Reidy

A contradiction, strictly speaking, is the simultaneous assertion of a statement and its negation. What exactly is the contradiction supposed to be? If you didn't ask the stranger to make this sacrifice you didn't seek the unearned. If he really gets off on such bizarre activities, you're probably doing him a favor. Go ahead and take it (unless it's a brain).

Historical / bibliographical note: "Through Your Most Grievous Fault," on the death of Monroe, ran originally in the LA Times in 1962. The Objectivist reprinted it the same year, and it's available today in The Ayn Rand Column. The 1964 Playboy interview did not talk about Monroe.

Miss McGillicuddy: I find your justification for calling Ayn Rand by the wrong name (in #34) unconvincing.

1. Not having read Ryan, I'd answer yes. Crows don't think in the abstract terms we see in your second quote, but that doesn't keep the quote from being a good description of what goes on in the crow's mind. 2. She wasn't Mrs. Rand. Her married name was "O'Connor."

Hume's challenge is a tautology. He said that you can't infer an evaluative conclusion from premises with no evaluative terms in them. This is a case of the wider tautology that you can't infer a conclusion that isn't implicit in the premises. True but obvious. Philippa Foot, a philosopher who has some points in common with Rand, pointed out decades ago that the arguments of modern non-naturalists (i.e. of those who claim that evaluations aren't statements of fact that are true or false) define natural statements (statements of fact that are true or false) to be the ones without any evaluative language. This also applies to Hume as I recall his argument. You can't draw conclusions about biochemistry from premises that contain no biochemical terms, but this doesn't prove that biochemistry is outside the realm of reason or that we can't know universal truths about it. A more interesting question is whether evaluations can be natural statements. Hume's challenge does nothing to rule the possibility out, and I'm satisfied that Rand (among others) has shown that they can be. I think the essential problem with what you quote from the anarchist is that he confuses explanations with conscious goals. The former tell you why something is good, not somebody is aware of pursuing. Take the statement The value of life explains why some pursuits are or aren't good, and the fact that it isn't on somebody's mind at a particular time, or ever, doesn't change this. The next statement, is simply a contradiction. If he chooses to eat and if he does so in order to avoid hunger pangs, then it's a value. Finally, take A particular person's values or attitudes are insufficient to show that life is his ultimate, deliberate goal, but this says nothing about whether life ultimately explains valuing.

AstroPhysics is doing its customers a disservice by charging below-market prices and rationing the product. The sellers are doing the end buyers a corresponding service by making the product available to them sooner than it would otherwise have been. The manufacters seem to want power over who gets the product more than they want to make money. They are within their rights, but this is an eccentric way to do business. I'm glad that so few sellers behave that way. Much of the standard complaint about free markets comes down to the fact that resources go to whoever has the money rather than to the people the complainer wants them to go to.

Rand never said that everything is one; this is fortunate because the assertion gets you into some well-known problems. If it's one thing, then it has a boundary in space, outside of which is nothing, a beginning in time, before which was nothing, and, most notoriously, a temporally prior cause, distinct from it, which is the theists' first cause. The notion of one thing only makes sense if said thing is distinct from some other thing. Ask yourself what that other thing is. We use "existence," "what is," "the universe" and the like as syntactical singulars, but this is misleading. Nor do I recall her ever saying that everything is integrated. She said that our thinking ought to be integrated.

The edict by the owner of the surrounding property would constitute an initiation of force. Not a problem for Objectivism.

Looks like this one gets Dagny's age right, as the first did not.

I vote for price caps, since they suppress information the market leads, as taxes do not. I abstain on the question of emissions caps vs. taxes.

Another point: once word gets out that a particular buyer is eager to gain control of a company, its stock price rises to the point people think the buyer will pay. The more expensive the stock becomes, the less the new buyer can afford. This is the point where somebody says "yes, but what if they kept it a secret?" The answer is: they can't; getting this kind of information out is one of the functions that capital markets serve. This brings us in turn to the point where somebody says, "yes, but what if they did it through fronts?" The answer is that if somebody is making big buys, the price goes up anyway and the market catches on. I won't say categorically that you can't keep a secret, but you can't keep this secret, when the reward for figuring it out is so great. You apparently have worked in companies that were, at least in part, Chinese-owned. If it's not company-confidential, have you seen the investors behaving in the ways you fear?

Yes. To the extent that country B votes its shares to serve its national interests, it doesn't serve the other shareholders' natural money-making interests, as you make clear in #1. The foreign-controlled companies lose money and eventually either go out of business or get taken over. Other companies, perhaps privately held, come into the market to replace them. In the situation you describe, capital flows to privately-held companies that can control who owns their shares.

When the presidential debates start looking like this, you'll know we've reached the culmination: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELzjQ8F_2gE

See #20 point 4, above.

In the first place, the sentence "If you've got a business, you didn't build that" (source) is perfectly good grammar. "Business" is the antecedent of "that." Obama, his admirers and their entire cultural tradition have been telling us since around the time of the French Revolution that they are smarter than everybody else. Consequently we're entitled to hold all of them to a very high standard of erudition. The just-a-slip excuse you propose might work for most people, but not for (in the words of Michael Beschloss, eminent academic historian) "probably the smartest guy ever to become president." Second, it follows a bitchy, supercilious dismissal of entrepreneurs: "I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart... It must be because I worked harder than everybody else." It is immediately followed by a reiteration of the original claim: "Somebody else made that happen." This in turn is followed by a historical falsehood: "Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet." Third, the pro-Obama forces themselves dropped this defense after about a week, when they saw that the wider public didn't believe them. Fourth, if all Obama meant was that a division of labor prevails, the point is too trivial to be worth stating. If he's as smart as claimed, he wouldn't have taken time to say that. No alternative explanation will stand up. It was simple, overt malice.

More on Hayek and Ryan: http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/126521

One difference between a Romney administration and an Obama administration with a Republican congress is that in the latter case Obama's executive branch - his appointments to the cabinet and the regulatory agencies - would remain in place. Another is that whoever wins this year is going to nominate judges, probably at least two for the Supreme Court. The Senate, not the House, confirms judges.

She overstates the case against the Moral Majority. The notion that they controlled Reagan and his administration was mostly a media stereotype, as the John Birch Society had been nearly twenty years earlier. Rand is one of the people who bought the stereotype.

No, they are supposed to do their jobs and keep their promises. Is that such a difficult distinction to make? The fact that service members can't quit their jobs is a complication but not an insoluble one. It might be as simple as getting rid of the pertinent laws. Of the two remedies you propose (civil disobedence and not joining the service in the first place) I much prefer the latter. If you want to try the second, that's your prerogative as long as you're willing to take the consequences. A soldier's right to refuse is part of the Nuremberg Accords, which are supposed to be part of the constitution via the supremacy clause, but all three branches of government refused to recognize this during the Vietnam war.

A couple of objections leap to mind. 1. In a civilized society the military enforces a country's will on other countries, not on its own. Governments that don't observe this distinction are called juntas or military dictatorships. You may want that, but I don't. 2. The point of a military is to do its job, not to mutiny when it sees fit. During the Vietnam war a justification for the draft was that the threat of military rebellion (supposedly more likely with drafted than with volunteer soldiers) would place limits on the agressions or atrocities a government could get away with. One problem with this is that no such rebellion has ever happened. Another is that you could never trust them to fight for any of their country's objectives. What makes you think such soldiers would be Objectivists, implementing Objectivist values once they decided they didn't like their civilian employers' values? That strikes me as distinctly improbable, and you wouldn't have much chance of changing their minds once the shooting started.

After several years I'm still listening to by Lauridsen. It's the most wonderful piece of music written in my lifetime. (The link takes you to part 1; related links at the right will take you to the rest of the piece. Schlock visuals.)

My own answer to any question of the form "Is it moral..." is: no; if it were, you wouldn't be asking.

The Monitor links the ARI op-ed in turn to what may be the weirdest of all the Ryan/Rand pieces that have popped up in recent weeks.

First, I doubt that the association you fear is going to happen. The news media have been doing a thorough job of exposing Ryan's differences with Rand. Second, Objectivism is already associated with greed. Rand, not the left, did the associating, and I, for one, am glad that she did. Third, bringing any kind of light on any ideas is not a politician's job, so no one can or should expect Ryan to do this.

The Banister article you link to in #8 says he was acquitted of some charges in 2005. The Wikipedia article about him says he was eventually found liable for taxes (not the original criminal charges) and that the appeals court ruled against him in 2008. Russo stands convicted as a crank.