Atlas Shrugged: From fiction to fact in 52 years

by Stephen Moore

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read "Atlas Shrugged" a "virgin." Being conversant in Ayn Rand's classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only "Atlas" were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I'm confident that we'd get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that "Atlas Shrugged" parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

For more on this commentary, go to The Heartland Institute

FIRE's open letter to Pres Obama on speech codes

January 20, 2009

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Sent via U.S. Mail and Facsimile (202-456-2461)

Dear President Obama:

I write to you on this historic day to offer my heartfelt congratulations on your inauguration. Your achievement is a testament to the enduring promise of our great democracy and the constitutional ideals upon which our nation was founded.

As President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), I write also to request your assistance in ending abridgements of free speech on our nation's college campuses. Because you have taught constitutional law, you are particularly attuned to the importance of the fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. We therefore sincerely hope that you will help to eliminate censorship on college campuses and restore respect for robust expression in higher education.

Like most Americans, you likely would be surprised to learn how often the right to free expression is violated at our nation's colleges and universities, despite the fact that the vitality of these institutions relies upon the free and open exchange of ideas. In just the last year, FIRE has defended basic constitutional freedoms in some truly remarkable cases at both public and private schools.

To read the rest of this letter, go to FIRE's Web site

Money Bomb

Lincoln may not have welcomed Obama's election

by Leonard Pitts

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will stand on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and take an oath making him the nation's first president of African heritage.

The statue of Abraham Lincoln, which sits facing the Capitol in a temple two miles away, will not give two thumbs up. Neither will it weep, commune with the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. or dance a Macarena of joy.

The point is obvious, yes, but also necessary given that when Obama was elected in November, every third political cartoonist seemed to use an image of a celebrating Lincoln to comment upon the milestone that had occurred. Lincoln, they told us, would have been overjoyed.

For more on this commentary, go to McClatchy Newspapers

Sweatshops offer world's poor hope, not despair

by Nicholas D. Kristof

Before Barack Obama and his team act on their talk about “labor standards,” I’d like to offer them a tour of the vast garbage dump here in Phnom Penh.

This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It’s a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires.

The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn. Then the smoke parts and you come across a child ambling barefoot, searching for old plastic cups that recyclers will buy for five cents a pound. Many families actually live in shacks on this smoking garbage.

Mr. Obama and the Democrats who favor labor standards in trade agreements mean well, for they intend to fight back at oppressive sweatshops abroad. But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough.

For more on this commentary, go to The New York Times

Surviving the Great Depression II? Yes, we can!

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

For years, many of us puzzled about how something so stupid and destructive as the New Deal could have happened. The stock market crashed because it was over-inflated. That's nothing new. History is filled with credit-filled bubbles that pop. Resources are reallocated to reflect economic reality and we move on.

The New Deal was different. It actually began under Hoover, who initiated new spending programs and jobs programs, and tried to inflate the money supply and bail out the banks. He was blasted by FDR for his big government policies, and FDR won the election. Once in power, FDR went nuts, instituting a program of central planning that combined features of the Soviet and Fascist models.

For more on this commentary, go to LewRockwell.com

The bankruptcy of mainstream economics

Banks, home builders, and auto manufacturers are not the only ones going belly-up these days. If we may credit Louis Uchitelle's January 7 report in the New York Times, mainstream economists have, in effect, declared their intellectual bankruptcy. According to Uchitelle,

Frightened by the recession and the credit crisis that produced it, the nation's mainstream economists are embracing public spending to repair the damage – even those who have long resisted a significant government role in a market system. . . . Hundreds of economists who gathered here [in San Francisco] for the annualmeeting of the American Economic Association seemed to acknowledge that a
profound shift had occurred. At their last meeting, ideas about using public
spending as a way to get out of a recession or about government taking a role to
enhance a market system were relegated to progressives. The mainstream was
skeptical or downright hostile to such suggestions. This time, virtuallyeveryone
voiced their support, returning to a way of thinking that had goneout of fashion
in the 1970s.

At this point, one cannot help but recall Proverbs 26:11: "As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly."

Modern economics suffers from a variety of weaknesses and defects, among which faddishness ranks high. The chronic pursuit of fads, however, springs from a more serious problem: the mainstream profession's faulty epistemological foundation – positivist presumptions that lead economists to believe that by aping nineteenth-century physicists they are acting as "scientists." Laboring under this grave misconception, they are destined to be blown erratically by the winds of changing events. So tenuous is the contemporary appreciation of economic verities that the slightest apparent breakdown of the economic order completely befuddles the economists and sends them running about wildly in search of a new model that will predict better than the old, now discredited one.

For more on this commentery, go to LewRockwell.com

Alan Greenspan - The real culprit of the current economic crisis

by Stefan Karlsson

With no one denying anymore the obvious fact that America is in a deep slump, the discussion has instead shifted to why it happened. The Austrians (including me) who predicted these problems based on Greenspan's low-interest-rate policy know of course that the main cause was that low-interest-rate policy, with his numerous bailouts of failed financial institutions also creating a moral hazard that encouraged risky behavior.

But non-Austrians who for various reasons seem determined to exonerate the central bank have instead offered various other explanations. I will not here answer them all here. Instead, I will simply comment on the most common alternative explanations and the various arguments used for the explicit purpose of exonerating Greenspan.

For more on this op/ed, go to Mises. org.

IUPUI - the face of intolerance, and ignorance

Ga. Tech ordered to pay $200K in speech-code case

In March 2006 two brave Georgia Tech students, Orit Sklar and Ruth Malhotra, launched a challenge to several unconstitutional policies at the school. These policies included a speech code, a restrictive speech zone, discriminatory student-fee regulations, and a program of state religious indoctrination called "Safe Space" that explicitly compared those who have traditional views of sexual morality to slaveowners. (Full disclosure: Ruth and Orit are represented by the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom, and I am lead counsel in the case.)

Despite the fact that, if successful, Orit and Ruth would restore the First Amendment rights of every single student, they were immediately subjected to the most vile threats on campus and dishonest reporting off campus. The university's own campaign of disinformation aided and abetted the students' enemies.

For more on this story, go to Phi Beta Cons, David French's higher education blog on National Review Online

New Year's Substitutions

by Gary North

Well, it’s that time of the year again. All over America, smart people are sending out last-minute charity donation checks to get their income tax deductions for 2003, making sure they get stamped, dated receipts from the Postal Service (this costs an extra 37 cents).

Other smart people are making last-minute sales decisions on investments that did well, offsetting the capital gains tax by selling investments that did poorly.

But most people aren’t this smart. They are spending their time looking forward to New Year’s Eve parties and the bowl games (husbands, anyway) on New Year’s Day. College football teams that nobody outside of the home town paid any attention to three months ago will fight it out for mythical second through tenth place, which will entitle them to be forgotten by January 2nd. One team will wind up number one. The public will remember which one until at least Super Bowl XXXVIII, just as they remember the winners of Super Bowls past: Packers, NFC (I), Packers, NFC (II), Jets, AFC (III: Joe Namath > Earl Morrall/Johnny Unitas) . . . ?

This op/ed piece was originally published on Dec. 31, 2003 on LewRockwell.com where it can be read in full.