Aggrad02

Bob,

Flavor of ice cream? I suppose the issue of personal preferences is a minor ethical issue. But on a desert island, deciding to use reason and even use the survival guide instead of praying to the gods would be an issue of ethics. A very fundamental one.

Today I prefer strawberry to chocolate. Tomorrow I may prefer living to dying. Different details, but the same process. Preference and choice. Since it does not involve any second parties it is not an ethical matter at all.

Ba'al Chatzaf

What if the strawberries were picked using slave labor?

Seriously though,

Isn't ethics about values?

And when making choices we weigh our values.

--Dustan

Do you equate reason and good sense with ethics? I don't.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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

I wish I could have seen this episode. I love the Daily Show. I looked for it on youtube, but didn't find it. I did find this little gallup deal that showed a very small portion of the episode.

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

This is not altruism. There was an attempted genocide and there still are threats of it. Staying genocide is not altruism.

Michael

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

Dustan,

I think Greenspan will surprise people now because he is not bound by an oath to carry out a certain law and he will start nudging the people in high places he knows for essential reforms. In his words, he can now start pamphleteering. His memoirs is the first sign of this happening.

I sure hope he does.

I want to reiterate my total admiration for this man. If Ron Paul ever makes it, he would be foolish not to make use of Greesnpan's knowledge, experience and wisdom for advice.

Michael

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

I would like to add the common sense reason for supporting Israel.

The Holocaust was too horrible to allow to ever happen again. Ever. The only reason it got as bad as it did is because Jews had nowhere to go back then. They couldn't get out. Jews are perfectly entitled to have a country so they do not get obliterated off the face of the earth. Mankind has already shown that some people want to and will do precisely that if conditions permit.

There are many interests (and many conflicted ones), but one of the big honking reasons the USA is backing Israel is to prevent that kind of disgrace from ever getting a chance to happen again.

On this point, I am fully committed to the policy of protecting Israel.

Michael

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

--Dustan

It goes back further than that--to before the creation of Israel. Study what Justice Brandeis et al. did to get the U.S. into WWI. What was the purpose of the Balfour Declaration of 1917? It was more than a "Thank you" to the Zionists for influencing the American entry into the war.

In fairness to the Zionists, the U.S. almost certainly was fated by its imperial, expansionist nature, to enter WWI regardless of their conniving. The great irony is WWI led to WWII and the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. One might state that the U.S. has an interventionist, collectivist imperial foreign policy that has helped make the world, especially in the Middle East, a huge mess. The U.S. is a bigger, but more attenuated version of Israel (because it is less Jewish and socialist). Israel is compressed by its small size and population surrounded by enemies like the plutonium in its nuclear bombs that it could well use in the near future as a result of that pressure. The irony for the bad guys is that if they were patient or semi-rational, they would just let Israel be destroyed demographically, but they need that locus point of an enemy--and the U.S. would rather that locus be on Israel than itself.

--Brant

Thanks I will try and look some of it up.

--Dustan

We support Israel because of Israeli political, economic and cultural influence in the U.S.

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.

If it was just oil Israel wouldn't exist, for the U.S. would be cavorting and sleeping with its enemies from A to Z. You can argue that the U.S. uses its Israeli influence as a back-pocket threat against various regimes to help secure Middle Eastern oil, but that would be secondary to the basic, historically evolved situation.

--Brant

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

The U.S. was involved by making sure Israel had the means to turn off all Syria's air defenses. Everything in the Middle East geo-politically speaking has U.S. involvement or is heavily influenced by same.

--Brant

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.

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

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.

The war in the Middle East seems to be expanding with the Sept. 6 Israeli air strike against Syria's nuclear assets imported from North Korea on Sept. 3. This was in Northern Syria, a long, long way from Damascus. Again, apropos an earlier post, this has nothing to do with oil.

It also has nothing to do with the US.

This whole thing is a tar-baby of insanity. Iran cannot be defeated or effectively dealt with by air power alone unless the country is obliterated by nuclear weapons. This will mean continuous, on-going conflict on a much broader scale than what is happening today.

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.

A dictator has no moral standing and no legitimate claim to sovereignty.

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

A dictator has no moral standing and no legitimate claim to sovereignty.

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."

A dictator has no moral standing and no legitimate claim to sovereignty.

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.

Aggrad:

~ You say...

It is not our responsibilty to control what happens in another country.

~ 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.

~ You say...

If an American company [can we add 'person' here?] decided to do business in another country they have to be ready to play by the rules of that country and accept any consequences that follow.

~ 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

But it's not at all clear to me that Greenspan would have been an insider with special knowledge of Bush's motivations.

Alfonso

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