VOICES for REASON

In the name of fiscal responsibility, President Obama is promising a spending freeze–at the record-high spending level he reached in 2009. This is like an alcoholic promising to “freeze” his drinking at 20 beers a night.

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Over at AEI’s blog, Danielle Pletka detects signs that the Obama administration is changing its approach toward Iran. After getting nowhere with attempts to lure Iran into negotiations, suddenly “the administration has started pouring it on from all spigots: sending Patriot batteries to Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait, lengthening deployments to the Gulf, and otherwise talking up the stakes. So what’s the deal? Is Iran a major threat to the United States and our allies? Did this suddenly dawn on the administration?  . . . Hint: Something has changed. Second hint: It’s not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. About time too.”

Allow me to register a dissenting perspective.

Obama’s so-called diplomatic outreach has treated Iran as a morally worthy interlocutor and estranged friend, whose goodwill it is our duty to cultivate. And that entire initiative is predicated on evading Iran’s bloody record and militant ideal of global Islamist rule. It’s a long way to go from that to a clear-eyed recognition of the regime’s character.  Obama would have to do, and publicly say, a lot more to convince me — let alone convince Tehran — that the administration now views the regime as fundamentally hostile and is willing to use military force to eliminate the threat it poses. Everything our president has done since taking office has reinforced the contrary view.

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In honor of the 105th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth (February 2, 1905), I’d like to recommend Jeff Britting’s short but surprisingly comprehensive biography, Ayn Rand. Lavishly illustrated with items from the Ayn Rand Archives (a special department Britting manages within the Ayn Rand Institute), this biography is especially valuable because it pays close attention to the mental choices and processes by which Ayn Rand shaped her own character and ideology.

Britting’s biography traces Rand’s brilliant successes to the fundamental choices she made—choices about how to manage her own thinking and action. It started in early childhood, Britting observes, with a vigorously questioning attitude “aimed at understanding the things around her.” (p. 4) As she entered her teens, she “began asking why she liked what she did and, as a result, she began integrating her ideas into wider generalizations. She called this approach to integrating ideas ‘thinking in principle.’” (p. 13) Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Bernanke won a second four-year term at the head of the Federal Reserve yesterday with a 70-30 vote in the Senate. Alex Epstein pointed out the absurdity of reconfirming Bernanke on foxnews.com. Bernanke is among the individuals most responsible for the financial crisis, and he hasn’t changed his financial philosophy in the least. Yet nearly three-quarters of the Senate—and President Obama—think he saved us from disaster. To use one of Alex’s metaphors, we just elected the arsonist to put out the fire.

Image: Gage Skidmore on Flickr

Last week’s Supreme Court ruling, which struck down restrictions on certain kinds of political speech by corporations, was a profoundly important decision. Not only did it eliminate the most odious parts of McCain-Feingold, but it did so largely for the right reasons. In particular, the Court recognized that a corporation is an association of individuals, who retain their First Amendment right to free speech. I highly recommend reading the decision in its entirety.

The decision couldn’t have been more timely. The purpose of the First Amendment is to protect our ability to communicate our views without interference by the government. Politically, it is, as James Madison called it, “the only effectual guardian of every other right.” By enabling us to freely criticize our leaders, it is the best and last defense against the threat of unlimited government power.

As this blog has argued at length, Obama has been making an alarming grab for power since the day he entered office. He has shown nothing but contempt for economic freedom and limited government–and now he is seeking to silence those, corporations in particular, who challenge him. Read the rest of this entry »

We need to rise above fear, hesitation, and partisan politics–to give the government all the power it needs to solve all our problems.

That was the message of President Obama’s State of the Union address, which named dozens of problems in America and not once suggested that individual rights, liberty, or freedom were the solution.

From a quick reading of the speech, some statistics:

• Number of times President Obama said “I”: 105–mainly pushing for the government programs he seeks to pass.
• Number of times President Obama said “individual rights”: 0.
• Number of times President Obama said “liberty”: 0.
• Number of times President Obama said “freedom”: 1–but it was freedom for Afghanistan.

flickr: Darwin Bell

For years, Barney Frank has been the most prominent cheerleader of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the colossal failures that have cost taxpayers $110 billion to date. Frank has long denied any problems with the government sponsored entities designed to “promote home ownership” by making or guaranteeing loans the free-market wouldn’t.

“These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” he famously said, “are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Frank also explicitly endorsed the reckless lending that proved Fannie and Freddie’s downfall: “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. . . .”

Last week, Barney Frank changed his mind: “The remedy here is…as I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…”

But don’t celebrate just yet. Frank didn’t call for a meaningful abolition–he called for “abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance” (emphasis mine). Read the rest of this entry »

Later this week world leaders and diplomats will meet in London to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. In my earlier post I talked about the U.S.-Afghan drive to appease the Taliban; now, in the lead-up to the international conference, the NYT reports:

The leader of the United Nations mission here [Kabul] called on Afghan officials to seek the removal of at least some senior Taliban leaders from the United Nations’ list of terrorists, as a first step toward opening direct negotiations with the insurgent group.

What’s next, a plea-bargain for Osama bin Laden? That’s crazy talk, yes. But on 9/12/01, erasing Taliban fighters from terrorist watch lists would have sounded outlandish, too. Here we are, though, eight-plus years later, currying favor with enemies we have failed to defeat in the hopes they’ll deign to talk to us.

The Afghan government floated a new plan “offering jobs, security, education and other social benefits to Taliban followers who defect” in the hope of quelling, if not crippling, the Taliban-Islamist resurgence seeking to take over the country. The Islamist response? A massive, coordinated suicide attack on the presidential palace, ministry of justice and central bank in Kabul.

It was meant to deliver a message — which the Taliban’s spokesman put into words afterward: “We are ready to fight, and we have the strength to fight, and nobody from the Taliban side is ready to make any kind of deal.”

Horrific scarcely begins to describe the attack, but there was ample reason to expect the baksheesh (bribes) to elicit that kind of response from the Islamists. There are many parallels you could draw, but take just one: the current U.S. approach toward Iran.

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The election of Scott Brown to the United States Senate has a lot of pundits clamoring about a resurgence of the Republican Party. Let’s hope not. The last thing this country needs is a resurgence of the same Republican Party which, as Don Watkins noted on Monday, has become virtually indistinguishable from the Democratic Party in its fundamental philosophy. Although there’s presently a lot of tension between the two political camps, most of what President Obama is doing was already done by President Bush, and Republican “alternatives” to Obama’s proposals are typically nothing more than watered-down versions of Democrat bills.

What is that philosophy? As Don notes, it’s the idea that “the government has the right to force us to sacrifice our freedom, interests, and desires for the sake of the ‘common good.’”

If you want a sense of what’s wrong with this idea, I recommend Ayn Rand’s first novel, We the Living, which is set in Communist Russia—a society that implemented the idea of sacrifice for the “common good” as its fundamental principle. You’ll get a wrenching depiction of the misery and oppression of a totalitarian society (as well as a moving, plot-driven story filled with the heroic figures typical of an Ayn Rand novel), and a preliminary understanding of why life beneath a government wholly dedicated to the “common good” has to be so horrific. Read the rest of this entry »