I was browsing Google News today, and came across this editorial. The best part:

I feel obligated to point out the fundamental flaws in the Objectivist Club as a forum for discussing ideas…. The Objectivist Club’s constitution states that its mission is “to study, discuss and debate, using reason, the content, validity and application of Objectivism, and to disseminate Objectivist ideas.” In contrast, in its constitution, the Philosophy club states that its aim is to host, “events [that] will allow for thought-provoking, respectful discussion with peers and professors in the absence of classrooms, grades, competition, or judgment, for in such a context, people may best develop and clarify their thoughts to themselves and others… Does [the Objectivist Club] sound like a place where a free exchange of ideas occurs without competition or judgment?”

I don’t know about Drexel, but I went to a number of philosophy and agnostic club meetings at A&M. The usual format is usually as such: a speaker, usually a professor, wows the audience with an unintelligible attempt to prove that X is a “social construct” using enough logical calculus to make even a math major cry for mercy. Afterwards, the members (who have no clue what was just said, but feel enlightened already) gather into a circle and utter pronouncements such as “I get physically sick at seeing the suffering of others” (direct quote) at which point all the other members wow and feel even more enlightened. If there are enough upperclassmen who haven’t dropped out yet, the members usually proceed to one of the local bars and proceed to reach new levels of self-actualization with the aid of large volumes of booze, but without the aid of “judgement” or “reason.”

Arafat’s Looted Billions

CBS has some interesting revelations about Arafat’s finances. According to the story, he embezzled 1 to 3 billion dollars and directed it to his secret accounts in Israel and the Cayman islands. His wife receives a $100,000/month stipend for a lavish Paris mansion. He has looted billions from money that Israel gives to support the PLO, as well as the aid given by the US and other sources. He “financed a vast patronage system” to support his regime. He maintained “a system of monopolies in commodities — like flour and cement — that Arafat handed out to his cronies, who then turned around and fleeced the public.” The story just gets better and better: “The PLO’s former treasurer told us he saw Saddam Hussein hand Arafat a $50 million check for supporting him during the first Gulf War. And there were other large gifts from the KGB and the Saudis.”

What the article doesn’t mention, is that Arafat’s corruption has been pointed out by Palestinians before: however they were harassed, imprisoned, or usually murdered before the western media paid it any attention. It was only the mass public revolt by the Palestinian public (How many papers printed that story?) that forced him to appoint an honest finance minister.

I was surprised to learn that among the billions looted by Arafat were millions in tax funds that Israel gave to support the PLO according to the Oslo accord. I don’t have any words to describe how atrocious and inexcusable it is for the Israeli government to agree to finance its own destruction by money stolen from the very citizens it exists to protect.

New Essay on Capitalism

Last Wednesday, I presented a talk on capitalism for the A&M Objectivism Club. My speech was fairly awful, but afterwards, I converted my outline into an essay to add to this site. After finishing the first part, I noticed an unread copy of “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” sitting on my bookshelf – one of a dozen books I bought for my recent birthday. I decided to hold off writing the last part until I finished it, but that will take at least two weeks because I’m participating in the business school’s CASE competition. Big bucks and lucrative job offers are at stake, so not much bloggin’ this week, I’m afraid. However, if you’re interested in a design for an enterprise-level email marketing system, let me know.

Al-Qa'ida website hosted in Houston, TX

Did you know that Al-Qa’ida has an official website? Unfortunately for Al-Qa’ida, its former webmaster met an untimely demise in Saudi Arabia last month, but their website has been up and down since then under various domains. The site is no joke: “Al Qaeda is said to use this site as a means of communicating with their cells.”
I did a little background checking on the web servers providing the hosting and DNS services. Three locations came up: Madinah, Saudi Arabia, Ashburn, VA, and Houston, TX. I’m suprised they didn’t just host it in NYC.
For a sample of the content, check out this Free Republic post. Needless to say, a number of web servers in Ashburn, Houston, and Saudi Arabia were hacked last month under not-so mysterious circumstances.
(See for yourself: do a WHOIS on islamray.org and faroq.org)

Update: Wired reports that “[The Al-Qa’ida] site is familiar with certain hosting companies, exploiting their security problems and cracking confidential passwords.” I’ve never heard of a “site” that could hack, but I can’t say whether the web hosts in question knew which sites they were (are?) hosting. If you’re wondering whether terrorist groups really have the balls to host their websites in America, I suggest you check out this tutorial on how to shut down a Hamas website.

Almost 60 percent of Europeans say that Israel is a larger threat to world peace than North Korea, Iran or Afghanistan, according to a poll scheduled to be made public Monday by the European Commission.
Some 58 percent of those polled said the United Nations should manage the reconstruction of Iraq, compared with 44 percent who said the Iraqi provisional government should and 18 percent who said it was a job for the United States.
But 65 percent said they thought the United States should pay for the rebuilding of Iraq.
A majority of Europeans surveyed (54 percent) said they were not favorable to sending European peacekeepers to Iraq. And more than two-thirds said that the war in Iraq was not justified.
By contrast, 41 percent of Americans said they sympathized with Israelis and only 13 percent with the Palestinians.

What is Capitalism?

 

What is Capitalism?

David Veksler

November 1, 2003

Part 1: Theory

What is capitalism?

The Encarta dictionary defines capitalism as “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, characterized by a free competitive market and motivation by profit.” While private property, free markets, and profits are indeed important aspects of capitalism, they cannot exist without a legal and social framework that respects the freedom to engage in and to profit from productive activity. Capitalism requires certain legal, social, technological, and cultural conditions in order to exist, and has significant social consequences on the society that adopts it. Therefore, a comprehensive examination of capitalism must approach it as a social system, rather than an economic or political system. The study of any society must start with its smallest minority – the individual. In examining the nature and morality of capitalism therefore, the first question to ask is “What is man’s nature?” and “Is capitalism in accordance or in opposition to it?”

An examination of man’s nature begins with his relation to the rest of the world. Reality is objective –it exists independently of anyone’s perception of it. Thinking, wishing, and praying will not change it. The function of man’s consciousness therefore, is to perceive and comprehend reality, not to alter it. Because man cannot rely on instinct or any other supernatural method, reason is his sole means of reaching valid knowledge of reality. Like all living organisms, man can be distinguished from non-living matter by the fact that in order to remain alive, he must act to attain the values needed for his survival (such as food, water, shelter, clothes.) For animals, which operate entirely on the perceptual level, this guidance comes automatically through their facility of instinct. Man does not have any automatic means of attaining the values needed for his life. He may have urges (hunger, thirst, etc) – but he has no automatic means of fulfilling them. As a conceptual being, his survival depends on correctly using reason to identify and attain the values necessary for his life. As a volitional being, his thinking is neither automatic nor infallible, but is an active process that requires a constant focus on correctly identifying the facts of reality and applying them to achieve the values needed for his well-being. Unlike the automatic function of animal instinct, man must choose to think, – and his thoughts will determine his actions, his values, his emotions, and his character. The primary choice of every individual – to think or not– corresponds to his primary alternative – to live or not. His own life is the primary moral value of each individual– whether he chooses to accept it or not. Rational self-interest, or egoism is therefore the proper morality each man must adopt if he wishes to live – the application of his reason to achieve the values needed for his survival. A man may choose not to think or to reject his life, but to the extent he does so, he chooses to act towards his death.

In relation to other men, each man is fundamentally independent – not because he can live on his own, but because he can only think with his own mind – there is no “collective consciousness.” All creative effort, every invention in history, every advance in the process that created the wealthy, industrial society in which we now live in, and which distinguishes us from the proto-humans that lived short, violent lives in caves without the aid of tools or fire was created by the mental effort of individual men and women. Sometimes they worked together, and their knowledge was increased by the work of predecessors, but each advance they made was their own. The mind cannot be received, shared, or borrowed. Every new idea in human history was a product of the work of an individual mind.

In a human society – one that recognizes the independence of each man’s mind – each individual is an end in himself. He owns his life, and no one else’s. Other men are not his slaves, and he is not theirs. They have no claim on his life or on the values he creates to maintain his life, and he has no claim on theirs. In a free society, men can gain immense values from each other by voluntarily trading the values they create to mutual gain. However, they can only create values if they are free to use their minds to exercise their creativity. A man is better living off on his own than as a slave to his brothers. Individualism is the recognition that each man is an independent, thinking being. An individualist recognizes no authority higher than his of judgment of the truth, and no higher standard of value than his own life. That which furthers his life is the good, while that which destroys it is evil. Individualism is opposed to collectivism, the idea that man does not have an independent mind, does not own his life, and lives as a slave to his brothers. Collectivism holds the evil idea that man’s life has value only so far as it servers the society, State, or race.

To pursue the values necessary for his life a society, man requires only one thing from others: freedom of action. Freedom does not mean the freedom to act by permission of a state or a dictator, but the freedom to act however one pleases as long as one does not infringe on the same and equal freedom of others. To live in a society, man requires rights to protect the actions necessary to sustain his own life. All rights derive from a man’s right to his own life, including the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Thus, rights are moral principles defining his freedom of action in a social context. Rights are inalienable – they are not given to man by any government and may not be morally infringed upon. A man may have his rights violated by a criminal or a corrupt regime, but morally he remains in the right, and the dictator and criminal in the wrong. Rights are not guarantees to things or obligation placed on others, but only guarantees to freedom from violence (the right to life), freedom of action (the right to liberty), and the results of those actions (the right to property). The only obligations one’s rights impose on other men is to respect the same and equal rights of others – the freedom to be left alone.

In a political context, freedom means solely the freedom from the initiation of force by other men. Only by the initiation of force can man’s rights be violated. Whether it is by a theft, force, fraud, or government censorship, man’s rights can be violated only by the initiation of force. Because man’s life depends on the use of reason to achieve the values necessary for his life, the initiation of force renders his mind useless as a means of survival. To live, man must achieve the values necessary to sustain his live. To achieve values, man must be free to think and to act on his judgment. To live, man must be free to think. To be free to think, man must be free to act. In the words of Ayn Rand, “Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”

Because force renders man’s mind useless, every man has the right to self-defense – and the right to use force to retaliate against those who initiate force against him. However, no man – and no group of men – has the right to initiate force against any individual. The initiation of force is a great moral evil, but the use of force in self-defense is a moral requisite.

In a state of nature, men are allowed complete discretion in the use of force in self-defense and in the pursuit of justice. However, a lack of objective legal control over the use of force is anarchy: a perpetual state of civil war and warfare. Government is the agency that enforces objective control of force by having a monopoly on the legal use of force. This monopoly may be used for only one just purpose: to carry out justice against those who initiate force according to objectively predefined laws. Thus, the sole function of government is to protect individual rights by defending its citizens and retaliating against those who initiate force.

Just as no individual has the right to initiate force against anyone, neither does any group of men, in any private or public capacity. It is immoral to initiate force against any individual for any reason. This includes the initiation of force for “the public good.” The “public” is merely a collection of individuals, each possessing the same rights, and each being an end in himself. Any attempt to benefit the “public good” is an immoral attempt to provide a benefit to one group of individuals at the expense of another. In a free society, no individual benefits at the expense of another: men exchange the values they create in voluntary trade to mutual gain.

Therefore, the sole function of government is to protect individual rights by establishing a legal monopoly on the use of force. It does so by three agencies: The police protect against domestic criminals, the courts settle honest disputes, enforce contracts, and punish criminal according to objectively predefined laws, and the military provides protection against foreign invaders.

To ensure that the government respects individual rights, and that politicians cannot turn the power of the police against any of its citizens, the power of government must be strictly defined according to objectively defined laws. The rule of law has just purpose: to protect the rights of the individual.

The basic purpose of a government is enshrined in its constitution. The purpose of a constitution is to explicitly define the valid powers of government. Thus, a citizen remains to free to do whatever is not explicitly forbidden by law (in a proper legal system, that is solely the initiation of force), but an official of the state is only allowed to carry out what is explicitly permitted. A capitalist government is not the mob rule of democracy, but a constitutionally limited federal republic.

The proper name for a social system based on political freedom is capitalism. The essence of capitalism is not private property or market-based prices – these are the consequences, not the essentials of such a system. A capitalist society is based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights. Under capitalism, all property is privately owned, and the state is separated from economics just as it is from religion. Economically, capitalism is a system of laissez faire, or free markets. What kind of society does capitalism create?

Part 2: Practice

Part 2 Coming Soon…

Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.-Thomas Edison

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others.-Ayn Rand

The first condition for the establishment of perpetual peace is the general adoption of the principles of laissez-faire capitalism.-Ludwig Von Mises

The meaning of economic freedom is this: that the individual is in a position to choose the way in which he wants to integrate himself into the totality of society.-Ludwig Von Mises

All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out.-Ludwig Von Mises

If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.-Milton Friedman

Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action.-Ayn Rand

In a capitalist society, all human relationships are voluntary. Men are free to cooperate or not, to deal with one another or not, as their own individual judgments, convictions and interests dictate.-Ayn Rand

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity. -Robert A. Heinlein