Ray Harvey

The following interview, which was brief but I think penetrating, was conducted January 27, in Aspen, Colorado, and appeared in the February issue of Cunning Stunts. The questions were put forth by the interviewer, Ms. Eileen Appleton, who has graciously allowed me to reprint it here:

If he’s anything — and there does seem to be [...]

In December of 1958, an American thinker named Leonard Read wrote a remarkable essay entitled “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read.”
In this essay, Mr. Read walks us step-by-step through the entire process of how a single pencil is produced; I recapitulate it here because it is the only argument you’ll [...]

A reader writes:
Dear RayHarvey: I have heard that a clam without a shell grows into a huge phallic-looking creature that would horrify and intimidate people who are not usually horrified or intimidated. Can you verify? If true, is this reaction indicative of an underlying psycho-sexual issue and is it in any way related to [...]

In February of 2007, the Los Angeles Times ran an article that said, among other things, the following:
Since 1989, when organic-food activists raised a [bunked] nationwide scare over the pesticide alar in apples, many scientists have seethed quietly at what they perceive as a campaign of scare tactics, innuendo and shoddy science perpetrated by organic [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Ray Harvey: I’m one of these guys with a big belly and a small penis. I’m heterosexual, and I drive a truck for a living. I do not get a lot of exercise. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been pained by the size of my penis. I’m seriously considering [...]

Johann Bessler was born in Zittau, Germany, in 1680. He died in 1745.
His claim to fame is that, in the 1712, he built a remarkable machine — called the Bessler Wheel — which he said was a machine of self-perpetuated motion; by 1717, “he’d convinced thousands of people, from the ordinary to the most [...]

Everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it.
Freedom means you are left alone; you are neither helped nor hindered. That’s all it means.
Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that government’s [...]

There’s an old joke lumberjacks still love to tell:
“Why did the train stop?”
Answer: “To let the lumberjack off.”
This quip was coined around the same time that a famous study was conducted. It was a study that measured the caloric intake of lumberjacks, whose appetites are about as notorious as the size of their logs.
It turns [...]

Reality is existence, and existence is everything. Every theory of everything must start there.
There’s existence, and there’s essence. These two things are separate but not separable.
In the language of Thomas Aquinas, esse (or essence) is identity: To be, in other words, is to be something.
The conclusion is inescapable because (as Aristotle noted) the only alternative [...]

There is no such thing as nuclear waste — and that’s just one of the many beautiful things about nuclear energy.
A nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste.
Quoting Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France’s main nuclear facility, in an interview he gave with William Tucker, author of an excellent book called Terrestrial Energy:
Pierre Guelfe: [...]

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: Is Charles Bukowski a great artist?
– Billy Badass

Dear Billy Badass: No, he’s not. Bukowski is too sloppy to be a great artist. He lacks vision. He lacks depth and he lacks focus. Reading him, one is reminded of Truman Capote’s criticism of On the Road:
“That’s not writing; it’s typing.”
Here, for [...]

The following is excerpted from Chapter 10 of my book Leave Us Alone: A Capitalist Credo:
Environmentalism, with its attendant army of politicos all armed to the teeth with environmental laws, is, let us make no mistake, the highroad to hell.
Before going all the way green, I urge you to take a longer look into exactly [...]

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: Is Shakespeare all that?
– Slo Readuh

Dear Slo Readuh: No, he’s not all that. He’s all that and more.
It’s impossible to overstate Shakespeare’s genius. Forget that his plots were largely borrowed; forget that he never created a major character who didn’t have significant flaws. None of that is where Shakespeare’s [...]

It began, as it always does, with government intrusion into private industry.

What is now termed modern medicine actually began in the early 1920s when science — in particular, germ theory — culminated to a point that sickness and disease were at last being treated reliably. It was then that doctors and hospitals got much better [...]

WD-40 is a uniquely American invention, created in 1953 by three technicians at the San Diego Rocket Chemical Company. The name WD-40 derives from a project the goal of which was to find a water displacement compound. It took them 40 tries. WD-40 stands for Water Displacement #40.
Initially, the main purpose of WD-40 was [...]

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, and who on February 12th turned 201-years-old, was a devoted and life-long white supremacist — and remained so up until the day he died.
Nor did he waver in his staunch advocacy of colonization — which is the deportation of black people from the United States. [...]

There’s never been a famine in the United States, and one thing alone is responsible for this: private property rights.
Capitalistic societies are the wealthiest societies in the history of the world, and it is the absence of fully protected property that creates poverty. As the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto puts it in his instructive [...]

The population of the entire world could fit shoulder-to-shoulder in a space about the size of Jacksonville, Florida.
Ninety-seven percent of the earth’s land surface is empty.
If you allotted to each person 1,250 square feet (which is quite a bit), all the people in the world would fit into the state of Texas.
According [...]

In the beginning, and for several decades afterward, slavery was not primarily a governmental institution, neither in Europe, nor the United States.
Initially, the enslavement of Africans was almost all done privately. There were, to be sure, a handful of governmental charters, but in the early days, the preponderating number of slaves were traded by private [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Ray: I’ve always been told it’s better to be shot at and missed than shit at and hit. While getting shit on obviously does suck, getting shot at means someone doesn’t like you enough to want to shoot at you in the first place. So is it really better?
Scatman
Dear Scatman: I’m afraid [...]

The translators of the earliest English bibles were monks immersed in Latin. This is important to remember since they were translating directly from Greek, and agape, the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, meaning “To esteem highly.”
Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for free.
According [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Ray Harvey! You are a true friend to the workingman, such as me. Your book Leave Us Alone should be required reading in our schools.
Don’t you get sick and tired of capitalism being everyone’s escape goat, like I do? The halls of congress are crowded with representatives of the “X” industry, [...]

About a decade ago, Doctor R.J. Braithwaite wrote an article that appeared in Progress in Physical Geography.
In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers [...]

The following is Chapter 21 of my book Leave Us Alone:

Before the Great Depression of the 1930’s and 1940’s, there were a number of depressions and recessions in this country, two of the most notable being the Panic of 1819 and the depression of 1837. In every instance prior to the Great Depression, the government [...]

The two essential claims of the environmentalists, which I take for granted are already well known to everyone, are (1) that continued economic progress is impossible, because of the impending exhaustion of natural resources (it is from this notion that the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” comes), and (2) that continued economic progress, indeed, much of [...]

Editor’s Note: this is Part 2 of a two-part debate. Read Part 1 here.
Part 2 — The Debate Rages On:
We Are Not In Climate Crisis

Dr. Gray’s rebuttal to Dr. Trenberth:
Kevin Trenberth has given the standard response that human-induced global warming advocates always give to their critics. He cites the large number of people and the [...]

The following, which took place before ClimateGate, is a written debate between Dr. Kevin Trenberth — head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder — and Dr. William Gray, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. This debate originally appeared in the Fort Collins Forum [...]

Howard Zinn was born on August 24, 1922. He died January 27, 2010.
Zinn taught Political Science at Boston University from 1964 until 1988; he was an American historian, of sorts, a self-proclaimed Marxist who, by his own admission, did not believe in objective history:
I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history [...]

From the moment oil first made it into the mainstream, peak oil and the imminent depletion of fossil fuels have been vehemently predicted.
A by-no-means exhaustive list of those predictions might run something like this:
“I take this opportunity to express my opinion in the strongest terms, that the amazing exhibition of oil which has characterized the [...]

Under President George W. Bush, who was the Herbert Hoover of his day, appropriated government programs grew from $298 billion to $613 billion.
Under President George W. Bush, Social Security spending went from $406 billion to $662 billion.
Under President George W. Bush, Medicare spending went from $216 billion to $425 billion.
Under under President George W. Bush, [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Harvey Ray: Is there proof of God? Can science prove that God doesn’t exist?
Signed,
Hopelessly Devoted
Dear Hopelessly Devoted: No, science cannot. In fact, nothing can. Yet we can be certain that God doesn’t exist — by virtue of the very nature of proof.
The meaning of proof precludes proving something for which there is [...]

Capitalism is a social system based upon private ownership of the means of production and the preeminence of the individual over the group.
The word capitalism was coined by Karl Marx, in the 1850’s. Marx used it to denounce private ownership of the means of production and the autonomous workings of the free market.
Capitalism [...]

Read Part 1 of this article here.
Take an empty beer bottle. We can either throw that glass bottle away or recycle it.
Assume for a moment that we all want what’s best for the planet. Assume, therefore, that we want to use as few resources as possible.
Should we recycle our beer bottle, then? Or should we [...]

Few arguments are more dangerous than the ones that “feel” right but can’t be justified (Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 1981).
Paradoxically, recycled trash is exactly what you get 99 times out of 100 when the sacred subject of recycling comes up.
Recycling is the process whereby rubbish is converted into reusable materials.
Recycling — once [...]

The most obvious place to begin any real discussion of water is in pointing out that right now on planet earth, water in its potable form is about the most abundant resource there is. No one even passingly acquainted with the subject seriously disputes this.
In the words of water specialist Fredrik Segerfeldt: “Water is a [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Ray: I recently read a synopsis of a book about the question of animal rights, and I’m curious to know your take. Do animals possess rights? If so, where do these rights reside?
Thanks,
Pig Bodine
Dear Pig Bodine: Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.
Rights, as Herbert Spencer said, are “politico-ethical precepts” that [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Ray Harvey: I’m a fellow who exercises regularly. As a result, I often find myself the victim of a multitude of aches and pains, including these peculiar shooting pains in my balls. Without a doubt, though, the pain that plagues me most are side aches. What ARE these things?
Doubled Over
Dear Doubled Over: [...]

Politically, global warming and climate change have little if anything to do with climate science, and the fact that this subject has become such an overwhelming political issue is a fine testament to how poorly the world understands the legitimate functions of government, and why those functions are legitimate.
Indeed, it turns out that the [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Ray Harvey: Who’s the better filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino or David Lynch?
P. Durango
Dear P. Durango: Are you kidding me? But there’s no comparison.
As a filmmaker, David Lynch possesses innumerable shortcomings, foremost of which is the fact that he’s an obscurantist extraordinaire — and this is no small thing.
The symbolic in art, you see, [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Sir: You are reported to have said that there is no order or disorder in the universe apart from what man himself puts there — this in spite of your well-known preoccupation with a fluid and congruent universe. Can you tell us how you reconcile this, with regard in particular to your [...]

The difference between the cynic and the skeptic is the difference between epistemology and ethics. It is the difference between brain and body.

Skepticism is an epistemological word. Cynicism is ethical.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge.
Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with morality.
The Greek word skopein – from which [...]

Environmentalism has so thoroughly permeated world culture that the saving-the-planet rhetoric is accepted even by those who don’t really regard themselves as dyed-in-the-skein environmentalists. It is taught as holy writ in public schools, and it’s espoused by poets, priests, and politicians alike.
This monstrous ideology would, given the first opportunity, destroy humankind, a fact of [...]

The United States Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by an American socialist named Francis Julius Bellamy, who was also a Baptist minister, and whose cousin Edward Bellamy is the semi-famous author of two socialist utopian novels: Looking Backward (1888) and Equality (1897).

Francis Bellamy was born in Rome, New York, May 18, 1855. He [...]

Philosophy is an inescapable fact of human life because humans, as John Milton said, spend the better part of their lives inside their own minds.
Humans, in other words, think to survive, and life, therefore, is not primarily physical. It’s psychological.
Philosophy is indispensable because the fundamentals of thought are entirely philosophical. Any attempt to deny the [...]

The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was founded in 1919 and abolished in 1945. It came into full power under Adolph Hitler in 1933, and proceeded at that time to slaughter a spectacular number of people in a relatively short span of years.
Socialists today are of course universally agreed that Nazism was many things, but [...]

Epistemology is the science of knowledge. The word derives from the Greek episteme, which means knowledge.
Epistemology proper didn’t actually begin until Rene Descartes (1596-1650); but the stuff of epistemology — logic, reason, deduction, induction, et cetera — has been with us since the Ancient Greeks.
Epistemology is an extraordinarily complicated discipline that starts with three simple [...]

He is not nor was he ever regarded as a saint by the Catholic Church, and the St. before his name refers to his putative homeland.
No one knows where the enigmatic Comte de Saint Germain came from, and no one knows for sure where he went. He vanished into time without any trace.
The Count of [...]

A reader writes:
Dear Ray Harvey: Could there be time travelers from the future among us and if so, does that mean a time machine has already been invented?

Dear Anonymous: Your question is a fascinating one. Actually, it reminds me of a similar query people used to put to me all the time:
“Do we have a [...]

It’s high time we dispel once and for all the absurd myth that Ronald Reagan was somehow for deregulation.
Statistically speaking, the size of bureaucracy, in terms of sheer civilian manpower, increased dramatically under Reagan, so that by the time he was finished, there were well over 200,000 more government workers than in 1980, when he [...]

It insults the sophisticate like a sacrilege, to the outlander as alien as unwritten dialect, and both are correct to call it capitalistic.
Miniature marketplace of candy smells and gum, plantless and plastic, an assault upon all things organic, not postmodern but modern, a modern mercantile, with its gleaming tile floors and lurid lights that [...]

In 1993, senator Tom Harkin proposed banning imports from countries that employed children in sweatshops. The outcome: Bangladesh laid off 50,000 children. What happened next, however, is the real crime:
According to the British charity Oxfam, many of these children were forced into prostitution. Thanks to Senator Harkin — who lives in the complete luxury [...]

A reader writes:

Dear Ray Harvey: What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky? I ask because, like everyone else in academia, I think he’s about the smartest man in the world.
Best,
D
Dear D: Which Noam Chomsky are you referring to?
The one who openly supports Hezbollah?
Or do you mean the one with proven neo-Nazi ties? [...]

Ethics is the study of moral philosophy.
Morality is the science of human action.
First comes metaphysics, then epistemology, and then ethics.
Those are the big three of philosophy. Of them, ethics is arguably the most complicated.
Metaphysics and epistemology have a direct and immediate bearing on our most fundamental ethical questions: namely, is there such a thing as [...]

The definition of philosophy — judging, at least, from very nearly every philosophy dictionary on the planet — has confounded philosophers for many centuries, the concept being too large, it is sometimes said, to properly convey in a concise fashion. Yet, at the same time, in all branches of philosophy, minutia is cataloged to complete [...]

There is, among rightwingers predominantly, though not exclusively, a rather persistent misconception that the United States is at its roots a religious nation.
This is demonstrably false, and rather easy to verify, as we shall see in a moment, but first let us note that the subject is significant (and becoming more so) not because of [...]

Dr. Yuri N. Maltsev is an economist who teaches at Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin. Prior to that, for many years, he was an economist for Mikhail Gorbachev’s economic reform team. In 1989, he defected to the United States of America. Dr. Maltsev is now among the most articulate living defenders of laissez-faire capitalism.

Just recently, Dr. [...]

Three major branches grow upon the ancient tree of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. From these three branches spring two secondary and one tertiary.
The two secondary limbs are politics, a sub-branch of ethics, and aesthetics (also known as art), a sub-branch of epistemology.
One limb alone grows from the sub-branch of politics, and that is [...]

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
Said Oscar Wilde.
Esthetics — or aesthetics, if you prefer — is the philosophy of art.
It is a sub-branch of epistemology. Epistemology, the philosophy of knowledge, spawns esthetics like Superman spawns sequels.
Esthetics is classified as a sub-branch of epistemology because art is a by-product of the reasoning brain — [...]

Postmodernism, in all its vicious variations, is a term devoid of any real content, and for this reason dictionaries and philosophy dictionaries offer very little help in defining it.
And yet postmodernism has today become almost universally embraced as the dominant philosophy of science — which is the primary reason that science crumbles before our eyes [...]

In May of 1606, the first American settlers arrived in Jamestown.
The Virginia Tidewater Region, where these original 104 set up their colony, was a breathtakingly fertile chunk of land. So it was that these first American settlers found more resources than they could at first believe: oceans teeming with seafood, woodlands alive with birds, inexhaustible [...]