By a Few Great Minds

In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Francisco d’Anconia tells Dagny Taggart, “You can’t have your cake and let your neighbor eat it, too.”

With this turn-of-phrase, one discovers a long running economic fallacy: the villains, as in relation to Rand’s work, want to “have” a bigger piece of the cake, whereas the heroes perceive society as a bakery to continually “make” endless amounts of said cake.

Milton Friedman, Nobel prize-winning economist, once stated, “Most economic fallacies derive--from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”

The heroes take the world as wherein party one has a price at which he will sell and party two has a price at which he will buy and the price is set and the transaction made if and only if through this each benefits, yet neither will proceed if harm is to befall either.

The “looters,” however, live by a code that reflects the misconception;--they can only mentally grasp this world as the proverbial fixed pie, wherein “wealth [is] a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor.”

Francisco expands on such logic, “That phrase about the evil of money… comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries.”

These were “centuries of stagnation and starvation”, in which looters through force, inheritance, and government bureaucracy, not producers, not traders, not entrepreneurs, stood as the exalted among men.

“Stagnation”--the very word helps the reasoning mind to pause and then take the leap into the internal workings of the looter’s. If money is a “static quantity,” then, the cake and the dividing of it, would be a somewhat reasonable motive for the actions and reactions to the consequences of the prior actions by the looter.

Yet, time and again, the looters and the moochers witness, such incidents, as Rand’s fictitious Twenty Century Motor Company, where money lays abandoned, because they “look upon money as the savages did before [them], and [they] wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of [their] cities.”

As a torpid crowd comprised of looters and moochers at a wedding listens to Francisco explain that “Money is made possible only by the men who produce,” and that “Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think,” one learns the value of ideas and the production by which these ideas are manifested in society.

When Francisco asks rhetorically, “Have you ever looked for the root of production,” he elaborates by drawing to the forefront of his audience’s minds that the electric generator was not “created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes” and he even challenges them to attempt to grow “wheat without the knowledge left [them] by men who had to discover it for the first time.”

Francisco succinctly phrases, “Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed…”

However, in this present time of political correctness, none seems to be comfortable with stating the unquestionable: civilization presses forwards only by the very few great minds, not by the numerous strong backs.

These great minds with solely their “virtue of selfishness,” not their altruism, expand for us all the knowledge of the once tribal to the now celestial. On the mental coattails of these, ever we all ride into prosperity and betterment.


I hope this is a clearer understanding of a post or two I added a while back. This column was to run today, yet I cannot find it on the paper's website. I do not know to what reason it might not have been published. Unless for stylistic differences.

Belief in Miracles is Irrational

No rational person can believe in miracles, to put it simply.

A miracle is by definition a given act or revelation of a supernatural being that defies and denies the natural order and the cosmological laws.

Miracles, ergo, mock nature and disregard reality. The belief in them, quintessentially, tears at the fabric of intelligence.

Thomas Paine greatly understood and boldly states in his 1793 work, “Age of Reason: Part I,” that something revealed to one individual is a “revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.”

In the paragraph following, Paine adds, “[A]nd though he [the individual to which the revelation was revealed] may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.”

One must notice that lying is a part of the human condition; all human beings at one point or another become economic with the truth and commit, thusly, their fair share of perjury.

With this fact, how can one rationally side on the abrogation of nature’s laws in the light thereof of human nature itself?

One simply cannot.

Paine illustrates, “When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so.”

Another example, Paine uses, “When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.”

To consider Christianity, a religion with its unmitigated doctrine entirely based on the notion that the miracles of Jesus Christ denoted in the Gospels are nonetheless true; thusly, proving that Christ was the son of God and worthy of worship. A textual problem arises, since everyone recognizes the Gospels were penned no less than a generation after Christ’s supposed crucifixion.

Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author, explains that “The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus it still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred.”

One might ask, Why not?

Harris continues, “Well, the problem is that first-hand reports of miracles are quite common even in the 21st-century.” He tells further about hundreds of Western educated men and women who think “their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus.”

The foundational Christian claim that miracles of the sort, as by the present Hindu swami Satya Sai Baba, Harris explains, “become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire decades after their supposed occurrence.”

With at least a million eyewitnesses to certain miracles of Sai Baba, this man still does not, as Harris states, “even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel.”

Man’s two countering dispositions, as a creature, are to question and to accept. These two temperaments led man to battle himself socially and personally. However, only through questioning, not by accepting, did he come to a better understanding of his place in nature.

He began to simply understand. He began to place miracles in the same drawer as commonplace parlor tricks.


The paragraph before “To consider Christianity...” did not appear in the column published in The Parthenon, due to my attempt to be under 600 words this week. I like the paragraph because it hits on another religion. I dig this column.

Cradle of an Abstraction

If in a time of national threat from a domestic or foreign enemy--as in war, either symmetrical or asymmetrical--should we, as Americans, sacrifice liberty for safety?

For as long as this current war has been surging, I defended the argument, one well backed by history, that in wartimes all Americans relinquish certain liberties for protection. Furthermore, with an end to any of these particular crises, we would then reclaim our surrendered liberties, as well as additional ones.

The argument that by reining in our freedoms, restricting our way of life, fettering our principles, we then have lost the war from the outset, I heard numerous times.

As well, the Revolutionary sentiment, often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

These lines of reasoning ate away at the core of what is honor, what is principle, to the basic questions of man, what is right and wrong. And to the greatest couplet of questions: why and why not.

I viewed the surrender of certain liberties as a way to combat the threat in its many arrays by more flexible means, and the resoluteness of a single, immovable stance existed only in a black-and-white world.

The idea liberty becomes a casualty of war was rebutted with the simple proclamation that a life saved is a battle championed, yet I found these all inconstant with my value of principle.

The principles that liberty divides us from our foes and unites us with our allies, liberty mirrors the civilized and well-informed citizenry and lures the curious to our shores, liberty to all grants all the ability to accept and to be accepted and thusly to be equals.

Yes, liberty battles with one arm tied, yet liberty always maintains the upper hand in the moral, ideological battles, which run alongside the physical.

Better for a thousand to die for the preservation of liberty than one to be saved by liberty's crucifixion. What value does one have, if the whole is lost?

The American Experiment displays the fragility and the power of the abstraction of liberty and the majesty of the execution of such by millions who believe so ardently in the principles of liberty that death for it is something for which countless volunteer.

Not saying countless offer to wear a blindfold and smoke a last cigarette, but that countless will risk their lives for the principle that liberty must remain or the American Experiment fails, thusly, all that is fair and just or the ever attempt forwards such then fails.

What I am saying translates basically as liberty cannot be a casualty of any conflict, no matter how severe, for the principle of the abstraction then unwinds and the abstraction disappears as a dream in the closing hours of a simple, commonplace twilight and there, forgotten by the time the dreamer opens his eyes.

Paramount with all that said, politics is not a science rather a game of strategy;--hence, of compromise. Liberty and safety exist not divorced of each other, as above here summarized and as many may as well portray. We, as individuals, need the balance of this temperamental ratio of liberty and safety.

What one should come to understand, accept, and expect is for an individual--when the lines are not clearly demarcated, when the costs and benefits are not so certain, when ethics are dissociated with their functional construct--to then err on the side of liberty, the great attraction.

For from the cradle of safety comes only withering of tender liberty, while from the cradle of liberty, safety flourishes in all its yields.


This column was taken from an earlier blogpost. The title was changed by the paper for their reasons, which it is fine. It was changed to "Seeking only safety hurts liberty". Some sentences were changed as well. The last three paragraphs critique the afore read paragraphs, yet the deletion of the transition makes the argument seem inconsistent. But life goes on.