Gus Van Horn blog

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog The real news is all bad this morning, with the headline, "Plan B: Flood Banks with Cash" taking the cake. Nice. The government, which has precipitated this crisis by meddling with the financial markets -- in the form of vast infusions of capital -- will now attempt to solve it by doing the same thing more quickly and with even less thought! And the clueless media will fixate on the inconsequential details rather than reporting the real story. The reporting routinely calls this a "panic", which it is, but fails to notice who is panicking or why.For this mess, we can thank two cultural causes: (1) a widespread disdain for abstract principles, helped along with positive feedback from a common inability to use them properly (and thus appreciate their survival value), and (2) the fact that what few principles many people have managed to absorb are often completely wrong. A few paragraphs from the second page of "Plan B" ought to illustrate this point nicely. Ideologically, this is not what either Republicans or Democrats would have proposed a few months ago. But desperate times produce desperate tactics. "The central bankers all learned the lesson of the 1930s," said Robert Barbera, the chief economist of ITG, a Wall Street firm. That lesson was that if the choice is between allowing the system to collapse and writing a lot of checks, you write the checks and forget about ideology. Unfortunately, none of them learned the lesson of the 1920s, which is that when asset prices soar, it is not a good idea to sit around doing nothing, as the Fed did for most of the housing boom. Cheerleading, which it sometimes did, is even worse. The first paragraph is pure pragmatism. Abandon your "convictions" when in trouble. Do what seems expedient at the moment. Determining whether your convictions were wrong and, if so, in what way, is a waste of time. Never mind the fact that doing so would quickly reveal that you are about to make essentially the same mistake all over again! So much for the alleged practicality of Pragmatism. And for the notion that blowing off abstract thinking can save time. The second and third paragraphs illustrate my second point, which Amity Shlaes (paraphrased by Nicole Gelinas of City Journal) backs up with a historic example drawn from both decades referenced above: Shlaes argues that the 1929 stock-market crash wasn't a well-deserved punishment for Roaring '20s greed. Many profits that drove up the market in those days were real - the result of private-sector managers' ingenious exploitation of new technologies. Nor did the crash guarantee that a decade of depression would follow. Decision-makers, beginning with Herbert Hoover, helped to make it so. Hoover wasn't unfeeling or incompetent. Before he was president, he'd been a successful businessman, and had won praise as commerce secretary for his compassion and management expertise when he aided the victims of the 1927 Mississippi flood. After the market crashed, President Hoover immediately applied this same can-do attitude to the economy. To protect workers, he called upon big businesses not to cut jobs or wages. And to protect big business, he gave in to protectionist sentiment and signed into a law a huge tariff on imported goods. Hoover wanted to help, but instead, he hurt. The tariff ignited a trade war that harmed companies and consumers. Encouraging employers to keep wages and employment up when the economy couldn't support such measures ensured stock prices' continued fall. After Hoover, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched his own wave of economic experiments, detailed by Shlaes, ranging from ambitious public-works programs to fiddling with the dollar's value. Shlaes makes a good case that Roosevelt didn't do any one thing that protracted the Depression. Instead, with his bold and oft-changing ideas, he created an air of economic uncertainty that was deadly to private-sector recovery. Investors had no idea what might come next, so they were afraid to move on. [bold added] Our leaders are already acting like FDR, and many economists have obviously never learned the lessons they should have from what history ought to call the "Great, Avoidable Depression". And they never will, until they question whether the government ought to attempt to run the economy at all, be it directly by means of the explicit ordering-around of regulations; or indirectly by the encouragement of poor decision-making of endless, doomed bailouts. When the government attempts to replace the reasoning of countless individuals by issuing orders to all of them, it attempts the impossible task of performing better than they with a comparatively minuscule number of central planners. Central planners are human beings, and, like you and me, not omniscient. This approach will fail. And when the government blinds countless individuals to the differences between levels of investment risk by saving some people from the consequences of poor decisions, it also removes (although in another way) what is most needed from the market right now: The careful long-range planning of those in the market who do know what they are doing, all the way from holding the correct conceptions of how to function in business, to intimate "on the ground" knowledge of their areas of expertise. The government needs to stop second-guessing everyone, and it needs to stop preempting their decisions. I have often heard some people described as "having more money than sense". That phrase aptly describes our entire economy right now -- thanks to the government forcing it to be that way for everyone, rather than letting things play out naturally! To end our financial crisis, we (meaning as countless individual free to make our own best decisions) need to throw less money and more sense at the problem, and the only way to do that is for the government to get out of our way. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004230.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog It's the Culture, Stupid! Before I go on, I must note that I really hate the James Carville formulation ("It's the economy, stupid!") to which the above sentence alludes. It's dishonest, self-righteous, and wrong all at the same time. It's both an argument from intimidation and a package deal (of concern for a problem and a particular political agenda that purports to solve it). Its main purpose is to club anyone who hears it over the head with a sound bite before he can respond, said sound bite being catchy enough that it will likely be all anyone remembers of such an exchange. That said, I found the Quin Hillyer piece of the same name in The American Spectator thought-provoking in two ways. First, it makes a suggestion to John McCain on how he ought to counter Obama's political advantage on the economy. Second, in doing so, it makes an interesting error in calculation precisely because its author, being a conservative, fails to fully grasp the nature of American culture and so fails to realize that McCain is ill-suited to follow what would otherwise be excellent political advice! Hillyer does a great job of indicating Obama's far-left contempt for American culture -- while unfortunately also package-dealing the virtues of said culture with Christianity. But he is giving this advice to someone who does not understand the importance of freedom of speech and actively endangers it, wants to enact a program of national service, and -- like Obama -- blames capitalism for the current government-induced financial meltdown. McCain's own convictions are contrary to freedom and individualism! Even if he attempts to follow this advice by pretending to uphold them at the last minute, he risks sounding insincere, as he already has to the extent that he may have realized on his own that he may need to stop being the Media's Favorite Republican long enough to campaign against his ideological twin. His lack of fire in the belly and the dullness of the debates are symptoms of the fact that McCain and Obama are similar under the skin and of the fact that McCain does not sincerely oppose Obama's premises. But there is another angle to the formulation, "It's the culture, stupid!" that is worth considering, and that pertains to how we came to this situation in the first place. Americans overall still, in a confused, sense-of-life way, value their freedom, but many do not have at their disposal a clear, intellectual grasp of what freedom is, or what it depends upon. If more of us did, neither candidate would have even gotten very far in the primaries. For more on that, I refer the interested reader to Mark V. Kormes's latest post, "America's Anti-America Candidates", at Principles in Practice. In sum: Forget McCain. We'll get a terrible president no matter who wins in November. This whole damned predicament -- our predicament -- is due to the culture. It's not obvious. You're not stupid, and I hope you consider what Ayn Rand has to say about the nature of freedom and its importance. Setting Terms An ongoing discussion I have been skimming through has reminded me of a couple of things... In intellectual debate, one must be very careful to define terms because people often use the same word to mean different things. This can lead to disastrous results, because intellectual ideas have real-world consequences when they are put into practice. Just consider the so-called Libertarian Party, home to hoards of people who feel that it is not necessary to know what the term "freedom" means in order to fight for it -- and all manner of people (e.g., anarchists) whose "pro-freedom" positions would actually destroy freedom were they to be implemented. For that reason, there is an interesting discussion going on at HBL about whether Objectivists ought to use the term "greed" as a description of virtue, much like Ayn Rand did "selfishness". I do not intend to hold that debate here, but I do note an interesting aspect of intellectual debate that came up in that discussion. A problem with almost any abstract term -- like selfishness -- is that there can be multiple meanings that are widely-enough accepted to occur in dictionaries. In fact, as the first two entries here show, a given dictionary can even fail to define the term in the sense one intends at all. (The first definition is fine until the end, where it appends, "regardless of others". Only a fool would attempt to pretend that one can ignore a fact of reality such as the existence of other human beings!) I note here that we can set aside the word "greed" completely here. "Selfishness" offers plenty of challenges on its own! One participant in the HBL thread noted this problem and added something to the effect that to fail to define one's terms is more than a semantic issue: it is to concede ground without a fight! Just considering "selfishness". Suppose I thought something like, "Well, everyone thinks I'm a baby eater the moment I say I'm selfish, so I'll pick (or invent) an new term to sidestep that problem." What would happen? The correctness of an idea will not determine anyone who happens to bump into it to accept it. There are plenty of people who both oppose selfishness and realize that a great way to prevent its wider acceptance as a virtue is to cause people to confound it with such things as self-centeredness, envy, and criminality. The new word would quickly become just as misunderstood. (Of course, there are also some who, being in positions of power, will simply try to stop you from even getting to make your point. (Paul Hsieh recently blogged about such an occurrence at Noodlefood, but I can't seem to locate the post!) All of this reminds me of political correctness, which was all the rage when I was in graduate school (and remains so in some quarters), so much so that intellectual thugs would seize upon even common words as excuses to put meanings you clearly did not intend into your mouth and start a fight. Quote of the Day The article is depressing, outlining in gory detail what Obama wants to do if he is elected, but the writer in me enjoyed this line, which comes from the book Peter Ferrara is reviewing: The political class seems to be almost intentionally steering the United States economy into the abyss -- and, to borrow a phrase from P.J. O'Rourke, the American electorate, alas, seems ready and willing to hand them the keys and the bottle of whiskey to do it. [italics added] I'd initially written "depression" for "depressing" above. Freudian slip.... Roundups This week's Objectivist Roundup is hosted at Titanic Deck Chairs, and Martin Lindeskog recently hosted Carnival of the Recipes. Exceptional Post Strangely absent from the Objectivist Roundup is a very insightful post about self-centeredness versus selfishness that I read yesterday. It ends in this way: The selfishness vs. self-centeredness misunderstanding is fairly common among Objectivists. Its an easy error to make, but it can be a difficult one to rectify. If you value relationships, make sure you take the selfish approach. And get over yourself already! I thought that the following observation was particularly good: Since many aspects of one's personality become automatized, the self-centered man may get the feeling that he is socially awkward, but he doesn't know why. Social ineptness due to self-centeredness can build on itself, as one automatizes the impression that new people do not value him properly. [bold added] Notice the vicious circle that failing to appreciate the value of other people that can result, and consider that it can eventually significantly hinder the attainment of other important goals besides friendship! How are the odds of getting married or finding a good job or achieving greatness in a career affected by the premise that others do not generally evaluate one properly? All of these goals also depend on the opposite happening and on someone being confident that it will eventually occur! Very thought-provoking! More Beautiful Pictures! To end today's roundup on a positive note, I direct my readers to Dianne Durante's blog, where, I belatedly note, she has posted some stunning photos of the Manhattan skyline. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004225.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog What a morning! A thunderstorm has popped up out of nowhere, knocked the desktop off line (destroying what I had done in the process), and is forcing me to go on a half-depleted laptop battery. (It has caused the lights to momentarily go out or flicker at least six times in the past fifteen minutes.) Pardon the rush job, but I'll have to see what I can slap together in about thirty minutes... SNL Spoof Video Reader Dismuke emailed about a hilarious Saturday Night Live skit that lampoons various figures in the "bailout" debacle, including Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, the Georges Bush and Soros, and Soros's pals, Herbert and Marion Sandler: NBC keeps yanking it off the Internet every time it gets posted ... presumably under pressure from Soros or his friends .... NBC is also apparently deleting all mentions of the skit from its online message boards. It is HILARIOUS. It also parodies Bush and Pelosi and they have both of their personalities down pat -- including just how utterly pathetic Bush has become. [minor edits, bold added] I agree with that last paragraph! The video, at least for now, is posted here. Michelle Malkin has also preemptively posted a transcript illustrated with stills from the skit. Ship above Water One of the funniest family photographs there is from my childhood is one of the older of my brothers and myself as toddlers making complete pills of ourselves on a family trip to Ship Island, off the Mississippi coast. Mom and Dad took us to this neat island with an old fort on it and what did we do? We cried the whole time! The photo has us standing in an entrance to the fort looking hilariously pathetic! My brother has been back several times since, but I never have, although I'd like to. So it was with some wistfulness and regret that I read an article in the New York Times about the destruction of the island -- which Hurricane Camille sawed in half decades ago -- by Gustav and Ike: "I don't see Ship anywhere," said Asbury H. Sallenger, a [ sic] oceanographer at the Geological Survey who was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat and had the best view. "On the map we see it, but all I see is breakers. There is just zip left of this thing." Eventually, the scientists spotted the western part of Ship, but its eastern half had all but disappeared. A small patch of land and whitecaps breaking on underwater shoals were all that remained. After I emailed him with the news, my brother replied by pointing to photos to the contrary, commenting, "I don't know what Asbury H. Sallenger's motive was ... probably wanted some of my money for his research." Indeed. As the Times article states later: Storms and climate change are partly to blame. But the region as a whole is subsiding. And in some areas, some critics contend, federal dredging projects are robbing islands of sand. [bold added] Encouraged by my brother's good news, but bothered that the pictures were still taken before Ike, I found this article from a Biloxi paper which reports that the obituary for Ship Island was premature, and cites a scientist who politely, but pointedly noted that the flyovers cited by the Times were performed less than 48 hours after Ike made landfall -- while its massive storm surge, I surmise, still covered the islands. Looks like my brother was right on both counts. Gorgeous Photographs Leading up to Hurricane Ike, I frequently went to the blog of the Houston Chronicle's Eric Berger (aka, "SciGuy") for information on storm developments and how they could affect the Houston area. I enjoy his blog, and still drop by from time to time. A recent visit treated me to the photograph at right, which Berger obtained from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day web site. -- CAV Updates Today: Made a correction and added a clarification to section on Ship Island. http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004197.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Via Matt Drudge is a video that must be seen to be believed. (There is some additional information and commentary at Newsbusters.) The clip opens with a group of camouflage-clad adolescents from a charter school repeatedly chanting "Alpha! Omega!" as they march into a room. (A lefty commentator somewhere said that the order was reversed. Whatever.) The kids stop, and each in turn stands aside and, with his arms held almost genie-like, aloft, says, "Because of Obama, I am inspired to be the next [fill in an occupation here]." Next, they chant through a litany of things (e.g., "take responsibility for our own lives") in between refrains of "Yes we can!" In their grand finale, the kids tick off the alleged virtues of the Obama plan for physician enslavement -- only they call it the "Obama Health Care Plan". Their "education", if the above terminology and this absurd exercise are representative of it, has consisted primarily of memorizing political slogans instead of developing mental acuity, and in acquiring muscle memory for bizarre poses in between Twinkies instead of achieving actual physical fitness. Yes they can! But not for much longer under that kind of tutelage. Or under a regime that threatens to be as hostile, if not more so, to freedom of speech than John McCain's: When an outside group ran TV ads pointing out links between Obama and the former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, the Obama campaign asked the Bush Justice Department -- yes, that Bush Justice Department, the fount of all evil -- to open a criminal investigation. The Obama campaign's effort dovetails with the work of an outfit called Accountable America, run by a former MoveOn.org operative. It is devoted to threatening conservative donors with legal action and exposure of any embarrassing details of their private lives if they give money to groups running ads against Obama. The New York Times account says the group hopes to create "a chilling effect," but the phrase is used non-pejoratively. [bold and some formatting added] The apparently thoroughly-forgotten Founders of our nation took pride in "a government of laws, not men" for good reason: They understood the advantages of living under laws that not only protected individual rights, but were understood by the people in advance -- rather than the whims of an absolute ruler. They also understood the value of freedom of speech, which such a government protects. What will become of these unfortunate boys if their minds somehow survive a childhood of indoctrination, only to find themselves threatened for expressing an opinion that might endanger the grip on power of some politician? What kind of nation uses speech as a means of enforcing conformity rather than as a means of uncovering the truth through debate? Man must be able to think and act on his judgement to survive. A nation that destroys the minds of its children and forbids intelligent discussion among any remaining adults is doomed because man, having no instincts, cannot function on the animal level. And yet, before this election and, if we are lucky, over the next four years, the exercise of freedom of speech is all we are going to have to beat back the advance of tyranny. The behavior in this video is shocking and pitiable, but at least there is no coordinated effort on the part of the state to foster it as there eventually could be under the national "service" initiative that Obama's "opponent" favors. In one month, the United States of America is almost certain to elect the worst President in its history. -- CAV Updates Today: Reposted video, which had been taken down (HT: Andrew Dalton). Also, the "teacher" who produced it has been suspended, according to Fox News. http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004192.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Now in Newsstands! Via email: Dear Subscribers and Friends of TOS, I'm pleased to announce that TOS is now on 310 newsstands (primarily Barnes & Noble) nationwide. Next time you're in your local bookstore, check to see if it's there. If it's not, let the manager know about the journal (you might even show him a copy), and suggest that he order it, which he can do through Ingram Periodicals. Mention that the journal presents a unique and vital perspective on cultural and political issues, elaborate on that perspective as you see fit, and point out that such a journal might sell well today. Also, we are now selling downloadable PDFs of single articles and book reviews for $4.95 and $2.95 respectively. To purchase PDFs, or to browse what is available, click on "Single Issues" in the navigation bar of our website. And if you know anyone who might appreciate one of our articles, please let him know about this new option. Thank you for your continued business and support. Yours, Craig Biddle Editor and Publisher You can preview the seven main articles and five book reviews of the Fall 2008 issue at the TOS web site. Being in the process of relocating to Boston due to my wife's medical residency there, I'm particularly interested in Paul Hsieh's "Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America". In fact, the topic came up indirectly when I was on the phone with Mrs. Van Horn last night. If you see TOS during your shopping trips in Boston or Houston, where I'll be through the end of the year, let me know! I'd Last Longer Tied to a Bedpost with a Velociraptor! Having work to do yesterday evening, I missed meeting with my home brewing club, and worked at home instead. Breaking for dinner, I figured that this week's episode of The Office might be on, so I turned on the boob tube, only to find that the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden had preempted it. It must have been around the same time Dismuke tuned in. Sez he: I listened to part of it on the radio. When it started, I was actually rooting for Palin - not because I like McCain (I don't) but because of the slime and sludge that has been thrown at her by the Walter Duranty media. Her AGREEING with Biden that it was a lack of regulation (!) that caused the current economic mess - well, I wanted to puke. The Democrats and the Walter Duranty Media have been trying to lay the blame for the situation on capitalism. Here was a chance for someone who ought to know better to bypass the Walter Duranty media filters and educate the public on what REALLY caused the mess. But instead she merely echoed the media and the Democrats. That is pretty close to treason in my book. Was it her own doing - or was she simply following the wishes of her boss, John McCain? I am not really sure that it matters one way or another. The damage has been done. He may have lasted longer than I. I heard her say this, or something very like it, adding something to the effect of "John McCain is known for advocating tough regulations." She cited campaign finance reform -- a primary reason I simply can not vote for the man -- as an example. As if that were a good thing! I turned off the tube immediately. You'll have to go to the Man with the Iron Stomach, Myrhaf, for a detailed analysis of the debate.... I will say a couple of things, though. First, I thought that Biden trounced Palin in terms of sounding like he knew what he was talking about, but that in terms of likability, it was even more heavily skewed the other way. Second, if you want to know how long you'd last tied to a bedpost with a velociraptor, go here! Opting Out of Making a Principled Stand On several occasions (esp. links in first paragraph), I have discussed the pernicious idea of "libertarian paternalism", which is especially appalling when governments apply it to make unwitting citizens into organ donors by default, as some have in Europe: A "social good?" American defaults could "just" be flipped around? That's my body, asshole, and possibly my life you're talking about like it's a damned toggle switch! Whether I part myself out is up to me. The "difference" between the United States and "parts of Europe" is not so much that "the defaults" are different, but why they are different: In the United States, the government is designed to protect individual rights by default, not infringe upon them. The argument against the government applying "libertarian paternalism" in cases like this, and in getting it away from more benign instances like the one I cited above, is that the government should respect individual rights. Given my obvious moral opposition to that idea, as well as to libertarianism, it stands to reason that I would take a gander at this libertarian critique of libertarian paternalism (a review of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein) I found at Arts and Letters Daily. I was not disappointed, at least in the perverse sense of finding only weak objections where unsparing attacks should have been. Will Wilkinson offers the following objections to applying libertarian paternalism to a couple of policy questions. Suppose President John McCain were to implement a policy of opt-out national service. We might reasonably object on the grounds that it would all too clearly communicate that individuals need reasons not to serve the state. If allowed to stand, such a policy could shape social expectations and individual preferences in a direction at odds with individual liberty. Soon enough we might find ourselves asking, "Why should you be able to opt out at all?" The initial paternalistic nudge may "leave the choice open," but accepting the legitimacy of certain nudges may eventually diminish the value we place on liberty. [bold added] The point about choice withering away when we hand all power over to the state is well-taken, but the state's ability to even be in the position of being able to offer such a "choice" already depends on the violation of individual rights on such a massive scale as to make the question a bad thought exercise at best! Why not kill two birds with one stone by morally opposing national servitude -- and the massive welfare state that has acclimated the public to being told what to do, and makes it easier to implement than it would be otherwise? We remain somewhat free even now: Our descent into tyranny is preventable, but on the cultural level, which is to say, on the level of the philosophical ideas held by the general voting public. And then we get back to my favorite, the practice of the state harvesting organs from the incapacitated without their actual consent: Thaler and Sunstein's suggestion to increase the supply of transplant organs by changing the default rule to "presumed consent" instead of nondonation may leave you with similar thoughts. To say that an individual's body is common property by default is to make a statement with cultural consequences that reach beyond the policy's immediate effects. Anyway, why not just legalize markets in organs and tissue, a genuinely libertarian form of choice architecture likely to have even better results? [bold added] Again, a good point in the last sentence, but has Wilkinson ever felt the palpable rage that such a suggestion can draw from a religionist who doesn't want "us" "playing God"? And speaking of rage, where is his? What Thaler and Sunstein propose is wrong, and beyond the pale, and yet all Wilkinson can muster against it is that it "has cultural consequences beyond the policy's immediate effects"!?!? Thaler and Sunstein are wrong, but they're pikers. It isn't so much the fact that they are implying that we don't even own our own bodies that is the problem, but the fact that they can get away it so easily. Our culture is saturated with the notion (in many ultimately inconsequential variants) that man does not exist for his own sake. Failing to take a stand against that very idea -- and instead feebly offering as Wilkinson does that it might have unpleasant consequences -- is not going to stop such an idea from being implemented. People generally buy into the idea that the moral and the practical are often at odds and, when they see a clash, they will favor the "moral" if they are decent. If they are not, they will permit themselves to be "nudged" into doing what they feel is expedient, which ultimately means that decent, mistaken people and range-of-the-moment pragmatists all end up doing the same foolish things. Libertarian paternalism is, as Wilkinson puts it, "no source of ideological realignment", but that's not the issue here. The issue is that it is a symptom of the fact that our culture needs a massive ideological realignment, one away from the altruism and collectivism that makes serious proposals to steal the liberty of the conscious and the very bodies of the unconscious possible in the first place. Such a realignment cannot occur when, in the face of such obscenities, one fails to call a spade a spade. Altruism is not just something with unpleasant "cultural consequences": It diminishes and ends human lives. As such, it is immoral and must be exposed as such at every opportunity. The facts of reality make a proper morality a necessity. There is no way to opt out. (I note with interest that there is a review of Nudge by Eric Daniels in the upcoming Objective Standard.) -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004173.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Via Randex and HBL is an article in The Wall Street Journal that reads almost as if Ayn Rand herself had written it: "Loose Money and the Roots of the Crisis". Here's an excerpt. In the aftermath of this financial catastrophe , as we sort out causes and assign blame, with experts offering various solutions -- More regulation! Less complex financial instruments! -- let's not lose sight of the most fundamental component of finance. No credit-default swap, no exotic derivative, can be structured without stipulating the monetary unit of account in which its value is calculated. Money is the medium of exchange -- the measure, the standard, the store of value -- which defines the very substance of the economic contract between buyer and seller. It is the basic element, the atom of financial matter. It is the money that is broken. [bold added] The article is worth a full read and even manages to deal with former Objectivist Alan Greenspan's role as a central banker about as well as one could hope for a non-Objectivist proponent of capitalism. After the article is the following blurb about its author: "[Judy] Shelton, an economist, is author of 'Money Meltdown: Restoring Order to the Global Currency System' (Free Press, 1994)." Notice the year her book came out. I remember that year, and the heady (but mistaken) feeling that came with the Republicans winning control of Congress. It seemed at the time like we were finally about to make some progress towards reversing the decades-old trend towards a government-run economy. Now, nearly a decade and a half later, we have not only failed to achieve even the beginning of a rollback, but have seen a massive increase in the size and intrusiveness of the federal government, and driven by a Republican President at that! For anyone urging a vote for McCain based on the notion that you "fight an election with the politicians you have", there might be a historical lesson here. The fight for a sound financial system is too important for pro-capitalists to make the mistake of pledging loyalty to any one political party. Advocates of capitalism must instead present our arguments to the public at large, and make the parties vie for our votes in every election instead. The former will ensure that our numbers grow, and the latter will protect our political power from misuse by false allies (such as the religious right) for purposes at odds with freedom. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004161.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Reader Dismuke alerted me via email to an excellent piece at RealClear Markets regarding the current economic crisis, by investor Joseph Calhoun. What I like about it is that it busts two myths at once: that the current crisis represents a failure of capitalism and that there is a shortage of capital in the economy. Each has been used when convenient lately to sow panic and to justify massive new government interventions in the economy. Last week Goldman Sachs raised $10 billion in new capital in one day. They sold $5 billion in preferred stock and warrants to Berkshire Hathaway and also completed a secondary offering of common stock that raised another $5 billion. Friday, JP Morgan raised $10 billion in a secondary offering to help pay for the Washington Mutual takeunder. Both of these offerings were oversubscribed, meaning that the companies could have raised more capital if they wanted. There is not a shortage of capital for well run financial companies. There is, however, a shortage of capital for companies that have acted irresponsibly with investor capital in the recent past. For some reason, our political leaders believe this is a failure of the market, but isn't this what should be expected from rational investors? Given a choice,why would a rational investor allocate limited capital to the losers rather than the winners? If capital is really as scarce as it seems, isn't it better for our economy if we make sure that it is allocated wisely? [This can be done only by making sure that people who know what they are doing are free to act on their rational effort. --ed] The biggest bank failure in the history of the United States happened last Thursday night and by Friday morning, it was business as usual. The only difference was the name on the door and the losses suffered by those unfortunate enough to invest in Washington Mutual bonds or stock. The taxpayers didn't lose anything and depositors didn't lose anything, only investors. That is how capitalism works in case everyone has forgotten. [bold added] Oh, and scratch what I said about "justifying" government intervention in the economy. The proper verb in my last sentence is really "excuse". Capitalism depends on (and, to the extent that a nation is free, it is the triumph of) countless individuals exercising their own, independent judgement. This is impossible without freedom, which must be protected by the government. In fact, that is the only proper function of the government. Any time and for any reason (HT, C. August) the government interferes with individual rights, it curtails the ability of some individuals to act according to their best judgement, and threatens to do so for all. Think about what this means in the context of the current crisis. Those who have made bad decisions in real estate (and related) investments have already suffered their losses, or can probably see them coming. What good is it going to do for our economy or our freedom for the government to take money away from those who have not made similar mistakes and hand it over to those who have? And what good will "supervision" of the able (in the worst imaginable context, that of threats) by the very people who helped create this mess do? Most importantly, by what right? In all the disgraceful spinning of campfire ghost stories, cries of "act now, think later", and groveling before Nancy Pelosi (of all people!), not once has any politician in favor of the bailout explained why robbing American citizens for the benefit of inept bankers is the right, American thing to do. That's because they can't, any more than Nancy Pelosi can wave a wand and relieve all of us from the necessity of thinking carefully in order to make a living. Or make socialism compatible with the actual requirements of human life. Just for starters, a "bailout" will insulate those who deserve their losses from the consequences of their bad decisions, as well as (via the inevitable redistribution of wealth) visit those consequences upon those who don't deserve them and deprive the rewards of sound judgement from those who do deserve them. Isn't the last thing our economy needs right now to throw good money after bad, while removing incentives from those best able to make good economic decisions? If we allow sympathy for the inept (or the foolish) or envy of the able to cloud our judgement enough to blind us to the fact that government intervention in the economy is ultimately achieved by violating someone's inalienable rights, we will rue that choice sooner or later. A mere bursting bubble will look like a walk in the park. (Calhoun hints at that, too, although he could have gone a lot farther.) Read the whole article. (Among the things I haven't discussed here, Calhoun succinctly explains how some recent government interventions have already misfired.) -- CAV Updates Today: Corrected typos. http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004154.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Articles on the Mortgage Crisis Via HBL are two must-reads on the government-caused mortgage crisis. The first explores the origins of the housing crisis, pinpointing events in 1999: Why did it happen? Let's go back to 1999, when Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, was under pressure by the Clinton administration to find a way to get more loans to "borrowers whose incomes, credit ratings and savings are not good enough to qualify for conventional loans." A pilot program was launched, which soon became general policy. Money flowed to people who couldn't afford to pay it back. Michael Arrington then quotes one Peter Wallison predicting a government bailout resulting from that policy that same year! The next article, by Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune, ends up asking a similar question to the one I raised the other day: "Who will rescue the federal government?" Unlike myself, he presents the gory financial details behind this question. Even the government admits this can't go on forever . A report from the Treasury Department says that without big increases in revenue, "Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security spending and the related deficit financing costs will far exceed the government's ability to pay." When you spend more than you bring in, you have to borrow to cover the difference. In the next three decades, the government's official debt is on track to triple. But at some point, the Treasury predicts, " the world's financial markets would likely cease lending to the United States." Then what? David Henderson, a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution and editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, ticks off the options: We could close the budget gap by drastically cutting spending or raising taxes. The Federal Reserve could print a lot of money, reducing the real value of the debt and making it easier to pay off. Or the government could default -- in short, declare bankruptcy. [link dropped, bold added] Huge spending cuts, confiscatory taxation, government theft by inflation, or federal bankruptcy, take your pick. Even the only moral or permanently viable answer, the first of these, will be painful, thanks to most Americans having become accustomed to some kind of government handouts. Now that we're in this situation, what ought we do about it? Through Instapundit and, again, HBL, we have "Key Points on 'Rescue' Plan From A Healthy Bank's Perspective" from John Allison, Chairman and CEO of BB&T. Among other things along the way, he traces the origin of the crisis even further back than Bill Clinton's big assist in 1999: Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are the primary cause of the mortgage crisis . These government supported enterprises distorted normal market risk mechanisms. While individual private financial institutions have made serious mistakes, the problems in the financial system have been caused by government policies including, affordable housing (now sub-prime), combined with the market disruptions caused by the Federal Reserve holding interest rates too low and then raising interest rates too high. [bold added] As Yaron Brook recently put it so well, this is not a failure of capitalism, but of the "unfree market". To make matters worse -- as if this bailout bill weren't already bad enough -- some earlier versions of this bill included massive outlays for ACORN, a left-wing advocacy group. That particular measure appears to be gone, but there's plenty more to hate about this bill: In the interest of "transparency," there will be four layers of oversight, and judicial review of Treasury decisions -- something Hank Paulson tried (with good reason) to exclude in his initial draft. The ACORN subsidy is gone, but mortgage relief is in, through some yet-to-be-determined process of federal mortgage review. [bold added] Re-read John Allison's analysis of the origins of this crisis and recall that "bailout" and solution" are not synonyms. Update: Just as I was about to head out the door, I noticed that David Veksler has posted on the economic crisis as well. The key to understanding economic theory is to grasp that the same principles that apply to your personal finances, and perhaps to your interaction with your local grocer apply equally to the world at large, at all levels of economy activity. The key to understanding politics is to grasp that political success requires advocating policies which violate these basic economic principles - and then evading the consequences of their own policies - with the voters' eager participation in the delusion. This last sentence indicates why cultural change is the only possible long-term solution to the current crisis. If people do not generally re-gain at least the same level of appreciation of personal independence and freedom that they once had in America, the formula for political "success" will not change. Bush's Statist Legacy, Updated In barely over a month since I pointed to an eye-opening MacLean's article about the enormous growth in the size of the federal government under our current President, we have not only seen him accelerate our disastrous domestic policies (above), but have had him doing exactly the same thing in the meantime with respect to foreign policy. On The Drudge Report, in a single day, I spotted the following collection of headlines. They practically do my job for me: "Israel Asked US for Green Light to Bomb Nuclear Sites in Iran" "US, Russia Reach Deal on New UN Iran Resolution" "Russia Offers Chavez Nuclear Help amid US Tensions" I leave it up to the reader to determine how (1) stopping an ally from doing (even a part of) what we should have done to Iran long ago, (2) making a deal on Iran with the country that has been helping it become a nuclear threat, and (3) evading the open intercourse between that same nation and an open enemy very nearby, will promote our long-term national security. I certainly don't see it. Who needs McCain or Obama to take office when we still have George W. Bush until January? Chavez Echoes the Ayn Rand Institute... ... regarding a fact, but not his evaluation of that fact. As if recent world events haven't closely-enough resembled some hack attempting to re-write Atlas Shrugged in as grotesquely-exaggerated a manner possible, we have Hugo Chavez saying of the financial crisis, "I am sounding like Bush, more or less. What a novelty!" Sadly for us, the only novelty is that this is now so obvious, even Hugo Chavez can see it. A press release from the Ayn Rand Institute indicated a year and a half ago that this has been the case: "In announcing his commitment to achieving 'social justice' in Latin America," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "President Bush is following in the footsteps, not of Thomas Jefferson, but of Hugo Chavez." In addition to this being old news, this is not a good thing. Furthermore, both Chavez and Vladimir Putin, who understand this on the level of cunning, see this and appear to be getting ready to use it. Of course, if any leader really understood this, he would do, as Stephen Borque suggests in a letter he sent to his Congressmen, and "grab the free-market baton that the Republicans have long ago dropped." Sadly, in a twist too ironic even for a good farce, Chavez and Putin seem closer to doing this than our own government! -- CAV Updates Today: Added link to David Veksler to end of first section. http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004138.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Via Arts and Letters Daily is one of those fascinating articles that sneaks up you and leaves you pleasantly surprised with an insight where you'd expected merely to fulfill a twinge of morbid curiosity. Here's the blurb: Sushi is just what “ White People” want: foreign, expensive, healthy, and hated by the uneducated. White People are not snobs or anything... "Here we go again," I thought, remembering a bus ride in Dallas shortly after college. Some black guy in the front of the bus was very loudly and pointedly slamming "white people" every chance he got. Was he trying to incite his fellow black passengers against the whites or dare his white passengers to do something about his rude behavior? I don't know, but I had fun reducing him to a stammer when, as I left, he looked at me and said, "Oh! When I say 'white people', I mean management." "Well that's funny! I thought you were talking about skin color the whole time," I replied without so much as raising my voice or breaking stride as I continued to exit the bus. I had hoped to simply not give this idiot the satisfaction of acting irate, but he handed me his own head on a platter instead. Thanks for the memories, Malcolm X! But back to the article, which discusses the most recent "instant book" based on a blog, this one being, Stuff White People Like, by one Christian Lander. The article, rather than being some sort of elitist slam against American culture actually gives insight into someone who slams an American subculture (and probably does despise American culture). I'd heard of this blog before, shortly after mentioning St. Patrick's Day and having this guy's entry about it pointed out to me. Kinda funny, but more sarcastic in tone than I cared for. A more recent entry of his on ultimate frisbee, which I played in grad school, is more to my liking: If you look a little closer, you will see some surprising things. First, you will never see hippies get more upset than on an Ultimate Frisbee field. It can be jarring to see people who look like they should be playing acoustic guitars yelling at each other about whether or not Blake stepped out of bounds. Secondly, you will notice that Ultimate Frisbee matches are the best place to meet white guys who wear headbands. [bold added] Heh! How true! Maybe I like this one better because I am not a leftist. And my wife really is Irish, and yet never has said a word about being "oppressed". Maybe she's Black Irish.... But Lander is a leftist, and what he means by "white people" is basically the same thing my old pal Malcolm from the bus did: the educated elite. Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic Monthly comments: Lander's White People aren't always white, and the vast majority of whites aren't White People (he doesn't even capitalize the term). But although Lander's designation is peculiar, he's hardly the first to dissect this elite and its immediate predecessors. ... [David] Brooks calls these people variously "bourgeois bohemians," the "educated elite," and the "cosmopolitan class"). Lander, like many of these writers, traces this group's values to the 1960s, and there's clearly a connection between a politics based on "self-cultivation" (to quote the Students for a Democratic Society’s gaseous manifesto, the Port Huron Statement) and what Lander defines as White People's ethos: "their number-one concern is about the best way to make themselves happy." That concern progresses naturally into consumer narcissism and a fixation on health and "well-being": Lander's most entertaining and spot-on entries dissect White People's elaborate sumptuary codes, their dogged pursuit of their own care and feeding, and their efforts to define themselves and their values through their all-but-uniform taste and accessories (Sedaris/Eggers/ The Daily Show/the right indie music/Obama bumper stickers/uh, The New Yorker [And ribbons and wristbands. --ed]). [bold added] And, much later: Here and elsewhere, accompanying the book's mockery of the essentially innocuous solipsism of White People is what Lander, a man of the left, described to me as his exasperation with progressives' "cultural righteousness" and "intolerance and groupthink"-- a set of attitudes that enhances and is enhanced by a profoundly smug and incurious outlook. In other words, Lander has spent a large amount of time and emotional energy banging his head against a cultural wall Ayn Rand identified nearly fifty years ago! Avowed non-materialists whose only manifestation of rebellion and of individualism takes the material form of the clothes they wear, are a pretty ridiculous spectacle. Of any type of nonconformity, this is the easiest to practice, and the safest. ("Apollo and Dionysus" in The Objectivist, Jan. 1970, p.775) This irritates the hell out of Lander, who regularly lambastes his "white" fellows for superficiality and laziness ("White People 'like feeling smart without doing work -- two hours in a theater is easier than ten hours with a book.'") and apparently doesn't shrink from the impracticality of the immoral ethos/politics of altruism/collectivism he espouses ([White people] will also send their kids to private school with other rich white kids so that they can avoid the 'low test scores' that come with educational diversity."). Landers thus seems to have an inkling that poor academic performance and public education go hand in hand -- that his moral code is at odds with the requirements of human survival -- and chooses what he regards as the high road. He is thus intellectually independent to the limited degree that he can call his fellows for "acting white", so to speak, but he ultimately fails, for whatever reason, to stray too far from "white" tradition himself. Rand said something about this, too. Intellectually, the activists of the New Left are the most docile conformists . They have accepted as dogma all the philosophical beliefs of their elders for generations: the notions that faith and feeling are superior to reason, that material concerns are evil, that love is the solution to all problems, that the merging of one’s self with a tribe or a community is the noblest way to live. There is not a single basic principle of today’s Establishment which they do not share. Far from being rebels, they embody the philosophic trend of the past 200 years (or longer): the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis, which has dominated Western philosophy from Kant to Hegel to James and on down. [bold added] ("From a Symposium," Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 174.) The fact that so many "white people" act the same is certainly irritating, but when one understands the source of an irritation, one can, accordingly, learn to accept the circumstance or act to change it. In Lander's case, understanding why so many "white people" are banal hypocrites might help, but he would first have to take time to critically evaluate (and therefore reject) his own moral code and political assumptions. "White people" are hypocrites in part because their survival depends on it: Altruism and collectivism, if consistently applied, would ultimately be deadly. Some are, doubtless, also hypocrites because they do not want to think. And some, after an entire lifetime of being told that the moral and the practical are at odds, have been beaten into intellectual submission. Lander seethes about the wrong thing even as he, "acting white" himself, profits from the book he published -- not that there's anything objectively wrong with earning money. It isn't that personal style, or exotic food, or sending one's kids to good schools is wrong because it isn't altruistic. It's that altruism and collectivism are wrong. Lots of those "white people" out there would have become much more interesting and dynamic people had they not been saddled with an inverted morality their entire lives, and that probably includes the witty Lander himself. -- CAV Updates Today: Added a sentence explaining why I thought the article was valuable. http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004122.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog In an article called "269 tie: An electoral college 'doomsday'?", Joseph Curl of The Washington Times speculates on a few plausible Election Day scenarios that could lead to a tie in the Electoral College, and conceivably result in Sarah Palin serving as Barack Obama's Vice president. There are at least a half-dozen plausible ways the election can end in a tie, and at least one very plausible possibility - giving each candidate the states in which they now lead in the polls, only New Hampshire - which went Republican in 2000 and Democratic in 2004, each time by just 1.5 percent - needs to swap to the Republican column to wind up with a 269-269 tie. The odds of this happening are slim -- about 1.5 percent -- but higher than they were for the last election. My initial reaction to this possibility was something like, "So what? We're getting stuck with Unity '08 no matter who wins!" But then I realized that a tie could ultimately be a good thing: It would clothesline any argument that the incoming administration has a "mandate", and if there is one thing we want after Election Day it's anything that will help gridlock happen or destroy any momentum towards tyranny the winner might have. Or almost anything.... The news isn't all good. The law regarding how Congress (or which -- the incoming or the outgoing) should break a tie is not unambiguous, and one particularly nauseating scenario looms: According to Electoral College specialist Judith Best, we could end up handing the reigns over to an Acting President Nancy Pelosi while armies of lawyers duke things out for a couple of years. In the sad state of confusion regarding the proper role of government, I am loathe to contemplate what could ultimately come out of a protracted constitutional crisis like this. (More foolishness about abolishing the Electoral College, which we should not do, would be just the start.) This election is potentially a disaster for the cause of individual rights no matter what the outcome. The potential for difficulty in breaking a tie is particularly unfortunate, because a tie otherwise would be just the sort of unintended benefit from the Electoral College we could use right about now. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004114.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog At first, it astounded me, although it should not have, that Barack Obama selected as his running mate Joe Biden, whose own 1988 presidential campaign was ended by a plagiarism scandal. Furthermore, by all appearances, this is one dog that, like "a thousand generations" of dogs before it, can't learn new tricks, as Joe Biden himself -- I mean Neil Kinnock -- might put it. One of the many flaws of John McCain, who heads the Democratic Vice President's opposing ticket, is that he confuses national servitude with individual voluntarism. Alex Epstein put this well last year: The logical end road of the belief that you have a duty to serve the nation is legislation that forces you to do so--i.e., compulsory national service. Like Time magazine, Senators John McCain and Evan Bayh, who introduced the Call to Service Act in 2003, think that "national service should one day be a rite of passage for young Americans." But there is only one way to make national service a "rite of passage": by government coercion. McCain has long favored compulsory national service, but laments that it "is not currently politically practical." Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution has proposed that every 18-year-old be forced to perform one year of compulsory service. This is nothing less than involuntary servitude of the youth in the land of the free. [minor format edits, bold added] McCain never tells us how it is that a period of servitude will prepare the young to live lives as free men. And add Joe Biden to the list of politicians who wish to tread on the last embers of freedom in America while whistling "Yankee Doodle": Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden said Thursday that paying more in taxes is the patriotic thing to do for wealthier Americans. In a new TV ad that repeats widely debunked claims about the Democratic tax plan, the Republican campaign calls Obama's tax increases "painful." [bold added] It is bad enough that essentially the entire body politic takes government confiscation of property for granted as acceptable, which it is not. What is worse is that Biden is, like McCain, (1) selling a government coerced act as a virtue of altruistic morality -- while (2) ignoring the fact that coerced acts have no moral import whatsoever, (3) evading the demonstrable fact that acting in one's own self-interest (as the Founding Fathers did when they volunteered to fight the British at great personal expense and risk) is demonstrably the moral thing to do, and (3) helping to further set in stone the pernicious, anti-American notion that the government is the guardian of public morality. What is scandalous beyond belief is that none of this so much as raises a brow of the average voter. Joe Biden is, obviously, not actually guilty of my rhetorical charge of plagiarism, although I wish that were his only sin. But if he and all the other major candidates in the upcoming presidential race seem as if they might as well be, it is because they all subscribe to the same, wrong, moral code. That is, they attach nobility to human sacrifice. Worse still, they all threaten to force America -- the land of the free! -- to endure the consequences of living by this idea by means of a collectivistic, anti-freedom political agenda, that differs between the two major tickets only in the details of its implementation. What is supremely ironic about all these flag-wrapped calls to self-immolation is that it would be patriotic, and in the proper sense, for Americans to donate money, time, and effort to America -- but only if America consistently protected individual rights, meaning that she never forced anyone to do so! Just look at how the Founding Fathers acted as they rebelled from the tyranny of the British, and why they did so. As Joe Biden -- I mean Neil Kinnock -- might put it, I wish I were among the first of a "thousand generations" of Americans to see freedom wax rather than wane in my lifetime. I will continue to work to see that happen, but I do not labor under the illusion that either Obama-Biden or McCain-Palin will help this happen. Appearances to the contrary, these tickets are carbon copies of each other. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004085.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Mr. Patchoulihead Well, courtesy of Hurricane Ike, I missed getting my hair cut by my regular stylist before leaving town and instead got a two-fer in the Culture Shock Department when I took care of that in Cambridge yesterday. I needed a cut some time before 2:00 so I could make it to an evening event in Waltham. Found this place through a Google search of barber shop recommendations, after passing over the top result, which read like its own staff "reviewed" it. The shop is described as "funky" by one customer. Consistently good reviews. Call 'em, explaining my situation, and they fit me in, no problem. I've been using a stylist (rather than a barber) for a little over a year now. She won my loyalty by devising a new hair style for me that solved all the problems that normal thinning had been causing for some time with my old style, while updating it, making it far easier to maintain, and yet not radically altering the basic look. Ingenious. If a stylist can be an artist, then she certainly is one. She can work magic with any head of hair. Nobody cuts hair like she can, but I did wonder how well I'd be able to convey what she did to this new guy. I've heard her describe what she does to the sides as a "fade". I don't know whether white barbers use the term, but yesterday makes me suspect that the answer is, "No." Still, I was satisfied overall with the final result. So I navigated the business end of things well enough, but was too stunned by the conversation in the shop to miss the salon as much I expected to. Some kind of high-falutin' far-left news/talk radio was going on in the background. (Bonus: Until yesterday, I had never heard a radio ad for Matlab!) The other patron was talking about how his normally apolitical and "somewhat conservative" wife was livid about Sarah Palin and getting ready to donate huge amounts of cash to the Obama campaign. The barbers were on the same page as this guy, who was going on about "the lies" of the McCain campaign. In Texas, such a conversation would be unthinkable among such "men on the street". Ordinary people there may lean a little to the left, but these people were so far out there, I am not sure how I could have even begun to engage them in a political conversation. Some time in a blue state will definitely be good intellectual practice for me. I hope. The second wave of the culture shock came later, on the subway back. My barber had applied some kind of styling goop to the top of my head. In the shop, I got a strong whiff of mint. "Interesting," I thought with some indifference. I normally avoid using fragrances, but I was heading straight home to wash my hair anyway. But I started sensing that there was some odd undertone to the scent of the goop that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Mint and .... What?!? At some point on the Red Line, the answer hit me: It was patchouli! Where I come from, only hippies use patchouli! This place is nuts! Case Closed Via HBL is an instructive look at what should be the end of the "controversy" surrounding the conviction of the Rosenbergs for espionage. What I found most interesting about it was how much the Left did to cover for them. Even I was stunned. To this day, this received wisdom [that the Rosenbergs were persecuted merely for being communists] permeates our educational system. A recent study by historian Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton has found that very few college history textbooks say simply that the Rosenbergs were guilty; according to Schweikart, most either state that the couple were innocent or that the trial was "controversial," or they "excuse what [the Rosenbergs] did by saying, 'It wasn't that bad. What they provided wasn't important.' " Being curious about how bloggers would react to this, I did a cursory blog search and found a ton of conservative commentary and little left-wing commentary. Many conservatives seemed of the mind that now, finally, the Left would "have to" admit they were wrong about the Rosenbergs. This is wrong, of course. Men have a capacity for evasion of facts that would be unlimited but for natural selection. Amid the deafening silence are whispers that the whole thing is unimportant because the messenger, Ronald Radosh, holds a grudge and, besides, the events of the case happened so long ago. And, oh yeah, the LA Times marks the piece as "opinion". Context and Lessons Curious awhile back about an aspect of the job hunt that was causing me to wonder whether I was doing something gravely wrong (and worse, completely oblivious to), I stumbled upon an interesting pair of articles. The first half of "Job Search Pet Peeves" was of commiserative value, but a blog entry by a corporate recruiter offers an interesting explanation that at least makes sense of many of the items on that list -- and what not to do about a common job hunting situation. If you find yourself in perpetual limbo about an interesting position, take a look at those articles -- and then keep on hunting. The more options you have, the less any one of them matters, and the less it will bother you for it to remain unresolved or go to someone else. With that, I don my hunting gear and head out the door! -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004074.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Via Arts and Letters Daily is an article from the site's parent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, that discusses the pedagogical pitfalls of online content, both in terms of how people read content from a computer screen and in terms of how delivery through the Internet can affect comprehension. Given one of the points it makes -- that we go for the "nut" as we browse the web -- I can't resist the temptation to provide a short, pithy excerpt, this being a quote from web researcher Jakob Nielsen. (But I do recommend reading the whole thing.) We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets -- so long as the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts. [bold added] The educational fad of exposing children to computers at a very young age has bothered me for a long time because a computer is just a tool and, as such, it is no better than the person using it. The article argues that the widespread use of computers in educational settings may be detrimental to cognitive development. That point is well-taken, and I agree that much could be gained by having children do more learning without all the distractions of a computer to compete with the lesson at hand. But it is noteworthy that the article describes a study of how "student achievement" in New York was influenced by a laptop program. Laptop use was found to have no effect on student achievement. If computer use is so detrimental to the development of young minds, shouldn't laptop users have scored lower on such a test? More important, other than in the narrow skill set of knowing how to use a computer, why would we necessarily expect students to score better simply by virtue of familiarity with the use of a computer? Calculators are superior to abacuses and slide rules in many respects, but were we to test for a student's understanding of mathematical concepts, why would the use of a tool really matter, unless one tool gave better practice in the use of the concepts in question? (I dare say, I can easily imagine that inferior tools could often be better in this regard!) Not mentioned in the article is the elephant in the room of the dismal quality of our educational system and its systematic, purposeful resemblance to the "hidden television set" of the modern, networked computer. Computers can be distracting in many ways, yes, but were we to consider that the dominant school of thought in education fails to "emphasize systematic study of the academic disciplines", we would probably better understand why our students can't make better use of computers than they do. Conceptual development (which Nielsen alludes to above) and self-discipline are two qualities that are systematically omitted in today's dominant Progressive school of educational thought. Blaming modern technology for our failing classrooms now is as wrong-headed as expecting computers alone to somehow save our children from public education was in the past. (I don't think the article makes this error, but making the computer less prominent in education will not alone accomplish much in our current context.) Rather than snatching tools from their grasp, perhaps we should save our children from the clutches of public education and its entrenched cadre of comprachicos. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004073.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog (Just Part of) The Difference between Houston and New Orleans As my property sits unattended after Ike's unwelcome visit Saturday, I find the Houston Chronicle news report containing the following to be encouraging: Houston police have arrested almost 100 people suspected of looting since Hurricane Ike barreled through the area. Sixty-one were taken into custody from 6 a.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. on Sunday and another 33 during the following 24-hour period. " We expect those numbers to continually decrease," said HPD Sgt. John Chomiak. He said additional police patrols are working 12-hour shifts. At Sonny Ngo's east Houston convenience store, the S&T Food Mart on Navigation near Wayside, two men on Sunday tried to force their way into his business. "I didn't let them inside," Ngo said. "They weren't from the neighborhood." Ngo said a group of regular customers confronted the two men, keeping them there until police arrived. " The good people in the neighborhood supported me," Ngo said. "They backed me up." [bold added] The paper is also keeping tabs on power restoration efforts on its front page -- except that I'd prefer this to be listed in terms of "percent restored" rather than "percent out". This is, after all, only the biggest power outage in Texas history! Wordweb Environmentalism Dinesh Pillay used a software program called "Wordweb", until he read its unreasonable licensing conditions: WordWeb free version may be used indefinitely only by people who take at most two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12 month period. People who fly more than this need to purchase the Pro version if they wish to continue to use it after a 30-day trial period. In better days, an airline executive would hear about this and find a way to bankroll a competitor, and there would be a critical mass of people calling for the boycott of this software that it deserves. The Case for Abstaining I will not be casting my vote for John McCain in the upcoming presidential election because he has a track record as an enemy of freedom of speech. So should I help elect his collectivist twin, Barack Obama, or should I abstain? A recent posting at HBL by Harry Binswanger points the the below video of Barack Obama as food for thought for those considering voting for him. It comes from the time before he moderated his stated positions in order to broaden his appeal among the general electorate. After considering his suicidal views on national defense, it is also worth noting his dearth of character witnesses, something Charles Krauthammer recently discussed: Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama's life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I've been with Barack Obama. We've toiled/endured together. You can trust him. I do. The strategy of the Democrats, ever since the party was taken over by the New Left, has been to conceal its agenda from the voting public, and Barack "the human Rorschach Test" Obama would seem to be the very incarnation of this strategy. Electorally, this strategy can easily backfire, as Myrhaf (from whom I learned of the Krauthammer piece) describes: "An undefined man is vulnerable to hostile definition." I don't want McCain, but I am afraid he will win. Update: See also, Myrhaf's post, "The Blank Screen President", for another take on Obama's changing "positions". Two Interesting Reads Darren Cauthon recently read -- and strongly recommends -- the book based on Randy Pausch's inspiring "Last Lecture". Meanwhile, Apollo points to some talks by Michelle Goldberg on her book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. -- CAV Updates: (1) Changed "Abstention" to "Abstaining". (2) Added update to "The Case for Abstaining". http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004066.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog I woke up this morning at my mother's home in Mississippi to the brightness of cloud-scattered sunlight in a happy, tranquil emotional state it is impossible for me to describe adequately. There are elements of the feeling that goes with my very distinct recollection of playing in a sandbox in the shade during a sunny morning just before my first day of kindergarten -- the rest of that day escapes me -- and a somewhat "tropical" mood (to use a crude approximation) I sometimes get when I listen to some of Bob Marley's music. That feeling, fortunately, has not entirely dissipated, but I do recall thinking it odd, in a very good sense, to feel that way as I woke up further and remembered that today, Hurricane Ike is probably doing -- or has done -- whatever it will do to the house in Houston. I write now -- before looking at any hurricane news -- partly to enjoy the small dose of normalcy that writing can afford me and partly to collect and record some very interesting thinking I have done over the last couple of days. If I recorded the mundane details of the Rita evacuation, my chronicles of the travails of Ike will look inward a little more, to how I dealt with them. *** As I mentioned just before boarding up here, I had planned an evacuation in three stages: (1) Get out of immanent danger. (2) Evaluate the post-strike situation. (3) Act accordingly. As with Rita, Ike demanded an evacuation just before a week-long trip out of town I was already planning. In the one case, I was to take a trip down memory lane, heading to Jackson for the twenty year reunion of my high school class. In this case, I am headed to Boston to see my wife, who has already relocated there, and for purposes related to my job hunt. My flight to Boston is Tuesday, or at least it is scheduled for Tuesday. An event I must attend for networking purposes is Wednesday: I would really like to attend it because it may offer me a chance to meet someone in a position to help me get a job with one of my favorite companies. In addition to preserving my life, then, I needed to have a way to keep building my future. Houston's official disaster plan, of "hiding from the wind", was foolish advice for me for two reasons. (I worry that it was bad advice generally.) First, any one of the enormous pine and ash -- or is that "trash"? -- trees surrounding my house could fall on it to turn it into a death trap during the storm. Second -- and I was not accounting for this when I decided to leave -- the lack of electrical power and the logistical nightmares brought on by littered and blocked streets would have limited anything I could do for at least a week afterwards to physical labor and "guarding" whatever was left at the house. Did I mention that I don't own a gun? How does one react to such a potential disaster, whose effects can range from practically nil to a near-total loss of possessions? My plan was not a bad first stab, but the nature of the storm, compounded with its huge size, ruined Stage One. Removing to a location north of town looked good at the time. I would, in fact,be safer there than at the Houston house. But at minimum, my kind hosts were going to be without power the next day, and my cell phone connection was unreliable as it was. I'd take a step back to look and see, only to be blinded by the power loss, and immobilized by impassable country roads. So I checked some track maps of the storm, and the traffic conditions along U.S. 59 to be sure that my customary "northern route" to Mississippi would allow me to outrun the storm and head to an unaffected area. Now, thanks the fact that I am such a fine son, I can use the DSL connection I helped Mom set up in July to follow up on the storm. (Cable and radio are useless. "The real problem is the storm surge," isn't just the particular way that the moronic products of modern journalism schools happen to be bragging to others and fooling themselves about how "on top of things" they are. And it isn't just something that can drive you crazy if you need real information. It could also be the refrain of a musical farce about the television "coverage" of this storm, which has been wrong or ambiguous in content and patronizing in tone. These ass clowns are so collectivistic that they're gearing their news coverage to a mass rather than to their own individual customers. The wind is a big deal -- to anyone not on the coast.) I can do what I need to do now. I can call people in Houston, if they are reachable, about matters pertaining to my current job and what the house looks like. Failing that, I can probably at least see if I still have a roof through Google Earth or something like that. I can follow the progress of the storm through the National Hurricane Center and a few good storm bloggers. I can change travel plans, if need be, and contact anyone I need to in Boston -- and the storm preparations have put me behind on that already. Today, I plan Stage Three. For the extreme cases of a late miss -- There was still hope, the last time I checked, that my area could see the "clean side" of the storm. -- or the total disaster of a dirty side hit from an intensified storm, my course of action is straightforward. If the storm "misses", I may be able to drive back to Houston today and more or less proceed as if Ike never happened. If there is utter devastation, I change the flights to Boston to start and end in Jackson, or possibly New Orleans. It will be at least a week before I can get to the Houston house, and probably longer before I would be able to act effectively there anyway. My time is better-spent in Boston. My biggest concern, next to the state of the house, is the possibility of looting, but I have our most important things with me, and that is what insurance is for. I think I made a very good decision yesterday. *** Before I post this, answer some comments, and then get back to the business at hand, I briefly note an interesting observation on how the prospect of losing most of one's possessions can lend perspective. Now, I'm all for checking into things and learning that I have agonized over nothing and made a long trip that was ultimately unnecessary. That would be great. May all my coworkers turn me into the butt of a running in-joke involving paranoia about high winds and pine trees! But there is a certain amount of freedom that would come with such a loss. Most material possessions can be replaced fairly easily. I essentialized this best in a joke I made to my mother: "Well, a claim check is a lot easier to transport than a bunch of furniture." There can, perversely, be upsides to this disaster. There's no use spending too much energy mourning losses when one ought to be seeing how to use them. My wife is safe in Boston. The cats and I are safe in the forests of Mississippi. And Ike may have volunteered to downsize our furniture for us. I just hope he leaves that one photo album I forgot in the living room alone! *** Before I turn to answering some comments -- and I thank all who wrote in to wish me well -- I note that while I am back to blogging, how regular I can be will depend on whether things in Houston are as bad as they could be, and then on how quickly they can be improved or I can get myself to Boston. -- CAV PS: Incidentally, I think that the state of serenity I felt before, coupled with some sort of implicit realization that not all aspects of an "act of God" are necessarily bad, are often expropriated by hucksters of religion. (e.g., "Everything God does has a purpose.") Before I saw the potential upsides of a direct hit and had made, I'm guessing, some subconscious adjustments to my potential losses, I thought something like, "Any worshipper of 'nature' or a God who could do something like this is an utter asshat!" My remark stands for nature-worshippers, but religious people are being helped in their folly by people who are more than happy (and prepared) to help them mis-integrate life's lessons with arbitrary religious dogmas. http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004055.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Don't think that just because C. August has set up shop selling political paraphernalia up in the Land of the Puritans that things have been quiet down here in Hurricane Alley.... Recently, at the end of a sub-post, I said the following: Hmmm! Awhile back, I saw a bumper sticker saying something like, "Keep Austin Weird". Perhaps as the zoning fight heats up, supporters of freedom in land use could similarly display our sentiments: "Keep Houston Free". I like that. Later that day, Brian Phillips of Houston Property Rights wrote me to say that he liked it, too, and now he's selling just such a bumper sticker! I'm glad to see that this bit of thinking out loud on my part led to such a good idea on his part, and it reminds me of something I read about writing recently: I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated. This isn't exactly the same thing. In this case, we see that one can realize unforeseen benefits not only by writing, but also from participating in some online forums. In fact, the bouncing-around of ideas here goes a step beyond what Brian recalled: It was a remark of his, to the effect that Houston is America's freest city, on an email list we both participate in that I had in mind when I was writing that post. As you ponder the benefits of refining your ideas by writing, and by bouncing them around with others, don't forget to stop by Brian's blog to make a donation and get your bumper sticker today -- especially if you live in or near Houston! -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004034.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog I have commented here numerous times on how the applicability of that that old saw in economics, "controls breed controls", is not limited to economics. Do not think that just because enemies of individual rights fail to understand the nature of rights or to appreciate the dire consequences of the government trampling them for everyone (including themselves) that they do not grasp the above fact on the level of low cunning. They do, and they will never refrain from helping the process accelerate if they see a chance to increase or consolidate their political power. Yesterday, for example, I learned that some theocrats see in the labyrinth of federal tax law an opportunity to start telling people whom to vote for each Sunday: Declaring that clergy have a constitutional right to endorse political candidates from their pulpits, the socially conservative Alliance Defense Fund is recruiting several dozen pastors to do just that on Sept. 28, in defiance of Internal Revenue Service rules. The effort by the Arizona-based legal consortium is designed to trigger an IRS investigation that ADF lawyers would then challenge in federal court. The ultimate goal is to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out a 54-year-old ban on political endorsements by tax-exempt houses of worship. " For so long, there has been this cloud of intimidation over the church," ADF attorney Erik Stanley said. "It is the job of the pastors of America to debate the proper role of church in society. It's not for the government to mandate the role of church in society." [links dropped, bold added] What "cloud of intimidation", Mr. Stanley, would that be? That churches can't enjoy a government-granted exemption from taxation and act to influence the government? And what of the real "cloud of intimidation" that exists for enyone who has to consider the Byzantine rules of taxation in so many areas of his life? The truth is that taxation violates the individual's right to property and that everyone has the right to freedom of speech. Were the government not so busy confiscating everyone's property (with occasional exemptions that, predictably, have strings attached, as we see with the exemption on churches), the issue of pastors feeling hemmed in by an inconvenient rule would never even arise. So are the pastors emulating their forebears who spoke against slavery at the pulpit by crusading against taxation? (Taxation is another form of slavery, after all.) No. They are instead making the problem worse by accepting taxation of everyone else but themselves, while demanding only that the attached strings be cut. (In the process, they more closely resemble leftists who correctly hold that a woman has the right to an abortion, but incorrectly hold that the exercise of this right ought to be subsidized.) If we are going to have taxation, it is already arguable that exempting churches from it verges on a violation of the separation of church and state. What the pastors have in mind will make this problem worse: They are effectively demanding government subsidies for the preaching of political sermons. The right to freedom of speech does not equal the right to make others subsidize its forum or transmission, especially in the name of the government. Yet this is exactly what these pastors hope to achieve. The right solution to this dilemma is not to add yet another bad rule onto the heap. Nor is it to "reform" an inherently corrupt taxation system. The right solution is to abolish taxation. As these pastors demonstrate, we will not only see our property rights better respected in doing so, we would also remove a beachhead for the establishment of religious tyranny at the same time. No wonder I haven't heard about any anti-taxation sermons lately! Let the pastors endorse political candidates -- but without government help or the appearance of a state imprimatur. -- CAV PS: The Wall of Separation discusses this "pulpit initiative" in more detail. Updates Today: Minor edits. http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004027.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog An Open Letter Brian Phillips of Houston Property Rights has posted an open letter to Houston's real estate developers and builders. Our abundant and affordable housing and our low cost of doing business are the economic benefits of that freedom. Our glorious skyline is the monument. ... It is not easy to stand alone when the mob declares that your ideas are wrong. It is not easy to reject the consensus, to rock the boat, to question the status quo. But Christopher Columbus did it. Galileo did it. Henry Ford did it. Thomas Edison did it. Our Founding Fathers did it. The world is a much better place for their courage to see the truth. These men and women have helped build a city poised to become one of the greatest in the world, but are purposely being made, by those who want to dictate terms to them, to feel isolated even as their right to do what they do to earn a living is openly attacked. Houston's builders need to know that they have support, that other good men have had to stand up to massive injustice in the past, and that it is possible to win against irrational public opinion. If you know any builders and developers in Houston, or anyone who might have their ear and values freedom, let them know about this open letter. Qwertz is back... ... in a manner of speaking. His work towards a J.D. has been taking the lion's share of his time and will continue to do so, but he hopes to begin posting somewhat regularly again. In the meantime, he's enjoying a newer version of the ultra-portable laptop I've found so useful over the past few months, although he agrees that the Eee PC is not for everyone. In his review, he also notes a few potential additional matters that pertain to those who use Windows XP: All that said, I cannot recommend the Eee line of netbooks to everyone. They have a funky hard drive situation, with a tiny (4GB) main drive that has fast write speeds and a larger (16GB) data drive with much slower write speeds. The write speeds on the slow drive make certain operations tricky. XP often writes back to the drive, so XP and its programs need to be on the faster drive in order to work smoothly. This limits what you can do with the Eee. If you really know XP and know how to do it, you can shrink your Windows installation and move installer caches off to the data drive so you have plenty of space, but it takes work. I have no idea whether the XP version of the 901 comes with these sorts of modifications to the operating system. The version I bought came with a dumbed-down Linux distro that was absolutely useless for what I wanted to do with the machine. I researched the machine's limitations and knew what I was getting into before buying. I recommend that anyone interested in getting an Eee (or any netbook for that matter) to do the same. Of particular interest to me is the much-improved battery life of his newer Eee. That and the larger screen will have me upgrading as soon as I can afford to, although that might be awhile. He also reviews a non-Kindle e-book reader. A Few New Links No time to go through each this morning, but I draw your attention to three new additions to the sidebar: Born to Identify, Fun with Gravity, and Principled Parent. I will note that Born to Identify features a post about a particularly encouraging example of cultural activism that has helped preserve freedom of speech on a college campus. Also, there is a new group blog by the Inspector and Kriegsgefahrzustand (so far), who are contemplating moves from their current respective abodes. So if you notice a link to Dispatches from Area 32 crop up in the near future, you'll know they've finished their move. A Visual Aid Upon reading Craig Biddle's incisive analysis of this year's non-choice for President, C. August came up with a perfect visual aid. That is why, barring some clear strategy to slow down the inevitable war on freedom that will follow the November elections, casting a vote is meaningless. Indeed, to anyone who says that not casting a vote is somehow throwing away an opportunity to affect the course of our nation, or that it is somehow a "waste", I would counter that our current culture has wasted my vote already. Biddle outlines the proper course of action in his last paragraph. Tree-Mourners Q: How could one elicit an even more childish display of emotionalism from the savages in the following video? A: By speaking up for the countless human lives lost to malaria due to environmentalism through the banning of DDT. This video is hilarious on one level, and obscene on another. One of the great virtues of separating the economy from the state, which I advocate, is that people like this will be rendered much more harmless to myself and those I care about. (HT: Dismuke) -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004022.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog This article, being extremely good, can't wait for me to blog it next week -- and being extremely long, it's better recommended over a weekend anyway. The "article" is really a speech delivered over two decades ago by the mathematician Richard Hamming to an audience of fellow scientists, followed by a transcript of the Q&A. Its title is "You and Your Research". Don't be fooled by the audience or the subject matter. The author's excellent advice on knowing oneself -- one's goals, one's strengths and weaknesses, and how one changes over time -- makes it worthwhile for anyone, and required reading for anyone with an intellectual career. I have never seen such a good (although implicit) grasp of the principle that values are hierarchical applied directly to the question of how to perform one's work. An excerpt can't do this justice, but I'll excerpt anyway: Over on the other side of the dining hall was a chemistry table. I had worked with one of the fellows, Dave McCall; furthermore he was courting our secretary at the time. I went over and said, "Do you mind if I join you?" They can't say no, so I started eating with them for a while. And I started asking, "What are the important problems of your field?" And after a week or so, "What important problems are you working on?" And after some more time I came in one day and said, "If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?" I wasn't welcomed after that; I had to find somebody else to eat with! That was in the spring. In the fall, Dave McCall stopped me in the hall and said, "Hamming, that remark of yours got underneath my skin. I thought about it all summer, i.e. what were the important problems in my field. I haven't changed my research," he says, "but I think it was well worthwhile." And I said, "Thank you Dave," and went on. I noticed a couple of months later he was made the head of the department. I noticed the other day he was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. I noticed he has succeeded. I have never heard the names of any of the other fellows at that table mentioned in science and scientific circles. They were unable to ask themselves, "What are the important problems in my field?" Elsewhere in his talk, Hamming outlines how to determine whether a question is important, the importance of being clear about what you want, and how the broadness or narrowness of one's goals can affect whether one ought to consider a managerial role. If you can't read this soon, do yourself a favor and bookmark the lecture. And don't neglect to read the Q&A at the end. My thanks go to Paul Graham for posting this on his site. I have other things to do today, but I don't regret spending big chunks of yesterday evening and this morning reading this. Enjoy! -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004010.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Yesterday, I said that, " a little lipstick might go a long way in this year's presidential pageant," and I was right, as I learned through a hurricane blogger this morning. In an article titled, "McCain Haters for McCain", Randall Hoven of The American Thinker echoes many other conservatives in his enthusiasm for John McCain's pick for Vice President, taking Sarah Palin as a new incarnation of Ronald Reagan: If McCain were trying to morph the Republican Party into Democrat-Lite, I would not vote for him. He could have demonstrated that by picking a Vice President like Joe Lieberman. Nothing wrong with Joe, but he's not a Republican. He thinks life is improved through government programs. Republicans think government usually is the problem, not the solution. But McCain did not pick Joe Lieberman or anyone like that. He picked Sarah Palin. And that changed everything. Sarah Palin is pro-freedom, pro-life, pro-gun, anti-tax, anti-spending. And she walks the walk. Her life story is pure American -- even old-time, frontier American. We can compare experience levels in years of "public service": her 12 to Barack Obama's 11. But more importantly, Obama's experience consists mostly of missing a lot of votes so he could write a second autobiography and make speeches, while Palin's includes negotiating a gas pipeline deal with Canada and confronting Big Oil face-to-face and making it blink. [bold added] Each of the bolded points in the last paragraph above speaks to why the authoritarian, anti-freedom John McCain chose someone who projects something different as possible from his and Obama's shared governing philosophy, as I explained in detail yesterday. Hoven is a religious conservative and, although he wrote a pretty good piece about how an Obama presidency would not necessarily be the end of the world, his own reasons for disliking McCain are a mixed bag. Furthermore, his religious premises probably help blind him to the fact that if he's worried about the Republican Party morphing into "Democrat Lite", he is worse than too late to start worrying on McCain's account. Be that as it may, I think his reaction to having Sarah Palin on the ticket is a typical one that proves that the pick is a cunning one. If individual freedom is a genuine concern for Hoven, he should reconsider his enthusiasm for the McCain-Palin ticket. Palin, whose popularity may (according to Matt Drudge) exceed Obama's, could well duplicate Reagan's feat of appealing to Americans enough to deliver the White House to the GOP. But if she does so, she will have helped a GOP that now doesn't even pretend to be a party interested in governing properly. Americans will respond to Palin healthily on an emotional, pro-freedom level. I find her likable, too. Unfortunately, most of my coutrymen grasp the nature of freedom so poorly that they will fail to see how Palin's own political philosophy (not to mention her decision to support McCain) is incompatible with that very freedom. In the "audacity of hope" game, Obama is a piker. McCain just schooled him -- by taking in anyone who wasn't satisfied with Obama's particular smoke and mirrors act. The GOP has proven -- and Hoven seems at times close to grasping this fact -- that it does not care about individual rights. In this light, the fact that it may have found a way to win power yet again is anything but reassuring to me. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004006.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Sarah Palin, certainly an appealing figure to many normal Americans, is the lipstick on the pig of the McCain candidacy. I did not watch -- but did read -- her address to the RNC, intrigued as I was by the following choice remark about Barack Obama: "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities." This dig, by the way, essentializes why a little lipstick might go a long way in this year's presidential pageant. But I'll risk gilding the lily by throwing in another good one: "My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of 'personal discovery.'" Barack Obama has so little in the way of tangible accomplishments -- is such a lightweight -- that almost any adult with a modicum of a sense of personal responsibility will feel faint at the prospect of having such a flake for President. I feel faint at the prospect, and yet I may vote for the man anyway. Why? It is true that Barack Obama, empty suit that he is, comes closer than any candidate in recent memory to making "experience" an actual argument in favor of his opponent -- rather than the red herring it usually is in elections. Just ask yourself of any welfare state politician: "Experience? At what?" to see what I mean by "experience" normally being a red herring. Since Obama has no meaningful experience (including in the proper sense for a government official), this question should be directed at John McCain in order to see why we want the empty suit. But it isn't, because we all like sane, responsible, down-to-earth, but tragically-misguided Sarah Palin. Surely, she is responsible. Surely, she cares about America. Surely, she wouldn't help a traitor get elected. A traitor is the only worse thing that could happen to our country than a flake, and that is because of what he would do with his experience and competence. It is hard to imagine a reassuring figure like Sarah Palin helping this to happen, and yet that is exactly what might be going on: We can take as indications the delirious joy at her addition to the ticket from some quarters and the blind rage from others. To understand that she is doing this and why, we need only turn to her speech, where the terrible truth is laid out plain as day, only to be missed by a nation of nearly-blind men. Palin said the following of McCain to reassure us that there is a better alternative to Obama in this election. This pair of lines drips with unintended irony: For a season, a gifted speaker can inspire with his words. For a lifetime, John McCain has inspired with his deeds. Among the authoritarian McCain's deeds are restrictions on political speech that have been metastasizing to the point that private citizens are being hounded by federal officials merely for advocating ... that the government protect freedom of speech! I guess when one man forcibly prevents another from speaking, that man will stop inspiring with his words. And if we permit ourselves to focus selectively on the past heroism of the one man, I guess we can be inspired by those actions. Too bad that the inspiration, misguided by that lack of context will cause us to vote away more of the protection of our inalienable rights by choosing him as our leader. And notice that McCain has endangered that most important political right in the name of "reform", of which Sarah Palin is also a champion. I will not belabor the point, but I have said it before and I will say it again: You can't fix what is inherently broken. A government apparatus premised on the massive violation of property rights for the purpose of passing out unearned loot is corrupt by its very nature. Or, as I once put it: Such grassroots efforts as "Pork Busters" form when enough people become outraged at such things as that infamous "bridge to nowhere" -- and yet nobody challenges the massively larger larceny cum vote purchasing that is the welfare state, and which makes such relatively penny-ante outrages possible at all. Palin at once point speaks of sending "a large share of [Alaska's oil] revenue back where it belonged -- directly to the people of Alaska". She may feel that she did the right thing then, but the fact remains that the state should never have had its hands on any of that money in the first place. Widely-accepted socialist fictions to the contrary, there is no such thing as collective "ownership". The only way to end government corruption is to separate the government from the economy. I don't particularly fault Palin for failing to see this, but the fact that she does not calls into question her judgement of McCain as the right man to send to the Oval Office. John McCain is, by far, the more competent of the two presidential candidates. Unfortunately, he is highly skeptical of individual rights, indifferent to (and admittedly ignorant about) economics, and shares many of the same goals as his opponent (e.g., limiting our ability to use fuel via "carbon caps" and "making you work" via national service). He will not be using his competence and experience to protect our individual rights, but to endanger them with goals that contradict their protection. I oppose the goals of this year's de facto "Unity '08" ticket, and the best way to ensure that they will not be achieved appears at this juncture to have the incompetent half of that ticket, Obama-Biden, at the helm and frustrated by a mutiny of congressional Republicans, who will fend off many of these programs only if a Democrat is pushing them. As evidence of McCain's competence, notice whom he picked as his running-mate. He is not oblivious to the fact that he already has Alaska, a small state anyway. Palin is there to make his candidacy look different from his opponent's, while balancing Obama's charisma long enough to give us a glimpse at the secret nothing inside. To make us run to him for lack of a better option, and ironically, for the very reason we should be headed in the oppositie direction. -- CAV P.S. It occurred to me some time ago that this election has been like a final culmination of a steadily-diminishing political discourse. Americans value their freedom, but do not fully realize that government controls endanger it. At the same time, we are so far down the slippery slope that politicians are loathe to speak in anything other than vague generalities or aphoristic sound bytes that can mean almost anything to anyone. If they were more specific, they'd risk having their power grabs exposed for what they were. Far safer, electorally speaking, to say nothing at all -- or damn near exactly what the other guy is saying. The candidates personify this. Barack Obama has been called (and I think has bragged about being) a sort of human "Rorschach test", being an unknown and unexamined quantity that can't be pinned down. McCain's candidacy was all but left for dead at one point -- a fact which exempted him from the nastiest part of the primary season. He is here now because he was the last man standing on the GOP's side. Overall, our nation is suspicious of clear political agendas (and rightly so, given that all the popular ones today are anti-freedom), but until the proper basis for freedom is well-known, politicians will have no individualists to "pander" to, and none will offer a coherent alternative to the current march towards tyranny. This post was composed in advance and scheduled for publication at 5:00 A.M. on September 4, 2008. Updates Today: Minor edits. http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/004001.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog The Essays of Paul Graham After noticing that I was referring to one of his essays for the second time in less than a week, I visited Paul Graham's web site and found the mother lode. (For future reference, I've linked to this list from here.) Based on a random sample, I have to say I'm looking forward to lots of really good reading: Graham has a clear, direct style, and is a very original thinker. Needless to say, I enjoyed his "Writing, Briefly" and found "How to Do What You Love" very insightful. From the latter is this example of the kind of original thinking I like about Graham's essays: By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world." Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do. ... It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren't identical. The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them. If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school. [bold added] From there, Graham proceeds to discuss the question of enjoyment as it pertains to work, how money and prestige can lead one astray, and how to help oneself find work one loves. His advice on that last score, briefly is, "Always produce." (But don't stop there. See what he says about how that works.) He then discusses two broad approaches to going about the difficult task of finding work you love. Professionally, Graham is a businessman, a programmer, and a programming language designer, and he writes about these things, too. An example of this would be "Microsoft is Dead". After yesterday's post, his number one reason for saying this sounds right on the money: The most obvious [of four things that killed Microsoft] is Google. There can only be one big man in town, and they're clearly it. Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward. There's something on the order of a hundred essays there, on a wide range of subjects. I hope you enjoy them as much as I will! Chrome and List Update Google, not unexpectedly, left us Linux users out with its initial release of the Chrome browser, so I probably won't get to play with it for another couple of weeks. But several people had good things to say about it in yesterday's comments. I'm no computer whiz, but from what I read about it, the new browser sounded like it would fix lots of things that have been annoying me to no end about web browsing lately.... Brad Harper also posted on Chrome yesterday, and he includes some links that show that a company can do brilliant things and yet still support positions which, if consistently implemented, would be at odds with its ability to continue doing so. (I have to say that I am puzzled by his term "GovCo"....) I did get to tinker around with the less-flashy command line list management application I also mentioned. It's rough around the edges, but it will give me the ability to sort through my various lists effectively, which makes it worth using for awhile, and perhaps modifying. Objectivist Roundup I'm late getting around to this, but be sure to stop by the latest Objectivist Roundup, hosted by Shea Levy, if you haven't already done so. Or if you might have missed something. I'm even later in adding a link to his blog to the sidebar, but I've fixed that this morning as well. Bloggin' Boston Brahmans Rational Jenn, in accepting a nomination for a blog award, manages to find a Boston connection -- even if so tenuous as to want a negative qualifier -- for every single one of the seven other blogs it was her turn to nominate! I'm ahnah'd to have appeahed on uh' list! (Can one drop too many -r's?) And one of my fellow Bostonians deserves special mention for getting a song stuck in my head over the weekend. (Gentle Reader, you have been warned!) Heh! Click here to see the video I'm talking about: Its owners apparently don't appreciate the value of free advertising.... (HT: The older of my two brothers.) -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/003997.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Gustav Making Landfall If surprise storms that might become hurricanes would head up a top ten list of things I won't miss about Houston, Hurricane Season in general would be fairly high on the list. It doesn't rank first because, for the vast majority of storms, you have enough lead time to run away, if necessary. But being able to run from a dangerous storm doesn't mean that the decision is always straightforward. Over the past few days, I've been a regular visitor to The National Hurricane Center and three good hurricane blogs -- and feeling a little bit like an amateur meteorologist by now. Up until the day I wanted to decide whether to flee, some of the computer models were showing the storm taking a jog towards Houston just before landfall. On top of that, there were big uncertainties about its intensity at landfall and its forward speed. Since I don't trust either of our cars for an evacuation, I ended up renting a car for several days as a precaution, but ended up staying put. With the storm being much weaker than many feared it would be (and the storm surge smaller), it appears that New Orleans has dodged a bullet, but check back there in a couple of days. Remember: Its levees didn't fail until the day after Katrina made landfall. And while Houston has been spared a direct hit from even a hurricane, the remnants of Gustav are forecast to advance into East Texas and stall, meaning that Houston might flirt with a reprise of the flooding of Tropical Storm Allison. Three Good Shots in the Arm About a week after posting on Bush's legacy, I noticed a nice upsurge in traffic that lasted for several days after Diana Hsieh, Billy Beck, and SayUncle each linked. I thank them all for sending their readers my way! I bet he does want to "fix" the medical sector! Not too long ago, I said, "If you equate generosity and benevolence with altruism, I would suggest that you check your premises." This weekend, Michael Moore gave a demonstration of this very point: His latest outrage occurred on MSNBC's August 29 "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" and when he commented about the coincidental timing of an unfortunate disaster -- the potential for Hurricane Gustav to make landfall at the beginning of the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. "I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven," Moore said, laughing. "To have it planned at the same time – that it would actually be on its way to New Orleans for day one of the Republican Convention, up in the Twin Cities -- at the top of the Mississippi River." [bold added] No further comment is necessary, and were our culture not in such a sad state, Moore would be in for a monumental task of rehabilitating his public image, not to mention under fire for making any theory or cause he advocates looking very questionable. The Morbid Calculations of Collectivism As if not to be outdone in the sleazy task of calculating how Hurricane Gustav might affect the outcome of the upcoming elections, some Republicans are tallying up the advantages the storm offers to the GOP: (8) [Gustav t]akes the convention from the traditional role of being an orgy of enemy-bashing to one of national service and charity. Setting aside how the nature of altruism can turn any disaster into an disgusting contest for moral prestige, I would note that were the government confined to its proper role of protecting individual rights, this storm would be completely irrelevant as a political issue. Instead, both parties are going to fall over themselves seeing which can pass out more storm loot. This reminds me that Thomas Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute recently wrote a very good piece about government disaster aid. He ends with the following: With their own lives and wealth at stake, people will have every incentive to evaluate risks objectively. And if hardy souls still choose to occupy and fortify New Orleans, or build on an earthquake fault, or live in a tornado alley, the risk and reward will be theirs alone. No longer will government make disasters more disastrous by pretending that citizens have a right to defy the forces of nature at others' expense. [bold added] My sentiments exactly! Left More than Fails to Defend Rights McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate was a brilliant political move because Palin is personally likable enough to make many people give her "pro-life" and pro-creationist views an undeserved pass. Palin is likable, and how she leads her own life is her business, but the fact that is "pro-life" -- and means it enough to bring a fetus with Down's Syndrome to term -- disqualifies her as a candidate in my eyes. The government has no business forcing someone to make the same decision she did. Too bad the allegedly pro-choice left has apparently forgotten (if it ever knew) the basis in individual rights for the pro-choice position, not to mention the persuasive power of articulately-defended ideas. Members of the lefty blogosphere haven't stopped perpetuating the rumor Sarah Palin "faked" her last pregnancy and are now humiliating her daughter Bristol on the blatantly incorrect suspicion she is the real mother of baby Trig. According to this article, the attacks are poorly-founded, based as they are on a photograph that is too old to substantiate the claim. In other words, these bloggers are not only wasting their time looking for a "baby bump" when they could be defending a woman's right to her own person, they are unjustly making that very important application of the principle of individual rights look foolish and petty by association. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/003987.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog The New Hampshire Union Leader half-way nails it in a brief editorial ("Statism on Parade: The Dems in Denver") regarding the Democratic convention: When Democrats today say they want to "take America back," they mean it. They want to take this country back to the 1970s, when government was thought to be the answer to every problem and weak foreign policy was thought to make us safer. That is not change we can believe in. It is change we should run from. While it was refreshing to see that some members of the press weren't at the Democratic Convention cheering for Barack Obama, I would not be surprised to see this paper endorsing the other statist in this campaign, John McCain. That is a shame, because McCain is even more dangerous than Obama: Obama's true nature as an empty suit will quickly become apparent if he is elected, and the only way, it seems, to get Republicans to oppose a statist agenda is when they have to stop the Democrats from enacting it before they do. If McCain wins, we'll wish all we had was Bush in the White House. Yes, we need to run from this kind of change. Too bad the Republicans have been helping build the fences to block our escape. I'm pondering whether to register my dissatisfaction with the "choice" at the top of the ticket by writing myself in. I don't want the office and I'd probably be impeached in short order for refusing to enact some form of statist legislation. These two things alone make me more qualified than Obama or McCain -- and in today's cultural context, a safe bet to lose. Gallows humor aside (HT: Diana Hsieh), the ultimate answer to today's political disaster is cultural change -- to make people once again more generally aware of the nature of freedom and the proper purpose of government. Along those lines, I remind my readers that there is a way, now, to help reverse our altruist-collectivist cultural trends: Consider ordering and distributing, or even just donating to The Undercurrent, which is once again set to hit campuses nationwide. Our colleges will remain full of Obamatons (and worse) -- and any opponents they have will remain intellectually disarmed -- until and unless students are presented with a rational alternative in political philosophy. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/003978.html

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog Writing at The American Interest, John Lewis Gaddis suggests that a "return to our roots is called for" as a means of sustaining our "national greatness". Specifically, he starts off by asking the related questions of what constitutes a presidential doctrine, and whether President Bush can be said to have a doctrine. Gaddis concludes that Bush "may have proclaimed a doctrine for the 21st century comparable to the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and to the Truman Doctrine during the Cold War". That doctrine, if it was one, Bush stated succinctly in his Second Inaugural Address: t is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. It is this policy Gaddis wishes to examine in his article. The examination is lengthy, interesting at times, frustrating at others, and ultimately unsatisfying. Why? Gaddis, a historian by profession, hints at the answer early on in his essay when commenting on the fact that President Bush reads quite a bit of history himself: "Well, so Bush reads history", one might reasonably observe at this point. "Isn't it more important to find out how he uses it?" It is indeed, and I doubt that anybody will be in a position to answer that question definitively until the oral histories get recorded, the memoirs get written, and the archives open. But I can say this on the basis of direct observation: President Bush is interested -- as no other occupant of the White House has been for quite a long time -- in how the past can provide guidance for the future. The question of how a leader uses history is vitally important, but I beg to differ that one need wait -- setting aside the question, "For how long?" -- for how events will play themselves out to answer that question. Two aspects of how a leader might use his knowledge of history leap to my mind as being important here. First, there is the ethical matter of what said leader intends to do with his power, for which we already have a mountain of evidence against Bush. The interested reader may follow the link to learn why I regard Bush as a failure in his proper role as a protector of individual rights due to his altruist ethics and collectivist politics. Second, there is the interpretive matter of what a leader will learn from the historical data he considers. Both will be influenced by the philosophical ideas -- implicit and explicit -- and psycho-epistemology of the leader. In Bush's case, I suspect that both are sent off course by his defective compass of compassionate conservatism. It is his interpretation of history I will examine more closely here. It is further hampered by how modern historians approach American history. In a note of disclosure after his essay, Gaddis notes that he has served Bush at least once in an advisory role. I suggested including the idea of ending tyranny in a session with the President’s speechwriters on January 10, 2005. Correlations, however, are not causes. Fair enough. Let's assume Gaddis did not help Bush formulate his policy. But let's take Gaddis as a typical modern historian, as an example of how the historical record is being transmitted to Bush for his subsequent interpretation. Gaddis examines the history of both the ideas of spreading "democracy" (a term he never defines and ends up misusing) and of ending tyranny, as well as some past American doctrines of foreign policy. Here is an example, from his look at the Monroe Doctrine: The Monroe Doctrine reflected a long American tradition -- extending well back into the 18th century -- of associating liberty, prosperity and security with continental expansion. Its principal author, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, related that history to the crisis caused by the apparent intention of European monarchs -- Great Britain's excepted -- to re­establish their colonies in the Western Hemisphere after Napoleon's defeat. The course Adams set was that "the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers." Its feasibility lay in the fact that the British tacitly agreed with that policy and were willing to use their navy to enforce it. The Monroe Doctrine was unilateral, as presidential doctrines must be. But it was based upon a realistic calculation of power within the international system, as all doctrines should be. A young America takes advantage of England's desire not to have strong rivals in Europe to keep from having powerful, hostile neighbors in close proximity. That was a master stroke, and it certainly prevented tyranny in the Americas from being established by European colonial powers, but Gaddis fixates on "ending tyranny" as the end purpose of the doctrine. To him, a Doctrine, "[draws] on a long history, ... relate that history to a current crisis, and in doing so ... set a course the nation could feasibly navigate into the future." So far, so good, but later in his essay, it becomes clear that he confuses the immediate end of many doctrines (of opposing tyranny) with the goal of protecting the American people from foreign threats. Here is what he says as he critiques the Bush policy/doctrine: "So if ending tyranny is what you want to accomplish, promoting democracy in and of itself may not be enough. Something more seems to be required." That America has a long tradition of opposing tyranny is clear from this essay, but why she does is strangely absent. Our Founding Fathers were not after "national greatness" when they rebelled against England, but the ability to live their lives freely in the pursuit of their own happiness. They understood that a proper government would protect their ability to do so and that part of that protection entailed it being strong enough to thwart invasion by foreign aggressors. In the context of the original purpose of the founding of this nation, then, we see that national strength is certainly a desirable thing -- because it enables us to live our lives as free men. To the extent that our government is good (or "great"), then, it is serving its proper role. (And as for the call for America to "return to its roots", full protection of individual rights is the only thing it is proper to call for in a political context.) Whether a nation is a "democracy" (or, more properly, generally respects individual rights) or is a tyranny is of secondary concern at most to our government. (And if we must topple a tyranny in some way to ensure our security, the benefits enjoyed by its former victims are a happy side-effect.) Tyrannies are natural enemies of freedom (and thus, of America). No wonder we have had, as a matter of self-preservation, to oppose them throughout our history! So to claim that America has a "tradition" of opposing tyranny, while ignoring the roots of that tradition in the allied rational self-interests of her citizens is to make a gross interpretive error. It strips opposition to tyranny of its crucial context in political philosophy, and having done so, allows it to be subordinated to such altruistic ends as "national greatness", by which it should be apparent by now means something like "adherence to God's will" to a theocrat immersed in such an interpretation. Our government exists, in the context of foreign policy, solely to protect us from harm by foreign powers. It certainly does not exist in order to force its own citizens to sacrifice their own lives and treasure to save others from tyranny. If Gaddis is a typical modern historian, and I think he probably is, then his failure to consider the importance of philosophical ideas in shaping history is helping leaders like Bush evade (or get away with ignoring) crucial aspects of our history even as they go about misusing what they learn of our history for their own tyrannical ends. A leader whose sole purpose is anything other than the protection of your individual rights is either a tyrant or is paving the way for one. True national greatness is not a goal to which the individual is subordinate, but the result of protecting all individual citizens. -- CAV http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/003968.html