This Week on the Web (May 19 – May 25)

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Quote of the Week:

The idea of Jimmy Carter calling ANY President a bad one, much less THE WORST one, is darkly comical. Actually, it's just plain comical, other than for the fact that life or death issues are at stake when it comes to a President of the United States. I could list a longer, and more deeply fundamental, list of grievances against President George W. Bush than Jimmy Carter ever could. President Bush has not, like Jimmy Carter, been a complete pacifist; but he has, like Jimmy Carter before him, badly bungled protecting our nation from the likes of terrorist-sponsoring Iran and Syria, choosing instead to focus all our military energy and "moral capital" on Iraq. It was, we can now see, a tragic error, in part because it gives rise to criticisms such as Carter's, from a pacifist and anti-American point-of-view, that the United States should never dare defend itself, militarily, at all. Actually, I think I'll just hold this as one more strike against George W. Bush. His lousy leadership caused me to reflect on the much more wretched, miserable and dangerous era of Jimmy Carter.

- Michael Hurd

NEWS

Iran's secret plan for summer offensive to force US out of Iraq

Guardian

Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal, US officials say.

[…]

The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.

[…]

US officials now say they have firm evidence that Tehran has switched tack as it senses a chance of victory in Iraq. In a parallel development, they say they also have proof that Iran has reversed its previous policy in Afghanistan and is now supporting and supplying the Taliban's campaign against US, British and other Nato forces.

Tehran's strategy to discredit the US surge and foment a decisive congressional revolt against Mr Bush is national in scope and not confined to the Shia south, its traditional sphere of influence, the senior official in Baghdad said. It included stepped-up coordination with Shia militias such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Jaish al-Mahdi as well as Syrian-backed Sunni Arab groups and al-Qaida in Mesopotamia, he added. Iran was also expanding contacts across the board with paramilitary forces and political groups, including Kurdish parties such as the PUK, a US ally

COMMENTARY

What We Owe Our Soldiers This Memorial Day

Alex Epstein, Capitalism Magazine

Every Memorial Day, we pay tribute to the American men and women who have died in combat. With speeches and solemn ceremonies, we recognize their courage and valor. But one fact goes unacknowledged in our Memorial Day tributes: all too many of our soldiers have died unnecessarily--because they were sent to fight for a purpose other than America's freedom.

The proper purpose of a government is to protect its citizens' lives and freedom against the initiation of force by criminals at home and aggressors abroad. The American government has a sacred responsibility to recognize the individual value of every one of its citizens' lives, and thus to do everything possible to protect the rights of each to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. This absolutely includes our soldiers.

Soldiers are not sacrificial objects; they are full-fledged Americans with the same moral right as the rest of us to the pursuit of their own goals, their own dreams, their own happiness. Rational soldiers enjoy much of the work of military service, take pride in their ability to do it superlatively, and gain profound satisfaction in protecting the freedom of every American, including their own freedom.

Soldiers know that in entering the military, they are risking their lives in the event of war. But this risk is not, as it is often described, a "sacrifice" for a "higher cause."

Rachel Carson's Genocide

Keith Lockitch, The Ayn Rand Institute

On May 27, environmentalists will celebrate what would have been the 100th birthday of Rachel Carson, the founding mother of their movement.

But Carson's centenary is no cause for celebration. Her legacy includes more than a million deaths a year from the mosquito-borne disease malaria. Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, has been essentially discarded--discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma advanced by Carson.

The crusade against DDT began with Carson's antipesticide diatribe "Silent Spring," published in 1962 at the height of the worldwide antimalaria campaign. The widespread spraying of DDT had caused a spectacular drop in malaria incidence--Sri Lanka, for example, reported 2.8 million malaria victims in 1948, but by 1963 it had only 17. Yet Carson's book made no mention of this. It said nothing of DDT's crucial role in eradicating malaria in industrialized countries, or of the tens of millions of lives saved by its use.

Instead, Carson filled her book with misinformation--alleging, among other claims, that DDT causes cancer. Her unsubstantiated assertion that continued DDT use would unleash a cancer epidemic generated a panicked fear of the pesticide that endures as public opinion to this day.

But the scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent.

Opportunity Knocks; But Don't Answer

Michael Hurd, DrHurd.com

I saw a quote of presidential contender John Edwards the other day. The quote essentially stated that he wanted to "give average Americans the same opportunity to succeed that I had." This is more or less what all candidates for high office say. What does it actually mean? In other words, how can some politician "give" anyone--"average" or otherwise--an opportunity?

In a political context, the only thing that enables opportunity is freedom. Other than the "freedom" to impose force or fraud on others--that is, to violate the rights of others--there should be no restrictions on individuals to pursue their dreams and to develop their talents. If I thought for one second that John Edwards meant, by his statement, that he seeks to expand the freedom of individuals to do so, then I would support him as a standout candidate. Of course, he supports no such thing. Instead, he wants to restrict the freedom of doctors and patients to provide/receive medical care by having the government control it more than it already does. (He calls this "universal coverage.") He wants to increase the amount of income that wealth producers give to the government, thereby inhibiting these wealth producers from (a) enjoying what's rightfully theirs and (b) most likely investing it in businesses that keep capitalism expanding and going. (He calls this "investment.") He, like his cohorts in both parties (who only vary in degree and specifics), wants to restrict numerous freedoms while calling it "expansion."

Always beware of candidates who seek to "expand" your "opportunity." A mommy or daddy can do this while you're growing up, or contemplating college. But that's about it. It's the job of politicians to expand and protect freedom--nothing more, and nothing less. These days, we mostly need expansion of freedom...not expansion of what they call "opportunity."

In Defense of Price Gouging

Galileo Blogs

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed a bill outlawing gasoline “price gouging.” Violators would face penalties of fines as high as $150 million or prison terms of up to two years. Price gouging is defined as “taking unfair advantage” or charging “unconscionably excessive” prices for fuels. What is unfair advantage? How does one measure when a price is unconscionably excessive? There is no answer.

This is bad law. First, because it is non-objective. Because no objective definition of price gouging is provided in the law, a gas station owner or oil company can never know when it is breaking the law. There is no way to comply with a law when the crime cannot even be defined. More ominously, a non-objective law becomes a tool to terrorize in the hands of unscrupulous government officials. The businessman is told that he must obey the bureaucrat or face punishment, a punishment he cannot defend against because there are no objective standards. This is a tool of tyranny. Incidentally, this is also the nature of antitrust. Like this anti-gouging measure, antitrust law is completely non-objective.

The other reason why this law should not be passed is because it is anti-capitalist. It attacks the heart of the market economy, which is the price mechanism. Prices work to harmonize the interests of buyers and sellers when they are allowed to freely rise and fall.

Sarkozy's task

George Will, Townhall.com

Arson is a form of commentary favored by the French left, so at least 1,000 vehicles were torched by disappointed supporters of the Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal after she was defeated 53-47 by Nicolas Sarkozy. Last spring, rioting was the left's economic argument when the government proposed, then retreated from, legislation that would have made it somewhat easier for businesses to fire younger workers in the first two years of employment. The idea behind the legislation was that employers would be more likely to hire workers if it were not a legal ordeal to fire them. The rioters were, of course, mostly young.

France's unemployment rate is 8.7 percent, nearly double the U.S. rate of 4.5 percent. Among persons under age 25, a cohort that supported Royal, the rate is 21.2 percent, and is apt to stay there unless Sarkozy can implement reforms that irritate rioters.

Sarkozy has a mandate from an 84 percent turnout. Seen, however, in the flickering glow of smoldering Peugeots, his chances of fundamentally reforming France seem fragile, and his idea of fundamental reform -- he remains an ardent protectionist -- seems pallid. Nevertheless, his attempt merits Americans' attention because he is confronting, in an especially virulent form, a problem that is becoming more acute here. The problem is the cultural contradictions of the welfare state.

Chavez to Enslave Louverture's Ghost

Gus Van Horn

In an irony so blatant only generations of "Progressive" education could hide it from the general public, Hugo Chavez -- the man who has essentially transformed Venezuela into a giant plantation -- is backing a film about Toussaint Louverture, who led an 18th-century slave revolt in Haiti.

To summarize: A studio operated with funds expropriated from Venezuelans will make a film about a slave who revolted against his servitude -- in the name of rousing world opinion against the only civilization in human history, the West, to have abolished slavery!

To top that off, the black American director who plans to help him is not just oblivious to the irony, but is showing through his own actions so far that something more fundamental than Louverture's story has been "wiped clean" from our "historic memory": the difference between freedom and slavery.

It may be true that most Americans do not know about Toussaint Louverture, but I would wager that just as many are unaware that it was largely through the efforts of the British Empire during the nineteenth century that slavery -- a nearly universal practice all the way up to that time -- was essentially abolished throughout the globe

The notion that the story of Louverture's struggle for freedom is somehow an indictment of the West is possible only by a massive dropping of context, including not just that it was the West that abolished slavery in the first place, but that there are some, like Chavez, who want to bring it back, only calling it "freedom" this time.

Yes. Slavery was once practiced in the West, but this was a massive contradiction to the Enlightenment principle that men should enjoy the freedom to pursue their own happiness. In fact, it was eventually this better principle that won out.

Far from helping us to remember this important aspect of our history, Chavez would prefer, in a sense, to re-enslave Louverture in the service of his desire to promote the fiction that slavery -- and not freedom -- is the defining attribute of western civilization and that, by implication, the universal slavery of socialism -- in the forms of massive theft, censorship, and oppression -- somehow represents freedom.

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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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This Week on the Web (May 12 – May 18)

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COMMENTARY

Study of Troops’ Mental Health, Ethics Indicts Bush’s Selfless War
Elan Journo, The Ayn Rand Institute (via Principles in Practice)

A recently disclosed Pentagon study on the impact of the Iraq war on U.S. combat troops suggests that many are stressed and hold views at odds with official ethics standards. Critics view this as evidence that more must be done to ensure troops comply with those standards. But in fact the study provides evidence for a searing indictment of Washington’s immoral battlefield policies—policies that entail the sacrifice of American troops for the sake of the enemy.

The study reports, for example, that less than half of the soldiers and Marines surveyed would report a team member for unethical behavior. It also finds that “soldiers that have high levels of anger, experienced high levels of combat or screened positive for a mental health problem were nearly twice as likely to mistreat non-combatants” as those feeling less anger and screening negative for a mental health problem.

Although many military personnel may support the Iraq war, and although war is inherently distressing, Washington’s immoral policies necessitate putting our troops in an impossible situation. The reported attitudes of combat troops in Iraq can be understood as the natural reaction of individuals thrust into that situation.

U.S. troops were sent, not to defend America against whatever threat Hussein’s hostile regime posed to us, as a first step toward defeating our enemies in the region; but instead the troops were sent (as Bush explained) to “sacrifice for the liberty of strangers,” putting the lives of Iraqis above their own.

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Rebuilding Ground Zero
Steve Malanga, Opinion Journal

But if Mr. Silverstein thought his quick work--which for several years represented the only signs of progress around the site--was going to earn him congratulations, he was mistaken. Soon after 7 World Trade opened, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg criticized him for not leasing it more quickly, claiming that the developer was asking prices that were too high. Government officials publicly pressured him to complete a deal with a Chinese developer who was to be the tower's first tenant, and then excoriated him when he cancelled the deal after the prospective tenant failed to provide adequate details on its financing.

But since then Mr. Silverstein has managed to lease 1.1 million square feet of 7 World Trade to blue-chip tenants like Moody's, at rents that are 50% higher than what officials were urging him to accept. "I simply did not listen to all the naysayers because I was spending my money, not theirs, and fortunately I had no government involvement in 7 World Trade, which gave me the opportunity to do what I do best," he says.

While construction proceeded on 7 World Trade, Mr. Silverstein got bogged down in the battle over how to redevelop the rest of the site. The agency charged with leading the redevelopment was torn by conflicting visions and tried to shoehorn as much as possible into their plan--a museum, a memorial to the dead, a home for a major New York cultural institution, residential development and office space. Critics urged cutting back the office space to make room for these varied uses. In the midst of his re-election campaign, Mayor Bloomberg even declared that the market couldn't support new skyscrapers anyway. He advocated instead building housing where the towers once stood, calling to mind a glum prediction about Manhattan by a character in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead": "The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project." The New York Daily News responded to the mayor's imprecations with the headline: "Butt Out, Larry."

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The Next WTC...If There Is One
Michael Hurd, DrHurd.com

Steve Malanga, writing in The Wall Street Journal Opinion page 5/12-13/07:

"The terrorists attacked the twin towers because they embodied the values of our democratic free-market economic system. The memorial that will rise on Ground Zero will make no reference to those values, nor seek to celebrate our way of life. Rather the memorial, in the way of postmodern monuments, will merely ask us to ponder the absence of those who died."

How true--and how sad. The aftermath of the World Trade Center is a metaphor for our times. It will be rebuilt with private money, but only on terms the government finds acceptable. This is how most of our "free market" economic system operates today--at the behest of the government, but with private dollars. (Keep in mind: Even tax dollars started out as private dollars. Someone created the wealth.) And government officials have accepted the "postmodern" philosophy of today's intellectuals. That philosophy holds, on the surface, that there are no values or principles and, therefore, the new World Trade Center (why even name it that?) can stand for nothing except as a memorial to those who died. In truth, it's free markets, capitalism and, on a deeper level, man's productive enjoyment of life on earth that these intellectuals despise, which is why, in their eyes, the next World Trade Center must stand for nothing aside from a gravesite. It remains to be seen if it will stand at all. If it does, and if the World Trade Center rises again, then the real values behind its name may well override the cynical attempts of our politicians and professors to pretend those values never existed.

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The Genesis of Thought Crime
Ed Cline, The Rule of Reason

The first and most crucial thing to grasp about what can be deemed a “hate crime” is that it is, essentially, a political crime. If this country were still ruled by objective law; if Congress fulfilled its proper role as a protector of individual rights; and if the Supreme Court acted to uphold the legitimate individual rights-based philosophy of the Constitution; then pressure and special interest groups would have no chance of having laws enacted that favored them at the expense of others. In short, they would have no political power to instigate the passage of fiat legislation. The only crime that could legitimately be called “political” would be treason, that is, actions taken to aid and/or comfort the enemies of the United States. But every piece of “public policy” legislation in this country, from Social Security, to Medicare, to banking laws, to disability laws, to anti-discrimination, racial and gender quota laws – the list is long and growing longer – is a consequence of political pull and a measure of the corruptive influence of collectivism.
[…]

What will stop the blurring of distinctions between disparagement, defamation, slander and libel? What federal, state or local judge will uphold the conceptual lines between them at the risk of being politically incorrect and inviting the wrath of the liberal left and pressure groups? Well, nothing and no one. Rational jurisprudence is unraveling apace with freedom of speech. Fox Television’s “24” toned down its anti-jihadist plots at the behest of CAIR. No major American newspaper or public figure came to the defense of the Danish cartoonists. And Dr. John Lewis last month was subjected to actions of intimidating thugs at George Mason University for daring to criticize Islamists. Do not forget that other courageous individuals, such as Daniel Pipes, Steve Emerson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and other critics of Islam, can appear at universities and other public forms only after the most stringent security measures have been taken. All this occurred while H.R. 1592 incubated in the House. But Muslims would not be the only beneficiaries of H.R. 1592. What rankles conservatives more than its potential to further abridge the First Amendment is that it singles out for special protection homosexuals, the “trans-gendered,” and “cross-dressers,” all “sinners” by conservative moral criteria. Do not expect conservatives to defend the First Amendment with any important, fundamental arguments. For example, the possibility that H.R. 1592 would have any connection to the abridgement of the First Amendment is nowhere mentioned in George Will’s column. He skirts the issue – “Hate-crime laws…mandate enhanced punishments for crimes committed because of thoughts that government especially disapproves.” In fact, Christian activists no more like seeing God’s or Christ’s name besmirched or hearing it taken in vain than do Muslims Allah’s or Mohammad’s. It is a certainty that they, too, will avail themselves of the power of H.R. 1592, if it becomes law, to punish or gag anyone who dares offend their religious feelings or sensibilities, as well.


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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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Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who may be interested (or they can sign up by sending an email with “Week on the Web” in the subject line to rsmurphy@hotmail.com).

Send links to articles that you feel would be a good addition to this newsletter to rsmurphy@hotmail.com.

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This Week on the Web (May 5 – May 11)

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Quote of the Week:

The modern political premise implicitly held by many politicians is that the government owns you, or at least knows what's best for you. This logic requires that the government tell you what you can and should do with your life, such as not costing the government too much for your medical care.

At the logical extreme, government officials could — and should — force you to sacrifice your very life for a greater good.

The other premise is that you own yourself, such as articulated in our Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

In this vision, human beings have rights prior to government; government is a tool of the governed, not the other way around.

- Robert J. Cihak

Audio of the Week:

Allison on Strategy, Profits, and Self-Interest

EconTalk

John Allison, CEO of BB&T Bank, lays out his business philosophy arguing for the virtues of profits, self-interest and production. His definition of justice, one of the core values of his firm, is that those who produce more, get more. He argues that Bill Gates would do more for the world improving Microsoft than running his foundation and giving away money. Allison praises Atlas Shrugged and refuses to let his bank make loans to companies that use eminent domain to acquire property. Is this any way to run a company? Does Allison really run his company this way? How does he deal with the gap between his philosophy and our popular culture's view of business and profits? Listen as Allison and host Russ Roberts discuss BB&T's unusual business strategy.

NEWS

Gas station owner told to raise prices

Yahoo! News

A service station that offered discounted gas to senior citizens and people supporting youth sports has been ordered by the state to raise its prices.

Center City BP owner Raj Bhandari has been offering senior citizens a 2 cent per gallon price break and discount cards that let sports boosters pay 3 cents less per gallon.

But the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection says those deals violate Wisconsin's Unfair Sales Act, which requires stations to sell gas for about 9.2 percent more than the wholesale price.

Bhandari said he received a letter from the state auditor last month saying the state would sue him if he did not raise his prices. The state could penalize him for each discounted gallon he sold, with the fine determined by a judge.

Bhandari, who bought the station a year ago, said he worries customers will think he stopped the discounts because he wants to make more money. About 10 percent of his customers had used the discount cards.

Dale Van Camp said he bought a $50 card to support the local youth hockey program. It would have saved him about $100 per year on gas, he said.

COMMENTARY

Jamestown: Birthplace of America's Distinctive, Secular Ideal

Eric Daniels, ARI Media (via Principles in Practice)

On May 14, America will commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the settlement of Jamestown, Virginia. The occasion provides us with an opportunity to understand and celebrate the distinctive, secular ideal underlying America's freedom and prosperity.

Although many Americans recognize that Jamestown was the first permanent English colony in North America (predating the Pilgrims and Puritans of Massachusetts by over a decade), too many mistakenly view the religious ethos of the New England colonies as the impetus for America's flourishing. But the religious colonists, whose moral outlook stands opposed to our ideals of intellectual and political liberty, merely transplanted Old World ideas to new soil. The New World that promised opportunity and progress had begun in Jamestown, where the defining spirit of American individualism was born.

The Jamestown settlement project began, not as a Puritan escape to pursue and enforce a dogmatic faith, but with a group of profit-seeking investors in London pooling capital in a joint-stock company, a forerunner of our modern corporations. Members of the Virginia Company had organized with the goal of uncovering economic opportunity in North America by finding precious metals and possibly a water route to the Pacific.

Don't Extend the 'Hate Crime' Law---Abolish It

ARI Media (via Principles in Practice)

Last week the House passed a measure that extends the federal "hate crime" law to include attacks motivated by the victims' gender or sexual orientation.

"Congress should not extend the federal 'hate crime' law," said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "It should abolish the law.

"The government's job is to punish criminals for initiating force against other citizens; objective laws that ban the use of force and fraud are its means of doing so. But 'hate crime' laws undermine objective law at the root by punishing criminals, not for their actions, but for their ideas.

"According to 'hate crime' laws, a murderer deserves a greater punishment if his crime is motivated by an idea such as racism or sexism. If the government assumes the power to punish on the basis of 'unacceptable' ideas, it has assumed the power to exonerate and offer leniency to favored ideas. If anti-abortion religionists hold sway in government, on the premise of 'hate crime' laws, a zealous Christian who guns down an abortion doctor could receive a lighter sentence or be exonerated—on the grounds that such an act is evidence of noble 'idealism.'

"Once the government starts punishing criminals for acting on 'unacceptable ideas,' it has assumed the role of arbiter for which ideas are acceptable or not. If whoever wields power can shape the law to advance an ideological agenda, then it cannot be long before merely holding unorthodox or unconventional ideas becomes a crime that the government punishes.

"The government has no business punishing people for their ideas, no matter how repugnant. By demanding the government do precisely that, 'hate crime' laws threaten our freedom of thought—and undermine the system of objective law that protects it. Such laws should be abolished."

The Democrats’ Assault on Freedom of Speech

Edward Cline, The Rule of Reason

“Fight the doctrine with slaughters the individual with a doctrine which slaughters the individual.” (Ellsworth Toohey, The Fountainhead, p. 669, Centennial edition.)

The gloating, drooling avarice with which the Democrats took possession of Congress should have shocked no one. They took over the House and Senate like a spendthrift heir who had finally won a long-contested lawsuit over the distribution of a decedent’s estate. All their plans for expanding the welfare state and government powers were put on hold for the longest time – they thought – and now they were going to have a feast redirecting the nation’s private wealth and abridging its remaining freedoms as they saw fit – with government force.

They were ready and eager to bulldoze everything to make way for Hillary’s “Village,” declaring political eminent domain over the whole country.

The irony is that the man who blocked their agenda for seven years, Republican President George W. Bush, is responsible for having expanded government powers and enlarged the federal debt on such a scale that his administration’s record would turn Franklin D. Roosevelt green with envy. Bush pulled a rabbit out of his hat, in the name of “free enterprise” and other “conservative” values, and did what the Democrats would have given their eyeteeth to do in the name of explicit collectivism, only wholesale. Bush’s social, economic and moral values are certainly not those of the Democrats; they are just different forms of the same things, different expressions and applications of statist and collectivist policies.

[…]

The Republicans have always wanted to experiment with censorship, but what has stymied them is not being able to find a nicer, less scary term for it. In fact, freedom of speech over the airwaves and in some newspapers has allowed them to criticize the liberal left. The abandonment of the “Fairness Doctrine” on the airwaves, instituted by the FCC in 1949 and dropped in 1987 – the failure of government power to coerce a radio or television station to carry “opposing “ or “conflicting” viewpoints – has been a boon to especially conservative radio talk show hosts. Until the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, many stations preferred to remain silent on issues rather than attempt to perform the “public service” of presenting opposing positions.

As Adam Thierer observed on the Cato Institute’s TechKnowledge site:

“…The Fairness Doctrine actually stifled the growth of disseminating views and, in effect, made free speech less free. As the FCC noted in repealing the doctrine in 1987, it ‘had the net effect of reducing, rather than enhancing, the discussion of controversial issues of public importance.’” (April 20, 2004)

The Democrats, however, are not so shy about what they want to impose. They want to revive the “Fairness Doctrine” as a means of silencing or muting popular talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity.

Chavez Steals American Property, Bush Does Nothing

ARI Media (via Principles in Practice)

On Tuesday president Hugo Chavez forced ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil to cede operational control over their multi-billion dollar projects to the Venezuelan government. With their backs to the wall, these oil companies are "negotiating" the terms of their surrender, and trying to get some "compensation" for the property being stolen from them.

"President Bush should do something to protect the assets of American companies in Venezuela," said Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "It is disgraceful that while Chavez steals American property Bush says nothing and does nothing."

"At a minimum," Dr. Brook said, "Bush should denounce Chavez's nationalization of private businesses as a form of robbery and cut U.S. diplomatic relationships with Venezuela."

Federal Efficiency Rules Ruin Washing Machines

Competitive Enterprise Institute

New findings by Consumer Reports on washing machines demonstrate that their performance has been severely degraded by federal energy efficiency standards. The findings should raise alarms about the federal government’s push to tighten its energy conservation mandates, especially when it comes to more complex technologies such as the automobile.

The just released June issue of Consumer Reports finds that many new top-loading models are “sacrificing cleaning ability” due to the Department of Energy’s new standards. The standards, which were issued in 2001 but took effect this year, require the machines to use twenty-one percent less energy. The new models comply with these rules, but when it came to cleaning ability “some had the lowest scores we’ve seen in years”, according to the magazine. High performing models are still available, the magazine notes, but often at $900-1000 more. This is in sharp contrast to DOE’s claims, in 2001, that the new rules would save consumers money and not affect cleaning ability.

The findings for washing machines should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the federal government’s fuel efficiency program for new cars. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules, in place since 1973, have also had the effect of downgrading performance – specifically safety, in large part due to new cars being made lighter. According to the National Academy of Sciences, CAFE rules contribute to thousands of deaths a year.

“The government’s claims that its efficiency standards would give us a better product have turned out to be absolutely false,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute General Counsel Sam Kazman. “Instead, it has managed to take a simple, reliable, low-cost appliance and wreck it. Why should we believe that government will do any better on something as complex as the car?”

As the Senate Commerce Committee meets tomorrow to mark up more stringent CAFE standards, the example of the humble washing machine is especially relevant. Poorly functioning household appliances are bad enough; vehicles that are less safe are far worse.

********************************************************************************************

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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This Week on the Web (April 28 – May 4)

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Quote of the Week:

The West's survival requires that we wake up and recognize the true character of the enemy we face. We are involved in a clash with a culture that has little regard for the Western values that hold the sanctity of human life dear. Terrorists specifically target civilian populations. It makes no difference to them whether their victims are babies, women or children. In fighting the war on terrorism, the West goes to considerable lengths, often risking the lives of our troops, to avoid civilian casualties. The West has the means, but not the will, to utterly destroy terrorists and countries that give them sanction. I hate to think of what the terrorists might do to give us the will.

- Walter Williams

Audio of the Week:

Audio of John Lewis's Talk at GMU

The Objective Standard

The audio of John Lewis’s talk “‘No Substitute for Victory’: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism,” which was delivered at George Mason University on April 24, 2007, has been posted to the events page of the TOS website. The audio is free and accessible to all. Click here to listen now.

NEWS

Iranian Walks Out Of Dinner With Condi

CBS News

Iran's foreign minister walked out of a dinner of diplomats where he was seated directly across from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on the pretext that the female violinist entertaining the gathering was dressed too revealingly.

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Editor’s note: And we’re supposed to be negotiating with these medieval Neanderthals…why, exactly?

COMMENTARY

Kant Stressed Duty, Rand Lauded Reason

Bob Murphy, Richmond Times Dispatch ("Correspondent of the Day" 5/3)

In his column, "Brain Damage: Science Proves That I'm Right and You're Insane, My Friend", A. Barton Hinkle lumps together "Catholic theologians, Ayn Rand's objectivist hordes, and admirers of Immanuel Kant" among those who take a "deontological" approach to ethics. He is mistaken.

A deontological theory of ethics is duty-centered, and duty was a cornerstone of Kant's beliefs. His influence has been seen in most dictatorships - from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany to modern Venezuela. Kant wrote that it is "necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith," and in oppressive societies, there is always a duty to have faith in the god of the state.

However, Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism has a very different basis, which apparently - according to Hinkle - is embraced by "hordes", in contrast to Kant's "admirers". Rand advocated a morality based on reason as man's only tool of knowledge and his basic means of survival, with man's life as the standard of value. In Rand's words: "To live is his basic act of choice."

Therefore, man's only ethical "duty" is to use the facts of reality both to determine right from wrong and to make the choices that he feels will best guide his life, based on what he values (with government's role to be the protector of individual rights from force). This is in sharp contrast to both deontologism and utilitarianism, neither of which embraces the rights of the individual.

Morality presupposes a choice. Duty leaves no room to choose.

Where are the liberal non-Muslims?

Frank Gaffney, Townhall.com

Since 9/11, many of us have wondered: Where are the moderate Muslims? If they are out there, why are we not hearing more, and getting more help, from them in the fight against our common foe -- the totalitarian Islamists?

In recent weeks in this space, I have chronicled the saga of an effort to answer that question. It took the form of a 52-minute documentary I helped produce for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s “America at a Crossroads” series. The film, entitled “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center,” features compelling stories of anti-Islamist Muslims who have had the courage to stand up to co-religionists who are using faith to accomplish political ends.

The documentary makes clear why the moderates are not more in evidence. Observant Muslims who dare to challenge the Islamists over ideological agendas pursued in the name of religion are shown being subjected to ostracism, intense coercion to conform and, in some cases, death threats. As long as these anti-Islamist Muslims are rightly seen as isolated, vulnerable and powerless, it would be foolish to believe that many of their co-religionists will want to emulate them.

[…]

Unfortunately, what has happened to “Islam vs. Islamists” can only compound this perception. The Public Broadcasting Service and its Washington flagship station, WETA, refused to air this film. While a number of explanations have been given for that decision – including demonstrably false claims that the documentary was not submitted on time, was too long, was unfinished, the officially stated reason is that it was: “flawed by incomplete storytelling, a limited focus that does not adequately corroborate the film’s conclusions, and a general lack of attention to the obligation of fairness, which requires that viewers have access to additional context and relevant information about a complex subject.”

In other words, PBS/WETA judged our film to be “unfair” to the “conservative imams” and fellow Islamists shown denouncing, threatening and, in one case, proposing to murder the moderate Muslims we profile. Unless our production team, which included a number of world-class journalists, agreed to change not the “storytelling” but the story, “Islam vs. Islamists” was going to be suppressed.

Interestingly, PBS and WETA were untroubled by the manifest lack of fairness in a film on much the same subject entitled “The Muslim Americans,” produced by Crossroads series host Robert MacNeil. This documentary amounted to a love letter to the Islamists and like-minded organizations in America. It helped legitimate a number of their most prominent spokesmen and agendas, in the process virtually ignoring easily ascertained records of troubling statements, behavior and/or affiliations.

A Loser's History: George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace

Christopher Hitchens, Slate.com

It's difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm. There is already a perfectly good pro-Tenet book written by a man who knows how to employ the overworked term storm. Bob Woodward's 2002 effort, Bush at War, was, in many of its aspects, almost dictated by George Tenet.

[…]

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his "slam dunk" vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that.

[…]

In the post-Kuwait-war period, there was little political risk in doing what Tenet had always done and making the worst assumption about anything that Saddam Hussein might even be thinking about. (Who but an abject idiot would ever make a different assumption or grant the Baathists the smallest benefit of the least doubt?) But we forget so soon and so easily. The problem used to be the diametrically opposite one. The whole of our vaunted "intelligence" system completely refused to believe any of the warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to invade and occupy Kuwait in 1990. By the time the menace was taken seriously, the invasion itself was under way. This is why the work of Kenneth Pollack (this time titled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq) was received with such gravity when it was published in 2002. Pollack had interpreted the signals correctly in 1990—and been ignored—and was arguing that another final round with Saddam was inevitable. His book did more to persuade policy-makers in Washington than anything ever said by Ahmad Chalabi. To revisit these arguments is to be reminded that no thinking person ever felt that the danger posed by a totalitarian and aggressive Iraq was a negligible one. And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Jefferson

Genevieve LaGreca, George Reisman’s blog

Our rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness are rights to take action; they are not entitlements to the goods and services of others. Jefferson defined liberty as "unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others." This means we may act in our own behalf, for example, to earn money and buy a house, but we may not expect the government to tax others to provide us with a house for free. Life requires productive work and effort to sustain it, a fact that Jefferson considered to be our glory. When his Monticello farm fell on hard times, he began producing nails, and did so proudly because "every honest employment is deemed honorable [in America]…. My new trade of nail-making is to me in this country what an additional title of nobility … [is] in Europe." He scorned the "idleness" of the European aristocracy, calling their courts "the weakest and worst part of mankind." What would he think of our current government's grants and handouts to countless special interest groups, a practice that rewards people for non-effort?

Our right to property means we have the right to keep the things we acquire. Does a rich person have less of a right to property than a poor person? According to Jefferson: "To take from one because it is thought his own industry … has acquired too much, in order to spare others who … have not exercised equal industry and skill is to violate the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." What would he think of the persistent cries of today's politicians to "tax the rich," thereby depriving them of their property and the pursuit of their happiness?

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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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Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone who may be interested (or they can sign up by sending an email with “Week on the Web” in the subject line to rsmurphy@hotmail.com).

Send links to articles that you feel would be a good addition to this newsletter to rsmurphy@hotmail.com.

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