I never spent much time listening to talk radio. My various occupations over the years — professor, writer of software and, more recently, unpaid blogger — always demanded my mind’s full attention, leaving no room for the distraction posed by a conversation in the background, especially a conversation dealing with matters of importance. Thus, I did not become a regular listener of the Ron Smith Show until last spring, when I began a project to repair and repaint my entire house.

I was almost too late. Ron Smith died last night following a battle with pancreatic cancer. It was a mercifully short battle that lasted only a little over two months — he was diagnosed with cancer in mid-October — but it was scant consolation for his many devoted listeners.

It was my son, Steve, who brought Ron Smith to my attention about eight years ago. At that time the Ron Smith Show had the three-to-six afternoon time slot on WBAL, and Steve used to listen to him during his long commute. The war in Iraq was still new, and virtually all conservatives supported former President Bush’s decision to go to war — all except Ron Smith, that is. The fact that Smith, who was so conservative on so many other issues, opposed the war got Steve’s attention and, eventually, his agreement.

Ron Smith’s political views could probably best be described as “paleolibertarian”, but to my knowledge he never called himself that. He had an instinctual mistrust of the use of force to accomplish anything and thus was the perfect person to confront the frequent caller or guest whose solution to every problem can be summed up in the phrase, “there ought to be law”.

Laws, Smith said, seldom accomplish their stated goals, especially when they mandate outcomes. In reality, such laws — and Bush’s No Child Left Behind law is a prime example of this — end up mandating fraud.

By the time I became a regular listener last spring, the Ron Smith Show had moved to the morning nine-to-twelve time slot. I listened to practically the entire show every day — and often found it very depressing. He was very pessimistic about the future of western civilization and believed the United States has had its season in the sun. What made this assessment especially depressing to me is that he based it on facts and logic.

Logic was a weapon Ron Smith used to slay many beasts. I was always amazed at his ability to drill down to the heart of any argument, to marshal facts and reasoning to expose the argument’s unanalyzed assumptions. One of his listeners dubbed him “the voice of reason”, and the label stuck because it was so accurate.

I was also impressed by Smith’s wide-ranging erudition. He was knowledgeable and read widely in many subjects. It was therefore with genuine surprise that I read that his formal schooling ended when he dropped out high school to enlist in the Marine Corps. I should not have been so surprised: no amount of formal education could have given him what he brought to every broadcast.

I will miss Ron Smith. One of the highlights of my short blogging career was a link he posted on his website two and a half years ago to an article I wrote on the suppression of dissent in the global warming debate. But links to my blog posts aren’t what I will miss about him. In the combined cacophony that emerges from the airwaves and the web, his was a voice of reason, and now that voice has been stilled.

With great power comes great responsibility.

— Uncle Ben to Peter Parker

We know approximately what then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary told Penn State head football coach Joe Paterno when he came to Paterno’s house the morning after witnessing the rape of a ten-year-old boy in the football locker room shower. That’s pretty much summarized in the grand jury presentment charging retired assistant coach Jerry Sandusky with that rape and 39 other counts of sex crimes. (You can read the presentment here; be warned, however: it is one of the most sickening documents I’ve ever read.)

What I’d like to know is what Paterno said to McQueary.

There’s one thing I’m sure he did not say. He did not say, “Mike, you have to go to the police about this. Right now. Don’t even think about possible consequences to yourself. I’ve got your back on this. I’ll protect you from the athletic department, I’ll protect you from the administration. But you’ve got to report this.”

How do I know Paterno didn’t say this? Because if he had, McQueary would have gone right to the police. He would not have waited until he was subpoened by a grand jury nine years later. Read more »

Not really. In fact, I had hoped to be on vacation about this time, if not earlier. Since last April I’ve been completing the renovation of my house — repairing drywall, installing fans and fixtures, sanding and refinishing the floors, repairing brickwork, and painting, painting, painting and more painting. Not to mention, moving, disposing of, and assembling furniture. And, except for the brickwork and sanding and refinishing the floors — I hired a couple men to do that — I did all of the work myself.

And I vastly underestimated how long all this would take. Back in April I had guessed that renovating the first floor (except for the floor refinishing) would take me about a month. It took me three. And the basement took more than a month.

The good news is that this renovation project that I began two years ago with the installation of a new driveway, porch and front walk is done (although I still have to put something in my flower beds other than weeds).

The bad news is that it took a physical toll on me. At some point during this process I injured my knee, and the pain is now so bad I can barely walk. For the past month I’ve been going to physical therapy twice a week and doing all the assigned exercises, but there has been little improvement. It appears to be a meniscus tear (I’ll know for sure when the orthopedic surgeon reads the MRI results Tuesday) and it probably will have to be surgically repaired. Hopefully the death panels haven’t kicked in yet and Medicare will cover it.

Anyway, that’s why I haven’t posted anything to this blog since last April. After a full day of work on my house I was too exhausted to do anything at night except plop myself down in front of the TV. A lot has happened since last April and I would have loved to comment on it, but researching and writing about this stuff takes time and energy that I just didn’t have. If there’s any good to come from my knee injury it is that my enforced leisure has given me the opportunity to get back to writing.

What is it about Atlas Shrugged that makes it so popular? Why has Ayn Rand’s dense, hard-to-read, and way-too-long novel sold over seven million copies and inspired such a loyal, even fanatical following?

I was asking myself these questions last week as I finished rereading the novel for the first time in 46 years. I wrote a retrospective review of Atlas Shrugged, which appears in Sunday’s edition of the webzine American Thinker, and I gave the book low marks, both as literature and philosophy. Such were not my views the first time I read it, and such obviously are not the views of most of those who have commented on my review.

What captivated me most about Atlas Shrugged the first time I read it was how different it was from what the culture was offering. Rand actually viewed businesspeople who were out to make a profit as the good guys! Up to that time, the only work of fiction I had read in which businessmen were treated sympathetically was Sloan Wilson’s novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which gives us a glimpse of the huge personal price that is often exacted from those who build great business enterprises. In Atlas Shrugged Rand does more than just treat businesspeople sympathetically:  she exalts them as heroes and presents them as innovators who are as brilliant and creative as the writers, artists and intellectuals who despise them even while depending on them for their livelihoods.

Another thing I liked about Atlas Shrugged was the way Rand skewered those collectivist clichés I had been hearing all my life and that people seem to regard as almost self-evident. It was hard to take them seriously after they came out of the mouths of ridiculous people like James Taggart, Orren Boyle and Philip Rearden.

Read more »

Less than two weeks ago political strategist Dick Morris conducted a poll of likely Wisconsin voters that produced some strange results. By a margin of 74-18, those polled want teachers and other government workers to contribute more toward their health insurance premiums, and by an even larger margin (79-16) they want public employees to pay a larger share of their pension costs. Voters also want to end the automatic deduction of union dues from public employees’ paychecks (54-34) and want to require that pay increases that exceed the rate of inflation be submitted to referendum (66-30).

At the same time poll respondents say (by a 54-41 margin) that they don’t want to limit the collective bargaining rights of the public workers’ unions. But by a 58-38 margin, they want issues such as tenure, merit pay, and the right to fire incompetent teachers taken off the bargaining table.

I suppose this could be taken as proof of the Arrow impossibility theorem — that there is no voting system consistent with both individual rationality and democratic principles that will produce consistently rational results. Or, more likely, it just shows that people don’t really understand what “collective” bargaining is.

Whatever Governor Walker’s intentions, his proposed reforms amount to union-busting, just as his critics charge. Collective bargaining becomes a sham when there is nothing to bargain about. And it becomes impossible when a union loses the ability to coerce dues out of the workers it claims to represent. So for Wisconsin voters to say they support collective bargaining, while at the same time expressing strong support for reforms that will kill it, is to reveal a profound misunderstanding. Read more »