Per Arne Karlsen

On this day in 1992, a young Muslim woman stood on a train platform with only a duffel bag, a tenacious spirit, and an active mind. These were all she needed now.

Before she wrote a best-selling autobiography, the stories of her childhood would have sounded as foreign to Westerners as her name, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. From the moment she could speak, she was taught to obey authority without question, to honor her parents no matter what, and to remember her second-class position as a woman.

The horrific nature of the Islamic culture into which Ayaan was born can be concretized in a single event from her childhood. In order to eliminate the possibility of sexual pleasure and to preserve her virginity for the husband her parents would later choose, her elders subjected her to a form of hell on earth. As Ms. Ali explains, “There is no other way to describe this procedure. . . . After the child’s clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off . . . the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl’s own scarred flesh.”

Fortunately, while growing up in Kenya, Ayaan attended a colonially-influenced school and learned of a different kind of culture—one where girls were not mutilated but venerated; where independence, not blind obedience, was prized; and where a woman was free to pursue her own life in her own way.

Now, standing on this train platform, she faced a choice. Her parents had arranged for her to marry a Muslim. That meant a life of submission not only to the dictates of Mohammed and the community but also to those of an unchosen husband. Her only alternative was to run away and start a new life somewhere else.

Ayaan got on the train and marked the date: July 24, 1992. Of this day, she later wrote: “Every year, I think of it. I see it as my real birthday: the birth of me as a person, making decisions about my life on my own.”

Happy Birthday, Ms. Ali!

Image: Courtesy of Tali Yashinski Despins

Related:

• “Welcome, Ayaan Hirsi Ali“

I Norge har vi i det siste hatt det relativt kaldt, bla. med to kalde vintre, og noe tilsvarende har store deler av Europa, USA og Asia hatt. Også i Sør-Amerika finner vi tilsvarende kulde. Vi siterer fra Aftenposten i dag:

«Etter en av de kaldeste vintrene på flere tiår har regjeringen i Peru innført unntakstilstand i mer enn halve landet ... Over 400 mennesker har mistet livet som følge av kulden .. i hovedstaden Lima har innbygerne frosset og hutret med temperaturer på 8 grader, det laveste som er målt på 46 år.» (NTB-melding i Aftenposten 26/7)

In a previous blog post I showed how the Securities and Exchange Commission has wielded power, assaulted businesses, and ignored fraud. Now it appears that the SEC colluded with the Obama administration to assault Goldman Sachs, boost the administration’s chances of passing the financial “reform” bill, and line the coffers of Obama’s reelection campaign. Quoting the Washington Examiner:

It seemed a little odd last week when the Securities and Exchange Commission settled its lawsuit against Goldman Sachs within two hours of Senate passage of the Democrats’ Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. After all, who could ask for a more perfect backdrop than a successful prosecution of the investment colossus of Wall Street and a prime mover in the economic crisis of 2008? But this one looks stranger still considering that the SEC action was announced on April 15 of this year, only a week before the legislation was brought before the Senate, thus neatly bookending debate on the proposal. And it gets even stranger. On the same April 15, President Obama’s campaign organization, Organizing for America, purchased a Google ad directing people who Googled “Goldman Sachs SEC” to donate money at my.barackobama.com.

Whether or not evidence of collusion in this case is conclusive, the sad fact is that there is no reason to put such corruption past the SEC or this administration. Fortunately, as John David Lewis has argued, the brazen evil of Obama and company is providing a kind of political clarity that could lead Americans to see that our alternatives really are capitalism or statism.

If someone were to propose today that the United States implement a “new,” “exciting” economic idea called “socialism,” in which government central planners effectively owned and controlled the entire economy, we would surely point out that such a system has already been tried and implemented, with disastrous results.

We should do the same with the supposedly “new,” “exciting” economic idea known as the “green energy economy”–in which government central planners mandate that practical energy sources (coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear) be replaced by solar panels, windmills, dung piles, and corn fields. (Thomas Friedman’s latest column is a typical endorsement of such policies.)

There is nothing new and exciting about the “green energy economy.” There is a place overseas that has already provided stark evidence of what it means to pursue a “green energy economy,” and it’s not pretty. That place is called Europe, and it’s a testament to what happens when you force unproven, inefficient energy down people’s throat. A recent post at the free-market energy blog Master Resource explains:

Renewable energy has proved an expensive and unreliable source of energy everywhere it has been tried on a significant scale…Italy, Spain and Germany are cutting back on their taxpayer/ratepayer-funded generosity toward politically correct energies….In all, Europeans have tested the theory of a “clean energy revolution” to destruction.

For the gory details, read the whole article here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Investor’s Business Daily has published an essay from ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook on  Atlas Shrugged. The piece begins:

In the years leading up to 2008—09′s financial meltdown, government control over mortgages, interest rates and America’s banking system was at an all-time high.

And yet when crisis struck, free enterprise took the blame.

The cure, therefore, was to give government even wider powers. Washington can now bail out any company, fire CEOs, override contracts and print billions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy — all in the name of the public interest. The result? Our deficits and debt continue to mount, and there’s a real possibility of a future like Greece’s.

This is the state of our world today. It’s remarkably similar to the state of the world in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a mystery story about a future America whose economy is disintegrating and whose government is accumulating power faster than anyone thought possible. This parallel is a big reason a record 500,000 people bought “Atlas Shrugged” last year.

So what can we learn from a book that foresaw in 1957 what few believed possible in 2007? We can learn a lesson the heroes of the novel learn: the cause of the government’s greater, destructive control of business. And we can learn how to oppose it.

Read the whole thing.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. In a just-published op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, my colleague Tom Bowden argues that Kagan does not understand the Constitution–the document which, if she confirmed by the Senate, Kagan will have to swear to uphold.

Alarmingly, Kagan’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that she rejects the Founders’ view of the Constitution as a charter of liberty whose purpose is to protect individual rights. Instead, she adheres to the modern view that it’s a mechanism for establishing unlimited majority rule over the individual.

As a matter of historical fact, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution for a certain purpose. They wanted a government that would respect and protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Aside from certain contradictions (the worst of which, toleration of slavery, required a bloody civil war to expunge), the Constitution is dedicated to protecting the individual from society by means of a limited government. The Supreme Court cannot objectively interpret the document’s language apart from this essential purpose.

Regrettably, however, too many of today’s judges reject this approach to constitutional interpretation.

Read the whole thing.

The other day I blogged about an antitrust class action suit against Apple and AT&T, relating to Apple’s hugely successful iPhone. That post was based on press reports. I’ve now had a chance to read the plaintiffs’ complaint as filed in court, and a subsequent court decision. They provide interesting detail, but the basic injustice of this antitrust case remains.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Apple sells “locked” iPhones. That means they work only on AT&T’s network. Consumers know the phones are locked into one network—there’s no mystery or fraud involved.

Okay, so what about the plaintiffs in this class action? They managed to scrape together enough money to buy iPhones and enter into two-year contracts with AT&T. They used their phones for the full two years. Then their contracts expired. Now they want to unlock their phones and use them on T-Mobile or some other network. There’s only one small problem with that—their individual software license agreements with Apple forbid such tampering. That’s not to mention violation of Apple’s software copyrights. But none of that bothers the plaintiffs and their class action lawyers.

Elsewhere, I have called antitrust laws a “war against contract,” and this case is a perfect illustration. These plaintiffs don’t want to be bothered with the contracts they signed. “I promise” means nothing to them. Instead, they assert what amounts to a divine right of hacking—to be achieved with the help of the infamous Sherman Act.

Here’s the plaintiffs’ legal theory: Apple and AT&T are monopolizing the so-called aftermarket for the iPhone. This “aftermarket” is not to be confused with the market for smartphones—that’s a huge market in which Apple is a significant but by no means dominant player (Blackberry, anyone?). No, the “aftermarket” amounts to the various ways of hacking the iPhone to make it work outside AT&T. Do you get this? Since the only way you can keep making calls on an iPhone after two years is sign up with AT&T for another two years, that’s evidence the companies are “monopolizing” the “aftermarket.”

Now you might say, wait: This “aftermarket” sounds more like an illegal enterprise than a market. If licensing agreements forbid unlocking, then why would the law protect an “aftermarket” devoted to unlocking? Well, in the wonderland of antitrust, anything is possible. If this class action is successful, Apple and AT&T may have to pay damages and abandon their policies against unlocking.

So much for sanctity of contract, which is but a distant memory in American law.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

In a recent article in Investor’s Business Daily, Thomas Sowell explains why Obama’s economic policies are bad for the economy:

The current issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has a feature article about businesses that are just holding on to huge sums of money. They say, for example, that the pharmaceutical company Pfizer is holding on to $26 billion. If so, there should not be any great mystery as to why they don’t invest it.

With the Obama administration being on an anti-business kick, boasting of putting their foot on some business’ neck, and the president talking about putting his foot on another part of the anatomy, with Congress coming up with more and more red tape, more mandates and more heavy-handed interventions in businesses, would you risk $26 billion that you might not even be able to get back, much less make any money on the deal?

Of course you wouldn’t. No rational person would. And this phenomenon of businesses hording cash is rampant today for this very reason. Just as Pfizer does not want to risk its cash on investments, so other businesses don’t want to risk theirs on new employees or equipment or innovations or branches. As Sowell points out so clearly, Obama’s economic policies are thwarting the economy.

But Sowell misses the more important point: the moral factor. The fundamental offense for which Obama’s economic policies should be condemned is their violation of businessmen’s moral right to keep and use their wealth and property as they see fit. The crucial point to be made is that for a government to put its boot on a businessman’s neck or to “kick [his] ass” is profoundly immoral. Unfortunately, the worst Sowell and most other “defenders” of capitalism can say about our increasingly enslaved society is that such policies are bad for business.

It is time for Americans to realize that if we want to save this country from the likes of Obama (and Bush for that matter), we must argue not merely for the economic superiority of capitalism, but also, and more fundamentally, for the moral propriety of capitalism. For elaboration on this, I recommend Craig Biddle’s “Capitalism and the Moral High Ground.”

Here’s a great interview with Steve Simpson in which he argues that Americans need to recognize freedom of speech not as a permission to be granted when it suits social purposes, but as a right to be protected at all times. (The interview is in the first hour of the July 17 podcast.) For more on this subject, see Simpson’s article “Citizens United and the Battle for Free Speech in America,” which is also available in audio.

Selv om vi i sommer ikke skriver daglige nyhetskommentarer, så skjer det stadig ting som egentlig burde fortjene en kommentar med utgangspunkt i DLFs liberalistiske grunnsyn. Vi vil derfor i dag kort kommentere noen saker som har dominert nyhetsbildet de siste dagene.

La oss først nevne det som er blitt hetende Narud-saken: en filippinsk au pair, gift med en nordmann, hadde på sitt arbeidstillatelsskjema fått oppgitt at hennes arbeidstillatelseskode var «UF4a2b».

In my article, “Justice Holmes and the Empty Constitution,” I discussed the widespread doctrine that the Constitution’s underlying purpose—protection of individual rights to life, liberty, and property—has no legitimate role in interpreting the document’s language. I summarized this view, pioneered by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the early twentieth century and prevalent among judges today, as holding that “the Supreme Court presides over an empty Constitution—empty of purpose, of moral content, of enduring meaning—bereft of any embedded principles defining the relationship between man and the state.”

In recent hearings, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan confirmed her allegiance to this modern orthodoxy.

Kagan’s views came out under clumsy questioning from Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and religious conservative. Coburn’s questions mixed together several ideas: that individuals have natural rights—that those rights pre-exist the Constitution—that such rights are God-given—and that those rights include owning guns for self-defense.

Rather than try and untangle Coburn’s mish-mash of truth, falsehood, and controversial detail, Kagan used the knife of Holmesian orthodoxy to slice them away with a single stroke. Inquiries about man’s natural rights are irrelevant to her fitness for the Supreme Court, she testified, because they are “outside the Constitution and the laws.” As such, she told Coburn, “you should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief.”

Let’s consider the implications of Kagan’s view by means of a hypothetical Supreme Court justice. This judge knows, as a matter of fact, that the founding generation fought a bloody war against England to vindicate man’s individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. This judge also knows, as a matter of fact, that the Founders crafted the Constitution for a single purpose, stated in the Declaration of Independence: to “secure these rights.” He also knows, as a matter of fact, that the Constitution establishes a government of limited powers, well suited to the protection of those rights.

What would it mean for such a judge to abide by Kagan’s view of conscientious judging? It would mean deliberately setting aside all these facts as mere personal views, “outside the Constitution and the laws.” It would mean following Justice Holmes in treating the Constitution as a document “made for people of fundamentally differing views.” It would mean acting as if any political viewpoint with electoral clout—be it capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, Muslim totalitarianism, Christian fundamentalism, or some other ideology—has an equal constitutional right to shape American law for its own purposes, while the Supreme Court sits idly by.

This is an important issue—more important even than Kagan’s views on the Twilight film series. It’s a shame that our senators are not up to the task of making allegiance to our nation’s founding purpose a litmus test for confirming a Supreme Court nominee.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

A message from Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute:

UPCOMING AYN RAND INSTITUTE EVENT—THE ATLAS SHRUGGED REVOLUTION, SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

I am very pleased to announce that on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, in New York City we will hold our second annual Atlas Shrugged Revolution fundraising dinner event.

Last year’s event attracted 125 attendees and raised more than $400,000—and we hope that this year’s event will be an even greater success.

Here are the details for this year’s dinner:

Tuesday, September 14, 2010
6:00 p.m.
W New York
541 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10022

John Allison of BB&T Corporation will again join me to discuss the public’s continuing interest in Atlas Shrugged—and the ideas behind it. We will also update attendees on the work being done by ARI to promote Ayn Rand’s philosophy at this critical time in our nation’s history.

For more details and to register, please visit our event Web site.

We hope you’ll be able to join us in Manhattan on September 14, for ARI’s second annual Atlas Shrugged Revolution event!

Sincerely,

Yaron Brook
President and Executive Director

P.S. At this year’s event we will again hold an auction of rare Ayn Rand books and manuscripts. Images and descriptions of the items are available for viewing on the Web.

Copyright © 2010 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

A message from Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute: UPCOMING AYN RAND INSTITUTE EVENT—THE ATLAS SHRUGGED REVOLUTION, SEPTEMBER 14, 2010 I am very pleased to announce that on Tuesday, September 14, 2010, in New York City we will hold our second annual Atlas Shrugged Revolution fundraising dinner event. Last year’s event attracted 125 attendees and raised more [...]

In California, a federal judge has ruled that an antitrust class action suit can proceed against Apple and AT&T. What have those companies done to warrant being hauled into court? Basically, they agreed to sell only “locked” iPhones. A locked phone is one that works only on a specific mobile network—in this case, AT&T’s network.

So, let’s get this straight. Both Apple and AT&T want to make money. Apple makes money by creating cool mobile devices like the iPhone—creating, as in designing and manufacturing phones that didn’t exist before Apple’s brilliant designers and engineers thought of them. AT&T makes money by creating a mobile phone network–creating, as in erecting a complex array of electronic equipment capable of transmitting messages from handheld phones, a network that didn’t exist before AT&T created it.

Then Apple and AT&T decide to make money by working together. Although details of their deal aren’t public, it’s clear that AT&T saw an opportunity to increase its subscriber base by becoming the only retailer of iPhones. Apple, for its part, looked forward to receiving payments from AT&T based on a percentage of every iPhone subscriber’s monthly bill. Was this collaboration a good idea? You be the judge: consumers have bought 50 million iPhones in three years.

Let’s pause at this point to remind ourselves that the Apple-AT&T agreement does not interfere with anyone else’s smartphones or networks. The makers of Blackberry or Palm phones can choose to sell phones locked or unlocked. Networks such as Verizon and Sprint can choose whether to enter into exclusive contracts as AT&T did with Apple. In short, every other firm in the industry is free to make as much money as they can competing with Apple and AT&T.

So far, does this sound like conduct that should be illegal? Let’s look at what the plaintiffs are complaining about. According to reports, their lawsuit charges that the locked phone agreement “hurt competition and drove up prices for consumers.”

“Hurt competition?” This is competition. Apple and AT&T are competing with other makers of smartphones and with other mobile networks—and those other makers and networks are competing right back. In a free market, everyone else in the universe is at liberty to enter the market and offer a product that is better, cheaper, or both. No competitor can forcibly prevent another’s efforts.

“Drove up prices for consumers?” There was no price for an iPhone before Apple created and sold it. There was no price for an AT&T iPhone subscription until AT&T offered it. Those prices were not “driven up” from some arbitrary level that the plaintiffs would have wished to see. The prices were set by the owners of the goods and services being sold. Consumers were free to buy or to wait for some competitor to offer an equally attractive, unlocked phone.

As this suit progresses, observers should look closely at what conduct is illegal under this nation’s antitrust laws, and whether it should remain so.

[Update: Thanks to TheStreet.com for publishing this post to their many readers.]

Image: WikiMedia Commons

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Det var med stor sorg vi for noen dager siden fikk vite at Knut Mønnesland var gått bort. Vi visste at han en periode hadde vært alvorlig syk, men allikevel kom budskapet om at han var død som en overraskelse.

Det var i fjor sommer vi fikk vite at han var syk, og etter hvert fikk vi inntrykk at det var alvorlig. Vi hadde planlagt å feire hans 70-års dag i november, men dessverre måtte feiringen avlyses, Knut følte seg ikke i form til en feiring. I perioden etter fikk vi inntrykk av at sykdommen var slått tilbake, og vi hadde planlagt å isteden feire hans 71-års dag.

Organizers of a gay pride festival in Minneapolis are required by law to allow in an evangelist who wants to hand out Bibles, discuss theological issues, and conduct opinion polls, according to a recent ruling by a federal judge.

Why on earth did this become a legal issue? Why did it fall to a federal judge to decide who would be allowed to attend such a gathering, and what they could do there?

It’s because the festival was to be held on public property, city-owned land known as Loring Park. “As a festival attendee in a public forum, [evangelist Brian] Johnson is entitled to speak and hand out literature, quintessential activities protected by the First Amendment, so long as he remains undisruptive,” wrote Judge John Tunheim.

Conflicts such as these are built into the very concept of public property. After all, there is no rational standard by which one person can be deemed part of “the public” and another person excluded from “the public.” Therefore, Johnson can argue that he has a right to attend—just as the festival’s organizers can argue that their event will be spoiled by Johnson’s presence. Who’s right? Both of them, and neither of them. It’s an insoluble conflict, so long as governments continue to own and operate parks such as Loring Park in Minneapolis.

There is, however, a solution: private property. In a private setting, the festival’s organizers would be free to exclude wet blankets like Johnson the evangelist. Johnson, for his part, would be perfectly free to speechify about gay sex from his church’s pulpit or on any private property whose owner would allow it.

Consider that more than one-third of land in America is owned by governments, and millions of citizens have conflicting views on how that land should be used. That’s a prescription for endless civil war among pressure groups. The only prospect for peace lies in making public property private.

Image: WikiMedia Commons

My colleague Dr. Keith Lockitch recently spoke at the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, held in Chicago, IL. The title of his talk was “The Roots of Climate Alarmism.” To view the video, follow this link, then scroll down to find the title slide for Keith’s talk.

If you are attending OCON next week and have any interest in starting an Objectivist community club in your hometown, this is a good opportunity to learn from those who have a successful track record in such ventures:

Join the Oclubs.org workshop at OCON. Learn how to start & grow an Objectivist Community Club in your hometown!

• The Colorado Objectivist community has more than 60 members and 7 monthly events
• Chicago has 40 members in its community and 7 events per month
• Atlanta’s new Objectivist community is thriving with 30 members and 1 event per month

Learn how these cities got started!  Join Oclubs for a 45 min presentation and workshop at OCON. This event is either for people who already run a community club and want to grow it or for people who want to start one.

Wednesday, July 7 at 6:15p -7:00, 5th Floor, Charleston F room

Oclubs.org was started to support the leaders of Objectivist clubs. We create resources, answer questions, and share advice. Read our Mission Statement here.