Greenspan Abandoned Objectivism Long Ago

Of course, the financial mess is largely being blamed on capitalism, and given that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently admitted that his ideology was wrong, Ayn Rand’s detractors are falling all over themselves to point fingers at her philosophy of Objectivism. Greenspan once, long ago, adhered to that philosophy, but abandoned it for sure once he became the head of the Fed. These facts are what Miss Rand’s detractors want to ignore so that they can smear her ideas. So whenever I see their evasions pop up in some article or opinion piece, I’ve been answering them with this stock comment:



To Whom It Concerns:

The economic meltdown in the U.S. was essentially caused by government intervention and regulations, not their lack thereof. For many years now, banking, housing and insurance have been the most regulated areas of the economy.

As to Mr. Greenspan, the philosophy he put into practice is the opposite of capitalism. Back in the 1960s, Ayn Rand taught him why capitalism requires that there be a wall of separation between economics and state, and why the Federal Reserve, as the state’s central economic planner, must be abolished. Yet Greenspan went on to become the Fed's leader and champion -- keeping interest rates artificially low and manipulating the money supply. So he long ago rejected Miss Rand's philosophy of Objectivism -- and now he and all of us are paying the price for it.

JOSEPH KELLARD
East Meadow, NY

Peikoff On The Election

By Joseph Kellard

Dr. Leonard Peikoff offers his brief thoughts on the presidential race on his Oct. 20 podcast:

http://tinyurl.com/5ekg6x

Here's how Dr. Peikoff starts:

"I have this podcast to discuss ideas, not to choose among the lowest subhumans. I wouldn't dream of voting in this election, not for either side."

Here's how he sums up:

"Personally, I think McCain comes across as a tired moron, Obama as a lying phony, Bidden as an enjoyably hilarious windbag, and Sarah Palin as an opportunist struggling to learn how to become a moron, a phony and a windbag."

McCain's War Policy is a Dud

McCain’s War Policy is a Dud

By Joseph Kellard


So John McCain may "bomb" Iran. The important questions are
what should he bomb and to what extent.

A committed altruist-pragmatist Republican, McCain would likely
just compromisingly target Iran's nuclear facilities, thus leaving the
ruling theocrats unscathed to rebuild or import their nukes and
capabilities to strike us another day.

But even if McCain wiped out that whole lot of theocrats, they'd be
replaced by their ideological peers. The theocrats pull the strings on
everything in Iran, from how women must dress in public to the
thugs that have taken hostage, terrorized and murdered Americans
for nearly three decades. Supposedly most young Iranians are more
secular, pro-American and want "democracy," but how long must
we wait for them to overthrow their Islamic regime? They've done
little to even weaken it, and I'm suspicious about just how
committed they are to freedom. That the theocrats remain in power
tells me that they still have a lot of support.

So an effective bombing campaign would not only wipe out Iran's
theocrats, but also all their major mosques--especially those where
congregants chant "Death to America"--and any major religious
schools, as well as their nuclear facilities and military complexes.

If the Iranians dared to rebuild another Koran-based government,
our leaders must tell them they will suffer similar consequences.

I can dream, can't I?

Meanwhile, Obama wants to have a "dialogue" with the Iranian
theocrats. So, right now, about the best we can expect is that the
theocrats' own irrationality will do them in. But the timetable for
such a collapse is really impossible to predict, particularly when
you consider the endless propping up Iran receives from the
American Left, our appeasing, so-called European allies and our
enemies in Russia, China and North Korea.

Ultimately, McCain's limited bombing campaign would amount to
little if anything, just as Bush's "surge" is nothing more than a push
for "representative government" so that Iraqis can vote themselves
into some form of statism, as the Taliban-Al Qaeda regroup again in
Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iran contracts out to have others do its
dirty terrorist work.

Our terrible political choices are part of the suffering we continue to
endure due to years of pragmatic foreign policy, and we're assured
to suffer further deadly consequences under Obama or McCain.
This won't change much until our leaders start acting on what the
Yaron Brook- and John Lewis-influenced policy makers in America
propose: all out war!


Joseph Kellard is a journalist and commentator living in New York. Contact him at Theainet1@optonline.net.

Conspiracy Theorists: The "9/11 Truthers"

By Joseph Kellard


The City Journal has an article on its website, “A Conspiracy of Crackpots,” by John Avlon, regarding the so-called “9/11 Truthers.”


http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0910ja.html


I sent the following post in response to the article:

Conspiracy theorists like the so-called 9/11 Truthers are fundamentally akin to the radical Islamics who, yes, actually attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Islamic 9/11 terrorists held radically to the essence of Islam (and religion as such): faith, that is, the suspension of reason to believe in something that otherwise has no evidence to tie it to reality. The Islamics have faith in the dogmas of their religion, which commands them to go slay non-believers, simply because they reject their particular faith.

Faith, too, explains the essence of the “Truthers.” The “Truthers” enemy is the actual truth, since it doesn’t conform to their particular faith: that America is an evil nation that deserved what it got (from the Islamics) on 9/11. But they try to mask this hatred by, figuratively speaking, faithfully flying planes into the facts, that is, by dreaming up conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact, that is, America itself perpetrated 9/11, so that it’s war-mongering leaders could go to war in the Middle East. The reality they evade is that the Islamics in the Mid-East, most particularly the Iranian theocrats, have been waging war on America for decades before 9/11.

Conspiracy theorists such as the “Truthers” are fundamentally at war with reality.

They Deserve Every Penny

By Joseph Kellard

Fellow Objectivist Sylvia Bokor and I had letters published in the Boston Globe in response to another letter-writer who challenged Ayn Rand fans to justify CEO pay. Here's the relevant part of his letter:

"The average chief executive makes 344 times as much as the average worker in major US corporations … I challenge any 'free'-market apologists, clutching their Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman books, to come up with a reasonable explanation for this execrable distribution of wealth."

http://tinyurl.com/5mheoc


Here's how our letters appeared:

They deserve every penny

September 2, 2008

RE BRYAN Tucker's challenge to Ayn Rand fans ("Too little outrage over pay inequity," Letters, Aug. 28): There's no need to apologize for free markets. But because of considerable miseducation, there is a need to explain them. Tucker's use of the phrase "execrable distribution of wealth" indicates his mistaken Marxist-Keynesian views. Properly, wealth should not be "distributed." It should be earned. Chief executives do that. They earn a lot of money because they have a great deal more responsibility than other employees do. Most important, they create jobs, expand production, and thereby raise the standard of living.

Politicians' promises to "create" jobs are self-aggrandizement. Politicians don't create jobs. CEOs do. That's why they're highly paid.

SYLVIA BOKOR, Albuquerque


CEOS MAKE much more money than the "average" worker because they are exceptional. In short, they are the brains behind a corporation, that is, the Atlases on whose shoulders the entire operation of the corporation fundamentally depends.

JOSEPH KELLARD, East Meadow, N.Y.

http://tinyurl.com/5mheocc

Harlequin Saves

By Joseph Kellard
In her book “Infidel,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali acknowledges several people who made it possible for her to survive the Islamic tribalism she grew up under in Africa, to escape to Holland after her father arranged for her to marry a man she didn’t love and to prosper thereafter. But if I were to cite one overriding factor that saved her, it would be the Western novels she read.

Throughout “Infidel,” Ali brings up these books again and again, particularly in regard to love, sex and marriage. To understand their impact, it’s important to recognize the mind-numbing, repressive culture she had to endure. Ali was born in Somalia to religious, clannish Muslim parents, and her mother taught her to memorize old chants of war and death, raids, and camel herding, and female Somali poetry that never mentioned love, which is, she writes, “considered synonymous with desire, and sexual desire is seen as low — literally unspeakable.”

Fortunately, Ali and her family moved to non-Muslim Kenya, where she attended a British colonial-based school and learned English. There she read “1984,” “Huckleberry Finn,” “Wuthering Heights” and tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.

“Later on there were sexy books: Valley of the Dolls, Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steele,” she writes. “All these books, even the trashy ones, carried with them ideas — races were equal, women were equal to men — and concepts of freedom, struggle, and adventure that were new to me.”

Here are some other excerpts:

“[T]he spark of will inside me grew even as I studied and practiced to submit. It was fanned by the free-spirited novels … Most of all, I think it was the novels that saved me from submission. I was young, but the first tiny, meek beginnings of my rebellion had already clicked into place.”

“I always found it uncomfortable to be opposed to the West. For me, Britain and America were the countries in my books where there was decency and individual choice.”

“I knew that another kind of life was possible. I had read about it … [T]he kind of life I had always wanted, with a real education, a real job, a real marriage … I wanted to become a person, an individual, with a life of my own.”

“Infidel” is a great study for someone who would like to (further) concretize the crucial, life-sustaining role that art plays in man’s life.


Joseph Kellard is a journalist and columnist living in New York.

Please post comments about this article. For inquiries about Joseph Kellard’s writing services, email him at: Theainet1@optonline.net.

A Monadnock Valley Experience

By Joseph Kellard

My sister, nephew and his friend, Evan, who had never been to New York City before, visited me from Virginia recently. Acting as amateur tour guide, I drove them around Manhattan one Saturday. Once we made it into the city from the Triborough Bridge, Evan, who is 14, expressed awe at the size of some large, modern apartment buildings. As we drove through mid-town, he kept looking upward out the back window. (I was reminded of that line from the first letter in the book "Letters of Ayn Rand": "I am so Americanized that I can walk in the streets without raising my head to look at the skyscrapers.")

Among our stops or the places we passed were Park Avenue, the Metropolitan Museum, Central Park, Trump Tower, St. Patrick's Cathedral, Rockefeller Center, the GE Building, the Empire State Building, Times Square, the Flatiron Building, McSorley's Old Ale House, Wall Street, the still undeveloped property where the Twin Towers once stood, the Statue of Liberty and Brooklyn Bridge.

I noticed Evan continued to take particular interest in the buildings, and he revealed that he wants to be an architect. So later, back on Long Island, I handed him a copy of the 25th Anniversary edition of "The Fountainhead," whose cover features Frank O'Conner's wonderful painting "Man Also Rises." I told Evan he may be too young to understand the book. If so, I suggested he pick it up again in a few years.

Evan told me that his mother's boyfriend had already suggested that he read the novel; that it had "changed his life." (Sound familiar?) Evan also said he liked to read and enjoyed books about "psychology." I said that the novel is very philosophical. He thanked me, and said that after reading the description on the back cover, it sounded interesting.

Afterward, I thought about the young man on the bike who meets Howard Roark while he sits on a boulder overlooking a valley dotted with summer resort homes that he created. No, I didn't create "The Fountainhead," but giving it to a youth like Evan nevertheless reminded me of that famous line from that scene at Monadnock Valley: "Roark looked after him. He had never seen that boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime."


Joseph Kellard is a journalist and columnist living in New York.

Please post comments about this article. For inquiries about Joseph Kellard’s writing services, email him at: Theainet1@optonline.net.