It is my pleasure to announce that I have joined Intellectual Takeout as vice president of research and education. IT, a Minnesota-based nonprofit, provides academic resources for libertarian and conservative-minded students and lay persons.

College students’ political beliefs tend to move toward the left throughout their undergraduate education. Results from the 2008 College Senior Survey (PDF) administered by the Higher Education Research Institute show that “[b]ased on the longitudinal figures, fewer students would characterize themselves as conservative compared to when they entered college as freshmen. In contrast, an increased percentage of students consider themselves liberals by the end of their college careers” (p. 31). Moreover, a 2004 HERI research report (PDF) surveying the political attitudes of recent college graduates found that this group supported increased government control over “the sale of handguns (83%) and environmental pollution (75%)”, a national health care plan (64%), levying higher taxes on the rich (59%), and raising taxes to reduce the federal deficit (29%) (p. 4).

What explains these findings? One reason is that college students are exposed to an overwhelming majority of liberal college faculty. In a study by Tobin and Weinberg (2006) 60 percent of social science and humanities faculty defined themselves as liberal, and only 12 percent as conservative. Even though business faculty were found to be the most conservative and politically diverse, only 30 percent of them called themselves conservatives (pp. ii-iii). Tobin and Weinberg also identified the following beliefs as pervasive among the college faculty they surveyed (pp. i-ii):

Propensity to blame America for world problems.

A tendency to strongly support international institutions such as the United Nations.

Strong opposition to American unilateralism.

Criticism of big business.

Skepticism about capitalism’s ability to help address poverty in developing nations.

The liberal dominance on American college campuses is often accompanied by hostility toward and censorship of conservative and libertarian ideas. Books such Indoctrination U and The Shadow University and the film Indoctrinate U provide grim accounts of this fact. Students and faculty dissenting from the dominant views held on campus also censor themselves for fear of suffering negative consequences (Tobin & Weinberg, p. iii).

At IT we work toward a better hour. We seek to empower students to counter the effects of liberal indoctrination by providing them with the intellectual resources to defend the foundations of a free society – a society based on the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and personal responsibility.

I hope you will assist us in our efforts.

Today, I celebrate my birthday. Well, not really. I should call it my re-birthday. You see, I grew up in East Berlin, and today twenty years have passed since the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

I was 8 years old, living in Moscow on that day. Little did I know that it would not only change the course of history, but my life as well.

Back then I did not understand the significance of what had happened. However, when I returned to Berlin during the summer of 1990, I could already feel that some profound change had taken place, and that more was to come. Still, I had yet to grasp how philosophy shapes man and his creations. I had yet to gain the knowledge necessary to perceive how the human spirit is uplifted by freedom and crushed by coercion.

But today, I understand that the fall of the Berlin Wall opened much more for me than a physical border.

Had it not been for that day, I would probably not be living in the United States now. Those who wanted to cross the East German border, attempting to exercise one of their most fundamental individual rights — the freedom to seek greater economic liberty and personal opportunity — were shot by the border guards.

Had it not been for that day, I would probably not have obtained a degree in philosophy, or have been exposed to the great minds of classical liberal and libertarian thoughts — John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Milton Friedman. Higher education was rationed, controlled and censored; individualists were spied on, harassed, blackmailed and imprisoned in East Germany.

Most importantly, had it not been for that day, I would not have met my husband, a man as passionate about choosing his life as I am about choosing mine.

Yet, I do not regard this day as a reminder not to take for granted the freedom I now enjoy. It is simply the day that I and millions of other people regained the ability to exercise the rights we naturally possess.

What matters are not the walls that we erect, but the ones that we tear down.

The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, where I work, has received one of the 2009 Templeton Freedom Awards for Excellence in Promoting Liberty.

The Templeton Freedom Awards are the largest international awards program for think tanks, and are decided and given by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

CEE won in the category “Special Achievement by a University-based Center.” According to the AERF press release, it was “awarded the University-based prize for launching six courses focusing on the ethical infrastructure of entrepreneurship and the preconditions of the free society in ethics.”

To find out more about the 2009 Templeton Awards, check out the AERF website.

Reason Foundation will have a special series in November celebrating Ayn Rand.

Check out this list of people who the Nobel Peace Prize committee passed over in favor of Obama.

(Let us set aside the many ways in which goverment interference, through onerous regulations, stifles the profit making ability of businesses.) The essential argument to make against business bailouts is this: Bailing out enterprises like GM means forcing the consumer, i.e. the tax payer, to pay money to GM without receiving anything in return. The consumer who does not want its products has to pay GM anyways without getting anything for his money. The consumer who has purchased a GM product pays more without receiving more. Bailing businesses out means your right to liberty does not need to be respected. It does not matter whether you want a business’s product or service; you still have to pay the salaries of incompetent executives and to secure the jobs, pensions and healthcare plans of thousands of employees who think it is right that you are forced to sacrifice for them. At bottom, a bailout violates your rights because it negates your freedom of choice. That is why bailouts are immoral.