DavidOdden

The injustice comes from the means of financing. There is not a shred of moral justification for continuing to tax people for entitlements of any nature. So taxation would be ended immediately, if there were any justice. Then the question is, what should happen to the surplus wealth under the control of the government if taxation were ended -- and the answer is, there isn't any. There is a very large debt which is covered up via creative accounting, and no surplus. I grant that it would suck for a person to work all their lives in the pious hope that the government will take care of them in their old age and then find that the state isn't going to really take care of you. But no rational person in the US can possibly think that SS will be viable in the long term, and you should recognise now that this is just money that has been stolen with little hope of recovery, and plan accordingly. The problem with the "I paid into the system, I just want what's coming to me" argument is that it ignores the well-known reality that the government destroys wealth rather than creating it, and therefore at best you can hope to recover a dime on the dollar. Everybody pays into the system, and you cannot wait on ending taxation for everybody to get their full refund. People have learned to depend on the government to take care of them in their old age, so it might seem cruel to make people face reality, and maybe we should not cut on dependence on the state too quickly. The same with the highway system -- gradually taper off. And farm subsidies: many farmers are dependent on those government handouts, so they should be phased out gradually (not!). I have no doubt that there will be some serious pain coming from a swift end to improper government. Actions have consequences, and the actions of the government over the past 200 years (and really just the past 100 years) will have some significant consequences. Since I don't have any expectation, at this point, that things will get better short of an Atlas-style meltdown, the question is pretty much purely academic.

There is a basic rule of the game in academic philosophy, that any idea has to be minutely dissected with reference to its relationship to all other ideas. Rand did not play the citations game, which is partial license to ignore her work. The upside of her not playing the citations game is that you can actually read and understand her ideas. She also did not publish in (academic) peer-reviewd journals, and there is a basic rule that you don't have to pay attention to anything that comes out in an unrefereed souce.

In this case, there is no difference between legally and morally. The best advice in case of uncertainty, if you want absolute certainty, is to consult a team of copyright specialist lawyers. The "problem" would be between the manufacturer and the estate, not the purchaser, and this is typically sorted out by licensing a usage. For example "Happy Birthday" is copyrighted and to perform the song "publically", you have to get permission (easy to do). But it is not a crime to hear an unlicensed performance -- that would impose an unconscionable burden on the audience member to verify that the proper license was obtained. So buying such a shirt is legal (unless you know that it is an illegal usage), but manufacturing one may not be. The fair use section is an important mishmash of good and bad. It grants exemption from copyright laws for nonprofit educational use (bad), but also recognises that the similarity must be "substantial". Hence, nobody can make a copyright infringement claim based on the occurrence of the phrase "my dog" in some earlier work. In this case, I think the relationship between AS and "Rearden Steel" would be recognised as "substantial similarity", but perhaps not "Reardon Steel" (I don't know if you spelled it wrong or that's what actually is on the shirt). If you could ask the author for permission directly, that would be the best course of action. The law states what the conditions for protection are, and if the creater does not want to be subject to those conditions, they can either come up with a clever technical obfuscation scheme (like the Coke formula), or only license the item (check the software you buy), or not market the product at all. As a respecter of the rights of the person creating the work, you should obey those legal restrictions.

I find it strange that the answer could be "yes". I wouldn't say that I'm ethnically Lutheran even though my ancestors were practicing Lutherans. And if someone asks "Are you Norwegian", I don't say "I'm ethnically Norwegian", I say "Well, I had Norwegian ancestors". or (if I'm being irritable) "No, I was born here". The answer to the question "Are you X" is simple. If you identify with the values of X, then you should say "Yes". Otherwise, say "No".

No, I think that's wrong because it leaves out the mind. The ear is a physical transduction device and only initiates low-end neural activity. Perception does not take place in the ear. Properly, the interaction is in the auditory cortex or, if you want to be more general, the auditory system, but not just the ear.

Maybe yes, maybe no. If you had asked "if a tree falls in a forest and no being hears it, does it make a sound?", the answer would be no. The word "no one" implies a human. Animals have auditory systems, so if there is a bear in the woods, there answer could be yes. What a bear is doing in the woods, I shall not say. Analogously, if a traffic light in the woods is stuck on so-called "green" but nothing is there to perceive it, does the traffic light still give off a green light? Hyper-technically, the traffic light emits EM radiation of a particular wavelength that whacks people in the eye which causes the percept of a color "green" (in some people). If you say that the light "is still green" rather than say "emits EM radiation of a wavelength that would, if seen, cause the percept 'green' in most people", I'd understand what you meant. What's most important to understand is that the percept is quite different from the physical underpinning of the percept. But common usage of words rarely makes that explicit, hence the belief that such and such a book "is red".

Why? Well, first, check the schedule -- it's not 8 hours. But more importantly, what you teach at home is vastly more important and influential than what they teach at school, when it comes to values. No school manages to teach values coherently or effectively, and presenting a child with a full-time consistent classroom in values by example will have a huge influence on your children. You shouldn't assume that schools have some magic power to cancel parental influence, if you are willing to take responsibility and exert that influence.

Here is what you want, I think. You'll need to learn how to cope with the alphabet which should take no more that a few days (well, YMMV), but this link (the Persus project) might be a good tool to use. Like many online tools, you have to be patient. Try looking up ousia (name of a plaster?!).

Purchasing co-cops don't have profit (in the normal sense) as the motive, they have reduction of cost and maximization of value for the member as their principles. With that caveat, I disagree with the statement (with the understanding that it might turn out that as a statistical matter, co-ops of the socialist-altruist variety might actually manage to predominate, statistically speaking). That's not a fact about the idea of cooperation, but about a specific historical implementation. Crazy. I don't see any reason to prefer that particular correlation. My initial feeling is that stable, labor-intensive industries should be shareholder-owned and and high-risk, capital-intensive industries should be worker-owned. The details of the business would be important, but I don't see any good reason to expect any such simple correlation between sharaholder / worker owning and the su-called labor / capital distinction.

Your characterisation of a cooperative as a business not owned by shareholders is mistaken; that would include single proprietorships and even Google up until a couple of weeks ago. A single proprietership is not a cooperative. Obviously no blanket statement about cooperatives can be true because there are a lot of kinds of cooperatives. I have various experiences with good cooperatives, which reflect good capitalist values, in particular individual greed. Purchasing co-ops are good because if the economy of scale thing: you can deal directly with the wholesaler or manufacturer and get a significantly lower price for the item(s), since you're not paying the overhead of a retail outlet (not to mention whatever necessary profit that the owner requires in order to stay in business). There's nothing wrong with the other guy making a profit selling those widgets as his means of survival, but his survival is not my primary value. I only care about getting the widget as cheaply as possible. A variant selfish motivation for a purchasing co-op is that it may give you the power to purchase things that you could not otherwise get (i.e. you go to the store and they say "Nah, we don't have that, there isn't enough demand", a situation that a co-op can solve). I recently had wiring done by an electrical co-op: their motivation was pretty much analogous to mine in the purchaser's co-op. The independent contractor makes more money than the employee, for a given job, because some of the money paid to the guy goes to the boss. The co-op structure increases their individual profit (which is good for them, and actually for me too since they charged me less). The capital limitations of cooperatives are not limitations of cooperatives, but are because they don't sell shares as a way of generating money. A lot of companies which are not cooperatives do not sell shares. So that's a non-argument.

The question should not be about universities and BA or MA degrees, but what the content is at each educational level. The public education system is very inefficient and ineffective (in graduating students who are far from being fit for a university education but who are admissible by the numbers and often admitted, nevertheless). At the university level, expectations are adjusted downwards. High school students tend to lack fundamental skills, especially grammar, writing, argumentation and knowledge of history, as well as the oft-cited problems in math and science, and this has a dragging-down effect on higher education. There are well-prepared students of course: the point is that there shouldn't be any ill-prepared students graduating from high school. They shouldn't graduate from high school. They should be graduating from a trade school, picking up technical skills that would be useful in their future life. My opinion is that 1st grade children are not generally suited for high-level learning, so that 1st grade mostly serves a babysitting function. Introducing multiplication for everybody in the 2nd grade would be a bad idea. But some children are ready for math and reading well before they get to first grade, so in some cases, multiplication should be introduced in first grade (I know of one case where it worked). The cause of the current educational stupidity is the "one size fits all" view that retards children of ability in order to keep the class going at a medium (read mediocre) pace, while at the same time not really addressing the problems of the, shall we say, "alternatively enabled" (slow) students. I went through the public system in the 60's, and my mom (who was a teacher) tells me that they used to have a reasonably efficient system of tracking and skill-based segregation where they didn't just pile all of the smart kids into the class with the dumb kids; they had largely eliminated such ability-based segregation by the time I got to school. Contemporary American high school is the reductio ad absurdum of the single-track approach to education that has infected the way society thinks about child development, and it really does not help the future carpenter to be forced in the same classes as the future Nobel prize physicist.

For example the 18th and 16th amendments. What individual rights are enshrined in the 25th. 22nd, 20th?

That's absolutely correct. The standard meaning of "belief" carries with it unsavory connotations of possible irrationality and subjectivity. Epistemologists can make statements such as "For the purposes of this discussion, we will define 'belief' as...", but that's an improper use of language. (And to be "disposed to" assert the truth of a proposition is just another way of invoking whim). Pick a word that clearly identifies what you're referring to. The JTB characterization is inaccurate as a statement of knowledge according to Objectivism because it leaves open these wrong interpretations, and by choice of words denigrates the method of acquiring knowledge. This holds for "justification" as well. The JTB position fails because it does not say what J and B are, and these are not just small details, these are the whole ball of wax, and using prejudicial words does not advance the cause of understanding knowledge. To Philo: Kant; Pierce (cf. "types"); Jerrold Katz; Tarski. Gödel [nb: I just found out that "neo-platonist" also refers to post-Platonic Greek philosophy fathered by Plotinus, so I wasn't referring to them. How many neo's can you put on the adjective?]

The "Justified True Belief" view of knowledge smells seductive when you first sniff it, but after being around it long enough and poking it and prodding it, I think you'll come to conclude that it stinks. Bowzer sums it up well in his critique, so what I want to emphasize is how I think the JTB view reflects a fundamentally wrong epistemology, one that does not consider reason to be particularly important. A "belief" is a statement of emotion, and criterion 1 focuses on having a particular emotional state. Objectivism sees knowledge as a grasping of reality -- it emphasizes a particular relationship between consciousness and reality. Belief does not do that. If a person is acting on the basis of known facts and reason, then those facts determine your evaluation, and "belief" is irrelevant. Invoking belief, which can be entirely irrational, implies that emotion can be a tool for gaining knowledge. It is not. A rational person who has the fully integrated system of observational knowledge that leads to "knowing P" cannot then cast aside this knowledge and application of reason, to conclude "But I don't believe it!". However, anybody is capable of letting emotion override reason and say "But I don't wanna believe it!" - the technical term for that is "evasion". With a fully rational person, the "belief" part comes for free, and should not be a defining criterion. The claim that P must be true begs the question of what truth is. A widely held view is that truth is something that is "out there", that it is not mental (this is where the neo-Platonist correpondence people tend to get very confused, because they see truth as being neither something mental nor something metaphysical). Objectivists (tend to) use the term "fact" to refer to the metaphysical state of affairs, so we'd say that a proposition is true if it describes a fact. You could restate 2 as "P describes a fact" and not get grief. And as you can tell, the "justification" clause really reeks because it trivializes the nature of "justification", making me wonder why this isn't expressed in terms of "rationalisation". A "justification" can be entirely emotional; I cannot imagine anything that cannot be called a "justification". The crux of the Objectivist position is that it involves perceptually-grounded knowledge and integration of that knowledge, which is pretty specific. One of the most important questions to address is whether you can "know P" at some point in time, and then learn that you were wrong. But that's another thread, another channel.

I had a slightly related problem with them overcharging a shipment to me (paid by me) where they charged me twice their published rate. The significant point of similarity is that I cannot get them to acknowledge my written protests and nobody is willing to take responsibility. The may have some kind of "ignore it and it will go away" policy; which in a sense worked, because we're not doing business with UPS anymore. In your case, there is an issue about "your property". UPS doesn't have any obligation to you, but rather has a business relationship and an obligation to the vendor. They cannot know whether the item is your property, nor should they be expected to inquire into issues of ownership. Since the contract is between them and the vendor, you are out of that loop. On the other hand, you have a business relationship with the vendor to the effect that he has not completed his end of the bargain and therefore if he has already received payment from you, you are owed a refund. It is quite possible that the terms of the agreement between UPS and the vendor address the question of goods damaged in transit. It cannot be automatically assumed that UPS was negligent in performing their duties, so the vendor does not have an automatic right to a free return of the damaged goods. There maybe be some clause that says, for example, that UPS will dispose of any goods that are irretrievably damaged, unless the shipper agrees to pay for return shipment of the corpse. In such a case, I'd think "Well, what's the point of me paying $50 to get a bunch of smashed glass returned to me?", and I would decline the "return damaged goods at your expense" option (which may be implicit: the agreement may say that you have to explicitly request corpse-return service). So while this may be another example of a general bad customer relations problem, it's not a violation of your property rights.

That would emerge from the interaction of 1 and 2: promoting ideas is not protecting rights, therefore a law putting government in the position to promote ideas fails the purposive justification test. That is more or less the point of 3. The wording of the First is somewhat unclear and we don't have clear guidance as to whether "promoting" constitutes "establishment". 2 requires justification referring to 1, and you just cannot construct a coherent argument that the promotion of religion protects individual rights. You can add anything to the Constitution and the beauty of is is that an amendment cannot be declared unconstitutional, and thus has absolute power except insofar as the Constitution can actually be ignored by judges if they want. Such an amendment would force the Commerce clause and the Welfare clause to be narrowly construed. The basic principle is that the Constitution is supposed to be interprerted as a noncontradictory document, so that in case one part of the document appears to contradict another, both parts should be interpreted in some way that avoids contradiction. Blatent contradiction is possible, in which case chronology rules (i.e. you can change and revoke parts of the Cnstitution by amendment).

I think you should bring in something that you recognise as ethically correct, and not widely accepted. Anything pro-capitalist should do the trick.

Paid linguist.

I hesitate to make a very strong claim here, but the picture on the PBS page looks not only like a forgery (looking at the letter density, shapes and sizes), but a very bizarre forgery. It seems to me that we're just supposed to focus on the part that gives the name, and just see and not wonder why it doesn't say , since the rest of it is in Russian and if they were to switch to English for some reason, surely they would use the letter "Ye" and not that "E oborotnoye oborotnoye". Well, maybe that's real old school. I'm somewhat less that persuaded. It is telling that at the end of the various sequence of pages, here, you can vote on the truth of the conclusion. Fact as product of democracy -- only on PBS.

Interesting stuff. The cropped picture of a supposed piece of evidence is a bit hard to make out, and a bit peculiar.

1. There is no "axiom" to the effect that the sole function of government is the protection of individual rights. 2. There is no requirement that (when created) laws be explicitly justified or that (when interpreted) they be interpreted with reference to that axiom. 3. Rules of interpretation, or at least metarules, should be incorporated in the Constitution itself, and should be restricted to defining proper interpretation according to the function of government, and objectively justified principles of disambiguation. 4. In numerous places, direct or indirect sanction is given to improper functions of goernment (e.g. 1.7.1: "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate..." which asserts that bills for raising revenue are within the scope of the government; 1.8.1: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes" says so blatantly, the Commerce clause 1.8.3: "To regulate Commerce..." -- pretty much every word of section 8. The worst is the Welfare clause, 1.8.1, which also includes "provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States".

On the other hand, one of the strongest and most dangerous fources in America today is religion. From the perspective of what the government does which it shouldn't do, that is on the nearly ummeasurable end of the scale. But in terms of implications for the future, I consider the rise of religion in America to be one of the greatest threats, one that is much worse than abridgement of human rights to the product of your labor. Religion is fundamentally and primarily a denial of reason -- that is what religion is. Restriction of human rights, at least the way it has been carried out in the U.S., is a denial of fact and often a grotesque misuse of reason, but it has not yet involved a flat-out denial of reason. While the removal of the 10 commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court building does not itself alleviate the grotesque problem of regulation and theft by the government, fighting against Moore and having him removed from office was absolutely worth it for its symbolic value, as a reaffirmation of a proverbial line in the sand which could too easily disappear and become trivially crossable, especially in the current political climate. From religion, evil springs. Now please excuse me, I have some scratching out to do.

No, in fact no language can exist without concepts. Language is fundamentally conceptual. Time is a architypical concept: it is a mental extraction based on and integrating very many concrete percepts (events which you have observed). The basic difference between English and Japanese really just has to do with different conventions for those concepts which are expressed by a suffix (or verb plus auxiliary), versus those that require more complicated multi-word means to express. It's kind of like the ser / estar difference in Spanish, which seems hopeless if you try to understand it in terms of "What does it mean in English". We don't make that difference in English. For people trying to write what they actuallt, yes. The main cognitive problem would be people saying "Boy, what a stupid way to write! We say 'tabemasho', 'tabemasureba, 'tabenai', 'taberu', 'tabetai' and those Chinese guys they just say 'chr'. Fortunately, we're clever and we can figure out a way to write the stuff that has no Chinese characters". It had no effect on the grammatical structure of the language, since that is causally independent of the writing system. Before that, it like try write English not use any grammar suffix, because Chinese no have suffix. It would not be logical to believe that unless you knew some reason for thinking that is so -- I'm trying to discourage you from engaging in unjustified rationalization that is not supported by observation. Fortunately, I've got an observational basis, so I can point you to some observations. It is very common in the develpment of writing systems that when a source writing system diverges significantly in structure from a recipient language's system, then the original writing system can be adapted in some way. The development of kana from Chinese characters would be an example; similarly, the development of the Greek alphabet from Semitic, Uighur from Aramaic, Persian from Arabic, and so on.

More accurately, they will (in most states) be held legally responsible for their actions. A number of adults never learn to act responsibly or to take responsibility. The age can be lower, and also isn't uniform (consider legal age for consensual sex vs. drinking vs. driving vs. voting vs. getting married). In Nebraska and Alabama, the Age of Majority is 19. In addition, in some states, the Age of Majority is 16 if you are married. And finally, let's not forget that the courts have the freedom to treat someone under the age of majority as though they are an adult. So really you have to check the local laws for the specific purpose before concluding anything about the relationship between age and rights & responsibilities.

The expression of time and event relations, and how such relations are compressed into specific tenses, varies considerably across languages, and there is a respectable body of evidence that -ta vs. -ru reflect differences in event relations rather than absolute time. Since tense inflections aren't conveyed in kanji, there's no reason to think that the semantics of the so-called "present" tense in Japanese has some connection with the writing system.