Video: The Government Can
The hilarious Tim Hawkins' take on the Candyman can.(Hey everybody! Gather 'round! I'm here to give you anything you like! You want a car, money, mortages?! Whatever you like! You have come to the right place! Why? I'll tell you why!)Who can take your money? (Who can take your money?) With a twinkle in their eye? (With a twinkle in their eye?) Take it all away and Give it to some other guy[Chorus] The Government (the Government) The Government can! (The Government can!)Who can tax the Sun rise? (Who can watch the Sun rise?) Who can tax the trees? (Who can touch the trees?) Let you run a business and Collect up all the fees[Chorus]The Government can 'cause They mix it up with lies and Make it all taste good! (Make it all taste good!)The Government takes Everything we make To pay for all of their "sollutions" Healthcare, Climate Change, Pollution (Throw away the Constitution)Who can give a bailout? (Who can give a bailout?) Tell us to behave? (Tell us to behave?) Make the Founding Fathers Roll over in their graves[Chorus]The Government takes Everything we make They're power hungry And maliciousThe economics are fictitious Soon we'll have to eat our dishes Mmm! Delicious!Who can be a failure? (Who can be a failure?) In so many ways? (In so many ways?) Instead of getting fired, HEY! We'll give ourselves a raise![Chorus]The Government can 'cause He mix it up with lies and Make it all taste good! (Make it all taste good!) And your Uncle Sam can 'cause He mixes it with lies and Makes it all taste good! (Makes it all taste good!)And I feel so good Because the Government Says I should! Oh!...Peikoff Thanksgiving Podcast Features Excerpt From His Forthcoming Book
Every week, Dr. Peikoff answers questions about Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. The podcasts focus on human relationships, career, moral issues – not technical philosophy or practical politics.This week's question: Given the desperate state of the United States today and the future we seem to be heading toward, do we still have anything to be thankful for?Hear the answer at www.peikoff.com which includes an excerpt from hisupcoming book “The DIM Hypothesis”Physics Today: Logic Leap Reviewed
"The Logical Leap" -- a Review:That scientists should employ the inductive method is not the main theme of The Logical Leap; rather, the book makes the stronger claim and demonstrates that scientists must use this method in order to make progress. And many scientists are indeed making progress, even now, particularly in the applied fields. But what happens when the inductive method is misapplied, or worse, abandoned? String theory is a case in point: Some physicists accept it because it is “beautiful”, not because it was induced from observational evidence. That sort of evidence has caused many fundamental theories of contemporary physics to stagnate for more than a generation. Indeed, Harriman quotes the late Harvard University chemist E. Bright Wilson, who said, “It is very unsatisfactory that no generally acceptable theory of scientific inference has yet been put forward. Mistakes are often made which would presumably not have been made if a consistent and satisfactory basic philosophy had been followed.”
The Separation of School and State: The Case for Abolishing America’s Government Schools
The Ayn Rand Institute website has a recording of Professor C. Bradley Thompson's lecture "The Separation of School and State: The Case for Abolishing America’s Government Schools."From the description on the ARI website:Why do so many Americans—liberal and conservative—support a compulsory system of government-run education? What role should the State play in educating America’s children? Are government schools compatible with a free society? Is it possible to have a free market in education?
In this lecture Dr. C. Bradley Thompson, Professor of Political Science at Clemson University, will examine the destructive effects of “public” education in America. He will critique the principal assumptions behind government schooling (e.g., that children have a “right” to an education and that government schools are for the “public good”). And he will call for the abolition of all government schools. Thompson will present a principled argument for a free market in education that begins with the rights and responsibilities of parents to provide for the education of their own children.
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The Separation of School and State: The Case for Abolishing America’s Government Schools—lecture only (59 mins.)
The Story of Thanksgiving
How Americans overcame Socialism.Free The Young From The Wrath of SS
Let younger people opt out of the Social Security system...so says the former chairman and CEO of BB&T John Allison. Here is a money quote: "You know, if you look at what killed democracies in the end, it’s always lack of personal responsibility,” said Allison. “And it’s when 51 percent of the people find out they can vote a free lunch from 49 percent, and then 60 percent want a free lunch from 40 percent, and then 70 percent want a free lunch from 30 percent, and that’s the end of the party. "All of this dependency on the federal government ends up attacking and almost punishing personal responsibility,” said Allison. “And America was built on the idea of individuals that are personally responsible and, therefore, have a personal right to control their own lives. And that’s what’s been under attack.”http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/give-young-people-option-get-out-socialLessons From History About Victory in War
Excerpts from Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History (Princeton University Press, 2010) by John David Lewis, Ph.D.“The causes of war and peace run far deeper than the movements of armies and troops (strategy and tactics) into the reasons why armies form and move at all” writes John David Lewis. Those causes are to be found in the ideas that motivate an aggressor to attack, or a defender to rise to the defense.“The wellspring of every war is that which makes us human: our capacity to think abstractly, to conceive, and to create. It is our conceptual capacity that allows us to choose a nation’s policy goals; to identify a moral purpose for good or for ill; to select allies and enemies; to make a political decision to fight; to manufacture the weapons, technologies, strategies, and tactics needed to sustain the decision over time; and to motivate whole populations into killing—or dissidents into protest. Both war and peace are the consequences of ideas—especially moral ideas—that can propel whole nations into bloody slaughter on behalf of a Führer, a tribe, or a deity, or into peaceful coexistence under governments that defend the rights and liberties of their citizens.”To defend this claim, Professor Lewis examines seven events in history, derived from six major wars, to show how a long-term resolution to the causes of the conflict was only possible with a complete victory over an enemy’s will to fight. About the attack by Persia against the Greeks, Lewis writes:
“Xerxes began with the inherited passion for conquest that had motivated three generations of predecessors. But when his army and navy were mutilated by the Greeks and he saw his men sink beneath the waves, he confronted serious personal defeat for the first time. As his Great Pyramid collapsed, the effect on the king was immediate; he set off posthaste to secure his own retreat. His defeat was open and public, and despite his likely attempts to make it appear a victory, he knew that this could be fatal to the dynasty. His position had demanded that he demonstrate his splendor—but at the moment of defeat he reached the point of greatest danger. His task now was to reestablish his position inside his own territory—and this required a permanent change in policy. The legitimacy of his throne had to be disengaged from the conquest of the Greeks.”Writing of the defeat of the Spartans by the Theban leader Epaminondas—in which generations of slavery were ended in a single winter campaign directed against Sparta itself—Lewis writes that:
“such wars are powered from an ideological center, for both aggressors and defenders, which relies upon an economic and social base for its material sustenance and its affi rmation. This is the intersection of theory and practice. For the Spartans, this economic center was their hold over their Messenian helots, but when the Spartans were defeated and their helots found a political voice, more was lost than someone to do the dirty work. The Spartan ethos and its ideological center—the system of ideas that placed them at the top of a social hierarchy and that anchored their excellence in physical dominance—was discredited, its failure in action made undeniable.”The result? Sparta never again invaded the land of Thebes.Sherman’s march through Georgai and the Carolinas had the same positive effect, demonstrating the hopelessness of the southern cause and undercutting their motivations to fight:
“Sherman’s tactics—like those of the cavalry commander Philip Sheridan, who was set to operate in the Shenandoah Valley—would shock southern society to its roots by the sheer force of his demonstration. This was not an unattended consequence; it was central to Sherman’s plan, and it centered on destroying property while avoiding the loss of life. An army burning its way through Georgia plantations is not a compassionate thought, but the creation of peace out of war was not a compassionate process. Sherman knew that the war could not be won as long as southern civilians thought that they were winning the war and were able to send men, arms, supplies, and psychological comfort to their army in the north.”In defeating the Japanese will to fight in World War II, Lewis shows a specific campaign to end military indoctrination in schools, and to sever the ties between the religion of Shinto and those using it to motivate a population into suicidal war:
“State-mandated Shinto—the coercion of the Japanese people to follow this mythology and its rituals—was the cardinal means by which the Japanese government was able to motivate the population into suicidal military action.81 MacArthur’s so-called Shinto Directive left the shrines open—a very important issue to many Japanese—but it severed the connection between Shinto and the government. Shinto was reduced from a political mandate to a private matter; this was key to ending the sacrificial, nationalistic mind-set that had infected the Japanese people.”Lewis applies the lessons derived from such events in a brief but provocative description, in the conclusion, about American involvement in Vietnam:
“The Americans had only two courses of action open to them: to accept the existence of the North Vietnamese government and therefore the fall of the South, or to destroy the government in the North as a necessary condition to an independent South. In either case, [the ancient Chinese military thinker] Sun-tzu should have been consulted, for the protracted campaign that followed was more damaging than either a fast destruction of the northern capital or the swift fall of the South without a fight would have been.”Lest anyone think that Lewis is a warmonger, who glories in the idea of mass civilian casualties, this is what he writes of the Roman destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War:
“The Third Punic War of 149–146 BC was not a war. It was a massacre. Rome was wrong; the peace of Scipio Africanus [following the Second Punic War] was good, and the Romans could have preserved it by just mediation of the Carthaginian complaints. The Romans . . . could have ended the Numidian [North African] attacks [on Carthage]. It is to Romans’ eternal shame—there is no credit due here—that they slaughtered a former enemy that had accepted peace and was living by its word.”
Professor Harry Binswanger Makes the Case for Capitalism on Freedom Watch
Video: VanDamme on Motivation and Discipline
Miss VanDamme explains her observation that sometimes the best way to motivate or discipline a child is to tell him a story--and speculates about why.Defining the Climate Debate
Another great one by Warren Meyer:
Alarmists like to call climate skeptics “deniers,” usually in an attempt to equate climate skeptics with holocaust deniers. But skeptics do not deny that temperatures have warmed over the last century, or even that man (through CO2 as well as land use and other factors) has played some part in that warming. What skeptics deny, though, is the catastrophe. And even more, what skeptics deny is the need to drastically reduce fossil fuel use – a step that will likely be an expensive exercise in the developed west but an unmitigated disaster for the poor of Asia and Africa. These developing nations, who are just recently emerging from millennia of poverty, need to burn every hydrocarbon they can find to develop their economies. [Denying the Catastrophe: The Science of the Climate Skeptic's Position - Forbes]
3 Things About Islam Every Non-Muslim Should Know
Dr. Hendricks on Obamacare (1957)
“I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”
-- Dr. Hendricks, a fictional character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957
Larry Downes Interviews Steve Simpson on Free Speech in America
Here’s a great interview with Steve Simpson in which he argues that Americans need to recognize freedom of speech not as a permission to be granted when it suits social purposes, but as a right to be protected at all times. (The interview is in the first hour of the July 17 podcast.) For more on this subject, see Simpson’s article in The Objective Standard “Citizens United and the Battle for Free Speech in America.”Here is are the opening paragraphs:The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Citizens United v. FEC is one of the most important First Amendment decisions in a generation and one of the most controversial. In it, the Supreme Court struck down a law that banned corporations from spending their own money on speech that advocated the election or defeat of candidates. In the process, the Court overturned portions of McConnell v. FEC, a case in which the Supreme Court, a mere six years ago, upheld McCain-Feingold, one of the most sweeping restrictions on campaign speech in history.In many ways, Citizens United is a ringing endorsement of First Amendment rights, and it is certainly cause for optimism about the future of free speech. But the divisions on the Supreme Court over the case and the reactions from Democrats in Congress, the media, and the left in general indicate that Citizens United will not be the last word on the matter.In this respect, the controversy is not surprising: Citizens United dealt a serious blow to the further growth of campaign finance laws, supporters of which are determined and outspoken. But the controversy is shocking from the standpoint of the law at issue: It prevented a nonprofit group from distributing a film that criticized a candidate, Hillary Clinton, during her run for the presidency in 2008. During oral arguments in the case, the government admitted campaign finance laws could be applied to prevent corporations from publishing and distributing not only films but also books that said the wrong things during election cycles.Banning films and books?The First Amendment states: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Those simple and elegant words would seem to leave no room for a law, passed by Congress, that prevents corporations from spending money to distribute films and books. So, how did we get here?Read Simpson’s article in The Objective Standard “Citizens United and the Battle for Free Speech in America,” which is also available in audio. [Hat tip - TOS]
Peikoff on Immigration in a Welfare State
Dr. Peikoff provides some perspective on What is the proper government attitude toward immigration?
Founding Principles
In reply to a comment at http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2010/2/19/founding-principles:BECKETT STERNER is wrong on both counts.One cannot integrate freedom and slavery. Freedom is good; slavery -- whether the of the socialist liberal or the conservative theocratic variety -- is evil. That is the fundamental issue in politics.The only principle that allows one to distinguish between freedom and slavery is the principle of individual rights -- a principle Sterner has clearly failed to grasp. What a shame.See Ayn Rand's *Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal* and www.capmag.com for details.