Nicky Cheese

Observe:

• Fidel transfers power to his brother and, thereby, saves the Cuban people from the indignity of electoral choice. Congressman Serrano’s (D-NY) first instinct is to publicly congratulate the dictator.

• Bruce Raynor, president of the union UNITE HERE!, urges legislators to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act (a misnomer of monumental proportions), and thereby, spare potential union-workers the burden of democracy. According to Raynor, “There’s no reason to subject workers to an election.”

Yikes. Since when has Ellsworth Toohey become an influential moral spokesman?

Ellsworth Toohey, for those of you unaware, is the unabashed collectivist within Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. “His” thoughts on freedom below:

The basic trouble with the modern world … is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is forced upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.