seen Donald Cohen and his ilk at work over the past century.

I have linked to the blog in the sidebar and the organization on the web link page.

Con Con Update

C. August emails me a link to a blog posting that explores the threat of a Constitutional Convention in more detail than the World Net Daily article I cited Friday. I haven't time to read it in detail this morning, but it looks worthwhile:

Fearing a tyrannical Congress would block the amendatory process, the Framers formulated Article V, wording it so as to fence off the Constitution from hostile or careless hands. They were careful to enumerate Three Forbidden Subjects:

1. Altering the arrangement known as slavery until 1808, a ban that has been lifted both by time and war.
2. Altering the arrangement of equal representation of the states in the Senate.
3. Writing a new constitution.

The last Forbidden Subject is implied, rather than explicit, like the first two. The Framers took great pains to avoid using the term "constitutional convention". Instead, the Founding Document refers to a "Convention for proposing Amendments...as Part of this Constitution". An Article V Convention is strictly limited to proposing amendments to the Constitution of 1787, and it is forbidden to compose a new constitution. No matter what amendments may be proposed, the Constitution must remain intact, else the actions of the Convention become unconstitutional. Unless Article V is amended first to allow it, a Convention for Proposing Amendments can never become a true constitutional convention, i.e. it can never write a new constitution. And neither can Congress. [bold in original]

This is somewhat reassuring, at first blush, anyway.

Mike N and Myrhaf, ...

..., respectively (1) discuss why so many Americans seem to support statist policies, and (2) describe (among other things) how the hard left is still the Angry Left even after the election of The One and single-party government in Congress.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added note on spoof article.

Warning regarding the economy

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

I just sent my family the following email:

Hi folks,

If you’ve been following the news, you may have heard that:

• The Federal Reserve just cut the overnight loan rate to .25 percent.  Gold prices immediately jumped to $847/oz.  (Last week, I bought gold at $775).  We haven’t seen rates this low for over 50 years.
• The government has given away over 8,000,000,000,000 dollars of “free” money in the last three months.
• In the last 5 years, the dollar has lost more than half its value relative to gold.

All evidence points towards the fact that the U.S. government is rapidly devaluing your savings, and a currency collapse followed by hyperinflation like we recently saw in Iceland is all but inevitable.  If you don’t want to lose your savings and investments in the coming economic collapse, you need to take action NOW.

Here is what you should be doing:

• Buy some gold and keep it in a safe place. I suggest http://www.kitco.com/ or eBay  - you can get a good deal on 1oz gold bars. (Buy plain gold bullion, not the “collectible” stuff.)
• Don’t pay anything above the minimum payment on any loans or mortgages you have.
• It’s a good time to get a new loan.  I would not suggest taking on new mortgages, as I expect housing prices to collapse further.
• The stock market may lose up to 50% of its value in the next year.  Still, investing in the S&P 500 is a good hedge against inflation.  You can also invest in metal & mining index funds.
• Stock up on supplies, especially durable goods.
• Minimize your holdings of inflation-prone assets, like cash, bonds, and government securities.

When you’re done, you should have a minimum of cash and cash-like investments, and plenty of material assets you can sell or barter in an emergency.  Also, consider getting a firearm for self-defense – expect crime to rise dramatically when the economy collapses.

You’ve been warned.

Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This forthcoming-in-February book of Ayn Rand's interviews looks like a gem. Here's the announcement from the Ayn Rand Bookstore:

Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed
Edited by Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz

Preorder now for expected delivery in early February

Half a century of print and broadcast interviews of Ayn Rand are included in Objectively Speaking. This collection includes print interviews from the 1930s and 1940s, and edited transcripts of radio and television interviews from the 1950s through 1981. Ayn Rand's unusual and strikingly original insights on a vast range of topics are captured by prominent interviewers in American broadcasting, such as Johnny Carson, Edwin Newman, Mike Wallace and Louis Rukeyser. A remarkable series of radio interviews over a four-year period at Columbia University are also included. An appendix provides a transcript of a radio program of Leonard Peikoff discussing Ayn Rand's unique intellectual and literary achievements.

(276 pages)

Softcover: $29.95

Hardcover: $34.95

I was pretty interested in this book when I saw this announcement last week. Then I read an excerpt from it in the latest issue of Impact yesterday. (That's the newsletter that the Ayn Rand Institute sends to its donors.) In it, Ayn Rand compared the life of Olga, a young woman working in the USSR, with the life of Kitty, a young woman working in the US. It was awesome. Now I can't wait to read this book!

’Twas the Night After Single Payer

By Gina Liggett from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

'Twas the night after Single Payer, when all through the land
Not a creature had health care that could be called grand;

The ERs were stuffed with those seeking care,
In hopes Dr. Daschle soon would be there;

The patients were all nestled sick in their beds,
Hallucinating that sugar-plums danced in their heads;

And doctors at their post, and nurses at their station,
Had just hunkered down for a long Administration,

When on the Rose Garden lawn there arose such a clatter,
I turned on CNN to see what was the matter.

Away to the screen it flew like a flash,
Camera shutters were clicking, Dr. Daschle with his sash.

TV lights shined in faces hailing the plan
Gave the lustre of "quality" for each woman and man,

When, what to my wondering eyes be endured,
But a huge new department, and forty-eight million more insured,

With a powerful new driver, two roles to fulfill,
I knew in a moment it would be government overkill.

Regulations not treatments his ideas they came,
New restrictions, new rules, and he called them by name;

"Now, Daschle! now, Dollar! now, Payer and Taxin'!
On, Common! on Cure-all! on, Daunting and Blighted!

To the top of the White House! it will hit the wall!
Now cash away! cash away! cash away all!"

As dry heaves that before an intestinal flare,
With patients on the wait list, what do they care?

So up in the bureaucracy the coursers they flew,
Through the cabinets of paperwork, and Dr. Daschle too.

And then, in a news conference, I heard more restrictions
The limits and taxing and fewer prescriptions.

As I called 911, one day writhing in pain,
The response that I got could only be called insane.

He was dressed in his scrubs, and checked my citizen's ID,
And the equipment malfunctioned, but the diagnosis was free;

A bundle of supplies, the treatment room disordered,
But they lacked what was needed, what the Dr. had ordered.

His eyes--how they glazed! dark circles how weary!
His cheeks were so sallow, his job was so dreary!

Another patient in line dehydrated like wheat,
Uncontrolled diabetes, his blood sugar too sweet;

The stump of a leg infected for weeks,
It was surgical care that this patient seeks;

He had Universal Insurance and a sad-looking face,
Because it only covered some gauze and an Ace.

He was pale and sweaty, a sickly young man,
And I cried when I saw him, in spite of his free-coverage plan.

A wink of the bureaucrat and a nod of her head,
Said, with Single Payer I had nothing to dread;

She spoke no more words, but took her first break,
Civil servants remember their rules are at stake.

And the Doctor came back, his fingers rubbing his eyes,
And he gave me a med and some vague replies;

He sprang to his computer, the new high-tech efficiency
Sent my records to D.C. for some clerk to see.

But I heard him exclaim, ere he walked out of sight,

"Single Payer for all has become a nightmarish fright!"

Nature Gets Legal Rights in Ecuador

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Wow: According to the progressive quarterly newspaper Positive News, Nature Gets Legal Rights in Ecuador:

Approximately two-thirds of Ecuador's population voted 'yes' this Autumn, in a historic, national referendum ... [T]he Ecuadorians backed their president, Rafael Correa, in voting for a new progressive constitution - the first in the world to grant Nature the same inalienable rights as human beings. ...

Dr Mario Melo, a lawyer specialising in Environmental Law and an advisor to Fundacion Pachamama, explained that the new constitution redefines people's relationship with Nature. It is not an object to be appropriated and exploited but rather a rights-bearing entity, that should be treated with parity under the law.

"In this sense, the constitution reflects the traditions of the indigenous peoples living in Ecuador, who see Nature as a mother and call her by her proper name, Pachamama," Dr Mario Melo said.

This new bill for Nature's 'right to exist' offers an alternative paradigm. It clearly acknowledges that all life on Earth is interconnected. It must be protected and respected for the sake of all species - beliefs which have long been obvious to Ecuador's indigenous peoples.

The constitution provides explicit legal protection for the environment. Says one section: 'Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has a right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structures, functions and its processes in evolution.'

It also decrees that the government must apply: 'precaution in all the activities that could lead to the extinction of any species, the destruction of ecosystems or cause the permanent alteration of natural cycles.'

Although the government is ultimately responsible for upholding the new laws, in Ecuador, every individual, organisation or community now has the power to represent Nature in the courts and halt any damaging activities.

Alberto Acosta, ex-president of the Ecuadorian Assembly, helped draft the new laws. He said: "If social justice was the axis of struggle in the 20th century, environmental justice is going to be the focus of conflicts for the 21st century."

Does anyone know any more about this insanity?

Ayn Rand & The Economic Crisis (Show 089)

By Brandon from talkObjectivism.com,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Because of technical difficulties with TalkShoe, Show 089 was relatively short. For the beginning of the show Mosley and caller joey23 discuss Newsweek’s interview with Dr. Yaron Brook on Objectivism and the economic crisis, noting its comments on Alan Greenspan, the mainstream publicity for Objectivism it offers, as well as its objectivity. Then, for the remainder of the show, they discuss the related issue of government regulation in the economy.

Asking the Right Question

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

It may sound trivial, but one of the most valuable skills one can possess is to be able, in any given situation, to ask the right question. This is true whether one is working alone, learning from others, or working with others, trading on his specialized knowledge in exchange for that of other experts.

A couple of examples should illustrate what I mean.

In an article at Fast Company, Keith Hammonds considers the performance of human resources departments, starting off from an example of a particularly bad personnel decision:

A talented young marketing exec accepts a job offer with Time Warner out of business school. She interviews for openings in several departments -- then is told by HR that only one is interested in her. In fact, she learns later, they all had been. She had been railroaded into the job, under the supervision of a widely reviled manager, because no one inside the company would take it.

You make the call: Did HR do its job? On the one hand, it filled the empty slot. "It did what was organizationally expedient," says the woman now. "Getting someone who wouldn't kick and scream about this role probably made sense to them. But I just felt angry." She left Time Warner after just a year. (A Time Warner spokesperson declined to comment on the incident.)

Part of the problem is that Time Warner's metrics likely will never catch the real cost of its HR department's action. Human resources can readily provide the number of people it hired, the percentage of performance evaluations completed, and the extent to which employees are satisfied or not with their benefits. But only rarely does it link any of those metrics to business performance. [bold added]

Note that the management at Time-Warner evidently isn't (or wasn't) asking the right question of its human resources department, and was likely being blinded by a blizzard of facts driven by the wind of an implicit assumption behind what its human resources department was supposed to be doing. The metrics were there, but they were worse than useless because they did not address the right question!

Unfortunately for them, a filled personnel slot does not necessarily translate into a higher profit margin. Hammond takes a step back from the immediate problem, and asks the right question in the last sentence of the above excerpt. Note that even in a less extreme example, with a less "ethically challenged" HR department, asking the right question frames the criteria by which to judge the job performance of an entire department, and perhaps could have prevented the above scenario from ever happening at all.

Asking the right particular question is no less important than asking the right general question, as another example from the world of job hunting will show. (Yes, I've been doing some reading on the subject. My thanks go to the Resident Egoist for a tip that is going to pay off very well.)

Never agree to an interview until the employer confirms the title of the job you'll be talking about, the date the opening was created, the name and title of the manager you'd be working for, and the deadline for filling the position. Most HR recruiters will act appalled at your request for this information, saying it's confidential. Remember that you are about to invest several hours of your time to be interviewed, so insist on seeing a detailed copy of the job description before you agree to interview, and compare your interview to the documentation. This is a business transaction and you should expect both disclosure and good faith. If you believe a job has been misrepresented, politely but firmly insist on confirmation of the above information. [bold added]

It may sound shocking, but an emerging trend in employment recruiting is to advertise fake job openings in order to generate recruiting leads. Notice again how Nick Corcodilos gets to his implicit question and helps his readers integrate it into the rest of their knowledge: He focuses on the purpose of the job interview, and its nature. You are interested in landing a job -- and, he points out all the time, helping a future employer turn a profit. And an interview is both time from your life and a business transaction.

These examples illustrate several things. First, even for something as conceptually straightforward as a trade, the right question, general or particular, is not always obvious. Second, maintaining the correct context can help you formulate the right question, or at least evaluate what someone else proposes as the right question. Third, you can take advantage of the thinking of others in finding the right questions to ask.

The third point can save one an enormous amount of time, if one does it well. I first encountered this idea -- of seeking out expert advice -- stated explicitly in Jean Moroney's "jump start" Thinking Directions mini-course, where she recommends compiling lists of such questions as one goes along. I think the second point is the way one can best take advantage of what subject matter experts have to say. After all, like Time-Warner's management, they are fallible human beings.

One cannot expect to jump into a new field and immediately see what the best questions are, but one can profit from the past effort and thinking of others -- if those others are prioritizing their questions properly, namely by asking the Granddaddy Question of Them All: "For what purpose?"

It occurred to me as I was reading Nick Corcodilos's work last night that this is what I like about his career and job-hunting advice, and this is what makes it stands out above the rest. That question is always the backdrop, no matter what Corcodilos might be talking about in particular, or on what level of abstraction.

If you can't come up with the right question on your own, look for someone who thinks like him, see what he has to say, and ask yourself whether it integrates with the rest of what you know.

-- CAV

The Right's Pathetic Opposition to the Auto Bailout

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

The Right’s Pathetic Opposition to the Auto Bailout
December 15, 2008

Washington, D.C.--Republican opponents of the auto bailout are being accused of putting ideology ahead of the economy’s well-being. They are accused of having an ideological animus against bailouts.
 
“That criticism pays Republicans a compliment they don’t deserve,” said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “The Republican opposition to the auto bailout was not a matter of principle, but of pragmatic nit-picking.
 
“A principled opposition to the auto bailout would have denounced as immoral any attempt to use taxpayer money to prop up failing companies. It would have insisted that such attempts at central planning are destructive and un-American. It would have said that the government’s proper function is not to engineer the economy, but to protect individual rights and otherwise leave the economy free. That is not what the Republicans claimed.
 
“In his floor statement opposing the bill, leading Republican senator Mitch McConnell’s ‘stinging’ criticism consisted of finding that the bill ‘does not’ lay out ‘an effective strategy for securing the long-term viability of these companies,’ that it did not give the proposed ‘Car Czar’ enough power, and--the ultimate deal-killer for Republicans--the bill would have adjusted auto worker wage rates at ‘too slow’ a pace.
 
“The tragic fact is that Republicans do not regard central planning as objectionable--they merely disagree with the Democrats’ central plan.”

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Man: Good or Evil? (Show 088)

By Brandon from talkObjectivism.com,cross-posted by MetaBlog

On last week’s show on economic freedom, Mosley discussed a common argument against capitalism. The argument states that the capitalist assumes a mistaken view of human nature, namely, that given freedom, he will act morally. This led to the question, “Is man inherently good, evil, or neither?” that served as the main topic for this show.

Topics include: Thomas Hobbes and the view of man as a brute; man as neither inherently good nor evil; the reward and motivation for choosing to be good; contradictions in the Hobbesian view and argument for government intervention; altruism as wrongfully assumed as standard for whether man is good; the good as in man’s interest, but remains his choice; charities in a capitalist society; government “charity”/welfare parallel to FDA and regulatory institutions; cultural shift required for capitalism to work; example of paying tips at restaurant; capitalism in theory vs. practice; activism and successful argumentation; etc.

The FCC's Plan to Censor the Internet

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

The FCC’s Plan to Censor the Internet
December 12, 2008

Washington, D.C.--The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to auction off a portion of the airwaves for Internet use. Under the terms of the auction, the winning bidder would be forced to use a quarter of the auctioned spectrum to provide free wireless Internet service to all Americans.
 
“If you think free Internet access under this plan would be a good thing, think again,” said Don Watkins, a writer for the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “This ‘free’ access comes at the price of giving government unprecedented control over the Internet.
 
“Since no ISP can compete with free, omnipresent Internet access, this plan means that virtually all online users will be herded into the government-controlled Internet. And as the history of radio and television has shown, once the government guarantees ‘free’ access to a communications medium, it will inevitably exercise control over its content--i.e., censorship.
 
“In fact, this plan already comes with censorship strings attached; the FCC has declared that this ‘free’ Internet must filter out pornography and other material deemed unsuitable for children. Not only will this prevent vast numbers of Americans from accessing content the government regards as inappropriate, but it will unavoidably lead to massive self-censorship by websites struggling to avoid government sanitization.  
 
“The FCC should auction off these airwaves without preconditions--not use the prospect of ‘free’ wireless access to lure us into accepting an online censorship regime.”

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FA/RM

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I'm delighted to report that Dr. Monica Hughes recently launched Free Agriculture - Restore Markets (FA/RM) -- a new organization devoted to promoting "agricultural and health policies based solely on the principles of individual rights." Check out the web site including the goals of the organization, opportunities for activism, and readings on rights. Also, be sure to bookmark the blog.

Until quite recently, I was almost entirely ignorant of the nature and extent of the government controls on agriculture and food production. Sure, I'd heard vague tidbits here and there, but I didn't realize the breadth and depth of the sheer insanity until I began doing just a wee bit of digging for myself, often with Monica's help.

The simple fact is that the pursuit of one's life, health, and happiness requires a government that respects and upholds the rights of property and contract in all aspects of food production, distribution, and consumption. We have nothing of the sort in America today. The rights of individuals (i.e. producers and consumers) are utterly disregarded by the state -- often in ways that border on a police state (e.g. see here, here, and here). The growing alarming about "carbon emissions" threatens to unleash even more life-threatening statist controls. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Our daily sustenance is in peril.

Visit FA/RM for more.

The LAST Thing We Need

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

According to the American Policy Center, the United States is only two states short of obliterating what is left of our government's policy of protecting individual rights:

A public policy organization has issued an urgent alert stating affirmative votes are needed from only two more states before a Constitutional Convention could be assembled in which "today's corrupt politicians and judges" could formally change the U.S. Constitution's "'problematic' provisions to reflect the philosophical and social mores of our contemporary society." [bold added, link dropped]

The message is, unfortunately, made to look ridiculous by its messenger, which warns not only of the legitimate threats to freedom of speech this could unleash, but also pretends that we do not (and should not) have separation of church and state. I would not want conservative theocrats holding such a convention any more than I would the socialists now in power.

Alan Sullivan, who notes that the left is suddenly talking about pushing for this in Ohio, comments that -- surprise! -- certain elements of the conservative movement helped push us to this brink some time ago: "[T]he Reagan-era drive to launch a new constitutional convention ... began with a revolt by disgruntled deficit hawks, who were horrified by Cold War deficits, and failed to get a balanced-budget amendment through Congress."

Let us hope that this does not occur, so that we can profit by this object lesson in substituting the point of a government gun for rational persuasion. The ultimate problem lies not with Congress, but with a public that is all too happy to accept trinkets in the form of welfare state programs from the government in exchange for little pieces of its freedom.

What were those fools thinking? That Congress would fail to find a way around their amendment if it was passed? Or that a nation that elected such a Congress in the first place would outdo the Founding Fathers as authors of a constitution?

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 385

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

The Real Obama

Charles Krauthammer takes a look at Barack Obama's centrist appointments and sees pragmatism:

A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's. [bold added]

Pragmatism is a rejection of philosophical principles on principle in the name of expediency. But what is expedient? What "works"? Because a pure pragmatist will not have firm moral convictions, he will end up absorbing as worthy ends whatever other people around him regard as moral goals. Society's dominant moral code is altruism.

Obama's osmosis has taken place in such places as the Reverend Jeremiah Wrights pews, so those who are hoping to see his altruist-collectivist domestic ambitions blunted by his pragmatism may be in for a rude awakening. Like a Christian who is pious one day of the week, Obama may be hoping to be pious with one aspect of governing. It may take a witch's brew of continuing crises to distract him from implementing his domestic agenda -- but Krauthammer points out that even those could just as easily serve as an excuse for his agenda as a distraction from it.

What will it take for Obama to throw his agenda under the bus? That may be the question for those of us who realize that his agenda is to throw the protection of our individual rights there instead!

Interesting Article on Teasing

Via Arts and Letters Daily is a thought-provoking piece that indicates one way that misguided efforts to ban bullying in grade schools may be causing more harm than good:

The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it's aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They're pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life's ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.

Author Dacher Keltner raises lots of similarly good points in his essay, but they are undercut by elements of his personal philosophical views. For example, He notes at one point that when kids reach about 11 or 12, "you begin to see a precipitous drop in the reported incidences of bullying". This may be, as he says, because "[a]s children learn the subtleties of teasing, their teasing is less often experienced as damaging", because actual bullying drops off around that age, or both.

But here's his deeper explanation for the appreciation of "the subtleties of teasing":

[C]hildren become much more sophisticated in their ability to hold contradictory propositions about the world -- they move from Manichaean either-or, black-or-white reasoning to a more ironic, complex understanding. As a result, as any chagrined parent will tell you, they add irony and sarcasm to their social repertory.

Note his metaphysical interpretation of the cognitive challenges of social life as reflecting the nature of the universe rather than simply the ambiguities of navigating complex relationships with people whose minds you can't read.

But reality is absolute, and existents (including relationships) have definite identities. To attribute our own ignorance of these identities to a flux-like metaphysics is wrong and will lead to losing the scent of this interesting line of inquiry.

Let's look at an example from Keltner's own life:

I still remember that day, as clear as a bell. Off to the side of the seventh-grade four-square game, Lynn, future high-school mascot, valedictorian, and my first love, approached me with hands coyly behind her back. She stopped unusually close, and with a mischievous smile framed by her cascading hair, asked, "Hey Dacher, wanna screw?" As I was in the midst of mumbling an earnest and affirmative reply, she held her hand open in front of me, a screw lying flat on her palm. "Just teasing" I heard amid the screeching laughter of the cabal of finger-pointing girls.

Had I trained my ear to discern the off-record markers of teasing, I would have detected subtle deviations from sincere speech in the artfully elongated vowels of Lynn's enunciation ("Hey Daaaacher, wanna screeeuuw?"). Had I read my Shakespeare I would have known to counter with my own provocation....

This is indeed a very ambiguous situation. Lynne, a young girl, may have been feeling some of her very first romantic stirrings, and may have been inexperienced enough with such feelings even to be aware of them as such. She needed room to explore these feelings. Teasing gave it to her.

And furthermore, even if she was sure that she was wild about Dacher, she can't read his mind. Teasing gives her a way to put romance on the table without necessarily putting Dacher on the spot. He is her friend, after all, and being too insistent might, if he did not have such interest, have endangered the value of continuing to have that friendship.

There is nothing self-contradictory or unknowable about reality at all here, but clearly, teasing is serving at least one useful function for two young human beings exploring their own values and trying to learn more about each other. This is very interesting stuff, but as I have noted before, modern philosophy is endangering the prospect of making further progress by altering how results are interpreted.

Teasing is not an acceptance of mutually exclusive possibilities at the same time. It is (at least in part) a means of learning which of several possibilities is true without costing oneself more than the knowledge is potentially worth.

Incidentally, Keltner edits a magazine based on the mistaken premise that altruism is good and that purports to support that contention with scientific evidence. Not too dismiss the value of studying animal behavior (or the psychological consequences of altruism), but ethics can apply only to beings with free will. The question of which ethics is proper is a philosophical one (and also necessarily assumes the existence of free will), and comes before science, which can lend insight into mechanisms that result in free will and how emotions arise, but cannot say anything about the matter of whether altruism is a proper morality for man.

Daily Dose of Reason

Rather belatedly, I have read an email announcing a new look for Dr. Michael Hurd's website, which now (or I am now aware) includes a blog. His Daily Dose of Reason is now accessible from the sidebar and, by coincidence, flows nicely from the above mention of altruism as a subject of study in cognitive science. His latest post briefly discusses the difference between short-term rapaciousness (which he calls "greed") and actual selfishness.

-- CAV

The Truth About Semi-Automatic Firearms

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This video by San Jose police officer Leroy Pyle provides an excellent demonstration of the difference between "semi-automatic" and "automatic" firearms:

"The Truth About Semi-Auto Firearms"



In particular, Officer Pyle does an excellent job of showing that two guns can have nearly identical inessential cosmetic features (such as the material the stock is made of), but differ in this one essential feature (semi-automatic vs. automatic), making them fundamentally different guns. Conversely, two guns can have the same essential features (i.e., both be semi-automatic), but one can be made to look very menacing and the other very innocuous simply by changing a few inessential cosmetic features.

In my experience, there are even some Objectivists who lack this basic understanding of the difference between automatic vs. semi-automatic weapons.

This is a nice real-life example of the importance of good epistemology, and in particular of defining by essentials. And we can see the dangers of failing to define by essentials when policy makers talk about banning "assault weapons", which is a bogus concept created grouping together firearms based on these inessential cosmetic features, rather than the essential ones.

Even now, there are some Republican Congressmen (not Democrats) who wish to reinstate the expired "Assault Weapons Ban" based on precisely this bogus concept. And given the incoming Obama Administration, this bill may become law.

As a corollary, this is also a concrete example of why a proper defense of one's political freedoms depends on upholding a proper rational epistemology -- and more generally a proper objective philosophy. Fortunately, that epistemology and that broader overall philosophy is already available to us -- we just have to be willing to use it.

(Video link via Howard Roerig.)

Open the Borders, End the Housing Glut

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

Open the Borders, End the Housing Glut
December 11, 2008

Washington, D.C.--As the housing glut continues to send home prices spiraling downward, leaving millions of homeowners unable to unload houses they can’t afford, Washington is debating ways to address the oversupply of housing.
 
“This crisis was caused by government intervention into the economy, yet every proposal to fix the housing market involves more power for Washington,” said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “Instead of more government distortion of markets, we should be looking for ways to get the government off our backs. That will require us to think outside the box, so here’s one--admittedly radical--suggestion to get us started: free up immigration.
 
“At a time when Americans are suffering from an oversupply of housing, it is tragic that the government continues to forcibly prevent millions of peaceful people around the globe from bringing their wealth, talent, and ambition to this country.
 
“Imagine if the number of annual immigrants increased from around 650,000 a year to, say, five million. Virtually overnight we would see money pour into the American real estate market, as millions of new businessmen and workers bought and rented homes. Not only would this eliminate the oversupply of houses, we would enjoy the broader, long-term economic benefits of welcoming legions of highly skilled and motivated individuals into the American economy.”

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Since When Does America Allow Czars?

By Alex Epstein from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Since When Does America Allow Czars?
December 11, 2008

Washington, D.C.--“Our Founding Fathers must be turning over in their graves hearing Americans, of all people, discussing the need for a ‘car czar’ and an ‘energy czar,’” said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

“The whole purpose of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was to liberate individuals from czars, kings, and other dictators who violate individual rights and kill progress by shackling everyone to their ‘vision’ of how others should act.

“The new advocates of czarism claim that freedom has failed, and so we need some economic strongman to order everyone into line. But in fact, the energy and auto industries are suffering because they have been the victims of central planning and regulatory strangulation for decades. The solution to our problems is not to centralize government intervention from many czars to a few, but to remove it altogether. We must de-socialize the electric grids, liberate nuclear power, end bankrupting fuel economy mandates, and remove the many other government interventions that destroy freedom and progress.

“What we need is not a new set of czars, but freedom.”

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WAAA!!!! Take Care of Me!

By Gina Liggett from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

When I hear of some new government program that's made available courtesy of working, tax-paying citizens and businesses, I'm left stunned in a state of resentful disbelief. But our government -- of the free and brave -- provides benefits in the areas of career development, child care, counseling, disability, disaster relief, education and training, food and nutrition, energy assistance, scholarships and grants, health care, housing, insurance, living assistance, loans, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and tax assistance.

Well, that pretty much covers food, clothing, and shelter... wait a minute, no mention of clothing. Oh well.

Since I currently receive no welfare benefits because I work for a living and buy everything I need and then also pay taxes (like millions of other Americans), I wondered what governmental benefits I could receive anyway. So I took a little on-line quiz at govbenefits.com.

After answering questions about my age, profession, education, veteran status, disabilities, needs I have, etc., I discovered that I would be potentially eligible for 17 government programs! Most of these were for the opportunity to use my educational and professional background to do research in the biological sciences. But I also might qualify for some HUD (Housing and Urban Development) benefits. My favorites, though, were two exciting opportunities, the Prose and Poetry Fellowship and the National Ocean Service Intern Program. Maybe I could combine the two somehow by taking a government-sponsored cruise and write a novel!

It was a dreary and foreboding moment for Juliet as she pondered tearfully with heaving and panting breaths, her longing for Sven, her long-lost beau of an era swept away by the wind which whipped the willows in a wild winter when wondrous wanderings of the heart did happen.

Hey, I could dig it.

Then I wondered what I could get if I decided to quit working, quit paying for health insurance and had $45 dollars in my savings account. I would quality for 32 government programs in my state! Not only would I potentially quality for the Special Milk Program but also the Colorado Summer Food Service program. I'm not sure how as a middle-aged woman those school-based programs would apply to me, but maybe it's because women are recommended to get lots of calcium in their diet.

But certainly I could qualify for more than that. So I re-took the quiz and claimed to be a "practicing artist." Hey! I practice my dance steps everyday! I also added that I have an Injury or Illness because the other day I got this nasty hamstring pull from practicing so much. And I also put in my claim to have a "difference of limb length" because I'm pretty sure that my right leg is 1/17th millimeter longer than the left. I added that I would like Mental Health Services because I've been so distraught over the U.S. socialist revolution that happened on November 4. I would also like some Women's Health Care. Oh, also, I answered "yes" to the question, "Do you feel that you've been denied housing or financial assistance due to discrimination." I'm awfully sure that I feel that somewhere along the line I been discriminated against.

Guest what? 37 programs! Oh my gosh! Lots of housing assistance. Food stamps. Health care. Architectural Barrier Act Enforcement (that's probably because of my limb length difference). Energy assistance. Short-term lending. Job opportunities for low-income persons (hey! I don't want a job!). Weatherization Assistance for Low-income persons (now, THAT, I could use).

And I would only have to jettison maybe that one Objectivist virtue of "independence" to get my goodies. But hey, as our presidential candidates reminded us, this is the country of sacrifice, right?

Tara Smith in her book, "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist," presents Ayn Rand's definition of the virtue of independence: "one's acceptance of the responsibility of forming one's own judgements and living by the work of one's own mind." Tara Smith adds,

More colloquially, it is a matter of making one's own way in the world. The independent person supports himself both intellectually and materially, thinking for himself and taking productive action to sustain himself.

As an individual becomes an adult, a psychological milestone of independence is supposed to occur. This is a time when children separate from their parents who cared and provided for them; they strike out their own, choose a career or job, form new social relationships, and pursue their values. Our welfare-minded society enables the dependency of many of its adult citizens, leaving them in a perpetual state of adolescence, unable to survive without sacrificing others to meet their endless needs.

I've decided after all not to apply for that government-sponsored cruise to become a novelist (although, I hate to deprive the world of my prose). But a society that sacrifices its citizens so that others don't have to grow up is an immoral society.

And despite the so-called good intentions of politicians and interest groups who come up with these care-taking programs, they are no different than the parents who enable their unemployed 30-year-old offspring to live at home for free and play video games all day long.

The virtue of independence is a requirement for survival as a moral being. Only in an individual-rights-respecting society, where there is no sacrifice of some to pay for the dependency of others, can the virtue of independence manifest to its fullest potential -- a benevolent society of individuals left free to pursue their happiness.

So for now I'll keep my job and work on that novel on my free time. (I know you can hardly wait for me to finish it!)

Advice on Objectivist Groups

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Back in November, Amy Nasir posted some good advice for people looking to create a local Objectivist group. Based on my experience with the highly successful Front Range Objectivism, I think such groups should focus on discussing Objectivism -- particularly essays by Ayn Rand -- with the goal of understanding how the principles of the philosophy apply to their own lives.

Such groups have three major benefits, in my view:

1. They can help people deepen their understanding of Objectivism. Personally, I find it enormously helpful to be committed to reading and discussing two or three essays by Ayn Rand (or another other Objectivist philosopher) each month in FROG. I learn something new each time I do that, and I know I'm not alone.
   
   
2. They can be a great resources for friendships with like-minded people. Paul and I have a really fantastic slew of friends in Colorado, almost all found through FROG. Not everyone has been fantastic, but the few real duds have made themselves scarce.
   
   
3. They can be a springboard for local activism. Not everyone in a discussion group will become an activist. But a few might be inspired to do so in a serious way, and some others might be willing and able to contribute on occasion. And given #1, they'll have the requisite knowledge to do that relatively well.

If you want to see how we conduct our FROG meetings, see this page.

Link-O-Rama

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Who Is To Blame?: Yaron Brook interviewed in Newsweek. Here's the final question and answer:

With free markets now in disrepute, what's going to happen to the popularity of Ayn Rand's most famous book, "Atlas Shrugged"?

I think it's going to go up dramatically. I think it already has. [People] are saying, "We're heading toward socialism, we're heading toward more regulation." "Atlas Shrugged" is coming true. How do we get out? How do we escape? Unfortunately, there is no escape. Businessmen are panicking, and I think they should be panicking. Many of them understand that this was not a crisis of free markets. There was no free market to fail. What we have is a regulated market, and the regulated market has failed.

What capitalists need to understand: Alex Epstein blogs at the London Telegraph. You can comment.

The Magic of Photoshop: Watch a revoltingly fat ass transformed into something lovely before your very eyes.

Welcome to Equestria: A spot-on and damn funny response to Dinesh D'Souza's stupid argument that athiests shouldn't be concerned about the religious beliefs of other people if God doesn't exist.

10 useful iPhone tips & tricks: I was totally unaware of some of these delights.

Old Castro = New Castro

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Remember this report from the Human Rights Foundation (which I support) next time you hear a leftist sing the praises of Cuba:

Cuba: Rights Activists Assaulted, Beaten, and Detained by Castro Government

At least 20 activists were detained in Cuba this week for planning to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). According to independent and verifiable sources inside Cuba, detainees, some of who were taken by force and beaten, include former political prisoners, human rights activists, opposition political leaders, and independent journalists.

"The government of Raul Castro is arresting human rights advocates for wanting to celebrate a declaration of human rights--it's business as usual, the new boss is the same as the old boss," said Sarah Wasserman, Chief Operating Officer of the Human Rights Foundation. "For a country that denies violating human rights, this is the epitome of hypocrisy; it's evident that the Cuban government's signing of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to notable pomp, circumstance, and self-congratulation earlier this year was just window-dressing."

I'm not surprised.

WHAT AM I DOING ON TWITTER?

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I am still trying to figure how to use Twitter in an optimal way. Feel free to follow me on Twitter.

At this moment, I have a Twitter grade of 87 (#41,527 overall rank, out of 563,695).



Read Using Twitter... 'The Smart Way' by Mark Ramskill. [Editor's note to self: Check out SubHub's online publishing platform later on.]

Check out the video, Twitter in Plain English, by Lee LeFever.



You could follow an interesting comment thread to Anita Campbell's post, You Should be Looking for Small Businesses on Twitter. I have added Randa Clay's Twitter graphic to my section with the latest five "tweets" (Twitter Updates).

In the news: Twitter: Secret Business Model On Track For Q1 - Silicon Alley Insider.

I think that the following quote from Evan Williams's post, What Blogger Should Do, is right on target and I hope to see this feature mentioned at Blogger Buzz blog sometime in the future...

Become the Aggregator: One possible answer to the question to what role does the stand-alone blog live in the age of a million-and-one generalized and specialized participatory web experiences is as a personal aggregator that reflects back the other stuff one does on the web. Yes, I'll load all that stuff into FriendFeed, but that's not my "online presence" as we used to say back in the day. Everybody (or at least a lot of people) needs an URL -- and one without a ? in it. I want my tweets, and my photos, and my whatevers to show up on evhead.com (hosted by Blogger) in an attractive way. (Evhead.com, December 3, 2008.)

Related: My post, TWITTER.

DRAW OBAMA IN SIX SIMPLE STEPS

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Follow John Cox's instruction on how to draw Barack Hussein Obama II.



Related: My post, DRAW BUSH IN SIX SIMPLE STEPS.

Objectivist Blog Round-Up

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

Welcome to the December 11th, 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:

Edward Cline presents A Rookery of Rogues posted at The Rule of Reason, saying, "Watching the federal "bailout" story unfold over the last several months, I was struck by a unsettling familiarity with it that I could not pinpoint, a sense of déjà vu garnished with an unsavory intimacy. Then, at a recent book signing at Colonial Williamsburg, it hit me: the current bailout, complete with a cast of scoundrels, pages of fraud and lies, and an oscillating expediency exercised by the originating principals -- including presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama -- was no precedent at all."

David C Lewis, RFA presents There Is No Such Thing As A Right To Healthcare or How To Solve The Healthcare Problem posted at A Revolution In Financial Planning.

David C Lewis, RFA presents PPO vs. HMO: Do You Really Need These "Health Plans"? posted at A Revolution In Financial Planning.

Andy Clarkson presents History of Ideas: Democritus Update posted at The Charlotte Capitalist, saying, "Adding notes on Democritus to "History of Ideas" series. Democritus was one of the Greek Big Three -- Aristotle and Plato are the others -- whose ideas drive our culture today."

Guy Barnett presents Welcome to the Post-Danish-Cartoons World posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "Islamic intimidation strikes again. Sony is the latest example of self-censorship in the name of appeasing Islamists who take murderous offense at anyone not following their religious precepts."

A. Chambers presents Condemned By Democracy posted at The Undercurrent, saying, "Parwez Kambakhsh, a young man in Afghanistan, was given a death sentence, later commuted to a 20-year-prison term, for blasphemy. Democracy is what makes this kind of verdict possible - it is the problem, not the solution."

Doug presents Book Review: New Deal or Raw Deal? by Burton Folsom posted at The Rule of Reason.

Rational Ryan presents Religious Relativism and Subjectivism. posted at The Dirty Kuffar, saying, "Briefly discusses the relativistic nature of Religion's ethics and metaphysics."
Rachel presents Beyond Blogging posted at Brass in Pocket, saying, "This post is a response to a post by Myrhaf at The New Clarion."

Flibbert presents Local Bailouts posted at Flibbertigibbet, saying, "Everyone's talking about bailouts these days! And it's not just the people in Washington. Here in NYC, a bailout is being proposed for the ever-inefficient, ineffectual MTA above and beyond the regularly scheduled bailouts NY pays them! Get the full rant over at my blog!"

Michael Labeit presents Again, On the Reason/Mysticism Dichotomy posted at Philosophical Mortician, saying, "No new revelations here. A run-of-the-mill Aristotlian explanation for why reason and mysticism are incompatible. Just a refresher for newcomers or those of you who have perhaps become rusty."

Rational Ryan presents The Left Wants to Compromise on Abortion. posted at The Dirty Kuffar, saying, "The Left wants to compromise on their pro-choice position, but the Religious Right is still full steam ahead."

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Objectivist round up 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.

Who Is Really Endangered?

By Paula Hall from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A man wants to encourage the growth of a wild turkey population near his farm. He's a hunter -- perhaps he wants some new targets. He may even eat the wild turkeys he kills.

At any rate, he knows there's a pack of coyotes in the area and fears the coyotes will not give the wild turkey population a chance to increase. So he baits some traps for the coyotes with beef laced with a lethal and illegal poison.

He kills some coyotes.

Some bald eagles feed on the coyote carcasses and die, too.

A passerby sees the dead bald eagles and tells the feds, who set out to discover who is responsible for illegally killing the birds. As reported by the New York Times:

With no prior criminal history, he was sentenced to two years of probation and was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.

As a convicted felon, Mr. Collier would have to give up his collection of hunting guns, a blow to his lifestyle. "We kind of got a hunting heritage in this family," he said. "It's what we do."

For the sake of two dead birds our government spent thousands of dollars, and used up court and prosecutors' time, to ruin the life of a human being. The birds have no thoughts, no plans for their life, no chosen obligations or enjoyments -- and no rights. Mr. Collier was fined, humiliated, and deprived of one of the chief joys of his life because he accidentally killed some rare birds.

[I]t was not so much the felony conviction for killing two bald eagles that stung the most, and that stung plenty. It was the loss of his hunting rifles that went with it.

For his mother, June S. Collier, it was the pain of seeing her son's name sullied in their town of roughly 5,000 people in southeastern Missouri, where the family had lived, farmed and hunted for four generations.

To all you casual environmentalists out there who believe that there "oughta be a law" to protect endangered species, is this really what you wanted? If it isn't what you wanted, have you examined your beliefs lately?

(Cross-posted to ms. think.)

Quick Roundup 384

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

Government Distortion of Price Signals

Brian Phillips does a good job explaining how government interference with prices impairs our ability to gather objective information about supply for the goods we need.

When the government subsidizes some product, it is essentially saying that that product exists in a higher quantity than it actually does. For example, filet mignon is more expensive than hamburger because there is less of it. However, if the government subsidized filet mignon so that the consumer only paid $2 a pound, consumers would react as if it existed in the same quantity as hamburger. Consumers who never buy filet mignon would be dining on it weekly. But the supply would not have changed--only the mechanism that rations that supply.

This is on top of the fact that all such activity is wrong, because it violates our rights, and results in theft from the productive.

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute offer a novel solution to the housing glut caused by federal interference in the housing market. And Craig Biddle commented at length on the novel aspect of said solution some time back.

Dr. Lewis to Appear in Israel

If you are in Israel or know someone who is, mark your calendars: Dr. John Lewis will be making two appearances there.

First, he will speak on "The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism: A Proper Policy" at the Facing Jihad Conference in Jerusalem at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, December 14.

Dr. Lewis will also lecture on "Israel's Moral Right to Exist" at Tel Aviv University on Monday, December 15 at 6:00 p.m. for the Tel Aviv University Objectivist Students club.

Distraction? For Whom?

This news article on the repercussions of the arrest of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevic for attempting to sell Barack Obama's now-vacant Senate seat is missing something big:

However, the scandal, which Fitzgerald described as a "political corruption crime spree," threatened to be a distraction as the Obama team assembles a new administration. Some Chicagoans planning to move to Washington with Obama could find themselves facing continuing questions about what they knew about Blagojevich's attempted shakedown. [bold added]

To be sure, this will be a distraction for Obama, the governor's behavior is quite brazen, and it is disturbing that Obama is possibly tied to this, but....

Recall the Clinton years, and how fixated the Republicans were by Clinton's scandals. Consider further how some political pundits "moon over ... transparency initiatives" [link added] when they should be working to end the welfare state that is making such rampant corruption possible. Or who "become outraged at such things as that infamous 'bridge to nowhere' -- and yet [fail to challenge] the massively larger larceny cum vote purchasing of the welfare state."

Yes. We must get to the bottom (top?) of this scandal, but at the same time, we must be mindful of The Man Who Floats Above It All. The conservatives who don't support the welfare state outright are largely out of ideas, and will grasp at whatever straws Obama hands them to build a case against him, just as they did with Clinton. Such a case must be made, if there is one, of course, but not as a substitute for principled opposition.

Nor must it occupy too much of our attention or energy. A politician can do plenty of harm while he's dealing with accusations that he is corrupt.

0 for 2!

Drat! Two interesting links I came across yesterday aren't working. One I'll save for another day since it's a blog, and what's the point of trying to help someone out by linking to nothing?

The other was entertaining (HT: Elizabeth). You could -- and hopefully can once this post goes up -- throw in the URL for your blog and have a computer program attempt to guess your Myers-Briggs personality type. My blog came up as INTP, whereas I have tested strongly as INTJ twice, nearly ten years apart.

And speaking of web malfunctions, have you noticed that GMail, and anything to do with Google Ads has been acting squirrelly lately, often requiring multiple load attempts or taking a long time to load?

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on December 10, 2008.

Updates

Today: Added hypertext anchors.

A Rookery of Rogues

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

Watching the federal “bailout“ story unfold over the last several months, I was struck by a unsettling familiarity with it that I could not pinpoint, a sense of déjà vu garnished with an unsavory intimacy. Then, at a recent book signing at Colonial Williamsburg, it hit me: the current bailout, complete with a cast of scoundrels, pages of fraud and lies, and an oscillating expediency exercised by the originating principals -- including presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama -- was no precedent at all.

It had happened long, long before in our history, in 1765, when a similar “bailout” was defeated by Patrick Henry. I had written about it in Sparrowhawk, Book Four: Empire, finished in 2001.*

It matters not which organizations or entities are the beneficiaries of a government plan to “rescue” them from their incompetence, insolvency, and government-enticed avarice: financial institutions and banks, mortgage companies, automakers, insurance companies, airlines, aircraft manufacturers….or Virginia planters. The freshman burgess from Louisa County introduced his Stamp Act Resolves in May 1765 in the House of Burgesses. The Resolves altogether comprised an affirmation of the rights of Englishmen to their liberties and to self-governance, and whose later dissemination throughout the colonies served to unite them for the first time in a common cause, which was to oppose and defy Parliamentary authority.

But Henry first tackled the “loan office” scheme that was proposed by the Tidewater gentry in the House and favored by the colony’s biggest planters.

Virginia then was the largest and richest of all the British colonies, but, within the confining system of the mercantilist system, was in no better economic and fiscal shape than the smallest and poorest. All the colonies, but especially Virginia, experienced a continuing credit crisis with British merchants and the mother country, whose laws guaranteed that the colonies would remain in constant debt. Commerce and trade with any country other than Britain was forbidden; only British-made goods could be imported into the colonies, while colonial goods, mostly tobacco, lumber, rope and raw materials could be exported only on British merchant vessels and were forced to be landed in Britain first before going on to any other country.

All these movements and transactions were taxed, as well, and charged to the credit accounts of colonial merchants, entrepreneurs and planters.

Virginia plantations were renowned in the 18th century for the size of their lands and their ostentatious beauty. Many were in effect small towns of workers and slaves. They grew tobacco, as well as wheat and other marketable crops. But virtually every plantation rode on credit and never-ending debt. In the early 1760’s, after the French and Indian War, and when they owed nearly a million pounds sterling to Britain, most Virginia planters sought a way out of these straits and colluded with several powerful men in the General Assembly to propose to borrow £250,000 from British merchants which would be overseen by a loan office. The Virginia legislature had been granted the right to issue paper notes in lieu of British pounds during the war, but these were to have been retired from circulation and destroyed by the Treasurer and Speaker of the House, John Robinson, who also conceived of the loan office scheme.

To my knowledge, neither the passage of the Stamp Act in Parliament, nor the passage of Patrick Henry’s Resolves has ever been dramatized in fiction. What follows are excerpts from Sparrowhawk, Book Four: Empire, that illustrate the parallels.

Lieutenant-Governor Francis Fauquier warned his friends in the House about the obstacles facing a loan office bill if one were introduced.

“Be warned, my friend: I will not sign another bill without it having a suspending clause. And Mr. Robinson and his friends should not breathe easier if the bill is passed. The Board of Trade must approve it, and then the merchants, who must then introduce in the Commons a companion bill and secure its passage. It may be two or more years before any borrowed sterling reaches these shores.”

That daunting schedule does not discourage the bill’s advocates. However, George Washington, a burgess in the House, is asked by George Wythe, Williamsburg’s leading attorney and an influential burgess, for his thoughts on the bill. Washington answers:

“What little has been said about it, sir, I dislike. True, a loan to us by British merchants would bring us some true sterling here. God knows, we need such money in these parts. But I must ask this: For how long would that sterling stay in our purses, before it was whisked away in duties and taxes and the debts we already owe those gentlemen?…I am not in favor of increasing our debt to them. My children and grandchildren would needs spend their whole lives paying it off, living on their own property as mere tenants of absentee landlords in London, for that would be the only end consequence.”

“I see,” said Wythe. “And…on the Stamp Act?”

“With all due respect to our host [Fauquier] and the Crown, I believe it is as villainous a piece of legislation as can be imagined.”

Edmund Pendleton, another power in the House, defends the loan office idea on May 24th, 1765, recommending that it be assigned to a committee to be introduced as a bill to be debated and voted on. In answer to questions about the value of the loan office, he replies:

“…The depressing circumstances of this colony -- the present low price of tobacco, the recent ban on our ability to issue money, the nullification of so many patents on land west of the Blue Ridge -- all these factors, and others, have obliged so many persons here of substantial property to enter into great debts, which, if their payments were severely demanded, would ruin those men and their families and all who depend on them, and their ruin would certainly harbinge the ruin of men of lesser and other circumstances throughout this colony. A loan office, supervised by men of the strictest virtue, would enable those more substantial persons to pay their necessary debts with greater ease, and help to put this colony on a firmer and unassailable footing.”

Hugh [Kenrick, a hero of the series and a burgess] observed that Pendleton’s answer was more a plea than an answer. He wondered if Pendleton was one of those men of “substantial property.” The man was a key member of the Loyal Land Company and had title to thousands of acres of land in the now-forbidden Ohio Valley and beyond. Many other burgesses in the chamber were also speculators. There were no looks of confusion on their faces, he noted, only a common one composed of hope, patience, and made-up minds.

Hugh suspects that more is behind the loan office scheme than a ploy to save the colony’s credit standing and its largest planters from bankruptcy. Walking from the Capitol building with his fellow burgess from Queen Anne County, he discusses the loan office scheme. He asks his companion:

“All those paper notes that were issued during the war and which were supposed to have been retired and destroyed -- is there any evidence that they were destroyed?”

Cullis searched his memory for a moment, then emitted a slow gasp. “Why…well, I don’t know….Mr. Robinson is the Treasurer….But, now that you mention it, well, I don’t recall that he ever reported to the House that it was done….I see what you are suggesting. And now I know why Mr. Henry was so coy in his accusations today….It puzzled me, why he was not more forward in his opposition to the scheme….”

Hugh sighed. “It cannot be proven, not unless the Treasurer’s books are very closely examined….Mr. Henry is eager to press for an investigation, but not until the next session. But you see how simple a task of legerdemain it would be for Mr. Robinson to substitute the expected sterling notes for those paper monies, at least in the account books. If there have been secret loans of those condemned notes, their amounts and dates could be altered to conform to the sterling. And then, the paper notes could truly be destroyed -- and with them, any evidence of malfeasance. And it is Mr. Robinson who grants leave for an examination of the books. His own private account books would need to be examined, as well, for that is where the truth would be found….He got away with it last time, as you related to me, by blaming the deficit on delinquent tax collection by the sheriffs. But I do not believe he could fox another inquiry of that kind. Why propose only a two hundred and fifty thousand sterling loan, and not some other amount?”

Further on, Hugh explodes in anger:

“He tore off his hat and angrily flung it into the air. “Oh, what a conniving club of uncles, cousins, brothers-in-law, and nephews!” he exclaimed. He faced a startled Cullis and waved a finger at the Capitol far down Duke of Gloucester Street. “It is too much that we are dunned without by petty thieves in London, and sniveled within by that…that rookery of rogues!”

Pendleton’s plea does not resonate with Patrick Henry. Neither John Robinson, nor Edmund Pendleton, nor Peyton Randolph, the Attorney-General, knows what his position is on the loan office scheme. Henry soon disabuses them of their doubts.

He excoriated the complexity of the proposal -- “only a Newton could conceive of such a Gordian labyrinth…or should we say a charlatan?”…He pointed out that not only did British merchants already control the price of the colony’s exported tobacco, but that the scheme would “allow them to pick our pockets afresh with the proposed ten shillings per hogshead levy, for ten long years, in order to pay back the loan.” He ended his speech with the question, boldly addressed alternately to Speaker Robinson and Pendleton: “What, sirs? Is it proposed then to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance by filling his pockets with money?”

…The burgess for Caroline [Pendleton] and the Attorney-General were not quite certain which was the object of Henry’s rhetorical query: the colonial government, which had a debt of £250,000; or the colony’s largest planters, who owed nearly a million pounds to British merchants and the Crown; or particular planters who would be the beneficiaries of the loan office.

Hugh, Washington, and other burgesses vote against referring the loan office scheme to committee to be introduced as a bill. But the scheme passes by a comfortable margin, and the idea is referred to committee.

On Monday, the 27th, the loan office committee conferred with the Council [the 12-member Governor’s Council, which acted as a senate, much as the House of Lords in Parliament acted as a senate for the Commons]….On Tuesday, the House resumed its business, and the Council returned to it several bills that it had passed and received the Governor’s signature, and one that had not -- the loan office proposal, which was unanimously rejected.

Edmund Pendleton announces his departure for home, and leaves the session in a snit, because of the rejection, telling his allies:

“My work is finished here, and was fruitless. The Council, acting on bad and perhaps slanderous advice, has seen fit to ignore our pleas and scuttle the only accomplishment this session could have boasted.”

Pendleton did not think the Stamp Act would be debated, because he believed no copy of it was in anyone’s possession. But the stage is set for Henry to introduce his Resolves, and it is Pendleton’s absence that allows at least five of them to pass by a bare margin.

Historically, it transpired that upon John Robinson’s death some time later, he had not destroyed the notes as he was obliged to. And it was Edmund Pendleton who discovered the malfeasance when he audited the Treasurer‘s and Robinson‘s personal accounts. He spent the next decade repaying the debts from the late Treasurer’s estate.

Except for the denouement, the parallels with the current bailout “crisis” are uncanny. Just substitute AIG, Goldman Sachs, Washington Mutual, mortgage companies, the automakers and every other person or institution that depended on regulation and government largesse for the planters. Substitute Congress, the present administration and the one to come for John Robinson and his corrupt colleagues in and out of the General Assembly, and one has a cosmic replay of the scandals of 1765.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of California, for example, was guaranteed a big chunk of the original $700 billion bailout for one of her constituents, Star-Kist. Other Congressmen rushed to guarantee bailout money for their own special political clients. It is likely that many in the Senate and House have or had stock and bond portfolios linked to the failed financial institutions they hurried to “rescue” from collapse.

Doubtless, Patrick Henry’s reported opposition to the loan office scheme gave the Governor’s Council pause for reflection. And, his Stamp Act Resolves gave Virginians and other colonists food for thought. I date the true beginning of the American Revolution to colonial resistance to the Stamp Act, which was repealed exactly a year later in 1766.

What we have today, instead, is an ignorant 500-pound federal gorilla attempting to “stimulate” the economy with the defibulator of unconstitutional, fiat power and an inflatable currency, that is, with force and fraud, with the news media and Congress conveniently forgetting that it was the gorilla that wrecked the economy in the first place.

Note also that various polls of Americans are opposed to not only the bailout of the automakers, but the overall virtual nationalization of banks, financial institutions, and the automakers, as well, but that Congress and the present and future administrations are ignoring them, just as they have ignored the pitiful handful of Congressmen and journalists who also have opposed Congress’s “loan office” schemes.

Long live Lady Liberty! And let us work to clean out our own “rookery of rogues.”


*Chapters 6-9, pp. 191-220.

Los Angeles Parking Violations Bureau

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

My friend Bryan Olive -- whom you might know as the customer service manager of the Ayn Rand Institute -- has been fighting an Orwellian battle against the Los Angeles Parking Violations Bureau over a parking ticket issued for a car he no longer owns. Finally, after many inane go-rounds with bureaucrats and after the government refused to consider his definitive proof that he did not own the car when the ticket was issued, he took his case to a local reporter. The result is this excellent story.

As one commenter said, "If the DMV, which is a government agency, can't handle title transfers, how the heck will government handle the Obama health care system? Scary times!"

Indeed.

That Sucking Sound ...

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

... is being caused by an intellectual vacuum, as a post by Megan McArdle demonstates (HT: Glenn Reynolds).

McArdle is reacting in The Atlantic Monthly to the charge that she is enjoying left wing disappointment over Obama's cabinet appointments. She is not, she assures us. In fact, not only did she support Obama herself, but she would, "personally be pleased to see Ingrid Newkirk appointed to head the USDA." McArdle has been mistaken for a conservative and she's setting the record straight.

So far, so good, so to speak.

It's when she explains why she feels some measure of equanimity about this situation (and, by implication, why her fellow Obama supporters should, too), that things get interesting. After first calling herself a libertarian, she names having a "radical agenda" as a commonality between libertarians and "progressive" leftists, along with "the lunatic belief that if only there were some structural change in the world, they'd finally get the opportunity to enact their agenda".

Politicians don't listen because progressive and libertarian activists are not pushing minor schemes to benefit themselves greatly at small cost to everyone else. They are pushing for radical change that will require radical fiscal medicine to effect. That fiscal medicine will not pass unnoticed, and hence, it does not happen. [bold added]

Let us set aside McArdle's claim that there is a libertarian "agenda", for what she is saying about radical agendas per se is the interesting point here: This is half-right and half-wrong, which is worse than simply being wrong, because the correct half makes the incorrect half look correct.

Yes. It is true that politicians don't like agendas (radical or otherwise) when people understand that such agendas imply consequences that they do not support. (e.g., "[T]hey want national health insurance and lower government spending, but, you see, not that way....")

But no. It is not true that politicians simply don't listen to radicals, or that popular opposition to radical changes is written in stone. History shows us that, for better or worse, politicians frequently do listen to radicals. This is directly because radicals frequently do effect fundamental changes in popular opinion. Otherwise, we would still have black slavery, but lack an income tax today.

What, then, is the nature of McArdle's error? Her closing paragraph says it all:

This does not make me happy. It does not make me happy that I can't privatize social security [sic] and eliminate the corporate income tax, and it does not make me happy that I can't have radical agricultural reform and a stiff carbon tax. But the universe is not here to please me.

Set aside the fact that her goals are contradictory (or even self-contradictory, as in the case of Social Security). Notice the magical powers she seems to attribute to politicians generally and Obama in particular. What would it take -- to use a truly pro-freedom example -- to phase out Social Security?

To listen to McArdle (or most leftists), it would seem to take some form of dictatorship. What other kind of "structural change", exactly, would it take to get popular objections to all that "nasty ... medicine" out of the way of these radical agendas? To her credit, she opts for resignation, instead, but she is still wrong.

And the nature of her error is that it is a confusion of the man-made for the metaphysically given. "[T]he universe is not here to please me." True, but as the case of slavery shows us, widespread sentiment is, unlike gravity, not a natural force beyond man's control. It can be changed.

The question is: How? Man, environmentalist fashion and centuries of religious dogma to the contrary, is a natural phenomenon. His mind is, and his opinions are. As with any other thing in nature that one wants to change, one must consider the nature of man and his mind before one can attempt to change popular opinion.

When one does so, he will realize that he cannot force a mind to agree, but that he can attempt to persuade other individuals of the merits of his position by offering sound arguments. This is what the "moral suasion" of the abolitionists was, and we see the results today. It sounds contradictory to put it this way since men have free will (and individual rights), but in political discourse, it is true: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."

But McArdle, I would guess, despairs of achieving a radical agenda at least in part because she understands (correctly) that popular opinion will not change overnight. However, there is more to this picture. If persuading other people is the key to (eventually) enacting a radical agenda, what is required to do so? The one thing libertarians uniformly dismiss: fundamental philosophical principles. You can neither explain what freedom is or offer a convincing argument for why someone should support it (instead of, say, government handouts) without recourse to principles that correspond to the facts of reality.

Libertarians thus "tend to moon over" various free-sounding (but often contradictory) random stances but ultimately become resigned to politics as usual. This is because they refuse at the outset to arm themselves for the battle of ideas necessary to achieve (or even understand) the goal of freedom they say they want. In doing so, they leave the door wide open to those who will not shrink from the kind of "structural changes" needed to enact their radical agendas without popular consent.

Anyone who doesn't like this state of affairs, take note, and know that treason vs. resignation is a false alternative.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Changed wording of one sentence.

HAPPINESS IN A SOCIAL NETWORK

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

A new study by James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis, in the British Medical Journal, concludes that your happiness can be spread through degrees of separation within your social networks. I think that it could be easier to stay in a good mood and be a "happy camper" if you interact with individuals that are advocates of the benevolent universe premise. I think a general positive attitude outlook could spread to others, but it has to start with you, the individual. Therefore I can't agree with the following statement from the study:

Conclusions People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon. (BMJ 2008;337:a2338, December 4, 2008.)

[Editor's note: I have empasized the word, collective, in the quote.]

Related: My post, PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS.

BUSINESS IN AMERICA

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I have tried to give several reasons for why America is a great place to run a business on Open Forum.

Bushobama vs. Your Health

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

The religious right and the socialist left could potentially deliver a one-two punch against your health by putting government guns behind the irrational beliefs of certain medical workers.

The outgoing Bush administration is planning to announce a broad new "right of conscience" rule permitting medical facilities, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other [medical] workers to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable, including abortion and possibly even artificial insemination and birth control.

This rule would bar "any entity" that gets federal money (e.g., private companies that happen to be funded in part by a grant) from disciplining any employee, including one "whose task it is to clean the instruments."

If this rule is not dropped by the Obama Administration, which has plans to further (if not complete) the process of nationalizing the medical sector, it could very well end up forcing patients to accept care from superstitious zealots who want to withhold from them a full range of treatment options.

If liberal commentators, reporting their own Obama-Rorschach test results, think that "their man" will likely repeal this rule, it will be because they are forgetting that (a) he is very religious, and (b) the left has been pandering to certain religious minorities for years through various misguided (at best) laws aimed at ending discrimination, such as "hate crime" legislation.

And we might as well throw in a (c): In a sort of mirror image of the global warming (agenda) "debate", everyone on the left will be myopically focused on the excuse for this rule, whose purpose is plainly to give religious conservatives a way to prevent some women from taking the "morning after pill". (The Slate article inked above focuses on the falsehood being used to lend a scientific "case" against this pill, for example.)

If leftists really didn't want to be under the knife of fundamentalist doctors, they would support freeing all medical care from government control, and then take advantage of that freedom to boycott such physicians. Likewise, if conservatives really valued freedom of conscience for physicians, they, too, would begin working to get the government out of medicine. They could have whole hospitals that didn't practice abortion! (But then, they would have to give up on their dream of forcing everyone else to abide by their arbitrary dicta.)

In fact, neither side values freedom, and we already have another precedent to back my claim: In education, where the precious minds of children are entrusted to their teachers for hours a day, every day, leftists will not have the state monopoly of education challenged in any way, shape, or form (despite its disastrous results), and religious conservatives, far from opposing it, simply try to co-opt it -- in order to deprive developing minds of the care they need on religious grounds. Creationism is just the most prominent example.

As with education, so it will be with medicine: Two anti-freedom sides will haggle over small swaths of control, with victory by neither being a victory for individual rights. Americans must repudiate both left and right, and demand the freedom to live according to their own best judgement. As a corollary, Americans must also renounce all attempts to use government force to get others to do their bidding. If we do not respect the rights of others, how can we hope for reciprocation?

-- CAV

Deals With the Devil

By Gina Liggett from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

This month, the Chief Executives of Chrysler, General Motors and Ford grovelled back to Washington, tails between their legs, chastised by Congress for their display of capitalist excess when they arrived to their November begging session aboard separate corporate jets. This time, their humble 520-mile road trip in hybrid cars was just so Green and so Special that I bet it moved even Al Gore (also known as "The Inventor"). Speaking of invention, getting the Big 3 automakers to make hybrid cars is part of the grand scheme Gore has invented to save the planet.

Well, what about saving the country from economic ruin? The auto leaders warned that American families and the very soundness of our economy would be disastrously affected if a bailout is rejected by Congress. And the Big Three have a lot of support in their appeal to Santa as other major companies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor unions, and other interest groups hunker down for a major lobbying effort.

If saving the planet and saving the economy are the very raisons d'etre of a business enterprise, where does this duty come from? As many Objectivists know, it is the pernicious and ubiquitous moral standard of altruism. And its modern manifestation is the Corporate Social Responsibility Movement which has placed tremendous pressure on companies to cast aside the very notion of profit-making as their primary goal and legitimate purpose.

This movement pushes businesses to "behave responsibly," by demonstrating environmental awareness, concern for human rights, and giving money for community development. The Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government explains it very well:

Throughout the industrialized world and in many developed countries there has been a sharp escalation in the social roles corporations are expected to play. Companies are facing new demands to engage in public-private partnerships and are under growing pressure to be accountable not only to shareholders, but also to stakeholders such as employees, consumers, suppliers, local communities, policymakers, and society-at-large.

While the moral foundation for capitalism identified by Ayn Rand is largely unknown today, there is no such lack of awareness of the moral rationale for Corporate Responsibility. We find its specific ideas in the popular notion of "economic and social justice." The Center for Economic and Social Justice defines that principle in what I describe as a stew of the best original ideals of America's Founding Fathers, seasoned with a religious-based identity of the nature of man, and congealed in the view that man's highest moral purpose is a duty to the social justice of others -- in other words, the incompatible combining of liberty and property rights with religion and altruism:

There is a Source of all creation and of all universal and absolute values such as Truth, Love and Justice, which represent the ultimate ends of human actions. Many people call this Source, God. ... The essential means to achieve the sovereignty of the person include such inalienable human rights as the right to life, liberty, and access to productive property and free markets, equality of opportunity, and the secret ballot. These rights--including the rights of property--are not ultimate ends in themselves, but they are intermediate ends or fundamental means to enable each person to pursue Truth, Love and Justice. ... The highest responsibility of each person is to pursue absolute values and to promote economic and social justice in his or her personal life and all associations with others.

To enlighten us as to the social system consistent with these "core values," the Center offers a side-by-side comparison of what it considers two "unjust" models, capitalism and socialism, with the ideal "just third way" of economic and social justice. I have provided a link to the entire comparison; but in summary, the Center views capitalism as literally a "dog-eat-dog" kind of system that is morally and practically no better than "scarcity"-causing socialism.

The Big Three arrived in Washington not only in a hybrid car, they arrived with a hybrid morality. The ever-growing and widely-embraced partnerships of government and business is the natural consequence of these moral contradictions. In such a union of social purpose, government and business desperately need each other to survive. But the price is paid by the American heart and soul, and the individuals who must set aside their pursuit of happiness for social goals defined by think tanks and politicians.

But what if there were a non-contradictory view of the nature of man, his requirements for survival and a non-sacrificial moral purpose in life? Such a system would be opposite of the deal-with-the-devil mixed economy we have now, where the main moral and practical purpose of business is to serve the welfare of society. Such a system would be laissez-faire capitalism, a society of real economic and social justice for individuals who create wealth and prosper because of it.

Book Review: New Deal or Raw Deal? by Burton Folsom

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

Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal? is a timely, informative and captivating read on the destructive economic policies on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration. This book is a valuable addition to the growing number of books on how government intervention, not free markets, plunged the United States deep into the Great Depression.

Folsom corrects many common misconceptions about the New Deal and the Great Depression in this book. The first is that President Hoover was a big government Republican and not a principled advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Consider the Smoot-Hawley Act, which imposed unprecedented tariffs on thousands of imported items. Not only did this drastically increase the prices of U.S. imports (hurting U.S. consumers), but it also encouraged European nations to impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports (hurting U.S. producers.) Furthermore, Hoover responded to the early onset of the Great Depression with disastrous economic regulations. He endorsed the Federal Farm Board, which issued over $500 million in cotton and wheat subsidies only to have the massive surpluses dumped on an oversaturated world market. Hoover also supposed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which spent over $1.5 billion on bailouts to failing banks and industries. (Sound familiar?)

Another major point of Folsom’s book is that many of FDR’s programs were struck down as unconstitutional. These include the National Industrial Recovery Act (later shortened to NRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). The NRA imposed economy-wide price controls and production regulations on domestic manufacturing. The AAA was similar in spirit, except it focused on price and production controls on agriculture. The extent of the controls evidently became so detailed where, for example, the purchasers of a live chicken were required by law to blindly reach into the coop to randomly choose a chicken. Customers were not free to choose whichever chicken they fancied. Recognizing the absurdity of this, one of the Supreme Court justices quipped “what if the chickens are all on the other side?” before the Supreme Court unanimously ruled the NRA unconstitutional.

Folsom also emphasizes the crushing tax burdens imposed by the New Deal. Under FDR, the highest income tax rate was 79%, meaning that four out of five earned dollars was confiscated by the government! According to Folsom, FDR also seriously entertained the idea of imposing a 99.5% income tax rate on all who earned over $100,000 in income. Flippantly justifying this, FDR joked that nobody in his administration would ever make that kind of money. Under FDR, the national debt grew more in the 1930s than it grew in the previous 150 years of the existence of the United States. Putting it in other words, Folsom indicates that if $100/minute was deposited into an account the day Columbus discovered North America up until FDR took office, there would not be enough money in this account to fully defray the costs of the New Deal.

The last major point that I will reiterate is the extensive level of corruption of the FDR administration. According to Folsom's research, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) offered large government handouts to whichever lobbyists ingratiated themselves most with the administration. FDR used the WPA to make or break the careers of public officials, depending on whether they supported him. This corruption rose to such an overt and perverse level that officials at the WPA used to cheerfully greet callers with “Democratic headquarters!” The Hatch Act, which forbids government employees from using their office for political activity, was passed in response to these activities.

Reading this book will reveal how truly appalling his administration was and how in many respects, FDR was like a gangster. In addition to the above, you will learn about how FDR used the IRS to intimidate political opponents, such as the principled banker Andrew Mellon as well as FDR’s unscrupulous court-packing scheme. You will learn about the sheer arbitrary nature of FDR’s economic controls. This cannot be better exemplified than how, when advised to increase the unit price of gold from 19 cents to 22 cents, FDR proposed 21 cents since it was his “lucky number”.

Anyone interested in politics and economic history should read this book, before history repeats itself with the Obama administration.

The Amazon dot com version of this review can be found here. If you enjoyed this book review, please rate my review as helpful on Amazon dot com. The more favorable ratings I receive, the higher visibility they will have on Amazon. The complete collection of my Amazon book review can be found here.

Consumerism will not save us

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

The conventional view of economic growth now being discussed in the news prescribes higher consumer spending as the solution to the current economic recession.  The idea is that if people buy more big screen TV’s for Christmas, manufacturers will increase production, hire more workers, raise wages, and we’ll all live happily ever after.  As practiced in government policies, this mistaken belief is highly dangerous, and will lead to the exact opposite of its intended effects.  To explain why, I will apply my earlier principle that “same principles that apply to your personal finances… apply equally to the world at large, at all levels of economy activity” and that “political success requires advocating policies which violate these basic economic principles - and then evading the consequences of their own policies.”

First, we have to question the premise that maximizing economic growth is inherently good.  Consider the nature of a young person saving money for his future.   If all he cares only about is his income and net worth, he must spend every waking hour of his life working, advancing his career and investing everything but the bare essentials of survival.  Such a strategy will maximize present and future income at the cost of sacrificing the actual purpose of that income – to enjoy the values that his labor makes possible, including both consumer goods and time to relax and enjoy life with friends and loved ones.  If everyone employed such a strategy, our society would experience rapid economic growth – until we all dropped dead from exhaustion or depression.  In fact, social and economic progress requires that we devote some resources to long-term investments such as hobbies, art, and philosophy to develop our careers, values, and other opportunities to improve our lives.

Second, the lack of a consumer culture is not an impediment to economic growth, as resources that are not consumed are invested into new markets and improving the capital resources needed to expand future production.  If our workaholic forfeits a new car now to buy a better car at some point in the future, his savings are not lost.  Instead of being directed into present consumption, his savings become the investment capital for new factories and R&D into cheaper and better cars.  Thus is why such high economic growth is possible in “Asian tigers” such as Japan and China – high rates of savings support rapid technological progress and investment into industry at the cost of a much more frugal lifestyle than in the West.  In fact, there is a tradeoff between current consumption and the savings available to invest in future production and increased economic growth.  There is no single right answer to this tradeoff – every individual must choose for himself how to balance present spending with investing in his future.  In a free market, the sum of individual savings rates becomes the real interest rate.

Third, the consequences of artificially manipulating interest rates are disastrous.    By expanding the money supply through manipulation of interest rates or (as is happening now) sending money directly from the printing presses to banks and other corporations, the government is devaluing savings and redirecting them into increased consumer spending.  This improves the economic statistics in the short run at the cost of wiping out the resources set aside for long-term capital improvements.  For the last few decades, America’s spending binge has been funded by foreign investment and rapid technological innovation, but ultimately, unless we drastically cut our consumption, and direct our income into savings and repaying our debts, we will find our money increasingly worthless both here and internationally.  If you are wondering how bad hyperinflation could get, just look at Zimbawbe, were life expectancy has declined from 60 to 37/34, unemployment is at 80%, and as much as half the surviving population has left the country.

Quick Roundup 383

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

Forthcoming: The Objective Standard

Via Principles in Practice:

The print edition of the Winter issue of The Objective Standard is at press and will be mailed shortly; the online version will be accessible to subscribers beginning December 20. For promotional purposes, "Capitalism and the Moral High Ground" and "Reason or Faith: The Republican Alternative" are available early and to all.

The contents of the Winter issue are:

From the Editor
Letters & Replies

ARTICLES

"Capitalism and the Moral High Ground" by Craig Biddle
"Reason or Faith: The Republican Alternative" by John David Lewis
"Net Neutrality: Toward a Stupid Internet" by Raymond C. Niles
"Bubble Boy: Alan Greenspan's Rejection of Reason and Morality" by Gus Van Horn
"The Assault on Energy Producers" by Brian P. Simpson
"Demystifying Newton: The Force Behind the Genius" by Gena Gorlin
"Errors in Inductive Reasoning" by David Harriman

BOOKS REVIEWED

New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America by Burton Folsom Jr. (reviewed by Eric Daniels)
Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 by Adam Fairclough (reviewed by Gus Van Horn)

If you have not yet subscribed to TOS, you can do so online or by calling 800-423-6151. And the Standard makes a great Christmas gift for your active-minded friends, colleagues, and relatives. Everyone concerned with the future should be reading this journal today.

It hasn't even arrived yet and it's already my favorite issue!

67 Years Ago Yesterday

Pearl Harbor was attacked. What better way to remember than to recommend John Lewis's "No Substitute for Victory" to a friend?

Review of The Deniers

Over at Capitalism Magazine, there is a thought-provoking review by Jay Lehr of The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud, by Lawrence Solomon, a "longtime environmental activist" who wondered why so many scientists were disputing the global warming "consensus" and began interviewing them. This book was the ultimate result.

Global warming has become a critical question for citizens who must decide whether the cures being bandied about are not in fact worse than the disease.

In matters of health, most intelligent citizens seek a second opinion before undergoing a serious medical procedure, but in the case of global warming, a second opinion is exactly what global warming activists do not want you to seek, for fear it will reduce the effectiveness of their fear-mongering. Therefore, we are treated to a continuous drumbeat of the words, "the science is settled."

All the scientists Solomon interviews in his book are prominent in climate science and are not just nitpicking over the interpretation of some small piece of data. Throughout the book Solomon artistically includes boxes of highlighted quotes from his subjects, taken from their own publications. [bold added]

Lehr, author of Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, of which I own a copy, raises a very good point, and his many examples from the book will cast serious, much-needed doubt on the often outrageous claims coming from global warming fear-mongers. I'll probably put this one on my Christmas wish list, but I suspect that, like this review, the book will have failed to challenge the premise in this debate that really demands challenging: the notion that the government has any business interfering with the economy period, global warming or not.

Nice Parody

Via Adrian Hester comes the following parody of "The Way I Are". You needn't have any familiarity with the original to enjoy this!


And if you like that, there appears to be plenty more where that came from at HotForWords, whose author explains, "Who is HotForWords? Her name is Marina Orlova, she's 27 and she's a philologist!"

-- CAV

ART ATTACK WITH LEE SANDSTEAD

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Check out Art Attack with Lee Sandstead! [Via Hence the Elizabethan.][Editor's note to Lee: See you in NYC next year?]

HELP ILLUSTRATED IDEAS WITH WORDPRESS

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

From Robert Tracy's post, Word Press Upgrade Easy?!:

I’m an image man, and a trader. Anyone out there who can do the upgrade for me without losing what I’ve got, I propose a trade. You do the upgrade for me. I make a graphic or any other image of your desire for you. As long as my image doesn’t require creating a traditional drawing or painting in the traditional manner. I rarely take commissions on my traditional work, and besides it takes too long.

I know I have few viewers of my blog. Of these I ask to spread the word on my offer. (Illustrated Ideas, December 6, 2008.)

I think he needs help with his RSS feed too. I have his feed on my Blog List, but I don't get his latest posts listed on my blog. It looks like this at the moment:

Illustrated Ideas
Introducing Brian Faulkner, Poet. - I’ve found a living poet who seems to possess an unlimited imagination. I find delight, inspiration and encouragement in his works. Find him at: Brian Faul...
9 months ago

Stop Drinking Responsibly, Adults! You Might Corrupt the Binge-Drinking Children!

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Wow, this story is undoubtedly the worst kind of false-alarmist local television news:

Despite years of fighting their "party school" reputation, the University of Colorado hosts regular drinking events for staff, students and visitors, a CALL7 hidden-camera investigation found.

Over several days, CALL7 investigators visited the Boulder campus, finding drinking events that appear to have little to do with enhancing either research or education at CU.

[Scary, bad, scary... the story continues...]

Here's what the story is actually talking about: After departmental colloquia and other scholarly events, alcoholic beverages are sometimes served to and consumed by the faculty, graduate students, and visitors in moderation to facilitate friendly conversation. In other words, the legal grown-ups in an academic department awkwardly chat over a glass of bad wine in a plastic cup after a somewhat boring lecture. Notably, such alcohol cannot be purchased with state funds; it can only be purchased with money from donors who must sign a form saying that they understand that the money might be used to purchase alcohol.

According to 7News reporters, Arthur Kane and Tony Kovaleski, such events are "parties" of the same sort that make CU Boulder known as a "party school." Somehow, departments are setting a bad example for the many CU Boulder undergraduates who regularly drink themselves into a blackout, rub genitals to persons unknown to them, and fall asleep in their own vomit.

In other words, responsible drinking by legal adults is a serious problem at CU Boulder that must be stamped out immediately, lest underage binge drinkers get the wrong idea.

Um, okay.

A Taste of Libertarianism

By Greg Perkins from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Well, here's a little integration that caught my google-alerted eye: "John Galt Republican."

A libertarian columnist at nolanchart.com coined the term for himself, and now lays it out for the rest of us:

I submit, to a candid world, my explicit definition of what it means to be a 'John Galt Republican'. And since Ayn Rand was agnostic with regards to political parties during her life, I've also realized that you can prefix your own political party affiliation with 'John Galt', if you agree with the items of definition, below.

These three of the 14(!) elements pretty much say it all:

1) You've read one or more of Ayn Rand's works, and by doing so, your world views have either been changed or strengthened to a positive degree.

5) You do not care to talk about Ayn Rand's (or anyone else's) metaphysical views.

13) OPTIONAL: You have an affinity for laissez faire capitalism.

Good grief, what a mess. Capitalism as optional?? And in a political context, no less?
Rand/Galt advocates an integrated system of philosophy -- each element is essential and intertwined with the rest. As I commented there,

This part of a candid world can only say: Rand understood that her politics flowed from her metaphysics, and she showed how capitalism was its only valid expression. I know who John Galt is, and he would have nothing to do with the vast majority of those meeting this confused "definition."

What's the point of adding that Galt qualifier if it doesn't really mean anything? Sheesh.

The High Cost of Washington's Price Manipulation Policy

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

The High Cost of Washington's Price Manipulation Policy

By Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

For decades Washington has been manipulating prices to encourage homeownership and "steer" the economy. To "incentivize" you to buy a house, it made mortgage payments tax deductible, largely exempted homes from capital gains taxes, and created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After the stock market tumbled in 2001 and 2002, Washington established a policy of artificially low interest rates that created the illusion of cheap credit; leery of the stock market, and looking for someplace else to put all this easy money, Americans began buying homes in droves. 

But eventually the drug-induced high of artificial credit wore off, and out-of-whack housing prices plummeted, sparking the financial crisis. What was Washington's response? It ramped up its price manipulation policy, injecting us with a new round of "easy money" amphetamine:  Bush doled out "stimulus" checks, the Treasury began funneling billions into banks, and the Fed started frantically slashing interest rates. And, we are told, this is only the beginning. A new dose of bailouts, interest rate cuts, and "stimulus" giveaways is just around the corner.

Maybe it's time for a new approach. How about we start thinking of ways to address this crisis by getting the government out of the business of price manipulation--and let prices, from home values to interest rates, be determined by people’s free choices and the law of supply and demand?

This will require some unconventional thinking--and here's a suggestion to get us started: free up the housing market by freeing up immigration. That's bound to be controversial, but indulge us for a moment.

Right now the housing market is in disarray. Too many homes built for our current population has sent prices spiraling downward, and millions of homeowners, stuck with mortgages they can't afford and houses they can't unload, are facing foreclosure. Meanwhile, there are millions of peaceful people around the globe eager to bring their wealth, talent, and ambition to this country, but can't because Washington forcibly prevents them from immigrating.

This government-enforced cap on the number of potential home-buyers is just another instance of price manipulation. Imagine if the number of annual immigrants increased from around 650,000 a year to, say, five million. Virtually overnight we would see money pour into the American real estate market, as millions of new businessmen and workers bought and rented homes. Not only would this eliminate the oversupply of houses, we would enjoy the broader economic benefits of welcoming legions of highly skilled and motivated individuals into the American economy.

You might be thinking, "Won't this lead to lower wages or unemployment at a time when we can least afford it?" The history of this country attests to the fact that, in the long run, immigration fosters economic growth. Even in the short run, however, the effect on wages and employment is an open question--it depends on how much capital and entrepreneurial acumen the new immigrants bring and create.

There are many other simple measures we could take to roll back the government's manipulation of prices. For instance, we could eliminate restrictions on bank ownership, which coercively limit how much capital banks can raise.

Besides such quick, immediate steps to end government price distortions, we need a long-term strategy to eliminate all government policies that manipulate prices. We need to eliminate the countless regulatory shackles on financial institutions, which distort market forces and encourage reckless actions. We need to put an end to the government’s crusade to encourage homeownership through Fannie and Freddie, the Community Reinvestment Act, tax code manipulation, and many other avenues. Above all, we need to end the government's ability to set interest rates and create inflationary booms--and their inevitable busts--by phasing out the Federal Reserve and allowing the United States to return to a gold standard.

These would be radical reforms, to be sure--but that's because the government has been radically expanding its price manipulation policies for the better part of a century. We're seeing where that path leads. It's time to start moving in a new direction.

Yaron Brook is the president of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. Don Watkins is a writer at the Ayn Rand Center. 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 Times That Try Men's Souls

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

As I am sure many ROR readers have noticed, I have not been posting much of late. This is due in part to a responsibility I took starting in mid-September. I more or less accepted the task of being Mr. Nanny to a five year old girl as her mother sat through the murder trial of her husband, Army Captain Phillip Esposito, who was ruthlessly killed in Iraq alongside First Lieutenant Louis Allen by Alberto Martinez, a solider under Phillip's command.

This Thursday, after three and a half years of delay and subterfuge and two months of grueling and heart-wrenching trial, the victims of this outrage received their so-called justice by the Army: they were told that the killer of their loved ones was "not guilty" of the crime of murder by a military court martial. They were told that there was not sufficient circumstance to justify even a minor conviction and that a murderer should walk free.

Needless to say, I am numb. We are all numb. Siobhan, Phillip's wife, expressed it best on her website (and please leave a comment there; all the messages of support and encouragement are truly appreciated):

"He slaughtered our husbands and that’s it!"

Those are the words of my dear friend Barbara Allen whose husband was also killed alongside mine by this despicable man.

I am disgusted. This is a miscarriage of justice. My husband took an oath and died in fulfillment of it. The officers and non-commissioned officers who sat in judgment of Alberto Martinez betrayed their oath. Their task was to ensure justice and they failed utterly. I want them to pay for their failure.

They have said in a time of war you can take a personal grudge and turn it into premeditated murder and get away with it. He got away with murder. How can that be?

How do I explain to my daughter that her father would give his life to an institution that would turn his back on him so many times? How do I find the words? How do I come to grips with it myself?

I'm afraid for myself and my child. This man who murdered my husband leered at me in the courtroom in front of the jury. If he was innocent he would feel nothing but compassion for our families and would have shown it.

Barbara and I have been betrayed. The fact that it was by men and women who wore the same uniform as our husbands and claimed to share the same values makes this both sickening and wrong. This is the second worst day of my life.

Thank God for my family and friends whose untiring support gives me the strength to carry on (and some days, to keep living).

I am so deeply proud to be among those friends and to have been entrusted with the care of Siobhan and Phillip's daughter, Madeline. I wasn't given only the responsibility to feed Madeline or drive her to school by Siobhan while she was away during the week--I was given the mandate to act as Madeline's mentor in her mother's absence, to share my knowledge and values as I took it upon myself to give her discipline and to help to explain to her the discipline, knowledge and values of her father.

And thus I have taken this child to the artwork in Washington that portrays dignity, valor, love of freedom and the thirst for justice and told her how in that she can come to know just who her father was. I have answered her questions as she struggled to come to grips with the meaning of life and death in a way that no five year old should ever be forced to have to understand, especially by an act of cruelty. I have held her in my arms as she wept in longing for her mother as this woman fights for her fallen husband.

And now I stand staggered as this child that I have come to so deeply love has been forced to live with her own thirst for justice unquenched. Like all who love these people, I must stand powerless and watch them suffer. It's a nightmare—but only worse. I must live knowing that neither I nor these people that I care about will ever wake up from it.

Yet in the face of all this madness, you would be stunned at the strength of these people that I have come to know. You can take little more away from them but they are still standing tall. And let me tell you of their compassion. My grandmother died the day before the verdict. All I will say is that Madeline's concern for me went well beyond one would expect from a child of five.

I will soon write a book sharing all I have seen here. I'm still trying to take it all in because there have been so many moments that it will take time just to sort them all out, let alone describe them with any justice.

Justice. To give to he that which he deserves. I have seen so much injustice here that I have to ask just what kind of world I live in. And yet I have also seen its polar opposite. I have seen the incredible love of a woman and mother for her fallen husband and innocent child. I have seen a child who will no doubt grow into a remarkable woman in her own right. And I will tell the world of it.

It may be inconvenient to some that Phillip Esposito and Louis Allen were murdered by one of their own solders in time of war and that the killer was allowed to go scot free by members of the Army that both men served; an episode better swept under the rug than acknowledged for the appalling travesty that it is. All I will say is this: it is not inconvenient and embarrassing to me.

The Crown Prince of Collectivism

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

As one pundit observed, there is no such government position as “The Office of the President-Elect.” Yet, it is a measure of Barack Obama’s hubris (and vanity) that for a time he held press conferences whose locus was a lectern bearing the splayed federal eagle encircled by the fictive and powerless title, a knock-off of the Presidential Seal. The title is as phony as a three-dollar bill. Or, for that matter, as a dollar bill, since the dollar bill is just a piece of paper declared to be the sole legal tender of the land, backed by nothing but the fictive “credit“ of the U.S. government, which is currently on a spending spree.

There was a time when one could tender a federal “pay to bearer on demand” note or certificate of any denomination in any bank and receive gold or silver specie in return. What passes for currency now is just glorified scrip and clad zinc.

Apparently, Obama’s staff may have read on the Internet some dissatisfaction with the sign among his supporters, and also some mockery from his opponents, and recommended a more modest form of hubris. Gone now is the whole bogus seal of office, and the title appears on a sign without embellishment. I have heard no reports of any journalist at one of these press conferences questioning the employment of the fictive title. Doubtless the person who dared challenge Obama on the counterfeit seal of office or the title would be banished from further news conferences.

Obama’s hubris is also a measure of the sanction granted him by large sections of the electorate and of the news media, a sanction he is very much aware of and is exploiting. It has given him leave to behave like a royal heir presumptive preparing for his imminent succession to the throne, conditioning himself to govern his subjects, many of whom want to be conditioned, governed, led, and told what to do and why. It is a servility he is also very much aware of and has not hesitated to exploit, as well.

Watching the press question Obama, one has the sense that journalists are not so much seeking clarification on policy or even so much as a fact, as asking for orders about what to think and say. And the president-elect is not shy about giving them. The press and news media have replaced a search for truth with a yearning for belief, even if it is suspected that the truth is buried beneath a mountain of lies and well-cultivated deceptions about the man, about his ideas, about his character, about his intentions.

In modern journalism, truth is a regrettable option, to be leavened with artful palaver. One can only despise a press that reports half-lies as the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Claude Rains, as the diplomat Dryden in Lawrence of Arabia, remarked about men who repress the truth: “…A man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it.”

Obama’s proposed economic agenda, which will include a socialist or Marxist “redistribution” plan under a more palatable name, is as transparently specious as the notion of “Intelligent Design.” (Were dinosaurs an instance of Unintelligent Design? Was their creator not as omniscient as has always been credited? Or were they an instance of divine planned obsolescence? There’s food for thought for creationists.) It is not any more intelligently designed than George W. Bush’s or Henry Paulson’s. Obama’s publicists, who now include most of the news media, are doing their best to assure the country that he is not a left-wing radical ready to seize the property and wealth of the rich and the upper middle class, but a “centrist” ready to compromise and “reach across the aisle” to find better bipartisan ways to salvage the economy and incidentally to ensure “social justice.”

Perhaps the most telling and honest appraisal of Obama’s present actions and intentions was voiced by Michael Gerson, writing for The Washington Post on December 3, in his column “Closet Centrist”:

“…Obama’s appointments reveal something important about current Bush policies. Though Obama’s campaign savaged the administration as incompetent and radical, Obama’s personnel decisions have effectively ratified Bush’s defense and economic approaches during the past few years. At the Pentagon, Obama rehired the architects of President Bush’s current military strategy -- [Robert] Gates, Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Raymond Odierno. At the Treasury Department, Obama has rehired one of the main architects of Bush’s current economic approach [Timothy Geithner].

“This continuity does not make Obama an ideological traitor. It indicates that Bush has been pursuing centrist, bipartisan policies -- without getting much bipartisan support. The transition between Bush and Obama is smoother than some expected, not merely because Obama has moderate instincts but because Bush does as well. Particularly on the economy, Bush has never been a libertarian; he has always matched a commitment to free markets with a willingness to intervene when markets stumble.”

That is the most perceptive admission to date to be found in the liberal press on the absence of any fundamental difference between Republican and Democratic economic policies. But Gerson did not mention Obama’s nomination of Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and former president of Harvard University, to be head of the National Economic Council. He is regarded as some kind of economic wizard and troubleshooter.

David Leonhardt of The New York Times, however, let the cat out of the bag in his article of November 26, “The Return of Larry Summers”:

“His favorite argument today…goes like this: To undo the rise in income inequality since the late ‘70s, every household in the top 1 percent of the distribution, which makes $1.7 million on average, would need to write a check for $800,000. This money could then be pooled and used to send out a $10,000 check to every household in the bottom 80 percent of the distribution, those making less than $120,000. Only then would the country be as economically equal as it was three decades ago.”

One cannot get more socialistic than that. Never mind, says Summers, the rewards of wise investments by private individuals -- that has nothing to do with “social justice” -- never mind the capital represented by the multiple $800,000 checks that would not be ploughed back into the economy as investments in productive enterprises, never mind cause and effect, never mind the rights of the rich: all the “little guys” must be awarded their fair share of the economic pie, and if that hurts the rich and reduces them and everyone else to penury, too bad. We will have social and economic justice even if it penalizes everyone, but especially the rich, and on that foundation of theft and misery we will build a more equitable society.

No one should doubt that Obama shares with Summers his collectivist fantasy land, nor that he regards Summers’ redistribution idea as just an ideological day-dream. There will be no reality-checking Austrian or laissez-faire economists in an Obama administration, just as there were none in George W. Bush’s.

“It’s not that I want to punish your success,” Obama told the Plumber Joes of the nation. “I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a good chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody….I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

For a while, perhaps, up until the time the money is spent, goods become scarce, the capital is consumed. Only blame will be in plentiful supply, and it will be directed at everything and everyone but the chief culprit: the government.

Obama’s presumptuousness is in sync with the giddy, arrogant sanctimony too evident now in the political aristocracy. Witness the malicious glee, for example, with which politicians are subjecting cringing auto executives to egalitarian-premised interrogations, executives who are guilty of asking for their own “bailout,” not to mention of submitting themselves to the interrogation. (Do not expect them to emulate William H. Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, and reply to their interrogators and the press, “The public be damned!“) If you ever wanted a concrete picture of Ayn Rand’s “drooling beast” (The Fountainhead) look to the Senate and House, particularly at Henry Waxman, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi, and pick your villain. There is no reasoning with them, their power-lust is gracelessly shameless, and they mean to deliver the final death blows to what remains of freedom in this country.

Do not count on Obama undergoing, at some future date, when his agenda self-destructs, an eye-opening epiphany concerning the catastrophic consequences of his economic and social policies, which will simply punctuate the cumulative economic and social policies of the past, including Republican ones. If he is true to his model of FDR, with whom the press and news media are comparing him, he will not acknowledge the wrongness of his policies. After all, FDR never apologized for prolonging the Great Depression.

Do not grant Obama the meanest shadow of a doubt. Should things not go right, when reality catches up with his policies and those of his predecessors in office, he and his advisors will simply blame America for not being statist enough and Americans for being too selfish. They will blame all those Americans who will have exercised their modicum of volition and liberty and acted in the name of self-preservation and upset their calculations and plans. His cabinet and advisors are largely composed of persons who hate America -- that is, America the land of the free -- all of whom will want to force everyone to tow the line of statism.

Barack Obama claims that he does not mind disagreement, but has also said that as president-elect and as president, he will ultimately make policy, regardless of the rationality of any disagreement.

He will be Head of State, and he will give orders. Make way for the King.

Quick Roundup 382

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

Will Obama be a Centrist?

The burning question, now that America has elected Barack Obama President, is (still!) how he will govern. In one sense, this should come as no surprise, since this election came down, at least on the party primary level, to who could get away with saying the least. This is a particularly dangerous implication of the prevalence of pragmatism in our culture, for it both removes debate from the equation in elections and leaves us open to nasty surprises: We won't know what we have until after the swearing-in.

Tony Blankley pretty well summarizes this state of affairs -- although he does not see its cause -- at the start of a column that takes Obama's rather centrist-looking cabinet appointments so far as his point of departure.

There is something degrading about serious, prominent political people of the left or right (to say nothing of the broader public) being forced to play policy hide-and-seek with the president-elect of the United States. And there is something presumptive about a president-elect who is very satisfied to keep the public guessing about what he stands for and what he plans to do. It is redolent of the most cynical of 19th-century European politics. But if he wants us to play the guessing game, I'll play.

Blankley cautions us: "Do not take too much comfort from his appointees. Brace for the change you do not believe in."

More Speculation on Obama ...

... is to be found at the group blog, The New Clarion, which Bill Brown and Myrhaf launched just before I broke for Thanksgiving. Specifically, Myrhaf is "in search of the big O", as he puts it himself.

I found the following, which he quoted from Commentary magazine, especially interesting:

It was Michelle [Obama], [David] Axelrod remembers, who stopped the show. "You need to ask yourself, Why do you want to do this?” she said directly. “What are hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?" Obama sat quietly for a moment, and everyone waited. "This I know: When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently," he said. "And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently."

This reminds me of a quote I recently tried (unsuccessfully) to unearth to the effect that Obama hopes, as a politician, to "make everyone happy". In any event, even Obama's not being as hard left as he could be will not necessarily help us. As Myrhaf notes, "All Obama has to do is continue Bush's policies to take America toward socialist hell."

You can find The New Clarion in the sidebar from now on

Even the Democrats Fear Her

Via Matt Drudge:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) moves since the November elections have shaken up some of her colleagues, with some looking over their shoulders and others worried about how the Speaker will lead her expanded majority in 2009.

...

Pelosi's effort to make some Democrats anxious could be a calculated maneuver as she seeks to maximize the effectiveness of her caucus heading into 2009. Pelosi's hard-charging tone and decisions over the past month have sent a message to her colleagues: Don't get too comfortable.

...

The seniority system that tempers the power of the Speaker is teetering, having received a body blow from Rep. Henry Waxman’s (D-Calif.) coup at the Energy and Commerce Committee.

When chairmen aren't flinching at the possibility of a challenge from a junior member, they can look forward to being bounced by term limits in four years. That's a change that Pelosi quietly endorsed in the 2007 House rules package.

...

Few members clash publicly with Pelosi. Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), who were at odds with Pelosi over the last few years, were stripped of their top committee posts.

Centrists are grumbling that their growing ranks aren't represented in the leadership team that Pelosi shaped through back-room arm-twisting. The so-called Blue Dogs, while publicly celebrating President-elect Obama's commitment to "pay-go," are wondering when the stimulus balloon stops expanding. [The use of a term so similar to "bubble" was non-ironic, as far as I can tell. --ed]

Will the "Blue Dogs" stand up to Pelosi, or compliantly roll over?

Our liberty is at the mercy of the answers to such questions as whether Obama is a pragmatist or an even emptier suit; and whether today's so-called centrists will have the cajones to stand up to a lipstick leftist -- if they actually want to, that is -- thanks to the wholesale abandonment of principled thinking in America today.

A Crisis for Talk Radio

An interesting article by conservative talk show host Michael Medved comes close to naming a far greater crisis for conservative talk radio than even the threat of the effective return of the "Fairness" Doctrine. (Both censorship and the intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement are crises for individual rights.)

Talk radio led the opposition to the Clinton juggernaut (and flourished mightily in the process) as a mass audience medium that appealed simultaneously to all dissenters from the Democratic drive for domination. The great power of the medium involved its ability to change minds -- but that requires drawing significant numbers of listeners who don't already agree with you. [bold added]

Unfortunately, as a religious conservative, Medved espouses a philosophical approach to ideas that cuts the "ability to change minds" off at the knees. If the best argument you can give for your views ultimately amounts to "because" (i.e., you base your whole worldview on faith), you will be by that very fact unable to do anything more constructive than report news and point out obvious flaws in your political opponent.

"Why on earth should I listen to Micheal Medved?" Is a fair question, and he can't answer it. The field is thus wide open for a real, rational alternative to left-wing socialism and right-wing theocracy. Thanks for the tip, Michael.

-- CAV

Starnesville

By softwareNerd from Software Nerd,cross-posted by MetaBlog

When I first drove through Detroit, I saw a poverty-stricken city, with burnt-out homes, tall abandoned office buildings and hotels with boarded doors and broken windows, and liquor-stores neighboring some reverend's loudly-advertised house of redemption. Poverty was not all, though. Worse still were the wide, well-laid boulevards, and the intricately carved stone facades... the evidence of better times. Not just poverty, but decay.

The industrial equivalent can be found driving into Chicago. One drives past Gary, Indiana, with huge factories standing abandoned.

But the "prize" for resembling Starnesville (from Atlas Shrugged), probably goes to a "Detroit suburb" built in the Brazilian jungle.

Activists Learning from Business: Recommendations from John Drake

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Shortly before Thanksgiving, John Drake of Try Reason posted the following comment on William E. Perry's post How Free Is Speech?:

Yes advocacy is essential. But as with anything, understanding reality is essential. If your goal is cultural change, it is important to understand how ideas are adopted by individuals in society. Are there any over-arching trends that might help guide your efforts into a more efficient programs of advocacy? For a partial answer to this question,

I recommend the book Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. In Rogers terms, innovations can be technology OR ideas (including philosophic ideas). After 1000s of research projects over many decades looking at many different innovations, some overarching trends are observed as to how ideas and technologies spread through society. Like much research today, the work tends to be highly descriptive, not normative. But there are a few practical applications, such as on page 361, where he very briefly discusses "Strategies for Getting to Critical Mass". I will note that [the Ayn Rand Institute] is explicitly pursuing 3 of the 4 strategies.

A couple years ago, I wrote a few notes on Objectivism in relation to Diffusion of Innovation theory: see here. (As a disclaimer, I no longer associate with some groups or websites listed in that post...many thanks to Diana for helping me see the light). There is much more I would add today if I could find the time to write about it.

I ordered the book John recommended, then wrote in reply: "Thanks for the book recommendation. Do you have any other books on business management that you think those of us interested in spreading ideas should definitely read?" I also e-mailed John privately to tell him that I'd be interested in posting anything that he might write up as a NoodleFood post. Here it is, with links added. You can also find it on his blog here.

Although my initial recommendation was from the perspective of how best to spread ideas, I thought it might be useful to suggest books about management that may be helpful when speaking or writing to/for businessmen and women. I also thought it might be useful to suggest books on how to run activism campaigns as a business. I've mixed each perspective, but hopefully you can find what you need.

In all honesty, there really are not a lot of management books I would recommend for the express purpose of spreading ideas. I had a seminar in strategic management where we read many of the classic management books. Except for the one by Peter Drucker, they were a cesspool of bad philosophy propagated as intelligent thought. Peter Selzinck, in Leadership in Administration, gives explicit credit to the pragmatists, Dewey and James. Herbert Simon (Nobel prize winner in economics) has a chapter in Administrative Behavior titled "Fact and Value in Decision-making" that would probably make Peikoff's head explode. It was pure philosophic torture getting through that seminar. Interesting enough, most of the authors were Harvard professors of business. According to the professor of our seminar (who was himself a DBA from Harvard's school of business), these books were all part of a seminar required of all Harvard DBAs back then. I'm not sure if these books are still taught at Harvard, but the influence of these authors is felt in the business schools and business research studies throughout the U.S. today. The Harvard influence over the business research has lead to few useful books, in my opinion.

I mentioned Drucker's above as the exception. Pretty much anything he has written I would recommend. His first book, The Practice of Management, is superbly written and the one best books on management and decision-making that I have ever read. While written in the 50s, it largely defined how business evolved over the next 30 years and the best at describing businesses as they are run today. I would recommend it to any Objectivist activist that plans on speaking to business executives and/or business professionals.

I would also recommend a newer book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Friedman. This book is about globalization and the role technology has played in changing the world workforce, particularly in the past 10 years. While not as essentialized as it could be, it does offer a good view of the changing nature of information exchange and how its effecting businesses, cultures, and personal experiences. I use parts of this book in my Introduction to Information Systems class.

For running your activism as a business, I would recommend Drucker's book as well as The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber (Chapter 1). The E-Myth (entrepreneurial myth) posits that most entrepreneurs fail because they get into business for the wrong reasons. Its been quite a few years since I read it, but my take-away was that many entrepreneurs fail because they are good technicians, but poor businessmen. They think that just because they know the skill or subject (for [Objectivists], read philosophy), they can be effective entrepreneurs (read activists). This book offers various ways to overcome these common failures. For example, think turn-key when designing your activism. Also, use metrics to measure effectiveness.

I don't know much about marketing, but I imagine a good introductory book on marketing may be useful to activists as well.

From other fields:

I've already mentioned Diffusion of Innovations, which is actually from the field of sociology.

Another book from sociology and psychology fields that uses many of the ideas from Diffusion of Innovations without giving it much due is a recent best seller called The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. The focus again is on how ideas spread through society, from cool shoes to Sesame Street. It isn't a great book (not as good as Diffusion of Innovations), but it may be of some value.

I give a very limited recommendation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. If you have ever heard the phrase "paradigm shift", Kuhn is the one who invented it. Philosophically, the book is way off base. Essentially, Kuhn claims scientists fail to integrate new facts of realty due to their adoption of inbred intrinsicist thinking. The only way to overcome this inbred intrinsicism is with outsiders who come up with new ideas and create scientific revolutions. This leads Kuhn to suggest the cure for intrinicism is subjectivism. That being said, the book contains a number of interesting historic examples about how radical new ideas are rejected and/or adopted by a community. If you can ignore Kuhn's philosophy and focus on the facts illustrated in the book, you may be able to take away something of value.

I've also read a number of other good business books, but I'm not sure how useful they'd be for [Objectivist activists]. And I'm sure there are plenty I haven't read.

Thank you, John! That's a very helpful bit of sources and commentary. Anyone else want to add their own recommendations? As always, the comments are open!

Progressive Fantasies

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Progressive hopes for July 4th, 2009, as reported in a fictional New York Times: www.nytimes-se.com. Click on some of the articles, if you have a strong stomach. They're quite revealing.

Save the Big Three, Kill the U.S. Auto Market

By Alex Epstein from The Ayn Rand Institute Media Releases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Save the Big Three, Kill the U.S. Auto Market
December 4, 2008

Washington, D.C.--Advocates of a bailout for the Big Three claim that if we allow these giants to fail, it will destroy the U.S. auto industry. “In fact,” said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, “it is the bailout, a veritable marriage between Detroit and Washington, that will destroy the U.S. auto industry.

“The Big Three have no right to demand that taxpayers risk money on them when private investors won’t. They do, however, have a right to demand the repeal of the policies that have helped destroy the auto industry. These include the labor laws that have forced them to acquiesce to economically catastrophic UAW demands, and fuel economy laws that have forced them to produce small cars that they can’t profit from given their labor costs. Indeed, the Big Three should have done this long ago--so that they would have been free to produce desirable cars at a profit in America, just as they do in scores of countries around the world.

“But instead of demanding their freedom and making a case to the market, the automakers are surrendering even more of their freedom to the government in exchange for taxpayer money. They have met Congress’s demand to commit to producing more small cars--even though it is small cars that have bankrupted the companies in the first place.

“By seeking handouts, not freedom, the auto industry is helping to destroy any remnant of a genuine auto market. In a real market, free companies would make money by producing the cars that free individuals judge best. In the new pseudo market, companies will make money by collecting taxpayer dollars in exchange for making whatever cars Washington tells them to. If this is what it means to save the U.S. auto industry, then the industry should die, and then real, freedom-seeking, profit-making companies might emerge.”

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What Pragmatic Thinking Gets You

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

I couldn't pass this one up. Hat tip: Carpe Diem

It's funny, yes, but at the same time there is a fundamental there I'm trying to figure out. I'll write more on it as well, but I've been amazed at the number of people who advocate some aspect of this ongoing government intervention in the economy. A recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by noted economists Oliver Hart and Luigi Zengales, entitled "Economists Have Abandoned Principle" articulates the same thing. I'm also seeing the same phenomena on a vast array of economics blogs.

Is the integration required to be able to trust Adam's Smith's invisible hand that much more difficult to make than the direct (although deeply flawed) action of government?

NOT "as in Beer," Please!

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

The apparently good news is that the FCC sounds almost like it is about to borrow a page from Ayn Rand's own playbook:

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is likely to consider a plan this month to auction public airwaves...

But then the shoe immediately drops to the floor with a loud thud:

... with a mandate that the winning bidder set aside some for free Internet nationwide, a proposal staunchly opposed by the cell phone industry.

So, instead of the winning bidder actually owning the airwaves with no strings attached (which is what Rand called for), he will be a government pawn, sometimes taking orders from the government, and sometimes using his "property" as the government will permit, or hadn't gotten around to prohibiting yet. (Historically, we have moved from auctioning off others as slaves to auctioning off ourselves! We ought to try ending slavery, in all its forms, instead.)

Predictably, the government will not only tell this new ISP what he may or may not transmit, it will also place its foot in the door of regulating all Internet content.

Also lining up against Martin's proposal are free speech advocates, who don't like a provision that would require the winning bidder to block pornography and other offensive content from the free Internet access. (See Note below.)

"Other offensive content," as determined by the government? It is disappointing enough (although par for the course) that a Republican would make such a proposal, but a shocking display of stupidity that one would make it on the eve of his own party becoming the minority opposition even as the Democrats are already pondering some way to effectively bring back the "Fairness" Doctrine, and expand it to include the Internet. Yes. Let's introduce government regulation into the only medium that is not already under the thumb of the government!

If this happens, brace yourselves for some pragmatist businessman to demand a "level playing field" for all ISPs -- by regulating all "equally", of course. Arguing to repeal such nonsense would be too troublesome, and pragmatism is all about taking the path of least resistance.

I fully agree with Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute, who discussed this proposal a little over a year ago and closed with the following.

Americans need to start recognizing airwaves as the private property they really are, and demand the abolition of the FCC. Then the government can hold a fair and just auction for the 700 MHz spectrum, and the others, in which each spectrum is not licensed but sold--no strings attached.

Not only would the current proposal not really be a sale, but it would greatly expand government power to violate individual rights.

-- CAV

Note: The very next sentence in this "paragraph" is:

Another concern is whether investors are willing to create the needed infrastructure for free Internet access in the recession-hit economy.

If a paragraph is supposed to be a complete unit of thought, why are these two sentences together? The first sentence details a legitimate argument against the government doing something that will fling the door wide open for it to violate freedom of speech, while the second merely describes something properly of concern only to someone wanting to build a big, free wireless network.

A quote an activist shortly afterwards explains what's going on: "Everybody likes the concept -- free broadband, free access to the Internet -- but in practice, the way the model is set up, it may present problems."

Thus the debate is not over whether we will get "free" (read: government-controlled) Internet, but how. And with the economy a mess, there might not be enough short-sighted people with money to throw around to make this happen.

Walking Cultural Activism: Of The World

By Greg Perkins from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Tammy and I thought it would be great to produce a series of T-shirt designs for those occasions when it is appropriate to wear our ideas on our sleeves. Bonus points if they aren't just provocative but actually spark some good engagement!

Alan Greenspan vs. Ayn Rand and Freedom

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

If you haven't yet read Alan Greenspan vs. Ayn Rand and Freedom by Harry Binswanger, published in Capitalism Magazine, I strongly recommend that you do so. It's a great article to send to people to who claim -- whether honestly or not -- that Alan Greenspan's actions over the last 25 years or so represent Ayn Rand's philosophy in any way, shape, or form.

Consider Dr. Binswanger's list of Alan Greenspan's betrayals of Ayn Rand's principles:

I can't say I knew Alan Greenspan, though, being an associate of Ayn Rand, I met him a few times in the 1960s. But by 1970--almost 40 years ago--I and a couple of other Objectivists in that circle already realized that Greenspan was compromising on her philosophy. Little did we know how far his anti-Rand journey would take him. As the years rolled on,

• he was hailed as the man who "saved" Social Security--by extending its confiscatory power,
  
• when Bill Clinton's State of the Union address called for socialized medicine, he rose to his feet, standing next to Hillary Clinton in giving a standing ovation to that proposal,
  
• he became head of the mammothly anti-capitalist Federal Reserve, directing the government's manipulation of money and credit,
  
• he provided a laudatory dust-jacket blurb for a book attacking Ayn Rand (by a woman he had "irrevocably" condemned in print in 1968). Yet he repeatedly refused to contribute to or lend his name to the Ayn Rand Institute,
  
• he wrote, in 1995, that government central banking is a necessity: "Only a central bank, with unlimited power to create money can guarantee that such a process ["a cascading sequence of defaults"] will be thwarted before it becomes destructive." (Note that we just witnessed this "cascading sequence of defaults" despite --or, actually, caused by --our central bank.),
  
• he wrote in his autobiography about coming to reject Objectivism: "as contradictions inherent in my new notions began to emerge . . . the fervor receded",
  
• and now he has blamed free markets (as if we had them!) for his failures at the Fed. In conceding that his "ideology" was wrong, he was understood to be saying Ayn Rand was wrong--even though he had long ago forgotten or evaded every essential of what Ayn Rand stood for.

Can it get any worse than that? Yes, it can -- and Dr. Binswanger lays out the case clearly. In essence, "a man who betrays Ayn Rand, and who wrecks the economy of the U.S. in carrying out that betrayal, then succeeds in shifting the blame onto Ayn Rand and capitalism." Lovely, no?

Go read the whole thing. And then post a link to it in the comments of every annoying blogger who claims that the current financial crisis is a refutation of Ayn Rand's ideas.

In Memory of Leon Trager (1928-2008)

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

I have been informed by Jack Crawford that Leon Trager, a long-time admirer of Ayn Rand passed away November 26th from pancreatic cancer. His newspaper obituary can be read here.

I first met Leon when I was a freshly minted Objectivist. As I am sure was the case with all who know him, I witnessed a man possessed with an infectious spirit and unbridled passion for life. At a crucial time in my intellectual development, Leon's personification of the Objectivist ideal helped solidify my understanding of what it meant to be an Objectivist and where Rand's ideas could take your life.

To share with you one such moment I had with Leon, I remember when he celebrated Christmas by throwing a magnificent party at his home. Already in his 70s, this was nevertheless the first time he had ever marked the holiday. The joy he shared was beyond description: we each sang, danced and laughed like no other. Everyone who had something to give of themselves did just that; my then wife who sang opera regaled us with her talent, another person joined her on the piano, other instruments were brought to bear and people who had never sung a verse in their life discovered their long-buried voice. It was all impromptu, all brought out in the richness and inspiration of Leon's warmth and hospitality.

And there, on the top of Leon's Christmas tree, shone a dollar sign in the place of the Star of Bethlehem, Leon's small testament to Ayn Rand's vision of the trader principle. Needless to day, the real testament was the man himself. Leon was an utterly selfish man and I utterly admired him for it.

I have heard though friends that Leon kept his spark and verve until the bitter end. Outlasting a diagnosis that put him in the grave long before he actually passed, I was told that he was still every bit the man he was right up until the bitter end. I am glad to hear it—I am thankful for Leon's example and I hope that I may do as well in following it.

Thus to Leon's family and loved ones, I extend my sincerest condolences and celebrate with them a life well lived. Leon will be missed, but I am glad for the opportunity to have known him. In its own way, it made all the difference to me.

Reflections from Reason

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Do we need a reminder of even how some of the better elements of the libertarian movement can be hostile to Ayn Rand? Perhaps not, but here's one that ran across my inbox a little while ago. It's a tidbit from a December 2008 Reason article on the origins of their magazine:

[Tibor] Machan: Manny [Klausner] was never an Objectivist, and even Bob [Poole] was more mild-mannered about it. I was the philosophically grounded one, but I stylistically repudiated the atmospherics of the Objectivist world. I was excommunicated back in 1963 from the Rand thing. [Oh whatever, Tibor.]

[Bob] Poole: We wanted a magazine for thinking people, not Randians. As time went on and various marketing strategies were tried it became clear that Rand was some people's cup of tea and not others', and if we wanted to be influential being an explicitly Objectivist magazine was not the recipe for doing that. [Emphasis added.]

Bob Poole's first comment is offensive as stated, but I'm willing to be generous, given that this was an "oral history." Perhaps he meant that he wanted a magazine for all thinking people, not just Randians. (I've seen Poole speak a few times; he never struck me as hostile to Objectivists. However, my memory might not be what it should on that score.)

However, it's his second comment -- that "Rand was some people's cup of tea and not others'" -- that's just so very libertarian. Reason couldn't possibly insist that their writers agree on any fundamental principles, like respect for reason, right? No way! That might alienate some people, namely people whose "cup of tea" is supernaturalism, mysticism, and altruism. So anything goes -- and the result is today's often disgustingly postmodern Reason. (Or rather, that's what it became after the departure of the sensible and interesting Virginia Postrel some years ago. I've paid it very little attention since that decline.)

The libertarian movement took so many ideas from Ayn Rand, while often spitting in her face in a manner worthy of James Taggart. If only they'd learned her most basic lesson -- that philosophy matters because it's the fundamental motor of human life -- the history of the last 50 years might be different.

Hsieh OpEd: Asking For Trouble in Health Care

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The November 22, 2008 edition of the Colorado Springs Gazette has published my OpEd on the bailout crisis and lessons for those advocating "universal health care":

Asking For Trouble in Health Care

Paul Hsieh, M.D., Guest Columnist

In the 1990s, politicians wanted to make home ownership as universal as possible. They used laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act to force banks to make unsustainable loans to millions of people. They also expanded quasi-government agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee these loans.

This scheme could last only a few years. In 2008, the housing bubble finally burst and economic reality caught up with the politicians. American taxpayers were stuck with the tab for these "toxic" mortgages. The result was the Wall Street Bailout of 2008 and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In 2008, politicians want to guarantee "universal health care" with new laws and new government programs. President-elect Barack Obama wants to require health insurers to sell policies whether or not those policies are economically sustainable (for instance by requiring them to issue policies regardless of pre-existing conditions). He has also proposed creating a massive new "National Health Insurance Exchange" to help ensure "universal coverage."

But no politician can evade the laws of economic reality. Massachusetts' program of "universal coverage" requires hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money a year to stay afloat, paid for by the taxpayers of the other 49 states. If the U.S .attempted this at a national level, there would be no one to bail us out.

When Obama's proposed national system inevitably collapses under the weight of market inefficiency and bureaucratic overhead, this will merely pave the way to fully socialized single-payer health care. Health care spending now comprises one-sixth of the U.S. economy. Forcing taxpayers to pay for everyone's medical expenses would make the $700 billion Wall Street bailout look like pocket change in comparison.

Even worse, under nationalized health care the government will eventually have to ration medical services to control costs. This is already commonplace in other countries. A Canadian woman who feels a lump in her breast oftens wait months before she receives the surgery and chemotherapy she needs. In contrast, an American woman can get the treatment she needs within days.

According to The Telegraph, Great Britain's National Health Service paid bonuses to primary care physicians who reduced the numbers of referrals to hospital specialists - thus forcing those doctors to choose between their oaths to their patients or the government which pays their salaries. Whenever government attempts to guarantee a "right" to health care, it must also control it. Bureaucrats then decide who gets what health care and when, not doctors and patients.

The fundamental problem with "universal health care" is the mistaken premise that health care is a "right." 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 health care that they purchase with their own money, are promised by prior contractual agreements, or are given to them via voluntary charity.

Attempting to guarantee an alleged "right" to health care must necessarily violate someone's actual rights - the rights of those compelled to pay for it. The ultimate victims will again be the taxpayers, just as they were the ultimate victims of the Wall Street bailout.

Instead of universal health care, we need free market reforms that reduce costs, reward individual responsibility, and respect individual rights. Some examples include eliminating mandatory insurance benefits, repealing laws that forbid purchasing health insurance across state lines, and allowing individuals to use Health Savings Accounts for routine expenses and to purchase low cost, catastrophic-only insurance for major expenses. Such reforms could lower costs up to 50 percent, making health insurance available to millions who cannot currently afford it.

We can't go back in time and avoid the Wall Street Bailout of 2008. But we can still make the right decision with respect to health care. We must reject calls for "universal health care" or else we'll be faced with a massive "Health Care Bailout of 2018." The events of the past few months have taught us some important lessons about economic reality. The only question is whether we're willing to learn from them.

Hsieh, of Sedalia, is the co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine.

Quick Roundup 381

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

The State vs. Sensible Investment

A few days ago, I read about a somewhat amusing unintended consequence of a government effort to help America get over her "addiction" to oil.

Domestic producers of the renewable fuel have been selling huge quantities of biodiesel in Europe and in other foreign markets, where prices are often better, and then receiving a $1-per-gallon tax credit from Uncle Sam.

Biodiesel, made in the U.S. mostly from soybean oil or [used] cooking oil from restaurants, is blended at low levels with petroleum diesel to reduce emissions and reliance on fossil fuels.

Today, American exports of biodiesel represent more than half of domestic output.

Biodiesel's $1-per-gallon subsidy, known as the "blender's tax credit," is available to U.S. companies that blend biodiesel with petroleum diesel and was intended to boost biodiesel production and encourage diesel marketers to buy the fuel. [bold added]

Setting aside the incompetent or deliberate equation of tax credits with subsidies -- stealing less from someone is not the same thing as handing him loot -- it is amusing that our all-knowing central planners failed to see such an obvious business opportunity, and that the Houston Chronicle's Brett Clanton seems to regard this as some sort of swindle by the energy industry: A business is keeping more of its own money is not somehow wrong.

The real crime here is that the government regularly and systematically loots corporations through taxation -- and then uses mild relief from taxation to steer companies into unproductive capital outlays, like biodiesel. The article goes on to note that, despite the tax credit and the ability of American biodiesel producers to export to more profitable markets, "many U.S. plants shut down temporarily this year after soaring vegetable oil prices made production too costly[, while s]ome ... that kept working relied on exports to stay afloat." Clearly, the time for biodiesel, at least for large scale production, has not arrived, if it ever will.

But the reporting is hardly the worst thing about this story. That would be a toss-up between the fact that many businessmen see this government interference in their affairs as a good thing, and the fact that some self-proclaimed opponents see this boondoggle as "financed by the taxpayers".

Our state tramples over our property rights daily (which it should not do) in the name of solving the imaginary crisis of global warming, elevating already high fuel prices it helped cause in the process, and even further hamstrings the energy industry's ability to solve the actual problem (i.e., getting the most economical fuel into our tanks as possible) by meddling further in its resource allocation!

And then Clanton hops on like a flea at the end of this to whine about business practices that actually make some sense -- at least within the limits of the artificial context of biodiesel production!

Christmas Note to Self (and, Possibly, Wife)

For the same reason I inquired about chairs awhile back, I found this product recommendation over at Lifehacker somewhat amusing and worth looking into. (Yeah, I've been down that wallet-free highway before!) The review is about an "All-Ett", an ultra-thin wallet that, despite being made of rip-stop nylon, at least looks like it might be presentable.

A cursory search for a larger image found one in this mixed review. (And I'm leaning towards a leather-clad "executive" version after seeing it.) Has anyone here used one of these, and, if so, have you anything to add to the product review?

Scott Powell Gives Thanks

As I hoped, Scott Powell has put together a very worthwhile Thanksgiving Day post. He begins by saying that, "Thanksgiving, properly conceived, is a time to pay tribute ... to those who have created the values that sustain us." Read the whole thing, especially the ending. I like the way this man thinks!

Nanny State Update


If you have any doubts that the state can and will intrude into every nook and cranny of our lives if we do not reverse the trend towards statism, you need only look across the Atlantic.

Without particularly looking for them, I found the following three news stories:

• Britain may ban happy hour at its pubs.
• The police will soon start handing out "free" flip-flops (at right) so drunkards in high heels don't injure themselves on the way home.
• A taxpayer-subsidized "graffiti wall" (above) was recently "vandalized" by a tax protester who merely used it for its stated purpose!

The last example is doubly ironic: The wall was built in a hare-brained attempt to protect property (from graffiti artists) by means of luring them with a wall built using property (in the form of money) stolen from citizens through taxation! If you violate the principle of property rights, you can not protect the property of all citizens.

-- CAV

An Army of Zeros

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

Coming soon to an Inbox near you is an email containing a scanned-in copy of a column by Norma White, a retired network engineer, along with the exhortation, "LETS GET BEHIND THIS ONE....SEND IT ON AND ON".

Needless to say, even if everyone actually "got behind this one", nothing substantive would happen because the column does not challenge any of the common premises that have made our country into the mess that it is.

It is easiest to see this on the matter of government expenditures:

Stop the abuse of our benevolent welfare system. We feed children free meals three times a day until they are 17. Churches give away good, clean clothes. Companies buy and donate school supplies. Emergency rooms provide health care at taxpayer expense and the food stamp program is buying food at home. What are parents doing for their children?

Since when has taking money away from its rightful owners -- which must be done sooner or later to fund welfare programs -- been "benevolent"? This system is inherently abusive! The only way to stop "abuse" in a system financed by theft is to do away with such a system, and begin consistently protecting property rights. In the meantime, everyone who wants to feel good about helping the poor is free to do so.

Ditto for "Stop all unnecessary spending so we will have the money for our nation's security, and to help needy and elderly Americans." Forget about the relative magnitudes of wasteful spending compared to the amount of money it takes to fund welfare state programs: What's "unnecessary"? (I nominate, "the government stealing money"!)

Call this the "pork buster fallacy". As I have said before:

Such grassroots efforts as "Pork Busters" form when enough people become outraged at such things as that infamous "bridge to nowhere" -- and yet nobody challenges the massively larger larceny cum vote purchasing that is the welfare state, and which makes such relatively penny-ante outrages possible at all.

And while we're on that subject.... Social security spending alone is currently about 4.3% of our Gross Domestic Product, which is about $13.8 trillion per annum, or $593 billion per year. By contrast, according to Citizens against Government Waste, "pork barrel spending" cost only $29 billion in 2006. And speaking of penny ante, each member of Congress is paid less than $200,000 per year. I don't care for them voting on their own pay raises either, but I'd be thrilled to pay them ten times as much if they'd start getting rid of the welfare state.

Pork is about $17 billion this year, but recall the trillions being spent -- I mean "pledged" -- on the bailout so far, and the "success" of the Pork Busters is put into perspective. To her credit, White is against these bailouts. Unfortunately, she isn't consistently against government bailouts, for what is the "social safety net" but a massive system set up to perform personal bailouts?

And White's soft spot for a small, personal bailout here and there leads us directly to why her proposal -- even if made consistently pro-freedom -- would fail: Her call for Congressional term limits is the clue.

Who elects the louts in Congress year in and year out? If, as White implies, "all Americans" are really tired of how the country is run, there would be no need for term limits. And, unlike in the last presidential election, we would have choices at the polls that were more meaningful than selecting which color socialist we're going to send to office.

But until enough Americans become indignant about the regular trampling of their individual rights (which include the right to property), and accept the fact that with individual freedom comes responsibility for leading one's own life and, yes, risk, it will not matter that we have the vote because demand will ensure that only panderers run for office.

And if you don't believe me, ask yourself what the chances are now of a candidate being elected on a platform of phasing out social security and welfare, returning our nation to the gold standard, and fully deregulating the economy.

I didn't think so, either.

The way out of the predicament of an enormous welfare state that violates our individual rights more every year is for more individual Americans to begin to demand that the government restrict itself to its only proper function, which is the protection of individual rights. And this will come only after more Americans embrace as moral the pursuit of their own self-interest and reject the false, impractical ethical idea that it is good to sacrifice the well-being of some human beings for the sake of others, and its political expression of collectivism.

That is my goal, and history shows that it is perfectly achievable.

-- CAV

TOS Article on Mandatory Insurance Now Free!

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Craig Biddle (publisher of the journal, The Objective Standard) has graciously agreed to make the full text of my article in the Fall 2008 issue on the dangers of mandatory health insurance available for free, to subscribers and non-subscribers alike.

The full article can now be found at:

"Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America"

This issue is heating up much faster than I expected.

Senator Max Baucus, a powerful Democrat, has just proposed adopting the Massachusetts plan on a national scale:

"Healthcare reform gets backing in Congress"

Even more ominously, insurance companies have agreed to support this idea, saying that they'll accept new government regulations in exchange for the federal government requiring all citizens to purchase health insurance:

"Insurers make pitch for health coverage mandate"

President-elect Obama has pledged to make universal health care one of the highest priorities of his new administration.

If we don't want to go down this dangerous path, we'll have to speak out in opposition to this bad idea.

Hence, please feel free to link to this article and/or send it to friends, coworkers, elected officials, and anyone else who might make a difference. A few active minds in the right places could make more difference than you think. And it's your future health care at stake:

"Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America"

Furthermore, given the importance of the philosophical battles we'll be fighting over the next 4 years, please consider sending Christmas gift subscriptions of The Objective Standard to friends, family members, and other active-minded people. I gave two subscriptions last year to two non-Objectivist friends. Both of them enjoyed reading it. And even though they didn't always agree with the ideas, they found the articles thought-provoking. I plan on giving even more this year, and I encourage other Objectivists to do the same. Not only is it a great gift, it's an investment in your own future.

To give a gift subscription, go to this page:

Give your friends the intellectual ammunition they'll need to fight for their values (and yours)!

Recap #20

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

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

• Monday, November 24, 2008: Religious Right Is Set Back by Gina Liggett
  
• Wednesday, November 26, 2008: Happy Thanksgiving! by Diana Hsieh
  
• Friday, November 28, 2008: Ted Haggard in the Pulpit Again by Diana Hsieh
  

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

• Monday, November 24, 2008: Sooner State Says "Later" to Mandatory Insurance by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Tuesday, November 25, 2008: Mandatory Insurance Article Now Free by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Wednesday, November 26, 2008: Herrick on Single-Payer Care by Paul Hsieh, MD
  
• Thursday, November 27, 2008: Happy Thanksgiving! by Paul Hsieh, MD
  

Economic Freedom (Show 087)

By Brandon from talkObjectivism.com,cross-posted by MetaBlog

For this holiday weekend, Mosley hosts the show and discusses the issue of economic freedom in the context of today’s economic situation, with special focus on the auto industry.

Topic include: government bailout of the auto industry; the expression “too big to fail”; “are we all socialists now?” and the socialist trend in America; “bailout” and “aid” as buzzwords; learn from mistakes, don’t appease them; the role of unions; the industrial revolution; connection between economic and political freedom; separation between state and economics; legalization of drugs, prostitution, etc.; possible topic for next show: is man inherently good?

On the issue of being “too big to bail,” feel free to check out Alex Epstein’s article Too Big to Bail. Also related to the show, you can check out Yaron Brook’s article Are We All Socialists Now?.