Friday Hodgepodge

Notable Commentary

"[T]he Founding Fathers, relying on philosopher John Locke, identified the fundamental political principle: government's sole purpose is to protect individual rights." -- Robert Stubblefield, in "Letter: Morality Should Be Based on Reason, Not Faith" at The Aiken Standard.

"Making exceptions to legal requirements on religious grounds is merely the flip side of prevention (e.g., of embryonic stem cell research) on religious grounds." -- Robert Stubblefield, in "Letter: Religion Shouldn't Be Used as Reason" at The Aiken Standard.

"[T]he most significant barrier [to the wider use of telemedicine] is not technological, but rather political -- namely state regulatory agencies..." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Help Patients by Allowing More Telemedicine" at Forbes.

"The entire lawsuit [against CollegeAmerica] is motivated, and colored, by the ideology of paternalism -- by the notion that we are helpless ciphers who must be protected, not against real fraud, but against our own inability to know what is good for us." -- Peter Schwartz, in "Attack of the Nanny-State" at The Huffington Post.

The Christopher Columbus Monument in Barcelona. (Image courtesy of Pixabay.)

Happy (Belated) Columbus Day!

I was happy to see a couple of Objectivists mentioned in popular media in pro-Columbus Day editorials. The first of these, in the Sun Herald of Mississippi's Gulf Coast, noted the following substantive point:

"Columbus brought America to the attention of the civilized world, i.e., to the growing scientific civilizations of Western Europe that led to the influx of ideas and people on which this nation is founded," says Michael Berliner of the Ayn Rand Center. [link in original]

The second, from Pittsburgh's Tribune, reprints an editorial that draws on the wisdom of the Ayn Rand Institute's Tom Bowden, a tireless defender of that great man:

As wrote Thomas A. Bowden of The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, "Thus, the deeper meaning of Columbus Day is to celebrate the rational core of Western civilization, which flourished in the New World like a pot-bound plant liberated from its confining shell, demonstrating to the world what greatness is possible to man at his best."

The full tribute containing the above quote can be found here.

-- CAV