Culture — VOICES for REASON

Investor’s Business Daily has published an essay from ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook on  Atlas Shrugged. The piece begins:

In the years leading up to 2008—09′s financial meltdown, government control over mortgages, interest rates and America’s banking system was at an all-time high.

And yet when crisis struck, free enterprise took the blame.

The cure, therefore, was to give government even wider powers. Washington can now bail out any company, fire CEOs, override contracts and print billions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy — all in the name of the public interest. The result? Our deficits and debt continue to mount, and there’s a real possibility of a future like Greece’s.

This is the state of our world today. It’s remarkably similar to the state of the world in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a mystery story about a future America whose economy is disintegrating and whose government is accumulating power faster than anyone thought possible. This parallel is a big reason a record 500,000 people bought “Atlas Shrugged” last year.

So what can we learn from a book that foresaw in 1957 what few believed possible in 2007? We can learn a lesson the heroes of the novel learn: the cause of the government’s greater, destructive control of business. And we can learn how to oppose it.

Read the whole thing.

My colleague Alex Epstein has published a new commentary at Forbes.com, “Three Myths About Oil.” Noting that the average American consumes three gallons of oil a day, Alex observes that nevertheless,

… oil’s detractors call it an addiction, downplaying its enormous benefits as fleeting pleasures that will necessarily bring long-term pain and destruction. An oil-based economy will inevitably collapse, they say, because oil is finite and will run out, because foreign oil causes terrorism, because oil, as a fossil fuel, will bring about climate catastrophe. Let’s examine these myths about oil.

Read the whole thing.

New York magazine’s Steve Fishman just penned a fascinating account of Bernie Madoff’s life behind bars. What I find most fascinating, however, is the reaction from a number of quarters to the effect that Madoff is “thriving behind bars” and living like a “rock star.”

What actually emerges from the article is the exact opposite conclusion: that Madoff was frightened and unhappy before he was caught, and that his life in prison is empty and pathetic.

Take Madoff’s life before he was arrested. According to Fishman:

For Bernie Madoff, living a lie had once been a full-time job, which carried with it a constant, nagging anxiety. “It was a nightmare for me,” he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago,” he said in a little-noticed interview with them.

And what does life look like for Madoff, now that he’s been caught? As Fishman shows, Madoff lives separated from his family, surrounded by murderers and sex offenders, sweeping floors for fourteen cents and hour, and doing what he can not to fall victim to prison violence. Some rock star.

What comes across from Fishman’s article is that Madoff’s existential life now matches his inner life. A man whose inner life had been a nightmare is now trapped in a literal nightmare.

Madoff is often taken as the preeminent example of selfishness. But what the facts show is not a man who was concerned with his own interests, but rather someone totally uninterested in thinking about what kind of choices would genuinely promote his life. By trying to live like a criminal, rather than as a productive individual, Madoff guaranteed himself a meaningless, joyless, self-destructive  existence. There’s nothing selfish about that.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In his New York Times column, Ross Douthat recounts the backstory behind the death threat—posted on a Muslim website—against the producers of “South Park” and discerns a broader issue. He argues plausibly that Comedy Central’s decision to bleep out references to “Mohammad” and remove the supposedly offending episode is part of a larger pattern of self-censorship in our culture.

What concerns him is the apparent lopsidedness of the self-censorship: practically every value and idea today is subject to criticism in popular culture, whereas the “South Park” incident is “a reminder that Islam is just about the only place where we draw any lines at all.” There’s something to that observation (though I don’t subscribe to Douthat’s explanation of it); but I want to put that aside for the moment to isolate a widely ignored, and broader, point. What he and others who echo this line overlook (or evade?) is that self-censorship in North America and (to a far greater degree in) Europe is in significant part a function of governments’ failure to uphold the freedom of speech.

The guardian of that right is the government — and it’s AWOL. To put it mildly.

The pattern we’ve witnessed in previous crises—from the death decree against author Salman Rushdie in 1989 to the Danish cartoons crisis, and similar cases—is the refusal of our political leaders to defend us against threats to our freedom of speech. Worse: we’ve seen them genuflecting before and seeking to appease aggressive Muslim activists and their backers. (I touch on this in Winning the Unwinnable War.) Yes, there have been publishers and TV networks and bookstores that exhibited fear, and perhaps cowardice, in the face of such threats. But when our government issues limp, apologetic statements mollifying the aggressors—and effectively leaves writers, publishers, filmmakers and everyone else unprotected from the threat of reprisals by would-be Islamist enforcers—is it surprising that self-censorship grows?

In a new editorial published on foxnews.com, Alex Epstein writes:

This Earth Day, Obama renewed his call for “comprehensive energy and climate legislation that will safeguard our planet, spur innovation and allow us to compete and win in the 21st century economy.” In lockstep with environmentalists, Obama has previously said the ultimate goal of legislation is “a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming–an 80% reduction by 2050.”

But this raises the question: What is going to replace the coal, oil, and natural gas that we use to heat our homes and offices, fuel our cars and airplanes, power up our computers, and light up the night? [Read the whole thing.]

Keith Lockitch is quoted in a National Geographic article on the history and meaning of Earth Day. He touches on the anti-capitalist ideas behind the environmentalist movement.

[update] On PajamasMedia.com, Alex writes: “This Earth Day, take a moment to thank the Greens’ biggest punching bag: Big Oil.” Read the whole post. Alex also appears with Keith Lockitch to discuss Earth Day on PJTV’s Front Page here and here.

For a unique perspective on the history, science, economics, and philosophy behind Earth Day, check out the resources listed in the post Cancel Earth Day, Stop Green Guilt.  And if you missed the Earth Day interview with Onkar Ghate and Keith Lockitch, here’s Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

image: barunpatro

We at Voices for Reason would like to wish all you a very happy New Year. And what better way to start the New Year than by reading Alex Epstein’s op-ed, “The Meaning of New Year’s Resolutions”?

This New Year’s, resolve to think about how to make your life better, not just once a year, but every day. Resolve to set goals, not just in one or two aspects of life, but in every important aspect and in your life as a whole. Resolve to pursue the goals that will make you successful and happy, not as the exception in a life of passivity, but as the rule that becomes second-nature.

Whole thing here.

Image: Flickr

Amid the economic collapse and backlash against the growth of government, interest in Ayn Rand exploded in 2009. Within six months of 2009, bookstore sales of Atlas Shrugged had doubled the record of 200,000 set in 2008, and they are expected to exceed 400,000. Discussion of Rand and her views was a regular occurrence in the media, with some even dubbing 2009 “the year of Ayn Rand.”

Undoubtedly Ayn Rand’s popularity 27 years after her death was remarkable, and I view it as a positive sign that so many Americans saw on some level the connection between Atlas Shrugged and current events. I’d like to think, however, that the year of Ayn Rand would not be characterized by billion dollar government bailouts, the inauguration of a statist president elected on a platform as vacuous as “hope and change,” and government takeovers of automakers, financial institutions and the health care system.

On the contrary, a truly “Ayn Rand year” would witness the casting off of these and all other government chains. But this would require a much deeper process of intellectual and cultural change than we have yet seen. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s the intriguing start to an essay by Onkar Ghate, senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute (and Voices for Reason blogger), in the latest issue of U.S. News & World Report. The magazine invited him to address the “con” side of this debate: “Have the Holidays Become Too Secular?”

His answer, in essence, is that the true meaning of Christmas is secular, not religious. “Christmas in America is not a Christian holiday,” Dr. Ghate writes, explaining the paradox this way:

Christmas’s relation to goodwill leads many to believe the holiday inseparable from Christianity, allegedly the religion of goodwill. But the connection is tenuous. A doctrine that tells you that you’re a sinner—that you must seek redemption but cannot earn it yourself—and that Jesus, sinless, has endured an excruciating death to redeem you, who doesn’t deserve his sacrifice but who should accept it anyway—can hardly be characterized as expressing a benevolent view of man.

Read the rest of this entry »

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s an unforgettable Thanksgiving scene at the mansion of Hank Rearden, a self-made millionaire industrialist whose achievements include the invention—after ten years of toil—of a revolutionary new metal, stronger, cheaper and more durable than steel. In addition to Rearden, seated at the table for Thanksgiving dinner are his mother, his wife Lillian, and his brother Philip, all of whom are wholly dependent on Rearden and his wealth.

Here’s is Rand’s description of the setting:

The roast turkey had cost $30. The champagne had cost $25. The lace tablecloth, a cobweb of grapes and vine leaves iridescent in the candlelight, had cost $2,000. The dinner service, with an artist’s design burned in blue and gold into a translucent white china, had cost $2,500. The silverware, which bore the initials LR in Empire wreaths of laurels, had cost $3,000. But it was held to be unspiritual to think of money and of what that money represented.

A peasant’s wooden shoe, gilded, stood in the center of the table, filled with marigolds, grapes and carrots. The candles were stuck into pumpkins that were cut as open-mouthed faces drooling raisins, nuts and candy upon the tablecloth.

In keeping with Thanksgiving tradition, Rearden’s family gives thanks for the bounty before them.

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Today is the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the most famous event signaling the fall of Communism. In the days following November 9, 1989, the world saw residents of East Germany—a satellite state of the supposedly great and powerful Soviet empire—flee en masse to West Germany, revealing how hellish life under Communism truly was. The sight of Germans literally breaking down the wall is an inspiring one that should be remembered as a great landmark of the 20^th century—as Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate explain in this must-see interview.

As we celebrate an event that revealed to the world the oppression of Communism, it is important and instructive to note that for the seven decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, many journalists, authors, and intellectuals in the West evaded the atrocities of Communism, even as Communist states were racking up death tolls in the tens of millions.

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