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  Is there a Constitutional right to self-defense? Judge Sonia Sotomayor http://www.askheritage.org/sotomayors-record-promises-judicial-activism-you-can-believe-in-2/
Throughout the Bush and Clinton presidencies, Alan Greenspan, a disciple of free-market economist Friedrich Hayek and an avid reader of Ayn Rand, had served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan had lived through the Ford/Carter inflationary years and had watched with concern the rise of federal deficits in the 1980s. Early in Clinton’s term, while interest rates remained low, the president took an action that dictated the behavior of the Fed and its chairman for the entire decade. In order to show rapid progress against the “Reagan/Bush deficits,” Clinton refinanced large chunks of the national debt at the lowest rates possible, regardless of the length of maturity. Much of this consisted of short-term bonds; but it had the effect of reducing the interest paid by the government on the debt, thus giving the appearance of reducing the deficits. By doing so, Clinton refused to refinance the debt in much longer term securities at a slightly higher rate. As long as inflation, and therefore, interest rates, stayed low, it was a good deal for the country. But the slightest uptick in inflation would add billions to the national debt and raised the specter of a massive refinancing of the debt at much higher prices. Clinton’s action in essence locked the Fed into a permanent antiinflation mode. Any good news in the economy—rising industrial production, higher employment figures, better trade numbers—might cause prices to go up, which would appear on Greenspan’s radar detector as a threat. The chairman found himself raising the prime rate repeatedly, trying to slow down the stock market. It was a perverse situation, to say the least: the most powerful banker in America constantly slapping the nation’s wage-earners and entrepreneurs for their success. Worse, Greenspan’s actions resulted in a constant underfunding of business, a steady deflation affecting long-term investment. Although few spotted it (George Gilder and Jude Wanniski were two exceptions), the nation suffered from a slow-acting capital anemia. Larry Schweikart A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
And, once upon a time we had a good group in place - from the founding fathers on through most of our history we had adequate people in place, until the Fabian Socialists got our schools all turned around and we came to find ourselves a dumbed down nation of entitlement whiners and elitist control freaks.Steve Wolfer http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1715.shtml#11
...academic philosophers, who ought to have been Rand's allies in helping young people to knowledge, instead proved to be her enemies. Philosophy courses, with some honorable exceptions, seemed designed to leave students with the impression that philosophy means never having to say you are certain.Ron Merrill The Ideas of Ayn Rand
With the end of McCarthyism, many universities found ... they [could] not discriminate against communists. ... After all, the thinking went, 'Who's to say what's right or wrong?' Such views did not go far in science, business, or engineering, but the requirements at most universities in general education fields meant that the extremely activist and liberal faculty elements ... would reach the most students.Larry Schweikart A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.Rand Paul http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/05/12/sen_rand_paul_right_to_health_care_is_like_believing_in_slavery.html
And the truth is there's only one thing in the world that I really, really hate. Does anyone know what that is? Money. But there's only one thing I hate more than money ... and that's the truth.Lady Gaga http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1713.shtml#2
Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat!President Barack Obama http://nation.foxnews.com/president-obama/2011/05/10/obama-republicans-want-moat-alligators-border
They want to give people like me [millionaires] a two hundred thousand dollar tax cut that's paid for by asking thirty three seniors to each pay six thousand dollars more in health costs. That's not right, and it's not going to happen as long as I'm President.President Barack Obama http://www.whatisworking.com/2011/04/obama-budget-they-want-to-give.html?amp&
Or they suggest that we can somehow close our entire deficit by eliminating things like foreign aid, even though foreign aid makes up about 1% of our entire budget. ... So here's the truth. Around two-thirds of our budget is spent on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and national security. Programs like unemployment insurance, student loans, veterans' benefits, and tax credits for working families take up another 20%. What's left, after interest on the debt, is just 12 percent for everything else. That's 12 percent for all of our other national priorities like education and clean energy; medical research and transportation; food safety and keeping our air and water clean. ... Up until now, the cuts proposed by a lot of folks in Washington have focused almost exclusively on that 12%. But cuts to that 12% alone won't solve the problem.President Barack Obama http://www.whatisworking.com/2011/04/obama-lets-be-honest-about-whats.html
... four further theses: that no way of conducting rational enquiry from a standpoint independent of the particularities of any tradition has been discovered and that there is good reason to believe that there is no such way; that the problems of understanding and representing faithfully the concepts and beliefs of some tradition alien to one's own in a way that makes those concepts and beliefs intelligible within one's own tradition confront difficulties which can in certain contingent circumstances be overcome; that rival traditions have rival conceptions of rationality and of progress in understanding, but that this does not entail relativism or perspectivism; and finally that although these theses are themselves advanced from the standpoint of a particular tradition, that of a Thomist Aristotelianism, they involve a substantive and nonrelativizable conception of truth, and that in this respect as in others there is no inconsistency in making universal claims from the standpoint of a tradition.Alasdair MacIntyre http://www.jstor.org/stable/2107828
People often ask me how I became successful in that six-year period of time while many of the people I knew did not. The answer is simple: The things I found to be easy to do, they found to be easy not to do. I found it easy to set the goals that could change my life. They found it easy not to. I found it easy to read the books that could affect my thinking and my ideas. They found that easy not to. I found it easy to attend the classes and the seminars, and to get around other successful people. They said it probably really wouldn't matter. If I had to sum it up, I would say what I found to be easy to do, they found to be easy not to do. Six years later, I'm a millionaire and they are all still blaming the economy, the government and company policies, yet they neglected to do the basic, easy things.Jim Rohn Success Is Easy, but So Is Neglect
It is not the concept of government that is anathema to freedom; it is the concept of government unbound by any principle other than the brute force of numbers that is anathema to freedom. A government limited to defending the principle of free association and enforcing penalties for forced association is not anathema to freedom, it is a necessity for freedom.Fred Bartlett http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1706.shtml#13
"The fourth step in our approach is to reduce spending in the tax code. In December, I agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans because it was the only way I could prevent a tax hike on middle-class Americans. But we cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society. And I refuse to renew them again."Barack H. Obama
I said, 'You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We'll have that debate. You're not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we're stupid?President Barack Obama http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_theticket/20110415/ts_yblog_theticket/obama-caught-on-audio-slamming-gop
The 'America' that I know is a generous one.President Barack Obama President's April 13, 2011 speech on fiscal policy at George Washington University
My finely honed political instincts tell me that almost nobody believes that they should be paying higher taxes.President Barack Obama President's April 13, 2011 speech on fiscal policy at George Washington University
"Racing frantically against the clock, the team was still scouting for locations [for the movie Atlas Shrugged, Part I]with only three days left before shooting ended. Some locations were found only the day before they were used; some actors were cast just two days before they went on camera."Brian Doherty "Atlas Shrugged: The Movie Scenes from the 38-year struggle to film Ayn Rand's famous novel", Reason magazine, May 2011
"The fact is, close to five years after 9/11 and fifteen years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States still lacks a coherent national security policy. Instead of guiding principles, we have what appear to be a series of ad hoc decisions, with dubious results. Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?...Are we committed to use force wherever there's a despotic regime that's terrorizing its people—and if so, how long do we stay to ensure democracy takes root?...Perhaps someone inside the White House has clear answers to these questions. But our allies—and for that matter our enemies—certainly don't know what the answers are. More important, neither do the American people. Without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands, America will lack the legitimacy—and ultimately the power—it needs to make the world safer than it is today."Barack H. Obama Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope", page 302.
By elevating the issue of helping others into the central and primary issue of ethics, altruism has destroyed the concept of any authentic benevolence or good will among men. It has indoctrinated men with the idea that to value another human being is an act of selflessness, thus implying that a man can have no personal interest in others—that to value another means to sacrifice oneself—that any love, respect or admiration a man may feel for others is not and cannot be a source of his own enjoyment, but is a threat to his existence, a sacrificial blank check signed over to his loved ones.Ayn Rand “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 43.
The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall.Marcus Tullius Cicero 55 BC
"It is my contention that limited government is a floating abstraction which has never been concretized by anyone; that a limited government must either initiate force or cease being a government; that the very concept of limited government is an unsuccessful attempt to integrate two mutually contradictory elements: statism and voluntarism. Hence, if this can be shown, epistemological clarity and moral consistency demands the rejection of the institution of government totally, resulting in free market anarchism, or a purely voluntary society ... Suppose that I were distraught with the service of a government in an Objectivist society. Suppose that I judged, being as rational as I possibly could, that I could secure the protection of my contracts and the retrieval of stolen goods at a cheaper price and with more efficiency. Suppose I either decide to set up an institution to attain these ends, or patronize one which a friend or a business colleague has established. Now, if he succeeds in setting up the agency, which provides all the services of the Objectivist government, and restricts his more efficient activities to the use of retaliation against aggressors, there are only two alternatives as far as the "government" is concerned: (a) It can use force or the threat of it against the new institution, in order to keep its monopoly status in the given territory, thus initiating the use of threat of physical force against one who has not himself initiated force. Obviously, then, if it should choose this alternative, it would have initiated force. Q.E.D. Or: (b) It can refrain from initiating force, and allow the new institution to carry on its activities without interference. If it did this, then the Objectivist "government" would become a truly marketplace institution, and not a "government" at all. There would be competing agencies of protection, defense and retaliation – in short, free market anarchism."Roy A. Childs, Jr. "Objectivism and The State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand"
... the United States represents approximately 5% of the world's population but has created more new wealth than all the rest of the world combined.Ronald M. Mann The 5000 Year Leap; ISBN 10: 0-88080-148-4
"[there is] no clear distinction between money and non-money ... although we usually assume there is a sharp line of distinction between what is money and what is not -- and the law generally tries to make such a distinction -- so far as the causal effects of monetary events are concerned, there is no such clear difference. What we find is rather a continuum in which objects of various degrees of liquidity, or with values which can fluctuate independently of each other, shade into each other in the degree to which they function as money."Friedrich A. Von Hayek "The Denationalization of Money", p. 47, quoted in "The Sovereign Individual", page 198
"Mass democracy leads to control of government by its 'employees.' But wait ... there are many more voters than there are persons on the government payroll. How could it be possible for employees to dominate under such conditions? The welfare state emerged to answer exactly this quandry. Since there were not otherwise enough employees to create a working majority, increasing numbers of voters were effectively put on the payroll to receive transfer payments of all kinds. In effect, the recipients of transfer payments and subsidies became pseudogovernment employees who were able to dispense with the bother of reporting every day to work."James Dale Davidson "The Sovereign Individual", page 126
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management.Franklin, D. Roosevelt http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15445
There's a lot of college students who all want to be Ayn Rand and soon they'll ... grow up and become conservatives. ... and in the end those college students and their buddies ... in the end will vote for the republican candidate, whoever he is, in November 2012.Charles Krauthammer http://rebirthofreason.com/Spirit/Videos/227.shtml
What’s extraordinary about all this is that stimulus can’t have failed, because it never happened. Once you take state and local cutbacks into account, there was no surge of government spending.Paul Krugman http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/the-great-abdication/
Maybe sacrifice--altruism--is popular (though not so much in practice as in discourse) because people want other people to sacrifice for them! Not exactly a benevolent reason!Tibor R. Machan Post after his article "Are our actions mostly motivated unconsciously?"
He [Obama] hasn't advocated the abolition of private property; only of individual control over it. A distinction in search of a difference.Fred Bartlett http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/ArticleDiscussions/2247.shtml#5
Of all the Civil War legislation -- aside, obviously, from emancipation -- this [National Banking Act of February 1863] had the most far-reaching consequences, most of them bad. Although Congress increased the number of national banks in operation (1,650 by December 1865), the destruction of the competitive-money/private-note issue system led to a string of financial upheavals, occurring like clockwork every twenty years until 1913. Competition in money had not only given the United States the most rapidly growing economy in the world, but it had also produced numerous innovations at the state level, the most important of which, branch banking, was prohibited for national banks. Thus, not only did the National Bank and Currency Acts establish a government monopoly over money, but they also excluded the most efficient and stable form of banking yet to emerge (although that mistake would be partially corrected in the 1920s). Critics of Lincoln's big-government policies are on firm ground when they assail the banking policy of the Civil War.Larry Schweikart A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
It is time to leave behind the divisive battles of the past. It is time to move forward as one nation.President Barack Obama President's State of the Union Address; Jan. 2011
The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. It is obvious which of these would be the better outcome for America, and the world. Let us hope the plutocrats aren’t already too isolated to recognize this. Because, in the end, there can never be a place like Galt’s Gulch.Chrystia Freeland http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/8343/#
The difference between capitalism and 'democratic socialism' is like the difference between choosing to patronize different restaurants based on their value to you; and that of voting-in a live-in cook who, for 4 years, literally force-feeds you foods he chooses at prices he dictates -- in complete and total disregard of your preference and even of your tolerance.Edward D. Thompson Ed Thompson
I admire [Rand's] emphasis in everything she writes on individual liberties, and how fragile they can be. ... I do want to add that I'm not an admirer of her harshness, and her lack of thinking about the social contract -- what we all need to do with each other in order to live happily in society.Anne C. Heller http://rebirthofreason.com/Spirit/Sightings/56.shtml (video)
So, let me get this straight. You want me to violate his God-given civil rights in the name of some murky sense of the "greater good," is that right? ... [heads nod] ... Well, all right. I'm game.Annie Corlie [playing the part of Judge Laura Burch] 2009 movie: Law Abiding Citizen
In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon. Mars gets along perfectly without so much as a microorganism.Dr. Manhattan 2009 post-kantian, existentialist movie: "Watchmen"
A physicist will accept the goal of grasping the nature of the independently existing physical world, only if he accepts that there is such a world, and he perceives it, rather than a shadowy world of subjective appearance. He will search for the causal laws governing nature, only if he accepts the law of causality and rejects the view that things can act apart from or in contradiction to their natures. He will require his theories to ascribe specific, non-contradictory properties to physical entities, only if he accepts the law of identity and the principles of Aristotelian logic. He will demand that his theories derive from observational evidence, only if he accepts the wider principle that abstractions, of any kind, derive from perceived concretes. And he therefore rejects claims based on arbitrary guesses or intuition. He will choose rationally between competing theories and eventually be able to prove his theories, but only if he accepts rational standards of proof and believes himself capable of achieving certainty. And he will hold to the independence of his scientific judgment, but only if he recognizes that truth is the correspondence between ideas and facts and not, for example, a consensus among the scientific community.David Harriman http://arc-tv.com/the-crisis-in-physics-and-its-cause/
There's not a single Democrat or Republican who's ever worked with me that will not look you in the eye and say, "Biden has never, ever, ever broken his word." Vice Pres., Joe Biden http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40720643/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts
Absolutely, positively. Look what the deficit commission suggested. They suggested we do exactly what we did. They suggested we have a payroll tax. They suggested that we stimulate the economy this year into next year. They suggested that this has no impact on long-term debt because it's for two years. Look, you know this, the only people who are going to agree with me when I say this are the economists listening, left, right and center. In the middle of a recession, where we're just climbing out of it, where the economy--unemployment is still at 9.7 percent, the idea of raising taxes and reducing spending is a prescription for disaster. No one is suggesting that.Vice Pres., Joe Biden Biden's answer on Meet The Press regarding spending another $1 trillion after seeing deficit commission report
There is one simple truth that many politicians, on both sides of the aisle do not seem to understand: You cannot be for jobs but against those who create them. Reread that sentence and let it sink in. You cannot give speeches about job creation and simultaneously vilify those who do the creating.Glenn Beck Broke, page 342
"'Sympathetic as I am to those who prefer a fight over compromise,' Obama explained, it would be the wrong thing to do.' 'Wrong thing,' as in 'impossible thing.' With Republicans coming, tax rates were going to stay the same or rise for everyone. 'Sympathetic,' as in 'I wish we could use reconciliation or some other procedural ruse to cram this tax hike through, but oh, yeah, we already did that to pass the most contentious domestic legislation in memory.'"David Harsanyi And This Is the Thanks Obama Gets?
"President: We should have pointed out not everyone goes through the new machines, and only a minority get patted down. SAR [Special Assistant for Reality]: Mr. President, if you'd told people, 'Hello, there's only 1 chance in 3 you'll be molested at the airport today' most people wouldn't think, 'Oh good, I like those odds.'"Peggy Noonan "The Special Assistant for Reality"
... Barbara and Nathaniel had inherited or adopted some of Rand's philosophical prejudices and modes of expression that (I felt) limited their ability to be objectively descriptive. ... I ended up disagreeing with some of both Brandens' interpretations of Rand's character and importance, but that was to be expected.Anne C. Heller Anne C. Heller interview in Summer 2010 issue of The New Individualist
Without objects self-consciousness would be nonsense.Johann Friedrich Herbart Psychology as a Science (1824)
"President Obama took to urban radio to reassure his base and whine his case. He said he does not get enough credit for all he has done. He took a situation that was in trouble and in terrible disrepair two years ago and brought it back from the brink of destruction – referring, of course, to the Republican Party."Ron Hart OCregister.com, "Ron Hart: The Audacity of Nope Brings Hope"
Does my conclusion differ from 'common-sense' and if so can I isolate why that is okay?Steve Wolfer http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/RoRFitness/0087.shtml#7
"Not only is it highly unlikely, for paradox-of-voting reasons, that yours will be the crucial vote, but even if it is, it will have elected a candidate who is then highly unlikely to be the crucial vote on any proposal of interest, and who cannot even be relied upon to vote the right way if he is. So given the generally lower level of stakes, an election like this one is likely to be a happy hunting ground for protest votes ... I know that there are some souls in the grip of the model who probably would vote for a policy of exterminating X puppies over a policy of exterminating X+1, but it seems pretty clear that there is some point at which it becomes obvious that a morally and politically valid response is simply to declare that the fundamental basis of the implied contract has broken down, and that it’s a reasonable choice to simply refuse to participate further ... [if you don't] vote for the candidate you think is the best ... the expected value of your vote is very small indeed, and the costs of it are the psychological toll on your own morale, plus the opportunity cost of whatever else you might have done with the time."Daniel Davies CrookedTimber.org, "On Not Being Obliged to Vote Democrat"
If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,' ...President Barack Obama http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39839069/ns/politics/?utm_source=web&utm_medium=twitter
We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. Abraham Lincoln
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