Culture — VOICES for REASON

Ayn Rand was born on February 2, 1905. To commemorate the 107th anniversary of her birth, ARC analyst Don Watkins has an op-ed on FoxNews.com today, in which he discusses the controversy over Rand’s influence on today’s politics.

“Rand has clearly inspired millions,” he writes, ”But a debate has emerged over the question of Rand’s political influence, with many commentators claiming her ideas have played a key role in shaping the political landscape. . . . But to gauge Rand’s influence, we need to know more about her views than the sound bites we’re typically offered.”

Why are Tea Partiers, political commentators, and politicians talking about a philosopher almost thirty years after her death? Read the article to find out.

Here are my recent comments on the Occupy Wall Street protests:

Some Americans have expressed sympathy with the Occupy Wall Street protesters because they oppose bank bailouts and the incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street.

“Americans are understandably upset by what they see as ‘crony capitalism,’” said the Ayn Rand Center’s Don Watkins. “But the real motive of the protesters is not to end ‘crony capitalism’–it’s to attack real capitalism and end whatever is left of it in America.

“For years, Washington has favored certain bankers by intervening in the market. But that has nothing to do with genuine capitalism. Capitalism means that the government does one thing–protects us from force and fraud–leaving us free to conduct our economic affairs as we see fit. A capitalist government doesn’t intervene to pick winners and losers, or to save companies from their mistakes.

“But the Wall Street protests aren’t calling for an end to government intervention in markets–they want to increase it. Most of them, for example, want to increase wealth redistribution in the name of fighting income inequality.

“Contrary to their rhetoric, they do not oppose the banks on the grounds that Wall Street is in bed with Washington. Notice, for instance, the plans to protest outside the home of investor John Paulson, who cannot be accused of getting government favors, and the lack of complaints about taxpayer money being poured into GM, Chrysler, and Solyndra. They chose to protest Wall Street because, whatever its flaws, it symbolizes genuine capitalism.

“What the protesters object to is not government stacking the deck to determine winners and losers. They just want the government to pick different winners and losers. They want to take the ‘capitalism’ out of ‘crony capitalism’–not the other way around.”

Photo: Paul Stein

Over at the American Thinker, Dr. Harry Binswanger, a member of the Ayn Rand Institute’s Board of Directors, writes:

The American Values Network, a left-wing group, with considerable funding by George Soros, has launched a media blitz under the banner “Ayn Rand vs. Jesus Christ.”  As an Institute founded by Ayn Rand’s heir and devoted to advancing her philosophy, Objectivism, we would like to respond.  Since this is an issue Rand faced repeatedly in her lifetime, our response is basically to let her speak for herself.

Read the whole thing here.

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has an editorial on FoxNews.com today. “Ayn Rand is everywhere,” he writes, and “her political opponents are growing nervous.” With some Tea Partiers and politicians praising Ayn Rand’s views, what “worries advocates of the welfare state is that they have never before faced any moral opposition.”

Whatever the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats in the past, they agreed on the basic goal: more and more government controls are necessary to rein in businessmen, “manage” the economy, and minister to those in need.

No matter which party was in power, therefore, we got things like Sarbanes-Oxley, bailouts of GM and Citibank, a huge prescription drug “benefit” and ObamaCare. Politics was a squabble about the efficacy of any proposed controls, not a dispute about the morality or immorality of imposing controls in the first place. As Krugman observes, in years past everyone “accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state.”

But now its advocates sense that this is no longer true, that some Americans are beginning to question the moral legitimacy of the welfare state. To strangle this questioning in the crib, supporters of government controls are trying to persuade their opponents to abandon Rand.

The current tactic is to tell Tea Partiers and “conservatives” that if you take religion seriously, you can’t be a fan of the atheist Ayn Rand. . . .

Dr. Ghate notes that “this much is true. Rand’s moral teachings are fundamentally different from Jesus’ teachings.”  But he goes on to ask the question, “Did Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers not reject the Sermon’s advice in creating America?”

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

Image: Wikimedia commons

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has a new op-ed published today in the Christian Science Monitor.  In the article, Dr. Ghate asks, given the parallels between the events in Atlas Shrugged and the financial/economic crises in recent years, “Should you, like Rand’s heroes, ‘go Galt,’ stop working, retreat to a secluded valley, and try to rebuild only when the country has collapsed?”

Dr. Ghate writes:

Rand was asked these very questions in her own lifetime. Her answers might surprise you. In the 1970s, America was in a deep financial crisis (a new word, stagflation, had to be coined), urban violence was rampant, and power-seeking politicians like President Nixon instituted wage and price controls that led to, among other things, gas stations with no gas. How, people wondered, could Rand have foreseen all this? Was she a prophet? No, she answered. She had simply identified the basic cause of why the country was veering from crisis to new crisis.

Was the solution to “go Galt” and quit society? No, Rand again answered. The solution was simultaneously much easier and much harder. “So long as we have not yet reached the state of censorship of ideas,” she once said, “one does not have to leave a society in the way the characters did in Atlas Shrugged…. But you know what one does have to do? One has to break relationships with the culture…. [D]iscard all the ideas – the entire cultural philosophy which is dominant today.”

Read the rest of Dr. Ghate’s op-ed here.  And to learn more about the ideas in Atlas Shrugged, go here.

ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has an article published today on FoxNews.com’s opinion page.  Titled “The Radicalness of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” Dr. Ghate writes:

To give a taste of its radicalness, consider that  today it’s taken for granted that the man of virtue is Mother Teresa-like; he  selflessly lives to serve others and demands that you do the same. The man of  vice is selfish; he pursues his own interests and demands that his actions bring  him a profit. Whenever a television show or movie needs a stock villain, one  whose evil motivation will require no setup, you can be sure a businessman  erecting an office building on treed land or a corporation testing an  experimental drug will be written in. Simply to point out that they are pursuing  profit is sufficient to damn them. Judging from my experience, more murders on  television are committed by businessmen than by mobsters.

It is this entire viewpoint, entrenched for  centuries by religious and secular thinkers alike, that Atlas Shrugged challenges. What emerges from its pages is that the moral man is in fact truly  selfish: he chooses to embrace his own life by choosing to purposefully,  systematically, and unwaveringly do the thinking and take the actions necessary  for his own happiness.

Read the rest of Dr. Ghate’s op-ed here.  And if you’ve heard of the movie and are interested in exploring Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, you can start here.

Despite obvious similarities between the scandal now enveloping TV star Charlie Sheen and the one that brought down Tiger Woods a couple of years ago, there’s a difference worth noticing. Reports indicated that Woods’s various contracts with sponsors included “morals clauses” permitting quick and quiet termination of business relationships when it became apparent that Woods was an adulterous philanderer.

Sheen, by contrast, is engaged in an extended, boisterous war of words with CBS and Warner Bros. Television, which have shut down production on “Two and a Half Men.” Sheen contends that he is both able and contractually entitled to work, and he’s threatening to sue. One reason he can take such an aggressive stand despite widely noted scandals is that, by all indications, there is no “morals clause” in his contract. According to one report:

A morals clause allows a buyer—in this case, a TV studio—to bail on a contract if a star’s conduct is “detrimental to the buyer’s interests,” according to a 2005 Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts article by Noah B. Kressler.

But lawyers and studio insiders say that while morals clauses remain a fixture in the popular imagination, they are seldom used anymore in deals for entertainment talent.

“In terms of my own practice, I haven’t seen a lot of them,” said Doug Mirell, a partner and entertainment litigator at Century City law firm Loeb & Loeb.

The clauses, however, are still widely used in sports contracts and product-endorsement deals. When golfer Tiger Woods was caught up in a heavily publicized cheating scandal that led to his divorce, a number of companies quickly dropped or downgraded their sponsorships. Kellogg dumped swimmer Michael Phelps after video surfaced of the gold medalist smoking marijuana. And Sheen himself was nixed as a spokesman for underwear purveyor Hanes after the actor was accused of threatening his wife in 2009.

To see what they’re talking about, here’s a sample morals clause, typical of those found in professional athletes’ contracts:

“The employee agrees to conduct himself with due regard to public conventions and morals, and agrees that he will not do or commit any act or thing that will tend to degrade him in society or bring him into public hatred, contempt, scorn or ridicule, or that will tend to shock, insult or offend the community or ridicule public morals or decency, or prejudice the producer or the motion picture, theatrical or radio industry in general.”

Of course, there are many considerations that figure into inclusion of a morals clause in a contract. After all, it has to be agreeable to both parties. (Plus, I should note that not all relevant details about either the Woods or Sheen situations have been, or perhaps ever will, be made public.) Nonetheless, one of the values of contract law is that it offers a method for companies like CBS and Warner Bros. Television to arrange in advance a way of disentangling themselves from embarrassing relationships when a star starts misbehaving.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

With a new year approaching, we looked back at some of the topics we discussed on VFR since the blog was launched. Here, we highlight a few of our favorite VFR posts that you may enjoy revisiting (or reading for the first time, if you’re a new reader).

Posts by Alex Epstein:

• Google isn’t a threat to competition–but antitrust law is.
• GovernMent propaganda
• Cash for car-wrecks
• Gut the SEC, catch the next Madoff
• Inside the mind of a financial dictator

image: flickr/myobb

With a new year approaching, we looked back at some of the topics we discussed on VFR since the blog was launched. Here, we highlight a few of our favorite VFR posts that you may enjoy revisiting (or reading for the first time, if you’re a new reader).

Posts by Don Watkins.

• The rich get richer, the poor get richer, the New York Times gets outraged
• Controls breed controls: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3.
• The Unselfish Bernie Madoff
• The irrational argument for rationing health-care

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Following the news that Facebook founder and Time Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg had signed the Gates/Buffett Giving Pledge, ARC put out a press release arguing that signing the Pledge was not a morally praiseworthy act–that businessmen like Zuckerberg deserve moral credit for creating wealth, not for giving it away.

Nick Baumann of Mother Jones recently linked to it, suggesting, tongue firmly in cheek, that it might be “the best PR ever,” and his comments are getting a fair amount of play around the web. Given all the attention, I would like to recommend that interested readers take a look at the full argument Yaron Brook and I laid out in our original piece on the Pledge.

By the way, I will be discussing the Giving Pledge with Baumann tonight on Thom Hartmann’s TV show The Big Picture.
[Cross-posted from forbes.com]