Machines into Humans?

Tibor R. Machan

There’s been a pretty impressive movement afoot for over a century or even more championing the idea that human beings are but complicated machines, nothing special at all in the world. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) folks tend to hold this view—machines, in time at least, will do whatever people can, maybe even much better than we do it, like thinking, feeling guilt, empathizing, regretting, apologizing, and the whole gamut of stuff many think is unique to human life. No, say the AI folks, it’s just a matter of handling some of the technicalities and then, voila, we will have machines just like us. After all, aren’t machines already doing many of the tasks most if us had once thought only people could do? Sure.

I recall when I first ran across this topic, in a course what was called “Philosophical Psychology,” back at Pamona College, in Claremont, where I took some of my undergraduate philosophy courses—we studied, among others, Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein both of whom addressed aspects of the issue. I even recall one of our tests on which we were asked what Wittgenstein would have said to the idea that machines could think and my answer was, “Wait and see, it isn’t something to know about ahead of time.” My professor was rather impressed with this little part of my test, not much else. But I, too, would have said the same thing—who can tell ahead of time? Although I have doubts that non-living beings could ever come up with all of what people can do.

So I was discussing this with my best friend the other day, we both serious students of philosophy, and he noted that if the AI folks are correct, we should soon have a way to purge ourselves of false beliefs, as well as useless information. We will just take some kind of drug—well, may be a pill with who knows what in it—that will purge our system of falsehoods and trivia, plain and simple, just like today computers have programs that can purge them of unused desktop icons, cookies, and the like. We laughed about this some, since the notion that there could be some mechanical or even chemical way to get rid of false ideas or beliefs seemed absurd. But why? Don't we use drugs to get rid of viruses now?

Well, one reason is that to learn what is true versus false involves elaborate research, reasoning, checking and double-checking, with the ingredient of self-generated, initiated mental concentration, clear focus, keeping one’s attention, and recalling all sorts of information the coordination of which is needed to make sure of what’s what. No mechanical process is sufficient here, not at least when it comes to some of the deeper issues such as religion, politics, ethics, metaphysics, even biology and the rest of the disciplines the findings of which require extensive work of the sort that's unique to human beings, using their higher level thinking, reasoning for which they possess their very complicated brains and minds. To think some machine or mechanism or even chemical agent could accomplish the purging of falsehoods from our minds is to assume there are minds much like ours that will program whatever it is that’s supposed to do this purging business and use it to do the job. But there aren’t. Nothing in the known world does this kind of work other than people. At least not yet. It takes other people—or oneself, if one is really self-ware—to come up with criticisms and discarding of the bad ideas one holds. Sure, some tools can help—like a calculator, but who made those tools? Whoever could would be, well, pretty much people.

Yes, we can fantasize about a falsehood-purging-pill or such—that’s been done since time immemorial. Take all those Disney-like movies, right up close to our own time, in which everything and anything is routinely animated, with all those animated beings doing what we do and more, sometimes. Animals in this imaginary world do philosophy and math and literature, as do desks and chairs and cars and flowers and mountains—the human imagination is very fertile with such remote, counterfactual possibilities. But they are not to be confused with real prospects, not unless there is evidence instead of mere speculation.

So if you are waiting for the pill that will fix all your mistakes, do not hold your breath.

General Pinochet—Some Lessons

Tibor R. Machan

It is interesting just how real politics works. When the chips are down, we can often detect from little gestures and moves where people really stand on basic issues.

When General Pinochet died the other day, there was not a great deal of discussion about him and those that did appear tended to make a great deal of his having been supported by the American CIA when he overthrew the regime of Salvador Allende. Now for my money if it took the CIA to do this, it could well be to its credit, even though technically Chile was a so called sovereign country and Allende a sovereign leader (or ruler!). Of course, all this stuff about people being sovereign leaders or rulers of countries is nonsense, no less so than being kings or queens of countries. It fairy tale talk—there are no kings or queens, actually. There are only some men and women who dress up in fancy clothes as they impose their will on other men and women—“subjects.” And since Allende was about to take Chile into the Soviet bloc, joining Cuba as another Latin American country to be ruled by the Kremlin’s thugs, frankly I thought the CIA, never mind its technical malfeasance, did the right thing. I would have thought the same had it done this against the rulers of South Africa back then!

But all this bellyaching about Allende having been put down by the CIA instead of focusing on his allegiance with the Soviets and with Castro makes it clear that even after the fall of the Soviet Empire—a vicious Left wing, totalitarian dictatorship far worse then Pinochet’s petty military regime turned out to be—a great many intellectuals in the West are loyal to the fantasies of socialism and communism. If the brutality is done for the sake of the socialist or communist revolution, if a country is brought to its knees for that wonderful cause, well never mind the destruction and the sacrifice it takes. But if the goal is some other fantasy, say fascism, well then it is worth harping about it forever, never mind what the other choice happened to be. Never mind, also, that Pinochet voluntarily relinquished his rule in Chile after some years, ushering in a more or less democratic form of government, while no country under the rule of the likes of Stalin, Khrushchev, Cuba or North Korea ever managed to do this. Even Grobachov didn’t to this but merely toyed with some reforms hoping to keep the USSR a Soviet style social country, essentially. Yet he was hailed as some kind of savior of humanity and is still on the lecture circuit being widely welcome throughout the West. Pinochet, however, was hounded to the day he died. And by all accounts, he had committed serious crimes against many Chileans and there is little question that he should have been punished for this. But what about ex-KGB Gorbachov and Putin and the rest?

It seems that in the minds of too many on the Left what Pinochet did was only criminal because it was done for undesirable ends. The means, hell, they were routine among Leftist dictators and far more consequential. But just as after the fall of the Berlin Wall most of those on the Left kept silent—there were a few exceptions!—so when it comes to comparing fascist authoritarian brutal dictators to socialist totalitarian brutal dictators, the latter will routinely come off squeaky clean. The reason is mostly this loyalty to the fantasy of the revolution, although in some cases it is something else. That is the desire to pain the USA as dirty in all cases, as never having done the right thing, even comparatively speaking. When it was revealed that Radio Free Europe, where I did a short sting as a child actor back in the mid 1950s, and Encounter magazine, both got support from the CIA, the Left hollered from glee and some of my own libertarian pals were ecstatic—after all, the government once against did something bad and isn’t that wonderful for the cause of discrediting it. Hell with real politics, never mind what Allende would have done with Chile, never mind that those in Eastern Europe benefited a lot from RFE and that Encounter was a very fine magazine. Those goals aren’t worth it to these folks, and perhaps they aren’t. But to make these matters the focus of attention here shows how little people appreciate the evil of that evil empire!

Comparing Political Systems

Tibor R. Machan

Islam is not explicitly a political system but it has strong implications about political economy, as most religions do. Something will be forbidden in a human community if Islam dominates, something will be taken as acceptable by those in charge. This is so with Christianity, too, of course, as well as with any other religion. Some religions, however, do not aspire to rule everyone, not at least by coercive force. Islam, as it is understood by a great many Moslems, does consider the use of coercive force acceptable for certain vital purposes, notably the one of having people convert to Islam.

Now the real community value that we all, regardless of our faiths, ought to prize is people living a freely chosen moral life. But this is something impossible if coercive force is used in any realm of human affairs. Only in defense of liberty is the use of force justified—in that case it is not coercive but defensive force. Most Moslems do not share this priority of liberty over any other public good—they insist that the public good amounts to willing or unwilling service to Allah as understood from the Koran.

So the fight is over the importance of liberty. Those who deny its importance easily can reach the conclusion that killing innocent people, including children, is OK for certain, if rare, purposes, such as achieving religious dominance throughout the world. It is sad but acceptable, given the stakes.

This is wrong and however much those in the West may have failed at living by our own principles—some of us have been or supported coercive force ourselves—we are responsible to resist the attempt to make any religion, including Islam, dominate the world. We must defend human liberty.

Of course, a free country, one that does really honor liberty, can be either flawed or wonderful. There just is no guarantee. But such a country at least makes it possible for all of its citizens to aspire to their own best selves, their human excellence, however they conceive of this except for when the aspiration interferes with what other people choose to do peacefully in their lives. In short, a free country is open to many experiments with how the best life should be lived and even with what that best life is.

No, this isn’t utopia, a society with perfect lives lived in it, which is the political goal the imperialist religions pursue and plan to implement. (Here, by the way, is where Islam as understood by most of its current world leaders, resembles Communism as the Soviets understood it. No wonder the Left has taken its side recently.) It is however the kind of human community that is most likely to foster human excellence—everyone must decide how to live, which means those who decide correctly will have personally chosen the pursuit of their excellence. They will not merely have been coercively forced to behave right! This, ultimately, is why Western style liberal constitutional democracies are superior to what Islam and some other religions and ideologies would promote.

We can pretty much also judge a system of political ideas by considering how bad things can get while it is used to guide a country's legal order. Liberal constitutional democracies can be pretty bad; people can be pretty immoral--say, hedonistic, materialistic, or whatever other sort of malady the West is supposedly suffering from. But with all this, the West is not likely to glorify in violence, brutality, murder, cruelty, and so forth against innocent human beings. This really is a QED. When a religion’s or philosophy’s political implications can legally find such conduct acceptable, the system is has proven to be unacceptable, period.

Sure not all those who subscribe to Islam prefer—just as not all those who embraced Communism chose—to act violently, brutally, etc. There are moderate Moslems as there were moderate Communists, even Nazis. But those who went off the deep end had no systematic objection offered to their conduct from within their position, none. It is OK by their convictions to perpetrate murder, etc., no problem, even if not universally practiced.

Yes, there can be much amiss with the Western type liberal constitutional democratic idea and how it is practiced but at its very worst the position will not construe systematic violent sacrifice of children and innocent adults as acceptable in the pursuit of any goal whatsoever, not even the goal of self-defense (as evidenced by how many Westerners stand up for the rights of those who attack us). That is a very strong reason for its superiority!

Christmas, Holidays & Commerce

by Tibor R. Machan

There has been much fuss lately about some people referring to Christmas as "the Holidays" and it is a bit strange. After all, "holiday" has the term "holy" in it, so those using it may be said to acknowledge the holiness of these days, something one would not expect from heathens, atheists, or agnostics. For the latter nothing much qualifies as holy since that term signifies something otherworldly, supernatural.

But perhaps the insistence on using "Christmas" has a somewhat insidious, religiously intolerant source. It may be the effort of some Christians to lock up the holidays for themselves alone, a kind of imperialism we have been witnessing the last several years from people who are willing to go the great lengths of brutality and violence to lock up the entire world for their own religion. Christians, however, were supposed to have been guided by the philosophy of Jesus, who hadn't adopted the aggressive stance of Islam's prophet, Mohammed, so it is entirely unbecoming of Christians to lord their religion over others. Especially in America, which has for over two centuries been a country that has welcomed members of all kinds of faiths.

Despite the insistence of some, America wasn't established as a Christian country—its legal system does not invoke any religion in some official sense in which, say, even England does (being officially Anglican). As to the argument about the American founders, two recent books make it abundantly clear that among them they had no agreed-upon common religious allegiance other than belief in God. But belief in God is common among Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and many other faiths. So at most America can be regarded as a religious country, which using the term "holiday" by no stretch of the imagination disputes!

There is another bit of controversy, though, surrounding the holidays, namely, whether all the commercial activity during them somehow serves to demean them. One thing in favor of this idea is that Christmas ought to be a time when we are more concerned with spiritual than with earthly matters. So all the focus on gifts and such would appear to reject this notion.

Yet, especially for Christians, earth is just as important as will be the world beyond, assuming such exists, which, of course, Christianity does assume. Yet according to Christianity the earth is a creation of God and Jesus himself became a human being for a while, thus honoring the earthliness of the rest of us who will live here for a good bit before heading elsewhere. And while here on earth, we are also supposed to be generous, kind, charitable, and friendly, all of which involves, at least to some extent, looking out for our fellows' earthly needs, wants and desires.

It is a large measure of our goodness, according to Christian ethics, that we act accordingly and Christmas is especially suited for it, when we are supposed to think of what our relatives, friends and other associates might like from us. Being remembered, for example, via cards, invitations to parties, gifts and so forth is certainly part of the thoughtfulness we ought to exhibit this time of the year and going about looking for a finding gifts is certainly a part of what such consideration involves.

No doubt, one can overdo everything, including focusing so much on buying things for those we care for, although mostly people tend to be involved in finding just the right thing, which is what all the running around is about. (As a father of three grown children, it is becoming more and more difficult to tell just exactly what would make them most pleased, so I need to invest some time in shopping!)

The commerce that's done during the holidays is, in fact, all to the good—it usually brings joy to those receiving gifts, to those finding just the right gift to give, and to whose producing and selling what will become gifts so they, in turn, can go out and do all this as well. I see nothing but a win-win situation here, all around, so the complaints really have no basis so far as I can see.

Values and America

Tibor R. Machan

A theme that comes up often in commentaries about contemporary American culture is the absence of firmly grounded and widely embraced basic values among the people. While Americans have a coherent and stable enough legal tradition—albeit in the process of gradual erosion now and always a bit flawed—they seem to lack a basic ethics by which their lives might be guided, given some in depth meaning. It is for this reason, it is often said, that people require religion in their lives, whether it be Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or Hinduism.

And there is little doubt that human beings are just the kind of living creatures who cannot live without basic moral values. Even those who are totally skeptical about this do not manage to do without morals—they implicit embrace some ethical precepts, such as integrity or consistency or justice. For example, no skeptic accepts having his or her views distorted. No a-moralist believes it makes no difference how he or she is treated by critics. Total nihilism about values is impossible unless one is some kind of sociopath, seriously mentally deranged.

Why do we need values? Because we, humans, are just the sort of living beings that lack instincts. We are born with the instinct to suckle and that is about it—the rest is a matter of learning. And it isn't only the kind of learning that most higher animals need, namely, being trained in some skills. It is learning on one's own, to figure out ideas, to form principles about life and its innumerable facets. That is what all the fuss is about when we talk about the ethics of merchants, lawyers, doctors, politicians, parents, etc. And while some of this has become submerged in the discipline of psychology—so that for example such chintzy public forums as the Oprah show and The View will rarely talk about ethics and focus, instead, on psychological problems—it is still quite inescapable. Consider that however much we try to explain away ethical matters, even our psychologists are subject to moral criticism when they abuse their patients, for example.

So it seems clear enough that human beings cannot live by law alone. The law itself is open to be judged as ethical or unethical—just think how we treated the laws of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or South Africa. The same is true about the United States of America—its laws are open to moral scrutiny. We need, therefore, more than just laws for a coherent, civilized, and decent society.

But America is a highly pluralistic country—millions of people live here from extremely diverse cultures, traditions, religions, ethnic groups and the like. It seems, therefore, that just relying on these as sources of the common bond of ethics will not help. Instead, as elsewhere in the world, such sources often pit people against one another. Christians versus Jews or Moslems, Moslems against Infidels, agnostics against theists, atheists against agnostics, etc., etc.—there is no end of the varieties of conflict that can arise if we depend on these sources for moral guidance. Why? Because they lack a common base. They draw their principles of human behavior from diverse belief systems which are, themselves, not grounded in some common and accessible reality. When we depend upon the teachings of our culture we can be reasonably sure that some connection to reality must have infused what we believe. But a good deal of it is myth and fiction, made up by the human imagination and showing about as much diversity as that faculty can produce.

So what can Americans hope for in this matter of some set of common values? There is, first of all, no guarantee that we will come together on any possible answer as we search for a common ethics. That is because human beings are quite free to ignore even the best answers to questions they pose, say if they find it unpleasant, disturbing, scary, inconvenient or whatnot. But some answers probably offer a better chance at consensus than do others.

In ancient Greece it was Socrates, the first major Western philosopher, who proposed an answer to this question of how to come by an ethics that we can all agree on, even if we do not choose to. He proposed that reason must be employed to study human nature and when we learn what human nature is, we will also learn how to live right, how to live virtuously, justly. Because human nature is something we can all study. It is there before us every second of every minute of every hour of our lives. We have ample opportunity to examine what it is to be a human being. And this will give us a strong clue as to how to live a human life properly, ethically.

And the most important thing about human beings is that they are living creatures who must use their minds to navigate their lives. It is human intelligence, the activity of figuring things out and living accordingly, that seems to be the best guide to living well. As Socrates put it, "The unexamined life is not worth living." But only nature and, for our purposes, human nature, is available for common study and ultimate consensus.

In a diverse society such as America the people cannot hope to reach peace, harmony, and justice by finding principles from diverse traditions. That always runs the serious risk of conflict, since we interact among one another so frequently and pervasively. What we need to learn is to use, trust and be guided by our common reasoning capacity. There is a common world to be studied and our reasoning capacity is the best tool with which to study it. The results may get us what all else has failed to, namely, a set of ethical guidelines that will help us to come to agree on solutions to our problems.

There is no utopia in trusting reason. But as novelist Scott Turow put it in his best selling book, The Burden of Proof, "In human affairs, reason would never fully triumph; but there was no better cause to champion."

Another Virtue of Liberty

by Tibor R. Machan

When men and women are free to make mistakes or act from ignorance, they are also free to correct themselves promptly. This is one reason why involving government in such policies as banning trans fats or mandating the use of helmets by bicycle riders is a bad idea. The trans fats policy was just cast into stone in New York City—as of the summer of 2008, no eating establishment may cook with the stuff. And the ban on going without a helmet while riding bikes on public roads is nearly ubiquitous now in America and quite a few other countries.

The bureaucrats and politicians who run the nanny state are, of course, convinced that they are our saviors, even as many of the regulatory agencies are captured by the industries being regulated and serve, in consequence, to promote industry interests. But never mind that part of the problem. Another is that often the policy deemed to be so helpful—such as forcing us to wear seat belts or to use helmets—turns out to have very bad unintended consequences.

A traffic psychologist at the University of Bath, in the UK, Dr. Ian Walker, has conducted research on the impact of the bike helmet ban and found that "motorists passed, on average, three inches closer when he was wearing his helmet [during his experiments] than otherwise." As the English weekly THE WEEK reported in its September 23, 2006, issue, Dr. Walker "also found [vehicles] gave him more room when we wore a wig (to resemble a woman), and when he kept close to the kerb (undermining the normal advice that cyclists should drive in the middle of the road)." As Dr. Walker noted, "By leaving cyclists less room, drivers reduce the safety margin that cyclists need to deal with obstacles in the road, such as drain covers and potholes, as well as the margin for error in their own judgments."

Of course, people who research these matters can make mistakes whether they work with, or independently of, the government. However, once their advice is cast into law, abolishing the law is generally very difficult. Just ask yourself how often you hear about such laws being revoked? The most widely known example in the USA is prohibition and even that hasn't been completely overturned—some states still have various remnants of the ban that became a constitutional law back in 1920 and then was repealed in 1933. Although the ban of trans fats is for now confined to New York City, at least as far as I have been able to determine, the ban on going without helmets is much more widespread and there are numerous initiatives by politicians and bureaucrats to spread the other ban as well.

One need not dispute the wisdom of the advice to stop using trans fats or to use bike helmets, even if it is true that these measures may in time prove to be counterproductive. We are not required to be omniscient in order to take actions, to make policies. Human beings often need to act without perfect knowledge which is, in fact, an impossible ideal. Knowledge is always contextual, based on the currently available information and research. Demanding that governments be omniscient is also quite silly.

What is not silly, however, is to demand that government stay away from enacting laws about matters of safety and prudence since laws are usually left in place to kingdom come! Somehow there is a far greater proclivity to make than to repeals laws—Dr. Walker might give that topic a bit of study! Arguably, if there were no legal ban on bike helmets, the mistaken idea that they are a great help to bikers, that they are safer overall then going without them, at least in areas where there is a lot of vehicular traffic, adjustments could be made rapidly, with impunity. But given that there are all these legal bans on going without bike helmets, that there are bureaucracies that have a stake in continuing the bans, that jobs would be lost if the bans were discontinued, etc., it is very likely that the mistake will remain in force and who knows how many bikers will sustain serious injuries from doing what the law requires, namely, wearing protective helmets as they use the roads.

How to Learn English

by Tibor R. Machan

Yes, if you came to the US as an immigrant, to live your life here, it's quite likely that you could get by without learning English. Even back when I first landed here, in 1956, there were regions of America where people only spoke Hungarian. (I recall shops in Cleveland's Buckeye District with signs saying, "We also speak English!")

But all in all it's best to become proficient in English if one is going to live and work in the United States of America. But it isn't easy. Often people who come here live in households where the default language is the one spoken where they hail from. Hungarian, Polish, or Mexican immigrants will likely continue to speak their native tongue just because it is simpler—there's so much else to worry about that if one can get away without spending time on learning English, it looks advantageous ... for awhile! In time, however, not learning English turns into a big liability.

This is especially true for children who lack proficiency and thus undermine their chances in schools, colleges, and the work place. A friend of mine's five year old son, born in China but living in the States since he was 3, simply will not even try to speak English, apparently because his mother and other relatives and friends lack the fortitude to insist on speaking English with him. So he is doing very badly in his elementary school and his mother is even thinking of sending him back to his aunt in China.

Not that one swallow makes springtime, so my example may be moot as far as many other immigrants are concerned. Still, I have a few suggestions to those who come here and do wish to learn English even though they are surrounded by folks who don't much support this idea. When I arrived, I was quite old, 17 and a half, and although I already spoke the language a bit, having gone to an American high school in Germany for a few months so as to get a head start, I was very far from being fluent, which I did, eventually, become—so much so that few people detect even a trace of an accent now when I speak English. And I tried for this quite deliberately.

How?

For one, I learned a lot of American songs—my very first one was "Mr. Sandman." I listened and tried to imitate such singers as Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and a host of others. I learned a bunch of American songs, like "Ain't Misbehavin'," "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby," and many, many more, and sang them whenever I could, whenever I wouldn't drive others up the wall with my inept but educational crooning.

Of course, that is just the start. Going to the movies is another good way to acclimate oneself to a new language. Reading books, magazines, newspapers, or whatever else is at hand also helps, certainly with one's vocabulary and grammar. Indeed, I had very little formal instruction and only practiced the irregular verbs, mostly on my own initiative since learning them involves a lot of memorization. But use was my best instructor.

After living with a bunch of emigre Hungarians for about a year, I realized that that was an impediment. Since I had run away from my home anyway, I decided to leave Cleveland for someplace where no Hungarians could be found: New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. This was a great move for me since there I had no one to talk with unless I become pretty good with English. Being someone who likes to talk, to chat with people, to discuss ideas and so forth, being away from Hungarians made a big contribution to my becoming more and more proficient in English. It didn't hurt, either, that I joined the US Air Force where once again Hungarians were very scarce and where I simply had to speak English if I was to speak at all.

Of course, some people are more adapt at learning a new language than others, but I would surmise from my own and some other people's experiences that the old German saying, "Ubung, ubung macht den Meister"—"Practice, Practice makes the Master"—is true and if one wants to prepare for a productive, successful life in a new country, one ought to go to work on learning the language in ways similar to those that stood me in good stead.

Perils of State Soft Paternalism

Tibor R. Machan

Jim Holt discusses the recent debate about soft paternalism, in his essay in this Sunday's, New York Times Magazine. His “The New, Soft Paternalism” is a fair and pretty thorough account of the debate about whether people have multiple selves of which some may be wiser than others and it does a decent job of considering whether the wiser selves we have ought to get government support, as when states limit gambling or other easily abused activities by their citizens. Holt comes out in favor of the government’s lending a hand to our wiser selves in the end. Here is how he put his conclusion:

“But what if you are one of those people who rely on more mundane stratagems, like self-binding? The general problem you face (as put by the political theorist Jon Elster [a member of the analytical Marxist school, by the way]) is this: For a given uphill goal and a given strength of will, does there exist a path, however circuitous, that will get you to the top of the hill? By adding a new path here and there, state soft paternalism makes it more likely that the answer will be yes.”

A couple of preliminaries. Invoking David Hume’s idea of the totally—indeed, impossibly—fragmented human self is a non-starter here. For Hume the idea was to show that is no self but he advance the notion merely as a reductio absurdum argument against radical empiricism, to show that simply relying on our senses gets us nowhere in trying to understand anything, including ourselves. Of course we have different ideas and desires, with some of us remaining intact over time while others waffling about with no integrity at all. Yet even the worst of us, with the most discombobulated personalities and unhinged character, can have some good moments during which we try to set about straightening our who we will be henceforth--just think of all the New Year's resolutions here. And, yes, a bit of push from peers and institutions may help when such folks are ready to lapse once again.

Now it might be tempting to do what Jim Holt, on the advice of Jon Elster, is proposing, get the state involved here. State soft-paternalism has its greatest appeal not because of its successes and because good theory supports it, quite the contrary. It appeals because of the powerful governmental habit that has been powerfully cultivated in the human race from time immemorial. This is a bit akin to the root idea behind paternalism—"parents know best." And that’s right for most kids, of course; for adults, however, it is a disabling, inept approach to dealing with life and gives dangerous powers to governments.

The governments of most societies have, of course, sold themselves to the people as their parents—or uncles or nannies—who have nothing but the best interest of their children, the people, in mind. Kings notoriously justified themselves along these lines, as have dictators. What differentiates democratic governments is merely the fact that they work by a process of decisions-by-committee and there are numerous competing committees vying to dominate until in the end a decision is reached that supposedly has had the benefit of extensive discussion. Of course, the decision will be coercively imposed but, presumably, wiser then many private decisions would be.

Now this is the kind of view that began to be questioned with the writings of Baruch Spinoza. Thomas Hobbes, writing just a bit before Spinoza, made the mistake of trusting the democratically selected absolute monarch, arguing, like Holt and Elster, that people want themselves to be ruled and a king or government is just who should do the ruling. But as Spinoza began to suggest and, later, classical liberals like John Locke, Adam Smith, and a host of others began to warn us, governments aren’t made up of angels but people. People with the crucial added attribute that makes it easy to yield to bad temptations, namely, power over other people.

In the 20th century Jim Buchanan and Gordon Tullock finally put the idea into a fully developed theory called "Public Choice" which argued that politicians and bureaucrats will routinely pursue their own agendas, not those assigned to them by the people via the democratic process. Now this pretty much means that entrusting government to engage in benign soft paternalism is futile.

Yes, some people could benefit from this if it could be counted upon—although that alone doesn’t make it good public policy either—but counting upon government to administer soft paternalism without corruption, without abuse, is the big mistake embraced by the likes of Jim Holt, Jon Elster, and, sadly, millions of others across the globe.

Promoting Freedom Close to Home

Tibor R. Machan

Over the several decades that I have championed the fully free society, one that basically conforms to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, I have had the good fortune to be able to address many people about this topic. Much of this consists of writing books, articles, letters to editors, scholarly papers and columns, of course. But aside from writing, I have also been privileged to be invited to talk to a great many and highly varied groups of people, with such organizations as the Rotary Club, Kiwanis, and the like all over America and indeed the globe. Quite recently, for example, I gave a series of lectures in the Republic of Georgia as well as in Santiago, Chile.

One persistent question I have faced all these years is what an individual person can do to promote advances toward a free society. And, naturally, there are nearly as many answers to this as there are individuals asking the question. So, quite often I have to remind people that while I can give some general ideas, based on my work and experience, they are the ones who are in the best position to answer the question about what to do to advance liberty. Yet, there are a few specific ideas that will help nearly anyone concerned with promoting liberty in their own communities. One, in particular, is very worthwhile to keep in mind. It can guide one to do things that may really bear fruit.

I have in mind advocating the decoupling of government from the innumerable projects that it’s now involved with everywhere. Governments are now supporting, through public funds acquired by way of taxation, innumerable projects in every community across the world and if one is dedicated to advancing liberty an important step in that direction is to promote removing government from all these "community" endeavors.

If some convention center is widely desired, or a baseball park or football stadium, or some other recreation or athletic facility, it is imperative that these be supported voluntarily and those who want these facilities go about soliciting the support instead of relying on the extortionist approach of taxation. Champions of liberty should vigorously advocate that!

After all, it is not difficult for most people to appreciate that those uninterested in football should be free to devote their own resources to some purpose of their own choosing instead of having these resources taken from them against their will and put to use for what they do not want, a football stadium. This is very simple to convey in letters, conversations, on talk programs, etc. One can always make mention of the fact that this is supposed to be a free country where people have the right to pursue their own happiness and not to be conscripted to help in the pursuit of others’.

Also, this is a country with a reasonably strong individualist tradition, which can also be deployed in defense of having those who want something go about securing support for their projects, leaving others to do so in support of what they want. We all have ideals, goals, dreams, purposes of our own, often not unlike those of some others but rarely those of all others.

And that’s an excellent reason why the various community projects people now tend habitually to expect governments to support should actually be supported privately, voluntarily. Sure, there are some projects where this idea would be too radical to promote—airports, roads, and schools should be funded voluntarily but the governmental habit is too powerful here and it will take a while before advances toward privatization can be made about those. But swimming pools? Ice skating rinks? Volley ball and tennis courts? Even football stadiums, while quite large projects, have no business being built with funds extorted from people who care not a whit about football.

I believe that this particular idea, so closely related to what a free society is about—namely, people being free to pursue their own objectives so long as they do not violated anyone’s rights—holds out considerable promise of gaining ascent from one’s neighbors. Even if it will not fly immediately, it can become a focus of discussion, of editorializing, of local talk programs and so forth.

So what can you do to promote liberty? One thing among others is to advocate getting government—the governing right in your own back yard, your city or county—out of the task of supporting special interest projects pretending to serve everyone’s interest. Let those who want these often very worthy goals (to some) get up the support from them and let the rest support what they value.

Watch out For Growing Public Sector

by Tibor R. Machan

In a free society adult men and women have the rights to their lives, liberty and property proficiently protected. That's what it means when the Declaration of Independence states that governments are instituted to secure our rights and, presumably, for no other purpose that conflict with this one.

Of course, rights must be exercised some place—if I have a right to my life, I must have a right to obtain some location where this life may be lived; if I have the right to liberty, this too, involves the right to seek out places where my liberty may be exercised. So the right to private property is implicitly affirmed by any of our basic rights. Effectively, then, a free society is one wherein private property is ubiquitous.

Public property, in contrast, is highly limited, namely, to whatever is required to operate the courts, house the police and the military and some other administrative structures. (Here is the only place where eminent domain law applies, in obtaining—with appropriate compensation—the places needed for such public uses.)

But when the free society is compromised Left and Right, meaning, the major political factions don't give a hoot about private property rights as they do not in this country for sure, the private sector— which includes not just individual but a bulk of social affairs— contracts. More and more of the society becomes public—schools, colleges and universities, business establishment, forests, parks, rivers, lakes, museums, concert halls, massive portions of land of all sorts, and, of course, all the roads and traffic hubs, including airports and so on.

One consequences of this expanding public sector is that the rights people have to carry on their activities, such as their freedom of expression of all kinds, begin to be exercised all over the entire society, and to be regulated by the government. Freedom to pray would then have to be granted on public lands and in public buildings, not just private churches and homes and halls. Freedom to speak up about various matters would have to be granted on any public property. And, because the public realm is normally under the jurisdiction of public authorities, local, county, state or federal, these rights to exercise ones liberty now no longer amount to bona fide freedoms but highly restricted "freedoms," regulated and regimented by the public authorities. And this is natural—after all, in my own house, for example, the exercise of free expression is regulated by, well, me! I own the place. If you are invited and want to speak up, you have no unlimited freedom to speak out but whatever freedom I grant you.

Same with newspapers—whoever owns them sets the limits of what goes in the pages—only the owners have the right to freely use the space as they see fit. Ownership, in short, confers the authority to set terms of use and when public spheres are being used by citizens, governments set the terms. And this invites nothing less than government supervision over our supposedly free conduct, conduct we have the right to engage in and would be able to exercise without interference on our own private property but not on public property.

Now this situation, which I sketch in broad terms here, accounts for much of the hassle about what is and as not permitted by the legal authorities when we try to exercise our right to liberty on public property, such as a high school football field or classroom or a state college or university newspaper or research laboratory. The whole stem cell research controversy is largely understandable as a function of how such research is conducted mostly at public facilities—hospitals, universities, etc.

The only nearly private sector in America today—though now also in peril from IRS intrusions—is where religion is being practiced—churches are virtual private property and what goes on there, barring criminal conduct, is protected against interference and regulation and censorship. It is also true that from such private places anyone who is not invited may be excluded (except meddling bureaucrats, unfortunately), whereas this isn't so with public places. Because these are public, they generally must admit anyone who is a member of the public, so allocating use will be needed, as will be the imposition of various conditions—political correctness, for example, in what goes into student newspapers or is being said in classrooms.

The bottom line is that with the expansion of the public sector, something widely championed by thinkers both Left and Right, there is greater and greater contraction of our liberties to do as we judge correct. The free society is clearly being more and more compromised.

Secular Thinking, Science, and Ethics

by Tibor R. Machan

The Center for Inquiry, a secular humanist organization that publishes some important and interesting literature mostly in support of construing the world without recourse to mysticism or faith in supernaturalism, placed an ad in The New York Times recently. It calls for us all to take the scientific perspective on the world more seriously and leave aside the religious approach, especially religious fundamentalism.

A central passage of this ad goes like this: "Science transcends borders and provides the most reliable basis for finding solutions to our problems. We maintain that secular, not religious, principles must govern our public policy ..."

Now I have sympathies for this viewpoint because I, too, think that reliance on faith is divisive and very unsure-footed. That's why there are about 4200 different religions in America alone, all with their own conceptions of the world and how people should live in it. And, yes, science seems to be far more unified across the world, even the ages, even though there are, of course, many disagreements brewing among scientists of all types. All in all, though, science does offer up more reliable understanding than religion.

Still, religion has the corner on one area of human concern which science has been approaching very ineptly. This is morality or ethics. Scientists have never quite managed to escape the paradox of claiming that there isn't any free will at all, everything just happens because it must happen, while at the same to complaining about how people behave, especially about science! Well, if we are moved by impersonal forces, the laws of physics, chemistry, biology -- especially genetics -- then why complain? It's all que sera, sera, isn't it? If this scientific approach is right, then all the lamentations about how people view science is itself pointless. They just do as they must, so why beef?

Moreover, there is the problem that science itself doesn't have much to offer about whether we ought to respect it. Nor can science itself demonstrate that it "provides the most reliable basis for finding solutions to our problems." That, assuredly, isn't a scientific claim, provable by experimentation and other scientific procedures. Thinking that science can legislate about the merits of science is folly -- as demonstrated by the fact that the Center's ad hasn't an ounce of science in it backing up its claims about the reliability of science.

So there is a problem with secularism as understood by most of the folks at the Center of Inquiry. It doesn't address one of the most important issues in human affairs, namely, how we ought to live. Sure, there are claims that we ought to honor science but this isn't something that is well supported. Science itself cannot do it so what will? The ad doesn't say.

The bottom line is that the scientific -- some critics will call it "scientistic" -- approach needs to be supplemented with something and champions of secularism aren't generally very good at showing how to do this. Once they step away from science itself, they need to turn to some other source and what should that be? Philosophy? Of course, there are about as many schools of philosophy seeking adherents as religions. Sure, most promise ways of solving human problems that avoid the pitfalls of faith based solutions -- they claim that their ways are available to all without recourse to some supernatural guidance that is very hard for people to grasp rationally, practically. But beyond this, there is very little unanimity among philosophers.

My idea is that folks at the Center of Inquiry and other such organizations ought to advance their positive case and stop denigrating other positions, especially by besmirching their ways of trying to find solutions to our problems. No approach has found universal acceptance; each is trying to put its case out there to be considered. So let's put out our various proposed approaches to solving human problems and let there be a debate about that instead of dismissive messages about how some approaches are inadequate. Let, so to speak, the free market of ideas decide. Yes, it is best for this purposes, for government to stay out of the fray, as the Center's ad suggests. But beyond that, it is most fruitful, I think, to simply stick to arguing the substance without calling into question anyone's good will.

For What Should We Thank Bill Gates?

Tibor R. Machan

When a few days ago PBS's Charlie Rose had Bill Gates back on his show, it was Thanksgiving and Rose began with noting how much Bill Gates had to be thankful for and how we should thank him “because of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has given a lot to education and global health.” During the entire interview the focus was mostly on this feature of Gate’s—and Warren Buffett’s—life, namely, their charitable endeavors.

Of course, there was some discussion about technology in general, computers, and so forth, but the one topic completely ignored was Bill Gates’ contribution to commerce—to serving his customers well, to creating thousands and more jobs around the world, to investing in new technology and the like. In short, it was as if Bill Gates were nothing but a philanthropist and computer guru, totally removed from the economics of the field in which he has been such an enormous success. The idea that perhaps Gates deserves thanks from us because he makes and sells very desirable merchandise simply never came to Charlie Rose’s mind—nor to Bill Gates’, oddly enough.

As I was watching and listening very closely to the interview I was baffled by why both interviewer and interviewee so assiduously avoided talking about making money and focused only on giving it away—as if one could do the latter without the former. It occurred to me that perhaps Charlie Rose thought nothing of such feats at all and Gates has been instructed by spin doctors to avoid making any mention of his commercial achievements. Or perhaps the producers of the show waved off any such discussion, fearing that viewers of PBS programs would be offended if the subject matter of making money got any attention.

Bill Gates would hardly be of public significance if he hadn’t made a great deal of money from his creativity and diligence, his business savvy. None of his talk of “giving back” would be of much significance if what he gave back amounted to no more than, say, a bit of volunteering at a homeless shelter or making the kind of contributions most of us can make to various charities and other worthy causes. Bill Gate matters mostly because of his technical and entrepreneurial genius which then enabled him to be a philanthropist.. But that issue seems to be taboo, at least during an hour long interview on Charlie Rose’s prestigious PBS program. Why?

My guess is that part of it is that Bill Gates would much rather be liked than being admired for what he actually accomplished in his career. He has become a celebrity. Perhaps enough people in his industry show him professional respect so he can parade for the rest of us his goody two shoes persona. Assuming that he sincerely wants to spend a good deal of the money he has made to help out the unfortunate around the globe, even there it would be of some interest whether giving away the bulk of his wealth is a better way to do this than making more money by, say, building new research facilities and manufacturing plants and providing steady jobs for the poor in Africa. Maybe the example of Mother Theresa has influenced Gates—the lady, after all, did very little of permanent significance for those whom she helped, given that she, too, just gave away mostly perishable goods and did not focus mainly on helping the poor help themselves.

Or maybe the customary guilt that sadly afflicts so many honest wealthy people around the world is at the bottom of Gates’ failure to acknowledge his own true achievements, figuring that he is just one of the lucky ones and doesn’t deserve any pride at all in what he has done. I don’t know Bill Gates but to find out about why he is disclaiming any credit for what should in point of fact gain him the most of it would be worth making some effort to find him and ask him some questions if one were permitted to do so. Maybe we would discover that in his private thoughts he is well aware of why he really counts for something to us all in his life and that the kind of stuff he gets singled out for on Charlie Rose is but a sideshow, one that may or may not be of some serious help (since it might in fact lead mostly to people becoming dependent upon others for their well being).

Don’t please misunderstand—emergency help to those who need it is often crucial and many of us do our own share to provide a bit of it when the occasion for it arises. But even the meager emergency support to the unfortunate many of us provide would be impossible if we didn’t work hard at our professions and earn a decent living. That, not giving things away, is the crucial issue to keep in mind, especially when it comes to a creative entrepreneur like Bill Gates.

A Most Civil Adversary and Comrade

Tibor R. Machan

When Milton Friedman, the Nobel Laureate economists, leader of the Chicago School of Economics, a husband to Rose and devoted father of their two children and friend of VIPs as well as not so VIPs died the other week, I couldn’t find my voice because of how little I could really say at first about such a fine individual and how many others there are who would want to express their grief and convey some of their memories in public. I wasn’t a very close associate, nor intimate friend, only someone who now and then would have the privilege of having Uncle Milty in my life, sometimes as a kind of mentor, sometimes as celebrity intellectual, and at others as a critic, even a severe one at that. My own reflections here will focus on his style of intellectual exchange more than on other aspects of this wonderful man’s contribution to our culture.

When I began my involvement with the libertarian movement in America, I was brought in by reading the novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand but then quickly discovered that beside this stimulating thinker there were several others who had been making significant contributions to the study of the free society. One of them was the economist Milton Friedman, who was, among other things, a founder of the Mt. Pelerin Society, the international association of classical liberal intellectuals founded back in the late 1940s as a rather humble antidote to the massive more or less extreme Left Wing academic, intellectual, and literary movement across the West.

Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, James Buchanan, Fritz Machlup, and Friedman were just some of the very learned people who felt the need to go on the philosophical offensive against those who in the name of what classical liberals believed is a pure fantasy, namely, the socialist ideal, one they knew was leading countries astray on numerous fronts but most especially economically. Younger enlistees like me had to immerse ourselves in the works of these and many other defenders of the right to individual liberty and the free market society men and women required so as to flourish because, well, those championing statism were, tragically, a vast group and quite learned to boot. But their values and analyses of human affairs were seriously askew, this we quickly realized, especially those of us who had a solid taste of socialism and would-be communism shoved down our throats back behind the Iron Curtain early in our lives. (Rand, von Mises, von Hayek, Thomas Szasz, and others in the classical liberal group had themselves experienced either fascism, socialism or both for part of theirs.)

In time I tried to make some contribution to the literature, as well as to efforts to spread the ideas about liberty throughout the media. One of these was helping to found Reason Magazine as a serious, dependable monthly publication containing accessible yet in depth analyses of society from the libertarian perspective. One of the features of the magazine was to be lengthy, probing interviews with important thinkers from several sides of the intellectual spectrum. These included Nathaniel Branden, Thomas Szasz, Yale Brozen, Bill Niskanan, Bill Buckley, Nicholas von Hoffman, Sidney Hook, F. A. Hayek, Yale Brozen, et al, and, also, Professor Milton Friedman.

I was teaching at a small place in Western New York and drove, in the middle of February, 1974, to Chicago to meet and interview Uncle Milty at his apartment. I had along Professor Ralph Raico and we were joined also by one of Dr. Friedman’s students, Joe Cobb, and the interview commenced. It went on for several hours and when we finished we were exhausted from a most exhilarating exchange with a very intellectually agile and superbly educated scholar.

In the course of the interview we argued a good deal, exploring various approaches that one might take to understanding human affairs and the best economic system that would serve people anywhere and everywhere. While in broad agreement, there were certain matters on which there were some differences among us and I, especially, had a very intense exchange with our interviewee on the topic of whether it is possible for people to know what is right versus wrong ethical conduct. One of the most memorable points made by Friedman was this: "I think that the crucial question that anybody who believes in freedom has to ask himself is whether to let another man be free to sin. If you really know what sin is, if you could be absolutely certain that you had the revealed truth, then you could not let another man sin. You have to stop him." "Interview with Milton Friedman," Reason, December 1974, p. 5. He, of course, held that no one could know when another sinned or did something morally wrong. I disagreed with this and we went a few rounds before moving on to other topics.

Over the years that I have taught and written quite extensively on the subject of business ethics, I have always presented my students with one of Uncle Milty’s most widely reprinted and relatively nonacademic essays from 1961, one that appeared in The New York Times Magazine, addressing the topic of corporate moral responsibility. His essay put on record one of the most uncompromising defenses of economic liberty, rejecting the notion popularized by Ralph Nader and John Kenneth Galbraith, among others, that business corporations must serve various social purposes and not the goals of those who own them. Although here, too, I was not in full agreement with him, Dr. Friedman held that managers must serve no other goals at all but those the owners designate—which is mostly to pursue the prosperity of the enterprise, or profit—and to do otherwise is to betray a trust the owners extend to managers who voluntarily come to work for them. (Uncle Milty told me and some others at Chapman University, on the occasion of the unveiling of his bust some years ago on the promenade of the campus, that, ironically, this essay of his brought him more royalties that any other piece he wrote in his long career.)

A few years later I had the good fortune of spending a year at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University where Dr. Friedman had just started as a Senior Fellow. During my year there I was working on a project about government regulation of business and my approach focused on the ethical dimensions of this by now well entrenched institution—in particular, how it violates certain elements of due process by imposing burdens on people in business who haven’t been proven to have done anything wrong. My way of looking at the practice did not please Uncle Milty at all—he preferred straightforward, ethically neutral economic studies, nothing that involved moral or even political evaluations which he thought could not be well grounded. I was firmly rebuked by him when my work saw the light of day and it was eventually published without his support.

Yet, for some reason Milton Friedman seemed to find some of my contributions to the struggle against statism worthwhile. So in time he and I would exchange views, in person or by mail or at some conference. At one of the latter—which he himself directed at the Silverado Ranch in Napa Valley, with the support of the Canadian free market think tank, the Fraser Institute—we spend three intense days discussing numerous aspects of the free society. We did, also, revisit our earlier debate and things become quite agitated when I once again argued that moral knowledge is possible to human beings and he disagreed, calling this a view that lacks humility. When I noted that his claim was itself pregnant with moral overtones, something of a mini-volcanic eruption occurred. But very soon after the conference I received a copy of the Hungarian translation of one of Uncle Milty’s books, on price theory, with a wonderful note saying that despite our differences, what matters most is to keep up the good fight.

Of course, these were minor encounters compared to the many in Dr. Friedman’s intellectual career but what they taught me with considerable poignancy is how important it is to keep one’s disputations civilized, how to keep one’s emotions in check as one examines even the most emotional topics in human affairs. Not only in my rare encounters with him but in all his writing and public appearances—in his many Newsweek columns, on Meet the Press, in the PBS broadcast of Friedman’s wonderful program Free to Choose, and everywhere else—there was exemplary conduct on display, the kind that too many who take part in public disputation nowadays seem to have cast aside in favor of character assassination, speculation about motivation, and imputation of ill will.

When Friedman produced Free to Choose (1980), by the way, something important emerged in how the design of the show compared with one that John Kenneth Galbraith did a little earlier, Age of Uncertainty (1977). Both of the programs focused on economics and both prominently featured the views of their hosts. However, whereas Friedman ended each installment with a half hour of debate, inviting several adversaries to challenge him, leaving the resolution of the disputes ultimately to the audience, Galbraith pointedly did not and closed with yet another reiteration of his position. (This, incidentally, prompted some at the Hoover Institution to produce a series of rebuttals to Galbraith in both book and media formats.) The episode reminded me of an exchange I once had with a prominent neo-Marxist sociologist at U C Santa Barbara. I asked him why those on the Left had the tendency to use their class room as a bully pulpit and he answered, “Well, we are revolutionaries and for us teaching is always something in the service of the revolution.”

I do not believe too many public intellectuals and academics can reach the level of decency attained by Dr. Milton Friedman. Luckily for us he left a large paper—and media—trail and millions here and abroad will be able to learn from it and maybe improve the quality of intellectual life everywhere.

Market Blues

by Tibor R. Machan

The free market economy is the most suited to human commercial affairs, there is no reasonable doubt about this. But a free market leaves some people with various laments that then tempt them to undermine this great institution.

When we do all our production and consumption in a free market, we are able to do well as well as badly as producers and consumers, even as we do not violate any principles of the market economy. Freedom of trade, the right to private property, and other elements of free market economic affairs can remain fully intact, yet people in the market place can do many things badly or well. People can shop carefully, prudently, efficiently, attentively and so forth. But they can also shop recklessly, inefficiently, inattentively, and so forth.

Shopping, for instance, can be impulsive, overindulgent and out-and-out stupid, and all this is perfectly compatible with the principles of the free market. Those involved in the commercial transactions aren't going to focus on helping people improve themselves as market agents. Stupid buyers will find eager sellers to please them just as careful buyers will. It isn't generally the task of buyers and sellers to watch over one another's judgments, so often these judgments will guide the behavior of either with no attention to their quality. Sometimes market behavior can be out-and-out immoral, yet so long as no theft or assault or some other violation of anyone's rights is involved, there will not be much remedy of these in the market place.

Of course, market agents do pay attention to each others' judgments and conduct and often act in reaction to finding these flawed, but only later, after transactions have transpired. I find someone in the market who acts badly and later I might avoid such a person, or I find someone who is sharp and sensible and then return for further market relationships, but this is not guaranteed. Often convenience is the primary value being sought, aside from just getting what one wants from others.

But when one steps back and thinks about markets, one may lament all this—how come there are no systematic discouragements against bad, albeit peaceful, conduct in markets? Why are people not stopped from buying stuff they should not buy, or selling stuff others should not purchase? Why are there so many ways people can easily go wrong as they navigate the marketplace?

So there is then the temptation to want to do something, anything, to remedy matters. Apart from people who want to impose their ways on the rest of us or simply want to control others, there are those who just wish for things to turn out better then they can sometimes turn out in the marketplace where people are free to do a lot of things well or badly.

They wish people would act more sensibly, more prudently, more efficiently and so forth and they realize, also, that this wish is fully justified, at least in general terms. They can also see around them individuals who aren't being stopped in the free market from
carrying on badly. And they wish they were stopped somehow.

So they then support government measures that promise to regulate human conduct in the marketplace. Never mind that such regulation is fraught with hazards, much greater ones than the conduct of free people in the marketplace, given that it always involves some measure of some people coercing other people in various ways. Never mind that the knowledge to fix things that may go awry in the free market is rarely if ever possessed by those who would set out to set things aright. Never mind that getting government involved here will encourage it to be involved there and at yet another place, so that temporary and petty tyrannies turn into massive and institutionalized ones. The mere wish to do something about the clearly undeniable prospects of some misconduct in free markets gives aid and comfort to those who would ruin it all in a vain effort to improve matters.

And there is the plain fact that making improvements on market misconduct is always open to people in peaceful ways, ones that do not involve undermining the free market. One can try to influence others to act better but, of course, this takes a bit of courage and initiative. Farming it out to government tends to suit the lazy way toward remedying matters and has the tremendous liability of contributing to the destruction of the greatest human institutions, the free society.

Leftist Hypocrisy #2342

by Tibor R. Machan

I admit it up front—I want to be published in The New York Review of Books, even if only by means of a letter to the editor. I have been reading the magazine ever since it started and often I have something to say about what appears in its pages. Now and then, actually, I have started very civil discussions with some of the authors. Many to whom I send a comment have answered and in some cases we have carried on email correspondence for some time.

But The New York Review of Books, unlike The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, National Review, The Claremont Review of Books, Mother Jones, and numerous other publications Left or Right to which I have sent letters to the editor, will not budge. I simply don't get admitted within its hallowed pages.

Well, in the very recent past one of the most frequently published authors from TNYRB, Tony Judt, got bumped from a talk he was to give at the Polish Consulate in New York City and the whole bunch of his fellow authors from that magazine have been bellyaching about this big-time. Apparently what he wanted to talk about was deemed unwanted by his hosts, so they uninvited him. But now all his pals are in a tizzy about it and there have been angry letters from them in TNYRB about this, sounding very much like the authors believe that Mr. Judt has some kind of natural or constitutional right to speak wherever he wishes to speak.

Hey, let's consider this for a moment. Mr. Judt is not wanted at the Polish Consulate, which is not some public square in the United States of America but, effectively, a private one, belonging to the Polish government. He definitely has no natural or constitutional right to sound off there, any more than he would in the Consulate of some other country or, indeed, on any terrain that doesn't belong to him or those who want to hear him.

Indeed, this is not much different from my case—I would like to sound off in TNYRB and have sent them many letters over the years (having subscribed very early to the magazine). I do not send them hate mail, nothing uncivil, only some brief missives arguing a point or making a criticism of some point made in the publication. Yet, I am excluded from those pages regularly, even while some of their authors find what I say worthy of a response when I send them the comment.

Now that is the nature of a free press. You don't get to publish in a forum where you aren't wanted. It is not your right. Newspapers and magazines and web sites belong to people and unless those people invite or permit you to sound off there, you don't get to. Not even if you are Tony Judt, friend of the editors of and of many contributors to TNYRB.

But then this is not really all that novel a phenomenon. Those on the Left regularly make use of concepts of freedom, whether deployed legitimately or not, when their agenda is at issue—while happily excluding from discussions in their forums anyone who isn't on their side.

The Left and, especially its communist wing back in the 50s were notoriously lopsided in their defense of individual rights to free expression—they insisted on it in the United States of America and other places in the West (sometimes quite wrong-headedly, as when they protested blacklists by private parties which they later eagerly employed themselves toward racists and others they didn't like much) while making no protests at all when the Soviets ran a state-owned press and publishing industry and barred anyone not toeing the party line from them.

No, The New York Review of Books is not a commie outfit and often it publishes letters protesting violations of free speech rights across the globe, be it by right- or left-wing governments. But they have a problem. They fail to understand that not every forum is subject to the constitutional protection of freedom of speech. Like my home or the Polish Consulate in New York City, for example, which are not available to their pals to peddle their ideology. Just as the pages of TNYRB aren't to me if they don't choose to have me in there.

Bush’s Disgraceful War

Tibor R. Machan

One of the saddest things about the George W. Bush years is how America’s reputation as a relatively peaceable society has become discredited. Sure, the U. S. A. has been involved in dubious military ventures throughout its history but not until now has there been a deliberate effort to embark upon a total military transformation of another country by the U. S. A. The effort has been utterly incoherent—a kind of forcing, coercing another country to conform to the ideals of the leaders of the U. S. A., ideals that are actually quite far removed from those of the founders of the American Republic. Sure, some have welcomed this—for example a good many Kurds—but on the whole no one seems to have benefited much and the citizens of the U. S. A., whom our government is supposed to serve, haven't for sure.

When George W. Bush talks of how America is fighting for freedom in the Middle East, he does not mean fighting for the freedom of the individuals of the people living in this region of the world. That’s evident from the fact that what Iraq is now and is likely to become in the near future is nothing like a country in which the principles of the U. S. Declaration of Independence will be even remotely approximated. Iraq is rife with violent public religious conflicts, more murderous today than yesterday, and virtually impervious to becoming civilized. That is to say, there is no evidence at all that a significant percentage of the population in Iraq is interested in setting aside their religious differences and confining their disagreements to civilized debates. There just is no evidence of such a prospect, not because Iraqis are incapable of living in a liberal democratic society but because the chosen priorities of the people are evidently quite different from such civilized, peaceful coexistence.

Secretary of State Rice keeps saying it is insulting to those in the Middle East to claim they aren’t prepared to live in a democracy and that would be so if it meant that Middle Easterners are somehow innately incapable of doing so. But that isn’t the case. The real problem is that too many of them do not value liberal democracy. They value imposing their religion on everyone else in their country. They are interested in nothing like peaceful coexistence of the sort familiar to Americans and other Westerners, with some attending this church, some another, and others yet another, etc., and so forth, with none insisting that those who do not share their faith be liquidated.

Now such folks are simply not willing, never mind able, to live democratically or freely. They have too many criminal inclinations they just don’t want to relinquish. And to fail to appreciate this is a kind of self-imposed blindness. It is a very costly blindness to boot, having already produced deaths that really are all in vein, however much Bush & Co. keep shouting—whistling in the dark—pretending it isn’t so. And that isn’t the only cost of this disgusting war, this abomination of American foreign policy.

A country once thought to be a beacon of the free world is now perceived by many as but a big bully. Its own form of government, a highly intrusive, meddlesome welfare state, is being exported to a region of the world that cannot afford such a system and whose population doesn’t seem to be interested in it at all. Its president is trying to sell others on the wisdom of trying to secure a kind of national freedom that only Machiavelli could appreciate and only for a country that has at least something of a unified citizenry. (For Machiavelli “freedom” meant the absence of foreign domination.) But because Iraq is a totally artificial hodgepodge of a county, such freedom makes no sense there at all. Under a dictatorship it could be intact, albeit as a function of massive state brutality but once the dictatorship has been abolished, there is nothing there to amount to a country, whom our government is supposed to serve, sort of like recent Yugoslavia. So the freedom of Iraq is a fantasy and it is this fantasy for which thousands of American soldiers and many more Iraqis have died and more are being slated to die.

In all my years as a naturalized citizen of the United States of America I have had laments and criticism of the country based on its failure to live up to its promise of a fully free society. But I have never been disgusted by its leadership as I am now. Bush needs to be sent on his way in total disgrace, as someone who has managed to destroy any remnant of America’s reputation as a bona fide free society and an example to the world of how such a society’s government should comport itself.

Reductionism, Science and Reason

by Tibor R. Machan

Some natural scientists who like to philosophize prefer the doctrine of reductionism as their philosophical position. This view is that everything in reality is but one kind of thing—there are no real differences, only apparent ones. So, for example, even though it seems like music is different from airline travel, or mice are different from giraffes, or again that a Rembrandt painting is different from the contents of one's trash can, by the reductionist account all these things are the same—atoms, or strings or, to quote a famous passage from All the King's Men, dirt:

"... there ain't a thing but dirt on this green God's globe except what's under water, and that's dirt too. It's dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain't a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt."

Even the Bible propounds the reductionist thesis when it proclaims we all came from dust and will return to dust, although this implies that for some time we aren't dust.

Why, when in fact so many things are so different from one another if one goes by what one can see, feel, hear, touch and think about, is this notion that it's all the same so appealing? Why, when it is contradicted by the evidence we face all around us, do serious people embrace it nonetheless?

For one thing, if it were true that everything is composed of just one kind of thing, say, atoms, then if we came to know atoms well, we would have bypassed having to come to know anything else. That would be enough. We would then understand everything else just fine since, well, it is anything else at all, it only appears to be. (Why so? That's a mystery the reductionists haven't addressed.) In all periods of human intellectual history there have been very bright thinkers who have accepted this idea, from ancient times to the present. Democritus, born at Abdera in about 460 BCE, was the most famous of the Greek atomists who thought everything is but atoms, albeit configured somewhat differently, which made it appear that there are indeed different beings in reality. But that is an illusion.

Today the most prominent candidate is string theory, the notion that the world is composed of zillions of ever so tiny strings. The view is meeting with some resistance lately, though, because it tends to be untestable. But it also has a lot of champions.

In philosophy the most prominent reductionist was the Englishman Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). He got his ideas from Galileo who believed the best way to go about understanding anything is to break it into its smallest parts, then figure out the principles that operate those parts and then apply the principles to everything. A very promising idea—saves a lot of time since all one needs is to understand one thing, the smallest, and everything else falls into line.

Is reductionism credible? Depends on the criteria of credibility. If one goes by our experiences with the world, it is not—there are too many things that are vastly different from each other. Apples, shoes, cars, clouds, symphonies, dogs, bacteria, etc., and so forth. One reason there are all those different departments at universities is the fact that so many different kinds of things need to be understood to be an educated person, educated about the world. But for a reductionist it would be enough to just study subatomic physics. We'd know everything from such study alone.

But perhaps our experience is all askew. We suffer from delusions, illusions, misunderstandings galore. Still, it is difficult to reconcile that with the very fact that we try to gain understanding. Isn't understanding different from what is being understood? If our minds seek answers to questions about something, aren't the minds most often something different from what they wish to understand?

I find reductionism so contrary to the facts that face me day in and day out in all realms of my life that I tend to believe it is a hopeless quest. It makes better sense to accept that reality comes in many forms, types, and kinds and go about studying it all in the spirit of the division of labor—chemists some parts, physicists others, biologists, psychologists, astronomers, economists, and so forth yet others.

Two kinds of Stereotyping

by Tibor R. Machan

Now and then people will characterize groups in various ways. Some of this is clearly prejudice—as when one ascribes to blacks, whites, women, those from Poland, or Latin Americans certain moral attributes which some of those from these groups may exhibit but which are certainly not innate to all members of the group. Thinking that all Mexicans are lazy or that Germans are by nature methodical or, again, that Americans are phlegmatic would be such prejudice. These are traits of individuals and while some in these groups may have them, many clearly do not. One needs to see if the ascription is justified instead of making it just because someone is a member of the group. One is, to put it somewhat differently, not morally good or bad because one is born black or Australian or Chinese. One is good or bad as a result of one's own judgments and actions.

But sometimes it makes good sense to ascribe traits to people in light of their membership in certain groups. This is so when they belong to the group as a matter of their own choice. If someone, as an adult, joins the Mafia or the Nazi Party, or becomes a Roman Catholic or a Muslim, and if it turns out that such membership amounts, in part, to agreeing to think and act in certain ways, then it makes perfectly good sense to expect members to favor the thinking and acting that goes with membership in these groups. And if such thinking and acting turns out to be morally or politically objectionable, holding such members responsible for what they have freely agreed to accept in terms of thinking and acting is justified.

Even if one is born into a religion or political party—as most of us are—we aren't forced to remain members in near-free countries but in time freely accept our membership, even if only by acquiescence. If my parents are Nazis or members of the Ku Klux Klan and they inculcate their vile ideology in me, if after I reach the age of reason I remain a member, this can certainly be held against me.

Sometimes this can happen with less obvious cases. Suppose a certain profession in one's part of the world has become corrupt—for example, medicine has pretty much been taken over by quacks or the police have become an arm of dictatorial government—then becoming or remaining a member of such a group can certainly be a fault. And those on the outside have every justification to hold it against the members for staying with the group.

When under the Nazis many judges of the pre-Nazi regimes were induced to remain with their new masters, who were perpetrating gross injustice, it was perfectly valid to question the integrity of these judges—especially since, by their choice, they added a patina of fake legitimacy to the whole thing. For a while, of course, some of them stayed with their roles in the hope that they would be able to reverse trends; but in time it became obvious that such efforts were futile. Remaining a judge under the Nazis pretty much made one complicit in the policies of the Nazis.
This, of course, is a very clear-cut case and not all of them are similar. Suppose the Roman Catholic clergy slowly began to turn a blind eye to child molestation among its members. At some point remaining a member of the Roman Catholic clergy could make one guilty of supporting child molestation, at least unless one takes a clear stand against one's fellow clergy in the matter.

The same holds true for members of other professions who fail to take a stand against corruption within their own ranks. For example, when in many countries across the globe the police willingly carry out tyrannical—or even petty-tyrannical—laws and regulations, coercively intruding upon the lives of innocent people, without resigning their positions or at least speaking out against the tyrannical measures their duties entail, then membership in the police corps becomes something morally objectionable, even when there are many aspects of the work that do not involve such tyrannical conduct.

Or, say, it turned out that for someone to teach philosophy at a university it would be a requirement to distort the history of the discipline or to mis-instruct students—as was the case, for example, throughout Soviet bloc countries during the rule of the Communists and in German universities when the Nazis where in charge—some sign of resistance would be required for one to remain a respectable member of the teaching profession.

Of course, there can be mitigating circumstances—in some countries if one does not fall into line, one pretty much risks one's life. But that isn't so in America. If one refuses to protest the unjust or corrupt policies of a profession that has gone substantially corrupt, one is guilty of being an accessory—however much good one also does within the profession in question.

Say if I were urged by the administration of my university to distort the nature of some school of philosophy I am teaching and I complied. Even while remaining accurate about all the other schools, I would have compromised my professional integrity.

Accordingly, it is no prejudice to condemn people who are members of professions which have gone substantially corrupt, even if the proper objectives of the profession are morally unobjectionable and one is able to carry out some of these while performing one's duties.

Gridlock versus Monolith

by Tibor R. Machan

Being a friend of neither Republicans nor Democrats, this election like most left me pretty nonplussed. Except for one thing. I favor gridlock. The idea is that the more they squabble among themselves in Washington, Sacramento, Tallahassee or other centers of political power, the better chance people around the country have for carrying on with their own lives as they deem proper. That is, after all, the point of life in human communities. To be able to live peacefully on one's own terms and those one can come to with others. The proper role of the lawmakers and law enforcers is to secure that peace, to make sure our individual rights aren't violated. The details may get quite complicated at times, but that's the bottom line.

Given that neither of the major parties has any interest at all in facilitating this limited purpose for us—because they all want to meddle with nearly every part of our lives now, and are often encouraged to do this by the very people whose lives they bother so much (in the hope that perhaps the meddling with favor them as against others)—what is there left to hope for from politics? The gridlock.

When the power-hungry politicians are not quite in cahoots—what they want the power for differs among them significantly enough so they keep haggling about it—they get preoccupied with jockeying for the power they see available to them. If one party is in charge of the whole shebang, well, this haggling is reduced and the likelihood of messing up our lives is greater, what with all of them agreed to do it in roughly the same ways.

As everyone could see over the last term and a half of Republican presidential and Congressional dominance, these folks were just as eager as those they kept calling 'tax and spend liberals' to, well, tax and spend. Sure, some temporary tax relief was evident but with all the spending these hypocritical Republicans supported, sometime in the near future the jig will be up. (It is moreover pretty rotten to go against that somewhat reasonable idea that there ought not to be taxation without representation, which is exactly what funding government by borrowing money really comes to!)

Republicans and Democrats alike are caught in the spiral of public choice theory—they refuse to say no to anything they can do to spend your money and mine, given that we have no systematic block against it in our legal system. (My friend Jack Wheeler says this ought to be the next big item of political debate, the erection of constitutional barriers to confiscatory taxation. Dream on Jack—they all think they can square the circle somehow!)

So the only hope that's reasonable and promising is for the politicians to get completely immersed in infighting. Let the Bush team strive to increase the military budget and Nancy Pelosi & Co. fight him tooth and nail, and let Nancy & Co. try for more money for whatever interest group they want to benefit and get the Republicans up in arms about that. And the same thing on as many fronts as possible—extending government regulations, installing more environmental precautionary measures, promoting religion in public schools, whatever.

Then if we are lucky, we will get some additional scandals from the new team manning the Nanny State, so perhaps that will add some more obstacles to their getting anything done. (They all seem to think that the most important part of their job is to "get something done," whatever that "something" happens to be, even if it means adding a bunch of intrusive laws into our lives.)

No, there is nothing very positive about gridlock except for the chance that it will slow down a bit the runaway train of government intrusion in people's lives. Perhaps that will provide a little chance for people to learn better and better what the American Founders tried to teach them about the proper scope of governmental power. This is that such power is only justified when used defensively, to ward off violations of our basic and derivative rights. The rest is tantamount to nothing less than political malpractice.

The Temptation to Lie

by Tibor R. Machan

Have you noticed that when you ask someone on the street where the next post office or drug store or some other locally known place is, they usually tell you it's just a couple of blocks when in fact it is a lot farther than that? Or when someone tells you she will be there in a few minutes and then you wait for half an hour and she is still missing? Or when you are told on the phone 'May I put you on hold for a moment?' and you are still waiting ten minutes later?

Why do people prevaricate so much? It comes out big time just before Election Day—we are sure to win, the candidate states with the utmost confidence, only to lose by a substantial margin a few days later. This happened in the recent election—the Republicans came on various news programs saying their own micro-polls tell them they are in far better shape than the mainstream polls would have them. And then they lost bigtime. It happens a lot. As someone who votes Libertarian when I vote, I sometimes find candidates of the LP predicting they will win when it is completely ridiculous—they haven't a ghost of a chance in this country where the bulk of the public is suffering from what might best be called the entitlement mentality. You vote for those who tell you that you are entitled to this, that, and yet another thing, all of it paid for from other people's pocketbooks. Libertarians cannot honestly make such promises since they hold firmly to the view that stealing from Peter so as to benefit Paul is morally wrong, a view that is in fact correct. But sadly most voters believe in redistributing wealth that doesn't belong to them.

OK, so LP candidates should know by now that the time hasn't come yet that most voters recognize that stealing is wrong. Sure, they usually don't steal in their circle of neighbors but when it comes to stealing from strangers across the country, they definitely believe stealing is just fine. And all of this is happening in a supposedly Christian country, with the clear commandment from God that prohibits stealing.

But despite the facts speaking a clear message, even LP candidates predict victory. Why?

I suspect the reason is that people believe they have a duty to tell others only what will please them, what will appear to benefit them. This altruistic outlook—namely, never bring bad news to people even if that's the truth of it—is encouraging millions of people to be liars. Yes, the Post Office is just around the corner—not because that is the truth but because it will make you feel good! Yes, you will only be on hold for a moment or two, not because that is the truth but because then for a little while you will feel good and I will have seemed to be doing you a favor.

Indeed, altruism may well account for why so many yield to the temptation to tell lies to others. Many people simply do not dare to tell the truth if that truth isn't pleasant, if it doesn't promise what is desired. The truth is often unpleasant. You may have to wait for 20 minutes on hold, yes, and there is nothing pleasant about that (especially with all that cheesy music being blasted into your ears). Yes, you will have to walk ten blocks to get to the drug store and this may not promise much comfort for you but it is the truth. But for me to bring to you an unpleasant truth is to make you feel bad and my duty is, of course, to make everyone else feel good. Or so altruism would have it.

Maybe it would take a bit of patience to help people get acclimated to the truth of things, to have them face up to what's what instead of what they wish for. But in the long run it would even serve them better to learn the truth—it would set them free of illusions, free of wishful thinking. But no; instead, millions are taught to serve others, which then leads them to try to make them feel better rather than be straight with them.

Can One Respect the Police?

Tibor R. Machan

It began with the Orange County ordinance authorizing police to stop teens from smoking in public places. One of my children asked me, who are these people to tell them whether they may smoke? Isn’t that the job of parents? Don’t the cops have kidnappers, rapists, murderers, and robbers to deal with? Is it really their role in our lives to order us to stop smoking?

I really couldn’t argue with the logic here. It isn’t the proper task of the police to tell us whether to smoke cigarettes or dope or whatever, for that matter. The police of a free society are supposed to be peace officers, not parents or nannies or even schoolmarms. I did mention that what the police do is follow orders given to them by the politicians and bureaucrats but my kids reminded me that this is the excuse German soldiers used when they were asked about enforcing the tyrannical rules of the Nazis. They said isn’t it just a few steps—well, maybe quite a few—from that kind of a system when cops start taking over the jobs of parents?

Later I had a chance to talk to some of my kids’ friends—they had a little gathering at our house and I took advantage of this and asked them about their views of the police. Several of them, the more articulate ones, said they have zero respect for the police because of the kind of tasks they have willingly taken on, ones they should not be doing at all. The entire notion of a vice squad was upsetting to many of them—how can police officers expect young people to think highly of them when they are willing to follow such orders handed to them by the politicians, orders to eradicate vice! When I asked, well what do you expect them to do, some answered that they should rebel and refuse to follow these immoral orders; some argued that they should resign in protest, just as should the police of any tyrannical regime.

This led to a discussion of democracy—what about when the majority of the voters, through their representatives, order the police to enforce these rules? Some of the kids immediately questioned whether a majority may order the police to do what individuals may not order them to do—such as tell them how to behave when they are not violating anyone’s rights. They knew about lynch mobs and mentioned how despite the majority’s intention of hanging a suspect, it would be wrong to do this because no conviction has occurred, no due process has been followed.

You might say the friends of my children are a special bunch— they do some thinking about these matters quite on their own. Even in class, my kids speak up and challenge conventional wisdom. (It may have to do a little with the example I and my friends set for them!) But with respect to the role of the police, it is really sad that so many young people appear to be cynical about what is happening. After all, the proper task of the police is a very important one, namely, to deal with crime, where crime is understood as people violating the rights of other people—murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, kidnapping, etc., etc. This task requires serious training—the police may not fight crime by acting like criminals in the process. And that's often difficult to do—discipline, self-restraint, and knowledge of the nuances of crime are required, as well as much else. Those who take up the job of the police and do it properly do deserve respect. They are doing the quintessential public service in a free society where the public good is nothing more or less than securing the rights of individuals. So the police are a major agency of securing the genuine public good.

But when they start meddling in all kinds of things they have no business doing, when they blindly and even enthusiastically follow the orders or rouge politicians, then they have become corrupt. And young people are not oblivious to this.

Moreover, arguably seeing the corruption of the police on so many fronts, they are likely to lose respect for them where it really counts, namely, in their capacity as crime fighters. The police often needs the help of citizens in fighting crime but this help isn’t likely to be forthcoming from a citizenry that lacks respect for police officers in light of what they learn about them from their role in enforcing rules and practices that are none of their business.