Aggrad02

Reason and good sense are one and the same. So the question is do I equate reason with ethics? Then yes. --Dustan Rand summarized her ethical theories by writing: “To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-esteem. ”

Bob, What would the manual say about how many trees you should cut down to make your hut compared to how many are on the island. Add in the percentage that are nutritious producing versus how quickly others will grow in its place. What amount of wood should you burn per day so that you wouldn't run out. Are those the types of things that would be in the manual? Or are those ethical questions? --Dustan

I was reading some post on this subject over there and many of the post were very interesting. Most went like this: Ron Paul = Libertarian Libertarian = Anarchism (write a couple of pages about Lib=Anarchism without mentioning RP) Ayn Rand said "Anarchism = Bad" therefore Ron Paul = Bad then Rudy Guliani = Kill Muslims Rudy Guliani = Good This is without researching RP's positions or votes, or anything else that Guliani has said he will do or has done ( I wonder if these people would support Hitler as long as he vows to "get the terrorist"). It is quite sickening. Especially since RP is not a traditional libertarian in the LP mold (even when he ran in '88). BTW: I would also like to say that I am very fortunate that I found this board. I have had many disagreements with people here but they have always (for the most part) been intellectual and not emotional. I would also like to say that the people on this board have a high degree of integrity. Not only do they try to be truthful but will usually admit when they are wrong or not entirely correct. I think this is very important for intellectual dialog, and I always try to hold to this standard. On other boards that I lurked at in the beginning, people usually were just beating their heads against one another, yelling about how they are right and how the other person wasn't objective enough. --Dustan

Comedy Central is suing Youtube over intellectual property rights, so youtube takes down immediately anything by Comedy Central. But you can watch it on Comedycentral.com http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/in...ml_video=102970 --Dustan

Staying genocide may not be altruistic, but that does not mean it is moral to do so.(This is a very complex moral problem as we all know). But the main problem with monetary/military aid to Israel is that it is not staying off genocide. If we just wanted to stay off genocide we could have brought all of the Jews to the United States/other western countries. How is it moral to take my money by force and give it to Israel to protect them? How is it moral to send soldiers into combat and have them give their lives in the defense of Israel? --Dustan

I sure hope he does. I have a ton of admiration for him as well. I was pointing out what I thought was a flaw (we all have flaws, most people more than others, luckily this is the only thing that I see in AG). And I know that Paul also has a lot of respect for Greenspan, he called him a genius. I hope that if RP wins he would try to get Greenspan to be Sec. of Treasury, giving Greenspan the hat trick. --Dustan

Michael, I agree with you that he did a good job as Fed Chairman. I even said so in my post. But as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors he could have pushed for better policy. Also as fed Chairman his word carried a lot of weight, especially since he did such a good job, but never once did he call for an end to the fiat money system. If Greenspan would have went to congress and said that this system is not the best and we need to change it to (X), congress would have probably done it. It was either in this book or an interview, I can't remember where right now. But Greenspan said that his job at the fed was to keep the monetary system stable, to make sure that it acted like commodity backed currency and that he thinks that he achieved that goal. But when you look at history our dollar has continued to deteriorate. Right now it is only worth 4 cents compared to when the Fed began and is continuing to go down. How is that moral no matter how well you do it? The Fed also allows banks to fractionally reserve bank. Meaning it allows banks to create credit and charge interest (real money paid back to the bankers) on that credit. If this continues eventually the banks will own everything. Now all of this is not Greenspans fault but he did nothing while he was there to change it. And the reason that he gives for not saying or doing anything about it was that it wasn't socially acceptable in his social group to do so? --Dustan

So what other groups should we give and defend a country for? :baby: --Dustan

Thanks I will try and look some of it up. --Dustan

Most of this political/economic influence arose only after we started to back Israel. I just bought The Israel Lobby , by Mearsheimer and Walt to learn more about this. Isn't that what we do? We support Saudi and their Madrases, we support Jordan, We give money to the Palestinians. We supported Saddam Hussein. And before 9/11 Egypt received the second most Military aid behind Israel. This is the way that you control a region/people. You divide them up. Muslims vs Jew keeps the populace from seeing that the US is heavily influencing their leaders and policies. If the entire region was Muslim then they would have kicked their despots to the road, but by focusing their attention on Israel the leaders keep order. Also Israel was strategic in the cold war as well. There was a great fear that communism was going to get a foothold in the Middle East (Iran, Afghanistan) and we needed allies there to keep the commies at bay. The biggest reason being that we didn't want them to get the oil. Just my observations. --Dustan

Michael, I understand what you are saying. I also understand that given more time then a few seconds to answer the question would have probably brought a much better answer. But to things have led me to believe that Greenspan compromised his values. 1) pg. 52 "I still found the broader philosophy of unfettered market competition compelling, as I do to this day, but I reluctantly began to realize that if there were qualifications to my intellectual edifice, I couldn't argue that others should readily accept it. By the time I joined Richard Nixon's campaign for the presidency in 1968, I had long since decided to engage in efforts to advance free market capitalism as an insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer. When I agreed to accept the nomination as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, I knew I would have to pledge to uphold not only the Constitution but also the law of the land, many of which I thought were wrong. The existence of a democratic society governed by the rule of law implies a lack of unanimity on almost every aspect of the public agenda. Compromise on public issues is the price of civilization, not an abrogation of principle." 2) When retiring from the fed: Ron Paul took his copy of the Objectivist Newesletter that contained Greenspan's article on the gold standard and asked him to sign it upon Greenspan retiring. While he was signing it Ron Paul asked him if he still believed in what he wrote. Greenspan said yes. Both of these instances lead me to believe that Greenspan actually held ideals other than those he implemented as his various positions in the politics. I have no problem with AG's role in the fed, he was doing a good job there. But why didn't he, with the influence that he had, try to change policy? Why not push for a commodity based currency instead of the fiat system which steals wealth from the people? He is using the same excuse that a benevolent dictator would. It goes back to his first encounter with Rand, when he stated that he wasn't sure that he existed, likewise he wasn't sure he was right about free market capitalism as policy because it wasn't popular. --Dustan

That is true, but the whole reason that we support Israel in the first place, is because of their centrality in the oil region. So it still comes back to oil. --Dustan

I am generally supportive of Greenspan. But his comments are clearly indefensible. He is generalizing to make his social aspirations morally acceptable. BTW: I can think of one presidential candidate who has stuck with his principles even when compromising them would have helped him "climb" socially.

Then what do you propose that we should do? Killing our enemies in sufficient numbers has an elegance and simplicity to it, in spite of some of the difficulties. If we do not slaughter our enemies, then what should we do about them? I like the idea of killing. It is straightforward. Ba'al Chatzaf How about creating more friends and less enemiess. Or how about making our enemies our friends by leaving them the hell alone. --Dustan BTW: Bob I believe your military solution is the only military solution that would be successful.

It also has nothing to do with the US. Your right that it is turning into insanity. Iran maybe able to be defeated by ground troops, but how can we hold Iran, we are having a hard enough time holding Iraq and Afghanistan. There would certainly be a draft to do this, it would also send the deficit through the clouds (it is already through the roof), killing the dollar even further (for those of you who don't watch the markets; gold is at $731, the euro is at $1.41, the canadian dollar is at par, oil is at $82/barrell and corn is at $3.50/bushel). I think we would have a violent revolution here if we go into Iran. --Dustan

On pg. 61-62 this was in the 2nd paragraph. It seemed like it could have came right out of Atlas: "Finally on Sunday August 15, 1971, my phone rang at home-it was Herb Stein, who was then a member of Nixon's Council of Economic Advisors. "I'm calling from Camp David," he said. "The president wanted me to tell you he'll be speaking to the nation and he'll be announcing wage and price controls."........ After Nixon imposed wage controls , I'd fly down to meet with Don Rumsfeld, who was head of the Economic Stabilization Program, the bureaucracy created to administer them. He also ran the Cost of Living Council, where Dick Cheney was his deputy. They asked my advice because I know a great deal about how particular industries worked. But all I could do for them was indicate what type of problem would be created by each type of price freeze. What they were running into was the problem of central planning in a market economy-the market will always undermine any attempt at control........... Rumsfeld asked me, "What do I do? And I said ,"Simple-raise the price." Situations like this came up week after week, and after a couple of years the whole system fell apart. Much later Nixon said wage and price controls had been his worst policy. " Economic Stabilization Program? Cost of Living Council? No wonder we are in the mess we are in. This bozos have been running our gov. since the 70's. To bad Greenspan didn't tell Rumsfeld and Cheney the same thing that Galt told Thompson when he aked for help. --Dustan

p.52: "It did not go unnoticed that Rand stood beside me as I took the oath of office in the presence of President Ford in the Oval Office. Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her. All of my work had been empirical and numbers-based, never values-oriented. I was talented technician, but that was all. My logical positiveness had discounted history and literature-if you'd ask me whether Chaucer was worth reading, I'd have said, "Don't bother." Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I'd learn...... All of this started for me with Ayn Rand. She introduced me to a vast realm from which I'd shut myself off." Under a picture of Arthur Burns and Ayn Rand (two pictures): "Of all my teachers, Arthur Burns and Ayn Rand had the greatest impact on my life" And that about as to CURRENT as there is. It seems that Greenspan opinion of Rand and Objectivism hasn't changed overtime.

Define dictator and define legitimate. This is getting tedious. William Thomas wrote a great article a while back: http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showconte...ct=586&h=54 The article is discredited for me when he wrote the following: The Objectivist view of foreign policy derives from its view of morality. Just as each person should pursue his rational self-interest in his personal matters, so should a proper government uphold the interests of its citizens in its conduct toward other nations Further: In effect, it unites the best aspects of the conservative emphasis on national interests with the best liberal human rights internationalism. A government exists to protect and serve the rights of its own citizens.......But our individual interests are also served by the positive goal of creating and supporting a society of traders One basic tenet, then, of Objectivist political philosophy is that the only just governments are those of the free countries—and all the free countries are natural allies And who decides this? After all, we have no blanket duty to rescue oppressed and suffering foreigners, and sometimes even bad governments can reform, with the right encouragement. But our reasons will be based in the practical costs and benefits of war and other policies in the particular case. What price, victory? The Iraqi military is fairly negligible and the Baathist dictatorship there is widely loathed. Precision U.S. weapons can hopefully avoid massive civilian casualties. U.S. casualties may be worse than in the Gulf War, but if in the end they number more than a few thousand, it would be a surprise to pre-war assessments. Various officials and experts have bruited financial costs on the order of $50 billion to $120 billion. How can you trust anyone who went along with those figures? What those principles teach us is that a free people should be unembarrassed about defending liberty and the modern, Enlightenment values that underlie it. Ultimately, war must be a weapon we are willing to use against illiberal despotisms. But war itself is only a means of changing foreign government policies. We cannot lose sight of the fact that political policy is a symptom, but culture is the root cause. There would have been no 9/11 without Islamism and the Middle Eastern culture of resentment. There will be no end to such attacks without religious toleration and a culture of reform. We should seek whatever realistic means we can find to keep ideas and business flowing. While in the short range we act to maintain our interests, in the long run those interests require that we build up a world society of individuals living by their own choices and thinking their own thoughts. Being willing to fight for our interests will not ensure that great goal, but being unwilling to fight will surely doom it. And this total last paragraph is a contradiction. You want to change Islamic society of hating America by beating them over the head. Hmmmm..... I am sorry but I never inferred or read any of these foreign policy positions from reading Ayn Rand. This essay seemed very fascist and the author did even know he was being fascist. :sick: --Dustan

Define dictator and define legitimate. Define define. --Brant From Wikipedia: A definition is a statement of the meaning of a term, word or phrase. The term to be defined is known as the definiendum (Latin: that which is to be defined). The words which define it are known as the definiens (Latin: that which is doing the defining).[1]

More from a 1994 Speech: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...750C0A962958260 Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do. We're going to find the answer when schools once again train citizens. Schools exist in America and have always existed to train responsible citizens of the United States of America.

Apparently he wants a fascist state: He has no regard for the Constitution. http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archiv...evolution_o.php On the 2nd Amendment: "Your right to bear arms is based on a reasonable degree of safety," he said. On the 1st Amendment: Giuliani said that MoveOn.org's ad criticizing Gen. Petreaus was out of bounds and hinted that the group should face some sort of sanction. "They passed a line that we should not allow an American political organization to pass," he said. "We are at war right now, whether some people want to recognize it or not."

Just because a dictator has no moral authority, does not mean that we do to go in a country and confiscate their property. Especially in countries where we "prop up" the dictator.

~ If we have no citizens of *ours* there, true. Otherwise, this absolutist view is way off; we have a responsibility to our citizens re how they're treated there. We certainly do not have a responsibility to how our citizens are treated in other countries. If you travel to another county you are taking a risk, and you must take responsibility for that risk. Now I don't have any problem with us "rescuing" citizens that are trapped or taken hostage, but that is about it. The laws of the US do not trump another country's sovereignty in that country. ~ As absolutistically asserted, without 'caveats', there's no reason a rational person/company would/could accept this. If the 'other' country/group is not decreed by our own govt/country as a threat, then, if a citizen person gets outside-of-our-country protection (such as within 'treaties') by our govt of what our govt recognizes as their rights, in dealing with said group/govt, *we* have a responsibility there. You are right about economic treaties. They are similar to contracts between countries. But we should treat them as so and litigate them instead of attacking militarily. But our military are not hired henchmen for corporations or individuals. International dealing is not always safe and companies have to take that into account and pass the cost of the risk onto the consumer. --Dustan

It seems to me that Gereenspan is about as inside as it gets. There are pictures in his book of Greenspan laying around the staff room at the white house with a young Cheney and a young Rumsfield in the '70's during the Ford Admin. Then they same guys in the Reagan Admin. and then the same guys in the HW admin, and then the same guys in the W admin. These guys "grew up" politically together. --Dustan

Whoop!!!!!!! That is wonderful. It probably didn't make a difference, but that is the first time that I have called or written a letter about a serious issue and have seen action eventually taken. --Dustan