MichaelJ

A HD version of the video clip Carlos posted. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ac0bXkxM3E

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Thanks for the link, it is great to see Objectivist success stories!

Why are you pasting all these quotes about WW1, Vietnam, Korea when I was asking you about one specific war, WW2? So essentially, your answer is that it is in Americas interests for its enemies to get more material and manpower so they become stronger. That is insane. Enemies who wish your destruction are meant to be weakened or destroyed. In my ethical code, actions that strengthen my enemies are not ethical and are evil. That is not altruistic or aggressive, it is called wanting to survive. How can any sane person want a stronger enemy? How can they let their allies be destroyed so when it is their own time to face the enemy, the enemy is at its strongest and they are at their weakest for they have no allies left to fight the enemy with? I am not giving Nazi germany too much credit, it was the USSR which developed nukes and the capacity to destroy all of America under their socialist system. There is no reason why Nazis couldn't do the same if they survived a few more years. They had the research programs to develop the technology to do so.

So you believe that stamping out an aggressor nation that gases millions, conquers other nations and thus obtaining their wealth, technology and millions more people in manpower is not in American interests? Do you believe that a world with Nazi germany controlling every bit of Europe and Africa, Japan controlling Asia and the Pacific, and the USSR controlling Russia, is more in American interests than what the world today is? All I can say is that you really need to take off your "America is evil" blinders that you got over your eyes and check your premises because in my view, being surrounded by barbarians and all alone in the world, is not a scenario that America would last that long in.

Thanks for the term convergence, it was a private view that I had, but now I got a name for it. I don't see convergence as automatic, it takes a government shifting towards economic freedom for it to happen. In most 3rd world nations, a big problem stopping convergence is a lack of capital because most citizens can't access the capital in the land their house is on due to a lack of a system of property rights. They got nothing to guarantee the loans with. One thing I am interested on seeing when the Chinese bubble bursts, will the lack of freedom of speech make the economic problems worse in China? It doesn't matter how much economic freedom that the Chinese government gives people in their special economic zones, if the Chinese government favour a certain company and punishes any citizen for advocating shorting a government favoured company because the citizen identified problems in it. I see the lack of a freedom of speech, as causing problems for quick, efficient capital reallocation when the bubble bursts there. (And it wouldn't surprise me if their government not only banned talk of it when it bursts, but tried to impose price controls to hide it for a while).

I am in complete agreement on shorting the AUD(and already have been doing so actually), I consider it massively overvalued. When you can stick money in our banks and earn 6%+ interest, and borrow from other nations banks for 1 to 2% interest, well there is stacks of people borrowing from overseas and buying up the Australian dollar to stick it in our banks for easy money. It won't even take Chinas bubble bursting to hurt the AUD, it will take merely the US or Europes central banks to start raising their interest rates and then the Australian dollar will probably drop 20%.

My litmus test for any nation is freedom of speech. A government that is proud of its actions, and proud of its relationship with its citizens would not outlaw freedom of speech. Instead they would welcome it, for the citizens would mainly talk about how good their life is, and if there are any problems, the government would have the self confidence in itself to be able to rectify them. A government that outlaws freedom of speech however, is deathly afraid. It is afraid of its citizens comparing notes on how badly they have been treated, it is afraid of the citizens comparing their lives to other nations, and it is afraid it can't solve any problems that citizens identify. That is how I see China, a country afraid of its citizens, it brutalises them in the hope they will never unite and rise up against their government. Having lived in a small country all my life, I don't get sucked into comparing GDP as a total between nations. So what if Chinas GDP is almost the same as Americas now? They got far bigger population. It is the average GDP per capita that I look at, and those figures say that the Chinese economy is a long long way from catching up to America. Does their growth amaze me? No it does not, for while I might not be an expert in economics, I have got one private rule that I apply to nations. A nation that is playing catchup, finds it far easier to grow than a nation that is the very best. A farmer in a third world nation, if he finally gets the freedom to do so, can mortgage his land and buy the latest tractor from the US that quadruples his productivity as an individual. As long as he has the money, he can get the very latest the west has to offer. But for the west to build those machines, they had to invest in centuries of research and development; development of many iterations each applying the latest knowledge discovered at that point in time. The third world can leapfrog over all that effort in purchasing the latest, to get the efficiency of the latest now, to get the spectacular growth of the west over centuries in a matter of years. Does their currency worry me? No, for I know one secret about China, they import a heck of a lot of the raw materials for their economy, such as coal, iron, gas and so on from Australia and other nations. If the US governments accusations about China holding its currency low to encourage exports is true, well it is equally punishing China in the import of the raw materials from Australia and punishing China in the import of the latest technology from the rest of the world. It is needlessly wasting Chinese capital. There are only 2 things that concern me about China. 1. Its military buildup. Besides Russia and North Korea, all of Chinas neighbors are peaceful. North Koreas military is a joke so they can't be planning this military buildup against North Korea. Russia wouldn't risk the Chinese nukes since they are well within range of all of the Chinese nuclear missiles. The military buildup has a lot of antisatellite weapons, and a lot of anti carrier weapons. There is only 1 nation on earth that relies heavily on both of those in its military so the question has to be asked - Why is China building up a military designed to fight the US? 2. Properganda victories such as playing anti american songs at the whitehouse. Events such as those, embolden dictators to take on the US. This event, has probably created 5 more Saddam Huisseins that America will have to fight in the next century to maintain global peace for they will have seen China spit in the face of the US, insulting America right in the whitehouse with no repercussions.

So you believe that fighting a nation who sticks millions of people in gas chambers, was evil? So you believe that the US protecting Australia from Japan in 1942, and thus stopping me and my ancestors from becoming slaves to imperial Japan, was evil? What a despicable view!

I have a lot of disdain for armchair generals. I have no experience in any military. What I do have, is experience running a business. I know from commercial experience just how hard it is to get supplies delivered on time. It relies on finding individuals or organisations that can deliver on their promises. I also know the amount of decisions that project management requires, with all its associated curve balls that get thrown at you(employees sick and so on) to get things done on time. The thing about doing that in a commercial reality, is that the employees all want you to succeed, the suppliers do too. (no supplier wants to hurt their customers) and competitors just don't care, they are too busy running their own businesses. When I think of doing that exact same job, with peoples lives depending on the outcome of decisions, and with hundreds of thousands of enemies all paid to be thinking of how to do their best to undermine you doing your job so that you fail, well it gives me a lot of respect for those people who handle that responsibility, and do it successfully in the military each and every day. When I see 'armchair generals' with no respect for that job, talking about making that job harder by cutting resources and who think that just because they got the capacity to reason, that they can reason it out without any experience or knowledge of how the military operates or how tough their job is(and actually calling it irrelevant), well they are clearly not rational and so I have disdain for them. I am an Australian, living in Australia so I pay no taxes to support the US military. Yet through the ANZUS treaty, I get the benefit of the US military protecting me. Even tho that same treaty gives the US the benefit of the Australian military, I am no fool as to take for granted just how large that benefit is of the US military in ensuring the world is safe for me to live in and to do business.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/49822/ Chinese use their visit to the US, to play antiamerican songs in the white house. For those who call themselves 'Objectivists' who support China, even tho all the evidence shows they are enemies of the US, and violators of rights, shame on you. This being allowed to happen in the white house is a travesty that will hurt American interests for decades. It reinforces the 'paper tiger' image that is being formed around the world about the US and will help speed up the receding of US influence with its subsequent replacement by China.

Articles don't have an automatic effect tho, readers can think for themselves and if the facts are accurate, can extract some value from reading it to gather facts. This was the first that I unfortunately heard about Founders College failure, so I found the article to be informative for basic background information. Phil, I haven't heard of Peter LePort's schools, can you describe them and what they do well?

You say that if the buildings are built, the teachers will come? Where will they come from exactly, considering that we don't even have enough good teachers for our own countries.

An old one but I find this interview sketch by John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson to be hilarious.