Please offer commentary for this
section. Please keep them to the subject of shrugging, not Objectivism in general.
We reserve all editorial rights. Please submit in an email to: editor@timetoshrug.org.
Editor’s Note:
This article sets
the stage on why we cannot get rid of self-serving politicians of both
political parties.If they all lie about the use of our
money, what can we possibly trust them with?We need a system where the taxpayers
can hold power over all spending and borrowing and have monthly veto
privileges to insure accountability, much like a real corporation does.
The argument
against this approach is that we have a representative government and as
citizens do not have the knowledge and time to oversee our elected
officials.BUNK.Look at the mess we have now then
consider the knowledge and time we need to invest to insure
accountability.
Notable and Quotable: Budget Games
By Scott Rasmussen
The Wall
Street Journal, March 8, 2014
The standard media coverage of President Barack
Obama's new budget claimed the proposals included $600 billion of budget
cuts over the next decade.
It was just about
impossible, though, to find any media story mentioning some basic
numbers that belong in any story about a new federal budget. How much
money is the federal government spending this year? How does that
compare to what it spent last year, or expects to spend next year?
Perhaps the reason for this failure is because
the real numbers don't match up with the storyline. For example, in the
current year, the federal government is expected to spend $3,651
billion. With all the spending cuts being talked about, a reasonable
person might assume that spending next year will be down a bit. But it's
not. In fact, the president's budget calls for spending $3,901 billion
in 2015. That's $250 billion more than this year. It's not a one-year
aberration either. Spending increases are projected every single year
for the next decade and beyond.
It's hard to write that the president's budget
is cutting spending by $600 billion while also reporting numbers showing
spending going in the opposite direction. . . .
The basic problem is simple and should be easy
for a reporter to explain. In the 1970s, Congress tortured the English
language by requiring that if federal spending grows less than expected,
it should officially be called a spending cut. Outside of the beltway
bubble, nobody talks like that. Reporters are letting the public down by
accepting the word games of politicians and not reporting the real
numbers in the language of ordinary Americans.
This is more than just a theoretical discussion
about journalistic standards. The failure of reporters to provide real
numbers presents a false image to the American public about the state of
the budget. Spending is not being cut but going up.
From syndicated columnist Scott Rasmussen's
commentary on President Obama's budget proposal released recently by the
White House:
I Challenge You! How to make an Objectivist and why you should
Dear readers, please allow me a personal view of my coming to
Objectivism.It might be similar to yours and
be of some help.
I started my early teens as an Episcopalian complete with being
an acolyte every Sunday.I was 11.My Father was a Goldwater Republican and my Mother
provided the church influence. By 12 I knew something was wrong with the Episcopal
doctrine.Our church insisted on children
tithing to help the poor, but would not admit African American members.I’m white and lived in a mid-western city and
in a changing neighborhood.I didn’t know
the word hypocrisy, but I was witnessing it in the flesh.Both these policies disturbed me at 12.
My parents read Atlas
Shrugged about the same time, 1961, and it was the talk of their social circle.Neither however became Objectivists.I read their copy of Atlas at 13.Then
found The Fountainhead and We The Living.By 14 I was an Objectivist.In a
jewelry box I built in shop class I taped in a small strip of paper with the typed message
“I swear by my life and love of it –
that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”I still have the jewelry box and the message is
still there and I see it almost every day and smile.
Now over a forty-year-plus business and Objectivist career I
have friends and acquaintances who are not Objectivists.I am a CEO, a serial entrepreneur and a musician.These areas are not particularly breeding grounds
for Objectivists.So naturally I have had
many, many discussions with non-Objectivists about the morality of Objectivism and how it
can better your life immensely.
My first and most straightforward answer is always along the
lines of “Objectivism is moral; it is the right thing to do.Its practice boosts confidence in all things to
face the unknown and to overcome bad periods in life”.I have never met any individual who has led an entire charmed life.Some have had a little trouble and some have had a
lot.The manner in which one deals with
trouble, defined by your character, determines your success in overcoming the rough
patches.
Many turn to religion, substance or alcohol abuse,
personality disorder or a wide variety of coping mechanisms.All these methods are forms of denial.I
always turned to Objectivism.By that I mean I
re-study some of the appropriate principles of Objectivism.Objectivists may touch on denial but they do not linger in it.A is A and existence exists, and so on.
So again why be an Objectivist?Aside from being on the right side of morality, it makes you a better
person.Objectivists do not reject charity or
lack compassion.They can and do bestow
charity and compassion to others, but only to those who are worthy of receiving it and
usually having an attachment.I will support
grandkids with college help but do not give handouts to street drunks. Objectivists
believe in the principle of justice but not mercy.We
are usually unfairly judged as cold and uncaring but that is not true.We are warm and caring to those we care about.
So where am I going with this personal account?I am going to try to understand the big question.If a person who acknowledges that they are
intellectually honest and they have sufficient knowledge of Objectivism, is not an
Objectivist, why not?
In other words, I am happy and smart AND an Objectivist.Why isn’t everyone?Next, I will offer some insights of why and under
what scenario they could become Objectivists.After
all, it is in the interest of Objectivists everywhere to have more and more Objectivists
to help turn around the economical, political and cultural suicide this country is
embracing.
The first precept of understanding why someone is not an
Objectivist is understanding intellectual honesty.Being
intellectually honest means never faking reality.It
means never going into the denial mode.It
means never deceiving oneself no matter what the rationalization.
The second precept is to really understand Objectivism.I am constantly surprised by the number of people
who pontificate on Ayn Rand but have never read Atlas
Shrugged or the Fountainhead. One should
have read the 3 biggies, Atlas, Fountainhead and We The Living.In addition one should have read at least Capitalism The Unknown Ideal, The Virtue of Selfishness and For The New Intellectual.
Reading these six books do not make you an expert on
Objectivism but launch you into good company where you can discuss Ayn Rand and
Objectivism with most.
I am going to make a statement next.And I stand by it.Certainly, it will be challenged by many of you, but it is the product of
years of thought about this subject.Here it
is.
If you are
intellectually honest and know in depth about Objectivism you will become an Objectivist.Except when you don’t.And when you don’t you have quit thinking at
the stage where you don’t.
This is a mouthful and certainly will be challenged, maybe by
smarter people than me.So in summary you stay
honest, you learn Objectivism and then you refuse to quit thinking and voila…you
become an Objectivist.Tell this to your
friends.
As always, I welcome your commentary.
Mr. Craig is the founder and current editor of Time To
Shrug.
Objectivism (and Time To Shrug) needs desperately leadership
and focus.Focus will come from strong
leadership.The two times we need leadership
and focus are now and later (to take from a recent Wall Street ad).
To be taken seriously by the mass media and the public we
must move out of the shadows and fringes.We
must speak to and write for the mass media and require their truth in reporting and
respect.We need to quit giving short media
interviews (they will always be spun) and we must quit speaking to and writing for small
audiences.All of this makes us look fringe.
Our leadership must be charismatic and must be able to unite
all of the Objectivist groups under one massive tent.
We have two senior groups – ARI and TAS – and many small groups including this
one.We do not speak or write with a powerful
voice.We have too many separate agendas
dictated by the individual groups’ leaders.
We have several up and coming potential new leaders.Among them are Aaron Day, Don Watkins and Craig
Biddle.There are others.We have several more senior leaders like Yaron
Brook and David Kelley. But overall there is not much cooperation of effort.
And Objectivism suffers. Additionally, leadership would benefit by having business
leaders at the helm. We are moving past the academic era and are moving toward the
organizational and action era.
In the area of charisma, I would like to recommend the
speaking style of Dr. Kenneth McFarland.He is
gone now but was most assuredly the most compelling public speaker of our era.He was a religious conservative so please ignore
his content and focus on his delivery and his ability to move his audience.There was no better persuader from the podium.
Click to listen to a 1976 speech >
I strongly believe that a new leader of this movement should have the persuasion
capabilities of a McFarland albeit with strong Objectivist credentials.
As
always, I welcome your opinions and comments.
Mr. Craig is the founder and current
editor of Time To Shrug.
A column from last Sunday's (1/13/13) London Daily Telegraph
that aptly summarizes the present state of America.
By Janet Daley
So Europe got the American president it wanted – the one
who would present no threat to its own delusions. The United States is now officially one
of us: an Old World country complete with class hatred, ethnic Balkanisation, bourgeois
guilt and a paternalist ruling elite. And it is locked into the same death spiral of high
public spending and self-defeating wealth redistribution as we are. Welcome to the future,
and the beginning of what may turn out to be the terminal decline of the West.
It has become clear why it was so easy to misjudge the significance of the apparently
lacklustre Obama campaign – the drastically reduced crowds at his events; his
underwhelming, peevish performances in the debates, and his failure to produce any
substantive plan for a second term – as signs of how the election would go. Mitt
Romney may have pulled far larger and more enthusiastic audiences for his stump speeches
but this contest was not, in the end, going to be about speeches or arguments. The reason
that so many of those who would vote for the incumbent president did not bother to turn
out to see him as he toured the country was that they were largely untouched by the
campaign: their voting allegiance was always a certainty. It was not about political ideas
at all. It was about identity: about who and what you were in the most visceral and
personal sense – about race, about class, about being the kind of person you believed
it was necessary to be.
The saddest development is the one that is most counter-intuitive. Mr. Obama – who
famously ran in 2008 as the post-racial candidate – has polarised the nation racially
in a way that it has not been for half a century, reversing what had been the progressive
trend toward real social integration and colour blindness in American political life.
Ninety-three per cent of black voters – 93 per cent – voted for Obama in this
election, as did 71 per cent of Latino voters and 73 per cent of Asian ones. But if
non-white ethnic groups are choosing to segregate themselves electorally – quite
often with little regard for their actual economic or social interests – white voters
are not. Only 59 per cent of them supported Romney: a majority but not an overwhelming
one. Some of this was down to the class war issue: blue collar voters were encouraged to
see Romney as a rapacious capitalist who would destroy people’s livelihoods if the
balance sheet dictated it.
But that was an unfortunate consequence of this particular candidate’s credentials.
There is a more historically significant, and possibly more permanent, development too.
The United States has now acquired an electorally powerful liberal bourgeoisie who are
convinced, as their European counterparts have been for several generations, in spite of
all evidence to the contrary, that public spending is inherently virtuous, that poverty
can be cured by penalising wealth creation, and that government intervention can engineer
social “fairness”. But just when some of Europe’s political class has begun
to appreciate the dangers of this philosophy – that taken to its logical conclusion,
it leads to economic stagnation and social division – America seems to have decided
that it is the quintessence of enlightened sophistication.
This is precisely the model – the Gordon Brown vision of government as omnipotent
benefactor and purveyor of “social justice” – from which we in Britain are
attempting to escape, and in which the EU is still hopelessly trapped. But it should run
deeply against all the traditional American values of ferocious self-reliance and personal
aspiration. How does the resentment of the rich, which Obama’s campaign fostered so
successfully, sit with the old American dream that the United States was a place where
anybody who had talent and worked hard could become rich – even if he had arrived as
a penniless immigrant? The idea of “the rich” as an unreachable and undeserving
class apart is an Old World concept rooted in the landed, hereditary wealth of an
established aristocracy.
Almost all wealth in America was,
traditionally, self-made.
Janet Daley
was born in America where she began her political life on the Left as an undergraduate at
Berkeley. She moved to Britain (and to the Right) in 1965 where she spent nearly twenty
years in academic life before becoming a political commentator.
I believe on Election Day 2012
Objectivists reached a tipping point and not one they expected or desired.
52% or so of voters voted for more
welfare state.They all are either recipients
of the welfare state (including crony business people), employed by the welfare state or
sympathize with it.Or they are just too
intellectually lazy to think.
48% were Objectives or at least
anti-welfare statists.
Many Objectivists think they can
change the culture with ideas.That is not
going to happen.Honestly, if you drill down
into the psychology of any group of welfare statists you will find the common reason why.It is that ideas don’t matter.I ask you which group of the 52% is going to change
future voting habits by hearing powerful ideas.Please
name one if you disagree with my premise.
Changing culture by talking
Objectivist ideas to the 48% is preaching to the choir.Certainly only a small percent are Objectivists but the whole group of 48%
will vote against the welfare state.
I believe the only real alternative
is to cut off the money supply of the welfare state.The
US government gets money in three primary ways – collecting taxes (fees, fines, etc),
borrowing it (T-Bills, etc) and printing it (Federal Reserve).
The 48% can attack the money supply
in a variety of ways.It can shrug - meaning
it will pay as little as possible in taxes.There
are many ways to reduce taxes and all should be explored.
The 48% can refuse to buy T-Bills.It can avoid investments that invest in T-Bills.Everyone making up the 48% can discourage everyone
they know to do the same.Recently at a US
Treasury auction, the Fed bought 75 percent of the available T-Bills with funny money.It seems Europe and Asia are not as interested as
they once were.
I am aware of the argument that our
T-Bill is still among the safest worldwide investments, but we should try to change that.If we and the world quit lending money to the
welfare statists, it would have a very positive effect.As Ayn Rand said over 40 years ago, that account is overdrawn.So why are we still lending money to the US?(And a sidebar, recently some high grade corporate
bonds surpassed T-Bills in the safety rankings.)
And finally, the 48% can work for the
abolition of the Federal Reserve.This is
hard.But if every voter knew down to the
dollar how much of their personal income was diluted by the Fed’s printing press,
they might become supporters of abolition.Calculate
the dilution over a person’s lifetime and it is staggering.
The tipping point was Election Day
2012.The required action is to shrug.I believe it is now truly Time to Shrug.As all the speeches in Atlas Shrugged illustrate
“how much more are we going to take”?And
if we don’t shrug now, who will?Are you
willing to leave this mess to your kids and grandkids and their kids?
Mr. Craig is the founder and current
editor of Time To Shrug.