Pimping Ayn Rand At The Free Market Of Ideas

CEOs give millions to get the patron saint of anti-pulbic education taught in public schools.

"Rand could not write her way out of a paper bag."

Harold Bloom
Yale University Professor




April 11 (Bloomberg) -- Ayn Rand's novels of headstrong entrepreneurs' battles against convention enjoy a devoted following in business circles. While academia has failed to embrace Rand, calling her philosophy simplistic, schools have agreed to teach her works in exchange for a donation.

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that Rand's novel ``Atlas Shrugged'' would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

The author, who died in 1982, used her self-righteous heroes to promote objectivism, a philosophy that embraces reason and individualism, while rejecting religion. While Rand, an advocate of free markets, would support a university's getting paid to teach her works, the idea riles academic ethicists.

Read more at Bloomberg...

Share The Wealth

"I wonder if any of you people who are listening to me were ever at a barbecue! We used to go there--sometimes 1,000 people or more. If there were 1,000 people, we would put enough meat and bread and everything else on the table for 1,000 people. Then everybody would be called and everyone would eat all they wanted. But suppose at one of these barbecues for 1,000 people that one man took 90 percent of the food and ran off with it and ate until he got sick and let the balance rot. Then 999 people would have only enough for 100 to eat and there would be many to starve because of the greed of just one person for something he couldn’t eat himself."

Huey P Long
Barbeque Speech

Read more and watch the actual speech

Governing By The Numbers...

Bush 28 percent v. Global Warming 85 percent



According to a Time magazine/ABC News/Stanford University poll, the majority of Americans - 85 percent, to be exact - believe global warming is a threat.

The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds that only 28 percent of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing, a new low. He was at 30 percent last month.

What about Congress?



More on Congress related polls.

"Deja Vu" Is French For "Dueling Banjos"

WASHINGTON -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, known for his skills as an orator, conceded today that comments he made at a private San Francisco fundraiser about working-class Democrats clinging to "guns or religion" were poorly chosen.
Read more...

Haven't we heard this song before?

2004
"I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. We can't beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats."

Howard Dean

"I don't want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks. I will win the Democratic nomination because I will be the candidate for guys with American flags in their pickup trucks."

Dick Gephardt

"I would rather be the candidate of the NAACP than the NRA.”

John Kerry


2008
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Barack Obama

"He suggests that people are bitter. I think they are frustrated. I think they are anxious because eight years of the Bush economy has not done what it needs to do. What they want is not a pat on the head from a presidential candidate; they want a pat on the back."

Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack

"Instead of apologizing to small-town Americans for dismissing their values, Barack Obama arrogantly tried to spin his way out of his outrageous San Francisco remarks. You can't be more out of touch than that."

Tucker Bounds
McCain campaign spokesman

"I can tell you what your worst nightmare is. It's one of the big-spendin', tax-raisin', abortion-promotin', gay marriage-embracin', more welfare-without-accountability lovin', school reform-resistin', illegal immigration-supportin' Democrats for governor who think Hillary Clinton should be president of the United States."

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty
Possible McCain VP Running Mate

Thoughts From A "Free Market" Peacenik

"Peace and not war is the father of all things."

Ludwig von Mises

"If some peoples pretend that history or geography gives them the right to subjugate other races, nations, or peoples, there can be no peace."

Ludwig von Mises

Peace March In River Falls

A large peace rally was held in River Falls on Tuesday, April 8. A large enthusiastic crowd of all ages participated.


See more pictures...

The Freedom To Work

"Freedom is the right to work a decent length of time and to get a decent living for doing so; to be able to arrange the little personal details of one's own life. It is the aggregate of these and many other items of freedom which makes up the great idealistic Freedom. The minor forms of Freedom lubricate the everyday life of all of us."

Henry Ford
My Life And Work

Who is your choice in November?

Larry, Moe, or Curley?

Pier 500 Pressure: Hudson's New Mayor Speaks...

Separated At Birth?

"There’s no denying that a collapse in stock prices today would pose serious macroeconomic challenges for the United States. Consumer spending would slow, and the U.S. economy would become less of a magnet for foreign investors. Economic growth, which in any case has recently been at unsustainable levels, would decline somewhat. History proves, however, that a smart central bank can protect the economy and the financial sector from the nastier side effects of a stock market collapse."

Ben Bernanke



"...the concentration of capital and the growth of their turnover is radically challenging the significance of the banks. Scattered capitalists are transformed into a single collective capitalist. When carrying the current accounts of a few capitalists, the banks, as it were, transact a purely technical and exclusively auxiliary operation. When, however, these operations grow to enormous dimensions we find that a handful of monopolists control all the operations, both commercial and industrial, of capitalist society. They can, by means of their banking connections"

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Thoughts From The Chair Man

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward."

Franklin D. Roosevelt


"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Where's The Money Tree?

"...And it is under this oak where Evangeline waited for her lover, Gabriel, who never came. This oak is in an immortal spot, made so by Longfellow's poem, but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment.

Where are the schools that you have waited for your children to have, that have never come? Where are the roads and the highways that you send your money to build, that are no neared now than ever before? Where are the institutions to care for the sick and disabled? Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment, but it lasted through only one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give us the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weap here!"

Huey Long

Campaign Promises: Where The Rubbers Hit The Road!

Yo Baby! So That's Why They Call Him The Beaver!!!

The new mayor said:

The question of whether and how to further develop the city's riverfront also will be foremost.





Now that's some well developed river front!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reactionaries and Reformers

"I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances. The man who calls himself a reformer wants to smash things. He is the sort of man who would tear up a whole shirt because the collar button did not fir the buttonhole. It would never occur to him to enlarge the buttonhole. This sort of reformer never under any circumstances knows what he is doing. Experience and reform do not go together. A reformer cannot keep his zeal at white heat in the presence of a fact. He must discard all facts.

...On the other hand, we have a different kind of reformer who never calls himself one. He is singularly like the radical reformer. The radical has had no experience and does not want it. The other class of reformer has had plenty of experience but it does him no good. I refer to the reactionary -- who will be surprised to find himself put in exactly the same class as the Bolshevist. He wants to go back to some previous condition, not because it was the best condition, but because he thinks he knows about that condition.

The one crowd wants to smash up the whole world in order to make a better one. The other holds the world as so good that it might well be let stand as it is -- and decay. The second notion arises as does the first -- out of not using the eyes to see with. It is perfectly possible to smash this world, but it is not possible to build a new one. It is possible to prevent the world from going forward, but it is not possible then to prevent it from going back -- from decaying. OR, should everything be petrified, that thereby six percent solution, interest may be paid. The trouble is that reformers and reactionaries alike get away from the realities -- from the primary functions.

One of the counsels of caution is to be very certain that we do not mistake a reactionary turn for a return of common sense. We have passed through a period of fireworks of every description, and the making of a great many idealistic maps of progress. We did not get anywhere. It was a convention, not a match. Lovely things were said, but when we got home we found the furnace out. Reactionaries have frequently taken advantage of the recoil from such a period, and they have promised 'the good old times' -- which usually means the bad old abuses -- and because they are perfectly void of vision they are sometimes regarded as 'practical men.' Their return to power is often hailed as the return of common sense."

Henry Frod
My Life And Work

Another Voice of Reason

The Importance of Public Libraries

"From fearing Mrs. Ruffner I soon learned to look upon her as one of my best friends. When she found that she could trust me she did so implicitly. During the one or two winters that at I was with her she gave me an opportunity to go to school for an hour in the day during a portion of the winter months, but most of my studying was done at night, sometimes alone, sometimes under some one whom I could hire to teach me. Mrs. Ruffner always encouraged and sympathized with me in all my efforts to get an education. It was while living with her that I began to get together my first library. I secured a dry-goods box, knocked out one side of it, put some shelves in it, and began putting into it every kind of book that I could get my hands upon, and called it my 'library.'"

Booker T. Washington
Up From Slavery



"Many years before author Richard Wright achieved international acclaim for his classic novel, Native Son, he lived in Memphis and worked for an optical company where he swept floors and ran errands for his white employers. It was 1926, and the 18-year-old Wright loved to read; but he could not afford to buy any books and as a black man, he was not allowed into the public library.

Fortunately, Wright worked for a generous man named Jim Falk. Falk cared more about Richard Wright's intelligence and his desire to learn than he did about the color of his skin. Falk lent the young black man his library card and Wright began checking out books for himself, all the while telling the librarian that the books were for Mr. Falk. The world of literature was suddenly opened and in all-night reading sprees Wright devoured the masterworks of Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Stephan Crane, and other writers. His life would never be the same again.

Richard Wright himself wrote about this episode in his autobiography, Black Boy. Here, Gregory Christie's illustrations of the young man and his life in Memphis are personal and touching, and make Wright's hunger for words almost palpable. William Miller manages to retain all the power of the original story even as he makes it accessible to younger readers. Between the illustrations and the story, what certainly comes through is the injustice of ignorance and the power and hope education can provide."

On William Miller's Book Richard Wright and the Library Card

Thomas Sowell: Free Market Flip Flopper

"During the first 30 years of my life, I had no health insurance. Neither did a lot of other people, back in those days. During those 30 years, I had a broken arm, a broken jaw, a badly injured shoulder, and miscellaneous other medical problems. To say that my income was below average during those years would be a euphemism.

How did I manage? The same way everybody else managed: I went to doctors and I paid them directly, instead of paying indirectly through taxes. This was all before politicians gave us the idea that the things we could not afford individually we could somehow afford collectively through the magic of government."

Thomas Sowell
Capitalism Magazine



"Most important of all, he took me one day to a kind of place where I had never been before and knew nothing about -- a public library. Impressed but puzzled as to why we were in a building with so many books, when I had no money to buy books, I found it all difficult to understand at first, as Eddie patiently explained to me how a public library worked. Unknown to me at the time, it was a turning point in my life, for I then developed the habit of reading books."

Thomas Sowell
A Personal Odyssey (p. 16)

(Evidently Sowell for got about the importance of public funded libraries when he wrote the piece for Capitalism Magazine.)

Tough Choices: Who to Believe Fox News? or Dr. Bil?

After a short journey over to the internet blog swamp we fondly refer to as ontheborderline.nut.
I came upon a post by blog genius "Flashy" aka. Dr.bil. He has an MBA from the UW-System you know, just check out his vanity press bio. His genius is beyond the comprehension of the intellectually inferior Senator Obama, graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School.... But I digress.




















Flashy is attempting to convince the cadre freedom fighters at who regularly frequent .nut blogs like OTBL that Presidential Candidate Barack Obama is delighted to have received the endorsement of the Black Panthers.
This race baiting clown (aka. Dr.Bil ) goes on to claim Obama to be an advocate of Black Nationalism ...
blah blah blah. ( go read it for yourself if you dare soil you web browser http://www.ontheborderline.net/?p=5391).

Who'd have thunk that the brilliant minds at OTBL would have been contradicting another more well known
right wing tool, FOX NEWS? (see Fox article)
What a dilemma, who to believe, OTBL or Fox News?

"What kind of society isn't structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of a system."

Milton Friedman



"It is no longer OK to be in a black box. There will be a lot more honesty from us as an industry, and it is painfully obvious this will be the biggest change."

Erin Callan
CFO Lehman Brothers
3/18/2008



"Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Get Your Own!

“A few men or a few families own the country and run it for their personal benefit. There are no schools, hospitals, nurses, doctors, or medicines for the masses. The elite of those countries are intelligent and well educated. They have, however, no program for the people. Babies are born in miserable villages that do not have even outhouses. Filth piles high. Mothers do not know the secret of boiling water or pasteurizing milk or screening against flies. Children hardly every know laughter; they are old when they reach the teens and walk wearily through life. Their substance is perhaps a meal a day. A few villages have schools through the fourth grade; but they are for boys only. Even those who learn to read have no books. Their houses have no floors; their feet, no shoes; their rooms, no light. These villages are without aspirin, not to mention quinine; penicillin is nonexistent; so are surgeons to remove an appendix or drain a mastoid.

This picture of the village fits South America and Africa, as well as Asia. It is universal; it has not been changed by the billions we sent abroad. The perquisites of education, medical care, sanitary housing, and three meals a day were for the few at the top.”

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas
Democracy’s Manifesto: A Counter Plan for the Free Society
Published 1962