This Week on the Web (February 10 – February 16)

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NEWS

New Wage Boost Puts Squeeze on Teenage Workers across Arizona

Arizona Republic

Oh, for the days when Arizona's high school students could roll pizza dough, sweep up sticky floors in theaters or scoop ice cream without worrying about ballot initiatives affecting their earning power.

That's certainly not the case under the state's new minimum-wage law that went into effect last month.

Some Valley employers, especially those in the food industry, say payroll budgets have risen so much that they're cutting hours, instituting hiring freezes and laying off employees.

And teens are among the first workers to go.

COMMENTARY

Expecting

Michael Hurd, DrHurd.com

Expectations are what you impose on others, consciously or subconsciously--accurately or not. Expectations are frequently disappointed, and usually not advisable because you cannot force another individual person to adopt, integrate and act upon your values.

Standards are what you hold to be true, correct and good. To live with integrity, as well as with psychological peace of mind, you require standards. Implicitly, you will hold some mixture or contradictory "hash" of standards whether you know it or not; it's obviously best to know, choose and act upon your rationally, consciously accepted standards.

Life without standards is impossible. Life without expectations is more possible than you think. If you hold to your standards, the right people will find you, and you will find them. Disappointment will be the exception, and not the rule. If you run around life with nothing but expectations of other people, you're doomed to needless frustration and even despair.

Advertising is Good Medicine

Wayne Dunn, Capitalism Magazine

Imagine that you spent years of research and millions of investors' dollars developing an idea that could save or prolong hundreds of thousands of lives. You put your product on the market and advertise.

But a few weeks later, various columnists and "talking heads" begin deriding you for it. Advertising, they say, harms consumers by raising the cost of the product they so desperately need (a product which wouldn't exist had you not created it). Soon there's a movement afoot to prevent you from advertising¾ in the name of "the public good," of course.

Unfair? That's exactly what's currently happening to drug companies.

The main fallacy of the anti-drug-advertising crowd is based on the premise that an individual (or group of individuals, i.e., a company) has a moral obligation to be charitable, e.g., to sell cheaply the product of his mind. Well, if your moral code demands charity, fine. Go invent a new lifesaving drug and simply give it away. No one will stop you. You certainly have the right to be generous with your own goods, but not with your neighbor's, even if he's the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation.

Washington 's Make-Believe Policy on Iran

Elan Journo, The Ayn Rand Institute (via Principles in Practice)

The Bush administration claims to have a way to deter the militant theocracy of Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons—and thwart its ambition to bring "death to America." Washington's plan aims to pressure Teheran, financially and psychologically. The idea is to cut off Iran's nuclear program from banks and businesses in other nations, and to undermine the confidence of Iranian officials. The right amount of pressure, we are told, can induce Teheran to give up its nuclear program.

In fact this policy is a pathetic sham. It is a cover-up for Washington's abdication of the responsibility to protect American lives.

George W. Bush's WW II World

Michael Hurd, DrHurd.com

The defenders of the war in Iraq often invoke World War II as an example. They cite the years it took to liberate, and rebuild, Europe from the threat of the evil Nazis. This comparison evades a huge, and overwhelmingly obvious, difference. The Europeans were civilized and, more or less, free nations before the invasion of the Nazis. They fell victim to the Nazis because they didn't take the threat seriously enough as Hitler built his power; but once they realized it was too late, they very much wanted their freedom and civilization back. The situation in Iraq could not be more different. The country was, for decades prior to our invasion, under the dictatorship of an evil thug not unlike Adolf Hitler, and nobody in that country has ever even tasted a whiff of freedom. It would have been nice had they embraced it the minute liberation from Saddam Hussein was handed to them, but clearly this didn't happen, and is not going to happen. Worse than that, the U.S. persists, under President Bush, to intensify its fixation on Iraq rather than fight the wider war on terrorism, something it claims to want to do, but clearly doesn't have the resolve to do--as Islamic Iran gleefully builds nuclear weapons and threatens to use them against the infidels, once developed.

It's easy to be against the Iraq war because it's such a self-evident, tragic bungle--on the Administration's part, not the military's part. What's much harder is to oppose the Iraq war for the right reasons--to oppose it NOT because it was an attempt by the United States to assert itself militarily against terrorism, but because its mishandling has set us back even further in the war against terrorism. Those painful lessons will have to be learned in the coming years, beyond the Bush Administration, as the U.S. pulls back, ignores the enemy until it strikes again--much stronger next time, to be sure. I don't hope for another attack against the U.S., but I see it as unavoidable given our weakness. Given that such a terrorist attack is all but certain, I can only hope that the people who oppose the war in Iraq for the WRONG reasons will be in charge, and be forced to take the blame they deserve, for promoting pacifism against such a dangerous enemy as Islamic fanaticism.

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Other links

The Ayn Rand Institute

The Objective Standard

Capitalism Magazine

4Commonsense.net

OpinionJournal.com

Junk Science

Activism Humor

The Intellectual Activist

Web Logs

Principles in Practice– Principled commentary on cultural matters and current events from “The Objective Standard”

Cox and Forkum – Political cartoons and commentary

Noodle Food

The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid – Donald Luskin

Dollars and Crosses – CapitalismMagazine.com

Rule of Reason – The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism

4CommonSense

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