Blog Roundup

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Gregory Salmieri of the Ayn Rand Society discusses "Two New Books, an Upcoming Meeting, and a New Platform" st Check Your Premises:

The first piece of news is that we have moved our web content and our communications to Substack. This message should be reaching you through that platform. If you were a contributor to the Society for AY 2023-24 or have paid your dues in AY 2024-25, we've set you up with a one-year subscription. After that you can contribute simply by re-subscribing annually to our Substack. If you had a recurring subscription to our previous website, this will be cancelled in the coming days so that no future payments are taken via that means.

The next two pieces of news concern our book series with the University of Pittsburgh Press. As of this summer, the series includes Tara Smith's monograph, Egoism Without Permission. [links in original]

Although the event has already happened, the post is good for descriptions of the two books.

2. Jean Moroney of Thinking Directions analyzes "Three Misconceptions Concerning Analyzing Negatives" at her site's blog. The misconceptions are:

• Doesn't analyzing negatives stop you from orienting to values?
• Aren't the values at stake obvious as soon as you identify the negatives?
• Can't you just name all of the values you want without actually introspecting threat-oriented emotions?

The refutation of the second memorably analyzes the all-too-common phrase wage slavery as an example of exaggeration of negatives causing positives to become less than obvious.

It was productive industrialists like Rocekfeller, not looting politicians like McKinley, who made America prosperous. (Image by Scientific American, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

3. Harry Binswanger considers a common historical charge against John D. Rockefeller, and argues that Cartels Are Fine at Value for Value, incidentally addressing a misconception that has been rearing its ugly head a lot lately:

The whole animus against "giant" firms and "monopolies" comes from confusing production and destruction. Since a bigger army means more power, it is assumed that a bigger business means more power. Well, it often does: more productive power, not coercive power like an army.

I also recommend a couple of the newer entries at the blog, which are samples of Binswanger's new Substack blog.

4. Ben Bayer of the Ayn Rand Institute considers the abortion controversy from an individual rights perspective in "Individual Rights and the Right to Abortion" at New Ideal:

[T]he task of defending abortion rights is far from hopeless, precisely because the intellectual tradition behind the American founding documents derives from the doctrine of individual rights, a doctrine originally formulated by radical Enlightenment philosophers. Few who engage in the current abortion debate (on either side) bother to examine the history or implications of that radical doctrine for this debate. In fact, the concept of individual rights was such a revolutionary intellectual development that even its originators did not grasp all of its implications. Most people today realize that it took time to appreciate how the doctrine would support the case for the abolition of slavery. In my view, fully grasping the doctrine would also support the case for abortion rights, and this essay will show how.

I read more slowly than most, but my computer tells me that an average reader will require about 25 minutes to read the whole thing.

The blog post also appears as an essay in an expanded edition of the forthcoming Why Abortion Rights Are Sacrosanct.

-- CAV