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.]

Ayn Rand Smears Still Popular with the Left

It would seem that the left still enjoys painting Rand and Objectivists as giggling baby-eaters. A recent spate of disinformation pieces have been circling the internet here and here. The basic gist is that they drop context on some lines taken out of Ayn Rand's personal journals in which she comments on the William Hickman kidnapping murder of a young girl in the 1920s. It's funny too, because they're really just plagiarizing the same drivel that was passed about a few years ago with an 2005 article here. The response should be the same as the response it got then...click the big red x in the upper right of the window. A brief discussion on the Objectivism Online Forum should help clarify how the argument is specious. I've included a link to that discussion here.

I quote the very eloquent summation of one poster, Dismuke:

"To summarize - that article drops several bits of very important context.

1. The fact that the journal entries were PRIVATE, not intended for publication and, therefore, the contents were not written for the purpose of being objective to any audience other than Ayn Rand's own eyes.

2. The entirety of Ayn Rand's explicit philosophy which was consistent across volumes of works written over the span of many decades - including her philosophy's contempt for those who initiate force.

3. The fact that Ayn Rand herself dismissed it all as probable "idealizing."

4. The fact that, Ayn Rand, unlike the author of the article, did not equate self-interest with "walking across corpses" and, therefore, did not regard an out-of-context admiration for certain attributes of a brutal murderer's statements and demeanor as having possible negative implications for a morality of self-interest worthy of giving serious consideration to in the mental exercise the journal entry documents.

Now, if someone who was very familiar with the William Hickman case but had never heard of Ayn Rand before somehow stumbled across that particular journal entry, I can fully understand why he might properly conclude that Ayn Rand must have been some sort of strange, sociopathic kook not worthy of looking into further. But the author of that article very clearly IS familiar with the larger context of Ayn Rand's work and her personal history - so my conclusion is the article is nothing more than a cheap and sleazy "hit piece" designed to smear Objectivism. Don't be too surprised if it is embraced by the likes of David Kelley and Barbara Branden as more "proof" that Ayn Rand was indeed nothing more than a malevolent neurotic kook who somehow, nevertheless, managed to make a few good philosophical points here and there."

I can't think of anything more to add to this, except to express my sincere hope that trash like this will stop popping up in the news results for Rand on the right side of this blog. It is increasingly clear that the Left has no rational refutation of Rand's philosophy and can only resort to character assassination and ad hominem flubbery. Context is everything. ANY quote taken out of context can be read to mean anything you want it to. That is why the process of contextualization is so important in all written forms of exposition and especially literary, scientific, and philosophical exposition. Ayn Rand's journals were none of these, simply personal notes and notations meant to guide her own thought process.

If a man were to find admirable qualities in Obama, it would not make him instantly an Obama acolyte. If a man were to find admirable qualities in Reagan, it would not make him instantly a Reaganite. One can admire certain qualities of a person without admiring their motivations or actions, hence the restriction to certain qualities. Some people admire Rommel, despite the fact that he was a Nazi. They can admire his intelligence and skill without admiring his political ideology. Some people admire Clinton despite his philandering. It doesn't mean they admire the whole person, just some things that he did or said. The only way to be certain of why, in what way, and under what conditions that admiration existed, is to have a properly contextualized account of that admiration. The reasons, the exceptions, the moderations...these elements are essential to understanding the meaning of any given utterance in the English language. Without this account, irresponsible accusations slapped onto decontextualized cherry-picked quotes say no more about the character of a person than graffiti on the wall of a bathroom stall--the very place where such "journalism" belongs...in the toilet.

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

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.

An American Anti-theist...No longer Abroad

That's right. I'm coming home. The combination of six years in a heavily socialized nation (Japan) and the horror with which I view the news since Obama assumed power have been the catalyst I needed to refine my vision and understand the duty that lies before me. Don't get me wrong. I would much rather keep on teaching foreign languages and have as little to do with politics as possible. It looks like a relatively filthy profession. However, I've seen what socialized medicine does to a society. I've seen what the welfare state does to business. I've seen what government intervention, coddling, and cronyism does to the average worker. But I have also seen that the necessary hinge upon which change rests is a lucid argument based on reason.

Arguments have power, the power to explain reality to the confused. If one's stance is muddled and uncertain, a clear argument will expose all of that stance's inadequacies. I believe that freedom is the superior argument to all forms of collectivism. I believe that objectivism is a superior philosophy to all other philosophies. I believe when placed in sharp and unapologetic juxtaposition that objectivism and freedom win out every time. So, as one objectivist who is unapologetic for his philosophy and who is unforgiving of the theists and socialists who are clamoring for the sacrifice of humanity to their God/Society of death, I vow that I will work to the best of my ability to reform our government and culture. I don't know how much I will be able to do. But I will volunteer to help the libertarian, objectivist, and libertarian republican movements. I will do what I can to raise the profile of these ideas in the academic sphere. I will do what I can to raise awareness of Ayn Rand, Ron Paul, the Austrian School and anyone (truly) allied with them. If needs be, and if possible, I will even run for what offices I can.

I don't know how much I will be able to accomplish. But I will try. I urge any of you who feels similar to do the same. Not to sacrifice your life for a cause, but to do what you can with the freedom and ability you have. Don't let them disarm you with their apparent numbers. Don't let them humiliate you with their insults and slurs. We the objectivists, We the constitutionalists, We the defenders of individual liberty, We are correct. Do not let them intimidate you. We are following the true and right and noble course. The democrats, the liberal republicans, the collectivists of all stripes are following a path that will require a strictly regimented order to realize. As terrifying as that will be, the chaos which will follow, once that colossus of government collapses under its own weight, that will be even more terrifying.

We have the chance to avert this end. We have the chance to right the path of the nation, to restore it to the city on the hill, to restore it to the emblem of freedom, free will, and self-determination which it once was. All it takes is for all of us to act, to organize, to speak, to assemble, to educate, to argue. If we all make a nuisance of ourselves, in every forum, on every networking site, on every message board, newsgroup, editorial page and blog we come across, if we make such a racket that they can't ignore us any longer, then I promise you, the gears will turn and things will change for the better.

Right now, bad ideas are winning because not enough good people are acting on good ideas. But put the best arguments against the weak collectivist ones, and the collectivist ones will fail. Hone your skills. And then use them.

Best premises and Best of luck,

American Anti-theist

Ayn Rand: The Mike Wallace Interview

This interview was first aired in 1959. I wasn't able to figure out exactly when, but since it's 2009, I figured it would be nice to post it here on it's 50th anniversary. I hope you enjoy hearing Rand's views in her own words. Enjoy.

Part 1



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ukJiBZ8_4k

Part 2



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMTDaVpBPR0

Part 3



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

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

An Interesting Debate

I don't have much to say this time. But I have been involved in some interesting debates lately. So, I thought I'd post links to them so you can check them out if you're interested.

Cheers.

http://www.mndaily.com/2009/05/05/rand%E2%80%99s-atlas-myth-america

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2009/05/15/a-conservative-tears-apart-ayn-rand-and-atlas-shrugged.html

(Please understand that I am not sanctioning the work of these journalists. The reason I'm linking there is because the resulting discussions make for a good read.)

Why Do People Still Not Get It?

I received the following question that someone sent to my YouTube channel: bakukenshin, and I thought it fit in nicely with the topics on this blog.

"What do you think of people who have read Ayn Rands books but refuse to believe in or accept the philosophy of Objectivism? Are they simply refusing the ability of the mind or are they afraid of the idea of being responsible for their own decisions? Or does it just go against too much of what they have been "taught"?"

My response was as follows:

I think there are several reasons why people could read her books and not accept the entire philosophy of Objectivism.

1. Most people read a book and they pick and choose what they like about it and what they don't like. Most of the time this coincides with values that they have already decided upon. So a lot of people take Objectivism piecemeal, which results in a lot of what you can see in the Republican party. That is a lot of people who try to push for capitalism and free markets (at least when they're campaigning) but at the same time pushing to restrict civil liberties (such as with the anti-abortion movement, domestic surveillance, etc.).

2. To accept Objectivism, people need to accept three basic premises. Reality is. Existence exists. Consciousness is conscious. Unfortunately most of the gatekeepers to modern philosophy (professors, novelists, poets, scientists, etc.) have been indoctrinated in and come to believe the opposite of at least one of these. Since these are axioms, unless they realize that there is no way to disprove these premises without using them, then they cannot be expected to accept them. In order for someone to change their mind on axiomatic propositions they need to start from the standpoint that reason is the final arbiter of their viewpoints, that they cannot resist what their senses and the rules of logic tell them simply based on their feelings or a priori assertions. But, if they accept that already, then they are already half way to Objectivism anyway.

3. The philosophy of Objectivism isn't self-evident. The reaction of many new objectivists when they've decided to accept it, is to assume that because they read Ayn Rand's works and it makes sense to them, that it must therefore automatically make sense to everybody. Unfortunately, this would be a mistaken assumption. Everybody starts from a different starting point. Some people have devoted a lot of time thinking seriously about fundamental philosophical questions. Some people have not. Even among seriously committed thinkers, it took a long historical tradition starting with Aristotle leading up through the founding of America and it took Ayn Rand's genius building on all that to bring the various threads of history into sharp enough focus to formulate Objectivism. Some people just make some honest mistakes along the chain of abstraction.

4. Some people know better and are consciously malevolent enough to deny it anyway. But be very careful before jumping to conclusions about who you place in this category. Sometimes I think Objectivists need to understand their own philosophy better before they start leaping to judgments about others.

I think it's a little like teaching someone a skill at which you are highly proficient, but the person you're teaching isn't. Like your native language for instance. You don't even think about it. But try teaching it to someone who only knows Chinese. You quickly find out that you have to know things about the structure of your language at a much more detailed level than you'd ever have dreamed of having to worry about before. More importantly, the process of clarifying your thoughts, so as to better present them to others, teaches you things about your own mode of thought and helps you understand your beliefs better than before.

If you seriously teach any subject for a significant period of time, you will understand that subject in a fundamentally different way than if you had just accepted that you knew it and left it at that. I think this is true of math, English, art, and especially philosophy. If you want to truly understand why people don't get it, and understand better just what it is that makes sense to you, then try to think about how you would explain it to someone, calmly and clearly. Try to talk to people about it. Try to teach it. Through this process of discussion, through refining your arguments, through thinking about the points people raise in opposition, you will come to understand the philosophy that much better. And you will have a much clearer image of what it represents, and which people are the ones who should truly be morally condemned. But remember, in these discussions, if you find yourself losing your temper, resorting to insults or irrational tactics or agencies, then you've already lost. You need to accept that when it happens (as it inevitably will), go back and rethink it through.

Objectivism is ultimately understanding yourself. You have to start there. And it can be the hardest place to start. Especially when you're wanting to rush out and change the world. But it is central. After all, that's where everything in Ayn Rand's philosophy begins.

I hope this helps somewhat. I know it didn't exactly address the question as you stated it, but I, too, am struggling with the line between people who are mistaken and people who are consciously evading truth. So, until I reach a conclusion on that, I like to recommend caution before leaping into judgments on people. It can be tempting, and it can be difficult to see the distinction. (This by the way is the very issue that led to the split between Kelley and Peikoff and why the "The Atlas Society" and "The Ayn Rand Institute" aren't on speaking terms.) The above is my best attempt to deal with it myself. Read as much as you can on the philosophy, both the good and the bad. Don't get sidetracked on following any one person's interpretation. Remember the most important perspective is your own. Try to form it in as balanced and rational a way as possible.

--I think the only thing I can add to this right now is in this prior blog post here. I am still very interested in the opinions of other practicing objectivists. If anybody has an opinion on this matter please feel free to post your comments.

Best premises,
American Anti-theist

And Justice for All? But what is Justice?

With the resignation of chief justice Souter, Obama has yet another chance to skew the machinery of government so as to sustain his socialist agenda long after he has been replaced. Check out the link below for an article detailing why Obama's pragmatism really means amorality in a legal context.

When It Comes to Judges, 'Pragmatic' Means Unprincipled: How the president reasons that disregarding the rule of law can be a virtue.

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

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.

Apples, No Apples, Apples: The Sleight of Hand of Obama Inc.'s Elite Economic Corps of Dunderheads

OK. Now I had to read this a couple of times to make sure I got it straight. Now, I thought that I wasn't reading it correctly. I mean, circular logic has some famous adherents. Just look at Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy...or Sam Harris' justification for torture. But this circle is the most striking for how clearly circular it is. You don't have to dig too deep to see the sleight of hand going on in this one. For the whole article, you'll have to check out this link here.

But the part that floored me was this quote:

""I do think the American people in the past have shown an excellent ability to respond to adversity," Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told members of the Senate Budget Committee. "And I believe it's going to happen this time and that we're going to see a much stronger economy, not that far in the future."

To hasten that day, the Fed and the Treasury launched their long-awaited program to jump-start the market for consumer loans, including financing for small businesses, students and car buyers.

Under the program, known by the acronym TALF, the Fed will provide loans to investors who buy securities backed by newly issued consumer loans. The idea is to revive the market for asset-backed securities, which provides funding for a large portion of consumer lending.

"In our system, banks are important, but typically 40% of lending comes through the securitization markets. And those markets are not functioning well," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the House Ways and Means Committee.

"So we're going around banks . . . by doing something only the government can do, which, on appropriate terms to protect the taxpayer, is to try to get those credit markets opening up again," he said." "

OK. TALF. This is the system as it appears to be presented here. The government will now encourage more lending to groups which are high risk in a recession and which the markets recognize as such: students, small businesses, and car buyers. (It may be for that reason that the banks aren't loaning as much to these groups right now..duh....)

But of course, Obama Inc. and his party of looting neanderthals, think that the answer is to give more money to people who probably won't be able to pay it back. (AIG, GM...etc, etc, etc...)
In this case, they will subsidize the extension of credit to high risk groups by sponsoring securities based on packages of volatile debt. They will use the security of the United States Treasury to guarantee that debt and sell shares in it to investors. Not only that, but it will loan money to investors so that they can buy those securities. So, technically, the government will be making it look like it's selling financial instruments when really it's just handing out taxpayer money again.

If the initial loans go into default, the securities become worthless. That means the government can't collect the money from these loans, which means that the investors also don't get anything from the securities either, except that they have to pay back the loans to the government that they used to buy the now worthless securities. Which means that the government will in effect be paying for it's handouts to high-risk lenders by convincing credit-worthy investors to commit to paying for them over the long-term.

Housing fiasco redux.

What Obama and his geniuses are assuming is that the people who will receive these loans will actually pay them back. Now here's the catch. If any financial institution was reasonably confident that the people who are the potential beneficiaries of these loans could actually pay them back, then the financial institutions would loan them the money in the first place.

Why? Because that's how financial institutions make money. By lending to people who pay them back plus interest. Nobody makes money by lending to people who don't pay back. As the housing fiasco and its consequences have effectively demonstrated.

So what will happen to investors who buy large amounts of these securities, if the securities go into default (as they probably will)? Well, their balance sheets will have a sudden gaping hole where their assets used to be, and an equal amount of now unsupported debt. In short, I think that any investor who takes a heavy interest in these derivatives will be staking a lot on the dependability of the federal government to lend responsibly. And if the federal government doesn't, then we will see even more investors taken down in this thing. That will further damage the economy, destroy even more wealth (or "redistribute it" as Obama likes to say), and almost certainly cripple our nation for decades. (That is, decades more than these kind of policies have already crippled us...)

Now, now, I'll be fair. The current crisis isn't Obama's doing. It was caused by Bernanke, Greenspan, and the hypocrites at the Fed and in Congress on both sides of the aisle who have been supporting centrist government-controlled markets. That was the problem with the Republicans. They talked free markets, but they were busy getting their hands deep into the guts of it, so they could grease their own pockets, and the pockets of their buddies. That and they were spending so much time preaching about God that the secular conservatives out there didn't feel very comfortable supporting them either.

The Democrats are idealogues. I seriously believe that they think that they are helping people by sacrificing us all to the hunger of the disenfranchised mob that has been created by generations of irresponsible governance. (Although I think it's telling, how many of Obama's picks have a problem paying their taxes...)

The answer is to stop this madness, not to keep trying more of the same thing.

Cut spending, cut taxes, cut social programs and privatize them.
Privatize education.
Dissolve the Fed.

Introduce a staged retreat from social security so that we can support those who have already paid their way in, but so that we can phase it out as soon as possible. Phase out medicare and government intervention in insurance premiums.

Stop the senseless bailouts of companies that shovel out lifetime-guaranteed retirement policies to workers who retire at 48?! (Like GM....)

Stop the war on poverty. The supposed enemy in that war is the only group that can even remotely provide what is needed to alleviate the problem, by pursuing that war we intensify the poverty.

Stop the war on drugs. 1 in 32 Americans are in jail. 25% of them are there for drugs. Only 5% of homicides were narcotics related. Educate your children to keep them off drugs. I agree, they suck. They are NOT good things to have around children. But neither is tobacco or alcohol, and we have managed to keep them in control without making them into the dangerously uncontrolled illicit multi-billion dollar global industries that illicit drugs are today. In a way, the war on drugs is paying for the war on terror....paying our enemy's wages. Not unlike Prohibition and the mafia...Remove the profit, make them legal and regulate them like any other drug or intoxicant.

And, no, we don't need the self-inflated pompous rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh to rally around. What we need is a return to fundamental principles, like those advocated by Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater and the generation of conservatives who really lived up to that name. The crisis we are experiencing day by day in our sweat, our fear, our blood, and our lives...this crisis is a moral crisis. The moral superiority of laissez-faire capitalism, the objective moral reality of rational self-interest as a life-generating force, the moral supremacy of reason as opposed to the bulwarks of religion or the frantic paranoia of the social relativist---the denial of these truths is what we are experiencing tangibly, and visibly and undeniably this very moment.

This country is headed in the wrong direction, and we're speeding it up! You can't defend freedom by destroying it. You can't defend liberty by enslaving yourselves. You can't increase prosperity by punishing it. You can't inspire innovation by stifling it in bureaucratic red tape. You can't broaden minds through education by stifling teacher creativity. You can't heal bad debt by creating more of it. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

"Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. Yes, you are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality -- you who have never known any -- but to discover it." --Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

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

It's been a while... お久しぶり

First off, I'd like to apologize for being away for so long. But real life takes a priority over my internet musings. Anyways, having taken care of business for now, I find myself with some time to comment on the events of the last 4 months. Probably most prominent in everybody's minds is the full-blown financial panic that is sweeping over the world. The dollar is trading for 88 yen, the Dow is down, way down, and the big auto companies are on the verge of collapse. In the midst of this we have Greenspan lamenting the free-market system and Fortune 500 executives running down to Washington to beg for money--your money.

So, it goes without saying that a lot of people are wondering what Obama is going to do with this mess when he gets into office. A lot of people, that is, except for me. That's because I know exactly what he's going to do. He's going to spend a lot of government money. He's going to give a lot of money to big business, of course not the same big business cronies that Bush has, he'll give it to his green frontier democratic buddies. They may very well let the car companies hang (as they really should) but I don't think they'll go through with it. The Democrats are too reliant on unionized labor. Although the only way they're going to be able to pay for all these bailouts and all the social programs they want to cram down our throats is to raise taxes. Or perhaps they'll just raise taxes on businesses and the rich. (As if that won't be even more of a reason for companies and rich people to put their money elsewhere). Or, like Bernanke and the incompetent quacks at the FED have already done, devalue the currency like there's no tomorrow.

0% interest rates are not a good thing. Printing money on 0% interest rates to "increase cash flow" is not a good thing. It has one tangible result. Yes, money increases. But the downside is that money is worth less. Or worthless as the case may be. Japan is still stuck with interest rates next to nothing after 20 years of recession. It took Koizumi and his aggressive stance of let them fail and make them write off their bad debt, that cleansed the banking industry and let Japan recover, if only temporarily. For a brief span, the Japanese economy recovered. But it wasn't long before the looting bureaucrats, the ruling daimyo of the LDP decided to sink their teeth into the only freshly rejuvenated business sector. First off was a crack-down on foreign-sourced investments, increased government intervention in mergers and sales of businesses. A raise in taxes, the dismantling of Livedoor, and the ongoing stink of corruption in Japanese politics all combined to nudge things back over the edge. This was happening well-before the housing meltdown in the US, despite what the pundits say. I know. I've been watching the news, and I have a fairly decent long-term memory. Nonetheless,　America wants to charge right after Japan and do exactly the same wrong things they did. Nobody, except perhaps Jim Rogers and perhaps the far too splintered assortment of objectivists and libertarians out there has a real understanding of what needs to be done...or perhaps nobody else who's speaking...

Dismantle the FED. Dismantle the government's centralized banking scheme. This disaster, and the long string of disasters that have been happening for the last hundred years are all the direct result of government intervention. Think about it this way, did they have such a thing as unemployment in early days after the American revolution, when business was relatively unrestricted? No.

Yes, there were poor people and there were rich people. There will always be poor people and rich people. But the difference is that the classical American system enabled people to become rich by their own effort, with the fruits of their will. And with this freedom came the condemnation to poverty for the lack of effort. This is the principle of social justice. That those who do not strive to improve their lives shall not be able to, and that those who do, will be. Whether they will achieve personal happiness or not, is something which no government can ever promise, no human being can ever promise another. But the freedom to pursue happiness, the freedom to strive for it, to grasp for it, to work for it, matched with the opportunity to seize it if it is in your grasp---this is the freedom which drives the mind and hearts of men and women to do great things and to pull themselves up from the sordid depravity of apathetic resignation to misery which so characterizes life in the collectivist nations throughout history.

But you, who would preach that social justice must be meted out by the government, those of you who preach that we should all be held hostage to one man's vision of the future, to one man's dreams, even if he is selected by all of our neighbors, you preach a different creed. For how many years must we pay off the future? For how many years must the children of today be sacrificed for the phantoms of tomorrow? Whose vision is worth the slavery of a single man? A single woman? A single child? The founders of this country said that freedom was the heart and soul of value, that without freedom, there is no value to be had in society. That without freedom, we are slaves. And so we are.

'How can we be slaves?' you may ask. After all, are we not surrounded by art and entertainment to suit any fantasy? Are we not free to elect whoever we want for office? (Although the efforts to keep third-party candidates from participating in elections may cast some doubt on that premise.) What else would you call it when all of us must work as hard as we can to gather what resources we can to survive, but people come with the threat of imprisonment or violence to take what you have worked to bring into creation by force? The presumption is that the fruits of your labor are not yours. The presumption is that they belong to your master and that it is your master's will which has the right to decide how they are dispersed. Whether that master is one man who seized power, or if that master is a group of men who your neighbors have chosen to lead you, even if that master was chosen by you yourself--that does not grant them the moral right to your labor. If you grant others the moral right to dictate the terms of your work and the use of its products, then you grant them the moral right to treat you as a slave. And so we are treated. Groups of men and women gather to decide how they can divvy up the pie of American wealth without any consideration that they did nothing to create it, and have no moral claim to it. They cite legal precedent as the foundation of their right, common law borrowed from Europe.

What they neglect to recognize is that America's break from Europe was an ideological break, a moral break. The morality of Europe had led to the servitude of its citizenry and generations of feudal wars, alliances, treachery, and corruption. The strengths of America were the strengths of an emergent American morality, one which died stillborn for want of a voice to express it in terms detached from the old traditions of altruism. And altrusim has slowly choked that system of strength until America will soon fade into the ranks of other statist, socialist nations, chomping at the bit for a taste of world power. What could have once been a shining model of the glory of human liberation, is slippy into the murky, soiled, and shabby frame of a beggar whining about destiny. A nation of men and women who forged their own destiny with their bare hands, is being whipped and shaped into a nation of equivicators and rationalizers. Let reality be the final judge and arbiter of this debate, of this age-long struggle. Open your eyes and see that the tragedies in the headlines today are the culmination of thousands of years of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. For how long can we repeat those very same mistakes without realizing that the answer is to try something different, something which has not been tried, something which would set us all free to pursue our dreams to the extent of our abilities and fly as high as we are able? Why not try freedom? Why not try capitalism? Real capitalism. Not the watered down, hypocritical vacillation characterized by base opportunists like Greenspan. Real capitalism, like that envisioned by Ayn Rand (whom Greenspan betrayed the moment he joined the FED). Instead, is it really better to emulate a socially stagnant Japan or the disastrous economic policies of Soviet Russia?

Who pays for it? Who pays for it all? We all do. We are all victims in this, and some are both victim and victimizer. But we will all pay the price. Our children will pay it and their children. By supposedly working for the future we are instead signing our children over into a life of slavery, where their dreams will always be ranked second to the demands of any organized group of their neighbors. What's the price? The price is paid for in deserted store fronts. The price is paid in unemployment. The price is paid in disease and crime. The price for your slave-owner's paradise, is that everyone is enslaved, noone and everyone is master, and we all descend into poverty together. Or is it that you imagine yourself in the 'privileged' elite that won't have to muck about with all that. Well, I suppose an altruist like Warren Buffett would probably be the last to feel the effects of the meltdown. But when need and apathy has strained their functional capacity and drained the motivation of it's creative minds--it won't be long before the institutional foundations of businesses around the world come tumbling down like a cascading array of dominoes.

If you are still not convinced, if instead you are more than ever insistent that the only way to cure our current ails is to whip us into better and better shape, to force us at the point of the gun and demand our cooperation through violence, then you deserve everything that's coming down the line. Why? Because it's your choice. The ideas you promote, the people you elect have a tangible effect on the world we live in. You can either choose to make it a better world, one where people are freer and happier. Or you can prolong the suffering, dispense misery and condone the execution of the human soul. You WILL reap that which you sow.

Dr. Anne Wortham: Objectivism and the Black Community

I stumbled across this interview with Dr. Anne Wortham and I have to say I'm impressed. I remember vividly that when I was in college I would propose that people should be judged by their merits rather than by their race, creed, or religious beliefs. At such times, I would be labeled as racist or intolerant. I could never grasp the reason. How can the assertion that race simply just NOT be a factor in our decisions--how can that be racist?

The assertion seemed to be that minorities deserve guarantees of jobs, guarantees of opportunities whereas those who aren't privileged enough to be a member of that group deserve no guarantees. What I felt then, and what I've come to know now, is that these guarantees must come from somewhere. Somebody must be sacrificed for the sake of them. If the job goes to somebody based on race, that means that somebody else is not getting the job, also based on race. This is pure racism. If somebody gets the job because they are the most qualified, then the reason why somebody else doesn't get the job is because they aren't qualified. This is only fair. The goal, I think is to remove race as a consideration in our evaluation of people rather than to emphasize it and thereby create unnecessary divisions among our human kin.

It is for this reason that I found Dr. Wortham's comments in this interview particularly refreshing. Only by replacing the culture of entitlement with the culture of self-empowerment can any minority hope to better its people. I hope you find her comments as enlightening as I did.


11/8/2008: I apologize but it's been brought to my attention that the video was removed from YouTube for a terms of use violation. The original interview was entitled "Another View of the Civil Rights Movement: Anne Wortham" and was part of a series called "A World of Ideas" featuring Bill Moyers. I couldn't find it at amazon, but a google search will bring up places where it can be purchased online. I highly recommend it.

12/5/2009: The video is back on YouTube! I don't know for how long, so check it out while you can!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpWEM2Z9yn8



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS1qhBxiIQY