Certainly most, if not all, wars are bankers' wars. As the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition state, "War is good for business."

You view the relationship between the mother and the fetus as parasitic. I know at least one other person in this forum who agrees with you. I suppose that it could be viewed as a parasite if the mother does not want the fetus to be alive. Otherwise the relationship is more commensalistic than parasitic.

Such a valley or island would not necessarily be found and destroyed, if those there would small enough in number and significance to be "noticed" AND they did not wish to do transactions with the outside world.

Those publicizing this are not distorting their own material. The entire set of unedited videos is available for download. They are doing it for the hysteria, however.

It has nothing to do with the current battle for the right of abortion. Neither do the forced abortions in China.

The PP person in the video did not say she "'wants to buy a Lamborghini' with the profits", she said that no one is doing that and there aren't profits, only reimbursements for costs. The organization who made the video and those publicizing it are distorting their own material to try to spread hysteria. (But that does not mean you should like paying for any of it in any government program.)

Galt's Gulch as created in Atlas Shrugged was a literary device - an other-worldly Atlantis. Collectivism's global reach will make a this-world Galt's Gulch impossible. No valley, no island protected by a force field can possibly exist for long. It would be found and destroyed.
Revolutions are about ideas and not about numbers. They are won like football games on the field. We will never know how many minds we have brought over to Objectivism by these posts and comments. We must be as relentless as our enemies. Even more so.

The original quote with "is" was not mine.

Government subsides for abortion and contraception are secondary to the religious opposition across the board. They want abortion, and for many, contraception, shunned and banned as immoral. The Senate bill against PP didn't even cut funding, it only shifted it to other organizations. Bush's religious attack on scientific stem cell research took the same approach. This is not an uprising against government subsidies.

There can be no question that these organizations should not be getting government funding, but the same is true of countless other subsidies taxpayers are forced to pay for regardless of their opposition to all kinds of subsidized activities. The current hysteria over PP is based entirely on the attack on abortion as such. They aren't showing inflammatory videos of money changing hands.

The nature of the "dependency" of a child on its parents is radically different than the biologically parasitical dependency of a fetus in a pre-birth environment in which thinking and choosing is irrelevant to life. Rights are not based on "self generated action", which all life does.

The rights of the woman are not just "primary", they are absolute. The fetus is not a moral being and has no rights. It does not have conflicting rights secondary to someone else, which would be an impossible contradiction. There are no conflicting rights.

Rights for children are limited because of their lack of capacity. It doesn't mean they don't have rights. At the time of birth the child begins to directly perceive the external world and mentally process it with his faculty of reason, along with the complete break of biological parasitism. The newborn infant is still helpless to use its mind to live, but that is the beginning of the process. Identifying that fact is not subjective.

This is not a matter of rationalistically deducing principles somehow intrinsic to reality. Intrinsicism and subjectivism are a false alternative. The facts are in reality but not the abstract principles we live by. We can only objectively identify and conceptualize facts, then formulate abstract principles, then formulate a codification into law. At any stage of knowledge there are always options to a sensible formulation and there will always be borderline cases (like measuring the precise point of "birth"). At that point the objectivity of law means settling on some formulation so that everyone knows what it is.

RE: Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQPF3...

Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) institutionalized abortion with the stated intent to eradicate blacks and others she deemed "unfit" (see http://www.lifenews.com/2013/03/11/10.... Her own statements expose her intent of racial cleansing and eugenics. Sanger admired Adolf Hitler for doing the same thing in his campaign to wipe out the Jews and others not fit for his own "master race". She was also heralded by the Ku Klux Klan for her work. Sanger did not push abortion as a "women's rights" issue but rather as a social policy aimed at government-sponsored population control. Dispute these facts at your own peril.

People have the right to have abortions. I don't like being forced to pay for it, especially when those subsidized entities are saying they "want to buy a Lamborghini" with the profits of the harvested parts. My problem is that I'm being forced to pay for it. Talk about "statists"... (I wasn't clear). I also am opposed to forced medical treatment, especially on children. This has been tried by GOVERNMENTS before. It always ends poorly, not to mention that it flies in the face of Objectivism. To me, Objectivism really works. It keeps clarifying situations for me. (And, I'm probably less clear today. I worked until midnight, up at 5 this morning. I work a lot, feeding this mess. So far...)

The statists will continue to try all kinds of atrocities. You can't head that off by denying people rights to actions like abortion because the statists irrationally exploit it for something else. That only adds to their injustice. The right of abortion is not a frivolous one-way question with implications only for fetuses. The whole point of it is the rights of the women who choose not to bear a child.

Defending a proper moral foundation of a culture is always in your self interest. You live in it. It's never a hypothetical question.

Please note the significant difference in meaning between your quote with "is" and the actual text which is "has to be" vital distinction and of course she is right. Thanks for doing the citation. She is great!

Subsidies for abortions are far from a side issue in the Planned Parenthood debate. Do you remember Sandra Fluke from February of 2012? The expectation is that producers are to pay not only for abortions, but even the relatively small costs of contraceptives. This became a requirement for all insurance providers as part of Obamacare.

The comment about philosophy trumping science came from conscious1978, who just admitted that wasn't his best turn of phrase. I have chosen to let that disagreement rest.

The origin of rights for a human derives from man's freedom and ability to act on his/her own judgment. It is not guaranteed that a sentient life form will have the ability to act on his/her own judgment, and in the case of human life, infants (let alone fetuses) lack a complete ability to act on their own judgment. If they did, parenting would be unnecessary. However, at the point of sentience, even a fetus is taking self-generated actions, albeit quite limited, to further its own life. Do some limited rights start at the point when a fetus is taking self-generated actions to further its own life? You would argue that those rights should be secondary to the rights of the mother, who is providing all that is necessary for the fetus to maintain its life. I do agree that the rights of the mother are primary. At what point does a young life form get rights? I am going to argue with you that the point of birth is a terrible time for assignment of all rights from an Objectivist standpoint, although some rights might reasonably be assigned then. An infant is completely incapable of taking enough self-generated actions to sustain its own life. If one uses the Objectivist definition for assignment of rights, then one only achieves that at some point in adulthood, if even then. Would you argue that killing of a child under one or two would be moral, because that child is still dependent on its mother? I think not. Consequently I will argue that the decision regarding the date at which abortion is moral but infanticide is immoral is not entirely objective.

I concede the point that an epistemology is required to converted direct observables of raw data into science.

I agree with you that the right of abortion is not the moral foundation for euthanasia in an Objectivist universe. However, that is not how the statists see it, and unfortunately we do not live in an Objectivist universe ... yet. The statists see euthanasia as a logical step, perhaps several steps down the road, after abortion rights. So I have to play chess and think many steps down the road in order to live in a world that is worth living in.

I couldn't agree more that the statists' sacrificing individuals to the collective to make Medicare work is the opposite of morality and rights. And I also agree that violating other people's rights in the short term would be a violation of the non-interference principle.

But my question still stands, "At what point does defending the moral foundation of a culture become something in my best self interest?" I think that doing so in America's case has been a lost cause for at least the last 15 years and perhaps the last 100 years, so at this point, the question is purely hypothetical.

Understanding how to build things from the atomic scale up and then doing so will take up much of the rest of my life. I supplement that with what I learn from the Gulch.

"...philosophy always trumps science" probably wasn't my best turn of a phrase. But, my point was that science without rational philosophy results in things like "The State Science Institute".

There is always philosophy underlying science, and as 'ewv' mentions, it explains how we know, what we know.

http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts...

I got lucky, Jan, and was able to retire before two policies
which I disliked took effect -- universal DNA sampling
and the change to "Navy-type" uniforms. . the former was
a bait-and-switch of the first order (compulsory DNA sampling
was added to their side of the contract unilaterally),
and the second required that a full set of new uniforms
be purchased. . I got outta there. -- j
.

We don't need as many people as others suspect, I submit. I'm here to be summoned and to summon others. :-) I'm getting to work with my talents. Let's go, pardner.

Those a true and relevant points, ewv. We need to focus on the rational source of individual rights, and the relevant characteristics of what it means to be an individual person. Abortion is a question of actual vs potential.
Jim, I appreciate and salute you for asking questions and checking your premises too. Ive had to do the same many times. The common issue and theme I see is that (in the US at least) we've been raised and taught to assume many things are a certain way (e.g. The military is a proper function of government and defends our rights and country from foreign threats). But what if the government abuses it's power and authority with the military? Too many Objectivists (and Americans for that matter) have let their patriotism and defense of a military become separated from the reality of what is happening. It's very difficult to acknowledge the facts and trust your own judgment when so many voices and premises assume otherwise.

The right of abortion is a consequence of the rights of the individual, not a moral foundation for euthanasia. The "looter statists" sacrificing individuals to the collective to "make Medicare work" or any equivalent are the opposite of morality and rights. Violating other people's rights because you find their actions objectionable supports the statists.

Rearden also had a different, less flamboyant, personality more typical of engineers.