Auburn’s email servers, or at least the ones I use, have been down all day; I watch our IT department’s twitter feed with interest, but there’s been no update in the last eight hours. So if you’ve sent me email at my university address today, I haven’t gotten it.
Along with Gary and Kevin. Not in the 400, though, alas.
The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies now has online archives. Here, selfishly (appropriately), is a list of links to my own JARS articles over the past decade:
The Benefits and Hazards of Dialectical Libertarianism (2.2, Spring 2001)
Keeping Context In Context: The Limits of Dialectics (3.2, Spring 2002)
Praxeology: Who Needs It (6.2, Spring 2005)
Reference and Necessity: A Rand-Kripke Synthesis? (7.1, Fall 2005)
A Beauty Contest For Dichotomies: Browne’s Terminological Revolutions (8.1, Fall 2006)
Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues: Aristotle versus Seddon (10.1, Fall 2008)
Most of those were my side of debates with other people, so you should probably go read their side too. Plus lots of other good stuff. Here.
Libertopia, the marvelously radical libertarian event where I’ll be speaking again this year (21-23 October, in San Diego; y’all should come!), has a blog for speakers. My first post, Beyond Government, is up now.
Check out some of the other entries too; I particularly like Gary Chartier’s, Spencer MacCallum’s, and Stefan Molyneux’s.
The schedule for next month’s Alabama Philosophical Society is now online. Meeting info here.
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News. Regular readers of this blog will find no surprises here:
To the Editor:
D. W. St. John (“Regulations often needed in today’s world,” Thursday) blames both the BP oil spill and the financial crisis on a lack of government regulation.
On the contrary, both disasters were caused by pro-big-business regulations.
BP took unnecessary risks because they’d been given a liability cap of $75 million. Small wonder that they engaged in riskier behavior when they could count on regulations limiting their victims’ right to sue.
As for the financial crisis, Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s manipulation of interest rates distorted price signals and encouraged unsustainable investments, thereby making a collapse inevitable. Calling this longtime regulator a messiah of unregulated markets is ludicrous.
Most government regulations are pro-plutocracy in their effects, regardless of how they’re marketed. Both liberal and conservative politicians are reliable supporters of the big-government/big-business partnership that dominates our economy, though of course they’re careful to wrap that support in anti-big-business rhetoric and anti-big-government rhetoric, respectively.
It’s no coincidence that most of the supposedly anti-big-business legislation of the Progressive Era was lobbied for, often even drafted by, the corporate elite, who understood that big businesses thrive when small businesses are choked by regulations.
The grain of truth in the idea that crises are caused by deregulation is that when government grants special privileges to banks and corporations, and then removes restrictions on how these privileges are exercised, perverse incentives take over and catastrophic results predictably ensue.
But the problem is the initial regulations that create the privileges in the first place.
Unchaining a state-privileged entity is not a decrease in state intervention; rather the contrary.
To learn more about why government regulation systematically serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of everybody else, check out the websites of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and the Center for a Stateless Society.
Roderick T. Long
