Podcasts about randian

Many very rich men who support Trump fancy themselves heroes from the novels of Ayn Rand. I've never done an episode of this show on Rand's ideas, because I'm not a Randian, and don't think about political questions through anything like an Objectivist perspective. But the fact that so many men breaking the country believe they are Randian archetypes makes her ideas now, I think, worth talking about. Particularly because, as my guest argues, Rand would hate these guys.Paul Crider is an associate editor at Liberal Currents and an admirer of Rand. But he comes at from an interesting perspective, being on the whole pretty progressive, and decidedly not an Objectivist libertarian. He recently published an essay at The Bulwark about how Elon Musk, far from being a Randian heroes, is in fact a representative of her villains.Paul and I discuss Rand's ideas and their influence, and then walk through how men like Musk are just the sort of people she loathed.Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/ If you enjoy ReImagining Liberty and want to listen to episodes free of ads and sponsorships, become a supporter. Learn more here: https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/upgrade I also encourage you to check out my companion newsletter, where I write about the kinds of ideas we discuss on this show. You can find it on my website at ⁠⁠www.aaronrosspowell.com⁠⁠. Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago. Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand's greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology. Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns' biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world. Here are a couple of excerpts.We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Also this.What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she'd despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they're caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It's a hard medicine.And.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello.Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you?Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this?Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, though I saw today, Matt Yglesias had a blog post about Middlemarch, which I think he just recently read. I can credit you with that, or us, or those of us who are telling people read the big novels.My life trajectory was that I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before I read Dickens, before I read Jane Austen, before I read Harriet Beecher Stowe or Melville or the Brontës. For me, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were foundational novels as novels. I wondered what it would be like to talk to somebody whose experience was flipped.Henry: Right, I'm 38 and I'd never read this book. I was coming at it partly having read all those other books, but partly for my whole life, people have said, "Oh, that's really a bad book. That's so badly written. That book is no good." The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun.Hollis: It's really fun. I was going to say usually what I forget to do in talking about books is give the summary. I'm going to hold up my copy, which is my dog-eared copy from high school, which is hilarious. It's got the tiniest print, which I couldn't possibly read now. No underlining, which is interesting. I read this book before I understood that you were supposed to underline when you liked passages in the book.It was interesting to me. I'd probably read it five or six times in my youth and didn't underline anything. The story is--- You can help me fill in the blanks. For readers who haven't read it, there's this young woman, Dagny Taggart, who's the heiress of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad fortune. She's a woman. This takes place in about, I think, the '40s, '50s. Her older brother, Jim Taggart, is CEO. She's COO, so she's the operations person. It is in some ways the story of her-- It's not quite a bildungsroman. This is the way I tell the story. It's the story of her coming to the realization of how the world works. There's many ways to come at this story. She has multiple boyfriends, which is excellent. Her first boyfriend, his name is Francisco d'Anconia. He's the head of d'Anconia Copper. He too is an heir of this longstanding copper fortune. Her second is a metals magnate, Hank Rearden, who invents this great metal, Rearden metal.Really, it's also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she's creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she's like, "What is going on?"It turns out there's this person, John Galt, who is saying, "I don't like the way the country is run. I don't like this extractive philosophy. I am going to take all the producers and lure them voluntarily to a--" It's a hero's lair. It's not like a James Bond villain lair. It's a hero lair in Colorado called Galt's Gulch. He is John Galt. It ends up being a battle between who is right in a wrong world. Is it the ethical person, Dagny Taggart, who continues to strive and try to be a producer and hold on to her ethics in this corrupt world, or is it somebody saying, "To hell with this. I am going on strike. You guys come with me and let the world collapse." How's that for summary?Henry: No, I think that's great. I couldn't have done a better job. One thing that we can say is that the role of reason, of being a rational person, of making reason the sole arbiter of how you make choices, be they practical, ethical, financial, whatever, that's at the heart of the book, right?Hollis: That's the philosophy. We could go there in a second. I think the plot of the book is that she demonstrates this.Henry: What she has to learn, like what is the big lesson for Dagny, is at the beginning, she hasn't fully understood that the good guys use reason and the bad guys do not, as it were.Hollis: Right. I think that's right. I like thinking about this as a bildungsroman. You said that the book is fun. Her part of the book is fun, but not really fun. The fun part of the book, and you can tell me because every time you kept texting me, "Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart."--Henry: These guys are so awful. [laughs]Hollis: They're so awful. The fun parts of the book, the Rand villains are the government entities and the cabals of business leaders who she calls looters and second-handers who run the country and all they do is extract value. Marc Andreessen was on a podcast recently and was all about these Rand villains and these looters. I think, again, to get back to why are we doing this and why are we doing this now, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is in the air with the second Trump administration.Henry: Yes. In a way, we're doing this because the question is, is this the novel of the future? Right? What we're seeing is it's very influential on the right. Rand's ideas have long been a libertarian inspiration. Elon Musk's read her. You mentioned Andreessen, Peter Thiel, all these people. It goes back to the Reagan days. People in the Republican Party have been quoting Ayn Rand. Then more broadly, we see all these worries about social collapse today. What happens in the plot of Atlas Shrugged is that society does slowly collapse.Dagny has to realize it's because of these people who are not using their reason and they're nationalizing things and taking resource away from proficient entrepreneurs and stuff. It's all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanors, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behavior because it's in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We're seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, "Oh my God, how did she know?"Hollis: How did she know?Henry: How did she know.Hollis: I think the bildungsroman aspect of this as a novel. It's hard to read it as a novel. I think it's hard. By the way, I have to really I applaud you for not, until you got almost to the end of the book, texting me about this person or that person, or how it's political. I admire you for looking at the book and coming to the book as an expert in novels.What she comes to terms with, and it's a real slowly-- It's not even scales falling from her eyes. She doesn't sit and say, "Oh my God, the world is corrupt." She just is like, "That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them. That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them." She just keeps going, but she doesn't ever accept with a fatalism that she's living in this world where every single person who's in charge is going to let her down.Henry: It's also interesting to me that she doesn't complain.Hollis: No.Henry: Now, that reminded me of I wrote about Margaret Thatcher in my book. She was another big one for however hard it was, however difficult it was, why would you complain? Let's just go to work. A lot of people found her difficult for that reason. When I was reading this, I was like, "Ayn Rand clearly has the same idea. You can nationalize every last inch of the economy. I'm going to get up and go to work and try and beat you. I'm not going to sit around and complain." It's a very stern attitude in a way. She's very strict with herself. I found the book to be-- I know Rand is very atheist, but a very Protestant book.Hollis: Yes, it really is.Henry: Intensely Protestant, yes.Hollis: That's a nice way to think about it. A certain kind of Protestant, a Weberian Protestant.Henry: Sure.Hollis: Not a Southern Baptist Protestant who believes in the absence of reason. I was thinking I was teaching in Mississippi years ago. I was teaching a course on Wordsworth and had to do a unit on Voltaire because you can't really understand Wordsworth unless you understand Voltaire. There was a woman in my class. She was a version of Presbyterian who doesn't believe in reason, believes that in the fall, man lost their reason.Therefore, she asked if she could be excused from class because I was talking about Voltaire and the importance of reason. She said, "This is against my religion. If you believe that man has reason, you are actually going about it wrong, so may I be excused?" Which in all the years I've had people ask for excuses to miss class, that was a memorable one.Henry: That's unique. [laughs]Hollis: It's interesting because, again, I should get back to the novel, the opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.Henry: Yes. I think that's worth emphasizing that some people listening will think, "I'm Rand. These nasty ideas, she's on the right." She's been ideologically described in that way so many times. Deirdre McCloskey in the Literary Review has just in the most recent edition written an absolutely scathing article about Rand. That's libertarian opposition to Rand.McCloskey is saying Hayek is the real thing here and Rand would have hated everything that Hayek did. She got everything wrong. I think the opposition to her, as you say, it's on both sides. One thing that's interesting about this novel is that because she created her own philosophy, which people will have different views on how well that went, but there isn't anyone else like this. All the other people like this are her followers.Hollis: Exactly.Henry: She's outside of the other systems of thought in a way.Hollis: We should talk about Rand. I'm going to quote a little bit from this book on feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand. Let's talk a little bit, if we can, about Dagny as the heroine of a novel, or a hero, because one of the really interesting things about reading Rand at this moment is that she's got one pronoun, he, him, man. She is in this era where man means man and women. That there isn't men and women, he and she, and now it's he, she, and them. She is like, "There's one pronoun." Even she talks about the rights of man or man believes. She means everybody, but she only means man too. It's interesting.I was very much part of the first pronoun wars in the 1980s when women scholars were like, "He and she." Now we're thrown out the window with that binary. Again, we don't need to talk about pronouns, but it's really important to understanding Rand and reading this novel, how much she embraces men and the male pronoun, even while she is using it both ways, and even while her story is led by this woman. She's beautiful. She's beautiful in a very specific way. She's tall, she's slender, she's got great cheekbones, she's got great shoulders, she's got long legs.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.Henry: I want to be Dagny.Hollis: I want to be Dagny. I want to have capes, right?Henry: There's a very important scene, it's not too much of a plot spoiler, where Hank Rearden has invented this new metal. It's very exciting because it's much more efficient and it's much stronger and you can build new bridges for the trains and everything. He makes a bracelet of his new metal. It's a new steel alloy, I think, and gives it to his wife. His wife basically doesn't care.She's not really interested in what it takes to earn the money, she just wants to have the money. You get the strong impression throughout the book that some of the people that Rand is most scathingly disapproving of are wives who don't work. None of those people come out well. When Dagny goes to a party at the Rearden house and she is romantically involved with Hank Rearden, she sees the bracelet.Hollis: She isn't then, right? Isn't she not then?Henry: No, but they have feelings for each otherHollis: Right. Reasonable feelings for each other.Henry: That's right, reasonable feelings, but they're not currently acting on those feelings. She sees the bracelet and she exchanges her, I think, diamonds-Hollis: Diamond bracelet.Henry: -for the Rearden metal bracelet with the wife. It's this wonderful moment where these two opposite ideals of womanhood that Rand is presenting. It's a great moment of heroism for Dagny because she is saying, "Who cares about glittering diamonds when you have a new steel alloy that can make this incredible bridge?" It sounds crazy, but this is 1957. Dagny is very much what you might call one of the new women.Hollis: Right.Henry: I think in some ways, Rand-- I don't like the phrase she's ahead of her time. I've read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman.Hollis: No, this is not Cheever. This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the '50s are taught, certainly in America, it's like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that. I read this first. I was only 15 years after it was published, I think, in the '60s, early '70s reading it.This, to me, seemed perfectly normal and everything else seemed regressive and strange and whiny. There's a lot to be said for reading this novel first. I think if we can talk a little bit about these set pieces because I think for me reading it as a novel and hearing you talk about it as a novel, that novels, whether we're thinking about-- I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That's the closest, right? Is there anybody that's closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand-- the idea is that she's not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader's attention. We go forward, we go backwards. There's her relationship with Francisco d'Anconia that we see her now, years after, then we have flashbacks to growing up and how they became lovers.There are big meeting set pieces where everybody's in the room, and we have all the backstories of the people in the room, what is going to happen. There are these big party scenes, as you say. For example, this big, glorious, glamorous party at the Rearden house, Francisco is there. Francisco and Hank Rearden get in a conversation, and she's like, "I want to go see what my old boyfriend is talking to the guy I like about."There are these moments where you're not supposed to come at the book that way in this serious philosophical way. Then later on when there's this wonderful scene where Francisco comes to see Dagny. This is much later. Hank and Dagny are lovers, so he has a key to her apartment. He walks in and everybody sees immediately what's going on. It's as good as any other farce moment of somebody hiding behind a curtain, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Everything is revealed all at once. She's very good at scenes like that.Henry: Yes, very good. She's very good at high drama. One of the phrases that kept coming back to me was that this book is a melodrama of ideas.Hollis: Yes.Henry: Right? It's not a novel of ideas as such, it's a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she's a bad writer will say is it's melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, "She's so good at melodrama." I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there's so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate--Maybe I'm being too English, but I don't read John Cheever, for example, and think, "Oh, he loves the train." Whereas this book is very, very exciting as a story about inventing a new kind of train that goes really fast," which sounds silly, but that's a really Dickensian theme, that's in Middlemarch. Actually, that's what Matt Yglesias was talking about in his excellent piece today. What does feel very 1950s is you've got the Hollywood influence. The dialogue, I think, is not always great, but it is often great.I often would read pages and think, "This would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue." There's a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these '50s aesthetics actually are present in the book. I'm going to read one paragraph. It's from part one. I think we should read out loud a few bits to give people a sense.Hollis: Yes.Henry: This is when Dagny has built a new train line using grid and metal to make the bridge so that it can go over a valley. I think that's right. The train can do 100 miles an hour. It's this very, very exciting new development. It means that energy can be supplied to factories, and so it's a huge, big deal. This is when she's on the train going at 100 miles an hour and she just can't believe it's happening."Things streaked past a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising, describing a curve, and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky. She looked ahead at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster.""She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine. Safer here where it seemed as if should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be the first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer. It was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one's own course, not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead."That's not MFA prose or whatever, but it turns the pages. I think she's very good at relating we're on the train and it's going very fast to how Dagny is thinking through the philosophical conundrum that is basically going to drive the whole plot forwards. I was reminded again and again of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, where she compared Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that Stevenson had beautiful sentences and dapper little adjectives. It was all jeweled and carefully done. You could marvel over each sentence.She said, "Whereas Scott, it's just page after page and no sentence is beautiful," but she says, "He writes at the level of the page. He's not like Stevenson. He's not writing at the level of the sentence. You have to step into the world." You can say, 'Oh, that wasn't a very good sentence,' but my goodness, the pages keep turning and you're there in the world, right?Hollis: Exactly.Henry: I think she made a really important point there and we just undervalue that so much when we say, oh, so-and-so is not a good writer. What we mean is they're not a Robert Louis Stevenson, they're a Walter Scott. It's like, sure, but Walter Scott was great at what he did. Ayn Rand is in the Walter Scott inheritance in the sense that it's a romance, it's not strictly realistic novel. You have to step into the world. You can't spend your whole time going, "Was that a great sentence? Do I really agree with what she just--" It's like, no, you have to go into this utopian sci-fi universe and you have to keep turning the pages. You get caught up and you go, "Wow, this is this is working for me."Hollis: Let me push back on that-Henry: Yes, good.Hollis: -because I think that was a beautiful passage, one of my favorite passages in this book, which is hard to say because it's a really, really big book. It's a memorable passage because here she is in a place at this moment. She is questioning herself. Isn't she questioning why? Why do I feel safe? Then it strikes her. In this moment, all interior while all this stuff is happening. This whole Rearden metal train bridge set piece is one of the highlights of at least the first half of the book. You come away, even if we've had our entire life up to her, understanding her as a philosophical this woman. How is that different from Dorothea or from Elizabeth Bennet? Yes, Elizabeth Bennet, right?Henry: Oh, no, I agree. My point was purely about prose style, which was to say if you say, "Oh, she writes like a Walter Scott, not like a Robert Louis Stevenson," you're going to deny yourself seeing what you've just said, which is that actually, yes, she has the ability to write philosophical characters.Hollis: When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I read it through the lens of Rand. Now, clearly, these heroines had fewer choices. Dorothea marries Casaubon, I don't know how you pronounce it, because she thinks he's a Randian expert, somebody who's got this grand idea. She's like, "Whoa, I want to be part of this endeavor, the key to all mythologies." Then she's so let down. In the Randian sense, you can see why she would have wanted him.Henry: That's right. I think George Eliot would have strongly disagreed with Rand philosophically. The heroines, as you say, what they're doing in the novel is having to realize that there are social conventions I have to understand and there are things I have to learn how to do, but actually, the key to working all that out is more at the moral philosophical level. This is what happens to Dagny. I think it's on the next page from what I just read. There's another passage where it says that she's in the train and she's enjoying. It's working and she's thrilled that her train is working. She was trying not to think, but she couldn't help herself.She said, "Who made the train. Is it the brute force of muscle? Who can make all the dials and the levers? How is it possible that this thing has even been put together?" Then she starts thinking to herself, "We've got a government who's saying it's wrong to do this, you're taking resources, you're not doing it for the common good." She says, "How can they regard this as evil? How can they believe that this is ignoble to have created this incredible thing?"She says she wants to be able to toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She wants the thoughts to go past like the telegraph poles, but obviously, she can't. She has this moment of realization that this can't be wrong. This type of human accomplishment can't be against the common good. It can't be considered to be ignoble. I think that is like the Victorian heroines.To me, it was more like Fanny Price, which is that someone turns up into a relatively closed system of ideas and keeps their own counsel for a long time, and has to admit sometimes when they haven't got it right or whatever. Basically, in the end, they are vindicated on fairly straightforward grounds. Dagny comes to realize that, "I was right. I was using my reason. I was working hard. I was being productive. Yes, I was right about that." Fanny, it's more like a Christian insight into good behavior, but I felt the pattern was the same.Hollis: Sure. I'll also bring up Jane Eyre here, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Jane Eyre, her relationship, there's a lot to be said of both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester with Hank Rearden because Hank Rearden has to come to his sense. He's married. He doesn't like his wife. He doesn't like this whole system that he's in. He wants to be with a woman that's a meeting of the mind, but he's got all this social convention he has to deal with. Rochester has to struggle, and of course, Bertha Mason has to die in that book. He ends up leaving his wife, but too late. If we're going to look at this novel as a novel, we can see that there are these moments that I think have some resonance. I know you don't seem to want to go to the Mr. Darcy part of it.Henry: No. I had also thought about Jane Eyre. My thought was that, obviously, other than being secular because Jane Eyre is very Christian, the difference is that Hank Rearden and Dagny basically agree that we can't conduct our relationship in a way that would be morally compromising to her. They go through this very difficult process of reasoning like, "How can we do this in a good way?"They're a little bit self-sacrificing about it because they don't want to upset the moral balance. Whereas Mr. Rochester, at least for the first part of the book, has an attitude that's more like, "Yes, but she's in the attic. Why does it matter if we get married?" He doesn't really see the problem of morally compromising Jane, and so Jane has to run away.Hollis: Right.Henry: One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together. They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them.Hollis: I think in a way, that's the central relationship in--Henry: Yes. That was how I read it, yes.Hollis: Yes. The fact as we think about what the complications are in reading this novel as a novel is that here is this great central romance and they've got obstacles. She's got an old boyfriend, he's married. They've got all these things that are classic obstacles to a love story. Rand understands that enough to build it, that that will keep a lot of readers' interest, but then it's like, "That's actually not the point of my book," which is how the second half or the last third of the novel just gets really wiggy." Again, spoiler alert, but Hank is blackmailed to be, as the society is collapsing, as things are collapsing--Henry: We should say that the government has taken over in a nationalizing program by this point.Hollis: Right, because as John Galt is pulling all the thought leaders and the industrialists and all the movers of the world into his lair, things are getting harder and harder and harder, things are getting nationalized. Some of these big meetings in Washington where these horrible people are deciding how to redistribute wealth, again, which is part of the reason somebody like Congressman Paul Ryan would give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to all of his staffers. He's like, "You've got to read this book because we can't go to Washington and be like this. The Trumpian idea is we've got to get rid of people who are covering up and not doing the right thing."They've blackmailed Hank Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal by saying, "We know you've been sleeping with Dagny Taggart." It's a very dramatic point. How is this going to go down?Henry: Right. I think that's interesting. What I loved about the way she handled that romance was that romance is clearly part of what she sees as important to a flourishing life. She has to constantly yoke it to this idea that reason is everything, so human passion has to be conducted on the basis that it's logically reasonable, but that it therefore becomes self-sacrificing. There is something really sad and a little bit tragic about Hank being blackmailed like that, right?Hollis: Yes. I have to say their first road trip together, it's like, "Let's just get out of here and go have a road trip and stay in hotels and have sex and it'll be awesome." That their road trip is like, "Let's go also see some abandoned factories and see what treasures we might find there." To turn this love road trip into also the plot twist that gets them closer to John Galt is a magnificent piece of plot.Henry: Yes. I loved that. I know you want to talk about the big John Galt speech later, but I'm going to quote one line because this all relates to what I think is one of the most central lines of the book. "The damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know yet chose to blank out reality." A lot of the time, like in Brontë or whatever, there are characters like Rochester's like that. The center of their romance is that they will never do that to each other because that's what they believe philosophically, ethically. It's how they conduct themselves at business. It's how they expect other people to conduct themselves. They will never sacrifice that for each other.That for them is a really high form of love and it's what enables huge mutual respect. Again, it's one of those things I'm amazed-- I used to work in Westminster. I knew I was a bit of a libertarian. I knew lots of Rand adjacent or just very, very Randian people. I thought they were all insane, but that's because no one would ever say this. No one would ever say she took an idea like that and turned it into a huge romance across hundreds of pages. Who else has done that in the novel? I think that's great.Hollis: It really is hard. It really is a hard book. The thing that people say about the book, as you say, and the reason you hadn't read it up until now, is it's like, "Oh, yes, I toyed with Rand as a teenager and then I put that aside." I put away my childish things, right? That's what everybody says on the left, on the right. You have to think about it's actually really hard. My theory would be that people put it away because it's really, really hard, what she tried is hard. Whether she succeeded or not is also hard. As we were just, before we jumped on, talking about Rand's appearance on Johnny Carson, a full half hour segment of him taking her very seriously, this is a woman who clearly succeeded. I recently read Jennifer Burn's biography of her, which is great. Shout out to Jennifer.What I came away with is this is a woman who made her living as a writer, which is hard to do. That is a hard thing to do, is to make your living as a writer, as a woman in the time difference between 1942, The Fountainhead, which was huge, and 57, Atlas Shrugged. She was blogging, she had newsletters, she had a media operation that's really, really impressive. This whole package doesn't really get looked at, she as a novelist. Again, let me also say it was later on when I came to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is another extraordinary woman novelist in America who wrote this groundbreaking book, which is filled--I particularly want to shout out to George Harris, the slave inventor who carried himself like a Rand hero as a minor character and escapes. His wife is Eliza, who famously runs across the ice flows in a brave Randian heroine escape to freedom where nobody's going to tell them what to do. These women who changed literature in many ways who have a really vexed relationship or a vexed place in academia. Certainly Stowe is studied.Some 20 years ago, I was at an event with the great Elaine Showalter, who was coming out with an anthology of American women writers. I was in the audience and I raised my hand, I said, "Where's Ayn Rand?" She was like, "Ha, ha, ha." Of course, what a question is that? There is no good reason that Ayn Rand should not be studied in academia. There is no good reason. These are influential novels that actually, as we've talked about here, can be talked about in the context of other novels.Henry: I think one relevant comparison is let's say you study English 19th-century literature on a course, a state-of-the-nation novel or the novel of ideas would be included as routine, I think very few people would say, "Oh, those novels are aesthetically excellent. We read them because they're beautifully written, and they're as fun as Dickens." No one's saying that. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. They're important because of what they are and the barrier to saying why Rand is important for what she is because, I think, people believe her ideas are evil, basically.One central idea is she thinks selfishness is good, but I think we've slightly dealt with the fact that Dagny and Hank actually aren't selfish some of the time, and that they are forced by their ethical system into not being selfish. The other thing that people say is that it's all free-market billionaire stuff, basically. I'm going to read out a passage from-- It's a speech by Francisco in the second part. It's a long speech, so I'm not going to read all eight pages. I'm going to read this speech because I think this theme that I'm about to read out, it's a motif, it's again and again and again.Hollis: Is this where he's speaking to Hank or to Dagny?Henry: I think when he's speaking to Dagny and he says this."Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he want. Money will not give him a code of values if he has evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose if he has evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent."The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him with his money replacing his judgment ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller than his money."Hollis: That's a good--Henry: Right? It's a great paragraph. I feel like she says that in dozens of ways throughout the book, and she wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich. That paragraph and so many others, it's almost biblical in the way she writes it. She's really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She's also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right?Hollis: Yes.Henry: We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Hollis: Right.Henry: The book does not end in a rich utopia, it's important to say.Hollis: It's interesting. A couple of things. I want to get this back since we're still in the novel. Let me say when we get to Galt's great speech, which is bizarre. He says a similar thing that I'll bring in now. He says, "The mother who buys milk for her baby instead of a hat is not sacrificing because her values are feeding the baby. The woman who sacrifices the hat to feed her baby, but really wants the hat and is only feeding the baby out of duty is sacrificing." That's bad. She's saying get your values in order. Understand what it is you want and do that thing, but don't do it because somebody says you have to. She says this over and over in many ways, or the book says this.Henry: We should say, that example of the mother is incidental. The point she's always making is you must think this through for yourself, you must not do it because you've been told to do it.Hollis: Right, exactly. To get back to the love story aspects of the book because they don't sit and say they love each other, even all the great romances. It's not like, "I love you. I love you." It's straight to sex or looks and meetings of the minds. It's interesting. We should deal with the fact that from The Fountainhead and a little bit in this book, the sex is a little rapey. It's a difficult thing to talk about. It's certainly one of the reasons that feminists, women writers don't approve of her. In the book, it's consensual. Whatever one wants to think about the ways that people have sex, it is consensual in the book. Also in The Fountainhead.I'm sure I'll get hate mail for even saying that, but in her universe, that's where it is. What's interesting, Francisco as a character is so interesting. He's conflicted, he's charming, he's her first lover. He's utterly good in every way. He ends up without her. Hank is good. Hank goes through his struggles and learning curve about women prioritizing. If you don't like your wife, don't be married to your wife. It's like he goes through his own what are my values and how do I live them.I know you think that this is bizarre, but there's a lot of writing about the relationship of Hank and Francisco because they find themselves in the same room a lot. They happen to have both been Dagny's lovers or ex-lovers, and they really, really like each other. There's a way that that bonding-- Homosexuality does not exist in her novels, whatever, but that's a relationship of two people that really are hot for one another. There is a lot of writing. There are queer readings of Rand that make a lot of that relationship.Again, this isn't my particular lens of criticism, but I do see that the energy, which is why I asked you which speech you were reading because some of Francisco's best speeches are for Hank because he's trying to woo Hank to happy valley. Toward the end when they're all hanging out together in Galt's Gulch, there's clearly a relationship there.Henry: Oh, yes. No, once you pointed out to me, I was like, "That makes sense of so many passages." That's clearly there. What I don't understand is why she did that. I feel like, and this is quite an accomplishment because it's a big novel with a lot of moving parts, everything else is resolved both in terms of the plot, but also in terms of how it fits her philosophical idea. That, I think, is pretty much the only thing where you're left wondering, "Why was that in there? She hasn't made a point about it. They haven't done anything about it." This I don't understand. That's my query.Hollis: Getting ready to have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on some Reddit threads. I ran Atlas Shrugged Reddit threads where there's some fantastic conversations.Henry: Yes, there is.Hollis: One of them is about, how come Francisco didn't end up with anybody? That's just too bad. He's such a great character and he ends up alone. I would say he doesn't end up alone, he ends up with his boyfriend Hank, whatever that looks like. Two guys that believe in the same things, they can have whatever life they want. Go on.Henry: Are you saying that now that they're in the valley, they will be more free to pursue that relationship?Hollis: There's a lot of things that she has said about men's and women's bodies. She said in other places, "I don't think there'll ever be a woman president because why would a woman want to be president? What a woman really wants is a great man, and we can't have a president who's looking for a great man. She has to be a president." She's got a lot of lunacy about women. Whatever. I don't understand. Someplace I've read that she understands male homosexuality, but not female homosexuality. Again, I am not a Rand scholar. Having read and seen some of that in the ether, I see it in the book, and I can see how her novel would invite that analysis.I do want to say, let's spend a few seconds on some of the minor characters. There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she's like, "Oh, you're so awesome," and they get married. It's like he's got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It's a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody's lying all the time, it's pretentious, Dagny hates it.Here's the Cherryl Taggart who's brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she's told by everybody, "Hate Dagny, she's horrible." Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny's shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she's like, "Oh my God," and she goes to Dagny. Dagny's so wonderful to her like, "Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn't going to tell you, but you were 100% right." That's the end of her.Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there's this really interesting speech she has where she says, "I want to make something of myself and get somewhere." He's like, "What? What do you want to do?" Red flag. "What? Where?" She says, "I don't know, but people do things in this world. I've seen pictures of New York," and she's pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. "I know that someone's built that. They didn't sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking." She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, "We were stinking poor and we didn't give a damn. I've dragged myself here, and I'm going to do something."Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart's. He's basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let's just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it's important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he's like, "Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is."Hollis: Oh, it's a horrible fight. It's the worst fight.Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it's the night and there are shadows. She's in the alleyway. Rand, I don't have the page marked, but it's like a noir film. She's so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She's running through the street, and she's like, "I've got to go somewhere, anywhere. I'll work. I'll pick up trash. I'll work in a shop. I'll do anything. I've just got to get out of this."Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express. Henry: Yes. She's like, "I've got to get out of this system," because she's realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a-- it's like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn't a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social-- Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, "Oh, my God, I'm going to be taken prisoner in. I'm going back into the system," so she jumps off the bridge.This was the moment when I was like, I've had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, "That could be a short story by Gogol," right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you're crazy and paranoid. Maybe you're not. Depends which story we're reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, "Oh, my God, I'm more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out." Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.Hollis: Oh, wow.Henry: When it happens, you just, "Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness."Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, "Oh, my God, I knew it."Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she's just a shop girl in the rain. You've got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she's going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don't have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who's like, "I can't deal with this," and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe's Dred, for example, is very much, "I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave." When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, "I'm going to throw out all of this and be on my own," is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn't invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we've discussed so far, she's there, she's influenced by and continues to influence. Let's talk about your favorite minor character, the Wet Nurse.Henry: This is another great death scene.Hollis: Let's say who he is, so the government sends this young man to work at the Rearden Mills to keep an eye on Hank Rearden.Henry: Once they nationalize him, he's the bureaucrat reporting back, and Rearden calls him the Wet Nurse as an insult.Hollis: Right, and his job, he's the Communist Party person that's in every factory to make sure that everything is--Henry: That's right, he's the petty bureaucrat reporting back and making sure everyone's complying.Hollis: He's a young recent college graduate that, Hank, I think, early on, if it's possible even to find the Wet Nurse early scene, you could tell in the beginning, too, he's bright and sparkly right out of college, and this is, it seems like a good job for him. He's like, "Woohoo, I get to be here, and I get to be--" Yes, go ahead.Henry: What happens to him is, similarly to Cherryl, he has a conversion, but his conversion is not away from the corruption of the system he's been in, he is converted by what he sees in the Rearden plant, the hard work, the dedication, the idealism, the deep focus on making the metal, and he starts to see that if we don't make stuff, then all the other arguments downstream of that about how to appropriate, how to redistribute, whatever, are secondary, and so he becomes, he goes native, as it were. He becomes a Reardenite, and then at the end, when there's a crowd storming the place, and this crowd has been sent by the government, it's a fake thing to sort of--Hollis: Also, a very good scene, very dramatic.Henry: She's very good at mobs, very good at mobs, and they kill, they kill the Wet Nurse, they throw him over. He has a couple of speeches in dialogue with Rearden while he's dying, and he says--Hollis: You have to say, they throw him, they leave him on this pile of slag. He crawls up to the street where Rearden happens to be driving by, and car stops, and so that finding the Wet Nurse there and carrying him in his arms, yes.Henry: That's right, it's very dramatic, and then they have this dialogue, and he says, "I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden, God, how I'd like to, not because I'm dying, but because I've just discovered tonight what it means to be alive, and it's funny, do when I discovered it? In the office, when I stuck my neck out, when I told the bastards to go to hell, there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner, but it's no use crying over spilt milk," and then Rearden, he goes, "Listen, kid, said Rearden sternly, I want you to do me a favor." "Now, Mr. Rearden?" "Yes, now." "Of course, Mr. Rearden, if I can," and Rearden says, "You were willing to die to save my mills, will you try and live for me?"I think this is one of those great moments where, okay, maybe this isn't like George Eliot style dialogue, but you could put that straight in a movie, that would work really well, that would be great, right? I can hear Humphrey Bogart saying these things. It would work, wouldn't it?She knows that, and that's why she's doing that, she's got that technique. He's another minor character, and Rand is saying, the system is eating people up. We are setting people up for a spiritual destruction that then leads to physical destruction. This point, again, about it's not just about the material world. It's about your inner life and your own mind.I find it very moving.Hollis: These minor characters are fantastic. Then let's talk a little bit about Eddie Willers, because I think a lot about Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers, the childhood three, there were three young people, we keep going back to this childhood. We have Dagny, Francisco, because their parents were friends, and then Eddie Willers, who's like a neighborhood kid, right?Henry: He's down the street.Hollis: He lives down the street. He's like the neighborhood kid. I don't know about you. We had a neighborhood kid. There's always neighborhood kids, right? You end up spending time with this-- Eddie's just sort of always there. Then when they turn 15, 16, 17, and when there's clearly something going on between Dagny and Francisco, Eddie does take a step back, and he doesn't want to see.There's the class issues, the status issues aren't really-- they're present but not discussed by Rand. Here we have these two children heirs, and they don't say like, "You're not one of us, Eddie, because you're not an heir or an heiress." He's there, and he's got a pretty good position as Dagny's right-hand man in Taggart Transcontinental. We don't know where he went to college. We don't know what he does, but we know that he's super loyal, right?Then when she goes and takes a break for a bit, he steps in to be COO. James is like, "Eddie Willers, how can Eddie Willers be a COO?" She's like, "It's really going to be me, but he's going to be fine." We're not really supposed to identify with Eddie, but Eddie's there. Eddie has, all through the novel, all through the big old novel, Eddie eats lunch in the cafeteria. There's always this one guy he's having lunch with. This is, I don't know, like a Greek chorus thing, I don't quite know, but there's Eddie's conversations with this unknown person in the cafeteria give us a sense, maybe it's a narrator voice, like, "Meanwhile, this is going on in the world." We have these conversations. This guy he's having lunch with asks a lot of questions and starts asking a lot of personal questions about Dagny. Then we have to talk to-- I know we've gone for over an hour and 15 minutes, we've got to talk about Galt's Speech, right? When John Galt, toward the end, takes over the airwaves and gives this big three-hour speech, the big three-hour podcast as I tweeted the other day, Eddie is with Dagny.Henry: He's in the radio studio.Hollis: He's in the studio along with one of John Galt's former professors. We hear this voice. Rand says, or the narrator says, three people in the room recognize that voice. I don't know about you, did you guess that it was Galt before that moment that Eddie was having lunch with in the cafeteria?Henry: No, no, no, I didn't.Hollis: Okay, so you knew at that moment.Henry: That was when I was like, "Oh, Eddie was talking, right?" It took me a minute.Hollis: Okay, were you excited? Was that like a moment? Was that a big reveal?Henry: It was a reveal, but it made me-- Eddie's whole character puzzles me because, to me, he feels like a Watson.Hollis: Yes, that's nice, that's good.Henry: He's met Galt, who's been under their noses the whole time. He's been going through an almost Socratic method with Galt, right? If only he could have paid a little bit more attention, he would have realized what was going on. He doesn't, why is this guy so interested in Dagny, like all these things. Even after Galt's big speech, I don't think Eddie quite takes the lesson. He also comes to a more ambiguous but a bad end.Hollis: Eddie's been right there, the most loyal person. The Reddit threads on Eddie Willers, if anybody's interested, are really interesting.Henry: Yes, they are, they're so good.Hollis: Clearly, Eddie recognizes greatness, and he recognizes production, and he recognizes that Dagny is better than Jim. He recognizes Galt. They've been having these conversations for 12 years in the cafeteria. Every time he goes to the cafeteria, he's like, "Where's my friend, where's my friend?" When his friend disappears, but he also tells Galt a few things about Dagny that are personal and private. When everybody in the world, all the great people in the world, this is a big spoiler, go to Galt's Gulch at the end.Henry: He's not there.Hollis: He doesn't get to go. Is it because of the compromises he made along the way? Rand had the power to reward everybody. Hank's secretary gets to go, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: She's gone throughout the whole thing.Henry: Eddie never thinks for himself. I think that's the-- He's a very, I think, maybe one of the more tragic victims of the whole thing because-- sorry. In a way, because, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, they try and do the right thing and they end up dying. That's like a more normal tragedy in the sense that they made a mistake. At the moment of realization, they got toppled.Eddie, in a way, is more upsetting because he never makes a mistake and he never has a moment of realization. Rand is, I think this is maybe one of the cruelest parts of the book where she's almost saying, "This guy's never going to think for himself, and he hasn't got a hope." In a novel, if this was like a realistic novel, and she was saying, "Such is the cruelty of the world, what can we do for this person?" That would be one thing. In a novel that's like ending in a utopia or in a sort of utopia, it's one of the points where she's really harsh.Hollis: She's really harsh. I'd love to go and look at her notes at some point in time when I have an idle hour, which I won't, to say like, did she sit around? It's like, "What should I do with Eddie?" To have him die, probably, in the desert with a broken down Taggart transcontinental engine, screaming in terror and crying.Henry: Even at that stage, he can't think for himself and see that the system isn't worth supporting.Hollis: Right. He's just going to be a company man to the end.Henry: It's as cruel as those fables we tell children, like the grasshopper and the ants. He will freeze to death in the winter. There's nothing you can do about it. There are times when she gets really, really tough. I think is why people hate her.Hollis: We were talking about this, about Dickens and minor characters and coming to redemption and Dickens, except Jo. Jo and Jo All Alones, there are people who have redemption and die. Again, I don't know.Henry: There's Cherryl and the Wet Nurse are like Jo. They're tragic victims of the system. She's doing it to say, "Look how bad this is. Look how bad things are." To me, Eddie is more like Mr. Micawber. He's hopeless. It's a little bit comic. It's not a bad thing. Whereas Dickens, at the end, will just say, "Oh, screw the integrity of the plot and the morals. Let's just let Mr. Micawber-- let's find a way out for him." Everyone wants this guy to do well. Rand is like, "No, I'm sticking to my principles. He's dead in the desert, man. He's going to he's going to burn to death." He's like, "Wow, that's okay."Hollis: The funny thing is poor John Galt doesn't even care about him. John Galt has been a bad guy. John Galt is a complicated figure. Let's spend a bit on him.Henry: Before we do that, I actually want to do a very short segment contextualizing her in the 50s because then what you say about Galt will be against this background of what are some of the other ideas in the 50s, right?Hollis: Got it.Henry: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what's wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that's an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she's been writing the book for what, 12 years, I think, or 15 years, the Galt speech takes her 3 years to write, I think. This is, I think the most important label we can give the novel is it's a Cold War novel. She's Russian. What she's doing, in some ways, is saying to America, "This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies." It's like, "This is animal farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life." We've had books like that in our own time. The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver said, that book said, "If the 2008 crash had actually gone really badly wrong and society collapsed, how would it go?" I think that's what she's reacting to. The year before it was published, there was a sociology book called The Organization Man.Hollis: Oh, yes. William Whyte.Henry: A great book. Everyone should read that book. He is worrying, the whole book is basically him saying, "I've surveyed all these people in corporate America. They're losing the Protestant work ethic. They're losing the entrepreneurial spirit. They're losing their individual drive. Instead of wanting to make a name for themselves and invent something and do great things," he says, "they've all got this managerial spirit. All the young men coming from college, they're like, 'Everything's been done. We just need to manage it now.'" He's like, "America is collapsing." Yes, he thinks it's this awful. Obviously, that problem got solved.That, I think, that gives some sense of why, at that moment, is Ayn Rand writing the Galt speech? Because this is the background. We're in the Cold War, and there's this looming sense of the cold, dead hand of bureaucracy and managerialism is. Other people are saying, "Actually, this might be a serious problem."Hollis: I think that's right. Thank you for bringing up Whyte. I think there's so much in the background. There's so much that she's in conversation with. There's so much about this speech, so that when you ask somebody on the street-- Again, let me say this, make the comparison again to Uncle Tom's Cabin, people go through life feeling like they know Uncle Tom's Cabin, Simon Legree, Eliza Crossing the Ice, without having ever read it.Not to name drop a bit, but when I did my annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, this big, huge book, and it got reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker, and I was like, "This is freaking John Updike." He's like, "I never read it. I never read it." Henry Louis Gates and then whoever this young grad student was, Hollis Robbins, are writing this book, I guess I'll read it. It was interesting to me, when I talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I've never read it," because it's a book you know about without reading. A lot of people know about Atlas Shrugged without having read it. I think Marc Andreessen said-- didn't he say on this podcast that he only recently read it?Henry: I was fascinated by this. He read it four years ago.Hollis: Right, during COVID.Henry: In the bibliography for the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and I assumed he was one of those people, he was like you, he'd read it as a teenager, it had been informative. No, he came to it very recently. Something's happening with this book, right?Hollis: Huge things are happening, but the people who know about it, there's certain things that you know, you know it's long, you know that the sex is perhaps not what you would have wanted. You know that there's this big, really long thing called John Galt's Speech, and that it's like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. People read Moby-Dick, you're like, "Oh, yes, but I skipped all the chapters on cetology." That's the thing that you say, right? The thing that you say is like, "Yes, but I skipped all the John Galt's Speech." I was very interested when we were texting over the last month or so, what you would say when you got to John Galt's Speech. As on cue, one day, I get this text and it's like, "Oh, my God, this speech is really long." I'm like, "Yes, you are the perfect reader."Henry: I was like, "Hollis, this might be where I drop out of the book."Hollis: I'm like, "Yes, you and the world, okay?" This is why you're an excellent reader of this book, because it is a frigging slog. Just because I'm having eye issues these days, I had decided instead of rereading my copy, and I do have a newer copy than this tiny print thing, I decided to listen on audiobook. It was 62 hours or whatever, it was 45 hours, because I listen at 1.4. The speech is awesome listening to it. It, at 1.4, it's not quite 3 hours. It's really good. In the last few days, I was listening to it again, okay? I really wanted to understand somebody who's such a good plotter, and somebody who really understands how to keep people's interest, why are you doing this, Rand? Why are you doing this, Ms. Rand? I love the fact that she's always called Miss. Rand, because Miss., that is a term that we

It's been coming a while. But now it's official. Keith Teare has declared his love for Elon Musk. In this week's THAT WAS THE WEEK newsletter, suitably entitled “I'm With Musk”, Keith argues that without Musk “I have no idea what a positive narrative about modernization and growth would be.” America, Keith argues, needs “builders” like Musk who will enable “a real conversation about change”. I'm more ambivalent, but then Ambivalence is my middle name. While I agree with Keith that Musk has been childishly vilified by progressives, I disagree with his Randian argument that innovators are naturally progressive because they claim to want to improve the general lot of humanity. In tech, there are right-wing (Musk, Sacks, Thiel &Andreessen) and left-wing (Moskovitz, Hoffman & Moritz) builders. Some builders are better than others. I know which I prefer.Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Over the past few years, Elon Musk's political evolution has been arguably as rapid and disruptive as one of his tech ventures. He has transformed from a political moderate to a vocal proponent of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and his outspokenness on issues like illegal immigration make him an outlier among tech entrepreneurs and CEOs.Musk's increasing political involvement has added a layer of scrutiny to his businesses, particularly as SpaceX aims to secure more contracts and regulatory permissions. Labor tensions also loom, with Tesla facing unionization efforts and accusations of unfair labor practices, adding a wrinkle into an election where both presidential candidates are vying for the labor vote in the midst of several high-profile strikes this year.Through all this, Musk's companies—SpaceX, Tesla, and X—are pressing forward, but the stakes have arguably never been higher with regulatory bodies and the court of public opinion keeping a close watch. Many conservatives have embraced Musk as a Randian hero of sorts, a champion of free speech and innovation. Others sound a note of caution, warning that his emphasis on “efficiency” could undermine certain conservative values, and question whether his record on labor and China are worth celebrating. So, should conservatives embrace, or resist, Musk-ification? Evan is joined by Chris Griswold, Policy Director at American Compass, a New Right think tank based in DC. Check out his recent piece, “Conservatives Must Resist Musk-ification.” Previously, he served as an advisor to U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, where he focused on innovation, small business, and entrepreneurship.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 443. “Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach,” 2024 Annual Meeting, Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 22, 2024). https://youtu.be/v9bDRDD2wWU Panel discussion: https://youtu.be/vFCZLT4tMY4 Notes below. Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach Stephan Kinsella Property and Freedom Society 2024 Annual Meeting Bodrum, Turkey September 19–24, 2024 Alright, let's have as much fun as we can with a topic like this. Contentious issues among libertarians: Anarchy vs. Minarchy Forms of state: monarchy vs. democracy Open borders vs. mass immigration Intellectual Property (we are winning this one) Israel vs. Gaza Ukraine vs. Russia Abortion: Pro-choice and Pro-Life I've changed my own mind a bit on this issue, after becoming a parent: from pro-choice. to more sympathetic to pro-life arguments, and to my current decentralist view Traditionally libertarians have tended to be pro-choice, including virtually all Objectivists, though there were always some minority pro-life voices (e.g. Doris Gordon of L4L). In recent years many seem to be more conservative, and more friendly to religion, and many more opposed to abortion than in the past. The LP removed its pro-choice plank in Reno in 2022 as part of the Mises Caucus takeover, the “Reno Reset,” arguing that the issue is not settled and each candidate should be able to adopt their own position on this issue. On some issues it seems possible to make progress. Many libertarians come from conservatism, or sometimes leftism, moving at first towards libertarian minarchism and then eventually to libertarian anarchism. I changed my mind on the IP issue and have managed to persuade a large number of people to adopt the anti-IP position. Views change on the issue of open borders and immigration and on particular issues like Israel vs. Gaza and Russia v. Ukraine. But it seems almost impossible for anyone to change someone else's mind on the abortion issue. The fact that this issue seems intractable, often rooted in deep lifestyle preferences or religious beliefs, is relevant, I think to how this issue is best solved in a political-legal sense. See Loren E. Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 91: “The intractability of the dispute … may itself be philosophically significant.” There are the well-known arguments Pro-choice There is the modern, or feminist, argument: it's my body. Of course the response is that there is a baby inside which complicates the matter For this reason even most pro-choice people do not not favor legality until birth Ayn Rand: “abortion is a moral right-which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved.” (“Of Living Death,” The Objectivist, Oct. 1968, 6) In Rand's view, opposition to abortion arises from a failure to grasp both the context of rights and the imposition that child-bearing places on women. As she put it: “A piece of protoplasm has no rights-and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months.” So even Randians recognize difficulty in the later stages of pregnancy Pro-life Then there is the religious-based pro-life argument As this is religious, it is not exactly rational since people of different faiths can have different beliefs about souls, life, rights, and so on Libertarian abortion arguments Pro-Life Doris Gordon of Libertarians for Life: Pro-life she was a neo-Randian and had a secular argument against abortion. However it ultimately was a cheap semantic argument about what it means to be “human”. It's a simplistic argument, as all semantic arguments tend to be Doesn't account for rights of non-humans, e.g.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 443. “Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach,” 2024 Annual Meeting, Property and Freedom Society, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 22, 2024). Recorded with my phone. Better recording and video to come. Notes below. Abortion: A Radically Decentralist Approach Stephan Kinsella Property and Freedom Society 2024 Annual Meeting Bodrum, Turkey September 19–24, 2024 Alright, let's have as much fun as we can with a topic like this. Contentious issues among libertarians: Anarchy vs. Minarchy Forms of state: monarchy vs. democracy Open borders vs. mass immigration Intellectual Property (we are winning this one) Israel vs. Gaza Ukraine vs. Russia Abortion: Pro-choice and Pro-Life I've changed my own mind a bit on this issue, after becoming a parent: from pro-choice. to more sympathetic to pro-life arguments, and to my current decentralist view Traditionally libertarians have tended to be pro-choice, including virtually all Objectivists, though there were always some minority pro-life voices (e.g. Doris Gordon of L4L). In recent years many seem to be more conservative, and more friendly to religion, and many more opposed to abortion than in the past. The LP removed its pro-choice plank in Reno in 2022 as part of the Mises Caucus takeover, the “Reno Reset,” arguing that the issue is not settled and each candidate should be able to adopt their own position on this issue. On some issues it seems possible to make progress. Many libertarians come from conservatism, or sometimes leftism, moving at first towards libertarian minarchism and then eventually to libertarian anarchism. I changed my mind on the IP issue and have managed to persuade a large number of people to adopt the anti-IP position. Views change on the issue of open borders and immigration and on particular issues like Israel vs. Gaza and Russia v. Ukraine. But it seems almost impossible for anyone to change someone else's mind on the abortion issue. The fact that this issue seems intractable, often rooted in deep lifestyle preferences or religious beliefs, is relevant, I think to how this issue is best solved in a political-legal sense. See Loren E. Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 91: “The intractability of the dispute … may itself be philosophically significant.” There are the well-known arguments Pro-choice There is the modern, or feminist, argument: it's my body. Of course the response is that there is a baby inside which complicates the matter For this reason even most pro-choice people do not not favor legality until birth Ayn Rand: “abortion is a moral right-which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved.” (“Of Living Death,” The Objectivist, Oct. 1968, 6) In Rand's view, opposition to abortion arises from a failure to grasp both the context of rights and the imposition that child-bearing places on women. As she put it: “A piece of protoplasm has no rights-and no life in the human sense of the term. One may argue about the later stages of a pregnancy, but the essential issue concerns only the first three months.” So even Randians recognize difficulty in the later stages of pregnancy Pro-life Then there is the religious-based pro-life argument As this is religious, it is not exactly rational since people of different faiths can have different beliefs about souls, life, rights, and so on Libertarian abortion arguments Pro-Life Doris Gordon of Libertarians for Life: Pro-life she was a neo-Randian and had a secular argument against abortion. However it ultimately was a cheap semantic argument about what it means to be “human”. It's a simplistic argument, as all semantic arguments tend to be Doesn't account for rights of non-humans, e.g.

Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture. Sponsored by Shone and Brae Sadler.Recorded at the Austrian Economics Research Conference, 22 March 2024, in Auburn, Alabama. Includes an introduction by Joseph T. Salerno.Lecture Text: Thank you, Joseph, for your kind introduction and thank you, Shone and Brae Sadler, for your generous sponsorship in making this event possible. It is a pleasure and personal honor to be invited to deliver this Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture titled “Ayn Rand and the Austrian Economists” at the Mises Institute's Austrian Economics Research Conference.Henry Hazlitt is one of my favorite writers on economics and ethics. His thoughtful, incisive, and influential writings are marked by his clarity of style and logical analysis. Both Henry Hazlitt and Ayn Rand could really write. Hazlitt's non-fiction books, Economics in One Lesson and Foundations of Morality, along with his novel, Time Will Run Back, complement Ayn Rand's ideas in her books such as The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Atlas Shrugged. In their philosophical, political, and economic views, Hazlitt and Rand largely agree, as they make the same points in different ways with respect to the virtue of the free market as the path to prosperity and happiness. Also, they were friends in their personal lives. In addition, Henry Hazlitt and I had a great friend in common in the late, well-respected and greatly-loved Austrian economist, Bill Peterson.I am excited to be here to give this talk on Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard and how their ideas may be complementary to the essential ideas of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. Perhaps I will be able to provide some new insights to you. We'll see!Like my recently deceased friend, Sam Bostaph, I have great admiration for the ideas of Carl Menger. I will begin by discussing some of Menger's key ideas and comparing them with those of Ayn Rand. I will then repeat this process with the fundamental ideas of Mises and Rothbard. I will conclude with an overall assessment with respect to the potential compatibility of Austrian economics and Objectivism.Carl Menger (1840-1921) began the modern period of economic thought and provided the foundation for the Austrian School of Economics in his two books, Principles of Economics (1871) and Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics (1883). In these books Menger destroyed the existing structure of economic science, including its theory and methodology, and put it on totally new foundations.Menger was a realist who said that we could know the world through both common sense and scientific method. Menger was committed to finding exact laws of economics based on the direct analysis of concrete phenomena that can be observed and characterized with precision. He sought to find the necessary characteristics of economic phenomena and their relationships. He also heralded the advantages of verbal language over mathematical language in that the former can express the essences of economic phenomena, which is something that mathematical language cannot do.Menger viewed exchange as the embodiment of the essential desire and search to satisfy individual human needs. It follows that the intersection between human needs and the availability of goods capable of satisfying those needs is at the root of economic activity. Emphasizing human uncertainty, error, and the time-consuming nature of economic processes, Menger was concerned with the information content of economic choices and the process of acquiring information in order to increase the well-being of economic actors.As this talk will demonstrate, Carl Menger's writings are the closest to Randian doctrines that have ever emanated from any economist. It will follow that we should read and reread his great books and share them with our friends and students.Aristotelian philosophy was at the root of Menger's framework. His biologistic language goes well with his Aristotelian foundations in his philosophy of science and economics. Menger illustrated how Aristotelian induction could be used in economics and he based his epistemology on Aristotelian induction. Menger's Aristotelian inclinations can be observed in his desire to uncover the essence of economic phenomena. He viewed the constituent elements of economic phenomena as immanently ordered and emphasized the primacy of exactitude and universality as preferable epistemological characteristics of theory.Menger's desire was to uncover the real nature or essence of economic phenomena. As an immanent realist, he was interested in essences and laws as manifested in the world. His general and abstract economic theory attempted to unify all true fragments of economic knowledge.Holding that causality underpins economic laws, Menger taught that theoretical science provides the tools for studying phenomena that exhibit regularities. He distinguished between exact types and laws that deal with strictly typical phenomena and empirical-realistic types and laws that deal with truth within a particular spatio-temporal domain. Empirical laws are found by observation and exact laws are found by conceptualization. Menger's exact approach involves deductive-universalistic theory that looks for regularities in the coexistence and succession of phenomena that admits no exceptions and that are strictly ordered. His theoretical economics is concerned with exact laws based on the assumptions of self-interest, full-knowledge, and freedom. Menger's exact theoretical approach involves both isolation and abstraction from disturbing factors.Menger developed a number of fundamental Austrian doctrines such as the causal-genetic approach, methodological individualism, and the connection between time and error. He incorporated purposeful action, uncertainty, the occurrence of errors, the information acquisition process, learning, and time into his economic analysis. As an Aristotelian essentialist and immanent realist, he considered a priori essences as existing in reality. His goal was to discover invariant principles or laws governing economic phenomena and to elaborate exact universal laws. To find strictly ordered exact laws he said that we had to omit principles of individuation such as time and space. This entails isolation of the economic aspect of phenomena and abstraction from disturbing factors such as error, ignorance, and external compulsion. Menger thus argued for an exact orientation of theoretical research whose validity is totally independent of any empirical tests.Both Aristotle and Menger viewed essences, universals, or concepts as metaphysical and had no compelling explanations of the method to be employed in order to abstract the essence from the particulars in which it is indivisibly wedded. For Rand, essences are epistemological and contextual, rather than metaphysical. For her, concepts are the products of a cognitive method whose processes are performed by a human being but whose content is determined by reality.Menger's theory of needs and wants is the link between the natural sciences (particularly biology) and the human sciences. He established this link by describing the final cause of human economic enterprise as an aspect of human nature biologically understood. He analyzed economic activity based on a theory of human action. His theory emphasized individual perception, valuation, deliberation, choice, and action.The foundation of Menger's value theory is a theory of human action that involves a theory of knowledge. He believed that men can understand the workings of the economy. Menger's goal was to establish economic theory on a solid foundation by grounding it on a sound value theory. To do this, he consistently incorporated his methodological individualism into his theory of value.Menger understood that values can be subjective (i.e., personally estimated), but that men should rationally seek objective life-affirming values. He explained that real wants correspond with the objective state of affairs. Menger distinguished between real and imaginary wants and goods depending upon whether or not a person correctly understands a good's objective ability to satisfy a want. Individuals can be wrong about their judgment of value. Menger's emphasis on objective values is consistent with philosophical realism and with a correspondence theory of truth.Menger does trace market exchange back to a man's personal valuations of various economic goods and observes that scales of value are variable from person to person and are subject to change over time. There are certainly “subjectivist” features in Menger's economic analysis that are founded on his methodological individualism which implies that people differ and have a variety of goals, purposes, and tastes. Personal evaluation is therefore inherent in a principled and consistent understanding of methodological individualism.As a supreme advocate of individualist methodology, Menger recognized the primacy of active individual agents who generate all of the phenomena of the social sciences. His methodological individualism is a doctrine that reflects the real structure of society and economy and the centrality of the human agent.Menger's theory of value essentially states that life is the ultimate standard of value. According to Menger, human life is a process in which a person, given his needs and the command of the means to satisfy them, is himself the specific point where human economic life both originates and ends. Menger thus introduced life, value, individual preferences that motivate people, and individual choices into economics. He thus essentially agreed on the same standard of life as the much later Ayn Rand. Value is a contextual judgment made by economizing men. Value is related to the existential state of the individual and the ability of the good in question to change that state in a manner desired by the person.Although Menger speaks of economic value while Rand is concerned with moral value, their ideas are much the same. Both view human life as the ultimate value. The difference is that Menger was concerned with economic values that satisfy a man's needs for food, shelter, healthcare, wealth, production, and so forth. From Rand's perspective, every human value (including economic value) is potentially a moral value that may be important to the ethical standard of a man's life qua man. Their shared biocentric concept of value holds that objective values support a man's life and originate in a relationship between a man and his survival requirements.Both Rand and Menger espouse a kind of contextually-relational objectivism in their theories of value. Value is seen as a relational quality dependent on the subject, the object, and the context or situation involved.Not many Objectivists, or others for that matter, know much about Menger's Austrian Aristotelianism and his commonsense and scientific realism. This is unfortunate. His writings have the potential to provide essential building blocks for a realist construction of economics. Ultimately, they may provide the vehicle for the harmonization and integration of Austrian economics with Objectivism.As we know, the preeminent theory within Austrian economics is the Misesian subjectivist school. Mises maintained that it is by means of its subjectivism that praxeological economics develops into objective science. The praxeologist takes individual values as given and assumes that individuals have different motivations and prefer different things. The same economic phenomena mean different things to different people. In fact, buying and selling take place because people value things differently. The importance of goods is derived from the importance of the values they are intended to achieve. When a person values an object, this simply means that he imputes enough importance to it to be willing to start a chain of causation to change or maintain it, thus making it a thing of value. Misesian economics does not study what is in an object, as does the natural scientist, but rather, studies what is in the subject.Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), the Austrian philosophical economist, is one of our most passionate, consistent, and intransigent defenders of capitalism. Mises defends the free society and private ownership on the grounds that they are desirable from the perspective of human happiness, freedom, peace, and productivity. He constructed a monumental, overarching, systematic, and comprehensive conceptual framework that elucidated the timeless, immutable laws that guide human behavior. Mises integrated his profound theories of methodology, economics, political science, history, and the social sciences in his 1949 magnum opus, Human Action.There is an important dissemblance within Austrian value theory between Menger and Mises. However, it is possible for Menger's more objective-value-oriented theory to coexist and complement Mises's pure subjectivism which is based on the inscrutability of individual values and preferences. Although Menger agrees with Mises that an individual's chosen values are personal and, therefore subjective and unknowable to the economist, he also contended that a person ought to be rationally pursuing his objective life-affirming values. Menger thus can be viewed as a key link-pin figure between Misesian praxeology and Objectivist ethics.According to Mises, economics is a value-free science of means, rather than of ends, that describes but does not prescribe. However, although the world of praxeological economics, as a science, may be value-free the human world is not value-free. Economics is the science of human action and human actions are inextricably connected with values and ethics. It follows that praxeological economics needs to be situated within the context of a normative framework. Praxeological economics does not conflict with a normative perspective on human life. Economics needs to be connected with a discipline that is concerned with ends such as the end of human flourishing. Praxeological economics can stay value-free if it is recognized that it is morally proper for people to take part in market and other voluntary transactions. Such a value-free science must be combined with an appropriate end.Economics, for Mises, is a value-free tool for objective and critical appraisal. Economic science differentiates between the objective, interpersonally valid conclusions of economic praxeology and the personal value judgments of the economist. Critical appraisal can be objective, value-free, and untainted by bias. It is important for economic science to be value-free and not to be distorted by the value judgments or personal preferences of the economist. The credibility of economic science depends upon an impartial and dispassionate concern for truth. Value-freedom is a methodological device designed to separate and isolate an economist's scientific work from the personal preferences of the given economic researcher. His goal is to maintain neutrality and objectivity with respect to the subjective values of others.Misesian economics focuses on the descriptive aspects of human action by offering reasoning about means and ends. The province of praxeological economics is the logical analysis of the success or failure of selected means to attain chosen ends. Means only have value because, and to the degree that, their ends are valued.The reasons why an individual values what he values and the determination of whether or not his choices and actions are morally good or bad are certainly significant concerns but they are not in the realm of the praxeological economist. The content of moral or ultimate ends is not the domain of the economist qua economist. There is another level of values that value in terms of right preferences. This more objectivist sphere of value defines value in terms of what an individual ought to value.Mises grounds economics upon the action axiom which is the fundamental and universal truth that individual men exist and act by making purposive choices among alternatives. Upon this axiom, Mises deduces the entire systematic structure of economic theory. Mises's advocacy of free markets and his opposition to statism stem from his analysis of the nature and consequences of freely acting individuals compared to the nature of government and the consequences brought about by government intervention.For Mises, economic behavior is a special case of human action. He contends that it is through the analysis of the idea of action that the principles of economics can be deduced. Economic theorems are seen as connected to the foundation of real human purposes. Economics is based on true and evident axioms, arrived at by introspection into the essence of human action. From these axioms, Mises derives the logical implications or truths of economics.Through the use of abstract economic theorizing, Mises recognizes the nature and operation of human purposefulness and entrepreneurial resourcefulness and identifies the systematic tendencies which influence the market process. Mises's insight was that economic reasoning has its basis in the understanding of the action axiom. He says that sound deductions from a priori axioms are apodictically true and cannot be empirically tested. Mises developed, through deductive reasoning, the chains of economic theory based on introspective understanding of what it means to be a rational, purposeful, and acting human being. The method of economics is deductive and its starting point is the concept of action.According to Mises, all of the categories, theorems, or laws of economics are implied in the action axiom. These include, but are not limited to: subjective value, causality, ends, means, preference, cost, profit and loss, opportunities, scarcity, marginal utility, marginal costs, opportunity cost, time preference, originary interest, association, and so on.As an adherent of Kantian epistemology, Mises states that the concept of action is a priori to all experience. Thinking is a mental action. For Mises, a priori means independent of any particular time or place. Denying the possibility of arriving at laws via induction, Mises argues that evidence for the a priori is based on reflective universal inner experience.However, Misesian praxeology could operate within a Randian philosophical structure. The concept of action could be formally and inductively derived from perceptual data. Actions would be seen as performed by entities who act in accordance with their nature. Man's distinctive mode of action involves rationality and free will. Men are thus rational beings with free wills who have the ability to form their own purposes and aims. Human action also assumes an uncoerced human will and limited knowledge. All of the above can be seen as consistent with Misesian praxeology. Once we arrive at the concept of human action, Mises's deductive logical derivations can come into play.Knowledge gained from praxeological economics is both value-free (i.e., value-neutral) and value relevant. Value-free knowledge supplied by economic science is value-relevant when it supplies information for rational discussions, deliberations, and determinations of the morally good. Economics is reconnected with philosophy, especially the branches of metaphysics and ethics, when the discussion is shifted to another sphere. It is fair to say that economic science exists because men have concluded that the objective knowledge provided by praxeological economics is valuable for the pursuit of both a person's subjective and ultimate ends.Advocating the idea of “man's survival qua man” or of a good or flourishing life involves value judgments. To make value judgments, one must accept the existence of a comprehensive natural order and the existence of fundamental absolute principles in the universe. This acceptance in no way conflicts with the Misesian concept of subjective economic value. Natural laws ae discovered, are not arbitrary relationships, but instead are relationships that are already true. A man's human nature, including his attributes of individuality, reason, and free will, is the ultimate source of moral reasoning. Value is meaningless outside the context of man.Praxeological economics and the philosophy of human flourishing are complementary and compatible disciplines. Economics teaches us that social cooperation through the private property system and division of labor enables most individuals to prosper and to pursue their flourishing and happiness. In turn, the worldview of human flourishing informs men how to act. In making their life-affirming ethical and value-based judgments, men can refer to and employ the data of economic science.Mises and Rand were passionate critics of collectivism. Whereas Mises criticized the economic and political functioning of collectivism, Rand attacked the morality of collectivism. They agree that collectivism in the form of people, races, or nations does not exist independently from the individuals who comprise them. In addition, they both dismissed positivism's rejection of the human mind as real and as the tool of knowledge about the world, man, and his actions. They also believed that free-market capitalism is the best possible arrangement for society. Their promotion of rationality, free choice, and subjective (i.e., personally estimated) and objective values (in their respective contexts) make their worldviews compatible. Mises's arguments for capitalism in terms of its utility can be interpreted to be in harmony with Rand's criterion of man's life as the standard of value. There is a great deal in Mises's science of human action that is consistent with Objectivist principles. As stated by Walter Block, on the majority of issues Rand and Mises “are as alike as two peas in a pod”.Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) was a grand system builder. In his monumental Man, Economy, and State (1962), Rothbard continued, embodied, and extended Mises's methodological approach of praxeology to economics. His magnum opus was modeled after Mises's Human Action and, for the most part, was a massive restatement, defense, and development of the Misesian praxeological tradition. Rothbard followed up and complemented Man, Economy, and State with his brilliant The Ethics of Liberty (1982) in which he provided the foundation for his metanormative ethical theory. Exhibiting an architectonic character, these two works form an integrated system of philosophical economics.In a 1971 article in Modern Age Rothbard declares that Mises's work provides us with an economic paradigm grounded in the nature of man and in individual choice. He explains that Mises's paradigm furnishes economics in a systematic, integrated form that can serve as a correct alternative to the crisis situation that modern economics has engendered. According to Rothbard, it is time for us to adopt this paradigm in all of its facets.Rothbard defended Mises's methodology, but went on to construct his own edifice of Austrian economic theory. Although he embraced nearly all of Mises's economics, Rothbard could not accept Mises's Kantian extreme aprioristic position in epistemology. Mises held that the axiom of human action was true a priori to human experience and was, in fact, a synthetic a priori category. Mises considered the action axiom to be a law of thought and thus a categorical truth prior to all human experience.Rothbard agreed that the action axiom is universally true and self-evident, but argued that a person becomes aware of that axiom and its subsidiary axioms through experience in the world. A person begins with concrete human experience and then moves toward reflection. Once a person forms the basic axioms and concepts from his experiences and from his reflections upon those experiences, he does not need to resort to external experience to validate an economic hypothesis. Instead, deductive reasoning from sound basics will validate it.In a 1957 article in the Southern Economic Journal, Rothbard states that it is a waste of time to argue or try to determine how the truth of the action axiom is obtained. He explains that the all-important fact is that the axiom is self-evidently true for all people, at all places, at all times, and that it could not even conceivably be violated. Whether it was a law of thought as Mises maintained, or a law of reality as Rothbard himself contended, the axiom would be no less certain because the axiom need only be stated to become at once self-evident.Both Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand were concerned with the nature of man and the world, natural law, natural rights, and a rational ethics based on man's nature and discovered through reason. They also agreed that the purpose of political philosophy and ethics is the promotion of productive human life on earth. In addition, both adopted, to a great extent, Lockean natural rights perspectives and arguments that legitimize private property. Additionally, they both disagreed with Mises's epistemological foundations, and on similar grounds.Both Rothbard and Rand endeavored to determine the proper rules for a rational society by using reason to examine the nature of human life and the world by employing logical deductions to ascertain what these natures suggest. They agreed with respect to the volitional nature of rational human consciousness, a man's innate right of self-ownership, and the metanormative necessity of noncoercive mutual consent. Both thus subscribed to the nonaggression principle and to the right of self-defense.Rothbard and Rand did not agree, however, on the nature of (or need for) government. They disagreed with respect to the practical applications of their similar philosophies. Rejecting Rand's idea of a constitutionally-limited representative government, Rothbard believed that their shared doctrines entailed a zero-government or anarcho-capitalist framework based on voluntarism, free exchange, and peace.Rothbard and Rand subscribed to different forms of metanormative libertarian politics—Rothbard to anarcho-capitalism and Rand to a minimal state. Unlike Rand, Rothbard ended his ethics at the metanormative level. Rand, on the other hand, advocated a minimal state form of libertarian politics based on the fuller foundation of Objectivism through which she attempted to supply an objective basis for values and virtues in human existence. Of course, Rothbard did discuss the separate importance of a rational personal morality, stated that he agreed essentially with most of Rand's philosophy, and suggested his inclination toward a Randian ethical framework. The writings of Rothbard, much like those of Menger, have done a great deal toward building a bridge between Austrian economics and Objectivism.Although Misesian economists hold that values are subjective, and Objectivists argue that values are objective, these claims are not incompatible because they are not really claims about the same things. They exist at different levels or spheres of analysis. The methodological value-subjectivity of the Austrians complements the Randian sense of value objectivity. The level of objective values dealing with personal flourishing transcends the level of subjective value preferences. The value-freedom (or value-neutrality) and value-subjectivity of the Austrians have a different function or purpose than does Objectivism's emphasis on objective values. On the one hand, the Austrian emphasis is on the value-neutrality of the economist as a scientific observer of a person acting to obtain his “subjective” (i.e., personally-estimated) values. On the other hand, the philosophy of Objectivism is concerned with values for the acting individual moral agent, himself. There is a distinction between methodological subjectivism and philosophical subjectivism. Whereas Austrians are methodological subjectivists in their economics, this does not imply that they are moral relativists as individuals.Austrian economics is thus an excellent way of looking at “social science methodology” with respect to the appraisal of means but not of ends. Misesian praxeology therefore must be augmented. Its value-free economics is not sufficient to establish a total case for liberty. A systematic, reality-based ethical system must be discovered to firmly establish a total case for liberty. Natural law provides the groundwork for such a theory, and both Objectivism and the Aristotelian idea of human flourishing are based on natural law ideas.Austrian economics and Objectivism agree on the significance of the ideas of human actions and values. The Austrians explain that a person acts when he prefers the way he thinks things will be if he acts compared to the way he thinks things will be if he fails to act. Austrian economics is descriptive and deals with the logical analysis of the ability of selected actions (i.e., means) to achieve certain ends. Whether these ends are truly objectively valuable is not the concern of the praxeological economist when he is acting in his capacity as an economist. There is another realm of values that views value in terms of objective values and correct preferences and actions. Objectivism is concerned with this other sphere and thus studies what human beings ought to value and act to attain.When thinkers from the Austrian school speak of subjective knowledge they simply mean that each person has his own specific and finite context of knowledge that directs his action. In this context, “subjective” merely means “subject-dependent”. Subjectivism for the Austrians does not mean the rejection of reality—it only focuses on the view that consumer tastes are personal.Austrian economists contend that values are subjective and Objectivists maintain that values are objective. These claims can be seen as compatible because they are not claims about the same phenomena. These two senses of value are complementary. The Austrian economist, as a neutral examiner, does not force his own value judgments on the personal values and actions of the human beings that he is studying. Operating from a different perspective, Objectivists maintain that there are objective values that stem from a man's relationship to other existents in the world.At a descriptive level, the economist's idea of demonstrated preferences agrees with Rand's account of value as something that a person acts to gain and/or keep. Of course, Rand moves from an initial descriptive notion of value to a normative perspective on value that includes the idea that a legitimate or objective value serves one's life. The second view of value provides a standard to evaluate the use of one's free will.Praxeological economics and Objectivism are complementary and compatible disciplines. Economics teaches us that social cooperation through the private property system and division of labor enables most individuals to prosper and to pursue their flourishing and happiness. In turn, Objectivism informs men how to act. In making their life-affirming ethical and value-based judgments, men can refer to and employ economic science.Objectivism's Aristotelian perspective on the nature of man and the world and on the need to exercise one's virtues can be viewed as synergic with the economic coordination and praxeology of Austrian economics. Placing the economic realm within the general process of human action, which itself is part of human nature, enables theoretical progress in our search for truth and in the construction of a systematic, logical, and consistent conceptual framework. The Objectivist worldview can provide a context to the economic insights of the Austrian economists.In conclusion, there is much common ground between Rand and the Austrians and much to be gained through the intellectual exchange between Objectivism and Austrian economics. Objectivism can be viewed as an ethical and logical augmentation of Austrian economics and Austrian praxeology can be seen as the ideal means for Objectivists when addressing economic issues. Economics would focus on attempting to discover economic principles but would leave ethical issues to philosophy.

Do we really need more jeremiads exposing the Randian greed of Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg & Travis Kalanick? Rob Lalka's THE VENTURE ALCHEMISTS is about how big tech turned profits into power. but this has been the alchemy of American economic life for two hundred years. What isn't clear to me is how we are supposed to distinguish good big tech guys like Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, & Reid Hoffman from the evil Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick and Elon Musk. Lalka's fetishization of “ordinary people” might be well meaning, but it doesn't really address today's alchemic challenge of democratizing the economic benefits of technological innovation. Rob Lalka is Professor of Practice in Management and the Albert R. Lepage Professor in Business at Tulane University's A.B. Freeman School of Business and the Executive Director of the Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He has twice received the A.B. Freeman School's Excellence in Intellectual Contributions Award and is the author of a forthcoming book, The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power, from Columbia University Press. Lalka moved to New Orleans from Washington, DC, where he was a director at Village Capital and a senior advisor at the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Prior, he served in the U.S. Department of State's Office of Global Partnerships and was on the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, for which he was recognized with the State Department's Superior Honor Award and its Meritorious Honor Award. Lalka currently serves on the boards of Public Democracy, Inc., Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, and Venture For America in New Orleans. He graduated from Yale University, cum laude with distinction in both history and English, holds his master's degree in public policy from Duke University, and earned executive education certificates from Harvard Business School.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown childrenKeen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Your ghosts, I mean hosts, are joined by Frank and Leon from Left Page and Here Be Media to discuss Adam West's Batman: The Movie! Dananana Dananana discourse! Keep up with Frank and Leon at: https://www.patreon.com/leftpage http://linktr.ee/leftpagehbm Preorder Jon's Book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/capitalism-a-horror-story-gothic-marxism-and-the-dark-side-of-the-radical-imagination-jon-greenaway/20692080?ean=9781914420887 Discuss your favorite bats with Horror Vanguard at: bsky.app/profile/horrorvanguard.bsky.social www.instagram.com/horrorvanguard/ www.horrorvanguard.com You can support the show for less than the cost of ignoring system sources of injustice in favor of a Randian daydream at www.patreon.com/horrorvanguard

An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 2023) follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death. After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand's theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse. Things look better in Hollywood--until the money starts running out, and with it Anna's faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother's house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna's odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom - communal love, communal toilets - and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself. "A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world. Lexi Freiman is the author of the novel Inappropriation, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She is a graduate of Columbia's MFA in fiction and worked as fiction editor at George Braziller for five years. She also writes for television. Recommended Books: Jordan Castro, The Novelist Herve Guibert, Crazy for Vincent  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 2023) follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death. After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand's theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse. Things look better in Hollywood--until the money starts running out, and with it Anna's faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother's house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna's odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom - communal love, communal toilets - and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself. "A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world. Lexi Freiman is the author of the novel Inappropriation, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She is a graduate of Columbia's MFA in fiction and worked as fiction editor at George Braziller for five years. She also writes for television. Recommended Books: Jordan Castro, The Novelist Herve Guibert, Crazy for Vincent  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 2023) follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death. After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand's theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse. Things look better in Hollywood--until the money starts running out, and with it Anna's faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother's house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna's odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom - communal love, communal toilets - and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself. "A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world. Lexi Freiman is the author of the novel Inappropriation, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She is a graduate of Columbia's MFA in fiction and worked as fiction editor at George Braziller for five years. She also writes for television. Recommended Books: Jordan Castro, The Novelist Herve Guibert, Crazy for Vincent  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 2023) follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death. After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand's theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse. Things look better in Hollywood--until the money starts running out, and with it Anna's faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother's house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna's odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom - communal love, communal toilets - and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself. "A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world. Lexi Freiman is the author of the novel Inappropriation, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She is a graduate of Columbia's MFA in fiction and worked as fiction editor at George Braziller for five years. She also writes for television. Recommended Books: Jordan Castro, The Novelist Herve Guibert, Crazy for Vincent  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

According to a study by the National Institute of Mental Health, 72% of entrepreneurs are directly or indirectly affected by mental health issues compared to just 48% of non entrepreneurs. 49% of entrepreneurs deal with mental health issues directly while only 32% of others experienced them.   Jeremy Evans owns and runs Thrice Agency, a marketing firm, as well as providing entrepreneurship coaching for hundreds of small business owners. Like any marketer worth his salt, he's generated millions for his clients and employs psychology daily. But psychology may not be enough to explain the global rise in mental illness. So Jeremy's founded the world's first marketplace for peer support. The goal is to incentivize people to talk about the heavy stuff and to prove that you're not alone.     ” I was pre-med in college. Typical premed student, studying hard and playing hard, until I woke up at 22. I had applied to just one medical school after an elaborate scheme. My girlfriend, a ballerina, was locked in place with her job, so I infiltrated a ritzy gala where I was selling $50 glasses of champaign. I found my target, the president of the medical school, and after the music was over, I got a private interview with him. I got all the way to the dotted lines, looking at those APRs. 16.9%. I remembered the 100 doctors I had worked with: they didn't even like their work. Then my future wife got fired. She needed to move to keep dancing. I stopped dancing and shut myself up in an unfinished Florida attic for a week. She was jet-setting to audition after audition while I was sweating, fasting, and crying like a baby. I didn't want to be a doctor. I wanted to help people. Lots of people. That's all I cared about. I was not some Randian psychopath. I was predominantly concerned about the poor and believed everyone would be rich if it weren't for greedy corporations. Until I had a vision”. AtlasTalked is a marketplace for heavy conversations. It's a network for those looking for or to provide one-on-one peer support, the first of its kind. Our providers ("Friends") are not professionals, just people like you. We talk about anything we like: from addiction and divorce to religion and spirituality. The platform is free to use, with a simple 20% commission on any transactions. We're growing a community of empathic, loving people to share their talents in a way they never have before. He joined me this week to tell me more.   For more information https://atlastalked.com/

Gabriel Custodiet speaks with Yaron Brook, philosopher of freedom, author, podcast host, and Chairman of the Board of the Ayn Rand Institute. Using the ideas of Ayn Rand, they explore what reason and freedom mean and how to live while pursuing rational self-interest. They also discuss intellectual property, anarchy and the allure of collectivism. Guest Links → https://yaronbrookshow.com/ → https://twitter.com/yaronbrook  → https://www.youtube.com/yaronbrook → https://www.amazon.com/stores/Yaron-Brook/author/B007UU9UJ0  → https://www.amazon.com/Fountainhead-Centennial-HC-Ayn-Rand/dp/0452286751 Watchman Privacy → https://watchmanprivacy.com (newsletter, consultation requests) → https://twitter.com/watchmanprivacy → https://www.amazon.com/Watchman-Guide-Privacy-Financial-Lifestyle/dp/B08PX7KFS2 Privacy Courses (supports the show) → https://rpf.gumroad.com/l/privatebitcoin → https://rpf.gumroad.com/l/hackproof Monero Donation Address (If you can't see the whole string, double click in the middle to select all) →8829DiYwJ344peEM7SzUspMtgUWKAjGJRHmu4Q6R8kEWMpafiXPPNBkeRBhNPK6sw27urqqMYTWWXZrsX6BLRrj7HiooPAy Please subscribe to and rate this podcast wherever you can to help it thrive. Thank you! → https://www.youtube.com/@WatchmanPrivacy  →https://odysee.com/@WatchmanPrivacy Timeline 0:00 – Introduction 1:27 – What is rational self-interest, Ayn Rand's most foundational idea? 4:52 – Modern people have no excuse not to be rational 7:20 – What is reason? 8:40 – Bad people: using reason incorrectly or not at all? 13:50 – Why is collectivism so alluring? 18:12 – Do rational people have the same ethics? 21:15 – Examples of irrationality in current world events 27:23 – Big Tech is an overall benefit 30:55 – Would a Randian hero ever be a politician? 32:50 – Rand's problem with anarchy? Is there a way to limit government? 38:48 – Optimism of Objectivism 40:32 – Intellectual property: how far does it go? 46:05 – Do Rand protagonists have empathy? 50:25 – How would a rationally self-interested person go about their day? #WatchmanPrivacy #AynRand #YaronBrook #PrivateProperty

You might be wondering what happened to the once-mighty Sears, and the answer is one weird libertarian CEO, Eddie Lampert, who almost single-handedly brought down one of the biggest American retail companies with the power of Randian objectivism. We also delve into the past glory days of Sears, when they sold mopeds, cars, and entire houses. But first: project car updates.Main topic at 32:00Email us with tips, stories, and unhinged rants: carsandcomrades@gmail.com //Our social media links etc: www.linktr.ee/CarsAndComrades //Music by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: www.kinggizzardandthelizardwizard.com/polygondwanaland //Links/Sources:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears //https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes //https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allstate_(automobile) //https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allstate_(vehicle_brand) //https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Lampert //https://web.archive.org/web/20160826045037/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-eddie-lamperts-warring-divisions-model-adds-to-the-troubles //

Dr. Richard Barbrook is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Westminster. He is the author of Media Freedom (Pluto, 1995) and Imaginary Futures (Pluto, 2007).  His other important writings  include The Hi-Tech Gift Economy, Cyber-communism, The Regulation of Liberty and The Class of the New, and today with Jules he is discussing his prophetic 1995 essay "The Californian Ideology".    In the essay, Dr. Barbrook and Andy Cameron argue that the rise of networking technologies in Silicon Valley in the 90s was linked to American neoliberalism and a paradoxical hybridization of beliefs from the political left and right in the form of hopeful technological determinism.  This new amalgamated ideology combined the ideas of Marshall McLuhan with elements of radical individualism, libertarianism, and neoliberal economics, using publications like Wired Magazine to promulgate their ideas.  This ideology mixed New Left and New Right beliefs together based on their shared interest in anti-statism, the counterculture of the 1960s, and techno-utopianism.    The original promise of the Californian Ideology was that computers would liberate us from all the old forms of political control, and we would become Randian heroes, in control of our own destinies. Instead, today, we feel the opposite—that we are helpless components in a global system—a system that is controlled by a rigid logic that we are powerless to challenge or change.   Additional Info/Links Below…   The Californian Ideology pdf  Dr. Richard Barbrook - Twitter, Website, GoodReads Imaginary Futures:  From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, by Richard Barbrook The Internet Revolution by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron The Class of the New by Richard Barbrook The Hi-Tech Gift Economy by Richard Barbrook Support this podcast and unlock bonus content: www.patreon.com/noeasyanswers --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/noeasyanswers/support

Gabriel Custodiet speaks for a second time with Paul Rosenberg: cryptographer, philosopher, theologian, and privacy advocate. This wide-ranging conversation covers the demise of the CryptoHippie VPN, the original cryptography movement, Bitcoin, Ross Ulbricht, Ayn Rand, the possibility of anarchy, Christianity, the moral inadequacy of democracy, and the future of technocracy.    Guest Links → https://freemansperspective.com/ → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRcS6fvukzA (Previous episode with Paul) → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo (Threat to our democracy fake news)   Watchman Privacy → https://watchmanprivacy.com (newsletter, consultation requests) → https://twitter.com/watchmanprivacy → https://www.amazon.com/Watchman-Guide-Privacy-Financial-Lifestyle/dp/B08PX7KFS2   Privacy Courses (supports the show) → https://rpf.gumroad.com/l/privatebitcoin → https://rpf.gumroad.com/l/hackproof   Monero Donation Address (If you can't see the whole string, double click in the middle to select all) →8829DiYwJ344peEM7SzUspMtgUWKAjGJRHmu4Q6R8kEWMpafiXPPNBkeRBhNPK6sw27urqqMYTWWXZrsX6BLRrj7HiooPAy   Please subscribe to and rate this podcast wherever you can to help it thrive. Thank you!   Timeline 0:00 – Introduction 1:06 – Has being an electrician changed your view of the world? 3:48 – CryptoHippie VPN went out of business; what can we learn from that? 8:06 – Global arbitrage of CryptoHippie business 10:58 – What was the original cryptography movement (and the cypherpunks) all about? 15:49 – What about people who are skeptical of all digital tools? 18:48 – Best ways to learn about computer code and cryptography 22:48 – Rapid fire with Paul Rosenberg 24:52 – What do you say to Bitcoin skeptics? 27:28 – Why shouldn't we focus on privacy coins like Monero? 29:31 – Ross Ulbricht trial 32:00 – Influence of Ayn Rand on Paul 35:23 – Problems with Randian philosophy? 38:40 – Do people today have the moral compass to live in anarchy? 44:44 – What do you say to Christians supportive of government? 50:19 – Democracy is morally unsound 54:21 – Neuralink and transhumanism

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at conman Sam Bankman-Fried, the scam of FTX, and how regime legitimacy has fueled several fraudulent companies with unprofitable business practices. Did post-2008 monetary policy fuel a bubble in "effective altruism?" Do examples like Elon Musk's restructuring of Twitter offer an illustration of what Big Tech firms will have to do to survive in a time of less-than-easy money, or will the regime bailout the corporate extensions of techno-managerialism? What killed Silicon Valley's once-promising techno-libertarian style? Ryan and Tho look at this and more on this episode of Radio Rothbard. Looking for Christmas gifts? Use promo code ROTHPOD for a 20% discount on select books featured on Radio Rothbard. Or, use code MURRAYCHRISTMAS for a special 10% discount on select new Mises apparel: Mises.org/RR_109_Store Recommended Reading "How Easy Money Fueled the FTX Crypto Collapse" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_A "Sound Money Is Our Best Hope Against the Monopolists' Threat" by Brendan Brown: Mises.org/RR_109_B "How Fiat Money Enriches the Unproductive" by George Ford Smith: Mises.org/RR_109_C "Without Easy Money, the Tech Sector Faces Layoffs and Losses" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_D "The Housing Boom Is Already Over. The Housing Shortage Will Continue." by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_E "Will the FTX Scandal Bring Down 'Crypto'?" by Jeff Deist and Bob Murphy (video): Mises.org/RR_109_F Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at conman Sam Bankman-Fried, the scam of FTX, and how regime legitimacy has fueled several fraudulent companies with unprofitable business practices. Did post-2008 monetary policy fuel a bubble in "effective altruism?" Do examples like Elon Musk's restructuring of Twitter offer an illustration of what Big Tech firms will have to do to survive in a time of less-than-easy money, or will the regime bailout the corporate extensions of techno-managerialism? What killed Silicon Valley's once-promising techno-libertarian style? Ryan and Tho look at this and more on this episode of Radio Rothbard. Looking for Christmas gifts? Use promo code ROTHPOD for a 20% discount on select books featured on Radio Rothbard. Or, use code MURRAYCHRISTMAS for a special 10% discount on select new Mises apparel: Mises.org/RR_109_Store Recommended Reading "How Easy Money Fueled the FTX Crypto Collapse" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_A "Sound Money Is Our Best Hope Against the Monopolists' Threat" by Brendan Brown: Mises.org/RR_109_B "How Fiat Money Enriches the Unproductive" by George Ford Smith: Mises.org/RR_109_C "Without Easy Money, the Tech Sector Faces Layoffs and Losses" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_D "The Housing Boom Is Already Over. The Housing Shortage Will Continue." by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_E "Will the FTX Scandal Bring Down 'Crypto'?" by Jeff Deist and Bob Murphy (video): Mises.org/RR_109_F Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

On this episode of Radio Rothbard, Ryan McMaken and Tho Bishop look at conman Sam Bankman-Fried, the scam of FTX, and how regime legitimacy has fueled several fraudulent companies with unprofitable business practices. Did post-2008 monetary policy fuel a bubble in "effective altruism?" Do examples like Elon Musk's restructuring of Twitter offer an illustration of what Big Tech firms will have to do to survive in a time of less-than-easy money, or will the regime bailout the corporate extensions of techno-managerialism? What killed Silicon Valley's once-promising techno-libertarian style? Ryan and Tho look at this and more on this episode of Radio Rothbard. Looking for Christmas gifts? Use promo code ROTHPOD for a 20% discount on select books featured on Radio Rothbard. Or, use code MURRAYCHRISTMAS for a special 10% discount on select new Mises apparel: Mises.org/RR_109_Store Recommended Reading "How Easy Money Fueled the FTX Crypto Collapse" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_A "Sound Money Is Our Best Hope Against the Monopolists' Threat" by Brendan Brown: Mises.org/RR_109_B "How Fiat Money Enriches the Unproductive" by George Ford Smith: Mises.org/RR_109_C "Without Easy Money, the Tech Sector Faces Layoffs and Losses" by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_D "The Housing Boom Is Already Over. The Housing Shortage Will Continue." by Ryan McMaken: Mises.org/RR_109_E "Will the FTX Scandal Bring Down 'Crypto'?" by Jeff Deist and Bob Murphy (video): Mises.org/RR_109_F Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 393. After a Twitter spat with Las Vegas Libertarian about IP (see here and here), I offered to have a discussion with him. I didn't make much headway, but it was a fun, robust discussion. Oh well. I tried. Related: “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism,” Mises Daily (July 28, 2010) Yet another Randian recants on IP (Feb. 1, 2012) An Objectivist Recants on IP (Dec. 4, 2009) Letter from a UK Grad Student Does Cato's New Objectivist CEO John Allison Presage Retrogression on IP? Timothy Sandefur, “A Critique of Ayn Rand's Theory of Intellectual Property Rights,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 9, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 139–61 Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward https://youtu.be/k7ebUpmAWHc

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast: Episode 393. After a Twitter spat with Las Vegas Libertarian about IP (see here and here), I offered to have a discussion with him. I didn't make much headway, but it was a fun, robust discussion. Oh well. I tried. Related: “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism,” Mises Daily (July 28, 2010) Yet another Randian recants on IP (Feb. 1, 2012) An Objectivist Recants on IP (Dec. 4, 2009) Letter from a UK Grad Student Does Cato's New Objectivist CEO John Allison Presage Retrogression on IP? Timothy Sandefur, “A Critique of Ayn Rand's Theory of Intellectual Property Rights,” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 9, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 139–61 Against Intellectual Property After Twenty Years: Looking Back and Looking Forward https://youtu.be/k7ebUpmAWHc

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Bias Against Altruism, published by Conor Sullivan on July 23, 2022 on LessWrong. I've noticed a phenomenon in our culture whereby altruistic actions face much more scrutiny than selfish actions. I think we should be aware of this bias effect, especially when discussing incentivizing people to e.g. work on AI alignment instead of ML research. When I say 'our culture', I mean modern WEIRD culture, especially the English-speaking world. Here's what I notice: when I declare that I'm doing something selfishly and avowedly, I get praised. When I do something out of altruism, or do something that is coded as altruistic, my motives and true values get heavily scrutinized. The assumption is that I'm doing good in order to accrue praise and social status, which is called 'ulterior motives.' The thing is, people aren't necessarily misreading my motivations: I do want praise and social status. (Doesn't everyone?) Given the direction of praise and status (selfish ambition is high-status, selfless do-gooding is questionable), my incentives are clear. Personally, I never, ever do anything out of altruism. (Honestly! I don't. Okay, maybe I give change to a homeless person once in a while...) I do have a heart, so I would like to do the right thing, but I don't, because I'd rather not get attacked all the time. I'm sick of the psycho-Kremlinology that we all get subjected to. I'm just not moral enough for that. Sorry. I have a few theories about why this happens: Because modern WEIRD culture is actually an amalgamation of many subcultures, and individuals have leeway to select their subculture, people who are genuinely doing harm with their selfishness are not easy to attack directly. Charles Koch is hated by the political left, but he doesn't care because he's a conservative and only associates with other conservatives. Attacking someone who is transparently doing wrong is boring, and doesn't lead to sustained dialogue. Therefore due to the dynamics of social media, people can't sustain their outrage. However, a person who is a mix of good and bad traits (Elon?) invites endless controversy. That is a sustainable hate train which runs on renewable energy. This is a problem we inherited from Christianity. Christianity was weirdly obsessed with getting people to have the right motives, and didn't care as much about right action. Doing good things, but being rewarded for them, would not get you into heaven. Only sacrifice counted. (This is, by the way, why I personally can't stand Christianity.) Modern culture has a weird obsession with misbegotten social status. Selfishness does not aim at attaining status, and is therefore 'based'; altruism (at least sometimes) aims at attaining status, and is therefore 'cringe'. A Randian individualist is actually hard to criticize, because they've renounced doing good as a way of attaining status. Desiring status is the lowest status thing in our culture. (In my opinion, this is a great sickness that would ultimately doom our society, except that the singularity will happen first.) I don't know if any of these four theories are correct or insightful. I'm not too concerned about the etiology of this problem, to be honest. (I'm worried that discussing the etiology will result in a fruitless political debate in the comments of this post; maybe I should have omitted these theories.) I just want people to be aware of this phenomenon so that real positive behavior gets incentivized again. If you want to encourage people to do good things, consider the following: actually encouraging. We hardly ever celebrate anyone anymore. Yes, there is also the issue of punishing wrongdoing: avowed selfishness strangely avoids criticism, and is in fact praised (i.e. by libertarians). So you might think the solution is to redirect criticism to the right people. But I ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A Bias Against Altruism, published by Conor Sullivan on July 23, 2022 on LessWrong. I've noticed a phenomenon in our culture whereby altruistic actions face much more scrutiny than selfish actions. I think we should be aware of this bias effect, especially when discussing incentivizing people to e.g. work on AI alignment instead of ML research. When I say 'our culture', I mean modern WEIRD culture, especially the English-speaking world. Here's what I notice: when I declare that I'm doing something selfishly and avowedly, I get praised. When I do something out of altruism, or do something that is coded as altruistic, my motives and true values get heavily scrutinized. The assumption is that I'm doing good in order to accrue praise and social status, which is called 'ulterior motives.' The thing is, people aren't necessarily misreading my motivations: I do want praise and social status. (Doesn't everyone?) Given the direction of praise and status (selfish ambition is high-status, selfless do-gooding is questionable), my incentives are clear. Personally, I never, ever do anything out of altruism. (Honestly! I don't. Okay, maybe I give change to a homeless person once in a while...) I do have a heart, so I would like to do the right thing, but I don't, because I'd rather not get attacked all the time. I'm sick of the psycho-Kremlinology that we all get subjected to. I'm just not moral enough for that. Sorry. I have a few theories about why this happens: Because modern WEIRD culture is actually an amalgamation of many subcultures, and individuals have leeway to select their subculture, people who are genuinely doing harm with their selfishness are not easy to attack directly. Charles Koch is hated by the political left, but he doesn't care because he's a conservative and only associates with other conservatives. Attacking someone who is transparently doing wrong is boring, and doesn't lead to sustained dialogue. Therefore due to the dynamics of social media, people can't sustain their outrage. However, a person who is a mix of good and bad traits (Elon?) invites endless controversy. That is a sustainable hate train which runs on renewable energy. This is a problem we inherited from Christianity. Christianity was weirdly obsessed with getting people to have the right motives, and didn't care as much about right action. Doing good things, but being rewarded for them, would not get you into heaven. Only sacrifice counted. (This is, by the way, why I personally can't stand Christianity.) Modern culture has a weird obsession with misbegotten social status. Selfishness does not aim at attaining status, and is therefore 'based'; altruism (at least sometimes) aims at attaining status, and is therefore 'cringe'. A Randian individualist is actually hard to criticize, because they've renounced doing good as a way of attaining status. Desiring status is the lowest status thing in our culture. (In my opinion, this is a great sickness that would ultimately doom our society, except that the singularity will happen first.) I don't know if any of these four theories are correct or insightful. I'm not too concerned about the etiology of this problem, to be honest. (I'm worried that discussing the etiology will result in a fruitless political debate in the comments of this post; maybe I should have omitted these theories.) I just want people to be aware of this phenomenon so that real positive behavior gets incentivized again. If you want to encourage people to do good things, consider the following: actually encouraging. We hardly ever celebrate anyone anymore. Yes, there is also the issue of punishing wrongdoing: avowed selfishness strangely avoids criticism, and is in fact praised (i.e. by libertarians). So you might think the solution is to redirect criticism to the right people. But I ...

Ana and Dan don their fancy hats and get ready to take on the lament of the lonesome space cowboy in the two Firefly episodes featuring Dan-favorite Christina Hendricks. Is the series randy or Randian? Could the dialog get any quippier? How did Fox fuck this series up so badly? And, lastly, does it make sense to export horses for terraformed moons? There is IR in this show. Get bonus content on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Ana and Dan don their fancy hats and get ready to take on the lament of the lonesome space cowboy in the two Firefly episodes featuring Dan-favorite Christina Hendricks. Is the series randy or Randian? Could the dialog get any quippier? How did Fox fuck this series up so badly? And, lastly, does it make sense to export horses for terraformed moons? There is IR in this show. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the free version of The Culture Journalist. For the full version of this episode and others — plus essays, monthly culture recommendations, and more — sign up for a paid subscription. Hey pals. We're going to kick things off today with a quote from the great Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”Gramsci was describing the political situation in Italy and Europe a year into the Great Depression. But his words also sum up the subject of political scientist and friend-of-the-pod Kevin Munger's new book: Boomers, their unceasing grip on American politics and culture, and why it's so difficult for them to understand what us young people are going through. His book, Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture, explores the confluence of factors that led the Baby Boomers to become the richest, the most powerful, and the most populous elder generation in American history — and how the concentration of so much power at the top of the age pyramid is shaping, or perhaps stunting, the ability of Millennials and Gen Z to come into their own as a political power base. Borrowing a metaphor from the nautical world, he calls this phenomenon Boomer ballast. “Our ship of state has more ballast” – or weight  — “than ever before,” he writes, “rendering us unusually stable or slow to adapt.” Think: The fact that members of the Boomer Generation and the Silent Generation jointly still hold more seats in Congress than any other age group. (Kevin has written an article on this). And how rare it is to see real, material progress when it comes to the problems that impact young people the most, such as climate collapse, student loan debt, and decades of stagnating wages. Today, we're diving deep into the Boomer generation, how their lived experience has shaped their view of the world, and the long legacy of the cultural and political currents they've embraced. (For example, the hippy movement of the '60s and '70s, segueing into the Randian individualism of the '80s and '90s.) We'll be exploring why our own experiences, and priorities, are so different from theirs, and how our inability to achieve our own political aims in the face of so much entrenched institutional power — and the internet — is pushing Millennial and Gen Z political behavior into strange and surprising new shapes. To do that, we enlisted the brains of two of our favorite thinkers on all things related to generational political self-expression: Kevin himself, an assistant professor of political science and social data analytics at Penn State University; and Joshua Citarella, an artist and researcher who studies political subcultures online. Josh is also the founder of Do Not Research, a Discord community, publication, and arts institution focused on documenting aesthetic culture and memetic influence on the internet. Did you know that the Boomer generation once appeared as “the person of the year” on the cover of a certain high–profile American magazine, simply by virtue of being born? Ever wonder why some young people on the Internet seem to be politically self-identifying in ways that completely explode the left-right, Democratic-Republican binary? Want to hear the story behind “How to Plant a Meme,” Josh's experiment in using “Capitalist Realism” memes to try to covertly steer radical meme accounts toward more productive ends? Buckle up, because we've got a wild show for you all. Follow Kevin on TwitterBuy Kevin's bookRead Kevin's blogFollow Josh Citarella on TwitterBuy Josh's book, Politigram and the Post-LeftRead more by Do Not ResearchBecome a member of Do Not Research  You are listening to the free version of The Culture Journalist. For the full version of this episode and others — plus essays, monthly culture recommendations, and more — sign up for a paid subscription. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Programa 02x164. Aquesta hist

It really is not all that popular to be a conservative today, is it? The liberal side of our society stereotypes a conservative as biased, narrow, even fundamentalist. A conservative is oppressive, defensive and for many offensive. But what exactly is a conservative? Can any individual human being be classified as a conservative in every way, for every occasion or every issue, anymore than a liberal can? For, in reality, virtually every human being holds some conservative points of view as well as liberal. And even the most ardent liberal can find himself or herself on the conservative side of an issue from time to time.So I ask again, what exactly is a conservative?One young aggressive entrepreneur Pia Varma chooses not to even use the word conservative, but rather the POLITICAL RIGHT. And she, bright young thinker that she is, thinks of this political right as a mixture of different and often conflicting factions. And, she is right even as there are many different liberal points of view in the liberal tent. There are, Varma says, under this conservative or politically to-the-right tent the following: Republicans Conservatives Libertarians Classical Liberals Objectivists Randians Austrians Neocons RadconsNine of them. Some who may think of themselves as conservative may never have heard of some of these conceptual categories or political groups. Do you know, for example, what a Radcon is, or for that matter an Austrian? There are for them enough differences on the political scene to differentiate themselves, to form a new category, and postulate new political philosophies and principles. Differences prevail and no wonder there are often conflicting factions under the so-called conservative or politically right tent. But it seems as though there are common areas of agreement for all those politically conservative or on the right.The first point of agreement is that government should be less and not more. Government at work in any capacity, size or political or social sphere is NEVER the solution, never. Government at work, especially large government, creates more problems than it provides solutions. All conservatives agree.Conservatives further agree that government bureaucracy is social and financial strangulation. It produces little more than obscure, inefficient and extremely difficult rules and regulations, and red tape at every turn. Conservatives also agree that welfare of any kind, in any extreme, is wrong done by government. That is so whether corporate or personal welfare. Government cannot provide and support in any permanent way again without causing more problems than solutions.Conservatives also agree that the government must take a conservative approach to the world of finances, to money. Government cannot provide bailouts and government cannot print money to pay the debt, only at the cost of runaway inflation and the devaluation of private assets and property.Conservatives agree that our Constitution and its precious amendments are the law of the land, and that law must be respected at every turn. Conservatives are essentially strict constructionists when it comes to the constitutional law and in fact all law and its interpretation and application of the law. Conservatives are passionate believers in individual freedom, and freedoms generally, and they rebel at the thought of government circumscribing any individual freedom. The more government intervenes, the less freedom there is.Conservatives passionately agree that taxes should be extremely limited. All taxpayers should be treated fairly and equally. The concept of taxation should never be utilized for social purposes, and any form of taxation should be eliminated whenever it is not absolutely necessary. Those on the political right think that the tax code should be overhauled, simplified or perhaps even eliminated in favor of a flat tax. Rampant taxation is a means towards socialism, it results in a redistribution of wealth and the subservience of individual rights, including and especially financial opportunity.Conservatives passionately believe in free enterprise and in the great system of capitalism without undue restraint or restriction. Those on the political right believe in laissez faire. That is, government HANDS-OFF, hands-off private enterprise and capitalism at work. Let the marketplace determine and let individuals have maximum opportunity to think, create, and make things happen.None of those nine groups would disagree in any fundamental way with these overarching principles. Whether Republican, Conservative, Libertarian, Classical Liberal, Objectivist, Randian, Austrian, Neocon or Radcon, or any other form or type of conservatism, none would disagree with the above principles. They are fundamental. They are American. They are the principles which formed the basis and total structure of our great country. They have guided us for more than two and a quarter centuries and those principles are right. They are the best. Without them, there would be no America. We are headed my friends in so many ways for statetism, for a new form of socialism foreign to all Americans. Movements are at work to erode or eliminate virtually every fundamental conservative principle and point of view, especially those mentioned. It is absolutely imperative that conservatives of all stripes put aside their differences, and work together for a common cause. That is, to save America. We need such an aggressive act to make certain that our great Country does not go under. America needs to be saved from the CHANGE which has come with far more detrimental change on the way. If we the conservative do not band together and protect and preserve what we have, there will be no America for our children and grandchildren. Nowhere near the America you and I now know and love and enjoy.Democrats and liberals, fairly synonymous, have an amazing way of putting aside differences and working together for common causes. That is why they are generally more successful in the political arena than conservatives. Conservatives seem to maximize and stumble over differences rather than putting them aside, forging allegiance and alliances on principles in common that bind and unite, and making things happen. Conservatives are done as a political force or a philosophic and conceptual point of view if they, if we, if you, as conservatives, if we do not unite. I urge you my friend to find every commonality with anyone who cares for America as it used to be and as it is. Otherwise, get ready for CHANGE radical, fundamental and perhaps forever. Stand up and say what you think and believe or say goodbye to America!

Follow me on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAmyZYsKRza4w6vrGAQdTJg If you want to gift me here's my Amazon Gift list https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/21BJZ829NEIYN?ref_=wl_share Get my art on you: https://streamlabs.com/crimson60620/merch Join my Discord: https://discord.gg/PvyjjC4 You can support me on Paypal https://www.paypal.me/crimson60620 Patreon https://www.patreon.com/crimson60620ps4gaming Streamlabs https://www.streamlabs.com/crimson60620 You can purchase my artwork at https://www.etsy.com/shop/lonesageartor https://www.deviantart.com/crimson60620 You can watch me live on https://www.twich.tv/crimson60620Follow me on Twitter @ crimson60620 --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/crimson60620/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/crimson60620/support

It seems that there is a twofold trend among modern Nietzscheans. On the one hand, we have those influenced by French thinkers such as Deleuze or Foucault, who saw no essential contradiction in adopting some of the ideas of Nietzsche while simultaneously striving for goals which were explicitly or implicitly Marxist oriented. On the other, there are those for whom the mere mention of the name "Marx" is met with revulsion, and for whom there is a serious allergy for anything having to do with talk of revolution, the working class, or seizing the means of production. For my part, I've never really been in either camp. I think the post-modernist and post-structuralist retconning of Nietzsche is just that: interesting as a later development in philosophy, but not an accurate representation of Nietzsche's political thought, which was reactionary and pro-aristocracy. On the other hand, the type of reactionary politics that Nietzsche advocated should not be taken as gospel. All too often, his ideas are transmuted into Randian worship of great individuals, who would solve all of the problems of society if only they were not constrained by government regulations; Nietzsche becomes an excuse for people to look away from the pressing problems of society and culture. Whatever your position on Marxism, I think it is the height of ignorance to hold to a political stance without hearing out the arguments for the opposing position in good faith. In this conversation with invalid_arg_, a Marxist-Leninist streamer, we discuss the philosophical origins of Marxism, the application of Marxism in the Soviet Union, how China looks today in light of Marxist thought, what Marxist-Leninists think about anarchists, and much more. I hope that my audience will set aside any preconceived biases they have to examine ideas which are beyond the pale of liberal-democratic thought, but from the opposite perspective that Nietzsche provides. invalid's Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/invalid_arg_ on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkfULrQdHWMPy1GZjm8oI8g

Enigmatic Californian tech investor and libertarian Peter Thiel is best known for his controversial ‘spy tech' company Palantir and for enabling Hulk Hogan to sue gossip site Gawker out of business. But as new book The Contrarian shows, Thiel has always had bigger ambitions to use tech to sideline government itself. Author Max Chafkin tells Andrew Harrison about the Randian ideas that propelled Thiel from the “Paypal Mafia” to Trump's White House – and why we should worry about ‘Thielism'.“Thiel is both a superhero and supervillain, like Ayn Rand crossed with… Ayn Rand.” “Thiel is the one person aside from Mark Zuckerberg who is responsible for Facebook's success.”“He named Palantir after this all-seeing orb from Lord of the Rings. And Sauron is not the good guy.”Presented and produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers: Jacob Archbold and Jelena Sofronijevic. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, I'm chatting with my friend Karl Nord about Ayn Rand's Romantic Manifesto, Nietzsche's Use and Abuse of History for Life, whether H.P. Lovecraft's characters have volition, the use of deus ex machina in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, the depressing spirit of Von Trier films, morality in art and as art, and the alchemical power of aligning the artistic and the political. 

outro: https://youtu.be/JanZSDIWpmg We start with a quick moratorium on self-deprecating apologia for doompill. Confronting, with sober senses and ruthless analysis, the material conditions of the world is not always a joyful thing. But, importantly, it is not one that calls for nihilism, fatalism, or doom. We then discuss a long excerpt from an upcoming biography of Peter Thiel and finally give this (self-admittedly) evil man the attention he deserves. Not only is Thiel driven by venal desires of power and wealth, he is also consumed with paranoia that one day the taxman will make him pay his fair share. Thiel is a ludicrous caricature of the Randian superhero. Some stuff we discuss • Peter Thiel Gamed Silicon Valley, Donald Trump, and Democracy to Make Billions, Tax-Free | Max Chafkin: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-15/peter-thiel-gamed-silicon-valley-tech-trump-taxes-and-politics • Lord of the Roths | Justin Elliott, Patricia Callahan, James Bandler: https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tech-mogul-peter-thiel-turned-a-retirement-account-for-the-middle-class-into-a-5-billion-dollar-tax-free-piggy-bank Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills Grab your TMK gear: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

"Nationalise Tebay, I say." More keen insights into Mumsnet and Reddit's /r/AskUK. This week, we discuss dramatising stories by adding 30 minutes to time periods, what to do if a cat steals your phone, some Randian nonsense about collective responsibility, "trying" to keep in touch, and we discuss the personality and net worth of the Pringles mascot.

It wouldn't be a return to in-studio recordings without just a lot of talkative dogs.  In between attention-seeking pooches, we discuss a Woodstock 99 documentary, Kids on Brooms, The fact that Reed Richards is a Randian douche canoe, and we do some spam letter readings   Intro Music: A Day In Cincinnati by Nicolai Heidlas Logo by Jamie-Lyn Trinckes brothersquarrel@gmail.com @ABQpodcast

In this podcast we comment on the state of the Tory Cabinet as members are 'pinged' as  a result of the Secretary of Sate for Health testing positive for COVID19 on the eve of 'free-dumb day'. We focus on contradictions within the right as authoritarian social conservatism vies with libertarian-libertinism for dominance and powerful opportunists attempt to face both ways. In this context we examine Javid's espousal of Randianism. [Free. 35 minutes.]

We're back to examine the distinctly whiffy corpse of the Labour Party, fresh off it's massive win in a Tory marginal to launch some pro-business policies. We love it, folks, don't we love it? Also we declare Victory Day in Afghanistan, return to our favourite Stupid Tank, and consider dropping that fuddy duddy Marx for cool Randian logic and reason. The things we do for you people.  Black Thoughts: A PiP Project will be out on the public feed next week, but it's available on Patreon now!  Follow us on Twitter: @Praxiscast Pod Cast:  David @SanitaryNaptime Rob @CountRthe  Jamie @coprespecter420 James @anarchonbury Alasdair @Ballistari Edited by @CountRthe , had it coming tbh

We recorded this episode on Mike's birthday, so while he was tripping on the gland secretions of some desert toad he found, friend of the podcast Colin Boyd-Bigby stepped in to fill in his shoes. The focus of this episode revolves in great part around the Adam Curtis BBC documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. We discuss Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy, her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and the outsized influence her work has had on the political, economic, and technological development in the United States. This episode features a segment of Ayn Rand's interview with Mike Wallace in 1959, and the song Crunk In Time by Wukileak. Follow on instagram.com/attackdethronegodcast Support this podcast at patreon.com/adgodcast Graphic design by Jeff C. Intro song by Jordan Thornquest --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/adgodcast/message

On today's Women's Day special, Mark and Rucka discuss their favourite Randian heroines.Consider supporting our work by becoming a member: https://aynrandcentre.co.uk/membership/

David’s book Atlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Gault III can be found here: https://atlashugged.world/ Home - Evolution Institute (evolution-institute.org): https://evolution-institute.org/ NESCent: The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center: https://nescent.org/ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957) B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948) Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (2009) Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) Massive Modularity - Oxford Handbooks: https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195309799.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195309799-e-4 Selection by consequences | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/selection-by-consequences/0F69B44DBC37419B8EBD90B5667738ED Acceptance and Commitment Therapy | Steven C. Hayes, PhD: https://stevenchayes.com/category/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy/ George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–2) Athena Aktipis, The Cheating Cell: How Evolution Helps Us Understand and Treat Cancer (2020) Timestamps 2:58 How David came to be interested in this topic and why he decided to put his thoughts into novel form 13:16 The mosaic of ideas 27:08 Randian economics and the alternative 39:26 Individual versus group-level perspectives in society and biology 50:11 Cooperation and cheating 55:54 Acceptance and Commitment Therapy 01:08:05 The advantages of the fictional form 01:13:05 The novel of ideas

Join us on the Fireside Chat with guest Vernon Meigs! Vernon is a programmer and aspiring musician, who also happens to write and make videos about men's issues from an individualist/Randian perspective.

This week we decided to re-pitch some of your favourite movies, The Galactic Empire has just been dealt a terrible blow after the death star exploded, hope is coming to the workers of the outer rim, and unions have started taking action, but will beleaguered middle-manager Darth (William Shatner) Vader put them down, or will the rock-n-roll up and comer Luke (Macauley Culkin) Skywalker be able to mobilize the strike the people have been waiting for? Honourable Mentions: Green Lantern - Jeremy Renner stars in this Randian reboot of the space-cop superhero Green Lantern. No Country for Old Men - Slide Parameeta (Tom Baker) is a down and out country musician, but when an opportunity presents himself he and his friend Johnny Cash might just be able to find a new lease on life pretending to be hip playing music the kids love!

We finish up our December January (no, YOU fell behind!) blockbuster month with Christoper Nolan’s head-trip extravaganza Inception and Brad Bird’s vaguely Randian, Epcot adaptation(?) Tomorrowland.

We finish up our December January (no, YOU fell behind!) blockbuster month with Christoper Nolan’s head-trip extravaganza Inception and Brad Bird’s vaguely Randian, Epcot adaptation(?) Tomorrowland.

Here we've got Tobi Olowe, host of the Impressions of America podcast, on to talk about the life and legacy of Ayn Rand, and her eponymous institute's decision to get on the coronavirus welfare train. Enjoy!   PS: The very funny Whittaker Chambers review of Atlas Shrugged can be found here.

I discuss ten observations I have on our current chaos and what it means, from a Misesian and Randian point of view.

“Free markets drive innovation!” It’s a narrative imparted to us ad nauseam. The ultimate catalyst of creation and progress — we’re told by policymakers, business executives, think tanks, and the media outlets that bolster them — in which great strides in healthcare, electronics, media, and other areas are the domain of private enterprise motivated by competition and profit, and unencumbered by state intervention. As the prospect of socialism — or at least the word “socialism” — regains currency in the West, these claims have resurged. Capitalism’s supporters insist that a profit-first system is the reason the world is always improving, lifting people out of poverty while equipping them with iPhones, WiFi, and central air conditioning. Socialism, they contend, hinders innovation because public ownership of the means of production removes the competition and profit that ostensibly incentivize creativity. But why are we expected to believe that concentrating ownership of the means of production in the hands of a few is the key to progress and prosperity for all? How is it that the most important metrics of “innovation” are consumer goods available to some, rather than socialized, need-based programs available to all? And above all, who does this narrative that “innovation” is driven by Anglo-American style Randian capitalism really serve? On this episode, we delve into these questions, looking at how the United States — the world’s foremost champion of capitalism — packages propaganda about its alleged innovation; the reasons capitalism not only fails to drive innovation, but also actively destroys it; and the U.S.’s brutal actions to thwart socialist efforts toward a more equitably and sustainable version of “innovation” at home and aboard. Our guest is Current Affairs associate editor Vanessa A. Bee.

Walter is taking on few wide ranging concepts and unpacking them to understand them. Spoiler alert, all love is conditional. The relationship between fensorship and cancel culture. Restoring the vote to those that have committed felonies shouldn't be this big of an issue. The imbalance of the #MeToo movement, and the double standard of equality. Why Trump is no 'Randian' hero, yet the media is smearing him as such. And, say hello, to Halal KFC.

Walter is taking on few wide ranging concepts and unpacking them to understand them. Spoiler alert, all love is conditional. The relationship between fensorship and cancel culture. Restoring the vote to those that have committed felonies shouldn't be this big of an issue. The imbalance of the #MeToo movement, and the double standard of equality. Why Trump is no 'Randian' hero, yet the media is smearing him as such. And, say hello, to Halal KFC.

Today’s Headlines: Giant Spiders nearly murder local teens but no one was available to cover the story because f*ck that. Front Page: Ernie MacMillan models excellent accountability skills! Education: It’s really time to close down Hogwarts, now, guys! Editorials: This spider situation is a big nope! Health and Science: Invasive spiders take over the Forbidden Forest! Classifieds: ISO a wife All this and so, so much more in this week’s edition of The Gayly Prophet! Support us at patreon.com/thegaylyprophet or by clicking the donate button on our website Follow us on social media @thegaylyprophet on facebook, instagram, and twitter! Find us, our comics, our merch, and more at thegaylyprophet.com Our show art and comics are by Theo Julien Forrester, find him on instagram @theojulienforrester Music from https://filmmusic.io "The Builder" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Music from https://filmmusic.io "Industrial Music Box" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Nikos Sotirakopoulos and Ashley Frawley join me in this second episode in what promises to be a new series of podcasts. Nikos is a committed Randian while Ashley Frawley and I are both Marxists and we debate how to define and understand capitalism with Nikos in this episode. This week’s podcast is available for our patrons. Our Patreon supporters get access to two podcasts every week: Symptomatic Redness and Zero Squared, but if you’re listening on our free feed you’ll always be able to access one or the other podcasts each week. At the moment we have 632 patrons. When we reach 1000 patrons we’ll begin production of a documentary on Western Marxism and Post-Marxism.

Nikos Sotirakopoulos and Ashley Frawley join Doug in this special, mostly unedited, episode of the Zero Squared podcast. This was recorded on the fly as a way to have a quick conversation about the Zizek vs. Peterson debate and, as a way to continue the debate. Nikos is a committed Randian while Ashley Frawley and Doug are both Marxists. Hope you enjoy this conversation/debate. It is being released for everyone.

Everything old is still old. Unless you are Jason Kenney. Then it's brand new and somehow it will work despite never working before. Trickle-down economics right out of the Randian book of failure. Thatcher's failed Big Society offloading. ALEC inspired labour exploitation endorsed by anti-union forces. More Harper style Law & Order that will end up in court on Constitutional grounds. Attacks on rights for students at all levels from elimination of Bill 24 protections for LGBTQ2+ youth to threats of post-secondary funding dependent on allowing far right propaganda on campus without protest. That doesn't even touch the proposed "war room" to defend last century's industry, the threatened unwinnable challenges on the Federal government that will do nothing but cost money and the multiple promises that "maintaining current funding" is not a funding cut. Despite 15,000 new students in Alberta entering the system every year. Despite the aging population needing increased access to healthcare plus population growth. As multinational Oil & Gas companies get out of the oilsands to prevent stranded assets, they need more subsidies and gifts apparently. And there is no need to end coal-fired electircity generation, according to these visionaries. If you think repealing the Alberta carbon levy regime is going to prevent or change anything, like the Federal plan being imposed, you must be a UCP mark. But then that plays into the poor Alberta false reality, but it will be Albertans who pay not the corporations increasing profit margins. But hey, P3's will be back big time. They still don't save any money and cost much more in the long run but this is a campaign for the literal survival of Alberta. Just ask the guys being investigated by the RCMP for illegal donations and vote rigging. As if the Ontario mess isn't warning enough, this one will go down to the wire.

Some years ago, I shared with you that Douglas and I have a personal prayer before we eat at home, our own take on saying grace before our meals. It goes something like this: “Gracious God, we thank you for all things, for each other and for others, and we thank you for this life that gives us life. Amen.” I shared that prayer of grace with you during a sermon where I was speaking of how we need to pay attention to the way our food is produced, that the way we nurture the land and treat the animals we consume, and that such attention is a matter of justice. And when Douglas and I thank God for “this life that gives us life,” we acknowledge that an animal, or even a plant, if you assume that plants live and die, we acknowledge that something had to die for us to be able to live. There is a rhythm to life there that is obvious, though it does not come without its own ethical quandaries, even if Genesis tells us that that God has given us these animals and plants as our food (Genesis 1:29). That topic is for another sermon, but this morning I wanted to tease something else out related to the issue of food and our ethical relationship to it, and that is whether or not we have an obligation to worry about other’s people food or lack of it. Now, you might think that the answer is an obvious “yes” for us Christians, that your lack of food is something I should care about. And it’s obvious that is the case in both the Hebrew and Christian portions of the Bible – caring for our neighbors and helping them is just right there, all over the place. But, there are forces in our culture, even among Christians, who want us divest the church of this notion that we owe each other something, including food, all in an attempt to make the case for a kind of libertarian, you’re on your own, late-stage corporate capitalism. I’ll get to that in a few minutes, but I want us to get a sense of what is happening in our text and how this relates to a larger call for food justice we find in the Bible and especially in the Hebrew Bible, what we often call the Old Testament.   Let’s look at the context of this text for a few minutes. The people of Israel have spent 40 years wandering in the desert and finally have reached the edge of the Promise Land. Moses has died on a mountain overlooking the land he will never enter because of a sin he has committed, sin being the overall reason it took the people of Israel so long to get to this promise land after being freed from Egypt. A generation has died and a new generation has risen, but the men of this new generation have not been circumcised, the male foreskin of these men have remained intact, circumcision was believed to be a sign of the covenant between God and Abraham in Genesis 17 (14-19). But there is historical evidence that circumcision was practiced by the Egyptians and the Bible itself says that other surrounding nations also practiced circumcision, in Jeremiah 9:25. Joshua, the new leader of Israel, calls for this new generation of men to become circumcised and they are, leaving a painful mess for the men that had to take a take a long, long month to heal up. The whole ordeal ends with the first verse in our text today, where God says to Joshua: “Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.” Honestly, we don’t quite know the obvious meaning of this sentence – what disgrace, other than perhaps the older generation having circumcised their male offspring after they left Egypt, forgetting the sign of the covenant God once made with Abraham.   Whatever that disgrace was, it has been rolled away and the people celebrate a Passover meal, a meal which commemorates the moment when the angel of death passed over every household whose door was marked with lamb’s blood, during the time when God sent the plagues to try to convince the Egyptian Pharaoh to let the Hebrew slaves go free. We don’t how they got this Passover food, but the very next day, the manna from heaven that God had provided the people just stops, this feathery bread-like substance that fed the people is no more. After 40 years of having that umbilical cord to their Creator, they would now have to eat what the land produced, and – this is very important – they would now have to begin to live under the rules around that land and food that they were given by God through Moses 40 years earlier. These rules, these laws that were in THE LAW, were now to be enacted, because they had moved on from complete dependence on God’s gift of guaranteed manna to one where they had to till the land, care for their livestock, and, and use the land in a just way for their sake and the sake of others. They had just left a life in Egypt where they were forced to work on storage cities, the place where the Pharaohs stored their abundance of food, food they would use to control the people, rather than helping out others, outsider even, unlike when Joseph was in charge of these same storage places generations earlier.   And that is important to keep in mind when you hear of the laws of these newly minted invaders of the Promised Land, as they took control of the land from those who were there before them – a reality that would be a tough sermon on its own, but look, I’ve got only a few minutes here. But the whole new system of rules they were to now follow were actually based in the rules of how to use the manna God had been giving them for 40 years. In Exodus 16, in verse 18, the Scripture says this: “those who gathered much had nothing left over, and those who gathered little had no shortage.” In another words, the folks that tried to store away more of the manna then they needed for that day found this stored manna uneatable the next day. And the folks who gathered little to make sure their neighbors had enough found that the little they gathered was enough for the day. The food wasn’t meant to be a way to enrich oneself, especially at the expense of others – that is why manna was useless the next day, to stop the greedy, like the Egyptians they had just escaped from, from using something needed by all to survive as a way to enrich and manipulate others. The manna helped the people keep the Sabbath, the holy day of rest, because the gatherers of this manna were expected to rest as well, and so the manna collected right before the Sabbath would not spoil as it normally did, making sure there would be enough to keep their bellies full. All this was to prevent the Israelites from playing around with their food, so to speak, of using it as a source of wealth building for the few at the expense of the many, as the Egyptians had done.   So the people are now to follow a new set of rules that would be echoed by their experience with the manna, rules about “land possession, farming, food choices, food sharing, and the treatment, killing and eating of animals” (Connections, Year C, Vol 2 –77). First, these manna based rules would show up in the idea that the land you were given in this new Promise Land was on loan from God – and that no person would ultimately lose their land because of some misfortune. Every 50 years, in what was called the Jubilee Year, the land would revert back to the original owners if they had previously sold it, which helped to narrow the gap between rich and poor (Leviticus 5:10) You couldn’t store up the manna of the land the forever, so to speak – it was on loan from God to you, and you could loan it out to others for a price, but it would always come back to your family every 50 years. Farmers were to reap from the harvest off their lands, but they were told to leave the outer edges of their fields unreaped, so that the poor and the immigrants could gather much needed food (Leviticus 19:9-10). Underneath it all was this idea that food was meant for all of us, and even those who couldn’t farm or who didn’t have a field to plow had a right to food, since the permanent owner of all land was actually God, who simply loaned it out to us human beings. And yet there is an interesting tension that comes in passage in the Bible that is used by some, while ignoring all of the texts and rules I’ve cited today. The anonymous writer of 2 Thessalonians 3:10 says that those that don’t work don’t eat, which seems to be an interesting contradiction of what the rest of the Bible says. Jesus fed 5000 people who unwisely didn’t bring food with them as they were listening to Jesus, as we all remember, and Jesus seems far more interested in scolding those who have much and do little for others with what they have been given. An interesting tension here found in the Bible, but it is noteworthy that the second Thessalonians text is often use as a way to contradict what the bulk of the Christian and Jewish tradition actually says.   But the Thessalonians text is not surprising, not really. There has always been a strain in our scriptures and the history of the church that balked at the idea of people getting something for free, which, I think, shows up in the trouble that some of us have with Jesus’ gift of grace being free and for everyone. Surely we should do something to earn this, and so we do this and this and this, and then it’s free, which, of course, doesn’t actually make grace a free gift at all. I was doing some research on the internet on today’s topic and I stumbled on a website of a think tank called the Institute for Faith, Work and Economics. It’s a right wing Christian organization meant to make the Christian case for a Hayekian, Randian, libertarian, extreme laisses faire style of economics. The website of the organization is quite impressive, reflecting that is a probably well-funded think tank, and its full of articles meant to debunk what Jesus and the Hebrew Bible clearly says by arguing that the ideas I mentioned a few minutes ago, found in Scripture, have been misinterpreted. After all, Jesus telling us to sell everything and give it to the poor, or this whole Jubilee year thing, with land going back to the original owners, is offensive to rights of private property owners – it’s not really God’s land, especially if God’s not going to pay the taxes on it! I read through a couple of articles, and it was obvious that these scholars were doing everything possible to get the Bible to justify our late stage corporate capitalism. Ignore what the Jewish and Christian traditions have taught about this, though rarely followed by the Jewish and Christian people, because these scholars from this think tank will show you that, in fact, the Bible endorses the ideas of, ironically, the atheist Ayn Rand, who called her owns ideas a philosophy of selfishness.   Look, I do think of food as a human right, and water as well, since without them we simply can’t survive as human beings – and I think the Scriptures of both Testaments generally agree with me, and with two thousands of Christian and Jewish tradition, though, of course, a set of traditions not always followed by us over the last 3000 years. Our current government is attempting to roll back food stamps, if not outright eliminate them, though these stamps rarely cover a family’s food budget or needs, even at their most generous. We have a tribe in charge, so to speak, that doesn’t really believe anything is a gift, not really, and they certainly don’t think of anything as being on loan from God. They often believe the land or money is theirs and theirs alone, and if you can’t farm, if you can’t make enough money, you shouldn’t even really be able to glean from the outer rim of the fields – “God didn’t make the miracle of that grain, I did,” some seem to believe, “and we don’t owe our fellow human beings anything.” Certainly food banks are often supported by many of these souls, as if food banks could ever match the government resources to meet food scarcity issues in this country. Places like the Common Pantry are meant to supplement a pay check and/or the little help one receives in food stamps. Private charity should take care of it, they say, but of course, ironically enough, we know though studies that the socio-economic group that gives most to charity are the poor and the very poor – they share what little they have because they know what it means to have so little. The upper middle class or rich, by percentage, give less to charity, especially to those charities that directly affect the poor – endowing the Chicago Symphony is good thing, or the Art Institute, but it is no feeding of the poor. Underneath this call for private charity to help alleviate food scarcity and poverty, and not the government is an idea that we humans will always take care of each other, and that our particular compassion and generosity will be enough. Thousands of years have showed us that this is simply not true, because, to get theological on us, we are sinners, and there is a reason that Jesus keeps calling his earliest listeners to do better, be more compassionate, and take care of the poor. And us being, at times, selfish sinners, that truth shouldn’t cause there to be hungry stomachs when there is so much food here in this country.   Over the last couple of years, I’ve often mentioned to you and others that food has become the central focus of our outreach ministry here at Epiphany. We’ve housed the Common Pantry since the mid-1980’s, this incredible organization centered around food justice, this belief that if food is what you need, here we are and we will do our best to feed you. Their work has grown so much, through things like providing help getting connected to social services that so many rail against, including the food stamps some want to see gone. I think we should be especially proud of being their partners, because I think it led into another food ministry that became completely our own, our Welcome Meal on Wednesday nights. In the early 2000’s some of you right in this room noticed that the Common Pantry guests could use a meal after picking up their groceries, and thus the Welcome Meal was born. I think we sometimes forget that it is actually rare for a small church like ours to be able to pull off a weekly meal for anyone wishes to come – that is not normal, it really isn’t and I’m grateful we decided to do that work so long ago. The funny thing is that more people come into this building to be fed than to worship God here with us. I wish it wasn’t that way because I would love to have it the other way, that there were more people worshipping here than being fed here, but I would only love that be true if it was because food scarcity was on a steep decline and so many didn’t need our help or the Pantry’s help. Otherwise, let’s worship the God who asks us to feed one another, and do it as an act of worship of God, because every act of justice and mercy is also an act of worship of the living God. It’s clear to me that food justice matters to us, that most of us, if not all, feel that food is a God given right, that all God’s children deserve to eat, just like all of God’s children need traveling shoes, to echo he title of one of Maya Angelou’s great books – all God’s children need to eat and we are the ones to feed them. Amen.

This week, we find the Gipper playing presidentially-monikered baseball star Grover Cleveland Alexander in The Winning Team. Reagan's Warner Brothers swan song was produced and directed by his old comrades from the B-unit trenches (Bryan Foy and Lewis Seiler, respectively), and pairs him with new studio world-beater Doris Day (#7 box office star in the country that year - and rising). The resulting film treads a fascinating line between inspirational sports/disability narrative and post-war "New Domesticity" woman's picture (with songs!). The winning team, you see, isn't the St. Louis Cardinals - it's Grover and Aimee (as long as she agrees to dream in his direction). It's not all Randian achievement and adulation, however - Reagan channels some real Kings Row style pathos in his portrayal of the beleaguered big leaguer - even winding up on the cusp of Nightmare Alley ignominy at his nadir - and it's up to Doris to reclaim him from oblivion.    Things get a bit "inside baseball" as Dave gives in to his lifelong obsession with the erstwhile national pastime, but we also find occasion to discuss millenarian barnstorming baseball squads, 1950s nostalgia for the early 20th century, and grapple with the film's discouraging omission (at the behest of the hurler's widow Aimee) of any mention of Alexander's epilepsy. The filmmakers do, however, delve fairly deeply into the physical symptoms that plagued the pitcher - and ultimately drove him desperately to drink. Also: discover what separates Sylvester from Frank Stallone (at least according to Gareth), hear Romy's reactions to a recent re-screening of In a Lonely Place,  and enjoy the AFI subject tags for Boy Meets Girl (which we forgot to provide in episode 8A).      Cast also includes Frank Lovejoy, Russ Tamblyn (who has had a brush with one of our panelists), Dorothy Adams, and then-current ballplayers Bob Lemon, Peanuts Lowrey, Jerry Priddy, George Metkovich, and Gene Mauch.    Relevant Link: How to Act Drunk by Joel Blackledge (Bright Wall/Dark Room)   Outro Song: "Ol' Saint Nicholas" by Doris Day and friends (including Ronald Reagan)   Follow us at: Facebook Follow Romy on Twitter at @rahrahtempleton Follow Gareth on Twitter at @helenreddymades Follow David on Twitter at @milescoverdale "Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

This week, we find the Gipper playing presidentially-monikered baseball star Grover Cleveland Alexander in The Winning Team. Reagan's Warner Brothers swan song was produced and directed by his old comrades from the B-unit trenches (Bryan Foy and Lewis Seiler, respectively), and pairs him with new studio world-beater Doris Day (#7 box office star in the country that year - and rising). The resulting film treads a fascinating line between inspirational sports/disability narrative and post-war "New Domesticity" woman's picture (with songs!). The winning team, you see, isn't the St. Louis Cardinals - it's Grover and Aimee (as long as she agrees to dream in his direction). It's not all Randian achievement and adulation, however - Reagan channels some real Kings Row style pathos in his portrayal of the beleaguered big leaguer - even winding up on the cusp of Nightmare Alley ignominy at his nadir - and it's up to Doris to reclaim him from oblivion.    Things get a bit "inside baseball" as Dave gives in to his lifelong obsession with the erstwhile national pastime, but we also find occasion to discuss millenarian barnstorming baseball squads, 1950s nostalgia for the early 20th century, and grapple with the film's discouraging omission (at the behest of the hurler's widow Aimee) of any mention of Alexander's epilepsy. The filmmakers do, however, delve fairly deeply into the physical symptoms that plagued the pitcher - and ultimately drove him desperately to drink. Also: discover what separates Sylvester from Frank Stallone (at least according to Gareth), hear Romy's reactions to a recent re-screening of In a Lonely Place,  and enjoy the AFI subject tags for Boy Meets Girl (which we forgot to provide in episode 8A).      Cast also includes Frank Lovejoy, Russ Tamblyn (who has had a brush with one of our panelists), Dorothy Adams, and then-current ballplayers Bob Lemon, Peanuts Lowrey, Jerry Priddy, George Metkovich, and Gene Mauch.    Relevant Link: How to Act Drunk by Joel Blackledge (Bright Wall/Dark Room)   Outro Song: "Ol' Saint Nicholas" by Doris Day and friends (including Ronald Reagan)   Follow us at: Facebook Follow Romy on Twitter at @rahrahtempleton Follow Gareth on Twitter at @helenreddymades Follow David on Twitter at @milescoverdale "Driving Reagan theme' by Gareth Hedges

Is Saruman a Randian superman? Should Alex Jones be banned? Has Jonah ever made love in the back of a Model-T? New York Times columnist and National Review film critic Ross Douthat returns to The Remnant to answer (or ask!) these and other pressing questions (yes, really). Show Notes: The National Review editors’ podcast Grand New … Continue reading Episode 53: Douthat II: Electric Boogaloo→ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After 14 long years, the Incredibles are back. The superhero film landscape has changed drastically in that time--but, blissfully, Brad Bird and his retro supers have not, as they  teleport and babysit their way through another round of domestic struggles. Paul and Arlo discuss how Incredibles 2 inverts and deepens the themes of the first, why this is some of the finest superhero action ever committed to film, how Jack-Jack avoids Minion-ization, and why Bird and his films are not Randian. Plus, Paul plays a game of Tag, Arlo takes in a service at First Reformed, Paul keeps getting mistaken for Thanos, Arlo is obsessed with Guillermo del Toro, and Paul goes all Cloak & Dagger. Next: this year’s superheroic Four-Color Flashback continues as Jed Waters Keith joins us to discuss Spider-Man: Origin of the Hobgoblin.   THE BREAKDOWN 00:00:00 - 00:36:17  - Intro / Banter 00:36:17 - 01:02:20  - Main Topic (Non-Spoilery) 01:02:20 - 02:00:57  - Main Topic (SPOILERS) 02:00:57 - 02:03:22  - Outro / Next Week

The "Dirty Sons of Pitches" are taking their cues from the latest "Star Wars" movie and looking for characters deserving of spinoff prequels. The guys chat about whether Bryan Fuller deserves another TV series to abandon, lawsuits with crude puppets, Morgan Freeman possibly being the next Groper of the Week, Zack Snyder as a Randian, and what makes a good "Star Wars" movie. Available on iTunes. Episode 211 includes: -Talking dog flick "Show Dogs" grooming children for sexual predators? Wait, what now? -The new "Roseanne" is cancelled because... of Roseanne being Roseanne. -"Geo Storm" and "Hurricane Heist" are not bad enough to be enjoyable and not good enough to be good. -Clint Eastwood's "15:17 to Paris" is a boring ride. -Ben surprisingly loves "Solo" and calls it the best "Star Wars" film since 1983. Nate finds it so-so. -This Week's Pitch -- Prequel Spinoffs! -Ben pitches vehicles for Khan, Doc Brown, Power Rangers, Ron Perlman's "Pacific Rim" character, the Vega brothers, the original Joker, and the best little cantina on Tattooine.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 235. This is a short video produced by the Federalist Society (Feb. 6, 2018), featuring me and IP law professor Kristen Osenga (I had met Osenga previously, as a co-panelist at an IP panel at NYU School of Law in 2011). I was pleasantly surprised that the Federalist Society was willing to give the anti-IP side a voice—more on this below. To produce this video, Osenga and I each spoke separately, before a green screen, in studios in our own cities, for about 30 minutes. The editing that boiled this down to about 5 minutes total was superbly done. see also James Stern: Is Intellectual Property Actually Property? [Federalist Society No. 86 LECTURE] Transcript below. From the Federalist Society's shownotes on their Facebook post: Why does the government protect patents, copyrights, and trademarks? Should it? Kristen Osenga and Stephan Kinsella explore the concept of intellectual property and debate its effect on society as a whole. Kristen Osenga, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, and Stephan Kinsella, author of Against Intellectual Property, explore the concept of intellectual property and debate its effect on society as a whole. Differing Views: Libertarianism.org: Libertarian Views of Intellectual Property A 21st Century Copyright Office: The Conservative Case for Reform Mises Institute: The Case Against IP Law and Liberty: Why Intellectual Property Rights? A Lockean Justification The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property Harvard Law: Theories of Intellectual Property I was pleasantly surprised that the Federalist Society was willing to give the anti-IP side a voice, given that many libertarian-related groups either outright favor IP or refuse to condemn it or to allow abolitionist voices. Since the dawn of the Internet in the mid-90s, the effects of patent and especially copyright law have become magnified and more noticeable. Thus more libertarians began to direct their attention to this issue. Gradually, scholarship emerged and the consensus began to shift over the last couple decades from an inchoate Randian pro-IP attitude, and/or apathy, to a interest in and opposition to IP law. It is safe to say that most thinking libertarians, most Austrians, anarchists, and left-libertarians, are now predominately opposed to IP.  (See “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism,” “The Four Historical Phases of IP Abolitionism”, “The Origins of Libertarian IP Abolitionism”.) Accordingly, many libertarian groups are now explicitly anti-IP or at least are willing to host speakers and writers with this view, such as: the Mises Institute, and various Mises Institutes around the world (Sweden, Brasil, UK, etc.); the  Property and Freedom Society; and others, like the IEA (see Stephen Davies' Intellectual Property Rights: Yay or Nay); the Adam Smith Forum-Russia, which had me present a sweeping case for IP abolition; and the Adam Smith Institute in London, which also has featured strong voices in opposition to IP (Adam Smith Institute: Do not feed the patent troll; Intellectual property: an unnecessary evil). FEE has featured my work and that of other IP abolitionists, like Sheldon Richman. Even the Mercatus Center has promoted strong IP reform, although not outright abolition (see, e.g., Tom Bell, What is Intellectual Privilege?). And, I've been invited to speak against IP in a number of fora, podcasts, and radio shows—PorcFest, Libertopia, Students for Liberty, FreeTalkLive, and so on. Even John Stossel's Fox show featured me and David Koepsell arguing the abolitionist side. So. This is good progress, and parallels the increasing interest in IP by libertarians and their increasing opposition to this type of law. But not all libertarian groups, sadly, recognize IP for the unjust state institution that it is. The Libertarian Party, for example, shamefully takes no stance on IP in its platform.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 235. This is a short video produced by the Federalist Society, featuring me and IP law professor Kristen Osenga (I had met Osenga previously, as a co-panelist at an IP panel at NYU School of Law in 2011). I was pleasantly surprised that the Federalist Society was willing to give the anti-IP side a voice—more on this below. To produce this video, Osenga and I each spoke separately, before a green screen, in studios in our own cities, for about 30 minutes. The editing that boiled this down to about 5 minutes total was superbly done. From the Federalist Society's shownotes on their Facebook post: Why does the government protect patents, copyrights, and trademarks? Should it? Kristen Osenga and Stephan Kinsella explore the concept of intellectual property and debate its effect on society as a whole. Kristen Osenga, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, and Stephan Kinsella, author of Against Intellectual Property, explore the concept of intellectual property and debate its effect on society as a whole. Differing Views: Libertarianism.org: Libertarian Views of Intellectual Property A 21st Century Copyright Office: The Conservative Case for Reform Mises Institute: The Case Against IP Law and Liberty: Why Intellectual Property Rights? A Lockean Justification The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property Harvard Law: Theories of Intellectual Property I was pleasantly surprised that the Federalist Society was willing to give the anti-IP side a voice, given that many libertarian-related groups either outright favor IP or refuse to condemn it or to allow abolitionist voices. Since the dawn of the Internet in the mid-90s, the effects of patent and especially copyright law have become magnified and more noticeable. Thus more libertarians began to direct their attention to this issue. Gradually, scholarship emerged and the consensus began to shift over the last couple decades from an inchoate Randian pro-IP attitude, and/or apathy, to a interest in and opposition to IP law. It is safe to say that most thinking libertarians, most Austrians, anarchists, and left-libertarians, are now predominately opposed to IP.  (See “The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism,” “The Four Historical Phases of IP Abolitionism”, “The Origins of Libertarian IP Abolitionism”.) Accordingly, many libertarian groups are now explicitly anti-IP or at least are willing to host speakers and writers with this view, such as: the Mises Institute, and various Mises Institutes around the world (Sweden, Brasil, UK, etc.); the  Property and Freedom Society; and others, like the IEA (see Stephen Davies' Intellectual Property Rights: Yay or Nay); the Adam Smith Forum-Russia, which had me present a sweeping case for IP abolition; and the Adam Smith Institute in London, which also has featured strong voices in opposition to IP (Adam Smith Institute: Do not feed the patent troll; Intellectual property: an unnecessary evil). FEE has featured my work and that of other IP abolitionists, like Sheldon Richman. Even the Mercatus Center has promoted strong IP reform, although not outright abolition (see, e.g., Tom Bell, What is Intellectual Privilege?). And, I've been invited to speak against IP in a number of fora, podcasts, and radio shows—PorcFest, Libertopia, Students for Liberty, FreeTalkLive, and so on. Even John Stossel's Fox show featured me and David Koepsell arguing the abolitionist side. So. This is good progress, and parallels the increasing interest in IP by libertarians and their increasing opposition to this type of law. But not all libertarian groups, sadly, recognize IP for the unjust state institution that it is. The Libertarian Party, for example, shamefully takes no stance on IP in its platform. This would be like failing to oppose chattel slavery, conscription, or the drug war in a society where these things were going on.

Androids and Assets has its first ever guest, the enigmatic physicist Pasquale. Join us as we wrestle with the big cosmological questions of the late Mchonaissance. Marshall laments the dark future of Gumbo, Stephen feels Randian, and Pasquale hangs back for the first episode.  More to come next week…   The post Interstellar Overman Part 1: The Lunar Schoolspiracy appeared first on Androids and Assets.

Androids and Assets has its first ever guest, the enigmatic physicist Pasquale. Join us as we wrestle with the big cosmological questions of the late Mchonaissance. Marshall laments the dark future of Gumbo, Stephen feels Randian, and Pasquale hangs back for the first episode.  More to come next week…   The post Interstellar Overman Part 1: The Lunar Schoolspiracy appeared first on Androids and Assets.

Ian is a writer, producer and director, who has brought numerous projects from concept to sales and distribution. His latest film Teleios, an official selection at Shriekfest 2016, has won numerous awards internationally, including New York Science Fiction Film Festival, The Forrest J Ackerman, Fantastic Planet, Los Angeles Movie Awards, Galactic Film Festival and Milan International Film Festival. After opening in the UK, Japan, German and Korea, Teleios is slated for broad release in the U.S. later in 2017.  Where Ian's other work has screened and/or won awards: Cannes Film Festival, Milan International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, SXSW Eco, Telly Awards, Telluride Indiefest and Sarasota International Film Festival. His work experience includes Warner Bros. Pictures Theatrical Marketing, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Spike TV, The Weinstein Company, GRB Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment. He is also Co-founder of RANDIAN, an innovative media/tech company based in Los Angeles. Ian holds an MBA from Penn State University and a BA in Theater (cum laude) from the University of Minnesota. He is a member of the DGA (director) and BMI.

位于深圳蛇口的「设计互联」将在今年十月份正式开幕，届时我们可以看到两个重磅展览：主展馆的「数字之维」和 V&A 展馆「设计的价值」。此外，一个屋檐下的观复博物馆深圳分馆也会同时开张。会员活动你们准备好了么？本期节目我们很高兴请来了设计互联的高级策展人陈嘉莉（Carrie Chan）女士、展览负责人黎潇楠先生和传播主管顾灵女士，分享「数字之维」展览台前幕后的故事。 在本期节目中你将听到： 「设计互联」是干什么的 「数字之维」是一个怎样的展览 展览筹备过程大揭秘 昂贵又脆弱的博物馆展品要如何正确地运输 昂贵又脆弱的博物馆展品要如何正确地买保险 「设计互联」的思路：文化机构如何可持续地良性运作 在「设计互联」工作是一种什么样的体验 关注和联系「设计互联」： 网站：DesignSociety.cn 邮箱：info@DesignSociety.cn 微信：DesignSociety 微博：设计互联 DesignSociety Instagram：Design.Society 「设计互联」（Design Society）是由招商蛇口创办的一个综合创新文化平台，包含设计互联基金会（筹，与英国国立维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆（V&A）合作运营）及确保可持续运营模式的商业运营组织。设计互联秉承深圳蛇口发展的先锋精神，极具开拓性地整合创新资源，创建全新的平台化机构运营模式，创造独特的文化体验，以设计启发生活、以设计链接产业，构建开放合作的聚合力网络。位于深圳蛇口海上世界文化艺术中心的设计互联将于 2017 年正式开放并呈现其完整项目与业态。 陈嘉莉（Carrie Chan），自 2015 年 9 月起任设计互联高级策展人，带领设计互联策展团队研发展览项目，包括设计互联主展馆开幕展「数字思维」，专注於回应中国及国际设计热点议题。她曾任职於香港知专学院，从事教学、策展及学术出版活动。她也曾任《南华早报》的副刊作者，撰写艺术、文化和创意行业的相关内容。她先后毕业於香港中文大学新闻传播系与伦敦西敏寺大学的服装设计专业。 顾灵自 2015 年任设计互联传播主管，带领传播团队开展机构的品牌、传播、公共关系、观众与社群发展等工作。曾任上海外滩美术馆营销发展主管，British Council 中国数字艺术主管。她也是一名活跃的艺术作者、翻译、编辑、策划人。自 2012 年起任《燃点 Randian》编辑，关注个体创作、机构生态与跨领域实践。编著有《李牧：仇庄计划》，译著有《策展的挑战：侯瀚如与小汉斯的通信》等。 黎潇楠，设计互联展览负责人，负责项目执行及流程管理。毕业于广州美术学院美术史专业，曾于 2010 至 2013 年在华美术馆（华侨城当代艺术中心设计分馆）先后担任媒体统筹、展务统筹；随后就任成都知美术馆公共教育与媒体主管一职；2015 年于雅昌艺术中心任展览项目经理。曾统筹管理展览《镜像——韩家英设计展》《十一日谈——杨诘苍个展》等；负责展务《TDC 2012 世界字体设计年赛展》《卓思乐爵士设计回顾展》《ONE EYE 一目了然-安尚秀行为摄影 20 载》《本能——荷兰设计与时尚的语境》等；负责媒体《感知增生——中法新媒体艺术交流展》《Architecture For Dogs 设计：为了爱犬》《What's Next 三十乘三十创意展》《词场——诗歌计划 2011 》《Push Pin——纽约图钉工作室回顾展》等，同时亦参与过综合性项目《「非建筑」-大型随境生象作品表演》《开放式原创：深圳经验》等，累计逾 40 场展览项目。 《博物志》网站：http://bowuzhi.fm 如果您喜欢《博物志》，请考虑成为《博物志》的会员支持我们。会员有机会收到购自世界各地博物馆的精美礼品：http://bowuzhi.fm/member 我们也支持直接通过支付宝付费入会，年付 340 元，月付 34 元（人民币）。请将款项打入支付宝账号 ai@bowuzhi.fm，并注明想用来接收会员通讯的邮箱即可。 我们鼓励所有听众——不论男女——都去了解卫生棉条这个大幅提升女性生理期生活质量的产品。 人物简介 婉莹：《博物志》主播 Carrie：设计互联高级策展人 黎潇楠：设计互联展览负责人 顾灵：设计互联传播主管Support 博物志

位于深圳蛇口的「设计互联」将在今年十月份正式开幕，届时我们可以看到两个重磅展览：主展馆的「数字之维」和 V&A 展馆「设计的价值」。此外，一个屋檐下的观复博物馆深圳分馆也会同时开张。会员活动你们准备好了么？本期节目我们很高兴请来了设计互联的高级策展人陈嘉莉（Carrie Chan）女士、展览负责人黎潇楠先生和传播主管顾灵女士，分享「数字之维」展览台前幕后的故事。 在本期节目中你将听到： 「设计互联」是干什么的 「数字之维」是一个怎样的展览 展览筹备过程大揭秘 昂贵又脆弱的博物馆展品要如何正确地运输 昂贵又脆弱的博物馆展品要如何正确地买保险 「设计互联」的思路：文化机构如何可持续地良性运作 在「设计互联」工作是一种什么样的体验 关注和联系「设计互联」： 网站：DesignSociety.cn 邮箱：info@DesignSociety.cn 微信：DesignSociety 微博：设计互联 DesignSociety Instagram：Design.Society 「设计互联」（Design Society）是由招商蛇口创办的一个综合创新文化平台，包含设计互联基金会（筹，与英国国立维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆（V&A）合作运营）及确保可持续运营模式的商业运营组织。设计互联秉承深圳蛇口发展的先锋精神，极具开拓性地整合创新资源，创建全新的平台化机构运营模式，创造独特的文化体验，以设计启发生活、以设计链接产业，构建开放合作的聚合力网络。位于深圳蛇口海上世界文化艺术中心的设计互联将于 2017 年正式开放并呈现其完整项目与业态。 陈嘉莉（Carrie Chan），自 2015 年 9 月起任设计互联高级策展人，带领设计互联策展团队研发展览项目，包括设计互联主展馆开幕展「数字思维」，专注於回应中国及国际设计热点议题。她曾任职於香港知专学院，从事教学、策展及学术出版活动。她也曾任《南华早报》的副刊作者，撰写艺术、文化和创意行业的相关内容。她先后毕业於香港中文大学新闻传播系与伦敦西敏寺大学的服装设计专业。 顾灵自 2015 年任设计互联传播主管，带领传播团队开展机构的品牌、传播、公共关系、观众与社群发展等工作。曾任上海外滩美术馆营销发展主管，British Council 中国数字艺术主管。她也是一名活跃的艺术作者、翻译、编辑、策划人。自 2012 年起任《燃点 Randian》编辑，关注个体创作、机构生态与跨领域实践。编著有《李牧：仇庄计划》，译著有《策展的挑战：侯瀚如与小汉斯的通信》等。 黎潇楠，设计互联展览负责人，负责项目执行及流程管理。毕业于广州美术学院美术史专业，曾于 2010 至 2013 年在华美术馆（华侨城当代艺术中心设计分馆）先后担任媒体统筹、展务统筹；随后就任成都知美术馆公共教育与媒体主管一职；2015 年于雅昌艺术中心任展览项目经理。曾统筹管理展览《镜像——韩家英设计展》《十一日谈——杨诘苍个展》等；负责展务《TDC 2012 世界字体设计年赛展》《卓思乐爵士设计回顾展》《ONE EYE 一目了然-安尚秀行为摄影 20 载》《本能——荷兰设计与时尚的语境》等；负责媒体《感知增生——中法新媒体艺术交流展》《Architecture For Dogs 设计：为了爱犬》《What's Next 三十乘三十创意展》《词场——诗歌计划 2011 》《Push Pin——纽约图钉工作室回顾展》等，同时亦参与过综合性项目《「非建筑」-大型随境生象作品表演》《开放式原创：深圳经验》等，累计逾 40 场展览项目。 《博物志》网站：http://bowuzhi.fm 如果您喜欢《博物志》，请考虑成为《博物志》的会员支持我们。会员有机会收到购自世界各地博物馆的精美礼品：http://bowuzhi.fm/member 我们也支持直接通过支付宝付费入会，年付 340 元，月付 34 元（人民币）。请将款项打入支付宝账号 ai@bowuzhi.fm，并注明想用来接收会员通讯的邮箱即可。 我们鼓励所有听众——不论男女——都去了解卫生棉条这个大幅提升女性生理期生活质量的产品。 人物简介 婉莹：《博物志》主播 Carrie：设计互联高级策展人 黎潇楠：设计互联展览负责人 顾灵：设计互联传播主管Support 博物志

In this week's edition of the ArtTactic Podcast, Chris Moore, founder of Randian, the Chinese art magazine, to update us on the latest happenings in the Chinese art market. First, Chris shares his overall impressions of this year's edition of Art Basel Hong Kong including the level of sales at the fair this year and the type of art on display. Then, he touches on the level of success American and European galleries are having targeting Chinese collectors. Also, Chris discusses the how the maturation of Chinese art museums are positively impacting the Chinese art scene and identifies some of the up and coming contemporary Chinese artists at this moment.

We delve further into the Schwarzwelt in this second part of our series on Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. Along the way, we learn why demons would want a Wal-Mart in hell, do battle with an eldrtich pig tank, and get some Randian knowledge dropped on us by a discarnate parasite.

Michael Malice comes to libertarianism more from a Randian perspective, and Tom from a Rothbardian one. Michael recently read The Betrayal of the American Right, Rothbard's part-history, part-autobiography. The resulting conversation is really excellent -- possibly my favorite Malice appearance yet.

我们非常荣幸地请到了设计互联的馆长奥雷·伯曼先生和传播主管顾灵女士来做客。 「设计互联」（Design Society）是由招商蛇口创办的一个综合创新文化平台，包含设计互联基金会（筹，与英国国立维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆（V&A）合作运营）及确保可持续运营模式的商业运营组织。设计互联秉承深圳蛇口发展的先锋精神，极具开拓性地整合创新资源，创建全新的平台化机构运营模式，创造独特的文化体验，以设计启发生活、以设计链接产业，构建开放合作的聚合力网络。位于深圳蛇口海上世界文化艺术中心的设计互联将于 2017 年正式开放并呈现其完整项目与业态。 奥雷·伯曼先生，「设计互联」馆长。文化历史学家、艺术及建筑评论家、编辑、跨学科策展人和机构运营者。他于 2013 年被任命为第五届中国「深港双城双年展（UABB）」（2013–2014）策展人，并从 2015 年 1 月开始出任「设计互联」馆长至今。 顾灵女士，「设计互联」传播主管，《燃点 Randian》编辑。艺术作者、翻译、策划人，关注个体创作、机构生态与跨领域实践，曾任职于上海外滩美术馆及英国总领事馆文化教育处。译著有《策展的挑战：侯瀚如与小汉斯的通信》（金城出版社，2013）等 。 请点击这里下载本期节目中译版全文。 关注和联系「设计互联」： 网站：DesignSociety.cn 邮箱：info@DesignSociety.cn 微信：DesignSociety 微博：设计互联 DesignSociety Instagram：Design.Society 《博物志》网站：http://bowuzhi.fm 如果您喜欢《博物志》，请考虑成为《博物志》的会员支持婉莹和大黄。会员有机会收到购自世界各地博物馆的精美礼品：http://bowuzhi.fm/member 人物简介 婉莹：《博物志》主播 奥雷·伯曼：「设计互联」馆长 顾灵：「设计互联」传播主管Support 博物志

我们非常荣幸地请到了设计互联的馆长奥雷·伯曼先生和传播主管顾灵女士来做客。 「设计互联」（Design Society）是由招商蛇口创办的一个综合创新文化平台，包含设计互联基金会（筹，与英国国立维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆（V&A）合作运营）及确保可持续运营模式的商业运营组织。设计互联秉承深圳蛇口发展的先锋精神，极具开拓性地整合创新资源，创建全新的平台化机构运营模式，创造独特的文化体验，以设计启发生活、以设计链接产业，构建开放合作的聚合力网络。位于深圳蛇口海上世界文化艺术中心的设计互联将于 2017 年正式开放并呈现其完整项目与业态。 奥雷·伯曼先生，「设计互联」馆长。文化历史学家、艺术及建筑评论家、编辑、跨学科策展人和机构运营者。他于 2013 年被任命为第五届中国「深港双城双年展（UABB）」（2013–2014）策展人，并从 2015 年 1 月开始出任「设计互联」馆长至今。 顾灵女士，「设计互联」传播主管，《燃点 Randian》编辑。艺术作者、翻译、策划人，关注个体创作、机构生态与跨领域实践，曾任职于上海外滩美术馆及英国总领事馆文化教育处。译著有《策展的挑战：侯瀚如与小汉斯的通信》（金城出版社，2013）等 。 请点击这里下载本期节目中译版全文。 关注和联系「设计互联」： 网站：DesignSociety.cn 邮箱：info@DesignSociety.cn 微信：DesignSociety 微博：设计互联 DesignSociety Instagram：Design.Society 《博物志》网站：http://bowuzhi.fm 如果您喜欢《博物志》，请考虑成为《博物志》的会员支持婉莹和大黄。会员有机会收到购自世界各地博物馆的精美礼品：http://bowuzhi.fm/member 人物简介 婉莹：《博物志》主播 奥雷·伯曼：「设计互联」馆长 顾灵：「设计互联」传播主管Support 博物志

The very fact that an unqualified, demagogic, racist could be close to the Presidency tells us less about the candidates and more about the shape and mood of America in the 21st Century.   The red/blue divide is after all, not about pure politics. It’s not about classical liberalism vs. Burkean or Randian conservatism.  It’s not Disraeli vs. Gladstone.   What we see in America today is a cultural divide. One in which our own personal experience breaks out and defines itself into a kind of moral and political matrix that both traps and defines us.   These principles are universal and enduring and perhaps if we can better understand them, we can, if not accept, at least have compassion for the better angels of our opponents.   That exactly what noted sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has tried to do in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right My Conversation with Arlie Russell Hochschild:

As a society, we’ve all been brought up to believe deeply in the idea of the self made man.  The power of persistence and hard work.  The Horatio Alger mythology of pulling oneself up by your own bootstraps. In modern political theology we hear about “makers” and “takers,”  and Randian and libertarian ideas. We embrace that quote by Jefferson that, “the harder I work, the luckier I get.” What we leave out of the equation is the role of pure dumb luck.  Being in the right place at the right time.  The existential circumstances over which we often have no control and often account for good things happening. That the jumping for point for Robert H. Frank in his book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. My conversation with Robert H. Frank:  

When BioShock launched in 2007 for Xbox 360 and PC, it transported players to a world lost to time and some not-so-subtle Randian-inspired madness. Players navigated a city embroiled in self-obsessed insanity brimming with otherworldly powers and twisted human forms. One part horror, one part action, BioShock was one of the first hugely popular mainstream titles that people could point to and say, "This game? It's not only about mature action; it's about mature ideas, too!" Nine years later with a remaster on the horizon, is BioShock one of the best games period? Outro music: Super Smash Bros. Melee 'Hank Jankerson's Wild Ride' by LongBoxofChocolate (http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR03376) You can follow the show on Twitter: @BestGamesPeriod Or download the podcast from Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/thebestgamesperiod

In this corner: striking terror into the hearts of cowardly and superstitious criminals, a creature of the night, black, terrible, it's the Dark Knight of Gotham City...Batman! And in this corner: faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, unable to get his own sequel not stuffed with a thousand other characters, it's the Last Son of Krypton...Superman! With Zack Snyder's hands in the toybox, they must now v each other in preparation for the dawn of next year's Justice League. Kenn Edwards, host of So Let's Get to the Point, joins Paul and Arlo to discuss the superheroic epic Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Is Snyder's Superman a Randian superman? How does Ben Affleck fare as the Caped Crusader? Is the film as much of a mess as you may have heard? The boys get to the bottom of all this, not to mention another of Kenn's metatextual monologues. Plus, Arlo's had a name change, and Paul saw Hamilton on Broadway.   Next: poet Donora Hillard joins us to discuss her new book Jeff Bridges. Plus a discussion of Starman!

TBTL overlord Steve "Dark Side" Nelson joins the show to talk about the Star Wars marathon he arranged for his family. Plus, Luke explains why he has to dress up like a mouse and dance this weekend. And Andrew claims that Luke is a Randian hero when it comes to HR paperwork.

Finally, and at long last: Shipwreck goes Randian with Ayn's doorstop paean to libertarianism and specious causality. Doff your top hat, light a cigar, and raise a flute of Dom to Atlas Shrugged. Featuring gold-encrusted pastiche from The Walnut, Wonder Dave, Kamala Puligandla, Natalie Warner, Joe Wadlington, and an anonymous lord of industry. Read by Baruch Porras-Hernandez.

This week the Spoilerpiece Hotline receives a call from Dave?! He has a special message for our listeners, so please excuse the audio quality. Then guest Dede Crimmins joins Evan and Kris to talk about the MAD MEN series finale, the state of horror movies in 2015, and the Brad Bird film TOMORROWLAND starring George Clooney. If you don't want MAD MEN spoilers, fast forward to 13:20, where you’ll hear Dede tell the guys about 2015’s hits and misses in horror. You can also learn the plural of Duplass and why THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is “the most tasteful ass to mouth you can find in the theatre.” While talking about horror, the gang swaps stories about movies that scared each of them growing up and Dede shares how she got into writing about horror. Everything gets wrapped up with discussion about TOMORROWLAND, which everyone thought was an overbearing pessimistic film with delusions of Randian and Orwellian grandeur.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 175. This is the fourth of six lectures of my 2011 Mises Academy course "Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics" (originally presented Tuesdays, Mar. 22-April 26, 2011). The first lecture may be found in KOL172. Transcript below. Youtube and slides for this lecture are provided below. The course and other matters are discussed in further detail at KOL172. The “suggested readings” for the entire course are provided in the notes for KOL172. Lecture 4: IP STATUTES AND TREATIES; OVERVIEW OF JUSTIFICTIONS FOR IP; PROPERTY, SCARCITY AND IDEAS; RIGHTS-BASED ARGUMENTS FOR IP: CREATION AS A SOURCE OF RIGHTS SUGGESTED READING MATERIAL See the notes for KOL172. ❧ Transcript Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics—Lecture 4: IP Statutes and Treaties; Overview of Justifications for IP; Property, Scarcity and Ideas; Rights-based Arguments for IP; Creation as a Source of Rights Stephan Kinsella Mises Academy, April 12, 2011 00:00:00 STEPHAN KINSELLA: … economics association groups, and Sheldon Richman is an anti-IP libertarian guy with the Foundation for Economic Education.  He's editor of The Freeman.  He's written some good stuff on IP as well, and he was there.  Roderick Long was there, who's also good on IP, and some other people and also this guy named Adam Mossoff who I've mentioned before I think.  He's an objectivist law professor at George Mason.  He's pro-intellectual property, and he gives this typical Randian line for it.  And Sheldon was relating to me his interaction with this guy and how the debate went.  It was quite fascinating. 00:00:37 Apparently, Mossoff really didn't like getting questions and didn't really know how to respond to a lot of questions to defend the IP view.  So I think that spurred Sheldon to pose this morning a question for Randian IP advocates.  It's already got a lot of comments on the thread.  Check it out.  He basically said I want to ask the Randians if you believe that their property rights come from getting property in things that you value, which is their theory, which we'll go into later today or next class. 00:01:15 Imagine a simple society where there's a tribe and there's one guy who explores – does a lot of investigation trying to figure out the best kind of fruit to eat, and he discovers that there's a lot of berries around and people eat them.  Sometimes they do better.  Sometimes they get sick.  And he discovered there's one berry that is really good, healthy, and nourishing, and he also discovers there's a few that you should not eat. 00:01:42 And according to the Randian theory, it would seem like he has an intellectual property right in that knowledge, in that technique.  And so the question is do the other people in the village who have observed what he's doing and they see which berries he's eating and not eating now, do they have the right to eat the berries they want to eat and not eat they berries they want to eat?  Or do they have to get his permission first?  So he asked them this question as sort of a test of their theory, and of course the answer is, according to their theory, he would not be able – these people need his permission, which is, of course, absurd, which is the point of the hypo, to make them uncomfortable.  I don't expect any serious Randians that would attempt to address it, but it's interesting. 00:02:23 I had a post this week on Mises, and C4SIF, “Let's Make Copyright Opt-OUT.”  I think I mentioned this already to the class before that copyright would be better if it was opt-in, which means you don't get a copyright unless you apply for it, register for it, which used to be the law in the US until '89, 1989.  But when we joined the Berne Convention, we got rid of formalities, so it's automatic now.  And it would be better if we could get rid of that because it would solve this so-called orphan works problem.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 112. From the vault. This is from 1989, an interview by my good friend Jack Criss, then host of a libertarian AM radio talk show on WJNT in Jackson, Mississippi (now the editor of BAMSouth). Jack interviewed lots of libertarian luminaries on that show, including Murray Rothbard and many others. At the time of this podcast I was an LSU law student and was talking in favor of educational vouchers—something I completely disagree with now, by the way. But I had not yet at the time reached the full flower of my current Austro-libertarian-anarchist radicalism. To my ear, too, I think I had a thicker Louisiana accent back then. Good times. For criticism of voucher: KOL419 | Soho Forum Debate vs. Corey Deangelis: School Choice Lew Rockwell, Education and the Election William Anderson, The Trouble with Vouchers Jacob Hornberger, "School Vouchers Are Anti-Libertarian," Hornberger's Blog (Future of Freedom Foundation) (July 5, 2022) ———, "More on Anti-Libertarian School Vouchers," Hornberger's Blog (Future of Freedom Foundation) (July 6, 2022) Bob Murphy Show ep 105: Corey DeAngelis Makes the Case for School Choice Jacob Hornberger Makes the Case AGAINST School Vouchers (with Bob Murphy -- Bob Murphy show ep. 248) Tom Woods Show: Ep. 2325 Corey DeAngelis and Connor Boyack: The State's Schools Are Beyond Repair Tom Woods Show: Ep. 2211 Corey DeAngelis on the School Choice Movement Kinsella, "Negates freedom of choice," Letter to the Editor, The Morning Advocate (Dec. 21, 1988), and related correspondence related to the voucher system and school choice, 1988–89 (Note: Written in a more Randian "Objectivist" phase, and before I came to oppose voucher systems.) Related: Rose City Catholics Fight for LGBTQ Rights—and Start a War With Portland's Archbishop (July 5, 2023) Update: Soho Forum Debate: resolved: "Today's school-choice movement in the U.S. is worthy of support by libertarians…" (taking the negative), vs. Corey DeAngelis, New York City (Aug. 21, 2023) (tickets) https://youtu.be/2Dbf0DTBwV8

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 076. IP Debate with Chris (aka "Sid Non-Vicious") LeRoux, hosted by James Cox. LeRoux claims to be an anarcho-capitalist and former Randian but not a libertarian (he doesn't like labels, you see). He was recently arguing kinda for IP-but-not-really on Shanklin's podcast (see below), and contacted me  about these issues. As you can see from the "debate" it's not clear what his position is or why he even wanted to debate me, or what he really disagrees with me on, but, .... here it is. Cox did a good guy trying to moderate, but it ended up being a mess, as it always is with people that are not clear on basic libertarian concepts and not totally opposed to IP. Transcript below. Relevant links: How We Come To Own Ourselves, Mises Daily (Sep. 7, 2006) (Mises.org blog discussion; audio version) A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability, Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 11-37 [based on paper presented at Law and Economics panel, Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn, Alabama (April 17, 1999)] “Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes,” Mises Economics Blog (June 23, 2011) (C4SIF) Hoppe, chs. 1-2 of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism Fraud, Restitution, and Retaliation: The Libertarian Approach The Libertarian Approach to Negligence, Tort, and Strict Liability: Wergeld and Partial Wergeld The Problem with “Fraud”: Fraud, Threat, and Contract Breach as Types of Aggression The Libertarian View on Fine Print, Shrinkwrap, Clickwrap Youtube: https://youtu.be/14POluaBwqU James Cox's original Youtube: https://youtu.be/wgJOeWU1Bek TRANSCRIPT IP Debate with Chris LeRoux Stephan Kinsella and Chris LeRoux Aug. 30, 2013   00:00:01 JAMES COX: Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we're having an IP debate, and in the right-hand corner is Stephan Kinsella for or against IP.  And in the right-hand corner, there is Chris LeRoux, who is for or against IP.  We will find out in this debate, and if you want more content or more debates like this, please like and subscribe to my YouTube channel.  Previously, we've agreed.  We didn't flip a coin.  Stephan Kinsella asked Chris LeRoux here if he wanted to go first. 00:00:36 Chris has agreed to go first.  The rules are quite simple.  The beginning of this discussing IP, Chris gets to talk for three minutes, and then Stephan Kinsella gets to talk for three minutes.  And then Stephan Kinsella gets to ask Chris LeRoux a question of which he has two minutes to answer and vice versa.  We plan for a 20-minute talk on this, and then after that, any time that's needed will be decided.  And if everybody decides then we'll go on for longer.  So okay, Chris, three minutes starting now. 00:01:12 CHRIS LEROUX: Well, I believe – Stephen – Stephan and I have had some preliminary discussions.  And I believe that he has essentially admitted that my position is correct, and he essentially admitted that contract rights are absolute in an anarcho-capitalist system.  And they're not subject to his interpretation of what's scarce or rivalrous, his opinion of these things. 00:01:39 Now, these things may be absolute.  They may be worthwhile concepts, but all he has is his opinion of them.  And he admitted that interfering in a contract in these things that are what he calls IP – I don't call them that – would be violence, as I said.  And the principle is nonviolence.  I apply the principle of nonviolence to all property rights, and that's it.  I don't think he can weasel his way out of that position, and I'll hand over my time. 00:02:13 JAMES COX: Okay.  Hold on a second.  Stephan, go. 00:02:18 STEPHAN KINSELLA: Okay, I'm actually not sure what you just said, Chris.  You maybe should introduce your position so we can know what it is instead of saying I've agreed to it already.  People here haven't read our email exchange.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 076. IP Debate with Chris (aka "Sid Non-Vicious") LeRoux, hosted by James Cox. LeRoux claims to be an anarcho-capitalist and former Randian but not a libertarian (he doesn't like labels, you see). He was recently arguing kinda for IP-but-not-really on Shanklin's podcast (see below), and contacted me  about these issues. As you can see from the "debate" it's not clear what his position is or why he even wanted to debate me, or what he really disagrees with me on, but, .... here it is. Cox did a good guy trying to moderate, but it ended up being a mess, as it always is with people that are not clear on basic libertarian concepts and not totally opposed to IP. Relevant links: How We Come To Own Ourselves, Mises Daily (Sep. 7, 2006) (Mises.org blog discussion; audio version) A Libertarian Theory of Contract: Title Transfer, Binding Promises, and Inalienability, Journal of Libertarian Studies 17, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 11-37 [based on paper presented at Law and Economics panel, Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn, Alabama (April 17, 1999)] “Intellectual Property Rights as Negative Servitudes,” Mises Economics Blog (June 23, 2011) (C4SIF) Hoppe, chs. 1-2 of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism Fraud, Restitution, and Retaliation: The Libertarian Approach The Libertarian Approach to Negligence, Tort, and Strict Liability: Wergeld and Partial Wergeld The Problem with “Fraud”: Fraud, Threat, and Contract Breach as Types of Aggression The Libertarian View on Fine Print, Shrinkwrap, Clickwrap  

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 033. I was interviewed back on Jan. 20, 2010 by Mark Edge, as part of his “Edgington Post Interview Series,” for his Free Talk Live radio show, about my Mises Daily article, “Reducing the Cost of IP Law.” The interview is lasts about 35 minutes, and starts at 2:02:36 in the original Jan. 20, 2010 show, which I have trimmed here. Edge conducted an excellent interview–very informed and interesting. And, like many others, he's come around to the anti-IP position. (See, on this, Have You Changed Your Mind About Intellectual Property?, Yet another Randian recants on IP, The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism, The Origins of Libertarian IP Abolitionism.) This podcast was discussed previously on the Mises blog.

Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 033. I was interviewed back on Jan. 20, 2010 by Mark Edge, as part of his “Edgington Post Interview Series,” for his Free Talk Live radio show, about my Mises Daily article, “Reducing the Cost of IP Law.” The interview is lasts about 35 minutes, and starts at 2:02:36 in the original Jan. 20, 2010 show, which I have trimmed here. Edge conducted an excellent interview–very informed and interesting. And, like many others, he’s come around to the anti-IP position. (See, on this, Have You Changed Your Mind About Intellectual Property?, Yet another Randian recants on IP, The Death Throes of Pro-IP Libertarianism, The Origins of Libertarian IP Abolitionism.) This podcast was discussed previously on the Mises blog.

WHY AYN RAND? SOME ALTERNATE ANSWERS by MICHAEL HUEMER http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/01/22/michael-huemer/why-ayn-rand-some-alternate-answers/   Human beings should be rationally self-interested Modern politics stems from denial of self-ownership, among other things What we have is a world of deficient self-esteem Egoism doesn't demand that others sacrifice for one's own sake http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/selfishness.html http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/virtue.html Objectivist ethics is a reality-based ethics   WHY AYN RAND? ANSWERS AND SOME QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION by DOUGLAS B. RASMUSSEN http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/01/18/douglas-b-rasmussen/why-ayn-rand-answers-and-some-questions-for-discussion/   THE WINNOWING OF AYN RAND by RODERICK LONG http://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/01/20/roderick-long/the-winnowing-of-ayn-rand/   Rational Ethics: Rational Oughts vs. Deontology by XOmniverse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKM27XazuQc A Basic Introduction to Rational Ethics by Shawn Huckabay http://completeliberty.ning.com/forum/topics/a-basic-introduction-to Rational Ethics: Introduction, Part 1 by XOmniverse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTXMwFG1jPQ   The key is to live in the present moment, appreciating that you are alive! Your happiness is the ultimate defiance of death Since life is the standard of value, an indefinite lifespan is a profound goal When people don't rid their lives of self-sacrifice, our culture suffers greatly   The Nature Of The Matrix: Red and blue pills (psychology meetup discussion) http://www.meetup.com/The-San-Diego-Psychology-Meetup-Group/calendar/12375612/ http://media.libsyn.com/media/hmfb/psychmeetupMATRIX.mp3   bumper music "Born To Be Alive" by Disco Kings http://store.ultrarecords.com/138 to comment, please go to http://completeliberty.com/magazine/category/91697