Monthly Archives: March 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a negative impact on all aspects of human life, and the U.S. economy is no exception. The virus outbreak and governmental reactions to it have sent the stock market crashing and dealt a major economic blow.

In a special installment of our webinar series Philosophy for Living on Earth, the Ayn Rand Institutes chief philosophy officer, Onkar Ghate, sat down with finance and economics specialists Yaron Brook and Rob Tarr to talk about the effects of the virus and government intervention on the markets and the economy. The discussion covered many aspects of the ongoing financial crisis and approached the topic from a perspective informed by the philosophy of Objectivism.

Some of the questions covered in the discussion include:

Stay tuned for future installments of our webinar series, where we willcontinue to analyze the effects of the pandemic from the principled perspectiveof Ayn Rands philosophy. And please consider donating to ARI if you value ourunique and rational evaluation of this crisis.

Watch the full discussion between Ghate, Brook and Tarr, below.

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Experts Assess Pandemic's Damage to the Economy - New Ideal

Author Yaron Brook is Tom Needham's special guest this Thursday at 6 pm on WUSB's SOUNDS OF FILM. He will be discussing what one can learn from Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED and FOUNTAINHEAD during the virus Crisis.

Yaron Brook is the host of the Yaron Brook Show, renowned best-selling author, and world class speaker. Brook's podcast can be heard on the Yaron Brook Show at BlogTalk Radio, Spreaker, Spotify and YouTube.

Brook was the Executive Director of The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) for 17 years (2000-2017). He remains Chairman of the Board of ARI and its primary spokesperson.

Brook, an internationally sought speaker, travels extensively promoting Ayn Rand and her philosophy, objectivism.

THE SOUNDS OF FILM is the nation's longest running film and music themed radio show. For the past 30 years, the program has delivered a popular mix of interviews and music to listeners all over Long Island, parts of Connecticut and streaming live worldwide on the internet. Past people interviewed for the show include Rob Reiner, Alec Baldwin, Dionne Warwick, Chuck D, Alexander Payne, Michael Moore, William H. Macy, Billy Joel and Howard Shore.

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Yaron Brook Talks Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED, FOUNTAINHEAD & Covid-19 On Tom Needham's SOUNDS OF FILM - Broadway World

We make fun of U.S. Sen. Rand Paul a lot. OK, more than a lot. Going waayy back.

But who deserves it more? Befitting his status as Kentuckys junior senator, only our senior senator Mitch McConnell suffers more scorn and bad-natured roasting from us at LEO.

Now, in The Time of Corona, Paul, a doctor and obstructionist of virus relief bills, gets a special poke with a hot stick for reportedly getting tested and going to the gym and consorting with colleagues before he got back the result.

And guess what?

He tested positive.

Paul released a statement this week defending his decision to not self-quarantine, saying he shouldnt have been tested at all. Whaat? Read this convoluted reasoning and let us know what kind of byzantine map of logic we would need to understand it.

Paul should have known better than to risk the health of other people. But we must understand that Rand Paul, who might as well have been named after the purposely selfish, libertarian, wack-job Ayn Rand, would be thinking about himself only.

Here is what he had to say:

Given that my wife and I had traveled extensively during the weeks prior to COVID-19 social distancing practices, and that I am at a higher risk for serious complications from the virus due to having part of my lung removed seven months ago, I took a COVID-19 test when I arrived in D.C. last Monday. I felt that it was highly unlikely that I was positive since I have had no symptoms of the illness, nor have I had contact with anyone who has either tested positive for the virus or been sick.

Since nearly every member of the U.S. Senate travels by plane across the country multiple times per week and attends lots of large gatherings, I believed my risk factor for exposure to the virus to be similar to that of my colleagues, especially since multiple congressional staffers on the Hill had already tested positive weeks ago.

As for my attendance at the Speed Art Museum fundraiser on March 7, unlike the other Kentucky government officials there, I had zero contact or proximity with either of the two individuals who later announced they were positive for COVID-19. The event was a large affair of hundreds of people spread throughout the museum.

There was an announcement by the Museum and Metro Louisville Communicable Disease department that those who public health officials consider at higher risk from possible exposure are being notified. Louisvilles health director put out a statement in The Courier Journal that most of the people at the Speed Ball were at very minimal risk. I was not considered to be at risk since I never interacted with the two individuals even from a distance and was not recommended for testing by health officials.

I believe we need more testing immediately, even among those without symptoms. The nature of COVID-19 put me and us all in a Catch-22 situation. I didnt fit the criteria for testing or quarantine. I had no symptoms and no specific encounter with a COVID-19 positive person. I had, however, traveled extensively in the U.S. and was required to continue doing so to vote in the Senate. That, together with the fact that I have a compromised lung, led me to seek testing. Despite my positive test result, I remain asymptomatic for COVID-19.

For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a tee, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol. The current guidelines would not have called for me to get tested nor quarantined. It was my extra precaution, out of concern for my damaged lung, that led me to get tested.

Perhaps it is too much to ask that we simply have compassion for our fellow Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so. Thousands of people want testing. Many, like Daniel Newman of The Walking Dead, are sick with flu symptoms and are being denied testing. This makes no sense.

The broader the testing and the less finger-pointing we have, the better. America is strong. We are a resilient people, but were stronger when we stand together.

Here is what one person tweeted in response to his statement:

You did not need to go to the gym. Americans all over this country cannot go to theirs, or do much of anything else. You felt you could do as you pleased and risked others. I hope you recover well, but you are not excused from being entirely selfish and overly privileged.

And, our favorite: Atlas Coughed.

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Sen. Rand Paul's reply to why he risked exposing people, or Selfish is as selfish does - Louisville Eccentric Observer

When I asked whether the virus had interfered with his lifestyle, Bret laughed. Oh, Im going to the shooting range tomorrow, he replied.

Was he worried that his friends might disapprove if they found out?

No, he told me, around here, I get much more of people saying, Why dont you go Saturday so I can go, too?

Terry Trahan, a manager at a cutlery store in Lubbock, Texas, acknowledged that a certain toxic tribalism was informing peoples attitudes toward the pandemic. If someones a Democrat, theyre gonna say its worse, he told me, and if someones a Republican, theyre gonna say its bad, but its getting better.

As an immunocompromised cancer survivor, Trahan said hes familiar with commonsense social-distancing practices. But as a conservative, hes become convinced that many Democrats are so invested in the idea that the virus will be disastrous that theyre pushing for prolonged, unnecessary shutdowns in pursuit of vindication.

Among experts, there is a firm consensus that social distancing is essential to containing the spread of the virusand they warn that politicizing the practice could have dangerous ramifications. This is a pandemic, and shouldnt be played out as a skirmish on a neighborhood playground, Dina Borzekowski, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, recently told Stat. (For the moment, at least, the scientists seem to have brought the president around: Yesterday, Trump announced he was extending social-distancing guidance until the end of April.)

Read: The four possible timelines for life returning to normal

Of course, not everyone who flouts social distancing is making a political statement. Many have to work because they cant afford not to; others are acting out of ignorance or wishful thinking. Beyond personal behavior, there is a legitimate debate to be had about how to balance economic demands while combatting a global pandemic.

Still, the polarization around public health seems to be accelerating: In recent days, Republican governors in Alabama and Mississippi have resisted calls to enact more forceful mitigation policies. Polling data suggest that Republicans throughout the U.S. are much less concerned about the coronavirus than Democrats are. According to a recent analysis by The New York Times, Trump won 23 of the 25 states where people have reduced personal travel the least.

Some of this is likely shaped by the fact that the most serious outbreaks so far in the U.S. have been concentrated in urban centers on the coasts (a pattern that may not hold for long). But there are real ideological forces at work as well.

Katherine Vincent-Crowson, a 35-year-old self-defense instructor from Slidell, Louisiana, has watched in horror this month as businesses around her city were forced to close by state decree. A devotee of Ayn Rand, Vincent-Crowson told me Louisianas shelter-in-place order was a frightening example of government overreach.

It feels very militaristic, she said. Im just like, What the hell, is this 1940s Germany?

But when we spoke, she seemed even more aggravated by the self-righteous people on social media who spend their time publicly shaming anyone who isnt staying locked in their house. It really reminds me of my kids who tattle on their siblings when they do something bad, she said. Im a libertarian I dont really like being told what to do.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun - The Atlantic

By John Authers

The coronavirus pandemic is a test. Its a test of medical capacity and political will. Its a test of endurance and forbearance, for believers a test of religious faith. Its a test, too, of a different kind of faith, in the strength of the ideas humans choose to help them form moral judgments and guide personal and social behavior.

The epidemic forces everyone to confront deep questions of human existence, questions so profound that they have previously been answered, in many different ways, by the greatest philosophers. Its a test of where all humans stand.

What is right and what is wrong? What can individuals expect from society, and what can society expect of them? Should others make sacrifices for me, and vice versa? Is it just to set economic limits to fighting a deadly disease?

The lieutenant governor of Texas thinks that those over 70 shouldnt sacrifice the country by shutting down economic activity, but should instead be ready to sacrifice themselves. A 22-year-old partying on Spring break in Florida becomes a social media sensation with a different critique of social distancing, saying, If I get corona, I get corona. Consciously or not, both men are placing themselves in distinct moral traditions.

Several philosophies of social justice have claimed wide adherence in the modern world. They do not line up neatly with party political labels, and most people have sympathy for more than one. Here is a guide to some of the leading idea systems undergirding competing conceptions of right and wrong. Each is being put to the test. As you are put to the test, which do you choose?

RawlsiansMany westerners are Rawlsians without knowing it. Fifty years ago, the Harvard philosopher John Rawls tried to work out how people would construct their society if the choice had to be made behind what he called a veil of ignorance about whether they will be rich, poor or somewhere in-between. Faced with the risk of being the worst off, Rawls posited, humans would not demand total equality, but would need to be assured of the trappings of a modern welfare state. The assurance of basic necessities and the opportunity to do better would form the foundation for social and political justice and provide the ability for people to assert themselves.

Rawlss monumental 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, is now regarded as the clearest moral and intellectual justification for modern center-left mixed economies. But the idea comes from somewhere deeper. Rawls was not religious, but his philosophy is essentially in line with the golden rule handed down by the Old Testament prophets and by Jesus, that we should do as we would want to be done by. Some religious leaders have approached the awful dilemmas presented by the coronavirus just as Rawls would, by taking treatment of the worst off as the criterion for social action.

I hope the lessons we take from our countrys experience with Covid-19 arent about food or avoiding the spread of germs, wrote Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention in the New York Times, but about how we treat the most vulnerable among us. A pandemic is no time to turn our eyes away from the sanctity of human life.

Pope Francis also invoked sympathy for the most afflicted as he addressed a prayer to an empty St. Peters Square. "We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other," he said.

Perhaps because of their religious resonance, Rawlsian ideas have guided the approach to the pandemic chosen by authorities in the western world. Societies are mobilizing, and governments are taking extra powers to mandate claustrophobic lockdowns in a bid to minimize the death and suffering of the weakest.

Even those who arent religious tend to accept the logic of the veil of ignorance. If a person is unwilling to be abandoned, governments are not entitled to give up on them; they must do their best to protect everyone, particularly the weakest.

UtilitariansOther philosophies produce very different ways of dealing with the epidemic. Under utilitarianism, most associated with the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, rulers must be guided to the total happiness, or utility, of all the people, and should aim to secure the greatest good for the greatest number.

In Victorian Britain, this was a radical creed, and the first utilitarians were passionate liberal reformers. But the utilitarian calculus opens up a new possibility that in situations such as a pandemic, some people might justly be sacrificed for the greater good. It would benefit society to accept casualties, the argument goes, to minimize disruption.

Explicit utilitarian thinking still seems beyond the pale. Last weekend, Britains Sunday Times reported that Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had advocated in private meetings a policy of letting enough people get sick to establish nationwide herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad. It caused an outcry and met with an immediate and impassioned denial by Downing Street. Even Cummings, an iconoclast, refused to be attached to such brutally utilitarian ideas.

Mill himself would not have advocated putting money ahead of peoples lives, but a utilitarian calculus is not about balancing money and life. If a recession could lead to shorter lives and widespread misery, it is possible that making less of an attempt to save every last life from the pandemic now could lead to greater total happiness.

In the U.K., a paper by an academic at the University of Bristol used mathematical techniques developed to measure the cost-efficiency of safety measures in the nuclear power industry to calculate the likely savings of human life by different approaches to the virus, and found that a 12-month lockdown followed by vaccinations would be best. But it cautioned that this would only create a net saving of life if the reduction in gross domestic product could be kept to 6.4% or less.

That paper, broadcast on the BBC, provoked a fiery response from economists, and some research suggests counterintuitively that recessions lengthen lives. Most people find the mere attempt at such an exercise callous, but its difficult to dismiss it. Governments and insurers do indeed put a notional price on a human life when setting policy. Must every last patient be given the utmost care if this plan of action causes greater suffering in the long run? Or, as President Donald Trump put it: We cant have the cure be worse than the problem.

Its intuitive to view moral problems through a utilitarian lens and then to find outcomes like this distasteful, and to reject them because they conflict with the golden rule. If the lockdowns drag on for months, utilitarian ideas may bubble back to the surface.

LibertariansThe libertarian place in American thought is long and distinguished. Its lineage goes back at least to the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke and the founding fathers, and in its modern incarnation gains inspiration from the author Ayn Rand, who outlined her ideas in novels and essays. For her, man had a right to live for himself and an individuals happiness cannot be prescribed by another man or any number of other men.

The most famous libertarian thought experiment was conducted by another Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, in a riposte to Rawls. He imagined what kind of political state would be built, and how much personal liberty citizens would surrender, if everyone were dropped into a utopian landscape with no social structures. The novelist William Golding gave one answer in The Lord of the Flies. To avoid the descent into violence that the schoolboys of Goldings novel endure, Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, reckoned that people would set up a very limited state dedicated to self-defense and the protection of individual rights but nothing more.

The western coronavirus response has hugely expanded state powers and limited individual rights with little debate, and to date populations have consented to privations that Rand and Nozick argued they should never accept.

But wait. There have been objections to lockdowns on the libertarian basis that they infringe on rights. Critiques are appearing saying that politicians havent proven that such drastic measures are necessary. Before the coronavirus, the U.S. suffered a measles epidemic as the result of anti-vaccination activism, a libertarian cause that put parents right to choose not to vaccinate their children above the states attempt to defend other parents right to expect that their own children wouldnt have to mix with unvaccinated peers. Panic buying, and hoarding of medical equipment also show that many people are following Rands idea of self-determination and putting themselves first. Such ideas may grow more appealing after a few more weeks of self-isolation.

In public spaces around the world, libertarians are in conflict with the state. Social media is full of images of big social gatherings, often in luxurious social settings. If I get corona, I get corona, as the 22-year-old said on video in Florida. At the end of the day, Im not gonna let it stop me from partying. Oklahomas governor even felt the need to tweet that he was at a packed restaurant.

Libertarians are not only found on the political right. As the crisis began to unfold, the American Civil Liberties Union made a statement accepting that civil liberties must sometimes give way when it comes to fighting a communicable disease but only in ways that are scientifically justified. It said, The evidence is clear that travel bans and quarantines are not the solution.

The right to walk in a park looks like a flash point. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was furious to see crowds expressing libertarian sympathies whether they saw it that way or not by gathering in parks. Its arrogant, Cuomo said. Its self-destructive. Its disrespectful to other people. And it has to stop and it has to stop now!

New Yorkers are organizing to keep the parks open.

In these conditions, individual choices become freighted with moral significance. How, for example, will society eventually judge behavior like that of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul? Arguably the most prominent libertarian in the U.S., he continued to socialize as normal for a week after being told that he had had contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. He had no symptoms. Recall that there are many elderly members of the Senate. Last weekend, after a workout in the Senate gym, he discovered that he had himself tested positive.

CommunitariansYet another approach is based on the notion that everyone derives their identify from the broader community. Individual rights count, but not more than community norms. These notions go back to the Greeks, but in modern times, the philosophy is most widely connected to the sociologist Amitai Etzioni and philosopher Michael Sandel. Sandels Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is another riposte to Rawls, arguing that justice cannot be determined in a vacuum or behind a veil of ignorance, but must be rooted in society. He sets out a theory of justice based on the common good.

Speaking last week to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Sandel said: The common good is about how we live together in community. Its about the ethical ideals we strive for together, the benefits and burdens we share, the sacrifices we make for one another. Its about the lessons we learn from one another about how to live a good and decent life.

The virus has attacked in exactly this place, depriving everyone of life in a community. And communitarian ideas are showing themselves. Across Europe, people on lockdown have arranged to go to their windows and balconies to applaud their national health services. These are seen as bedrocks of society. At Londons Olympic opening ceremony in 2012, a pageant of Britishness, the organizers celebrated the National Health Service with dancing nurses wheeling hospital beds. For many countries with a modern welfare state, celebrating and supporting the workers of their public-health service is seen as a communitarian duty.

This is a critical point of difference with the U.S., where the expansion of medical care is a hugely contentious issue. Communitarians like Princetons Michael Walzer argue that any system of medical provision requires the constraint of the guild of physicians. The coronavirus promises to bring this debate to a head.

Communitarianism also underlies much social conservative thought. When the very conservative Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said on Fox News that the rest of the country should not sacrifice itself for the elderly, he was making a communitarian argument, not a utilitarian one.

No one reached out to me and said, As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? Patrick, who is 63, told the host Tucker Carlson. And if thats the exchange, Im all in.

In this telling, it is the patriotic duty of the elderly not to force privations on their country, and make life worse for their grandchildren. Such a communitarian ethic has always resonated within the U.S. (just read Alexis de Tocqueville), and it provoked an outcry on social media.

China practiced another kind of communitarianism after the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan in January. The people of that city were told to lock themselves in, and often forcibly quarantined, for the good of the community and the state, largely identified with the Communist Party. Under Xi Jinping, the Party has rehabilitated the Confucian thought that long justified obedience to a hierarchical and authoritarian but benevolent state. That the notion of social solidarity remains strong showed in the spectacular discipline with which China and other Asian nations dealt with the problem.

We Are All Rawlsians NowFor now, the approach being adopted across the West is Rawlsian. Politicians are working on the assumption that they have a duty to protect everyone as they themselves would wish to be protected, while people are also applying the golden rule as they decide that they should self-isolate for the sake of others. We are all Rawlsians now.

How long will we stay that way? All the other theories of justice have an appeal, and may test the resolve to follow the golden rule. But I suspect that Rawls and the golden rule will win out. That is partly because religion even if it is in decline in the West has hard-wired it into our consciousness. And as the epidemic grows worse and brings the disease within fewer degrees of separation for everyone, we may well find that the notion of loving thy neighbor as thyself becomes far more potent.

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How Coronavirus is shaking up the moral universe - Economic Times

MARCH 30, 2020 Updated March 30, 2020

Dr Neal Curtis is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Auckland.

Ideasroom

Dr Neal Curtis looks at all the points of implicit trust within society, and how Covid-19 is revealing how important this trust is

As I stood in the queue to get into our local supermarket it was encouraging to see how carefully people were engaging in social distancing to minimise the spread of coronavirus. Admittedly, it was a beautiful sunny morning and we are still only a few days into the lockdown, but everyone seemed to be stoically accepting the inconvenience, with many in decidedly good spirits.

Speaking to the woman stood two metres behind me, it dawned on me just how much more aware of her I was than if this were a normal visit under usual conditions. My awareness of her did not stem from any sense of threat or danger, but from the recognition that as I was thinking about her,she was thinking about me. Curiously, our practice of distancing had actually brought us closer, not physically, of course, but in terms of being mindful.

Ordinarily I would get through the shopping as quickly as possible. I would no doubt need to exercise some form of etiquette to let another shopper pass in a crowded aisle, but awareness of being connected to that person would be minimal, if non-existent. That seems quite different now.

In a 1987 interview for Womans Own, Margaret Thatcher famously declared "theres no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and their families". In saying this, she was drawing together words from two of her favourite thinkers, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Her claim was, of course, just another way for her to justifyrolling back the state, depleting public services and embarking on widespread asset sales and privatisation, but she was also making a more significant moral claim about an absence of both dependency on and responsibility for others.

I am struck that if there were only self-reproducing and self-sufficient individuals and their families, the current situation would be much less of a problem. Wouldnt we all just be carrying on, untouched by what is going on around us? The crisis, aside from the very grave dangers of the virus and the risk to life, is in fact heightened precisely because we are all interconnected and dependent on each other. This is not just to do with the corporate sector continuing to function, but a whole set of social institutions relating to health, education, transport, and communication (official and interpersonal) that support the complex functioning of our daily lives.

We have also become increasingly aware of jobs that are done in the background, the importance of which we regularly fail to register. It is different now. Consequently, Ive been thinking about a little book by Geoffrey Hosking called Trust: Money, Markets and Society. This is a book whose brevity and diminutive size belies the importance of its argument. What I believe the current crisis has brought into relief or revealed like lemon juice on invisible ink is what Hosking calls "unreflective trust". By this he means the amount that we do in fact dependon others without consciously acknowledging it.

Talking about travelling by air, he writes: "Which of us before boarding an aircraft, demands to see the pilots qualification to fly it, or checks every rivet, joint and fuel duct in it? Or even the competence of the engineers responsible for maintaining and repairing those parts. Obviously we do not. Yet our lives depend on the impeccable working order of every one of those parts, and on the skill and conscientiousness of the engineers. The fact is we take them on trust because everyone else does so and because aeroplanes very seldom crash. Besides, to do otherwise would require us to have time and skills we dont possess. We dont 'decide'to board an aircraftwe just do it."

In this process, we rely on and trust the workings of society in all its complex, manifold, and interlacing facets. We trust symbolic systems such as the sciences of aeronautics, mechanics, and metallurgy; we trust institutions of regulation and oversight, of teaching and training; we trust corporate health and safety standards; and we trust the media to accurately report risk. Now imagine for a moment just driving through a busy city in the morning and all the points at which your unreflective trust is implicit but absolutely necessary.

"Trust", Hosking argues, "especially unreflective trust is part of the deep grammar of any society. It generates the templates within which people relate to each other, and within which they think and feel about how to face the future". These are societys "invisible bonds", and while there remains a constituency that wants to belittle and decry the actions of the government, I really hope that something good can come from so many of us beginning to see these bonds.

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Society's 'invisible bonds' come into the light - Newsroom