Undercurrent

If you had an opportunity to spend an entire day with a billionaire, would you take it? Whether you aspire to run your own business, become a make-up artist or a schoolteacher, there is much to learn from someone who has achieved success in their field, particularly if this person did so by doing what they love. Assuming you do not have ready access to a billionaire, the best substitute is to read autobiographies. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, wrote a best-selling book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. In a series of three blog posts, I will distill three life lessons hidden within the pages of Hsieh’s illuminating book. Let’s start with the most important one. LESSON ONE: Do not wait for hell to transform your life From the age of nine, Tony had an interest in building his own business. It started with a worm farm, but his worms escaped. What’s worse, he found it boring. In middle school, he founded a button-making business that finally brought him monetary success. But again he was bored, so he passed it on to his brother. After college Hsieh went to work for Oracle, but he quickly realized he could not grow there. His schedule consisted of running unfulfilling software tests, checking his email, going home for lunch, taking a nap, checking his email again at work, and then going home. Dreading the monotony of a job that paid well but didn’t push him, every morning he would smash his fist down on the snooze button. Soon, he and a friend left Oracle to start a web design business. The business made money, but like the button-making work it was not satisfying. He recognized that he hated the work itself, so he started looking for the next thing to do. His next venture was to found a company called LinkExchange, one of the first online banner advertising companies. Within two years, LinkExchange grew to over one hundred employees. Just a few years after starting the company, he realized once again that something was amiss. Initially, the excitement of the new company, the challenge of the unique work, and the feeling of family among coworkers made LinkExchange a source of pure enjoyment for him. However, what started as a company with dancing, pranks and camaraderie grew to be filled with employees who were there purely for the sake of making money and building their resumes. Two years into the venture, Tony hated it: One day I woke up after hitting the snooze button on my alarm clock six times. I was about to hit it a seventh time when I suddenly realized something. The last time I had snoozed this many times was when I was dreading going to work at Oracle. It was happening again, except this time I was dreading going to work at LinkExchange. When Microsoft approached him about purchasing the company, he jumped at the opportunity to escape. In what was a recurring pattern of his life he asked himself tough questions, such as “What am I doing here if I don’t love it?,” and “How can I create something I can be proud of?” Tony never waited long to take action for the betterment of his life. Once he started feeling dissatisfied with the work itself, he examined the feeling and then took action. He echoed the words of Steve Jobs who in his famous 2005 commencement speech said: For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “no” for too many days in a row I know I need to change something. The great danger is waiting for a wake-up call to tell us we need to make a change. Externally, this may come in the form of a near-death experience, the loss of a loved one or some other tragedy; it can be the violence of a spouse or the loss of one’s life savings. Too often we wait for hell to rise up and stare us in the face before we take action—and surrender years of our life to melancholy in the process. One safeguard is to find what I call your “Satisfaction Meter.” For Jobs it was a mirror, for Hsieh it was an alarm clock. Whatever it is for you, when the gauge hits “dissatisfied” too many times in a row, act accordingly. Some successful people I know have phone calls weekly or even daily where a friend asks them how they are feeling about their daily activities. If they continually say they dislike what they are doing, for whatever reason, their friends will ask: “What are you going to do to make a change?” This is one external mechanism to help steer oneself back toward a path of attaining life-long success and happiness. The lesson is to be aware of when you’re unhappy or unsatisfied. Your inner sense of unhappiness is an indicator prompting you to make a change. At an early age, successful people develop an almost uncontrollable urge to take action and make a change based merely on this inner feeling of unhappiness. Hsieh’s parents had pressured him to pursue a PhD. They signed him up for a variety of courses and extracurricular activities throughout his childhood. But Tony preferred learning how to run his own business. When his parents forced him to take piano lessons, he rebelled and read Boy’s Life magazine instead—where he heard about the button-making business idea. Tony was pursuing the thing he loved. The same pursuit, in various forms, can be found in the biographies of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and other successful entrepreneurs. In the same speech quoted above, Steve Jobs gives the advice not to let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. It is by listening to that voice where, as Tony says, the path to passion, profits and purpose, lies. In the next article, I will share the story of Tony Hsieh’s journey after LinkExchange, where, after much failure and dissatisfaction, he finally found his vision. And, in what is a trend among successful people, he deliberated, and invested everything (literally) in that vision. Creative commons-licensed image from Flickr user Khairul Nizam. The post Stop Hitting the Snooze Bar on Life appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Writing for The Daily Princetonian, Freshman Coy Ozias recently declared: “I’m a selfish person.” The piece, quite aptly titled “The Selfishness of Success,” came out in support of selfish living. This is quite surprising coming from a young person in today’s intellectual environment. Western society decries the selfish individual. Everywhere we turn, we’re faced with scores of talking heads—authority figures, even—who reinforce with gusto the selfishness taboo. Such was the spirit of Warren Buffett’s famous quip that “f you’re in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.” Pope Francis—the “people’s pope”—blames a “culture of selfishness and individualism” for perpetuating “social injustices” and holding us back from creating “a more habitable world.” As recently as the State of the Union Address, President Obama stressed that our promise as “one people” lies in the “generosity of the American . . . who, every day, live the idea that we are our brother’s keeper, and our sister’s keeper.” And yet, despite the seeming entrenchment of selflessness as a preferred moral norm (to say nothing of its greater sway in the academic world), Ozias breaks free from the mold to give selfishness a surprising degree of praise. Why? Ozias recognizes the very essence of selfishness: “put[ting] yourself first.” He then invokes Michael Jordan’s aphorism that, “[t]o be successful, you have to be selfish or else you never achieve.” He agrees with Jordan, noting that in order to earn his place at an ultra-competitive Ivy League school like Princeton, he and his peers “had to be selfish.” He explains that he had to devote hours of studying and personal development to making the Princeton cut, even though some of that time could have been devoted to serving others. Success in any worthy endeavor requires selfishness. The track runner who wants to make Olympic Trials in his event must exhibit the mental toughness required for a total dedication to his health and fitness. Everything from the food he eats, to the sleep he gets, to the more casual hobbies he allots time for, must serve his dream. The engineering student who wants to work at a top firm must be completely devoted to her studies. Too much recreation will compromise her goal. The classical guitarist who wants to master that tricky arpeggio for his next performance must put in the hours of concentrated effort that hone such a skill. He doesn’t have the time to binge on Netflix—or to work shifts in a soup kitchen. Goal-achievement demands mental effort, by a rational mind. What the track runner, the engineer, and the guitarist each have in common is a steadfast devotion to their goals. A frenzied, emotional approach to athletics or engineering or music clearly won’t do. Rather, achievers in these fields must focus their minds intensely—they must take into account all the relevant facts, plan a proper course, and exhibit fidelity to it. What’s surprising is that Ozias realizes that selfish action is productive action. The “self” isn’t merely some puppet whose strings are pulled by chance whims and fleeting desires. Nor is it just some mechanical vessel for achieving. The self, for its capacity to look outward at the world—to perceive, to conceptualize, and to decide—is the very thing that directs achievement. The self is the purposeful, rational mind. Ozias is also right to say that “selfish people put themselves first and their goals first without taking advantage of those around them.” This is because other people aren’t the primary concern of the selfish individual, whose first concern is self-improvement. The engineering student, for instance, dedicates her time in school to studying and mastering her field. She knows that while the professor lectures, she must actively listen—that while the textbook is a help guide to her assignments, she must grasp and apply its contents to the problems at hand—that when a project demands that she build for herself, she must be the one to muster her creative energy, in order to produce something truly great. She knows that she can reach her goals, and that others will be willing to assist her, but only when she puts forth her best efforts in return. So Ozias is correct to distinguish those who are just plain “mean”—who exploit others on their way to the top— from those who are truly selfish. Unfortunately, Ozias also adopts the remainder of Michael Jordan’s aphorism: that “once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish.” But if it’s true, as he claims, that selfish living really makes “success” possible to us, while requiring none of the misanthropic back-stabbing so often attributed to it, then it’s difficult to reckon with his conclusion that selfishness is “largely justified so that we can become better at being unselfish later.” Just why does selfishness require us to “give back” to others? Have we stolen our success from them? Of course it’s true that many individuals will play a part in our ultimate success—we choose to live among others for a reason. But the role that others play in our life stories is a function of our importance to them. Sure, students need teachers to learn—but teachers need students in order to teach. Yes, children need parents to grow and mature—but parents have children to love and nurture them. And neither teachers nor parents do what they do so that one day the young will “give back” to them—teachers receive paychecks and professional fulfillment, and parents receive emotional and spiritual gain. We aren’t forced upon one another in this world. We can choose to associate with, hold dear, and help others, all for what they’ll do to better our lives. One should not apologize or seek forgiveness for the pursuit of one’s own well-being or for the achievement of personal goals. A life of achievement is precisely what ought to inspire others to achieve as well. Achievers such as Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, and even Michael Jordan make everyone else’s lives inestimably better. Their light bulbs, iPhones, and game-changing play were the products of brilliant minds fueled, not by guilt and the desire to “give back,” but by a selfish desire to see their dreams made real. Because the ideal of selflessness is so pervasive, it’s not surprising that Ozias would couch his portrayal of the nature of selfishness within the framework of that ideal. But to do so compromises the whole point of his discovery. If it’s true that selfishness is about “put[ting] yourself first,” how could it be selfish to pursue your dreams just so that others will be made better for it? Selfishness is about production—for you; it’s about achievement—for you; it’s about running track, or studying engineering, or playing guitar—for you. The point is that your life is yours to live, that your dreams are yours to dream, and that their achievement demands, not your guilt, but your inviolate pride. Selfish living makes possible to us all the ends that make life worth living. Ozias rightly recognizes that, and deserves praise for his achievement. But to embrace his discovery to the fullest—to truly embrace it—demands rejecting guilt and the whole selfishness taboo that fosters it. And if Ozias and his generation can do just that, their lives (and ours as well) would be so much the better for it. Creative commons-licensed image from Wikimedia. The post Why Selfish Princeton Students Have No Reason to ‘Give Back’ appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

In recent years, the issue of sexual assault—especially on college campuses—has commanded heightened public attention. Despite a 58% reduction in rape rates across all age groups between 1995 and 2010, outrage over a “sexual assault crisis” seems stronger than ever. The Obama Administration has now taken action, ordering schools governed by Title IX to employ a lower evidentiary standard for sexual harassment and assault cases. Feminists in particular have popularized the term “rape culture”—the idea that sexual assault is the product of longstanding social mores, such as an underlying “historic and systemic” violence, or an underlying cultural sexism—often flatly labeled “patriarchy.” Social symptoms commonly labeled expressions of this “rape culture” include “victim blaming,” “slut shaming,” “sexual objectification,” and “rape trivialization.” Rape and sexual assault are morally atrocious and profoundly evil. And the idea of a “rape culture” does have its finger on an important issue: that this is a deep cultural problem which cannot be resolved easily by harsher penalties (or louder protests). But the social factors identified by proponents of the “rape culture” diagnosis are relatively superficial; to focus on them is to ignore the deeper causes of the rapist’s mentality. While some sexual assault is horrendously violent, a high percentage of sexual assaults occur when both parties have been drinking, and often this counts as sexual assault only because the victim is simply not in a position to consent. Assuredly, any sex without consent is inexcusable. But the fact remains that sexual assault is not always violent in the sense of involving a physical struggle. Victims in these cases will either not think to protest or to put up physical resistance, and may only later realize that they were not in a position to consent. Sexual assault cannot be an expression of an underlying culture of violence when so many sexual assaults involve no physical struggle. What makes sexual assault of an intoxicated victim a crime is that the victim lacks the capacity to rationally consent. Some feminists blame sexism. But while many rapes may be partially motivated by sexism, sexism is not the key element explaining their continued occurrence. There are plenty of sexists who would never dare commit the act of rape. And as RAINN reports, many rapists are more likely to become serial criminals than serial rapists: 46% are re-arrested for other crimes, including other violent crimes and property offenses. Many rapists are thus equal opportunity victimizers: they don’t seem to care about getting anybody’s consent for anything. It takes the mindset of a criminal to commit the act of rape—the attitude of someone with a one-track mind bent on satisfying his momentary whims, unconcerned with abstract hindrances like the “consent” of others. But why does consent matter? Consider the quintessential example of disregard for the consent of another: slavery. Like the rapist, the slave master assumes control over the slave’s body—not for the span of one encounter, but for the slave’s entire life. Slaves knew that if ever they did resist, the whip was sure to follow. The master treated his slaves as mere tools or beasts of burden that existed for the sake of his profit and pleasure. As Frederick Douglass put it, “The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from property. . . . It reduces man to a mere machine.” What distinguishes persons from property, or even from pets? Unlike other animals, human beings live and flourish through the use of their rational minds. To ignore and trample on the consent of another is to treat him as a mindless object to be used and abused as one pleases—to act as an animal oneself. To respect the consent of another is to acknowledge the sanctity of his sovereign mind and his right to live in accordance with it, just as one demands the same sovereignty and right for oneself. Consent is especially important to the value of sexual interaction. Unlike dogs who, out of instinct, mount everything in sight just because they can, human beings aren’t bound to act on whim. We spend our lives scrupulously searching for that perfect companion for life’s journey. And we ultimately choose our partner, not because they’ll serve our needs and placate our sexual desires, but because of what their conscious minds have to offer us. We choose our partners for all they’ve chosen to be. To rape is to deface a richly rewarding celebration of partnership and love. To rape is to mount another as unscrupulously and mindlessly as a dog would. Sadly, sexual interactions aren’t the only cases where our culture undervalues the importance of consent. Ask yourself whether you always consider the consent of others in your everyday life. Do you care about the consent of the musician when you download his music without payment? What about the consent of the t-shirt vendor who refuses to sell shirts with your design? Do you consider the consent of the baker when he denies you the cake you would like baked? How about the consent of the restaurant owner whose facility you storm in political protest? Do you care about my consent, when you vote to force me (and everybody else) to buy health insurance, whether I desire it or not? To be sure, rape is far worse—far more repugnant—than any of these offenses. But is it different in principle? The dormroom rapist who bypasses the consent of his intoxicated victim is entirely unconcerned with his victim’s most intimate personal wishes—it’s his will that comes first. And just as the rapist trivializes the mind of his victim by taking command of a body not his own, so does the demonstrator who takes control of a space that isn’t his to occupy, interfering with the lives and careers of others who have the right to use it. The same is true for the healthcare-mandators, the cake-demanders, and even the illegal-downloaders: to one extent or another, their victims are treated as objects to be owned, used, and commanded. The reasoning of the perpetrator in each case is simple and vicious: “I feel like taking this. I’ll take it.” If we hope ever to succeed in the battle against sexual assault, it’s this cavalier attitude towards consent that we must fight. For if we consistently permit the use of force in society to run people’s entire lives, how can we possibly expect to be taken seriously when suddenly stressing the importance of consent in cases of non-violent sexual assault? The way to combat behavior like sexual assault is not to speak out against a “rape culture,” but to advocate and foster a culture of consent—not just about sex, but in every area of life. Each of us as individuals must internalize and practice a sincere respect for the lives of others. This demands recognizing the sanctity of the sovereign mind, of the fact that others are not mere fodder for our whims, and that they can never be of value to us if treated as such. A culture of consent respects the idea that my end does not justify the seizure of your means. It demands that when I seek my favorite artist’s new album, I purchase it—that when I want a cake or a shirt designed my way, I ask the maker if he would be willing to do it my way—that when I want to start a charity for the poor, I persuade others to donate to the cause. And yes, it absolutely demands that when I seek the romantic affection of another, I earn it—not take it. Ultimately, a culture of consent offers the only civil terms on which individuals may deal with one another, treating persons, not as mere fodder, but as ends in themselves. Creative commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user Charlotte Cooper. The post Fostering a Culture of Consent: How to Cultivate Fundamental Opposition to Rape appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Igniting the Objectivist Student Movement (Part 3) from The Undercurrent on Vimeo. This October, The Undercurrent hosted the first-ever student conference on Objectivism. We’ve got big plans for 2015, and we’ve already gotten started! We broke new ground with this conference. And we’re excited to continue to make waves in the free market community. Students are interested in Objectivism and they want to learn more, and it’s up to us to continue to provide educational and social-networking opportunities that introduce students to and provide more education on authentic Objectivism. Students were polled to track the impact of the conference. Here’s what we found: The most change in opinion and ways of thinking occurred in students who did not self-identify as Objectivists The topic in which the most movement occurred was that of free will Students showed a significant increase in an understanding of what distinguishes Rand’s philosophy from libertarian ideas Student showed a significant increase in the understanding of topics like free will, selfishness, and intellectual property If YOU want to see a positive change in the culture, we urge you to consider supporting our efforts. We’re doing important work! WHY DONATE? TU cultivates writers that move on to careers in the non-profit sector, politics & law, education, and industry We teach students how to host major campus events that have a REAL impact Our focus on face-to-face interaction lends a positive association to Objectivism We understand students and we work to create opportunities for them to form long-lasting friendships and partnerships with each other and the broader free market movement The Impact: Donations will have a direct impact on the present student culture. Funds allow us to distribute issues of our print newspaper, host exciting events, and offer quality education to students nationwide. Since the founding of The Undercurrent, we’ve distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of our paper on campuses across the country, and we’ve seen many of our student writers go on to do fantastic things, such as starting their own companies or working as intellectuals at partnering think tanks. During the past 8 months, we’ve seen a dramatic impact in student attitude toward Objectivism. Students are more excited than ever about throwing events, creating a community of their own, and promoting Ayn Rand’s ideas on campus. Other Ways You Can Help: Help us get the word out! Share this fundraiser link via FB, Twitter and email. Tell your like-minded friends about this fundraiser and encourage them to donate and share the link. Let’s keep up the momentum and create a culture that we can all be proud of! Do you have questions about our current fundraiser? Comment here and we’ll provide you with an answer right away! “Like” us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter The post We’re Igniting the Objectivist Student Movement! appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Click here to Support TU Last weekend, over 100 student leaders from across the country and around the world participated in a students-only weekend event dedicated to deepening their understanding of Ayn Rand’s ideas. Students not only learned from our long list of experts, they were able to discuss and debate these ideas with each other, and share their mutual appreciation for Rand. As the director of development at TU, I was thrilled to observe an overwhelmingly positive and inviting atmosphere between the students and speakers. We expected a culture of camaraderie and collegial networking, and hoped to see some friendships blossom, but what we experienced this past weekend was well beyond our expectations! Speaker after speaker informed us that this group of students were amongst the most intelligent, more inquisitive, and most intellectually serious they’d ever encountered. 

 We’ll be sending a more comprehensive summary in a few weeks, but we wanted to immediately share a quick overview and a few amazing highlights right away: Saturday – Free Books and Photos with John Allison
 
 This year we were excited for the rare opportunity to have John Allison, President and CEO of the Cato Institute, inspire students in explaining how they can lead the philosophical fight for their own futures. Afterward, he joined Yaron Brook and Don Watkins for a joint free books and photo session event, a huge hit with our students!

 Yaron Brook and Don Watkins met with students to discuss their co-authored book, Free Market Revolution. Students were eager to have their books signed by these two great thinkers! Free books event with Don Watkins and Yaron Brook Left: Yaron Brook delivers a captivating talk on the morality of Capitalism Right: Meet & greet with John Allison Saturday – Q&A Session on Objecivism and Ayn Rand
 
 Onkar Ghate, Greg Salmieri, and Steve Simpson from the Ayn Rand Institute led a penetrating question and answer session, masterfully responding to a wide variety of students’ Objectivism-related questions. Our participants loved the opportunity to engage in such a “deep dive” into the core of Rand’s influential philosophy.
 Students ask general questions on Objectivism Saturday – 5:00 PM: The Morality of the Welfare State Don Watkins, co-author of Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government and fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, led a spirited discussion on the history and morality of welfare programs such as Social Security and Medicaid.
Students learned the significance of not only the financial but also the moral threat presented by these unfunded liabilities. Don Watkins delivers a talk on the dangers of the welfare state and later meets with students for photos Sunday – 11:45 AM: Selfish Trading Luncheon
 
 Students are still raving about Jonathan Hoenig’s energetic, motivational, myth-busting seminar about the virtues and benefits of selfish trade, both in business and in real life. Presentation and questions with Jonathan Hoenig These events are just a taste of what TUSC 2014 had to offer. Other events on intellectual property, privacy, communication, free will, legal philosophy, morality, and general interest in Objectivism garnered rave reviews!
 (View the complete list of speakers and topics here.) Other featured events Saturday and Sunday – 5:55 PM: Dinner and Socials

 Students had dinner and personally interacted with other young leaders from across the country, as well as our esteemed speakers.
 If ever an event captured Rand’s idea of burgeoning “new intellectuals”, this gathering certainly did! Students gather to network and discuss the first day of lectures Regular Surveys – Saturday & Sunday

 We polled students before and after each talk to track the impact of our program. 

 Students reported significant levels of improved understanding of the various topics, especially in the area of free will. In fact, we saw a significant decrease in students who claimed that man is the product of deterministic factors, such as heredity and upbringing. Another interesting find is that we received positive response and growth in understanding of areas of intellectual and privacy, which are quite controversial within the liberty movement. Small sample of total collected data We also conducted entrance and exit surveys. These data points will give us insights into how the students’ broader views on Rand, the philosophy, and application of her ideas changed throughout the duration of the conference.
Summary results from these surveys will be included in a future report. In the meantime, please do look through all of our conference photos! (https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10152827915832437.1073741829.27894627436&type=3) As with any inaugural event, we faced some major challenges with this conference. There were complications with transportation, venue and lodging logistics. And because of our tight budget, we had to make some compromises along the way. I’m happy to report that while these challenges were significant, they did not undermine the purpose of the event and its value to our student participants. If this update excites you as much as it excites us, I hope that you’ll take action today and support us further.
 Having proven the concept, we’re eager to raise the funding necessary to make the next conference even more impactful than this first one. Cheers to a hopeful future for Objectivism! Brittney F. Rivera Director of Development The Undercurrent Click here to Support TU Follow us on Twitter “Like” us on Facebook The post THE UNDERCURRENT HAS JUST CONCLUDED OUR VERY FIRST STUDENT CONFERENCE! appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

When the first smartphone was introduced in 1992 by IBM, it didn’t sell and the prominence of smartphone technology in our lives was hard to imagine. Now it is impossible to imagine our lives without it. Our phone is our personal assistant, our marketing manager, our personal trainer, and now with a free app download and three clicks, our personal chauffeur. It’s easy to chalk up ridesharing apps as just another add-on to the technological landscape, but apps like Uber and Lyft are innovative game changers sparking lots of political controversy and debate. As these companies begin to compete with traditional taxi service, taxi companies argue that regulations should limit or prohibit this “unfair” competition. Before ridesharing apps were created, taxi service could be hard to get during peak hours and especially during holidays, as anyone in major cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago can tell you. The supply of taxis has long been restricted by the medallion system, created in the 1930s to limit competition in the taxi industry. In Chicago there are only 6,955 medallions available and consumer demand for taxis far exceeds that number. With such a high demand for medallions, medallion owners lease out their medallions to drivers, for a fee of as much as $100 for a 12-hr shift. Whether taxi drivers have one customer or twenty they have to pay this leasing fee, which guarantees medallion owners and leasing companies a profit. Regardless of the number of customers drivers have, as long as medallion owners and leasing companies have drivers they will make a profit Ridesharing apps eliminate the middleman by connecting drivers directly with customers. But companies like Uber and Lyft are being allowed to operate only because they exploit a loophole in the law. Since ridesharing app companies do not provide cars to their drivers, they claim to not provide taxi service. Instead of leasing a medallion and cab, drivers can use their own car and a smartphone app to provide service. As a result, ridesharing apps allow an unrestricted number of drivers to provide customers with service. Despite the benefits that ridesharing apps provide drivers and their customers, lawmakers are implementing regulations in the name of “fair competition” in a way that will only reinforce the older ineffective system. To protect taxi drivers, lawmakers are placing caps on the number of drivers that can be employed using ridesharing apps and in some cases, banning GPS-based fare that allows companies like Uber to provide low prices. Taxi companies are right to argue that it is unfair for them to be subject to burdensome regulations when ridesharing app companies are subject to fewer of them. Every inch of a taxicab is regulated including: its model, type of interior, vehicle age, color and size of top lights, type of advertising that can be featured on the cab’s exterior, thickness of safety shields, and location of security cameras. Taxi companies and medallion holders have invested a lot time, energy, and finances to meet state taxi specifications, but these regulations make it very difficult for them to run their businesses profitably. The existing regulations prevent people from providing taxi service, and then dictate the type of service that can be provided to those who can. However, it is also unfair to punish ridesharing app companies and ban them from providing service to compensate for the unfairness of regulations on the taxi industry. Ridesharing app companies have done nothing wrong by creating an innovative alternative to traditional taxi service. They have created a tool that makes it easier to connect drivers with customers, which is a good thing. Regulating the service that ridesharing app companies provide would burden these companies in the same way that regulations on taxi companies do. The only just and fair way to resolve this dilemma is to eliminate regulations on the traditional taxi industry and those on new ridesharing app companies. This means ending the medallion system and allowing both companies the freedom to create the type of service they wish to provide to any customer who wants it. If Uber is allowed to continue operating only because it has petitioned for laws that privilege it specifically, it will continue to operate only by government permission. But all innovators and creators should have the freedom to create by right. By protecting the special interests of some and eliminating competition by others, regulations prevent new technology from flourishing. For example, as one commentator has noted, if Uber is allowed the privilege of operating only because it does not own its fleet, current regulations will prevent companies from using automated, driverless cars to provide taxi service, which will reduce overhead and bring savings to consumers. It is impossible for the government to anticipate what will be created and it is pointless for it to try. Imagine if the government were to dictate which art could and could not be created. Citizens would cry that this is a violation of rights and tyranny. How is an artist’s freedom to create any different from the freedom of businesspeople to create? Artists create because they are inspired to bring some vision into reality. Are businessmen any different? Do they also not wish to introduce a new product or service where none existed before? How is the restriction of business innovators’ freedom to create not a violation of their rights? Artists have to compete just like businessmen. While some artists make millions, others never make any money and spend their life in obscurity. Yet, no one protests that the artists making millions are monopolizing the industry and robbing other artists of their livelihood. Why? They know that if no one buys the obscure artist’s art, this is isn’t the successful artist’s fault. The freedom to create doesn’t include the right to stop others from creating. Far from creating fair competition, regulations against businesses do stop others from creating: they prevent innovators from creating their best work for anyone to buy. Not only do regulations stifle the innovations we already enjoy, but also they prevent others from being created at all. In the process, regulations prevent mankind from reaching its full potential. Regulations do not protect us so much as they cripple us from reaching our most ambitious goals. So ask yourself, what kind of world do you want to live in—a world of innovation and creativity or a world that punishes the good for being good? Creative commons-licensed image from Flickr user Robert S. Donovan. The post Protect the Right to Innovate: Free Uber and the Taxi Industry from Regulations appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

The newest edition of The Undercurrent is still available to order, and will arrive on your doorstep in the end of October! Place your order by clicking here, or e-mail your name, address, and the number of copies you would like to [email protected]. You can preview this edition here. The extended deadline to order is Monday, October 27th, so get yours today! The Undercurrent is sold at or below our cost to print and ship the papers. Here are the prices for the Spring 2014 issue (including shipping and handling): 250 copies $30.00 500 copies $60.00 750 copies $90.00 1000 copies $125.00 1500 copies $150.00 Campus clubs are encouraged to purchase copies, but If you would like to hand out copies and cannot afford to do so, please let us know. We may be able to find a donor to sponsor your distribution efforts. Send your request by e-mail to: [email protected]. On the other hand, if you have no time to distribute, we would greatly appreciate a donation. We’ll gladly distribute to a college of your choosing, or select a deserving campus on your behalf. This issue will cover the “checking your privilege” movement, and other hot topics such as the minimum wage, the war in Gaza, and the recent Hobby Lobby decision. TU Print is a great way to bring pro-liberty ideas to your campus. We’ll help you locate distribution zones, and/or you can use the paper as a giveaway at meetings, tabling events, and speaking engagements. Support your favorite Objectivist student organization and order today! The post Deadline extended! Preview the Fall 2014 issue of TU Print! appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

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The newest edition of The Undercurrent is now available to order, and will arrive on your doorstep in the beginning of October! Place your order by clicking here, or e-mail your name, address, and the number of copies you would like to [email protected]. The deadline to order is Monday, September 29th, so get yours today! The Undercurrent is sold at or below our cost to print and ship the papers. Here are the prices for the Spring 2014 issue (including shipping and handling): 250 copies $30.00 500 copies $60.00 750 copies $90.00 1000 copies $125.00 1500 copies $150.00 Campus clubs are encouraged to purchase copies, but If you would like to hand out copies and cannot afford to do so, please let us know. We may be able to find a donor to sponsor your distribution efforts. Send your request by e-mail to: [email protected]. On the other hand, if you have no time to distribute, we would greatly appreciate a donation. We’ll gladly distribute to a college of your choosing, or select a deserving campus on your behalf. This issue will cover the “checking your privilege” movement, and other hot topics such as the minimum wage, the war in Gaza, and the recent Hobby Lobby decision. TU Print is a great way to bring pro-liberty ideas to your campus. We’ll help you locate distribution zones, and/or you can use the paper as a giveaway at meetings, tabling events, and speaking engagements. Support your favorite Objectivist student organization and order today! The post We’re Now Taking Orders for the Fall 2014 Edition of The Undercurrent! appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

This summer, the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was the subject of much public controversy and discussion. In that case, employer Hobby Lobby challenged provisions of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”) which mandated that certain corporations cover birth control for female employees. Hobby Lobby argued that the mandates violated the company’s sincerely held religious beliefs. In particular, Hobby Lobby argued that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”) provided strict protection for its right to the free exercise of religion, and that the ACA’s mandates were correspondingly illegal. The Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby. Though some pundits have been quick to applaud the decision as a victory for personal freedom, deeper consideration reveals a more ominous result. Religious freedom has long been held as a cherished and respected right in the United States. The Founding Fathers—inspired by an Enlightenment philosophy which stressed freedom of conscience and independence of the mind—had a deep appreciation for the importance of religious freedom as a political right. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, requested before his death that his authorship of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom be included among his life’s greatest achievements on his tombstone. It’s no surprise, then, that the First Amendment requires that Congress refrain from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion (the Free Exercise Clause). But the First Amendment also provides, specifically, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” (the Establishment Clause). This Clause has been generally interpreted as forbidding the government from legislating on or otherwise intervening in matters of religion. On this interpretation, the government can neither favor one religion over another, nor can it act to promote religion as such (as against no religion)—it must take a hands-off approach to religion. Though in the past, Supreme Court decisions have required the government to demonstrate a “compelling” interest before burdening a person’s free exercise of religion, the Clause lost vigor in the 1980s and 1990s, when some of the Court’s decisions weakened constitutional protections for religious freedom (notably, in a controversial case, the Supreme Court upheld governmental practices that burdened Native Americans’ use of psychoactive substances in connection with religious rituals). Congress responded in 1993 by enacting strict statutory protection for religious freedom in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which expressly precludes government from “substantial[ly] burden[ing] a person’s free exercise of religion . . . .” In the Hobby Lobby opinion, the Court specifically held that the ACA’s contraceptive mandates “substantially burdened the exercise of religion” by requiring individuals “to engage in conduct that seriously violates their sincere religious belief that life begins at conception,” or suffer “severe economic consequences.” In sum, the Court held that Hobby Lobby’s religiously motivated opposition to the ACA warranted a special exemption from the law. The Court’s decision thus involves not only a clash of litigants, but an apparent clash of principles as well. The Free Exercise Clause and RFRA seem to imply that those who hold religious beliefs deserve special protection and should not be legislatively compelled to violate those beliefs. But the Establishment Clause seems to say just the opposite—that citizens are to be treated equally before the law, regardless of their respective ideologies. At root, the decision reaffirmed the underlying premise of RFRA, and of the First Amendment as currently interpreted: that freedom of religion is a primary, stand-alone right, worthy of special protection. Rather than holding true to the principles underlying the Establishment Clause, the Court held that Hobby Lobby’s beliefs were to be given special status under the law because they were religious ones. That’s a dangerous premise to adopt, because it misconstrues entirely the right to religious freedom and its place among the hierarchy of individual rights. In treating religious freedom as a primary, the Court invites the possibility of a conflict between the Establishment Clause and the freedom to practice one’s religion. But the prohibition of state-established religion is in fact a means to the protection of religious free exercise. Many of the first colonists came to the New World in search of the freedom to practice their religious beliefs because they were seeking asylum from persecution by the state-sanctioned Church of England. The government does not need to sponsor a church to sponsor religion and infringe on religious free exercise. This is why the Supreme Court was wise to rule on the side of the Jewish families who sued New York state officials who composed an official prayer for recitation in public schools. By its hands-off approach to religion in general, the Establishment Clause thus helps to protect the individual’s free exercise thereof—whatever its form. The Court’s decision in Hobby Lobby not only compromises religious liberty, but the broader right to ideological liberty from which it derives. By favoring the religious as against the non-religious, the Court reaffirms the establishment of favored and disfavored classes of persons based solely on whether individuals believe in a mystical deity or force. But the right to religious freedom is a necessary side-effect of the more fundamental right to personal liberty in the pursuit of happiness, which persons of all intellectual stripes should enjoy. At the core, we need the right to personal liberty in order to produce the values that make our survival possible, and to pursue the occupations and ends that make our lives worth living. An artist, for instance, needs the liberty to paint, or write, or play music, in order to sustain and enrich his life in the pursuit of his happiness. His rights to believe in whatever god he likes, and to paint grand murals honoring that deity, are only leaves off the branch of personal liberty on the whole tree of rights that makes his life possible. We need ideological liberty—the freedom to practice whole systems of ideas—for these same reasons. Consider the persecution of Galileo, when he proposed his heliocentric theory of the solar system. Galileo sought to produce a coherent model of the universe, in accordance with his own astronomical observations. This scientific approach came into direct conflict with the established conclusions of ecclesiastical scholars and the Vatican. Without the right to openly seek and advocate the ideas that would help him to flourish and succeed, Galileo was condemned to imprisonment until his eventual death. The right to ideological liberty would have protected Galileo’s freedom to act on his beliefs—whether right or wrong in the eyes of his fellow men. The freedom to be religious—or not—comes from that same basic right to ideological freedom, which comes from the more general right to personal liberty. In fact, ideological liberty is the common thread that ties together our First Amendment rights, from freedom of speech, to freedom of the press, to the right to petition the government, to freedom of assembly, to freedom of religion. Unfortunately, personal liberty has been eroding in this country for over a century. Most recently, public revelations have confirmed that the NSA has been conducting widespread domestic surveillance and data-mining on millions of innocent citizens for many years. The Controlled Substances Act dictates what we may and may not put into our own bodies. The Federal Communications Commission dictates what we may and may not say in the public forum. The Supreme Court has held that under the Interstate Commerce Clause, Congress has the authority to regulate even local, non-commercial activity, effectively restraining consenting adults from engaging in completely voluntary activity. The ACA itself orders citizens through an “individual mandate” to purchase health insurance—whether they want it or not. The Federal Election Campaign Act puts obscene restrictions on our right to assemble to petition elected officials for a redress of grievances, by limiting the amount we may contribute to political candidates and organizations that win our support. These examples barely manage to scratch the surface of the erosions to personal liberty the past century has wrought. The Hobby Lobby decision continues that trend. To draw an analogy, suppose that the Supreme Court upheld a pornographer’s right to free speech, while denying that same protection to political protestors. Would such a decision be applauded as a victory for the more fundamental right to free speech? Absolutely not, because such a decision would both compromise and cheapen the very concept of an unalienable right to free speech by giving special groups the permission to enjoy that freedom, while denying it to others. The same is true here of the Supreme Court’s treatment of religious free exercise in the context of the right to personal liberty. If anything is to be called unjust about Hobby Lobby’s being forced to pay for the birth control of female employees, it’s not that the company’s right to religious liberty was violated. Rather, it’s the more fundamental injustice of the ACA’s forcing unchosen terms onto a mutually agreed-upon employer-employee relationship, in violation of the personal liberty of consenting adults. The Court’s decision did nothing to affirm the right to this liberty. To think of the Hobby Lobby decision as a victory for your individual rights is thus to accept a pittance in exchange for your sovereignty. By carving out a special exception to the ACA’s contraceptive mandates for religious freedom, the Supreme Court treats religious liberty like a stand-alone permission slip for favored groups with favored beliefs. Because of its derivative nature, religious freedom cannot stand alone in this manner. A leaf cannot remain suspended without the tree from which it stems. And to give religious freedom this kind of special status, without protecting the more fundamental rights to ideological and personal freedom that are its roots, is to undermine the entire concept of our right to liberty. Thus, while the Supreme Court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby may be viewed as a particularized victory for Hobby Lobby, it represents a broader defeat for the concept of our fundamental right to personal liberty. And battles should never be cheered for their place in a losing war. Creative commons image by Flickr user Hitchster. The post Permission Slips are Not Rights: How Hobby Lobby’s Victory Cheapens the Right to Personal Liberty appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

A recent article in The Atlantic sheds light on the so-called “adjunct crisis” in today’s universities. Universities are relying more and more on adjunct professors, the part-time professors who comprise some 50% of the academic workforce he article goes on to allege that the cause of the crisis is the “corporatization” of the university, the process of reorganizing the university to make it more financially viable. When applied to employment decisions, this system allegedly encourages colleges to seek adjuncts who are willing to work for low pay with few of the privileges reserved for traditional tenured professors. Among other aspects of the crisis, the article alleges that one of the worst side effects of the crisis is that adjunct professors, are not able to contribute to the “research output of American universities.” On the contrary, the “adjunct crisis” has not grown out of the so-called corporatization of the university. Instead, the crisis is largely a product of the very assumption which both the author of the article and universities across the nation have swallowed: that research is valuable as an end in itself. It is this assumption that has led to the widely established practice of granting tenure based largely on one’s ability to publish research in journals. As things stand, many faculty members are encouraged to conduct research rather than focus on teaching. While research is celebrated and prioritized, teaching remains the source of economic value via tuition dollars, and in turn pays employee salaries. Because tenured faculty are expected to spend large amounts of their time researching, universities must find someone to staff classrooms. Adjuncts exist to fill this role. They do much of the productive work that subsidizes a class of researchers who are supposed to be discovering knowledge for its own sake. In essence, the teaching work of adjuncts subsidizes the research work of tenured faculty, in a way that leads critics to characterize their relationship as parallel to that between the feudal serf and his lord. The assumption that research is inherently worth conducting has led to the creation of what left-leaning, pro-labor academics would otherwise describe as a Marxist dystopia where, as another article in The Atlantic notes, you have: “two classes: tenured professors who are decently paid . . . and adjuncts who are paid at the poverty level.” This view that research is an end in itself is born of the Platonic notion that the highest and “purest” knowledge is not useful in the practical world, but valuable only as something to be contemplated. Plato considered knowledge of the physical world to be unworthy of contemplation and fit only for the lowest classes. For Plato, the highest purpose of the wise was to pursue this pure knowledge. In his view, the pursuit of such knowledge is so important that philosophers deserve to exist at the top of the social pyramid to be supported by the productive class of society, over whom they as philosopher kings would rule. Today’s academy is structured along similar lines for the purpose of maintaining an aristocratic class of researchers. Despite budgetary pressures, tenured faculty cling tenaciously to their positions in the modern academy. While tenure lines are sometimes eliminated when tenured professors retire, tenured professors rarely find themselves out of a job. And in order to keep tenured professors employed, it is necessary to retain a bevy of adjunct-serfs to generate income by teaching classes. If the research work of tenured faculty correlated directly to gains in knowledge which could be taught in the classroom, their “privilege” might be warranted. After all, professors should remain masters of the subjects they teach. But because research is thought to be an end in and of itself, it is usually not even practical for pedagogical purposes. Research that does not facilitate undergraduate education can be of real value, but only when it is a means to an end rather than an end by itself. Research by a scientist might lead to a theoretical breakthrough that eventually permits the invention of a brighter method of lighting, a stronger alloy of steel or a cheaper source of electricity. Research by a literature professor might enable readers to appreciate a previously neglected work of literature and learn to see the world through a new pair of eyes, to become better judges of character, and to question their own behavior. In both cases, research produces knowledge which human beings can use to improve their lives. But in today’s university, too much research does not seem to be very useful. While it can be difficult to decide if specific areas of research are justified, a recent article (reviewed here) showed that as much as 40% of published academic research is not cited—not even by other academics—demonstrating that in general, academic research is not fulfilling a critical function in today’s universities. The article also argues that today’s academics focus “on methodology, often to the exclusion of substance” and that increasingly specialized academics write only for people studying in their field—not for people outside their discipline. At the same time, research reviewed in the Chronicle of Higher Education has found that the amount of research produced annually continues to grow steadily. This should decisively close the door on claims that the adjunct crisis is producing a research shortage: if anything, there is an overabundance of research—much of which is of questionable merit. Universities err when they value research over teaching. While tenured professors gain status and wealth, adjuncts find themselves underemployed and their students find themselves with teachers who have little incentive to dedicate themselves to teaching. Research can be valuable, but it should be understood as a part of the educational process. After all, the purpose of education is to enable students to succeed in the world beyond the university, both as workers and as happy, fulfilled human beings. Research treated as an end in itself would be unsustainable in a university that was responsive to market forces, one where expenditure would be tied directly to the value received by students paying tuition. If anything, teaching professors (including adjuncts) alike stand to gain from a structure that would allow the university to respond to the market and provide the service students demand, namely, education. Instead of a system built on the premise that knowledge is an end in itself, a proper system would be built on the premise that knowledge is a means to an end. This would mean that those who transmitted knowledge effectively or discovered new, pedagogically relevant knowledge would be rewarded based on the merit of their efforts and achievements. Research irrelevant to the university’s educational goals might easily be carried out elsewhere. As many on the left have noted, at present, corporations sponsor research in the academy—research that is often irrelevant to the university’s goal of education. But if corporations are already paying for innovative research, what would stop them from funding it themselves if universities didn’t offer such an ancillary service? After all, as NPR tacitly notes, a great deal of research used to be very effectively conducted by private corporations before the rise of the modern research university. Universities need to seriously reconsider the tenure system as it presently exists. Perhaps tenure should be retained, but be given to effective teaching professors as well as academics who produced pedagogically relevant research. Or universities might decide to adopt a system in which professors sign long-term contracts, but are reviewed at the end of those contracts to determine if they have been of value to the institution. Another alternative might be to completely reconceive the division of labor in academia by having different professors fulfill different functions as graders, lecturers, administrators or writers. In any case, instead of protesting for a living wage and other benefits, adjuncts need to be trying to reform the university system as a whole. But reforming the current system will require professors of all stripes to check their premises and ask hard questions about the purpose of the university in order to understand the real value they have to offer. Creative commons-licensed image from Flickr user Scott Granneman. The post The Cause of the Adjunct Crisis: How a Research Focus is Destroying Higher Education appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has been pushed out of the headlines, replaced by stories of bloodshed elsewhere in the world. But the conflict continues on, as one ceasefire after another is broken (always by a barrage of Hamas rockets, as recently as this morning). But we cannot ignore the story, if only because it raises important questions that too many people try too hard not to answer. Emotions run high in any controversy about life or death, and rightly so. It is easy to want to take no stand, throw up one’s hands, and say that there is no answer, or to feign neutrality and say that both sides are at fault. So it takes real courage to see through the haze of wartime emotion to choose a side to defend. In this war, there is a moral principle on which one can and should take a stand. The principle is: “Do not blame the victim.” Who is the victim in this conflict? To date, over 1,900 Gazans have died, while only 67 Israelis (most of them soldiers) have met a similar fate. Depending on whom you ask, anywhere between half to a hefty majority of the Gazan casualties are “civilians.” These numbers have become the focus of the debate. They blot out of most people’s minds questions about who is the aggressor and who is the victim in the war. But the numbers don’t answer those questions. Some have said that the proximate cause of the current conflict was the June 12th kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers. Hamas applauded these kidnappers and has refused to rein in the splinter groups who supported them. But even before the kidnapping and Israel’s subsequent crackdown on known terrorists in the West Bank, militants in Gaza had been firing rockets into Israeli territory for months, as early in 2014 as March. And this was only the most recent attack this year. Almost as soon as a truce was negotiated in November of 2012, rocket attacks from Gaza immediately and repeatedly broke the truce. Of course one cannot understand the cause of this latest series of conflicts without evaluating the wider context of the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians, and that is a question we cannot pursue here. But even those who think that Israel is the victim in this conflict cannot get past the scale of the casualties suffered in the war. Gaza is a tiny, densely populated urban enclave pressed up against the sea. Israel knows that if it tries to oppose Hamas with force, it kills Gazan civilians. And nearly everyone agrees that this makes the choice morally dubious. The only disagreement is about whether Israel can afford to avoid its allegedly imperfect choice. This conventional reasoning is difficult to resist, as long as one accepts a number of conventional moral assumptions. But let’s take a deep breath and ask some hard questions that challenge these assumptions. If a bloodthirsty maniac aims his gun at you and you have every reason to think he’s about to shoot, do you think you have the right to shoot him first? Most people would say yes. But why? Some say that you have the right to kill the maniac, but only because, being a maniac, he might kill many other people. But what if he only has a quarrel with you? Should you then lay down your life to avoid killing him? Or do you have a real right to self-defense, a right to your own life? Many will agree that there is a right to self-defense. As the victim of aggression, you have the right to fight back. But here’s the test for whether you really agree with this idea. What if ten or even a hundred maniacs come at you with guns? Suppose you are an expert marksman and you can eliminate each one. Do you still have the right to kill this many people in defense of your one single life? Some philosophers think self-defense needs to be “proportionate.” To kill a hundred people to save just one sounds dramatically disproportionate. So if you still think you have the right to do this, you must agree that the morality of self-defense is not a numbers game; that it is not about calculating the effect of your decision on some “greater happiness.” If a hundred killers threaten your life, they are evil and do not deserve to live. As an individual who is the victim of aggression, you have the right to protect the value of your own precious individual life, even if it means opposing a whole collective mass of killers. The right to self-defense is an absolute individual right. None of this is any different for soldiers protecting innocent citizens from aggressors. If hundreds of Hamas militants fire rockets, and through their sheer ineptitude, only threaten a smaller number of Israeli citizens, Israeli soldiers have the right to kill hundreds of Hamas militants. But let’s ask one more hypothetical question. What if that bloodthirsty maniac who is training his gun on you also has an innocent hostage, so that the only way to shoot back is to risk the death of the hostage? Do you have the right to shoot back even though you may also kill the hostage? If you think you don’t have that right, why not? Why should you lay down your life to protect the hostage? Why is the hostage’s life more important than yours? It is your one and only irreplaceable life. You don’t get to congratulate yourself for saving the hostage from your grave. If you think that the right to self-defense is an absolute individual right, you should agree you have the right to shoot back. As individuals we aren’t responsible for the evil choices of others. If a thief running from the police steals a car, he rather than the police is responsible for that theft. If he injures innocent bystanders while in the car chase, he rather than the police is responsible. And if he takes a hostage and threatens the police, then if the police injure or kill the hostage while defending themselves, he, the hostage-taker, is still responsible. To blame yourself for the death of any hostage when you are battling for your own life is to blame the victim of aggression. The death of innocents in war is a moral crime. The responsibility for the crime rests with the aggressors, not with those who defend themselves against aggression. Any innocent civilians in Gaza are the hostages of the tyrannical Hamas regime. If a disproportionate number of them die as Israelis attempt to defend themselves, it is a testament to the scale of Hamas’ hostage-taking (and to the ineptitude of their military capabilities against Israel). Israel too has the right to defend itself. A nation that surrenders itself to hostage takers should not console itself that it is at least keeping the world safe for hostages. On the contrary, by bowing to the demands of thugs who take human shields, it only encourages thugs to take more and more of these shields whenever they want a license to get away with murder. This is the world in which we now live. Hamas knows that it cannot win any military confrontation with Israel. Why, then, does it start these wars? To bait Israel into defending itself and to killing Gazan civilians, and thereby to impugn Israel’s moral standing with the world. Israel can refuse to take this bait—not by refusing to defend itself, but by insisting on its moral right to defend itself, and reminding the world not to blame the victim. Creative commons-licensed photo courtesy of flickr user Israel Defense Forces. The post Don’t Blame the Victims in the Gaza War—Recognize Their Right to Self-Defense appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Imagine that you are talking with a friend about some controversial topic of the day—for example, immigration or the conflict in the Middle East. After you make a particularly incisive point, your friend claims that you aren’t intelligent enough to know what you’re talking about. Because of your race. How would you react to such a charge? Doubtless most readers would take offense and question its basis. While few today will try to dismiss your views on the grounds of your race, there are many who will do so by appealing to other accidents of your birth. They even have a catchphrase. That catchphrase is “check your privilege.” In April, Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang set the internet ablaze with a provocative missive in a student publication (later reprinted in Time) challenging that catchphrase. Reportedly, Fortgang had been urged to “check his privilege” after defending his conservative political views on welfare and the national debt. In his piece, he recounted the “privileges” of his Polish Jewish ancestors who were persecuted by the Nazis and Soviets. He implied, of course, that they weren’t actually privileged: because his family had to overcome such obstacles, he suggested that his views should be taken more seriously. In the controversy that ensued, critics of Fortgang argued that he failed to understand the import of the “check your privilege” mantra. Kristen Howerton, writing in The Huffington Post, claims that the phrase neither asks people to apologize for their privileges, nor dismisses those people’s opinions on the grounds of their privilege. Instead, she says “it’s a way of reminding someone that they may not know or understand what they are talking about.” Others critics of Fortgang have echoed this point. Perhaps the “privilege checkers” don’t want the privileged to apologize for their privilege or surrender their opinions unilaterally. Even so, their challenge is not simply that we remember the trivial and obvious fact that some people are more privileged than others. When they ask us to check our privilege, they mean it in the sense that we should check our privilege at the door when we engage in a policy debate. What would this mean? Howerton says we fail to check our privilege when we are “insensitive to the life experiences of others.” She lists a series of opinions that she seems to think one could not hold without being insensitive in this way: for example, one is being insensitive if one thinks the black community overreacted to the Trayvon Martin story, or that gays should stop complaining about marriage rights, or that handicapped parking spaces are unfair. Etc. Sometimes we can make mistakes by failing to empathize with the position of another. If a teacher prepares an exam that would be easy for him but impossible for his students, it may be because the teacher unjustifiably assumes that the students know more than they possibly could given their education so far. Or if students get angry at a teacher for not returning graded papers right away, it may be because the students unjustifiably assume that the teacher has plenty of free time. A failure to empathize can also lead to disagreement in politics—but it is not the only reason. Perhaps some people oppose welfare programs because they think the life of indigent people would be easy in the absence of such programs. But many oppose these programs not because they foolishly think that the indigent have it easy, but because they don’t think that the indigent deserve to live an easier life at the expense of others. Whether you agree with that or not, it’s not a belief that clearly results from a failure to empathize. It’s a philosophical belief informed by one’s deepest convictions. Are our philosophical beliefs nothing more than products of our privilege? Many obsessed with privilege-checking seem to assume that they are. Even esthetic opinions cannot escape the reach of their criticism. Even before the Fortgang controversy, a feminist journalist who said she admired a popular television show even though its cast lacked racial diversity was asked to check her privilege. So was a politician who defended the journalist by saying that griping about privilege never helped women to advance. So were the pundits who agreed with the politician. And so on. The idea that privilege blinds us to reality, that our philosophical ideas are rationalizations for our social status, is not a new one. It goes back at least as far as the writings of a renowned 19th century German political theorist. He famously argued that ideas are byproducts of our class interests. So a defender of capitalism may be convinced that his system maximizes freedom and prosperity, but his position can be dismissed as mere “bourgeois ideology.” The current obsession with privilege-checking simply generalizes from the critique of economic privilege to critique the privileges of race, gender, and sexual orientation, along with all the other categories of modern identity politics. But if we shouldn’t attribute an intelligence deficit to members of a disadvantaged race, why should we attribute an objectivity deficit to the advantaged members of society? It is controversial enough to argue that there is a genetic basis for the speed and scope of one’s intellectual processing. To maintain that genetic or environmental factors (especially advantageous ones) create inevitable biases in the quality and validity of one’s philosophical thinking should raise the reddest of red flags. If I believe only what my upper-middle class parents have raised me to believe—say, to reject the welfare state—then my view results from an appeal to irrelevant authority, not from an appeal to logic. But I can be critical of what my parents tell me, and evaluate it as logical or illogical—even when those beliefs support the right to enjoy my social status. I can decide that my parents’ arguments against the welfare state don’t make sense, and reject their views. But if I can do that, why can’t I also decide that I don’t agree with what my parents say just because they say it, but that I agree with it for reasons of my own? As long as we are capable of independently evaluating the logic of a position, we are capable of objectivity—regardless of how the position complements my social position. But if I can’t evaluate an argument for or against some political position simply on the basis of its logic and free from prejudice, I lack the ability to be objective. Then I don’t have real intellectual autonomy, which is the essence of human free will. But privilege-checkers think that some political or cultural beliefs result from bias simply because of their content, simply because they support the rights of some members of society who happen to be privileged. This entails a repudiation of human intellectual autonomy and therefore, of free will. But we are intellectually autonomous and we can be objective. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be able to identify any belief as a prejudice. But even privilege-checkers think we can do this, as they are intent on pointing out ways of avoiding prejudice. Unless they are somehow very special and the only ones who can avoid prejudice, all human beings can form objective, unprejudiced beliefs. If we really want to combat bigotry and prejudice, we need to follow the advice of another, somewhat underappreciated philosopher, and check our premises, not our privilege. That is, we need to identify the major starting points of our arguments and see if they are supported by the facts and by an integrated view of reality. We began to overcome racism when we checked the premise that African slaves were not rational human beings. We began to overcome sexism when we checked the premise that women were ruled by emotions not rationality. Before these doctrines were rejected by society at large, these premises were usually checked first by the intellectual leaders of the day—who happened to be straight white men in positions of privilege. If they could break free from prejudice through science and logic, we can as well. Interestingly, we should reject racism and sexism because their most basic premises deny human intellectual autonomy. Both see individual human beings as slaves of their genetics and environment. The privilege checkers who say we cannot help but see the world through the filter of our privilege share this premise. It is the most crucial premise to check—and reject. Just as we are free to reject our parents’ beliefs, we are free to reject the philosophers who reject the existence of that freedom—and of the many catch phrases they have spawned. If you found the ideas in this article provocative, you can learn more about them at The Undercurrent’s Student Conference, this coming fall. Students interested in attending can apply here. This article was funded by a donor to The Undercurrent who chose the “Personalized article” level of support. If you would like to see TU produce more articles like this, please visit our donation page. Creative commons-licensed image from Flickr user no lurvin here. The post “Check Your Privilege” Insults Your Intellectual Autonomy appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Applications are now open for The Undercurrent’s Student Conference! This Fall, hundreds of students will gather to learn the fundamentals of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism from Objectivism’s greatest experts. The theme of TUSC 2014: “Individualism and the Case for Liberty.” * Are you the leader of an Objectivist student club? Are you interested in starting a club? If you answered YES to either of these questions, you qualify to join the exclusive leadership training on Day 1 of the conference. Learn development tips from some of the liberty movement’s most successful activists and get to know your fellow club leaders. Not an Objectivist club leader, but still a fan of Ayn Rand? You’ll be invited to join the general conference and get to know other right-of-center students who share your same passion for developing a freer society. The conference will be held in the Washington, D.C. area, from October 11th-13th. For two days, hundreds of students will attend talks on leadership, collaboration, and various issues surrounding Objectivism delivered by an exciting group of Objectivist intellectuals and leaders. We are also pleased to announce that support from our generous donors has allowed us to offer travel scholarships to the first thirty accepted applicants! Early application deadline: July 23rd (Due to the limited number of scholarships available, students applying before this date will have the best shot at receiving one.) General application deadline: August 6th Late application deadline: August 20th Apply today and share this link with your friends and club members on Facebook and Twitter! * Lodging is FREE and travel scholarships are available for early applicants. The post Applications open for the 2014 The Undercurrent Student Conference! appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Debate has raged ever since Obama proposed that the minimum wage be increased to $10.10 per hour. According to the Congressional Budget Office this would result in the loss of 500,000 jobs, increasing unemployment and a large number of individuals in poverty. Other sources say increasing the minimum wage will reduce poverty, raising the income of low-salary individuals, reducing their use of food stamps and welfare. In many states, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart workers have protested or gone on strike demanding higher wages. Most recently, hundreds of workers stormed the McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois demanding the right to unionize and a $15 per hour wage. To evaluate this controversy, I have reflected on my own work experience. Right out of high school I would have loved to work for more than $8.25 per hour, but I now realize the benefits of working a minimum wage job are more than the meager source of income. Minimum wage workers don’t earn much. But by paying them so little, employers can afford to take a chance on workers who would otherwise not be able to get a job, because they lack a degree, connections, or advanced skills. Though minimum wage jobs do not require advanced skills, they give workers an opportunity to learn skills. By learning valuable skills and acquiring work experience, workers are preparing themselves to compete for even better jobs. Once I graduated from high school and found a job to start earning money for college, it was much easier to find a second job, to gain more hours, and acquire better employment with higher wages. These jobs also provide workers the opportunity to advance within a company. At both of my previous jobs, within 2 to 3 years of working there, hourly workers became assistant and department managers. Many establishments such Target, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, KFC, and Burger King even offer college scholarships to student workers. If I had continued working at these jobs I would have earned an employee scholarship. While the monetary compensation of a minimum wage job is small, the opportunity for character growth is huge. The most successful workers at minimum wage jobs are the ones who treat their job as if it is their ideal career. They work the most hours, develop one-on-one relationships with their supervisors, and come in when they are not scheduled. They look at their job as an opportunity not only to learn skills but also to develop valuable character traits such as accountability, independence, and reliability. Today’s job market is extremely competitive and demands the most from jobseekers. Particularly for students, a minimum wage job provides a great opportunity to prepare for the challenges they will face searching for their ideal career after graduation. To get ahead one has to be assertive and a minimum wage job provides a chance to do that. For these reasons minimum wage jobs are of great value to workers, and they should be grateful for them. While minimum wage jobs are very beneficial to workers, the reason employers hire workers is to profit from their labor. How much a worker is paid should (and would in a free market) be a reflection of their value to their employer. Some workers are better at their jobs than others. If workers are to be paid justly for their labor, more valuable workers should be paid more and lower skilled workers should be paid less. The more you offer as a worker, the more you deserve. The establishment of the minimum wage by law is thought to ensure that workers receive just compensation for their labor. But workers should not be paid more than they are worth, and yet minimum wage laws mandate that some of them be employed for more than they are worth. The attitude of many minimum wage workers is that they should be earning more, since the CEOs of their establishments earn so much, while they earn so little. The implication of this attitude is that the value of CEOs is comparatively not much greater than that of its workers. After all, without workers, CEOs wouldn’t be able to run their companies. And yet, without corporations like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, minimum wage workers wouldn’t have jobs at all. If someone hadn’t created McDonald’s, Burger King, or all the other establishments that employ minimum wage workers, these workers wouldn’t be able to earn an income as easily by working. Stocking groceries and flipping burgers are valuable to other consumers only because companies like McDonald’ s and Wal-Mart have created an infrastructure and distribution network that uses workers’ skills to provide a valuable commodity to customers. Minimum wage workers, therefore, should be grateful to these companies and their CEOs. The fact that the companies and not their employees make flipping burgers and bagging groceries commercially valuable is the reason that workers can be so easily replaced. In many cases, machines can provide service as effectively as or more effectively than workers. Since machines can provide quality service at lower costs, there is a greater incentive for employers to use them, and many chains are already implementing touch-screen kiosks to replace cashiers. If they are replaced by machines, workers will not only lose a source of income, but also valuable opportunities. A machine won’t learn anything from working at McDonald’s, but a person can, all while earning money. If you’re ambitious, what you can gain from a minimum wage job is much more than an income. If you take advantage of that, you won’t be stuck working minimum wage for long. Eventually, jobs such as bagging groceries and taking food orders will be eliminated. These jobs will be replaced the same way farming and factory jobs have been replaced. But instead of being angry about the elimination of these jobs workers should be thankful for the innovators creating new technology. Current minimum wage jobs are the result of technology and innovation. Workers should be grateful that these companies have created these jobs and use them as opportunities to earn more than a minimum wage. Creative commons image by Flickr user Annette Bernhardt. The post Minimum Wage Jobs are Opportunities to be Thankful For appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

<p style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://theundercurrent.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/800px-Leaving_courthouse_on_first_day_of_gay_marriage_in_Washington.jpg"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-5541" alt="800px-Leaving_courthouse_on_first_day_of_gay_marriage_in_Washington" src="http://theundercurrent.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/800px-Leaving_courthouse_on_first_day_of_gay_marriage_in_Washington.jpg" width="560" height="370" /></a></p> <p style="text-align: left;">The proponents of legalizing same-sex marriage should congratulate themselves on a number of victories in recent years. The fact that some 17 US states now allow gay marriage—and laws banning gay marriage have been challenged by courts in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samesex_marriage_in_USA.svg">7 additional states</a>—is making a real difference in people’s lives on a day-to-day basis. However, if this freedom is to be extended to all the remaining 33 states, its supporters will need to sharpen their arguments to eliminate a number of vulnerabilities in their position.</p> <p>Many people argue against bans on gay marriage by framing the issue as one of marriage <i>equality</i>. They seek to extend this right to gays because it is a right currently enjoyed by heterosexuals. This approach is generally consistent with other causes on the Left, which also crusades against pay discrimination on the basis of gender and against discrimination by restaurant owners towards patrons on the basis of race or sexual orientation.</p> <p>The first problem with current approaches to defending same-sex marriage is that the nature of marriage itself requires discrimination. We would not condemn the individual of discriminating tastes in a spouse, who dedicatedly searches for a partner he respects and loves more than anyone else. We <i>would </i>condemn the marriage entered into carelessly, thoughtlessly, and therefore <i>indiscriminately</i>.</p> <p>Let’s imagine three people for a moment: Greg, Jane and Jessica. Greg wants to marry Jane, but Jane refuses because she’s not attracted to men, and rather prefers to marry Jessica.</p> <p>When you think about it, a true anti-discrimination stance on marriage would mean that if Greg could demonstrate that his marriage proposal was denied on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, etc., he could sue on the grounds that he has been denied a valuable marriage. Of course, no one advocates this.</p> <p>One might respond that the government specifically ought to ban only the kind of discrimination which denies people things they need, like jobs, food, education and such. But by what standard do people need jobs, food and education, but not marriage? Gay marriage advocates <a href="http://lesbianlife.about.com/cs/wedding/a/unionvmarriage.htm">support</a> <a href="http://gaylife.about.com/od/samesexmarriag1/ss/legalunions_3.htm">their</a> <a href="http://www.revelandriot.com/resources/marriage-equality">position</a> by citing the ways in which couples need a legally recognized marriage to live together prosperously. If the problem with outlawing it is that it discriminates and deprives someone of what they need, why not also outlaw a discriminating choice of a spouse? Greg could argue that his happiness and prosperity depend upon his winning Jane’s hand in marriage.</p> <p>But this represents a completely backwards perspective. Gays should have the right to marry not because of the value of nondiscrimination or equality, but because they have the right to be free to live and associate with others on their own terms. No individual in a civilized society is beholden to a single employer, restaurant, or school for the resources they need to survive. If an individual is fired by an employer—or rejected by a potential spouse—he can seek another who will agree to hire or marry him. But an individual has no replacement for his own life, and that’s why he needs to be left free from interference so he can pursue it by offering his best in exchange for the best that others have to offer. If a man can convince a consenting adult to hire him or to marry him, he should be free to do it.</p> <p>Now, a number of marriage equality advocates are able to sidestep this first pitfall by asserting that surely, the <i>government</i> has no call to discriminate against gays. After all, aren’t all individuals equal in rights?</p> <p>This leads to the final, fatal flaw in the currently popular argument, and indeed any defense of same-sex marriage in the name of “marriage equality.” As a Maryland court <a href="http://mdcourts.gov/opinions/coa/2007/44a06.pdf">pointed out</a> when it delayed Maryland same-sex marriage rights for six years, same-sex marriage bans do not separate individuals into separate classes: under such laws, all individuals, gay and straight, are allowed to marry, so long as they marry an individual of the opposite sex. The fact that the argument for gay marriage can be undermined by such objections demonstrates that current argument isn’t getting to the heart of this issue, and a new argument is needed.</p> <p>People have the right to marry because it is the moral right of every individual to pursue his or her own happiness. This right requires that the government identify the nature of the marriage contract and enforce its conditions. Without marriage, couples seeking a level of commitment extending throughout life would not have any legal recourse in case of a breach of the terms of the arrangement. Many relationships get along fine without a legally binding agreement, but people have a right to commit themselves to such agreements in order to plan their future.</p> <p>Mountains of evidence demonstrating that homosexual love is very real, even commonplace, have squashed any reasonable moral objection to homosexual relationships as such. A marriage literally starts with the vows of love of two lovers, and this is a sign that we must take the pursuit of romantic values to be the defining element of marriage. Thus we should extend its applicability to all couples, including same-sex ones.</p> <p>People have the right to marry not because everyone should get the same deal out of life, but because the freedom to choose one’s spouse by one’s own standards necessarily includes the freedom to choose the best. The freedom of every individual to choose the best, happiest life he or she can possibly lead is the fundamental basis of a free society, and is the only standard which can grant full, passionate moral authority to the cause of extending same-sex marriage rights.</p> <p><em style="line-height: 1.5em;">Creative commons-licensed <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leaving_courthouse_on_first_day_of_gay_marriage_in_Washington.JPG">image </a>from Wikimedia Commons. </em></p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="http://theundercurrent.org/gay-marriage-must-win-appeals-freedom-equality/">Gay Marriage Must Win Through Appeals to Freedom, Not Equality</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="http://theundercurrent.org">The Undercurrent</a>.</p><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:JUhcmGiK9AQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=JUhcmGiK9AQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:WkrIHMmXu7Y"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:WkrIHMmXu7Y" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:V_sGLiPBpWU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=ICpVXPmHSDw:KjH8IPgPCY8:l6gmwiTKsz0"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=l6gmwiTKsz0" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/the-undercurrent/~4/ICpVXPmHSDw" height="1" width="1"/> Link to Original

A philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago, Jason Hill, has written a remarkable piece in Salon. In it, Hill recounts a story familiar to many of us at The Undercurrent: how, as a young man, he first discovered the writings of Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. But Hill’s story is one of the more dramatic versions of this story that we’ve heard. Hill grew up as a gay atheist in Jamaica, a country he describes as permeated by religious mysticism and as “the most homophobic culture in the world.” Hill suggests that Ayn Rand’s commitment to reason and individualism empowered his quest to break free from the chains of Jamaica’s parochial culture and seek a career as an intellectual in the United States. Hill recounts how Rand’s ideas helped him pierce through one conventional assumption after another. Speaking of the prejudice he had encountered against homosexuals, Hill writes: Hill also affirms a point which TU has made before: that one should neither be proud nor ashamed of one’s sexual orientation (gay or straight). Growing up, he saw himself as an individual who “happened to be gay,” and rejected all attempts to politicize his gay identity. Following the same thread, Hill explains how Rand’s individualism helped him understand and deal with racism: How then does one respond to racists who see individuals only through the lens of a collective identity? Hill’s own response, which we presume refers to his own way of thinking about his ethnic status, is enlightening: “I have never ever in my life sought to actively fight racism. I have simply adduced myself as evidence of its absolute stupidity and irrationality.” What’s most remarkable about the piece, however, is Hill’s commitment to individualism amidst the stifling conformity of academia. In his academic work, he has championed “cosmopolitanism,” a doctrine that asks us to move “beyond blood identities” and embrace the fact that we must define ourselves as individuals, a view that puts him starkly at odds with academically fashionable multiculturalism. And he is critical of academia’s rejection of Ayn Rand: Hill does not seem to be tempted to join these academics. He rejects their claim that growing up means compromising one’s principles and abandoning one’s ideals. Why then do critics reject Ayn Rand’s idealistic individualism as naive? Hill offers the following compelling speculation: Hill is of course echoing Rand’s own meditation on the popularity of The Fountainhead, a passage from her introduction to the novel which has inspired many of us at TU: At The Undercurrent, we are dedicated to raising awareness of Ayn Rand’s noble vision of man’s nature and life’s potential. We urge our readers to consider our message, “It’s your life. Own it.” And we are committed to helping inspire more young people to give shape, purpose and reality to their fire. Thank you, Jason Hill, for showing us that we are not alone. The post A Professor’s Tribute to Ayn Rand is a Dramatic Reminder of the Value of Individualism appeared first on The Undercurrent. http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=qj6IDK7rITs</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=JUhcmGiK9AQ</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=yIl2AUoC8zA</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=uIGop1M89u0:FJe2kEyIKow:WkrIHMmXu7Y</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=uIGop1M89u0:FJe2kEyIKow:V_sGLiPBpWU</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=uIGop1M89u0:FJe2kEyIKow:gIN9vFwOqvQ</img> http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=l6gmwiTKsz0</img>http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/the-undercurrent/~4/uIGop1M89u0 Link to Original

In his famed 2005 Stanford University commencement address, the late Steve Jobs imparted valuable advice to the hopeful eyes staring up at him: “You’ve got to find what you love. . . . Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” “Do what you love” is an inspiring message that has become commonplace in today’s discussions of career choice—a quick Amazon search will reveal dozens of self-help books centered on that very quip. However, an equally quick Google search will reveal an astounding catalogue of indignant critiques of the “do what you love” philosophy and its advocates. Earlier this year, one such critic, Slate’s Miya Tokumitsu, argued that Jobs’ philosophy is the unofficial work mantra of our time for all the wrong reasons. In her critique, she explains, “[t]he problem with [‘do what you love’] . . . is that it leads not to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.” On Tokumitsu’s view, for those who believe we should do what we love, “[w]ork becomes divided into two opposing classes: that which is lovable (creative, intellectual, socially prestigious) and that which is not (repetitive, unintellectual, undistinguished).” But does her view accurately capture the meaning and purpose of work? Why do human beings need to work in the first place? At root, our life depends on our choice to produce the goods we need. A person cannot merely assume, without action on his own part, that nature will deliver food to his refrigerator or that others will care for his health when he falls ill. The division of labor in post-industrial society makes it too easy to lose sight of the importance of production, as the goods each person produces appear not to be directly related to our most basic needs. But whether we produce our own goods or trade with others, the essence of that endeavor runs back to the time of early man, to his choice to bend a branch to craft a bow for hunting, to fashion arrows, to seek out and acquire his meal, to properly prepare it for consumption. Unlike animals, we survive not by adapting to our environment but by reshaping it: far from “dehumanizing” us, productive work is what makes human life distinctive. To Tokumitsu, work is lovable only if it is immediately satisfying and fundamentally intellectual. Thus, the teacher who works to serve children, the artist who lives to paint and nothing more, the business owner who merely enjoys selling hats, are clear examples of people who love their work. All other work, she holds, is non-lovable and typically the burden of the less privileged. This will often mean low-wage jobs that consist in repetitive action or manual labor (janitors, truck drivers, construction workers, etc.). But all work is—or can be—intellectual. Mere beasts would serve as poor trash-collectors, or janitors, or cargo-loaders, because even these kinds of jobs require a conceptual understanding of what the task is, and why it’s being performed. As Adam Smith points out in in The Wealth of Nations, because workers have the greatest interest in performing their work expediently, and must also give their undivided attention often to one task in particular, they are much more likely to discover more efficient methods of performing that task. No work needs to be menial: active-minded workers of any rank can challenge themselves and in doing so improve the production process. Further, to refer to unglamorous labor (driving a truck, working construction, etc.) as “dehumanizing” is to say that it’s degrading, and therefore cannot be performed out of self-love. But self-love is the primary reason that laborers continue to work. They want to earn a paycheck and improve their lives. And the more a man applies his intellect to his job (whether by producing more efficiently or developing a more innovative method), the more value he tends to produce for his employer, and thus, receive in return. Tokumitsu’s conception of the “inner life” of the laborer is particularly offensive. She writes: “If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.” If anything, Tokumitsu speaks only for herself. Being a day laborer does not extinguish one’s inner fire—it allows one to keep that fire burning. All people have the capacity for hopes and dreams—and that’s precisely what “do what you love” recognizes. Productive work enables the underprivileged to live and work towards achieving an even more fulfilling position—and thus deserves respect. And the value of work does not end with its capacity to sustain a person’s life on a physical level. The very act of engaging our minds and bodies in the task of rearranging reality to serve our purposes is also part of why we live. Productive work is a kind of living. It’s a source of pride to fight and win the battle to survive. The coal miner can revel in the power of his body to split and penetrate the earth, to achieve the purpose of his mind—the construction worker can appreciate his capacity to build and to repair by the efficacy of his motion and the thoughts directing it—the electrician can gain self-esteem from his ability to analyze and fix essential appliances. Each of these workers will finish his day tired, but to the worker who takes pleasure in his own ability, that fatigue will be the measure of his pride. Because of her clear disdain for work and self-actualization, Tokumitsu fails to appreciate the true meaning of “do what you love.” In so doing, she insults the inner lives of day laborers, and dooms them to a hopeless existence. Rather than dismissing “do what you love” as insulting to the nation’s underprivileged, it needs to be thought of an inspiring message for all those who seek the best possible lives for themselves: do what you love, and if you’re unable now, work to get there. As Steve Jobs said, “if you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” Creative commons image from Pixabay user tpsdave. The post “Do What You Love” Inspires Meaningful Work in a Meaningful Life appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

“The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer”: this common refrain is thought by some to explain many of the world’s problems. Recently there has been outrage directed toward high-income individuals. A popular video recently posted to Upworthy graphically depicts the “growing problem” of the gap between the rich and the poor. It notes in particular that many CEOs make 380 times the amount of the average worker. CEOs may work hard, it observes, but how could they be working 380 times harder than these workers? It may be true that income inequality is increasing, and that CEOs are making more money than they have in the past. But why are CEOs paid so much? Economically, the income gap is the result of the law of supply and demand. For example, let’s say the Atlas Company needs a new CEO. The board of directors will negotiate the salary with potential CEOs in an attempt to get the highest quality candidate for the best cost; they are willing to offer a high salary because the CEO offers a large value to the company. And if the board did not offer a large enough salary, the highest quality candidates would choose to work at different companies that made a better offer. There is a short supply of people who qualify to do the job of CEO. Only a small number of people who have devoted the energy required to gain the knowledge and develop the skills needed to do the job well. The short supply matters: when there is a short supply of something, the price increases. In a free market, when there is a short supply of talented CEOs, the price for a person to fill this role will rise as well. (In a market that is not fully free, other factors can artificially raise CEO pay.) A good CEO is a rare find because the job is so difficult. From implementing high-level strategies to managing the overall operations and resources of a company, the CEO’s decisions impact everyone working for the company, its investors, the company’s competitors, the company’s allies, and the entire industry. The skill required is enormous. As CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs needed to envision the right product, organize and manage the best team to make it. He needed to find, convince, and work with the best companies to help make the vision come true. And he needed to determine how to market the product so that customers would understand its significance. A month before the launch of the iPhone, Jobs realized the plastic screen on the phone scratched easily, and he demanded they develop a glass screen. He orchestrated the hiring of 8,700 engineers to figure out how to cut the glass and then found a factory of workers to cut the glass into millions of screens. They were done in four weeks. This example is just a snapshot of the type of work a CEO must perform. Everyone wins in a free economy: the CEO gets the position and the pay check he desires for the work he puts into the company, the board and the employees get a high quality leader that will help the company perform well, and customers get an excellent product. If you doubt the skill required to be a CEO, consider the woes of companies like Enron, Netflix’s Quikster, Blockbuster, Circuit City, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual. Each company failed and its failures were due to the company’s CEOs. Can you say “a lot of pressure?” If you are wondering why CEOs deserve to receive high salaries and golden parachutes even when they fail, keep in mind that benefits and compensation are often negotiated to convince the candidate to accept the position in the first place. The board must offer a great package in order to attract the best candidates, and the company is under contract to fulfill its promise, even if the CEO fails. It’s worth noting that CEOs are paid voluntarily, and if anyone takes issue with anything about a company, they can quit the company, not buy the company’s products or invest in it, or, spread word of the perceived issue with the company. One might think it’s just not right for CEOs to be paid so much more than their employees. CEOs may not work 380 times harder than employees, but they do create a substantially greater amount of value. And it is the CEO who enables the employees to have a job in which their skills can create value in the first place. It is value creation that properly determines pay, not the degree of effort expended. If I spent three days pushing a giant boulder five miles, I would find this extremely difficult; my muscles would be sore and I would be exhausted. But this does not mean I deserve to be paid a large amount of money for this hard work: I didn’t create anything of value. People who create more value for others, enabling others to live better, deserve to be paid more. So a CEO’s high salary can indeed be morally justified, because people deserve rewards in proportion to the value they create. There is nothing wrong with the income gap, because there is nothing wrong with the fact that different people create different amounts of value. The rich may be getting richer, but if they do because they create new value in an economy, it’s hard to believe that the poor get poorer because of it. The post The Value Creation Gap: Why CEO Pay is So High appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Short Summary The Undercurrent was founded 9 years ago with the mission of spreading Ayn Rand’s ideas on college campuses through a student newspaper. Where will tomorrow’s Objectivist leaders come from? The Undercurrent is spearheading efforts to unite Objectivist students and foment campus activism. We achieved some significant milestones this last year, but we have even bigger ambitions for the year to come. Check out our new video and fundraiser which outlines TU’s plans to grow the Objectivist student movement. Our focal project: host a major outreach conference in the fall of 2014. In order to make that happen, we need your help. With your support last year, we accomplished some major goals – with your continued support, we can develop projects which we think will kick-start a true Objectivist youth movement. What We Need We’re seeking to raise $100k via this campaign to help fund development over the next year. The bulk of project funding will go toward one major related project: a revolutionary “fans of Ayn Rand” conference, where Objectivist and Libertarian students will come together in an effort to educate themselves and set examples for each other. Objectivist students will arrive early to receive specialized leadership training and will later be joined with fans of Ayn Rand. Together they will enjoy a weekend of quality lectures on authentic Objectivism. Objectivist students will leave the conference with a greater understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, as well as polished leadership skills, and Libertarian students will leave with the tools necessary to continue investigating the philosophy. They will have real answers about Objectivism, and will share this information with their friends and fellow club members. Never before has something like this been attempted. And it’s exactly what needs to happen if Objectivism is going to compete with rival liberty movements. Capturing the attention of students who have a genuine interest in Rand, while they’re still willing to change their minds, is imperative for the success of the broader Objectivist movement. And if we don’t pick up these the wrong people will. In fact, they’re already enticing them with low-cost opportunities to network, so let’s do the same and win them over with the power of philosophy. The Impact Donations will have a direct impact on the present student culture. Funds allow us to distribute issues of our print newspaper, host exciting events, and offer proper education to students nationwide. Since the founding of The Undercurrent, we’ve distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of our paper on campuses across the country, and we’ve seen many of our student writers go on to do fantastic things, such as starting their own companies or working as intellectuals for The Ayn Rand Institute. During the past 6 months, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in youth involvement with the movement. Our students are more excited than ever about throwing events, and they’re beginning to form their own community. Let’s keep up the momentum and create a culture that we can all be proud of. Other Ways You Can Help Help us get the word out! Share this fundraiser link via FB, Twitter and email. Tell your like-minded friends about this fundraiser and encourage them to donate and share the link. Do you have questions about our current fundraiser? Comment here and we’ll provide you with an answer right away! The post Igniting the Objectivist Student Movement (Part 2) appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Don Watkins is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute and is co-author, with Yaron Brook, of the best-selling book Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government. Watkins is now drafting RooseveltCare: How Social Security Is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance. You can learn more about his campaign against welfare statism at www.endthedebtdraft.com. The Undercurrent is sponsoring a debate between Watkins and Howard Schweber (of the University of Wisconsin and The Huffington Post) on the topic “Is the welfare state just?” on April 1st. Visit the site above or www.itsyourlifeownit.org for more information on how to watch the debate live online. TU sat down with Don Watkins to learn more about his campaign to “end the debt draft”: You talk about ending the “debt draft.” What do you mean by that? The military draft treated the lives of young people as the property of the state. Well, what I call the debt draft refers to the fact that young people today have been drafted into debt by the government—a debt that runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per person. The overwhelming majority of that debt comes from government spending, not on services we all need, like the military, but on old-age welfare programs—namely Social Security and Medicare. Could you briefly describe the scale of the problem? How much are young people now supposed to owe the old, and why do you think it’s going to be so difficult for them to discharge their obligation? The government’s official debt is around $12 trillion and growing quickly, which means that each of us owes about $40,000. That’s bad but it’s nothing compared to the debt the government’s going to be racking up in the years ahead thanks to America’s old-age welfare programs. As the Baby Boomers retire, the bill for Social Security and Medicare will grow fast. Economists can calculate the difference between how much those programs are likely to cost and how much money the government will raise from taxes. They call this “unfunded liabilities” or “the fiscal gap.” That number is astronomical: roughly $200 trillion dollars or more than half a million dollars per person. If the bill comes anywhere close to that, it will spell disaster. The government could seize 100 percent of the income of the top earners and it wouldn’t make a dent in that amount, so taxes are going to skyrocket for everyone. Young people will find themselves working harder and harder and taking home less and less—if they are lucky enough to have jobs. Already studies show that young Americans are putting off buying homes, getting married, starting families, and starting businesses, largely for economic reasons. All of this is going to get much worse unless we put an end to the debt draft. Are economic problems the biggest problems with the debt draft? The debt draft is not the only problem with the welfare state. The welfare state takes money from the people who earned it and gives it to those who didn’t earn it. Instead of a society that rewards productive achievement, the welfare state creates a society in which the more you achieve, the more you owe others—the more successful you are, the more you’ll be punished in order to reward the unsuccessful. That’s the deepest injustice of the welfare state. It is a system of exploitation. Is the comparison to a military draft appropriate? Didn’t that involve forcing people to die for the national interest, not just to give up some money? It’s not a perfect analogy. The military draft left countless young Americans maimed or killed. As bad as the debt draft is, I would never want to trivialize war by equating the two in that sense. But in both cases what you have is the government trampling on the rights of young people, turning them into selfless servants of society rather than leaving them free to pursue their own happiness. The analogy is meant to be provocative. We’re so used to thinking of the welfare state as this noble project. I want people to question that—to see that the welfare state doesn’t help people but robs them of money, freedom, and opportunity. It is a totally immoral institution and it deserves to meet the same fate as the military draft. But doesn’t the welfare state keep many people out of poverty, and wouldn’t dismantling the welfare state, as you seem to be suggesting, result in worsening poverty? On the contrary, the welfare state manufactures poverty. It doesn’t just redistribute prosperity, it reduces it. If we look at history we see that poverty is the norm. Until the nineteenth century, virtually all human beings lived on about a dollar or two a day—if they lived at all. Prosperity is an achievement—and it is capitalism’s achievement. It’s no accident that the nineteenth century saw both the rise of capitalism and, for the first time, a rise in men’s standard of living generation after generation. How did that happen? This is something Yaron Brook and I discuss at length in our book Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government. Here’s the short answer. By protecting the individual’s rights, and in particular his right to property, capitalism gave him the greatest possible freedom and incentive to produce, save, and invest. Well, those are exactly the ingredients that lead to economic progress. Innovation and economic growth come from people making money, saving money, and investing those savings in profit-seeking ventures. The welfare state taxes production and rewards non-production: The more you produce, the higher your taxes; the less you produce, the bigger your welfare check. And since it also transfers wealth from savers to consumers, you get less and less investment capital available to grow the economy. If you wanted to invent a way to impoverish a nation, it would be hard to do better than to create the welfare state. Now obviously the welfare state hasn’t eliminated economic growth in this country. But it has slowed it down. How much? It’s impossible to put an exact number on it, but consider this. If, starting in 1870, economic growth had been just one percent lower each year than it was, our standard of living today would be lower than Mexico’s. Welfare statists do not care about poverty. If they did they would champion capitalism, which has lifted billions out of poverty. The welfare state may increase some people’s income in the short term—although that doesn’t justify wealth redistribution—but in the long run it ensures that more people face poverty and hardship. But what happens to people who can’t make ends meet in the short term under capitalism? There’s a saying in marketing: people don’t want a drill, they want holes. Well, people don’t want a safety net, they want economic security. And the best means of achieving economic security is to live in a free market, which maximizes prosperity and minimizes disruptions such as economic crises and mass unemployment. It also gives people the freedom to protect themselves against economic risks through savings, insurance, help from friends and family and neighbors and co-workers, and any other lawful method they can dream up. In addition, there’s a sense in which capitalism does provide a safety net, but it is private and voluntary. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries people formed mutual aid societies to protect themselves from risks like injury, illness, and unemployment. And, of course, there were thousands of private charities. Isn’t a voluntary system morally preferable to a coercive one that mass-produces victims? Could you comment on how premium payments by the young under Obamacare mirror your thesis about the debt draft? Obamacare is simply one more way that young people are being exploited in order to funnel benefits to their parents and grandparents. It forces young people to pay more for health insurance in order to subsidize the cost of insurance for older Americans. But don’t worry, they’re being told, you’ll get to enjoy cheaper insurance when you reach old age, so everyone wins. The truth is, young people lose a ton of money to the welfare state at a time when they can least afford it. But it’s not as if older Americans are getting rich from these schemes either. Social Security only pays, on average, a little over a thousand dollars a month. Medicare benefits can be enormous in dollar terms, especially relative to what people pay in Medicare taxes during their working years, but the overall effect of Medicare has been to make life worse for seniors, not better. To name just one example of this: Medicare reimbursements to doctors cover only about 80 percent of their costs, which means that it’s difficult for many seniors—who have no real choice but to enroll in Medicare—to find a doctor. Why do you think previous generations have voted for programs that will leave their children worse off? I place the blame on the political and intellectual leaders of the country. They have an unbroken track record of lying about the nature of their schemes. For instance, Social Security and later Medicare were not presented as welfare programs, but as “social insurance” programs: everyone would pay into a government “trust fund” which would later pay them “earned benefits.” The truth is that the people who created these programs hated capitalism and wanted to replace it with an American welfare state. They knew there was no “trust fund”—not in any meaningful sense—and that every penny that went in to the pockets of retirees came out of the pockets of current workers. When Social Security was created, the government vowed that the payroll tax to fund the program would never go above six percent. They knew that was almost certainly untrue, and of course today the Social Security payroll tax is more than double that amount. And now we have a cottage industry of what I call debt deniers—people like Senator Elizabeth Warren who cook up arguments to deny that the welfare state is bankrupting us. So you can’t blame the average person for supporting the debt draft. They are not being told the truth. What kind of obligations do you think a child does have towards his or her parents? Why doesn’t this imply an obligation to support the welfare state? My wife recently gave birth to our first child, and one thing I can tell you is that we never asked my daughter if she wanted to be born. We had a choice in the matter, so we have obligations with respect to our child. But she doesn’t have any with respect to us. Now so long as she lives in our house she has to follow our rules, but she has no moral obligation to take care of us once she’s grown. She might choose to do so, out of gratitude and benevolence and if we need it. But no good parent wants to breed servants. My daughter has a right to live her own life. In fact, there are only two sorts of obligations we owe to others: one, to respect their rights, and two, to abide by any commitments we voluntarily assume. Now, the welfare state violates people’s rights and forces them to assume burdensome commitments without their consent. So much for the idea that the welfare state is some grand moral achievement. Why do you say we are not our grandfather’s keeper? Who is if we’re not? I do say we are not our grandfather’s keeper, which of course is a play on the traditional notion that we are our brother’s keeper. That notion more than anything is responsible for the welfare state. It says you don’t have a right to exist for your own sake and that other people’s need is a mortgage on your life. So, when older Americans claim they need you to pay for their retirement and health care, that’s your moral duty, even if it comes at the expense of your goals and dreams. I am challenging that idea that we are our grandfather’s keeper. Obviously I don’t mean we should never help out our grandfather, or cooperate with others when our interests align. But welfare statists’ schemes are not about helping others but about exploiting others. Their view is not that it’s nice to help out others when you can—it’s that you are born in debt, in moral debt, to the needs of others. Take that seriously for a minute. To live by that notion, it would mean that you don’t have a right to a single morsel of food so long as there is anyone anywhere on the globe who needs it more—even if your dinner was not stolen from others but earned by your own effort. That is a monstrous idea, and the only reason we don’t perceive it as monstrous is because we don’t try to live by it day in and day out. Well, I say a moral principle that appears noble only because you cheat on it is not a true moral principle. I agree with Ayn Rand: morality is not about carrying other people’s burdens. It’s about human achievement and human happiness. It’s about each of us being our own keeper, taking responsibility for our own life, and trying to make the most of it. Can you give us a few more details about how the welfare state should be phased out? There are a number of options. In my forthcoming book RooseveltCare: How Social Security Is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance, I talk about a few of them. I think it’s something economists should be thinking about and debating. Our goal needs to be the complete abolition of the welfare state. In the short term, then, we should be looking for measures that move us in that direction. For instance, I think we need to start cutting benefits immediately. In health care, I would support turning Medicare into a voucher program rather than an open-ended fee-for-service commitment, which at least puts some sort of cap on what is now an open ended black hole slowly sucking us into oblivion. The critical thing, however, is to wage an educational campaign to change people’s thinking on this issue. Nothing will change so long as most Americans think the welfare state is moral. What can young people do? The welfare state cannot exist without the consent of its victims. It counts on the people being exploited to accept that they are being sacrificed for a noble cause. If the victims ever rebelled publicly and said they do not consent to being victimized—that the debt draft is immoral—then the whole thing would collapse. We have to turn the tables on the welfare statists. We can’t continue to adopt a defensive posture where we concede that their goals are noble but their programs are poorly designed. We can’t respond to charges that we are mean spirited by saying that we support the welfare state, we just want to make it smaller and more effective. That’s what the right has been doing for close to a hundred years, and it does not work. No, we need to take the moral high ground and put them on the defensive. Nothing will change until the people willing to tell the truth about the welfare state are able to mount a moral opposition—to say, not simply that its financial consequences are devastating, but that it is inherently immoral. And to provide a positive alternative. How do we make that happen? There’s a lot to say about this, and I address it at length in RooseveltCare. For now I’ll name two steps. First, educate yourself about the debt draft and about the individualist alternative to the welfare state, laissez-faire capitalism. It’s not enough to say that what’s happening to you is morally wrong. You have to be able to articulate why. Start by visiting www.endthedebtdraft.com, where I have a bunch of free resources on this subject. Second, speak out. This can take many forms. I don’t recommend getting into time-consuming debates online. Instead, look for high-leverage ways to have impact. Hand people books and articles you think are persuasive. Host talks and debates on your campus. Here’s one small but meaningful thing you can do: “Like” our campaign’s Facebook page, which you can find at facebook.com/debtdraft. If we can get thousands and ultimately tens of thousands of young people to like the page, that sends a powerful message. Thank you, Don Watkins! What do you think about Don Watkin’s thoughts on the welfare state? Stay tuned for an interview by “Is the Welfare State Just?” opponent, Howard Schweber. The post Ending the Debt Draft: Don Watkins Speaks out about the Welfare State’s Burden on Young People appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Howard Schweber is Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of a number of books on political theory and constitutional law, as well as numerous scholarly articles. He also writes a regular column for The Huffington Post. The Undercurrent is sponsoring a debate between Schweber and Don Watkins (of the Ayn Rand Institute) on the topic “Is the welfare state just?” on April 1st. Visit the site above or www.itsyourlifeownit.org for more information on how to watch the debate live online. TU sat down with Howard Schweber to learn more about his views on the justice of the welfare state: 1. Why in essence do you think the welfare state (the system of transfer payments such as social security, Medicare, food stamps, etc.) is just? The question is framed in a misleading way. The “welfare state” does not only include the transfer payments mentioned, it also includes the existence of public schools and universities like the one where I teach (The University of Wisconsin), the public maintenance of social services, and a wide array of other activities supported by tax dollars, most of which benefit the middle class and the wealthy rather than the poor. In fact, the estimates are that approximately 5/6ths of all social welfare spending in the United States benefits the non-poor. So the moral case for or against the welfare state has to include all those elements, or else the argument risks devolving into the proposition that only benefits for poor people are unjustifiable while benefits for the members of our audience are somehow outside the scope of the discussion. Leaving that aside, I would argue that it is not merely the case that the welfare state is just, it is the case that the abolition of the welfare state would be fundamentally unjust. There are many reasons for taking this position, but here are just three: First, it is unjust to refuse to pay one’s debts. Prior generations have sacrificed their taxes, their sweat, and in some cases their blood to create a decent living for the current generation. Those past ancestors cannot be paid back directly, they ask the same thing that was asked of them, to pay the debt forward by maintaining a decent society now and improving the lot of the next generation. That is the fundamental ethical presumption of any social organization from a family to a nation-state: that its members understand that they have obligations to others not yet born based on the debts they owe to those who have gone before. Now this young generation comes along and declares that they are the end of history: those who contributed to their welfare were suckers, they owe nothing to anyone. Here’s just one example. 8 million veterans have had their educations paid for by the GI bills, and more than 2 million received mortgages or business loans. That helped create stable and prosperous households in which their children could grow up—and now when those children and grandchildren are being asked to help other fellow citizens I hear the response “who, me?” Second, it is not unjust to invest in the development of human capabilities: indeed, I would argue that it is profoundly unwise as well as unjust to fail to do so. One rationale behind social welfare systems is not charity, it is public investment in human capital—this is the justification for the majority of the welfare state’s programs, which direct resources to the non-poor with the aim or producing public goods in the form of economic growth and security. There is a startlingly direct correlation between levels of economic and social development on the one hand and the level of access to participation in the economic system on the other. Public spending on education is one example, but there are many others including ensuring the availability of that education to girls as well as boys, rural residents as well as city-dwellers, poor as well as well-off populations. In a competitive world, no society can afford to waste massive amounts of human capital by allowing it to go undeveloped. That’s what social welfare payments are for; they are investments in the economic and social future of the nation. It’s not just nutrition and educational opportunities for the young that fit this model. For example, benefits to the elderly release the human capital of younger people who are not bound to remain at home to care for aged relatives or crushed by the costs of health care. And benefits to the indigent help not only their children, but also the adults to return to contributing to the collective welfare: the average period of time a person is on public assistance is two years. Other forms of investment in human capital include support for basic research (the vast majority of research in the U.S. is government-funded) and infrastructure investments that improve access and mobility. It is no coincidence that without exception the most economically successful nations are those with the most developed systems of public investment in human capital. That’s not just morally sound, it is intelligent. Moreover it would be unjust to invest our resources in the development of the capacities of some citizens and not others—unless the argument for the abolition of the welfare state is accompanied by an argument for the abolition of all public benefits from corporate licenses to student loans, then justice as well as smart policy demands that we invest in the capacities of all our citizens as best we can. That would be to drastically diminish the opportunities each of us have to “pursue happiness” for the dubious gain of avoiding the compulsion to help others do the same thing. But how do we make these kinds of investment decisions, or decide where our moral obligations as a nation lie? That brings me to the third reason the American welfare state is fundamentally just: the social contract. The kinds of investment decisions I am describing are made with the consent of the governed through a democratic process. That is a fundamentally morally sound system of political decision-making. There is a fundamental social contract that underlies any democratic nation-state: citizens will have their rights protected and will be free to participate in national decision-making about matters of public importance. More, there is an assumption that the decisions that are reached in this way will be aimed at securing the public welfare, which includes ensuring that our fellow citizens are not left defenseless just as they agree to protect us when it is our turn to ask. In return, citizens will accept the outcome of that decision-making process as legitimate, and when called upon to support the state or help their fellows they will stand up and be counted. 2. Do you think a young person today has the moral obligation to support people he does not know who are indigent? If so, why? There are two parts to this question: the focus on support to people who are indigent, and the focus on the provision of support to indigent persons “he does not know.” On the first point, once again the focus on the indigent distorts the focus of the inquiry. A genuine libertarian Objectivist would insist—as some do—that this university be closed down, all public schools be abolished, highways and airports closed, the utility systems that deliver power and water be destroyed, streetlights abolished, telephone lines and rail lines removed, and so on. Such a libertarian might argue that private businesses will step in and provide the same services—it is an argument I find remarkably unpersuasive as a matter of common sense, economics, and the lessons of history—but it is an intellectually consistent position. But it would be completely inconsistent for the young person in this question to question her obligation to support people she does not know while not questioning her own willingness to continue to accept massive benefits from persons she equally does not know. On the second point, the idea that we can only have obligations to persons with whom we are personally acquainted is the end of any form of political society. “Support for the indigent” is not a unique case, it is one of a thousand instances of collective decision making that comprise the activity of democratic self-government. We live in a democratic nation-state, and we derive numerous benefits from that fact. In turn, we agree to be bound by decisions reached through the democratic process: our “consent” is mediated by representative government. And so if we as a nation take up the moral obligation to abolish slavery or prevent racial segregation, or if we as a nation take up the collective moral obligation to extend electrical power into rural areas and to provide education even to rural areas where the costs are exceptionally high, or if we as a nation take up the collective moral obligation to prevent fraud in the marketplace and protect vulnerable people against violence, these are obligations that each individual citizen is expected and required to assume as his or her own. A separate point goes back to the fact that the existence of obligations in one direction implies reciprocal obligations. We are talking about fellow Americans, after all. When those persons are well off and you are in trouble, they will be called upon to help you; right now you are lucky enough to be in a position to be the one being asked for help. How can anyone trust a person who is unable to understand that concept? 3. Do you think the state has the right to compel people to support the indigent? If so, why? Of course. The state has the same right to compel people to support the indigent that it has to compel people to support the University of Wisconsin, the interstate highway system, the research programs that produced the Internet, the vaccine programs that permitted us to survive childhood without risk of polio, and every other public endeavor that is undertaken for the public good as that is determined through a democratic process of decision-making. 4. Do you think our mounting federal debt poses a significant economic problem? If not, why not? If so, how would you propose we solve the problem? The debt poses a significant problem on a number of dimensions, although it is worth pointing out that in some ways these dangers are exaggerated—for example, the debt is nowhere near exceeding the value of currently held public assets, which is at least as sensible a measure as comparing debt assumed over decades to current annual economic output (how many people earn enough in one year to pay off their entire mortgage?) Nonetheless, the size of the debt is certainly a problem insofar is it constrains the flexibility of future budgeting decisions due to the costs of debt service. There are multiple fairly obvious solutions: lifting the cap on social security contributions, means-testing old-age benefits and medical benefits, raising taxes above their current 60-year history lows, raising the retirement age by 4 years, rationalizing the health insurance market through any number of measures, reducing the risk level in private pension investments, reducing our nation’s staggering military spending, cutting ridiculous waste in the defense procurement process . . . the list is endless, and people of good will and intelligence are engaged in a serious discussion about how to solve the problem. But the solution of giving up on the idea of the possibility of national action on the grounds that it costs money is thoughtless. 5. Are indigent people better off today because of transfer payments than they were before the New Deal? How would you demonstrate your answer (keeping in mind that everyone today is better off because of advancing technology, among other reasons)? Once again, the phrasing of the question makes it hard to answer in a straightforward way. We are all better off, particular those of us in the middle and upper classes who would otherwise be among the indigent: to take only one example, estimates are that 50% of seniors would be below the poverty line but for social security. Indigent people are better off and so is everyone else in that families have been relieved of the burdens of caring for the elderly, educational opportunities have been made available to a vastly greater portion of the population, preventable diseases have been ended and public services have been extended into areas they did not exist before, publicly funded research has produced technological and scientific advancements, public services provide us all with the conditions for pursuing our individual ideas of happiness with some degree of security. As for the very narrow question of whether those who are indigent today—primarily rural Southern whites—are better off than those who were indigent in the 1920s, I fear the question betrays ignorance of the depths of poverty that were pervasive prior to the New Deal and Great Society programs that comprise the focus of these questions. “Advancing technology” has nothing to do with moving a generation of rural whites out of the sharecropping system (to this day, most poor people in America are rural whites), nor would technology have been shared with large portions of the country without rural electrification, a program that could not possibly be made profitable for private business but that created the essential backbone for the economic resurgence of the “New South.” Technology can produce vaccines, but it required a public program to distribute them. And technology itself does not progress without publicly funded research and the investments in human capital that I described at the outset. There is a disturbing complacency about the assumption that clean water, access to education, public services and the physical infrastructure that supports modern life are simply to be assumed. In parts of the world that lack well-developed systems of government, these resources do not exist, or are controlled by profit-making entities with the result that they are available to only a small and privileged segment of the population. That reduces the opportunity to pursue happiness to a prize for having exercised the good judgment to choose one’s parents carefully. Is it the case that some American programs have been failures or even counterproductive? Of course. All systems fail. But the direct and measurable effects of social welfare programs in raising the living standards of children, the elderly, and the rural poor since the period before the New Deal and Great Society are overwhelming. The post Is the Welfare State Just?: Howard Schweber says Yes, It is Fundamental to a Democratic Society appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Recently, Barack Obama was applauded for his admission that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol. Yet, should we really be praising his empty words? Despite his admission that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol, he has made no new steps towards legalization or even decriminalization of drugs. Effectively, Obama will continue his stated policy from the election when faced with the issue of marijuana: “Am I willing to pursue a decriminalization strategy as an approach? No.” So while he, rightly, believes that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol, he refuses to act on his belief. When asked for his justification, Obama had the following to say “If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say: ‘Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka,’ are we open to that?” Evidently, Obama still thinks government should manage drug use paternalistically: recently after his admission that it was no more dangerous than alcohol, the president stated “I stand by my belief . . . that marijuana, for casual users, individual users, is subject to abuse, just like alcohol is, and should be treated as a public health problem and challenge.” Paternalism is forcing someone to do something for their own good. This can be accomplished through “soft” paternalist policies, such as “sin taxes,” or “hard” paternalist policies such as the imprisonment of drug users. The question we face is: does the state have the right to force someone to make correct decisions? Paternalist policies undermine people’s rights to live their lives according to their own choices. So while we may disapprove of it, the choice to use drugs like marijuana is not a crime, merely a vice. Crimes initiate force against persons or property while vices have no victim besides the vicious person. Simply getting drunk at a bar and saying ridiculous things is not considered a crime, yet smoking marijuana and making the same mistakes under that influence is. How is that consistent? So long as a person does not hurt anyone through the use of force, his decision to use a given substance should be respected legally, even if it may lead to his ruination. Prohibitionists oppose ending the war on drugs because they believe drug use causes more crime. One common argument against legalization or decriminalization of drugs is that users of “hard” drugs like crack, meth, PCP, etc. are more likely to commit crimes simply because of the vice they are choosing to commit. But this thinking is not consistent with reality: alcohol is much more likely than any other drug to be involved in violent crime. Now, that is not to say that drugs that would surely cause one to commit a crime should be legal. Doug Husak, a noted legal philosopher, once said if we could find, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a drug would turn people into homicidal monsters, we should ban it; but as of now, we do not have a drug that would turn Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. While the use of a drug itself should be legal, any crimes committed under its influence should of course be prosecuted: they would be illegal even if a sober person committed them. People who commit crimes under the influence were not compelled to; the drug simply reduced their inhibition, making it easier for them to commit the crime. For instance, a bar fight is unlikely to occur unless the one who starts it is the sort who would choose to be violent in the first place. This raises the question: who knows our experiences, lives, and limits better than we do? And if we cannot be trusted to know them, what makes someone else more qualified to? There should be no reason to prevent consenting adults from doing what they want with their own bodies. At times, one person may actually have better knowledge of living safely in general, but only an individual has the real ability to decide if that knowledge applies to his life. Sometimes marijuana use may be a bad thing, but there are times when it makes sense. In a recent interview, Ryan Clark of the Pittsburgh Steelers explained how many players use marijuana to recover from pain during the game, without worrying about getting hooked on opiates. There are other legitimate uses. The state should have no right to regulate the vices of its citizens no matter how dangerous they may be to the citizens themselves. If the state can regulate things like drug use because it hurts the people engaging in it, perhaps the state should also prevent opening businesses from making ridiculous financial decisions, or stop you from making investment decisions even if it will destroy you. Or perhaps in an effort to prevent STDs and unplanned pregnancies, premarital and unprotected sex should be criminalized. So while it is disappointing that president Obama refuses to drop his paternalism about marijuana and other drugs, it is not surprising given his track record in other areas. His paternalistic policies include the individual mandate in health care and his plan to reform higher ed by tying funding to student success. Both sides of our political dialogue oppose certain paternalistic polices, whether they are health care mandates or the prohibition of drugs. Neither side is willing to reject paternalism outright. Voters need to understand that as a whole, paternalism is an unjustified philosophy: adults can and should make their own informed decisions. The post Freedom Means The Right to Make the Wrong Choice: The Case against Drug War Paternalism appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

Questions about immigration and citizenship are front and center now that immigration legislation is being actively debated by Congress. The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (S.744), which has passed the Senate and is currently pending in the House, contains a controversial provision which would allow undocumented immigrants currently residing in the US to legalize their immigration status and eventually to obtain U.S. Citizenship after 13 years of residency. This bill raises a question: what should be required to be a United States citizen? Public debate often ties the issues of immigration and citizenship together, with one used as a bargaining chip for the other. While there is some overlap, the two issues need to be viewed separately. To put a common misconception to rest: one can vote in favor of an open immigration policy without supporting citizenship for all immigrants. Indeed, in order to preserve American values, citizenship standards need to be high. Some argue that people should have the right to move and have legal residence wherever they can manage to travel and make a living. If that is so, does moving to a country entitle people to citizenship? What is citizenship, and who should have it? One question at a time! A central aspect of citizenship is the right to vote—the right to decide who will lead one’s government and how it will govern. Another aspect is jury duty, which involves deciding the fate of accused lawbreakers. Both of these powers have life-altering implications. So being a citizen means more than just living in a country. It means having a legally recognized share in governing that country. Citizens make decisions that will affect the freedom of other individuals. The decision of who should become a citizen and therefore get to exercise these powers should not be taken lightly. Okay, so we should take the decision seriously. Now what? Well, if we decide to develop high standards for citizenship, questions about who has the right to immigrate will become far removed from questions about citizenship. Not just anyone who moves to the US would be able to become a citizen. What would happen if the United States had open immigration but loose standards of citizenship? If all residents voted, the country’s leaders and the policies enacted would be chosen by people who would know less about the interests of the United States, who may not have our best interests at heart, and who may not be fully invested in the future of the country. Suppose that a referendum is held to decide whether to give full college tuition to every Mexican immigrant using American tax dollars. If citizenship were too easily granted with residence, we might see many of the 11.4 million immigrants born in Mexico vote in favor of this referendum—even if they have just arrived in the country. The US would plunge even further into debt and millions of dollars would be expropriated from taxpayers who have lived in the country for years. But there is nothing to fear about open immigration as long as standards for citizenship are strict. There should be tough standards for who decides the fate of the country via voting. Non-citizens should be entitled to the government’s protection of all of their fundamental human rights, and they should be allowed to assemble and advocate for causes they believe in, but they should not have the right to cast a ballot deciding who will fight for their causes in government—not right away. What about jury duty? Citizens decide not only who makes the laws, but whether or not someone is guilty of breaking the law. Voters must understand the consequences of the laws they have voted to enact. Citizens are guaranteed a trial by their peers. If any immigrant could become a citizen, the trial would be decided by people who may have no loyalty to the laws governing our country or even knowledge of the language in which these laws are written. The right to vote is often characterized as an essential human right. Some left-wing commentators believe that voting is a sacred right, the denial of which offends against basic human dignity. But voting is not a fundamental human right. The only fundamental human rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and it is the government’s primary job to make sure that no one infringes upon these rights. Liberty, for example, is essential to living a dignified, flourishing life. A slave has no liberty and consequently lacks both dignity and the ability to flourish. Without the right to vote, one may lack a power that others have, but this does not violate one’s human rights—especially not if the government still protects one’s basic human liberties. Human rights are fundamental rights of human beings. Civil rights, like the right to vote, are derivative rights that help protect those fundamental rights. For instance, voters can prevent abuses of fundamental rights by voting against those who promote those abuses. Everyone has the right to liberty, but the right to vote should be assigned to those who are best equipped to ensure that a government protects these liberties. The rights of citizens are best assigned to those who are most likely to believe in and understand the political system which protects freedom. So immigrants must earn the rights of citizenship by demonstrating that understanding. Citizenship should be difficult for immigrants to obtain because those choosing the future of the government and the fate of those subject to its laws should be those who are completely invested in the country and its laws and who understand the weight of their responsibility. A free country like the United States must have high standards for obtaining citizenship; mere residence is not enough. In order to maintain these high standards, Congress must remove “path to citizenship” from legislation in the coming immigration proposal; instead, citizenship should be granted to immigrants based on their proven understanding of and commitment to the system of laws that protects individual rights. Placing a high value on citizenship means placing a high value on the country’s laws, present and future. The responsibilities of citizens, and therefore deciding who should become a citizen, should not be taken lightly. Creative commons-licensed image from Flickr user Grand Canyon National Park. The post Set the Bar Low for Immigration but High for Citizenship appeared first on The Undercurrent. Link to Original

<p><a href="http://theundercurrent.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/iStock_000009259971Medium.jpg"><img class="aligncenter wp-image-5397" alt="iStock_000009259971Medium" src="http://theundercurrent.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/iStock_000009259971Medium.jpg" width="713" height="475" /></a></p> <p>Silicon Valley and the tech industry are generating enormous wealth, creating more jobs and opportunities, and radically reshaping our world. Our iPhones, tablets, and laptops allow us to become more independent and self-reliant, while at the same time allowing us to make more meaningful connections with other people. Apps and social media allow people around the world with similar interests and passions to connect in real-time, allowing the individuals most passionate about an idea or project to collaborate. In this regard, Silicon Valley allows for more people to connect, succeed, and profit.</p> <p>According to critics, however, even though Silicon Valley is creating more jobs and opportunities, it is a matter of some concern that these opportunities are not open to everyone, that the tech industry suffers from inequality of opportunity. In a recent article in <i>Wired</i> (“Silicon Valley isn’t a Meritocracy. And it’s Dangerous to Hero-Worship Entrepreneurs”), Alice Marwick <a href="http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/silicon-valley-isnt-a-meritocracy-and-the-cult-of-the-entrepreneur-holds-people-back/">observes</a> that to work in the tech industry it helps immensely to come from wealth and to have attended a prestigious university; above all it helps to be white, heterosexual, and male. For these reasons, she argues that we should be critical of Silicon Valley instead of praising and admiring it. Silicon Valley, she says, plays into the “power structures” of capitalism: to gain wealth and success one must already be wealthy or have substantial connections.</p> <p>While it is true that individuals born into wealth and privilege have an advantage over those who are not, they do not have an <i>unfair</i> advantage. Where one ends up in life also depends on whether one has made the right choices. If one is born to wealthy parents who have backgrounds in engineering one will have the opportunity to attend better schools and to learn more skills than one who does not have the same parents. But one must <i>choose</i> to take advantage of those opportunities. If an individual chooses to party and burn through all of his parent’s money he will not benefit from his upbringing in the long run.</p> <p>The tech industry is a rapidly accelerating, competitive industry. An idea one person has one day could the very next day be made obsolete by someone else’s idea. In the tech industry, it’s not enough that competitors be educated, they also need to make the<i> </i><i>right</i> choices.</p> <p>Suppose that two individuals both want to start the next big-name tech company. Both attended Harvard, both have connections, and both are smart. So imagine that the first person decides to leave Harvard to start his company; the second doesn’t. The first had to make a difficult choice. If he had stayed at Harvard he would likely have gotten a well-paying job after graduation. But then the idea for the company he wanted to start would become obsolete. The second individual stays at Harvard and upon graduation secures a well-paying job. But as result, he doesn’t create the multi-billion dollar company called Facebook.</p> <p>Mark Zuckerberg’s choices were fundamentally responsible for his success. Of course to succeed in the tech industry he also had to be qualified—he had to have something of value to offer the investors who gambled on his idea for a social network. To be a programmer one has to have extensive knowledge of computer science, which individuals who cannot afford college would not have the opportunity to learn. An individual’s educational background can indicate to an employer whether he has something of value to offer the employer. But the fact remains that those who choose to make the most of their opportunities deserve the jobs they are awarded.</p> <p>If an employer doesn’t consider someone’s educational or technical background and instead hires someone to promote diversity or social advancement, how can he know if the hire is of value to him? To run a successful business, an employer has to hire the best and most competent individuals. If there are not as many qualified women as men it will not benefit an employer to hire equal numbers of men and women. The decision to hire “unequally” isn’t unfair: people <i>deserve</i> a job only if they have skills and knowledge which will be of value to an employer.</p> <p>According to Marwick it is even unfair to reward entrepreneurs who are assertive, competitive, and self-reliant, because these are “male-oriented” traits. But all jobs demand certain characteristics and abilities, whether the candidate is male or female, black or white, straight or gay. To deserve a job individuals have to fulfill the demands of the job. If a job requires being assertive, those who fill it must be assertive, regardless of sex, race, or sexual orientation.</p> <p>Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg, executives of two of the biggest tech companies, have succeeded because they <i>are</i> assertive, competitive, and self-reliant. Both of these women <a href="http://theundercurrent.org/the-character-experiment-how-cultivating-moral-virtue-will-strengthen-the-post-grad-experience/">chose</a> to gain the knowledge and develop the skills—including the character traits—that are necessary for success in the business world. They chose to “<a href="http://theundercurrent.org/to-lean-in-women-must-abandon-the-false-moral-ideal-of-selflessness/">lean in</a>.”</p> <p>Marwick criticizes Silicon Valley for being so exclusive, but its competitive environment is what makes it so successful. Silicon Valley is creating new technology that decreases rapidly in price with every advancement made, which is much more than can be said of academia (where Marwick works). To go to college one has to spend anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 a year, which is not practical for even most upper-middle class students. Yet for a couple hundred dollars students can buy a laptop and Internet access to Coursera, Khan Academy and other MOOCs, and gain equal, if not greater amounts of knowledge, opportunities, and connections than they would gain from traditional higher education. Why then is Silicon Valley being criticized for not providing enough opportunities?</p> <p>Think of it this way: entrepreneurs could give up some of their resources so those born less well-off could live in greater comfort now, or they could invest <i>their</i> resources in <i>their </i>company, in <i>their</i> ideas, at <i>their</i> profit, and create whole new industries that allow us to not just live comfortably, but to live better. What do you think is the right choice to make?</p> <p><i>Sarah Martinson is an aspiring fiction writer.</i></p> <p>The post <a rel="nofollow" href="http://theundercurrent.org/offer-deserve-false-justice-equality-tech-industry/">The More You Offer the More You Deserve: Against the False Justice of ‘Equality’ in the Tech Industry</a> appeared first on <a rel="nofollow" href="http://theundercurrent.org">The Undercurrent</a>.</p><div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:JUhcmGiK9AQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=JUhcmGiK9AQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:WkrIHMmXu7Y"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:WkrIHMmXu7Y" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:V_sGLiPBpWU"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:gIN9vFwOqvQ"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?i=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:gIN9vFwOqvQ" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?a=KNYditexYwM:IIqHATlVnd4:l6gmwiTKsz0"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/the-undercurrent?d=l6gmwiTKsz0" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/the-undercurrent/~4/KNYditexYwM" height="1" width="1"/> Link to Original