October102009
“Whoever you are, you who are hearing me now, I am speaking to
whatever living remnant is left uncorrupted within you, to the
remnant of the human, to your mind, and I say: There is a morality
of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard
of value.”
Ayn Rand
September252009
“The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.”
John Dewey
September152009
Let Us Alone!
“Since “economic growth” is today’s great problem, and our present Administration is promising to “stimuate” it—to achieve general prosperity by ever wider government controls, while spending an unproduced wealth—I wonder how many people know the origin of the term laissez-faire?”
Ayn Rand, 1962
The above quote is 47 years old and it could have been taken from a news article today. The policies, the principles, the problems, they’re the same today as they were then. Only it’s not actually true that the quote could have been taken from an article today because no one in the current Administration nor in the mainstream media knows what laissez-faire means even enough to ask the question.
The key to why this failure has perpetuated so long is found in the following quote:
“The statists’ epistemologocial method consists of endless debates about single, concrete, out-of-context, range-of-the-moment issues, never allowing them to be integrated into a sum, never referring to basic principles or ultimate consequences—and thus inducing a state of intellectual disintegration in their followers. The purpose of that verbal fog is to conceal the evasion of two fundamentals: (a) that production and prosperity are the product of men’s intelligence, and (b) that government power is the power of coercion by physical force.”
Epistemology is the study of how we gain and validate knowledge. Statism is the political belief that men belong to the state, not that men should be free of the state’s interference.
Today the argument is over whether we should increase taxes on oil or should we “stimulate” the auto industry with increased taxes or “bailout” the financial industry. There is no such discussion about whether the government should be “stimulating”, bailing out or even making a comment on the economy at all.
This is happening because men reject principles, look at things only as particular concretes and deside the whole issue is because we’re not spending enough, as if somehow the desire for a product and having the dollars in hand make the product appear or the principle go away.
