Dante

... The book isn't about how bad being a thug is; that's a pretty obvious point to make. The world has always had thugs, and always will. The book is about philosophy, and in the case of the Wet Nurse, fresh out of college and full of ridiculous ideas, it's pretty clear where his philosophy came from. It's a pretty simple passage to understand, really. You've picked a passage that's specifically about teachers and then... wondered why it's specifically about teachers? As with all writing, different passages focus on different things. You seem to want every passage to be a microcosm of the entire philosophy being put forth, and that's just ridiculous.

Interesting, thanks.

There are a number of ways for businesses to get around the stickiness of prices. One common way is simply to increase or decrease the frequency of sales. If you decrease the frequency and quality of the sales that you offer, that will raise the average price that people pay for your product. Sales are currently abundant in the pizza business; I basically never buy a pizza that doesn't have some kind of a discount. It's actually weird how deep the discounts are in the pizza market. But this is a cost being imposed on everyone. Other pizza companies would also be facing these cost pressures, and would be inclined to do the same thing. Why would PJ lose customers when pizza prices and food prices more generally are rising across the board?

If the industry in question is highly competitive, then the businesses in it are already making close to zero economic profits. If profits in the industry fall below zero, say from an additional cost, then businesses will begin to leave the industry. This will cause price to rise to the point where businesses, on net, stop leaving. In short, lower profits directly result in the price rising for the consumer.

That's precisely the problem. "It is known..." is specified in the OP, but life doesn't work like that. In real life, these things have to be proven with evidence, in an objective forum, and if this guy were proven to be a serial killer in a court of law then he'd be in jail.

The person has witnessed one killing, which may or may not be murder, or self-defense. However it looks in the moment, it must be objectively proven in a court of law.

Except whether a person is a murderer or not must be established by an objective legal process. Vigilante 'justice' does not deserve the name.

Mises never won the Nobel, and he was the only one of the three that conceivably advocated a government compatible with Objectivism. Both Friedman and Hayek held that the state should have a more expansive role than an Objectivist politics would allow, in providing for a forced social safety net, roads funded by taxation, etc. If you wish to argue simply against generic libertarianism, I suggest you do so on a libertarian site. Asked and answered.

Two words for this, and the whole thrust of this thread: who cares? This thread basically amounts to digging up obscure quotes from libertarian theorists to try to argue that they, personally, sympathized with some fascist regime or another. You start with the ridiculous bolded claim that "Unfortunately in every actual case of a respected economist arguing for radical capitalism, that economist also has sympathies with fascist dictatorships." You argue this from your sample size of three (which has since been whittled down to maybe one) and your uncritical reading of a singe Salon article, as it turns out. But these are not even your most significant errors. This whole line of argument is fundamentally religious in its approach, and it shows the inability to focus on ideas rather than people. You try to take individual people (none of whom were actually Objectivists anyway) and attempt to discredit a philosophy by showing some quotes about their views on particular regimes. However, a philosophy does not stand or fall based on every single view of its advocates. That's a religion you're thinking of. For example, Jesus is claimed to have lived a sin-free life (which theologically is integral to whether or not he can save others), and therefore Christianity lives or dies based on whether every single word and action of his can be defended. Cults or governments centered around one person operate the same way. You seem to view systems of ideas through the same religious lens, but there's a problem; it doesn't work that way. Even if you had done your homework and gotten your facts right before starting this thread, it wouldn't matter one bit. You cannot discredit a system of ideas by pointing out flaws in the people that advocated them. So, I conclude with the same two words... who cares?

Well, if you're trying to gain a value from them, then that alone would seem to make it their business. If you're not, then there's no problem.

Quite easily. Ayn Rand strongly believed and argued that the ultimate driver of history is philosophy, not politics. No political system can survive for any extended period of time which is not supported by the intellectual, cultural, and philosophical trends of its people. Simply put, the prevailing philosophy of a populace leads, and politics follows. Capitalism cannot survive in a nation without a supporting philosophical base that is well-articulated and accepted as true by the people of that nation. This was precisely what she spent her life trying to create and promote. There is only one way to get a capitalist government in America, or any other country, and that starts with a cultural and intellectual acceptance of the foundations of capitalism, not a military coup.

Maybe someone here can help me understand this. So one of the legislative proposals being tossed around by gun control advocates is the idea of banning high-capacity clips (e.g. http://thehill.com/homenews/house/273813-sensing-political-shift-pelosi-dems-call-for-ban-on-high-capacity-gun-clips). And it seems that the magic number that defines a high-capacity clip is... 10? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the sidearm most commonly used by police officers was a Glock 22, which comes standard with a 15-round clip. So this would mean, that if I wanted to carry a handgun, and went through all the certification to get a license and a concealed carry permit and everything, I wouldn't be able to choose the go-to weapon of the police? The magazine would be too large by 50%? I get the rationale behind trying to ban large-capacity clips; advocates typically argue that really the only purpose for such a clip is to kill large numbers of people. However, when you set the cutoff at 10 bullets, this means you're now saying that police sidearms are equipped with clips whose only purpose would be to 'kill large numbers of people'? Police officers clearly carry their sidearm to protect themselves and others in the case of a shootout, so (even granting the argument for gun control) how can gun-control advocates possibly say that a 15-round clip is an unreasonable thing for a private citizen to want?

Interesting. Which laws specifically are you referring to?

Well, he's Asian himself, so there's that.

In both of your hypothetical examples, the person who is committing the lie of omission is doing so in order to gain a value from the deceived; in the first case, the wife's approval, and in the second, the parents' permission. Furthermore, the person doing the omitting knows that this information is material to whether or not the value will be given. He knows if he gives this information to his wife, she'll probably withdraw her approval. He is using the person's ignorance to get what he wants out of them. This is clearly dishonest. The cat example has neither of these elements. The questioner is not deciding whether or not to extend a value, and the breed, color, gender etc. are not material to any decision the questioner is making. Now, if the questioner was looking to adopt the cat, and you withheld information that you think would affect their decision, then it would have both elements, and it would be dishonest.

I'm inclined to agree with this analysis, except for the last point. Obviously, people would not switch en masse away from using the dollar if the legal tender laws were lifted, but it would open the door for the use of other currencies in certain situations, such as large transactions between corporations. Furthermore, the more dollars that the Federal Reserve created, the more appealing such infant alternative currencies would become. Ultimately, cash is hardly used at all anymore, and I wouldn't care much at all if my bank account was denominated in something other than dollars. I think the repeal of the legal tender laws would provide a tangible check on the actions of the Fed, one which is sorely needed.

Discussions about whether or not the Suffolk system was a central bank hinge on the definition of a central bank, but here's one thing that nobody claims: that the Suffolk System was the U.S.'s central bank. The Suffolk system was a localized institution that did not exert any significant influence on the banknotes that were issued outside of its area. Consider this quote from your link, in the very next paragraph: Clearly, the Suffolk system was a regional institution, and many parts of the country were not a part of it. We can argue about what kind of private clearinghouses might arise in the absence of the Federal Reserve, but it is simply wrong to say that, when we didn't have a national central bank, the Suffolk system arose as such an institution.

Hopefully this should cut through much of this discussion as far as my viewpoint is concerned. Yes, absolutely. The point of me bringing that up was that I wasn't comfortable with the statement that, if we've indeed identified some fundamental gender characteristic, it must apply to absolutely everyone of that gender. So we can properly identify the essence of masculinity or femininity without necessarily implying a course of action for all men and all women. The whole of the Objectivist ethics is premised on the notion that we can make true statements about the nature of man, that imply certain courses of action (adopting productive purposes, adherence to reason, dealing with each others through trade, etc). Thus, if someone actually does make a convincing case for the fundamental nature of a gender, we should take it seriously as men and women who want to achieve happiness. In actuality, I'm not at all convinced that anyone has done that. Furthermore, this issue of broken units, as well as the importance of context in applying principles, just goes to say that we should first and foremost be concerned about ourselves as individuals.

I find it very unlikely that she simply didn't value or like her life that much, and thought this would be a good opportunity to just throw it away for little or no reason. I find it much more likely that she took her responsibility (her chosen responsibility) as a guardian of these kids very seriously, and was willing to pay the ultimate price to preserve the integrity of that responsibility. I think, particularly if you have kids whose safety you entrust to others every single day, that calling her a hero isn't a misuse of the term at all.

The problem is that whether some use of force or not is "just" is not readily apparent. We need some objective process for determining what is just and what is not. However, if there indeed is some process, with an enforcement mechanism, to determine whether certain protection agencies are operating in just ways or not, then we're already back to a system with a final arbiter. Grames' point here was that under a system where any particular crime might conceivably be prosecuted under one of two different agencies, there is by definition no way to know beforehand what the particular punishment is, or even the substance of the law itself, because it could be the particular standards and strictures of the first agency, or the second. If in fact there is no difference between the two, then there isn't meaningful competition between them and we're not really talking about a polycentric legal system.

Well, my first thought in this case is that the person theorizing about some characteristic being a fundamental element of femininity is simply wrong. That would certainly be my response to the idea that a woman should not want to be President. If we have actually discovered a fundamental characteristic of women, it should hold true for all instances of that concept (the exception is broken units, which I don't have a complete grasp on but I think is well explored in this topic: http://forum.objecti...?showtopic=1099). This is why we should be wary of claims about the fundamental nature of each gender which are based on nothing more than armchair theorizing and personal introspection. Personally, I think it's obvious that there are fundamental differences between men and women, but what they are, and which ones are truly fundamental rather than just generalizations, I have no clue. The more I think about it, I think the broken units discussion might get to the core of what some of the issue is here. It could certainly be the case that there are instances of men and women who do not share the fundamental characteristics of their genders, in the same way that a broken unit generally is missing a characteristic that it should have. On the other hand, most of what is said about the "fundamental" nature of men or women is just people speculating based on their personal experiences. Serious claims should be backed up by serious, objective evidence.

Why should he care?

This is exactly what I thought of the movie, actually. The different storylines had only the thinnest connection to one another as far as plot goes. It was like the writers wanted to make it so subtle that the audience would get excited and feel smart when they spotted a connection from one storyline to the next, and as a result they made an effort to integrate them into the plot as little as possible. As a result, it comes out almost as 6 independent stories told at the same time. They weren't even thematically tied together all that well. The theme and structure of the movie was grand in conception, but the filmmakers relied far too much on the audience enjoying the activity of spotting the connections and recognizing the same actors in different roles, and as a result that's where the main mileage of the movie comes from (the same actors in different roles, and figuring out the connections). At the end of the day, there's just not as much there as promised.

Good replies by sNerd and Nicky. I'll only add a historical aside about how we ended up with health insurance that operates through our jobs and our employers, when it is so clearly a bad system. Following WWII there were a number of wage controls which prevented employers from competing for workers through wage increases. Thus, firms found a different way to compete for workers: by offering more lavish benefits packages, including health insurance. Eventually the wage controls were lifted, but at that point employer-managed health insurance was the status quo. Later, this system was entrenched with tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance making it much more expensive to purchase health care independently. All this to say, we're stuck in a bad system, and it's attributable mainly to the unintended consequences of past government controls.

What? I was pointing out that the blackmail idea still uses the drug law, even though you're not directly involving the police, so I don't see why it would be acceptable when simply calling the cops wouldn't be.