Friday Hodgepodge

I'm taking next week off for the holiday and for travel. I'll be back on July 11. In the meantime, there's lots here to keep you busy.

Happy Independence Day!

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Notable Commentary

"A fetus is not an independently existing, physically self-sufficient being that can have rights." -- Agustina Vergara Cid, in "Government Should Not Interfere With the Right to an Abortion" (The Orange County Register)

"We can accomplish much more freeing America's energy sector from overregulation than turning to authoritarians like Maduro or Putin." -- Agustina Vergara Cid, in "The U.S. Should Never Turn to Tyrants Like Maduro for Our Energy Needs" (The Orange County Register)

"Ideas have consequences, and there are some pretty bad ideas about raising children that have caught on in our culture thanks to John Dewey." -- Charlotte Cushman, in "Yes, Transgender Transformation Is Child Abuse" (The American Thinker)

"[W]hen they arrived in the city, many found that the health codes on their phone apps had mysteriously turned from green to red -- indicating they would be forbidden to travel around the city." -- Paul Hsieh, in "How Public Health Technology Can Be Misused to Stifle Dissent" (Forbes)

"Ideally, Congress should repeal the PTAB and return to the system of private property rights that successfully spurred the U.S. innovation economy for over 200 years." -- Adam Mossoff, in "Innovation and Leviathan: The Patent System Is Assimilated Into the Growing Administrative State" (PDF, The Heritage Foundation)

"If the city keeps reducing real rents by capping increases below the inflation rate (as it is doing now), and if inflation continues for more than a few years, we will see building abandonments once again." -- Raymond Niles, in "The Perpetual Tragedy of New York's Rent Control" (The American Institute for Economic Research)

"I have written extensively about nonmonetary forces driving up prices: mandatory useless ingredients, lockdown whiplash, green energy restrictions, trade war and tariffs, and actual war in Ukraine." -- Keith Weiner, in "Will Interest Rate Hikes Fix Inflation?" (SNB & CHF)

Johnny Carson Interviews Ayn Rand

Via EconLib:

The Ayn Rand Institute recently posted Johnny Carson's 26-minute interview of Ayn Rand, aired in August 1967. This was his first of 3 interviews with her.

There, David Henderson further notes, "there’s a substantial probability that I would be neither an economist nor an American if I hadn’t read her when I was 16 and almost 17."

The interview starts a bit awkwardly, but develops a good flow soon after, and I agree with Henderson that the questions were good.

The following quote by Rand brought back memories:

.. I find that young people particularly in colleges are enormously anxious to find rational answers... [T]hey need the quest for understanding, for an integrated consistent view of life... If you begin to speak to them about faith or religion or any form of mysticism, most of them will not listen with great interest.

This reminds me of what I thought heading into college:

Faith is the Church's shortcut for dealing with people who can't understand the arguments for religion I told myself -- until I got there and saw that it was all they really had.

Thank God, so to speak, that I encountered Ayn Rand back then!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Corrected return date from July 13 to July 11.