TOS Blog: Daily Commentary from an Objectivist Perspective

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Thank Industry for Protecting Us From Nature

Posted by Roberto Sarrionandia at 11:38 am ET

Many widely used phrases and bromides—including “mother nature” and “living in harmony with nature”—imply that nature is a benevolent and loving place. Yet natural disasters, such as the recent California Springs fire, show that nature can be lethal and that we need the products of industrial civilization to protect ourselves from its dangers.

Tragically, this particular fire damaged fifteen homes and injured eight firefighters. Had area residents not been blessed with the fruits of industry the damage would have been far worse.

Imagine organizing and implementing an evacuation without televisions, Internet connections, telephones, radios. Imagine fleeing the area on foot with what you could carry in your hands, as “mother nature” intended, rather than by automobile with your precious possessions piled in the seats and trunk. Imagine seeing the fire approach a house made of “natural” logs and shingles rather than man-made fire-retardant siding and roofing. Imagine clearing away brush and grass by hand rather than by means of gasoline powered tools and tractors.

Untouched nature does not give us this technology; men and women who produce and run modern mass-production industrial facilities do.

“Nature” does not act like a loving mother. It acts like nature. At best, it leaves people naked, cold, hungry, and vulnerable; at worst it kills people with utter indifference.

Natural disasters, such as the California Springs fire, remind us that we should thank our real guardians: the men and women of industry and science.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in: Science and Technology

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Obama’s Un-American Call to “Service” and “Duty”

Posted by Stephen Bourque at 12:28 pm ET

On May 5, President Obama delivered the commencement speech at Ohio State University. Invoking the Founders, he implored graduates to embrace the “quintessentially American value[s] of optimism; altruism; empathy; tolerance; a sense of community; a sense of service”—and to reject a “society that celebrates individual ambition above all else.” It is a “sense of civic duty,” according to Obama, the notion that “we are bound to one another,” that is at the heart of America. We have “rights,” he admits, “but with those rights come responsibilities—to ourselves, and to one another, and to future generations.”

But Obama’s message is the exact opposite of America’s founding ideals.

The fundamental principle of the United States is individual rights—the idea that each individual has an inalienable right to his life, liberty, the products of his efforts, the pursuit of his own happiness. There is no “but” about these rights; they are not conditional on service to others. So long as a person does not violate the rights of others, he is properly free to act in whatever ways he chooses.

The American spirit is not, as Obama would have us believe, about “civic duty” through which “we are bound to one another.” Rather, it is about individual rights and freedom from one another—freedom to act on our own judgment for our own goals and happiness regardless of what others need or want. The essence of America is not that the individual should selflessly serve the community (that’s the essence of North Korea). The essence of America is the radical, profoundly selfish idea that every individual is sovereign and must be free to live his life as he sees fit.

In saying “this country cannot accomplish great things if we pursue nothing greater than our own individual ambition,” Obama dismisses the purpose and history of the United States, and the very concept of liberty. America was not formed so that “this country” could accomplish great things; it was formed so that individuals could accomplish great things. And unfettered individuals, peaceably pursuing their goals and cooperating with others when and as they choose do accomplish great things—as the history of America is testament. How did Rockefeller revolutionize the energy industry? How did the Wright brothers launch the aviation industry? How did Sam Walton revolutionize retail? These men and countless others did great things by thinking and acting independently and by cooperating voluntarily as their judgment dictated.

In fact, genuine cooperation among men—which Obama imagines as conflicting with “individual ambition”—is possible only when individuals are free to deal with each other voluntarily. Freedom, not compulsory service, unleashes men’s minds.

Hopefully, some of the Ohio State University graduates recognized the deeply un-American meaning of Obama’s address (not to mention his chilling plea to “reject these voices” that warn of encroaching tyranny). These young Americans should pursue futures not of sacrifice and duty, but of value achievement and personal happiness. That is what America is all about.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in: Ethics, Individual Rights and Law

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Judge Narragansett’s Solution to Congress’s Shady Trading

Posted by Robert Begley at 7:30 am ET

When members of Congress can gain financially by supporting, blocking, or rigging legislation that affects their investments, they have an unacceptable conflict of interests.

Last year, Barack Obama signed a law intended to solve or at least mitigate the problem—the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act. A major provision of the Act required “electronic reporting and online availability” of information concerning the investments of members of Congress and government employees.

So much for that. Last month, Obama signed a new law specifying that information on these investments would be kept in the basement of a building in Washington D.C., and that anyone seeking to examine these investments would physically have to visit that basement to do so.

When members of Congress can line their pockets by passing, blocking, or rigging certain laws, corruption unsurprisingly ensues.

In his 2011 book Throw Them All Out, Peter Schweizer details many cases of suspicious congressional investments. For example, in 2003 Senator John Kerry helped to write the health care legislation that became the Medicare Prescription Drug Modernization Act; that same year he and his wife made a total of 103 stock purchases and eight stock sales involving insurance and pharmaceutical companies. The Kerrys made millions in profits on those investments. In 2009, Congressman John Boehner purchased volumes of shares in five health insurance companies days before he helped kill ObamaCare’s so-called “public option” for health insurance. The relationships between Nancy Pelosi’s Visa investments and congressional rulings in 2008 are too complex to explain in a blog post; I refer you to Schweizer’s book for details on her dubious multi-million dollar gains.

Given that in our current political system congressmen can pass laws to manipulate the economy and profit thereby, it is abundantly clear that we need laws requiring full transparency of all investments made by such officials. It’s also clear that in the age of the Internet, when congressmen can make their investments online, citizens should be able to view those records online and should not have to travel to D.C. to do so.

But laws mandating such transparency and accessibility are only short-term solutions, and the more politically savvy congressmen will likely find ways around such laws anyway.

What’s the long-term solution?

The long-term solution is a government limited to its proper purpose—the protection of individual rights. Under such a government, Congress would be constitutionally forbidden from passing laws that interfere with business in any way—whether to harm or “help” them. Achieving this state of affairs, of course, would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. What might that amendment say?

Toward the end of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, Judge Narragansett writes a sentence that is likely sufficient: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade.”

That should do it.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in: Regulations

Monday, May 6, 2013

Good News Abounds: Space Tourism, Medical Marvels, and More

Posted by Ari Armstrong at 12:41 pm ET

Terrorism at home, chemical warfare abroad, continued economic problems most everywhere . . . The bad news can be overwhelming. It is important, then, to keep an eye on the good news, both as an act of justice toward the rational and productive people who inspire the headlines, and as spiritual fuel for our own lives and efforts.

Here are a few such stories recently in the news:

  • On April 29, Virgin Galactic “completed the first rocket-powered flight of its space vehicle, SpaceShipTwo.” Richard Branson, the company’s founder, said, “Now we’ll be ramping up the building of spaceships. . . . We’ll be ramping up the building of rockets. It’s going to be the start of a whole new era of space travel. It’s going to be tremendously exciting—everything is possible, I think, after today.”
  • In South Korea, “A 2-year-old girl born without a windpipe now has a new one grown from her own stem cells.” This technology may eventually lead to doctors growing a variety of organs in a lab for patients.
  • Last month researchers at the University of Southampton in England announced progress in creating “fiber cables that can move data at 99.7 percent of the speed of light.” Rather than send data through silica glass—through which data moves at “only” 69 percent of the speed of light—the new cable sends it through a hollow-core fiber, achieving the massive increase in speed. This technology could lead to essentially light-speed supercomputing and, if researchers can solve problems of data loss over long distances, a radically improved global internet.
  • Swedish inventor Christian von Koenigsegg is working on a new type of “camshaft-free” combustion engine that may lead to a more powerful and more efficient engine. Koenigsegg and his team project their engine will soon provide 30 percent more horsepower while burning 30 percent less fuel.

Congratulations to these scientists and researchers for advancing technology in ways that dramatically improve human life—and for providing such powerful fuel for the soul.

As Ayn Rand said, “the sight of an achievement [is] the greatest gift that a human being could offer to others.”

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Image: Virgin Galactic

Posted in: Science and Technology

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Penny Nance’s Strange Bedfellows

Posted by Ari Armstrong at 7:30 am ET

Fox News host Steve Doocy recently invited Christian activist Penny Nance to comment on the so-called “Day of Prayer.” In response to Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx’s call for a “Day of Reason,” Nance denigrated reason:

You know, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust. . . . Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.

Nance is not claiming merely that moral relativism and the Holocaust followed the Enlightenment chronologically; she is claiming that the Enlightenment, by elevating human reason over religious faith, led to the Holocaust.

Andrew Bernstein answered just this sort of claim during his debate with Dinesh D’Souza:

[T]he Nazis are overt emotionalists. There’s nobody who could be a better example of rejecting the Enlightenment and a commitment to reason than the National Socialists. How did they [allegedly] know their moral superiority based on racial inheritance? . . . Nazis answered it themselves. “We just feel it in our blood and our bowels.” . . . They were overt emotionalists. They reject reason and logic as a Jewish tool. It’s sensationalism, bodily, visceral sensations and emotions that animate the National Socialists—not reason and the Enlightenment commitment to reason.

As for what the Enlightenment actually led to, Bernstein addressed that as well:

It’s the American Revolution that was based in reason. The leading minds of the American Enlightenment were responsible for the American Revolution: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison. Many of these men were deists; they were scornful of faith. . . . Thomas Paine, in his book The Age of Reason, said, “My own mind is my own church.” There’s the Enlightenment attitude. These were the men who created the American Revolution.

Bernstein broadened his point:

The real struggle in human history is not religion versus secularism; that’s only one example of it. The real struggle in human history is reason versus unreason, or rationalism versus irrationalism—those who support the mind and those who oppose it.

Nance has chosen her side in that struggle. It is up to each of us to decide what we stand for: reason or unreason.

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Image: CWA

Posted in: Religion

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Estimated Oil in the Bakken Region Doubles

Posted by David Biederman at 2:00 pm ET

American energy producers keep finding and developing more usable oil and natural gas.

Recently the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) increased its estimate of the recoverable oil in the Williston Basin spanning parts of Montana and the Dakotas—the region famous for Bakken shale. The USGS’s new estimate of 7.34 billion barrels is twice that of its 2008 estimate. And its 2008 figure was 25 times higher than that of 1995!

What about natural gas? From 2008 to now, the USGS expanded its estimate of recoverable natural gas from 1.85 to 6.72 trillion cubic feet. As for “natural gas liquids,” the USGS bumped its figures from 148 to 527 million barrels.

Energy producers have achieved these astounding advances by using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to drill more than 4,000 new wells in the Williston Basin since 2008. And they increased their technological know-how as they went. For example, rock and fluid specialists applied new information about subsurface geology to develop additional layers of shale beneath the Bakken—shale previously deemed useless.

Kudos to these producers for discovering new ways to draw oil and natural gas from previously useless rocks buried deep underground—thereby offering for sale life-serving forms of energy.

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Creative Commons Image: Lindsey Gee

Posted in: Science and Technology

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Latest Lesson from the Sequester: It’s Time to Privatize Air Traffic Control

Posted by Zachary Huffman at 11:12 am ET

Last Friday, after a week of public outrage over widespread flight delays and cancellations, Congress passed legislation granting the FAA $253 million to restore its air traffic control staff to pre-sequester levels.

While the bill may have quelled public unrest and ensured congressional members a timely flight home for their springtime recess, the legislation merely provided a bandage to hide a much larger problem: the federal government’s monopoly on air traffic control.

Rather than recognize the moral rights of airlines and airports to choose their desired air traffic control providers in a competitive and free market, the federal government protects its inefficient, taxpayer-subsidized, rights-violating system by erecting legal barriers to entry, preventing competition.

The government’s monopoly quashes what would otherwise be natural, market incentives encouraging air traffic controllers to serve their actual customers. As Reason Foundation scholar, Robert Poole explains:

Even though the air traffic system is there to benefit those who fly planes and pay aviation user taxes to support it, that’s not how the FAA operates. The “customer” the FAA has to keep satisfied is Congress, not aircraft operators or travelers. That’s because it is Congress that provides the FAA with its budget. And Congress loves to assert its control—in the name of protecting taxpayers’ money, of course.

In a free market, in which government protects rather than violates the rights of airlines and airports to freely contract with willing traffic control providers, air traffic controllers would, of necessity, provide better service at lower cost.

Fifty-one nations have made the move to privatize air traffic control, and many—including Canada, Great Britain, and Spain—have reported successful results. The United States should follow their rational example.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in: Regulations

Friday, May 3, 2013

Louis C.K. Schools David Itzkoff on the Cause of Success

Posted by Daniel Wahl at 11:36 am ET

In a recent interview in the New York Times, comedian Louis C.K. turned the questions on interviewer David Itzkoff to tease out the cause of C.K.’s success:

DI: Does it matter that what you’ve achieved, with your online special and your tour can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?

LCK: Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?

DI: You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.

LCK: So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

DI: At this point you’ve put in the time.

LCK: There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life.

Louis C.K. is admirably forthright and correct. He earned the platform he has through many years of hard work; he earned the fans he has by making them laugh; he earned his millions by making himself an expert in his field.

Kudos to Louis C.K. for naming and defending the cause of his success. Whatever you think of his crude humor, you’ve got to like his unapologetic style.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in: Productivity

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Pope Absurdly Blames Unemployment on Profit

Posted by Ari Armstrong at 1:08 pm ET

This morning, the new head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis, sent the following Tweet: “My thoughts turn to all who are unemployed, often as a result of a self-centred mindset bent on profit at any cost.”

The Pope has this exactly wrong. The profit motive is responsible not for causing unemployment, but for facilitating all the jobs that people do have.

A business owner hires an employee because he hopes to expand production and make more money, and the employee accepts a job in order to gain the financial and spiritual rewards of performing the work. That is, employer and employee negotiate terms of employment precisely so that both parties can profit.

What, then, causes unemployment? Leaving aside the small amount of normal turnover in the job market, the cause of chronically high unemployment is government coercion that deters or forbids individuals and businesses from profiting by freely negotiating terms of labor. Such coercion includes payroll taxes, employment mandates, and wage controls.

If Pope Francis wishes to condemn those responsible for causing chronic unemployment, he should first remove the plank from the eye of the Catholic Church, which, in various ways supports the coercion in question. As just one example, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops proclaims, “Catholic bishops have supported increasing the minimum wage over the decades.”

The Catholic Church lends its faithful and political support to (among other employment-throttling policies) laws forbidding the free negotiation of employment contracts—laws that have crushed employment opportunities particularly among minority youths.

If Pope Francis does not wish employers to gain a profit by hiring employees, what does he wish them to gain? A loss? And how long does he expect business owners to continue providing jobs if they operate at a loss? Perhaps he expects a miracle.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Posted in: Regulations, Religion

Thursday, May 2, 2013

The “Marketplace Fairness Act”: A Morally Unacceptable Gimmick

Posted by Michael A. LaFerrara at 7:30 am ET

The proposed federal Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA)

grants states the authority to compel online and catalog retailers (“remote sellers”), no matter where they are located, to collect sales tax at the time of a transaction—exactly like local retailers are already required to do.

The issue the bill purportedly aims to address is the need of equal protection under the law. Currently, a state can compel a retailer to collect sales taxes only if the retailer has a physical presence in the state. This state of affairs, the MFA’s supporters claim, renders in-state retailers “at a competitive disadvantage” relative to out-of-state retailers. The MFA, they say, would “level the playing field.”

Granted, the MFA would “level the playing field” in a certain respect: It would cripple businesses that are not currently being crippled, thus rendering all businesses equally crippled by sales taxes.

A sales tax violates rights, harms businesses, and increases costs for consumers. The MFA, if passed into law, would harm all and financially ruin many internet businesses. The moral way to level the playing field is not to increase the extent to which rights are violated, but to decrease it. Sales taxes should not be expanded; they should be eliminated.

Of course, from the perspective of state governments, the MFA is a pragmatic means to financing their spending sprees. The MFA’s official website states explicitly that the act is intended to “help the many states now facing significant budget shortfalls.”

The Marketplace Fairness Act is a rights-violating, statist gimmick being pushed under the guise of “fairness.” Americans had better open their eyes, see it as such, and reject it wholesale. Once something like this is passed, there is usually no turning back.

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Posted in: Taxation