Principles in Practice: The Blog of the Objective Standard

Principles in Practice: January 2008

Religion vs. Morality by ARI Media
Memo to Gates: The Cause of Third-World Poverty Is Not Capitalism, But a Lack of Capitalism by ARI Media
VanDamme Academy in the News by Craig Biddle
Poor Countries Don't Need Climate Change Welfare, They Need Capitalism by ARI Media
The Morality of Capitalism by ARI Media
Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2008 by ARI Media
Health Care, Moral Rights, and Selfish Action by Craig Biddle
The 'Market Failure' Fallacy by ARI Media

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Religion vs. Morality

Posted by ARI Media at 10:33 PM

Who: Dr. Andrew Bernstein, professor of philosophy and speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute

What: A talk arguing for a secular, rational basis for morality. A Q&A will follow.

Where: Rice University, Sewall Hall, Room 309, Houston, TX

When: Thursday, February 7, 2008, at 7:30 pm

Description: Conventionally, most people believe that morality can only be based in religious faith that in a world without God no principles of right and wrong could exist. Related to this, philosophers have long held that no objective, fact-based, rational code of values is possible. Regarding both points, this talk shows that the exact opposite is true. The purpose of morality is to guide human life on earth and religion is utterly incapable of it. Flourishing life requires a code of secularism, rationality, egoism and freedom. Religious faith clashes with every principle of a proper moral code, and, as such, has led, and can only lead to, hell on earth.

Bio: Dr. Bernstein is a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Marist College; he also teaches at SUNY Purchase. Dr. Bernstein lectures regularly at American universities and appears frequently on radio talk shows. His op-eds have been published in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Times, The Los Angeles Daily News, and The Houston Chronicle. Dr. Bernstein is the author of three Ayn Rand titles for CliffsNotes: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, and Anthem. He also authored The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire.

For more information on this talk, please e-mail media@aynrand.org

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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Memo to Gates: The Cause of Third-World Poverty Is Not Capitalism, But a Lack of Capitalism

Posted by ARI Media at 2:00 PM

Irvine, CA—Bill Gates made waves at the World Economic Forum by calling on Western nations to adopt a new, “creative capitalism.” He complained that under “pure capitalism . . . . the great advances in the world have often aggravated the inequities in the world. The least needy see the most improvement, and the most needy see the least . . .” Gates called for corporations and governments to devote far more time and money “doing work that eases the world's inequities.”

“Gates’s entire speech essentially blames Western capitalism for the Third World’s poverty,” said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, “and offers a slightly more sophisticated form of foreign welfare handouts as the antidote. But the West did not become wealthy at the Third World’s expense—we did not seize computers, houses, pharmaceuticals, and railroads from the Sahara. We created our wealth under capitalism, the system that liberates individuals to produce and trade without interference. And Third World countries could do the same if they adopted that system.

“The last 200 years have shown that wherever capitalism is adopted—from Singapore to the United States to Hong Kong to Australia—it enables its citizens to create wealth and prosper. Yet not one word of Gates’s speech calls for poor countries to change their anti-capitalist governments.

“No matter how many billions Bill Gates gives to poor nations, until he starts advocating universal capitalism instead of attacking it, he is acting as an enemy of prosperity in the undeveloped world.”

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Monday, January 28, 2008

VanDamme Academy in the News

Posted by Craig Biddle at 11:39 AM

Jillian Melchior has written an excellent piece titled " VanDamme Academy Shows Value of Choice" in The Heartland Institute’s School Reform News. Here’s the opening:

The VanDamme Academy, a K-8 school in Laguna Hills, California, has an unusual way of giving students a better foundation of knowledge.

Founder Lisa VanDamme said the students learn incrementally, not moving forward in concepts until they've mastered the one at hand. Moreover, teachers encourage them to make connections within and between the subjects, and between school and life.

"[We're] teaching in a very deliberate, planned, incremental order that provides for real understanding on the part of the child," VanDamme said. "They're starting on the small, simple steps and building on it, so at each new stage, they thoroughly grasp the material."

Personal Experience
Using a carefully planned curriculum, teachers help students build core knowledge and hone skills necessary for their future success, VanDamme said.

VanDamme developed her teaching method when she began as a homeschool teacher to an exceptionally gifted child about 11 years ago. She drew on the experience of highly educated friends and the educational philosophy of Ayn Rand to put together her curriculum.

The school emphasizes science, math, history, and language arts, which VanDamme considers universally necessary for all mature, informed adults.

Students must demonstrate a thorough understanding of each topic, often writing essay questions to explain everything from scientific theories to vocabulary.

"Something can pass as knowledge when it's really just memorized gibberish," VanDamme explained. "We only consider ourselves successful if [students] can explain to us what they're doing in complete thoughts of their own.

"We don't give multiple choice or true/false [tests] at any time," VanDamme continued. "We put a big emphasis on writing. We want them to really, fully, completely understand what they're doing. We want them to grasp and be able to explain everything."

Read the whole thing—and for more on VanDamme’s revolutionary philosophy of education, read her articles in TOS:

The most important aspect of a child's development—and the best hope for the future of the West—is proper, hierarchical education. VanDamme Academy provides it.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Poor Countries Don't Need Climate Change Welfare, They Need Capitalism

Posted by ARI Media at 11:32 AM

Irvine, CA—A major theme of the recent climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia, is that wealthy, industrialized nations have an obligation to help poor countries adapt to climate change. Delegates agreed to activate an "adaptation fund" to help undeveloped nations cope with projected threats such as disruptions to agriculture and decreased water availability.

But according to Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute: “If environmentalists were really concerned about people in undeveloped countries, they would be helping them to bring about what they really need: industrial development.

“The world’s poorest can barely cope with day-to-day survival, let alone with unproven threats projected to occur over decades. Imagine having no electricity or access to clean drinking water. Imagine having to cook your meals over an open fire, breathing smoke and ash every day. Billions around the world survive at a subsistence level because they lack the elements of industrial capitalism that we in the developed world take for granted: power plants, factories, modern roads and hospitals, cars, refrigerators, and countless time- and labor-saving devices.

"What poor countries need is not climate adaptation welfare doled out by environmentalists who oppose industrial development; what poor countries need is to become rich countries. They need to embrace free markets and private property rights and attract the investment of profit-seeking entrepreneurs to create wealth and drive economic growth.

"Despite the media's constant assertion that global warming science is ‘settled,’" Lockitch said, "it is far from certain that any countries will face catastrophic dangers from climate change. But even if certain dangers do emerge, they pose little threat to wealthy nations with a strongly developed industrial infrastructure. What poor countries need is not global warming guilt money but the rapid adoption of capitalism and industrialization.

"Yet, it is precisely the adoption of industrial capitalism by undeveloped countries that environmentalists reject. Not only do they not want poor countries to become rich, they are trying hard to force rich countries to become poor by capping carbon emissions and abandoning industrialization. Despite their feigned concern for the world’s poor, the measures proposed by environmentalists pose a far greater threat than any possible changes to the earth’s climate."

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Sunday, January 20, 2008

The Morality of Capitalism

Posted by ARI Media at 5:27 PM

Who: Dr. Eric Daniels, speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute and visiting scholar at Clemson University's Institute for the Study of Capitalism

What: A talk making the case that capitalism is the only moral social system. A Q&A will follow.

Where: Kimmel Center, Room 914, New York University, 60 Washington Square South, NY, NY 10012. Maps and directions: http://www.nyu.edu/about/virtual.html

When: Wednesday, January 23, 2008, at 7 pm

Registration: Attendees must RSVP to nyu@objectivistclubs.org

Description: Despite the enormous success of American capitalism at producing material abundance and political freedom, critics continue their assault on the system, calling it immoral. In this lecture, Dr. Eric Daniels makes the case that capitalism is the only moral social system. He also examines the conventional defense of capitalism, which relies on the practical, economic argument, and illustrates why only a defense of pure laissez-faire capitalism can succeed.

Bio: Dr. Eric Daniels is a visiting scholar at Clemson University's Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He taught for five years at Duke University, in the Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace, and at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned his doctorate in American history. He has lectured internationally on the history of American ethics, American business and legal history, and the American Enlightenment. Daniels's publications include a chapter in "The Abolition of Antitrust" and five entries in the "Oxford Companion to United States History."

For more information on this talk, please e-mail media@aynrand.org

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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2008

Posted by ARI Media at 8:30 AM

Irvine, CA—“Martin Luther King Jr. Day offers Americans an opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to eradicating racism in all its forms,” said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute.

Ayn Rand once wrote: “Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.” The essence of racism, she explained, is “the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced by his internal body chemistry, which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.”

“Achievement of a truly color-blind society will require not only that private individuals reject racism but that government policies and programs cease to favor some citizens over others on the basis of skin color,” Bowden said. “The solution to racism in government does not lie in further race-conscious, affirmative action programs that generate de facto quotas, nor in multicultural education that locates personal identity in one’s ethnic group. Because such policies are themselves racist, they are part of the problem.

“A model of good government policy is President Truman’s executive order ending segregation in America’s military services. Issued 60 years ago, Executive Order 9981 declared ‘that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.’

“This official policy exemplifies a government’s proper attitude toward its citizens,” Bowden said. “Every law-abiding adult has an equal right to serve in government, provided he or she can satisfy the position’s objective requirements. In setting standards, government agencies must be forbidden by law from making irrational distinctions among citizens, as by favoring some soldiers over others on the irrelevant basis of skin color.

“In a famous speech, Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently envisioned a world without racism: ‘I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’ Americans should be proud of their nation’s historical achievements in ending slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregated schools, and many other forms of institutionalized racism. On this holiday, we should embrace the challenge contained in King’s eloquent remarks and recommit ourselves to the task of fully eradicating racism from this nation’s public policies.”

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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Health Care, Moral Rights, and Selfish Action

Posted by Craig Biddle at 10:29 PM

Yaron Brook has an excellent article in Forbes titled “The Right Vision of Health Care.” Here’s an excerpt:

Prior to the government's entrance into the medical field, health care was regarded as a product to be traded voluntarily on a free market—no different from food, clothing, or any other important good or service. Medical providers competed to provide the best quality services at the lowest possible prices. Virtually all Americans could afford basic health care, while those few who could not were able to rely on abundant private charity.

Had this freedom been allowed to endure, Americans' rising productivity would have allowed them to buy better and better health care, just as, today, we buy better and more varied food and clothing than people did a century ago. There would be no crisis of affordability, as there isn't for food or clothing.

But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, this view of health care as an economic product—for which each individual must assume responsibility—had given way to a view of health care as a "right," an unearned "entitlement," to be provided at others' expense.

This entitlement mentality fueled the rise of our current third-party-payer system, a blend of government programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, together with government-controlled employer-based health insurance (itself spawned by perverse tax incentives during the wage and price controls of World War II).

Today, what we have is not a system grounded in American individualism, but a collectivist system that aims to relieve the individual of the "burden" of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. For every dollar's worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out-of-pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14%.

The result of shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them was an explosion in spending.

In a system in which someone else is footing the bill, consumers, encouraged to regard health care as a "right," demand medical services without having to consider their real price. When, through the 1970s and 1980s, this artificially inflated consumer demand sent expenditures soaring out of control, the government cracked down by enacting further coercive measures: price controls on medical services, cuts to medical benefits, and a crushing burden of regulations on every aspect of the health care system.

As each new intervention further distorted the health care market, driving up costs and lowering quality, belligerent voices demanded still further interventions to preserve the "right" to health care. And Republican politicians—not daring to challenge the notion of such a "right"—have, like Romney, Schwarzenegger and Bush, outdone even the Democrats in expanding government health care.

The solution to this ongoing crisis is to recognize that the very idea of a "right" to health care is a perversion. There can be no such thing as a "right" to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services. Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action.

You are free to see a doctor and pay him for his services—no one may forcibly prevent you from doing so. But you do not have a "right" to force the doctor to treat you without charge or to force others to pay for your treatment. The rights of some cannot require the coercion and sacrifice of others.

So long as Republicans fail to challenge the concept of a "right" to health care, their appeals to "market-based" solutions are worse than empty words. They will continue to abet the Democrats' expansion of government interference in medicine, right up to the dead end of a completely socialized system.

By contrast, the rejection of the entitlement mentality in favor of a proper conception of rights would provide the moral basis for real and lasting solutions to our health care problems—for breaking the regulatory chains stifling the medical industry; for lifting the government incentives that created our dysfunctional, employer-based insurance system; for inaugurating a gradual phase-out of all government health care programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid; and for restoring a true free market in medical care.

Read it all.

Brook here focuses primarily on the impracticality of socialized medicine and on the fact that no one has a right to the commodity that is health care, and he addresses these points soundly. I’d like to add that the producers of medicine and the providers of health care and health insurance have an absolute moral right to trade their products according to their own judgment. The reason why no one has a right to health care or health insurance is that these things morally belong to those who produced them—those who did the thinking and exerted the effort to get through medical school, to start a medical practice, to develop an insurance business, to create products that enhance and often save human lives. Their efforts do not render them slaves of the needy; rather, their efforts render them the rightful owners of the products of their efforts. So says the law of causality—and so says a proper morality.

The moral is the practical; respecting the rights of producers makes possible their productivity and thus our ability to trade the products of our efforts for the products of theirs. Violating the rights of the producers of health care and health insurance is not a way to acquire these goods and services; it is a way to diminish and eliminate them.

For more on this pressing issue, read “Moral Health Care vs. ‘Universal Health Care’” in the Winter issue of TOS—and pass the URL along to every active-minded person you know. With the exclusively statist field of candidates running for office in the coming elections, the only way to stop health care and health insurance from becoming fully socialized—and the only way to begin moving in the direction of a rights-respecting, flourishing, free market in these industries—is to generate sufficient principled advocacy of capitalism and opposition to socialism among the active-minded public.

These two articles—“The Right Vision of Health Care” and “Moral Health Care vs. ‘Universal Health Care’” are excellent tools for introducing people to the moral and practical nature of genuinely free markets. It takes only a few minutes to email a URL or two to all your thinking friends. Take action now. You may need a good doctor some day.

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Monday, January 07, 2008

The 'Market Failure' Fallacy

Posted by ARI Media at 7:52 PM

Who: Dr. Brian Simpson, associate professor and chair of the Department of Management and Marketing at National University in San Diego and speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute

What: A talk and Q & A arguing against the notion of "market failure" and defending the moral and productive value of capitalism

Where: Hilton Costa Mesa, 3050 Bristol Street, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

When: Thursday, January 31, 2007, at 7:30 PM

Admission is FREE.

Description: In contemporary economics textbooks there is typically at least one chapter devoted to the topic of "market failure," where it is claimed that capitalism leads to undesirable results, such as the creation of monopolies, harmful environmental effects, and an unjust "distribution" of income. In this talk, Dr. Brian P. Simpson attacks the notion of "market failure," arguing for the moral and productive superiority of capitalism, the immorality and destructive economic consequences of environmentalism, and the need to integrate economic analysis with Ayn Rand's revolutionary moral theory of rational egoism in order to properly defend capitalism.

Bio: Dr. Simpson is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Management and Marketing at National University in San Diego, where he has been teaching economics since 2002. He has published in peer-reviewed journals, made presentations at scholarly conferences, and created a minor in economics with a focus on free-market economics and Objectivist philosophy. He is the author of the book Markets Don't Fail!

For more information on this talk, please e-mail events@aynrand.org.

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