The Rational Egoist

Robert Tracinski has written another excellent article, this time on the need for the U.S. Government to help bring down the Iranian Regime.

I wanted to post this article because it is very much in line with one of yesterday’s posts, Lead the Way.

This story is a few days old but I’d like to point it out nonetheless. This court decision represents a victory for Microsoft and for capitalism, something we have been seeing too few of these days.

For those of you who do not know much about the antitrust case made against Microsoft, a simple look into the charges placed against the company reveals how ridiculous and arbitrary they are.

On May 18, 1998, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft. It was alleged that Microsoft violated the antitrust laws in the following four ways:
1. “Microsoft had forced other computer companies that used its Windows operating system to sign agreements that they would not license, distribute, or promote software products that competed with Microsoft’s own software products.”
2. “Microsoft ‘tied’ its own browser, ‘Internet Explorer’ to its Windows opearing system…”
3. “Microsoft had attempted to gain a monopoly in the Internet browser market by forcing computer companies that used its Windows operating system to agree to leave Internet Explorer as the default browser and to not preinstall or promote the browser of any other company.”
4. “Microsoft had a monopoly in the market for PC operating systems and had used anticompetitive and predatory tactics to maintain its monopoly power.”

Before I comment on this absurdity, I’d like to add one more unoffical charge leveled against Microsoft. The creation of what is called “a virtuous circle.” “In this virtuous circle, the more people that use an operating system, the more that software companies are willing to write programs for that operating system. The more software programs they write for the operating system, the more people want to buy that operating system.” (Quote provided by Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases by Manuel G. Velasquez)

Allegations 1 and 3 are easily wiped away by a definition of the word force. Force, in the context of human relations, is an attack on the human mind by using physical compulsion or threatening the use of physical compulsion in order to make an individual act against his own independent judgment. Did Microsoft make the decision to act on the part of the companies that it dealt with? No. The companies themselves decided to do business with Microsoft, which entailed, not supporting other businesses besides Microsoft in that given exchange. The companies involved always had the option to choose another alternative besides dealing with Microsoft, and at no point was any force or threat of force used against them.

If you were trying to sell a product, and you were in competition with others, do you think those other people have a right to share in the success that you alone create? Or do you think that in order for other businesses to enjoy success, they need to compete with you and take the proper course of action required for business success? The U.S. Government claimed that Microsoft’s competitors, namely, Netscape and Sun, had the right to be included in Microsoft’s business success. This is clearly absurd and a profound violation of individual rights. But this is the thrusting argument behind allegations 2 and 4.

Microsoft did not force anyone to do anything. Microsoft created a product which it then marketed to others. These others could either accept the product and mutually trade to each other’s benefit, they could reject the product and look elsewhere, or they could venture to create the product themselves. At no point in time did Microsoft force (act against their own will) any company to do anything.

So what was the attack on Microsoft based on? Using Ayn Rand’s words, it was caused by “the hatred of the good for being the good.” In modern politics, those who are unable to compete with the thrivingly successful companies such as Microsoft, use the government to put a gun to its head and “level” the playing field. It would be the same as claiming that during his time as a basketball player, it was unfair that Michael Jordan was so good and made so much money, so let’s force him to not use all of his talent in order to make him “equal” with the rest of us. This ridiculous attack on the good and on success is evident in the unofficial allegation made against Microsoft that I spoke of earlier, the virtuous circle.

It was alleged that this virtuous circle was “unfair” to other companies because it gave Microsoft success and made it harder for other companies to do well. Well of course it did! When a company creates a superior product which is chosen by the majority of software companies, it gains an advantage in the business market, and deservedly so! The reason that Microsoft was so viciously attacked was because of the fact that they created a superior product. They were attacked, not for their vices or their evil, but for their virtues, their good. There is no worse inversion of morality and all that is required of man’s life than this blatant attack on the good for being the good.

Some would say the reason why antitrust action was taken was due to the fact that since Microsoft had a monopoly, they could then decrease the quality of its product drastically and jack up the price. Yes, Microsoft is free to engage in this action, but not free to escape its consequences. Doing so would allow competition to gain a foothold in that market, and Microsoft at that point could either do nothing, and face a continual threat of rising competition, or they could better their product (quality + cost). This is the nature of competition in a free society. A company can have a monopoly in a given market, such as Microsoft in this market, but it can not have a coercive monopoly, meaning, it can not forbid any new competitiors from entering that market. Only an act of government (see Capitalism The Unknown Ideal) can forbid any new competitiors from entering a given market.

This attack on Microsoft was an outright attack on capitalism, justice, and the good. I fully support Microsoft in its battle against the U.S. Department of Justice, and I fully support every other company attacked by the hatred of the good for being the good.

It seems that North Korea is getting closer and closer to attaining a full nuclear weapons program. What has been done by the U.S. Government to prevent this from happening? More lip service to negotiations and appeasement.

NORTH Korea has enough plutonium to make six to 10 nuclear weapons and could test such a weapon by the end of the year, a former US negotiator with the Stalinist state said in an interview published today.

“To the best of my knowledge, based on very well-informed Washington sources, North Korea’s nuclear program is moving ahead very quickly,” Kenneth Quinones was quoted as saying by the Daily Yomiuri.

“Basically, this means North Korea’s reprocessing (of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel) is almost finished, or has finished. This means North Korea now has enough plutonium to make six to 10 nuclear weapons,” he said. [www.news.com.au]

U.S. Government: put a stop to this nuclear weapons program immediately, before North Korea has the ability to hold the world hostage. This does not mean appease the North Korean government by promising them aid. It means using force in self-defense by striking and eliminating the sources of North Korea’s capability to create nuclear weapons.

I’d like to suggest the following works of fiction and non-fiction for serious study. The following are written by Ayn Rand unless otherwise noted:

1. The Fountainhead
2. Atlas Shrugged
3. We the Living
4. Anthem
5. Night of January 16th
6. The Early Ayn Rand
7. The Virtue of Selfishness (with additional articles by Nathaniel Branden)
8. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (with additional articles by Alan Greenspan, Nathaniel Branden, and Robert Hessen)
9. Philosophy: Who Needs It
10. For the New Intellectual
11. The Romantic Manifesto
12. The Voice of Reason (with additional articles by Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz)
13. Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (with additional articles by Peter Schwartz)
14. Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology Expanded Second Edition (edited by Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff)
15. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff
16. The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff
17. Loving Life by Craig Biddle
18. Viable Values by Tara Smith
19. The Prime Movers by Edwin A. Locke
20. The Ayn Rand Reader edited by Gary Hull and Leonard Peikoff
21. The Letters of Ayn Rand
22. Journals of Ayn Rand
23. The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts by Harry Binswanger
24. Study Methods and Motivation by Edwin A. Locke
25. The Art of Nonfiction
26. The Art of Fiction
27. Why Businessmen Need Philosophy
28. The Ayn Rand Letter

I have read (and sometimes re-read) the majority of these books, and the ones that I have not read I am in the process of reading. This list is by no means exhaustive, and is in no particular order of importance. For those of you who are interested in learning more about Objectivism and want to know where to start, I offer the following resources:
The Ayn Rand Institute
The Ayn Rand Bookstore
Essentials of Objectivism
or you can contact me through either the AIM or e-mail links on the right hand side of this page.

I will add any books and/or resources as I become aware of them.

Another ridiculous statement from Bill Clinton. I’m not even going to waste my time commenting on how completely wrong and absurd his opinion is, it speaks for itself.

Iranian students continue to bravely oppose the theocratic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. The United States of America should support them not only morally, but physically as well. Iran is the #1 state sponsor of global terrorism (including Al-Qaeda) and it is the heart of the Islamic fundamentalist movement. The defeat of this brutal regime would spell a major defeat for the Islamic fundamentalist movement as a whole. Picture the Pacific arena of World War II: regimes such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc., represent the many Pacific islands near Japan, whereas states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia represent Japan.

As a secondary consequence of defeating the brutal theocracy of Iran, the Iranian people would be exposed to (at least let’s hope) some form of a constitutional republic (as opposed to a pure democracy which merely means majority vote wins, which is only another variant of dictatorship). Decades of brutal repression, murder, and terror would be over in another backwards country. While I firmly believe that Islam is incompatible with a truly free constitutional republic, at least it seems that the days of brutal dictatorships are numbered.

I support the rebels in Iran trying to overthrow the brutal Islamic regime.

Follow what is happening in Iran towards the end of overthrowing the regime. Our national media hasn’t been giving this very much attention, but I believe that this is an extremely important story. The removal of the theocratic regime of Iran would be similar in likeliness, though not in total scope, to the fall of the Soviet Union. July 9th is the set date for everyone in Iran to rise up and oppose the regime. Mark your calendars, history is in the making.

Prior to Sept. 11, it was widely believed among the members of the U.S. Government that it was favorable to compromise with dictators and terrorists in order to achieve some given end in the short-term and deal with the consequences of these actions later. This attitude, pragmatism, was prevalent in the principles (or rather, lack thereof) guiding U.S. Foreign Policy for the past 50 years. One example of this attitude in practice was the U.S. backing of Saddam Hussein in the early 1980’s. It was believed by the U.S. Government that it would be to our benefit to back this secular dictator in order to block the theocratic regime of Iran, Iraq’s neighbor, from gaining too much power. Another example of this was the U.S. backing of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan during the same time period in the attempt to block communism from spreading.

On the face of it, it would seem as though these two actions benefitted the United States. The theocratic regime of Iran was somewhat blocked from gaining further power, and communism was blocked from spreading further, right? But did the United States really benefit from these actions? What is beneficial to a nation and what is harmful to it? The only way to answer that question is to determine what is beneficial for a human being.

Determining the exact course of action beneficial to a human being is for the entire field of ethics in philosophy, and thus too long to cover here. However, one of the most crucial things for the benefit of every human being is…acting long range (over a long period of time), i.e. acting on principle. To use Ayn Rand’s famous example, imagine that you were on a deserted island. You would have to determine what is for your survival and what is against your survival and act accordingly. You would have to find food, determine what food is good for you and what is poisonous, make a shelter, etc.

But this is no easy task. It requires a constant process of scrupulous thought, of reasoning, in order to determine such things as what food is good for you, how to make a shelter, where to find food, etc. You would have to make numerous observations of the environmental conditions around you in order to determine what actions are necessary for your survival. What integrates these observations and helps you to formulate a proper course of action? Principles. According to Ayn Rand, “a principle is ‘a fundamental, primary, or general truth, on which other truths depend.’ Thus a principle is an abstraction which subsumes a great number of concretes. It is only by menas of principles that one can set one’s long-range goals and evaluate the concrete alternatives of any given moment. It is only principles that enable a man to plan his future and to achieve it.”

But principles are not formed automatically by one’s brain. As a human being, one must constantly choose between two alternatives: actions which are beneficial towards one’s life and actions which are harmful to one’s life. It is only principles, the integration of numerous observations of reality, which can aid a human being in determing which actions are beneficial and which are harmful to one’s life.

But the philosophy of pragmatism explicity rejects the necessity of long-range principles. Instead of integrating numerous concretes into a principled course of action, pragmatism says that one should react to each concrete separately. In the case of the deserted island, according to pragmatism, one should never integrate all of your observations about what food is beneficial/harmful into a single whole but rather act immediately based on “what works.” But one could not determine if a certain piece of food was actually food or poison without reference to past observations, i.e., to principles. Thus, the pragmatist claim to reject principles ultimately leads to not acting based on reason but rather on whim.

Attempting to determine the proper course of action for living by whim is completely incompatible with man’s nature as a human being: a being which must constantly choose between two alternatives: actions which are beneficial towards one’s life and action which are harmful to one’s life. A human being can not feel like not eating and expect to live. A human being must properly identify facts of reality and integrate them into principles with the purpose of guiding their actions. This is the nature of a human being and no other means of survival are possible. Therefore, it is only long-range principles which can bring long-range benefit to a human being.

Full circle to the original question, did the United States really benefit from aiding dictators and terrorists? Did the United States really benefit from the philosophy of pragmatism? The obvious answer to this, is no. A nation is not a living entity but rather the culmination of a large group of individuals. Thus, what is required by the nature of every individual for long-range benefit is also required by a nation. The only way that a nation can benefit long-range is by deciding all of their actions based on long-range principles. This means determing what is the beneficial, what is the harmful, and acting accordingly over a long period of time. When the United States Government decided to aid the harmful (Saddam Hussein and the Taliban), they were rejecting the need for acting on long-range principles and embracing the idea that one can do what is harmful and escape the long-range consequences (9-11, the second Gulf War, etc).

After Sept. 11, our government seemed to reject pragmatism and created a new movement for our country. President George W. Bush asserted our moral right to self-defense, and our moral right to eliminate terrorism wherever it exists. As he said on Oct. 7, 2001, “Today we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.”

But now it seems our government has returned to the ways of pragmatism. Instead of following this long-range principle of eliminating terrorism across the globe, our government has decided to negotiate with terrorists. Our government is now working on the “road map” to achieving “peace” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As I stated in my post, The Moral Hypocrisy of Our President, “In response to years of terrorist attacks against Israel and its people, President Bush has personally supported a “road map” with the intention of establishing a Palestinian state by 2005. This road map calls for numerous concessions on the part of Israel, and “promises” from the Palestinian government that they will increase their steps to stop terrorism. Terrorists attack America and kill roughly 3,000 people, and President Bush declares that there is no middle ground; any nation that harbors terrorists will be regarded as a hostile nation. Terrorists attack Israel for over 50 years and kill tens of thousands of people; President Bush declares that these terrorists have the right to their own state, at the expense of their victims. The failure to allow the Israeli army to completely eliminate the terrorist organizations of the Palestinians such as the PLO and Hamas and the failure to arrest and eliminate these organizations by the Palestinian leaders themselves qualifies as support of those organizations. By negotiating with the Palestinian leaders therefore, President Bush is negotiating with terrorists.”

Reject the philosophy of pragmatism. It is only the philosophy of acting on long-range principles, based on reason, which can benefit your lives, and can benefit this great nation of ours.

Hats off to the Australian government for showing some major gall.

Sept. 11, 2001:
“Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.” President George W. Bush
[Quote provided by The Indianapolis Star]

Oct. 7, 2001:
“Today we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril.” President George W. Bush
[Quote provided by The Indianapolis Star]

April 4, 2002:
“Terror must be stopped. No nation can negotiate with terrorists, for there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death.” President George W. Bush

“The United States is on record supporting the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people for a Palestinian state.” President George W. Bush
[Quotes provided by CBS News]

In response to years of terrorist attacks against Israel and its people, President Bush has personally supported a “road map” with the intention of establishing a Palestinian state by 2005. This road map calls for numerous concessions on the part of Israel, and “promises” from the Palestinian government that they will increase their steps to stop terrorism. Terrorists attack America and kill roughly 3,000 people, and President Bush declares that there is no middle ground; any nation that harbors terrorists will be regarded as a hostile nation. Terrorists attack Israel for over 50 years and kill tens of thousands of people; President Bush declares that these terrorists have the right to their own state, at the expense of their victims. The failure to allow the Israeli army to completely eliminate the terrorist organizations of the Palestinians such as the PLO and Hamas and the failure to arrest and eliminate these organizations by the Palestinian leaders themselves qualifies as support of those organizations. By negotiating with the Palestinian leaders therefore, President Bush is negotiating with terrorists.

The moral hypocrisy of President Bush at this point is apparent. He has long since abandoned his pledge to eliminate terrorism by regarding any nation who harbors or supports terrorists as hostile. Instead, he has begun the process of appeasing terrorists, of negotiating with them, of bowing down to their terror. “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining.” I beg to differ Mr. President. YOU have deviated from the principles of the foundation of America, YOU have dented the steel of American resolve, and YOU are steering America away from being the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.

As Ayn Rand illustrated through the character of John Galt in her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle…who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who shoves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison,it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.”

Indeed, in this Israeli-Palestinian “conflict,” it is our President George W. Bush who is the transmitting rubber tube.

Welcome to the new blog of the Rational Egoist! My name is Steve Giardina and I am a student of Objectivism. The purpose of this blog will be to demonstrate many of my thoughts on numerous topics such as current events, philosophy and political science in general, and especially Objectivism.

Now for a brief description of myself:

I am currently a sophomore at Drew University where I am a double major in Philosophy and Political Science.
I read numerous books about philosophy and political science, write frequently, listen to heroic and epic music which depicts man’s greatness as it can and ought to be, play chess, play the trumpet occasionally, and anything else with the purpose of mental and/or physical growth.
My favorite philosopher is Ayn Rand, with secondary philosophers that I like being Aristotle, Locke, and Aquinas. My favorite composer is John Williams. My favorite activity is living life.
I am an individual. I enjoy to think critically about everything (as one should). I live for myself, not for anyone else. My existence is the sole justification for my living, not sacrificing my life to others. I do not blindly accept the standards of others (conformists); nor do I blindy reject the standards of others (non-conformists). I am an individual because my standards for living are based on my own objectively defined standards.
Reality is knowable, certainty is possible, human beings are not innately evil/depraved, and the entire universe is open to human possibility.

I leave my introduction with this quote:

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.” Ayn Rand