Government School Follies

Tibor R. Machan

France, England, Germany, and who knows which other countries are in deep dodo because of the impossibility of supporting both multiculturalism and state school policies. The former is in fact a corollary of individual liberty—in a free country one may practice whatever cultural practice one wants, provided others’ rights aren’t violated. Thus, wearing a black veil—niqab—should not be banned, while, of course, female circumcision should, the former being a peaceful if unusual while the latter a violent practice. The latter are the policies enforced in government schools which simply could not exist in a free country. But since they exist in early all countries, including in the free West, the conflict is unavoidable.

Educational administrators have their idea of what, for example, is proper dress in schools, for a variety of reasons, some of which may be a bit loony, some quite sound. Parents, however, ought to be free to send their children to schools with administration policies of which they approve. Not all children require identical school practices and shopping among them is what freedom is about. A free market in education would make this possible.

What makes educational diversity, along with diversity of school rules, nearly impossible is the policy of government—or “public”—education that is anything but free in the important sense of that term. (Of course, it isn’t free even in the sense of being cost-less to those who have to send their kids there; they pay in property taxes and in the loss of other opportunities for educating their kids.) Such education is coercive and imposes extensive uniformity in an area where just the opposite is most fruitful, namely, where alternative approaches to education should be competing and experimenting.

But when government runs something that it should not run, such as education (as well as such obviously diverse elements of culture as museums, concert halls, theaters, athletic competitions), the problem will inevitably surface that some citizens will be put upon while others will want their ways to be imposed on all. Everyone will want to control the "public" turf so his or her way will be the one size that will be imposed on everyone else. This is akin to how in some countries different religions fight for the public square.

In a fully free country there would be innumerable types and kinds of educational institutions. Many would be similar, but quite a few would be unique, different from most. Some would admit children whose parents want them to get mainly religious instructions, others those whose parents would not want this but focus mostly on science; some would go to schools with extensive athletic programs, others to one’s where the arts are emphasized. Some would be Roman Catholic, some Muslim, some Hindu, some completely secular—you get the idea.

The same would be the case with various other cultural institutions that have been conquered by government—actually, that are relics of the supposedly obsolete monarchical system or modern tyrannies where the royal head's or dictator's entourage could call the shots about nearly everything. Museums, for example, have to struggle with the artistic sensibilities of those who manage them versus the will of the public being taxed to fund them. And when one side wins, the others becomes alienated and this characterizes much of the cultural and political atmosphere.

Instead education, the arts, and the rest should be dealt with the way religion is, at least largely, in America. Everyone gets to go to his or her own church or temple or synagogue, with no one having to pay for it and encounter unwanted rituals, practices, customs, and sermons. This is, of course, only possible in a society that respects the fundamental right to private property, a right that implies both the exit option and the authority to keep those who are unwelcome outside. But because there are thousands of alternatives to choose from, conflicts can be avoided far more effectively than when government, making policies for all about matters that are highly diverse and involved deep seated human differences, tries to administer matters at everyone’s expense.

No doubt, this idea will immediately meet with the lament, “But what will happen to the poor?” No one seems to worry that there are poor people who must confront the issue when it comes to religion—some religions are poorly and some are richly supported and funded in free countries. And despite how important millions of people believe religions is in people’s lives, few, at least in American, cry for government funding and administration of their churches.

It is high time to extend the revolution toward a fully free society into the area of education and apply the principle there that is well accepted in religion—the separation of it from government. Aside from according with the principle of individual rights, it would also promote just peace and reasonable tolerance.

SOME GOOD THINGS!

Tibor R. Machan

Those who write about politics are bound to complain a lot. No wonder. Throughout human history governments have perpetrated more misery than all criminals combined. Indeed, it is probably true beyond any reasonable doubt that most governments have been criminal gangs -- conquerors, bullies, robbers, murderers, ethnic cleansers and other type of oppressors. It is governments, so-called, that have started wars, enslaved huge numbers of people, kept minorities destitute and powerless.

Sure, governments have had the support of many civilians but these civilians rarely had the weapons to carry out the vicious deeds for which governments are famous. Civilians can only implore, urge, plead, try to bribe -- it takes those who hold and wield power to actually commit the vile deeds. (One reason I have never been an avid supporter of the police is that however much good they do, they also tend to blindly carry out the orders of governments, orders that on the whole tend to be directed toward violating the rights of individuals all over the place. How can one admire a profession that simply "follows orders?")

Yet, all this focus on government and its misdeeds throughout the ages and around the globe can give the wrong impression. It is as if nothing good happened anywhere. But that is to confuse government with the rest of society. And in most societies there is ample good going on. Most human relations apart from government are pretty decent, even admirable. All the creativity and productivity we have around us -- those activities that enhance efficiency, those that contribute to beauty and comfort, those that heal and cure -- come not from government but from individuals cooperating in society. (I hesitate to call it the "private" sector because strictly speaking these social undertakings are not private but very much cooperative.)

Someone who focuses on all the misdeeds of governments may seem oblivious to all the wonderful results of free social cooperation and, also, of individual initiative. As an avid fan of novels, both classical and popular music, the arts, the crafts and the sciences, I am especially concerned that we in the media don't stress all the good which comes from these corners.

Each night I go to sleep to the sounds of music -- three hundred CDs playing randomly, filling my little home with the most wonderful sounds. (I could list dozens and dozens of particular performers and artists but I am sure you can fill up your own list.) Each night I read about 10 pages from yet another novel that thrills me, that takes me into the souls of carefully imagined characters. Each night I walk to my bedroom taking a look at one or another of the paintings on my walls. And when I do this, I am so grateful for all that creativity, sensitivity, imagination that fills my life with joy.

Many years ago I saw a Seventh Day Adventist bumper sticker that read, "Notice the good and praise it," and I have been a devoted follower of this little, not widely enough heeded, motto. There is really so much that is utterly fabulous in our world, from one's neighborhood to the farthest corners. But if one keeps thinking only of what politicians and bureaucrats do and say, one will miss out on these. Then there are, of course, the joys of one's family and friends and, yes, even colleagues and associates. And all these are quite sufficient to offset a good deal of the destructiveness perpetrated by government and its lackeys, those, sadly, who keep being honored with buildings and statutes and institutes and such. In newspapers there is rarely much fuss about the latest novel a local citizen has written, a beautiful painting someone in the city has painted, a symphony or song or musical composed -- certainly not on the front pages. Yet those are the substance of most of our lives. But when one turns on th e so-called news, national or local, the bulk of what is thrust at us consists of nothing but misery.

I will, of course, continue to harp on all the bad stuff, hoping it may make a bit of difference. But it is also vital to make note of just how much good stuff there is to go around.

Unjust Laws of Commerce

Tibor R. Machan

Often I think of how journalists, ministers, and others protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution have an advantage over most other professionals. What’s bad about this is that those other professionals do not have their rights to be free equally protected. This shows that there's unjust discrimination built into the most basic American law. (Check it out—there is no government agency regulating professionals in journalism or religion, while there are dozens regulating those in commerce, medicine, psychology, transportation, farming, and so forth—and ask yourself, why is this discrimination supposed to be OK!)

But there are certain other instances of unjust discrimination widespread within and fully supported by the legal system. These are perpetrated against producers, as compared with consumers, and employers as compared with employees. Producers, you see, are extensively regulated in how they choose to relate to consumers; as are employers in how they choose to deal with employees. Producers, for instance, may not discriminate as they choose their customers or clients. In a restaurant the proprietor may not bar people he or she dislikes from coming there to eat. That is against the law. So would be for a store to refuse to sell to someone based on various kinds of biases. In contrast, however, customers may avoid stores for exactly the same reason.

Sure, in some establishments there’s a sign stating: “We reserve the right refuse service to anyone,” but it is pure bunk—in America no such right of free association is protected for merchants, mainly because of an irrational backlash from widespread racism and segregation of the past. Never mind that such racism and segregation prevailed mostly because the government enforced it and when the shift began to occur, it came from the private sector first. (Yes, Virginia, it was privately owned railroads that wanted to do away with racial segregation on trains and the government resisted this! And, earlier, it was in part because private schools did not discriminate on the basis of race that public schools were established to replace them.)

In the case of employer and employee, once again the employer’s bias is prohibited but employees clearly may indulge theirs if they so choose. If someone refuses to apply for a job for which he or she is fully qualified, merely because of prejudice against the employer, this can be done with total impunity. There used to be a doctrine once, called “employment at will,” in line with which both employer and employee had their right of free association protected by law. Employers could be let go and employees could leave and no one could object, whatever the reason was, unless a contract had been violated. Not so now. In today’s employment climate only employees have their right of free association protected by law—whatever the reason, if an employee wants to leave and isn’t in violation of a contract, he or she is entirely free go and the employer has nothing to say about it.

Does it impose burdens on employers that employees can leave “at will”? Of course, but so what? If my girlfriend leaves me, that too hurts but I have no authority to keep her around against her will. Yet, employers are forbidden to exercise their right of free association; they may not follow the doctrine of “employment at will” but need umpteen formal, often economically debilitating justifications for laying someone off. They have to be fair, never mind what they want.

And this is where the ironic injustice comes in: the fact that employers don’t get to employ but employees do get to walk away at will is quite unjust. It is also unjust that merchants must serve anyone who chooses to seek their services, while customers may discriminate to their hearts’ content. Sure, the unfairness in both cases is quite unavoidable. There is nothing to be done about it, nor should anything be tried—it would give rise to a totalitarian police state to attempt to remedy such unfairness. What is not appreciated that all kinds of attempts to remedy unfairness are moving toward totalitarian regimentation. And that is entirely unbecoming a bona fide free society.

Oddly, many people on the Left denounce those on the Right for trying to regulate morality, yet attempts to enforce standards of fairness are exactly the same thing, regulation of morality, only based on a different moral standard. Both the Right and the Left are perfectly willing to deny free choice to individuals in order to promote various types of so called moral behavior while failing to acknowledge that regulated morality is no morality at all.

What is moral or ethical is often very much dependent on the context—general principles are not, but how they are acted on are. So the law must stay out of dictating to us what we ought to do except when we violate the rights of others. The discriminatory deployment of anti-discrimination laws are just one example of the mess that’s created when this is ignored.

Sam Harris and Altruism

by Tibor R. Machan

In his recent book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, And the Future of Reason (Norton, 2004), Sam Harris advances some of his thoughtful reasons for doubting the merits of a religious outlook on the world, especially with regard to politics. Harris has spawned a bit of a revolution with this work, putting many who insist that religion is essential for a civilized and peaceful life on the defensive.

In a column he penned for The Boston Globe the other day, Harris goes further and argues, contrary to widespread opinion, that religion is not only not a necessary foundation for morality but actually incompatible with genuine morality. That widespread opinion is, of course, reinforced in such classic (but dubiously attributed) quotations from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, as "If there is no God, that means everything is permitted/allowed/permissible." Harris argues, instead, that

"The truth is that the only rational basis for morality is a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings. This emphasis on the happiness and suffering of others explains why we don’t have moral obligations toward rocks. It also explains why (generally speaking) people deserve greater moral concern than animals, and why certain animals concern us more than others. If we show more sensitivity to the experience of chimpanzees than to the experience of crickets, we do so because there is a relationship between the size and complexity of a creature's brain and its experience of the world."

My concern here isn't with the battle Sam Harris is carrying on with religion but with whether or not he is right about morality. Is "a concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings" a rational basis for it? Arguably, Harris is wrong here.

Perhaps the most explicitly rational ethics comes to us from the work of Aristotle, in 350 BC, in his book The Nicomachean Ethics. In this work one of the greatest philosophers in human history argues that the only rational basis for morality is human nature. Our nature, which is that of a rational animal, supports the idea that our moral or ethical excellence amounts to living life by our reason. And the first purpose or goal of such a rationally lived life is not "concern for the happiness and suffering of other conscious beings" but our own human happiness.

All of the ethical or moral virtues Aristotle identifies have as their aim, when we practice them conscientiously, to achieve human happiness in the agent's life. It is true, of course, that this rational ethics or morality includes as a very important virtue being generous or liberal toward others. But it also includes being prudent, courageous, moderate, temperate, honest, and, in politics, just. The most important imperative in this most rational of ethics is to live by right reason or prudence.

If one thinks for a moment, it would turn out to be very odd indeed to urge human beings to concern themselves primarily with others -- why on earth would others be more deserving of concern than one's self? Not only does one know one's own situation better than the situation of others so that one can act most responsibly about one's self. Not only does a concern for others as a primary responsibility tend to encourage meddlesomeness and intrusiveness other than in emergencies. But most importantly, one is, after all, a human being whose life is every bit as worthwhile as the life of another. So why then focus mainly on the lives of others, unless one has made a promise to take up that task as parents do?

In the modern age many moral philosophers have promoted altruism but that is because they believed that caring for one's self came naturally, automatically. So it would be redundant to have a moral system that also directs us to do this. Once the instinct or drive for self-preservation was accepted as innate, then it made sense to focus ethics or morality on interpersonal matters. Such was the thinking since the time of Thomas Hobbes, for example in the ethics of Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, among others.

If, however, we aren't hardwired to care for ourselves, if there is no selfish instinct in us -- and judging by the colossal mess throughout the world and history, it is a dubious idea that we all naturally take good care of ourselves -- then we must be prudent first, take good care of ourselves. Nor can we be any good to others if we do not do so.

Harris is mistaken to think that our first ethical responsibility is others -- and this quip from W. H. Auden makes pretty clear why the idea is not at all rational: "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know."

Freedom of Religion Misunderstood

by Tibor R. Machan

One of my guilty pleasures is watching Boston Legal, a current David E. Kelley television product. Kelley created The Practice, as well as Ally McBeal, and most of what he does is intelligent and often quite funny.

In a recent episode of Boston Legal, however, one of the topics, the right to freedom of religion, got a serious mistreatment. A favorite character has started his own law firm and hired a fellow lawyer on an "at will" basis—meaning, strictly, the relationship could be terminated by either employer or employee if either of them so chose—and shortly afterwards, because the lawyer was an outspoken Scientologist, the protagonist fired the lawyer whose religious babbling in the office he couldn't stomach.

He was promptly sued—the whole show is about everyone suing everyone about nearly anything. In many of the cases on Boston Legal there is at least a semblance of accuracy vis-a-vis American law and there is, also, a strong bias in favor of the contemporary liberal agenda: anti-big business, pro-affirmative action, anti-conservative, anti-Republican, anti-capitalist, anti-Patriot Act, pro-environmental harassment of everyone, pro-government regulation of nearly everything under the sun (mainly under the guise of helping the downtrodden), etc., etc. Pretty typical Hollywood fare, only a bit more clever and funny rather than, say, the moroseness of nearly all the rest (e.g., West Wing).

However, in this episode there was a glaring misunderstanding of the concept of the right to freedom of religion, so much so that in trying to make the case for the protagonist's right to fire the avid Scientologist, the firm's top lawyer Alan Shore, played by James Spader, actually advocated compromising the First Amendment protection of the right to freedom of religion so as to make room for the perfectly reasonable dismissal of the scientologist. Instead of standing up for the principle of employment at will, an extension of the principle of the right of free association—which means, insisting that the protagonist could let the lawyer go with as much justice as the lawyer could leave if he wanted to—Shore argued that we are taking the principle of the right to freedom of religion too far and the law is treating religion in general too uncritically by defending everyone's right to his or her religion, period. (One item on Kelley’s agenda is to bash religion but usually indirectly!)

Apart from defending the employment at will doctrine, which was mentioned but then quickly left aside, the defense on this particular program could also have used a private property rights defense. After all, on the premises owned by the defendant, there is no freedom of religion. Just think—your work place isn't there for you to advocate your religion, politics, or any other conviction. It's there for you to do your job.

Even in my profession, university teaching, where a special doctrine of academic freedom is widely accepted, it doesn't mean one can just do anything in one's classes. No, one has to teach one's subject matter but if one writes a book or gives a special lecture, one may say nearly anything (well, provided it is not too politically incorrect!). And certainly if you visit me and start spouting views I detest, if I make you leave my home I am not violating your right to freedom of speech!

Similarly, if you own a law firm and hire an attorney, he or she may not make the premises into some personal bully pulpit. In short, the right to freedom of religion exists on one's own premises—one's own home, office, plant, farm, book, newspaper or magazine pages, etc. One may not just up and sermonize in someone else's office! If I go to a restaurant to have a meal and instead stand on my table and try to deliver a political talk or religion sermon, and then the proprietor throws me out, I have no grounds for protesting that my freedom of speech was violated. (Of course, the proprietor could permit me to make my pitch but that isn't a matter of my right but his or her choice!). Even on so called public property one's right to freedom of speech will usually conflict with the rights of some other member of the public—a version of the tragedy of the commons and one good reason to reduce the public realm to a minimum!

Sad thing is that Mr. Kelly & Co. appear to be so hostile to the free marketplace, with its firm adherence to the right to private property (as well as employment at will), that they are defenseless against irrational demands (such as wanting to keep one's job against the employer's will) ruling the day. Not even another basic right, namely, to freedom of association, can gain a good hearing at the hands of these modern liberal Hollywood types—after all, what would such a principle make of mandated affirmative action or all the anti-discrimination laws? For these folks in the marketplace all rights are subject to being abrogated by the government for various worthy social purposes.

Is Asking for Consistency Extremism?

by Tibor R. Machan

In my business ethics class, someone recently brought up the issue of consistency—why is it desirable to be consistent, why are contradictions frowned upon? Maybe it is some kind of Eurocentric prejudice, all this emphasis on logic and rationality.

Certainly among the famous thinkers and writers there have been some who complained about insisting on these ideals that were hammered out in ancient Greece, mostly by the philosopher Aristotle. Herman Hesse, the poet, and the famous Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky—especially via his main character in Notes from the Underground (who may or may not be giving views with which he sympathizes)—have advanced the idea that reason and logic are restrictive. Indeed, much of contemporary multiculturalism carries that implication—all that emphasis on logic and rationality has no universal validity at all but amounts instead to virtual coercive impositions by those of one culture on those of the rest.

OK, this is a huge topic and only a bit of it can be treated here; namely, why consistency is desirable. First of all, because reality itself is governed by principles that are the basis of logic and rationality. It really is the case that one cannot both be at home and not at home at the same time, in the same respect; nor can one be both a fireman and not one, nor can something be round and not round all at once. And so with everything—the law of identity just isn't flexible. This is why a proposed scientific theory which contains a contradiction or inconsistency is dead in the water. And why self-contradictory testimony given in court completely discredits the witness.

As already noted, some have argued recently, along lines of the Underground Man, that all this stress on logic and reason is nothing more than Eurocentric prejudice, indeed a kind of wrongful cultural imperialism. Why should we adhere to views hatched in ancient Greece, by such folks as Socrates and Aristotle? Their prevalence is but a sign of their power, not of any superior virtue or wisdom. That's one of the themes of multiculturalism. All cultures are alike; none is superior or inferior to any other. That's not only a point about the ethical views being championed but even about the fundamental criterion of what makes sense and what cannot make sense.

A milder version of the multicultural thesis is that insisting on consistency in human affairs is too idealistic, certainly unrealistic. That is often said about politics, especially, where we are urged by some to be more tolerant of messiness, of murkiness, of fuzziness.

Here the problem is not only that trying to remain consistent and insisting that public officials do so as well is exactly the same as insisting on being reasonable, on staying true to the nature of reality. Another problem is that such a request confuses what is reasonable to expect with what is reasonable to insist on.

Of course human beings aren't likely to be consistent, logical, and rational all the time and in all matters. Some may well be so but most are likely to fall short. That's a bit like expecting total fitness from people, or only healthful eating practices. Such expectations are unreasonable themselves, which is why one should be wary of them.

But as far as insisting on logic and rationality, consistency and abstaining from self-contradiction, these are completely unobjectionable, indeed fully justified. We ought to strive to be consistent, logical, sensible, and rational—it is indeed our basic human responsibility to do so. Just as standards of good health should be kept in mind whenever possible, so with standards of sound thinking.

Moreover, just because it is not likely that everyone will live up to such standards, it doesn't follow that trying and urging us to do so is unreasonable. In fact, failing to try is just what produces more and more confusion, more and more incoherence and, indeed, chaos, say, in politics, marriage, child-rearing and so forth. It also gives people the excuse that there is nothing amiss when they hold contradictory ideas and promote contradictory policies. That we aren't likely to constantly live up to those standards is not a reason to abandon or especially deride them, anymore than the improbability of living a completely healthful life supports the idea that we ought to deride trying to do so.

Respect our Enemies— Why?

by Tibor R. Machan

Freeman Dyson, who is a famous physicist and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University, wrote the following lines in The New York Review of Books that are, in my view, worth reflecting upon:

"Yes, I wrote that we should respect our enemies as human beings in order to understand them. I do not tract or apologize for this statement. I would like only to add a more general statement, that our lack of respect for our enemies made it harder for us to deal with them effectively." [11/02/2006. p. 63]

OK, where to begin? Why should one respect someone as a human being? Does being a human being amount to some worthwhile achievement? No. Why then respect one merely for being human—Hitler was human, Ted Bundy was human, slaveholders were human, child molesters are human and it is pretty preposterous to consider all of them worthy of any sort of respect (although perhaps some did some few things that may be so, say, kept a clean house or treated their pets nicely). So, that part of Professor Dyson's claim is arguably false, unless, at least, it is seriously modified or amended.

Why would lack of respect imply lack of understanding? Much of the world around us deserves no respect at all, yet we can understand it pretty well. As a physicist, does Professor Dyson respect the electron or the quark? Do these inanimate, non-conscious beings go about earning our respect? Just how would that be, since they make no decisions, good or bad, worthwhile or not? Or are we to just respect anything, in which case the concept loses all of its distinctive meaning.

It looks like, then, that we could well come to understand our enemies, too, without respecting them. Of course, if "respect" amounts to nothing more than "giving something its due," including anything at all, regardless of accomplishment or merit, then, yes, by all means let's respect our enemies, as well as everything we need to understand—hurricanes, viruses, the plague, vicious crooks, and so forth. But then, once again, "respect" is being used quite idiosyncratically.

Now if "respect" is really synonymous with "understand," then the last part of Professor Dyson’s point is a tautology, an empty utterance—let's understand our enemies because if we don't, we won't understand them. No big news here.

Actually, often to understand our enemies it is imperative that we have no respect for them. Respecting them could well prejudice our understanding of them. We may be tempted to ascribe to them good qualities they do not have and by such means be tempted to misunderstand them quite seriously.

Now I am not familiar with Professor Dyson's complete philosophy and do not know whether, as a physicist, he believes in ethics, in the idea that some people are more deserving than others because of how they choose to act. It is often the case with natural scientists that they view the world as morally neutral, through and through, to the point that ethics is precluded even from an understanding of human existence. It is all just que sera, sera for them, with no personal responsibility, no freedom of will possible.

In such a case talk of respect is, of course, superfluous—at most it means being awed by the world, by all of it, by what are deemed vicious and virtuous deeds equally. But then, of course, the idea of an enemy goes by the wayside, too. At most some things may have adverse impact on some other things but there can be no enemy since all sides are simply playing out the ways of impersonal nature. Sure, the lion may be the enemy of the zebra and the zebra of the grass, but all such talk is myth, without any possibility of truth to it.

But as I said, I am not sure if that is how Professor Dyson looks at things—I suspect his ideas on such matters are complicated. So let us just stick to what he believed is worth presenting to the readers of The New York Review of Books.

And all in all those ideas, albeit put cryptically, don't amount to much that's useful or true. The implicit doctrine of tolerance that they contain—let's respect everyone, enemy and friend alike—is, I submit, more dangerous than the occasional mindless moralism some of his adversaries may evince. To tolerate the intolerable, as that famous neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse argued many moons ago with his doctrine of repressive tolerance, is not a virtue but a vice. If nothing else, Professor Dyson might acknowledge this fact as he considers the worthiness of those who disagree with him about these matters.

Society isn't Government

by Tibor R. Machan

David Brooks, The New York Times's conservative columnist, gave us a good example (in his Sunday, October 15 column) of a widespread confusion, especially among pundits, wonks, those too close to Washington. Let me quote his non sequitur for you. Presumptuously speaking for us, he states: "We don't think government can be neutral on values issues," like social libertarians do. "Nations are held together by shared beliefs. People flourish because they have been encouraged by society to adopt certain habits and behaviors. It's a chimera to believe individuals come up with solutions to moral questions alone: human beings are social creatures whose actions and views are profoundly shaped by the social fabric that binds them." OK, do you notice the problem?

Why on earth does Brooks assume that government's neutrality about values—and of course social libertarians mean personal moral values, not the character of law and public policy, which all libertarians claim ought to favor individual rights and thus aren't neutral about at all—implies that society, which is to say all those others with whom we all associate in our lives, should not encourage us "to adopt certain habits and behaviors?" Nothing like that follows from the idea that government's business is with a very narrow set of values, namely, as the American Founders put it, "to secure [our] rights."

Consider this: Social libertarians do not believe government ought to cook our meals, devise our exercise regime, select for us our careers, determine whom we date, decide how we should amuse ourselves and so forth. None of that is the job of the government in a free society. Yet these libertarians certainly don't have the utterly absurd idea that the people with whom we are close should have no say about any of this. Our friends and relatives and even colleagues and neighbors do and certainly should encourage or discourage us in how we act and in our behaviors. Society is very much part of the life of free men and women—society is where one learns to flourish, with the advice and encouragement of all those whom one respects.

What does government have to do with any of this? Why is the sheriff, who has a big enough job keeping the peace in the village, become not only the peacekeeper but also the dentist, preacher, teacher, editor, and whoever else influences our daily lives for us? By getting all entangled in what is a job for "society," which is to say for all those civilians who surround us, a very dangerous shift occurs. Instead of focusing on the difficult task of keeping the peace, and keeping it in a civilized rather than barbaric fashion—with what is called due process of law—the busybody sheriff will neglect his proper duties and employ his forcible means to try to shape our lives. That, I submit, is the road to totalitarianism and the only reason we haven't quite gone all the way there is that the social libertarian attitude is still live and kicking in much of our culture.

It won't be long, however, if the likes of Mr. Brooks get their way. Their careless equivocation between government and society is just what has fueled the totalitarian temptation throughout the world, whereby government takes over the totality of the lives of the citizenry and refuses to stick to what it could do well, namely, deploy its unique tool of physical force and its threat only where it is required—where crimes are being committed.

It is a sad thing that conservative pundits like Mr. Brooks have forgotten the main thing they are supposed to conserve in this country, namely, the principles of a free society. Once they start drifting in the direction of conservatives elsewhere around the globe—where the past that's to be conserved does not include the classical liberal or, if you will, social libertarian ideas of the American Founders (who believed in limited government)—they will steer government astray. They will, instead, encourage, in their capacity as vocal members of society, very bad actions and behaviors on the part of both government and the citizenry.

What’s the Fuss About Materialism?

Tibor R. Machan

You may recall that Osama bin Laden’s big complaint about the West and Americans in particular—resting in large part on his Islamic faith—is just how materialistic they all are. What’s that, this materialism, of which so many people are supposedly guilty and for which they may be killed with impunity? (Yes, Virginia, the animosity by Muslims toward infidels and such isn't based on US support of Israel or any such recent particulars--just check out Efraim Karsh's account, in his recent book, Islamic Imperialism [Yale, 2006].)

Before getting to the charge of materialism, it should be noted that whatever this doctrine is, assuming there are billions of us in the West who are materialists, that by no stretch of the imagination justifies terrorist attacks upon us. Nor does our supposed infidelity, whatever that is supposed to be—atheism, Christianity, refusal to convert to Islam, whatever. None of that authorizes anyone to attack us, not for a second. Sure, it may provide Muslims with a motive for trying to convert us—every religion, indeed, every point of view, inclines those who believe it to try to spread the thing but it does not entitle them to use force in the process. There is absolutely no merit in believing something because one has been forced to do so even if it is God’s greatest truth. Belief must come from free ascent, not fear, not, certainly, from mindless compliance. So, even if Islam is indeed God’s truth, the only proper way to spread it, to get nonbelievers to adhere to it, is peacefully. Anything else makes "conversion" entirely phony, artificial, and thus totally worthless even in terms of the faith itself even if the faithful and their holy book would have it otherwise.

OK, but what is this materialism of which so many millions are accused and which is given as a strong reason for unleashing brutal, merciless violence upon them?

Actually, materialism is many things. First, it is a metaphysical position that claims that everything that exists is made of nothing but matter. This is a very obscure idea, of course, since just what matter is supposed to be has always been in question. One idea is that anything that has mass is matter, or material.

A second prominent understanding of materialism is that it consists of liking and desiring stuff, of wanting more and more stuff, and stuff is whatever is made of matter.

The two senses of “materialism” are related. If the first is true and everything that exists is indeed matter, than one cannot escape being a materialist except by being terribly mistaken about what the world is like. Suppose you believe in ghosts. Now ghosts are supposed to be disembodied living things, so if everything is made of matter, there can be no ghosts and those who believe in them are flat out wrong. And wanting stuff is thought to follow from believing there is nothing but stuff in the world.

Since, however, the nature of matter is obscure, no one can be a materialist in any meaningful sense; no one can make it out what it is to be one. As to the other sense of materialism, namely, that one who is a materialist prefers to have a lot of stuff—likes to shop and accumulate various goodies and so forth—it has its own problems. That’s because there simply is no stuff people want that is, well, just stuff. Perhaps if someone simply collected a lot of raw dirt or sand or other shapeless mass, it would qualify as being interested in having stuff but there aren’t folks like that, not in the West, not in the East, nowhere.

What most of us do want is this and that—cars, houses, vases, CDs, home videos, books, chairs, paintings, gardens and the flowers and vegetables in them, and so on and so forth. If one is a collector of classic cars or of fancy watches or ancient artifacts—you name it, whatever it is that is being collected—none of this is simply stuff. What people tend to want, more or less of, is various kinds of things, most of them shaped by the human imagination, most of them created with ingenuity, most of them useful for this or that purpose. No one wants just stuff, although some may want more of something than makes sense.

In fact, there is no mere stuff lying about to want—it is all this or that, something or other. Even if one wants fancy rocks or gold or silver or petrified wood or sea shells, these are all desired mainly because of the beauty people see in them, not because they are simply stuff.

So, then, what is all this hostility toward materialism when either it doesn’t mean much or what it means is very, very benign indeed. (Consider, if one wants church artifacts, or merely admires them, even uses them for worship, these too are some kind of stuff but never just stuff, anymore than furniture or dishes or clothing amount to just stuff.)

I submit that the hatred of materialism is really something quite different from what it sounds like. It is the hatred of those who want to enjoy life by taking an active part in it, by trying to relate to all the different things that make up the world and to whatever can give people joy. This kind of anti-materialism is, indeed, hatred of life itself.

So, when people identify bin Laden and his followers as lovers of death, they are right and it is shown clearly by all their ranting against materialism, which is pretty much nothing other than the cherishing of this life we all live here on earth.

The Common Good

Tibor R. Machan

Liberal Democrats are having a conniption fit about the lack of any vision that unites the Democratic Party. So several of their pundit-philosophers are writing essays in which they lament this and propose remedies.

Among those doing this is Michael Tomasky who, in a recent piece for The American Prospect, suggests that “Democrats need to become the party of the common good.” Then he goes on to write, as one of his critics put it, “breathlessly,” that “We are all in this ... together, and ... we have to pull together, make some sacrifices, and, just sometimes, look beyond our own interest to solve our problems and create the future.”

I have a better idea. Let Democrats, Republicans, and the rest recover the powerful idea that got the country going in the first place, one laid out pretty neatly in the Declaration of Independence. This idea is that the common good is pursued precisely when government does what justifies its existence, namely, secure our rights. That, indeed, is THE common good in the American political tradition.

The reason is that in that tradition there are millions of disparate goods individuals pursue but only one unites them, only one is their common good. This is the protection of their fundamental individual rights. This was part of the revolutionary idea that animated the Founders and put the country in opposition to so many others, including those in Europe from which so many of its initial population fled.

In most countries throughout human history the idea was promoted that there is a rich common good, a whole slew of objectives that we all must pursue. In other words, the common good was really the collective goods of all the people, as if they really did share goods galore that they needed to promote. The one size fits all mentality was encouraged by rulers, monarchs, tsars, and the rest who needed to hoodwink us into thinking that their goals are really our goals and we cannot really, individually, have goals of our own. That was the common good—the leaders’ good peddled for the rest as their good, too.

The American Founders, guided by the classical liberal social-political philosophies of John Locke and Co., saw through this. They realized that in a big country, the millions of inhabitants, citizens, share but very few goods. (Of course, small associations—churches, clubs, corporations, professional groups and so forth—can have some common objectives all right. It is only that no such common good or objective exists for the millions of us!) And the most important—probably, in fact, only—common good we share is the protection of our individual rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. It’s the one good that’s indeed good for us all, that we have in common.

If government, which is instituted to secure these rights, does its job right, it will stick to little more than making sure that everyone’s liberty is safe. Why? Because then all the millions of different individuals, and some of the groups they voluntarily form amongst themselves, will quite successfully embark on the task of pursuing all those goods that suit them. Securing our rights does that for us!

But today’s public pundit-intellectuals don’t get it. They want to find some thick public good—a whole, humongous basket of allegedly common goods—which government will set out to achieve. And they are surprised that there isn’t such a basket—in a largely free society people have their own basket of proposed goods they want to obtain for themselves. And this isn’t because they are selfish and will not make sacrifices—notice how looking out for yourself is being demeaned in Tomasky’s call to arms—but because even in what they consider appropriate objectives for which sacrifices should be made the citizenry differs significantly. They don’t need having one idea of what’s worthy of a sacrifice shoved down everyone’s throat. No, they want to choose those objectives, as well as the ways of making the sacrifices for them if need be.

Maybe the Democrats—and Republicans—ought to recover the Founders’ vision. Then they wouldn’t have to concoct an impossible one behind which they cannot manage to unite folks at all.

Politics and Logic

by Tibor R. Machan

When people talk of being logical, they mean consistent, coherent, rational. They aren't talking about the kind of formal or symbolic logic that is studied in logic classes, but rather of the kind that basic reasoning classes discuss. Formal or symbolic logic is so rigid that nothing in the real world, not even subatomic physics, reflects it completely. Logic like that is a closed system, with symbols standing in for ideas and sentences but without the normal openness of the latter.

Still, be it physics, sociology, ethics or politics, it is imperative that when we consider anything we follow the rules or principles of logic. They are the method by which we make sure, first and foremost, whether or not we are talking about reality. Why? Because reality is at its base governed by logic. When, for example, someone violates the rules of logic during testimony in a court of law, we know that something has gone wrong no matter what the issue at hand. It is simply elementary that contradicting one's self discredits what one is saying. One cannot be both at home and not at home at the same time, so saying one was just cannot be right.

Trouble is a lot of folks would like to have things several ways, ways that simply cannot all be at once. A very clear case in point is when they claim they have rights to what others also have rights to. This comes up when people talk of entitlements, especially, to what other people have or produce. Health care "rights" are an excellent example. A doctor and nurse have their basic rights to their lives, their liberty, but if you and I have a right to health care, that means they don't because we have a right to make them work for us. Any citizen has the right to his or her property -- e. g., to their skills and resources -- but if you and I have a right to welfare that requires confiscating these, and that simply cannot be. Maybe people want it but then they want the impossible.

Whenever public policy or law affirms what is impossible, the result is that some people -- bureaucrats, judges and the like -- have gained arbitrary powers. The impossible cannot be achieved, so instead of relying on the law or public policy to guide us impartially, cogently, some bloke will have to decide what goes, in defiance of sense and reason. This comes from making laws and public policies that cannot function as consistent guidelines to how we should conduct ourselves. Someone must, then, step in and make a decision that is independent of objective law, of law that can be predicted to function in the real world. Instead some whimsical choice is substituted.

For example, since both the patient and the doctor cannot have those rights they are said to have -- the patient to health care, the doctor to liberty -- the government steps in and decides, arbitrarily, whose wants will be satisfied and when. Sometimes it will be doctors -- say, when they go on strike and refuse to work for the pay they are offered -- and sometimes it will be patients -- say, when they get to force other people to pay what doctors want for their services. In such cases, and there are zillions of them, logic is violated and the law becomes a matter of some people's arbitrary, irrational decisions.

And that's basically the destruction of the rule of law, the principles which put order into human affairs so that no one gets to call the shots and we all live by consistent rules and principles. If, for example, our rights to life, liberty and property get full protection, that means entitlements must be rejected in law and public policy because enforcing entitlements violate those basic rights. Sadly, violation of that has become routine now, urged on by the likes of FDR and his current followers, champions of so called "positive" rights, rights to other people's works and resources. (Professor Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago is such an FDR epigone.) The expansion of eminent domain is another case in point. If our property belongs to us but also to the city officials who want to take it so as to improve something in the community, the result is arbitrariness, rule not of law but by the whim of officials.

It only seems that logic and life don't mesh well but what in fact does not mesh well is how many of us wish life to be with how it can be. People, sadly, often want it in several incompatible ways and politicians are only too willing to promise they can deliver them this impossible gift. The result is more or less tyrannical rule in society and the abandonment of the rule of law.

One Size Fits All Revisited

by Tibor R. Machan

Outside of politics, the place where the one size fits all approach is most tempting would be the family. Parents are often eager to urge their own tastes and preferences on their children, confusing these with the basic values, virtues and principles they do need to teach them.

My own experience with this has been rather severe—my parents were nearly fanatic athletes who insisted that I, too, follow in their footsteps. Things got so bad that as soon as I reached the age of legal maturity, I left. Of course, back in Europe and in many parts of the world the idea that one must virtually copy one's parents' lives is widely embraced and it is often inescapable because of its economic utility. In a relatively free and abundant country, however, the idea that children need to find their own way, based on their talents, desires, opportunities and so forth, is more prevalent.

Yet even in such a society the temptation for parents to insist that children follow in their footsteps is a powerful one. Even though I have guarded against yielding to it, I cannot say I am immune. Just the other day I spent time with my older children, both in their late twenties, and I noticed how they were interested in matters that leave me entirely cold. In fact, in my more self-indulgent or vain moments I even consider my own interests superior to those of many others—just as one finds watching certain kinds of TV programs silly or trivial or tasteless. And I was on the verge of expressing my disdain for my adult children's tastes and preferences when I realized what I was doing—namely, following my own parents' lead in trying to make my children into clones of myself.

It is difficult, of course, to identify just what sort of values one really must try to inculcate in their children and what are those they should be left nearly on their own to discover. What if they enjoy horror movies while you find them disgusting? What if they love to watch professional sports all weekend and do not check out a novel or seek out some good play or concert in the neighborhood? What if they wear clothes that you consider in bad taste or read gossip magazines instead of those informing them of culture and science? How about if they have no interest at all in politics or economics?

Surely some matters are important to anyone and if one's kids show no interest, trying to encourage them to look into them is not being too tyrannical. Yet, even there a delicate balance needs to be found between being pushy and giving friendly suggestions and advice. Moreover, there may be a good time to explore some things—say, a bit after they have left school so they have had their break from all the heavy mental lifting.

Parenting is not instinctual for human beings, contrary to what so many people seem to believe, judging by how unprepared they are for rearing kids. The notions that one's own tastes and preferences are high and mighty, superior to those of others, is very tempting—after all, if one has them, surely they must matter more than those others have! But that is a mistake. More often tastes and preferences are quite idiosyncratic and there can be many different ones, with none superior to others at all.

Some people prefer opera, others drama, yet others big band concerts; some are fond of tennis, others of golf, and yet others of basketball. Even though one often hears debates about which of these is superior, which inferior, it is most likely that such debates are misguided. These matters are really more about tastes and preferences, not about right or wrong judgment and conduct.

However, that is difficult for many of us to keep in mind. Some tend to confuse matters of principle, about which it is important to find common ground, and matters of pleasure, about which no common ground need to be found at all. Never mind all the self-congratulatory magazines, books, galleries, fashion venues, and forms of entertainment that are advertised as superior to all the others. In fact, in most cases, they are just some people's pleasures but not that of others.

Indeed, this point is something too many educated people—even some geniuses (who peddle their likes as if they were metaphysical truths)—overlook. Some even insist that what they prefer, what they have a taste for, be provided with special subsidies by the government—such as PBS and NPR and museums and other forums the rest of us are coerced into supporting. And all of it tends to begin with the family practice of wanting kids to follow parents in all things, something that denies the children's individuality and freedom of choice.

Freedom back in the Mainstream?

Tibor R. Machan

Other than the occasional loose and practically incoherent mention of “freedom” by George W. Bush & Co., contemporary political discourse hardly invokes the idea. It is as if the era in which human liberty was of concern had now passed.

That, indeed, was the notion that Karl Marx championed. For the old communist individual liberty was a passing fancy, mostly of concern to those who were pushing for the special interest of the rich—e. g., John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo. And while the alternative, namely socialism (not to mention the fantasy of communism) has met with serious setbacks, there still linger strong echoes of Marx’s idea that liberty has become passé. Even American conservatives seem to have given up on the ideals and ideas of the American Founders, other than in some of their neo-conservative rhetoric that tries desperately to justify going abroad and futilely attempt to change some rouge regimes.

Yet, now and then the concept of individual liberty re-ignites the imagination of even mainstream scholars and pundits. That was evident from a riveting book review published in the October 9th issue of The New Republic, written by Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University and taking to task the book by another linguist, Professor George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over American’s Most Important Idea (2006). You may think what you will about either the book’s message or Pinker’s brilliant review but what is most encouraging is that The New Republic would publish a long discussion that’s focused so directly on the idea of human liberty.

In academic political philosophy and theory circles it is pretty standard fare that two conceptions of liberty have been doing battle for a couple of centuries now, usually dubbed “negative” and “positive.” Sometimes the discussion is cast in terms of “negative” versus “positive” rights, inasmuch as “rights” signify a sphere of human liberty. The idea of negative rights is just what is contained in the Declaration of Independence. It is that all adult human beings require, by their very nature, a sphere of sovereignty or self-government and others may not enter this sphere without being given permission. That is why government requires the consent of the governed, otherwise it is illegitimate. (This notion, while gaining public airing rather recently in human history has been around for a long time—check out Xenophon’s book, Memorabilia (written around 400 B.C.) in which it plays a vital role in a dialogue between Pericles and Alcibiades!)

Positive rights—which came on the heels of the fullest development of the idea of negative rights by John Locke and other classical liberals—was defended by such philosophers as Hegel, Marx, and T. H. Green and means being entitled to provisions from other people. It came to dominate political discourse during the era of FDR, who forged what’s called “the Second Bill of Rights,” filled with “rights” to services and goods other people must produce for us whether they choose to do so or not.

Obviously, these two ideas are incompatible. Pinker makes that point very well in his review of Lakoff’s book (one that's in full support of FDR’s idea): “[M]y freedom to have my teeth fixed impinges on my dentist’s freedom to sit at home and read the paper. For that reason, positive freedom requires an agreed-upon floor for the worst off in a society with a given level of affluence, and presupposes an economic arrangement that gives providers an incentive to benefit recipients without being forced to do so at gunpoint. That’s why many political thinkers (most notably Isaiah Berlin) have been suspicious of the very idea.” Certainly none more so than libertarians, who have always recognized that “positive freedom” is really the very antithesis of individual liberty.

We cannot fully explore this debate in a column but it bears noting how important it is that The New Republic made room for such a discussion by an astute thinker like Steven Pinker, who, though no libertarian himself (to my knowledge) has focused on the issue very precisely. And this in the context of reviewing a book that purports to advise the Democratic Party on what issues to stress in their push to regain Washington!

One can only hope that once again America will become a forum for some intelligent discourse on the most important idea in human political history, the idea of individual liberty.

A Primer on Rights & Animals

by Tibor R. Machan

When one has rights, it means others may not intrude and do violence to one, even if the intrusion might do good or benefit the victim. Rights are not about not being hurt or harmed. They are about a person's freedom of choice. And some exercise their freedom of choice to do harm to themselves. Still, others may not use coercive force to "help" out. Rights, in short, are about sovereignty, self-government.

Yes, there are some damaged persons who can barely, rarely or even never exercise choice -- they lack free will. (We all do now and then, say when asleep!) But a general principle such as the right to liberty extends to all of us, even those who don't fit the typical case of a healthy human being. It extends, for example, to children, even infants, who are but at the very beginning of being able to make choices. That's because principles of human association are not like principles of geometry, but rather more like biology -- some exceptions or borderline cases are to be expected.

Animals have no rights because in general they lack moral agency, the capacity to choose between right and wrong conduct. Of course, now and then some animals behave as if they were morally aware -- that's to be expected, especially, of domestic pets that have acquired many attributes from human beings in their thousands of years of association with them. Nonetheless, although dogs may appear to experience guilt, say when they pee on the rug, that's not guilt, which is why punishing them is nonsense. Rather one may try to train them by apply some discouragements or negative reinforcement. To stand around and morally blame the dog is preposterous -- animal abuse, if you will. They cannot help what they do, not like people. (Just chiding human beings for anything, including their thinking about animals, clearly suggests this.)

Of course, trying to ascribe rights to non-human animals is a great temptation, not unlike the attempt to ascribe to people what are called "positive rights" -- entitlements to treatment that would benefit them but would really amount to enslaving those who would have to provide the entitlements. Eagerly wanted benefits are often proposed as rights, but they are not. The way to check is to see if respecting such rights would require people to provide services and goods to their fellows. If they do, there cannot be a right to such services and goods. They would impose involuntary servitude! Ascribing rights to animals rests on similar eagerness, the desire to help them. But such help must be provided by those who want to care for the animals and not conscripted or expropriated from others who have made not commitment to them.

There is, of course, a good deal more to the story of how people ought to treat animals. It is not about rights, however, but about decency and empathy. These are not political concepts, like rights are. They have to do with human moral character that would not lead someone to inflict wanton harm or damage on animals. However, just as in the wilds animals are driven, by their instincts, to make use of one another for various purposes involving their survival and flourishing, so in human life the choice to make use of animals can be perfectly appropriate. It is not the same, though, because human beings do have the responsibility to act decently and so how they use other animals is subject to moral evaluation. Even inanimate objects, like beautiful artifacts (e.g., paintings), may be treated well or badly, not because they have rights but because they are valuable, precious.

As I have argued in my book, Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite (2004), trying to politicize our relationship to other animals is very risky for both the animals and ourselves. It shifts responsibility away from us individually and leads to our desensitization toward animals. Instead of once again relying on politics and law to solve problems, the ethical treatment of animals ought to be promoted as a matter of human decency, not of justice.

A new book by Tibor R. Machan, Libertarianism Defended (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006) is now in print in both paperback and hardback versions. It is available at ClassBook.com:
http://www.classbook.com/pages/product/product.asp?isbn=0754652165&aid=FETCH

See attachment for cover and for BackFlap blurbs.
Reviews would be much appreciated.

Tibor Machan

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Two Cheers for the Welches

by Tibor R. Machan

In their BusinessWeek column of October 9, 2006, Suzy and Jack Welch make a valiant effort to debunk the stakeholder theory of corporate ethics. This is the view that managers do not owe service first and foremost to shareholders or owners of a company but, rather, to anyone who has an "interest" in the company's activities. The idea has also been dubbed the CSR thesis, whereby the first duty of business managers is their so-called "corporate social responsibility."

The Welches do a fine job of affirming the idea that what company managers ought to be doing is improving the value of the firm for their employers, the stockholders or owners. That is indeed the moral responsibility of corporate managers, even if it is true that other moral concerns do have a place in how they make their decisions. (Just like individuals, who ought to be prudent, which is to say, strive to succeed in their lives, first and foremost, companies ought also to practice such virtues as generosity, charity, and so forth.) But there are some important points the Welches failed to call attention to in this debate.

When the stakeholder theory is made part of law and public policy, it clearly violates the right to freedom of association of managers. They have not chosen to go to work for stakeholders but for stockholders, so forcing them to serve the former is involuntary servitude, plain and simple. Free men and women should not be required to work for anyone other than those whom they have chosen as their employers. (Yes, Virginia, this calls into serious question a good many public policies in our so-called free society!) This element of the CSR or stakeholder theory is never discussed by its promoters, of which there are hundreds teaching in business schools and writing business ethics text books. It is, indeed, professional malpractice to fail to address the issue.

Yet there is something the Welches might also have discussed, albeit briefly, namely, how so many company managers act unethically by getting into bed with government. Whenever companies jockey to gain subsidies, special favors like protectionist policies, or urge government to bring anti-trust actions against their competitors, they are acting immorally. Their morally defensible position against the CSR and stakeholder advocates becomes weak when they fail to refrain from seeking government favors. (Doing this, by the way, is akin to participants in an athletic race seeking special favorable treatment from referees or judges, only far more serious!)

Unfortunately the idea of going to government for this or that favor is so widespread in society that most corporate managers probably don't even think of it as possibly unethical. I venture to guess that Suzy and Jack Welch are similarly oblivious to how widespread this kind of corporate malpractice is in our midst. Certainly BusinessWeek and other business publications, or other aspects of media covering business, seem to fully accept this kind of bad corporate conduct. After all, people in the sciences, education, arts, and elsewhere indulge in what economists call rent-seeking behavior. Get government to help you rip others off and after taking its own substantial share, transfer the funds to those making the "plea."

If the Welches will not acknowledge these types of misdeeds on the part of entirely too many corporations, their leverage against the unjust critics of corporations will seriously diminish. Their credibility as moral guides will evaporate. And that would be too bad, especially when it comes to their probably widely read insights about CSR and stakeholder theory. These are rotten, nasty ideas, albeit terribly popular among those discussing business ethics these days (too many of them business bashers, in fact). They are a roundabout, dishonest way to smuggle in and gain support for collectivism again.

To deny the right of ownership to individuals is basically to treat them as common property, as if their lives, work and resources may be used against their consent with impunity by anyone. And the Welches' help in resisting this should be much appreciated. So, two cheers for them!

A Most Unreasonable Option

by Tibor R. Machan

Not being an expert in the field of public transportation, I chime in with some trepidation here. However, the issue I wish to discuss is very much in the public domain, being debated by amateurs throughout the community. And since I've done my share of travel around the globe, with all kinds of methods evident in how people deal with congestion, I thought I could add my two cents worth. Especially since one local paper has asserted in no uncertain terms that the most reasonable option for solving the congestion that exists on the Riverside Freeway to Orange County route would be a people-mover such as being used at Disneyland and other amusement parks.

Of course, this option is a joke but those who propose it don't seem to know that. They are those among us who at any cost want to remove the automobile as a part of our lives and force us all to go back to an era where its conveniences would be renounced as too bourgeois and environmentally unfriendly. In the essay where this idea was proposed, the fact that Disneyland and some other amusement parks and recreation (skiing) regions make use of people-movers served as proof of their suitability for moving commuters from Riverside County into Orange County and back, during workdays, instead of some other approach to reducing the congestion on Routes 91, 55 and 57, the current roads linking the two areas.

Now people-movers are fine for those interested in being carted around from one attraction to another at an amusement park, from the parking area to the slopes at a skiing resort, from the parking era to the museum at the new Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and so forth. These places are attended for very specific purposes, for just a little while, after which people go back to their lives of picking up or dropping off their kids at school, little league or ballet, grocery shopping, visiting the mall or the local DMV, grabbing a bite of lunch, etc., and so forth. In other words, most people do their commuting while also taking care of business, which tends to require innumerable stops.

Anyone who believes that folks ought to be regimented into using people-movers hasn't a clue about what most people do while driving their cars to and from work. They do a lot besides getting to work and returning home. Even if the bulk of the driving occurs on reasonably long stretches of freeway or highway, once close to work or home they are very likely to pick up laundry, buy some milk and the like. This cannot be done when using a people mover -- or, it would be rather complicated since all such errands would have to occur right by the points of embarkation. Actually there is an option being considered, namely, a tunnel through the Santa Ana Mountain range, that makes much better sense (given that the alternative of private solutions, based on market forces, is not in the cards hereabouts). I have lived in Switzerland and traveled all around it, as well as Italy, where tunnels for trains and highways are ubiquitous. And they are not only highly efficient, able to accommodate private automobile use as well as public transport, but seem to be fully harmonious with a plush and abundant wilderness.

I am no expert at estimating the respective costs associated with various alternative solutions to the Southern California traffic congestion, one that takes up several hours of commuters' lives every day during which they are caught in massive tie-ups and waste horrendous amounts of gasoline. But it seems to me that the people-mover idea is a deal-breaker from the get-go. Unless one is willing to live in a country that is fully top-down regimented by some technocrats, wherein the agendas of individuals are of no significance at all and only some elite's goals matter, the people-mover idea simply should not be an option. The fact that some people believe that it is bodes badly for a culture in which individual rights and the pursuit of the happiness of these individuals are supposed to be an outstanding factor.

Will Foley Scandal Serve as Lesson?

by Tibor R. Machan

What lesson? I repeat myself by quoting Abraham Lincoln: "No man is good enough to govern another without that other's consent." And so as not to forget this, we have the likes of Mark Foley demonstrating its truth in grossly concrete terms.

The idea that politicians are to be the guardians of our morals -- an idea subscribed to by nearly all political factions throughout human history and certainly by Republicans and Democrats today -- is so off the wall that perhaps only blatant cases such as the Foley scandal can drive it home. Certainly Mark Foley is far from the first politician to illustrate what folly it is to entrust ourselves to the moral guidance of those who aspire to that job by joining the governing classes. We have many examples of crooked politicians, judges, cops and so forth, staring at us from the pages of newspapers across the land. Only the other week it came to light that innumerable small courts in New England have seen their share of systematic injustice. Then there was Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham from San Diego but a few months ago. And, of course, in the minds of most Democrats virtually all the Republicans are corrupt, while Republicans tend to think the same of Democrats.

With all the solid evidence and not so solid innuendo, the really major scandal is that the bulk of the public still considers politicians and bureaucrats qualified to enact laws, and the police to enforce them, concerning a great deal of our peaceful -- albeit at times risky and immoral -- behavior. The banning of this, the regulation of that, the criminalization of yet something else -- all of it is being done with the full awareness of the voting public.

Yet the plain and very scary fact is that these people who are drafting these laws and running on their record of having done so, are not being met with guffaws all around but keep getting elected to office!

The situation is bad enough to suggest that perhaps human beings are fundamentally flawed in their judgment and conduct, that their capacity to tell right from wrong is severely lacking. Why else would they keep going back to the politicians for help with their various problems? Why else do they keep up the silly hope that, well, maybe next time FEMA will save New Orleans, that the Federal Communications Commission will clean up filth on in broadcasting, that the Federal Trade Commission will get all commerce to be decent and honest, etc., etc., and so forth?

Ordinarily I don't share the pessimistic outlook about human beings in general, the sort that dominates thinking among environmentalists and people who teach business ethics, for example. And in fact even after a fiasco such as Mark Foley's misconduct that is not only vile on its face but demonstrates rank hypocrisy -- he has been a fervent supporter of governmental "protection" of children from Internet predators -- there is no sound reason to regard all people as innately corrupt, as some in the theological and psychological communities would have it.

Yet surely it ought to be evident to us all that human history, recent and ancient, demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that when people attain positions of power -- when they get the legal authority to regiment their fellows from Washington and other centers of officialdom -- they are very, very inclined to go bad.

Yes, this brings to mind yet another famous, oft-repeated quote, namely Lord Acton's about power that tends to corrupt and absolute power that corrupts absolutely! What is quite puzzling is how blind to this fact millions of people are. I have been attributing that blindness to, among other things, the governmental habit. After all, most of human history is mired in some people ruling and conquering and oppressing the rest, by means of sheer violence and its threat. And in most of the world nothing much as changed. So perhaps it is understandable that the alternative of a civilized approach to dealing with human problems, one that eschews coercive force, one that limits government to very minimal functions (like defensive and retaliatory force), doesn't catch on widely.

Still, when one does know just how corrosive the power of some over others is -- even in this so-called free society where it has usually been disguised as required by some emergency or last resort -- it is imperative that the more general point be stressed and such scandals as those involving Mark Foley don't get bogged down in the details of merely titillating sleaze.

America Not So Beautiful

by Tibor R. Machan

As a kid in Budapest I read a bunch of exciting American novelists, including Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Max Brand and others. I also saw some pretty exciting movies before the Soviets marched in a banned them all in 1948. Even afterward we kept trading the books back and forth in our small black market. They helped us counter the really nasty propaganda the Soviets and their Hungarian puppet regime put out against America through the government-controlled press and educational (read: indoctrination) system.

Yes, much of this was lopsided because it was, after all, mostly
fiction and cast the American past in far more favorable light than truth would have it, although Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer
contained some harsh truths about the country. Still, the viciousness of slavery and segregation and the depth of the racism did not come through fully until after I finally ended up on these shores, although by then the process of reparation and reform had been well under way. Also, I spent much time around the military in Germany in which there wasn't the racial divide that became evident to me once I came stateside.

One thing, though, was different back then from what it is now: the basic social-political philosophy associated with America had been pretty clearly and openly individualist, stressing individual
freedom, the free market economy, civil liberties and similar ideals I later learned came from the influence of classical liberalism. Of ourse, when I arrived, in the late 50s, the welfare state had become ubiquitous and both the Democrats and Republicans had gotten on board with it -- FDR, after all, had mesmerized much of the country with his utopian, anti-libertarian fantasies and promises as well as the corrupt charge that the Great Depression was the fault of individualism and economic laissez-faire.

Still, much of the language of politics, even in the era of Eisenhower, honored the ideals and ideas of the Founders, as sketched in the Declaration of Independence, whatever was the actual, messy socio-political reality throughout the country. And in time, with the national candidacies of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, these ideas received a bit of rhetorical run for their money, so that most citizens were reminded of what it was that made their country really different from the rest of the world, especially from regions controlled by the Soviets.

The fall of the Soviet empire was quite an encouraging development to those like me who had come to realize that human beings are treated most justly and are best off when they have their basic rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness respected and legally protected. I turned my attention to these matters very early in my academic career and tried seriously to do a thorough comparative assessment as between laws and public policies that were loyal to the Founders' vision and those that guided people toward one or another form of statism. Although I never believed there must be progress for the better in human history, the demolition of the Berlin Wall was very encouraging.

Unfortunately, by that time there wasn't much intellectual, academic commitment to classical liberalism, if indeed there ever has been, in the centers of learning, so the newly liberated countries received bad leadership and only here and there were they urged to embrace the principles of a fully free society. As far as America's leadership in these matters was concerned, it had long been abandoned and the two active political parties focused mainly on just how much of a welfare state -- with a focus on government controlling which parts of our lives -- should public policy promote.

It seemed, in fact, that the demise of socialism in practice energized the hordes of the faithful in the American academy to come up with all sorts of more or less reconstituted clones of the statist system. In Europe the gutless "third way" became the intellectual and political rallying vision, while America got bogged down in panic about the environment, guilt about the past, and so called wars on poverty, drugs, and terror. Freedom got scant attention! The vision of a fully free society -- resting on the idea that adult human beings must take responsibility for their lives and solve their numerous problems in civilized, non-coercive ways -- got buried in all the muck of reactionary trust in government. It was as if the country regretted rejecting the monarchy it so boldly tossed aside in 1776, and wished once again for a king -- or at least Nanny or protectionist state.

None of this needs to spell doom. People rid themselves of bad habits with great difficulty and the governmental habit is the worst; it can take decades, even centuries to overcome. One can only hope that the next generation and those following it will manage to recover the ideals and ideas of the Founders despite how the bulk of the intellectuals and academics, not to mention politicians and bureaucrats, have demeaned them.

The Times's Leftist Blindness

by Tibor R. Machan

In The NY Times Sunday Magazine, October 1st, the Profile feature,
"Questions for," is devoted to Warren Beatty on the occasion of a
revival of his 1981 movie Reds -- one that recounts the journalist
John Reed's love affair with Soviet communism -- for which he
received the Academy Award as the director. I have seen the thing
once, I believe, and it just goes on endlessly casting the beginnings of the murderous era of the Soviet Union in pretty favorable light. (As an antidote, one ought to read or see the movie of Ayn Rand's novel, We the Living! Even Reds acknowledges in the last analysis, though, that the Bolsheviks were up to no good.)

Now there is nothing all that much new about this. The New York Times has always favored the Left, however rotten it has been demonstrated to be over the decades. Even in our times, it tends to side with the Leftists in the Middle East, never mind that their latest heroes violate nearly all the egalitarian ideals The Times has been championing over the decades, such as equal rights for women, due process, gay rights, etc.! I suppose those who hate George W. Bush enough will gain the support of The Times and other Leftists no matter how bloody their hands. (Just take a look at The London Review of Books and see how they bend over backwards to rationalize every evil perpetrated by violent Muslims, never mind how these people stand against everything that's part of the liberal ethos.)

Beatty produced, directed and starred in Reds and this movie is loved by all those who supported Lenin and Stalin and the rest of those Bolshevik thugs because it makes all the supporters out to be idealists, naively hoping that this time a massive tyranny is going to end up righting all the wrongs of the world. That this can still receive approval from American Leftists just goes to show that 20 million deaths at the hands of reds isn't enough to dissuade the enthusiasts.

The late Susan Sontag was right for a while when she shocked her
fellow Leftists by saying that communism is successful Fascism. She said this, of course, several years before the Soviet system finally bit the dust, an event that showed that neither communism nor Fascism manages to be very successful at anything more than causing death and misery for millions. Still, if there were a movie made called, say, "Blacks," honoring the idealistic Nazis and Fascist black shirts, we would not see many sentimental remembrances to its creator in The New York Times Magazine.

Somehow these people still suffer from that macabre illusion that one tyranny can be more honorable than the other, what I call the Victor Navasky (of The Nation) thesis (advanced in his book Naming Names). Even after it has been shown that between the Red Soviets and the Red Chinese the toll of communism has been more than double that of Nazism, these Leftist sentimentalists just will not accept how destructive their vision has been, how much horror they have helped unleash in their blind championing of the "ideals" of the reds.

This, by the way, is what is also happening at high schools, colleges and universities across the land, with all those sophisticated Leftist professors treating the reds with kid gloves compared to how they, rightly, treat the Nazis as vicious murders. The crimes of the Right are, to them, unforgivable but those of the Left get cast in understanding terms (the struggle for the poor can lead to mistakes, etc., etc.).

With this sort of scenario on our intellectual landscape, it is
difficult to be properly upset with George W. Bush and his nearly
total abandonment of the libertarian inclinations in the American
conservative movement. Yes, Bush is a traitor to the ideals of the
American Declaration, what with his total rejection of Ben Franklin's insight that "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither." But compared to the blindness of the Left, with its ongoing failure to acknowledge how evil communism was and how culpably naïve are the likes of Warren Beatty when they romanticize the commies in vehicles such as Reds, Bush is somewhat tolerable.

Worries About the Future

by Tibor R. Machan

For a moment, let's forget that the environmentalists' precautionary principle is a devastating threat to the idea of due process of law -- it is, but there are other problems with it. Why is it? Because when one anticipates that bad things might happen even though no one has been found guilty of violating anyone's rights, people begin to be treated badly. Their rights begin to be violated right and left. The mere possibility of something untoward happening leads to public policies that run roughshod over our liberties and rights. A very clear case
in point is the Endangered Species Act, which authorizes government to violate property rights merely because use of one's property might possibly hurt some critters. By this principle anyone who might commit a crime could be locked up ... whether they actually do so or not!

But there is something else at issue, something economics professor George Reisman once called my attention to in one of his fine essays critical of various aspects of environmentalism
(http://www.mises.org/story/661). This came to mind for me as I was considering my upcoming schedule of activities -- talks, conferences, seminars, and so forth.

Sometimes when a good many of these activities are planned, I get
nervous and start preparing way before necessary so that I will be
ready to cope with them all. What seems to happen is that the future, with all these planned activities in it, appears to my mind to unfold independently of the periods of time in between the events that are coming up. I see the future, as it were, on one flat canvas and it looks utterly unmanageable.

Environmentalists seem to be looking at the unfolding of the future of humanity along similar lines. They see a problem here, another there, an unanswered question concerning this, and another about something else, and these seem to appear to them all bunched up, as one huger -- possibly catastrophic -- event. Al Gore's movie is a good case in point -- thousands of years of a possible and scary future are crammed into a little over an hour and when so considered, what unfolds does come off as hopeless, unmanageable and, thus, cause for panic. And people often act irrationally when they are panicked. That is why talk of threatening our rights seems beyond the pale for both environmentalists and those worried about terrorism. The
prospects are frightening, so who cares about niceties like
respecting individual rights?

What Professor Reisman pointed out in his essay is that such an
approach to dealing with the future of humanity is completely
misguided because it omits from consideration the primary facts of
human innovation, creativity, initiative. It treats us as if we were all mere bystanders, unable to do anything about those possible dangers, whereas in fact if one considers human history, people have been quite successful in dealing with all kinds of hazardous contingencies by applying themselves. Exactly how they will do so is never easy to spell out, so those who in their panic ask, "But how will it all work out?" or "What precisely must we do to cope with this and that awful scenario?" cannot be given simple answers. (The same applies in the field of emergency ethics, those famous desert island or lifeboat cases, which are so extraordinary that one has to remember that people often come up with ingenious solutions to extraordinary problems and challenges.)

My own anxiety over my upcoming full schedules abated when I realized that I kept forgetting about the fact that there are several days, sometimes a week, in between the various events and that I will be able to prepare with little trouble for the next one after one has passed by. Time was what I forgot about, as well as my ability to make the most of this time as I came to cope with my various upcoming challenges.

Sure, there will be changes in the climate, there will be more or
less water or ice or what have you. But all of this will not happen in one fell swoop but over years, decades, even centuries, and if history is any clue, most of it will be dealt with quite competently, thank you, by those who will have to cope with it all. Nor need our basic principles of human association -- the rights we have to our lives, liberties and property -- be sacrificed for that to happen.

Doing Government's Dirty Work

by Tibor R. Machan

It has always bothered me that government carries out all kinds of
tasks that are none of its business. Collecting funds for innumerable projects people in a country undertaken by means of extortion -- taxation, in short -- is just one of these tasks. It is bad enough that a government founded on the principles of our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (among others!) extorts funds from the citizenry. But it then goes on to coerce employers to collect these funds, to become its bagmen, and hand them over to the various governments perpetrating the extortion.

Forcing employers to collect the extorted funds is really low. They must incur the cost of this collection, with overhead and special employees hired just for this entirely non-productive purpose. The money wasted in the process could have meant jobs for millions of people who, in turn, could pay for what government provides voluntarily, by various means that do not amount to extortion and that do not burden others with the collection process. But worst of all is that these companies become complicit in what is by all accounts a natural crime!

Yes, these are radical notions, but so at one time was the idea of
abolishing serfdom, which along with taxation was part of the unjust feudal system. Maybe in time taxation will go the way of serfdom but while it is still kept in force by the police of most societies, at least the collection could be more honest and straightforward. That way everyone would get a clear idea of what taxation is about, namely, expropriating people's resources at the point of a gun. Getting employers to do the dirty job manages, also, to disguise what is going on.

People who believe it's OK for a democratic government to extort
resources from the citizenry probably believe themselves to be
supporting law and order. The following exchange, written by the
ancient Greek general, Xenophon (circa 444 BCE), in his Memorabilia, should disabuse them of that idea:

Alcibiades: Please, Pericles, can you teach me what a law is?

Pericles: To be sure I can.

Alcibiades: I should be so much obliged if you would do so. One so
often hears the epithet "law-abiding" applied in a complimentary
sense; yet, it strikes me, one hardly deserves the compliment, if one does not know what a law is.

Pericles: Fortunately there is a ready answer to your difficulty. You wish to know what a law is? Well, those are laws which the majority, being met together in conclave, approve and enact as to what it is right to do, and what it is right to abstain from doing.

Alcibiades: Enact on the hypothesis that it is right to do what is
good? or to do what is bad?

Pericles: What is good, to be sure, young sir, not what is bad.

Alcibiades: Supposing it is not the majority, but, as in the case of an oligarchy, the minority, who meet and enact the rules of conduct, what are these?

Pericles: Whatever the ruling power of the state after deliberation enacts as our duty to do, goes by the name of laws.

Alcibiades: Then if a tyrant, holding the chief power in the state, enacts rules of conduct for the citizens, are these enactments law?

Pericles: Yes, anything which a tyrant as head of the state enacts, also goes by the name of law.

Alcibiades: But, Pericles, violence and lawlessness -- how do we
define them? Is it not when a stronger man forces a weaker to do what seems right to him -- not by persuasion but by compulsion?

Pericles: I should say so.

Alcibiades: It would seem to follow that if a tyrant, without
persuading the citizens, drives them by enactment to do certain
things -- that is lawlessness?

Pericles: You are right; and I retract the statement that measures
passed by a tyrant without persuasion of the citizens are law.

Alcibiades: And what of measures passed by a minority, not by
persuasion of the majority, but in the exercise of its power only?
Are we, or are we not, to apply the term violence to these?

Pericles: I think that anything which any one forces another to do
without persuasion, whether by enactment or not, is violence rather than law.

Alcibiades: It would seem that everything which the majority, in the exercise of its power over the possessors of wealth, and without persuading them, chooses to enact, is of the nature of violence rather than of law?

Condoleezza Rice’s Bad Analogy

Tibor R. Machan

In the interview conducted with her on CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes program on Sunday, September 24, Condoleezza Rice, who is the Secretary of State of the United States now, made a bad analogy. She compared the condescending attitude of racists toward blacks with the skepticism of those who do not consider it realistic to attempt to implement democratic politics in the Middle East and some other regions of the globe. She said that she believes that the view that blacks cannot handle freedom and responsibility is an irresponsible, prejudiced position and so is the idea that the people in Iraq, Iran, Syria and other countries cannot now handle democracy, for the same reason.

This is a bad analogy for several reasons. The racist claim that blacks cannot handle freedom rests on a belief in their alleged racial inferiority, the idea that because they are of a certain race, this prevents them from being able to cope with the freedom and responsibility that those of a "superior" race can handle.

That view falls apart as soon as it is understood that being black doesn’t make a person mentally and morally inferior. It is vital to realize that the racist idea attributes the inability to deal with freedom and responsibility to something over which the individuals involved have no say. They supposedly cannot deal with freedom and responsibility because they are black, something over which they have absolutely no control, no say whatsoever. If this factor is found to be irrelevant to whether one can handle freedom and responsibility, the claim about blacks turns out to be unfounded, indefensible--rank prejudice.

The claim about people in the Middle East is not advanced by those who do advance it on the grounds that men and women of their race haven’t the capacity to handle democracy. Few if any attribute their supposed inability to race. If there is anything to the skepticism about those in the Middle East and elsewhere managing to live under a democratic polity, it has to do with something entirely different.

Before continuing, it is worthwhile to mention that all the talk about democracy by members of the Bush team is too loose. Simple, unqualified democracy is not a just system of politics. It is no accident that from Socrates to the American Founders many wise and prudent political thinkers had doubts about democracy per se. For what is so wonderful, or just, about a system that simply places the majority in a position of superiority, with the minority subordinate to it? If that majority is wrong, why does it matter that it is more numerous than those in the minority?

In fact, the only kind of democracy that deserves support is the classical liberal variety, one strictly limited by the individual rights of the citizenry to their lives, liberties, property, religious worship, etc. Any democracy not so limited is no better than a dictatorship or tyranny by one individual or a small group. Possibly, agreement among members of a majority would be more difficult to achieve if they were all wrong, although 50 million Frenchman can be, as the old saying goes!

But let’s get back to Secretary Rice and her bad analogy. It is perfectly reasonable to hold that some people have chosen ideas and ideals to live by that are incompatible with any kind of democratic government, liberal or not. We certainly know of people who chose to place themselves into subservience—the followers of cult leader Jim Jones come to mind, or of the Reverend Moon, or other powerful leaders of religious and other organizations. The majority of Germans gave Adolph Hitler absolute power and thereby rejected democracy out of conviction, not because of some innate inability.

Many who have been examining President Bush’s drive to bring democracy to the Middle East—and indeed the entire notion, beginning with President Woodrow Wilson, to spread democracy across the world—dispute the idea not because they are racists who think people over there haven’t got it in them to act democratically. No. The skepticism comes from the observation of a very long history of people either having freely rejected democracy or having voluntarily placed themselves under the rule of others they deem wiser and more virtuous than themselves. Or because they are too severely controlled by some elite or clergy.

Wherever a situation like this prevails, for whatever psychological, philosophical, religious, or other reasons, it is not unreasonable—and certainly not racist—to be doubtful that America can turn the place into a functioning democracy, especially via military force.