The New Clarion

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) was asked a tough question: “Out of every dollar that I earn, how much do you think I deserve to keep?”

I have a smidgeon of sympathy for the Congresswoman. From a statist politician’s point of view, the question is impossible to answer. If they were honest, they would say 0% — the money should be appropriated by disinterested philosopher-kings who would then redistribute it to each according to his needs.

But statists can never be entirely honest. They know that in America you have to fool the selfish voters in order to attain and keep power. Oh, the contempt for the unwashed masses this must breed in the political elite!  (more…)

I often disagree with the religious pragmatist Michael Medved, but he is right when he says to the birthers, “Please shut up.”

World Net Daily leads the campaign to prove Obama is constitutionally ineligible to be president. Their latest post on the issue claims that the White House is in panic mode over Jerome Corsi’s book, Where’s the Birth Certificate?

The White House is not panicking at all. Quite the opposite: they want the birthers front and center in the 2012 presidential race. Not only do the conspiracy theorists distract from Obama’s record in the Oval Office, but they turn off moderates and independents. Without independents Obama has no chance of winning reelection.

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During the health care “debate” — or suppression of debate — the White House asked people to send in anything that looked “fishy” from their opponents. Now they put out an even more ham-handed attempt to intimidate Americans: Attack Watch.

It is currently being laughed off the internet, which is a good sign. The Democrats look like the gang that can’t shoot straight.

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On Facebook Betsy Speicher links to a remarkable 1943 letter from Ayn Rand to a Reverend. The letter is for sale on eBay for $4,999.

A few questions come to mind after reading the letter. Do these thoughts represent Ayn Rand’s mature philosophic thinking? Is it realistic to believe Christianity could resolve its moral contradictions and rid itself of altruism when its metaphysics and epistemology conflict with reality? Does this letter contradict Leonard Peikoff’s recent thinking about religion? Why was this letter not in Letters of Ayn Rand?

It is common among the leftist elite, including the MSM, to question the intelligence of Republicans. They’ve been doing it at least as far back as Calvin Coolidge. Democrats are assumed to be intelligent.

Watch this video of Nancy Pelosi explaining economic issues.

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We survived another hurricane of hype from the media. Why do the MSM eagerly anticipate hurricanes — instead of reporting facts — as if they actually want massive disaster?

No, it’s not because greedy corporations gin up phony news to make money. No, it’s not essentially because cynical politicians love catastrophes for the opportunity to look good helping victims (although that is a corollary reason).

The reason is much deeper that any of that; it goes to our culture’s fundamental idea of man’s nature. Widespread disaster represents the metaphysical essence of altruism. Catastrophe is not the accidental to altruists, it’s the way things should be.

The altruist sees productivity, achievement and happiness as accidents. Successful people are lucky freaks, bound by their success to help normal people — the weak and downtrodden.

Remember back in the ’90s when Al Gore in a convention speech called healthy people “temporarily able”? That’s the altruist vision of man: we’re all victims or potential victims. The essence of life, the really important thing, is helping victims. Morality is not about happiness and how to live well; it’s the duty to sacrifice for others.

So media and politicians cannot help themselves at the prospect of disaster. They want it. The routine of daily life — people going about their business, pursuing happiness, achieving goals — this is as false to the altruist as the world of facts is to the Platonist. But potential disaster brings them to life, for they see it as the chance to escape the illusions of happiness and success and find true morality in sacrifice.

Walter Williams has a terrific piece on how Obama is more like FDR than Carter. If figures that if a Democrat wants to fundamentally change America, he would emulate the man who brought the welfare state to our shores.

One thing bothers me about this. FDR used WWII to extend state power and spread collective sacrifice across the land. Would it not be in Obama’s interest to get America in a major war? Leviathan cannot grow without crises.

Another question: since we owe so much money to China, would it be in the American state’s interest to foment a war with China and then declare our debts wiped clean off the books? Or am I getting into paranoid conspiracy theory lala-land here?

1. Paul Hsieh looks at a chilling pattern of politicians intimidating big business.

2. James Valliant takes on Ayn Rand’s critics.

3. This headline made me laugh.

4. Send a gun to defend a British home. (That’s from a campaign in 1940.)

5. I thought this was one of my funniest Tweets. I write this with some trepidation because a lot of people don’t appreciate my humor.

6. Douglas J. Feith and Seth Cropsey analyse the Obama Doctrine.

In what kind of country can the state arrest anyone on a whim without due process of law? That would be a dictatorship, a tyranny, a country without freedom — precisely what Michael Moore wants America to be.

“Pres Obama, show some guts & arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008& now they will do it again,” Mr. Moore wrote.

At Noodlefood, Diana Hsieh asks the following question: “Does the Right to Life Trump Property Rights?”

Diana rejects the notion implicit[*] in that phrasing, that “trumps” implies a conflict between these two rights — a notion which Objectivism flatly rejects, for reasons explained by her and by Dr. Leonard Leikoff in quotes supplied by Diana.  Taking the meaning of “trump” as “winning a conflict or fight”, I agree with her.  Rights cannot logically conflict, simply because there can be no such thing as the right to violate a right.

The key concepts that I use to understand and explain rights in practice, are as follows.
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In Ayn Rand’s 1957 classic Atlas Shrugged, one of the bureaucrats, in response to the nation’s economic collapse, provides his reasons for Directive No. 10-289. (more…)

At the website of the Western Representation PAC I found this rather rational post titled ‘Life After the Debt Ceiling Debate.’ I think they’re right in that we can’t expect much more than what we’re getting from the handful of conservatives in the House. I left the following in their comments: (more…)

Mark Steyn said this week,

…the world is looking for about $4 trillion dollars of real cuts. And what we’re being offered, depending on how you score it, is about $7 billion dollars of cuts from fiscal year 2012. That’s, what, about the United States government borrows every thirty hours. So in other words, we have spent a month negotiating, in real terms, a cut that represents what the United States government borrows every 30 hours.

Democrats and Republicans are like two doctors arguing about how to put a bandaid on the cut of man who has cancer. They’re focused on a trivial issue and evading the real problem. The status of America’s credit rating will not mean much if we don’t solve the spending and borrowing problem.

As Yaron Brook explains, if we don’t do something now, by 2025 entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare will be spending every penny of revenue. Our politicians refuse to face reality.

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A very common meme amongst religionists is the charge that atheism is itself a sort of faith, that the statement “there is no God” is as much an act of faith as the declaration that there is a God.  I haven’t fisked it, largely because it’s pretty much self-fisking.  In addition to its easy vulnerability to the fact that rational atheism is not a belief at all, but a rejection of a particular belief as arbitrary, that meme also contains a rather ironic confession; it accuses atheists of “faith” as if the accuser thinks it’s a bad thing (whoops!).

There is another interesting angle to it, however, in which this accusation contains a grain of truth: it’s when the “atheist” in question is a Leftist.  The following is a comment I left on Ann Althouse’s recent post where she interviews the infamous “Skepchick” (of the now infamous complaint about being asked out on an elevator at 4AM).  My response is worded to her question “Why don’t atheists just move on?”, but is mainly aimed at the dozens of religionist commenters deploying the “atheism = faith” charge.

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Jeff Jacoby writes about the ban on the incandescent light bulb, passed by Congress in 2007 and signed into law by the wretched George W. Bush.

The use of efficiency mandates to snuff out the standard light bulb was an exercise of unadulterated crony capitalism. It came about after big bulb manufacturers, frustrated by their customers’ refusal to switch from cheap throwaway incandescents to the far more profitable compact fluorescents touted by greens, decided to play hardball.

“So some years ago,’’ The New York Times Magazine noted last month, “Philips [Electronics] formed a coalition with environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, to push for higher standards. ‘We felt that we needed to . . . show that the best-known lighting technology, the incandescent light bulb, is at the end of its lifetime,’ says Harry Verhaar, the company’s head of strategic sustainability initiatives.’’

Other corporations joined the plot, lobbying Congress to croak a product Americans overwhelmingly like and compel them to buy the more expensive substitute the industry was eager to sell them. The entire scheme, a lobbyist for the National Electrical Manufacturers Association testified candidly in 2007, was “at the industry’s initiative.’’ Unable to convince consumers to voluntarily abandon Edison’s light bulb, Big Business got the government to force the issue.

So the law was driven by America’s suicidal corporations. The combination of environmentalist moral approval and more profits must have been too much for the fools in charge.

I have one disagreement with Jacoby. This is not “crony capitalism” — there is no such thing. Capitalism is the unfettered free market. Corporations working with the government to restrict competition is crony socialism, also known as fascism. Don’t let the Orren Boyles of the world give capitalism a bad name.

“Even though altruism declares that “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” it does not work that way in practice. The givers are never blessed; the more they give, the more is demanded of them; complaints, reproaches and insults are the only response they get for practicing altruism’s virtues (or for their actual virtues). Altruism cannot permit a recognition of virtue; it cannot permit self-esteem or moral innocence. Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation. If the giver is not kept under a torrent of degrading, demeaning accusations, he might take a look around and put an end to the self-sacrificing. Altruists are concerned only with those who suffer—not with those who provide relief from suffering, not even enough to care whether they are able to survive. When no actual suffering can be found, the altruists are compelled to invent or manufacture it.”

– Ayn Rand, anticipating Art Uncut’s accusation that U2′s Bono isn’t sacrificing enough.

“One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary.” — Ayn Rand

At Pajamas Media, there is an appalling post declaring that “the American experiment has failed”.  I was disappointed, but not surprised, to find that it was authored by a conservative — and one that I have already fisked before, here at The New Clarion.

Once again, Matt Patterson gives us another striking example of ideological causality.  Here, Patterson demonstrates how conservatism plays off the Left in attacking their common enemy: America, and the Enlightenment ideals it concretizes.

Have you ever wondered why conservatives insist on ascribing the term “liberalism” to the Left, despite the clear contradictions between actual American liberalism and Leftism?  Why would they aid and abet the Left’s co-opting of liberalism?  The answer lies in conservatism’s essential anti-Americanism.  The Left seeks to discredit and destroy liberalism — i.e. Americanism –  from within, by passing off illiberal ideas in its name.  When these ideas have their logical, destructive results, the conservatives point to the wreckage and declare “thus fails liberalism.”

Either way, it is genuine liberalism — Americanism — that is discredited, diluted, and floated away as if it never existed.  This underlying, collusive synergy between the soi-disant “opposites” against their common target is itself a function of ideological causality; that is, most of the participants are unaware of the synergy.  (I don’t envy you the unpleasantness should you ever encounter one of the few Leftists or religionists who DO know it).  This is why Objectivists and all defenders of liberty must remember that at a certain, fundamental level, we are dealing with a single enemy.

I’m quite certain that Patterson would genuinely recoil from the accusation of moral treason that I direct against him in the comment I posted on his article, and which I reproduce below.  It doesn’t matter.  His terms of thought, his underlying premises, manifest themselves according to their own internal logic no matter what Patterson tells himself he believes…. and down that road he goes.

Ideological causality is a bear.

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A Portrait, in Links, of Philosophical Panic

(Built from Randex links, OActivists posts and a Google search, with apologies to Tennyson.)

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Today is different
And tomorrow the same
It’s hard to take the world
The way that it came
Too many rapids
Keep us sweeping along
Too many captains
Keep on steering us wrong
It’s hard to take the heat –
It’s hard to lay blame
To fight the fire –
While we’re
Feeding the flames

– Neil Peart “Second Nature”, from the album “Hold your Fire”by Rush

Billy Beck is beating the drum over the murder of Jose Guerena in Arizona, and rightly so.  What I wish to highlight here is the horrible spectacle of mainstream minds raising the alarm over the increasingly violent intrusions of the government into our lives, even as their underlying ideologies move them inexorably towards that end-of-road.  To judge by the reaction around the blogosphere, both Left and Right are aghast and angry over Guerena’s death — but I will show how, in fact, both “sides” are, at root, complicit in it.

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In my previous writings on the topic of ideological causality, I have emphasized the “end of road” of an idea and/or of ideologies, as determined not by one’s intentions, but by the logic and flow of these ideas.  Even a completely passive-minded individual does not sit still; he will still drift slowly, “downhill”, towards its destination.

Today, I will sketch out the flow of ideas with a “triangle”, going both ways along the conservative road.  I start with an article by one conservative and work backwards (or “uphill”) to its root premises — and then logically back “downhill” to another article, by another conservative, which is superficially unrelated, but fundamentally trapped within the same premises.

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