Per Arne Karlsen

From the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights:

Citizens United and the Future of Campaign Finance Law

A Panel Debate in Washington, D.C.

Who: Steve Simpson, Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice
Eric Daniels, Research Assistant Professor, Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism
Tara Malloy, Associate Legal Counsel, The Campaign Legal Center
Doug Kendall, Founder and President, Constitutional Accountability Center (Invited)
Moderator: Tom Bowden, Analyst, Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

What: A panel discussion on campaign finance laws. 

Where: 722 12th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20005 (Americans for Tax Reform's event room)

When: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at Noon (lunch to follow)

Description: We invite you to join us for an engaging discussion on one of the most important and controversial campaign finance decisions in decades. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on speech during elections. Critics view Citizens United as a striking example of judicial activism that will unleash a flood of corporate money in elections. Defenders view it as a ringing endorsement of First Amendment rights. All agree that it will have a significant impact on campaign finance laws. Please join our panel of experts for a vigorous discussion and debate about this important ruling.

Admission: FREE. Open to the public.

RSVP: Please email Krissy Keys at the Institute for Justice at kkeys@ij.org by Friday, March 12th.

Sponsors:  
Institute for Justice
Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

From FOXNews:

George and Sharlee McNamee have a beautiful home, an ocean view and a bounty of children and grandchildren who invade their house every weekend. The breeze is fresh, the view is stunning and retired life in Corona Del Mar, Calif., is good.

But the McNamees wake up every morning fighting for their rights. In this case, the freedom to use a picnic table, shed and shower in their own backyard.

"We fight for two reasons, property rights and freedom," says George McNamee, a silver-haired former insurance salesman. "My wife and I decided a long time ago, those two things matter. Without that, there isn't much left."

For the last decade, the McNamees' backyard has been a battlefield. The retired couple has spent $250,000 in legal fees protecting amenities worth little more than $100.

Those numbers are shocking, but not to those who know the regulatory reach and zeal of the California Coastal Commission, which claims that items in the couple's backyard—the picnic table, a thatched palapa, a shower and barbecue—are illegal. Failure to remove them results in a fine—and that fine is $6,000 per day. . . .

Read the whole thing.

For background on this horror story and on the tyrannical nature of the California Coastal Commission, read Paul Beard’s article “The California Coastal Commission: A Case Study in Governmental Assault on Property Rights,” which is now accessible for free. And please send these links to everyone you know who cares about property rights. Your property could be next.

Craig Biddle will be delivering his talk “Capitalism: The Only Moral Social System” at the following universities next week:

• February 22, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Grainger Hall, Morgridge Auditorium (Room 1100) [map] 7:00pm
• February 23, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Willey Hall, Room 125 [map] 7:30pm
• February 24, Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts, Performance Space [map] 6:00pm
• February 25, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Physics Building, Room 204 [map] 7:00pm

Admission is FREE and open to the public.

Description: Capitalism is widely recognized as the practical social system because, wherever and to the extent that it is implemented, it leads to wealth and prosperity. But this same system is widely regarded as immoral because it enables people to act fully in their own self-interest—that is, to act on their own judgment and to keep, use, and dispose of the product of their own effort. In this talk, Mr. Biddle demonstrates why, far from making capitalism immoral, the fact that it enables everyone to act selfishly and own property is what makes it not only the most practical but also the only moral social system ever devised.

Image: Wiki Commons

Penguin has announced that July 6, 2010 is the official release date for David Harriman’s book, The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics.

Here’s the blurb from the back cover:

A groundbreaking solution to the problem of induction, based on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts

Inspired by and expanding on a series of lectures by Leonard Peikoff, David Harriman presents a fascinating answer to the problem of induction—that is, the epistemological question of how we know the truth of inductive generalizations.

Ayn Rand presented her revolutionary theory of concepts in her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. As Dr. Peikoff subsequently explored inductive reasoning, he sought out David Harriman, a physicist who has taught philosophy, for his expert knowledge of the scientific discovery process.

Here, Harriman presents the result of collaboration between scientist and philosopher. Beginning with a detailed discussion of the role of mathematics and experiment in validating generalizations in physics—looking closely at the reasoning of scientists such as Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, and Maxwell—Harriman skillfully identifies the method by which we discover laws of nature. Refuting the skepticism that is epidemic in contemporary philosophy of science, Harriman offers demonstrable evidence of the power of reason. He then argues that philosophy itself is an inductive science—the science that teaches the scientist how to be scientific.

You can see the Table of Contents and First Pages at Falling Apple Science Institute, and you can preorder the book at Amazon.com. For a preview of Harriman’s work on this subject, see his TOS articles:

• Enlightenment Science and its Fall
• The 19th-Century Atomic War
• Induction and Experimental Method
• Isaac Newton: Discoverer of Universal Laws
• Proof of the Atomic Theory
• Errors in Inductive Reasoning

In my last post, I responded to Will Wilkinson's allegation that Ayn Rand's ethical egoism cannot support the principle of individual rights, because the egoist has no self-interested reason to refrain from using force against others. Wilkinson contended that bureaucrats who feast at the public trough seem to fulfill their self-interest even though they live by force. In response, I asked whether they might be able to live a better, happier life by becoming producers rather than looters.

But many who read Ayn Rand's works are troubled by Wilkinson's question about why it is in the egoist's self-interest to refrain from predation on others, and it is worth expanding on the answer. The question arises again in the series of posts from Cato Unbound that originally motivated Wilkinson's comment. I want to briefly sketch an answer to one of these posts, by philosophy professor Roderick Long. Long also asks the question about how egoism supports rights, and offers an answer that he regards as superior to Rand's. His position rests on a misunderstanding of Rand's view on the relationship between means and ends.

To explain his answer to the predation problem, Long invokes a distinction from the history of ethics:

But what, in Rand's view, connects our self-interest with the moral claims of others? For most of Rand's aforementioned "eudaimonist" predecessors, the requirements of moral virtue were conceived as a constitutive part of the agent's own interest; the Epicureans were the only major dissidents, regarding virtue instead as an instrumental strategy for attaining this interest (rather like Hobbes, in a way, though the Epicureans are surely closer to the main line of eudaimonism than Hobbes is). Rand appears to waver between these two approaches, treating the individual's ultimate good sometimes as a robust human flourishing that has virtue as a component, and sometimes as mere survival to which virtue is only an external means. Long sees this distinction as relevant to answering the predation problem because if we adopt the "constitutive" view rather than the "instrumental view," and regard a man's honesty and integrity as proper parts of his self-interest, then his being a man of honesty and integrity automatically contributes to his self-interest, whereas his use of force against others would contradict these virtues and automatically count against his self-interest. Long thinks that he sees elements of this "constitutive" view in Rand's fiction:

The constitutive approach predominates in her novels; the chief reason that Rand's fictional protagonists (such as architect Howard Roark in The Fountainhead or railroad executive Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged) do not cheat their customers, for example, is pretty clearly that they would regard such parasitism on the productive efforts of others as directly inconsistent with the nobility and independence of spirit that they cherish for themselves, and not because they're hoping that a policy of honesty will maximize their chances of longevity. Long rightly stresses that elsewhere in her work, Rand urges that virtue is not an end in itself but a means to the end of human life. This suggests that she regarded virtue as "instrumental" to self-interest, rather than as a proper or constitutive part of it. But Long contends that this instrumental view of virtue is harder to square with an obligation to refrain from initiating force against others. If virtue consists of whatever achieves one's self-interest, and self-interest is constituted only by generic material gain, then regularly mugging one's neighbor would be virtuous. Long urges that we adopt the view that self-interest is constituted by virtue, but contends that Rand does not hold what he takes to be this more defensible view.

Long's argument begins from a faulty assumption: that there is a firm distinction between the "instrumental" and the "constitutive" in value theory, that a means to an end cannot itself be part of the end.

Rand does regard the virtues as means, not as "ends in themselves." But her point in rejecting the idea that virtue is "its own reward" is to distance her view from the altruistic view that severs the tie between virtue and the happy life. "Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue." Her point is not necessarily to regard virtue as a mere means to an end—as if engaging in virtuous action were external to the end of life or as if virtuous action were not itself living.

Consider further that virtues are the principle-directed actions we must engage in to live a distinctive kind of life, a human life, which is itself constituted by distinctive types of values, values of both the body and the spirit. Life is an end in itself, and part of what this means is that living is both means and end, the means to more of itself. The question to answer, then, is what is this action of living?

In an underappreciated passage in "The Objectivist Ethics," Rand makes this brilliantly clear:

Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep—virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics—the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one's ultimate value, one's own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride (pg. 25). [my emphasis]. Reason, purpose, and self-esteem are the values that most crucially constitute the distinctively human way of living—as such they are both means to and part of the end. And the virtues are actions in service of these values.

Reason, purpose and self-esteem are the fundamental means to the ultimate end, which is human life. We need reason to identify the facts of reality that bear on solving the problem of survival, we need to identify the relationship of our actions and goals to our life and happiness—which is the value of purpose, and we need self-esteem to motivate these actions by reminding us that we are capable of succeeding in them and worthy of doing so.

The crucial nature of these cardinal values to a life of happiness is exhibited in Rand's fiction when her characters are shown enjoying work, and enjoying it even when it is not a part of their chosen career. When Roark can't find commissions, for example, he finds purpose in his life by working in the quarry. And when Dagny exiles herself from the railroad, she creates tasks for herself—like clearing brush and clearing paths—just because "what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form" (563).

Life itself is a process of action, and the actions that are central enough to an organism's life are by that fact also essential parts of that organism's distinctive form of life. Ayn Rand uses the language of "man's survival qua man" to describe the distinctive virtues and values that compose a distinctively human life.

To draw a parallel: A plant's distinctive life qua plant is more than its life qua a mass of cells; its life includes the way its cells are organized to interact with each other, to allow its leaves to reach toward the sun and its roots to burrow into the earth. Were a plant to be harvested and sliced into salad bits, many of its cells would still live, but the plant's life qua plant would cease.

By the same token, a man's distinctive form of life involves more than heartbeat and respiration, and more than walking and eating and reproducing. Distinctive to human life is the way our actions are organized and integrated by the operations of a rational mind. A man in a comatose state has lost this distinctive organizing principle. His cells and his brain stem may continue to function, but his is not man's life qua man.

Being in a comatose state is not the only way to live a less than fully human life. When people fail to live lives of reason, purpose, and self-esteem, they may not exactly be vegetables, but they are not living the full, flourishing lives that they could. Wilkinson's beltway bureaucrats, to the extent that they parasitize others, live "lives" of force rather than lives of reason, of the promiscuous "why not?" instead of the purposeful "what for?", and of neurosis about whether they can maintain their ongoing parasitism, rather than self-esteem.

Which man lived a more confident, self-secure life: Thomas Edison, or Al Capone? Which man does a Rahm Emmanuel or a Timothy Geithner more closely resemble? And in our current situation, how long will either be able to maintain even the façade of the productive law-abiding citizen, rather than that of the gangster?

Images:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Da_Vinci_Vitruve_Luc_Viatour.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonardo_Flowers.jpg

Amazon.com has offered TOS in Kindle Book format (i.e., single issues) since last May, but they've not offered the journal via their highly exclusive Kindle Magazine program (i.e., via subscription), which currently includes only 48 periodicals. Today, however, Amazon added TOS to their Kindle Magazine lineup. Kindle owners, enjoy!

Here’s an announcement from the Ayn Rand Institute:

Announcing Objectivist Summer Conference 2010!

We are pleased to introduce the Objectivist Summer Conference 2010 Web site. Objectivist Conferences is the premier venue for high-caliber presentations by Objectivist scholars, and that is what we bring you this year as Leonard Peikoff presents "The DIM Hypothesis" (part 2), the six-part sequel to the groundbreaking series of lectures that he delivered to our conference attendees in 2007. This year's conference offers eleven general session lectures, sixteen optional courses, and a variety of social activities and special events.

In addition to Dr. Peikoff's lectures, we will bring you lectures and courses on a broad spectrum of topics, including politics ("Defending Capitalism" by Yaron Brook); writing ("Writing Objectively" by Keith Lockitch); history ("The Renaissance [part 3]: Reformation and Religious Wars [1517-1648]," by Andrew Lewis); and poetry ("Making Poetry Part of Your Life," by Lisa VanDamme). We are also pleased to announce that there will be a special Q & A on ARI's 25th Anniversary, hosted by Michael S. Berliner and Yaron Brook.

This year's conference takes place in the exciting setting that only Las Vegas can provide. Besides the renowned glamour of the Vegas Strip, the area boasts excellent shopping and restaurants, and landmarks such as the Hoover Dam (subject of a general session lecture by Talbot Manvel).

We are looking forward to an inspiring and memorable conference—we hope to see you there!

Register by March 31 to take advantage of discount pricing. Details are available on our registration options and pricing page.

Note: For those who prefer to review details of Objectivist Summer Conference 2010 in print, we have made a printable PDF available online: PDF Catalog.

[The following is an excerpt of from Craig Biddle’s article “The Creed of Sacrifice vs. The Land of Liberty.” Citations have been omitted here but are available in the article, which is accessible for free.]

The correlation between the morality of sacrifice and the violation of rights is no accident. It is a causal relationship. To see why, we must zero in on the little-understood essence of altruism.

Altruism is not about moral obligation as such; it is about a specific kind of moral obligation. Altruism does not call for a person to serve others if he has made an agreement or a commitment to do so—as in the case of a doctor who contracts to provide a patient with medical care in exchange for payment, or an employer who contracts to pay an employee in exchange for his work. Such obligations are chosen obligations, obligations stemming from mutually beneficial agreements, agreements in which both parties gain a life-serving value. Altruism is not about chosen obligations. It is about “unchosen” obligations or “duties.”

As the altruist philosopher John Rawls explains, whereas regular obligations “arise as a result of our voluntary acts,” duties “apply to us without regard to our voluntary acts.” We have a duty “to help another, whether or not we have committed ourselves to [doing so]. It is no defense or excuse to say that we have made no promise . . . to come to another’s aid.”

A “duty” is non-optional; it is something you must do regardless of what you want, regardless of what you think is in your interest, regardless of what you would choose to do if you had a choice in the matter. In the words of the foremost advocate of this idea, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, “duty is a necessitation to an unwillingly adopted end,” and its “specific mark” is “the renunciation of all interest.”

Altruism is the morality of “unchosen” obligations—obligations you must honor regardless of your values, desires, interests. This fact points to why altruism not only calls for self-sacrifice but also necessitates the initiation of physical force. British philosopher John Stuart Mill explains:

It is a part of the notion of duty in every one of its forms that a person may rightfully be compelled to fulfill it. Duty is a thing which may be exacted from a person, as one exacts a debt. Unless we think that it may be exacted from him, we do not call it his duty. . . . There are other things, on the contrary, which we wish that people should do, which we like or admire them for doing, perhaps dislike or despise them for not doing, but yet admit that they are not bound to do. . . .

Observe what this means in regard to the relationship of “duties” and rights. Whereas a “duty” is an (alleged) obligation that one has apart from one’s choices or interests and that one “may rightfully be compelled to fulfill,” a right is a prerogative to act in accordance with one’s choices and interests so long as one does not violate the same rights of others. In other words, “duties” and rights are utterly incompatible. They are mutually exclusive. A person can have one or the other—but not both.

The French philosopher Auguste Comte (who coined the term “altruism”) puts this clearly: Because “to live for others” is “for all of us a constant duty” and “the definitive formula of human morality,” it follows that “[a]ll honest and sensible men, of whatever party, should agree, by a common consent, to eliminate the doctrine of rights.” Altruism, explained Comte, “cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism.” On the premise of altruism, “[rights] are as absurd as they are immoral. . . . The whole notion, then, must be completely put away.”

The morality of altruism is incompatible with the principle of rights, and the theoreticians of altruism are clear on this point. In order to “completely put away” the concept of rights in America, however, the pushers of altruism will have to convince Americans to abandon their love of liberty—which is easier said than done.

Historically, Americans have been profoundly attached to liberty. Their country, after all, was founded on the right to liberty. They have even called their country the “Land of Liberty.” Putting away this principle will require persuading Americans to accept altruism fully, consistently, as a matter of principle. How do the opponents of rights propose to accomplish this goal? By taking their cue from John Stuart Mill, who explained precisely how to do it. “[T]he direct cultivation of altruism, and the subordination of egoism to it,” wrote Mill, “should be one of the chief aims of education, both individual and collective.”

Nor can any pains taken be too great, to form the habit, and develop the desire, of being useful to others and to the world . . . independently of reward and of every personal consideration. . . . [E]very person who lives by any useful work, should be habituated to regard himself not as an individual working for his private benefit, but as a public functionary; and his wages, of whatever sort, not as the remuneration or purchase-money of his labour, which should be given freely, but as the provision made by society to enable him to carry it on. . . .

American intellectuals and politicians have taken Mill’s advice. Over the past century, intellectuals have advocated altruism and condemned egoism at every turn. They have sought to habituate Americans to regard themselves not as individuals but as public functionaries. They have tried to sap the American spirit of individualism and to instill the altruistic spirit of collectivism. And they have done so to great effect. The American philosopher John Dewey, for instance, called for “saturating [students] with the spirit of service” and making “each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with the types of occupations that reflect the life of the larger society.” To those who contend that schools should instead teach children the facts of history, science, literature, and the like, Dewey replied: “The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.”

Dewey’s philosophy launched the “progressive education” movement, which has dominated American schools and saturated students with the spirit of service for almost a century. Given the wild success of this movement, is it any wonder that so many Americans today accept the propriety of sacrificial service to the community as an unquestionable absolute?

And while Dewey and company have focused on “educating” students for sacrificial service, other intellectuals—led by the American philosopher William James—have focused directly on forcing youth to do their “duty.”

James called for “a conscription of the whole youthful population,” which he appropriately called a “blood tax.” Contemporary political theorist Benjamin R. Barber advocates “a national service program, universal and mandatory.” And sociologist Charles Moskos explains that “[a]ny effective national service program will necessarily require coercion,” and he rebuffs those who “de-emphasize the role of the citizen duties in favor of a highly individualistic rights-based ethic.” We should, he says, “extend the concept of national youth service to include quasi-military civilian services . . . cast in terms of civic duty.”

Such educational and political efforts have given rise to an increasingly pliable citizenry, a steady stream of service-oriented legislation, and the establishment of numerous altruistically motivated institutions, from the Peace Corps, to Volunteers in Service to America (aka AmeriCorps), to Learn and Serve America, to the Corporation for National and Community Service, to the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation, to the recent efforts by Congress and the Obama administration—which, if successful, will eclipse all preceding efforts combined.

The purpose of the $5.7 billion Serve America Act, recently passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama, is “to integrate service into education,” to encourage “many more Americans to give a year” of their lives, and to “increase service early in life” because “service early in life will put more and more youth on a path to a lifetime of service.” One advocate of the law hails it as the “quantum leap in community service that we’ve all been looking for.” Another exclaims: “The stars are aligned for national service.”

It seems that they are.

Following the lead of the state of Maryland—which, in 1993, became the first state in America to require community service as a condition of high school graduation—hundreds of school districts across America have established similar policies. And, today, pressure is growing not only for all students to be required to serve, but for everyone in general to be required to serve.

The Congressional Commission on Civic Service Act, a bill introduced on March 11, 2009, reads, in part: “The social fabric of the United States is stronger if individuals in the United States are committed to protecting and serving our Nation by utilizing national service and volunteerism.” The goal of this bill is, in part, to “improve the ability of individuals in the United States to serve others”; and, in part, to identify the “issues that deter volunteerism and national service, particularly among young people, and how the identified issues can be overcome.” Toward these ends, the bill calls for Congress to consider “[w]hether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed,” and “[t]he effect on the Nation, on those who serve, and on the families of those who serve, if all individuals in the United States were expected to perform national service or were required to perform a certain amount of national service.”

Such is the state of the Land of Liberty today: The government is passing and enforcing an ever-increasing number of laws and regulations that violate our rights. It is nationalizing private corporations and nullifying private contracts. It is mandating community service for students and investigating the possibility of mandatory service for everyone. And—as if the foregoing were not enough to cause alarm—the government is now asking Americans to inform on fellow citizens who oppose the government’s statist measures.

On August 4, 2009, the following request was posted to the blog of the White House Briefing Room:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

In light of all the evidence above—which barely scratches the surface of the mounting government power over the lives of Americans—the unavoidable conclusion is that the Land of Liberty is slipping down the slope to tyranny. The fundamental cause of this slide—the basic reason it is happening—is the widespread and increasing acceptance of the morality of altruism.

By accepting the morality of altruism, Americans accept the notion that they have a “duty” to serve “the common good”; and by accepting this “duty,” they thereby reject the basic principle of America: individual rights. The two are mutually exclusive. It is altruism or America. Indeed, it is altruism vs. America. And altruism is winning.

If Americans want to reverse this trend, they will have to challenge the creed of sacrifice at its root, which will require intellectual independence and substantial courage because the philosophic root of altruism is: religion. . . . [Read the whole article.]

Image: Wikimedia Commons

John David Lewis' new book, Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History, has been released and is now available for purchase. Congratulations Dr. Lewis!

For a taste of Dr. Lewis' masterful analysis and writing, see his article "'No Substitute for Victory' The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism."

Here’s an announcement from the UCLA Objectivist Club about an upcoming conference:

What is liberty? Why is it desirable? How is a free society achieved?

Today, it is relatively uncontroversial that freedom is good, but there is widespread disagreement about what it actually constitutes and how to implement it. Some believe that liberty amounts to the wishes of a democracy being carried out; others believe that it is being faithful to a literal interpretation of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers. But is there an objective basis in philosophy for determining what freedom is in principle and in practice?

Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, laid out such philosophic principles: A free society requires limited government that enacts and enforces objective laws for the sole purpose of protecting individual rights. It is where the government does not interfere, by penalty or reward, in thought, production, or trade. It requires a separation of church and state, science and state, education and state, and economics and state.

The Philosophic Foundations of Freedom Conference will focus precisely on these philosophic fundamentals, with numerous talks and Q&A sessions, a leadership seminar on intellectual activism, as well as a panel with a special guest, Alex Kozinski, the Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Saturday, January 30, 2010–Sunday, January 31, 2010

Click here for full event details.

An event announcement from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights:

A talk at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
Who: Dr. Keith Lockitch, fellow focusing on science and environmentalism at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights
What: A talk examining the drastic claims put forth by environmentalists, and a critical look at their fundamental goal
Where: Angell Hall, Auditorium C, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI 48105
When: Wednesday, February 3, 2010, at 7:30 p.m.
Description: Environmentalists claim that our use of carbon-based energy is altering the climate, making us more vulnerable to climate disasters. Human survival, they insist, requires the immediate abandonment of fossil fuels in favor of carbon-free sources. So why do environmentalist groups vehemently oppose projects involving every alternative form of energy ever proposed to replace fossil fuels--including wind farms and solar power plants? And why do they ignore the dramatic degree to which industrial development under capitalism has reduced the risk of harm from severe climate events? Before we rush headlong into drastic climate policies and energy rationing, a critical examination of these policies is urgently needed. Dr. Lockitch will address these important issues and answer audience questions.
Admission: FREE. Open to students and the public.
Bio: Dr. Keith Lockitch is a fellow focusing on science and environmentalism at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. He teaches writing courses for the Objectivist Academic Center’s undergraduate program and a history of physics course for the graduate program. His writings have appeared in publications such as the Orange County Register, San Francisco Chronicle, Australia’s Herald Sun and the Canberra Times, and USA Today magazine. Dr. Lockitch has been a frequent guest on radio shows such as The Thom Hartmann Program. Prior to joining ARI in 2003, Dr. Lockitch was a postdoctoral researcher in physics at the University of Illinois and at Pennsylvania State University. He is an alumnus of the Objectivist Graduate Center.
More information: Please e-mail Adam Gaglio, president of the University of Michigan Students of Objectivism, at agaglio@umich.edu.
Please note: The above event is organized, hosted and sponsored by an individual campus club. Although ARI provides financial support, educational materials and speakers for eligible student clubs, campus clubs are organizations independent of ARI. ARI does not necessarily endorse the content of the lectures and sessions offered.
Copyright © 2009 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Commenting on the recent revival of interest in Ayn Rand, libertarian blogger Will Wilkinson recently asserted that while "Rand's emphasis on the role of individual rights in generating creativity and entrepreneurial effort remains enlightening," her moral justification for individual rights fails. Wilkinson, himself a former Ayn Rand enthusiast who became disenchanted with Objectivism, dismisses Rand's argument with stunning brevity:

On the face of it, Rand needs to solve the compliance problem—why should a rational egoist comply with constraints on self-interested action?—and the way to solve the compliance problem is to show that mutual restraint is generally to mutual advantage. But I don't think Rand ever shows this. Instead she goes off the rails trying to argue that rational thought, and therefore a distinctively human life, is impossible in the absences [sic] of a strong version of the non-coercion principle, and that predation or parasitism are never in an individual's self-interest. None of that is convincing. (A strong version of the non-coercion principle is not in effect, but we're doing fine thinking rationally and living human lives. Lots of people live long and satisfying lives of institutionalized parasitism and predation, especially in and around Washington, DC.) Wilkinson's objection unjustly attributes a bizarre kind of naiveté to Rand's argument. Does Wilkinson really believe that in Rand's view all rational thought and happiness must cease immediately in a society that adopts even the tiniest amount of coercion? This interpretation is difficult to square with Atlas Shrugged, in which John Galt, Hank Rearden, and Dagny Taggart make important discoveries, produce innovations, and at least at times draw substantial happiness from these achievements, in spite of the coercion to which they are subject.

Rand's point, quite obviously, is that the greater the extent of force used against individuals, the less they are able to act on their own judgment, and thus the less happy they can be. As Leonard Peikoff summarizes in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

In all its forms and degrees, from private crimes to the incursions of the welfare state to full dictatorship, the principle is the same: physical force, to the extent it is wielded or threatened, denies to its victim the power to act in accordance with his judgment. In the context of the present mixed economy, Wilkinson's contention that we are "doing fine thinking rationally and living human lives" is ridiculous. Surely we are doing better than cave men and Medieval serfs, but as the present financial crisis illustrates, we could obviously be doing a lot better—and the crisis is demonstrably a result of government coercion.

Wilkinson's only remotely plausible objection is his allegation that Rand's egoist has no reason to refrain from coercion because it seems as though he can profit from predation and parasitism. The example of comfortable beltway bureaucrats feeding off the public trough could lend one pause. But how are we to evaluate Wilkinson's smug contention that these people live satisfying lives—and his implication that they would not live better lives if they were producers rather than plunderers?

Wilkinson is a fan of empirical "happiness studies," which measure people's self-reported happiness under different social and economic conditions. He is happy to trot out empirical evidence alleging that people in richer countries are happier than those in poorer ones, that those in less-religious countries are happier than those in more-religious ones, and that those in more-individualist cultures are happier than those in more-collectivist cultures. On one occasion, Wilkinson even provided evidence in support of the idea that people who earned their wealth reported greater satisfaction than those who inherited it or otherwise obtained it through luck. Why would this not bear on our evaluation of the happiness of those comfortable beltway bureaucrats?

Of course all of this data comes to little, because happiness is not merely the short-term feeling of satisfaction one might enjoy while sitting in comfortable house, or the elation of winning political power over the producers—and self-reported happiness is far from objective data. Wilkinson himself admits that we can be wrong about how happy we are. If that's true, then we'd better not measure the self-interest of an act by the extent to which it affords us temporary material comfort or superficial self-satisfaction. Instead we must appeal to philosophic principles that measure the value of an action or policy to the life of a being who survives by reason—principles such as the virtues of independence, production, honesty, and integrity—none of which support the initiation of force.

Happiness is not a fundamental standard of value, though it is a consequence of the achievement of values. Contrary to Wilkinson's claim that Rand never sought to understand the relationship between the use of force and the achievement of one's own happiness, her most crucial passage on the matter defines happiness as "a state of non-contradictory joy" and connects directly to the question of predation or parasitism on others:

Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no conflicts among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a cannibal's lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

In my post about the contradiction between the technological sophistication of the Burj Dubai and the primitive superstition on display in the mosque at its pinnacle, I argued that this disparity is another example of the general disparity in progress between science and morality. But what accounts for this gap?

Two reviews in last week’s New York Times Book Review provide a clue.

The first, commenting on the first Soviet test of an atomic bomb in 1949, speaks of the nuclear arms race with the United States that followed:

Those years are some of the most complicated in American history. Great successes, like the Marshall Plan, combined with one monumental failure: the beginning of a catastrophically unwise arms race. Somehow, rational decision was piled upon rational decision to create something utterly irrational. Four decades later, two countries with few disputes over land had lavished trillions of dollars and rubles on world-destroying weapons. The second, also a story of postwar technological intrigue, comments on how Werner von Braun, onetime architect of the Nazi V-2 program, could have acquired respectability for his work on the U.S. space program:

[In the author’s view,] von Braun escaped from the sphere of moral judgment with the help of the American authorities, who wanted to employ him in the missile and space programs. [The author’s] aim is to make him answerable, if only posthumously, for what he did. And he has a more general point to make, too: scientists and engineers, by claiming to be "apolitical," often escape being held to account for what they help to produce. In other words, von Braun is an egregious example of a more general phenomenon. What is the "more general phenomenon" here, and what does it have to do with the passage from the first review?

The first passage characterizes Soviet and American military decisions as equally rational. But why would anyone describe the actions of a brutal totalitarian regime as equal in rationality to those of the government of a free nation? One could portray Soviet decisions as "rational" only by judging their effectiveness as a means to an end, without judging the rationality of the end itself. That is, one could consider the Soviet construction of a bomb to be a "rational" means of defending the regime against foreign threats only by leaving aside the question of whether it is rational for an oppressive regime to maintain its grip on power in the first place.

The view that rationality judges only of means, not of ends, is the "general phenomenon" of which von Braun and too many other scientists are guilty. These scientists assume that they need not evaluate the ends for which their discoveries and creations are used, and that scientific rationality has nothing to contribute to the evaluation of these ends. Science, they think, is "value free," and the ends of action can only be judged non-scientifically.

This "general phenomemon" is a contemporary version of a view made famous by the British philosopher, David Hume, who wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature, "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." But is it not obvious that to enslave a whole society and threaten with death the rest of the world is irrational? By contrast, is it not obvious that some of von Braun's endeavors—his assistance in the development of the U.S. space program, and the life-giving technology it spawned—were rational while his support of the Nazis was not?

Not according to Hume. Our evaluation that the threat of mass death is evil and the protection of innocent life is good may seem to be a basic, uncontestable value judgment, but Hume claims that only sentiment supports it. This view, that moral value judgments bottom out in subjective preferences, wrought havoc across the landscape of 20th-century value theory, in which a variety of neo-Humeans propounded versions of "non-cognitivism" about ethics, to the point where it became a commonplace among college freshmen that all values are relative.

It is with some relief that non-cognitivism in value theory is sounding a modest retreat in academia. The philosophic vacuum resulting from complete value subjectivism had to be filled, eventually. New theories, some drawing on the wisdom of the ancients, purport that value can be a natural property like any other. Ayn Rand was ahead of her time when she advanced a version of this view in Atlas Shrugged, contending that what is good for a living organism is simply what furthers its distinctive form of life.

But our culture has yet to catch up with any of this philosophic insight. Journalists regard Soviet and American military decisions as equally "rational," and scientists regard morality as irrelevant to judging the ends of their research. This is why our moral progress has not kept pace with our scientific progress. Few people have come to realize that morality is a science and that the ends of human action can be rationally assessed on the basis of their life-based objective value.

Images: Wikimedia Commons (1, 2)

Part four of Craig Biddle’s six-hour seminar The Source and Nature of Rights has been posted to UFM’s website and is accessible for free. In this section, Mr. Biddle concludes his discussion of Ayn Rand’s ethics and theory of rights.

The beginning of the new year and decade bore witness to the opening of the world's newest tallest building: the Burj Dubai in the UAE. Like many other commentators, Landon Thomas of the New York Times noted the dire economic situation Dubai faces as it celebrates this moment of triumph:

All the same, the tower’s success by no means signals a recovery in Dubai's beaten-down real estate market, where prices have collapsed by as much as 50 percent and many developers are having trouble finding occupants for their buildings. Unlike other commentary, Thomas goes further in noting paradoxes surrounding the spectacle of the opening:

With its mix of nightclubs, mosques, luxury suites and boardrooms, the Burj is an almost perfect representation of Dubai’s own complexities and contradictions. It will have the world’s first Armani hotel; the world’s highest swimming pool, on the 76th floor; the highest observation deck, on the 124th floor; and the highest mosque, on the 158th floor. When humanity achieves the technical feat of erecting a 2,717-foot skyscraper in the desert and places a mosque on one of its highest floors, one is tempted to reflect on the builders’ hierarchy of values, in this case as expressed by the literal, physical hierarchy of the superstructure. Of greater importance than worldly pursuits to these builders are certain values of the spirit.

But what pursuits of the spirit do a mosque, or a church, or a synagogue represent and encourage? Religious buildings—whether cathedrals or minarets—often feature architecture that reaches for the sky. But everyone knows that the heavens are cold and lifeless. And "reaching for new heights" would be a fitting metaphor to describe religious devotion were it not for the fact that so many religions encourage us to grovel, to submit, to lay down our spirits for the service of a higher power.

What is the human spirit, in the end? Our spirit, if it is anything, is our "glassy essence," what distinguishes us from all other living beings: our rational mind. But the reasoning mind is precisely what religious faith bids us to ignore or abandon. There are still those religious thinkers (mostly obscure figures in the West) who think that God's existence might be proved rationally. But this is not the attitude that motivates the masses or their religious leaders to build monuments to an all-powerful, unseen deity, to which all of their worldly pursuits must be subordinate.

Many have noted the disparity between mankind’s technological and moral progress. Often the example is the invention of advanced weaponry which is subsequently used to slaughter masses of people. But if morality pertains to human flourishing on Earth, and if human reasoning is what enables that flourishing, then war is not the only example of this disparity. The contradictions of the Burj Dubai illustrate it, as well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/palander/ / CC BY 2.0

Part three of Craig Biddle’s six-hour seminar The Source and Nature of Rights has been posted to UFM’s website and is accessible for free. In this section, Mr. Biddle continues his discussion of Ayn Rand’s ethics and theory of rights.

From the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights:

The Ayn Rand Center is excited to announce that Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, will be the subject of the Thursday, January 7, edition of Stossel on the Fox Business Network.

The program airs at 8 p.m., eastern time, and features interviews with leading Objectivist intellectuals including Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Center, John Allison, chairman of BB&T Corp., and C. Bradley Thompson, executive director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism.

If you’re not able to view the upcoming airing, please check your local listing for a possible rebroadcast.

Kudos to all the writers and activists involved with Front Range Objectivism. As reported by Paul Hsieh, in 2009 FRO members published 3 articles, 57 op-eds, and 48 letters to the editor.

Some of the topics covered include the financial crisis, health care, gun control, environmentalism, free speech, and government regulation.

The majority of this writing was done by people working in their spare time, in addition to their day jobs.

This list does not include numerous citations and interviews in local and national media, participation in Tea Party events, letters to elected officials, and blogging.

I'd like to thank my fellow FRO activists for their hard work this past year.

The detailed list of our published output includes the following:

Articles: 3

Ari Armstrong, "Lest We Be Doomed to Repeat It: A Survey of Amity Shlaes's History of the Great Depression", The Objective Standard, Spring 2009.

Monica Hughes, "A Brief History of U.S. Farm Policy and the Need for Free-Market Agriculture", The Objective Standard, Summer 2009.

Paul Hsieh, "How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability", The Objective Standard, Fall 2009.

OpEds: 57

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Shut down corporate welfare for tourism", Grand Junction Free Press, 1/5/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Universal healthcare and the waistline police", Christian Science Monitor, 1/7/2009. (Also redistributed to ABC News, Yahoo News and multiple local newspapers.)

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Obamanomics threaten economic recovery", Grand Junction Free Press, 1/19/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Free Our Beer", Colorado Daily, 1/25/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Salazar promotes special-interest warfare", Grand Junction Free Press, 2/2/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Obama's Regulatory Chief Believes in Paternalistic Government", Pajamas Media, 2/10/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "We're From the Government and We're Here to Help You Drive", Grand Junction Free Press, 2/16/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Food Thoughts", Boulder Weekly, 2/19/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "America Doesn't Need a Health Care Czar", Washington Examiner, 2/23/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Ayn Rand and the Tea Party Protests", Pajamas Media, 3/2/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Political Controls Provoke Producers to Go On Strike", Grand Junction Free Press, 3/2/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Beware single-payer health care", Colorado Daily, 3/8/2009 (also Denver Daily News, 3/9/2009).

Paul Hsieh, "Health Insurance Industry Sells Its Soul to the Devil", Pajamas Media, 3/22/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Everyone is welcome at Hamburger Mary’s", Grand Junction Free Press, 3/30/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "See you at the Grand Junction Tea Party", Grand Junction Free Press, 4/13/2009.

Lin and Ari Armstrong, "After tea, try long, cool drink of liberty", Grand Junction Free Press, 4/27/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Health Care Reform vs. Universal Health Care", Pajamas Media, 5/5/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Legislature Passes Job-Killing Bills”, Grand Junction Free Press, 5/11/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Udall's credit controls punish the responsible", Colorado Daily, 5/24/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Invasion forces headed for Japan", Grand Junction Free Press, 5/25/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Are you a conservative or a liberal?", Grand Junction Free Press, 6/8/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Reject political control of health care", Grand Junction Free Press, 6/24/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "More poison, not an antidote: Mandating employer health insurance”, Boulder Daily Camera, 6/28/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Politicians Cause Mortgage Meltdown", Grand Junction Free Press, 7/6/2009

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "DeMint's health handouts violate liberty", Grand Junction Free Press, 7/20/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Hope and change in Harry Potter", Denver Daily News, 7/22/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Don’t ban or force abortions", Boulder Weekly, 7/23/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "The Federal Health Care Muggers", PajamasMedia, 7/24/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "In health debate, left and right need to check premises", Grand Junction Free Press, 8/3/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Rationing inherent in Obamacare", Colorado Springs Gazette, 8/14/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "That government is best which protects individual rights", Grand Junction Free Press, 8/17/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Not a health care remedy", Denver Daily News, 8/21/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Debunking health care reform myths", Grand Junction Free Press, 8/31/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "The Free Market Is Not Another Form of Rationing", PajamasMedia, 9/2/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Health Care Is Not a Privilege... Nor Is It a Right", PajamasMedia, 9/8/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Atlas Shrugged relevant for modern times", Longmont Times-Call, 9/14/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Restore free market to address preexisting conditions", Grand Junction Free Press, 9/14/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Is Your Doctor Getting Ready To Quit"?, PajamasMedia, 9/18/2009. Edited version also appeared as "Health Overhaul Could Force Doctors to Quit", Health Care News (Heartland Institute), 10/13/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Republican plans for health care reform similar to Obamacare", Colorado Springs Gazette, 9/18/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Fifty Ways to Leave Obama", Grand Junction Free Press, 9/28/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Healthcare in Massachusetts: A Warning For America", Christian Science Monitor, 9/30/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "The Real Stakes", Denver Post, 10/1/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Pay Your Own Doctors", Colorado Daily, 10/2/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "James Warner Shares Light of Liberty", Grand Junction Free Press, 10/12/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Radical environmentalists undermine human progress", Grand Junction Free Press, 10/26/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "ObamaCare: A National Version of RomneyCare", PajamasMedia, 11/2/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Bizarro Health Care 'Reform': Expect Less, Pay More", PajamasMedia, 11/5/2009.

Hannah Krening, "Dissent and Nationalization of Health Care", Denver Post, 11/8/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "If planet did warm, low-cost tech could cool it", Grand Junction Free Press, 11/9/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Why we should keep selling low-priced books", Denver Post, 11/12/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Mafia-Style Health Insurance: An Offer You Can't Refuse", Washington Examiner, 11/16/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Environmentalist clowns threatening human life", Colorado Springs Gazette, 11/20/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "People vote for freedom with their feet and effort", Grand Junction Free Press, 11/23/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Have a Harry Potter Christmas", Grand Junction Free Press, 12/7/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "ObamaCare: Tightening the Noose Around Private Health Care", PajamasMedia, 12/15/2009.

Monica Hughes, "Animal fat, sugar and diabetes", Denver Post, 12/17/2009.

Linn and Ari Armstrong, "Ralph Carr shows politicians can stand for liberty", Grand Junction Free Press, 12/21/2009.

LTEs: 48

Paul Hsieh, "'Concierge' model offers a free-market solution", Baltimore Sun, 1/2/2009.

Brian Schwartz, " Come together... right now: It's the law", Boulder Daily Camera, 1/3/2009.

Gina Liggett, "Science adviser pick is pure politics", Rocky Mountain News, 1/6/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Economic grief started with Hoover, not FDR", Denver Post, 1/7/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "New insurance law wastes taxpayer dollars", Denver Post, 1/7/2009.

Richard Watts, "Let's try capitalism for a change", Rocky Mountain News, 1/9/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Year-round Schooling", Boulder Daily Camera, 1/10/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Kefalas readies comprehensive health-care bill", Northern Colorado Business Report, 1/16/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Government paternalism saps desire to make own decisions", Colorado Springs Gazette, 1/22/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Medicare For All", Boulder Daily Camera, 2/7/2009.

Hannah Krening, "The Stimulus Plan", Denver Post, 2/11/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Single-payer health care has failed in every other country", Rocky Mountain News, 2/18/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Heads they win, tails we lose", Rocky Mountain News, 2/19/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "No food stamp soup for you!", Westworld, 2/19/2009.

Richard Watts, "Lincoln did not value unity above liberty", Rocky Mountain News, 2/25/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Free market alternatives to zoning", Boulder Daily Camera, 2/28/2009.

Ari Armstrong, "Legislator’s comments on promiscuous women", Denver Post, 3/4/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "HB 1256 would aid health coverage", Denver Business Journal, 3/6/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Ward Churchill", Boulder Daily Camera, 3/28/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Our Health, and the Health of Insurers", New York Times, 3/30/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Eliminating the charitable tax deduction", Denver Post, 3/30/2009.

David Weatherell, "Employee Free Choice Act", Denver Post, 4/1/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Prepare For More Expensive Medical Insurance", Boulder Daily Camera, 4/12/2009.

Doug Kreninng, "Denver's Tea Party", Denver Post, 4/18/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Drug legalization", Boulder Daily Camera, 4/19/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Taking guns won't hike safety", Colorado Springs Gazette, 4/24/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Don't Raise Taxes, Legalize Marijuana”, Boulder Daily Camera, 5/16/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Sotomayor for Supreme Court", Boulder Daily Camera, 5/30/2009.

Anders Ingemarson, "Is Canadian Health Care Better?", Denver Post, 6/14/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Health Care Reform: Coverage Is Not Care”, Boulder Daily Camera, 6/16/2009.

Hannah Krening, "Time to fight for your rights", Colorado Springs Gazette, 7/3/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "The Public plan will be the only plan", Boulder Daily Camera, 7/4/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Health Care Systems", Boulder Dail Camera, 7/18/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Democrats' health care 'reform' would reform nothing", Boulder Daily Camera, 7/25/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Cash For Clunkers", Boulder Daily Camera, 8/8/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Health Care Debate", Denver Business Journal, 8/10/2009.

Anders Ingemarson, "The Heart of the Health Care Debate", Denver Post, 8/19/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Health Care Statistics", Denver Post, 8/29/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Single payer: rationing both ideas and medicine", Boulder Daily Camera, 9/5/2009.

Doug Krening, "Health Care Debate Renewed", Denver Post, 9/13/2009.

Briain Schwartz, "Boulder land use restrictions undermine rights & personal responsibility", Boulder Daily Camera, 9/18/2009.

Diana Hsieh, "Government’s attempts to stifle speech", Denver Post, 10/20/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Health care reform and the public option", Denver Post, 10/30/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "The Incentives Aren't To Help You", Wall Street Journal, 11/2/2009.

Gina Liggett, "Governor’s proposal to tax candy and soda", Denver Post, 11/18/2009.

Brian Schwartz, "Why To Condemn Insurance Companies", Boulder Daily Camera, 12/5/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "The Climate Science Isn't Settled", Wall Street Journal, 12/7/2009.

Paul Hsieh, "Raising Federal Debt Ceiling", Denver Post, 12/20/2009.

Remarkable!

The video of part one of Craig Biddle’s six-hour seminar, The Source and Nature of Rights, has been posted to the website of Universidad Francisco Marroquín. In this first hour, Mr. Biddle surveys common theories of rights—from God-given rights to man-made rights to so-called “natural” rights—and explains why each fails to ground rights in reality. In part two, which has yet to be posted, he begins his presentation of Ayn Rand’s theory of rights.

According to the New York Times, Somali pirates hijacked a British-flagged vehicle carrier off the Somali coast late on Friday. For a principled and historically grounded analysis of what the civilized world should do about such atrocities, read Doug Altner's excellent essay “The Barbary Wars and Their Lesson for Combating Piracy Today.”