Free Will or Not?

Tibor R. Machan

Sure enough, some topics resurface quite naturally in the wake of certain types of events. The Virginia Tech massacre has brought out the gun control champions, as well as those who anticipate their histrionics and warn that banning guns can do more harm than good in just such circumstances. Also, the issue of whether perpetrators of such heinous acts are helpless or in fact possess free will and are therefore responsible for their actions has come up (notably in a recent missive by New York Times columnist David Brooks).

As to the free will issue, one of the many points worth noting, especially in response to Mr. Brooks’ input, is that the dispute has been around for ages. The ancient Greeks put on record some rather sophisticated arguments on both sides, so Mr. Brooks’ claim that free will is now in retreat, in light of various brain-scientific theorizing, is way off.

In fact, ever since the 15th century, when the natural sciences gained a strong momentum—having been legitimatized by Thomas Aquinas’ philosophical writings, which party embraced the naturalism of Aristotle—free will has been challenged based on the idea that everything in nature behaves deterministically, as billiard balls do on a pool table. Thomas Hobbes, in England, and Baruch Spinoza, on the continent, laid out somewhat different but very impressive cases against free will.

There have not been too many free will champions ever since then, other than Immanuel Kant in the 17th century and a few others. In our day the only well known naturalist thinker who defended free will was Ayn Rand, although in academic philosophy quite few have advanced the view that people themselves can be causes of their actions, so there need be no conflict between scientific causality and free will.

What makes this a recurring popular topic is that without free will there would seem to be no basis for morality and criminal law. If one should do some things and not other things, one would have to have the capacity for free choice. Otherwise personal responsibility is a myth. And nearly all those who have argued against free will agree. For example, the famous defense attorney Clarence Darrow argued that such clients of his as Leopold and Loeb had no choice and couldn’t help themselves when they brutally murdered a young woman. The late Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner also argued that freedom and dignity—our moral capacity—are both mythical notions, without scientific foundation.

So, pace Mr. Brooks, the dispute between those championing free will and those who deny it predates by many decades, even centuries, the current arguments between some neuroscientists and their detractors. (As a side note, there are brain scientists, such as the late Roger W. Sperry, who defended free will on scientific grounds, saying that the human brain contains features that enable one to govern one’s impulses, resist one’s habits, control one’s emotions—if one will only apply oneself.)

I am a partisan in this dispute, having written two books, one on Skinner himself and another on the free will issue directly, in which I have argued that free will and science are not in conflict. What makes it appear that they are is that too many believe that science assumes a materialist view of the world, one according to which everything is just simple matter, kind of like everything made of sand at the beach is just sand, even though it may look like a castle, a car, or a bridge at first inspection. But this isn’t really part of any of the sciences but rather a part of a certain philosophy that admittedly many scientists accept.

There is one major argument against determinism that’s very tough to overcome, especially by scientists. This is that unless human beings are free to do independent thinking, including scientific research, the results of inquiry are always infected with bias, prejudice, and other causes they cannot resist. This is the same problem most of us associate with prejudice in other areas, such as racism, sexism, ethnic bias, and so forth. We tend to take it that such prejudice is avoidable—indeed much public policy in the last several decades rests on the idea of its avoidability. Similarly, most of us take it the jurors can be objective, if they work at it.

But if free will is a myth, no such objectivity is possible, including about the issue of free will versus determinism. And that is a very difficult idea to reject because even to reject it, one would need to be able to be objective and, thus, to have free will.

Mars May Need Al Gore

Tibor R. Machan

Yes, Virginia, the red planet is getting warmer. As Science News magazine reports in its April 7, 2007, issue, “Modeling conditions on Mars using albedo [the percentage of light reflected form its surface] data form the Mars Global Surveyor, the team [of Paul E. Geissler, planetary geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, AZ and his colleagues] calculated an average air temperature at the planet’s surface about 0.65oC higher than in comparable simulations using the Viking-era data. In some areas, particularly those over the planet’s southern ice cap, air temperatures might have increased as much as 4oC, the researchers report in the April 5 Nature.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but it is my very strong impression that Mars is not teaming with gasoline powered traffic just now. Exactly what the folks up there are using for fuel I do not know but I have heard on good authority that none of what they use is causing the warming of the planet. Indeed, I have heard rumors that there is no one up there using any fuel combustion for anything, not a soul. The warming seems to be happening quite without the influence of Martians, let alone human beings.

But of course, Mars hasn’t had the benefit of Al Gore’s wisdom concerning its recent remarkable warming. Soon, perhaps, the former Vice President and his team of climate scientists will be invited to make a movie there. This is what happens when you get an Oscar here on earth—everyone wants to give you scripts to film and those concerned with Mars’s warming trends are no exception.

Rumor has it that there is a script making the rounds already, tentatively called, “A Very Inconvenient Truth, One Only Mr. Gore Could Prove.” And it will demonstrate, with the wide consensus of the universe’s climate scientists—and with the soon to be expanded United Nation’s bureaucratic community in tow—that, yes, the warming of the climate on Mars is caused by, well, human beings who have been secretly sending up the CO2 from earth, in the hopes that this would show they have no hand in earth’s global warming. In the new movie, however, Mr. Gore will demonstrate that these sneaky humans won’t get away with their scheme and now have the great Al Gore to deal with.

It is hoped by all concerned, of course, that once the movie is made and shown, especially on Mars, the terrible dangers predicted from Mars’s impending climate changes will abate, although some who have had a sharp eye focused on the planet have concluded that it is too late now, just as they have done as far as earth’s prospects are concerned. The dice has been tossed and we are all doomed both on Mars and on Earth.

It remains to be seen, though—and here is where the “who done it” aspect of the new film enters the picture—who exactly must be chewed out for the climate warming on Mars. There must be someone to blame, although whereas on Earth we have, of course, capitalism, American consumers, fossil fuel use by nearly all, and similar villains to target with the charges, on Mars the perpetrators have managed to do some effective obfuscation by not providing any evidence whatsoever of who they might be. Mr. Gore, it is also rumored, will inject a surprise ending into his new movie by finding the culprits. Maybe he will finally solve the on going UFO controversy here on Earth, revealing that all those sightings have been about the dastardly humans on Earth who were shipping off the bad substance to Mars—which will demonstrate just how much worse things could be here on Earth if Al Gore didn’t scare them into their sneaky ways.

Science News, in its report on Mars’s warming trends, did venture into the ongoing controversy about global climate warming when it concluded its report by noting that “The team’s findings don’t point to an external influence, such as an increase in solar radiation, that some climate-change skeptics have suggested may be behind earth’s recent warning,” Geissler says. Well, at least no non-human external influence!

Bias at PBS, etc.

Tibor R. Machan

Over the last year or so some friends of mine have been involved in a crash course in bureaucratic corruption and bias at PBS-TV. They were invited, initially, to contribute a documentary on the conflict between moderate and radical Islamists around the world. Their contribution was well received at first, slated to be included in a series of PBS-TV programs that have just hit the television airwaves, “America at a Crossroads.”

Martyn Burke, the producer of the documentary “Islam vs. Islamists,” says his film was dropped from the series for political reasons. As reported in The Arizona Republic, he claimed "I was ordered to fire my two partners (who brought me into this project) on political grounds." Burke sent a letter of complaint to PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supplied funds for the films. He said that his documentary shows the plight of moderate Muslims who are silenced by Islamic extremists, and added that "Now it appears to be PBS and CPB who are silencing them." Yet, as the newspaper reports, “A Jan. 30 news release by the corporation listed Islam vs. Islamists as one of eight films to be presented in the opening series.” The two partners were labeled neo-conservatives by those at PBS which they regarded a serious liability, enough to cause them to cancel the showing of the documentary.

I have seen portions of this film and it is riveting. There is hardly any commentary in it. Instead all those shown, as well as the events, are allowed to speak for themselves.

It is always risky to climb into bed with the likes of PBS and NPR, both media outlets that exist by virtue of the federal government. (Sure, they also receive private support—NPR recently got big bucks from Joan Kroc’s estate, the widow of McDonalds' founder, who died last October and left $225 million to the organization which, incidentally, eagerly invites opponents of trans fatty foods to air their views. But with the feds, they wouldn’t be.)

The few times I have gotten near such outfits I felt the censorial pinch—when, for example, in the late 80s, Bob Chitester produced a pilot for a political philosophy series, with me as the host and the late Sidney Hook as the expert guest. The show, “For the Love of Work,” dealt with the ideas of Karl Marx. (Chitester, you may recall, later produced Milton Friedman’s immensely successful “Free to Choose” program.) The pilot we did was turned down somewhere in Washington after I was identified by one of the judges, according to The Wall Street Journal, as “a mere popularizer of libertarianism.”

More pertinent is the recently shown program, produced by Filmmakers Collaborative of San Francisco, about America’s anti-trust laws, “Fair Fight in the Market Place.” This is pure, unabashed, and unadulterated statist propaganda. And badly produced to boot.

For one, it presents only anecdotal stories of how wonderful the anti-trust laws are, mostly based on some of the prosecutions of price fixers and industrial colluders and the hidden camera shots shown of their discussions in which they clearly indicate their knowledge that they are breaking anti-trust laws. Among those interviewed for the show there is but one (Purdue University) economists, very favorable to the Sherman and Clay anti-trust laws, with the rest all partisan state and federal prosecutors.

Not a single, solitary individual on the program gave any opinion disputing the ultimate wisdom of anti-trust law and of the history of anti-trust prosecution, not even when discussing the failed effort by the Justice Department’s anti-trust division to break up Microsoft Corporation because of its supposed illegal bundling of the operating system with its own Internet browser. (I recall this case well since I took part in numerous debates, both at my own university and elsewhere, making the point that bundling should not be illegal and that it occurs time and time again throughout the market place.)

The main idea in defense of anti-trust laws is “consumer choice.” As if it were a proven proposition that only with anti-trust laws can there be a truly competitive market. The late Yale Brozen of the University of Chicago’s graduate school of business and University of Hartford Professor Emeritus Don Armentano are just two of the prominent, well published authors who have argued against this idea.

But why be surprised? PBS, NPR and PRI (Public Radio International) are all instruments of the American federal government’s self-promotion. If anyone is featured on any of their programs who disputes statism, you can be sure that there will be strong voices opposing such an individual. The rest, the cheerleaders of statism, aren’t going to be allowed to be challenged.

Authenticity and Integrity in Art and Entertainment

Tibor R. Machan

Plato’s many dialogues have Socrates—his version of Socrates, since there never ending debate about whether Plato’s is the real one—aspire to understand what important ideas mean. Virtue, justice, being, knowledge, piety and others are explored with Socrates usually taking the part of the skeptical inquirer while his very clever pupils advance answer to the questions about what these all are, what the concepts mean.

So from this we still have as one of our pedagogical ideals the Socratic method for searching for the truth about something, anything. While Plato’s Socrates has come in for criticism when it comes to the goal of this method—namely, to discover the final, timeless, perfect truth about the subject matter—his method has most often been regarded unexceptional.

Ah, except when it comes to art. In this realm we aren’t so much after truth but after, well, artistic excellence, including beauty. And to teach this goal it has often been thought that we require a sort of single vision, a unique apprehension, be this in painting, the novel, drama, music or some other medium. Integrity or authenticity has often been deemed to be the necessary virtue to reach the goal here. Any kind of cooperation, collaboration, or brain storming before the creativity comes to fruition seems to many to take away from the worthiness of the work.

Now in the recent movie, The TV Set a good deal is made of the fact that in order to bring an idea to the TV set, it has to go through a whole lot of adjustment, editing, rethinking, testing and so forth. Somehow, those who conceived of this movie bought into the notion that even a silly old sitcom must spring forth in finished form from the mind of the writer. If someone else from the production team suggests that a change is needed for making some shows work, and if the original authors of the idea for it yield to the suggestions they must in some ways be compromising their integrity.

But this, I think, is misconceived. Yes, we know that Howard Roark’s character in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead made it big in fiction because he resisted all efforts to change his idea of a low cost apartment building. Yet even here we don’t know whether he talked over his original conception with other like-minded architects, with engineers who might have given him advice about how much it will cost to do it the original way and how this might be reduced with some perfectly acceptable changes that still do justice to Roark’s idea.

And a TV program is by its very nature not an individual creation. In fact, a great many other creations that have one person’s name as the author have several editors, helpful readers of initial manuscripts, and so forth. Even artists—novelists, playwrights, poets and musical compositions run their initial drafts by others who will often give advice for more or less significant changes.

So, it looks to me that all this hullabaloo about how it’s insulting to writers in Hollywood to make suggestions to them about the scripts, who to cast for their parts, whether someone on the show who is initially killed off might not better survive to live a few and more additional episodes, is bunk. There is, of course, something to the point that if one is simply caving in to pressure based on prejudice, irrelevant or trivial considerations, or something quite offensive to one’s basic principles or values, that is shameful. But not all suggestions from producers and others surrounding the development of a show amount to demands to compromise the basic idea behind it, the writer’s essential vision. In the movie The TV Set the ideas for the changes were not sorted out properly so that we, the audience, could grasp what was central to the idea and what incidental.

Which is why I suspect that The TV Set was an entertaining enough but not altogether subtle besmirching of the business end of Hollywood. If one changes one’s cast for monetary reason, that’s got to be bad; but if there is a suggestion to do based on how well the prospective actor can act, that’s OK. Yet, this isn’t quite right—budgetary constraints surround every project, even those of the greatest artists of world history. They needed to rein in some of their idea because of money, too, or because they were running out of time or materials.

I wouldn’t fret so much about whether one or many people have a hand in a creative project, more about whether the result is good.

Racism versus “Bigotry”

Tibor R. Machan

In his guest column for The New York Times on Saturday, April 14, 2007, Robert Wright compares the insulting remarks of former radio talk show host Don Imus to the anti-Muslim tirades of conservative columnist Ann Coulter. He appears to be treating these as very much the same kind of thing and concludes that the fault line between blacks and whites won’t be as significant in the future as that between Americans and Muslims. As he put it, “And if anything, I’d say that the second fault line is the more treacherous. America has already done things abroad that are helping to make the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let’s not make that kind of mistake at home.”

However, when Don Imus insulted the Rutgers University women basketball players, he was uttering what arguably are racial slurs. These are insulting primarily because they attribute character traits to people based on something no one can do anything about, namely, one's membership in a racial group. No one’s race may be rationally held against him or her since anything one cannot make a choice about cannot be morally or otherwise faulted.

In contrast, when Ann Coulter insults radical Muslims, she is uttering what arguably are criticisms or attacks on the self-chosen traits of people of a given faith or viewpoint. Such traits are not something over which individuals can have no choice, so they can be held responsible for them. Such criticisms and verbal attacks are akin to criticizing or attacking Nazis, members of the KKK, Communists, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, or Christians. No one is born these but chooses to be a member (at least in his or her adulthood).

So Imus's and Coulter's cases are incomparable. Hostility against radical Muslims as radical Muslims could be misguided but it is of a different category from hostility against blacks as blacks.

Of course, there is a not so hidden controversy beneath the surface here, one that has to do with whether human beings have the freedom to choose their beliefs, their membership in a religious, philosophical, political or other community based on a viewpoint. As a former Roman Catholic, I often hear it said that I cannot depart the faith as a matter of my own free will—I am stuck in it, like it or not. Even citizenship is often regarded something one obtains by virtue of being born in a certain place, although here it is problematic to argue that one cannot shed one’s nationality. Many people switch theirs, as I did mine when I emigrated from Hungary and eventually took up American citizenship by taking an oath before a judge—along with 50 some others—back in 1961 in a court house in Washington, D.C. Yet, some might well argue that here, too, various forces pushed me to become an American citizen and my choice is but an illusion.

Perhaps Mr. Wright is of this outlook and considers one’s religious—or political, ideological, philosophical “membership”—just as unavoidable as one’s membership in a racial or ethnic group. But to argue that issue he would need to do a great deal more than to suggest that Don Imus’s remarks are akin to those of Ann Coulter’s. Because however that issue of choice is ultimately resolved—and it has been an issue since time immemorial—it would be difficult to make it credible that being of a certain race is just like being a member in a religious or political group. That’s because although in today’s technological climate one might conceivably change one’s race and color, that’s more a feature of science fiction than reality, while changes in religious or political affiliation are evident all around us.

And, of course, religious or political (or other) convictions and the ensuing ways of life are open to scrutiny and criticism and can often be rationally attacked. Some call this bigotry but it is only that when done mindlessly, without careful attention to the content of the targeted beliefs. For example, in the book Islamic Imperialism, as in many similar books, the author, Efraim Karsh, finds many objectionable feature of Islam, especially of the radical variety. And, of course, Democrats attack Republicans, libertarians attack socialists, atheists attack theists, all because they find fault with the choice to embrace these religious or political viewpoints.

Mr. Wright was, therefore, wrong in comparing Imus and Coulter. The former did something that’s morally objectionable because he ridiculed people for what they cannot help but be, while the latter has been doing something that could quite easily be justified, attacking a viewpoint no one needs to embrace.

Why Markets Are Dreaded

Tibor R. Machan

In one of those vapid, in-house disputes often published in The New York Review of Books’ letters to the editor sections, we can read now about a disagreement among educational experts under the heading “’Scandals in Higher Education’: An Exchange” (4/26/07). Well, not much of a disagreement because none of the participants gives a quarter to basic challenges to how colleges and universities are funded. They all accept, without question, that it is the business of governments to run most of the country’s colleges and universities, so the disagreement is on mere details.

Indeed, in the exchange it is clear that no one likes markets in higher education. Henry Wasser, who is a former academic dean and VP a The City University of New York, complains that a previous piece in the magazine “ignores the growing and transforming inequalities” that supposedly afflict American higher education. Among these are, of course, “the dominant commercialization of universities in function and psychology,” and “the pervasiveness of the ‘market’ model,” whatever that is supposed to mean in a profession that is dominated by government administration and funding. In response to this the original author of “Scandals,” Andrew Delbanco, replies that he has elsewhere “discussed most of the themes [Wasser] mentions,” among them commercialization and “the rise of ‘market’ values.”

So clearly there is no disagreement about basics—governments ought to run and to fund colleges and universities (by extorting money from citizens via taxes). And markets are a bad thing, however they might make their appearance in higher education.

What is meant by “markets” and why the scare quotes around the term? Markets are arenas wherein people exchange goods and services with one another, once they have freely reached agreement on terms. It is, in other words, a place of voluntary commercial and professional interaction. It is not a place regimented by criminals or by governments. The latter at most stand by to help adjudicate certain disputes, although even there arbitration agencies can often be hired to work out terms of resolution. Markets are free forums of trade and those in markets are free agents dealing on terms they can agree to.

So what’s so terrible about this? Why would Drs. Wasser and Deblanco both be so ready to badmouth markets, make it so clear to readers they are against them by way of placing scare quotes around the term? What is wrong with free exchanges in higher education? Why, in other words, are market values—which are reached via free exchanges—besmirched?

I am not privy to these academicians’ inner thoughts, motives, or feelings but I have spend over 40 years teaching in higher education and, before that, studying there, and I can say without any hesitation that the bulk of those working in the groves love to rook the taxpayer for their pay. They do not want to enter the market place where their income would have to be obtained solely from willing customers. That kind of dealing—such commercialization—offends them, makes them think they are no better sorts than, say, people who sell shoes, cars, life insurance, mutual funds, or kitchen utensils.

No. Let these other blokes cope with the burden of having to convince customers of the value of what they have to offer them. Higher education merchants and professionals must be protected from such burdens. They must have their income expropriated from many unwilling taxpayers; their scholarship and research, unlike that of many in the private sector, must be funded with the loot the government gets to extort from us with complete impunity. They need not sweat the possibility of their customers choosing to go elsewhere for their higher educational services.

Oh, yes, and when someone dares to mention just how vicious their approach is, how it resembles the methods of organized crime in dealing with “customers,” one will very soon hear about how leaving things to the market place will engender the dreaded horrors of “growing and transforming inequalities.” Never mind that inequalities are part of all, including human life, and that the only place they are to be banished is if our basic rights—those listed by the American Founders—are not equally protected by the professionals in government.

If the discussion gets this far with one of these righteous defenders of their—unequal!—professional privilege, one soon hears about everyone’s equal positive rights to whatever is of benefit to them in life. This is one widely hailed doctrine that’s deployed when the enslavement of us all is advocated so as to justify keeping these erudite folks on the dole!

Let’s entrust higher education to markets rather than to this scam.

Remedying Procrastination

Tibor R. Machan

One problem many of my students—actually, even colleagues—have is that they are procrastinators. So many of them miss deadlines for papers—in class or for journals, conferences, and books—that it’s a wonder they manage to pass courses or get published. Certainly many get to their tasks at the last minute. Thus, even though over the decades I have offered all my students to look over drafts of their papers provided I received them three days prior to the due date, very few of them take advantage of this mostly because they get down to doing their papers at the last moment.
Once I was a procrastinator too. I used to think of ideas to work on and write about but would say, "I’ll get to it later," or as that old song has it, "Manana, manana, manana is good enough for me." But then I wouldn’t get to it because some new thought would crowd out this one and then that got postponed.

In time I got into a bit of panic about this. After all, I was embarking upon an academic career and if you don’t publish, you will perish! One day I was sitting watching the Huntley-Brinkley NBC Nightly News and in the middle of the broadcast I got an idea and, sure enough, was about to postpone doing anything about it. But this time I took a hold of myself and with some trepidation turned off the TV set and went to work on the idea and it turned into a nice little essay that later became part of my doctoral dissertation or something—I no longer recall where exactly it ended up.

What I do remember is that henceforth I virtually never postponed going to work on the idea that I thought of, if I thought it worth working on it in the first place. I would get up in the middle of the night if, while dozing, I thought of something that needed working out. I would carry notepads with me everywhere I went, even in my car, so that if something interesting occurred to me, I’d at least be prepared to make a brief notation that would later bring it back into focus for me.

Of course, none of this guarantees that what one thinks of is actually worth much but that can be dealt with later—editing is always important and sometimes leads to discarding ideas that seemed worthy at first inspection. Still, if one is careful enough in formulating ideas, these will often turn out to have some merit, at least for some purpose.

In time I not only parlayed many of the ideas that I thought up into essays, articles, editorials, papers, and books but started, back in the fall of 1966, to write newspaper columns. At first these appeared mostly in The Santa Ana Register, but later they made it all over the place, including The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The LA Times, and many other places. Again, not all of them were sterling pieces but most managed to catch the eye of some editor or other and ended up seeing the light of day.

I write this up only because so often I am told that it is amazing how prolific I am. Well, I am not amazed at all. It took some initial discipline, yes, but in time it became a habit, so by now it is nearly routine for me to immediately pick up pen and paper—or its electronic equivalents—and make some kind of notation so I can turn a glimmer of an idea into a substantial product.

Is there a lesson here? Well, yes and no. Certainly the approach I took may not suit everyone. Some folks depend on the Muse, as it were; others require a set time of day to do their writing or whatever creative activity they like to embark upon. But one thing seems to make sense to me based on my own experience: Routinely postponing projects can become a habit and lead to the dreaded trait of procrastination.

Over the years I have shed other habits by means of a bit of concentration or focus, or what some call resolve, and in time found that after some fairly difficult effort the practice I wanted to take up became more of a habit or even character trait. Be this about smoking or drinking or exercise or other kinds of conduct that I decided would be best to cultivate—or to discontinue—the process seems to me not all that difficult, once on puts one’s mind to it.

There is one serious source of procrastination I have not found a remedy for, although it afflicts some good friends of mine: perfectionism. Perfectionists want to produce the Platonic form of whatever they embark upon creating and that is simply not in the cards. They do not wish to take the risk of getting anything even possibly wrong. I don’t know what to advise such folks. Maybe they need to accept that not everything they will do will end up completely flawless.

Kicking My News Addiction

Tibor R. Machan

Many moons ago I was a news addict. I had it coming from TV, radio, via the papers and magazines, and wherever else I could get it. I was a news junkie but I am no more.

First, I am older and don’t want to get all the news, especially since I usually can’t do anything about it. Second, it seems like every news source has adopted the CNN—“crisis news network”—formula. Nearly every item is aimed to put the fear of God in us.

Recently I started to use a treadmill in my garage and while doing so I have experimented with watching CNN, Fox, or some other news channel and the couple or three times I have done so have confirmed to me that there is not so much any news being communicated but mostly scary stories, ones happening someplace where people may be a bit panicked about this or that but there isn’t anything worth watching for you.

Take, for example, Fox’s story about the plastic baby bottles that may, if you heat them to above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, might produce some harmful materials to little children. This took up five minutes and concluded with some doctor saying she would be careful but not alarmed. Then there was the story from London, reporting how the Brits are deploying talking TV cameras that supervise and reprimand people in public places for all kinds of alleged misdeeds. This took up nearly ten minutes with comments from people who liked it and others who thought it couldn’t happen in America where civil liberties are prized far more than in England.

No mention was made at all of the fact that this phenomenon is mostly the result of the expanding public sphere both in England and here, where the government deems itself fully authorized to become everyone’s Nanny and totalitarian police. Within the private sector, in contrast, such measures would be left to those who own the realm and there would be competition between those who deploy the supervisory mode and those who do so minimally or not at all.

Then there was that story from Colorado where a fallen Iraqi war hero was supposed to be getting a memorial, depicting him in full military gear, and some of those who recall the Columbine massacre are protesting this. Once again, no one said anything about how this is an issue because there is once again a public realm in which the controversy arose—were the memorial being planned for a private area, this would be a matter of whoever owns it, not everyone’s business.

But then we are now living not in a free society but in one that adheres to the principles of so called democratic socialism—everything is a matter of public concern and which side has the greater numbers tends to win. Which pretty much shows that the worry about bringing the Brits’ ways over here can be valid because civil liberties have no impact without private property rights. You cannot be free of government meddling when the government has been legally authorized to be in charge of everything. And by now there is very little respect for private property rights in our legal system—the sole effort to establish such respect lies with libertarian organizations such as the Washington, D.C. based Institute of Justice and the Sacramento, CA, based Pacific Legal Foundation. While they have scored some victories both in the court and at the ballot box, the trend isn’t going their way and the country is slowly but surely being socialized in virtually all areas.

If the news had some brains behind it, instead of simply presenting stories that seem to have no other purpose than to scare us out of our wits, we could have some intelligent commentators and analysts who could show us why these scary things are happening. They might communicate to the public that whenever everything in society comes under government jurisdiction, there is no liberty left, no way to escape the Nanny state, no way to dodge the regulators (for which read: regimentors).

The New Republic, RIP?

Tibor R. Machan

A few weeks ago David Brooks, the conservative columnist at The New York Times, reported on how that venerable liberal magazine, The New Republic, is now moving hard leftward. It used to be a liberal magazine in the tradition of Hubert Humphrey and, more recently, Bill Clinton, not in favor of empowering the federal government but of spreading the responsibility for solving the problems of the country between the private and the public sector. This is classic welfare state politics which, in fact, the Left tends to despise because those on the Left see such a fusion as an obstacle to advancing the statist revolution, one that assigns responsibility for everything in society to the government. Such a view has been promoted in America mostly by the likes of Ralph Nader, the champion of what is called economic democracy or European style social democracy. By the tenets of this position, all significant problems in society need to be addressed politically. And while this today tends to mean some kind of democratic process, in the past it meant simply “government.” (This is why I have always considered the Left’s self-designation as “progressive” such a fraud—in fact it is reactionary, returning to those times when government was in charge of the whole society, as in a monarchy and mercantilism.)

Brooks was right. The New Republic has turned Left in recent weeks—the two or three issues after the change, which saw Martin Peretz relinquishing his strong influence to one Franklin Foer, have a far more socialist tone than those during the last several years have had.

For example, in a review essay of books about Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, Raritan editor Jackson Lears eagerly works to reinstate Karl Marx as a political economists with “glimmers of analytical insight,” namely, that a free market is harsh on laborers and fails to help those in dire straits. In fact, Marx cared little about laborers as such, only about labor power and believed, as the late Robert Heilbroner, a more honest champion of old Karl, observed, that according Marxist socialism labor belongs to the collective or to society, not the individual laborer. After all, if the means of production are owned by the collective and administered by government and labor power is the major means of production, as Marx had it, it follows that labor power is owned by the collective, not by individuals. (For more on this, see my book, Revising Marxism: A Bourgeois Reassessment [Hamilton Books, 2006].) And as far as the claim that the market will not care about those in dire straits, the book by Michael Tanner, The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in Civil Society (Cato Institute, 1996) tells the true story.

The most telling sentence in the review essay, expressing an idea often repeated by Leftists, goes like this: “Since the rise of Reagan, the love feast for laissez-faire has continued uninterrupted, on a scale not seen since the heyday of Carnegie and Mellon. The successors of Samuel Smiles have retaken center stage, preaching a pepped-up version of free-market fundamentalism and recoining the catchphrases of self-help as if for the first time.”

This is such a blatant lie that it is hard to imagine any responsible editor permitting it to appear in a publication. After all, there are now very, very few mainstream politicians who champion anything like laissez-faire economics. And the pundits and academics who supply the thinking for them are nearly all welfare statists, if not out and out democratic socialists who want government to manage wages, prices, imports, the employment relationship, and the rest of the economy. On top of it, the U.S. Supreme Court has invalidated the idea of private property rights in its Kelo v. City of New London, CT, decision in July of 2005 and keeps supporting extensive government regulation of the economy as in its latest 5 to 4 ruling about the governments vast powers to impose CO2 standards for the auto industry.

I am not here concerned about arguing for laissez-faire, which cannot be fully defended in a column. I am concerned with showing how low the system’s opponents must descend intellectually in order to besmirch it, making it appear that the idea is triumphant in America today. It is not. And we are paying a heavy price for this.

It is sad to see The New Republic join the hard Left. It used to be, for a few decades, a fairly reasonable modern liberal voice. Now it will join the shrill voices of The Nation, The Progressive, and Mother Jones, even as the culture itself has little room for genuine defenders of human liberty and its economic corollary, free market capitalism.

Now for some Real Diversity

Tibor R. Machan

People are often seen as either not of this earth or no more than collections of atoms. Contemporary science, even psychology, tends toward the latter, while the general public sees us as endowed with something supernatural so we can do the myriads of odd things people are known to do. But there is another option that should find many friends because it just makes so much sense.

Why not see ourselves as a novel part of nature? We aren’t like ants or gorillas or rocks, that is for sure. People have capacities nothing else in nature exhibits, some welcome and some not so much. No other being on this earth writes so much about itself, frets endlessly about what kind of thing it is; worries about its future; speculates about an afterlife, composes music, writes novels, and so forth and so on. These seem to be genuinely unique to human beings.

Consider some not so welcome aspects of human life: crime, meanness, procrastination, murder, slavery and so forth. All these, too, are human. What makes them possible? We see them all around us, throughout history, and this suggests that we really are unusual.

However, take a look at anything and it will have some features other things lack. Trees are different from grass, ice is different lava, a bee is very different from an ant. Nature teams with diversity, with all kinds of stuff that differs from other stuff. And people are just like that—very different from everything else.

Now in recent months there has been a spate of discussions in the popular press about how people really aren’t that different at all. They are just an assembly of raw matter, governed by the same laws that govern the movement of billiard balls on a pool table. Mostly the target is free will—these discussions want urgently to deny it. The idea seems be to dethrone human beings,
to deny them their measure of specialness in the universe. This is the egalitarian spirit run amuck. We are like everything else and to think otherwise is specieism, an irrational chauvinism, favoring humans above all else.

How wrongheaded this impulse is can be gleaned from the fact that clearly no other being in the world engages in such self-flagellation. No animals demean themselves the way humans do (even as they again demonstrate by this that they are special). And there is really no good reason to deny it since affirming the special status of human beings in the world does not confer any superiority on any individual person. For someone to be special among human beings, one has to excel at a thing or two, it isn’t enough to have been born, nor to belong to some group like whites or men or the English. Instead to achieve human excellence a person needs to put his or her faculties to good use and that require effort; it’s not automatic.

In nature there evidently is a scale of greater and greater complexity and at different points on this continuum whatever occupies a given point will possess capacities different from those at other points. And with human beings there is such an immense range of capacities that it really is quite amazing, baffling actually, and undeniable.

And why would this be so odd? After all, as the world has developed, whatever its origins, beings have emerged that continually outdo each other for what all they are capable of, can accomplish and achieve. Among these beings the human animal appears clearly to be the most complicated, most fascinating of them all, both for good and for ill! And for this to be so, people have to have certain attributes that other beings lack. Their ability to govern their own lives, to direct themselves, to be autonomous seems to be crucial to what all they are capable of, again both for good and for ill.

So I don’t see why so many erudite folks want to deny that human beings are quite different from the rest of nature. It is too evident to deny and even its denial merely confirms it since only people have the capacity to deny the obvious!

Ayn Rand, Libertarianism, and ARI

Tibor R. Machan

In a recent letter to the editor to The Los Angeles Times, Jeff Britting of the Ayn Rand Institute writes as follows:

"Ayn Rand did not write novels of "uncompromising libertarianism." In her view, libertarianism has no philosophy to uphold uncompromisingly. Libertarianism rejects the need for a consistent, objective, philosophic defense of liberty and regards politics as primary. Rand was a defender of reason and recognized that political freedom requires a philosophy of reason and egoism. That is why Rand repeatedly condemned the libertarian movement, regarding herself, instead, as a "radical for capitalism." For further explanation, see Rand's novel of uncompromising objectivist, not libertarian, ideas — "Atlas Shrugged" — celebrating its 50th anniversary this year." (Letters, March 30, 2007)

To appreciate the errors of this letter, first notice that no libertarian is ever mentioned—the claims about libertarianism are fabricated. ("Libertarianism rejects" is, of course, nonsense—a political stance cannot do any rejecting, it is its advocates or defenders who may.)

As the author of the recent book, Libertarianism Defended (Ashgate, 2006), I can testify to at least one libertarian not rejecting "the need for a consistent, objective, philosophic defense of liberty…." Moreover, Ayn Rand identified herself as a libertarian early on and only once some libertarians disagreed with her on certain issues did she rather arbitrarily dismiss all of it. Her dismissal, moreover, was based on a careless generalization about libertarians, whom she dubbed "hippies of the right."
In fact, a great many libertarians have reached their libertarian political conclusions based on their view that Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy gave this position solid support. Libertarianism is a political stance, not a full blown philosophy; this, by the way, is the case with many other political positions, including those of Republicans, Democrats, monarchists, or theocrats, all of which have been defended from a variety of philosophical viewpoints not every one of which is successful in giving them adequate support.

Rand, by the way, also called herself a "radical capitalist" and it is clear that capitalism is also defended from a variety of philosophical and religious standpoints. She used to insist that many of these are hopeless but hers, Objectivism, achieves what is needed. Well, that is exactly what she and her epigone should have said about libertarianism—the Objectivist defense succeeds, others do not. But, in fact, her politics is every bit as libertarian as her political economy is capitalist.

One reason for all this quibbling is, of course, turf fighting. Those at the Ayn Rand Institute would like nothing better than having everyone believe that their way to give support to the fully free society is the only one worth paying attention to. Now I happen to agree that Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy is head and shoulders above other attempts to make the case for libertarianism, but this does not translate for a moment into claiming that those at the Ayn Rand Institute are the only ones who are able to provide such a case. Rand was a teacher, as were Adam Smith, John Locke, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman. And she had students, some strictly loyal to her wording of the case for the free society, some more independent and still fully in accord with her ideas, and some others more or less heretical. Most do a creditable job of laying out a case for the free society—that is to say, for libertarianism. All this nitpicking about whether Rand was a libertarian is entirely pointless, in the end, and only serves dubious, distracting purposes.

Would it not be swell if all these silly quarrels could be set aside and all those who are convinced of the value of the free society for human community life could focus on productive endeavors instead? Alas, that is perhaps wishing for human nature to be different from what it is, which, as Ayn Rand herself taught, is endowed with free will and thus all too capable of straying from the right track in all matters, including in how essentially sound ideas will be defended.

Keep Loving That Gridlock

Tibor R. Machan

After the November 2006 elections I was hoping for this and said so in one of my columns. Sure enough, there is gridlock in the air in Washington, helping with the task of slowing down the rampage of Democrats to loot us of all our wealth so they can redistribute it to their heart’s content. Yes, going after Attorney General Gonzales has its benefits, as does the bill passed by both the House and the Senate, curtailing the war in Iraq, one President Bush is sure to veto. All this acrimony is to the good!

Let me just say that I am all for pulling out of Iraq. It’s been bad war, if any of them can be welcomed, and it is time to admit it and let go of it. America really has no business being in Iraq—there has never been any credible evidence that that country poses a serious threat to us, which is the only justification for war in a free society. (Remember, “governments are instituted” to “secure [our] rights,” not to go on military adventures around the globe!)

However, I don’t much trust the motives of Democrats, who had no trouble sending troops to Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere in the Balkans when no threat existed against the U.S.A. from anyone there. Moreover, Democrats, with their modern liberal “precautionary” public policies preemptively intrude on our lives everywhere, so I don’t for a moment believe that they have anything in principle against preemptive military actions. They just don’t like Bush’s war. Were it their war, they would probably love it, at least most of them. (Remember Vietnam! Wasn’t a Republican war, that one.)

But, while they are beating up on Bush & Co. in Washington, Democrats may not be focusing so much on running our lives—on increasing regulations of financial institutions because of some unpleasant experiences certain customers are having who have extended themselves unwisely. This kind of Nanny state approach to governing is now part and parcel of the vision of the Democratic leadership, so if they are bogged down with acts of vengeance, at least their zeal to meddle may be somewhat arrested.

Of course, a gridlock is but a small consolation where the growth of government power over our lives is concerned. It can slow things down but only temporarily. If, however, during this slow-down there commences vigorous education from government skeptics—those who know that people working for government aren’t any wiser or more virtuous than are those working in the marker place—then perhaps some serious benefit can be reaped from it.

In the end nothing can substitute for such education, which ultimately translates into policies that will reduce the scope of government’s power. That, after all, is what a free country is about, limiting the range of government’s power over the lives of citizens to a strictly protective, defensive function that abates crime and foreign aggression. That is the vision of political society that animated the American Founders and still resonates with those around the world who want to live their lives by their own lights, not as slaves or involuntary servants.

A gridlock can help with this only so much but if good use is made of it, perhaps the trend can be extended and in time, with vigilance, the government’s reach can be reduced more and more significantly. For the time being, though, all those who recognize that the respect and protection of our right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness is the fundamental public good—with all the rest politicians and their cheerleaders promote mere phony projects that are none of government’s proper business—need to support the gridlock that may be with us for at least another year or so. And then, if voters wise up, they may realize that the best bet is to elect some Republican, any Republican, to fill the role of the president just so that a gridlock can continue.

Again, remember that this is just to forestall what would otherwise be routine, namely, the liberal Democratic zeal to tax and spend and regulate and mess with our lives. The real work must be done proactively—folks need to be taught that their best bet lies with a freer and freer society, with the abandonment of the redistributionist welfare state. (No, this isn’t a homogenous Scandinavian country, where, by the way, the welfare state is supported by a rather robust semi-free market economy, without the Draconian regulations we have here!)

So, once again, hurrah for the gridlock! Even if it is only temporary.

Non Partisan Teaching

Tibor R. Machan

Over the years that I have taught, I have also held some firm, often controversial, positions in ethics, politics, economics, and so on. Yet I have also believed in and tried to practice nonpartisan teaching. For example, although I believe that business managers have as their primary obligation to serve the owners and investors in their companies, I make it a point to present the stakeholder theory in my classes—and textbooks—which argues that they actually ought to serve all who have a stake in the firm. Or in political philosophy, where I am very much a libertarian, I do full justice to the ideas of socialists, communists, conservatives, theocrats and others.

The reason is that I signed up for all this when I entered the profession of college teaching. That was, as it were, my oath of office, not to make use of my class room as a podium for advocating my own ideas but to familiarize my students with the current ways o fthinking about those topics. Now and then I will make an “editorial” comment, of course, but these are clearly labeled as such. My students are no fools and know that their teachers have views of their own on the topics they discuss in class. But the job isn’t to preach but to teach.

In my own discipline, philosophy, this is not all that complicated because academic philosophy has mostly involved teaching a great variety of positions on innumerable topics. God, determinism, free will, knowledge, the nature of reality, and all the rest are dealt with differently by different schools of philosophy and the job of teachers, in the main, is to familiarize students with what these different schools have to say about these topics, to lay out their arguments, to offer doubts about them and then leave it to students to figure out what they find most sensible or to suspend belief until they know more.

There are disciplines, however, where this kind of relative even-handedness is difficult if not impossible to pull off even if the professors are committed to be non-partisan. Those are ones where it is the latest understanding of the subject gets taught, never mind alternative approaches. Certainly most of the hard sciences—physics, astronomy, chemistry, anatomy—fall into this category. No one teaches Newtonian physics at universities and while there are puzzles aplenty left in quantum physics, those are mostly widely agree upon puzzles. Fringe thinking may get mentioned now and then but mostly it is mainstream science that is communicated to the students.

When it comes to the less then hard sciences and fields—for example, climatology, anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, economics and such—things get a bit messy. Yes, in most of these there are schools that have more or less won out in the competition for who gets it right about the subject matter but there are also quite a few debates afoot. Still, most who teach these disciplines work from their own school’s perspective, which they tend to consider the winner in the competition. So often they will favor their school’s take on how to understand the subject matter of the discipline and only now and then tip their hats toward dissenters. A convinced behaviorist in psychology is probably not going to be even-handed about how to understand human conscious experiences. Even if the field of biology, there are disputes that get neglected because partisan teachers do not much respect those from a rival school of thought.

All in all, non-partisan college education is not easy to come by. There is something, however, that’s a remedy for this—the many courses students tend to take in the fields they study. This is why departments ideally do not adhere to orthodoxies, although this is not the norm, unfortunately. Still, over four years or so of college, let alone graduate school, most students are exposed to teachers of a great variety of positions in the various disciplines they study so, when one adds to this outside reading and personal, creative thought, there is likely to evolve a fairly balanced educational experience. Even if some professors abuse the process and use their classes to indoctrinate, they can rarely succeed. To think they can is to give students and the system very little credit. If one keeps in mind that it is prudent to be on guard against professors who abuse their positions, I do not think there will be a great deal of successful advocacy in college education.

Property Rights Redux

Tibor R. Machan

A little while ago I had occasion to spend time with some fine legal minds. For one thing, they were all convinced that the right to private property is central to a just legal order. And many of them were involved in striving to get this idea established and strengthened within the American legal system, in the various ways that’s possible to do through the legitimate avenues of advocacy, litigation, scholarship, and so forth.

I missed, though, one thing in the discussions that I heard, namely, a clear articulation of why a legal system should incorporate a firm commitment to the right to private property. Sure, the American founders appear to have been pretty firmly committed to the idea—although when they switched from “property” to “the pursuit of happiness” in their list of basic, unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence, they opened up a good deal of room for controversy about just how loyal they were to the idea. Still, it isn’t often enough considered why this principle mattered to them so much and why others, who champion the free society, think so highly of it.

The issues isn’t moot at all. Among many American historians there is a persistent notion that the founders favored the right to private property for personal, economic reasons. They were land owners—Washington, especially—and so given a central place to the right to private property was a kind of self-interested project, not really one of principle. This was the theme of the historian Charles Beard, which held sway among many for decades and is still prominently featured in history classes from high schools to universities. His book, An economic interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (The Macmillan Co., 1913), advocated this view. And, more generally, the heavy influence of Marxist thinking on how history is understood among many academics keeps the idea alive—when people support an institution, public policy, or law from which they reap benefits, they must do so because of those benefits, never mind whether the idea has universal merit.

Unless this is rebutted, the principle of private property rights will forever be suspect no matter how much benefit it produces for a society in prosperity, technology, innovation, and so forth. Even apart from academics, most people think that unless an idea has independent moral and political merit, it just isn’t quite up to snuff. While they may not fully subscribe to the Kantian notion that “it is the thought that counts,” for most of them the thought does matter. A principle, in short, should gain principled support and not just be accepted because it is practically useful.

Defenders of the free society do need to revisit the issue of why is the right to private property important in a society. Is it because its adoption will make most of us richer? Is it because it will facilitate the growth of knowledge and scientific inquiry? Is it because the arts are better of in a rich society? Is it perhaps because in a rich country people can be more environmentally responsible? Or is there something even more fundamental about this right, given human nature and community life?

I have always found the last of these the most important reason for championing the right to private property and the economic system of capitalism that rests on it. Property rights are the foundation of freedom of choice. To be prudent, courageous, charitable, generous, philanthropic, and kind one needs to have command over resources. When others are authorized to expropriate one’s labor and resources, they are in charge of one’s life and conduct. One’s life slips from one’s own grasp and personal responsibility and the chance of morally significant action disappear.

The story is a longish one, of course, and can only be hinted at here. What is crucial is that underlying all the economic, legal and related support for the right to private property, it is remembered that a moral justification is required and, indeed, available.

Strikes at Public Universities

Tibor R. Machan

In a free society when employers and employees negotiate on terms of trade, both sides are free to walk away from the table. Employers would then be left with the need to hire new staff, while employees would need to find a new job. Neither is a welcome prospect, so both sides try to avoid it. But customers can live with this because other sources of goods and services usually exists in the market place where they can purchase what the negotiating parties offer.

When one turns to public employment, however, the situation is markedly different. That’s because customers are not free to refrain from purchasing the goods and services public institutions offer. So, for example, if the teachers at the California State Universities, who are threatening to strike if their terms are not met by the university system, walk of their job, those who pay their salaries and for the schools operations must keep paying. The paying customers, namely, California taxpayers, aren’t legally free to walk, whereas teachers are. And this is unjust.

The entire notion of striking is at home only in a free market system where all parties have alternatives. In a public service industry, however, those who pay for the service lack the freedom to seek other ways to spend their funds. Their funds are confiscated, no matter what.

Now if it is OK, which it isn’t, of course, to force customers (mostly the parents of the students in the case of CSU) of public services to pay, it could be argued that it is OK to have providers put out the work for which these customers are legally required to pay. There is clearly an imbalance afoot—teachers may refuse to work but those who pay them are not free to refuse to pay.

The lesson, of course, is that there should be no public employment other than those required for the maintenance of justice—the courts, military, and so forth. And those should not be able to go on strike since their pay is secured by means of coercion and cannot be withheld.

In a free market of education, colleges and universities would be just like shoe stores or recreation facilities or weight loss centers—their provisions would be obtained with the full consent of all the parties involved in the exchange relationship. No one would be privileged, favored by government as against others involved in the provision of the service (in CSU’s case, education). Because no one’s resources could be obtained against his or her will, there would have to be serious, honest negotiations, with no one in the position to act like an extortionist.

With public service institutions, however, not all the parties are free to deal on their own terms. Taxpayers are stuck having to pay taxes, while teachers can refuse to teach. They can even shut down a university or the entire system while those who pay them will go to jail if they attempt to withhold payment of their taxes that go to the maintenance and administration of the system.

So, perhaps all this is moot since we do have a massive public service sector in this country, which is far from a free one the rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. What is the right approach given this plain enough fact?

Striking would have to be banned, just as refusing to pay taxes is banned. This is not a welcome option, of course, to anyone who believes that the flow of goods and services ought to be free. But when it isn’t free for customers, maybe it shouldn’t be free for employees either.

In some public service industries strikes are banned precisely for this reason. If a monopoly or near-monopoly has been established for the delivery of certain goods or services, so that it is nearly impossible to go elsewhere to gain what one wants (since resources for this are conscripted and one could go to jail if one failed to provide them), then no one ought to make it seem this is a free market in which all parties are free agents.

Iraq War Conservative Skepticism

Tibor R. Machan

Since the start of talks of invading Iraq, it has been my view that it was a bad idea, in conflict with the principles of the foreign and military policy of a free society. I ended my first column written against the war on September 9, 2002, as follows:

"Perhaps Iraq needs to be moved on and fast, to stop Saddam Hussein from destroying us and our friends abroad. Perhaps some people do have the needed information that would justify such a preemptive retaliation.

"But with all the evidence showing the lack of credibility of the U.S. Government in so many matters, and the evasion of the process of getting Congressional authorization, how can someone support a mission that involves such serious risks as a war does?"

Later I kept reiterating my skepticism, based mainly on the idea that the government of a free country is established so as to secure the rights of its citizens, not to solve problems abroad unless some very carefully draw treaty has been entered into which requires getting involved there.

Slowly but surely quite a few early supporters or fellow travelers joined in and by now many conservatives such as Senator Chuck Hegel and William F. Buckley, Jr. have gone on record opposing President George W. Bush in his refusal to relinquish his irrational objective of building a functional constitutional democracy in Iraq. These are, it bears keeping in mind, not a bunch of America hating Leftists. These are men and women who came to realize that there is no rational justification for America to be fighting this completely mad war, a war against an enemy that amounts to, as I recently put it, a deadly heavy fog with no clearly identifiable substance that could be construed as a disposal enemy.

I admit that my opposition to the war was what some folks call "ideological"—in that tone that has surrounded this term ever since Karl Marx made it into something insidious. (An ideology, for Marx, was a simplistic rationalization for the ruling class’s efforts to make its exploitation of the people seem acceptable.) What, in fact, guided my thinking is the plain, unambiguous wording in the Declaration of Independence about the purpose of government in a country that is founded on the idea that human beings have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

If this is a sound idea—and it is eminently sound, in comparison to others on which political regimes are founded—then government are akin to a body guard one may hire to provide one with proper protection against aggression from others. The body guard isn’t supposed to go around looking for other people who may need help. The job is to protect the clients and the clients of the government and military of the United States of America are its citizens.

Sure, sophists among us may scoff at this as simplistic—but basic principles are supposed to be clear, unambiguous, understandable by all to whom they apply, whose conduct they are supposed to guide. The complexities, and there will be plenty when those principles are applied in concrete situations, need to be worked out but never at the expense of those basics.

For this reason such apparent slogans—which are, in fact, sound, clearly articulated principles—as Benjamin Franklin’s observations that "Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither…" have been my guiding ideas and all the talk about pragmatism and how the world is too messy to stick it out with principled policies, have never deterred me from my stance.

It is somewhat gratifying that early Bush loyalists are beginning to appreciate this, although it’s like that it comes too late for all those who were sacrificed on the altar of hubris. But then this has now become clear about the American government, be it under the administration of Democrats or Republicans. Its officials would not recognize a principle such as those laid out by the American founders if it came up to them a bit them in the face.

Dinesh D’Souza’s Amoralism

Tibor R. Machan

As Andrew Sullivan makes so evident in his review of Dinesh D’Souza’s controversial book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11 (Doubleday, 2006), D’Souza thinks morality means being forced to follow God’s laws. In fact, of course, morality means voluntarily doing the right thing and refusing to do the wrong. Whatever moral or ethical system is involved, if one doesn’t follow it voluntarily, of one’s own free will, one isn’t being moral or ethical in the slightest. One then is an amoralist! Because of this gross mistake, D’Souza argues that there is a natural affinity between modern Christianity and radical Islam, so much so that despite some differences and excesses, the two are locked in a struggle with the real enemy of morality, namely, post-Enlightenment secularism.

For D’Souza, ethics "is based on the notion that there is a moral order in the universe, which establishes an enduring standard of right and wrong." So far so good, although D’Souza omits that crucial element, namely, that the order has to be embraced by a human being of his or her own free will. And that is so within the Western Christian ethical tradition, however much that might have been overlooked or perverted during the Holy Inquisition. Radical Islam, in contrast—especially its most dominant version today, the Wahhabi doctrine, as fashioned, mainly, by Sayyid Qutb—rejects the idea of free will. Instead Muslim ethics or morality involves coercing people to the will of Allah, along lines that ethics is understood vis-à-vis little children in the West. In Muslim ethics, at least as Qutb saw it, every human being is like a child; the state, which is God’s instrument, must make the "child" comply with the moral order.

Why Dinesh D’Souza, who used to have a good grasp of the meaning of American liberty, all of a sudden forgets this essential difference between Western religion and radical Wahhabi Islam is quite perplexing. But perhaps it is his desperation to shore up old fashioned, non-American conservatism that explains his current stance, a stance that he seems to see as the last hope for conservatives. The reason it seems to him to be the last hope is that he takes it to be the only alternative to the liberal moral position, which is concerned with "autonomy, individuality, and self-fulfillment as moral ideals." And, as Sullivan notes, for D’Souza this implies that "liberal morality … consists first of all in the right of the individual to choose for him- or herself what morality is."

Seeing things in this light lends D’Souza’s stance some credibility—it is no morality at all which an individual chooses for him- or herself. The point of morality (or ethics) is to provide a standard by which individuals are guided in their conduct, not something they invent for themselves. An uneducated person may be excused for confusing "choosing to do the right thing" with "choosing what the right thing is" but D’Souza isn’t uneducated. So why does he make this mistake?

As with many traditional conservatives, D’Souza seems unable to abide by the idea that individuals must choose to do the right thing, even though of course what the right thing is isn’t up to them in the slightest. Compare: in a free society people must choose to adhere to a diet or fitness program yet clearly what diet or fitness program they ought to follow could be something entirely independent of their wishes or choices—it is, rather, what the science of nutrition or medicine identify. The same with ethics—right and wrong are indeed "based on the notion that there is a moral order in the universe." That much D’Souza got right. But an adult human being must choose to obey that order and no moral credit comes from being coerced to follow it.

Yes, there is much talk in the West of moral skepticism and has always been, even back in the good old days conservatives claim to love. Socrates and Aristotle did battle with the moral skeptics. But the Left does not embrace moral skepticism. The Left considers the ethics of the Right wrong but it has its own it thinks is correct. What really distinguishes the conservative’s and the radical Islamists’s moral stance is the issue of freedom of choice, not skepticism. In the end Dinesh D’Souza is propounding life without ethics at all, a life of dehumanized regimentation, which is to say, a life of amoralism.

What Ails the World

Tibor R. Machan

The ills of the world aren’t mostly medical, of course, but philosophical, moral, and cultural. And the main one is definitely something only straight thinking can hope to cure.

Now, mind you, straight thinking doesn’t produce results immediately. It’s like a fitness program which needs to be followed rather strictly and over a good bit of time before its effects can be realized. But thinking well really is the only answer—it is, in fact, the only thing that’s under one’s control, the rest in about the forces of nature and the consequences of past religious, scientific, legal, and related thinking now embedded in the societies in which people live their lives. The mind is the free organ of the intact human agent from which the complex actions that can transform the world spring. (Yes, there is debate about this but the skeptics refute themselves when they make their skeptical case with, you guessed it, their minds!)

So then what is the main malady and how can it be fixed? First and foremost the world needs to give up on lumping people all in with groups. The Asians, illegal Americans, refugees, blacks, whites, middle class, politicians, merchants, and so forth—thinking about human beings as if they all managed to fit such groups, as if their identity consisted of their national, racial, ethnic, religious, class membership, or origins is nearly always a bad idea. Now and then it is acceptable, as when some biological similarity can help predict how someone will fare medically or when people make commitments to be part of a group and others can infer how they will act as a result. But even here it is how they act as individuals that will make the greatest difference—whether they take the initiative to educate themselves, to work hard, to rethink the ideas they have accepted mostly unthinkingly and so forth.

Tribalism is the term I prefer for the kind of “we” think that so many folks practice both when it comes to themselves or to other people. Women this, Southern Californians that, Europeans yet another thing, and all the rest that bury who a person is by virtue of his or her choices and decisions beneath layers of group identity. The practice is evident in the thinking done by the most unsophisticated as well as the most erudite folks one runs across.

Multiculturalism is one implication of this kind of constant classification of human individuals across the globe. Diversity programs even at those bastions of supposed independent thought, namely, colleges and universities, focus on lumping students and faculty not by the variety of thinking but of color, race, gender, national origin and so forth, as if when one looks different from another, or hails from a different place, that necessarily means one will think and look at the world differently.

Not only is this demeaning of people—regarding them as if they were made with cookie cutters and had no hand in directing their own lives (which then can actually become a self-fulfilling prophesy)—but it also renders most creativity difficult to get off the ground, especially about social and political issues. It is difficult to escape it. Yes, it is possible but tough because most people do not cherish being deemed weird. Yet of one thinks for oneself, that’s often the result.

Tribal thinking has been around for most of human history and has had its periodic uses, too. But the damage it has wrought has been devastating (e.g., the Holocaust). Such a way to view people tends to make it appear they are replaceable, predictable, and interchangeable within the group. As if their individuality didn’t much matter.

Of course, this is way off—anyone knows that the death of a friend or loved one cannot be remedied by replacement. That’s because in their essence human beings are individual, unique, irreplaceable. But this doesn’t suit tribal policy-makers much, those who have plans for people as members of groups regardless of their individual choices and agendas.

For me, a first generation American, it was American culture’s stress of the importance of the individual that held out the greatest hope. It was, even if only rhetorically, what gave the place its uniqueness among the societies of history and the world. And it is still, I am convinced, the major cure of what ails the world.

Chavez’s Vision: Latin America’s Coming Nightmare

Tibor R. Machan

In a recent Op Ed for The New York Times, Argentine novelist Luisa Valenzuela, who admits to having no special understanding of politics and is identified as a fiction writer in the "magical realist" tradition, gives a glowing send off to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as a great "pan-American hope." In the process Valenzuela engages in a good measure of wishful thinking and pays no attention to the nature of the political vision Chavez is peddling in Latin America. Perhaps a word of warning from someone who has experienced the reality of that vision would be in order.

To start with, Valenzuela does not bother at all to discuss Chavez’s out and out socialist agenda—such as the nationalization of oil companies (a polite word for theft or expropriation), abolition of private property rights, and silencing of philosophical and political opposition, etc. Here is, at some length, her way of embracing this demagogue’s role in the region:

"Unlike the homogenous rallies of Peronist times, the 30,000 people in this crowd [who greeted Chavez with enthusiasm] came from very diverse backgrounds. In Argentina, the economic crisis of December 2001 significantly altered not only our social dynamic but our semantics. We no longer talk about the "pueblo" — which means town or village as well as people. Now we talk about the "gente," which also means people, but with a different nuance, derived as it is from the Latin gens meaning race, clan or breed.

"The new vocabulary transcends distinctions of class: the middle classes have now merged with the poor to demand their rights. Hence many students and professionals were in attendance that day, not necessarily attracted by the figure of President Chávez himself so much as by the anti-imperialist opportunity he symbolized. We Argentines, who once imagined ourselves more sophisticated, or more European, than the citizens of neighboring states, were brought closer to the rest of the continent by our impoverishment, and we find ourselves more open to the idea of pan-Latin American solidarity."

Notice, right away, the characteristic approach whereby 30 thousand Argentines become "we Argentines." Forget about the other several million and never mind that of the 30 thousand a goodly number were arguably (a) fictional, with the numbers embellished by Chavez supporters, and (b) simply curious or out for a public bash, with no serious commitment to Chavez’s agenda. (Anyone who has Argentinean friends and acquaintances could confirm this.)

This approach to dealing with public affairs is significant because it reveals the central trouble with socialism and the vision of communism that is often used to excuse its currently necessary harsh measures: it is a collectivist political ideal, one that logically produces a dictatorship. Even the innocent sounding doctrine of democracy, when it isn’t limited by constitutional provisions for the protection of individual rights, runs this risk but with socialism—or its current American equivalent, communitarianism—the idea is impossible to disguise except for the wishful thinkers among us: people who talk of "we" this and "we" that ultimately mean, whether they admit it or not, "those who agree with me." The rest just has to accept, like it or not, that they are going to be forced into the tribe, the big "we."

Valenzuela is actually not far from being up front about this when she announces, "Now we talk about the ‘gente,’ which also means people, but with a different nuance, derived as it is from the Latin gens meaning race, clan or breed." This pretty much confesses to tribal thinking, whereby the clan is taken to be some homogenous albeit somewhat diverse whole in which individual identities and differences, however, are abolished in favor of what some powerful figures regard as group traits that are supposedly superior to anything an individual might have in mind.

It is, of course, quite silly for Valenzuela to speak of rights in her column, when she says "the middle classes have now merged with the poor to demand their rights." What rights? Demand them from whom? Indeed, the stress of classes, clans, breed, and such brings to mind the most destructive trends in human social thought, whereby human beings are divided into warring groups, the trends that have given us the age old Balkan and Middle Eastern wars.

Of course, while there is plenty of oil flowing, the tribes can get along to some degree—although judging by the Middle East, even that’s doubtful—since the tragedy of the commons can be disguised when free goods are available a plenty. But once the oil is gone, look out! The solidarity Valenzuela holds out for Latin-America under this socialist vision Chavez is peddling will come to a screeching and tragic end.

I wonder how much responsibility the likes of Valenzuela will take for the result. Will they admit to having produced a vision that amounts to no more than the dream Karl Marx has spawned around the world and which ultimately led to the death of over a 100 million human beings East and West?

Why Victimless Crimes are Wrong

Tibor R. Machan

When the courts refused to let Angel Raich—the California mother of two, suffering from scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, and some other maladies—take a doctor prescribed dosage of marijuana, I was outraged. I wrote this in a column which I submitted to, among other places, a web page, AmericanThinker.com. I received a rebuke from the editor for not producing an analysis of victimless crimes instead.

Well, a 700 word column just doesn’t suffice to provide a comprehensive analysis of what is wrong with victimless crimes but some words on it may be worth producing if only as a kind of mind-teaser that may prompt some further inquiry on the part of readers. But in response to what was done to Angel Raich, words of outrage were the order of the day!

A crime in a free country amounts to the violation of one’s basic and derivative rights. So that murder is a crime since murderers violate the right to life; and so is vehicular manslaughter, because such conduct, too, violates the right to life but in a less direct, straightforward fashion. The American founders had it right when they stated, in the Declaration of Independence, that “to secure [our] rights, governments are instituted among [us], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consent to such a government is granted, either explicitly or implicitly, by being part of a community that recognizes our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and where these rights are given legal protection.

In contrast, when someone advocates a disagreeable idea, no one’s rights are being violated; when someone engages in self-destructive conduct, once again the culprit isn’t violating any rights; when someone sells dope to a willing adult buyer, once again no rights are being violated. Consensual interaction can not be rights violating.

But what, you might ask, about vulnerable folks, with weak wills? Here is where the complications arise, which is why the matter isn’t amenable to being treated briefly. If ordinary citizens, human beings, do have free will, as morality and the criminal law assume, they are able, even if with some difficulty, to resist temptations and inducements from others to do what can hurt them. If they refuse to resist, if they decide to take up a bad habit—smoking dope, gambling excessively, hiring hookers—and even get addicted, this is their responsibility to handle. Others may be morally blameworthy for attempting to induce them, tempting them, promoting the bad behavior, but no one has violated their rights in doing this. I can influence others, perhaps, with fancy words, with charisma, and the like but none of this forcibly imposes anything on them, none of it amounts to violating their rights. Even if they are unusually vulnerable, they have the freedom to take measures to protect themselves from my bad influence—they can avoid me, form a support group to keep away from tempting literature I might send their way, and so forth.

Basically, rights violations are unavoidable physical intrusions on (or threats against) other people, so they are criminal—the victim has no choice but become a victim. But tempting people, influencing them, inducing them and such can all be resisted without much trouble except to summon some will power, some diligence, some resolve.

Of course, and here is the rub, the very idea that people have such freedom of will is in much dispute in our time and to make our the case that they do, if they do, is an elaborate task. Just recently The New York Times Magazine ran a long essay by law professor Jeffrey Rosen—“The Trials of Neurolaw”—in which readers learned that a widespread debate is afoot on whether the assumption of free will can be sustained and should be retained in the legal system (and, by implication, in ethics) in the light of current findings in neuroscience.

Nonetheless, within the framework of the American political and legal tradition, animated by the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence, victimless crimes simply are no proper crimes at all. The people “committing” them may be vicious, evil, acting immorally, and so forth but their doing so does not suffice, in a free society, to make them criminals.

Of course, this is quite moot when it comes to Angel Raich’s case whose consumption of marijuana would amount to taking medicine, not being a drug abuser. So demanding that one defend the rejection of victimless crimes in order to stand up in Raich’s defense is entirely beside the point. Still, on the more general matter of why victimless crimes are bad laws, the essential issue is what such crimes do not violate anyone’s individual rights.

Government Cruelty

Tibor R. Machan

Some of the malfeasance in the world comes not from deliberate malice—malice a forethought, as it’s put in the law—but from stupidity and negligence. Yes, these, too, are mental states riddled with culpability, the culpability of inattention, of obliviousness to what matters, of recklessness, and of oversight. But they are not the sort of evil that involves meanness and cruelty.

Governments throughout human history, however, have been the most guilty of both types of evil. The way those Roman emperors exercised their imperial powers, or feudal monarchs and lords taxed and pillaged the people over whom they ruled (unjustly in the first place), or the armies of various countries imposed brutal force on peasants and merchants who wouldn’t just disappear as they rampaged around the landscape—all this and much, much more has clearly established governments as the worst criminal groups in human history, far worse than the Mafia or any gang in Los Angeles.

Aside from their deliberate, mean-minded viciousness, governments also have perpetrated evils by way of oversight and negligence, as when they impose "public" policies that wreak havoc throughout the land as these rulers, legislatures, bureaucrats, and judges sit about wielding power in Washington and other comfortable centers, leaving the dirty work to the cops. Any even cursory check of what governments have done everywhere, with but the most minimal and negligible exceptions, can show one that this institution has been far more corrupt than helpful in human history.

Yes, the police do at times repel bona fide crime, but even this is marred grossly with how often they embark on harassing, on the orders of "law" makers, "criminals" who do no harm to anyone other than perhaps themselves—prostitutes, johns, gamblers, and, yes, drug offenders and those servicing them. Some actual criminals are convicted in the courts and sent to prison. But even in the so called leader of the free world, the United States of America, about 40 to 50 % of the prison population has no business being there! The injustice of it all is staggering!
When it comes to America’s war on drugs and all the legal paraphernalia surrounding it, we can see that despite some improvements over the last couple of centuries—elimination of slavery, abolition of conscription, institution of various due process provisions—the habits of governments have not gotten much better. This war on drugs is bad enough just in and of itself, of course. There should not be one, period. It is not government’s task in a free society to cope with people’s ill-chosen conduct, including commerce, however much it upsets the sensibilities of some and, indeed, the lives of others. People ought not to be saved from themselves except by the counsel of their family, friends, and neighbors.

But let us just overlook, for a painful moment, how vicious are the war on drugs and all its consequences and focus on the deliberate meanness the mentality that has spawned it inflicts on some people. In California, for example—and it really is just one of many such cases—a women who has been medically judged to require medical marijuana—her doctor reportedly says "marijuana is the only medicine keeping her alive"—has been declared by a federal appeals court "not immune from federal prosecution on drug charges." Angel Raich, a mother of two and suffering from scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, and some other maladies, had sued the feds so she could get relief but instead of making an exception for her, the U. S. Supreme Court and other courts have ruled against her.

I am not privy to all the legal technicalities and, frankly, could care less about them—what matters is that here is an individual in demonstrable danger for her life who could get the remedy she needs but the government stubbornly refuses to yield. Why? The three-judge appeals panel, in this latest round, said that the US hasn’t reached the point where "the right to use medical marijuana is ‘fundamental’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’."
Ordered liberty? What a bogus concept! Meaning no liberty but compliance with idiotic, paranoid orders by politicians who, in response to vicious voters without a sense of proportion, want their arbitrary will to be the law of the land.

And some people think government is serving the public interest. My foot.

Spoiling My Children

Tibor R. Machan

This idea of tough love, I am sick of it. When I was a kid I had plenty
of tough—actually brutal—love cast my way, prompting me to run from home once I got to be of age (couldn’t do it before because the cops would have dragged me back). So I decided a few things then and there.

For one, I wouldn’t have children until I myself grew up. My first was
born when I was 40. And good thing too—by then I had pretty much gotten rid off much of the pent up anger engendered by my own parents who—in their defense—tried to raise kids in the midst of communism, which was no picnic. Also, there was economics. As a first generation American, an immigrant, in other words, I thought it a bad idea to bring kids into the world without funds to support them. So I wanted to be solvent when they were born. Not only that. Because of that miserable system of socialism, still adored by too many people in the Western academic world, my family was poor, as were most people back in Hungary. So I started to work at 11, in a bakery, and haven’t stopped since. Not that it was such a bad thing. But then some of us turn things around pretty good and I learned not to let stuff get to me too much, lest I’d be unhappy all the time.

But I had no desire to put my kids through the hardships I experienced. Certainly, once I had the ability to provide for them and more, I did so. Even now, when they are young adults, I figure what else should I spend my spare change on besides helping them out, provided it’s reasonable. So I do.

Some of my friends warn me that this is bad for my kids. They should struggle for everything. I say, bunk. If I can, I will help out so they
can start with a pleasant life and that is how it has gone and still
goes, partly because I help out. I have tried suggesting to them, firmly,
that my help is temporary and they need to become self-sufficient; but is it necessary to acclimate them to this fact by not giving them goodies
they would like and I can provide? I don’t think so. That idea suggests
that kids need to be trained, not taught. I think they can be taught.

Indeed, I find it odd that so many people have come to believe that doing nice things for one’s kids is something of a liability. Clearly it’s
pleasant for me—I enjoy it when they can live pleasantly with my help. And it seems, too, that there is a time when young people need to be young people, not yet adults. And that’s when they ought to have an abundance of fun. If it can be had, so much the better.

All in all, my idea is that raising kids is done best by providing a good example for them—if you work hard, are responsible, keep your word, are creative, and so forth, as the adult who is most prominent in your kids’ lives they will most likely learn from that, plus a bit of wise counsel. (That's while the basic necessities are taken good care of, of course.) You don’t need to deploy behavior modification techniques, as if they were circus animals that need to be trained all the time.

Come to think of it, the point is that kids have minds and aren’t
passively reacting to the world around them. Sure, it may have been one unavoidable way to raise someone to put him through endless hoops and hurdles, all that tough love stuff. But I bet that if my parents—at least my mother—had not had to deal with the damned commissars and bureaucrats all the time, she, too, would rather have “spoiled” me instead of subject me to all those strictures I now recall somewhat bitterly.

So, I say, spoil the kids, if you can couple it with some decent advice and set an example you aren’t ashamed of. The rest is up to them.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Tibor R. Machan

Yes, I do have a blog but all it contains is copies of columns I send out to various newspapers, magazines and web sites, as well as a few book, movie, and TV recommendations. I do not get into lengthy exchanges on blogs and despite being asked to do so, I think I should stay away from blogs, for the most part. I have nothing against those who do all this blogging but it’s just not my cup of tea.

While columns are something I have done for over forty years, I much prefer longish papers, articles, and books, mainly because in such fare one is able to address the various controversial assumptions on which one’s more particular suggestions and recommendations rest.

For example, when I attack the institution of taxation in a column, all I can do there is engage in a bit of mind-teasing. I might prompt some readers to undertake their own investigation based on the little I can produce in such a brief discussion. In a longer piece, however, I can discuss how taxation was at home in a feudal system; why such a system appeared palatable to so many people and had a long history (which continues, still); how some of its elements linger on in constitutional democracies even though their foundations have disappeared, etc., and so forth.

Or I can consider how when one discusses what public officials should or ought to do, one is assuming that they have free will, otherwise chiding or praising them is groundless—if one cannot do other than what one did, all things being the same, then one isn’t free to do the right thing or the wrong, just what one must. In which case human conduct is no more praise- or blameworthy than is a tornado or earthquake. And this point requires considerable exposition and explanation, impossible to perform in a column, not, especially, with all the heavy hitters today in neuroscience and other technical fields lining up to ridicule free will. One just cannot handle such matters briefly.

Nor can one do much with these topics on blogs except to exchange points one by one, without the possibility to develop a general thesis that can be convincing. As a result, whenever I have yielded to the temptation to blog, I have noticed how quickly some folks lose their cool—including me, come to think of it. (Some people do post my columns on their blogs and the few times I have checked, many respondents have been insulting—there seems to be this widespread desire to inflict pain rather than to help reach some kind of reasoned conclusion.)

Now there are some matters that blogs are very good for. One that comes to mind is conveying rapidly developing information. When that’s of value, blogs are a great resource. They are like an instant newspaper, with unending stories coming at readers all the time. And that is of immense value when, for example, one needs to make accurate, up to date plans or decisions. Getting word about a fire or heavy traffic or the need for some information is achieved much more quickly these days than it used to be. Indeed, the Internet is of unsurpassed use to anyone who wants to communication such information to maximum effect.

Which brings to my mind how both too much good and too much evil is expect from cyberspace. Like all other human inventions, cyber-communication has its pluses and minuses. The minuses will surely bring out alarmists who will gleefully call for government regulation of the Internet—most often invoking helpless children to justify this, as if government has ever managed to be of much use to the vulnerable among us as opposed to using them to gain more power!

So, just because I will not blog, it doesn’t in the slightest follow that others, with different skills and temperaments, shouldn’t. But then this is yet another place where it becomes so very obvious that how people ought to act varies; there are very few universal ethical or practical principles or rules for people, and when some presume to know what others ought to do, let alone to gain power to make them do the right thing, we are all in trouble. The power is most likely to be used, very soon, to perpetrate far greater wrongs than it was meant to correct.