Obama's Budget: CME to the GDP?

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

Via Matt Drudge, I learned of a type of solar event called a coronal mass ejection (CME), which could wipe out modern civilization under the right conditions. Such conditions existed in 1859, before we became dependent on the power grid that would get knocked out. During the eight-day "Carrington Event", named for the British astronomer who made the connection between the solar storms he observed and events on earth:

There were eyewitness accounts of stunning auroras, even at equatorial latitudes. The world's telegraph networks experienced severe disruptions, and Victorian magnetometers were driven off the scale.

Another source elaborates on the "severe disruptions":

[T]elegraph systems crashed, machines burst into flames, and electric shocks rendered operators unconscious. Compasses and other sensitive instruments reeled as if struck by a massive magnetic fist. For the first time, people began to suspect that the Earth was not isolated from the rest of the universe. However, nobody knew what could have released such strange forces upon the Earth–nobody, that is, except the amateur English astronomer Richard Carrington.

That was nothing compared to what such an event would look like in today's much more electrified world, according to a team of scientists who have been considering the problem.

IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters. The World Bank declares America a developing nation. Europe, Scandinavia, China and Japan are also struggling to recover from the same fateful event - a violent storm, 150 million kilometres away on the surface of the sun.

The article, oddly enough, attempts to place a dollar estimate on the damage caused by our electrical infrastructure getting fried and the sequelae of the immediate, yet protracted and near-universal blackout for the most productive parts of the country:

Hurricane Katrina's societal and economic impact has been measured at $81 billion to $125 billion. According to the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] report, the impact of what it terms a "severe geomagnetic storm scenario" could be as high as $2 trillion. And that's just the first year after the storm. The NAS puts the recovery time at four to 10 years. It is questionable whether the US would ever bounce back.

The last sentence is all I need to hear about this. If money can't buy anything because nobody can make anything, price tags become meaningless and all is lost.

Fortunately, the natural conditions that could cause such a catastrophe obtain only about once every 500 years and there are ways to prevent or mitigate much of the damage discussed in the articles. (One not mentioned is the introduction of freedom to the utility industry. Specifically, decentralization as described in the penultimate paragraph of Raymond Niles' "Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid" would, I suspect, contribute to a sort of "natural immunity" to such a disaster.)

But what struck me was the $2 trillion dollar estimate of the damage, as well as the time frame projected for the recovery (if any) of the United States. Consider also that Obama's own nominee for Commerce, Judd Gregg, has said that his ten year, $3.6 trillion "financial plan" would bankrupt the country. I think that this scenario is a good way to visualize what this means, as I shall explain.

There is a photo essay making the Internet rounds of what $1 trillion in $100.00 bills looks like. More relevantly, I once computed that government confiscation of $1 trillion amounted to "about $3,000 [taken from] every man, woman, child, and infant alive today." Making the outrageously generous assumption that half of that number could and would engage in productive activity, that translated to $6,000 per productive individual.

I was computing how much a mere $1 trillion financial "bailout" would affect an average working American -- before the "bailouts" snowballed with Bush and Obama's eager assistance, and before Obama proposed his Ten Year Plan.

Just to make things simple, let's pretend that the bailout is only a $3 trillion dollar, government-forced liability for the producing public. (I suspect that it's closer to $10 trillion.) And let's further ignore the estimated $9.3 trillion in projected government deficits over the next decade. That still leaves us with everyone who works for a living being saddled with at least 6.6 times $6,000 of debt not his own, or nearly $40,000 over the next decade.

I can't even afford a new car as it is. What does Barack Obama hope I'm going to forgo next in order to make his redistributionist scheme work? What does "work" even mean to Obama? This is a man who has never held a real job, clearly has no idea of how free market economies work, and has spent his whole life surrounded by leftists who do not want America to succeed -- so I wouldn't count on him being on the same page regarding the term "work" as any ordinary American.

(And to think that I haven't even touched all the new regulatory hoops he wants producers to jump through as they attempt to work with such a leech sucking from each jugular!)

How all this is supposed to "work" is an important question, no matter how hard everyone tries to avoid it. The coronal mass ejection that could bring the modern world to its knees in 90 seconds would certainly "work" as a means of destroying civilization. It would "work" faster than Obama's budget, but when the material means that people need to produce (and hence survive) are sufficiently depleted, people become unable to produce, to trade, or to survive. Sure. Obama might collect or print the amount of money he blithely quotes as a "price tag", but what if it can't buy anything?

Picture Zimbabwe without Western aid.

Picture America after a coronal mass ejection at just the wrong time, but perhaps in slow motion at first, until things snowball.

Now, if you value being alive, renounce the creed of self-sacrifice and work to stop Barack Obama. More important, learn what freedom actually means, and work to reestablish it in America.

-- CAV

Freedom down the Drain

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

Too busy laughing at the hoops some people are having to jump through to notice the real danger an all-intrusive state can be, The Houston Chronicle places an AP story about detergent smuggling in the "News Bizarre" section of its online edition.

The state of Washington has, on environmentalist grounds, banned dish-washing detergents containing phosphates in Spokane County. It will make the ban statewide next year unless a few husbands decide to stand up for their wives and oppose the move.

This not only violates individual rights, it has led to the following predictable result:

Many people were shocked to find that products like Seventh Generation, Ecover and Trader Joe's left their dishes encrusted with food, smeared with grease and too gross to use without rewashing them by hand. The culprit was hard water, which is mineral-rich and resistant to soap.

But strike that last sentence. The hard water problem had been solved -- by phosphates -- until the state invaded the kitchens of private citizens and forced them to stop using detergents that actually worked. The real culprit isn't hard water, but the government.

The government is supposed to prevent us from having our lives hindered by thugs who want to order us around, and force us to act contrary to our own best judgment. Instead, it is arbitrarily and sanctimoniously sentencing citizens to easily-avoidable, time-wasting drudgery.

Washing dishes may seem like a small thing, but it is part of an alarming pattern that has included everything from people being threatened with jail for washing cars and having to screw in inferior light bulbs to taking on enormous amounts of undeserved financial burdens.

When I turn on every light in my house this evening at 8:30 p.m., I'll be sure to run a load of dishes and a load of clothes. And I'll make doubly sure I'm using phosphates when I do.

-- CAV

PS: For a discussion of how a proper government might deal with legitimate issues concerning the disposal of chemicals harmful to humans, please refer to the comment thread here.

Hugel OpEd on National Service

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The March 30, 2009 edition of the Harrisburg (PA) Patriot-News has published the following excellent OpEd by OAC student Lucy Hugel on the national service bill. Here's the introduction:

National service bill makes 'volunteerism' compulsory
by Lucy Hugel

Thursday, the U.S. Senate sent back to the House an amended bill to "expand and improve opportunities for service," legislation modeled on President Obama's campaign promise to establish "universal voluntary citizen service."

If passed, this act will produce an explosion in the number of service programs. Unfortunately, the goal of this legislation is profoundly un-American--to instill an ethic of servitude in every citizen.

How could expanding community service programs have such a radical effect in the land of liberty? To understand this, one must see how the plan aims to smuggle in compulsory service...

Read the whole thing here.

Congratulations on getting published, Lucy! And thank you for defending a person's right to his or her own life.

Hsieh LTE in NY Times

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The March 30, 2009 New York Times has printed my latest LTE on health care. It's the 6th one down:

Re "A Health Plan for All and the Concerns It Raises":

To the Editor:

It would be just as wrong for the government to compete with private insurers to provide health insurance as it would be for the government to compete with G.M. or Ford to build taxpayer-subsidized "public automobiles."

The unfair competition from a public plan would destroy the private health insurance industry. The inevitable result would be the rationing and other horrors of a Canadian-style single-payer system, which most Americans neither wish nor deserve.

Paul Hsieh
Sedalia, Colo., March 25, 2009

The writer, a medical doctor, is a co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine.

It was written in response to their March 25, 2009 story, "A Health Plan for All and the Concerns It Raises".

The National Service Threat

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The March 26, 2009 Washington Examiner has published a good OpEd on the threatened expansion of the Americorps "National Service" program. Although this issue has received less press than the various bailout-related issues, it could be equally important to the future of America.

Here's an excerpt from the Examiner piece (bold emphasis is mine):

"Expanded Americorps Has An Authoritarian Feel"

...To begin with, the legislation threatens the voluntary nature of Americorps by calling for consideration of "a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people." It anticipates the possibility of requiring "all individuals in the United States" to perform such service -- including elementary school students.

The bill also summons up unsettling memories of World War II-era paramilitary groups by saying the new program should "combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service," while establishing "campuses" that serve as "operational headquarters," complete with "superintendents" and "uniforms" for all participants. It allows for the elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life. And it calls for creation of "a permanent cadre" in a "National Community Civilian Corps."

But that's not all. The bill also calls for "youth engagement zones" in which "service learning" is "a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency." This updated form of voluntary community service is also to be "integrated into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula" at all levels of schooling. Sounds like a government curriculum for government approved "service learning," which is nothing less than indoctrination.

Now, ask yourself if congressmen who voted for this monstrosity had a clue what they were voting for. If not, they're guilty of dereliction of duty. If yes, the implications are truly frightening.

(Read the whole thing.)

This bill has already passed the House and being considered by the Senate.

The Senate recently voted 74-14 to move the bill onto the floor (i.e., to not filibuster the bill). Hence, it has support from numerous Republicans and Democrats.

If you're alarmed and outraged by this idea, then you can do the following:

1) Forward the Examiner piece to friends, family, co-workers, etc.

2) Tell your US Senator to vote against the bill.

The Senate version is called S.277.

To contact your Senators to tell them to oppose S.277, click here.

You don't have to write anything long or super-eloquent. It's more important that your e-mail subject line be something unambiguous like "Oppose S.277", so their staff aides know how to tally your e-mail. For instance, I dashed off the following short note to my Senators:

Please oppose S.277. It moves us dangerously close to mandatory national service, something which is un-American and a violation of individual rights.

Of course if you are so inclined, you can write something longer. Here's what Diana sent:

As your constituent, I wish to express my opposition to any expansion of AmeriCorps and other "service" programs. Such programs are not just costly and ineffective. They also violate the property rights of taxpayers to dispose of their own hard-earned income in accordance with their own choices and values.

Personally, I strongly object to any attempts to use the power of the government to promote the moral ideal of selfless service to the community -- as AmeriCorps does. That ideal does not represent my values: I reject that moral ideal as destructive to human life and happiness. Yet I am forced to pay for this government program. That is morally wrong.

A person has every right to donate his own money to the charity of his choice. A person has every right to volunteer or work for the charity of his choice, if the charity is amenable. I do both -- routinely -- for causes that I care about.

However, a person has no right to dispose of another person's money to fund his charitable work. That's theft, plain and simple.

AmeriCorps should be dismantled, not expanded.

The Senate will be voting soon on this. Hence if you wish to speak out on this issue, the time is now!

Update: The Senate has just passed its version of the bill by a margin of 78-20. They still have to reconcile their version with the one passed by the House of Representatives before they can submit it to President Obama (who has promised to sign it).

How and Why Athletes Go Broke

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The March 23, 2009 issue of Sports Illustrated features this interesting article entitled, "How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke".

One astonishing tidbit:

By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke

The article analyzes the psychology behind the bad decision-making and puts them into four main categories:

1. The Lure of the Tangible
2. Misplaced Trust
3. Family Matters
4. Great Expectations

As the article notes, many professional athletes are very similar to lottery winners in that they suddenly gain a great deal of money out of proportion to their life skills. Either they raise their life skills to match their money, or they lose money until their bank accounts are again proportionate to their life skills.

These athletes' stories also illustrate the following truth from Francisco D'Anconia's "money speech" in Atlas Shrugged:

...Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money.

...Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth -- the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him.

Is This The End of America?

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Terence Corcoran asks this provocative question in the March 19, 2009 edition of the Financial Post.

Here are a few excerpts from his column:

Is this the end of America?

...One test of whether we are witnessing the end of America is how many more times Americans put up with congressional show trials of individual business people and their employees, slandering and vilifying them for their actions and motives. And for how long will they tolerate a President who berates business and corporations as dens of crime and malfeasance? If the majority of Americans come to accept the caricatures of business as true, then America is closer to the end of its life as a global leader, as a champion of markets and individualism.

...Reform of health care, environmental policy, education, energy, banking, regulation -- every nook and cranny of the U.S. economy has been put on alert for major change. Expansion of government spending, plunging the U.S. into unprecedented deficits, is without parallel. In economic policy, through regulation and control of energy output, financial services and monetary expansion, the U.S. government has embarked on a fundamental reshaping of America. It is designed, in short, to bring on the end of America.

Corcoran also discusses the recent massive expansion of the money supply caused by the Federal Reserve and the risk of inflation.

So is this the end of America? I hope not. And it won't be if enough people are willing to speak out against our current path and also stand up for the right ideas.

But we'll find out soon enough.

Freedom of Speech: Silence is Not Golden

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

One demonstrable “toxic asset“ of the country‘s governing altruist philosophy comes in two forms: censorship and the “fairness doctrine,” or the suppression of free speech and its regulation. Of course, “regulated“ speech cannot be free, either; regulation is simply an overture to censorship. Call it “Censorship Lite.“ While in the economic realm the federal government is actively and noisily nationalizing the economy, the move to de facto censorship has recently bolted ahead, as well, from a fast walk to a gallop on padded hooves to better steal up on us and lop off our heads. Distracted by the gutting of Wall Street and the ongoing vilification of all business CEOs, and not just those who were seduced by the chance to profit from subprime mortgages, few people are paying attention to the peril in which their right to speak against Congress and the administration has been put.

The cyclone of legislation and engineered destruction of freedom and capitalism being whipped up by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress (the Republicans, a.k.a. the GOP, or Grand Old Pathetics, as I am want to call them, no longer can be said to count for opposition to anything) cannot help but be accompanied by an aggressive assault on the freedom of speech to suppress all spoken and written dissent and opposition, to silence those whose ideas the administration and Congress do not want to hear and do not want others to hear. This assault represents the logical amalgamation of Left and Right.

Historically, and by necessity, one of the first casualties of a collectivist “revolution,” such as we are witnessing today, has been the free press by either its complete abolition or its takeover by the usurpers. The goal of such physical force serves a number of purposes: to silence those whose ideas are a threat to the totalitarians’ ideological and economic hegemony; to impose conformity on the public, and thus create a population of passive, yeah-saying or silent slaves; to regulate the minds of the public by suffocating them with propaganda and with a fear of the consequences of open, public dissent.

In such circumstances, the guiltiest party is a “free” press which voluntarily parrots the government line, either from agreement with the government’s ends or from ignorance. The American news media today can be charged with a combination of both offenses.

But Congress and the federal government are not the only parties stealing a march on the First Amendment of the Constitution. The Jerusalem Post of March 12 reported:

“The Islamic states circulated a new resolution at the current session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday that could criminalize defamation of Islam as a human rights violation and encourage the imposition of Sharia.

“According to the nonbinding governmental resolution, titled ‘Combating Defamation of Religions,’ anything deemed insulting to Islamic sensitivities would be banned as a ‘serious affront to human dignity’ and a blatant violation of religious freedom.”

The Post reports that the only religion named in the resolution is Islam.

Of course, given the moral relativism of the Obama administration (not to mention that of the Bush administration), such a “law” would be granted legitimacy if it ever came to having to take an official position on Islam. “Defaming” Islam by identifying its brutal, anti-mind nature, by cataloging the crimes committed in its name, by highlighting the Koran’s invitation to murder, genocide and enslavement, and by reporting its pathological hatred of freedom and free minds and its barbarous conduct towards its own adherents, can be deemed “criminal.” It is the brother of secular “hate speech.” And the fact that hate speech laws exist in several states and are condoned by the judiciary does not bode well for anyone who wishes to tackle the issue of jihad.

“Introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), it passed by a 108-51 margin, with 25 abstentions….The resolution decries ‘the negative projection of Islam in the media’ and voices ‘deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.’”

I cannot recall the last time any member of the news media “negatively projected” Islam. Nor can I recall the last time the news media reported any of Islam’s “human rights” violations, either abroad or here in the U.S., such as the “honor” killings of teenage girls who stray from the deadening Muslim subculture. The news media’s knee-jerk deference to all things Muslim is rooted in non-judgmental fear. The Western press has been intimidated and practices self-censorship. Pakistan is an alleged ally of the U.S. in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The resolution was also supported by our other “allies,” Egypt and Iraq. It is payback for all the billions of dollars in aid the U.S. has sent to those countries.

A more visceral method of censorship occurred in Fairfax County, Virginia, when over 600 Muslims packed an auditorium for a hearing of the county planning commission on whether or not to allow a Saudi Wahhabist school (or a mind-killing, anti-Western madrassa) to expand on property already leased to it by the county. The commissioners extended every courtesy to the Muslim mob, and none to the few who questioned the wisdom of allowing an incubator of jihad to grow in the “community,” who were bullied, shouted down, and surrounded by hostile Muslims with the sanction of the commissioners.

The Virginia of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason and James Madison -- the colony and state in the intellectual forefront of championing individual rights and limited government -- is not the Virginia that exists today. Its governor not only endorsed Obama and signed a bill banning smoking in bars and restaurants (in an exercise of eminent domain, or the partial seizure of property to benefit others), but went begging to Washington for a cut of the stimulus billions.

Here in the U.S., the federal government and its enablers in Congress are working frantically to suppress or discourage any kind of speech they deem “offensive” or “unfair.”

“Senior FCC staff working with acting Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps held meetings last week with policy and legislative advisers to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman to discuss ways the committee can create openings for the FCC to put in place a form of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ without actually calling it such.”

Waxman, one of the most power-lusting congressmen in politics, who also wants tobacco put under Food and Drug regulation, and who is practically a caricature of an Ayn Rand villain, “is also interested, say sources, in looking at how the Internet is being used for content and speech purposes.”

“One idea Waxman’s committee staff is looking at is a congressionally mandated policy that would require all TV and radio stations to have in place ‘advisory boards’ that would act as watchdogs to ensure ‘community needs and opinions’ are given fair treatment. Reports from those advisory boards would be used for license renewals and summaries would be reviewed at least annually by FCC staff.”

Those “advisory boards” would function as the Politburo did in Soviet Russia, to enforce compliance with federal criteria of what constituted “community needs” and to decide whose opinions were to be given “fair treatment.” (Are you ready for an all-Muslim version of “Dancing with the Stars” or a La Raza-approved interpretation of the Alamo?) Forgotten by the likely victims of this looming legislation is the fact that the FCC is already a component of the welfare state, having the authority to ration out the airwaves to the highest bidders and those with political pull in the name of “public service.”

The Internet poses a particular threat to the statists, because it can now replace not only newspapers and the airwaves, but serves as an alternative to those media for information, opinion, and objective journalism. The Waxman-Pelosi-Reid-Obama coalition and its allies wish to regulate it and tax it. The Internet cannot be controlled and taxed except by either the FCC or another, newer government body. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook and other Internet “providers” or “common carriers” could be forced to have “advisory boards,” as well. And given their cooperation with totalitarian regimes such as China’s, not much opposition to regulation should be expected from them.

For an excellent comment on the rise and possible fate of the Internet under Obama, see C. August's Titanic Deck Chairs site here.

From rationing out the airwaves, a power it should not have, the government may be moving to rationing out newsprint.

“With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday [March 24] introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

“Cardin’s [Benjamin Cardin] Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting systems [that is, to the various units of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting system, or PBS].”

There is an instance of beggar thy looting neighbor.

“Cardin’s office said his bill was aimed at preserving local and community newspapers, not conglomerates which may also own radio and TV stations. His bill would also let a nonprofit buy newspapers owned by a conglomerate.”

Except for government departments and agencies, big is always “bad.” And here is the logical catch to winning a government-granted “nonprofit” status:

“Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements. Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible.”

And there you have it. Newspapers bailed out through the ruse of being dubbed “nonprofit” organizations would be required to gag themselves, in exchange for tax-exemptions on their revenue. The power to not tax can be as destructive as the power to tax, if the bribe or inducement is tempting enough to those who do not think ahead or who do not care to think at all. Of course, that would leave TV, radio, and the Internet as sources of news and opinions Americans want to search for, read or hear, and not what politicians and the government would prefer them to read or hear.

Theoretically, Americans would be compelled to listen to opposing viewpoints and opinions under a resuscitated “Fairness Doctrine,” a mongrel concept that purports to advance “diversity” in politics and culture but which was declared unconstitutional by the FCC in 1987 and abandoned. In reality, Americans would not listen to or watch what the government and “public service” advocates wished them to audit. The failure of Air America, a left-liberal radio station created to counter popular conservative talk radio, testifies to the power of volition. Radio stations across the country did not wish to syndicate or carry Air America because their owners or managers knew that their audiences did not wish to listen to it. (Americans already get enough of left-liberal perspectives and talking points in their newspapers and from politicians.)

“Senator Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told radio host Bill Press yesterday when asked about whether it was time to bring back the so-called ’Fairness Doctrine’: ’I think it’s absolutely time to pass a standard. Now, whether it’s called the Fairness Standard, whether it’s called something else -- I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves….”

Which means: Any station that allows someone like Rush Limbaugh to publicly hope that Obama’s policies fail, would be held “accountable” and presumably penalized, taken over, or driven out of business. Stabenow, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and their cohorts are not working to see Rush Limbaugh debate someone like Bill Moyers (of PBS) on important issues; they know that Limbaugh, whatever his faults, would wipe the floor with Moyers and that countless Americans would cheer Limbaugh on with all the raucous gusto of a crowd watching a prize fight. The last thing the advocates of “fairness” and “balance” want is confrontation. They know they would lose.

But the fundamental purpose of the “Fairness Doctrine,” or whatever its new name might be, is not to establish “fair standards” or to enforce ‘accountability” or to “serve” the public. Its goal is to destroy the very concept of free speech, to reduce it to a contest of “he said-she said,” to give insupportable, arbitrary assertions the same weight as statements of fact -- in short, to sully the value of the freedom of speech, to nullify the role of ideas and to inculcate in one’s mind a cloying indifference to whatever anyone says about anything.

In June a ruling is expected from the Supreme Court on whether or not a documentary film, “Hillary: The Movie,” produced by a conservative group, Citizens United, is political speech or a political ad. It was shown in eight theaters during the primaries in 2008 and intended to criticize Hillary Clinton, then regarded as the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. The Federal Election Commission subsequently prohibited it from being aired on television.

“Government lawyers argued that conservative group Citizens United’s 90-minute documentary…is a political ad just like traditional one-minute or 30-second spots and therefore regulated by the McCain-Feingold law, the popular name for 2002 revisions to the nation’s campaign finance laws [the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act].

“The FEC’s conclusion that the movie was nothing more than an overt attempt to persuade voters not to side with Hillary Clinton was affirmed by a three-judge panel last summer which ruled the film had ’no other interpretation’ other than as an advocacy message to voters that Clinton should not be elected.”

Whether or not the Court rules for or against the film, its decision will likely be grounded on non-fundamental reasons. The Court will not challenge the validity of McCain-Feingold, only the utterly arbitrary rules by which it is enforced and whether or not they are practical or “fair.” It will not venture to rule McCain-Feingold and every other statutory or legislative abridgement of the First Amendment unconstitutional. It will simply count beans and measure concretes and second-guess the intent of the film and of its producers.

Helping the Court dodge the issue is Citizens United itself:

“Citizens United appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that ‘Hillary: The Movie’ should not be considered a political ad. The group says there is nothing in the movie urging people to vote against Clinton. The group says the film is more of a documentary comparable to critical television news programs such as ‘Frontline,’ ‘Nova,’ and ‘60 Minutes.’”

No political principle I know of was ever defended by artful insinuation, which is what the group’s argument before the Court amounts to. “It really isn’t what you think it is, it’s something else entirely, and shouldn’t be called a political ad. It is an ‘express advocacy’ of nothing. Clinton just happens to be the subject.”

Cringing is not an efficacious method of persuasion. Far be it from Citizens United to insist that the government has an obligation to defend anyone’s right to persuade voters about candidates and issues in any style or medium he wishes or thinks the most effective, at any time before, during, and after a campaign, paid for with as much funding as possible by whatever any individual or group is willing to provide it. Far be it from Citizens United to insist that the Court uphold the First Amendment.

With friends like that, freedom of speech does not need enemies.

Yaron Brook on Glenn Beck

By Roberto 'Tito' Sarrionandia from Tito's Blog,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Candidate Replies

By Roberto 'Tito' Sarrionandia from Tito's Blog,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Iraq to start executing gays this week

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

More than 100 prisoners in Iraq are facing execution – and many of them are believed to have been convicted of the ‘crime’ of being gay, the UK-based Iraqi-LGBT group revealed this afternoon.

According to Ali Hili of Iraqi-LGBT, the Iraqi authorities plan to start executing them in batches of 20 from this week. There is, said Mr. Hili, at least one member of Iraqi-LGBT who are among those to be put to death.

That innocent people die for their sexuality is a moral atrocity.  But many thousands of people (mostly women accused of extramarital relations) die in the Islamic world every year.  What’s really outrageous is that thousands of American soldiers died and trillions of dollars were paid to support regimes fundamentally opposed to Western values in the name of democracy.

On Down Syndrome and other self-inflicted tragedies

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

Earlier this week Salon published an article about a mother dealing with an adult Autistic son, who’s out of control violence led her to desperate measures. Her story reminded me of the angry responses I’ve received whenever I’ve written against Down syndrome.

Dozens of parents have responded to each post, claiming to have adorable little children with Down’s. (The context to keep in mind here is that Down syndrome is now an optional illness, now that safe and effective testing is available for all mothers in the developed world.) Yet, I haven’t recieved a single comment from parents of adults with Down syndrome. Where are all the adorable little adults with Down syndrome?

I suspect there are three reasons why I haven’t seen their comments.

First, many of their children died prematurely due to the many health complications of Down Syndrome. (See previous posts for details.)

Second, many children have grown up to become severely disabled adults, and are living in mental institutions at taxpayer expense - or sometimes, in homeless shelters or on the streets.

Third, the minority of parents whose children survived to adulthood and who remained committed to taking care of them on their own know that their adorable babies turned into incomprehensible, obstinate, sullen, capricious, and sometimes very violent adults. Their mental illness makes the world an incomprehensible place to them, and their unpredictable behavior makes them bewildering to their caretakers.

Have you ever noticed the ratio of mentally disabled children to that of mentally disabled adults in social situations? The apparent disparity goes beyond their lower life expectancy. I suspect that the surviving retarded children grow into retarded adults, fundamentally unable to deal with civilized life, and hidden away in homes and institution and highway underpasses.

My point is that human disabilities, mental and physical, are a tragedy to be avoided at all costs, not something to be accepted as unavoidable fate, or worse, to be cherished for their uniqueness. They ought to be screened, aborted, and engineered out of the human race as soon as medically and technologically possible. If this is obvious to you, great. Unfortunately, inexplicably, even rational people whom I respect differ with me on this issue. The only proper response for parents who make such choices ought to be moral condemnation: if they have chosen to have crippled children, they ought to condemned, and all the pain, frustration, violence, and expense caused by their choice ought to be placed squarely on the parents.

(In response to the inevitable comments, I must emphasize that the condemnation extends only to the parents. Like all human beings, the victims of their parents’ choice ought to be cherished, and every effort should be made to integrate them into society and make them productive adults.)

One last observation: I’ve already written how many parents who choose to have Down children treat them as religious icons when they are small. When they grow large, how many of them treat them as pets who have grown too large to keep in the house, and delegate them to a locked basement, or a mental institution?

Quick Roundup 415

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

Two all-day flights in two days await me, starting soon after this auto-posts. I'll have a tight schedule in between. Fortunately, I've been experimenting in the kitchen lately with some good results and can slap up a recipe if I'm really pressed for time tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some items that merit your attention...

Mark Your Calendars! Flip Those Switches!

Last year, I said, "I ran across Kindredist, by a Michigander named Amy as I was catching up on 'Edison Hour' festivities. I wish only that I'd thought of the name first!" I then quietly entered the time of Edison Hour into my calendar with the intent of getting the word out and celebrating the occasion if nobody else did.

This Saturday, March 28, 8:30-930 p.m., please be a responsible and grateful Industrial Revolutionist and TURN ON YOUR LIGHTS -- join Edison Hour on Facebook.

It's good to see that Amy has already gotten the word out.

Good Poem

I really like this poem by LB, which was inspired by John Keats' The Human Seasons.

Pinched for the Right Reason

I meant to link to Joseph Kellard's piece on St. Patrick's Day last week. Here's an excerpt from "Celebrate Individualism, Not Ethnicity:"

It's high time for Americans to shed their false racial "pride" -- and should stop championing essentially race-based pseudo-ideals such as multiculturalism -- to pursue universal values beneficial to all men, no matter their biology or background. Identifying primarily with one's physical genetics or racial heritage, and the eventual irrational divisions, wars and mass killings this tribalism has ultimately caused throughout history, is nothing to be proud of.

And be sure to read what a commenter there went through at work when he spoke up against multiculturalism.

Out of the Woodwork

With all the publicity Ayn Rand's works have been getting lately, it was only a matter of time before the usual confederacy of dunces would rise up to be heard.

Leading the charge is -- who else? -- National Review, which explicitly stands by Whittaker Chambers' glaringly inaccurate review of half a century ago. After that lead-in, we have a "symposium" consisting mainly of lame, willfully ignorant put-downs that make the talking stain sound erudite. (They can only envy its relative effectiveness.)

In that context, I found the following quote from the tail end of probably the "friendliest" words spoken about Rand particularly ironic:

Still relevant in the Age of Obama? With all due respect to Whittaker Chambers, if we didn't already have her, we'd have to invent her, double-quick. [bold added]

Ah, but they did invent her -- or at least whoever it is that they are attacking. Starting with Whittaker Chambers, National Review has invented a grotesque caricature of Rand, which they have pilloried, and attacked what they imagine her ideas to be. Fittingly, the author of that quote, Leo Grin, "was twice nominated for a World Fantasy Award."

As I put it before the last time I encountered commentary on Rand of a similar quality, "Let Ayn Rand speak for herself. She does a much better job than anyone who tries to do it for her." Oddly enough, nobody at National Review advised readers to read the books, be it to see for themselves what is wrong with the ideas or even in the snarky vein of sampling the horrible prose just for kicks.

Huh! I wonder why.

Why not gold?

First Russia, and now China, have called for something else to replace the American Dollar as the primary international reserve currency. That's understandable, but notice that it isn't gold. I explained this desire to have one's cake and eat it too in a different, but relevant, context:

Recalling some recent congressional testimony, and quoting himself, Greenspan said that "monetary policy should make even a fiat money economy behave 'as though anchored by gold.'" If that is the case, why bother with fiat money at all? Because without fiat money, the government would be unable to confiscate property and redistribute wealth via inflation...

Amusingly, the president of Kazakhstan also pushed for such a currency, to be called the "acmetal". The name was a portmanteau of "acme" and "capital," and yet it could just as easily been one of "acme" and "metal" -- which would have described gold!

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on March 24, 2009.

Hsieh OpEd at PJM: "Health Insurance Industry Sells Its Soul to the Devil"

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The online political commentary/opinion website PajamasMedia.com has published my latest OpEd, entitled "Health Insurance Industry Sells Its Soul to the Devil".

Here's the introduction:

Health Insurance Industry Sells Its Soul to the Devil

Summary: Health insurance companies are on the verge of a Faustian bargain that will take the rest of us down with them.

March 22, 2009 - by Paul Hsieh

In German folklore, Johann Faust was a physician who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge. Of course, the pact destroyed him. The American health insurance industry is on the verge of striking its own Faustian bargain with the U.S. government. But this bargain won't just destroy the insurance industry; it will also drag 300 million Americans into the pit of government-run "single payer" socialized medicine...

Read the rest here.

Bigger & Better: Celebrating Market Success

By Roberto 'Tito' Sarrionandia from Tito's Blog,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Obama's “Extreme Makeover” of America

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

It is hard to decide any more which current government-spawned disasters and those to come one should dwell on. As on the popular TV program, ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,“ President Barack Obama is overseeing the demolition of the remnants of a republic that upheld individual rights and of the construction of a socialist “republic.“ The country is “needy,“ he claims, and must be housed in a new habitat, which is looking more and more like a minimum security prison, with all medical records managed by the government, movement monitored by the TSA, diet regulated by the warden, and one’s time spent on guarded work details (otherwise known as chain gangs).

For example, there is the move to draft all Americans into “voluntary” national service -- presumably a servitude with the encouragement of bribes if one submits or promised reprisals if one does not. In Congress, Senate and House Democrats and Republicans are shepherding through legislation which, taken altogether, is pretty much a civilian cradle-to-grave Selective Service System. For example:

“The House passed a bill yesterday; which includes disturbing language indicating young people will be forced to undertake mandatory national service programs as fears about President Barack Obama’s promised ‘civilian national security force’ intensify.

“The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act, known as the GIVE Act, was passed yesterday by a 321-105 margin and now goes to the Senate.”

In the Senate, Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, says that bills introduced by Thad Cochran, R-Mississippi, will “create the architecture and the structure that will serve as the invitation to everyone to serve.”

“The legislation would target everyone from schoolchildren to the elderly and aim to create new bases of volunteers beyond the usual young-adult pool of service-program participants, reports The Day.”

Accompanying the article on the Senate bills is a propaganda poster straight out of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia: a drawn figure of a youth shouldering a shovel, his upward glance presumably focused on a cause higher than himself. The shovel could be used to dig ditches, or as a club against the recalcitrant, non-volunteer.

What about examining the “spontaneous” demonstrations by scruffy, soup-kitchen caliber “community activists” who take buses to the homes of AIG executives who received some of the $165 million in bonuses that Congress and the news media are frothing at the mouth over? These semi-literate individuals look suspiciously like recruits of ACORN, Obama’s public service alma mater. Wasn’t the list of AIG executives who received bonuses supposed to be confidential to protect the executives from harassment or worse? Are these demonstrators destined to be drafted into Obama’s “civilian national security force,” which he called for in July 2008, and sent to Rahm Emanuel’s Public Service Academy?

Or should one dwell on the possibility that the United States was subjected to a 9/11-style economic attack, one calculated to give Obama and the Democrats the excuse to take initial steps to nationalize the economy? Diana West, in her March 17th article, “Who Attacked Our Economy?” reports that in mid-September 2008, $550 billion was abruptly and unaccountably withdrawn within two hours from the country’s banks and money market funds, precipitating the eventual collapse of virtually every entity, governmental or private, linked to the vast gossamer web of government-sponsored subprime mortgages.

“Who or what was responsible for that electronic run on the banks to the tune of $550 billion?” West asks. Was it George Soros, who hates the freedom that allowed him to amass an incredible fortune, and who acted as Obama‘s chief campaign fund “angel“? A cabal of Russia, China and other countries hostile to the U.S., such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, intent on bringing the U.S. into the fascist fold by guaranteeing the election of a man equally hostile to the U.S. and to what is left of its freedoms? Saudi Arabia and Iran in a rare bi-sectarian alliance between them to bring the U.S. into the Islamic sphere of influence by ensuring the election of a more accommodating and apologetic appeaser than was then-President George W. Bush?

Briefly, was Barack Obama some power’s “Manchurian Candidate”? That the electronic run on the banks occurred is beyond doubt. But it remains inexplicable and unreported by both the government and the news media.

Should one dwell on Obama’s proposed “cap and trade” energy policy that would clutter the landscape with wind turbines and solar panel arrays and ensure that Americans become dependent on the whims of the weather and on government management of power, and pay more for it? Or on his education policies, which will be inspired by his lurking left-wing, ex-Weatherman friend, William Ayers, whose “education” philosophy is nothing more than a kindergarten-through-high school curriculum of collectivist indoctrination?

Or, should one comment on Obama’s appearance on Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show” on March 19th, when Obama did not answer Leno’s query that now that Congress has established the precedent of further violating the Constitution by punishing AIG executives for bonuses their employer was contractually obligated to pay them, what was to prevent Congress from making a habit of it, of targeting private individuals who incur the wrath of do-good sadists in government? In reply, Obama demonstrated that he is the doyen of dissemblers and delivered his usual spiel of vague assurances. He did not answer Leno’s question. Leno may as well have never asked it. And the news media was selectively deaf to it, focusing instead on Obama’s gaffe about the “Special Olympics” of the “disabled.”

A more honest answer to Leno’s question would have been: Nothing, not any more.

It is noteworthy that Obama’s bantering, unscripted comment about the disabled revealed a core contempt for those whom he professes a wish to help. This is characteristic of all professional, career altruists, as Ayn Rand demonstrated in Ellsworth Toohey in her novel, The Fountainhead. Does anyone with a modicum of self-respect believe that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are acting from the milk of human kindness? Say, rather, they speak and act from the venom of malicious hatred for anyone not willing to submit and take orders.

Speaking of the disabled and the “Special Olympics,“ nothing is more obviously “disabled” and “special” than our government-subsidized cultural establishment, and Obama has capped his Creature Feature menagerie of political appointments by naming a half-blind crony, Kareem Dale, as his special assistant to oversee arts and culture. He was also named in February as special assistant for disability policy. He will work with Valerie Jarrett, another of Obama’s Chicago cronies, who heads the Office of Public Liaison and Intergovernmental Affairs.

“’It’s a big step forward in terms of connecting cultural and government with mainstream administration policy,’ said Mr. Ivey said in an interview on Friday…Mr. Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said he expected that the job would mainly involve coordinating the activities of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services ‘in relation to White House objectives.’”

What is “mainstream administration policy”? What are the “White House objectives”? One can be certain the policy and the objectives constitute a mandatory wheelchair ramp for federally-funded arts organizations, from local bric-a-brac makers all the way up to Broadway plays and ethnic festivals.

“The challenge for culture boosters in Congress was to convince a House-Senate conference committee that the arts provide jobs as other industries do, while also encouraging tourism and spending in general.

“’We had the facts on our side,’ said Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a New York Democrat who is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Arts Caucus. ‘If we’re trying to stimulate the economy, and get money into the Treasury, nothing does that better than art.’”

Come again? What “facts”? Most reality-grounded observers would say that taxed capital investments and capital gains in the productive sector and technological innovations and freedom of trade send most of the money to the Treasury, not to mention stimulate the economy, and not the esoteric, non-objective sallies in “free expression” by dependent, pathetic, no-talent dilettantes of art.

“Taking the Obama past as prelude, there’s a fair amount of evidence to support arts partisans’ hopes for a White House attuned to music, theater, fine arts and dance….On his Facebook page, the president includes Bach’s cello suites and Shakespeare’s tragedies among his favorite works….If the president needs input on the arts, he’s plugged in with a chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who entered Sarah Lawrence College with dreams of becoming a ballet dancer.”

These are supposed to assurances that Obama and Company mean well, that they are cultured and wouldn‘t harm a fly? Obama purportedly wrote two books, and attended a performance of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Kennedy Center and applauded that group‘s meaningless gymnastics and gyrations. Emanuel “dreamed” of becoming a ballet dancer, and, as did many members of FDR’s Brain Trust, purportedly wrote a book about the necessity of government controls on the economy. It is certain that many of his staff and appointees have cultural pretensions, as well, and now may indulge them at taxpayer expense.

I’m sure that Valerie Jarrett and Kareem Dale, together with the National Endowment for the Arts, which will disperse the $50 million to “qualified” individuals, organizations, and states, will endorse the funding of such things as a Muslim production of Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” and a WPA-style traveling exhibit of paintings by amateurs employed in pork barrel construction projects.

Well, Hitler once “dreamed” of becoming a famous painter, but had to settle for dictating Mein Kampf in prison (the German Koran, literally) and attending the opera. Stalin, Franco, and other dictators all aspired to contribute “culturally” to their serfs and sycophants and established bureaucracies to ensure that the culture conformed to political dogma.

When the federally-funded cultural “establishment” learned that its cut of the $787 billion “stimulus” bill had been removed from the House version by the Senate, I wrote in an earlier commentary that its spokesmen and lobbyists beat an undignified and hysterical path to Washington and succeeded in having the $50 million reinstated. But, as The Wall Street Journal reported on February 18, “fifty million dollars…is just a bubble on a wave.”

It has occurred to no one, not even to the author of the WSJ article, that the government has no business subsidizing any of the arts; its only legitimate role is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (Section VIII of the Constitution). Which means protecting individual rights and intellectual property. There is no mention in that document of funding quilts of cultural diversity or Third World music jamborees or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Taxpayer money has been and now will continue to be used to promote “noncommercial art.” (See Ayn Rand‘s 1973 article, “To Dream the Noncommercial Dream” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought for a discussion of the specious arguments of the champions of state-funded art.)

What this country desperately needs is an “extreme makeover” of its governing philosophy. The entire welfare state must be dismantled or be allowed to collapse before we can begin to regain our liberty. And that will take a philosophical revolution.

"Going Over" Their Heads?

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

The Sunday edition of the Houston Chronicle kicked off its unnamed lifestyle/leisure section with the following headline: "Who makes $250,000? And how do higher taxes go over?" Given where the article resides and its folksy aimlessness, it would be easy to dismiss it merely as a puff piece. It is a puff piece, of course, but it is thought-provoking for a couple of reasons.

First, puff pieces are meant to flatter, and newspapers frequently place "human interest" stories in their leisure sections. With its solicitations of the opinions of six of the "richers" Obama is about to persecute with higher taxes, the article is clearly meant to flatter, but why?

Second, with "tea party" style protests breaking out all over the country, why was the noun, "right" entirely absent from this story? Perhaps, feeling that readers are in no mood for controversy on a Sunday morning, Claudia Feldman (or an editor) swept a real malcontent or two under the rug. (None of the six spoke of "going Galt", even if to dismiss the idea.) Or perhaps Feldman did not find even a single richer willing to speak up for his right to the fruits of his own labor.

Considering that a quick search of the archives at the Chronicle for the phrase "tea party" yielded no news results (although I know of at least two being planned here), I lean towards the former explanation, which fits in with the purpose of writing a leisure section puff piece about the likely future victims of a government-organized mass theft, rather than a stinging editorial call-to-arms in their defense located in the opinion section.

Human interest stories often attempt to draw the reader's attention to the humanity of someone else he may not have otherwise given a great deal of thought about. The subject may be obscure to most readers or, alternatively, a great deal of recent news coverage might have made the subject seem distant to the average reader. Properly done, a human interest story helps readers understand why they should care about a given item of news. One can easily imagine, during the Jim Crow Era, human interest stories concerning discrimination helping an average white reader stop for a moment and think something like, "You know. These are human beings who are getting threatened and beaten just because they want to vote! This really is important."

Here, we certainly see the human side of the six richers being interviewed, and we even get dissenting opinions from some of them, although on the flimsiest, pragmatic grounds. None contends against the assumption that the government can take from them whatever it wants, and all agree with the altruistic moral premise behind the welfare state. The whole "debate" is mere quibbling over how much the government should take. One richer who does not want his taxes raised cites as his proudest achievement, "Setting up a leadership program for area teens called Youth Leadership America."

The clear impression one gets from the piece is that these richers our government keeps talking about in the abstract are real human beings -- and that they really care about their fellow man, as evidenced by their having no moral objection to what the government is about to do to them. In so far as the article is also a puff piece, it is also directing kudos to any richers who decide to read it.

Unfortunately, taxation is not voluntary, and no matter what some of its victims might think about its propriety, the fact remains that it is a violation of property rights. This article is an attempt to excuse massive theft by the government -- the entity that is actually supposed to prevent it -- by giving the impression that the richers don't really mind, and that stealing the fruits of their labor is for the best, anyway. As icing on the cake, its altruistic back-patting might cow a few of the uppity troublemakers from their ranks into shutting their traps about rights and opening up their checkbooks at tax time. Rights, after all, aren't even a blip on this human interest radar.

And that's a pity, for if there is one thing of urgent human interest, it is rights, including the right to property. As Ayn Rand once put it so succinctly, "Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law."

Rand's argument hinged on a revolutionary view about morality, but our society is reaching the point where her view will soon be the only one that can make sense out of what our government is preparing to do. If stealing is wrong, by what right does the government do it? There is no such right, and it is appalling that a "human interest" story about six hapless richers would fail to mention that.

-- CAV

The Shirt-Sleeve Millionaires

By West from The Pursuit,cross-posted by MetaBlog

5 months or so ago I developed an economic history bug. Through hours and hours of time spent in the library, I've come across a lot of great material covering a broad range of developments within the 18th and 19th centuries. Since this blog is all about the pursuit of the good, I wanted the first post to include one of the passages that I've found to be particularly striking and inspirational to me from this research.

Most people to some degree have heard of the heroic stories of men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan. These "Prime Movers" were forces to be reckoned with, and everyone benefitted (and continues to benefit) from their products enormously. These characters are merely the tip of the iceberg though. There weren't just a few titans; there were innumerable self-made men throughout the 18th and 19th century who amassed tremendous fortunes. For many of them, you won't find libraries or universities with their namesake, but they deserve ample recognition and praise, for they are, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, among the "men who walked down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision." Today I'd like to recognize and praise the Pittsburgh shirt-sleeve millionaires.

From Herbert N. Casson's The Romance of Steel (1907):
"Pittsburgh has about one hundred shirt-sleeve millionaires and a very few silk-hat ones. Without a single exception, the steel kings and coal barons of to-day were the barefooted boys of yesterday. In this respect no other city is as genuinely republican, as thoroughly American, as Pittsburgh. Its motto might be "from rags to riches"; and its name should be spelled--Pitt$burgh. It is a region where even yet "all men are born free and equal"--where the ladder of opportunity has rungs that reach to the bottom. It is a land of money; but more, it is a land where the average man has received a squarer deal in the game of life than he would have got anywhere else--where prizes are not bequeathed from strong fathers to feeble sons, but carried off by the "fittest" in each contest.
Pittsburghers have no pedigree. They want none. They are themselves a generation of ancestors. The few aristocratic landowning families are being bought out by the iron and steel men. No "gentlemen" emigrated to Western Pennsylvania. From first to last it was settled by plain, ordinary people, who had nothing to help them except their own efforts. Among the earlier iron kings not one had a college education. Christopher Zug and Curtis G. Hussey--two stately figures--were the sons of poor farmers. Thomas M. Howe and Joshua Rhodes were grocery-boys. Aaron French and John J. Torley were child workers in iron-mills. There is not one conspicuous exception to this rule. The greater greatness of Greater Pittsburgh is in the fact that it has been created by the rank and file of the human race. It is the extroardinary achievement of ordinary men."

Posted by Meta Blog at 8:39 PM | TrackBack

The Nationalization Continues

By Jennifer Snow from Literatrix,cross-posted by MetaBlog

After a tip from my housemate, I located this news story that illustrates the true effects of the bailout on any company foolish enough to take the money. Take government money, and there is no limit to what the would-be dictators in Washington will dictate. They will feel free to order you to violate your contractual agreements regarding bonuses, for instance, because people are "outraged". The economic dictators feel no need to be restrained by anything like legality, contracts, or common sense. These social metaphysicians seek only to appease the loudest screamers of the immediate split-second.

AIG is doomed--either it will finally be "allowed" to fail (after destroying yet more millions of dollars of taxpayer money), or the government will soon own 100% of the company and keep it in operation like a corpse animated by ropes tied to the ankles and wrists. It will become a Ponzi scheme as grotesque as Social Security.

If you have money in AIG, get out. Get out, get out, get out, no matter HOW much it costs you. And maybe do some screaming of your own, before this nationalization spree continues.

I Lobby Voinovich

By Jennifer Snow from Literatrix,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Re: my last post, I sent the following email to Senator Voinovich:

Dear Senator Voinovich:

On Thursday, the House passed a bill that would institute a special 90% "emergency tax" on bonuses paid by financial institutions that have received more than $5 million in federal bailout money.

Completely aside from the impropriety of the federal government bailing out failing businesses, this bill is a disgrace--this is the act of a dictator seeking to expropriate and nationalize an industry to appease the worst type of envy imaginable. I hope that you will stand fast and fight this bill to the best of your ability for the sake of those who do not wish to see America become a Fascist country, Fascist in the literal sense of the term, where the government determines how business is run while still retaining the fiction of private property.

Stop this travesty!

Jennifer Snow

I encourage you to contact your own senator, which can be done via this site.

When Outsourcing Isn't

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

The Chronicle of Higher Education features a fascinating article about students who "outsource" their college writing assignments -- sometimes including dissertations! -- overseas to essay mills. Most of the article focuses on the shady nature of one such mill in particular, how orders are processed, and what might motivate the participants in such a transaction.

Needless to say, the article finds more than one parallel to the economic phenomenon of outsourcing, particularly as made possible by the great efficiency of today's electronic communications across the globe. In fact, it holds out these essays-for-hire as examples of outsourcing: "Just as many American companies are outsourcing their administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to outsource their academic work."

But are they?

According to one dictionary, to outsource means, "to obtain goods or services from an outside source." The usual understanding for the motivational context of the term comes from business, but it certainly applies to individuals, as indicated by another definition of outsourcing: "To send out (work, for example) to an outside provider or manufacturer in order to cut costs."

The term, which verges on the superfluous, ends up in practice simply describing any recent application of the law of comparative advantage. Its main utility seems to be in pointing out just how well recent technological advances have created new opportunities to do this.

So, in a literal, context-dropping, and short-sighted sense, one could certainly say that the students are outsourcing their essays. They don't have adequate time for the immediate assignment (or, worse, to learn the research or writing skills they need in order to do the work), but they have money on hand to pay someone who has, to produce the essay. They save on time by paying the essay mill money that they value less than this time.

But the comparison to outsourcing breaks down when the legitimate purpose of the course work is considered, and that is precisely for the student to acquire skills in writing and research, not to mention experience thinking about the material of the course. This is ideally the whole reason a student is attending the class, and it is something that, by its very nature, cannot be outsourced. It is this fact which demolishes even the best legitimate-sounding reason to use an essay mill I saw in the article, which is, "to use it to get ideas." You cannot pay someone to acquire skills and experience on your behalf. Most or all of the students participating in these transactions are cheating themselves.

Having said that, and still not to excuse this practice, one issue driving the growth of modern essay mills remained unmentioned, although the article brushed very closely with it: What is an education for?

But [Notre Dame Associate Professor Susan D.] Blum points out a more fundamental issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of talking to students about what college is about and why studying -- which may seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential -- actually matters. "Why do they have to go through the process of researching?" she says. "We need to convey that to them."

Thanks to progressive education and credentialism, which feed off one another, students are too focused on the marks they will get for an assignment or a course, rather than the vital improvements to their minds that they will get out of a course. And often, many are accustomed to getting very little of the latter. To that extent, the urge to "outsource" is understandable.

The "progressives", by setting education against the process of fostering the rational faculty, have severed it from its proper, selfish role to the student in more ways than one. (e.g., Even if you can get the students to appreciate thinking about one course in particular, you won't necessarily get them to generalize the lesson to all disciplines. They won't necessarily know how to generalize.)

Pragmatic credentialists finish the job of making a time-wasting joke out of education by attempting to bypass the work of evaluating how well any given individual has mastered his material and can apply it to the tasks he needs to perform in order to help a future employer and thus to make a living.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 414

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

First, a word from my favorite source for cultural commentary....

Save 20 Percent on The Objective Standard now through March 27

TOS is offering a 20% discount on subscriptions to first-time subscribers through March 27, 2009. If you have considered subscribing to the Standard but have held off -- or if you know anyone who has -- now is the time to act. A one-year print subscription is only $47.20 (regularly $59), and a two-year print subscription is only $87.20 (regularly $109). Likewise, a one-year online-only subscription is only $39.20 (down from $49), and a two-year online-only subscription is only $71.20 (down from $89). These prices revert to regular rates after March 27.

Save now by clicking here.

Ranking the Punters

Don't be fooled by the title, which only sounds like it could refer to the ravings of a particularly hard core fantasy football player who can't wait for fall to return....

Scott Powell continues his series of Presidential rankings with an installment on the "punters."

The pressing problem of the Era of the Growth and Decline of the Union that required presidential leadership, but instead met with default and evasion, was slavery. Every year that passed made this point clearer, and every time that presidents "punted" on this issue only made the situation worse. Consequently, one might be inclined to say that the difficulty level of each successive presidency got higher as the nineteenth century unfolded, and that this should be taken into account when judging the presidents in question. However, the issue is moot, because not one of the presidents in question ever did anything particularly impressive that would allow someone who is ranking them to even consider how hard it was for them to do the right thing.

Among the punters is the tenth President, John Tyler, who, I recently learned, has two living grandsons. Yes. Grandsons.

Red State Blues

Texas regularly votes for Republican presidential candidates and is generally regarded as pro-capitalist, but anyone familiar with its legislature would wonder where that reputation comes from. Every session churns out ridiculous headlines, like one I ran across yesterday over lunch pertaining to a proposal to regulate the tanning industry, of all things:

"In the United states and Texas, we don't allow our teens to purchase cigarettes until after they are 18 because it is a carcinogen," said Rep. Burt Solomons, R-Carrollton. "Yet we don't do that for tanning beds, which can expose teens to the same risk for cancer."

The bill would require anyone under 18 years old to get a doctor's note before using a tanning bed and would require a parent be with them in the salon. Supporters and detractors said this would be the strictest legislation any state has passed on teen tanning.

Notice the party affiliation of Burt Solomons, as well as his facile use of one bad law as an excuse to pass another. You get bonus points if you recall that many, many things can increase the risk for cancer. What will they restrict or outlaw on that basis next? Your guess is as good as mine.

In the meantime, even slight moves in the direction of greater freedom are greeted with resistance, like a proposal to allow the sale of liquor on Sunday. Brian Phillips explains:

The fact is, if a business wishes to open on Sunday, it is not appropriate or moral for the government to prohibit it from doing so. And it is no less immoral if most of the businesses in that particular industry support such prohibitions. The decision to open on Sunday should be left to the discretion of each individual store owner, not politicians or industry lobbyists.

Later in the same post, he also makes some salient comments on the recent bust of a huge prostitution ring in Houston.

The government does not exist to protect my health. It does not exist to make me able to loaf on a given day of the week. It doesn't exist to prevent consenting adults from buying or selling sex, no matter how distasteful the very idea. It doesn't exist to help my gang run your life or yours run mine.

It exists to protect individual rights, and this protection necessarily precludes it from doing any of those other things.

Heroes of Capitalism Celebrates March

Specifically, you can learn more about James Naismith, the father of March Madness, and Arthur Guinness, the real patron saint of Ireland. Or would that be one of the descendants of Nicholas O'Murphy? I may have to -- erm -- think about that one for awhile.

Houston Rankings

Recently, a virus knocked out the computers at Municipal Court for at least a week, including the day I came to settle a parking ticket. So I settled the ticket by mail. Of course, I never heard anything back, so I ended up having to go online to check on whether the city would permit me to take driver's ed or whether it simply took my money.

My visit to the city government's web site came with a silver lining. I noticed a link to various top ten rankings achieved by the city in recent years. Here are just the top rankings Houston has racked up. Most of them reflect well on the city.

• Top Metro in the Nation Site Selection Magazine -- March 2009
• Best City to Live, Work and Play Kiplinger's Personal Finance -- July 2008
• Best U.S. City to Earn a Living Forbes.com -- August 18, 2008
• Best City for Your Job BusinessWeek -- June 12, 2008
• Best City to Buy a Home Forbes.com -- July 14, 2008
• Best City for Recent College Grads Forbes.com -- June 26, 2008
• Hottest Labor Market Bizjournals.com -- September 8, 2008
• Fastest Job Growth (12/07 to 12/08) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment -- February, 2009
• Lowest Cost of Living Among Major Metro Areas ACCRA Cost of Living Index -- Third Quarter 2008
• Largest IT Service Economy Onforce, Inc. (VoIP Monitor) -- December 5, 2008
• Top U.S. Manufacturing Cities Manufacturers' News Inc. (as reported in the Houston Business Journal) -- May 30, 2008
• Most Accessible City for the Disabled The National Organization on Disability -- February 14, 2008
• Top Local Government Green Power Purchaser Environmental Protection Agency -- July 2008
• America's Best Hospitals -- Cancer, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center U.S News & World Report -- July 2008
• Highest Population Growth in the Nation U.S. Census Bureau (as reported in the Houston Business Journal) -- July 10, 2008

Compiling such lists isn't a proper function of the government, but the entire list is here.

-- CAV

Updates

3-20-09: Added missing hyperlink to Powell's "punter" post.

May Rebuts Stranahan

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

As more Americans rediscover Ayn Rand's ideas, some of her detractors are coming out of the woodwork.

One such attack came from Lee Stranahan, who wrote, "An Insider's Look At How Ayn Rand Destroyed The World".

Fortunately, frequent NoodleFood commenter Jim May has taken the time to rebut Stranahan in this post at the New Clarion blog, "The Stranahan Syndrome".

Thank you, Jim!

Environmentalist Propaganda Video

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

When someone asks if environmentalism is really anti-man, you can point them towards this video:



One of man's cardinal values is self-esteem. If a person believes he is evil and unfit for existence, then he won't fight for his life.

Environmentalism attacks self-esteem by portraying man as such as evil and unfit for existence. If Americans ever fully internalize that code of values, then we'll be in big trouble.

Hence the importance of identifying (and opposing) that deadly code whenever one sees it.

Atlas Shrugged Audio Sale

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

An audio version of Atlas Shrugged is currently available for purchase from Audible.com for a whopping $4.95. This is the version read by Scott Brick, not Christopher Hurt.

It's part of Audible's "Win-Win" sale, which ends tomorrow (Thursday) at 4 pm EDT. The sale, I think, is only good for members of Audible.com.

The Trouble with Republicans

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

“There has long been an element of the Republican Party that has felt a need to distance themselves from people who stand up for conservative principles, whether those with principles have been Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, or whomever.”

So observed Thomas Sowell on March 17 in his latest Townhall column, “The Republican Civil War.” Sowell is one of my favorite political commentators, together with Walter Williams and a few other conservative/“libertarian“ columnists. Author of many books that explode contemporary political and social fashions with bomb-squad precision, Sowell wrote what I consider the best critique of Marxism, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (1985), in which he shreds the doctrine into countless specks of chad. And his columns can be depended on for their cogently piquant criticisms of what passes for modern political and social “received wisdom.” It is doubtful that any of his book titles will be found on President Barack Obama’s bookshelf -- if he has one.

His latest column, however, points up the main problem with the Republican Party, and with Sowell’s argument, which is chiefly that conservatism, as an ideology or a set of principles, is utterly bankrupt. Its adherents can only try to out-shout the Democratic Party that they could do a better job of “managing” the country and the economy, when the best solution is to get the government out of the economy and back to its Constitutional mandate of protecting individual rights. But such a solution is as abhorrent to the Republicans as it is to the Democrats. It would entail a relinquishment of power and the repudiation of not only the welfare state, but of the roles of God, family and other “traditional” values in the GOP platform. Any other course of action will guarantee a sentence of irrelevancy of the Republican Party.

Sowell takes the Republican Party to task for being bankrupt, citing its current infighting over whether or not to side with Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and other outspoken religious and secular conservatives. It is not so ironic that most Republicans wish to distance themselves from the likes of Limbaugh and Coulter, who regularly launch broadsides against liberals and the Democrats from their flip-flopping religious/common sense convictions. It is exactly those convictions on which the Republicans once campaigned and legislated.

The Republicans behave like private citizens cowering in fear of a roaming street gang, and seek to protect themselves by paying moral and political protection money to the gang -- the gang in this instance being the Democrats.

Sowell, however, does not name those principles, nor does he offer a constructive solution other than that the Republicans should stick to their principles and stop indulging in what novelist Ayn Rand called “me-too-ism.”

“There has even been an undercurrent among some Republicans of a sense that it is time to move away from the image of Ronald Reagan, to update the party and court newer and less embarrassing segments of the voters than their current base.”

One can wholeheartedly agree with that observation. The two Reagan administrations made no serious attempt to abolish or reduce the welfare state. Reagan did nothing to nip the Islamic jihad in the bud (remember the Marine barracks massacre in Lebanon?) when forthright and terminal action against our enemies, chiefly Iran and Saudi Arabia, would have spared us 9/11 and the two futile and costly Iraq wars under the Bush administrations. One is at a loss to understand why Reagan is upheld by conservatives as the template of “good government.” He is credited with making tax cuts. But what the government gave during his terms of office, can be taken away just as easily, as Obama and a Democratic Congress are eager to do.

And, of course, let us not forget that the Republicans, under both Bush administrations, were responsible for the largest expansion of the welfare state and intrusive government interventions, which the Democrats happily obliged them with, and which the Obama administration wishes to surpass FDR-style.

Jared Seehafer, in his article of March 17, “Jesus Christ or John Galt? The Republican Party’s Identity Crisis,” argues that if the Republican Party wants to regain Congress and the White House in the next election, it must abandon the religious foundation of its principles and discover and advocate capitalism. He also argues that conservatives largely recognize the value of capitalism and seek to ensure its existence, and that the Republicans must realize that religion and capitalism, as moral systems, are irreconcilable.

I agree with that evaluation, except that, from my experience and observations, I do not think the conservatives actually value capitalism. It is a secondary matter to them. But, Rand put it best in her 1973 article, “Censorship: Local and Express”:

“The conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories -- with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals [the Democrats] see man as a soul freewheeling to the farthest reaches of the universe -- but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.”

Further on, she notes:

“…Each camp wants to control the realm it regards as metaphysically important; each grants freedom only to the activities it despises…..‘Control,‘ to both camps, means the power to rule by physical force. The conservatives want to rule man’s consciousness; the liberals, his body.”*

Sowell raises the issue that Republicans could easily win more black voters to their party by charging the Democrats with the horrendous and ongoing debacle of their welfare state and educational policies.

“No segment of the population has lost more by the agendas of the liberal constituencies of the Democratic Party than the black population. The teachers’ unions, environmental fanatics and the ACLU are just some of the groups to whose interests blacks have been sacrificed wholesale. Lousy education and high crime rates in the ghettos, and unaffordable housing elsewhere with building restrictions, are devastating prices to pay for liberalism. Yet the Republicans have never articulated that argument, and their opportunism in trying to get black votes by becoming imitation Democrats has failed miserably for decades on end.”

All that is true. But what Sowell fails to grasp is that, for reasons of altruism, the Republicans largely endorse the programs that Democrats advocate and enact, but say that they would do a better job of it, just as left-wingers claim that Soviet communism would have triumphed if only it had been guided by “better men.” The Republicans are not going to garner any significant support by implicitly endorsing Obama’s aggressive takeover of the economy by bickering over such minor issues as the amount of pork in the stimulus legislation or by harping on whether or not Obama and the new Treasury Secretary “knew” about the AIG executive bonuses before taking an 80% ownership in the company.

(Abetting both the Democrats and the Republicans in that exercise in fascism are the news media, which continue to report the lie that American taxpayers “own“ that 80%. I have heard no Republican point this out. Nor have I heard any conservative warn the nation about the peril of forcing AIG executives to return their bonuses, which would be an assault on contract law via ex post facto taxation, regardless of those executives‘ culpability in the subprime mortgage fiasco. No Republican has upbraided Congressman Barney Frank for demanding a list of those executives‘ names, which he would hand over to a Congressional lynch mob.)

Seehafer is correct to ask what Sowell did not: What principles does the Republican Party uphold, other than religious-based ones, which Sowell does not even mention in his article? Another question to ask is: What intellectual leadership could cure the Republicans of their bifurcated political policies and persuade them to adopt a moral advocacy of capitalism?

It certainly will not be the Sermon on the Mount, nor even Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. It must be John Galt. It must be a philosophy of reason, or Objectivism.


*In Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet softcover (1982), p. 187.

Are politically-incorrect Google search results being censored?

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

I recently searched for the words “capitalism definition” on Google, and saw this at the bottom of the first results page:

In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 2 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at ChillingEffects.org.

When I followed the link, the only information I could find is that an “Internet Watch Foundation” has submitted a “Child Pornography Complaint in Google Search.”

It appears that the “Internet Watch Foundation” submits a list of URL’s to Google which must be removed from search results. Google must do is - it may be held legally liable if it judges which URL’s are acceptable on an individual basis and makes a mistake. I tried some alternative searches and skimmed through the results, but I was unable to find anything non-political in the searches, much less pornographic.

This seems dubious to me. Various organizations are submitting a secret list of sites which are automatically removed by Google based on secret criteria. If the website was truly illegal, then why not prosecute the webmaster and take it down? The fact that it was delisted and not taken down suggests that it is not illegal in its jurisdiction, yet judged not worthy for me to see. I have no way to verify whether I am being prevented from seeing legitimate political speech, and even if I did have a way to find out which website was blocked, if the website really is child porn, viewing the site carries severe criminal penalties.  (Actually, even attempting to view illegal content is a criminal offense.)

While law-abiding citizens have no way to know which websites they are forbidden to see, it is easy to browse anonymously with an anonymizing proxy.  You just can’t speak out about the sensorship.  

By the way, Australia already censors politically-incorrect websites, and has threatened to prosecute anyone who links to them.

YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR SOCIETY

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Check out the Young Entrepreneur Society:



Bob Proctor endorses the Young Entrepreneur Society:


Find more videos like this on Young Entrepreneur Society

Mike Michalowicz, author of the book, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, is one of the entrepreneurs in the Y.E.S. movie.


Find more videos like this on Young Entrepreneur Society

Obama vs. the Unknown Ideal

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

Leading up to the election, I ran across material from the Obama campaign that spoke volumes about his contempt for debate and for the opinions of the American people. I concluded that:

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

And then, shortly after the election, I ran across another story describing how and why the Lord of the Gadflies, as I called Obama last November, might be poised to reactivate his network of grass roots supporters. The news story relays the mind sets of his supporters and his campaign.

Many are eager. "I'm going to be sitting at the phone, asking, 'What do you want me to do next? I'm ready,' " said volunteer Courtney Hood, 37, a mother of three from Owings, Md.

...

Joe Trippi, the Internet politics guru whose computer geeks made Howard Dean a contender in 2004 and who went on to design Obama's socially networked campaign machine, offers a provocative and educated guess.

Trippi predicted that Obama would use his forces, first and foremost, to intimidate congressional foes of his agenda, rally his allies and forge "one of the most powerful presidencies in American history." [bold added]

"What comes next" turns out to be Obama budget, which is giving even some members of his own party heartburn.

Beginning Sunday, the White House will harness every part of the Democratic Party's machinery to defend President Obama's budget and portray Republicans as reflexively political, according to party strategists.

A participant in the planning meetings described the push as a successor to Democrats' message that Rush Limbaugh is the Republican Party leader. "We have exhausted the use of Rush as an attention-getter," the official said.

Needless to say, Obama never debated Rush Limbaugh on the merits of his agenda, and this latest tactic is also intended to avoid debate:

Democratic strategists explain that the message [war] is designed to accomplish three things:

-- First, it could deflect attention from the size of Obama's budget and blunt attacks on the ambition of his agenda.

"It helps change the conversation from their criticism of the president's plan," a top Democratic official said. "If they want to say he's going to raise taxes in the middle of a recession or he's got socialist tendencies -- none of which we agree with -- one of the easy things for us to come back with is: We have tough choices to make right now, and you have nothing to offer." [bold added]

If the Republicans had been honest defenders of actual capitalism all along -- rather than the welfare state misbranded as capitalism -- they could easily demolish this cowardly and dishonest tactic.

-- Second, by painting Republicans as politically motivated, the conservative House Democrats known as Blue Dogs may be less likely to side with the GOP.

"As long as they're seen as reflexively political -- saying 'no' to everything -- the Blue Dog Democrats can say, 'I don't agree with everything the president proposes, but at least he has a plan, an outline of what we should be working on,'" the official said. [bold added]

This follows from the first part, and is made possible, again, by the unprincipled -- and therefore inarticulate and spineless -- Republicans. What's especially galling is that in the sense that "politically motivated" means "unconcerned with the actual merits of the Obama agenda", it is the Democrats who are even more guilty of being politically motivated.

--Third, Republicans could look like they're playing politics in a time of crisis, rather than disagreeing based on substance. [bold added]

Note the concern with appearances. If Obama's plan is so great, it should be a cinch for him to explain why America needs to set a record federal budget deficit and expand the very government that caused the financial crisis. But that is the one thing missing from the Democrats' plan, and that shows that it is really about grabbing power.

Back in November, I said the following of Obama's Army of Gadflies:

Who knew that one day, every annoying neighbor you ever had, every jackass who ever yelled at you at work for putting a soda can in the trash (where, by the way, it belongs), and every yokel communist who ever started spamming you with left-wing "news" links would one day be harnessed like this? This is clever, amusing in a way, and chilling all at once.

Obama does not yet feel that he can ramrod his agenda down our throats with impunity, but he senses that, with so many Americans unaware of the true nature of capitalism -- which our country does not have now and has never had -- that he can wear down the American people by relentlessly pushing it until we give up just so he will shut up. Now is not the time to let the most annoying person you can imagine have his way for the sake of momentary convenience.

Obama intends to start with the path of least resistance: the unprincipled politicians. It is ... incumbent ... on those of us who know enough to value freedom to make it clear to them that caving in to his agenda is not what we want, and that we will remember this come election time.

Obama is betting the farm on a very low estimate of the intelligence of the American voter and the ability of other politicians to gauge it. Let's make sure he loses. Vital to the effort is making clear what too many Republicans can't or won't: that the choice isn't between Obama's welfare state and welfare state of the status quo, but between statism and freedom.

-- CAV

Quick Roundup 413

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

Sixty Years Ago Today

Ludwig von Mises' Human Action was published. Debi Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute quotes a letter of Ayn Rand's on why the book is still relevant today:

As to your statement that "laissez-faire" capitalism is the cause of depressions-this is an issue of economic fact and is simply untrue. The cause of depressions is government interference into economics. For proof, I refer you to such books as Capitalism the Creator by Carl Snyder, Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, How Can Europe Survive by Hans Sennholz, and the works of the great economist Ludwig von Mises.

That recommendation should strike a chord with the public. As I write, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged ranks third in sales at Amazon.

Black Boy American Hunger

For about a year, I have been slowly working my way though Always in Pursuit, a collection of essays by Stanley Crouch. In one of his shorter pieces, I encountered the following interesting revelation about a book that was part my high school literature curriculum:

Wright's actual struggle is usually misunderstood. As Black Boy shows, he realized early on that color preceded his essence as a human being. He was a Negro in the skin but intended to become a man of his own making. What he really wanted was to be a writer whose work could stand up next to the best.

Because of decision at his publishing house, Wright's original title for his autobiography, American Hunger, was changed and the second half of it was removed. That vital second half was set in the North and pulled the covers off the urban Communist movement. Now, in its full form, the book is remarkable.

The reader can feel the sweat, the bruises, and the cold, and understand the dreams as the boy fights the Southern restrictions imposed on him by the Negroes as well as the whites. When Wright comes North, he isn't overly impressed by the black or the white people nor is he taken in too long by the communists, who have no use for his intellectual probings and his desire for individuality. His insights into the totalitarian techniques of dominating mass thinking are as good as anyone's. [bold and hyperlink added] (115)

Or perhaps I should have said, "half a book" in reference to Black Boy.

Human Action, Atlas Shrugged, and American Hunger: That's three books I wish the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue could have read before he took office. But I'll settle for millions of voters discovering the second of these.

For once, ...

... the Texas legislature might pass a semi-good law! As quoted by Kingsport TN Government:

As College Station is expanding its red light camera program, a state representative is trying to stop it.

A Lubbock legislator has filed a bill that would end red-light cameras in Texas, and a local driver is offering help.

Lubbock did away with its red-light cameras last year when the citizen group that oversaw the cameras, determined the cameras hadn’t made Lubbock’s streets any safer.

At that time, the cameras also hadn't made Lubbock any money. A College Station man is supporting that Lubbock legislator; he says money is what the cameras are all about.

I say "semi-good" (which may still be generous) because I don't know all the details of this law, and banning such cameras would not really be the right step to take. It is the use of such cameras by government entities to generate ticket revenue, and probably also for general surveillance, that should be banned.

While the use of such traffic cameras might be legitimate and useful in a society in which all roads were privately-owned, they are little more than automated bandits in our current context. (And, based on my experience of passing by one of them on my usual route to work each day, the "little more" consists of encouraging dangerous, sudden stops in heavy traffic, even when the roads are slick.)

Why do I hold that there is a difference?

A private road owner who abused such devices in order to cheat customers out of money would face bad publicity, boycotts, and litigation. This is because, in a free society, the government is delimited only to the task of protecting individual rights. Nobody would be forced to deal with such a business and anyone who did would have recourse to government protection if a business did attempt to resort to force or fraud.

On the other hand, the government, as the sole legal wielder of force in our semi-free society, is able to codify such abuses as law and is, therefore, all but immune to such corrective measures. As a further effect of the government illegitimately owning roads, the element of choice is guaranteed to be absent with its monopoly. (This does not mean that monopolies as such should be illegal: just government-created or -enforced monopolies.) The existence of competition alone would discourage the misuse of these cameras, while also encouraging their use in situations where having a camera around might actually promote better driving.

Fun with Math

En route to something else, I stumbled across a collection of humorous, mathematics-themed bumper stickers. My favorite was, "Alcohol and calculus don't mix Never drink and derive."

-- CAV

Intellectuals and History

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

Writing for City Journal, Adam Kirsch reviews Charles Kurzman's Democracy Denied, 1905–1915: Intellectuals and the Fate of Democracy, which examines the role of intellectuals in ultimately unsuccessful attempts by six nations -- Russia, Iran, Turkey, Portugal, Mexico, and China -- to establish Western-style democracies.

His conclusion should provoke thought among those wondering about the fates of more recent revolts, from the the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, to Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, to the current "Tea Party" movement in the United States.

[T]hese six revolutions are not remembered as a glorious chapter in history. In each, pro-democracy activists scored dramatic initial successes, only to surrender quickly to infighting, resentment, and apathy, setting the stage for counterrevolutionary coups.

...

[T]he revolutions of 1905–1915 failed because intellectuals overestimated popular democratic support and underestimated the challenges that democracy presented. Kurzman writes acerbically about these intellectuals, repeatedly suggesting that such liberal values as a free press and universal education were just parochial interests of the class that writes and teaches for a living. But are democracies' enthusiasms for these values really just examples of "hegemony" in the Gramscian sense, as Kurzman argues -- "the acceptance of the interests of the ruling group as though they were the interests of the whole society"? If so, it's hard to understand why, as Kurzman acknowledges in his concluding chapter, these rights became the goal of the post-1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe -- which were led not by intellectuals but by labor movements like Solidarity. The intellectuals of 1905–1915 were, Kurzman amply shows, deluded about their peoples' readiness for democracy. They were ahead of their time, a misfortune not just their own, but their countries'.

Kirsch sounds, in his critique, closer to the truth than Kurzman, but I think that stopping with the conclusion that the intellectuals are "ahead of their time", as perceptive as it is, misses a larger, crucial point.

Why were they "ahead of their time," if they were at all? Later democratic movements may have striven for similar values, but history is not preordained, either, as the failure of Iran to overthrow the mullahs by now shows us. Why has this not happened? And what, ultimately, causes society to change for the better, anyway?

Kirsch and Kurzman are getting warm when they look at intellectuals; for abstract, philosophical ideas clearly play a role in changing society. They are also right to wonder whether the societies these intellectuals functioned within were ready to implement their ideas. But two more things merit attention from anyone genuinely concerned with preserving and expanding freedom: (1) whether the ideas of such "revolutionaries" are consistent with freedom, and (2) how well-accepted they are by the population at large. A revolution can fail because the ideas of its leaders are not really compatible with freedom, because such ideas do not already permeate the culture, or both.

The notion that a people may "not be ready" for freedom more obviously touches on the second of these, and Bush's attempt to bomb and rebuild Iraq into freedom is often seen as futile for this reason. But this notion also touches on the first. The tenets of Islam -- the dominant ideology of the Iraqi people, as well as the acknowledged source of law in its new constitution -- are incompatible with freedom. This is why the Iraqis are not ready for freedom.

And what of the revolutionary? If we take Bush, the architect of this "revolution" as an intellectual leader for the sake of argument, we see that his acceptance of theocracy is an idea incompatible with freedom. (Nor has he, needless to day, attempted to introduce the Iraqis to a coherent political philosophy supporting individual rights.) Bush is no intellectual to be sure, but what he tried to do is no different than what any band of intellectuals is attempting to do by staging a political revolution without first winning minds to their side. Thus, as a theocrat, or at least someone tolerant of theocracy, Bush has the wrong ideas, and this caused him to fail to challenge the wrong ideas already held by the Iraqi people.

No matter how modern Iraq's new infrastructure looks, be that infrastructure the bridges we built or Western-looking parliamentary elections, freedom cannot prevail without the population generally favoring individual rights. The ideal of total obedience to Allah contradicts a proper conception individual rights.

Putting the last differently, unless the intellectuals succeed in changing the overall outlook of the larger society in favor of ideas consistent with freedom, attempts to cause fundamental political change will be premature and will eventually fail. Why? Because the people will ultimately demand policies and institutions in line with their personally-held views. (Would our government's forming an Islamic morality police be tolerated in America?) In fact, in order for lasting political change to occur, an intellectual revolution is necessary first, as Yaron Brook recently pointed out on Pajamas TV regarding the "Tea Party" movement. (He gets to this around 16:30.) To succeed in bringing about freedom, intellectuals must have ideas that lead to freedom when put into practice and influence society enough that those ideas can be put into practice.

Ayn Rand, writing in her essay, "For the New Intellectual," discusses how intellectuals who want freedom must work to achieve that end.

The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. The intellectual carries the application of philosophical principles to every field of human endeavor. He sets a society's course by transmitting ideas from the "ivory tower" of the philosopher to the university professor -- to the writer -- to the artist -- to the newspaperman -- to the politician -- to the movie maker -- to the night-club singer -- to the man in the street. The intellectual's specific professions are in the field of the sciences that study man, the so-called "humanities," but for that very reason his influence extends to all other professions. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man's means of knowledge sad makes an other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields. A free society has to be an informed society. In the stagnation of feudalism, with castes and guilds of serfs repeating the same motions generation after generation, the services of traveling minstrels chanting the same old legends were sufficient. But In the racing torrent of progress which is capitalism, where the free choices of individual men determine their own lives and the course of the entire economy, where opportunities are unlimited, where discoveries are constant, where the achievements of every profession affect all the others, men need a knowledge wider than their particular specialties, they need those who can point the way to the better mousetrap -- or the better cyclotron, or the better symphony, or the better view of existence. The more specialized and diversified a society, the greater its need for the integrating power of knowledge; but the acquisition of knowledge on so wide a scale is a full-time profession. A free society has to count on the honor of its intellectuals: it has to expect them to be as efficient, reliable, precise and objective as the printing presses and the television sets that carry their voices. (For the New Intellectual, pp 26-27) [bold added]

Unlike in Iraq, many of the ideas necessary for a free society are widely held by many in the general American population, although often only implicitly and in inconsistent form. The job of the intellectual is, relatively speaking, much easier here than elsewhere, and our political situation is less dire. Nevertheless, political revolutions do not happen without philosophical revolutions -- and turning an anti-freedom political tide cannot occur without a turning of the philosophical tide. We elected Obama because many Americans favor the welfare state, which is incompatible with freedom.

What's next for the Tea Party movement? Third party futility at best, unless intellectuals who understand the philosophical roots of freedom notice that the public is on their side this time, and carry the day.

-- CAV

The Sleeping Giant Stirs?

By Jennifer Snow from Literatrix,cross-posted by MetaBlog

While looking at Yaron Brook's recent WSJ OpEd "Is Ayn Rand Relevant?", I stumbled upon this fascinating piece analyzing Obama's recent poll numbers. Go read it, it's well worth the effort. Could there be any more hopeful sign for the future of this country (and thus, of the world), that the popularity of the socialist, populist president is dropping like a stone just two months after he entered office?

Sales of Atlas Shrugged are rising and continuing to rise. Many Americans are now seeking an answer to the question of why the actions of their "leaders" are accomplishing precisely the opposite of their stated intentions. If ever there was a time to speak, this is it.

Fatal Distraction

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Via The Agitator, here's a must-read: Fatal Distraction by Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten. It is one of the most heart-wrenching stories that I've ever read. It's about the loving parents -- 15 to 25 per year in America -- who accidentally kill their own young children by unknowingly leaving them in the car on a hot day. The article makes perfectly clear that the attempted prosecution of such parents for any kind of crime is completely unjust. Memory is inherently fallible -- as we all know -- and even the most loving parent can forget his or her own child. When such happens as a result of a fluke, rather than as the product of habitual failure to take proper care, the result is an unimaginable tragedy, not a crime.

I wish that I had time to write more about the issues pertaining to memory and negligence that the story raises, as that's right up the alley of my dissertation. Perhaps I can do that later.

Sadly, as the article observes, the laws regulating the way in which children are strapped into car seats contributes to the problem.

This is journalism at its finest. Prepare to have your mind engaged and your heart broken. Go read it.

Laws Versus Regulations

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

I'm looking for a good source to help clarify the distinction between ordinary laws and regulations. Any suggestions? A relatively short online essay would be most helpful.

Here's why I'm asking: On Saturday, I attempted to argue against any and all regulations, on the grounds that ordinary laws would be sufficient to protect individual rights. I wasn't satisfied with my answer, as I felt like I had muddied the issue somehow. Then yesterday I was asked about the issue in e-mail, so I said the following -- tentatively:

Laws might be good (insofar as they protect rights) or bad (insofar as they violate rights). The same could be said of regulations. However, due to their different origins, regulations are dangerous to liberty, I think. How so? In essence, laws are a product of the legislative process, whereas regulations are a product of agencies of the executive branch.

Laws must be passed by our representatives: we can review the legislation, ask that they vote one way rather than another, and hold them accountable for their votes. This process is imperfect, particularly today. Yet we still find some measure of openness and accountability in it.

In contrast, regulations are passed by government bureaucrats in agencies answerable to the president. These bureaucrats may or may not court public opinion; they may have a narrow partisan agenda; they may not give a damn about public opinion. These agencies are likely to be ruled by special interests at the expense of the rest of us -- for the kinds of reasons that Milton Friedman observes in Free to Choose. In particular, the special interests stand to gain much by making the regulations in their favor, while each citizen (or resident) will only lose a bit. Consequently, regulations are very likely to violate rights in all kinds of horrible ways -- just as we see today.

In other words, regulations come to be when the legislative branch illegitimately cedes its power of making law to the executive branch. It's a dangerous violation of the separation of powers -- and an evasion of legislative responsibility. And the result is reams and reams of unknowable and often contradictory government edicts.

Is that basically right -- or am I totally confused? Also, as I mentioned at the outset, I am interested in any good sources on this issue of laws versus regulations.

Oh, and I should mention that I didn't cite Milton Friedman's Free to Choose because I'm a fan of the book. I'm not. However, Friedman's discussion of some of the tendencies of regulatory agencies is reasonably good, and I know that the other person has read it.

Eric Daniels on Free Speech

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

On April 11th, Front Range Objectivist Supper Talks (FROST) will host a dinner lecture with Objectivist historian Eric Daniels on "The Looming Crisis over Free Speech." It will be an excellent lecture, so if you're able to attend, please consider doing so. Note that an RSVP is required by April 6th.

Here's the full announcement:

Supper Talk with Dr. Eric Daniels on "The Looming Crisis over Free Speech"

• Date: Saturday, April 11, 2009
  
• Time: 6:00 pm social hour (cash bar); 7:00 pm dinner; 8:00 pm talk
  
• Location: West Woods Golf Club, 6655 Quaker Street in Arvada, Colorado
  
• Cost: $60 per individual, $35 per student
  
• RSVP: To reserve your space, you must RSVP by April 6th to Betty Evans via e-mail (betty@frontrangeobjectivism.com) or phone (303.421.7334). Please send your check to FROGS c/o Betty Evans, 1140 US Hwy 287 STE 400-283, Broomfield, CO 80020 or use Paypal to send your payment to betty@frontrangeobjectivism.com.

In this lecture, Dr. Daniels examines the state of free speech in America and finds that it is under serious threat. From campus speech codes to anti-discrimination and harassment law, from campaign finance to commercial speech, Americans today enjoy less and less freedom in communicating their ideas. Today's colleges and universities have become a hotbed of censorship, producing generations of Americans who have accepted suppression of speech as the norm. Dr. Daniels argues that the emerging crisis is a result of the lack of a proper understanding of individual rights, especially property rights. Only by understanding the proper basis of rights can we act to secure our freedom of speech and to protect the rights that give rise to it.

Dr. Daniels is a research assistant professor at the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He lectures internationally on American history and attended ARI's Objectivist Graduate Center. He recently coauthored U.S. Economic Freedom Index: 2008 Report. He contributes to The Objective Standard and wrote a chapter for Abolition of Antitrust.

Activism Against NAIS

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

On March 11th, a congressional committee held a public hearing on plans to expand NAIS, the National Animal Identification System. This issue has been on my radar thanks to Monica Hughes' blogging on it on the FA/RM blog. An action alert from the Weston A. Price Foundation describes the proposal as follows:

The USDA has proposed a rule to require all farms and ranches where animals are raised to be registered in a federal database under the NAIS for existing disease control programs. The draft rule covers programs for cattle, goats, sheep, and swine. It also sets the stage for mandatory NAIS animal identification in the future.

It's not too late to comment. The alert noted that:

You can submit written testimony to the subcommittee up to 10 days after the hearing. Send your testimony to the Hearing Clerk, Jamie Mitchell, at Jamie.Mitchell@mail.house.gov. Be sure to put "March 11 Hearing - Animal Identification Programs" in the subject line. Keep your comments clear, polite, and concise.

Here is the e-mail that I sent yesterday. I encourage others to write their own letters.

From: Diana Hsieh <diana@dianahsieh.com>
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 09:58:58 -0600
To: <Jamie.Mitchell@mail.house.gov>
Subject: March 11 Hearing - Animal Identification Programs

Dear Members of the Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry --

I am writing to you to oppose National Animal Identification System (NAIS).

I am an ordinary citizen from Colorado, albeit with some interest in raising livestock myself. I am opposed to NAIS because:

* NAIS violates the property rights of all farmers. Farmers should not be required to tag their livestock any more than parents should be required to tag their children. Livestock is private property, and the government should respect that by limiting itself to protecting the rights of property and contract.

* The costs of compliance with NAIS will drive smaller farmers out of business. Sadly, I suspect that many large farms -- particularly those already on the government dole -- are pushing for NAIS for that very reason. They are eliminating their competition by government regulation. That's anti-American. The government should not be complicit in such schemes.

* NAIS will raise prices for consumers. Food prices have already gone through the roof. Particularly during an economic downturn, to require farmers to incur more costs -- which will then be passed on to consumers -- is very bad economic policy. Freedom, not government controls and regulation, is the key to economic prosperity.

* NAIS will not protect the food supply. The government does a lousy job of protecting the food supply, as the recent peanut butter and tomato scares show. The solution is not more burdensome regulations. It is a free market in agriculture. Under that system, Americans would have the capacity to buy from known local farmers or rely on the private certification of their choice. Americans will be responsible for their own safety -- just as they ought to be. We are not children: we are rational adults who ought to be free to act on our own best judgment.

NAIS is indefensible. It is anti-American. It should be wholly abandoned.

For more information on Free Market Agriculture, see the web site of Free Agriculture - Restore Markets (FA/RM) at http://fa-rm.org/.

-- DMH

Diana Hsieh
Ph.D Candidate, Philosophy, CU Boulder
E-mail: diana@dianahsieh.com
Blog: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Twitter: http://twitter.com/DianaHsieh
Secular Government: http://www.SecularGovernment.us
Free Market Medicine: http://www.WeStandFIRM.org

I also sent that letter to my two senators and one representative in Washington.

If you express your opposition to this dangerous and expensive expansion of government control over the private property of farmers, write to the subcommittee hearing clerk at Jamie.Mitchell@mail.house.gov. You can find and contact your own representatives via Congress.org. You are welcome to use my letter (or portions thereof) as you see fit. Please feel free to post what you write in the comments.

Ranking America’s Presidents: The “Punters”

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

Atlas Shrugged Classes Up Amazon

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

I was doing a search of the recent Amazon sales figures for Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, and stumbled upon a marvelous discovery: In Amazon's "Literature and Fiction/Classics" category, Atlas Shrugged is the #1 best-seller!

Even better, the #2 best-selling "Classic" is also Atlas Shrugged, just another version of the paperback. The #3 best-seller is The Federalist Papers. And the #4 best-seller is, amazingly, Atlas Shrugged again!

Rounding out the top ten are Fahrenheit 451 (#7), Thomas Paine's Common Sense (#8), and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (#9).

People are starting to sit up and pay attention to what is going on in the world around them.

Woo hoo!

--Dan Edge

On cultural reform

By Roberto 'Tito' Sarrionandia from Tito's Blog,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Egyptian Cleric Warns Muslim Youth of the Upcoming Valentine’s Day

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

Many more clips at Memri TV.

When Fools Rush In

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

The nation -- indeed, the world -- is waking up to the idea that ideas have consequences. One idea is that sacrificing is not a life-enhancing option and will lead to misery or death. Another is that the heedless policy of a spendthrift is not a rational course of action. Another is that adopting the policy of a spendthrift benefits no one but a politician who advocates it as a sound fiscal policy. Envy is not a paying proposition. “Class warfare” in the form of “soaking the rich” to help the poor assures mutual impoverishment. There are so many more altruist and collectivist ideas that are being grasped by millions as a collective prescription for penury and extinction.

The world seems to be emerging from a moral and intellectual coma, perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently. It is discovering that other ideas have other consequences, as well, ideas that promote life, promote prosperity, promote ambition and personal success, and that they are possible only in political freedom, and that this freedom has been violated, abridged, and nullified by the first set of ideas. True, politics is the last thing to be affected by a philosophical revolution. But one cannot help but be pleased with how startled the collectivists and altruists are now by the knowledge that they have not successfully pulled a fast one on Americans. These Americans have come knocking on the doors of elitists or leaning over the café railings or invading their legislated smoke-free bars and restaurants to ask: What in hell do you think you are doing?

The Americans who recently protested the spendthrift policies of the Obama administration and Congress with “tea parties,” and who plan to protest them on an even larger scale in the near future, one can wager are not regular readers of The New York Times. They cannot have much in common with its columnists and editors, nor with the news media. So the collectivist and altruist elite become very touchy when the people for whom they are “doing good” for their own sake, even to the point of enacting coercive and felonious legislation, exhibit signs of intelligence, resistance and anger. How dare these yokels!

And nothing raises their hackles higher than any mention of Ayn Rand. This is because they thought she and her philosophy had been buried by that arch-conservative, Whittaker Chambers, wielding a shovel on one side of the grave, while that fellow-traveler and critic Granville Hicks wielded another on the other side, in a true demonstration of bipartisanship half a century ago. And hadn’t all the academics and pundits and book writers since then refuted her and her philosophy over time and ensured that she would not return to haunt them?

The cultural and political elite are upset that she has not been forgotten. That philosophy has returned to haunt them and aggravate their guilt. And they are in high dudgeon because they are being cast in the role, not as saviors, but as her black-hearted villains. They are discovering that ideas cannot be interred as permanently as their authors. Atlas Shrugged is on their minds.

The Times blog, “Opinionator” (a round-up of positions expressed in other blogs) of March 6th, called “’Going Galt’: Everyone’s Doing It!“ is a testimonial to how the elite have been blind-sided in their arrogant complacency and sent spinning out of control on the Internet highway, and evidence of how thoroughly they have been indoctrinated in the belief that reality has nothing to do with their chosen “reality.” They are deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming train, but sneer that the train does not exist. They are stuffed animals crammed with the excelsior of worn-out bromides, mulched second-hand sociology, and the sawdust of a failed ideology.

Reading the denials of the cultural elite is almost as amusing as watching Sir Fretful Plagiary, the hack playwright in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy, The Critic, protest that his play does not fall off, is not tediously spun out, and does not want incident. Incredibly, these are the literary vices they ascribe to Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and they claim they can’t understand why it is getting so much attention. Nor can they understand why President Obama is having problems putting over his disastrous policies. Why don’t these “Galtists” just shut up and do as he says?

That they protest too much is an indication that they do understand. These are the crusaders who crusaded to destroy literary, economic and political values, and made living in this culture as pointless as watching a snow-covered TV screen. They would not have campaigned to destroy them if they did not feel threatened by them.

Their truncated minds and shriveled souls will not permit them to concede defeat. They see the “relevance,” these programmed altruists and dispensers of others’ wealth, and join in a chorus of denials of the relevance. Many are loathe to admit their malice. Others, while not projecting their self-deception and hatred on Rand or on her admirers, confess their utter ignorance of the importance of Atlas Shrugged. Randomly, and to wit:

“I look to Atlas Shrugged more for conveniently totable beach reading than an economic blueprint…. If only the people in her novels had acted remotely like actual people, rather than [like] comic book characters, I, too, would be rereading the thing now.”

This is the kind of “missing link” mentality that never progressed beyond the concretes under her nose. The novel is a novel, not a blueprint for anything. It is an idealization of reality, and the events in it are necessarily telescoped. Those events in the novel are so grounded in reality -- and the heroes and villains are so concretely real -- that it would be futile to explain to such a person that “actual people” are moved by the same values or anti-values as are the novel’s characters. The task of induction would be impossible to her. One must ask, also: Whose fictional characters, in her mind, aren’t of “comic book” caliber? John Updike’s? Joyce Carol Oates’s?

Then there is another kind of arrested mentality, writing about those who may choose to go on strike:

“And of course none of these folks designed an engine that would have created basically free energy (and made global warming a non-issue). In the individual case, ‘going Galt’ smacks of a kind of self-aggrandizement in the same way that climate smuggery does. Because, really, your marginal contribution doesn’t matter that much….The point is that you are not John Galt. You don’t even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks.”

This is someone struggling to convince “you” that you aren’t important enough to make a difference, and himself that your quitting in protest wouldn’t affect him much. The desperation is in the sneer. This individual apparently has read the novel, and got nothing from it. He is a minuscule, belittling Ellsworth Toohey. Well, Hillary Clinton once said she’d read Ayn Rand’s novels in college, and that it was just a “passing phase.” Look at the kind of contemptible person she grew to be.

Other bloggers make equally irrelevant comments about Rand and her novel. Trying to make sense of them is like trying to make sense of a Picasso canvas. Just as interesting, however, are the kinds of responses their comments elicited from their readers, ranging from the malicious to the short-range to the certifiably dumb. To wit:

“Atlas Shrugged is a joke. A piece of ridiculosity.”

“I wish they would take a John Galt….Please feel free to go on strike. We would be better off without you.”

“Rand falsely assumes these innovative genius[es] work in a vacuum and don’t benefit from having a safe, civil society to work in.”

“Please show me anything that I can touch, or eat, or live in, or drive that the ‘productive rich’ have made?”

Then there are the obvious Obama supporters, individuals ready and willing to sacrifice and work for “the good of society.”

“It is not at all clear that we need to bribe people with promises of riches in order to get them to do useful work. If it turns out to be necessary with today’s crop of masters of the universe, then we’ll need to find a way to start over, once we have turned the spoiled brats out of their unearned positions of power.”

“Please, go Galt. Be my guest….Take that genius talent of yours right over to the bus station at Applebee’s. I can’t wait to watch you scraping uneaten peas into the garbage disposal. You and your genius Galt buddies Bernie Madoff and Sir [Allen] Stanford.”

“The top tax rate will go up approximately 5%, and this makes you decide to take your ball and go home? That seems silly to me.”

“One of the characters [Hugh Akston, the philosopher of reason] in Atlas Shrugged was working in a diner frying hamburgers when he encountered Dagny Taggart. He was one of the ones who ‘shrugged.’ It was honest work and he made a very good hamburger. If Malkin and [Rick] Santelli and some others ‘go Galt,’ hopefully we can count on an increase in hamburger quality across the nation.”

These are people who probably believe that the concept of “unearned income” is a valid one and should be taxed and otherwise penalized, because no observable physical labor is involved in the rewards of risking investments in stocks and innovators and loans to productive enterprises. Intellectual labor is as much an unreal concept to them as it is to the IRS. Such labor is responsible for everything that the one individual “can touch, or eat, or live in, or drive.”

And, a number of these individuals view Bernard Madoff and Stanford as the symbols of capitalism and freedom. One newscaster on ABC this morning erroneously referred to Madoff as a “financier,” but then the news media suffer from a similar truncated mentality. They don’t “get it” that Obama, his appointees, and Congress are all guilty of the mother of all Ponzi schemes.

Two or three respondents answered with defenses of Rand and the novel. One promised to go on strike.

“I will cut back so that my hard-earned income is not taken by the government and redistributed to people who have not worked as hard. I will not subsidize others.”

One point of this commentary is to reveal the scope of hostility that exists in our culture to individualism, capitalism, freedom, and “the rich” -- and to the mind. Another is to prepare those who would argue in defense of those things for the levels of ignorance and species of malice they will encounter, not only in people they might personally engage in argument, but in politicians, academics, and the news media.

The thing to remember is that reason and reality is on our side. Most of our opponents and enemies know it. They are not the ones who need convincing or any kind of rational guidance. Beware especially of the ones who claim it is your duty to convince them. These creatures' minds are the truly truncated. Let reality be their ultimate persuader.

Focus on those who show genuine interest in answers, and never mind the fools.

The One Minute Case for Bankruptcy

By heroic@gmail.com (David Veksler) from One Minute Cases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What is bankruptcy?

Bankruptcy is a financial state that occurs when a person or business can no longer repay its debts. In the legal sense, bankruptcy begins when a court recognizes that the financial state of bankruptcy exists. The bankruptcy court takes charge of the bankrupt entity and disposes of its assets or reorganizes it to pay off as much of the debts as possible.

A bankruptcy proceeding recovers money for the creditor, but both parties benefit.

The purpose of a bankruptcy proceeding is to facilitate the maximum recovery of the money owed to the creditor. But it also benefits the debtor. After the debtor pays off what he can, his remaining debt is extinguished. This is not a “get of jail free” card; the creditor, whether a person or business, must face the damage to its reputation and a greater difficulty in obtaining credit for a long time into the future. Rather, it is an acknowledgement that the debtor simply cannot repay his debt. For both parties, bankruptcy offers timely resolution to an otherwise unsolvable dilemma. The creditor regains a portion of the money owed, and the debtor, relieved from the burden of a debt he cannot pay, can move on with his life.

Bankruptcy is economically valuable.

In economic terms, a speedy and fair process of bankruptcy allows both assets and people to resume being productive as quickly as possible. The creditor regains cash that it can redeploy as it sees fit. If it is a bank, it has regained funds that it can loan out again to more productive businesses or creditworthy individuals. The creditor can also redeploy the assets of the bankrupt entity into the hands of a more capable manager.

Take the financial malaise of General Motors as an example. Although effectively bankrupt, there has been no legal recognition of this fact (as of this writing in March 2009). As a result, its factories and workers continue to be tied up inefficiently making mediocre cars. General Motors is a drag on the American economy.

Bankruptcy would free General Motors’ factories and employees to be more productive. Once a court legally acknowledges General Motors’ bankruptcy, it could allow General Motors’ new owners, its creditors, to appoint a more competent manager. Or the creditors could sell the plants to a superior car manufacturer, such as Toyota. Either way, after reorganization under bankruptcy, the plants would be used to make cheaper, more attractive cars that customers want to buy.

The creditors may also choose to shut down some or all of the plants and sell them for scrap. But recycling the old plants into new steel that becomes the girders of modern, efficient factories is a better use for those plants if they are obsolete. No party is in a better position to make these judgments than General Motors’ creditors, who have their financial self-interest at stake.

While General Motors is just a single, albeit enormous, example, speedy and fair bankruptcies end the bleeding of money-losing operations across the economy, and re-direct inefficiently utilized assets and capital to more productive activities. In sum, bankruptcy facilitates economic recovery. A failure to permit bankruptcy prolongs stagnation.

Some fallacies about bankruptcy

Bankruptcy always means shutting down a business. This is not true. Creditors, in consultation with the bankruptcy court, decide whether to shut down and liquidate, or to operate under new management. Creditors have every incentive to make the decision that maximizes their pay-out over time, not just the amount of cash that can be had right now.

Bankruptcy is bad for employees. Considered in full context, bankruptcy is good for employees. An economy with speedy and fair bankruptcy procedures is one where healthy, growing companies predominate. Healthy companies can pay employees more because their labor is worth more to them. Therefore, employees benefit from bankruptcy, even if someone occasionally faces dislocation or the uncertainty of working for new management. But, even if employees dislike such occasional dislocation, there is no alternative to bankruptcy if their employer is not financially viable.

Bankruptcy allows deadbeats to avoid meeting honest obligations. When bankruptcy laws are properly drafted and applied, this is the exception rather than the rule. Bankruptcy laws are designed to protect the rights of all parties, not to unfairly favor debtor or creditor. Bankruptcy acknowledges a fact, that the debtor cannot repay all his debts, and it facilitates the repayment of all debts that can be repaid.

Government should stop bankruptcies. During financial panics, governments sometimes try to prevent bankruptcies by putting moratoriums on them, subsidizing bankrupt entities, or changing the laws governing bankruptcy to favor debtors. Such interventions are both unjust and impractical. They are unjust because they deny the legitimate right of the creditors to collect what they are owed. The money they are owed is their property, and they have the right to collect it, to the extent it is reasonably possible. Such interventions are unjust and impractical because they attempt to deny reality. “Stiffing” the creditors or forcing innocent third parties to bail out the bankrupt entity through subsidies does not change the fact that the bankrupt entity cannot repay its debts.

Bankruptcy is moral.

Bankruptcy is just, if resolved through a fair and speedy judicial process. A bankruptcy proceeding acknowledges the actual state of affairs that exists, that the bankrupt entity cannot repay its debts. It resolves this dilemma for the maximum benefit of the creditor, but in so doing allows both parties – debtors and creditors – to resolve this matter with finality, and move on with their lives. Bankruptcy only involves the parties to the debt obligation. It does not require that innocent, third parties be forced to subsidize or bail out creditors or debtors. In doing so, it respects the rights of all concerned.

A just process of bankruptcy is also economically practical. Bankruptcy removes assets from those who have mismanaged them, and puts them into the hands of those who are most capable of putting them to productive and financially responsible use.

Quick Roundup 412

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

Salmieri on Atlas Shrugged

Via HBL, I have learned that the blog of Rowman and Littlefield, the parent of Lexington Books, has featured a post by philosopher Greg Salmieri about the current wave of popularity of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, in anticipation of its upcoming release of Robert Mayhew's collection, Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, by Lexington.

It's a short post, and excerpting it can't do it justice, but here we go anyway:

Most of the recent discussion of Atlas has focused on its political themes, creating the impression that the novel is essentially a condemnation of government intervention in the economy. However, its scope, its relevance to the current crisis, and the reasons for its enduring appeal go much wider and much deeper than this. Galt goes on strike not simply against high taxes and unjust regulations, but against the morality of altruism, which Rand identifies as the cause of such measures, and against the world-view of which this moral code is an expression -- a philosophy that denies the efficacy of reason and the absolutism of reality.

With amazing word-economy Salmieri succeeds in both describing the deeper significance of Atlas and building even more interest in the novel. Read the whole thing. I especially like how it ends.

Admin Note: Blogroll (and Other Sidebar) Updates

Yes, it's been a busy year, but no, I'm not letting that stop me from updating my blog. In this installment of a few long-delayed maintenance tasks, I have updated the blogroll, adding more than thirty new blogs, and removing about a dozen retired or abandoned blogs, for a net increase of about twenty.

In quieter times, I prefer to introduce each new addition by highlighting a post, but the large backlog and my time constraints prohibit my doing so today. This time, I'll highlight just three of the new additions, one from each group of blogs I have added.

First, from a small group of blogs I've been following for awhile, but just haven't gotten around to adding, is fiscal conservative Alan Sullivan's Fresh Bilge. Sullivan is a weather buff and, blogging in that capacity during hurricane season, he has become a well-respected hurricane blogger. It was during the run-up to Hurricane Ike's landfall in Houston, where I live, that I made a habit of checking in on his blog each day. I still do, and I frequently find interesting news there that others miss, such as who the next Republican target of the Democrats will be.

Second, and from the bulk of the new additions -- promising, (mainly) Objectivist blogs that have recently come to my attention -- is Rajesh's Objective Extrospection. In fact, I first learned of his blog just yesterday. Go there for a look at India's recent past -- and the future Obama has the unmitigated ... audacity ... to wish on America. His post is titled, "Living under Socialism":

One of my jobs was to check with the local govt. office if our quota of pig iron had come. I had to go to the office which was on the outs kirts of the city on my puny scooter between rashly driven trucks (big rigs) since nobody would tell you anything on the phone even if you somehow got through. ...

The staff was indifferent at best of times and outright hostile at other times. All the offices were dull, dusty, drab, dreary and every time you entered one your heart sank a little at the prospect of dealing with people who didn't even bother to look at you and were deliberately dismissive. If you persisted they would snap at you like a rabid dog and it was almost physically painfull when you had be very polite and use deferential tone even when you wanted scream at them and ask them if they were human before grinding there faces in the pile of dusty files in front of him.

He also got taunted in school -- by his teachers -- for being the son of a businessman.

And I thought the caste system was on its way out over there....

Third, from the group of bloggers I'll call "the big guns" for their general interest and broad popularity, I note this hipster PDA key chain from Life Hacker. It's too aesthetically-challenged for my tastes, but it has me thinking of using a small container made for key chains-- a pillbox, perhaps -- with an emergency paper scrap inside. That and a space pen should keep me from ever catching my mind churning at some weird time, but unable to capture the results.

Please take a look at the blogroll, if you were on it before and remain active. If your blog is now inactive, you will find it here, instead. Drop me a line if you are not listed in one of these places. Updating the sidebar was a big task, and I would not put it past myself to make a mistake here or there. If your blog has changed names at any point in the past year, you should find it listed under its new name now, if it wasn't already. For example, Rick MacDonald's blog is now listed as Doc MacDonald, rather than as SSN 687 and Friends.

Usually, I highlight only the last ten additions to the blogroll with the word "new", but at least until the next update, I'll have all these latest additions highlighted.

One last thing: I have removed most advertising from the sidebar. That will return only when I have time to figure out how to make the ads for Amazon change easily and the ads from Google pay!

Happy Blogiversary!

Stephen Bourque has been blogging at One Reality for a year, and has taken the occasion to explain origins of the name.

Greenspan's Latest Mumble

C. August reacts to Alan Greenspan's latest attempt to curry undeserved favor with anyone who will listen just long enough to throw up his hands and assume that the gnome must know what he's talking about.

The old dog is back to his old tricks. The right regulations are the ones that Alan thinks are right, and despite his and statism's (not the free market's) spectacular failure, he clings to the idea that if someone is just smart enough, with enough data, they can "fix" everything. And it sounds like Alan thinks he still has the right stuff. I'm sure Geithner has him on speed-dial for when things get really tough.

Brad Harper had emailed me about the Wall Street Journal piece a couple of days ago, too, but I never got around to it. That may be, in part, because Alan Greenspan had already answered himself decades ago. (More on that from me here, and from a former professional associate of Ayn Rand's here.)

Objectivist Roundup

Finally, if I recall correctly, Titanic Deck Chairs will host the next Objectivist Roundup some time in the very near future.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected a blog name in the body of the post (HT: Burgess Laughlin), as well as another typo.

"Saved" in Translation?

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

Considering a book called God Wants You Dead, Eric Raymond recalls some interesting facts about early Christianity, including a couple I'd never heard. These two are rather amusing when one considers that the entire New Testament was written in Koine (i.e., common, post-classical) Greek due to the original, Aramaic-speaking founders of the sect having been all but wiped out:

3. In other Aramaic sources roughly contemporary with the New Testament, the phrase "Son of God" occurs as an idiom for "guru" or "holy man". Thus, if Jesus refers to himself as "the son of God", the Aramaic sense is arguably "the boss holy man".

4. The Koine Greek of the period, on the other hand, did not have this idiom.

Now, imagine a Koine speaker reading the lost Aramaic source documents of which the Gospels are redactions, with only an indifferent command of the latter language He does not know that "Son of God" is an idiom...

Yes, that's right. I'm suggesting that Jesus got deified by a translation error!

Mild chuckles aside, I suspect that some non-religious people (I am not suggesting that Raymond is one of them.) will see this historical curiosity as buttressing their position, much as they did awhile back when news reports circulated to the effect that the remains of the historical Jesus had been unearthed, amid crowing that Christianity had, finally, been sunk. Nevertheless, as I said then:

[A]ny arbitrary claim, by its nature, has no evidence for or against it. Whether we have found the skull of Jesus or not [or his supposed divinity is due to a mistranslation] makes precisely zero difference in our evaluation of him as divine, on the question of whether he turned water into wine, or whether he rose from the dead. Whenever something earthly is taken as "evidence" for or against such claims, one will find that the person is guilty of perpetuating, or has fallen for, a package deal, an indiscriminate lumping-together of things that differ essentially in some way. [hyperlink and bold dropped]

This means two things. First, there is no need, based on epistemological grounds, to entertain arbitrary claims. And second, the real joke is on anyone who accepts as truth arbitrary, unprovable claims -- and then goes on to base his entire worldview and life around them.

-- CAV

Churlish? Or Unready?

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

Jack Kelly, writing of Barack Obama's miserable debut on the foreign stage, notes that those amazed with his je ne sais quoi increasingly include the leaders of other countries.

Obama has been particularly rude to our strongest, and most reliable allies, the British, on multiple occasions now.

"The murmurs began when President Obama returned to the British embassy the Winston Churchill bust that had been displayed in the Oval Office," wrote Dana Milbank of the Washington Post.

"The fears intensified when press secretary Robert Gibbs...demoted the Churchillian phrase 'special relationship' to a mere 'special partnership' across the Atlantic.

"And the alarm bells really went off when Brown's entourage landed at Andrews Air Force Base," Mr. Milbank said. "Obama, breaking with precedent, wouldn't grant the prime minister the customary honor of standing beside him in front of the two nation's flags for the TV cameras."

It got worse. The White House initially cancelled a joint press conference with the prime minister on account of snow. This explanation was unconvincing to Toby Harnden of the London Telegraph, who noted "there are 132 rooms in the White House at least some of which, presumably, are free of snow."

When Mr. Obama did hold a truncated press availability from which most of the British press were excluded, he went right to questions, skipping the usual words of welcome for his guest. The hapless Mr. Brown didn't even get invited to lunch. [bold added]

This is disgraceful, to say the very least, and it may even be intentional. In either case, it has led Kelley to ask a variant of the "evil or stupid" question that seems to be on everyone's lips these days:

In the first of his autobiographies, Mr. Obama said his grandfather was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the 1950s. Winston Churchill was prime minister at the time.

If the snub was deliberate, this is remarkably churlish behavior. If it wasn't, it is evidence Mr. Obama is not ready for prime time. [bold added]

Or Obama is deliberately betraying his country.

Unsurprisingly, his behavior towards Iran has baffled all but the Iranians and the Russians, who see weakness for what it is, regardless of the cause.

I was about to say that I hope we have only a rough four years ahead of us -- until I realized that such hope depends on the Republicans, who put McCain up against Obama in 2008, after Bush set the table for him.

The GOP needs to get back to the drawing board in a hurry!

Regardless of what the Republicans do, America needs and deserves much better than this.

-- CAV

This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on March 10, 2009.

Selfishness, Not (Just) Competence

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

Like sharks sniffing the blood of an injured swimmer, pundits of all stripes are encircling President Obama and crying, "Incompetent!"

It may or may not be that Obama is incompetent, but what many of these analyses miss or sweep under the rug is the importance of philosophical ideas in causing (and ultimately ending) the terrible crisis our nation faces today. As I have put it here before, "What difference does it make if the trains are running on time, if they're all headed to the gulag?" Blasting Obama for incompetence when the successful implementation of his statist policies would be disastrous is counterproductive at best.

If our basis for judging the Obama Administration is protection from all foreign and domestic threats, we had better hope he is incompetent, because to the extent that he isn't, his policies will become a huge domestic threat and embolden many foreign ones. When his administration fails, "Try this again, but execute it better," would be exactly the wrong lesson to learn. But unless more commentators accept the individual's right to freedom and prosperity as their standard of value, this is precisely the lesson they will teach most Americans. This is a serious danger.

More to the point, our economic crisis did not magically begin with the Obama -- or the Bush -- Administrations. And it will not end when Obama finally leaves office. The crisis has long and deep roots in a general approach to government and the specific policies that grew from that approach. This approach to government and the resulting policies are justified by a generally-accepted moral ideal of the populace. The American people ultimately demanded the welfare state in lieu of a government properly delimited to the protection of individual rights. They did so because too many accept the premise that they are their brothers' keepers.

The latest issue of The Objective Standard focuses on how this moral ideal, altruism, brought about today's train wreck and what we must do to recover. Specifically, it makes available free of charge two full-length features that discuss this crucial issue.

In "Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis," Richard M. Salsman examines the evolution of the financial crisis in detail, and explains how altruism effected it at every step. For example, he considers what Americans' acceptance of fiat currency really means.

The Fed was granted a monopoly on the issuance of currency; all other bank currencies were deemed illegal. Within twenty years (in 1933), the Fed reneged on the gold standard and began issuing fiat paper money -- money unmoored to any objective standard of value -- as it does to this day. With this privileged, pet bank at their side in the decades since, Washington's politicians were better able to finance the burgeoning American welfare state. Had Americans objected to this monopoly and its nonobjective money at the outset, we would be thriving in a very different America today. But Americans did not object. Why?

Few people have ever objected to the Fed's role as financier of the welfare state because so few object to the welfare state itself. The welfare state is the political ideal of altruism; it facilitates the sacrifice of the successful to the needy. Indeed, defenders of the welfare state defend the Fed no matter how irresponsible its policies or actions, precisely because it is so integral to the welfare state. And Fed officials excuse their own irrational behavior in the ether of moral superiority, seeing themselves as duty-bound to help the needy, even if indirectly, through the funding of mathematically and economically ridiculous Congressional schemes. They willingly finance (by printing fiat money) the welfare schemes that Congress cannot finance via direct taxation. Paul Volcker, head of the Fed from 1979 to 1986 and now an economic advisor to Mr. Obama, admitted that "central banks are not exactly harbingers of free market economies," primarily because they have always been "looked upon and created as a means of financing government [projects]." [bold added]

Paired with this penetrating analysis is an interview with Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, about what can be done about this deeper problem, which has caused the current crisis, and will deepen it or cause similar one later, unless it is solved.

How can we turn an overwhelming culutral tide? By getting the right ideas out into the intellectual marketplace. As Brook puts it:

[M]ore than anything else, Americans need to understand the philosophical roots of this crisis. They need to know that freedom cannot coexist with altruism. And they need to know that there is a rational alternative to the destructive ideas that dominate America today: Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.

Ayn Rand saw today's crisis coming half a century ago for a reason: She understood that philosophical principles drive history, and she saw that the ones dominant in her time and today would necessarily drive it in the wrong direction.

-- CAV

Good News/Bad News on Atlas Shrugged Publicity

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

We're currently in the middle of a "good news/bad news" situation with respect to Objectivism.

The good news is that there's tremendous interest in Ayn Rand's ideas.

At OCON 2008, Yaron Brook said that one of ARI's goals was to reach the point that Ayn Rand's ideas were being discussed everywhere -- in the newspapers, in line at the local Starbucks, on talk radio, etc. He hoped that it could happen in 10 years.

It's taken less than 10 months.

The bad news is that there's a lot of misinformation about Objectivism being circulated out there, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Hence, if you think that some people are not accurately portraying Rand's ideas, feel free to set the record straight by leaving your own comments on the various blog or news article sites.

The single most important thing you can do is to encourage people to read (or re-read) Rand's books for themselves, so that they can make up their own minds on these issues (rather than just taking the word of some random author or online commenter).

Another thing you can do include post a link to the ARI website's, Introduction to Objectivism.

The free online CliffsNotes for Atlas Shrugged are also pretty good (although of course not a substitute for the book itself.)

Or if I can plug myself, link to my PajamasMedia article, "Ayn Rand and the Tea Party Protests".

Or if you're feeling ambitious, write up your own blog post or OpEd on what "going John Galt" really means.

Other promotional methods (t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc.), can also play a part as long as they get people interested in studying Rand's ideas.

And think about "upping your game" by one notch. If you're a blogger and you've written an especially nice post on the topic, think about also sending it to your local newspaper as an OpEd. If you've composed a good online comment, think of sending it to your local newspaper as an LTE, as well as leaving it as a comment on more than one blog or article website. If you've read a good article on Rand, forward it as appropriate to your friends, family members, co-workers, and elected officials.

We have an unprecedented opportunity right now to promote Rand's ideas. If we let her opponents and detractors frame the debate on their terms, it could harm our cause for years to come. On the other hand, if we frame the discussion on our terms, we could advance our cause by several years or possibly decades.

From personal experience, a single individual can have a disproportionately large effect in this battle of ideas, if he or she is willing to speak up and willing to articulate their ideas in a way that makes sense to the average American.

But we don't have a lot of time to spare. Hence the importance of taking advantage of this golden opportunity.

Of course, there's no "duty" to advocate and defend Rand's ideas. But for many of us, it's enjoyable and in our self-interest. If this is something that appeals to you, then please do so in whatever fashion is most suitable within the context of your life.

Thanks!

Challenging What Everybody Knows

By Greg Perkins from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

How do you quickly explain -- or at least motivate further exploration of -- subtle ideas that would challenge "what everybody knows"? It's just hard, a skill to be practiced, which is why I eagerly listened to the (quite excellent) debate between Dr. Ghate (Ayn Rand Institute) and Dr. Huemer (CU Boulder Philosophy Department) over Ayn Rand's ethics.

One of Huemer's big points was that egoism logically entails predation. The idea is that there are times when it is in one's interest to lie, cheat, steal, etc. -- so it logically follows that a true egoist selfishly seeks to exploit others when he would so profit. Huemer's reduction to absurdity on this was that the true egoist would do so even when the overall benefit is tiny and the offense is great, like killing someone for the net benefit of a dollar. If an "egoist" wouldn't murder for a dollar, then he isn't actually an egoist and ought to stop pedaling the notion that thoroughgoing selfishness is proper.

That one can profit from "prudent predation" is one of those things that Everybody Knows. So what might an Objectivist say to shake a general audience's confidence in the idea that predation is egoistic? That's a tall order given our current culture; there's just too much conceptual territory to cover to truly nail it down in a scant few minutes. So my first-blush approach would be to only try to indicate how Objectivists have a considered view that reveals predation -- no matter the form or degree -- to be utterly, unequivocally, hideously at odds with genuine egoism. Something like:

Recall my sketch of Rand's analysis of the nature of "value" and how values are what living organisms must pursue to live -- i.e., that there are needs they must satisfy to maintain their existence as living organisms. Different kinds of organisms do this in different ways, of course. Look at, say, the need for food: trees grow roots and turn their leaves to the sun, while squirrels climb and scurry to harvest nuts, and lions use their speed and teeth and claws to chase and catch their prey. But we are a bit different, in that there is no particular method we need to use to satisfy our requirement for food: we may grow it on a farm, harvest it from the sea, raise it on a ranch, hunt for it in the plains, trap it in the forest, create it in the lab, and on and on. So it wouldn't make sense to say that we eat by virtue of fangs, claws, or roots like we might say of other organisms -- rather, we get our food by some method, but that method is determined by our thinking. It's a long discussion, but the same is true for every need we have and every value we pursue: put simply, our primary or basic means of survival is thinking. We are the rational animal, discovering by reason what is valuable, and determining via reason how to achieve it.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed -- and ignoring facts and acting on emotion or whim means courting disaster. So someone really interested in living -- our truly selfish ethical egoist -- will want to internalize the fact that reason is his fundamental means of survival, his basic tool for living, the essential faculty and activity that he needs to cultivate and use and jealously protect as the lifeline it genuinely is. Reliant on the power of his conceptual awareness, he will see the value of working to understand the nature of concepts and the implications for the nature of knowledge; the laws of logic and absolute requirement for objectivity -- because indifference to these things would mean indifference to his lifeline! He will seek to think and act on principle because reason demands it as his only hope for methodologically pursuing life over the span of an entire lifetime in the face of an incredibly complicated world.

Morality is a set of principles guiding your choices and actions in life. And rationality is our fundamental tool for living. So it makes sense that an egoist will understand moral virtues as expressions or applications of rationality to various aspects of living. Indeed, Rand framed each major virtue as the recognition of a fundamental fact. At this point you should be able to glimpse why Objectivists recoil in horror at someone suggesting that even the most "prudent" of predation would be egoistic: seriously considering predation means ignoring or outright rejecting the fundamental facts of human life captured in supremely-prudent moral principles like productiveness, justice, and honesty. Seriously entertaining their violation means rejecting not just particular principles and the facts they describe, but the need to act on principle and rationality as one's basic means of survival. What a real egoist hears is someone suggesting living by actively repudiating their fundamental means of living! That's insanity. And it's certainly not selfish.

This of course invites followup on just what those fundamental facts are, why reason demands thinking and acting on principle, etc. That's fine, though, as the goal was only to weaken their confidence in what "everybody knows" and spark further investigation.

There are so many angles that could be taken, so many basic ideas to try to sketch -- how would you approach this? What are the actual words you would use in such a setting?

Activism for the day: Atlas for a candidate

By Roberto 'Tito' Sarrionandia from Tito's Blog,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Guardian just can't resist

By Roberto 'Tito' Sarrionandia from Tito's Blog,cross-posted by MetaBlog

George Galloway is evil

By Roberto 'Tito' Sarrionandia from Tito's Blog,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Quick Roundup 411

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

If you're from Houston, ...

... or know someone who is, be sure you stop by/send him to Live Oaks to consider virtual mayoral candidate Brian Phillips' petition for reduced government:

Whereas, the proper purpose of government is the protection of individual rights;

Whereas, individual rights can only be violated by the use of force (or the threat thereof);

Whereas, the City of Houston routinely violates the rights of citizens by seizing their money through taxation, regulating individuals and businesses, prohibiting voluntary interactions between consenting adults, and more;

We, the undersigned, call upon all candidates for Mayor of Houston and Houston City Council to take a public position on the following:

1. Privatizing inappropriate city services, such as water, wastewater, and trash collection;
2. Selling city assets, such as parks and libraries, that do not contribute to government’s proper functions;
3. Repealing all building codes, all land-use regulations, and all ordinances that regulate business conduct;
4. Repealing all ordinances that criminalize voluntary interactions between consenting adults;
5. Immediately reducing property taxes by 10%.

Follow the link at the upper right of the main page of the blog to sign.

Objectivist Roundup

In case you haven't seen it yet, Tito hosts the latest edition.

Faking Reality, Indeed

I completely agree with Andrew Dalton's reaction to Brian Dougherty's asinine take on Objectivism and a comic book character he claims represents an "Objectivist" "hero":

Readers interested in Ayn Rand's real ideas should discover for themselves, rather than taking the word of some snarky, shoot-from-the-hip libertarian.

Case in point:

[The character's] sense of justice may make him hate most of humanity (!) -- he brags to himself at the beginning that if mankind begged him to save them, he'd justly say "no." But by the end he sacrifices (!!!) himself in the name of avenging the deaths of millions who he doesn't know.

Amusingly, this paean to the sin of sacrifice -- be it merely a horrendous formulation or also accurate -- comes just before an oddly-capitalized reference to "Faking Reality," which is linked to the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on "rationality".

Speaking of the Ayn Rand Lexicon, Dougherty should try boning up on justice and sacrifice before opening his mouth and "removing all doubt", as Mark Twain might have put it.

But I'd settle for him keeping his mouth shut and giving Atlas Shrugged another read-through.

Oh, and one more thing.... The whole idea of the heroes of Atlas Shrugged being re-cast as comic book-style heroes instead of normal men is completely inane. Atlas Shrugged is about the importance of man's mind as his tool of survival, and demonstrates this through the consequences of the withdrawal of man's mind from a society that routinely damns it.

Who needs super powers or a beltload of flashy gadgets and a cape when he has a weapon like that at his disposal? This device -- even for Ragnar Danneskjold, for whom mystery is far more compelling than any costume could be -- would actually undercut the above theme, and the fact that Dougherty entertains it at all is a confession of his own failure to fully grasp that point.

"Bread is a platform."

This post on food by Amy Mossoff amuses me because the below passage reminds me of the saying above, which I came up with while married to my first wife, whose enthusiasm for bread always baffled me.

To me, grains are not "real food." First of all, they have almost no flavor. I've never understood why people love rice, bread, cereal, and pasta. Even pastries leave me cold. I'll eat these things, but only as carriers for something that has flavor and substance. Bread is great for holding meat and mayonnaise, but the less of it, the better. Sweet, sugary deserts are nice sometimes.... [bold added]

Oh, yeah. Ditto for pasta!

-- CAV

The One Minute Case Against Wage and Price Controls

By heroic@gmail.com (David Veksler) from One Minute Cases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What is a job?
A job is a contract between two parties, in which one party agrees to provide certain services on a certain schedule in exchange for payment from the other party. By definition, an employee agrees to do job for a particular wage by his own voluntary consent. This is opposed to slavery, in which a slave is forced to work without his consent or compensation.

What determines wages? Can employers pay workers whatever they want?

A wage is the price an employer pays for the services his employee. While the two may negotiate any wage they come to mutual agreement on, the mutual self-interest of both and market forces intersect at a market-set price that represents the intersection of their interests. Disregarding non-economic factors, an employer wishes to pay his employee as little as possible. The maximum amount he will pay however is the value of the marginal productivity a given worker provides. (The marginal productivity is the value per unit of time the worker provides to the employer.) If the worker refuses to work at or below his marginal productivity, then the employer will not hire him, since doing so will incur a loss. Conversely, disregarding non-economic factors, the employee wishes to be paid an infinite amount. The minimum wage he will actually accept is the marginal value of his labor. This can be measured in terms of the next-most useful value-producing activity the workers may engage in.

For example, suppose that my marginal productivity as a programmer is $30 per hour. I will accept any job paying above $30 an hour, but no job below it, since I can find an employer paying that much in another computer or tech-related industry. A fast-food worker might have a marginal productivity of say, $6 an hour – the value per hour that his labor creates for the business. From the employer’s perspective, I create $40/hour of value, and the fast food workers creates $7 of value, so he will be willing to hire us. (Assuming that no one is willing to provide the same value for a lower wage.) However, if I only provide $20 of value, the employer will not hire me, because he would incur an hourly loss of $10 in doing so. Similarly, if the fast food worker only provides $5 of value, he would no be hired either because he would cause a loss of $1 for each hour he works.

Can the government increase wages when employers don’t pay enough?

Suppose that the government imposed a minimum wage of $8. Would the fast food worker who provides a value of $7 per hour now be paid $8? No, he would lose his job - because keeping him would mean a $1 loss for each hour he works to his employer. All minimum wage laws have a similar effect - they cause everyone with a marginal productivity below the minimum wage to lose their jobs - most often teenagers and the very poor. Wage caps (including progressive income taxes) have a similar effect - they lead the most productive individuals of our society to retire early or forgo new opportunities — resulting in a lost opportunity for them, and for everyone who might have benefited from their ideas.

What if the government creates a job by paying an unemployed worker to do make-work such as digging holes in the ground?

Where would the money to pay for his wage come from? It would have to be taken by force from the remaining employed fast food workers and computer programmers. Everyone will be paid less to pay for the government workers, but has a job been created? No - now the fast-food employer has $1 less to pay to his other $8 employees, so he must fire some of them or go out of business. Each new $7 government worker costs at least one $7 privately employed worker. This is always a social loss because by definition, the government worker is less productive. If he were not, then the private business would voluntarily employ workers to perform his job.  While a minimum wage causes everyone who produces less than the marginal productivity of the minimum to lose his job, each new government job causes at least one more productive worker to lose his job.

If the government cannot raise wages, can it lower prices?

Prices are determined by the marginal value of a given good, just as a wage is determined by the marginal productivity of an employee. Attempts to regulate the cost of goods have the same effect as wage controls: if the price is set below the cost of a good, producers will be unable to make any.   Since different producers have different costs, lowering the prices of a good will decrease the percentage of producers able to supply them, until they can make none at all.

So how can prices be lowered?

The only way for prices to go down is to increase the productivity of workers.  Productivity in the production of a good comes from the application of mental effort to the production of values. A profit (the difference between the value of a good to a consumer and the cost to produce it) is the reward of an entrepreneur for bringing about the new wealth he’s created. In the absence of government coercion, profits can exist only as long as men continue to create new values ,or improving on existing ones.  The only to make goods cheaper is to allow entrepreneurs the freedom to invest in improvements in the capital and labor methods used in production

Doesn’t a more efficient product result in lost jobs for those who were replaced by automation or better processes?

When oil lamps replaced candles, the cost of producing affordable lighting greatly decreased. In the absence of a government monopoly, competing lamp-makers quickly started making their own lamps, which brought the price decrease to the consumer. In the process of transitioning from candles to laps, many thousands of candle-makers lost their jobs.  However, oil lamps did created a new industry of their own and increased the prosperity of society as a whole, just as electric lighting did in the 20th century.  Since consumers could buy cheaper lamps, they now had more money to spend on other things, ,creating new industries, and raising their overall standard of living.

Technological progress and capital accumulation has both created new careers made us enormously more productive – we not only have a wider range of vocations to choose from but work far fewer hours.

Can government “soften the blow” when all these candle-makers lose their jobs?

In today’s world, the government would probably try to subsidize the candle or lamp-makers when their chief product became outdated. What would that subsidy accomplish? It would save the candle-makers jobs - but it would cost the jobs of everyone who stood to benefit from the increase wealth that came from cheaper lights. In the short term, the candle-makers might benefit - but in the long term, they would lose too, since they would lose the new, higher paying jobs the could have making electric lights and the new products the cheaper lights would allow consumers to afford. Meanwhile, the Thomas Edison’s, Graham Bells, Thomas Moore’s, and Bill Gates’ would be too busy working to pay off taxes to have the time or money for research.

Of course, we know that these inventors and entrepreneurs succeeded. But how many didn’t because they never got their first break in the field because of a minimum wage, or gave up before they tried because the red tape was too much, or the taxes too high, or they knew that the old, outdated industries would use the government to tax and regulate them out of existence? The real tragedy is that we will never know.

What's the Diff?

By Paula Hall from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The New Intolerable Acts

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

There are qualified parallels between what American colonists protested and rebelled against in 1774-1775, and what modern Americans ought to be rebelling against today. As Congress passes legislation intended to take over the economy, the British Crown passed legislation intended to take over that of the American colonies. President Barack Obama’s proposed budget is specifically worded to accomplish the near total nationalization of the economy. A succession of Acts of Parliament which virtually assured revolution and war were what were called the Intolerable or Coercive Acts.

The TARP and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Acts are more massive in scope than any of the Intolerable Acts -- which were mercantilist in nature, not socialist -- but not dissimilar from the British Acts in their specific ends: to achieve a captive economy intended to serve statist purposes.

A letter to the editor of The Tennessean of February 5, in the form of a letter to the IRS advising it that the writer would be late in paying his income tax, lists all the taxes the individual paid in the daily course of his life:

“I have paid these taxes: accounts receivable tax, building permit tax, CDL tax, cigarette tax, corporate income tax, dog license tax, federal income tax, unemployment tax, gasoline tax, hunting license tax, fishing license tax, waterfowl stamp tax, inheritance tax, inventory tax, liquor tax, Medicare tax, city, school and county property taxes (up 33 percent the last four years), real estate tax, Social Security tax, road usage tax, toll road tax, state and city sales taxes, recreational vehicle tax, state franchise tax, state unemployment tax, telephone federal excise tax, telephone federal, state and local surcharge tax, telephone minimum usage surcharge tax, telephone state and local taxes, utility tax, vehicle license registration tax, capital gains tax, lease severance tax, oil and gas assessment tax, Tennessee property tax, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, Georgia and Alabama sales taxes, and many more that I can’t recall but I have run out of space and money.”

The average American citizen could also report an equal or greater number of taxes he pays, regardless of his state of residence.

A host of British and even colonial taxes burdened American colonists (in Virginia, for example, there was a local tax on carriages and their wheels) in the decades leading up to passage of the one that lit the fuse of rebellion, and then of revolution: the Stamp Act, passed by Parliament in March 1765. Its repeal almost exactly a year later by Parliament taught the Crown government nothing. Aside from the Revenue or Sugar Act of 1764, which was intended to reduce smuggling rum and goods from the West Indies and the European continent, the Act of Parliament which first proved “intolerable” was the Stamp Act. It is the Stamp Act which best parallels the situation of Americans today. The Intolerable or Coercive Acts of 1774-1775 were largely punitive in nature and not intended to raise Crown revenue.*

The Stamp Act was chiefly a wholesale levy on the commercial and legal structure of the colonies. Its gross effect was to encompass virtually every action taken by the colonists in their daily lives. An American colonist could not move without encountering a tax. Hardly a commodity -- tea, hats, furs, lumber, and so on -- could be purchased as either a necessity or a luxury that was not directly taxed or whose price reflected a tax paid by another party and passed on to the purchaser; often, both taxes added to the price.

Here is a sampling of some of the Stamp taxes**:

A three-pence tax was imposed on “declarations, pleas, replications, rejoinders, demurrers, or other pleading, or any copy thereof, in any Court.”

A four-pence tax was imposed on “bills of lading, for any kinds of goods for exportation, or any Cockett or Clearance granted within the Colonies and Plantations of America.”

A one-shilling tax was imposed on “monitions, libels, answers, allegations, inventories, or renunciations in ecclesiastical matters in any Court…informations or other Pleading in any Admiralty Court.”

A two-pound (£) tax was imposed on “donations, presentations, collations or institutions to any benefice, or registers, entries, testimonials or certificates of any degree taken in any university, academy, college or seminary of learning.”

A four-pound tax was imposed on “licenses for retailing wine, grants, appointments or admissions to any public beneficial office….” [A three-pound tax was imposed on the renewal of a license to retail wine.]

A one-shilling tax was imposed on “every pack of cards sold or used within the Colonies and Plantations of America.”

A ten-shilling tax was imposed on dice. [Packs of cards and dice were wrapped to accommodate the stamps, which were already affixed to the wrappers. Today, for example, state tax stamps are printed on packs of cigarettes and other tobacco products.]

The taxes which most outraged colonists were the ones imposed on newspapers, almanacs, and calendars, ranging from two to eight pence, depending on the item. Newspapers especially would have been crippled, since all newsprint (the paper on which newspapers were printed) was by law restricted to British-made and imported newsprint, for which a hefty premium was charged. Colonists regarded these taxes as taxes on knowledge. And the catch was that all stamp taxes had to be paid in British sterling or specie only, of which very little circulated in the colonies because most of it remained in Britain under the credit arrangements with British merchants in the mercantilist system. The average colonist handled little more than two or three pounds in one year.

Today, Americans pay a “stamp” sales tax on their newspapers, periodicals, and books, pay the numerous taxes passed on to them by the publishers of these things, in addition to taxes on virtually everything they buy and consume.

Whatever one’s verdict on the Crown’s failed Stamp Act, British politicians were counting on the Americans to keep producing in order to sustain the mercantilist system (chiefly as suppliers of raw materials; other legislation discouraged or prohibited development of manufacturing in the colonies). But one cannot say that about TARP and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The ARRA and Obama’s budget proposal are designed to drain all private capital into federal coffers. Obama and his Congressional allies cannot help but realize that this would destroy what capitalism -- or freedom -- is left in the U.S.

The first “bailout” was intended to sustain the creations or beneficiaries of a mixed economy. Ayn Rand pointed out in her 1972 article, “The Establishment of an Establishment,” that:

“In business, the rise of the welfare state froze the status quo, perpetuating the power of big corporations of the pre-income tax era, placing them beyond the competition of the tax-strangled newcomers. A similar process took place in the welfare state of the intellect. The results, in both fields, are the same.”***

Thus General Motors, AIG, Bank of America, and many other older companies which grew to mammoth size not only have benefited from the rise of the welfare state, but are the beneficiaries of federal favors. (AIG, or the American International Group, I should remark here, is especially culpable; together with Armand Hammer and other amoral Western businessmen with connections to government trade officials, it had close dealings with the Soviet Union and helped to sustain that totalitarian regime.)

The Obama regime aims to buy “stakes” in nominally private entities for the purpose of “socializing” them by directing their purposes and revenue. This is what happened in Fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany. Fascism and Nazism are hardly “right wing” political systems, as left-wingers claim; they are left-wing to the core. Presidents Clinton and the two Bushes prepared the way for Obama and Company with their own legislation; Obama and Company are ready to finalize the destruction of this country.

There is another noteworthy parallel. In 1763, at the end of the French and Indian War, George III issued a proclamation prohibiting colonial settlement in the lands west of the tramontane, or the Allegheny Mountain range, the better to regulate, control and tax the American colonists. A similar move is brewing in Congress to cut off the escape of private capital from federal taxation and confiscation to offshore banking havens, such as the Bahamas and Switzerland.

Captive economies such as that contemplated by Obama, Congress and their supporters outside of the government remain command economies for very brief periods of time -- unless they are buttressed by relatively freer economies. It explains the longevity of such totalitarian regimes as the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba and North Korea, which for decades benefited from loans, subsidies and “trade” agreements granted by Western governments. Otherwise, such economies, if left to their own devices, simply atrophy and ultimately collapse. They are naturally asphyxiated by the absence of freedom.

The only American colonies to generate revenue for the Crown from the Stamp Act were Georgia, East and West Florida, and the Canadian and West Indian colonies. In all the other colonies Americans rebelled and refused to pay the taxes. Shipments of stamps were burned or were warehoused by distributors until they could be sent back to Britain. Royally appointed governors were impotent to enforce the Act. Every Crown-appointed stamp distributor was compelled to resign his commission. The rebellion was an overture to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and ultimately to Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and to the Declaration of Independence.

Whether or not the recent, numerous “tea parties” held across the country in protest against Obama’s and Congress’s plan to guile Americans into accepting slavery or servitude will have any lasting consequence or effect on Washington, remains to be seen. Whether or not the stock market continues to refuse to “rally” in response to Obama’s economic agenda, also remains to be seen.

But the fact that they have occurred is evidence there are countless Americans who regard recent and proposed legislation as intolerable. At the moment, it is hard to gauge if they possess the moral stamina required to consistently confront the behemoth of federal power. They will need intellectual guidance as well as courage. They will need ideas to let them know they are right. They will need the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

It is not enough for Americans to merely sense that the only moral and practical “stimulus” to economic recovery is freedom. They must know it. Only philosophy can give them that certitude.

And it is hard to judge if Obama, Congress and the collectivists will have the malice and vengeful bottom to call for their own Coercive Acts in answer to such resistance. Having come so close to conquering America, they may be tempted to try it. Just as the Crown, long before the Stamp Act was even enacted, was contemplating turning the American colonies into one huge camp of indentured servants, the “progressives” in this country have for decades plotted and drooled over the chance to achieve the same end.

Americans, beware! Obama, Congress and the collectivists are not the rattlesnakes that appeared on American militia flags, but together one stalking monitor lizard that bites its prey, poisons it with the venom of altruism, and waits for it to die of it before feeding on the carcass.

Long live Lady Liberty!



*Source: English Historical Documents: American Colonial Documents to 1776, ed. Merrill Jensen. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode (1964).
**The 1765 Tax Stamps for America, ed. Adolph Koeppel. American Revenue Association (1962).
***In Philosophy: Who Needs It. New York: Signet softcover (1982), p. 170.

Evil or stupid, he stuffs the beast.

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

It seems I'm not the only one asking asking whether Barack Obama is evil or stupid. Myrhaf comments on Roger Kimball's raising the same question.

... Obama could not do better at harming our economy if he was trying. Since his election, Americans have watched their life savings disappear on the stock market. Kimball lists some of Obama's destructive policies. [bold added]

The executive summary is that Obama has pretended to lower taxes for most Americans, raised taxes directly and by closing loopholes, and proposed a national fossil fuel rationing scheme. (And I agree with Myrhaf that Obama is essentially a villain.)

Two articles I encountered this morning at RealClear Politics convey both the destructiveness of Obama's agenda and what might be his underlying strategy.

First, Stuart Taylor of National Journal crunches some numbers. The below is just one of the more compelling paragraphs, and it doesn't really touch the deception behind Obama's budget projections:

The numbers don't add up -- and still won't if and when, as seems almost certain, Obama ratchets up his so-far-fairly-modest new taxes on the top 2 percent. "A tax policy that confiscated 100 percent of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue," according to a February 27 editorial in The Wall Street Journal. "That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable 'dime' of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion." [bold added]

One British outlet puts the consequence of his $4 trillion budget very succinctly: "If he's wrong he could bankrupt the whole country." He is wrong, but what might he hope to achieve?

For that, we can turn to Ross Douthat, as quoted by Mickey Kaus, who names the strategy, "stuffing the beast":

Obama's spending proposals would ... create new spending commitments and run up large deficits, in the hopes that the dollars poured into health care and education will create a new baseline for government's obligations, which in turn will create the political space for tax increases on the middle class. Like the starve-the-beast approach, the Obama strategy puts off the hard part till tomorrow: Give them tax cuts today, conservatives said, and they'll swallow spending cuts tomorrow; give them universal health care, universal pre-K, subsidies for green industry and all the rest of it today, liberals seem to be thinking, and they'll be willing to pay for it tomorrow. ...

[I]f you can change the baseline of social spending that Americans expect from their government before that day of hard choices arrive - and once created, government programs are awfully hard to get rid of, whether they're actually effective or not - then you've tilted the landscape of negotiation in liberalism's favor, and ensured that a post-Obama entitlement compromise will look a lot more like social democracy than a pre-Obama compromise would have. [bold added]

Consider, for example, how many Americans are already (wrongly) indignant about paying for medical care as it is. Widespread hardship would cause many to want whatever relief they could get from the government, compounding the political difficulty of repealing any growth in the size of the welfare state.

This reminds me of an interview I saw about twenty years ago in which someone from Britain described how radically Margaret Thatcher had altered the debate over the role of government. He likened what she did to changing the catch on a ratchet wrench so that any movement resulted in more freedom.

Obama's goal is simple. He wants to ratchet America into socialism, and he sees this crisis as his big chance.

-- CAV

The One Minute Case Against Wage and Price Controls

By heroic@gmail.com (David Veksler) from One Minute Cases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What is a job?
A job is a contract between two parties, in which one party agrees to provide certain services on a certain schedule in exchange for payment from the other party. By definition, an employee agrees to do job for a particular wage by his own voluntary consent. This is opposed to slavery, in which a slave is forced to work without his consent or compensation.

What determines wages? Can employers pay workers whatever they want?

A wage is the price an employer pays for the services his employee. While the two may negotiate any wage they come to mutual agreement on, the mutual self-interest of both and market forces intersect at a market-set price that represents the intersection of their interests. Disregarding non-economic factors, an employer wishes to pay his employee as little as possible. The maximum amount he will pay however is the value of the marginal productivity a given worker provides. (The marginal productivity is the value per unit of time the worker provides to the employer.) If the worker refuses to work at or below his marginal productivity, then the employer will not hire him, since doing so will incur a loss. Conversely, disregarding non-economic factors, the employee wishes to be paid an infinite amount. The minimum wage he will actually accept is the marginal value of his labor. This can be measured in terms of the next-most useful value-producing activity the workers may engage in.

For example, suppose that my marginal productivity as a programmer is $30 per hour. I will accept any job paying above $30 an hour, but no job below it, since I can find an employer paying that much in another computer or tech-related industry. A fast-food worker might have a marginal productivity of say, $6 an hour – the value per hour that his labor creates for the business. From the employer’s perspective, I create $40/hour of value, and the fast food workers creates $7 of value, so he will be willing to hire us. (Assuming that no one is willing to provide the same value for a lower wage.) However, if I only provide $20 of value, the employer will not hire me, because he would incur an hourly loss of $10 in doing so. Similarly, if the fast food worker only provides $5 of value, he would no be hired either because he would cause a loss of $1 for each hour he works.

Can the government increase wages when employers don’t pay enough?

Suppose that the government imposed a minimum wage of $8. Would the fast food worker who provides a value of $7 per hour now be paid $8? No, he would lose his job - because keeping him would mean a $1 loss for each hour he works to his employer. All minimum wage laws have a similar effect - they cause everyone with a marginal productivity below the minimum wage to lose their jobs - most often teenagers and the very poor. Wage caps (including progressive income taxes) have a similar effect - they lead the most productive individuals of our society to retire early or forgo new opportunities — resulting in a lost opportunity for them, and for everyone who might have benefited from their ideas.

What if the government creates a job by paying an unemployed worker to do make-work such as digging holes in the ground?

Where would the money to pay for his wage come from? It would have to be taken by force from the remaining employed fast food workers and computer programmers. Everyone will be paid less to pay for the government workers, but has a job been created? No - now the fast-food employer has $1 less to pay to his other $8 employees, so he must fire some of them or go out of business. Each new $7 government worker costs at least one $7 privately employed worker. This is always a social loss because by definition, the government worker is less productive. If he were not, then the private business would voluntarily employ workers to perform his job.  While a minimum wage causes everyone who produces less than the marginal productivity of the minimum to lose his job, each new government job causes at least one more productive worker to lose his job.

If the government cannot raise wages, can it lower prices?

Prices are determined by the marginal value of a given good, just as a wage is determined by the marginal productivity of an employee. Attempts to regulate the cost of goods have the same effect as wage controls: if the price is set below the cost of a good, producers will be unable to make any.   Since different producers have different costs, lowering the prices of a good will decrease the percentage of producers able to supply them, until they can make none at all.

So how can prices be lowered?

The only way for prices to go down is to increase the productivity of workers.  Productivity in the production of a good comes from the application of mental effort to the production of values. A profit (the difference between the value of a good to a consumer and the cost to produce it) is the reward of an entrepreneur for bringing about the new wealth he’s created. In the absence of government coercion, profits can exist only as long as men continue to create new values ,or improving on existing ones.  The only to make goods cheaper is to allow entrepreneurs the freedom to invest in improvements in the capital and labor methods used in production

Doesn’t a more efficient product result in lost jobs for those who were replaced by automation or better processes?

When oil lamps replaced candles, the cost of producing affordable lighting greatly decreased. In the absence of a government monopoly, competing lamp-makers quickly started making their own lamps, which brought the price decrease to the consumer. In the process of transitioning from candles to laps, many thousands of candle-makers lost their jobs.  However, oil lamps did created a new industry of their own and increased the prosperity of society as a whole, just as electric lighting did in the 20th century.  Since consumers could buy cheaper lamps, they now had more money to spend on other things, ,creating new industries, and raising their overall standard of living.

Technological progress and capital accumulation has both created new careers made us enormously more productive – we not only have a wider range of vocations to choose from but work far fewer hours.

Can government “soften the blow” when all these candle-makers lose their jobs?

In today’s world, the government would probably try to subsidize the candle or lamp-makers when their chief product became outdated. What would that subsidy accomplish? It would save the candle-makers jobs - but it would cost the jobs of everyone who stood to benefit from the increase wealth that came from cheaper lights. In the short term, the candle-makers might benefit - but in the long term, they would lose too, since they would lose the new, higher paying jobs the could have making electric lights and the new products the cheaper lights would allow consumers to afford. Meanwhile, the Thomas Edison’s, Graham Bells, Thomas Moore’s, and Bill Gates’ would be too busy working to pay off taxes to have the time or money for research.

Of course, we know that these inventors and entrepreneurs succeeded. But how many didn’t because they never got their first break in the field because of a minimum wage, or gave up before they tried because the red tape was too much, or the taxes too high, or they knew that the old, outdated industries would use the government to tax and regulate them out of existence? The real tragedy is that we will never know.

Objectivist Round Up

By Roberto 'Tito' Sarrionandia from Tito's Blog,cross-posted by MetaBlog

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.

Now that the formalities are over, it honours me to present (for the first time) the lastest Objectivist Round Up!

• Gena Gorlin presents Obama the Intellectual? posted at The Undercurrent: Many hail Obama as a true intellectual, yet his shooting-from-the-hip decision making style seems no different from that of self-professed non-intellectual politicians. Is Obama really a model of how to apply the intellect to solving political problems?
  
  
  
• Jared Seehafer presents The Republican Party's Identity Crisis posted at The Undercurrent: The first years of President Obama's administration provide the Republican Party with an opportunity to redefine itself. But to do so, Republicans first need to decide what they stand for.
  
  
  
  
• The Undercurrent Editors present Ayn Rand's Non-Religious Conception of Morality posted at The Undercurrent: Many young people seek answers to important questions about the world and their own lives, and religion offers answers - in fact it sells itself as the only way to get such answers. But there is a way to be both moral and of this world...
  
  
  
  
• Rituparna Basu presents Who Should Pay for Autism Treatment? posted at The Undercurrent:Several states have passed laws mandating that insurance companies cover the costs of autism treatment, and other states are considering similar laws. The proponents of such bills cite the emotional and financial hardship involved in caring for a child with autism. Is the hardship felt by these families a justification to demand that others to pay their medical bills?
  
  
  
• Khartoum presents Some Of My Insights -- Objectivity posted at Reddie Reasons.: Some of my thoughts on the concept of Objectivity after some learning from the Objectivism Seminar.
  
  
  
• Kendall J presents When is Nationalization Not Nationalization? posted at simply Capitalism: Why you should be worried that everyone is trying to put lipstick on the "nationalization" pig.
  
  
  
• Doug A. presents Obama Rejects Absolute Truth posted at Dark Waters Blogs.
  
  
  
• Diana Hsieh presents Dissertation Draft One Completed posted at NoodleFood: Woohoo! Come celebrate my progress on my philosophy dissertation!
  
  
  
• Stephen Bourque presents Shock and Awe: Obama’s First Forty Days posted at One Reality: Effort, ingenuity, and talent, which would constitute the fortune of a free man, become his yoke in the welfare state.
  
  
  
• Stella Daily presents A Gross misunderstanding posted at ReasonPharm: A New York Times blog post claims that we need more government control in medicine...completely evading the fact that the problems these controls are supposed to solve were themselves caused by government interference.
  
  
  
• Paul Hsieh presents Hsieh OpEd: "Ayn Rand and the Tea Party Protests" posted at NoodleFood: Will the Tea Party protests the beginning of a new birth of freedom? Or will they fizzle out? I discuss this question in my latest OpEd at PajamasMedia.
  
  
  
• Daniel presents John D Rockefeller Quotes posted at The Nearby Pen:This posts lists a ton of great quotes by John D. Rockefeller, on everything from frugality to education.
  
  
  
• Ari Armstrong presents Political Controls Provoke Producers to Go On Strike posted at FreeColorado.com: Political controls over people's work and wealth provoke many to work and invest less. The idea of a producer's strike spans the last century and is featured in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged.
  
  
  
• Greg Perkins presents Asking the Right Question posted at NoodleFood:Here's a hilarious comic strip making a philosophical point that Objectivism addresses with a crucial epistemological principle.
  
  
  
• Myrhaf presents Rush Limbaugh and His Critics posted at The New Clarion.
  
  
• Gus Van Horn presents Keeping the Secret posted at Gus Van Horn:The local paper teases readers with the question, 'Who is John Galt?' only to send them to two people who haven't the slightest idea.
  
  
  
• Brian Phillips presents If I Were Mayor: Pay Off City Debt posted at Live Oaks:It is a gross injustice to mortgage the lives and property of future Houstonians through debt. Future taxpayers will be forced to pay for today's profligate spending, and that burden will undoubtedly continue to grow as city government increasingly expands its involvement in our lives.
  
  
  
• Paul McKeever presents The Mouse Who Became a Cat: A Fairy Story for Children posted at Paul McKeever:When might I expect these unicellular freeloaders to get a haircut, get a real job, meet and marry a nice spouse, get a mortgage, have kids, and to start paying taxes like the rest of us allegedly “free” “persons”?
  
  
  
• Miranda Barzey presents Elementary Economics and the Bailout posted at Ramen & Rand.
  
  
  
• Jason Stotts presents Shattered Illusions posted at Erosophia:On the illusions that permeate our culture and how we can deal with them.
  
  
  
• Rational Jenn presents Kids & Money posted at Rational Jenn:This post details how we are handling money with our (still young) kids. Sometimes a "handout" is okay!
  
  

That is the end of this week's Round Up. Next week's will be hosted by Titanic Deck Chairs.

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

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Obama Whitewashes Iran

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

Obama Whitewashes Iran

By Elan Journo
 
In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Obama said that “We cannot shun the negotiating table” in conducting our foreign policy. He’s previously elaborated that “if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” And Iran’s president Ahmedinijad tentatively welcomes “talks based on mutual respect and in a fair atmosphere.”
 
The shared idea, evidently, is that our conflict with Iran stems largely from a past failure to use so-called diplomacy to settle disputes. Alluding to George W. Bush’s supposedly tough policy, Obama has said he wants to restore “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years” ago.
 
Really? Thirty years ago this November, followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, who spearheaded Iran’s Islamic revolution, stormed the U.S. embassy in Teheran and took the personnel hostage. President Carter gently admonished Iran, but ruled out military retaliation. Instead his advisors spent months dreaming up schemes to bribe Iran into releasing the hostages--while bending over backward to enable the regime to save face. In the end Khomeini’s Islamist theocracy collected a handsome payoff for its aggression, and concluded, rightly, that if attacked, America would crumple to its knees.
 
Was Obama thinking of the 1980s? In April 1983 Iran’s jihadist proxies in Lebanon rammed a truck bomb into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut; the Reagan administration responded by doing nothing. Months later, encouraged by Washington’s inaction, Teheran issued a kill order--via its ambassador in Syria--to its allied groups in Beirut. Early one morning, an Islamist suicide bomber set off a massive explosion at the barracks where U.S. marines were sleeping and killed 241 of them.
 
Reagan spouted hot air about not backing down--and soon after ordered the U.S. troops to bug out. The jihadists wanted America out, they slaughtered our troops, and we caved in and gave them what they wanted.
 
Osama bin Laden, like jihadists in Iran and elsewhere, viewed our response to the Beirut bombings as further proof that their ideologically driven war was a viable cause. And so, inspired by Iranian aggression, the anti-American jihad kept ramping up.
 
Maybe Obama meant the fabled halcyon days of the 1990s, when President Clinton tried to mend fences with Iran?
 
In 1996 a team of jihadists--financed and trained by Teheran--blew up the Khobar Towers building in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen. Clinton’s administration learned that Iran was behind the attacks. But Washington brushed aside any notion of retaliating against Iran, in order to facilitate a “reconciliation” with that murderous regime. In an eerie parallel with today, Iran expressed its openness to U.S. groveling--an opportunity Clinton seized.
 
So, Clinton attended a speech by Iran’s leader at the U.N.; the administration also permitted the sale of much-needed aircraft parts to Iran, among other sweeteners. Granted the cover of respectability, Iran was emboldened to continue fomenting Islamist aggression and avidly pursue its then-embryonic nuclear program.
 
Obama’s appeasing diplomacy re-enacts the disastrous policy of the past. Our policymakers evaded Iran’s character as an enemy, and by rewarding its aggression with bribes and conciliation, they encouraged a spiral of further attacks. 
 
No. Bush was no exception to this trend. After 9/11 his administration invited Iran--the leading sponsor of Islamist terrorism--to join an anti-terrorism coalition(!). Talk of an axis of evil was quickly abandoned, and Washington backed the European scheme to bribe Iran to halt its nuclear program. By late last year, there was talk of opening a U.S. Special Interests Section (a step down from an embassy) in Iran. Meanwhile Bush’s welfare mission in Iraq negated U.S. security and left Iran untouched to grow more powerful and resolute.
 
A genuinely new, rational policy toward Iran would turn away from the last 30 years and begin by facing up to Teheran’s ongoing proxy war against us.

 

Anti-Smoking Paternalism: A Cancer on American Liberty

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

Anti-Smoking Paternalism: A Cancer on American Liberty

By Don Watkins

Newport Beach is considering banning smoking in a variety of new places, potentially including parks and outdoor dining areas. This is just the latest step in a widespread war on smoking by federal, state, and local governments--a campaign that includes massive taxes on cigarettes, advertising bans, and endless lawsuits against tobacco companies. This war is infecting America with a political disease far worse than any health risk caused by smoking; it is destroying our freedom to make our own judgments and choices.

According to the anti-smoking movement, restricting people’s freedom to smoke is justified by the necessity of combating the “epidemic” of smoking-related disease and death. Cigarettes, we are told, kill hundreds of thousands each year, and expose countless millions to secondhand smoke. Smoking, the anti-smoking movement says, in effect, is a plague, whose ravages can only be combated through drastic government action.

But smoking is not some infectious disease that must be quarantined and destroyed by the government. It’s a voluntary activity that every individual is free to abstain from (including by avoiding restaurants and other private establishments that permit smoking). And, contrary to those who regard any smoking as irrational on its face, cigarettes are a potential value that each individual must assess for himself. Of course, smoking can be harmful--in certain quantities, over a certain period of time, it can be habit forming and lead to disease or death. But many understandably regard the risks as minimal if one smokes relatively infrequently, and they see smoking as offering definite value, such as physical pleasure.

Are they right? Can it be a value to smoke cigarettes--and if so, in what quantity? This is the sort of judgment that properly belongs to every individual, based on his assessment of the evidence concerning smoking’s benefits and risks, and taking into account his particular circumstances (age, family history, etc.). If others believe the smoker is making a mistake, they are free to try to persuade him of their viewpoint. But they should not be free to dictate his decision, any more than they should be able to dictate his decision on whether and to what extent to drink alcohol or play poker. The fact that some individuals will smoke themselves into an early grave is no more justification for banning smoking than that the existence of alcoholics is grounds for prohibiting you from enjoying a drink at dinner.

Implicit in the war on smoking, however, is the view that the government must dictate the individual’s decisions with regard to smoking, because he is incapable of making them rationally. To the extent the anti-smoking movement succeeds in wielding the power of government coercion to impose on Americans its blanket opposition to smoking, it is entrenching paternalism: the view that individuals are incompetent to run their own lives, and thus require a nanny-state to control every aspect of those lives.

This state is well on its way: from trans-fat bans to bicycle helmet laws to prohibitions on gambling, the government is increasingly abridging our freedom on the grounds that we are not competent to make rational decisions in these areas--just as it has long done by paternalistically dictating how we plan for retirement (Social Security) or what medicines we may take (the FDA).

Indeed, one of the main arguments used to bolster the anti-smoking agenda is the claim that smokers impose “social costs” on non-smokers, such as smoking-related medical expenses--an argument that perversely uses an injustice created by paternalism to support its expansion. The only reason non-smokers today are forced to foot the medical bills of smokers is that our government has virtually taken over the field of medicine, in order to relieve us inept Americans of the freedom to manage our own health care, and bear the costs of our own choices.

But contrary to paternalism, we are not congenitally irrational misfits. We are thinking beings for whom it is both possible and necessary to rationally judge which courses of action will serve our interests. The consequences of ignoring this fact range from denying us legitimate pleasures to literally killing us: from the healthy 26-year-old unable to enjoy a trans-fatty food to the 75-year-old man unable to take an unapproved, experimental drug without which he will certainly die.

By employing government coercion to deprive us of the freedom to judge for ourselves what we inhale or consume, the anti-smoking movement has become an enemy, not an ally, in the quest for health and happiness.

 

GOING JOHN GALT ON PJ TV

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

"Going John Galt on PJTV.com."

OList and Activist Mailing Lists

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Here's a reminder about mailing lists potentially of interest to NoodleFood readers:

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

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

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

Second, I heartily support the following activism-oriented e-mail lists. They do not require agreement with Objectivism, but they do require support for the mission statement of the organization.

• FIRM Activists: An unmoderated, low-volume mailing list for activists for free market medicine with Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM).
  
  
• CSG Activists: An unmoderated, low-volume mailing list for activists for government solely based on secular principles of individual rights with the Coalition for Secular Government (CSG).
  
  
• FA/RM Activists: An unmoderated, low-volume mailing list for activists for agricultural and health policies based solely on the principles of individual rights with Free Agriculture - Restore Markets (FA/RM).
  
  
• Colorado Free Marketeers: Ari Armstrong's new list for free-market activism in Colorado. He describes the list as follows: "Colorado Free Marketeers is a moderated list for activists looking for information and inspiration. Membership is open to any person committed to the principles of free markets and willing to engage in activism involving public speaking or writing at least every three months. While the list focuses on Colorado activism, those outside Colorado may join the list to track activism in the state and pick up ideas for activism where they live."

Please do join if you're interested.

Your Nest Egg on the Government Bailout

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Amanda Teresi is an activist for free markets and limited government here in Colorado. She runs Liberty on the Rocks, for example. I met her through the Leadership Program of the Rockies (which I'm really enjoying) -- and I think very highly of her. She recently made this very clever and memorable video of "your nest egg on the government bailout":



I'd love to see more Objectivists being so creative and memorable in their activism -- in conjunction with the necessary economic and moral arguments, of course.

Homecoming "Queen"

By Paula Hall from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The Washington Post ran a story the other day on the controversy over the recent George Mason University homecoming queen contest, the "Ms. Mason" pageant.

A gay student and drag queen performer entered "as a joke," competing as his drag alter ego "Reann Ballslee." He competed by wearing "a silver bra and zebra-print pants and . . . lip-syncing to Britney Spears's 'Womanizer.'" The other contestants included

a government and politics major from Chesapeake and a Chi Omega sorority member who told the school newspaper she should win because "I have pride in Mason to the point where my towels are green and gold."

"Reann" won the pageant.

"It was just for fun," Allen, 22, said over coffee at the Johnson Center, where he was congratulated by classmates with hugs and squeals. "In the larger scheme of things, winning says so much about the university. We're one of the most diverse campuses in the country, and . . . we celebrate that."

Apparently, the pageant had been held for five years previously with little engagement by the student body. Few students were interested in an event regarded as "the province of pretty blondes and fraternity boys." This year, however, with Ryan Allen as a contestant, students were interested.

"I've never been into homecoming over here. This is the first time I've actually wanted to support someone," said Melissa Benjjani, 21, from Lebanon. "He deserves to be queen. He's already a queen for everybody."

All was not joy in Mudville, however, when Reann won. GMU is in a years-long campaign "to revamp its image from commuter school to distinguished institution of higher learning." Although GMU's official statement is that the university is "very comfortable with it," a sophomore who helps with recruiting thinks

"It's really annoying," said Bollinger, who works as an ambassador for the admissions office. "The game was on TV. Everyone was there. All eyes were on us. And we do something like this? It's just stupid."

When I read this story I did not know what to think. On the one hand, this is clearly a no-skin-off-my nose situation; who cares who the homecoming queen of George Mason University is? Why should there be any controversy? And besides, we live in a country where people are trying to keep gay men and women from getting married to the person they love, so it's refreshing to see what looks like very public acceptance of one gay man's lifestyle.

On the other hand, I felt bad that a benign tradition was being subverted in some sense. Wikipedia describes homecoming as a tradition that is "celebrated" by bringing together alumni and others for banquets, a football game, and a ceremony where two students who have "gone above and beyond the call of duty to contribute to their school" are crowned Homecoming King and Queen. Crowning a man homecoming queen as a "joke" seems to thwart what many people expect and enjoy about homecoming celebrations. When Ryan Allen entered the competition, he did not intend to be judged by the same standards as the other two contestants. That is, he was not trying to show school spirit, or to demonstrate that he was a good student, or even that he was the prettiest contestant. He hoped to win despite those standards; he wanted those standards to be disregarded. Put another way -- there may not have been any official rule barring a drag queen from participating in George Mason University's homecoming pageant, but it does seem that when Ryan Allen entered the pageant, he broke the spirit, if not the letter, of the "law."

Then I remembered what Ayn Rand said about humor:

Humor is the denial of metaphysical importance to that which you laugh at. The classic example: you see a very snooty, very well dressed dowager walking down the street, and then she slips on a banana peel . . . . What's funny about it? It's the contrast of the woman's pretensions to reality. She acted very grand, but reality undercut it with a plain banana peel. That's the denial of the metaphysical validity or importance of the pretensions of that woman. Therefore, humor is a destructive element--which is quite all right, but its value and its morality depend on what it is that you are laughing at. If what you are laughing at is the evil in the world (provided that you take it seriously, but occasionally you permit yourself to laugh at it), that's fine. [To] laugh at that which is good, at heroes, at values, and above all at yourself [is] monstrous . . . .

I wonder: if Ryan Allen entered the pageant as a "joke," what did he hope people would laugh at? Is the Ms. Mason homecoming pageant the proper subject of a joke? Is there something evil about it, such that it is good to deny its "metaphysical importance?" So far as I am aware, it was never any part of the GMU homecoming tradition to disparage homosexuals, such that the pageant should be considered evil for contributing to prejudice against gay men. If I'm invited to ridicule the pageant as a result of this, am I contributing to the destruction of something evil, or of a value?

Perhaps in the end, what people will take away from this episode (to the extent anyone notices) is that the-times-they-are-a-changin' -- in a good way. But that will only be in contradiction of Ryan Allen's original intent, which was to make the pageant the subject of a joke. Which means -- to destroy the pageant.

Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is in the eye of the beholder. From where I sit this doesn't look like a harmless joke. It looks like a spiteful prank.

Walking Cultural Activism: People of Reason

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!

Professor Reports Student to Police for Defending Concealed Carry

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

At Central Connecticut State University, student John Wahlberg was reported to the police by his professor Paula Anderson, after he gave a presentation in class on campus violence in which he defended concealed carry.

After Wahlberg raised the point that allowing students with concealed weapons permits to carry on campus might have saved lives in incidents such as the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, Professor Anderson filed a complaint with the campus police against Wahlberg stating that his presentation was making students feel "scared and uncomfortable".

The police questioned Wahlberg about his own firearms and where he kept them:

"I was a bit nervous when I walked into the police station," Wahlberg said, "but I felt a general sense of disbelief once the officer actually began to list the firearms registered in my name. I was never worried however, because as a law-abiding gun owner, I have a thorough understanding of state gun laws as well as unwavering safety practices."

I guess Professor Anderson doesn't think that academic freedom extends to students arguing to exercise certain constitutionally-protected rights.

As another student noted:

"If you can't talk about the Second Amendment, what happened to the First Amendment?" asked Sara Adler, president of the Riflery and Marksmanship club on campus. "After all, a university campus is a place for the free and open exchange of ideas."

Update: As others have noted here and elsewhere (e.g., Volokh and Instapundit), we may not have the full story. So appropriate caution is warranted before leaping to hasty conclusions.

Asking the Right Question

By Greg Perkins from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

   


That's great! Unfortunately, it is hilarious because what it refers to is so widespread.

The lesson to be taken from this "sign of insanity" is a key epistemological principle in Objectivism: that arbitrary notions -- ideas with no basis in reality -- must be rejected if you want your mind to actually be useful in pursuing life here on earth.

A familiar application can be seen in our justice system: When someone brings a baseless charge before a court, it is rightly dismissed as beneath consideration (and could even earn penalties for wasting the court's time). Chaos would reign if this were not the standing practice, with spurious claims sapping precious resources and inviting injustice. Well, the same should hold in the fact-finding forum of your own mind: if someone brings a baseless idea before a rational mind, it ought to be dismissed as beneath consideration or argument -- as "not even wrong."

As Leonard Peikoff discussed in his lecture series presenting "The Philosophy of Objectivism":

An arbitrary claim has no cognitive status whatever. According to Objectivism, such a claim is not to be regarded as true or as false. If it is arbitrary, it is entitled to no epistemological assessment at all; it is simply to be dismissed as though it hadn’t come up ... The truth is established by reference to a body of evidence and within a context; the false is pronounced false because it contradicts the evidence. The arbitrary, however, has no relation to evidence, facts, or context. It is the human equivalent of [noises produced by] a parrot ... sounds without any tie to reality, without content or significance.

In a sense, therefore, the arbitrary is even worse than the false. The false at least has a relation (albeit a negative one) to reality; it has reached the field of human cognition, although it represents an error -- but in that sense it is closer to reality than the brazenly arbitrary.
...
It is not your responsibility to refute someone’s arbitrary assertion -- to try to find or imagine arguments that will show that his assertion is false. It is a fundamental error on your part even to try to do this. The rational procedure in regard to an arbitrary assertion is to dismiss it out of hand, merely identifying it as arbitrary, and as such inadmissible and undiscussable.

This can be a subtle and tricky topic, and gaining clarity on it represents an important mental upgrade. For further exploration I recommend Peikoff's excellent book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, where he reorganized, systematized, and strengthened the material of those lectures.

[HT: Pharyngula]

Hsieh OpEd: "Ayn Rand and the Tea Party Protests"

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The online commentary/opinion website PajamasMedia.com has just published my latest OpEd entitled, "Ayn Rand and the Tea Party Protests".

My theme is that the Tea Party protesters must couple their outrage at the government bailouts with a positive vision of a properly limited government based on Ayn Rand's ideas.

Here is an excerpt:

Ayn Rand and the Tea Party Protests
March 2, 2009 - by Paul Hsieh

Over the past week, an extraordinary wave of "Tea Party" protests has erupted across America. Citizens around the country have expressed outrage at the government's mishandling of the financial crisis. And one of the most intriguing developments has been a resurgence in interest in Ayn Rand's classic novel Atlas Shrugged.

Denver's Tea Party protest opened with a reading from Atlas Shrugged. A sign at the New York City protest read, "Ayn Rand Was Right." One banner at the Atlanta Tea Party said, "Read Atlas Shrugged Before It Happens." The Ayn Rand Institute reports that sales of Atlas Shrugged have nearly tripled compared to last year due to Americans' concerns about the economic crisis.

So why has there been such a renewed interest in Ayn Rand?...

Read the rest here.

The One Minute Case For Capitalism

By heroic@gmail.com (David Veksler) from One Minute Cases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Capitalism a social system based on the principle of individual rights.

A capitalist society is based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights. Under capitalism, all property is privately owned, and the state is separated from economics just as it is from religion. Economically, capitalism is a system of laissez faire, or free markets, where the government plays no part whatsoever in economic decisions.

Capitalism is the only social system compatible with the requirements of man’s life

To pursue the values necessary for his life a society, man requires only one thing from others: freedom of action. Freedom means the ability to act however one pleases as long as one does not infringe on the same and equal freedom of others.   In a political context, freedom means solely the freedom from the initiation of force by other men. Only by the initiation of force can man’s rights be violated. Whether it is by a theft, force, fraud, or government censorship, man’s rights can be violated only by the initiation of force. Because man’s life depends on the use of reason to achieve the values necessary for his life, the initiation of force renders his mind useless as a means of survival. To live, man must achieve the values necessary to sustain his live. To achieve values, man must be free to think and to act on his judgment. To live, man must be free to think. To be free to think, man must be free to act. In the words of Ayn Rand, “Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”

Capitalism recognizes the inherent worth of the individual

In a human society – one that recognizes the independence of each man’s mind – each individual is an end in himself.  He owns his life, and no one else’s.  Other men are not his slaves, and he is not theirs.  They have no claim on his life or on the values he creates to maintain his life, and he has no claim on theirs.  In a free society, men can gain immense values from each other by voluntarily trading the values they create to mutual gain.  However, they can only create values if they are free to use their minds to exercise their creativity.  A man is better living off on his own than as a slave to his brothers.  Capitalism recognizes each man as an independent, thinking being.

The individual is an end in himself

Just as no individual has the right to initiate force against anyone, neither does any group of men, in any private or public capacity. It is immoral to initiate force against any individual for any reason. This includes the initiation of force for “the public good.” The “public” is merely a collection of individuals, each possessing the same rights, and each being an end in himself. Any attempt to benefit the “public good” is an immoral attempt to provide a benefit to one group of individuals at the expense of another. In a free society, no individual benefits at the expense of another: men exchange the values they create in voluntary trade to mutual gain. The rule of law in a free society has just one purpose: to protect the rights of the individual.

Capitalism leads to freedom and prosperity

A free, capitalist economy has never existed anywhere in the world. The closest the world came to a free market was during the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and during the late 19th century in the United States. The Industrial Revolution was a period of unprecedented economic growth and unimaginable improvements in quality of life. In less than two hundred years, the life of most people in the Western world changed from a a short life filled with poverty, plague, and near-constant war to a modern, comfortable existence that  even the kings of medieval Europe couldn’t have imagined.  Since 1820, the leading capitalist nations have increased their wealth sixteen fold, their populations more than four-fold, their productivity twenty-fold.  Annual working hours went from 3,000 to less than 1,700 and life expectancy doubled from thirty to over seventy years. ¹

Yet despite the undeniable material superiority of capitalist societies, its critics continue to attack it as inhuman and selfish.  What the world lacks is not evidence of capitalism’s practical superiority, but a moral defense of a man’s right to his own life.

Reference

1. Angus Maddison. Phases of Capitalist Development, p4 (1982)

Further Reading

• Andrew Bernstein: The Capitalist Manifesto
• Ayn Rand: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
• The One Minute Case For Individual Rights
• The One Minute Case Against Interventionism
• The Bernstein Declaration On the Principles and Possibilities of Capitalism
• The Capitalism Site

The One Minute Case Against Wage and Price Controls

By heroic@gmail.com (David Veksler) from One Minute Cases,cross-posted by MetaBlog

What is a job?
A job is a contract between two parties, in which one party agrees to provide certain services on a certain schedule in exchange for payment from the other party. By definition, an employee agrees to do job for a particular wage by his own voluntary consent. This is opposed to slavery, in which a slave is forced to work without his consent or compensation.

What determines wages? Can employers pay workers whatever they want?

A wage is the price an employer pays for the services his employee. While the two may negotiate any wage they come to mutual agreement on, the mutual self-interest of both and market forces intersect at a market-set price that represents the intersection of their interests. Disregarding non-economic factors, an employer wishes to pay his employee as little as possible. The maximum amount he will pay however is the value of the marginal productivity a given worker provides. (The marginal productivity is the value per unit of time the worker provides to the employer.) If the worker refuses to work at or below his marginal productivity, then the employer will not hire him, since doing so will incur a loss. Conversely, disregarding non-economic factors, the employee wishes to be paid an infinite amount. The minimum wage he will actually accept is the marginal value of his labor. This can be measured in terms of the next-most useful value-producing activity the workers may engage in.

For example, suppose that my marginal productivity as a programmer is $30 per hour. I will accept any job paying above $30 an hour, but no job below it, since I can find an employer paying that much in another computer or tech-related industry. A fast-food worker might have a marginal productivity of say, $6 an hour – the value per hour that his labor creates for the business. From the employer’s perspective, I create $40/hour of value, and the fast food workers creates $7 of value, so he will be willing to hire us. (Assuming that no one is willing to provide the same value for a lower wage.) However, if I only provide $20 of value, the employer will not hire me, because he would incur an hourly loss of $10 in doing so. Similarly, if the fast food worker only provides $5 of value, he would no be hired either because he would cause a loss of $1 for each hour he works.

Can the government increase wages when employers don’t pay enough?

Suppose that the government imposed a minimum wage of $8. Would the fast food worker who provides a value of $7 per hour now be paid $8? No, he would lose his job - because keeping him would mean a $1 loss for each hour he works to his employer. All minimum wage laws have a similar effect - they cause everyone with a marginal productivity below the minimum wage to lose their jobs - most often teenagers and the very poor. Wage caps (including progressive income taxes) have a similar effect - they lead the most productive individuals of our society to retire early or forgo new opportunities — resulting in a lost opportunity for them, and for everyone who might have benefited from their ideas.

What if the government creates a job by paying an unemployed worker to do make-work such as digging holes in the ground?

Where would the money to pay for his wage come from? It would have to be taken by force from the remaining employed fast food workers and computer programmers. Everyone will be paid less to pay for the government workers, but has a job been created? No - now the fast-food employer has $1 less to pay to his other $8 employees, so he must fire some of them or go out of business. Each new $7 government worker costs at least one $7 privately employed worker. This is always a social loss because by definition, the government worker is less productive. If he were not, then the private business would voluntarily employ workers to perform his job.  While a minimum wage causes everyone who produces less than the marginal productivity of the minimum to lose his job, each new government job causes at least one more productive worker to lose his job.

If the government cannot raise wages, can it lower prices?

Prices are determined by the marginal value of a given good, just as a wage is determined by the marginal productivity of an employee. Attempts to regulate the cost of goods have the same effect as wage controls: if the price is set below the cost of a good, producers will be unable to make any.   Since different producers have different costs, lowering the prices of a good will decrease the percentage of producers able to supply them, until they can make none at all.

So how can prices be lowered?

The only way for prices to go down is to increase the productivity of workers.  Productivity in the production of a good comes from the application of mental effort to the production of values. A profit (the difference between the value of a good to a consumer and the cost to produce it) is the reward of an entrepreneur for bringing about the new wealth he’s created. In the absence of government coercion, profits can exist only as long as men continue to create new values ,or improving on existing ones.  The only to make goods cheaper is to allow entrepreneurs the freedom to invest in improvements in the capital and labor methods used in production

Doesn’t a more efficient product result in lost jobs for those who were replaced by automation or better processes?

When oil lamps replaced candles, the cost of producing affordable lighting greatly decreased. In the absence of a government monopoly, competing lamp-makers quickly started making their own lamps, which brought the price decrease to the consumer. In the process of transitioning from candles to laps, many thousands of candle-makers lost their jobs.  However, oil lamps did created a new industry of their own and increased the prosperity of society as a whole, just as electric lighting did in the 20th century.  Since consumers could buy cheaper lamps, they now had more money to spend on other things, ,creating new industries, and raising their overall standard of living.

Technological progress and capital accumulation has both created new careers made us enormously more productive – we not only have a wider range of vocations to choose from but work far fewer hours.

Can government “soften the blow” when all these candle-makers lose their jobs?

In today’s world, the government would probably try to subsidize the candle or lamp-makers when their chief product became outdated. What would that subsidy accomplish? It would save the candle-makers jobs - but it would cost the jobs of everyone who stood to benefit from the increase wealth that came from cheaper lights. In the short term, the candle-makers might benefit - but in the long term, they would lose too, since they would lose the new, higher paying jobs the could have making electric lights and the new products the cheaper lights would allow consumers to afford. Meanwhile, the Thomas Edison’s, Graham Bells, Thomas Moore’s, and Bill Gates’ would be too busy working to pay off taxes to have the time or money for research.

Of course, we know that these inventors and entrepreneurs succeeded. But how many didn’t because they never got their first break in the field because of a minimum wage, or gave up before they tried because the red tape was too much, or the taxes too high, or they knew that the old, outdated industries would use the government to tax and regulate them out of existence? The real tragedy is that we will never know.

Ranking the Founding Presidents

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

Uncle Obama Wants You

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

When I finished reading and marking up a transcript of President Barack Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress on February 24, there was possibly as much of my own ink on the pages as in the speech itself. Numerous triple question marks highlighted blatant lies, half-truths, fallacies, ambiguities and generalizations pregnant with unspecified meanings. Several “Huh?’s” were linked to statements that made no sense at all. And sixty-one checkmarks were penned over bracketed instances of applause by Congress.

That was the result of just one pass at the speech. The experience was much like editing a James Joyce novel, which would also be an oxymoronic task, because no rules of grammar or logic or clarity would apply to that task, either. As I had remarked in another post, an Obama speech is yadda-yaddaism elevated to a high art. It is appropriate that his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is an equivocating ignoramus with all the charisma of Elmer Fudd, and that his thuggish chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, is staying out of sight.

It was the number of checkmarks for the applause that was scary. Listening to and watching Hitler rant shrilly in front of thousands of cheering and saluting Nazis never fails to send shivers up my spine. But Hitler never frightened me as much as did the mob entranced by his messianism and in gestalt with his message. Listening to and watching Obama speak to crowds, however, does not affect me personally. I know that he is a power-luster imbued with far fewer oratorical skills than had FDR, JFK, or even Hitler, and that he wishes to complete the job begun by his “progressive” predecessors over a century ago and transform the country from a republic into a national socialist state. There are plenty of such creatures around, in and out of office. But listening to Obama speak bores me to distraction, almost as much as having listened to former president George W. Bush stumble through a speech or trip over words and contradictions during press conferences.

What scares me more than Obama are his worshippers, his supporters, and anyone else who would approve of putting a gun to my head, picking my pockets, and marching me to a make-work program to assemble solar panels or smoking-cessation kits or to lay track for Harry Reid’s Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas magnetic rail line.

As was Hitler, George Bush and Barack Obama are nonentities, mediocrities. As was Bush, Obama is in a position of power not for any special talent for reaching it or for out-maneuvering his competitors for it. He is simply the most accommodating zero willing to echo the wishes and intentions of lesser power-seekers, such as George Soros, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, to name but a few. Obama is the beneficiary of the collapse of philosophy and the implosion of political pragmatism.

“Now is the time to act boldly and wisely -- to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity…..That is what my economic agenda is designed to do, and that is what I’d like to talk to you about tonight.” (Applause)

What is the nature of that “foundation”? There was no answer, except the implication that it is the government and the Democrats who will be laying that foundation along fascist/socialist lines, leaving a “tired ideology” behind, one that belabored “trivialities” such as property rights and freedom. And, it is a measure of Obama’s own ignorance of economics and history that “prosperity” has never been the hallmark of any police state or any collectivized nation or of any command economy.

His ignorance and arrogance notwithstanding, Obama stated:

“I reject the view that says our problems will simply take care of themselves; that says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity,” Obama declared, echoing generations of American progressives before him. “For history tells us a different story. History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas.”

Which resulted in vast expansions of government power over the economy. As for the history of the role of the Industrial Revolution, of freedom of thought and action, of free minds and free markets, of the prosperity those things made possible, that history Obama is utterly blind to. That history doesn’t fit his vision of what America must become for him to be seen as its “savior.”

E.J. Dionne Jr., writing for The Washington Post on February 25, fervently endorsed Obama’s vision and revealed that Obama’s “faith-based initiative” has little to do with religion:

"Like Franklin Roosevelt, Obama sought to restore the public’s faith that the private economy would recover by bolstering confidence in government’s capacity to act rationally, creatively and efficiently.”

I will go out on a limb here and credit Obama and the Democrats with the repressed knowledge that the best way to “stimulate” the economy is to suspend all income and excise tax collection for a year or so, freeze all federal regulatory enforcement by cabinet and non-cabinet departments and agencies, fire all “non-essential” federal employees -- in short, to paraphrase John Galt in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, to get the hell out of the way and allow the economy to function rationally, creatively, and efficiently. Those actions would certainly “stimulate” economic recovery beyond any politician’s comprehension. But that would mean a relinquishment of power, and that is the last thing Obama and the Democrats want to do. After all, the temporary suspensions might become permanent, once enough Americans realized they didn’t need the government to “jump start” the economy or to give purpose to their lives.

And, one must wonder: Is he so ignorant of economics and history? Are the Democrats?

“Now, I’m proud that we passed a recovery plan free of earmarks -- (applause) -- and I want to pass a budget next year that ensures that each dollar we spend reflects only our most important national priorities.”

Whose priorities? Not those of any individual with a shred of self-esteem, a nominal commitment to reason, and a desire to live his own life in freedom guided by his own values. No, when Obama said “our most important national priorities” he meant his and those of virtually everyone’s in that chamber, which are the impoverishment of America and its dependence on and compliance with government priorities.

Obama is not changing the course of the country. He is following it. In this sense, nothing he has ever said is “radical.”

Nearly all of the sixty-one instances of ovation were led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was odd the way she was repeatedly the first to shoot up and begin clapping, and odd as well what she thought merited applause, although Obama in most instances had said nothing remarkable. It was a cue to the rest of the chamber to rise and join her. It was almost as though she was trying to stop people from thinking about what Obama had just said by drowning his words with the noisy sanction of applause.

It explains why, for example, Obama was able to get away with the lie that the bill was “free of earmarks.” I kept imagining that the instant, hurried applause stopped most Democratic Congressmen from ribbing each other in ribaldry, or scoffing up their collective sleeve, or just sitting quietly in the stony-faced denial of a liar invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. The applause was in the nature of a combination of a triumph of the statist manifesto and repeated blank-outs of what it would actually accomplish, which, in virtually every goal, will be precisely the opposite of what Obama claimed it would.

As though to answer the volume of criticism of his “plan” to “revive” the economy and command it to regain “prosperity,” a volume that must have been monitored by his staff and the Democrats, Obama felt it necessary to state:

“Now, I know there are some in this chamber and watching at home who are skeptical of whether this plan will work. And I understand that skepticism. Here in Washington, we’ve all seen how quickly good intentions can turn into broken promises and wasteful spending. And with a plan of this scale comes enormous responsibility to get it right.” (No applause here; why draw attention to the contrary?)

Skeptical is hardly the adjective to describe the anger and incredulity of the criticism in the press, in some segments of the news media, on political blogs, and on talk radio. Skepticism, in Obama’s and the Democrats’ lexicon, is a synonym for reason. In this instance, reason recognizes that the $787 billion “stimulus” bill is a testament to broken promises and wasteful spending. So, he said, let’s pooh-pooh reason and believe it is not those things.

But, enough of the speech before Congress and the “stimulus” bill. Both have been exposed as the frauds they are here and elsewhere. What also deserves attention is Obama’s next economic “plan.” Of all the newspaper coverage of Obama’s proposed $3.6 trillion budget, The Washington Post of February 27 was the most straightforward about how that budget plan meshes with the “stimulus” plan:

“President Obama delivered to Congress yesterday a $3.6 trillion spending plan that would finance vast new investments in health care, energy independence and education by raising taxes on the oil and gas industry, hedge fund managers, multinational corporations and nearly 3 million of the nation’s top earners.”

Further on, the Post lets the cat out of the bag:

“With its immense scope and bold prescriptions, Obama’s agenda seeks to foster a redistribution of wealth, with the government working to narrow the growing gap between rich and poor.”

Remember Obama’s patronizing assurance to Joe the Plumber during the campaign, that he just wants to “spread the wealth around”? The Post, however, was merely the first to admit that Obama’s plan is one of “redistribution” (without employing the qualifying term socialist). Now the news media sense it is safe to repeat the term. It is only a matter of time before Congress and the news media feel arrogant enough to use the term socialist. Perhaps not. But the consequences will be the same. The "rich," or those earning over $250,000 annually, will be punished, looted, and vilified. We, the lower middle classes, will be expected to cheer and throw rocks at limousines.

In his new website announcement, “Organizing for America,” Obama condescended to release this message to his followers and supporters:

“The budget isn’t just a reflection of President Obama’s priorities. It’s a reflection of yours. This is the change you worked for and Americans demanded. But to make sure it succeeds, the President will need your help.”

Of course. Just submit to his will, like a Muslim, like a feudal serf, like a selfless manqué. Too many Americans are ready to heed his “call to prayers,” too many who believe that all one needs is faith to make sure Obama’s plan succeeds. These are the gnomes who worry me the most.

This is “democracy” in action -- against me.

INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT HOLLERAN

By Martin Lindeskog from EGO,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Stay tuned for the start of a new series of podcast interviews on Solid Vox. I will interview Scott Holleran on Friday, February 27, at 2 PM Pacific Time (Los Angeles) / 11 PM Central European Time (Gothenburg, Sweden) / 9 AM Melbourne time, Saturday.

Please feel free to send me questions for Scott Holleran and suggestions for future guests.

New video by John Allison on the financial crisis at AynRand.org

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

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The media, politicians, and even many businessmen have blamed today’s financial meltdown on capitalism. But in this talk, John Allison—the longest-tenured CEO of a top-25 financial services company—argues that this crisis is a legacy of the government’s anti-capitalist policies.

Mr. Allison uses his unique inside view of the financial services industry to show how