Abortion Rights and Why Obama is a Poor Leader

Here’s Obama’s statement on abortion rights.

“Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women's health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters.”

Obama does not mention individual rights which is based on property rights which is the fundamental principle governing the right of a woman to her own body and its fetus until it is metaphysically an independent being. (And, the fundamental principle upon which our country is set up.) Rather, he says the fundamental principle is that the government should not “intrude on private family matters.” But if this is a fundamental principle, then one should not intrude on the private family matters of the Muslim honor killers, right? Or one should not intrude into the private family matters of families where a child is locked up in the basement for weeks, right? Or one should not intrude into the private family matters where there a house full of cats, rats or dogs that have become a threat to human life beyond the confines of the person involved, right?

Notice that Obama’s principle is collectivist. The term family refers to a group, not an individual. So, in this seemingly benign statement, he complete overthrows the right of a woman or a man or any individual to his own body – to his life. He overthrows you and me and every person’s right to exist as an individual.

The reason Obama can’t lead is because Obama can’t think in a powerful modern way. His thinking is actually pre-modern. The Enlightenment, the beginning of the modern world, was based on the fact that reason, the method by which a human mind operates, was discovered to be man’s basic means of survival. Out of this came the United States, the only country on the face of the earth set up on the idea that every man has a mind and he should be free to use and depend on it as his basic tool of survival. The reason that Individual Rights is so important is because it frees the human mind. (And because the human mind has generally been free here, the US has prospered and become the richest nation in the world.)

Prior to the Enlightenment – which began in Scotland and then England – man was seen and dealt with as part of a group. Until then the aristocrat and the serf were the two forms human life took and one was in one group or the other. (There were other groups who were outside this axis of power/no power. Traders and Church people being two. But they accounted for a pretty small number of people.) Although trade happened, it wasn’t seen in the way it is now that the individual mind has been set free. Obama, a collectivist and in particular, a socialist - as compared to some earlier forms of group think such as tribes, family clans, etc. – is of a mind that ran the world prior to the Enlightenment. This is why he bows to kings and other leaders and such. It’s his “pre-individual” obeisance to the collectivist, “rulers-of-men” mindset.

The modern view of human being although of European origin is not “white” nor European per se, although I hear black historians portraying it as if the “white man” is its distinguishing characteristic. (When I hear this, I hear a man wanting to return to the pre-modern view of man – a basically ignorant being that can be controlled easily through fear and guilt and be riled up to become dominant over the white man.) The discovery of what is true of man applies to all human beings. What we are faced with with Obama is whether we are going to go back to a pre-reason view of man where he had no choice but to dominate or be dominated by other men, or are we going to deal with each other as individuals who offer us their view of the world and what they see is going on. The success of the US, which O does not like, is apologizing for at every opportunity, and is looting and redistributing its wealth, is a result of the individual being set free and protected in his right to use his own mind. That really is all it is.

So when I hear Obama speak as he does, if I want to be generous I can say that, at best, he is saying something he might say at the beginning of his search for a proper principle. Why this supposedly Constitutional scholar puts this kind of thing into the public discourse doesn’t make sense unless one grasps where Obama is coming from. Neither proper thinking nor the values which honor every individual human being call to him. Neither are his values. As a consequence, he has the whole country in an uproar. He, day in and day out is trying to lay on us that which we are not. He’s trying to force mankind back into a bygone paradigm. By his lack of values which honor the individual and clear principles, he sews the seeds of distrust and argument among the people. How can we trust each other if we, as individuals, have no existence in his mind? Who knows what he will unleash next (and he’s already done lots of damage to us) that will violate our rights?

A good leader could go a long way to quiet things down. However, that leader will not be Obama. I am persuaded he is not capable of such a task given that his orientation is that of a pre-reason collectivist, a community organizer, a troublemaker by another name. He does not care about the plight of any individual person.

Why he would want to make trouble is another topic. Read Radical-in-Chief by Stanley Kurtz and you will understand what has motivated Obama for the whole of his life. Community Organizer has been the means for what he is up to.

The Unfree Market has Failed

With the economy slowing and the home mortgage industry reeling from the stupidity of government fostered regulations and money which obviated the need for sound financial judgment, we hear frantic cries, "Save us! Save us!!" directed to the government. If a person is trying to drown you, what good is it to scream for him to save you? Alas, this is the widespread response.

I read an argument last night the point of which was that gas prices are rising not because of rising demand but inflation. I hear scant mention of inflation as the cause and none of those come from Washington. We know when other currencies are rising relative to the dollar our currency is worth less. The dollar has been the currency of choice around the world for years and now people don't want it.

Government control of the money supply is certain, albeit sometimes slow, death and the expanding (once in a while it deflates) money bubble is where we have been perched for about a hundred years. Obviously money is something whose reputation has to be earned, as we are now seeing. It is done by the judicious maintenance of value, a quality that the US Government cancelled via the legal tender laws. See below: Money by Consent Not Force posted June 20.

The government is a political institution, not a business that must maintain its value to the world in order to exist. The governement deals with everything by the use of force, not value, and once it steps beyond the protection of individual rights, that force becomes an enemy of its people.

Every major industry is now regulated to the point that people cannot make rational decisions. Time is spent doing what we can get permission to do rather than what is creative, intelligent and prudent. The human mind is the source of values, production, wealth and happiness. The government, on the other hand, acting beyond its proper purpose, cancels the human mind except as a slave to its needs and whims.

Bribes to the legislators and regulators are commonplace because no other way to get their blessing to be their slave is possible. If you don't know how you are paying them bribes, think about it a minute. You buy a license to drive your car. You buy a license to open a business. You pay them fees and taxes to have a phone. The list is endless and would not be if these goods and services were the products of businesses creating appealing values and we were free. Now isn't this a mess? Nevertheless, it's true.

Government to Blame for Housing and Financial Crisis
by Yaron Brook (7/22/08)

Irvine, CA--In “The Government Did It,” an opinion piece published last Friday on Forbes.com, Dr. Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, argued that our government’s massive control over the housing and financial markets has led to many of the problems being blamed on the free market today.

“The financial peril of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Dr. Brook pointed out, “should help expose the lie that today’s financial problems are the result of an insufficiently regulated market.”

Citing the government’s hand in the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve Board’s inflationary policy of keeping interest rates artificially low, the irrational lending standards forced on lenders by the federal Community Reinvestment Act, and the quasi-official policy of bailing out large financial institutions deemed too big to fail, Dr. Brook argued that “our government contributed to creating a situation in which millions of people were buying homes they could not afford, in which the participants experienced the illusion of prosperity, in which billions upon billions of dollars were going into bad investments. Eventually,” Brook concluded, “the bubble burst.”

“We do not need more regulation or economic ‘steering.’ What we need to do,” said Brook, “is remove the government’s power to coerce, bribe, reward and bail out irrational decisions. The unfree market has failed. It’s time for a truly free market.”

Yaron Brook is president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Copyright © 2008 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

Distinguishing Empty and Meaningless

Empty and Meaningless, a term familiar to Landmark Education graduates, is the point at which you get in a course where you can now create something new. People go into the course to break through something that has stopped them in their lives. It can be in a relationship. It can be in one's progress in one's career. It can be in any area of life where one feels stuck.

After almost two days of deconstruction of the world that you have built, you come to a place in your mind where you are sufficiently clear of that to create a new future. You have seen where you've erred, interpreted events incorrectly, have taken into your being (i.e., adopted as a basic premise in your knowledge and/or evaluative structure) something that has been stopping you from moving forward.

This place, free of past attachment of any kind, is called "empty and meaningless." As a point to which one gets himself to be free to create something new beyond the way he has been able to create in the past, he has to let go of the meaning that the old way had for him.

The distinction I want to make is this. Life is not, I say NOT, empty and meaningless, and to think that it is has serious consequences. (Those consequences are for a later post.) Life is an aspect of particular kinds of entities - namely living ones. These entities are to be distinguished from stones, tables, books and all sorts of inert, lifeless entities. The existence of these lifeless entities just is. They cannot take action to prolong their life because they don't possess life. They are just "banged" or moved around in the universe based on their own identity and the identities of the entities around them via the law of cause and effect - rather like billiard balls.

Entities possessing life, however, have a completely different situation. They have to constantly take action that keeps their lives in existence. Life is not automatic. It is maintained by action consistent with what the life needs to exist.

In the lower animals, this is automatic in the sense that they act to maintain their life until they are killed or die naturally. But in humans, who are distinguished from the lower animals by the faculty of reason, this is not automatic. A human being can choose at any moment to end his life and take the action to do so. In other words, life, for a human being is something that he chooses to keep in existence or not.

Because of this fact, everything around a human being is imbued by him with meaning. The basic meaning is, "Is this for me or against me?" "Does this further or hinder my life?"

Man's life and his faculty of reason are part of his nature. His creation of meaning is automatic. He will create meaning regardless. It is said that "Man is a meaning creating machine." That's true, except that he isn't a machine, and he has no choice in this matter. Thus life is not empty and meaningless. On the contrary, life is everywhere filled with meaning.

Given that, the area where you have choice and control is the meaning that you give a particular situation, event or attribute. And the Landmark exercise is valuable in altering the meaning that you give something - especially events and situations that happened in your past.

A person can see a difficult childhood as bad or he can see it as good or some combination. There were things he didn't have and didn't experience. On the other hand, he learned to be strong in the face of that and those ways may lead to success in many areas of life.

The point of this distinction is to not blithely say, "Life is empty and meaningless" as a way to dismiss worrying about something or to dismiss another person's concern. The point is to get in there, take charge of and be responsible for the meaning you create. Each of us, after all, is responsible for this individual human capacity.