Photo credit: Dee-Ann Durbin
Photo credit: Cayusa / Foter / CC BY-NC
Photo credit: Andrew Kudrin / Foter / CC BY
rjb
Credit: Nina Paley
“(Ayn) Randian libertarianism is an illogical, impractical, inhumane, unpopular set of Utopian ravings which lacks internal coherence and has never predicted real-world behavior anywhere.”
“At no time or place in human history has there been a working libertarian society which provided its people with the kinds of outcomes libertarians claim it will provide.”
“In their world, democracy is a poor substitute for the iron-fisted rule of wealth, administered by those who hold the most of it.”
“(How did) Internet billionaires become wealthy? They hired government-educated employees to develop products protected by government copyrights. Those products used government-created computer technology and a government-created communications web to communicate with government-educated customers in order to generate wealth for themselves, which was then stored in government-protected banks, after which they began using that wealth to argue for the elimination of government.”
Credit: Jen Sorensen
Relating to the last of the quotes above: “Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?”
Since Ayn Rand called people who “live for others” parasites: “Does he think that Rand was off the mark on this one, or does he agree that historical figures like (Martin Luther) King and (Mahatma) Gandhi were parasites?”
Since libertarians are opposed to the undemocratic power of government: “Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?”
Libertarians revere the idea of “property,” but they object to government interference. “Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?”
Libertarianism is a dead philosophy. Unfortunately its zombie lurches on.
rjb
On August 15, 2010, Aaron Dunn of Musopen launched a Kickstarter project to raise money for a recording goal. His vision was to hire an internationally renowned orchestra to record some great classical music, and then release it into the public domain. Aaron was already running Musopen, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing the world with copyright-free music. Now he wanted to see if he could find people who had the same ideal, and were willing to put up some money for it. He set the funding goal at $11,000. By the end of the thirty day funding period, the total was $68,359. After this pleasant surprise, it was just a matter of getting it done. Now there is music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and others available free to all music lovers.
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After that phenomenal success, Aaron Dunn was encouraged to try again. There’s another Kickstarter project called Set Chopin Free. The project runs until October 20, 2013, with a funding goal of $75,000. As of this writing it has been running for two days and has reached almost $25,000. I think I can safely predict that it will reach its goal by the deadline, and that Aaron will achieve his goal of recording all of Frederic Chopin‘s music and setting it free.
If you love music I heartily recommend checking out this Kickstarter project and seeing the rewards available to you. And don’t forget to go to the Musopen site and download a bunch of free music. Or you can go to the Internet Archive Musopen page and download a whole DVD of it.
rjb
ISBN 978-0-9919532-0-2
