Corporate Cash for Collectivist Causes
November 2006 -- Because our April cover story chronicled the Enron debacle, we ran the following quotation from Ayn Rand on our table of contents page:
29 mars 2011
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November 2006 -- Because our April cover story chronicled the Enron debacle, we ran the following quotation from Ayn Rand on our table of contents page:
November 2006 -- In the early twentieth century, Argentina was one of the most prosperous countries in the world with one of the highest living standards. Rich in resources, a leading producer of beef and farm commodities, it had railroads, electricity, and all the infrastructure of an advanced country. Its population was largely European, from Spain, Italy, Britain, Germany, and France. Beautiful Buenos Aires was considered the Paris of South America.
Movie buffs still hotly debate whether Don Siegel’s 1957 cult classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a cautionary allegory against McCarthyism, or against communism. I have a different take.
How do you take a smug child of wealth and portray his moral denunciations of self-made men as admirable? How do you relate the career of a politician who recklessly violates the rule of law and make him look like a statesman?
An effective self-help guide lies in scope and universality somewhere between Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and a plumbing manual.
Decades of ideological corruption of scholarship in American universities have crippled us in the war against Islamic jihad.
What does a true artist live for, deep in his soul?
anuary/February 2006 -- “Ayn Rand is dead,” wrote conservative author William F. Buckley in an obituary column in 1982. “So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was in fact stillborn.”
One can hardly convey, a half-century after the publication of Atlas Shrugged , the excitement of teenagers who became Objectivists in the early 1960s. Objectivism was, clearly, the true philosophy; that much we knew. Perhaps more exactly, Objectivism was philosophy—it was the very enterprise of philosophy restored, to live again as once it had lived in ancient Athens. With William Wordsworth, we could say:
Hand it to the Ancient Greeks for understanding what motivates Man to commit acts of good and evil, and for identifying what consequences may befall those who do good. Prometheus, for example, gave Man the gift of fire, and for his troubles he was chained to a rock by Zeus where vultures ate out his liver, only to have it regenerate daily so that he could suffer the same torture over and over. In Judeo-Christian mythology, too, Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise for (God forbid!) eating fruit from the tree of knowledge.
Supporters of limited government used to take some comfort from liberal complaints about George W. Bush. Back in 2000 when Bush was running for president, liberal critics frequently observed that the state of Texas provided far fewer entitlement benefits than other states and that the office of governor had sharply limited powers. Bush’s experience as a governor led them to conclude that he was a fiscal conservative unlikely to support any expansion of federal government programs.
If you want to read a challenge to the pervasive influence of neoconservatism in the Bush administration and to its pandering to the religious right, then Kevin Phillips’s American Theocracy may be just what you’re looking for.
For several years, news stories have exposed the fact that the lifestyles of rich and famous environmentalists are anything but green.
November 2007 -- Those of us who believe that ideas have consequences (in Richard Weaver’s famous dictum) also tend to believe that consequences have ideas—as their causes. When we are confronted by some large-scale intellectual, social, or cultural phenomenon, such as the early twentieth-century turn against capitalism, we suspect that the explanation is to be found among the philosophies of prior generations.
October 2007 -- (b. 1905, St. Petersburg, Russia) Philosophy saves us one mind at a time,
May 2007 -- In the previous issue, I featured the worldview of a fictional character—counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer of the hit TV series “24.” Though wildly popular with the general public, Jack has been raising hackles in intellectual and political circles because (in the words of the show’s conservative executive producer, Joel Surnow) “He’s a patriot.” Or, as I put it, “he does what he must in order to protect his highest values: his family, his country, their freedom, their security."
May 2007 -- Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, Why Truth Matters (New York: Continuum, 2006), 208 pp., $26.95.
March 2007 -- You elected Republicans have almost hit rock bottom.
Have you ever watched a TV commercial and found it irritating or offensive? Do you suspect that advertising raises the prices of products? Have you wondered if it “forces people to buy things they don’t really need”? Do ads ever strike you as intrusive, repetitive, deceptive, manipulative, tasteless, or trivial?
June 2007 -- The April 16 massacre on the campus of Virginia Tech by a lone gunman has become another bloodstained entry in the ever-expanding ledger of mass murders, here and abroad. Headlines about slaughters in schools, post offices, and other public places blend in with daily news reports of terrorist assaults worldwide on civilians, reports so frequent and ghastly that eventually, unavoidably, they leave us numb.