The Objectivism Online Meta-Blog

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

At FrontPage Magazine, Jacob Laskin correctly cries foul on the Republican response to Nevada Senator Harry Reid's recently-publicized "racist" comments about Barack Obama. Laskin notes that the GOP is acting on an ill-conceived premise of expediency by adopting the childish tactics of the multiculturalist left. Doing so, while bemoaning the obvious double-standard applied to those who make such remarks, he argues is foolish because it wrongly legitimizes these tactics:

[GOP National Chairman Michael] Steele is of course right about this double standard. But the chairman does nothing to restore integrity to the political debate by validating the political left's pernicious smear that any and all comments about race, however innocuous, must be treated as an act of racism, with their author forced to prostrate himself before various racial lobbies or risk banishment from polite society.

As I have noted in the past with other, similar, cries of "Hypocrisy!" from the right, it is fine to call someone a hypocrite, but not enough when that person's precepts are wrong to begin with and it would thus be immoral to actually follow them anyway.

The right, unfortunately, does this all the time, even going so far as to dare the Democrats to be more consistent collectivists from time to time. But in this case, it's worse: The right is doing the job for the left rather than taking this golden opportunity to stand up for freedom of speech and against the attempted thought control that is multiculturalism.

Until the right definitively repudiates collectivism and its undergirding morality of altruism, such moral cowardice will be the order of the day. For the guilty secret of many conservatives is that they aren't individualists, either. This is why we see them, time and time again, toss tomatoes at the Democrats, only to "show them how it's done" in exactly the wrong way.

This is not the first time the GOP has aped the left right after noting one of its shortcomings, but it is one of the more obvious examples in recent memory.

-- CAV

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

You might be surprised to learn that New York City doesn't have a mayor. Yet it's true! New York City is governed by an armed nanny, Michael Bloomberg. He is determined to coerce adults into his vision of healthy living, without regard to their rights or the relevant science. His latest proposal concerns salt. The New York Times reports:

First New York City required restaurants to cut out trans fat. Then it made restaurant chains post calorie counts on their menus. Now it wants to protect people from another health scourge: salt.

On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products.

...

The city's campaign against salt resembles its push to cut trans fat from restaurant foods, which began with a call for voluntary compliance. When that did not work, the city passed a law to force restaurants to eliminate trans fat.

But city officials said it would be difficult to legislate sodium reduction.

"There's not an easy regulatory fix," said Geoffrey Cowley, an associate health commissioner. "You would have to micromanage so many targets for so many different products."

Oh, don't worry about those pesky details! Nanny Bloomberg will do his very best to mandate salt reduction at the point of a gun when his "voluntary" scheme fails.

Back in April, John Tierney wrote an excellent op-ed for the New York Times about this proposal, likening it to an ill-founded experiment using the whole city as unwitting subjects. That's clearly immoral, particularly given that the case against salt -- not just for healthy people but even for people with heart disease -- is weak at best. Tierney writes:

First, a reduced-salt diet doesn't lower everyone's blood pressure. Some individuals' blood pressure can actually rise in response to less salt, and most people aren't affected much either way. The more notable drop in blood pressure tends to occur in some -- but by no means all -- people with hypertension, a condition that affects more than a quarter of American adults.

Second, even though lower blood pressure correlates with less heart disease, scientists haven't demonstrated that eating less salt leads to better health and longer life. The results from observational studies have too often been inconclusive and contradictory. After reviewing the literature for the Cochrane Collaboration in 2003, researchers from Copenhagen University concluded that "there is little evidence for long-term benefit from reducing salt intake."

Even worse, salt-reduction might kill people with heart disease:

In the past year, researchers led by Salvatore Paterna of the University of Palermo have reported one of the most rigorous experiments so far: a randomized clinical trial of heart patients who were put on different diets. Those on a low-sodium diet were more likely to be rehospitalized and to die, results that prompted the researchers to ask, "Is sodium an old enemy or a new friend?"

Moreover, salt might be the only source of iodine for many people. Of course, iodized salt isn't a great source of iodine, and much salt isn't iodized. Nonetheless, further salt reduction would likely only exacerbate the all-too-common iodine deficiency in America today. Such iodine deficiency can be a source of major health problems -- such as hypothyroidism, retardation in children, goiter, and possibly breast disease. Moreover -- surprise, surprise! -- hypothyroidism dramatically increases risk of heart disease -- the very condition that the Nanny of NYC seeks to reduce by limiting salt.

No, I won't call that an unintended consequence. Like the politicians determined to worsen the mortgage crisis with their good intentions, Nanny Statists like Bloomberg ought to know better. They deserve to be morally condemned in the strongest possible terms for the suffering and death they cause by their negligent exercise of force.

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The US Never "Bullied" Castro

Via Dismuke is an interesting look at the actual history of the Cuban "revolution," in which Humberto Fontova even calls a spade a spade regarding the nature of Cuba's nationalization of American assets:

The Castro regime has never settled a penny of this mass burglary with its U.S. victims. Search for any mention of the above in an MSM article on the so-called U.S. embargo of Cuba (in fact, we've been Cuba's main food supplier and fifth largest trading partner for close to a decade now) and you will draw a complete blank.

Between Oliver Stone and the abysmal history curriculum in the typical public school, this editorial is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Where There's Smoke, ...

... and the U.S. Treasury smells it, there's fire.

We may be about to see what can happen when an arsonist tries to avoid getting caught. Karl Denninger quotes Business Week:

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

This move Denninger variously calls, "an attempt to prevent the collapse of the Treasury market," "a forced "CALL option on the future taxing ability of the government," and "the most dangerous investment of all."

He was most succinct the first time, though, when he called it a "screw job." (HT: Dismuke)

The Anti-Filibuster Movement

Claiming that the filibuster violates the intent of the Constitution because it "renders [the Senate] even less representative," Timothy Noah calls for its elimination at Slate and notes what he hopes is growing momentum for same. This is one of the last things I needed to hear about today.

Needless to say, Noah fails to adequately consider the intent of the checks and balances added to the Constitution, which exist in part to protect Americans from unrestrained democracy. To the extent that he does, he parrots James Fallow's charge that the filibuster,"converts the Senate from the 'saucer' George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might 'cool,' into a deep freeze and a dead weight."

Given the amount of serious deliberation that occurs in a legislative body that has gotten into the habit of passing major legislation unread -- and which is, incidentally, unconstitutional -- Noah should be thanking his lucky stars for the longstanding precedent of the use of this happy accident of history.

When, like socialized medicine, the drink is a hot tea made from the leaves of a poisonous weed, I for one would rather it be placed in a deep freeze permanently than into a mere saucer.

Heh!

Regarding my mentioning to him over email that, on my way to work every day, I walk past Stata Center, in whose bowels nests Noam Chomsky, reader Snedcat opines: "One of the few valid circumstances in which to wear a cross! Though garlic works just as well, I hear...but you're probably safe so long as you keep in direct sunlight."

-- CAV

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Clark S. Judge offers some surprisingly sound advice for the Republican Party in the form of a ten point plan for the 2010 mid-term elections, although it does not go far enough. My favorite item, because it reintroduces a much-needed idea into the mainstream political debate is his Item 6:

6) For the midterm election, unite around a clear agenda of repeal. The party should give its candidates a list of programs and spending that will be up for cancellation the hour a Republican Congress is sworn in. At the top of the list should be the Troubled Asset Relief Program, unspent stimulus funds, and the health-care overhaul.

I've long said that the voting public and politicians alike should become reacquainted with the "r-word."

Although the above suggestion is a good place to start, it is too bad that Judge didn't make a more principled case that recommended a "clear agenda of repeal" extending well beyond the next election and did not stop at only the newest incursions against individual rights foisted on us by Bush and Obama-Pelosi.

For instance, why focus on penny-ante earmarks...

The House and Senate GOP caucuses should walk away from earmarks, leaving Democrats alone to defend this symbol of D.C.'s degeneracy.

... or stop at mere "reform" of social programs that are inherently corrupt, rather than formulating a strategy to phase them out?

3) Start talking about the need to reform Social Security and Medicare. Swing voters know these programs could devastate federal finances. They want assurance that politicians know this, too, and are committed to fixing them. Talk of reforming these programs is no longer the third rail of politics. It will win the swing voters' respect.

The fact that Judge does not go quite far enough in his suggestions to the Republicans should serve notice on all who favor individual rights. The kind of substantive, principled reform of which Judge's suggestions can really only be a first baby step will never occur unless we renounce all party loyalty and treat every election as an auction with the winning bidder being the politician who believably (preferably via a solid track record) pledges to increase government protection for individual rights at every opportunity.

-- CAV

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The January 9, 2010 edition of PJTV includes an interesting discussion by Yaron Brook and Terry Jones on the estate tax.

Apparently, due to a fluke in US tax laws, the estate tax for 2010 is zero percent. (It's scheduled to go back up to 55% in 2011.)



One of the points Yaron Brook discussed was this view expressed by Bill Gates, Sr. (father of the Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Jr) that, "Society has a just claim on our fortunes, and that claim goes by the name estate tax."



As Brook notes, this battle is not just over economics but over fundamental philosophy. Does wealth properly belong to "society" or to the person who created it? The way our country answers that question will determine our future.

The segment on the estate tax begins at 8:35 minutes, but I enjoyed watching the whole video. (You can click on either image above to go to the PJTV video.)

By noreply@blogger.com (Edward Cline) from The Rule of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

The moral sewers that are the minds of the likes of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and Senate majority leader, were revealed this week with the report that Reid has apologized to President Barack Obama (and to other black civil rights leaders) for having said privately in 2008 that Obama was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.”

Reid’s remark was made public in a new book, Game Change, by political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. The book chronicles the sludge and sleaze behind the Democratic contest for presidential nomination and the race against John McCain and Sarah Palin. The publisher’s website describes what can only be characterized as a chronicle of dirt:

Game Change answers those questions and more, laying bare the secret history of the 2008 campaign. Heilemann and Halperin take us inside the Obama machine, where staffers referred to the candidate as "Black Jesus." They unearth the quiet conspiracy in the U.S. Senate to prod Obama into the race, driven in part by the fears of senior Democrats that Bill Clinton's personal life might cripple Hillary's presidential prospects….And they reveal how, in an emotional late-night phone call, Obama succeeded in wooing Clinton, despite her staunch resistance, to become his secretary of state.

Reid has apologized for the remark but sounded more like he was campaigning for reelection.

In a statement, Reid confirmed his remarks and apologized for them. “I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments,” he said today, “I was a proud and enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama during the campaign and have worked as hard as I can to advance President Obama’s legislative agenda. Moreover, throughout my career, from efforts to integrate the Las Vegas strip and the gaming industry to opposing radical judges and promoting diversity in the Senate, I have worked hard to advance issues important to the African American community.”

He was forgiven by Obama. Well, of course. Reid, together with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, has the principal task of getting the socialist health-care bill passed by Congress.

President Barack Obama released a statement this afternoon stating that Reid called him to apologize “for an unfortunate comment.” The president said he accepted the apology. “I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice and I know what’s in his heart. As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.”

Why would he castigate Reid over a mere slip of tongue and unguarded moment, when more important things are at stake than Obama’s own self-respect, such as vanquishing America? But, the book is not closed. Game Change goes on sale in a few days, and the guided tour by Heilemann and Halperin of the cesspools of Beltway politics should make the authors millionaires.

This is all very revealing about Harry Reid. It should not be surprising that a man who “advances Obama’s legislative agenda” of nationalizing the economy and abridging American freedoms would also harbor the same knee-jerk racist premises as Vice-President Joe Biden and former Senate majority leader Trent Lott. All the minds party to this legislation are vessels of malignity. In public, these creatures appear well-groomed in pressed suits and are on good conduct. Behind the scenes, they are, as Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota suggested, manipulative, foul-mouthed gangsters.

If the Republicans wished to “bring down” Harry Reid as a means of defeating the health-care legislation, they ought to be challenging his political career, premises, and political agenda. They ought to be screaming their heads off about the Marx/Alinsky/Ayers number Reid and his ilk in Congress and the White House are about to pull on the country.

Instead, they are calling for his resignation over a comparatively unimportant racial remark. If Reid is guilty of anything, which is his greater offense? Saying something uncouth, or advocating and working hard to bring about the destruction of American liberty?

The Republican ruse to defeat the health-care legislation is intellectually vacuous. The Republican strategy is as ludicrous and futile as if the Romans accused the Huns of being bad dressers, and so they should just go away, instead of pillaging Rome. Harry Reid may be, in the core substance of his existence, a rotten, hypocritical creature. But in the hearts of Republican leadership, there is only the hollow darkness of moral bankruptcy.

By noreply@blogger.com (Jason) from Erosophia,cross-posted by MetaBlog

by Jason

The case will decide a challenge to California's gay marriage ban that was approved by voters in 2008, and the ruling will likely be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. How the high court rules in the case could set the precedent for whether gay marriage becomes legal nationwide.

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Hitler's "Human" Side

Oliver Stone's idea of providing historical context would appear to be to drop moral context:

"Stalin has a complete other story," Stone said. "Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person.

We can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good.' Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect...

...


"He's not saying we're going to come out with a more positive view of Hitler," emphasized professor Peter Kuznick, the lead writer on the project. "But we're going to describe him as a historical phenomenon and not just somebody who appeared out of nowhere."

Stone said that conservative pundits will dislike the show.

"Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is not going to like this history and, as usual, we're going to get those kind of ignorant attacks," said Stone...

Hitler and Stalin were responsible for millions of deaths within their respective countries. Much is known (and already easily-enough learned) about the lives and intellectual influences on each.

Stone's denigration of moral judgment as "scapegoating" and "ignorant" are a direct result of determinism. Of course "we're [not] going to come out with a more positive view of Hitler." How could you have a positive view of anyone if, like Stone, you see the common (and correct) view of Hitler as an evil monster as foolish?

The creation of a historical account shares with fiction the element of selectivity, except that, because the ideas men accept and and act upon drive history, the historian's criterion for selectivity is which facts best illustrate what ideas motivated one historical figure or another.

Stone's rejection of the normative aspect of his job as a historian will lead him to dwell on nonessential details and create an account that will hinder a proper understanding of the people and events he covers. And, his prattling to the contrary notwithstanding, he will portray Hitler in an undeservedly positive light. Even to paint him an an ordinary human being is far better than he deserves.

There is a reason certain details about Hitler and Stalin are not more widely discussed: They're insignificant -- just like Oliver Stone's contribution to the field of history will prove to be.

Well, at least it isn't Avatar!

Eric Raymond makes some interesting comments on Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes:

The Holmes we have become used to from later interpretations is sort of Holmes-as-Vulcan, the Mr. Spock of the gaslight era; cool, cerebral, controlled, a bit disdainful. Forgotten in the Holmes-as-Vulcan version is that the original Holmes was an eccentric drug addict who went to pieces in the absence of a degree of mental stimulation ordinary life could not afford him.

I am not terribly familiar with the literary character or the Spock-like movie portrayals, but this Holmes sounds closer to Gregory House.

Raymond gave it a positive view overall and he disliked Avatar, which sounds abysmal to me. That's not saying much, but still...

Heh!



Because I haven't posted the results of a silly quiz here in quite a while.

Objectivist Roundup

Amy Mossoff hosts last week's edition. Hopefully, I will have recovered by Tuesday from my post-vacation backlog/adjusted to my new daily routine enough to submit a post for this week's edition.

Blah! Blah! Blah!

And speaking of catching up, I found the below observation spot-on:

My final thought on the comment that I find appropriate is the capitalization of "BLAH." In netiquette (i.e. network etiquette), capitalization is typically used to indicate a shout. This completes the perfect image of the modern leftist: a lout with nothing to say . . . and shouting it to drown everybody else out.

But that's just the summary of SB's analysis of a comment consisting of the word, "Blah!" repeated 262 times. Be sure to read the rest.

-- CAV

By Paul Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

In the Fall 2009 issue of Daedalus, economist Thomas Schelling asks what would happen if President Obama had his way and we had a "A World Without Nuclear Weapons?"

Schelling argues that, contrary to the optimists like Obama, the world would become far more unstable and dangerous.

One big problem is that the knowledge of how to create and deploy nuclear weapons wouldn't disappear. Hence, if the major nuclear powers did decide to eliminate their active stockpiles, any global crisis would create a tremendous incentive for them to reconstitute and/or use their nukes as quickly as possible before hostile countries did the same.

Here are a couple of noteworthy excerpts from Schelling's article:

Considering that enough plutonium to make a bomb could be hidden in the freezing compartment of my refrigerator, or to evade radiation detection could be hidden at the bottom of the water in a well, I think only the fear of a whistle-blower could possibly make success at all questionable.

I believe that a "responsible" government would make sure that fissile material would be available in an international crisis or war itself. A responsible government must at least assume that other responsible governments will do so.

The natural implication:

...[I]f, at the outset of what appears to be a major war, or the imminent possibility of major war, every responsible government must consider that other responsible governments will mobilize their nuclear weapons base as soon as war erupts, or as soon as war appears likely, there will be at least covert frantic efforts, or perhaps purposely conspicuous efforts, to acquire deliverable nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible.

The result would be greater global instability, rather than greater stability:

In summary, a "world without nuclear weapons" would be a world in which the United States, Russia, Israel, China, and half a dozen or a dozen other countries would have hair-trigger mobilization plans to rebuild nuclear weapons and mobilize or commandeer delivery systems, and would have prepared targets to preempt other nations' nuclear facilities, all in a high-alert status, with practice drills and secure emergency communications. Every crisis would be a nuclear crisis, any war could become a nuclear war. The urge to preempt would dominate ; whoever gets the first few weapons will coerce or preempt. It would be a nervous world.

Part of the fallacy behind the desire for a "world without nuclear weapons" is the false notion that the evil resides within the weapons, rather than within the aggressors who would use them against us. (This is just a grander example of the same fallacy that drives many gun-control advocates.)

If a US President truly wanted a safer world, perhaps he should eliminate America's enemies, rather than eliminating our means of striking against them.

(Link to the Schelling article via Marginal Revolution.)

By Diana Hsieh from NoodleFood,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Surprise, surprise:

The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect homeowners from foreclosure has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.

Since President Obama announced the program in February, it has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Home Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.

As a result, desperate homeowners have sent payments to banks in often-futile efforts to keep their homes, which some see as wasting dollars they could have saved in preparation for moving to cheaper rental residences. Some borrowers have seen their credit tarnished while falsely assuming that loan modifications involved no negative reports to credit agencies.

Some experts argue the program has impeded economic recovery by delaying a wrenching yet cleansing process through which borrowers give up unaffordable homes and banks fully reckon with their disastrous bets on real estate, enabling money to flow more freely through the financial system.

Go read the whole article. Conservatives tend to speak of these kinds of harms to underwater homeowners and financial markets as "unintended consequences." That's terribly wrong, I think.

Politicians should know better than to enact such laws. They ought to take some care in how they do their job -- just as electricians, doctors, and even garbage collectors do. That includes investigating the likely effects of proposed laws -- rather than hand-waving them away with the thought that they mean well. If they fail to do that due diligence, we are entitled to think them negligent -- or worse... that they intend their laws to fail so as to excuse even more violations of our property and contract rights.

Let's make sure that we call the spade that's digging our mass grave "a spade," not an "unintended consequence."

By noreply@blogger.com (Jason) from Erosophia,cross-posted by MetaBlog

by Jason

By noreply@blogger.com (Jason) from Erosophia,cross-posted by MetaBlog

by Jason

Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said. [Emphasis mine]