San Diego Objectivist Study Group

I am glad to see that fast-food McDonald’s Corp. is standing up to the so-called consumer watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

Last month, CSPI charged that McDonald’s Happy Meals with their little toys represent deceptive marketing, which lure the children to eat unhealthful meals and which undermine parental authority. CSPI wanted the toys removed altogether, and even threatened McDonald’s with a lawsuit if it didn’t comply. Along with the threat, it libelously alleged McDonald’s as akin to a stranger giving children candy at a playground.

Well, instead of kowtowing to CSPI’s demands, as are usually the case with these public-relations stunts against big businesses, McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner fought back.  He asserted his company’s right to sell the Happy Meals with their tiny toys. He even counterdemanded an apology from CSPI toward his company and toward the parents of children. Go, Mr. Skinner!

I haven’t visited a McDonald’s restaurant in months, but I will patronize one tomorrow to add my moral support.

“Activism matters.” That is the conclusion from Glenn Harlan Reynolds’s Sunday reflection on the recent Supreme Court decision McDonald v. Chicago. I find the conclusion unconvincing. It’s like saying action matters. The issue is really, what kind of activism that matters?

From my perspective, political activism not backed by intellectual activism is ineffective, if not dangerous. For, isn’t it true also that the gun-control activists on the “Establishment” side were just as active and well funded as the gun-ownership activists in the recent decade? The decisive factor is on the truthhood of the political cause, and that takes intellectual activism. It takes intellectual activity to marshall evidence into generalizations, come up with sound arguments, to communicate and persuade from reason. This is what changes minds, whose individual owners then will act.

Witness the recent judicial case. Not one single Supreme Court justice decided the case from fundamental rights. At best, Justice Clarence Thomas decided from the premise of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment. All the other eight justices decided from the pragmatism of either the cultural Right or the cultural Left.. It can be said, therefore, that there was insufficient intellectual activism leading to this climactic decision, not only because the tight 5-4 decision but also because the truth, properly reached intellectually, of the right for individuals to own gun has yet to be conveyed sufficiently through the culture.

Ultimately, it is one’s own life that matters, and activism must aim toward that ultimate value. But activism begins with thinking. It is a matter of thinking about an issue in one’s own life (including one’s environment) and of deciding from principles to do something about it; that is to say, it is a matter of knowing one’s values and of acting from virtues.

Daniel J. Mitchell at the Cato Institute has made another informative video on basic economics. The video asks a simple question: Since the government is a necessary institution in a free society, how big should the government be, in terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP, in order to maximize the growth of the society’s economy? Mr. Mitchell in the video explains the Rahn Curve, a graph similar to the Laffer curve, with the independent variable standing for government spending (federal, state, and local combined) and with the dependent variable showing the function of economic performance.

As expected, the Rahn Curve shows a skewed bell curve. Without government spending, as in the case of anarchy, there is no economic growth. As government spending increases, the growth rate of the economy increases. Then, at some point, the size of the government yields a peak rate of economic growth, and beyond this optimal size, the economic performance declines in a linear, negative slope.

The salient question is, what is the optimal size of government on the Rahn Curve? From the available empirical evidence, economists since the 1990s have given a wild range of numbers, from a low of 15 percent of GDP to as high as 25 percent of GDP. Their average converges at about 20 percent of GDP, which, according to one report, the U.S. government’s girth had not been seen since 1949.

But that is not all. Two other factors, explains Mr. Mitchell, could point to a much lower optimum for the right size of government. First, these working economists computed their estimates of economic growth based on vastly different models of policy constraints, policies such as taxation, monetary model, regulatory reach, and international trade, which individually can significantly affect the efficiency of the economy. But second, the economic data the economists used are limited to those countries (including Hong Kong) that are already in decline; they cannot be extrapolated to see how those countries would fare in the present era if the size of their respective governments were smaller. What the historical data do show is that all modern countries a hundred years ago spent less than 10 percent of GDP on the functions of government.

For comparison, the combined spending on government in the U.S. is over 40 percent in the present day. (The Europeans spend over 50 percent, according to one graph in the video.) The current administration’s ambition is to double government spendings in ten years!

It is a six-minute video worth watching.

Having launched Phase 1 today, The Atlas Society’s new web site looks good. Here is the press release about what else needs to be done in the upcoming months to migrate contents from the old site.

Of special note, the main page now has a prominent tab for the purpose of spreading Objectivism to Asia. The mission states: “As Asia rises in wealth and accomplishments, its societies share a common tension between traditional values and the new emerging Asian individualism. Here we chronicle the ongoing tension and its import.”

On the academic philosophy side, I look forward to the forthcoming audio and video programs.

Congratulations, TAS!

John Tierney writes another good article in science—this time in psychology. More specifically, it is about psycho-epistemology, though the neuroscientists working on it don’t know that. Skipping past these psychologists’ primitive theories about mind wandering (including daydreaming and zoning out) as being evolutionarily adaptive or as beneficial against boredom, we come to the real findings about human consciousness: that we have a conscious mind and that we have a subconscious.

[…] They found that when people’s mind wandered, the episode could last as long as two minutes.

Where exactly does the mind go during those moments? By observing people at rest during brain scans, neuroscientists have identified a “default network” that is active when people’s minds are especially free to wander. When people do take up a task, the brain’s executive network lights up to issue commands, and the default network is often suppressed.

But during some episodes of mind wandering, both networks are firing simultaneously, according to a study led by Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia. Why both networks are active is up for debate. One school theorizes that the executive network is working to control the stray thoughts and put the mind back on task.

Another school of psychologists, which includes the Santa Barbara researchers, theorizes that both networks are working on agendas beyond the immediate task. […]

And there you have it. Ayn Rand, by introspecting her own mind at work and by observing how people communicate their ideas, wrote way back in 1965: “Psycho-epistemology is the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between the conscious mind and the automatic functions of the subconscious.” [TRM “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art” 18a] Neuroscientists and psychologists would do very well if they but studied her writings.

It is a fact of nature that man has volition, and this faculty extends to his ability to control his conscious mind’s interaction with his subconscious, but only if he so chooses. Because of volition, human action is always purposeful (i.e., initiated and sustained for some purpose). Without a purpose, there is no human, i.e., rational, action.  This, too, is a fact, and having a purpose is absolutely necessary if the conscious-subconscious interaction is to be under rational control. Because of the crucial role of purpose, every man needs to internalize a personal hierarchy of values in order to prioritize what he ought to think and do at all times. And this, too, is a fact. A man without values to aim for, without purpose, without active choice, reverts to the default “freedom” of being an animal, free to have random, aimless wandering, both physical and mental.

Want to be more creative? Simply choose to be! It is a simple procedure as far as I can introspect: [1] ask yourself questions of what you need to accomplish cognitively; [2] acquire facts and store your knowledge methodically; [3] give yourself standing orders to integrate for answers; [4] persist toward that purpose. Eureka!

A new car that can fly is now available for anyone who wishes to preorder one. According to a news report, the model, called Transition, is being made by the company Terrafugia. It is a two-seater that can drive normally on land for 30 mpg and can fly as a “light aircraft” at 115 mph for 460 miles with a total cargo weight of 450 lbs. (Its own weight is 1,440 lbs.) It needs but a third of a mile of straight, wire-free road to take off or land.

As a light aircraft, its pilot needs but 20 hours of flight training to obtain a license rather than the full private pilot’s license. As a car, when the wings are electrically folded in, it can be stored in a standard garage. This must-have transport for the well-to-do retails for $194,000 apiece. So far, 70 individuals have put down their $10,000 deposits.

I wonder if it can be accessorized with a trailer hitch, a bike rack, or a surfboard rack.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in McDonald v. Chicago to re-affirm the 2nd Amendment that the right to bear arms is inherent in the individual, not in some collective, and that no federal, state, or municipal law shall be passed to infringe on this right. While this is the correct decision—correct with respect to the nature of rights as such—the judges in the majority, themselves, erred fundamentally in their deliberation toward this conclusion.

First, the decision is correct because only the individual human beings, by virtue of their nature as volitional, rational beings, have rights. Rights are inherent, not separable in the way a piece of clothing is separable from the body; no, “inherence” means an attribute of an entity, as having mass is an attribute of a physical object. A man’s right to life, liberty, property is as inherent in him as his having the abilities to see, hear, think. There is no difference in inherence whether the attribute is physical or mental. “Rights” are concepts of consciousness; specifically, they are moral concepts. The Court decision, therefore, is correct to return its opinion that the government, as instituted by the people to protect their rights, cannot intself infringe on the very rights it is to protect, specifically, on the derivative right of liberty to bear arms.

The decision, however, is flawedly reached. Rather than taking the principled approach and demolishing the opposition through reason, the majority took the pragmatic approach, rendering the decision weak and open to future revision. It had the shaky quality: there, but for the grace of 5 yays, go the nation. Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., wrote for the majority. This is their reasoning: “We repeat those assurances here. Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, [the decision] does not imperil every law regulating firearms.” Yet, according to the news report, nowhere in the decision did the majority elaborate on how the government can still restrict and “regulate firearms in certain instances.” They left the door open to “be determined in future litigation.”

What the majority failed to affirm is the broader principle from which the current case could be decided: the principle iof the right to property. Writing in 1965, Ayn Rand said it best:

… that no rights of any kind can be exercised without property rights. 

It is only on the basis of property rights that the sphere and application of individual rights can be defined in any given social situation. Without property rights, there is no way to solve or to avoid a hopeless chaos of clashing views, interests, demands, desires, and whims. [TNL “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion’” 29c]

This principle is absent in the reasoning of the Court ruling, for or against. Thus, though the decision was final and supreme, it is hollow of content. Government regulations of firearms “in certain instances” are still possible; every law abridging this individual right can still be wrangled and ”determined in future litigation.”

The Supreme Court’s decision today shows that even at the highest level of this branch of government, no one knows why individual rights must be protected, and no one knows how it can be done properly through the powers of government. While I am glad that the decision moved superficially one step toward more individual liberty, I am sad that the step taken was profoundly unprincipled.

It is over. The case for anthropogenic (or man-made) global warming has been busted for systematically not following any scientific method. According to the Financial Post:

A cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics has concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fails to stand up to scrutiny.

The cross-examination, carried out by Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that “on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the [reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”

Professor Johnson, who expressed surprise that the case for global warming was so weak, systematically examined the claims made in IPCC publications and other similar work by leading climate establishment scientists and compared them with what is found in the peer-edited climate science literature. He found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favor of a predetermined policy preference.”

The full report is found here.

What is happening in Israel today–with the many denunciations worldwide over its government’s blockade against “supply” boats to the Gaza Strip–is the result of postmodern collectivism.

To be clear, I don’t like Israel as a country, because it was founded, not on liberty, but on grounds of racism and religion, and because it has a nearly-socialist, mixed economy. But having said that, I am on its side, against its neighboring and far-flung enemies. At the very least, it is a Western civilized country, which is enough for me to come to its defense.

Any country based on modern ideals of liberty has the right to defend itself. This right is derived from the individuals who comprise the society. And as a democracy paying a modicum of  deference to individual rights, the Israeli government definitely has the legitimate function of defending its geographical borders against invasion and attack.

This very function, however, has been undermined by the Israeli people’s cultural altruism. They have elected government politicians with the morality of making others happy. It has been the Israeli government’s foreign policy in the past two decades to be good, that is, to be moral, by appeasing others. It placated its international enemies in the United Nations; it placated its bordering enemies; it acceded to the irrational demands of both its allies and its foes to the point of near surrender.

Surrender, pretty much, is the state of the state of Israel today. Charles Krauthammer’s op-ed today shows how far along Israel has been in losing in this policy of appeasement.

A right to defend oneself is unequivocal and is not open to debate or to a vote. Yet, because of its altruist morality, Israel’s defense sets itself open to the popular consensus of the world. And today, the world has voted that Israel has no right to defend itself. It is now conceivable, as Dr. Krauthammer states, to question the “legitimacy” of self-defense. Sadder still is that the United States, a once-great defender of liberty, is siding with Israel’s enemies in condemning Israel for intercepting some Gaza-bound ships supplying arms to terrorists therein.

Dr. Krauthammer asks one terrifying question: “If none of these [defenses: forward, active, passive] is permissible, what’s left?” It would seem that the Israeli people would make other peoples of the world very happy indeed if they just stopped defending themselves and letting themselves be destroyed—-as befitting their morality.

A Houston Chronicle news clip announces: “Texas Doctors Opting Out of Medicare at Alarming Rate.” Though the total number of doctors who are opting out of the Medicare system is small in magnitude, the rate as measured from previous years is alarming. Rearranged as a table, here are the data for the state of Texas:

The numbers, however, only show one side of the issue. They show only those doctors who have made the decision to opt out. They do not show how many are contemplating it. According to a recent poll conducted by the Texas Medical Association, four in 10 doctors are considering the option.

Only four in 10! The only logical reason these four and the other six–all the doctors–have not left the Medicare system is that they are still motivated by altruism. Over and above their usual benevolence, it is altruism that is keeping doctors from exiting the government-run health care system.

Altruism, the moral doctrine that one’s action is judged moral only to the extent that it benefits others, is their controlling motive. Doctors, like anyone else, want to act morally. However, their morality has pitted them with a dichotomy: Stay with Medicare to help others and be moral, or opt-out to survive and be immoral. For these doctors, at least for now, the inertia of altruism is tugging them to stay with Medicare.

One can see how painful emotionally this moral tug is. Here is Dr. Guy Culpepper, a Dallas-area family practice doctor who opted out in March of this year: “I’ve been in practice 24 years, and a lot of my patients got old right along with me. It’s stressful to tell them you’re leaving Medicare and they’re responsible for payments if they want to stay with you. You feel like you’re abandoning them.”