The Rand Interview

Maybe I’m the only person in the world who hasn’t seen this, but who can’t be completely riveted by this interview with Ayn Rand? What a remarkable woman -- so much truth and yet much truth gone mad, one might say -- and what a phenomenon. Thanks to youtube you can get a sense of what the whole thing was about.

Remote video URL

The booming ASC

Many people have wondered about the Austrian Scholars Conference, the trend line and general health, which might be considered a good barometer of the health and well being of the Austrian School generally.

Well, after years of enjoying a fairly stable attendance, this year, it is going to set all records. We are looking at having more than 150 people here, which, if you have been to the Mises Institute, means that we are going to be stretched to capacity. This is ideal and very exciting for us.

Maybe the explanation is the program itself, which looks really great.

Daycare providers allow unqualified parents to care for children!

Jeff Tucker’s post on the supposed failures of the daycare market got me thinking about some of the messages implicit in the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies report that criticises government oversight of daycare programs and calls for more regulation. Let’s think about this for a minute. What is daycare, anyway? It’s essentially the outsourcing, for some period of time, of the job of taking care of your children. When not done by daycare providers, this job is done by parents.

Acting Man

1. Purposeful Action and Animal Reaction

Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary.