Commentary

What is the Objectivist View of Law and Government (Politics)?

"Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately

Mar 25, 2010

6 Mins

What Does Objectivism Consider to be Art (Aesthetics)?

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments. Man's profound need of art lies in the fact

Mar 25, 2010

William Thomas

5 Mins

Health Care Deeming as Political Adultery

Let’s imagine a woman who is getting pressure from some obnoxious sleazeball stud to cheat on her husband and commit adultery. She’s tempted

December 17, 2004 -- Christmas is a season of beautiful lights, parties, gifts, food, family, friends, songs, and sentiments. Among the

Mar 19, 2010

Government, Yes! Leviathan, No!

Greg Hitt and Jeanne Cummings wrote on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (September 26, 2001): "In just two weeks, the terrorist....

Mar 19, 2010

5 Mins

Government Funding vs. the Progress of Science

Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.....

Mar 19, 2010

Malini Kochhar

Finding a Personal Response to the Terrorist Attacks

October 9, 2001 -- As the full impact of the barbaric attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon unfolded, we realized that we were witnesses to the worst terrorist attack in history. And even for the majority of us who do not personally know anyone whose life was stolen, the reports out of New York and Washington left a painful spiritual wound. Events as horrific and terrifying as these attacks tear us from the normal context of our lives and throw us into a seemingly inescapable world of chaos and unknown terrors. These events destroy, at least temporarily, the connection we feel with reality. We feel lost, alone, and without a way to make sense of the world. It makes it hard, as many people experienced, to focus on mundane tasks and everyday activities. These lose their meaning and make our lives feel as if they are also without meaning.

Shawn E. Klein

Every Day a New Year

January 1, 2007 -- [Published in The Washington Times] Janus, the Roman god after which the first month of our year is named, had two faces. One looked at the past year and the other looked ahead at the year to come. On New Year's Day in ancient Rome, the new magistrates would assume power; we wait until a few days later to swear in ours, since politicians hung over from partying would be even less fit for office than they already are. New Year's is traditionally when we reflect upon the year gone by and make solemn resolutions for the twelve months to come. Surveys find self-improvement rather than saving the world is most often on Americans' minds.

Environmentalist Vultures

January 30, 2006 -- A Columbia, Maryland neighborhood has been invaded by vultures. Not lawyers, politicians, and others to whom this description is often attached, but the real, flying, circling-the-dead, feeding-on-decaying-corpses ones. They are damaging the roofs on which they perch. The droppings of these fowl foul houses, cars, sidewalks, and streets, exposing the children who they frighten to diseases as well as nightmares. Non-violent means have failed to chase away the pests. In a more enlightened age, the answer to the problem would be simple. The adults might pack off the children for a Saturday afternoon, get out their rifles, have a neighborhood shooting party, take away the dead bird bodies for sanitary disposal, do a final cleanup, and spend a peaceful Saturday night, kids safely back to home and hearth.

Enron: It's OUR Problem

February 27, 2002 -- The enemies of capitalism are using Enron Corporation’s sudden bankruptcy to launch a new wave of attacks on the free market. Enron confirms the Left’s view that business is a dog-eat-dog arena of swindlers and exploiters that requires active government management. Enron lets the Right make a show of standing up to big business. So a host of new regulations on private business activities is moving forward in Congress, ranging from more restrictive rules on 401(k) retirement savings to intensive government oversight of the accounting profession. These new regulations won’t help Enron employees or shareholders. They aren’t meant to. They are meant to fix capitalism, but politicians can’t fix the problems that Enron exposed.

France's Killer Collectivism

William Thomas

The final figures are in. According to Isabelle Dubois-Costes of General Funeral Services in France, the death toll in the country's summer

France Labors at Folly

We can always count on the French to show us how holding the wrong moral values and following the wrong economic policies will produce a...

September 6, 2005 -- What could be a friendlier or more welcoming place than Hawaii, America's 50th state? If S-147, the Native Hawaiian

Extracting Ourselves from the Wetlands Quagmire

The severe winter snows and spring flooding in much of the country have yielded this summer's bumper crop of mosquitoes that carry the

Example of Our First President

4 Mins

George Washington unfortunately has become a cliché. For an older generation, he was too often treated as such a mythic figure that it was..

February 6, 2002 -- During last Sunday’s Superbowl, the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy aired the first two commercials of a new ad campaign linking drug use with terrorism. The ads, aimed at teenagers, are meant to capitalize on the kids’ growing sense of political awareness. Their message is simple: If you buy drugs, you might be financing terrorists. But as is often the case, the simple message masks a more complicated reality. The administration acknowledges that teenage potheads aren’t terrorists. But the ad campaign is pretty clear when it comes to what those little tokers are doing: They’re helping to finance terrorism, kill judges, murder families, and torture people. Sound a little extreme? It is. One television ad, titled “I Helped,” features a series of teenage faces reciting a litany of their crimes: “I helped kill a judge,” “I helped kill policemen,” and, of course, “I helped blow up buildings.”

Civil Society Is Not Civil Defense

Patrick Stephens

November 19, 2001 -- On November 8, President George W. Bush proposed his own version of the "national service" plan that had been espoused two days earlier by Senators John McCain and Evan Bayh. The New York Times's headline read "Bush Seeks New Volunteer Force for Civil Defense." But most of the text of the president's proposal had little to do with civil defense and much more to do with the senators' broad-ranging scheme for "national service." Thus, the president began to outline the ways in which people could help their country by saying: "You can serve your country by tutoring or mentoring a child, comforting the afflicted, housing those in need of shelter and a home." None of those could plausibly be classified as civil defense. They are precisely the activities that, in a free country, are carried out by a civil society of for-profit and non-profit organizations—educational, medical, cultural, recreational, and charitable organizations.

China's Challenge in Space

October 16, 2003 -- On October 15, 2003, China joined the United States and Russia as a country capable of putting humans in space. The launch of that country's "taikonaut," Yang Liwei, harkened back to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, and 1961 launch of Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space—both ahead of the United States. Those events spurred America into a space race with the Russians that led to its historic lunar landings. Today, the U.S. government's reaction to China's challenge should not be a new space race and bigger NASA budgets. Rather, the United States should turn to private providers in a free market to open outer space to all humanity. The Chinese people are understandably thrilled about their government placing a man in orbit. Space travel is a symbol of modernity at its best. For many years, China has used its Long March rockets to place commercial payloads in orbit, including American-manufactured satellites. Now that it has achieved the more difficult feat of placing a human in space, it has the prestige of playing in the big leagues with the United States and Russia. But China's newfound prestige in part reflects the failures of America's space program.

Capitalism and Financial Scandal

July 23, 2002 -- The recent furor over accusations of insider trading by high-profile shareholders of ImClone Systems has been touted as yet another example of corporate fraud, heralded by the collapse of Enron in December last year. These allegations led to the arrest of ImClone’s ex-CEO Sam Waksal and have shrouded Martha Stewart’s activities in doubt. They have also elicited the usual demand for stricter government regulation of corporate functioning. It is another rallying point for the voices that routinely decry big business and capitalism and clamor for the government’s protection from them. President Bush has already acquiesced to such demands for action and has promised steps to strengthen the Securities and Exchange Commission. There is also talk of creating an accounting industry Oversight Board (effectively expanding government regulation of the accounting industry).