John Allison - A Living Example of the Objectivist Ethics

I saw this video lecture today and I was captivated. Allison perfectly synthesizes the Objectivist ethics into a practical, matter-of-fact, and easy to understand presentation. I highly recommend this, especially if you're a new-comer to Ayn Rand's work and are having difficulties understanding what she's really all about. But I also think it would be refreshing for veterans in the philosophy as well. As always, why not check it out and decide for yourself?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twolXLHBmgQ

Obamacare and the Silencing of Dissent

I am livid today after I became aware of an obvious ploy to silence XCowboy2(Richard Gleaves)'s "This is John Galt Speaking" video series on Youtube. A company just issued copyright complaints against all 28 videos of the new and old series. They have also effectively wiped out 2 full years of view counts and discussion attached to the videos. That is 2 years of people questioning Objectivist issues and being debated or tutored by practiced Objectivists in the youtube community. Also, the videos were targeted on the very same day that Richard came out with this little parable about the nature of the current health care debate:

The Parable of the Octopus Man

Coincidence??? I'm sure it will all have been a mistake...to be cleared up after the vote goes through. But the tragedy is really the loss of that corpus of open, free Objectivist discussion. I find it ironic that the liberals claim to be champions of liberty while they seek to silence any opposition by whatever means.

"If the "liberals" are afraid to identify their program by its proper name, if they advocate every specific step, measure, policy, and principle of statism, but squirm and twist themselves into semantic pretzels with such euphemisms as the "Welfare State," the "New Deal," the "New Frontier," they still preserve a semblance of logic, if not of morality: it is the logic of a con man who cannot afford to let his victims discover his purpose. Besides, the majority of those who are loosely identified by the term "liberals" are afraid to let themselves discover that what they advocate is statism. They do not want to accept the full meaning of their goal; they want to keep all the advantages and effects of capitalism, while destroying the cause, and they want to establish statism without its necessary effects. They do not want to know or admit that they are champions of dictatorship and slavery. So they evade the issue, for fear of discovering that their goal is evil." --Ayn Rand

[Update 3/25/2010: It would appear that WKH didn't really have anything to do with it at all. As such I took out the link to their YouTube page and removed direct references to their company name. It appears that some computer hack was filing claims under their name, probably some automated attack. The videos were attacked by a different publisher soon after the other complaint was taken down. Some automated hack that relies on targeting chained videos? Anyways it DOES seem that some liberal with an axe to grind is probably behind the attacks. So I'm leaving the informative part of the article up and cutting out my invective.]

Searching for Fascism in Atlas Shrugged

I thought this might be of some interest to fans of Atlas Shrugged of a more academic bent. I stumbled across it in my internet wanderings. It appears to be that a linguist at the University of Birmingham did a study of Atlas Shrugged to try and objectively examine the charges of fascism that we hear so often on the net. It's more than a little dry and very heavy on the linguistic terminology but it makes for an interesting intellectual read. Here's a link to the site it's on:

Corpus Tools and the Linguistic Study of Ideology: Searching for Fascism in Atlas Shrugged

Maria Montessori and Ayn Rand: A foundation for a complete model of human development

The famous although largely academically ignored Montessori method and the increasingly relevant philosophy of Objectivism have many things in common. The Montessori method provides the foundation for the formation of an integrated and individual intelligence, and Objectivism provides the philosophical explanatory framework and the model for its extrapolation into the adult formation of ethics, work, and personal life. While roaming the internet I happened to find this particularly insightful article which discusses the relationship of the two in detail. I highly recommend it. Enjoy!

http://www.expert-tennis-tips.com/maria-montessori.html

Atlas Shrugged Essay Contest 2009

Just got the word that I didn't place in this year's Atlas Shrugged essay contest. I look forward to reading the winning essays when they're posted on ARI's website. Anyways, here's my entry from this year. Hope you enjoy reading it. -- American Anti-theist

BUSINESS & PLEASURE: Vice and virtue in the life of Hank Rearden

Hank Rearden runs his business with ruthless efficiency. The standard of value by which every aspect of his foundry is decided is one simple principle: What’s best for making metal? The wage of every worker he employs is balanced against the cost that wage adds to the production process and the necessity of that worker’s labor to the creation of product. The prices of materials are balanced against the market price of steel. The market price of steel is driven up by customer demand for his steel and down by the prices offered by his competitors. The only way to survive, the only way to prosper, is to minimize costs, to increase quality, to honor contracts, to expand his production so that he can further minimize costs, increase quality, and so on. In order to accomplish this he must pay his employees wages commensurate with their value. He needs quality workers to create quality product. He must buy quality materials. He cannot satisfy his customers with defective product. He must constantly refine his production process. He must condemn waste. He must reward efficiency. The highest value, the benchmark of all these other contributing elements, is simply the extent to which it enables him to produce better, faster, cheaper steel in greater quantities and make the greatest profit while doing so. This profit is his reward for organizing the resources of his business in such a way as to generate surplus. It is his reward for creating that which would not exist were he not to have created it. In business, this reward takes the form of money, a measure of the value he has added to the lives of all those with whom he does business.

If Rearden were to live as he ran his business, he would deal with all the people around him privately the same as he would deal with them professionally. Every emotional investment would be balanced by an emotional gain. If every process and function of his professional life is to render him a greater producer of steel, then every process and function of his personal life would be geared to render him a greater producer of his life’s highest values. The virtues of business are to minimize costs, to increase quality, to honor contracts, and to expand production. The virtues of his life would thus be frugality, integrity, honesty, and ambition. Just as he cannot settle for hiring just any worker for any job at any wage, so too he cannot afford to accept just any stranger into any given role in his life as only justified by their just having shown up. Friends, lovers, wives, and even family relationships cannot be based solely on chance, on the arbitrary advent of circumstantial proximity. They must be evaluated in terms of the value they offer and the price they demand. If they demand too high a cost for the value they offer, then they are not worthy of the role. On the contrary, the significance of the meaning of the words ‘friend’, ‘lover’, ‘wife’, and ‘family’ rests on the value that the people who fill those roles contribute to one’s life. A businessman cannot afford to promote an employee to a position of importance in his organization which outweighs that employee’s worth to the company. So, too, no man can afford to promote a chance acquaintance to a disproportionate position of importance within his own life. The objective measure of the success of his business is monetary profit, the value created by the practical implementation of his business philosophy. The objective measure of the success of his personal life is happiness, the value created by the practical implementation of his personal philosophy.

Rearden does not, however, initially adhere to parallel philosophies in his business and private life. Instead, Rearden follows a diametrically opposed moral code in his private affairs. His brother Philip, his wife Lillian, his mother, his “friend” Paul Larkin…these characters all represent the philosophical opposites of who should fill those roles were Rearden’s values applied consistently in both modes of his life.

Philip is devoid of ambition and produces nothing. He lives only to beg resources off others for the sake of others. He is an empty vessel, a conduit to be used by other men. He takes no pleasure in his existence nor deserves it. He has so little integrity that he has the audacity to undermine the brother who has supported him without complaint, to accept his money but condemn his character. Rearden would not even consider him for the job of a cinder sweeper, yet he considers him worthy of the title “brother”. Rearden would not even let him inside his mills, yet he allows him into his home and supports his every endeavor.

Lillian taunts Rearden with her sex. She uses it as a weapon to disarm him and to break him with guilt. Rearden is tortured by his own sense of guilt and hypocrisy every time he succumbs to her wiles. Yet he does not recognize that the source of the guilt is not the act of sex itself, but the act of sex with someone so completely devoid of any of the values he holds dear. His relationship with Dagny is the one truly worthy of the title “wife” but he does not recognize this inversion for what it is—that he has made the whore his “wife” and the woman who should be his wife into a whore.

His mother, completely dependent on her son for subsistence can do nothing but condemn him for the virtues which enable him to support her. His childhood “friend”, Paul, is simply someone he happened to know as a child and now is still somehow a friend despite the fact that there is nothing Rearden can conceivably respect him for and that he actively works against Rearden’s interests. Among these characters who hold the highest titles of honor in his life—friend, wife, mother, brother—not a single one is deserving of any respect. If his highest ideals are indeed frugality, integrity, honesty, and ambition, then Dagny should be his wife and Francisco D’Anconia should be his best friend. Yet those who scorn everything he believes in are his most valued relationships and he must view with contempt those who most closely reflect his own values.

Rearden is guilty of a terrible sin, a gross error of judgment. As Francisco tried to warn, "You're guilty of a great sin, Mr. Rearden, much guiltier than they tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt—and that is what you have been doing all your life. You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. You have been willing to carry the load of an unearned punishment—and to let it grow the heavier the greater the virtues you practiced” (421). Rearden’s willing acceptance of blame for pursuing his highest values has chained him to a philosophical system which will mean his destruction. He has accepted that the values that make him an excellent businessman, an inventor, and an entrepreneur are values which also make him a vile and loathsome human being. He has accepted a false dichotomy which states that productive activity which supports and enriches your existence is evil and that the only good is to support the lives of others. He has accepted the rule which condemns the fulfillment of one’s own desires but praises the fulfillment of the desires held by others. To the exact proportion that Rearden excels in his work, he is evil in his life. This is Rearden’s central error, the one that turns his life upside-down, that tortures him throughout his marriage, that tortures him throughout his affair with the only woman he has ever truly loved, and that eventually forces him to turn over his life’s work and greatest achievement, Rearden Metal, to a thankless mob of thugs as impudent as they are undeserving.

Then, Rearden realizes the weakness of his enemies. That weakness is that they have no power over him except what he has conceded. His sanction is necessary for them to continue their deception. His validation of their moral code is essential to enable them to brand him immoral. Once Rearden withdraws his sanction and aligns his personal moral code with his professional one, he removes the only device by which he could be chained, his own sense of guilt. Guilt is only possible to someone who has virtues, who feels that they have betrayed those virtues and sacrificed a greater value to a lesser one. By removing his acceptance of the slanders against him, he removed the ability of his enemies to pressure him with the guilt he had willingly accepted. By refusing to allow his virtues to be branded as vice, he was at last set free to feel his full worth, to embrace the self-esteem which had been rightfully his to claim from the very first. He was free to embrace his ethical peers as friends and to truly love them selfishly. With that simple realization, he was also set free of the world of decay. For him, the doors of Atlantis were at last opened and his place in the world of the future secured. That simple realization was that one’s virtues really are virtues and that it doesn’t matter who says differently. The only true measure is in one’s own happiness, the profit of a virtuous life.

On this day...

On this day, we must honor those who have died for our country. On this day, we must honor those who fought and lived, often with lifelong ailments of both mind and body. And how best to honor them? Do the parades and flag-waving actually mean anything anymore? What are we waving the flag for? Who are we saluting? For what are we fighting?

The answer for Americans has been and can only ever be one thing...FREEDOM.

But are we still fighting for it? Or is it something we passively accept? Do we still feel the weighty responsibility of the blood that has been spilled to defend the right to rule one's own life? Or have we surrendered it for the sake of the silken promise of serenity? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when our government continues to allow torture? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when our government takes control of businesses? How can we claim to be fighting for freedom when we rush to surrender our property and our choice to selected officials? Have we truly forgotten the horrors of the Berlin Wall, the Killing Fields, the Third Reich, the purges and concentration camps, the barbed wire and minefields, the executions and assassinations (public and private)?

Have the young people of today never learned of the horrors that chained whole continents to a destiny of fear and oppression? Have they never learned that these chains were all forged from promises made of an easier life, promises of the right to dispose of the blessings granted others as your own, promises that the blood of today will be the prosperity of the future? But that prosperity never came...only the blood. And true prosperity vanished as a whisper on the wind chasing the fleeting phantasms of its butchered progenitors.

Have you ever wondered why it is that every single country which has tried to earnestly enact the idea of wealth redistribution has had to keep its citizens within its borders at the point of a gun? Have you ever wondered what freedoms you would have left in the world you desire?

If you still remember these things, or if you see the error of fighting for freedom and then turning it over to a populist mob, then perhaps you can honor those who died fighting for the American dream. The American dream? Isn't that supposed to be a house, a white picket fence, 2.3 kids, 1.4 cars and a dog? No. The American dream is anything you want it to be. Therein lies its power. Therein lies its majesty and mystery. If the things you would fight for are nothing more than material objects than you are a fool, destined to find yourself in a gutter lying next to all the other petty criminals and thieves.

But if you would fight for freedom, for the true legacy of the right to decide for yourself, of the right not to support the fallacies and contradictions of your neighbors if you so choose, of the right to make up your own mind and the freedom to act on that choice-if you would fight for these things, then you are truly honoring the brave men and women who lost everything that they had just for the chance, for the shimmering sliver of a dream that freedom could be a reality.

So please, rather than making empty token gestures of patriotism today, go out and protest. Howl, scream, demand, argue, rant and petition for your freedom. Talk about it with your friends, lovers, spouses, co-workers, everybody you can. Post, comment, blog, YouTube it, Facebook it, Twitter it. Today is a day for honoring freedom. Even if it is just at arm's length, go and honor freedom today and the people who died for it.

I leave you with one of the great historical speeches that many of you may have never even heard of before.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MDFX-dNtsM

Health Care...or Smoke and Mirrors in the Halls of Congress...

I haven't had a lot of time to write or even think about social issues much in recent weeks, so I apologize for the lengthy hiatus. New country, new job, new home, new car...lots of things needed sorting out. Someone brought to my attention their concerns over the current health care debate and I thought I would add my two cents.

It may sound wonderful to imagine a world where everyone has cheap affordable healthcare, but what does that mean, who pays for it, and can such a concept as insurance ever be universal? I think the left and the right both grossly oversimplify all the issues involved and selectively fail to see the viewpoint of one side or the other. It is not a question of class struggle. It is not a question of haves versus have-nots. To adopt such a delineation is to instantly put the debate in a socialist camp from the get-go. The question is, as always, individual liberty. Do you have a right to order a doctor around? Do you have the medical knowledge necessary to second-guess their decisions? Do you have the financial knowledge necessary to adjust a fiduciary table of risk and returns? If you do not, then you cannot be expected to be able to select a representative who could responsibly make such decisions either. And if they cannot make such decisions, then should anyone have the right to supersede the conscience of educated and trained professionals at the point of a gun?

When it comes to government involvement in anything, it must always come down to the governments entitlement to use force to enforce law. By expanding legislation, we expand the government's charter to use force against us. Unless there is a damn good reason for that, I will be opposed to any enlargement of federal authority. We have to assume that our professionals will be professional. If they misrepresent their services, lie, make false promotions, etc. they are already violating the law and no further legislation is necessary. New legislation is necessary to define the terms of homesteading new frontiers of human knowledge and territory and the disputes that inevitably come from them. It is not to regulate and direct our lives. I am 100% inflexible on this concept: Individual human rights are absolute and inviolate. But people do not have the right to someone else's labor, their effort, or their livelihood (even and especially including doctors, bankers, and teachers). If Obama truly wished to make healthcare affordable, then he should consider unwinding the Gordian knot that our government has steadily added to practically everything over the last hundred some odd years, rather then instigating irrational waves of panic to help slide through unwarranted and unnecessary controls on free movement and action (e.g. Pig Flu pandemic scare).

Altruism is what is killing us. I believe this now more than ever. If you could but accept that as a possibility, I think you would be amazed at how much of the human narrative comes into a clear and understandable focus. Also how much easier it is to make moral judgments, when those morals are derived from clearly defined concepts which are derived from perceptions and are adjudicated by the facts of human existence and not on arbitrary exhortations of "humanity" as a concept undefined. I listen to Obama speak and I realize that he classifies businessmen as outside the scope of "we" when he refers to "us" as Americans and "them" as the bankers on wall street. But does he accept responsibility for the fact that business could not collude with government if government was not involved in business? Just as government cannot collude with religion, when religion is properly and strictly separated from government. Just as the end to religious war was precipitated by the separation of church and state, so will the class wars be ended by the separation of government and economics. Politics, is the province of reaching a consensus on how to deal with the classical crimes, the classical criminals, to defending the rights of its citizens from enemies foreign and domestic, and for determining the terms by which new properties, both intellectual and real, will be negotiated between vying parties. Nothing else requires an official mandate. The rest, as they say, is up to us, to the professionals, the educated men and women who decide where to invest their resources. The risk is also ours. As is the responsibility. These are absolutes, unchanging through time. No civilized society can be sustained without them. As much as we may want somebody, anybody to promise us sweet things and remove the burden of that responsibility, all attempts to do so throughout history have ended in disaster. If it will, is no longer a question. The question is, if we will let it happen again.

That is a choice we all must make, but rest assured I hold no illusions about my ability to sway you to my way of thinking. I see things in black and white, because that is how clearly the consequences of a course of actions springs to mind. It is an issue of life and death. I have seen what happens to medicine in highly regulated countries. There are horror stories that you could not conceive of happening here. (Such as women dying in childbirth because the ambulance had to keep driving in circles for hours because no hospital could accept them. Why? Because the mish-mash of regulation on obstetrics had so strangled the industry that most doctor's felt it was safer to go into other specializations and the country found itself with a shortage of nursery units. Funny, huh? That's Japan, where they're supposedly worried about a decreasing population). But there is always a first time for everything I guess. Seen the waiting lines in Canada? THAT's where we'll be going and in short order.

I apologize in advance if I haven't dealt properly with all the possible arguments. But fundamentally, my problem is at the root of the assumption--i.e. that government should have anything to do with the choice in this matter. Thereafter is merely quibbling over details of implementation.

Why Open Borders are the American Way

Now first I want to define what I mean by "Open" borders. I don't think that everyone should just be able to stream into the country unscreened. That would be disastrous. No, I think what should be meant by open borders is that the government screens for criminals, spies, terrorists, and diseases. If someone checks out okay, then they should be allowed in.

Now, there are several arguments I am aware of which people use to attack this position. First I would like to dismiss concerns about shifts in primary language or ethnic demographics as purely racist. Over time, populations naturally shift their genetic and linguistic composition. Opposition to immigration on purely linguistic or demographic grounds is therefore unwarranted and clearly motivated by a philosophical perspective which discriminates between human beings on non-essential characteristics. These arguments are not even worthy of attention and so this is all I will say of them.

The other two primary arguments against open borders, as I have already defined them, concern either the economic or the environmental impact of population increase. First I would like to address the environmental argument. Then I will address the economic one.

Environmentalists proclaim that we all have an environmental "footprint" and that expansion in population is destructive of the environment. Well, first of all, every single activity that human beings pursue is bound to have some effect on our environment--especially since the only way that human beings can survive is to alter their environment. Environmentalists also conveniently ignore the reality of the scientific advancements that have enabled us to double our population in the last 100 years while the forest population has remained relatively stable.

No, I think that the argument from environmental impact is largely geared at a hatred for humanity, for the desire to eliminate humanity from the face of the earth and leave a pristine, consciousless jungle in our wake. The "irreversible" disaster scenarios promulgated by activists are yet to be substantially verified by science. And even were they to be substantiated, handicapping our ability to deal with them (i.e. restricting the capital development of the sciences to refine our manufacturing technology) is not the road to finding viable solutions. But that's neither here nor there.

Ultimately, the rebuttal to the environmental argument is that they claim that living people are the problem and offer no solution except to hobble our ability to cope with environmental problems by limiting economic growth and in some cases even suggesting such fascist manuevers as forced birth control of the populace. Wouldn't that be pretty? In short, the fear of the environmental impact of population explosion due to immigration is a non-starter by scientific standards. And by economic standards it has even less weight as I will explain next.

(For a more in depth discussion of the environmental argument please see this blog entry by Curtis Edward Clark here: http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2009/01/environmental-footprints-and-starving.html)

(And I also recommend reading this op-ed by physics Ph.D. Keith Lockitch which explains the moral implications of environmentalism here: http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=22271&news_iv_ctrl=1021)

So, we are left with asking what would be the economic impact of massive immigration or population growth? Under our current system...disaster. But the reason for that disaster is the presence of entitlement programs, safety nets, public education, welfare, unemployment, minimum wages, medicare, public health insurance, food stamps, etc. In a laissez-faire capitalist system, there would be no need to screen immigrants for their economic sustainability. If they couldn't sustain themselves in America, then their options would be to go home or die. Not by violence, but from starvation. That's what happens when a population exceeds its resources.

But long before that would happen one of two things would happen.
1. The economy would adjust to accomodate the larger work force, resulting in more jobs, higher productivity, and lower prices.
2. Or, the economy would not be able to accomodate these workers, salaries would drop to unacceptable levels, and we would see reverse migration.

Although I think this second is extremely unlikely. The main reason is that in a free market, prices (especially wages for labor) are determined by supply and demand. A high demand for work may drive down wages, but it also drives down costs and thus prices for product, which effectively compensates for the numerically lower wage.

Another misconception is the idea of a limited amount of jobs or a set load which the economy can support. These concepts only enter into the picture once the economy is constrained by government coercion. If the marketplace is free to allow people and goods to flow without the threat of physical violence (government or individual), then people without jobs could start their own business with little resistance. With the increase in population would also come increased opportunities, an increased customer base with specific needs. In short, the increase in population would increase the economic potential of the nation, not diminish it. With the increase in economic activity would come more jobs, more money, lower prices, and a higher standard of living for all.

A side benefit would be, as Yaron Brook points out in the video below, that if we allow everyone except spies, criminals, terrorists, and the diseased into the country freely, then that means we only have to patrol the border for spies, criminals, terrorists, and the diseased. And as he aptly points out, those are people who we could shoot with moral impunity if they were discovered sneaking in, because those would be the ONLY kind of people sneaking in.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib3nVuw2RQU



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF92vXogERE

As it is, the influx of immigration, both legal and illegal, is motivated by the comparative poverty of other nations around the world. These people want to come to have a better life. Their motivations are largely noble. The only thing which gives us cause to fear them, are the very social institutions which we have put in place to steal from some, to secure the unearned for others, WITHIN the country. If we are aware of the unsustainability of those programs and the social cost of such, then we should be directing our energies at undoing those programs and not in further punishing people for exercising their American rights to decide their own terms of employment. The government has no right to dictate to any person who they should be able to hire. Period. And if it weren't for the minimum wage, which makes it impossible for agricultural concerns to hire citizens for the wages that the market demands for their products, they wouldn't have to face the choice of hiring illiegals or going out of business.

Ultimately, the immigration issue is yet another social ill which has been created by our government's intervention in people's lives. This and so many others will not disappear until the government is properly constrained into it's appropriate social role, the preservation of the individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Everything else, as they say, is up to you. You should have the freedom to decide who you want to hire. You should have the freedom to decide how much you want to pay them. People seeking employment should have the freedom to decide who they want to work for. People seeking employment should have the freedom to decide how much they are willing to work for. The government has no place in manipulating the job market or restraining economic growth. Economic growth is simply a function of all the activities that people pursue to live their lives and make those lives better. The more the merrier. The larger the economy, the more profit to be made by all.

But we are not free, and so we have these "conundrums". We must focus our energy on being free, on reclaiming our freedom. Being sidetracked with tertiary issues only divides us and makes it easier to continue the systematic unraveling of the American ideal.

Get the Word Out

Obama's socialist policies will result in increased taxes, inflation, the devaluation of the dollar, and the consequent losses of individual liberty that increased government intervention in the economy will inevitably bring. Vote Libertarian or for Libertarian Republicans like Ron Paul in the next election. We need to reject the morality of social cannibalism that the Democrats and like-minded Republicans represent. We need defenders of liberty in public offices at all levels of the government. So vote, even if it's a small election. Vote for Liberty before it's too late and we see the close of the American dream behind bars of our own forging.

Please mirror this video as much as possible. Let's get the word out for Liberty!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrQTp3kPnho

Bioshock: The Hype

OK. Well, quite a few people in the gaming community will have heard of the game Bioshock, a first-person shooter which touts itself as a philosophical simulation engine. Actually the philosophical element seems to be little more than a smear job of objectivism. With the advent of a sequel to the game and a possible movie, I thought it would be fair to point out that Bioshock does not have anything to do with objectivism in practice. If the objectivist government of Rapture had done their jobs, by protecting people's rights, punishing robbers and murderers, and yes by stopping the fraudulent sale of poison as medicine, then the catastrophe most likely would never have happened. However, the creators fail to understand (as do many) the difference between anarchy and capitalism. Anyway, XOmniverse did a nice piece explaining exactly why the "argument from Armageddon" isn't a decent argument to address any social theory. Bioshock is just a smear job. It's amazing that people are interested enough in objectivism to make the smear job into a movie, but Atlas Shrugged keeps getting put off. Anyway, here's the vid. Enjoy:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en&v=k2kw51Q1kr8&gl=US

100th Post at An American Anti-theist Abroad!!

Woohoo!! OK, so I'm feeling a little self-congratulatory. This makes the 100th post on this blog. Just to sum up. Since I started this blog in April 2008, I've had some more active periods than others. (1 post was actually salvaged from an older blog that I never really took anywhere.) But since I started putting this together, I've been able to write about a lot of different subjects of importance not only to me, but also to a number of people around the world. How big a number I'm not quite sure, but given the recent popularity of Ayn Rand and Ron Paul, it seems like the winds may be changing. So, we all have to do our bit to fan the fires.

Anyways,　just to give a status report on how I've been doing, here are some statistics.

Since this blog started officially in April 2008 it has received 5,825 visits from 68 countries.

THE TOP THREE VIEWING COUNTRIES ARE:

1. USA @ 4948 views
2. Japan @ 529 views
3. UK @ 65 views

THE TOP THREE VIEWING STATES (USA) ARE:

1. California @ 717 views
2. Texas @ 485 views
3. New York @ 395 views

THE TOP THREE VIEWED BLOG POSTS (aside from the main page which registered 1196 views) ARE:

1. Dr. Anne Wortham: Objectivism and the Black Community @ 5010 views
2. Dr. Anne Wortham: Black Victimhood vs. Black Individual Responsibility @ 307 views
3. Happy Science: Religious Cults in Supposedly Atheist Japan @ 142 views

Anyways, I just want to thank all the people who have taken the time to read what I've been posting. Also, more importantly, I want to thank all the people who've taken the time to sincerely think about what I've been talking about here. I'm sure that we can all make a difference. I'm still small fry here, but if I can reach even one person and convince them to look at the world even slightly differently, then I've gotten as much reward as I can reasonably expect. Changing the world is really for all of us. We have to change our morality, the standards of our belief and judgment. The alternative is to horrible to imagine. That's why we have to act. The native state of all systems is entropy. It is only through concerted and consistent human action that we can keep things from sliding into decay, whether that decay is cultural, moral, economic, political, scientific, cognitive, or spiritual.

Finally, I'd like to close with a video from Ron Paul. He's the only prominent figure in politics today who unabashedly supports a rationally integrated world view and truly advocates liberty and justice. Here he is talking about the torture debacle. Republicans and Democrats are both guilty as sin in leading us into such debauchery. For my prior articles on the issue please see these earlier posts:

Sam Harris and the Fallacies of Torture

And this is what happens when thugs get moral license...

Torture: The Madness that Wouldn't Die

Supreme Court Puts Foot Down on Abrogation of Due Process

Not Everything that Parades as a Democracy IS a Democracy

Ashcroft-Torture Bad Call But No Biggie

Enjoy the video:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skeom9K8fww

Capitalism Didn't Fail...Just saying so doesn't make it true

So many leftist pundits are spouting off about the death of capitalism and how Greenspan was a libertarian so that proves that free-market policies don't work. Well, bullshit.

Greenspan was not a libertarian, he wasn't even an objectivist except perhaps in his youth when he contributed to Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and advocated a return to the gold standard. But, of course he sold those views out right quick when they threatened to dampen his career goals. No, Greenspan was a soulless mercenary, who knew enough to know what was the right thing to do, and then did the wrong thing anyway. There can be few more damning indictments of a person's moral character than to knowingly choose to do the wrong thing.

As for the so-called failure of the free market system, well our market was not free of government intervention before, so it baffles the mind to think how people can actually convince themselves that we were actually under a free market system before this whole crisis developed. Of course it didn't help that Republicans were preaching free market principles while expanding government like there was no tomorrow, but all that proves was that the majority of Republicans were and still are hypocrites. At least if they have the sense to rally behind Ron Paul this time, perhaps we may see some change for the better. But with all the new legislation that Obama and his gang are going to be able to cram through the legislature, it's a bit like closing the barn doors after the horse has already fled.

Anyway, there's a very good article by objectivist Dakin Sloss over at the Stanford Progressive. It's a very succint and easy to understand explanation of how the government was involved in the economic collapse. I highly recommend it, so please check it out:

http://progressive.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/article.php?article_id=343

Best premises,
American Anti-theist

In Mourning for America

Do the math:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-budget7-2009may07,0,4310621.story

A 3.55 trillion dollar budget....17 billion dollars in budget cuts...a deficit of 1.2 trillion dollars...

Now, seriously....any investor....any one sitting at home doing their finances, would they seriously think that these numbers are acceptable? When you're in debt, do you spend more hoping that you'll magically bring in increased revenues somewhere down the line? Do you buy 2 new cars, a GM and a Chrysler with the hope that if you give them some money, they may give you a job, or a raise? Does it make any sense to increase debt beyond our ability to pay it back? If you're in business, do you expand your company's operations when sales are down? If you're managing a household, do you go on a luxurious vacation, when the creditors are knocking at the door?

No, of course not. Anyone who did that would be at least grossly irresponsible, and possibly insane. Does it justify it any more to demand that our children and our children's children, that generations, yes, generations of our descendants will have to pay for these excesses? Doesn't that make it all the more evil, to assign debt to those who have no say in the matter, to burden them with an obligation to feed our folly? Is it satisfying to mark our children with the mark of Obama's breed of original sin?

This madness seems to know no bounds. I do not see a bright future for America until a significant libertarian presence is felt in Congress and the White House. As such, I've darkened the background of my page to reflect the feeling that America has entered a dark age of decline. Hopefully the grassroots efforts of advocates of liberty across the nation will one-day be enough to lift this blinding curtain of self-righteousness and end the orgy of self-immolation which is the American politic.

Just think of it, and does it make any sense:

$1,200,000,000,000 deficit
- $17,000,000,000 budget cuts
=$1,183,000,000,000 remaining deficit

....Just what kind of difference is Obama making?

Ron Paul for 2012

There is only one man in elected government today who has had the courage and consistency to advocate what is objectively best for this country. Please, support Ron Paul and his Campaign for Liberty.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hDFndx1zY

Going Galt on Easter? or Trying to Have One's Cake and Eat it Too...

There is a reason that the Tea Parties will not amount to much. There is a reason why the Libertarian Party will continue to receive only minimal support. There is a reason and it's been staring us in the face for over fifty years. The reason is that we are facing a philosophical crisis, and only a coherent philosophical response will negate our opponents.

Why is the notion of laissez-faire capitalism viewed as a fringe crackpot obsession? It's because the so-called defenders of capitalism are logically incoherent. Greenspan preached free markets while going at them with a pair of pliers and a scalpel. Then, when the patient's dying on the table, he declares that the patient was to blame for being butchered. John McCain, like "W" before him, preached free markets out of one side of his mouth, while running around trying to curry favor with every right-wing Christian messianic institution who could offer to grease his shiny white noggin with. Freedom and theocracy don't mix. Period.

The people who are going to the Tea Parties and bearing signs accusing Obama of being a Muslim are also missing the point entirely. It doesn't matter what religion Obama holds in the confines of his own head. Hell, he could even be an atheist for all we know. The problem with what he is doing is that it is predicated on the assumption that political and economic power should be conjoined. The truth is that combining the two is the fast track to fascism. Perhaps he isn't even fully aware of that. Maybe he is. But it is certainly not an idea started or even driven by Obama. On the contrary, it is an idea that has been espoused by many people both Democrat and Republican and for a very long time. Ultimately, Obama couldn't be able to do what he has been doing unless the people of the country put him there to do it. Bush couldn't have started what Obama is finishing if the people of this country hadn't put him there to do it. So why? Why don't people turn to the Libertarian Party, the only one supposedly advocating freedom? The fundamental reason, as Ayn Rand pointed out a long time ago, was and is that it is philosophically incoherent.

The Libertarian Party stands against government, but what does it stand for? Is a vote for the libertarians a vote for anarchy? Or is it a vote for Objectivism? Is it a vote for an economic policy? But economics is just one province of politics. What can the Libertarian Party be expected to advocate? How can those who advocate armed revolution for the sake of abolishing government entirely stand side by side with those who want to secure the framework of a capitalist society and thus preserve the structure of what civilization has accomplished? The Libertarian Party needs to establish a philosophically coherent alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. There can be no allowance for god in government, just as there can be no allowance for politics in economics. The Republicans fail on the first count. The Democrats fail on the second. But the reason why the Democrats have such power right now is because theirs is the essentially more consistent philosophical stance, whereas the opposition is fractured and inconsistent. Neither is fully coherent, but in this age of "have-it-your-way" ideology, consistency is enough to make a philosophy seem coherent. But a fully coherent, internally consistent political platform would blow away even Obama's cocky smile.

The Democrats fully accept the altruistic doctrine that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They fully accept that the state, i.e. the body politic, has the full right to dictate the lives of its individual constituents, because they fully accept that people do not have individual rights. They view rights as a social privilege to be removed or altered at whim. So, they offer a fully consistent front when attacked on those issues.

The Republicans have presented only the most convoluted and tired excuses for capitalism. The reason is because they, too, want to cling to the old moral premises of altruism. However the Democratic ideology is more consistent with altruistic premises then capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally opposite to altruism in every conceivable way. Therefore, to try and justify capitalism on altruistic grounds is destined only to make advocates of capitalism look foolish, irrational, and illogical.

The Libertarians present a good economic argument for capitalism based largely on the work of Mises and some libertarians even credit Rand. However, the Libertarian Party still does not have a lucid image of what government should be. They only have an image, albeit an accurate one, of what it should not be. And while their arguments against intrusive government are convincing, arguments for total anarchy are fundamentally flawed. As long as there is a significant anarchistic/nihilistic influence in the Libertarian Party it cannot present a coherent alternative to either of the others.

It is time for the champions of liberty to recognize that Objectivism is the only philosophical system which both secures human rights, provides a rationale for freedom and capitalism, and delineates the proper constraints of government influence in a coherent, fully consistent model. Stop apologizing for Rand, we need to embrace her ideas. We need to embrace her arguments. We need to embrace her morality, the only morality which declares that "your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it." You cannot have capitalism and Pat Robertson. You cannot have McVeigh and freedom. You cannot have anarchy and prosperity. Until we have accepted and embraced a unifying, cohesive, and fully functional philosophical moral standard behind which to campaign we will not be able to stand up to a unified front of gentle, smiling socialists. We will continue to be internally divided and discredited by our own hypocrisy.

However Objectivism is not a philosophy that can be taken piecemeal. The whole point is that for political actions to be morally validated that they must be integrated into the whole of our objective knowledge of the universe. Of what it means to live, and to die. Of what truly is the nature of human beings. How do they come to know things? And what does such knowledge mean for their survival. A contradiction cannot be allowed, it is sufficient to invalidate any moral claim, or political initiative. Under Objectivist thought, unless a law can be demonstrated to be coherently integrated with human knowledge and the morality that knowledge entails, then that law should not be adopted. Conversely, if a law can be shown to be inconsistent with our knowledge of the human condition, or immoral in light of what we know, then that law should be removed. Taxation, global policing, government involvement in private lives...these are all things which are inconsistent with what we already know about the nature of human freedom and which systems optimize human happiness. This is why the enemies of freedom wish to pervert the meaning of the words freedom, human rights, and liberty. They want to coopt freedom to mean freedom to claim the property of others to establish equality. They want to distort human rights to mean an unqualififed claim to a doctor's or a teacher's labor. They want to claim that liberty means mob rule.

These stances are rife with contradictions, but until and unless we call their bluff and declare that the emperor has no clothes, until we do this, they will maintain the appearance of holding the high ground. Especially to the college professors responsible for training our teachers who are responsible for educating our children. Along this chain it ultimately starts in the colleges. And unilateral cries for freedom for freedom's sake will be powerless to stand against a consistent logical set of views.　The highly educated demand that there be at least a seemingly logically consistent philosophy behind their political agendas, and they devote a great deal of time and effort in picking holes in rival theories. Unfortunately the libertarian movement is so varied that it is relatively easy to demonstrate the lack of cohesive thought. And as long as we try to attack them for acting on principles explicitly which we continue to hold implicitly, we are bound to make them look like they are on the firmer ideological ground. If we want to be free, we must be prepared to demonstrate how and why freedom is superior. We cannot state that it just is.

The notion of going Galt, as an intentional withdrawal of sanction from the current social system, in our present age is premature and a practical impossibility. There are several reasons for this. One is that the government claims the legal right to tax almost everything, property, interest, etc. This means that to go off the grid, so to speak would be impossible. One could withdraw all their assets, buy gold and go live somewhere. But unless they continued to pay taxes on the capital gains of those assetts, taxes on the very land they live, and sales taxes for what they purchase the government would eventually come to collect. And as long as they have to pay those taxes to keep the guns off their porch, then they're supporting the current government. This is the fundamental immorality of any involuntary tax system. Namely, that it forces us to support those we oppose. Of course, cooperation under coercion cannot be said to mean sanction. We can be confident that we are morally pure in this, because the government has left us no alternative. Pay or die. Sacrifice your whole life, or pay a percentage. A choice made at the end of a gun is not a free choice.　But regardless of guilt, the end result is the same...the government is still supported by our labor.

The other alternative would be to simply stop doing anything, dismantle and dispose of all one's assets and go on the social dole. However this would have a psychological consequence on those who would attempt this. Not to mention, I think it wouldn't take the governement long to notice if people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were all applying for welfare. No, that won't work either. There's a reason why in Atlas Shrugged, there had to be a place for people to go to where government couldn't find them. It's because without such a place, they couldn't effectively withdraw. We can't withdraw if we have no place to go. As long as we are forced to be active participants in the system, the only tangible net effect of our withdrawing from social life, is to remove what little resistance we offered to begin with.

No, the only alternative is to increase our activity. To target it. To forge our resistance into a blade of reason--honed with our arguments and tempered by our convictions. We must take the leadership roles in the industries in which we work. Or we must support the most capable and efficient in those roles. We must become skilled debaters. We must actively seek out discussions where our views are freely under attack and we must defeat our opponents using polished rational arguments that leave them no where to stand but to resort to petty insults. We must drive the statists out of the public discourse, not by force, but with the inherent superiority of our policies. But just as impurities in the metal will cause a sword to break, so will inconsistencies and contradictions in the philosophical basis of our resitance cause us to falter when our mettle is tested.

Yes, we must organize. Yes, we must demonstrate our unified resolve. But until our resolve is in fact unified, all we demonstrate by organizing is how much lack of unity there really is. The unifying philosophical element is Objectivism. It is the only philosophy to organize the current social crisis into a coherent and comprehensible framework of ideas while still advocating the very things we claim to be pursuing. What we need to stand up to the politics of Obama and the politics of McCain is not a party against government in general, but a party for an Objectivist government, organized under objective priniciples, and motivated by the Objectivist ethics.

It's Your Life

Your life is your property. It's not mine. It's not your neighbor's or your spouse's. It's not your God's, your preacher's or your governor's. It does not belong to Barack Obama any more than it belongs to Kim Jong Il. And if it doesn't belong to Obama, it surely doesn't belong to Sarkozy or Brown or Medvedev or any of the other supposed leaders of this world who keep yapping at our heels to give more and more, to sacrifice ourselves to the lowest common denominator, to abandon our independence and enslave ourselves to a self-proclaimed new world order which seeks only to compound the problems of today by magnifying them tomorrow.

The argument has always gone that we haven't done enough. What if we've already been doing too much? What if the smug certainty of our politicians is actually misplaced? After all, are they economists? Are they historians? Are they philosophers? How deeply have they thought about the current crisis? Or are they simply parroting what their economics advisors, steeped in Keynesnianism have told them? Are they simply parroting what their philosophy teachers steeped in Kant have told them? Are they simply parroting what their law professors steeped in moral relativism have told them?

The root issue, the key, the crux upon which the entire scope of the major problems in the world today hinge is one pivotal issue: Do you have the right to your own life? Ask any proponent of central banking. Ask any advocate of public education. Ask any idealogue who advocates any social program where the fundamental and underlying premise is that your life belongs not to you, but to the state and that the state has the right to your life, that they have the right to do anything they want to you as long as they have the blessed "mandate of governance". Ask these people, "Do you have the right to your own life?" Ask them. And they will evade and dodge, and badger, and become indignant. But if you can actually get them to answer that question straight out, the answer will be "No". I've seen this many times, the desperate scramble to evade answering a simple yes or no question. Also, the horror of that single-syllable answer.

Because what does it mean if you do not have the right to your own life? It means that noone does. It means that anyone can be dealt with by others in any way. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of justice. It means, in effect, that there is no objective standard by which to conceive of morality.

But there is an objective standard of morality: your own life. What makes it harder to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the evil. What makes it easier to survive as is befitting a human being--this is the good. Life and Death are the simplest moral choices at the base of one's morality. Do you want to live? Or, do you want to die? If you decided to live, then all the things which make that life worth living become values to you. Your children, your family, clean air, and water, working hard to reap the products of that work to gain food and clothes for your family, so that they can live and generate life and so on. Life is an end in itself. Happiness is the consequence of a moral life in that the moral life optimizes one's realization of life. As one philosopher put it, "Happiness is enough to make life desirable and lacking in nothing." But the same philosopher also said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Happiness is not achieved by range of the moment actions, based simply on the arbitrary desires of the moment. Happiness is only attainable by examining the consequences of a plan of action over the span of one's entire life. It does not mean a state of prolonged and constant euphoria. It means self-esteem, self-respect, and the contentment that comes from honest living.

But implicit in the realization of happiness is that you are free to decide how your life shall be lived. Implicit in the realization of morality is that you be free to be moral. If you are not free to decide what ideas to support, to dispose of the fruits of your labor as would best suit your personal self-interests, if, in short, you are not free to work for your own good, then you are not free. If you are not free, you cannot be happy. If you are not free, you cannot be moral or immoral. If you are not free, then you are only a slave. If you do not have a right to your own life, then you are only a slave. If nobody has a right to their own lives, then everybody is a slave to the majority opinion holder of the moment and everyone must live in fear that the next majority wave of opinion will target them as the scapegoat to be sacrificed to the mob.

The founders of the United States of America understood this interconnectedness of happiness, freedom, morality, economy, and politics. The one failing was that they compromised on the moral principles and sought to justify the American system on altruistic grounds, on the principle that the justification for such a system is the good of the many. The true justification of the American system is that it rests not on the good of the many, but on the good of the one--you and what is good for you, yourself. Human rights cannot be held by any collective, because any collective is simply a group of individual human beings. If individual human beings do not have rights, then the group also has no rights. Human rights are inalienable, they are independent of the will of the mob, or of individual power holders. Thus, in the American system, political power holders must subordinate their actions within the limits proscribed by the doctrine of human rights. Conversely, American citizens should be free to do whatever they like unless it is expressly prohibited by a doctrine of human rights.

To adhere to a doctrine of human rights is to constrain the politicians and to liberate mankind. To reverse this is to turn politicians into Gods and humanity into slaves.

Your life is your property. If there are no property rights, there is no right to life. If you surrender your right to life, it is the same as committing suicide, a long slow suicide where the killing stroke will come at an arbitrary time and an arbitrary place. If you surrender your right to life, you surrender all the values that come with it. Justice, Freedom, Security....you cannot have one without the others.

Don't surrender your right to life any longer. Demand that the government commit to a doctrine based on the rights of the individual as opposed to the right of mob rule. Instead of forming increasingly expansive world governmental organizations, demand that the governments at home recognize individual rights and act to preserve them. There is too much lip service to rights, and too much sacrifice of them on the altar of a vague and unspecified "good" which we will never see, and our children are expected to slave to pay for. Enough of the political expediency of cake today, and poverty tomorrow. Enough of the sacrifice of the generations to come for some unseen benefit today. Demand your freedom and your rights. Demand the right to hold property, to dispose of it as you will. Demand the right for you to run your own life. Demand that your life is your own and noone else's to arbitrarily dictate to. Demand your right to yourself.

And if you hold that you do not have the right to your own life....kill yourself, and get out of the way of those who want to live.

The Communists Have Landed

I have to say that I am weary of looking in the news and seeing socialist / communist rhetoric spewing forth from Lord Obama and his cronies. Not only is the government buying out US companies on the cheap (a de facto nationalization strategy as illustrated by act such as this: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aqOyfIA14XQ8&refer=us ) but the very question of the propriety of nationalization is a total non-issue in the current political discourse. All that the so-called defenders of capitalism can do is equivocate on the practicality of doing so. All they can do is equivocate on the potential harm to the people. Nobody at all seems to be concerned with whether such action is morally right. Nobody at all seems to remember a little thing like human rights, rights which our nation was supposed to believe are INALIENABLE. Admittedly, most of Obama's supporters probably don't even recognize what the word inalienable even means, much less what the concept of human rights entails. No, they equate rights with an open-ended hunger. Their concept of rights is an infinite demand on what they percieve as a mystically infinite supply of naturally growing wealth. Shake the tree all you want, there'll still be more fruit on it tomorrow, right? But they don't seem to realize that if you cut down the tree, haul it over into your yard and prop it up against a shed--it will not yield fruit next year.

Now, don't get me wrong, I thing Wagoner was a fruitcake. He went crying to the government for help, and sure enough they gave him the help he so desperately deserved--a solid kick in the ass. But the point is that the free market would've sent Wagoner packing anyways and without sacrificing taxpayer money and without setting a dangerous precedent for the arbitrary government nationalization of American industries. Let the idiot CEOs fail, let the brilliant ones prosper, and let us all work to fill the jobs created by the ingenuity and excellence of the very best productive minds around us. The only jobs a government can provide are those which enable it to file, index, sort, encage, punish, and monitor the rest of us. This is because a government's sole function is to maintain and enforce the rule of law. All it can do is threaten, fine, and imprison people. A government doesn't create wealth. It produces nothing of value. It's function is to maintain an environment where people are free to produce freely. By constraining that environment, by bringing it's legislative violence into the private sector, the government in effect becomes a totalitarian force with it's eyes and hands on everybody's life, and the net result is that people are not allowed to be as efficient as they could be were they simply allowed to pursue their own happiness.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness used to be more than just words, they were a dream and an ideal worth fighting for, worth dying for, and more importantly--worth living for. And yet we find ourselves tied down in an age where the last flailing remnants of American idealism are being skinned alive, where the stillborn dream of an American society was sacrificed on the altar of "God and Society" with the self-defiant neurotic cry "For the good of the many!" What is America with no right to one's own life? What is America without the freedom to know your own mind and to act upon the values you decide for yourself? What is America without the moral conviction that one's happiness is an end in and of itself, that one's values have value, that one's dreams mean something? Those dreams mean something, Damn it! They mean something because they are fragile and isolated and occur only fleetingly in the minds of individual men and women all over the Earth. Those dreams that become generators. Those dreams that become companies. Those dreams that become the lifeblood of those who couldn't dream as well or as hard or as thoroughly. Ideas mean something, and the more fragile and fleeting, the more precious those ideas become.

The laughing dreams of children do not have to become the discarded carcasses of compromising adults. For the sake of us all, for your own sake, and for the sake of decency, don't sell out the American dream for a smile and a handshake and the burning coals of "good intentions". Vote libertarian or Vote for Ron Paul in the next election. Protest, speak out, scream out for Obama to stop his systematic, methodical butchering of the human spirit.

The End of Public Education

I've chosen the title of this article as I have, because I intend to address several points relating to the "end" of public education. First, what is the "end", or goal, of public education? Second, I intend to address the failure of public education as it nears it's practical end, or finality. Finally, I want to address the benefits of fully-privatized education and why we should advocate it's adoption as well as what we will need to consider in the conversion period. For the most part I don't think these arguments are new, and I don't believe they were originated by me. But I do believe in their validity, their urgency, and their relevance. I will do the best I am able to do justice to these arguments, but like always, I urge people to go back to the original sources and check the arguments for themselves. I am not an expert in most of the fields concerned, although I do have credentials and experience in education and finance, and have personally studied philosophy for most of my life. So, I am not an expert, these are simply the views of one man trying to express them in as clearly and concisely a manner as possible. I will be the first to admit that there is still a lot I don't know. But based on what I do know, I have confidence in the validity of my stances on these issues. I welcome any critiques, and I will respond to any valid criticisms with as reasoned a response as I am able. If I am wrong, please try to prove me so. Perhaps we can learn something together.

In that interest I would first like to clear up a concern that Keahou has brought to my attention in a comment here.

First of all, the advice that Pinochet decided to follow resulted in the "Miracle of Chile". That is, that a military junta adopted free-market reforms which drove Chile's economic growth and laid the foundations for a strong democratized society that eventually ousted Pinochet. Pinochet was a murderer and a despot. But he happened to have some good economic sense, which put his nation into a leading role in South America. Now, it can't be said to have been a free government at the time, because free governments don't allow the government to go around murdering people. But comparatively, in that Chile was more laissez-faire than other South American countries, it proved that the freer the market, the stronger economic growth. But as China has also proved, economic growth is not necessarily specific to democratic systems. The long-term democratizing effects of free-market reforms on the social status of China will, however, be interesting to observe. I don't think they will be able to oppress human rights with impunity forever. I would bet that, like Chile, the source of their prosperity will ultimately lead to the dissolution of their centrist government. Either that, or they will choose to crush the source of that prosperity and fade into the background like we are doing in America. The miracle of Chile is that the military junta opted for it's own obsolescence to preserve the country's economic prosperity, something which would seem to defy expectations.

Now that has been cleared up, we can get on with the privatization of education. What is the goal of public education? Simply put, it is to ensure a uniform standard of education to all students from elementary to post-secondary education. Now this hinges on two critical points. What do we mean by education? Also, has public education been effective in meeting that stated goal?

Education has several meanings depending on its context. The dictionary doesn't provide much more than a circular definition, although this is largely due to what Rand pointed out was the epistemological errors of lexicologists who try to define a word independently of its referents. Practically speaking, there are two basic interpretations of what is meant by education. One has as its goal the accumulation of a certain list of facts and formulae. The other has as its goal the acquisition of skills and processes. The former measures its success by the ability of students to answer questions correctly. The latter measures its success by the ability of its students to actually do things with their knowledge. The former is relatively simple to test quantitatively. The latter can only be assessed qualitatively by analyzing the child's productions. For ease of reference, then, let's define the former interpretation of education as the Textbook & Testing Approach (TNT) and the latter as the Cognitive Development Approach (CD).

Now regardless of whether a school system is public or private, teachers can tend to be attracted to either of these approaches. However, in a public, standardized system, the emphasis is systematically placed on the standardized testing, which means that the emphasis is consequently placed on the list of facts presented in the test. Now, the criteria that the test-makers use to select those facts is largely irrelevant. If the standard of measurement is simply a list of facts and formulae, then the success of teachers, schools, and methods are based on a measure of the ability of children to have memorized those facts. Whether or not they can actually use that information is not as clearly testable in a quantitative format. If school funding is based on quantitative performance measures, then schools which are the best at TNT will be the most funded schools. While it can be successfully argued, I think, that CD approaches would result in ultimately higher attainment on TNT measures, the practical upshot is that unless a school has at the very least a mixed system of CD and TNT, students still won't do very well on the quantitative tests. (They will still have to remember the specific facts and formulae on the given test.)

The problem with qualitative tests is that they don't produce results which can be easily assessed by non-specialists in education. A public system is ultimately responsible to the least specialized authority, the elected government official. Their interpretation of test results is bound to be based on the number crunching of quantitative assessments. Especially, the less autonomy schools and teachers have in making relevant educational decisions, and the more dependent they are on government for support, the less they can afford to concentrate on their students' cognitive development, if it will risk even a marginal decrease in their performance on TNT testing. If you doubt this, please come to Japan and visit a junior high school English class.

Japan is the model of top-down education. All the things I've just proposed are, in Japan, a stark reality. Despite the awareness of teachers that the methods they are constrained to use are widely accepted as being ineffective, the pressure to conform to and produce quantitative standardized results in the testing system, prohibit them from initiating the very innovations that would serve their students best. Japanese students are very good at memorizing a certain list of terms, short-term, for the purpose of passing a test, without understanding the rhyme or reason very well. But, even after 6+ years of English study under this methodology, most Japanese adults can't speak more than a few words that have been incorporated into Japanese as loan words or some memorized set phrases. If anything, it teaches students that they can't ever understand the subject, that it is hopeless, and that the best they can do is to try to stuff as many of the facts and formulae into their heads as possible so that they can pass the entrance exams into high school and college, facts which are promptly forgotten. Everyone involved understands this, and yet nobody can or will change it, because the people in charge of those decisions are the ones most removed from the process, the politicians. The people sacrificed? The children.

But of course, it's only appropriate to view the children as being sacrificed, if the standard of success of education is functional ability. If the standard of success is simply obedience and rote memorization, then these public schools would seem to be a great success. Or are they?

Even in a system of largely TNT dependent teaching and increasing standardization, the measure by those testing standards indicate that public schooling costs more per student and produce a lower quality of education. Just look at what's happening in Washington, D.C. since they instituted the voucher system. Of course, since the democrats are on the rise, that'll soon be eliminated. After all, who wants the ugly evidence of the comparative ineffectiveness of socialist educational practices to hang around under the advent of a socialist regime?

I don't think the failings of our current educational system are debatable. Pretty much everyone understands that private schools offer better education (even Obama's children aren't going public) and that maintaining teacher quality standards is well nigh impossible in a system that doesn't adequately reward competent teachers (watch the second part). The main objection to privatization, I think, is the potential cost.

So, what, really, would be the cost to parents of phasing out public education into privately run schools? As it is, parents are all taxed to pay for education. For example, in Washington D.C. the cost per student for education was about $12,979 a year making it #3 out of the top 100 largest school districts in the nation. Despite this fact, they ranked pathetically low compared to the national averages. 33% is the national average for 4th graders who lack basic skills in math, in DC, the percentage was 62%. 49% is the average nationally for 8th graders who lack those same basic skills, in DC it was more like 74%. That's why they instituted a voucher system to try and get these kids into higher quality educational programs. Those vouchers are good for $7,500. The average cost of going to a private school in the DC area is currently $4,500. Only 39% of private schools in the DC area are more expensive than $10,000. That means that, if the tax burden for parents was reduced by the amount the government would no longer need if the system was privatized, parents could easily afford the price of private education.

Students would receive better quality education. Teachers would also have to be more accountable, because private enterprise will be less tolerant of teacher incompetence then socialized unions. Standards will have to produce children who are capable of using their knowledge to further their goals, because that will be the product that parents and children will notice the most. Parents will be more involved in school, because they will want to make sure they're getting their money's worth. If anything, parents would be saving money, getting more for it, and everyone would be happier.

Vouchers are not an end in themselves. They are a means of privitizing the educational system without causing a massive system shock. As public schools become progressively outmoded in pace with the development of a private infrastructure, the schools could be absorbed into private organizations. Once the public funding and relevant taxes have been replaced by a privitized system, then there will be no more need for vouchers and no more need to make it a political issue.

Inner city schools are suffering as it is, and a critical problem is the lack of incentive for talented teachers to go to those schools, or for people to send their children there. People who can afford to move to a more affluent region, already do, taking their tax money with them. If the government's coercive monopoly on education was relaxed so as to stimulate private investment in education and the efficiency of free markets, then private schools could be instituted to compete with the faltering inner city schools for those temporary vouchers and thus raise the standard of education for all who live in those areas. It would effectively remove one of the constricting influences which drives money out of those areas. As education improves, the social climate will improve, and those abandoned areas will become revitalized.

As Keahou says, there are indeed "so many practical issues to be considered".

So, to sum up, privatized education should be cheaper, more efficient, allow teachers to develop innovative techniques in an environment that will offer incentives for efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation, will encourage the revitalization of impoverished areas and increase the competitiveness of our children in the global market place by effectively raising their comprehensive abilities in reasoning skills (the foundation of math and the sciences.) Either that, or we can continue to squander money on the floundering system that we have now, where everybody recognizes that the emperor has no clothes, but love Obama too much to tell him. I wonder what practical considerations I'm leaving out? Well, I hope somebody will let me know so we can continue this discussion.

Dr. Anne Wortham: Black Victimhood vs. Black Individual Responsibility

Well, with Obama sworn in and gearing up to charge headlong into a socialist rampage that will flush the remaining fractured remnants of our economy down the toilet, it seems that the issue of the day still seems to be race. I've recently been getting some negative feedback for supporting Anne Wortham a while back in this post here.

Anyways, it inspired me to look up more of her work, and as since the video I originally linked to was removed, I was really glad to find this article posted on the internet. It says much better than I ever could exactly what is wrong with the culture of victimization that has infected what the civil rights movement has unfortunately become.

It can be read at this link here: http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/polin/polin092.pdf

Also, if you're interested, here is a very well written op-ed she wrote about Lord Obama:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/wortham1.html

Best premises,

American Antitheist

The Curse of the Merry Men

This is an interesting take on the story of Robin Hood written by an associate of mine, I hope you find it as entertaining as I did:

The government has just issued Directive 10-289, a mandate to nationalize all business and establish “stability” by freezing the economy. No wages shall change. No one may leave their jobs nor find a new one. No competition is to be allowed whatsoever. All prices, all terms of employment, all terms of sale are to be set and administered by a centralized government. In the aftermath of this directive, Hank Rearden, one of the last great industrialists, teeters on the brink of total despair as he struggles to comprehend the ramifications of what this will mean for his life and his dreams. At this moment, Ragnar Danneskjold, a renegade and pirate, presents himself to Rearden with an offering of hope and a glimpse of the world that could still be. He reveals to Rearden his true aim in pursuing the life of a pirate. That aim is to destroy a man and wipe every last vestige of his memory from the minds of the human race. That man is none other than Robin Hood.

This pivotal scene from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (Part II Chapter VII) does not draw its significance from the action, but from Ragnar’s portrayal of Robin Hood and his reasons for fighting the very idea of the mythical bandit. To fully understand the significance of this we must first address this question: Who is Robin Hood? Ragnar describes him as the “foulest of creatures, the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and the blood of the rich, whom men have come to regard as a moral ideal.” The actual historical origins of the Robin Hood mythos are vague at best, but Ragnar makes clear that he is not fighting a historical character, he is fighting the moral principles that the legend of Robin Hood has come to represent.

Traditionally, Robin Hood steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Variations on the tale abound. Some state that he is dispossessed royalty fighting to regain what has been pillaged wrongly by the ruling regime. In this sense, the character is reminiscent of what Ragnar Danneskjold represents in Atlas Shrugged. Ragnar states explicitly that he avoids confrontations with representatives of the legitimate functions of government. He does not attack military or policing vessels. He only attacks those ships which carry resources that have been appropriated from their owners without their consent and in spite of their protest. He then takes those resources and holds them in reserve, waiting for their rightful owners to come and claim them. The rightful owners are those who created the resource, who either made a natural resource able to be utilized, or who created that which had formerly not existed. The rights to the distribution of those ideas and the benefits of that distribution belong exclusively to the creators of those values.

Oil belongs to those who make it possible to be drilled, those who do the drilling, and who process it and make it ready to be used to meet the demands of their customers. Each in turn works according to the terms they set amongst themselves in order to exchange productive work for their own survival and the resources necessary to develop their own dreams and ambitions. But if that oil is seized by some group of people without the consent of the producers, then that group is morally indefensible regardless of their social position. Justice is only served by returning the merchandise to its rightful owners. This is Ragnar’s function. He is an agent of justice reclaiming stolen merchandise. He even makes the concession that Robin Hood may be interpreted in this way “It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed…”However, as he continues, he qualifies this by emphasizing, “that is not the meaning of the legend which has survived.”

Despite potentially nobler interpretations of Robin Hood, the popular and by far most influential interpretation of the myth is simply that Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor. What gives the character moral status is that his crimes are mitigated by his charity. A robber who steals simply for himself would have been dull and commonplace in an era when highwaymen abounded. What gave the story its uniqueness and longevity was the idea that this character was somehow doing evil for good and the moral complexity that this signified. The heart of this paradox is the assumption that Robin Hood was doing good by distributing wealth to those who lacked it. In common portrayals of the story it is usually sufficient only to portray his victims as rich to establish Hood as the hero. Further explanations of the circumstances of the victim’s wealth are rarely given, if at all. The core idea is simply that it is justifiable to take from those who have and give to those who do not, simply because of the need of the latter and for no other reason. This is the moral imperative of altruism. It is this idea which Ragnar hopes to destroy.

Ragnar stands opposed to the idea that rights are defined by a person’s needs. Those who adopt the altruist ethic make a claim that the more productive and the more successful a person is, the more they deserve to be sacrificed to the needs of others. They claim that the good of an action is determined by how much the benefactor lacked the benefit. Means and ends become inconsequential. Cause and effect become inconsequential. The only things that matter are who benefits and how much they need. The altruist feeds off of the need of the poor and disadvantaged. He uses them as a justification for imposing his needs on the rich, whose resources he covets. His need is justified altruistically because he lays no claim for his own use; he covets those resources for the good of others. According to this reasoning, any crime is justifiable if it is done in the service of others. Even murder is justifiable as long as it can be justified by placating some group’s need—the greater the need, the greater the moral status of the crime; the more helpless the benefactor, the more noble the deed. Morality becomes defined by a calculus of human suffering and nobility restricted to those who sacrifice that they most value to the desires of whoever may demand it.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this ethic is that the poor are condemned to suffer forever. They are guaranteed immunity from Robin Hood only as long as there is not anyone with more need than they. Only the neediest, the least able to provide for themselves—only these people are immune. Everyone else must wait for the time when they are chosen as the sacrificial victim to placate the need of the lowest common denominator. Everyone else must wait under the knife. The only way out is to compete for the bottom slot, to make a business out of begging for help and pleading one’s need to the arbitrary jury of those around you. The altruist ethic condemns the poor to maintain their poverty lest they be sacrificed for succeeding too much at the practice of survival. It forces them to compete for death.

This is why Ragnar describes Hood as a “double-parasite”. This is why Ragnar is Hood’s opposite. Ragnar defends justice where Hood destroys it. Ragnar defends human rights and the freedom of all human beings to choose their own path and reap the full consequences of their choices. Hood abrogates them all in the pursuit of his own ends. Hood is the embodiment of the collectivist ideal. Ragnar embodies the ideals of laissez-faire capitalism. Ragnar defends a moral code founded on the twin principles of “life and production.” Robin Hood represents cannibalism for cannibalism’s sake. The unstated price of joining Robin’s ‘band of merry men’ is a taste for human flesh. This is why the two characters stand in conflict. This is the true significance of Ragnar’s declaration that Robin Hood is the one man he must destroy.