Jeff Scialabba — VOICES for REASON

One of the arguments that President Obama and his supporters have been making for expanding government control in the health care industry is that their reforms will be “uniquely American.” For instance, in the June 24 ABC Health Care Forum, the President said,

We’ve been talking about how do we provide care that is high-quality, gives people choices, and how can we come up with a uniquely American plan, because one of the ideological debates that I think has prevented us from making progress is, some people say this is socialized medicine and others say, we need a completely free market system. We need to come up with something that is uniquely American.

In other words, under his plan health care in the United States will be guaranteed by government, but it will be different from that of Canada, France, Britain or any other nation that has implemented a variant of socialized medicine. We’ll provide health care to all, the President is saying, but we won’t have any of the problems of those other nations. We’ll do it right. It will be universal, but it won’t be socialized. We’ll do it the American way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Republican Senator Orrin Hatch recently provided a noteworthy lesson in government intimidation. In the days leading up to the congressional hearings on the NCAA college football Bowl Championship Series, the Utah Senator published a letter in Sports Illustrated arguing that the “arcane” and “biased” system used to determine college football’s national champion should be changed to a format which is—by his unstated standards—more equitable.

The lesson comes at the letter’s close, where, after having spent the entire letter laying out the case for bringing antitrust violations against the NCAA, Mr. Hatch writes: “Government intervention into the BCS would be regrettable. There are many issues and challenges competing for Congress’s attention. Those with the power to reform the system should do so voluntarily. If not, legislation may be required to ensure that all colleges and universities receive an equal opportunity.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Under a 1975 U.S. law, school districts which fail to provide a “free and appropriate education” for students with disabilities can be (and have been) sued by parents for reimbursement of the cost of schooling those students privately. A new Supreme Court ruling will now allow parents to seek reimbursement for private school education even if their special needs child has never attended public school.

The ruling is significant not for the specific, narrow legal issue that it resolved, but because it brings back to light the perverse double standard inherent in the law guaranteeing such reimbursement. Namely, why are students without disabilities not afforded the opportunity for an “appropriate” education as well?

Read the rest of this entry »

Picking up on a press release from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, New York Times columnist Floyd Norris recently reported that the rate of unemployment in the U.S. is now equal to and may soon surpass that of Western Europe. Norris echoes the main thrust of the press release: “the current economic crisis . . . has turned the case for the U.S. model almost entirely on its head.” The CEPR authors imply that the European model of “large welfare states and high levels of labor-market regulation” should be the economic standard to which nations aspire.

Leaving aside the question of the validity of the data (unemployment data is notoriously politicized and difficult to acquire), it is telling that neither Norris nor the CEPR authors clearly identify what they take the U.S. model to be. There is only an assertion of “inherent” “flexibility” in the U.S. economic system, which Norris explains as meaning “it is easier to both hire and fire workers [in the U.S.] than in many European countries.”

The accepted premise, of course, is that the U.S. model is free market capitalism. But, as Ayn Rand argues, capitalism means a “full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism—with a separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.” This is not the system we have in America.

Read the rest of this entry »

A new article by Tom Bowden has just been published at The Objective Standard and is freely available online. “Justice Holmes and the Empty Constitution” starts this way:

On April 17, 1905, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued his dissenting opinion in the case of Lochner v. New York. At a mere 617 words, the dissent was dwarfed by the 9,000 words it took for the Supreme Court’s eight other Justices to present their own opinions. But none of this bothered Holmes, who prided himself on writing concisely. “The vulgar hardly will believe an opinion important unless it is padded like a militia brigadier general,” he once wrote to a friend. “You know my view on that theme. The little snakes are the poisonous ones.”

Of the many “little snakes” that would slither from Justice Holmes’s pen during his thirty years on the Supreme Court, the biting, eloquent dissent in Lochner carried perhaps the most powerful venom.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday Yaron Brook was interviewed on Pajamas Television’s Sharia and Jihad Review and Economy and Financial Review. Both of the interviews run about twenty-minutes, allowing Dr. Brook time to cover a fair amount of ground in responding to the questions.

On Sharia and Jihad Review, Dr. Brook assesses the war on “terror,” discussing how and why current efforts to ensure America’s security are failing and what we should be doing to quell the threat emanating from the Middle East (hint: it’s not engaging Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in some friendly conversation). The same day, Dr. Brook appeared on PJTV’s Economy and Financial Review to discuss President Obama’s first one hundred days in office.

In addition to Dr. Brook, Voices for Reason writers have begun making appearances on PJTV. Elan Journo appeared on Sharia and Jihad Review yesterday to discuss the rise of the Taliban in Pakistan, and Alex Epstein will be interviewed on PJTV later this week. Future interviews have also been scheduled.

On its website Playboy has posted its dynamite 1964 interview with Ayn Rand. In the interview, Rand discusses her work and some of the practical implications of her ideas. The frank, wide-ranging conversation is particularly notable for its breadth.

Among the topics covered: guilt, original sin, emotions, motherhood, religion, morality, romantic love, sex, hedonism, promiscuity, charity, compassion, literature, government, free will, foreign policy, nuclear treaties, politicians and others.

Rand’s words, as they so often do, resonate as if they were spoken yesterday.

Read the whole thing here: http://www.playboy.com/articles/ayn-rand-playboy-interview/index.html.

The website Ednews,org recently posted an interview with Yaron Brook in which he discusses the importance of Ayn Rand and a number of other issues. (Update – April 28 – the Ednews website is presently down for maintenance.) One of these other issues is the question of whether greed is virtue or vice, and I find Dr. Brook’s remarks on the matter particularly insightful.

Here’s an excerpt:

The answer to this question really depends on what you mean by “greed.” If you mean the pursuit of short-term gratification at any cost, then I do think greed defined that way is bad. And indeed what we’re seeing is some–certainly not as many as the media would lead you to believe–some businessmen, some CEOs are pursuing short-term self-gratification at the expense of long-term profit, long-term happiness, and the long-term success of their shareholders, to whom they owe a fiduciary duty. Ayn Rand would be disgusted by this behavior-but she wouldn’t be surprised. She portrayed this kind of CEO in Atlas Shrugged, in characters such as Orren Boyle and James Taggart.

Read the rest of this entry »

The deadline to apply for early admission to the Objectivist Academic Center is this Friday, April 17. The OAC undergraduate program is a comprehensive, systematic course of study in Ayn Rand’s philosophy and the art of objective communication. The four-year distance-learning program is designed to be taken in conjunction with the typical workload of a college student or working professional–and would be like earning a “minor” in Objectivism, if today’s universities offered such an option.

Courses are taught by professional Objectivist intellectuals such as Dr. Onkar Ghate and Dr. Keith Lockitch, and take place via teleconference or over the internet. All live classes are recorded for the benefit of those who cannot attend, and students receive personal feedback on tests and assignments from their instructors via phone or email.

Here’s what a couple of OAC students have said about the program:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I suggested that supporters of the upcoming tea parties need to base their protest on a consistent intellectual framework. The protests are right in spirit, but are lacking the clear and consistent principles necessary to sustain a real change in the culture. I referred readers to a talk by Onkar Ghate for an elaboration on what those guiding principles should be.

ARC has added a new page to our website with content that explores these issues further. Here you’ll find Dr. Ghate’s talk, along with articles, interviews and videos by ARC writers, essays and recordings by Ayn Rand, and free printable flyers to distribute at the protests. Please visit and spread the word.