Just saw some talking head on tv defending gun control; he said: “People talk about the 2nd Amendment, but the 2nd Amendment doesn’t give you the right to go out and gun down a bunch of people. We need stricter laws.”
You mean it isn’t already illegal to go out and gun down a bunch of people? I did not know dat.
I’ve read almost everything on this cultural literacy test, but it only goes through the 19th century. I have a feeling my score will slip severely once the second half of the test comes out.
Of the works on this list, how many were actually assigned to me in either high school or college? By my count, six. Or seven, if being assigned Henry V counts as being assigned “Shakespeare’s Plays.”
I have to gripe about some of the “signing statements” attached to the list – such as “Ignore any critic who downplays the Bard’s Christian vision or who tries to make him into a feminist or commentator on colonialism.” Any reading of Shakespeare that misses his deep skepticism concerning traditional theology, authority, imperialism, gender roles, and the like is simply missing Shakespeare. (It’s always worth remembering how deeply Shakespeare was influenced by Montaigne; the plays are filled with references to the Essais.)
Moreover, the claim that Elizabeth Bennet “must jettison Romantic sensibilities to find real love” is a very odd thing to say about Pride and Prejudice (it would be more accurate if said of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, though even there not perfectly so), given that the man Elizabeth ends up with is a quintessential arrogant brooding proto-Randian romantic hero.
I also have to gripe about some omissions from the list. In particular: No Herodotus or Thucydides?
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Apparently popular opposition to the bailout may help to kickstart the perpetually-approaching-but-never-arriving Atlas Shrugged movie, which is now being pitched as an anti-bailout movie. (Conical hat tip to Stephan Kinsella.)
That makes a fair bit of sense; for while both its critics (recently, e.g., Stephen Colbert) and its fans (recently, e.g., the loony Objectivist anti-tipping movement) have often read the book as championing the capitalist class against the proletariat, it actually champions the productive (in both classes) against the parasitic (in both classes); several of the book’s chief villains – most notably James Taggart and Orren Boyle – are wealthy industrialists who are eager lobbyists for special government privileges; and one of Dagny’s chief battles is against regulators who are trying to do her company (well, her brother’s company) a favour by putting its rivals out of business. So it’s really an anti-corporatist novel. (That’s not to say that Atlas isn’t still open to criticism from a left-libertarian perspective; sure it is, in various ways. But that’s another story.) So the present political climate would indeed be a great time for the movie.
Another factor moving the project forward is the need to start production before the rights revert to the Rand estate. That’s a major desideratum, since these days the estate probably wouldn’t approve any film version unless Galt’s Gulch was represented as being ringed by thousands of severed Muslim heads on pikes.
Evidently casting ideas for Dagny are now extending beyond Angelina Jolie, which is probably a good thing too. Jolie’s involvement was a plus to the extent that it made the film likelier to get made, but she never struck me as the right type for the role. Others being considered include Charlize Theron (whose name was once assigned to another never-produced Rand film project, The Husband I Bought), Anne Hathaway, and Julia Roberts – none of whom seem quite right either (though I think I could be persuaded re Roberts; I’ll wait until I see Duplicity to decide).
Freeman editor and left-libertarian comrade Sheldon Richman will be on Glenn Beck’s show this afternoon; details here. Alas, I will miss it; I hope it gets onto the Intertube.
Fazil Mihlar has an article in the Vancouver Sun titled Saint Wal-Mart?. (Conical hat tip to LRC.) The question mark is superfluous – it’s the usual right-libertarian hagiography of Wal-Mart.
He includes his e-mail at the end of the article, so I wrote him the following note:
I read your article on Wal-Mart with interest. But I think you’ve left out one important source of Wal-Mart’s low prices – government intervention.
Wal-Mart stores frequently acquire their land by eminent domain; in other words, they get to acquire land at lower prices than those at which the owners would be willing to sell voluntarily.
Once in business, such stores further benefit from various sorts of corporate welfare, both the direct kind and such indirect forms as the mass of regulations that have the indirect effect of making it harder for small companies to compete with big ones. As companies grow, diseconomies of scale eventually surpass economies of scale, placing a natural curb on their growth; but government regulation, by stalling competition, allows companies to continue growing past this point by externalising their costs.
Moreover, Wal-Mart’s entire business model depends heavily on federal transportation subsidies; so its competition with local businesses doesn’t exactly occur on a level playing field.
Both Wal-Mart’s critics and its defenders usually see it as an embodiment of the free market. But to me Wal-Mart looks like just one more special interest feeding at the taxpayers’ trough.
I’m opposed to Wal-Mart because I like the free market.
If others want to mail him, he’s at fmihlar@png.canwest.com.
Once again, Bob Murphy explains why Paul Krugman’s criticisms of Austrian Business Cycle theory are a bust.