I recently finished reading Equal is Unfair: America’s Misguided War Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook and a quote from chapter 5, The War on Opportunity, stood out to me and yesterday, while listening to the book on Audible, that same quote jumped out at me again. The quote is from remarks made by President Obama about economic mobility. As quoted in the book:
[W]e were convinced that America is a place where even if you’re born with nothing, with a little
Up in my part of the country, northern Vermont, drug addiction has been getting a lot of attention of late. In 2014Â Governor Shumlin dedicated his state-of-the-state address largely to heroin addition. More recently, Governor Hassan of New Hampshire testified before the legislature in support of a bill to provide more resources to fight the “heroin and opioid crisis.”
By and large the measures advocated for do not address the fundamental issue: why do people begin taking
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
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
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
Barry Wood
During one of Yaron Brook’s radio shows earlier this year, a listener in the chat linked to a lecture series by Barry Wood titled “The Battle over Reason in the Islamic World (and How it Was Lost).” I have finally had time to listen to the series, and it is quite fascinating, especially as I have been trying to learn a bit more about Islam since the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Mr. Wood begins the series by pointing out that Islam had some positive elements that set it apart from
Source: Wikipedia
Over the weekend I listened to Ayn Rand’s lecture Censorship: Local and Express (you can find this talk embedded below) and later read the text version of it which is included in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It. What first caught my attention was a quote that helped me get a handle on a post I am working on about Senator Bernie Sanders. Today, in light of the attack on the Draw Mohammad event in Garland, Texas on Sunday, I selected one dealing with the First Amendment and free speech.
The
The other day I came across an article by Allen B. West titled “The dirty little secret no one wants to admit about Baltimore.” The article discusses the protests and violence in Baltimore sparked by the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. Mr. West makes a good case that it is progressive policies that have caused the bulk of the problems facing
One of the ideas that struck me early on when I started studying Objectivism was the position Ayn Rand took in regards to the “public interest,” a concept she found to be invalid. She saw that there is no such entity as “the public,” there are only individuals. To claim that there is some public interest which we must consider ahead of an individual’s interest is to say that some individuals have a right to sacrifice the interests of others to their own. I find
One fact of today’s world that I see all around me is that government intervention, force, leads to more and more government intervention, more force. The government creates a program to protect the prices a farmer receives for his goods, forcing people to pay above market prices for the goods. This program has the effect of raising food prices which necessitates a program to help those who can no longer afford the more expensive food, forcing people to pay more in taxes so that money can