"What, exactly, is chiropractic, and what would happen if its claims were subjected to serious scrutiny?"

"[I]mprovement after treatment is not always improvement caused by treatment, since much of it arrives with time and attention. ...

"[C]hiropractic [is] not one profession but many: true believers, entrepreneurs, technicians, philosophers, clinicians ... [but w]hat, exactly, [is] chiropractic, and what would happen if its claims were subjected to serious scrutiny? ...

"During the 1980s and 1990s chiropractic researchers launched clinical trials, comparative-effectiveness studies, and collaborations with universities and medical centres.

"Then, the larger, better-designed studies made the clinical picture go soft. Patients improved—sometimes substantially—but the improvement proved stubbornly hard to pin on [chiropractic] manipulation. Natural history, spontaneous recovery, reassurance, exercise, attention, expectancy, and plain contextual healing kept blurring the causal thresholds. Manipulation generally performed about as well as any other conservative care including placebo, and when superior, it closely tracked the false positive rate expected under null hypothesis significance testing. In fact, to this day you will see chiropractic research conclusions proudly assert that manipulation is no less effective than other treatments for low back pain, including controls—a damnation by faint self-praise. ...

"Look closer, though, and the chiropractic 'arm' was not manipulation but, in reality, the effect of repeated visits, education, exercise, reassurance, coaching, ergonomic advice, self-management support, and the whole atmosphere of attentive care. Patients improved; the contribution of [chiropractic] manipulation itself stayed unknown. And when mechanistic studies looked for the distinctive physiological signature—balance, postural sway, neuromuscular response—the effects were weak, inconsistent, or absent. The anticipated effects of chiropractic refused to show up.

"The strongest test arrived recently. In a trial published online in late 2025, a team led by Gert Bronfort reported on a thousand patients ... Over a year, [chiropractic] manipulation by itself was statistically indistinguishable from ordinary medical care on pain and disability—half a century of hope for the adjustment, tested cleanly at last, returning null. ...

"Chiropractic research is alive and well in Denmark, New Zealand, and a handful of other centres, often more rigorous than anything the reform years produced. But the results of more research will not make spinal manipulation more acceptable. It cannot rescue a treatment this marginal; it will only measure it more precisely. ...

"But a literature that will not resolve after enough well-powered attempts is not unfinished. It is null."

~ J. Michael Menke from his post 'An Insider’s Look at What Happened When Chiropractic Was Evaluated Scientifically, and Why No One Remembers'

"More money is not the answer."

"[T]wo salient facts:

• At April 1, 2025, a sole parent with two or more children received on average $1,110 weekly; a couple with two or more children, $1,255 net. 
• In the year to the June 2025 quarter, median weekly income from wages and salaries was $1,380 gross or $1,111 after tax. ...

"There are already a quarter million children living in benefit-dependent homes ... where, the ‘experts’ tell us, it’s a struggle to provide essentials like food and clothing. ...

"More money is not the answer."

~ Lindsay Mitchell from her post 'Bigger benefits won't help children'

"Asset recycling...'

"Selling assets the state does not need, and investing the proceeds in new infrastructure, is called asset recycling, as opposed to selling to repay debt. ... The Crown has no particular reason to own farms, and every reason to want hospitals that work. ...

"I was in Sydney when New South Wales started asset recycling, but the idea appeared sensible yet politically bold and risky. It required political leadership, and New South Wales was lucky to have it. ...

"New South Wales pressed ahead against every warning of political suicide and was rewarded with re-election and a transformed state. New Zealand could write a similar success story. It only needs leaders willing to start."

~ Oliver Hartwich from his post 'New Zealand needs asset recycling to fund its infrastructure future'

"The Bill’s rhetorical appeal rests on the idea that it targets under-16s. Its mechanism does not."

"The Bill’s rhetorical appeal rests on the idea that it targets under-16s. Its mechanism does not.

"To reliably prevent a 15-year-old from holding an account, a platform must satisfy itself about the age of every account-holder — which in practice means age-assuring the entire adult population as well.

"Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster made the point bluntly when the policy was first floated. Keeping under-16s out means ... everyone will have to demonstrate they are not under sixteen, including you.

"This is the paradox the Bill never resolves, and it is not a drafting quibble but the whole problem. ... "[L]iberal societies are meant to presume adults free unless there is an overwhelming reason to constrain them, not to demand identification as the price of entry to the public square.
The Bill’s privacy safeguards, though real, do not answer this."

~ David Harvey from his post 'A Law That the People It Targets Can Defeat With a Felt-Tip Pen'

"People in Iran know they will have to bring down the regime themselves. All they ask is that the west doesn’t throw the regime a lifeline."

“The [Iranian] regime [massacred] up to 40,000 in just two days in January. Since then, an execution spree has killed hundreds, many hung from cranes in public squares. Still more remain on death row. ...

"The Iranian people’s struggle is one of the great democratic and human rights movements of our age. Yet it barely registers within progressive politics in Britain [or here in NZ].

"Part of the problem is that debate on Iran has become trapped in arguments about Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and military intervention. Those are legitimate debates, but they cannot become the only ones. ...

"The Islamic Republic is not simply another authoritarian government. It has spent decades exporting instability throughout the Middle East, supporting proxy terrorist groups and developing nuclear weapons that threaten regional security. It has become an increasingly important military partner of Russia, supplying the drones used against civilians in Ukraine. ...

"For many Iranians, the recent weakening of the Islamic Republic represents the first genuine opportunity in decades to challenge a regime that has ruled through repression, fear and violence. Inside Iran, the choice is no longer between reformers and hardliners. Instead, the conflict appears to be between a society demanding freedom and democracy and a state determined to preserve itself, at any price. ...

"When Donald Trump launched military action in February he urged Iranians to seize control of their destiny and overthrow the regime. The decision to break decades of western appeasement gave hope. Since then the on-off deal making has left many Iranians worried and confused. People in Iran know they will have to bring down the regime themselves. All they ask is that the west doesn’t throw the regime a lifeline."

~ Justin Forsyth from his op-ed 'The oppressed Iranian people are not asking for much – just our support'

"The Green Party’s supermarket policy is a textbook example of how modern ideological movements drift toward retroactive punishment."

Chloe Swarbrick: 'Yes, I alone will decide how much profit you will make. Or not.'

"One of the most valuable inheritances from Roman law is the prohibition on retroactive legislation; the principle that what is lawful today cannot be declared unlawful tomorrow and punished after the fact. Civilisation depends on this. Without it, citizens cannot plan, cannot trust the law, and cannot defend themselves against the State. The rule of law collapses into rule by law — law as a weapon. ...

"The Green Party’s supermarket policy is a textbook example of how modern ideological movements drift toward retroactive punishment. Their proposal to penalise 'excessive profit' or 'price gouging' sounds simple until you ask the only question that matters: excessive according to what standard?

"So far, no standard exists.

"Chlöe Swarbrick has been unable to articulate: 

• how “excessive profit” would be defined, 
• what baseline would be used, 
• whether the metric would be tied to past behaviour, 
• or how businesses could know in advance whether they were compliant.

"Without a clear, objective, forward‑looking definition, the policy becomes retroactive by default. It allows the State to declare, after the fact, that last year’s lawful profit was actually this year’s unlawful 'gouging.' That is not regulation; it is ex post facto punishment disguised as economic justice.

"This is precisely the danger Roman jurists warned about. Law must be knowable before action, not invented after action."

~ Colinxy from his post 'Retroactive Law: When the Past Becomes Illegal'

Markets are people too

[Hat tip Being Objectivist]

Krasnov is a criminal

 

"While Trump makes love to Kim Jong Un and betrays U.S. ally South Korea, North Korean ballistic missiles are slamming into Kyiv. 

"Trump blocks Ukraine from buying or making missile interceptors for Patriot air defence systems, helping the Russian/North Korean attacks get through."

~ Michael McKay [cartoon by "KT"]

Government Failure

“When government engages in a losing venture, it gets doubled in size. But in a market system, if somebody engages in a losing venture, he has to go out of business.”

~ Milton Friedman

"Postmodernism has created a generation of semi-psychotic, semi-neurotic, ignorant, and hostile whim-worshippers."

Philosopher Stephen Hicks writes on the long reach of postmodern philosophy, its insistence on the social construction of reality, and its practical results in the Arday tragedy. 

If influential philosophers teach that “reality” is merely a social construct, then what happens to us in the next, taught generation? We focus primarily on the social — on doing whatever we can to construct social reality according to our wills. We focus on what everyone is thinking and feeling and saying, and “real” reality becomes less significant, even irrelevant, to our psychology. And whenever “reality” is being obstinate — “facts” intrude upon us — that just means we have not been social-constructing hard enough. ...

Phrased neutrally: After first-generation (1960s-1980s) postmodernism’s anti-realism, social subjectivism, and conflict collectivism, the second generation (1980s-2000s) applied the high philosophical theory to their teaching (and non-teaching) in history, law, journalism, education, and politics. We (2000s-2020s) are [now seeing] the third-generation result.

Phrased uncharitably: Postmodernism created a generation of semi-psychotic, semi-neurotic, ignorant, and hostile whim-worshippers.

"What's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this."

"[W]omen, men, of all backgrounds discover, invent and create in ways that uplift themselves and others, thousands, millions ... applying reason, thought, research, enquiry and philosophy to humanity, the world and the universe. ...

"[W]hat's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this."

~ Liberty Scott from his post 'The real tragedy of the Jason Arday story'

"Your needs don't automatically become claims on somebody else's effort"

"Capitalism says inequality can exist, but your needs don't automatically become claims on somebody else's effort. You produce, trade, improve yourself, or persuade others to help voluntarily. 

"Socialism teaches the opposite moral lesson: need itself creates an entitlement and someone else's success creates the corresponding obligation. Follow that premise far enough and failure never teaches self-reliance, it merely produces another person to blame and another demand to make."

~ Rock Chartrand

Wealth taxes

"Defenders of a billionaire tax need to show that government officials would better allocate the relevant resources than billionaire entrepreneurs themselves," says Chris Freiman, "but I’ve yet to see any of them make that case."

Discuss.

"Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one's own antagonists." But not to ban them.

 

"[T]he substantive issues of the case [are] whether four blog posts Bradbury made on his site, 'The Daily Blog,' about O’Brien breached the Harmful Digital Communications Act. ... The details of the posts can still not be publicised. ... She [O'Brien] said she had never sought to 'prevent Martyn Bradbury from criticising my politics, opinions, or public work'."

~ STUFF: '‘Not a free speech absolutist’: FSU board member Ani O’Brien defends using legal action to take on high-profile blogger'

"Freedom of speech means freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government—and nothing else. ... Freedom of speech includes the freedom not to agree, not to listen and not to support one's own antagonists. [But not to have them banned.]"

“It's a curious post-modernist trend for laws to be created not to protect rights based on well-worn principles of individual rights and freedoms … but to 'prevent harm' - to have laws to sanitise life so that 'everyone' is protected."

~ Liberty Scott from his post' Harmful Digital Communications Act indeed'

"Q: What do you think of libel and slander laws?

"A: They are appropriate laws because the freedom of ideas does not permit you to lie about a particular person. Under the older interpretation of the courts, truth was your defense. If you knew something defamatory about some person, but it was true, then you have the right to say it. But today you can practically say anything, so long as your supposedly not motivated by malice. ... There are some standards, but they're not very clear, not very practical.

"This type of law is strictly to protect individuals; it has nothing to do with ideas. It is an issue of 'did you or did you not lie about some person and cause him damage'."

~ Ayn Rand from Ayn Rand Answers 

“New Zealand MPs are so keen to be seen to be 'doing something' about cyber-bullying that they are about to pass a poor piece of law that will do something terrible. If the  Harmful Digital Communications Bill passes, MPs who feel sad because of a media story can have the publisher [or blogger] jailed.” 

~ composite quote from 2015 from No Right Turn and Tim Watkin 

“[Given] that defamation would [otherwise] have applied ... [o]ne wonders whether the point of the [Harmful Digital Communications] Bill, in the view of some MPs, was to silence critics.”

~ Eric Crampton from his 2015 post 'Harmful Digital Communications and chilling effects'

Poverty

"I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

~ Benjamin Franklin from his 1766 essay "On the Price of Corn, and Management of the Poor"

"Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off. Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair."

 

"Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off. 

"Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair. ...

“The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights – coupled with social preferment – over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian. ...

“Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people – and especially humanities and social science academics – think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists – albeit in limited form – in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.

“It took humans centuries to work out that the law should punish individual wrongdoers rather than members of their family, their descendants, or their extended kin group for crimes or civil wrongs. One only need read some of the world’s great literature, both ancient and modern – from Njal’s 'Saga' to 'The Godfather' – to gain imaginative entry to a world where intergenerational and kin-based revenge are norms.

“May I suggest that the world of medieval Iceland or a New York dominated by the Five Families are the sorts of places you probably only want to visit in fiction? We stopped basing punishments on vendetta – a long, slow process of legal evolution starting in early Republican Rome – for good reasons. Societies based on vendetta are places of violent horror and boiling intergenerational resentment.”

~ Helen Dale from her column 'L’affaire Arday'

Economic regulation: coercive rule by political appointees vs. freely negotiated prices

"[M]ost people hold, explicitly or implicitly, that without regulation, markets could, and sometimes would, spin off into disastrous excesses of one form or another.

"The operative image of economic regulation is that of a huge truck without steering or brakes. 'We have to have those instruments of control, or the truck will go careening off the side of a cliff.'

"The truth is that government regulation is precisely the cutting of the brake lines and the seizing up of the steering column.

"The actual alternative is: government regulation vs. market regulation---which means coercive rule by political appointees vs. freely negotiated prices.

"On a free market, when price relationships begin to diverge from economic reality, they are brought back in line because of greed. Speculators, arbitrageurs, and other "profiteers" swoop in to profit from any misalignment.

"Their activity acts to eliminate the very misalignment with reality that created the profit opportunity. ... Whenever prices, including interest rates, diverge from economic reality, there is money to be made in correcting the prices by the appropriate buying and selling.

"And here's the best part: those with the best judgment of economic reality are the ones who make the most money, which means they have the most influence on the market. It is the buying and selling of the Warren Buffets (and their more speculative counterparts) that keep the economy aligned with the facts. ...

"But ... [t]o the extent there is government intervention, the minds of the profit-seekers are thwarted and rewards go not to the Warren Buffets but, at first, to the ward heelers and power brokers, then as the system devolves, power over the economy goes increasingly to those who are better at conning the public. Then, they are replaced by those more willing to use compulsion. The ruthless displace the relatively timid punks, and destruction reigns.

"So, people have it backwards. 'Unregulated' means reason sets the terms and 'regulated' means reason is quashed by political power."

~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'One contradiction in the fear of laissez-faire'

"Children in households with the same low income suffer hardship disproportionately if their parent is on a benefit."

"The source of income matters. A lot.

"Children in households with the same low income suffer hardship disproportionately if their parent is on a benefit. ...

"[The so called Ministry for Social Development] publishes a Child Poverty Report by Bryan Perry and has done so for many years ... The latest edition features a section on Children in 'working' and 'beneficiary' households. ...

"For children in poor working households their material hardship rate was 17 percent; for children in poor beneficiary households, their hardship rate was 47 percent.

"That is a significant difference. ...

"Based on the data ... a child in a poor benefit family is more than three times more likely to be in material hardship than a child in a poor market family.

"Whatever the personal circumstances, it is impossible to build a broad-based case for children growing up on welfare rather than in a working household. ...

"If the Left (Labour, the Greens, TOP and the Maori Party) was sincere about reducing child hardship they'd stop ignoring crucial evidence."

~ Lindsay Mitchell from her post 'What the Left constantly ignores'

"He builds elaborate Keynesian models that treat consumer spending as the engine of prosperity..."

Paul Krugman: "He builds elaborate Keynesian models that treat consumer
spending as the engine of prosperity, ignores the capital structure of
the economy, and then acts surprised when manipulating
aggregate demand produces distortions in real production. 

"Paul Krugman has spent three decades telling you that government spending cures recessions, that deficits don't matter when interest rates are low, and that anyone who warns about inflation is a crank.* 

"Then 2021 happened. 

"The Biden administration pumped $1.9 trillion through the American Rescue Plan in March 2021. Krugman called inflation fears overblown. By June 2022, CPI hit 9.1 percent, the highest since 1981. Krugman's response was to move the goalposts and call it a soft landing when the Fed started hiking rates. [Similarly, here in New Zealand, CPI hit 7.3% in June 2022, a 32-year high, after Grant Robertson's own 'rescue plan' pumped $70 billion into our own small pond.]

"This is the pattern. He builds elaborate Keynesian models that treat consumer spending as the engine of prosperity, ignores the capital structure of the economy, and then acts surprised when manipulating aggregate demand produces distortions in real production. 

"The villain is IS-LM thinking that strips out time, entrepreneurship, and the price signals that actually coordinate economic activity. When you flatten the economy into aggregate demand curves, you produce policy advice that consistently mis-prices risk and encourages central banks to suppress interest rates well below what voluntary savers would accept. 

"Krugman won a Nobel in 2008 for trade theory work that genuinely mattered. But he abandoned rigorous analysis for political performance years before that prize arrived. His New York Times column became a vehicle for justifying whatever the Democratic Party needed justified, with the academic credentials attached as decoration. 

"Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek built their entire framework on the impossibility of central planners processing dispersed local knowledge. Krugman's worldview requires exactly that kind of central management. The [central bank] sets the price of credit for the entire economy, guided in part by intellectual cover that Krugman provides. 

"You pay for that cover every time your purchasing power erodes. But the man with the Nobel told you it was fine."

~ Handre

* Bernard Hickey put on a similar performance here, but without even the pretence of economic acumen. At least people have the excuse of a Nobel Prize and good work in the past for taking Krugman seriously. Galt knows what Hickey has done to deserve attention.

'How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy'

"What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the
biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless
young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?"

"In the last few days, you may have heard about Leopold Aschenbrenner—the wonder kid hedge fund manager who lost tens of billions over the course of a few days. It’s the biggest financial fiasco of the year.

"If you didn’t read about it in the news, don’t worry. Hollywood will certainly make it into a movie. This 25-year-old hot shot’s financial empire was literally collapsing while guests were showing up for his blowout wedding at a fake Tuscan villa in Carmel, California. The screenplay practically writes itself....

"This tyro’s investing strategy looks more like gambling addiction than high finance. Aschenbrenner borrowed to the hilt, using four time leverage to buy AI stocks by the truckload. Then he added to his risk by shorting companies he was sure AI would replace. In other words, instead of hedging his AI position—which is standard practice (and why they call them hedge funds), he doubled down, setting himself up for a failure of Biblical proportions.

"When you take chances like this, even a small downturn in AI stocks will wipe out your entire capital. That’s pretty much what happened last week.

"I wanted to learn more about the young man behind this collapse—so I went to his Wikipedia page. There I discovered his connection to fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and the latter’s Effective Altruism philosophy.

"What are the odds that the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the year is connected to the clueless young bro who created the biggest financial fiasco of the decade?

"But there it is.

And—another coincidence!—the woman who assisted Bankman-Fried, and served 14 months in prison for fraud and money laundering, also helped run her college’s Effective Altruism club.

This is getting to be a trend.

"But, of course, none of this is coincidence...."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'How to Lose $35 Billion with Philosophy'

"If Effective Altruism was a movement that simply called on charities to more rigorously measure their impact, they would be an unequivocal force for good in the world. But that is not all that it argues for. Effective Altruism is a crusading movement that argues you have a moral obligation to 'do the most good' in the world, and it defines 'the most good' in strictly utilitarian terms.

"'The most good' means promoting humanity’s well-being. Morally, you are to be indifferent between your own life and the lives of others. Since those others vastly outnumber you, this means in practice a demand for radical self-sacrifice.

"No, Effective Altruists don’t take this to its ultimate, consistent conclusion. You don’t have to literally turn yourself into a meal for others to feast on. But the closer you can strive to lower your own standard of living in order to raise the standard of living of those worse off than you, the better. (See “Peter Singer is Truly Awful.”)

"And it’s not just your wealth that you’re supposed to sacrifice. You’re supposed to sacrifice the irreplaceable moments of your life: instead of choosing a career that you love, Effective Altruists urge you to choose a career that will maximize your earnings so you’ll have more wealth to give away. You’re even supposed to give away your internal organs to strangers. (See “How Many Kidneys Does Sam Harris Have?”)

"In short, the basic moral premise Effective Altruists crusades for is that you don’t have a right to exist for the sake of your own happiness—you exist as a tool to serve others.

"But that raises a troubling question: why bother saving lives in the first place? So that there are more servants to serve servants to serve servants? If more people exist, but exist in the soul-crushing state of living death Rand describes in [her early novel] 'We the Living,' is that really a victory? If the happiness of a single individual is not sacrosanct, if we are all to throw away our lives to maximise some 'general good' that is good for no one in particular, then what the hell is the point?

"Effective Altruists may be reducing deaths—but they are enemies of life. And, actually, it’s not even clear they are reducing deaths...."

~ Don Watkins from his 2023 post 'Has Effective Altruism done anything good for the world?' [emphases in the original]

Crypto scammer Sam Bankman-Fried in his proper place

"Sam Bankman-Fried [CEO of the fraudulent FTX cryptocurrency exchange], was a leading advocate for and financial sponsor of the 'effective altruist' movement. ...

"Whatever the role of Bankman-Fried’s philosophy in FTX’s collapse, effective altruism is increasingly influential and warrants scrutiny. In essence, effective altruism stresses the importance of using a [long-term] rational, scientific approach to calculate the most efficient way to help the most people, especially through charitable giving, as opposed to giving your money away for sentimental reasons. It attracts an audience of highly intelligent, scientifically oriented, secular people.

"But the more we learn about the causes the effective altruist leadership has embraced, the more we should question the moral foundation of the movement. As we’ll see, this is something that even the movement’s fiercest critics have been unwilling to do. ...

"[Some] critics of longtermist altruism claim that its obsession with sci-fi hypotheticals is inexcusable when there are real people suffering and dying in our world today. ... Still others claim the problem isn’t amoralism, but excessive idealism ... None of these critics seriously consider the intellectual content of the ideal of altruism itself ... [especially] longtermism’s call for all of us to sacrifice to the distant future. ...

"Remember, 'the future is big.' If altruism is to be understood in the popular utilitarian way, by looking to consequences of one’s actions for the largest number of people, why wouldn’t one look to the very long-term future where most of the other people will be? ... [after all] a utilitarian concerned with the impersonal consequences of our actions should regard distance in time as no more morally significant than distance in space.

"Although they’re criticised for reaching absurd conclusions, longtermists like MacAskill and Bankman-Fried are just following the logic of the path that’s been laid down by eminent moral philosophers. To simplify that path: morality is really about caring more about others than about yourself, since there are so many more others than you who need your equal attention. And the best way to be concerned with the most others who are far away from your rather insignificant, fragmented self is to concern yourself with the vast future beyond your interests.

"If longtermism is absurd, but the longtermists are just following the logic of the altruist moral ideal, we should take seriously that this ideal is the real source of longtermist absurdities. ...

"In the wake of the FTX scandal, [Bankman-Fried's teacher] William MacAskill himself weighed in on Twitter to condemn Bankman-Fried, arguing that serious effective altruists do not use naked 'end justifies the means' reasoning, and instead value integrity and honesty. Yet, as one philosopher responding to MacAskill noted, utilitarians who see some utility in “common sense morality” can be reliably counted on to say we can suspend it when there are big enough stakes.

"Any philosophy is subject to cynical use and manipulation by insincere advocates. But a philosophy that gives a pass to anyone who is not acting for his own sake but only for the sake of others is uniquely subject to abuse. A philosophy that says give up what you love and work for others is a tool in the hands of anyone who is willing to speak on behalf of others to gain power over those willing to give up what they love. It’s an especially dangerous tool when those who gain the power convince themselves that it is noble to use it, not for their own sake, but for the sake of a nameless, faceless future [for which they claim to speak].

"How, indeed, would one apply such a philosophy without abusing the lives of the people who practice it? Ayn Rand put her finger on the essence of the altruist morality long before advocates of altruism began to make their meaning as explicit as the effective altruists now have. In her novel 'Atlas Shrugged,' she puts these words in the mouth of one character whose workplace has adopted a similar philosophy: 'Do you care to imagine what it would be like, if you had to live and to work, when you’re tied to all the disasters and all the malingering of the globe? . . . To work — on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you’ll never see, whose needs you’ll never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question — just to work and work and work — and leave it up to the [altruists] of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and the days of your life. And this is the moral law to accept? This — a moral ideal?'"

~ Ben Bayer in his 2023 explanatory post 'Effective Altruism’s Faith-Based Sacrifice for the Future'

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master."

~ Ayn Rand from her chapter '"The Soul of a Collectivist,' in her 1963 book For the New Intellectual