Dr. Yaron Brook at the University of Washington
News ·Tuesday March 16, 2010 @ 23:59 EDT (link)
I went to UW tonight (parked in N5, $6, beats $10 at central) to hear Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) speak, title Capitalism Without Guilt: The Moral Case for Freedom (link goes to previous presentation; I asked a guy taking video for this event, and it'll be up shortly). The event was arranged by the Objectivism group at UW, An Objective University of Washington (OUW).
He started at 1900, spoke for about 40 minutes then took questions until about 2100. He covered the financial crisis a little, spoke about government regulation as the root cause (e.g., banks are the most regulated sector in the US; they have to run every decision they make past the government), then generalized out to individual rights, morality, and the purpose of government: protecting individual rights. He went over the difference between real rights, which require people to leave others alone, and non-rights that people claim as rights (e.g., health care) that involve forcing others to work for you (doctors in this case), i.e., making them slaves, and thus being incompatible with freedom. He didn't give very good reasons for a minimal state (the usual "force is outside of rationality and multiple private protection agencies would fight each other absent an absolute standard"). He got several rounds of applause during the presentation and questions.
Nobody asked any questions that were that interesting to anyone that had read Rand or even basic philosophy, but that was actually encouraging since the event was billed as open to all which means unexposed people are coming and learning and perhaps thinking differently. And it's still good to hear him answer them; he's an excellent speaker.
I did like when Brook said to one guy "Stop waving your hand, you could be waving five hands and it wouldn't do any good" and then the guys says "But I want to interject" and Brook says "I don't want you to interject", hehe. Pampered liberal perhaps, used to ranting on in liberal profs' classes where they agree with him so let him drone on? He also deftly moved on from the guy in the front that wanted to monopolize the Q&A period. Crowd control, he haz it.
Books finished: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
