It looks like I am developing a tradition of looking back at the past year on the blog and taking note of the successes and the lessons learned. As with last year, before I get to looking at specifics I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to stop by the blog and especially those who have taken the time to leave comments. It is greatly appreciated.
Egalitarianism Wrecks Production -Quote of the Day
As I wrote in a previous post, the Ayn Rand Institute has made available for download almost all of the talks that Ayn Rand presented at the Ford Hall Forum. I have been listening to them in chronological order and trying to make notes of when I come across interesting quotes to share. There have been plenty of quotes, but I am rarely able to follow-up later as I listen to them in my car during my daily commute.
Recently I was able to both make a mental note of the location of this quote (about
Minimum Wage – An Historical View, Part 2
In part 1 of this series I introduced the Supreme Court decision from the 1923 Adkins v Children’s Hospital to illustrate the opinion of minimum wage laws that was still common prior to the Great Depression. This decision struck down a minimum wage law in the District of Columbia as
[Video] Yaron Brook Q&A in Kiev
One of the greatest sources of motivation for me, in both my thinking and my posting here on the blog, is listening to talks by Yaron Brook. He is an incredibly engaging and prolific speaker and thanks to platforms such as YouTube I am able to watch far more of these talks than if I could only see those I attended in person. Indeed, I have viewed dozens of videos of his talks from all over the world but have only been to one
[Video] Defining Basic Moral Concepts
In this talk from the 2015 Objectivist Summer Conference, , author of In Defense of Selfishness, discusses the difficulty in defining moral concepts, among other concepts, due to package deals. Package deals are terms that try to integrate items by non-essentials,
Minimum Wage: An Historical Viewpoint, Part 1
Metropolitan Hospital Infirmary Ward, 1900
Image located at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/capitalism/landmark_adkins.html
If you have spent much time reading my blog you will know that I have written quite a bit about the immorality of minimum wage laws. Such laws insert government force into what would otherwise be voluntary, mutually beneficial arrangements. Because such laws are immoral and violate the rights of both workers and employers, the results they produce are harmful to everyone, especially those they are intended to help, the young and unskilled. As I wrote in 2013:
A 2011
Equality – In the Only Sense that Matters
During his recent lectures, Yaron Brook has spoken a lot about the evils of equality and the virtues of inequality. For those that are unfamiliar with him or with Ayn Rand’s philosophy this might seem to imply that he is in favor of discrimination by non-essentials, i.e. racism, sexism and etc, but this is the farthest thing from the truth. In his recent talk in Sweden, he spells out exactly in what sense he feels equality has any relevance:
The only sense of equality that means anything
[Video] Why Inequality is Good for the Individual – Yaron Brook
Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, spent several weeks recently on a speaking tour through Europe and Russia. The theme for these talks, largely, was the theme of his, with Don Watkins, forthcoming book: the idea that equality is unfair and that inequality is moral and just.
This particular talk was given at Högerteknologerna and Fria Moderata Studentförbundet, Sweden. Before he begin the main talk, he commented that in other places where he had given talks the Q&A sessions
What Can We Do? Speak! – Quote of the Day
From 1961 through 1981, Ayn Rand spoke many times at the Ford Hall Forum, the “nation’s oldest continuously operating free public lecture series.” Earlier this year the Ayn Rand Institute made almost all of these talks available for download, free of charge. I had listened to many of these already (many have been available to stream from Soundcloud), but some were completely new to me.
I set myself the project of listening to them all in chronological order, with the goal of
[Video] The Jihadist Movement – Elan Journo
At the 2015 Summer Objectivist Conference Elan Journo, author of Winning the Unwinnable War, presented a talk on the jihadist movement. While he touches on the material strength and successes they have had, e.g. attacks in Paris, Copenhagen and Garland as well as the spread of ISIS, the main emphasis was on what provides the moral strength of the movement. As he states early in the talk:
But more significant than all those material gains and measures of its strength is the moral strength.