Send this to every productive individual you know.

I’m unfamiliar with the host or the associated website, but insofar as this video is concerned I agree. Just close your ears during his reference of “drugs for the elderly” as a supposed proper role of government.

From Myrhaf:

Tonight we watched the beginning of the end of freedom in America, brought to us by well-meaning Republicans who have not the slightest idea that their perverted hierarchy of values will lead to destruction of individual rights. They were all good people we saw on TV tonight. Good, solid Americans. Their ignorance of economics and philosophy will be the end of the country they love.

I have many friends and family who correctly detect and loath the destructively nihilist essence of the left. What they fail to see are the thorns in their own bed of roses - which are just as deadly and cloaked in a much more palatable guise. The truth is they are still cheering for a losing team, and for exactly as Rand wrote in “Conservatism: An Obituary”:

Yet capitalism is what the “conservatives” dare not advocate or defend. They are paralyzed by the profound conflict between capitalism and the moral code which dominates our culture: the morality of altruism . . . Capitalism and altruism are incompatible; they are philosophical opposites; they cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society. [emphasis added]

As long as sacrifice, in any sense of the word, is part of a political platform the result will be destruction of wealth, freedom and life.

Book review: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand (from HBL)

She wrote the book because she was confounded by the fact that young people blamed every societal ill on capitalism, which was hardly surprising since they had not lived under any other system. Socialism and communism, at the time she was writing, had legions of promoters and defenders, but capitalist ideals seemed to be trampled on everywhere and held up as evil. An American immigrant who had witnessed the economic misery and attacks on individual dignity that defined communist Russia, Rand had at an early age resolved to be capitalism’s defender.

…

Most of the ‘anti-capitalists’ of today actually know little about the system into which they were born. They have eyes only for some actors within it (such as large companies) and their apparent greed, while being blind to the fantastic freedoms and prosperity they have inherited. Free markets, they believe, will mean a ‘race to the bottom’ of greater and greater exploitation of workers. Such arguments fail to notice that the sweatshop workers in developing countries who make goods sold in the rich world have usually arrived there by choice, leaving behind back-breaking lives of rural poverty. Their wages may be a pittance, but they represent the beginnings of a way out; their conditions look bad, but are little different to those endured by our grandparents or great-grandparents when their countries were industrialising.

The usual accusation levelled at Rand and her followers is of extremism. A more intelligent view is that she was a supreme rationalist who valued personal freedom to the highest degree.

Capitalism for her was not just a system for people to get richer, but was the only system in which people were free to act according to their best interests. Today, because we take our comfortable lives for granted, we take capitalism for granted as well. [emphasis added]

I’m shocked to see such an accurate and objective review of Rand outside of the core Objectivist media circles.  This is a very good thing. If you only read one article this week, this should be it.

Paul Hsieh points out exactly why some countries are darker than others on this map.

All of these factors were mutually reinforcing, in that the respect for rights and reason created prosperity which allowed for more innovations in science, technology, capital markets and communications, which led to more prosperity, etc. But the roots of this prosperity were ultimately philosophical. Without a proper understanding of rights, grounded in a philosophy of reason, none of the prosperity of the Anglosphere would have been possible.

Therefore, it is no coincidence that the GDP map tracks closely with countries that still respect reason and rights, which tracks closely with the Anglosphere. The prosperity of modern-day Japan follows from the sweeping cultural and political changes imposed on that country during the American occupation following World War II, and some regard it as a part of the “Anglosphere” in that sense.

To the extent that we depart Capitalism (via abandoning reason as our means of survival and demolishing the sanctity of individual rights) our color will grow lighter.

To illustrate more explicitly:

We can replace the y-axis with any metric of any value - the x-axis will remain the same.

A brilliantly written piece by Yaron Brook which points out the positive and negative impacts of embracing capitalism.

For all of capitalism’s astounding accomplishments, the intellectual underpinning sufficient to deflect its critics has never been fully identified or understood. Capitalism and the profit motive continue to be viewed with suspicion.

After all, even in America, we live in a culture that lauds self-sacrifice, community service and “giving back” as its moral ideals. Businessmen who selfishly pursue profits, in contradiction to those ideals, are consigned to a moral dungeon from which they can only hope to escape on evenings and weekends. This is why Barack Obama can get away with belittling the “money culture,” his wife can smugly counsel youth to shun “corporate America” and John McCain can brag about working “out of patriotism, not for profit.” [bold added]

I especially like this line…

Capitalism will remain the world’s punching bag until such time as the profit motive is rescued from moral oblivion. Ideas shape history–and therefore political reform requires active, fundamental intellectual change, not passive reliance on favorable trends.

In other words, we must learn to explicitly identity and proclaim the moral foundations of Capitalism. Most of our media today bickers about political fluff with nary a mention of the virtually abandoned ideal of our nations economy. Until such fundamentals - our natural right to live freely while pursuing and retaining values - are more widely accepted, the system will merely sputter along subject to varying degrees of destructive statist intervention.

Black Friday is the newly hip name for the massive day-after-thanksgiving shopping frenzy in America. One of the single most lucrative days in our economy is an extravagant display of the remnants of our Capitalist economy. It’s a celebration of disposable-income and the unyielding willpower to dispose of it. This is a celebration of the true beauty of America - the ability, sanctity and results of individual thought and action.

Game consoles, HDTVs, and jeans from GAP — all trophies for nearly 145 million free individuals enjoying the fruits of their labor.

The origin of Black Friday comes from the shift to profitability during the holiday season, when retailers depart from the red into the glorious blackness of profit.

Please remember to celebrate two holidays this week. Thanksgiving, a time to reflect on those who mean the most to you, and Black Friday, a time to champion Capitalism and pump even more money into our thriving economy.