Wednesday
September 3, 2003 |
 Pandering - the Redistribution of Virtue
by Russell Madden
Don't Upset the Ego-Drenched Parvenus (Read more...)
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Espresso Tax and the Hidden Costs
by Tibor R. Machan
News reports had it the other day that Seattle's politicians and bureaucrats have cooked up yet another extortion scheme. They are now planning to put a 10 cent tax on every shot of espresso coffee. (Read more...)
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 The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies: Four Years and Counting
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
I had been working very hard to secure a copy of the ever-elusive Ayn Rand college transcript from the University of St. Petersburg, an important postscript to my historical and archival work on Rand's beginnings as explored in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (Penn State Press, 1995). (Read more...)
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The Protectorate: The Ultimate Check
by G. Stolyarov II
During the summer of 2002, I had had the pleasure of touring through Canada with a guide who was one of the most ingenious, industrious, and rationally selfish men I had ever met. (Read more...)
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Help Skew Phony Poll Results in Favor of Freedom
by David M. Brown
Today I founded a new organization called Phony-Poll Skewers of America. Would you rather become a member by filling out some tedious form or just by reading this sentence? If the latter, welcome aboard, thou art hereby dubbed, certified and otherwise sword-clapped. (And guess what. We've doubled the organization's membership in the last minute alone! This kind of gyrating-out-of-control growth shows the crying need for what we're doing here.) (Read more...)
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 Saddams Succours #3
by Lindsay Perigo
It will be argued that I ought to change my mind, because no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found, & it seems increasingly unlikely that any ever will be. Thus, it will be claimed, the very reason the war was waged has been shown to be a pretext, a phoney justification for something America & Britain were hell-bent on doing anyway. Elizabeth Kanabe (Read more...)
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Why Taxes are Really a Bad Thing
by Tibor R. Machan
This is one of my favorite topics because I like to tell it like it is even when so many fashionable folks think I am way off base. You've heard it before, I am sure - taxes are the price we pay for civilization. Bunk - that's a ruse someone who loved big government dearly tried to perpetrate and, yes, and one with which he managed to fool quite a lot of people. Millions still believe that taxes are necessary just to have a decent community. (Read more...)
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Voting Fraud
by Russell Madden
No. I am not talking about the Fall television schedule nor even the rush to Christmas. I refer, of course, to the recent feverish focus on voting that has the jaws of the Talking Heads flapping in overdrive. (Read more...)
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Meritocracy: Cleansing the Smear
by G. Stolyarov II
The word "meritocracy" has often been employed as a pejorative smear against the system of capitalism, which, claimed the egalitarians, establishes the self-contradictory notion of a caste system based on merit (!), which supposedly elevates inherently "gifted" men into positions of "dominance" over the inherently "deprived of mind." (Read more...)
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Why Did the Transmission Lines We Weren't Allowed to Build Fail to Carry the Current?
by David M. Brown
It is always a great mystery to those who regulate our lives why, when you prevent people from doing things, the things you prevented them from doing don't get done. (Read more...)
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Property Rights: A Blessing for Maori New Zealand
by Peter Cresswell
The intellectually lazy can often be heard opining (amongst other nonsense) that before Europeans arrived all of New Zealand was owned by the Maori who inhabited some parts of the country. This is the 'thinking' that somehow concludes that some four hundred tribesmen somehow 'owned' the entire South Island! This is the sort of thinking that I can only conclude is utter tosh. (Read more...)
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Why Altruism?
by Joseph Rowlands
The other day I listened to some associates discuss the welfare state. Instead of giving my own opinion on the topic, I thought I'd listen in on them. (Read more...)
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 Thanks for the Technology!
by Tibor R. Machan
In 1972 I bought a Volvo P1800 off the Chevy used car lot in Santa Barbara, California. I owned that car for 20 years and am still sad to have had to sell it in 1992, after putting 250,000 miles on it and driving it back and forth over the USA nearly 17 times. (Read more...)
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Taxpayer's Rights
by Russell Madden
The folks in Spring Hill, Tennessee — a small town of about 12,000 residents located thirty miles south of Nashville — believe they have latched on to a good idea. The city leaders recently passed a "taxpayer bill of rights." (Read more...)
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The Betrayal of Checks and Balances
by G. Stolyarov II
The philosophy of Ayn Rand has taught me and numerous other thinkers of the new intellectual Renaissance the moral groundwork for laissez-faire capitalism as the sole economic system which fully and unequivocally recognizes the individual's objective prerequisites to survival, his natural rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and property. With slight loopholes, this was the implicit philosophy behind the founding of America, and the principal force in its first one hundred fifty years of development. (Read more...)
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 True Love is Expressed
by Matthew Graybosch
"It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge."
-- Voltaire (Read more...)
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New Products: Audio CDs
by Lindsay Perigo
Two new audio CD's available for sale at SOLOHQ. (Read more...)
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Foreign Affairs Quandaries
by Tibor R. Machan
Since early in its history America has been a world power and even aside from the ambitions of some of its leaders and citizens, it has been called upon increasingly by many leaders of other nations to come and fight in their behalf. (Read more...)
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 Getting Rights Right
by Russell Madden
Over the past century, the concept of "rights" has gradually been so distorted and twisted that its bloated and grotesque face is now barely recognizable. (Read more...)
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 Spellbound
by Kernon Gibes
In case you didn't know, "Spellbound" isn't the name of a 'me too' movie trying to capitalize on the laurels of "Lord of the Rings" or, for that matter, "Harry Potter". It is a documentary on the national spelling bee of 1999. And it's worth seeing. (Read more...)
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The AMD-Chinese Connection
by David M. Brown
On July 28, 2003, Advanced Micro Devices admitted that it is cooperating with the Chinese to help them build the world's third-largest supercomputer. (Read more...)
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 Conference: "Innovation, Substance, Vision: the Future of Art"
by Michael Newberry
The Foundation for the Advancement of Art is having its first conference, Innovation, Substance, Vision: the Future of Art, at the Pierre Hotel in New York City, October 6th, 2003. (Read more...)
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Europe's Welfare State Troubles
by Tibor R. Machan
The Hungarian economist Janos Kornia argued, in his book The Road to the Free Economy (W.W. Norton, 1990) that welfare states are a very bad idea for developing (and post-communist) countries because, well, they haven't enough rich people from whom to extort the resources with which to provide goods and services to those who have been promised these free of charge. (Read more...)
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Values and Virtues: Von Mises and Rand
by Russell Madden
While subjective wishes may be important in understanding human motivation, any such desires that undermine life should be understood and labeled for what they are: destruction. (Read more...)
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I Know What I Need
by Matthew Graybosch
People lie to me all the time. Advertisers tell me that all I have to do to be sexually attractive is to drink the right brand of beer or wear the right brand of clothes. Religious people tell me that I have to accept their brand of mysticism in order to be happy. Politicians tell me that if I hand over just a little more of my freedom then they will make all the world's problems just disappear. (Read more...)
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