khaight

And to think it was just four or five years ago when it was the Republicans who wanted to do away with the filibuster in response to its use by the Democrats to block Bush's judicial nominees. Back then, the Democrats said the filibuster was a Pillar of Democracy™, absolutely essential to the proper functioning of the government. Fucking hypocrites. (Of course, the same goes for the Republicans, who have flipped positions in the opposite direction for the same reason.)

I was thinking of people like Jane Hamsher of the left-wing site Firedoglake, who has come out quite strongly against the current version of the health care bill.

It is true that Obama has lost support on the left because of what they perceive as compromises on the health care bill. The removal of single-payer, which is what they really lust after, was a blow. Many leftists view the current version of the health-care bill as a sellout to corporate interests in the insurance industry. Tacking left would bring these people back into the fold. And don't make the mistake of thinking that the independents who are abandoning the Democrats are doing so for principled reasons. Their concerns are often very concrete-bound, based on what we would consider non-essentials such as cost, or the specter of cuts in Medicare payments. A revised version of the plan that gives the left what it wants while assuaging the concrete-bound concerns of the middle could gain support if presented properly. The Democrats were arrogant in their victory and thought they didn't have to persuade the voting public to support their plans; tonight they were shown otherwise. That doesn't mean they can't retailer their message. Tonight the voters in Massachusetts threw a spanner into the works, but the machine is still running. Tonight, celebrate. Tomorrow, get back to activism.

If you really want to stick it to the government, you should crank your exemptions up to the legal maximum and make explicit estimated tax payments each quarter to provide the maximum possible delay before delivering your hard-earned wealth to the government. That is living on the edge, though -- you have to be damn sure you're calculating your aggregate tax liability correctly. Several years ago I worked out a spreadsheet that does a pretty good job of tax estimation for people in basically 'normal' situations, i.e. income from salary, ESPP and stock option exercises, deductions for mortgages, charitable contributions and state tax payments. Then again, I'm a geek.

There would be positive secondary effects from a Brown win, even if it doesn't entirely kill the health care bill. If a Republican can win a Senate race in Massachusetts, then no Democrat is safe. A Brown upset will be a touchstone we can use to inculcate fear in the other Democrats in the run-up to the midterm elections, and that will help with the opposition to cap-and-trade and with squelching further 'stimulus' and bailout bills.

From memory, the only major thinkers who claimed to support egoism that come to mind are Aristotle, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Stirner and Rand. And the Nietzsche/Stirner brand of 'egoism' is really just lone-wolf whim worship -- sacrificing others to self instead of self to others.

The crucial question isn't what the candidate opposes, it's what he supports. What's his positive agenda, and what reasons does he give for it?

Human Action is an extremely lengthy and technical work on economics. Unless you have some prior familiarity with the subject it is not a good place to start. If you're a beginner, I recommend starting with Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. Follow up with George Reisman's The Government Against the Economy. For a moral-historical perspective on capitalism, I recommend Andrew Bernstein's The Capitalist Manifesto. Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics is a more mainstream, but still pro-freedom, economic primer that might also be worth considering. On the basis of the above, you will be in a much better position to tackle the more comprehensive treatises. Besides Human Action, two others worth examining are Reisman's Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics and Murry Rothbard's Man, Economy and State. Peter Schwartz has a short monograph entitled The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. There is also the recent collection edited by Elan Journo, Winning the Unwinnable War: America's Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism. I'm currently working my way through some books by Angelo Codevilla. While he's not an Objectivist, he's a pretty sharp analyst and theoretician of war, and he understands that the way you fight terrorism is by destroying the regimes that support it. I think his books should be read if you want a solid grasp of what's wrong with American war policy. I'm currently near the end of his War: Ends and Means; two other books by him that I'm planning to read are No Victory, No Peace (on the Iraq war) and Advice to War Presidents. That enough recommendations for you?

Just for that, I'm posting a follow-up.

I've also heard other Objectivists like Yaron Brook and John McCaskey say that the resistance to Ayn Rand in academia is much less now than it was a generation ago. My impression is that we're faced with less outright hostility and more incomprehension, which is progress.

Here's one quick example. Objectivism upholds three broad metaphysical categories: the subjective, the intrinsic and the objective. Mainstream academic philosophers don't typically distinguish between the objective and the intrinsic; as a result, they tend to classify any phenomenon which depends on consciousness in any way as subjective, and they interpret the claim that something is objective as implying that it does not depend on consciousness at all. Given that context, a statement like "concepts are objective" is simply baffling -- it sounds like an endorsement of some kind of Platonic realism. Here's another example. The analytic-synthetic dichotomy is widely accepted in academic philosophy. This leads philosophers to divide propositions into two broad categories: the analytic, which are necessary and logical, but not based on reality; and the synthetic, which are contingent and inexplicable, yet reality-based. This makes it impossible to grasp the proper nature of metaphysical principles, which are both necessary and reality-based. As for what it means that Objectivist methodology is conceptual -- Objectivism tries to build a system. Integrating widely disparate concretes together under principles, and tying principles together. The overall thrust is to take concretes and subsume them under a relatively small number of wide abstractions. This is in part a result of the Objectivist view of the epistemological purpose of concepts -- the condensation of units to address the crow epistemology. Most modern philosophers are nominalists, which means they view concepts not as integrations of concretes, but as socially-dictated arbitrary groupings which could always be different. From that standpoint, the Objectivist emphasis on conceptual integration is just arbitrary -- one group trying to dictate how it prefers that words be used.

That doesn't seem to prevent them from taking Sartre seriously as a philosopher, and he wrote fiction. (Bad fiction, but there it is.) I can think of one other reason why academics have trouble with Objectivism: method. Rand presents Objectivism as an integrated system, in terms of essentials. Modern and contemporary academic philosophy is much more comfortable addressing issues in isolation, and trying to analyze them in detail. Because of this methodological difference, Objectivists and traditional academic philosophers often seem to be speaking different languages. Each side has built up its own set of technical vocabulary, its own key concepts, and its own grasp of what the critical issues in philosophy are. As a result, when presented with a philosophic argument written from an Objectivist context, most academic philosophers automatically reinterpret it in terms of the concepts with which they are familiar. Figuring out how to bridge this gap is a significant part of what some of the Anthem-funded Objectivist academics are working on. An excellent example would be Ben Bayer's paper A Role for Abstractionism in a Direct-Realist Foundationalism, forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journal Synthese. (Bayer and Salmieri's paper How We Choose Our Beliefs is also interesting.) Rand and the first-generation Objectivist philosophers like Leonard Peikoff and Harry Binswanger were busy assembling a high-level, integrated presentation of the overall philosophy. Academia wants highly-detailed analyses of isolated issues, many of which are based on very widely accepted false dichotomies. I remember a story Peikoff told once of an incident back when he still held an academic position. He took a small chunk of his dissertation and reworked it into a paper which he submitted to a journal. The journal rejected it, saying "This is a fascinating idea, but you need to write a whole book on it." Because Objectivist methodology is conceptual, Objectivists will toss off ideas in a few paragraphs that academics want to see explicated in excruciating concrete detail for entire book chapters.

That's not quite right. If you create a law about something, the terms it uses must be objectively defined. Otherwise the law is non-objective. What this means is that if you wish to defend the claim that the law should provide an enforceable claim to an education, you must provide an objective definition of an education. If you haven't done that, you're advocating a non-objective law. Is it possible to provide an objective definition of an education? Yes. Is that definition self-evident? No. The questions I asked were intended to open up exactly that question: what is the 'education' to which you think the child has a claim, and on what basis do you validate your definition? But what is a 'proper definition'? It isn't just 'whatever the legislators and courts come up with' -- that would be social subjectivism, not objectivity. Courts and legislators can be wrong. (These days it seems they are more often than not.) You clearly have something in mind yourself. What is your own view? We need to maintain a distinction between a 'right' and a 'claim'. Rights are objective. This means that whether or not someone's rights are being violated is also objective. It can be legitimate for government to intervene and prevent a rights violation even if the victim does not wish it. (Consider a case in which a criminal gang has intimidated a shopkeeper into paying protection money. Surely we would want the government to prosecute even if the shopkeeper himself were too frightened to file charges himself.) If education -- objectively defined -- is a right, then a child who is not being educated is having his rights violated, and the government should step in to address the situation. A claim, on the other hand, is optional. Merely because I have a claim on something or someone doesn't mean I need to actually draw on it. Even if we take the position that education is a claim on the parents, not a right, there may still be problems. Consider that the basic argument for the educational claim is that, without being educated, the child will not be able to exercise proper rational judgment and choose life-sustaining actions. If this is true, then a child who has not been educated would lack the rational judgment to properly determine that fact -- so why should we give his determination any weight?

There is always something inherently wrong with taking money from people by force to provide 'public' services. That said, the notion that people in a community might band together to create and support a local school which would provide educations at low or no cost to children of local residents is perfectly reasonable. (This is somewhat analogous to the free private libraries once established and funded by the Carnegie Foundation.) You may be underestimating the impact of John Dewey's pedagogical theories as a factor in the decline of the quality of education. (As an aside -- no Objectivist would say that all government is evil. Government that serves its proper function -- protecting individual rights -- is not evil. It is an absolutely necessary requirement for successful living in a social context, and as such is a tremendous value. But governments that deviate from that function are evil, and government schools are such a deviation.)

I don't have a handy cite, unfortunately. This is one of those anecdotal factoids my brain picks up like lint.. A bit of googling suggests that the black literacy rate just after the Civil War was somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. I can't find an on-point statistic for black urban literacy rates, although John Taylor Gatto claims an overall black literacy rate of 56% in The Underground History of American Education and I found an article stating that over half of urban high-school graduates have literacy skills below the 9th grade level. So I think I may have to retract the claim, since I can't validate the factoid. I do stand by the conclusion that the contemporary educational system has badly failed its poor urban constituents -- I think that is uncontroversial.

I'm a software engineer. I work at Cisco doing embedded software on the Catalyst 4500 series of switch/router platforms. I'm not sure what you mean by "mesh with Objectivism". Obviously there's nothing in my career that conflicts with Objectivism; I'm not generally required to act irrationally, to sacrifice my interests, or to initiate force. A more interesting question would be how one's career is assisted by knowing the principles of Objectivism, or how it illustrates the truth of principles of Objectivism.

On some level you can't escape that if you say that a child has an enforceable claim against his parents to provide him with an education, because you have to define what an "education" is before you can determine whether a child has received it or not. Consider the so-called 'Unschooling' movement, in which the child is allowed to explore the world in his own way and at his own pace. Is that an education? Should it be illegal to 'unschool' one's child? Or suppose a deeply religious parent chooses to home-school, but refuses to teach evolution because he thinks it's pernicious, false and impious. Should the government step in because the child isn't being educated? Who gets to pick the standards that are imposed on everyone by force? On what basis?

In principle this is no different from the question 'How do you figure out that a parent is abusing their child?' Indeed, to the extent that there is a legitimate point here at all, it is that beyond a certain point a parent's failure to educate their child is a form of child abuse. On the private market. If I, as a parent, have a legally enforceable obligation to provide an education to my child, it is nevertheless my choice as to how to go about doing so. I can homeschool, for example. I can hire a tutor or tutors. I can pay to send my child to a private school. What I cannot do is use force to take money from others to pay for my child's education. Merely because I have a responsibility does not entitle me to force others to fulfill it.

I don't think anyone (myself included) has been arguing that failing to properly educate a child is morally acceptable. The argument has been over whether such a failure is a rights violation. There is a point where it isn't, and a point where it is. A parent who refuses to scrimp and send their kid to Harvard, instead sending them to the local community college, has not violated the child's rights even though the child is undereducated relative to what was possible. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end is a deliberate blocking of the child's ability to learn anything about the world. That's a willful blocking of the development of the child's basic means of survival, and probably is a rights violation. And there's a range in between. The 'locking in a closet' point is an illustration of the far end of the spectrum; it isn't a bright line this side of which anything is acceptable. The key point, and I think Peikoff agrees with me here, is that the parent cannot cause irreparable harm to the child. Mere ignorance is correctable as an adult. One other point. We must clearly distinguish between obligations that parents have to their own children and alleged obligations of 'society'. Even if we stipulate that a child has a legally enforceable right to some minimal form of education provided by his parents, you can not move from that to the conclusion that any form of public education is justified. Your failure to discharge your obligation to your own child does not create an obligation in me to clean up your mess.

Given that it's only the first week of January, that's sort of faint praise. Still, thanks. I liked it too.

There was an implicit 'ceteris paribus' there. I wasn't comparing the poor uneducated child in a free society with the poor public-educated child in a semi-free society; I was comparing him with the poor educated child in a free society. Surely it isn't a concession to acknowledge that, all else being equal, it is better to be educated than ignorant?

Three points. First, we currently have a public education system -- and its worst failures are in the inner cities, with respect to exactly the kinds of children for whom you are professing such concern. Literacy rates among black inner city children today are actually lower than they were among slaves in the antebellum South -- when it was actually illegal to teach blacks to read. Trying to defend public education on the grounds of the needs of the poor in the slums is a sick joke. Any society which had the political will to force a public education system to operate effectively in the slums would have the will to provide voluntary charitable support for the education of the poor. Second, there are ample instances of people with little to no formal education achieving great success in life. These hypothetical children, who have evil parents and who cannot find any charitable support for their education, would no doubt achieve less than they could have. But so what? I'm achieving less than I could have had I been able to afford to attend Harvard. That doesn't entitle me to force someone else to pay my tuition at the point of a gun. Third, the pathologies of the slums are in large measure created, supported and exacerbated by the lack of freedom. Why bother to get your child an education when he's just going to go on welfare anyhow? The myriad opportunities for advancement that freedom provides to people at all economic levels makes the value of an education more apparent, and serve to motivate more parents even in poor parts of society to try to educate their kids because the connection between education and success would be more apparent to them. There was a time when poor families aspired to send their kids to college. There could be again.

My boss (technically my boss' boss' boss) is a liberal, who lives in Palo Alto -- an expensive city with a better-than-average public school system. When she told me she had moved there and paid the premium price for the real estate because of the schools, I said "Yes, that's the way rich white liberals exercise the school choice they want to deny to poor black children." Oy, she gave me such a look.

Even in our current culture there are philanthropists who fund scholarships to provide educations to poor children. A free society would be much more prosperous, and such philanthropy would likely be much easier to come by if necessary. In brief, in a free society if such children exist there is nothing to stop you from helping them. (This contrasts with our current society, in which your productivity is cut in half by pointless government regulation and half of what you do produce is taken from you by force through taxation, resulting in your having to live on something like a quarter of the wealth you could have had.) The kind of hypothetical parents you describe are such a corner case they're hardly worth considering; any society in which the majority of people were so irrational and nihilistic as to treat their children in such a manner would collapse into anarchy or dictatorship in short order. One other rhetorical point: the 'what if bad people screw things up' argument cuts both ways. What if some bizarre pedagogical cabal seizes control of the public school system, grossly failing to provide a proper education to the children placed in their care? What if, as a result, massive numbers of children grow up with no knowledge of history, science, art, or even basic literacy? What could you do to protect your own child, trapped in such a world, forced to support the very comprachicos who are crippling his mind? And, as a bonus question, what is the difference between the educational nightmare sketched above and the state of the American public schools today?

There's no need for an alternative; that isn't a valid objection. One person's negligence cannot justify violating another person's rights. If it could then you could argue for enslaving everybody on the grounds that some people will use their freedom self-destructively. If you see a child that you think should be better educated than it is, offer to pay for the additional education using your own resources. Don't force other people to pay for it at the point of a gun. If the child's parents are so negligent that they are causing an objectively provable irreparable harm to the child (e.g. by locking it in a closet or something like that), that's child abuse and warrants loss of custody. Below that standard, it's none of your business. One person's 'negligence' is another person's free-range parenting.