Here are some observations I did not think appropriate to include in Part IV of these commentaries on Barack Obama, or which I omitted for length considerations.

In the New York Magazine, “Money Chooses Sides,” note the composition of the photograph that accompanies it. I do not think it is accidental. I do not know if the photographer (or even Obama himself) intended the tableau, but of all the pictures doubtless taken of the event, this was the one selected by the magazine’s editors to illustrate Obama’s influence. Their motive may have been mockery of the guests or unintended adulation of Obama. That is irrelevant. The picture captures the essence of Obama’s appeal.

Obama seems to descend the stairs, microphone in hand, looking very preacherly as he brings the “gospel” to the mortals below. All the mortals gape up at him with undisguised worship, as though he were indeed a messiah or savior, and are hanging on his very word. Remember that these are all Park and Fifth Avenue millionaires there by RSVP. A good political cartoonist could render the photograph to show Obama in Moses-like robes, one hand raised with an instructive finger pointed in the air, the other arm cradling two stone tablets with the Ten Commandments of socialism (the words, however, would be fuzzy and nearly illegible).

The only person not gaping at Obama is George Soros, seated directly behind Obama’s left. He looks vaguely bored but also smugly content with what he is hearing and with the undivided attention of the other guests.

Then, another point I did not dwell on, for I wished to leave the reader to make his own inferences, is why so many wealthy people are throwing their money and support behind Obama. Basically, and this is connected to his making them feel good, it is a form of penance for and expiation of the “sin” of wealth, not unlike that being performed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. This picture was taken long before Obama “resigned” from Jeremiah Wright’s church, but one cannot help but suspect that he and his campaign managers were consciously but subtly instituting the Obama Church of Hope, Change, and Salvation.

I end this postscript with a brief excerpt from Book II: Hugh Kenrick, of the Sparrowhawk series (pp. 115-116). Political and charity events to raise money from the wealthy and the politically influential are nothing new. The place is London, the time, 1755:

Bucklad House had undergone lengthy renovations, and the Pumphretts wished to mark their completion with a concert, to which were invited a list of London worthies. Lady Chloe, wife of Sir Henoch Pannell…was the mover behind this event. A donation of five guineas per person was levied, the receipts to be given to Lady Chloe’s own organization, the Westminster Charity for London Waifs. “She’s doing her penance early,” confided Sir Henoch with sly derision to friends in the Commons who had been invited to the concert, “so that she may enjoy the rest of the season without the encumbrance of conscience. She is essentially a moral woman.”

Irvine, CA--In two recent decisions, the Supreme Court has determined that blacks and over-40 workers may sue for “retaliation” under federal employment discrimination laws.

In the case of CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, a Cracker Barrel restaurant manager was fired for leaving the store safe open overnight. He sued for retaliation, alleging he was really being punished for having previously complained about racial discrimination against a fellow employee. The Supreme Court decided that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 allows such a retaliation claim. In the other case, Gomez-Perez v. Potter, the Court held that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act grants older workers a similar right to sue.

"These decisions erect new obstacles to rational employers whose goal is to market good products and services," said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute. "Most Americans think discrimination laws simply stop irrational employers from making decisions based on race, age, or sex when those factors are irrelevant to performance. In fact, however, such laws burden all employers by jacking up the costs and risks of hiring the so-called protected classes, such as minorities, women, and disabled or older workers.

"Any employer who disciplines, demotes, or fires a protected worker must be prepared to prove, to the government's satisfaction in a court of law, that the decision stemmed entirely from legitimate business reasons. Given the huge number of employment decisions made every day, the costs associated with maintaining evidence of those decisions' validity are staggering.

"A protected employee can file a charge of discrimination with little or no evidence. Then the burden of proof--along with attorneys' fees, lost employee work time, and the risk of large monetary awards, including punitive damages--falls on the employer. Predictably, therefore, employers end up giving preferential treatment to members of the protected classes.

"Outlawing retaliation clothes the protected classes in yet another layer of legal insulation. An employee whose bad performance puts him in danger of discipline or discharge need only make a complaint of discrimination as a 'pre-emptive strike.' Now if his employer fires him, he can cry 'retaliation' and drag his boss into court, without further evidence of wrongdoing.

"The ever-present threat of discrimination and retaliation suits prevents rational employers from acting on their own best thinking about who is most fit for a job. Congress should address the continuing injustice of laws that encourage irrational discrimination in the name of preventing irrational discrimination.

"The best weapon against irrational discrimination is a free market, in which those who act on their stupid prejudices are shunned and lose out on talented minority, female, or older employees. The solution is not to make hiring such employees a nightmare."

In The Fountainhead, novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand fully dramatizes the moral theory of rational egoism--the theory which holds that it is each person's responsibility to choose his goals and values by use of his independent reasoning mind; and that it is his right to pursue these goals in quest of his own selfish, personal happiness. Put another way, conscientious adherence to one's best rational judgment is the only appropriate means by which to live a fully human life--and success, creative achievement and personal happiness are its proper goals and ends. The theme of the novel is the virtue of independence in thought and action: the crucial importance of deriving your values and standards by the exercise of your own best judgment, as opposed to blindly following the judgment of others; and then pursuing these values consistently and indefatigably, as opposed to betraying or compromising them in practice. Dr. Bernstein explores how the plot and conflict of The Fountainhead convey this theme, including a detailed, in-depth analysis of the five major characters in the story--Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey, Gail Wynand, Dominique Francon, and the hero Howard Roark.

Who: Andrew Bernstein, professor of philosophy and speaker for the Ayn Rand Institute
What: A talk and Q & A examining The Fountainhead and explaining Ayn Rand's morality of rational egoism
Where: University of Maryland, Arts Building, Room 2309, College Park, MD
When: May 1, 2008, at 8 pm

Admission is FREE and open to the public.

Dr. Bernstein is a visiting professor of philosophy at Marist College; he also teaches at SUNY Purchase (which selected him Outstanding Teacher for 2004) and formerly at Pace University and at Marymount College (which selected him Outstanding Teacher for 1995). Dr. Bernstein lectures regularly at American universities and appears frequently on radio talk shows. His op-eds have been published in such newspapers as The San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Washington Times, Los Angeles Daily News and The Houston Chronicle. Dr. Bernstein is the author of three Ayn Rand titles for CliffsNotes: Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and Anthem. He also authored Penguin's Teacher's Guide to "The Fountainhead," and The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire.

In 1969 Ayn Rand's Ford Hall Forum talk, "Apollo and Dionysus," addressed the nearly simultaneous events of Woodstock and the first lunar landing. Employing Greek mythology's god of the sun and god of wine, she compared the awe-inspiring accomplishments of NASA's Apollo space program to the famous three-day concert that has come to exemplify the counterculture of the 1960s and the "hippie era." Almost four decades later, Dr. Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, reflects on her words and explores the implications of how American culture since Woodstock has valued individualism relative to collectivism and civilization relative to primitivism.

Who: Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute

What: A Ford Hall Forum talk that will consider how the opposing forces of reason and emotionalism have manifested themselves in American culture in the four decades since Woodstock, with special focus on the rise of religion and environmentalism. A Q&A will follow.

Where: Old South Meeting House, 310 Washington Street, Boston, MA

When: Thursday, May 8, 2008, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

The public and media are invited. Admission is FREE.

Yaron Brook is president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute and is a contributing editor to The Objective Standard. A former finance professor, he has published in academic as well as popular publications. He is frequently interviewed in the media and appears weekly on the new Fox Business Network to debate and discuss current economic and business news. His columns and opinion-editorials are published on forbes.com and in many major newspapers. Dr. Brook lectures on Objectivism, business ethics and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

 

The California decision that held homeschooling illegal violates parents' right to control their children's upbringing. An op-ed by Thomas A. Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute.

Yaron Brook has an excellent op-ed on Life and Taxes in Forbes:

Your taxes are overdue, if you're just reading this now. But the fact is that every day is April 15 for Jane and John Smith, America’s most tax-savvy couple.

They awaken in their highly mortgaged house (interest deduction), make breakfast for their adopted child (tax credit and exemption), then drive their hybrid cars (more tax credits) to work. John, at his office, signs a contract for solar energy panels (tax credit), but he turns down a promotion that would launch the couple into a higher tax bracket. Meanwhile, across town, Jane signs an application to get historic preservation status (tax credits) for her office building.

Back home that evening, the Smiths write a few tax-deductible checks to charities and then discuss where to put their savings--into a tax-free retirement account, or a start-up business whose income would be taxed at the highest marginal rate? Just before sleep, their thoughts drift to energy-efficient appliance credits and carbon-emission taxes.

Since it's an election year, the presidential candidates are busy figuring ways to add still more carrots to the tax code--so that the Smiths will become still more entangled in a tax policy that fears and distrusts the goals that individuals would select if guided only by rational self-interest.

Tax policy works by attaching financial incentives to a long list of values deemed morally worthy. If you want to maximize your wealth come tax time--and who doesn't?--you must look at the world through tax-colored glasses, "voluntarily" adjusting your behavior to suit social norms and thereby qualifying for tax breaks. In this way, the social engineers of tax policy preserve the impression that you're exercising free choice, while they're actually dispensing with your reason and your judgment.

As an example, consider the choice between buying and renting a home. In a free market, a dollar paid in rent is equivalent to a dollar paid for mortgage interest. But when the federal government offers a mortgage interest deduction--based on some alleged need for an "ownership society"--then each purchase dollar saves a few pennies in tax that a rental dollar does not. So the path to wealth maximization suddenly veers away from renting and toward home ownership.

Over the past century, such social engineering has inflated the nation's tax laws to an estimated 66,000 pages of statutes, regulations and rulings. [...]

Read the rest here.

Irvine, CA--Today Ben Stein's anti-evolution documentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opens in theaters. The film claims that advocates of "intelligent design"--the view that life is so complex it must be the product of a "higher intelligence"--are the persecuted victims of a "scientific establishment" dogmatically committed to evolution.

"The premise of Expelled is that proponents of 'intelligent design' have been shunned, denied tenure, and even fired because of a conspiracy to quash the scientific evidence supporting their theory," said Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. "But the truth is: there is no evidence supporting their theory. Intelligent design is completely devoid of any positive scientific content, and consists of nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on evolution. To the extent intelligent design advocates are facing obstacles in academia it is because they are not doing real science: they haven't been 'expelled' they have flunked out of the scientific community, just as a faith healer would flunk out of medical school.

"Observe that intelligent design advocates have pumped millions into publicity-seeking, rather than appealing to scientists with facts and logical arguments. They have spent more time at Christian 'apologetics seminars' than scientific conferences, and have attempted to use the courts to force schools to teach their ideas. Now they are hoping to dupe the movie-going public with a film that misrepresents Darwin's theory and the array of facts that support it--just as the makers of Expelled misrepresented the nature of the film in order to bamboozle respected evolutionary scientists into participating in it.

"Intelligent design advocates will do anything to advance their views--except science.

"The reason for that is simple: doing science has never been their goal. Their goal is to make biblical creationism appear scientific in order to skirt the constitutional ban on religion in public schools. Contrary to the film's claims, the real dogmatists are not the defenders of Darwin, but the religiously motivated advocates of intelligent design."