The Objective Standard Blog
The Objective Standard Blog: March 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Yaron Brook on Pajamas TV
The Ayn Rand Center is pleased to report that, for the second time, ARC executive director Yaron Brook has appeared in an extended discussion on Pajamas TV. The discussion is titled "Is the Government in the Car Business?"
This new interview follows from another given on March 18, titled "Is Atlas Shrugging?" The Ayn Rand Center has created a new Web page to hold links to these videos; we encourage visitors to check this page often, as future appearances on Pajamas TV will appear there as well.
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Center for Individual Rights. All rights reserved.
Labels: Announcements, Business and Economics, Individual Rights and Law
Friday, March 27, 2009
'Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand’s Morality of Egoism' Now Online
Because of the burgeoning internet discussion about Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged and her ethics of selfishness, I’ve posted an expanded, written version my campus talk “Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand’s Morality of Egoism” to the TOS website. A permanent link to the essay can be found on our “About” page.
Enjoy!
Labels: Announcements, Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Business and Economics, Philosophy
Thursday, March 26, 2009
The Financial Crisis: Free Markets as the Only Moral and Practical Solution
Who: Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center
What: A talk followed by a Q&A
Where & When:
- Rice University, Houston, TX—March 31, 2009, 7:30pm
Keck Hall, Room 100 [map]
Contact: Manjari Narayan, rice.objectivism@hotmail.com - University of Texas, Austin, TX—April 2, 2009, 8:00pm
Jester Auditorium, Room 121A [map]
Contact: Alan McKendree, utobjectivism@gmail.com
These events are open to the public. Admission is FREE.
Description: Virtually everyone today regards the financial crisis as a failure of the free market. In this talk, Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, will argue that in fact it is the un-free market that has failed. It was not capitalism that held interest rates below the rate of inflation, spurring massive amounts of borrowing and a housing boom. It was not capitalism that gave us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which promoted subprime lending and helped fuel the boom. It was not capitalism that gave us deposit insurance and the "too big to fail" doctrine, which encouraged risky financial practices.
These, and many anti-capitalist measures like them, Dr. Brook will argue, laid the groundwork for the financial crisis. The only cure, according to Dr. Brook, is to set the market free. But to do that, Americans must embrace capitalism as a moral system—one that should be defended without guilt.
For more information surrounding all ARI campus club talks, including detailed campus maps and campus club contact information, please visit www.aynrand.org/education_campus_calendar.
Please note: The above events is organized, hosted and sponsored by individual campus clubs. Although ARI provides financial support, educational materials and speakers for eligible student clubs, campus clubs are organizations independent of ARI.
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Center for Individual Rights. All rights reserved.
Labels: Announcements, Business and Economics, Events, Individual Rights and Law
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Monopoly Myth: The Case of Standard Oil
Who: Alex Epstein, analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights
What: A talk followed by a Q&A
Where & When:
- Duke University, Durham, NC—March 30, 2009, 12:15pm
Duke Law School Building, Room 3043 [map]
Contact: Beth Laughton, Elizabeth.Laughton@law.duke.edu - University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC—March 31, 2009, 7:00pm
Fretwell Building, Room 100 [map]
Contact: James Wadsworth, jwadswor@uncc.edu - University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA—April 1, 2009, 7:30pm
New Cabell Hall, Room 138 [map]
Contact: Sara Sherris, ss5dd@virginia.edu - University of Maryland, College Park, MD—April 2, 2009, 8:00pm
Adele H. Stamp Student Union, Benjamin Banneker Room [map]
Contact: David Crawford, david.crawford@gmail.com
These events are open to the public. Admission is FREE.
Description: America’s experiment with laissez-faire capitalism in the 1800s was a disaster, historians tell us, because businessmen used anticompetitive tactics to form giant, invincible monopolies. The textbook example of these evils of Big Business is John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust. In an era before government regulations and antitrust laws, the story goes, Rockefeller wielded market power to squelch innovative competitors and jack up consumer prices at will.
The textbooks need to be rewritten, argues Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Center. In his talk, Epstein tells the true story of Rockefeller’s rise to market dominance. Rockefeller’s success was not based on shady practices but on his company’s remarkable ability to bring the best oil to millions of Americans at the cheapest prices. Did Standard Oil abolish competition? Far from it. The company’s success actually made the oil market far more competitive, innovative, and productive. The story of Standard Oil, it turns out, does not reveal evils of Big Business but illustrates its great virtues.
For more information surrounding all ARI campus club talks, including detailed campus maps and campus club contact information, please visit www.aynrand.org/education_campus_calendar.
Bio: Alex Epstein has a BA in philosophy from Duke University and is an analyst focusing on business issues at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.
Please note: The above events is organized, hosted and sponsored by individual campus clubs. Although ARI provides financial support, educational materials and speakers for eligible student clubs, campus clubs are organizations independent of ARI.
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Center for Individual Rights. All rights reserved.
Labels: Announcements, Business and Economics, Events
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The Real Meaning of Earth Hour by Keith Lockitch
On Saturday, March 28, cities around the world will turn off their lights to observe “Earth Hour.” Iconic landmarks from the Sydney Opera House to Manhattan’s skyscrapers will be darkened to encourage reduced energy use and signal a commitment to fighting climate change.
While a one-hour blackout will admittedly have little effect on carbon emissions, what matters, organizers say, is the event’s symbolic meaning. That’s true, but not in the way organizers intend.
We hear constantly that the debate is over on climate change—that man-made greenhouse gases are indisputably causing a planetary emergency. But there is ample scientific evidence to reject the claims of climate catastrophe. And what’s never mentioned? The fact that reducing greenhouse gases to the degree sought by climate activists would, itself, cause significant harm.
Politicians and environmentalists, including those behind Earth Hour, are not calling on people just to change a few light bulbs, they are calling for a truly massive reduction in carbon emissions—as much as 80 percent below 1990 levels. Because our energy is overwhelmingly carbon-based (fossil fuels provide more than 80 percent of world energy), and because the claims of abundant “green energy” from breezes and sunbeams are a myth—this necessarily means a massive reduction in our energy use.
People don’t have a clear view of what this would mean in practice. We, in the industrialized world, take our abundant energy for granted and don’t consider just how much we benefit from its use in every minute of every day. Driving our cars to work and school, sitting in our lighted, heated homes and offices, powering our computers and countless other labor-saving appliances, we count on the indispensable values that industrial energy makes possible: hospitals and grocery stores, factories and farms, international travel and global telecommunications. It is hard for us to project the degree of sacrifice and harm that proposed climate policies would force upon us.
This blindness to the vital importance of energy is precisely what Earth Hour exploits. It sends the comforting-but-false message: Cutting off fossil fuels would be easy and even fun! People spend the hour stargazing and holding torch-lit beach parties; restaurants offer special candle-lit dinners. Earth Hour makes the renunciation of energy seem like a big party.
Participants spend an enjoyable sixty minutes in the dark, safe in the knowledge that the life-saving benefits of industrial civilization are just a light switch away. This bears no relation whatsoever to what life would actually be like under the sort of draconian carbon-reduction policies that climate activists are demanding: punishing carbon taxes, severe emissions caps, outright bans on the construction of power plants.
Forget one measly hour with just the lights off. How about Earth Month, without any form of fossil fuel energy? Try spending a month shivering in the dark without heating, electricity, refrigeration; without power plants or generators; without any of the labor-saving, time-saving, and therefore life-saving products that industrial energy makes possible.
Those who claim that we must cut off our carbon emissions to prevent an alleged global catastrophe need to learn the indisputable fact that cutting off our carbon emissions would be a global catastrophe. What we really need is greater awareness of just how indispensable carbon-based energy is to human life (including, of course, to our ability to cope with any changes in the climate).
It is true that the importance of Earth Hour is its symbolic meaning. But that meaning is the opposite of the one intended. The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.
Keith Lockitch, PhD in physics, is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, focusing on science and environmentalism. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.
Labels: Business and Economics, Environmentalism, Science and Technology
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Objectivist Summer Conference 2009 early registration discounts expire soon!
We are writing to remind you that the deadline to take advantage of our deepest price reductions is just twelve days away.
Objectivist Summer Conference 2009 will take place from July 3 to July 11, 2009, bringing you nine days of social and intellectual stimulation that you'll find nowhere else during the year.
This summer's conference will be hosted at Boston's Seaport Hotel and World Trade Center, known for its comfortable and enjoyable accommodations and meeting spaces. In the surrounding downtown area attendees can explore fine dining, shopping, and historical landmarks.
Recent months have poignantly demonstrated the importance of philosophy in human life, as current events seem to spring directly from the pages of Atlas Shrugged. As most Americans look towards government to rescue them, our speakers show what alternative solutions Ayn Rand's philosophy can offer to today's world with presentations such as "The Separation of Church and State," by Onkar Ghate; "Principled Leadership," by John Allison; “'Humanity’s Darkest Evil:' The Lethal Destructiveness of Non-Objective Law," by Tara Smith; "Free Minds and Free Markets," by Peter Schwartz; and "Property Rights—and Wrongs," by Thomas A. Bowden. Other stimulating topics will be available as well, including history, psychology, drama, epistemology, mathematics, and the nature and necessity of friendship. In all there will be ten general session lectures and sixteen optional courses. Attendees may register for the entire nine-day conference, or use à la carte registration options to choose those parts that best fit their schedule and budget.
As usual, we also bring you a variety of special events and social opportunities, including two different dance worshops (Swing and Salsa), our annual opening and closing banquets and a special Independence Day celebration.
We look forward to creating a unique and memorable conference in Boston, and we hope to see you there!
Discount reminder: Even if you missed out on our special advance-planning bonus this year, you can still claim early registration price incentives (price reductions available through March 31). Details are available on our registration options and pricing page.
For more information visit the Objectivist Conferences Web site.
Copyright © 2009 Second Renaissance, Inc. All rights reserved.
Labels: Announcements, Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Events
Atlas Shrugged Tops Amazon's Bestseller List
Washington, D.C., March 18, 2009—Earlier this year Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel Atlas Shrugged was selling at triple the rate it sold at in the beginning of 2008. Now the novel is soaring to even greater heights, and its trade paperback edition is currently in first place in the Classics category on Amazon.com’s best-seller list for sales in the United States. The 50th anniversary mass-market paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged ranks as #2 and the trade paperback Centennial edition ranks as #3. For several weeks Atlas Shrugged has been holding steady in the top 10 best-sellers in the broader United States Literature and Fiction category, and as of the writing of this release, different editions of the novel stand at #3, #5 and #6 in Amazon’s ranking.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, explained the parallels between Atlas Shrugged and today’s events.
“In Atlas Shrugged, Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?”
Brook also stressed the importance today of the book’s often overlooked message that capitalism cannot be properly defended without morally defending profit and self-interest: “. . . only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism—and that as long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention--and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.”
Those interested in understanding the morality of capitalism can learn more in Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness—which, at #12 in the Classics category, is setting records of its own.
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.
Labels: Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Business and Economics, The Arts
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Save 20 Percent on The Objective Standard now through March 27
TOS is offering a 20% discount on subscriptions to first-time subscribers through March 27, 2009. If you have considered subscribing to the Standard but have held off—or if you know anyone who has—now is the time to act. A one-year print subscription is only $47.20 (regularly $59), and a two-year print subscription is only $87.20 (regularly $109). Likewise, a one-year online-only subscription is only $39.20 (down from $49), and a two-year online-only subscription is only $71.20 (down from $89). These prices revert to regular rates after March 27.
Save now by clicking here.
And feel free to forward this information, or to post it on blogs, internet forums, Facebook, or the like.
Labels: Announcements
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Yaron Brook on Ayn Rand: A Triptych
1. If you’ve not yet read it, don’t miss Yaron Brook’s excellent op-ed “Is Rand Relevant?” in the Wall Street Journal. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged," is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history.
There's a reason. In "Atlas," Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?
The novel's eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence. "If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society," Rand wrote elsewhere in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," "you can predict its course." Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don't just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society—particularly its dominant moral ideas.
Read the whole thing here.
2. Brook expands on these points in his recent interview with The Objective Standard. Here’s an excerpt:
YB: Atlas Shrugged is not primarily a political novel. It is a novel about what happens to a world that denounces its best minds as greedy and immoral. It’s a novel about what happens when, instead of thanking and rewarding the brightest and most successful, a nation denounces, despises, and shackles them. It’s a novel about what happens when the best minds stop allowing that to happen. Whether this last aspect of the plot will play out in real life is yet to be seen, but the parallels to date are remarkable.
CB: What would you say is the fundamental reason for these parallels? What enabled Ayn Rand some fifty years ago to effectively project what we are witnessing today?
YB: Ayn Rand understood that ideas shape society. A society that values reason, the individual, and freedom creates the United States of America. A society that denounces the mind, preaches self-sacrifice, and worships the collective creates Nazi Germany.
Thus, once Rand identified the basic ideas driving American society in the 20th century, she could predict the course we would take. She could not predict the details, or the timing, but she could see where in principle a country committed to the ideas that prevail in the United States would have to end up—if it did not reject those ideas.
Above all, Ayn Rand understood that our culture’s dominant moral ideal, altruism, is incompatible with freedom.
Virtually no one in Rand’s time or today questions the precept that we are our brother’s keeper, that self-sacrificially serving others is good, and that being selfish is evil. What Rand saw was that this was irreconcilable with the vision of man as an independent, self-sufficient, sovereign being who deserves and requires freedom. If a society believes man’s duty is to sacrifice for others, then it cannot countenance capitalism—a political-economic system that enables and encourages men to pursue their own interests, their own profit, their own welfare.
The deepest reason Rand saw America as moving toward statism, however, was our deteriorating respect for reason. A culture that respects reason, such as the Enlightenment culture of the 18th century, will embrace a political system that leaves men free to exercise their own reason. But for more than a century now, our intellectuals have been preaching that reason is limited, that faith is superior to reason.
Read the whole TOS interview here.
3. Brook is interviewed on Pajamas TV, where he discusses the increasing sales and philosophical depth of Atlas Shrugged, the crucial role of bankruptcy, the statism of Alan Greenspan, the phenomenon of today’s “tea parties,” and the need of a moral revolution in support of capitalism.
Check out all three!
Labels: Announcements, Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Business and Economics, Individual Rights and Law
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
A Letter from Dr. Yaron Brook
Last November, in the wake of the election results and the mounting crisis in the financial markets, I wrote . . . that the months ahead could be a golden opportunity for ARI and for the advancement of Objectivism.
It appears that this opportunity is, in fact, upon us.
- Since the first of this year, sales of Atlas Shrugged have skyrocketed—selling at a rate three times that of the same period last year.
- CNBC’s Rick Santelli made headlines around the world with an impassioned call for resistance to Obama’s economic plans—making clear reference to Atlas Shrugged.
- On the radio, Rush Limbaugh has referred repeatedly to Atlas Shrugged in broadcasts to his tens of millions of listeners—and has applied the ideas of Atlas to the crisis we now face.
- Elsewhere, mentions of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged in relation to the current economic and political mess exploded across cyberspace: from Instapundit to The Economist; from Forbes magazine to Michael Savage; and from Michelle Malkin to (of all places!) an online publication in Abu Dhabi, UAE. A U.S. Congressman even declared that “We’re living in Atlas Shrugged”—and gives copies of the novel to his interns. Even the New York Times felt compelled to report on the skyrocketing sales of Atlas Shrugged—as well as the so-called “Going Galt” phenomenon.
- Spontaneous protests, styled as “Tea Parties,” in the spirit of America’s original 18th-century tax revolt, have erupted across the country—some with protesters making specific references to Ayn Rand; more protests are planned.
In other words, people are looking for answers, as I noted last November. And they are beginning to see that those answers can be found only in Objectivism.
ARI and our Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights (ARC) in Washington, DC, have worked tirelessly to capitalize on this growing public discontent, and on the emerging public interest in Ayn Rand and her ideas.
- ARC’s special Web page on the financial crisis adds new, hard-hitting commentary weekly; the site has attracted thousands of online readers—many of whom are directed there by links from the pundits listed above;
- ARC’s new blog, Voices for Reason, has further strengthened our ability to issue rapid-response commentary on the news of the day.
- Three public lectures in Washington, under the aegis of ARC, have drawn more than 600 attendees—an extraordinary turnout!
- ARC is working right now to finalize several promising partnerships with think tanks, industry groups, policymakers, and media outlets. These are institutions and entities that are seeking us out, who are eager to learn the Objectivist perspective on the current crisis, and who are committed to working with us going forward.
- I have received a number of invitations from a variety of groups seeking to learn more about the Objectivist perspective on the current political and economic crisis. One notable event will be an appearance at the Virginia state GOP convention in May, when I will deliver a 30-minute address to more than five thousand Republican activists.
The magnitude of the crisis appears to have served as something of a “wake-up call”—at least for some Americans.
But with a growing number of citizens now roused, and aware of the need to change course, they need to understand not just the basic, summary “plot line” of Atlas Shrugged. They need to know the full story—the full, philosophical background behind the novel.
In short, what’s needed—and what only we can provide—is the philosophical foundation for this nascent but growing opposition to the toxic ideas that animate Congress and the administration. That foundation, of course, is Objectivism.
The opportunity we have at this moment in history is unprecedented. On the other hand, however, we do not know how much time we have. There is a very real risk that either:
- Public attention will turn elsewhere; or
- The economic and political situation will deteriorate beyond the point of no return.
Which is why, in conclusion, I am turning to you for your assistance.
Please help us to capitalize on this unprecedented opportunity. You can contribute right here and right now to help the ARC expand, and help us to get out the Objectivist message.
Your support will strengthen ARC’s media capabilities, our online presence; it will fund speakers and underwrite articles and publications; it will give us the resources to seek out and secure strategic alliances with organizations who are coming around to our point of view.
As I suggested might happen in November, people are looking for answers.
Better still, they are looking to us for answers.
At no point in recent history has there been such public interest in what Objectivism has to say on matters that affect the everyday life of Americans.
With your support, we will be able to take that public interest, give it a firm, philosophically sound foundation—a foundation rooted in individual rights and reason—and help lead and give direction to the growing public discontent.
Every day, we read accounts of bad economic developments—and of even worse political ones.
Given the dire news, we should consider the fact that not only is this an unprecedented opportunity for the advancement of Objectivism—and thus an American renaissance—but that it may be one of the last such opportunities that many of us will see in our lifetimes.
With that in mind, I thank you in advance for your consideration and support.
Sincerely,
Yaron Brook
President and Executive Director
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.
Labels: Announcements, Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Business and Economics, Individual Rights and Law
The Spring Issue of TOS
The print edition of the Spring issue is at press and will be mailed shortly; the online version will be accessible to subscribers beginning March 20. For promotional purposes, we are making “Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and the World Today: An Interview with Yaron Brook” and “Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis” by Richard M. Salsman available early and to all.
The contents of the Spring issue are:
ARTICLES
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and the World Today
An Interview with Yaron BrookAmerica’s Unfree Market
by Yaron Brook and Don WatkinsAltruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis
by Richard M. SalsmanLest We Be Doomed to Repeat It: A Survey of Amity Shlaes’s History of the Great Depression
by Ari ArmstrongOf Freedom and Fat: Why Anti-Obesity Laws Are Immoral
by Stella DailyHouston, We Have a (Zoning) Problem
by J. Brian PhillipsDoubt vs. Certainty
by Gena GorlinReligion vs. Subjectivism: Why Neither Will Do
by Craig BiddleBOOKS REVIEWED
Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve, by William A. Fleckenstein with Frederick Sheehan
Reviewed by Joe KroegerPredictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely
Reviewed by Eric DanielsConcierge Medicine: A New System to Get the Best Healthcare, by Steven D. Knope, MD
Reviewed by Michael Garrett, MD
If you have not yet subscribed to TOS, why not subscribe today? You can do so online or by calling 800-423-6151.
Enjoy!
Craig Biddle, Editor
The Objective Standard
Labels: Announcements, Ayn Rand and Objectivism, Business and Economics, Healthcare, History, Individual Rights and Law, Philosophy
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Anti-Smoking Paternalism: A Cancer on American Liberty by Don Watkins
Newport Beach is considering banning smoking in a variety of new places, potentially including parks and outdoor dining areas. This is just the latest step in a widespread war on smoking by federal, state, and local governments—a campaign that includes massive taxes on cigarettes, advertising bans, and endless lawsuits against tobacco companies. This war is infecting America with a political disease far worse than any health risk caused by smoking; it is destroying our freedom to make our own judgments and choices.
According to the anti-smoking movement, restricting people’s freedom to smoke is justified by the necessity of combating the “epidemic” of smoking-related disease and death. Cigarettes, we are told, kill hundreds of thousands each year, and expose countless millions to secondhand smoke. Smoking, the anti-smoking movement says, in effect, is a plague, whose ravages can only be combated through drastic government action.
But smoking is not some infectious disease that must be quarantined and destroyed by the government. It’s a voluntary activity that every individual is free to abstain from (including by avoiding restaurants and other private establishments that permit smoking). And, contrary to those who regard any smoking as irrational on its face, cigarettes are a potential value that each individual must assess for himself. Of course, smoking can be harmful—in certain quantities, over a certain period of time, it can be habit forming and lead to disease or death. But many understandably regard the risks as minimal if one smokes relatively infrequently, and they see smoking as offering definite value, such as physical pleasure.
Are they right? Can it be a value to smoke cigarettes—and if so, in what quantity? This is the sort of judgment that properly belongs to every individual, based on his assessment of the evidence concerning smoking’s benefits and risks, and taking into account his particular circumstances (age, family history, etc.). If others believe the smoker is making a mistake, they are free to try to persuade him of their viewpoint. But they should not be free to dictate his decision, any more than they should be able to dictate his decision on whether and to what extent to drink alcohol or play poker. The fact that some individuals will smoke themselves into an early grave is no more justification for banning smoking than that the existence of alcoholics is grounds for prohibiting you from enjoying a drink at dinner.
Implicit in the war on smoking, however, is the view that the government must dictate the individual’s decisions with regard to smoking, because he is incapable of making them rationally. To the extent the anti-smoking movement succeeds in wielding the power of government coercion to impose on Americans its blanket opposition to smoking, it is entrenching paternalism: the view that individuals are incompetent to run their own lives, and thus require a nanny-state to control every aspect of those lives.
This state is well on its way: from trans-fat bans to bicycle helmet laws to prohibitions on gambling, the government is increasingly abridging our freedom on the grounds that we are not competent to make rational decisions in these areas—just as it has long done by paternalistically dictating how we plan for retirement (Social Security) or what medicines we may take (the FDA).
Indeed, one of the main arguments used to bolster the anti-smoking agenda is the claim that smokers impose “social costs” on non-smokers, such as smoking-related medical expenses—an argument that perversely uses an injustice created by paternalism to support its expansion. The only reason non-smokers today are forced to foot the medical bills of smokers is that our government has virtually taken over the field of medicine, in order to relieve us inept Americans of the freedom to manage our own health care, and bear the costs of our own choices.
But contrary to paternalism, we are not congenitally irrational misfits. We are thinking beings for whom it is both possible and necessary to rationally judge which courses of action will serve our interests. The consequences of ignoring this fact range from denying us legitimate pleasures to literally killing us: from the healthy 26-year-old unable to enjoy a trans-fatty food to the 75-year-old man unable to take an unapproved, experimental drug without which he will certainly die.
By employing government coercion to deprive us of the freedom to judge for ourselves what we inhale or consume, the anti-smoking movement has become an enemy, not an ally, in the quest for health and happiness.
Don Watkins is a writer and research specialist at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.
Labels: Healthcare, Individual Rights and Law
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Obama Whitewashes Iran by Elan Journo
In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Obama said that “We cannot shun the negotiating table” in conducting our foreign policy. He’s previously elaborated that “if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” And Iran’s president Ahmedinijad tentatively welcomes “talks based on mutual respect and in a fair atmosphere.”
The shared idea, evidently, is that our conflict with Iran stems largely from a past failure to use so-called diplomacy to settle disputes. Alluding to George W. Bush’s supposedly tough policy, Obama has said he wants to restore “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years” ago.
Really? Thirty years ago this November, followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, who spearheaded Iran’s Islamic revolution, stormed the U.S. embassy in Teheran and took the personnel hostage. President Carter gently admonished Iran, but ruled out military retaliation. Instead his advisors spent months dreaming up schemes to bribe Iran into releasing the hostages—while bending over backward to enable the regime to save face. In the end Khomeini’s Islamist theocracy collected a handsome payoff for its aggression, and concluded, rightly, that if attacked, America would crumple to its knees.
Was Obama thinking of the 1980s? In April 1983 Iran’s jihadist proxies in Lebanon rammed a truck bomb into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut; the Reagan administration responded by doing nothing. Months later, encouraged by Washington’s inaction, Teheran issued a kill order—via its ambassador in Syria—to its allied groups in Beirut. Early one morning, an Islamist suicide bomber set off a massive explosion at the barracks where U.S. marines were sleeping and killed 241 of them.
Reagan spouted hot air about not backing down—and soon after ordered the U.S. troops to bug out. The jihadists wanted America out, they slaughtered our troops, and we caved in and gave them what they wanted.
Osama bin Laden, like jihadists in Iran and elsewhere, viewed our response to the Beirut bombings as further proof that their ideologically driven war was a viable cause. And so, inspired by Iranian aggression, the anti-American jihad kept ramping up.
Maybe Obama meant the fabled halcyon days of the 1990s, when President Clinton tried to mend fences with Iran?
In 1996 a team of jihadists—financed and trained by Teheran—blew up the Khobar Towers building in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen. Clinton’s administration learned that Iran was behind the attacks. But Washington brushed aside any notion of retaliating against Iran, in order to facilitate a “reconciliation” with that murderous regime. In an eerie parallel with today, Iran expressed its openness to U.S. groveling—an opportunity Clinton seized.
So, Clinton attended a speech by Iran’s leader at the U.N.; the administration also permitted the sale of much-needed aircraft parts to Iran, among other sweeteners. Granted the cover of respectability, Iran was emboldened to continue fomenting Islamist aggression and avidly pursue its then-embryonic nuclear program.
Obama’s appeasing diplomacy re-enacts the disastrous policy of the past. Our policymakers evaded Iran’s character as an enemy, and by rewarding its aggression with bribes and conciliation, they encouraged a spiral of further attacks.
No. Bush was no exception to this trend. After 9/11 his administration invited Iran—the leading sponsor of Islamist terrorism—to join an anti-terrorism coalition(!). Talk of an axis of evil was quickly abandoned, and Washington backed the European scheme to bribe Iran to halt its nuclear program. By late last year, there was talk of opening a U.S. Special Interests Section (a step down from an embassy) in Iran. Meanwhile Bush’s welfare mission in Iraq negated U.S. security and left Iran untouched to grow more powerful and resolute.
A genuinely new, rational policy toward Iran would turn away from the last 30 years and begin by facing up to Teheran’s ongoing proxy war against us.
Elan Journo is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, focusing on foreign policy. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.
Labels: Foreign Policy and War
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