This is a somewhat edited and greatly expanded version of a comment I posted to Peter Schwartz’s Washington Post article, “Objecting to the ‘season of giving’.” You can find my posted comment here. 2000 characters was just not enough space to get across fully what I wanted to say in support of his article in the face of the vast majority of comments that had been left. Or at least I didn’t have the time to make my comment that short.
I would like to thank Peter
Whenever a man is made to act without his own free, personal, individual, voluntary consent—his right has been violated. – Ayn Rand
While I generally try to not write immediately as things get me worked up, tonight I am making a bit of an exception. Just a few minutes ago a post appeared in my timeline showing an image of what is claimed to be thousands of #BlackLivesMatter protesters essentially
That was one of the headlines in the local paper over an article detailing how the St. Johnsbury School directors have voted to approve a proposed $365,000 increase (about 2.3%) in the school budget with the bulk of the increase going to fund “universal prekindergarten.” This funding is to implement the program one year ahead of the date required (July 1, 2016) by Vermont’s recently passed universal pre-k mandate.
While prekindergarten has been getting a lot of press of late,
So this was the good news I came home to after going to see the final part of the Hobbit trilogy. (Excellent movie, by the way. Good action, loved Billy Connoly as Dain Ironfoot, and my god but Galadriel is revealed as a truly bad-ass elf lady.)
Governor Shumlin revealed that the plan to pay for Vermont’s single payer system would involve taxes that are, to use Shumlin’s word, enormous. Apparently the plan would have called for an 11.5% payroll tax (think your social security taxes,
“Value” is that which one acts to gain and keep, “virtue” is the action by which one gains and keeps it. “Value” presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? “Value” presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible. – Atlas Shrugged (quoted from the Ayn Rand Lexicon)
On Facebook yesterday
I am currently rereading Alex Epstein’s new book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and so far, I am through chapter 4, it is fascinating reading. His perspective on climate and fossil fuels is one that I have never heard before. He uses human life and flourishing as the standard of value when determining whether the use of fossil fuels, or any energy source, is moral and should be pursued.
One interesting item, not solely related to the climate change/fossil fuel debate, I noticed last night
My Facebook feed today had a link to an article from last year by The Objective Standard on homicide statistics. The article looked at claims that if the murder rate of blacks was the same as that for whites, then the United States would have a very low murder rate which would rank 147th in the world. After dissecting the numbers the article’s author pointed out the cultural causes for the disparity in murder rates.
The first comment to the article made a claim that in the 1960s many people
A question from Politix popped up for me today asking:
Do you wish there were more conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans around?
Here is my response:
I wish there were more radicals, yes radical, not moderate, for individual rights and liberty. When you talk of conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans you are essentially asking for people who believe it is ok to violate your rights, but just a little. This ignores the fact that any violation of rights leads inevitably to further
In re-reading Atlas Shrugged I am definitely seeing more than I did the first time. Or rather, I am better able to see parallels between Atlas and today’s world. Today I read the following in the chapter with the discussion of Directive 10-289 which would give the government complete control
In the last year or so there have been many comparisons between events in reality and those depicted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Many articles and internet memes pointed out the similarity between the decline of Detroit and the ruin of Starnesville in Atlas Shrugged. Both were thriving industrial areas that, due to collectivist, liberal policies essentially destroyed themselves.
I am currently re-reading Atlas Shrugged, listening to a series of podcasts by Dr. Diana Hsieh to help me get