Yes, it is burning question, and someone had to be bold enough to ask it. So I did. I wasn’t complaining, just asking. To my total amazement, Kellogs answered:
You just have to love it: The contract talks between the Ohio Education Association and its professional staffers appear to have stalled. Could a strike be imminent?
“What,” you say, “one union suing another. How could that be possible?”
Picture this situation: A union which constantly complains about wages and working conditions being struck by another union over similar issues? What happened to the worker’s paradise and the evils of management?
The primary social evil of our time is lack of respect for self-ownership rights. It is what underlies both private crime and institutionalized crime perpetrated by the state. State laws, regulations, and actions are objectionable just because the state is claiming the right to control how someone’s body is to be used.
When the state drafts a man or threatens him with imprisonment if he violates its narcotics laws, for example, it is assuming partial control of his body, contrary to his self-ownership rights.
In the comments to this post on time preference, I pointed to a confusion in Ayn Rand’s use of the example of “an immortal, indestructible robot” to show that only “life” makes the concept of “value” possible. Her basic idea was that an immortal, indestructible robot “would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; It could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests.
I’ve been Hoppe-ing my brains out lately. Take this cool, pithy statement about the nature of economic analysis:
I’m tired of two kinds of gloomy Guses: First, the Chicken Littles who claim the economic sky is falling on our heads. Secondly, the doomsayers who will not recognize the material abundance that’s produced by the cornucopia of America. A silly sub-cell of this ideological club repeats incessantly that the gap between rich and poor - the affluent and the empty-stomached flatulent is widening day by day. I considered this accusation last night as I watched an ad for a can opener. It’s a dandy. Attaches to the can magnetically, I suppose.
