Atlas Shrugged movie

Here's a clip showing the passage in which Dagny Taggart meets with a union rep about the John Galt Line:



This movie DEFINITELY needs to come to OKC! Do you hear me, theater owners?

Meth and philosophy

Here's a comment I posted online this morning at an editorial on NewsOK.com:

The anti-pseudoephedrine argument sounds SO familiar: "If only we could limit access to guns, there would be less crime." Wrong.

What motivates people to take drugs like meth in the first place? If they know how it undermines their mental capacities, could it be possible they've been taught that the mind is something NOT to be valued?

Could ultimate responsibility lie in a culture that teaches people to depend on others to make their decisions? To rely on faith rather than reason? That human beings are monsters (Originial Sin) but they'll be allowed to get away with whatever they want (grace)? Have you seen the Diesel ads that proclaim that being stupid is cool?

Or perhaps we should blame the philosophers that lay the foundations of a culture? Such as Immanuel Kant who sought to destroy reason by turning it against itself because he saw the Enlightenment as a threat to the political power of religion?

As long as we continue to evade such issues, our culture remains at risk.

Government: What Is Its Proper Role?

This is the question that underlies every discussion of what government does and how much it should spend.

It is the topic of a debate that will be held at New York University tomorrow evening from 5-7 Oklahoma time. The debaters are Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Center Institute and Miles Rapoport, president of Demos.

The event will be livestreamed through the Facebook page of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

Some preliminary discussion of this issue has already taken place online between Brook and Rapoport. You can read those comments here.