Jan 18, 2008 | Dollars & Crosses
Irvine, CA--"Martin Luther King Jr. Day offers Americans an opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to eradicating racism in all its forms," said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute.
Ayn Rand once wrote: "Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men." The essence of racism, she explained, is "the notion that a man's intellectual and characterological traits are produced by his internal body chemistry, which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors."
"Achievement of a truly color-blind society will require not only that private individuals reject racism but that government policies and programs cease to favor some citizens over others on the basis of skin color," Bowden said. "The solution to racism in government does not lie in further race-conscious, affirmative action programs that generate de facto quotas, nor in multicultural education that locates personal identity in one's ethnic group. Because such policies are themselves racist, they are part of the problem.
"A model of good government policy is President Truman's executive order ending segregation in America's military services. Issued 60 years ago, Executive Order 9981 declared ‘that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.'
"This official policy exemplifies a government's proper attitude toward its citizens," Bowden said. "Every law-abiding adult has an equal right to serve in government, provided he or she can satisfy the position's objective requirements. In setting standards, government agencies must be forbidden by law from making irrational distinctions among citizens, as by favoring some soldiers over others on the irrelevant basis of skin color.
"In a famous speech, Martin Luther King Jr. eloquently envisioned a world without racism: ‘I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Americans should be proud of their nation's historical achievements in ending slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregated schools, and many other forms of institutionalized racism. On this holiday, we should embrace the challenge contained in King's eloquent remarks and recommit ourselves to the task of fully eradicating racism from this nation's public policies."Jan 15, 2008 | Dollars & Crosses
Irvine, CA--Fearing a recession in the wake of the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and other economic problems, factions in Washington are competing to offer "stimulus packages" to come to the rescue. Some favor Fed interest rate decreases, while others want some sort of immediate tax cut, while others want an outright giveaway to lower-income Americans.
But, said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, "We don't need the government to 'stimulate' the economy with some new intervention; we need it to liberate us from all its destructive economic intervention that put us in this situation.
"We need liberation from environmentalist restrictions on oil drilling and energy production. We need liberation from Sarbanes-Oxley, which treats businessmen as guilty until proven innocent and increases the cost of doing business for every publicly traded corporation. We need liberation from the government's pervasive regulation and semi-socialization of the health-care market, which have artificially driven up the costs of health care. We need liberation from the intervention of the Federal Reserve, which is destroying our savings by inflating the currency. And we need liberation from countless other forms of government spending; if spending does not decrease, then any 'stimulus' tax cuts are simply tax increases for the future.
"We should not regard Uncle Sam as an economic Doctor Sam, whom we need to stimulate the heart of the economy with his defibrillator. When the government violates our right to produce and trade freely, it is an economic cancer that needs to be removed from the economy."Dec 4, 2007 | Dollars & Crosses
Who: Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute
What: A talk and Q&A on Atlas Shrugged and the application of Ayn Rand's ideas to environmentalism
When: Saturday, December 8, 2007, at 3 pm
Where: Frances Howard Goldwyn Hollywood Regional Library, 1623 N. Ivar Ave., Hollywood, CA 90028; Phone: (323) 856-8260
Sponsored by: Los Angeles Public Library and the Ayn Rand Institute
Admission is FREE
Description: Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957, about a decade before the rise of the modern environmentalist movement. Yet the ideas in Atlas Shrugged are indispensable to understanding and evaluating environmentalism.
In this talk, Dr. Lockitch will discuss the application of Ayn Rand's ideas to environmentalism, exploring such questions as man's proper relationship to nature and the deeper meaning of "sustainability."
Lockitch will discuss the crucial principles Rand identified in Atlas Shrugged that clarify a proper approach to the environment, and discuss the application of those principles to environmentalism--their application by Rand herself in her later writings on the nascent "ecology" movement of the 1960's, as well as their application to today's environmentalist movement.Bio: Dr. Lockitch has a PhD in Physics from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and is a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). He writes and edits for ARI and is a professor in the Objectivist Academic Center, where he teaches undergraduate writing and a graduate course on the history of physics. His writings have appeared in publications such as the Orange County Register and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nov 30, 2007 | Dollars & Crosses
Irvine, CA---At the opening of the Middle East conference in Annapolis, President Bush stated that the time is ripe for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. "The Palestinian people," he stated, "are blessed with many gifts and talents. They want the opportunity to use those gifts to better their own lives and build a future for their children."
But do Palestinians really want peace with Israel?
According to Elan Journo, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, "On the day the Annapolis conference opened, more than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza took to the streets to protest the peace conference." Gaza is the stronghold of Hamas, the Islamist group that denies Israel's right to exist. There were also demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron, organized by another militant Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, that regards Hamas as a sell-out for stooping to take part in elections. "The Palestinians who demonstrated," said Journo, "refuse to contemplate the possibility of peaceful co-existence with Israel; they're ideologically committed to replacing Israel with an Islamist regime."
"Yet despite the popular support for Islamists--Hamas won a landslide victory in the 2006 elections--Washington insists on regarding them and their many avid followers as fringe elements.
"The Bush administration and the Israeli government evasively claim they can marginalize such fringe groups by supporting the supposedly 'moderate' Palestinian faction Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas. Israel has removed 178 Fatah militants from its wanted lists and Washington has bolstered Abbas with money and arms so that his faction can maintain order in the Palestinian territories. But Fatah 'security forces' refuse to pursue militants wanted by Israel. Why? A recent story in the New York Times explains: as a governor of the West Bank town of Nablus put it, 'We don't want to look like collaborators with Israel.'
"That these 'security forces' policing towns fear being branded 'collaborators' with Israel tells us a lot about what the supposedly 'moderate' Palestinian public expects them to be doing. Not 'collaborating' can mean only one thing: abetting the militants in attacking Israel--as the Palestinian Authority has done for years. This is the goal that has inspired Palestinians across the political spectrum for decades, and the reason they idolized the arch terrorist Yasser Arafat (who led Fatah before Abbas), and continue to glorify and support the legions of suicide 'martyrs.' The so-called moderates of Fatah, who have pursued the phased destruction of Israel, share the same goal as so-called radicals like Hamas, who openly seek to liquidate Israel; they differ only in the means and timeline they choose for their common goal.
"The conference in Annapolis is based on a lie," said Journo. "What kind of accommodation is possible between the state of Israel and the Palestinians who want to destroy it?"Washington is urging Israeli concessions of land for the 'promise' of Palestinian peace, but such appeasement can only harm U.S. interests. By fostering such a deal, Washington will encourage the Islamists and help establish a new terrorist regime in the Middle East."Nov 7, 2007 | Dollars & Crosses
Irvine, CA--With the Southeast suffering a prolonged drought, the city of Atlanta, Georgia, has only about a three month supply of readily accessible water. Nevertheless, in compliance with the Endangered Species Act, the Army Corps of Engineers continues to drain more than a billion gallons a day from Lake Lanier, Atlanta's main water source, to release it downstream for an endangered species of mussel.
"The Endangered Species Act is a danger to the human species," said Dr. Keith Lockitch, a resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Institute. "People find it hard to believe that environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act could really require the sacrifice of human beings to nature. But that is exactly what they have to mean in practice; they mean that in order to sustain some obscure mussel species, the people in Atlanta must go without water.
Environmentalists claim that blaming the mussels is unfair. They say it is just a way of diverting attention from the real causes of the water crisis, which, in their view, are a lack of strict water conservation mandates and the 'unbridled development' of metro Atlanta over the last few years."
But, says Lockitch, "this amounts to the bizarre claim that the problem is not a failure to build reservoirs and expand water capacity, but a 'failure' to obstruct economic progress and impose draconian water restrictions on Atlanta. In other words, the environmentalists' view is that Atlantans should sacrifice even more to nature."In fact, the opposite is the case. Solving the Southeast's water problems requires the rejection of the Endangered Species Act and environmentalist obstacles to development and growth. Indeed, the real solution is more profit-driven development. What is needed is a water management system that is entirely owned and operated by private individuals and companies, who would be driven by the profit motive to ensure a sufficient water capacity. A wholly private system would protect the rights of all users with a legitimate interest in the Chattahoochee River Basin--including metro Atlanta as well as the energy plants downstream and the Florida seafood industry in the Gulf--with no one requiring that human beings be sacrificed to mussels."Oct 31, 2007 | Dollars & Crosses
Irvine, CA--The House of Representatives wants to greatly expand the number of Americans who are entitled to sue their employer under the Americans with Disabilities Act after being disciplined, demoted, or discharged. The proposed ADA Restoration Act would rewrite the definition of "disabled" to include employees who wear eyeglasses, have acne scars, or drink too much coffee.
"Congress is headed the wrong way down this road," said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute. "The cure for the ADA is not to tinker with its definitions but to reject the idea that jobs are public property, to be molded and remolded by government according to public opinion. Jobs are private contracts. Employers and employees have an absolute right to negotiate terms agreeable to each other, by their own standards of profit and satisfaction. The resulting contract, not arbitrary Congressional dictates, should govern their legal relationship. The ADA is immoral because it denies the individual rights of everyone involved."
Enacted in 1990 the ADA currently regards as disabled only people whose physical or mental impairments impose a "substantial limitation" on a "major life activity." The proposed ADA Restoration Act would erase that part of the definition. The revised law would cover everyone who has any physical or mental impairment, however minor, regardless of whether the problem is completely resolved by medication or physical devices, or is in remission or latent.
"Since almost every individual has some physical or mental impairment, the proposed expansion of ADA coverage would transform virtually every adverse employment action into a potential lawsuit," Bowden said. "It is bad enough that the threat of expensive litigation hangs in the air every time a wheelchair-bound paraplegic or recovering schizophrenic applies for work. The proposed amendment would extend ADA-based fear, uncertainty, and resentment throughout the workplace, to the detriment of all concerned."