Employment Blues Revisited

Tibor R. Machan

Even though making lots of money is often derided by politicians, they do routinely champion employment security. Exactly why it is fine to want the latter but not the former is quite unclear to me. There are some theories about this, though.

Some believe that making lots of money suggests that it is important to be able to live well, while a job merely allows you to survive rather than making very much of this life, trying to enjoy it fully, to be happy and prosperous until it is over. Being rich, then, is thought to be crass, lowly, while barely surviving, near poverty, is deemed more noble because it's more modest. Others figure that rich bashing stems from having a misguided zero-sum view of economics: if I get rich, someone must get poor. So, profit-making always involves making some poor bloke worse off than before. As the French poet Charles Baudelair said, "Commerce is vile because it is the worse kind of egoism," which to him meant getting ahead at other people's expense.

The first of these ideas can only be dealt with by way of ethics: it is there that we consider whether flourishing in life is to be regarded as an honorable objective and, once accomplished, something to be proud of. The second is both a philosophical and an economic issue: does wealth creation involve making others worse off than they otherwise would be? One philosophical issue is whether creating wealth is even possible, or are we stuck with just taking from here and putting it there, the famous zero sum game. The economic question is how has it happened that as the population of the world increased, the greater portion of people have been living better, at least economically. The stuff we need and want has not been reduced by way of entrepreneurship and mass production--that is, by the increase of the free flow of commerce, of enrichment. Instead commerce has managed to improve everyone's economic well being, even if not at the same speed.

Unfortunately, since government is so heavily involved in economic matters, there can be little calm in the discussion of these topics. Politicians have too much of a stake in scaring us to death about our future so that we will vote them into office where they will then pretend to turn things the way they ought to be. A Pat Buchanan or Ralph Nader cannot produce a sensible, reasonable discussion of the matter. Neither can a Hillary Clinton, a John McCain, or even a Barack Obama. And the news organizations also benefit most from disseminating "news" that create panic in our hearts. Even in scholarly circles these days there is too much partisanship, ever since Marx has convinced many in that community that everything is political, it's all related to power.

To make a living requires work but if one believes that to have a job means for someone else to lose one, this can only lead to bad blood between people. Oddly enough, it is in business that such a view is not usually shared, whereas those who focus on governmental affairs tend to view matters more akin to combat. This is why from politicians the refrain doesn't focus on productivity but on fairness, sharing prosperity, as Mrs. Clinton says, not on making it.

In business the idea is that commerce enhances everyone's well being, with losses coming only to those who misjudge the marketplace. Since forcing people to share is going to discourage them from working hard, it is better not to stress sharing and fairness but wealth and profit. Not only does everyone have a basic right to seek riches but this actually tends to produce more wealth for everyone who will but make the effort to work for it.
Unfortunately, we are now at a point where too many folks really think that they are owed a job, especially job security, never mind that this logically entails forcing customers to keep purchasing what one produces whether or not they want it. It would be encouraging to see some prominent commentators on C-SPAN or CNN making the point and for a few articulate politicians to affirm the plain truth: what would give us the greatest shot at job security isn't taking from the rich and spreading it around but making more wealth, training ourselves to anticipate future market changes, not expecting people to be forced to patronize our goods and services whether they want what they are being provided.

Job security comes from sustained, unimpeded productivity, not from trying to guarantee employment on the backs of some mythical job-manufacturers forced into service by the government.

Might've Guessed: Grisham likes Hillary

Tibor R. Machan

Of the very few John Grisham legal thrillers I have read, the only one I liked was The Firm. It was also a pretty decent movie, made good mostly by Gene Hackman's character and acting.

What I didn't like about the few other Grisham books I tried to read was their relentless business bashing. The Pelican Brief comes to mind. And that while corporations are picked as targets by making them all seem vicious, governments and their policies get completely off the hook. So I have stopped reading him despite my almost fanatical devotion to court room dramas, of which I like the works of Steve Martini, Scott Thurow, J. F. Freedman, Lee Gruenfeld, John T. Lescroart, Lisa Scottoline and, especially, Philip Friedman. I grew up reading Hungarian translations of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books and have never gotten tired of the drama that surrounds criminal trials.

What I find difficult to take is stereotyping in any fiction, but especially the court room variety. If lawyers are treated as if they were all really sleazy, or corporate managers as if they were all greedy, or professors depicted as if they were all saints, well this ruins a story for me from the start and I will stop reading it. I managed to start a couple of Grisham's books because, well, I didn't know about his anti-capitalist mentality.

My son tells me I should just put up with it since there is hardly any contemporary fiction, including TV drama and movies, that doesn't rely on such types. Well, I have managed to find some, so I remain hopeful. (I don't think the TV program Law & Order uses them much.)

My suspicion about Grisham has once again been confirmed. Reading the The New York Times Book Review I came upon an item reporting that John has endorsed Hillary for president, with all kinds of accolades: "she is a very warm, authentic person," and when you meet her, "you are taken with her warmth and humor and authenticity." Not a word, of course, about the fact that Grisham and Clinton share an anti-capitalist, anti-market ideology! But that is what I suspect makes him like her for the top political job. From up there she can exercise power and impose all her famous ideals and ideas that she so warmly and authentically believes we all must follow even if quite unwillingly.

You may not always be able to judge someone by the friends he or she keeps but in this instance there is good reason to think that the alliance between the famous court room novelist and the famous politician has to do with their shared political economic viewpoint. And this gives me yet another reason for thinking that if a Democrat must be the country's next president, Barack Obama is probably a safer bet than that fiercely Leftist ideologue, Hillary Clinton.

Mind you, I am not eager to throw around the label "ideologue." It suggests mindless, simplistic adherence to some set of ideas and is often used, say by Princeton economics professor Paul Kurgman in his columns for The New York Times, to besmirch people whose arguments one doesn't wish to address. But in the case of Mrs. Clinton the label seems to me to fit since her embrace of socialist public policies are never defended, never justified in her lectures to voters. She seems to have a faith in socialism, having gotten initiated by her mentor neo-Marxist Michael Lerner, the editor of TIKKUN magazine. (Once, very long time ago, Clinton was an admirer of Ayn Rand's novels and even supported Barry Goldwater for a while. Lerner appears to have been the person who led her to switch to the extreme Left.)

I am glad that Grisham's support of Clinton is out in the open. His unabashed opposition of capitalism should alert voters that when they vote for Clinton, they are voting for anything but a free economy.

It Isn’t Throwing it Away

Tibor R. Machan

Over the years, since when I voted for Barry Goldwater back in 1964, I have supported libertarian candidates and ballot measures, few of whom or which had any chance of winning. Often my more pragmatic, realistic friends tell me that I am throwing away my vote and I should stop this if I want to be serious about giving concrete support to my political convictions. They sometimes even suggest that it is irresponsible to keep up this practice of voting for hopeless candidates and measures.

I disagree. The reason is that political campaigns are very effective ways of taking certain topics to the media (and to other forums where remote possibilities) are being considered, ones that would otherwise be mostly ignored. Consider just recently how many stories were run about Ron Paul even though almost all of them admitted that Paul’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential candidate are nil!

So if there is a libertarian candidate or ballot measure, however little chance there is for their victory, libertarians and their critics will likely be asked to appear on radio, TV, and in other forums to discuss these ideas. Arguably, then, they will be able to keep the dim flame of liberty from being extinguished. They may even give the flame a bit of strength over time.

Moreover, it doesn’t appear to me to be a good idea to give additional credibility to the candidacies of people who really have no interest in furthering the cause of liberty. In the current race of the nomination there is no viable candidate who seems to care one tiny bit about whether this country is loyal to the ideas of the American Founders, to the effective protection of the unalienable individual rights of all. It just seems to be an act of betrayal to vote for a person with no interest in human liberty, one who has fully bought into the currently fashionable politics of special interests and entitlements.

The only sensible alternative, barring a full scale revolution, is to educate the electorate. And here is where a bit of optimism can also be justified. After all, it is no secret that the ideals and ideas of a fully free society are radical, novel, hardly explored by most people in the country and around the world. What John Locke and the American Founders proposed had only been considered by very few thinkers and most of them paid attention only to certain limited aspects of the political philosophy that the Founder’s sketched in the Declaration of Independence. Yes, there had been talk of limiting the power of government, of restraining absolutism, of abolishing serfdom and slavery, or of freeing the press and even markets. But very few influential thinkers came out in favor of a totally free society, one in which government exists only to secure the basic rights of citizens.

So it makes sense to suppose that one good way of giving this radical, novel political idea a good college try is to keep discussing it over and over again. As I have stressed many times, bad habits are not easy to get rid of even when one knows them to be bad. But in the case of statism--the belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of government--most people who embrace it are self-deceived into thinking that government really is the answer to most of our problems. Even in these United States it is nearly a knee jerk response to any problem that has been identified that some level or branch of government must be called upon in order to solve it. The self-deception is powerful enough to resist all the evidence staring us in the face that points to the futility of that belief.

All too many people also think in what can be called a fantastic fashion. They believe that if government might be of help, it will be of help. Of course, “might” is something for which no good argument is necessary, no history need support it. It need only be a matter of imagination, of speculation, of unsupported hypotheses. Then if you add to this the famous insight of the 19th century French economist, Claude Frédéric Bastiat--namely that what isn’t seen is often completely ignored in assessing the merits of policies--you can figure out pretty well how difficult it is to make progress on the path to liberty.

So to those who claim that supporting libertarian candidates or measures amounts to being totally ineffectual in the field of politics I answer that “Not in the long run.” Moreover, the career of the free society is more a matter of the future, actually, than of the past! So focusing on the constitution of that future would seem to me to make sense, at lest for some of us.

Naiveté at Business Week

Tibor R. Machan

Why do some reporters never manage to become educated in the areas they cover? Consider, for example, a recent piece in Business Week, “Food Fight over Calorie Counts” (2/11/08).

The fight is supposed to be between public health officials and the restaurant industry. As to the latter, the report, written by one Michael Orey, leaves little doubt about the reporter’s position: the industry is fighting to keep up its opportunity to sell us food without much health benefits, food that lacks nutrition, food that makes us fat. In contrast, for Mr. Orey all public health officials are “desperate to combat an epidemic of obesity.” In short, they are the heroes, even saints, in the story!

I don’t know how Mr. Orey knows what motivates public health officials but I do know a bit about public choice theory. This is the idea, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in economic science back in the mid 80s, that those in government are motivated no differently from those outside. They too want to advance their own agenda, including keeping and expanding the scope of their jobs.

One need not even turn to this somewhat technical field in economics to see Mr. Orey’s naiveté. Most people know about the way government bureaucrats, especially, try very hard to make themselves important, to become indispensable parts of all our lives. Everywhere government bureaucrats tend to be bent on creating obstacles to commerce, technology, and industry and their rationale--their professed motivation--is mostly a concern for the public interest.

In fact, however, the first concern of most government bureaucrats would be just exactly what the first concern of other human beings happens to be, namely, to make a decent living, to advance in their careers, to produce services that will be needed and well paid for. The difference is that government bureaucrats are paid from public funds and this liberates them from the need to reach a voluntary agreement with those for whom they provide their service. Instead, they mostly impose their service on us whether we want it or not.

In my neighborhood we had a good example of this recently. We had those horrible fires, followed by intermittent rains. The rains were feared by some because they could have, at their worst, produced mudslides. Because of this danger, county officials embarked upon what can only be considered fanatical alarmism--they sent out dozens of emails, daily, made phone calls to local residents, instituted voluntary and mandatory evacuations and did everything in their power to make themselves our saviors.

Needless to say, very little if anything happened that required all this panic. But the fact that there was just a chance that something could have happened sufficed for the county bureaucracy to go into action big time. At whose expense? Well, the taxpayers’. And taxpayers have no choice about whether they to receive this service--they get it whether they want it.

The government bureaucrat’s blessing is a vision of the worst case scenario--something really bad that might happen, never mind what is the probability of it happening. In my neighborhood, for example, only some of the residents are exposed to any real danger when the rains come, even after fires. The rest of us are far away from hills and slopes so there is very little chance of us suffering damage or harm. But when one does not have to worry about cost but mainly about possible public rebuke--being called to account for a failure to anticipate the worst--then alarmism triumphs.

Business Week’s reporters ought to know better than to assume that public health officials are all aiming to do nothing but “combat an epidemic of obesity,” especially when no such epidemic is in evidence and when, moreover, it really isn’t the proper task of a public official to reform the eating habits of the citizenry. Business Week’s writers might, at the least, mention that there is serious skepticism afoot about what really motivates government bureaucrats.

Instead while the restaurant industry is depicted mainly as intent upon cashing in on people’s culinary and nutritional imprudence, government bureaucrats are presented as saints. Come on, let’s get real.

The Scam of Shared Prosperity

Tibor R. Machan

When I was about 12 years old, I was taking a class in my Hungarian elementary school on Marxist economics. One day we were being told about Marx’s famous goal for the communist paradise he envisioned for us all: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

As most kids back in Budapest, I didn’t pay much attention to these lessons since they were nothing but pure propaganda for the ruling communists who ran the country. But I did happen to be listening to this particular presentation and once the “teacher” was done, I didn’t have the good sense to resist raising my hand to ask a question: “What if my pal here next to me and I both start the week with a fixed amount of money but he purchases some wood and builds a nice table while I buy some wine and drink myself under a table? Will he have to share with me whatever he can earn when he sells his product?”

As I recall, I was severely rebuked for my counterrevolutionary remark and shortly thereafter I was sent to a technical school where one would prepare for physical labor, not for entering a gymnasium where education is more theoretical, abstract. I was deemed too reactionary and a serious risk for infecting the intelligentsia with heresies. In time I managed to escape from the communist hellhole, of course, and land in America where I have been told freedom reigns and people’s property is not confiscated to be involuntarily and indiscriminately distributed among all.

Alas, this morning I was reminded once again that my hope of coming to a genuinely free country turned out to be more of a dream than a real prospect. One of the most prominent presidential hopefuls has penned an article for The Wall Street Journal, titled, “My Plan for Shared Prosperity.” Its author, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, makes no secret of her plan for massive wealth redistribution should she get the chance to implement her ideas. As she puts it, “My measure of economic success will never be a single, dry statistic. Rather, success means an economy that allows those at the bottom to work their way into the middle class, without pushing anyone out. It means leaving people better off when I finish than when I start. In short, success means an economy that shares its prosperity with all.”

Now a genuinely free economy “allows” those at the bottom to attempt to work their way up, to become economically better off, although there is no guarantee that this will happen. That’s because whether one’s work gains one wealth depends on whether enough people want to pay for it. In a free country no one has the authority to force others to purchase one’s wares or services. It is all done by means of voluntary exchange. And the result can well be unequal wealth across the society. And there is also the problem that some folks simply don’t want to do the work to gain much wealth.

Yet, when one compares the economic history of largely free market societies with those planned by bureaucrats and politicians, one finds, in the main, that there is far more prosperity and even equality in the former than the latter. More importantly, the opportunity to seek economic improvement is not squashed by rigid state planning or fixed socio-economic classification. No. Instead, as one can expect from the condition of freedom in all areas of life, there is a great deal of variety and volatility and mobility. The bottom line is that a free country will probably not be one with “an economy that shares its prosperity with all.”

Of course, Mrs. Clinton isn’t much interested in freedom, only in regimentation for the country to meet her standards of economic success. This is revealed in how she talks of “an economy that shares its prosperity.” She doesn’t appear to grasp that it is not economies that are prosperous, nor engage in sharing anything with anyone. That is what people are and do. And for Mrs. Clinton to get her way, she will have to order the level of prosperity that people will be allowed to attain and force people to share their resources with others, like it or not.

I suppose the idea of a free society is a hard sell, when too many folks like to live off the work of their fellows. But it would perhaps be of some value if our politicians, like Mrs. Clinton, read Orwell’s little fable, Animal Farm, and learned what happens when a country places forced equality ahead of liberty for its citizenry.

Why Altruism is Prominent

Tibor R. Machan

The most popular ethical viewpoint clearly seems to be altruism. What does altruism amount to? As one philosopher, W. G. Maclagan, put it in an article in The Philosophical Quarterly several years ago, “‘Altruism’ [is] assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows....Altruism is to ... maintain quite simply that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he is deciding what course of action to pursue.” Altruism means selflessness, unselfishness, and self-sacrifice.

In most novels, movies, sermons, or political speeches, altruism is treated as virtually the same thing as morality or ethics. To be ethical is, as many who talk about ethics or depict ethical people, identical to being altruistic.

On the other hand, people are rarely altruistic in their daily lives. Sure, off and on they lend a hand to others, even to total strangers. This is usually in some emergency, when others are in dire straits or just could use a leg up. But in their normal doings most people concern themselves with getting ahead in their lives, with trying to benefit themselves and their intimates in their careers, family affairs, neighborhoods, and so forth. To all appearances people act more like moderate egoists; they are mostly focused on what will further their best interests. As they carry on at work, on the road, in the grocery store, and in the broader economy, most of them are not altruistic at all.

Does this mean there is a lot of hypocrisy afoot? Not necessarily. When most of us think about how other people should act, most of us quite naturally praise them when they do what helps us. We want others to be altruistic, naturally, since this promotes their care for us, or so it may appear.

Of course, most of us do not want others to meddle in our lives even as we praise them if they intend to help us out. But many also know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so it is also popular to insist that people take care of themselves and only help others when special needs arise.

What seems to mislead us into thinking that altruism is the dominant, even the correct, ethical position is that most discussions of how people should act concerns what they do in their interactions with others. And in these interactions what seems to matter most to whoever discusses ethics is what people do for other people.

Yet, as the late W. D. Falk, a philosopher from the University of North Carolina, pointed out in several of his writings on ethics, by focusing on how people talk about ethics we are mislead about what really concerns and guides them in their conduct. (See W. D. Falk, “Morality, self, and others,” eds. Hector-Neri Castaneda and George Nakhnikian, eds., Morality and the Language of Conduct, Wayne State University. 1963). Falk shows that while most of us voice views that are altruistic, we actually act much more egoistically, much more involved with how best to live our lives, to succeed as the people who we are.

Altruism is, so to speak, the more noisily championed moral stance. It is given a great deal of lip service and quite naturally because of what so many people often focus on when they discuss ethics with other people and in public forums, namely, on how others should act. But in their private and even social lives, where they have much greater influence and impact than elsewhere, most people are not altruists at all.

So there is a decisive and perhaps understandable disconnect between the ethics most people practice and the ethics they propound. As in most cases, such a disconnect between practice and theory is unhealthy. Unfortunately those who discuss morality and ethics professionally, namely, most philosophers and theologians, are fully complicit in perpetuating the disconnect. They promote altruism without making it clear that this could very well be a mistake, that a proper ethics for human beings does not require self-sacrifice, selflessness and so forth but a sensible focus on one’s own success in life as a human being.

Elections Equal Theft Facilitation

Tibor R. Machan

Unless elections are confined to selecting administrators of a legal system, they are mostly about mutual theft facilitation. You elect someone to office so he or she will garner the resources of others and transfer them to you or your favorites in the community. And since there is never enough to go around and there is always more and more that people want, the process amounts to a mad dash to be first in line at the government’s treasury. And while there is never enough to go around, there is always the ploy of borrowing against the wealth of future generations, who aren’t around to protest much, needless to note. No taxation without representation in your dreams!

A clear case in point is my neighbor down the street. She works in one the local community district, I am told. For the last few weeks there has appeared on her fence facing out toward the street a sign endorsing a referendum that supports, you guessed right, added funds for community colleges. No other measure is given support on this neighbor’s fence but this one that serves a special interest, certainly not the public interest that defenders of the welfare state constantly invoke when they condemn those who are skeptical about their type of government.

This sign, that I see every time I leave my home or come back to it, is at least implicitly honest. My neighbor makes no bones about wanting the political process to advance her agenda. As to others, never mind that. “Let them take care of theirs, I’ll look out for mine” seems to be the operative motto here.

The underlying hope would seem to be that enough people will be fooled into thinking that supporting her agenda is a matter of the public interest, so she will come out on top and her institution will get the support, not others that are also using the political process to seek it.

In a recent letter responding to one of my columns I was chided for failing to consider the public interest, for being too much of an individualist instead of a citizens promoting the public good. This because I advocate that government ought to focus primarily if not exclusively on protecting the rights of individuals and not on handing out so called entitlements to members of various groups.

But what too many folks today consider the public interest really isn’t at all to the benefit of the public but mostly to special groups or even specific individuals. This war of innumerable groups of people against all the others¾one reminiscent of the war of all against all discussed by the English philosophy Thomas Hobbes as part of the state of nature (the state prior to the establishment of civil society)¾is the norm for contemporary politics. So when Barack Obama recently spoke in Kansas, he said outright that he will do right by the citizens of Kansas¾at the expense, of course, of all the rest of the citizens of America. Just like my neighbor hopes from her local government, Senator Obama was promising to deliver the bacon to those whose votes he was seeking at others’ expense.

The public interest my foot! The welfare state, which pretends to take care of all, is but a mad dash to promise and seem eager to deliver to everyone benefits for which others are going to pay. It is plainly fraudulent¾it cannot be done. But sadly millions of people, when elections roll around and when Congress and various state assemblies are in session, get their hopes up that they will be the winners in the effort to get others to pay for what they want.

Of course, the result is the tragedy of the commons: resources are depleted good and hard and the country goes into greater and greater debt and various groups of people are angry at the rest who prevented them from getting what they believe they are entitled to.

The idea of a free society is that one must rely on one’s works and good fortune and, now and then, on the kindness of friends and neighbors, in order to get on with one’s life, not on theft-facilitators. The idea of our society, in contrast, is for everyone to try, each election, to rip off everyone else.

An Elementary Fallacy!

Tibor R. Machan

Among the publications in which my columns sometimes make an appearance, Free Inquiry is a favorite. Although it is primarily a forum for discussions of secular humanism and connected issues, there is plenty of room there to bring up interesting topics and argue one's case, provided one's civil about it all.

I am in distinguished company, indeed, with Richard Dawkins, Nat Hantoff, Peter Singer and Christopher Hitchens, among others but I cannot recall that Paul Kurtz, the chair of the Center for Inquiry which publishes Free Inquiry magazine, ever replied to any of these other columnists in the very same issue in which their column appeared. Evidently I got to him. (My column argued that fairness is a minor virtue, in contrast to what post-Rawlsian defenders of the welfare state firmly maintain.)

But what is most interesting to me in this exchange is contained in the following sentence: "[Machan] escaped from communist Hungary; as a result, he has rebelled against taxation and believes fervently in the free market."

It needs to be kept in mind that Dr. Kurtz is a Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and in that discipline logic figures as a central method for reaching an understanding on all matters. Indeed, on of the messages of secular humanists is that people ought to deploy logic and reason, including science, not faith and mysticism as they go about trying to figure out how the world works.

Among the first lessons one learns in an elementary logic course is that there are various informal fallacies that too many people commit as they go about thinking things through. For example, the fallacy of begging the question or ad hominem or the genetic fallacy. One would not expect anyone in the discipline to commit any of these and similar fallacies. Yet Dr. Kurtz manages to do just that when he claims that I hold my views on taxation and the free market "as a result" of my having "escaped communist Hungary." It is where I come from, what happened to me, the circumstances of my early life that produced in me my views, not my careful reasoning, study, analysis, and such, all those methods that secular humanist advise we use when considering, for example, such issues as evolution, abortion, the existence of God, intelligent design and so forth. No. Dr. Kurtz chooses, instead, to treat my views as some kind of affliction that comes to people who escape from communist Hungary or similar tyrannies.

This is sad. I would have loved to see some argument against my views, not having the dismissed on such flimsy grounds. The entire episode reminds me of when back in my graduate school days someone invited me to a talk given in Los Angeles by a Hungarian refugee. I decided to go even though I put very little stock on shared cultural background when it comes to learning things from people. Those I regard as accidents, something one has no control over, whereas one's thinking, reasoning are something a person must choose to carry out. Focusing on evidence and steps in arguments is a free act but having come from Hungary is, well, an incidental aspect of one's history. Yes, it can supply one with experiences that can be useful in reaching conclusions about various matters but those experiences will not get one very far all by themselves, with careful research, comparisons with the experiences of others, etc.

Sure enough, the young man I went to hear spoke about Hungary's communist experience in ways totally alien to how I came to reflect on them. He advanced the view that communism is a wonderful ideal, a beautiful dream but, alas, it's too bad that it is unattainable in practice because human beings just aren't good enough to handle its demanding ethics and politics. I completely reject this notion, as my book Marxism Revisited, A Bourgeois Reconsideration (Hamilton Books, 2006) make abundantly clear. The point here is simply to note that background does not determined what one will think about anything.

My opposition to taxation rests on my ethics which rejects taking something from one person so as to support another, without the former's consent. Also, taxation is an institution, like serfdom, that belongs in feudal orders, not in free societies. But I have addressed these matter at great length in my various writings.

It is disappointing that Dr. Kurtz resorts to committing an elementary fallacy, explaining someone's ideas by reference to his or her history, instead of criticizing them on the basis of the argument advanced in their support. (Indeed, my arguments were scarcely addressed by Dr. Kurtz in his reply!)

Do the Clintons Deploy the Race Card?

Tibor R. Machan

Elections do not interest me a great deal. Not because they cannot ever be important but because my own focus is on political principles, not personalities or emotional hot buttons. Moreover, these days no one running for anything articulates truly sound ideas on political economy. Among the candidates for president only Ron Paul, whose chances of winning the Republican nomination are practically nil, shows interest in the principles of the free society and even his message has been recast so that now his ads on California radio stations, for example, make him sound like one of the Pat Buchanan nationalists who is concerned mainly with illegal aliens.)

The notion that one must vote for someone, anyone, just to vote, never mind that everyone running advocates bad ideas, bad policies, is completely off the wall. That really amounts to throwing away one’s vote--a kind of electoral littering. Better to wait for a time when perhaps some sensible people, with sensible ideas, become candidates.

Nonetheless, sometimes when a candidate has no concern for sound principles but only for winning elections, the lack of a political vision becomes significant. For example, one of my neighbors who works for a community college has a sign up advocating that we all vote for a measure that would deliver additional funds to the college district. There seems to be no other political agenda on this neighbor’s mind but one that amounts to ripping off others so as to gain benefits.

Anyway, lack of political principles can easily lead a candidate to stress other types of generalities, such as racial sentiments. Hillary and, especially, Bill Clinton appear to be in this fix now, trying to find some general issues apart from basic political ideas that will attract voters. Lacking any unifying idea of what this country is about--freedom, equality, order, spirituality, whatever--it seems like the Clintons are now putting their money on broad racial or sexual sentiments. Because Barack Obama is black, they can invoke, as Bill Clinton has done recently in South Carolina, the names of discredited or scary black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, thus linking the Senator with these men’s one-sided leadership, the kind that folks with racial bias will certainly be alarmed by.

Because of this the Clintons have recently become targets of the criticism of some liberal democrats who do not want their party to return to the era when it got all too comfortably in bed with racists. Even as a mere, pragmatic tactic this approach no longer carries any punch. The bulk of Americans, as Obama said after his South Carolina victory, just don’t much care now about the race of the candidates.

But then where else are the Clintons--who do not advance any kind of coherent system of ideas (perhaps because the one they may well have, namely Hillary’s “it takes a village” socialism, is too offensive to mention)--going to find common ground with enough voters, apart from forging a community with people who are prejudiced? Without an idea or vision of what kind of political system they are going to support when in office, the only thing they seem to be able to offer now, in a crunch, is that they, unlike their black opponent, will not favor only blacks. This even though Senator Obama has been rather careful to distance himself from any notion of black solidarity as his strategy for winning races.

One can unite voters on the basis of several common factors. One, the right sort, is a political vision. Another, an insidious one, is racial prejudice or apprehension. Another objectionable one is class hatred.

In South Carolina this last had no foundation at all. Indeed, class divisions are a phony device for separating Americans, even though many politicians give it a try. (What upsets people about class is when people are deemed to have been born into it, as a matter of a birthright. Merely being richer than others doesn’t cut it since riches can fast disappear and wealth can be earned and, in any case, most people want to become rich.)

I doubt, by the way, that too many in the Clinton camp are out and out racists. But I do think that out of desperation, and in the absence of a coherent political philosophy, many will at least be tempted to invoke the race card--subtly but still!

The Free Society & Democracy

Tibor R. Machan

Around the world democracy is often thought to be the system of liberty. A free country is often thought to be identical with a democratic one. And while this is wrong, the mistake is understandable. For too many millions of people progress toward liberty begins with gaining the vote, with managing to have some, however small, measure of influence on public policy as opposed to having public affairs dictated by some unelected chief of state or some unelected group of thugs. So to get at least a bit of influence—to gain the right to vote—is a step in the right direction toward becoming free.

But in a truly free society democracy has to be strictly limited. For starters, it cannot involved voting on how non-consenting citizens should act and use their labor and property. Democracy can involve no more than the selection of the administrators of the legal system and such as system must be strictly limited to the protection of everyone’s basic individual rights. In short, people may vote for who the sheriff will be but not on whether the sheriff may rob Peter to help out Paul. The sheriff may only act in the capacity of a peace officer, as a crime fighter, as the defender of the citizenry from domestic and foreign aggressors.

Now this shows very clearly and plainly that we do not live in a truly free society anywhere on the globe, not even in the United States of America. That’s not to say America is a full blow tyranny or that we do not enjoy far more liberty than do citizens—“subjects”—of most other nations around the globe. Just as is implicit in the way some organizations such as Freedom House rank countries, there are more or less free societies around the world. And compared to most eras in human history, there are societies these days that enjoy institutions and laws that come near to making them free, considering how brutal and Draconian tyrannies and despotisms had been in the past and were not all that long ago. Yet even today many societies are ruled top-down in more or less totalitarian fashion and things could get worse—there is no automatic progress toward freedom in the world.

The original statement of the way America was supposed to differ from other societies, laid out in the Declaration, made it abundantly plain that democracy may not trump individual rights. That is what is meant by calling the rights of all human beings unalienable—nothing and no one may strip individuals of these rights; nothing and no one may justifiably act to violate those rights.

Unfortunately the urgency involved in building a new country, despite all the good ideas most of the Founders had about how to devise it, made it very difficult to stick to the basic ideas of the Declaration. So the Constitution didn’t do justice to its principles, just as Lincoln explained when he invoked the Declaration’s ideals to try to remedy the Constitution. (Sadly, even Lincoln didn’t quite stick to those excellent ideas.)

For those who appreciate how vital liberty is to the maintenance of a just system of law, it is difficult in our day to tell just what one is to do, especially when the available selections during elections nearly all betray the principles of liberty. Will voting for a Hillary Clinton make American a freer society than it is now? How about voting for Rudy Giuliani? We don’t even have the kind of system, as many countries do, where many candidates can run for office in the final race so that citizens can at least register a sizable preference for other than the winner. It is certainly very frustrating to have to choose between two candidates who have no serious concern for what a free society requires.

But in some ways it may still be possible for some people to vote so as to guide the country in the direction of a truly free society. Just what that involves can vary a great deal from one region of the country to another, from what’s at stake in one election versus in another. Voters are intelligent enough to figure out what will get the country closer to a free society, although they do not often use their intelligence for that purpose. As it stands now, most often, sadly, they use it to figure how many goodies they can get at others’ expense by means of casting their votes. (That’s just what Alexis de Tocqueville warned us against in his famous Democracy in America!)

The original idea that what American should be is free, first and foremost, is getting hardly any attention in our democracy.

Revolutionaries and Reality

Tibor R. Machan

Those who are loyal to the political values of the American Founders are revolutionaries, far more so than any other type (like the Marxists or radical Muslims). This is because the American Founders identified something brand new and radical when they declared that individuals have unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

This idea overturned thousands of years of official doctrine according to which people belong to the government—the idea that they are subjects, not citizens. Such a notion is fundamentally alien to what the Founders proclaimed and believed is in fact the case, namely, that each intact adult human being is sovereign, a self-governor, and not someone’s slave, serf, or subject.

Sadly although the gist of the Founders’ idea has gained a good deal of influence in many cultures—legal systems and public policies certain give some lip service to it—there is still a great deal of habitual statism in vogue. Many politicians, intellectuals, educators, pundits, and such cling to the notion that you and I and the rest of us belong to some group—the race, nation, tribe, what have you—and so can be conscripted to do service to these never mind whether we consent. Both conservatives and liberals—and indeed nearly all the rest of the political factions—insist that your life isn’t really yours but you owe it to something or somebody else.

This was, of course, the essential teaching of socialists of all stripes, including Karl Marx. It is also the teaching of some of today’s leading political and social thinkers, such as Cass Sunstein, Charles Taylor, Thomas Nagel, Amitai Etzioni, and many others. They all deride individualism, the idea that you and the rest of us are sovereign and to gain our cooperation for any project we need to give our consent, we must be asked and only if we agree may such cooperation be obtained form us.

In the current election year this collectivist idea is especially prominent. It is taken for granted, not even argued for, by most liberal democrats and even by American conservatives, those in the country who claim to be conserving the ideas and ideals of the American Founders but have, in fact, become totally disloyal to them.

So what are the bona fide loyalists to do? What are those to do who insist that the original American position is sound and ought to be the governing set of ideas in this country and, indeed, in any civilized society? There is no one to vote for who embraces these notions except Ron Paul whose numbers aren’t very impressive, even if those who support him have made news with their enthusiasm and willingness to put their money behind their man. Even Dr. Paul isn’t quite the champion of the Founders’ ideas this country needs—someone who stands four squares by the Declaration of Independence rather than, as Paul does, by the much more ambiguous and constantly changing U. S. Constitution.

What the revolutionaries among us need to grasp is just how radical their position really is and how long it takes to make such radical ideas gain currency. Human beings can live by good judgment, their rational thought, but they also live, mostly, by habit. And many of the habits of the human race are flawed and tend to misguide people toward neglecting their sovereignty. Just as some women who have every right to insist on their independence in fact acquiesce to being subjugated by some men, so a great many people, even in America, are embracing the old, reactionary notion that people belong to the government, the king or whoever, not themselves. They do not protest at all when politicians make arbitrary, unjustified claims on their lives and labors, as if these didn’t belong to them at all but could be used and disposed of by the government.

John Locke made clear that “absolute monarchs are but men,” meaning, essentially, that government is simply other people and since no human being has rightful dominion over another—slavery is a vile institution, as is serfdom—the continued belief in government’s authority to expropriate what belongs to us, to conscript our labor against our will, is unjust. But, sadly, it is understandable because old habits are hard to overcome. (Just think of a habit you have which you have learned is destructive to, say, your health. It is often very hard for us to change it.)

So in this election year when our leaders want to continue to govern according to the tenets of the reactionary doctrine that government is our ruler, not our hired professional duty-bound to protect our rights, those who are loyal to the American revolution must continue vigilantly to promote their ideas however hopeless it seems to do so. That is a matter of integrity and in the long run it will also bear fruit.

Ethics and the Writers’ Strike

Tibor R. Machan

In the field of business ethics there is a very influential movement called stakeholder theory or, alternatively, corporate social responsibility. The gist of the idea is that when corporations are being managed, the managers have a fundamental obligation to serve those who have an interest in how the company is doing. So, in contrast to the idea that management ought to seek to advance the best interest of those who own or have invested in the company, this view holds that management ought to look out for the best interest of those who have a stake in the company, who could be helped by it, such as employees, customers, subcontractors, neighbors near plants and office buildings, and so on.

The target of this movement is the idea of the right to private property and that when one owns something, one may determine what should happen with it (within the limits of everyone’s rights). Shareholders own the company and together ought to be free to provide its direction. Instead, stakeholder theorists claim, it should be politicians, bureaucrats, pundits, preachers, and others in the population who should give company’s their direction, their purpose.

At the foundation of this movement lies the idea that people owe their lives, their labor, their property to others, first and foremost. This is the ethics of altruism, a favorite of many moralists but also an ethical doctrine that is ultimately impossible to practice consistently. As W. H. Auden so cleverly put the point, “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.”

The people who advocate this altruistic ethics, especially as it influences the way businesses are being managed, are those on the political Left. And the political Left in American includes, more than most professions, those who write the scripts for Hollywood movies and television dramas. If you check out the moral orientation of most Hollywood fare, it is plain to see that it promotes the idea that businesses shouldn’t seek to make profit but aim to help those in need.

The heroes in Hollywood aren’t the suits who bring in the dollars (and create the jobs), not by a long shot. The heroes are the actors and actresses who gallivant around the globe offering help to the needy and put down concern with the box office and commercial success. The fact is largely ignored that they couldn’t do their philanthropic work without the profits that the suits make possible for all these actors and actresses. As with Mother Teresa versus Bill Gates, never mind that the former could barely help a few people while the latter has created decent jobs for millions and useful tools for the rest of us. Looking good, in terms of the altruists, seems to trump actually doing real good!

Yet, there is a glitch here, as the writers’ strike reveals. Suddenly the fact that this strike has virtually crippled the entertainment industry cuts no ice. Never mind all the stakeholders who are losing work and cannot pay their bills because the writers are insisting on pursuing what they perceive to be their own economic interests. In short, where is the “social responsibility” of the writers, their unions, in this current strike? Why is it OK for them all to focus on their own economic well being, their economic future, on what benefits them and their loved ones? Why, if corporate managers are acting badly in advancing the economic interest of those who own and invest in their companies, aren’t the writers and their union leaders acting badly by trying, with this prolonged work stoppage, to advance their own economic interest?

Why are the writers and their union leaders not renouncing self-interest and profit and going back to work for the benefit of all the stakeholders? Is it, perhaps, that they aren’t actually very serious about their altruism? Is it perhaps that when it comes close to home they agree with W. H. Auden’s point that altruism is an impossible guide to human conduct. It is one thing to give lip service to it and to denounce those who seek to make a profit from their work; it is another thing entirely to walk the talk and abandon the pursuit of profit by, for example, stopping the writers’ strike.

Of course, the writers have every right to strike--although with the oddities of mandatory unionization their strike has a good many perverse elements. But it would be cool if they admitted that when it comes to their own economic well being, altruism isn’t their ethical guide and egoism is and they are doing exactly what those “greedy” suits are doing whom they are always putting down in their writings.

Empty Talk -- Blog Entry at ocregister.com/horserace08

http://epaper.ocregister.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=T3JhbmdlLzIwMDgvMDEvMjAjQXIxMjcwNA==&Mode=Gif&Locale=english-skin-ocr

Economic ups and downs

Tibor R. Machan

Those who study a country’s economic conditions, mostly macro-economists, track general trends--is inflation or unemployment, how about productivity, comparative strength of the currency, etc., and so forth. But the basics of all these are mostly local matters, all about what happens to you, me, our neighbors, all about what we decide to do with our income and other liquid assets.

At times I myself feel very much inclined to go shopping for stuff I would like, to replace some old things with newer ones, to take advantage of some innovative items I became aware of, or to simply stock up on things I like a lot, like novels to read, food to eat, and so on. Now and then I may go overboard with all the buying, get some big items as when I recently bought one of those mini-hot tubs I have been dreaming about to relax my aching back or a VCR to DVD converter to preserve some recordings for the future. And it was Christmas recently and I may have overdone it with gifts for my children and myself.

After I do some of this over the top shopping for a while I tend to get a scared and tighten my belt a bit, maybe even a lot. Instead of eating out I’ll just cook up something at home for several days; instead of taking trips to see friends up and down the coast of California, I decide to stick to those novels I bought and read and read and just read some more. And no more purchases of big items, nor home improvements for a while, certainly no new shoes or clothing. In short, I am inclined on such occasions to get out of the market except for services and goods that I need on a regular basis--but even these I may cut back so as to recover economically!

When last summer a large chunk of cash was stolen from me in Europe, as well as quite a lot of stuff I had carried with me because I was going to attend a wedding and bought gifts to bring home, I did experience some panic and stopped buying. I did replace the gifts but waiting a while before I got a new suit (when I was invited to another wedding). But to make the replacements less of a burden, I gave up other stuff. But I also went on a search for new sources of income--I lined up some speaking gigs and conferences I hadn’t planned to do beforehand. (This brought to mind the Laffer Curve! I assume if I were robbed weekly, I would just give up trying to recover.)

When I was robbed, I felt very nearly as I feel around April 15th every year. But that is a bit more predictable, within a certain amount of what will be extorted from me, so I can prepare for it better. But I usually react to having to come up with the funds (so as to avoid prison) by cutting back, saying no to purchases I’d normally make.

Now what if most people in the American, even the world, economy decide to cut back on their purchases? What if they all become terribly cautious about committing to spending? Millions of people stay away from the malls. Millions cut back on driving, going to movies, even visiting their dentist. What then? Well, I suspect this is when a recession is likely to commence. Add to this all the wasteful spending of the taxes extorted from us all, and the corresponding increases of our tax bills, hidden or overt, and this is likely to reduce economic activity and, therefore, income and savings.

To this, of course, politicians respond by promising to perform magic. They talk of stimulus packages--but where are the resources support to come from? Usually from printing more money, going into more government debt, or robbing Peter to make things a bit easier for a while for Paul. But, of course, one cannot get blood out of a turnip and none of this makes up for the reduced economic activity, the pause in consumption, and so forth.

Politicians have no bona fide magic--they only pretend to have it. So they will wave their hands about uselessly, maybe fooling a bunch of people with schemes of getting something from nothing. In the last analysis, however, the phenomenon of reduced economic activity is not something anyone can avoid. It happens. Most often it happens sporadically, not all at once across the country or the world, but at times the withdrawals tends to be nearly universal and then they will show up in the macro-economic statistics as somewhat sizable dips, a recession, even a depression at times. Trying to pretend that this cannot happen or can easily be avoided merely makes things worse.

Another Distortion at the Movies, etc.

Tibor R. Machan

American Rhapsody is a movie about a family that gets smuggled out of Hungary in the early 1960s and all the various complications this gives rise to. Since I went through this ordeal myself when I was 14, not with my family but several perfect strangers and a paid guide, I thought I’d check out the movie.

Expecting to see something familiar I’d witness, instead a very distorted picture of the escape emerged right from the start. And I have met up with this distortion before, when in 1981 TIME magazine carried a lengthy story about what TIME called flesh peddlers, the who people hired out their skills of leading people across the dangerous Iron Curtain. Just as TIME did, so American Rhapsody depicted the people smugglers not as heroes, not as folks doing an important piece of work for which hundreds of refugees would forever be grateful. No. Both TIME and American Rhapsody depicted the smugglers as rapacious, greedy, heartless brutes who had no concern for their clients at all, especially not the young children who accompanied them.

My experience was completely different. From the start, when my guide came to our apartment in Budapest and introduced himself to my mother and me, he was not only competent but very helpful. First he established his credentials so that we’d be at ease about the possibility that he might be some government agent setting a trap. This consisted of showing my mother letters I had written to my father, already in the West, ones only someone who had the trust of my father could have on him. Sure enough, this served its purpose--we relaxed and continued our preparations without nagging suspicions that very naturally infest such transactions.

I was allowed a day by the guide and my mother to decide whether this is something I wanted to undertake. It wasn’t a journey without serious risks, mind you. Several people we knew had tried to escape and were caught by vigilant border guards and immediately incarcerated and later sent to labor camps. (You see the communists were serious about the idea, one that attracts some Western communitarians, like the highly respected Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, that each of us belongs to our societies!)

Of course, I decided to make the trip--for me it was more of an adventure than a hazardous escape and I had always dreamt about coming West. (Young people probably do not fully appreciate the dangers of such undertakings so for them they tend to be exciting adventures, mostly.) My guide then helped me to get ready by instructing me to send my bicycle to the city, Gyor, where we would disembark from our bus and begin in earnest the more complicated portion of the trip during the night, on our bikes, sleeping during the day in hey stacks on the way toward the border, after which we would have to walk.

All of us, the four adults and I, were provided with phony documents that would at least temporarily fend of authorities who might ask what we are doing wandering about near the Austro-Hungarian border. Then we started our 20 miles or so walk, mostly at the edge of freshly tilled farmland. Our feet took a violent beating from this--I eventually had to toss all the stuff I brought along and even go barefoot for good spells.

All along our heartless flesh peddler gave us all the help he could, kept reminding us what reward lies ahead, once we crossed into Austria and reached the American sector there. At the border he skillfully cut the barbwires and made sure that we would not trip the hairline wires wrapped around it. We were also carefully led though the 25 feet soft dirt just before the barbwires since it was booby trapped and we would have been blown to smithereens without his guidance.

Once we successfully crossed into Austria, we still had some 10 kilometers to walk to reach the railway station where we were to catch the train to Vienna. And after some hassle we did, only to find the train filled with Russian soldiers. Fortunately they were all drunk and our strategy of going through the compartments talking loudly in German turned out the be quite superfluous.

But I have told this story elsewhere already--my memoir The Man Without A Hobby (2006). The only reason I tell it again here is to show how this supposedly rapacious, heartless smuggler was, in fact, a completely decent, as well as highly competent, individual whom Hollywood and TIME really should have represented more honestly.

Individualism, the Collectivists’ Nemesis

Tibor R. Machan

It is individualism that the American Founders elevated into political prominence and it is individualism that most politicians and governments, including America’s, find most annoying because it is the bulwark against arbitrary power.

If, as the Declaration of Independence states, individual human beings have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no one may violate these rights. Every adult individual is sovereign, a self-ruler and not subject to the rule of others. (This is why Americans are referred to as citizens, not as subjects, like so many around the globe.)

Karl Marx was among the many political theorists--like Hegel and Comte--who realized that if individualism becomes prominent, their dream of ruling others in the name of whatever “higher goal or power” is over and done with. So they worked tirelessly to discredit individualism, to establish that no one is sovereign and we all belong to some group--the nation, the tribe, the race, the class, the ethnic group, whatever.

Today some of America’s most powerful mainstream politicians have gone on record denouncing individualism and they are joined by a great many academicians, even some scientists in trying to besmirch the idea. Instead of each person having the free will to guide him or herself in life, each of us is said to be but a cell in the larger organism that is humanity. There have been many who laid out this idea in forceful ways--just read what the French “father of sociology” said about this: “All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.” Marx put it even more succinctly: “The Human essence is the true collectivity of Man,” and referred to human beings as “specie beings,” meaning they are part of the larger organism or body of humanity. The book, by Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell, defended the idea in the mid-20th century!

Most recently the highly honored Canadian philosopher, a recent recipient of the prestigious Templeton Prize, has argued for “a principle of belonging or obligation, that is a principle which states our obligation as men to belong to or sustain society, or society of a certain type, or to obey authority or an authority of a certain type” in contrast to John Locke’s idea, those laid out in the Declaration, that there are unalienable rights every individual possesses simply by virtue of his or her humanity. These rights are definitive claims against anyone who would intrude upon one’s life, who would rob one of one’s liberty and moral autonomy, who would deny one’s freedom to choose and to pursue happiness.

In our current political climate it is the philosophy of entitlement that undermines the Lockean idea, which is the philosophy of the Declaration, by insisting that people have a right to take from others what they need or badly want--be this health care, retirement funds, opportunities for purchasing goods and services at lower cost than what some favorite group wants, land on which to build important shops, etc. And the idea of such entitlements, namely, that they are to be legally mandated, enforced, is backed by the philosophy of communitarianism, one that takes us all to belong to society, belong to a larger and more important entity than ourselves.

Yet, of course, it is always some individuals who make these claims and insist that they be the ones to decide what everyone’s obligation is to others, to the country, the nation, or the racial group. It is these individuals, after all, who try to secure power for themselves with the phony claim that we all belong to society and thus must be made to pay up what they decide with our lives and labors.

This anti-individualism or communitarianism then comes to no more than the special privilege of certain individuals to run the lives of other individuals, to live off the lives of others who may very well have perfectly justified goals of their own that could be supported with their lives if they were left free to decide about such matters.

Whenever you hear or read attacks on individualism, these attacks are nothing more than efforts to wrest power from people so that only a few select individuals can legally enforce their will on the rest of us, the will of those with whom they disagree.

Communitarianism--or collectivism--is false. Individualism is true. And even communitarians know this perfectly well.

Ron Paul and the Cause of Liberty

Tibor R. Machan

Among libertarians hardly anyone criticizes Dr. Paul. The few who do have, in turn, abandoned him completely.~ I haven’t and I do write some supporting missives regarding his candidacy, although I think he has a style that stands in the way of his getting taken seriously as a presidential hopeful. And I also criticize his ideas now and then.

Mostly I find fault with his blowback theory vis-à-vis 9/11, the belief that terrorists act as they do largely because of America’s Middle East policies.~ In contrast, I believe terrorists are motivated by an ancient anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment ideology and religion and America’s Middle East policies have only been fuel on the fire, not the reason for the terrorist stance at all.

I support Dr. Paul because he is the only candidate today who firmly and consistently advocates limited government, something that to me is a bigger issue than his ideas on~foreign policy. Yet even on this score I am concerned with how Dr. Paul expresses his position. For example, he keeps saying we should “just go back to the U. S. Constitution.” But this is a troublesome idea because it doesn’t spell out which version of the U. S. Constitution is supposed to be worth going back to. It is surely not the original one, the one that permitted slavery and included some highly disturbing and false claims about African Americans. Or is it supposed to be the current version, one that has innumerable statist amendments included in it and no longer supports limited government?

In my view Dr. Paul should not issue blanket endorsement of the U. S. Constitution. Although sound bite talk is now the preferred way for candidates to communicate, it is very risky to yield to that policy because sometimes where one ought to stand on the relevant issues is complicated and cannot be stated simply. Perhaps what Dr. Paul and others who publicly advocate the free society should do is identify themselves as “Declarationists” so as to indicate that what they support is the principles of the free society as the Founder paid them out in the Declaration of Independence, not in the compromised political-legal document that became the U. S. Constitution.

The Declaration, which is a pre-legal, philosophical document, is nearly flawless and would really be very good to go back to--or rather to move ahead toward, since America never did full justice to it and it is high time it begins to do so. It is the ideas of the Declaration that have inspired millions of people to head toward America’s shores because of its position in the world as the beacon of liberty.

Ron Paul will probably not win the Republican nomination or the presidency but with the message that America should aspire to realize and implement the principles laid out in the Declaration he could spawn a serious political movement and influence the country’s direction henceforth. Even his foreign policy ideas--namely, that the government’s task is to fend off those who attack the country because the justification for its existence is the securing of the rights of its citizens--would flow much easier from the Declaration than from the U. S. Constitution.

Dr. Paul could then become today’s popular voice of America’s true and distinctive political ideas and ideals, not the voice of the rather muddled and corrupted ideas contained in the U. S. Constitution. There is hardly any principle in that legal document that hasn’t been eroded over the centuries--only the defense of freedom of speech and religion remains reasonably intact (although even there cracks are evident now).

Sometimes in the heat of election campaigning even candidates who are committed to sound principles will lapse because of the demands imposed on them. Sound bite communication makes it impossible to be thorough and nuanced. But I think it is possible to resist this with some careful guidance--and Ron Paul now has enough cash to hire folks who can provide him with the text he needs to make clear that he stands for human liberty first and foremost, something this country desperately needs.

Freedom & the Needy

Tibor R. Machan

The defenders of the free society assume that, generally, people can fend for themselves, often alone, more often in voluntary cooperation. But they are not blind to the plain fact that not everyone can or will do this--there are serious hard luck cases, people in dire straits, as well as many who make mistakes by failing to prepare for bad times or by producing bad circumstances for themselves. So such folks will require support in order for them to live reasonably well.

What the champions of the free society assume, significantly and unlike those who distrust liberty, is that the support required for those in special need should come from fellow citizens who will provide the necessary support of their own free will, from a spirit of generosity. This should not involve the government, which in a free country has as its proper task to secure the rights of the citizenry against criminals and foreign aggressors. Why?

For one, government as property understood is certain select people using force defensively. When the force is used coercively, the “government” has gone astray, become corrupt, by engaging in the violation of citizens’ rights. This is simple to grasp: It is akin to when police officers use force not to fight crime but to subdue citizens to follow some course of action the officers happen to prefer but are not morally authorized to enforce. Sadly, of course, all too many police officers do act in such morally unauthorized ways around the globe, including in America, just as too many governments overstep their authority and instead of defending their citizens embark upon ordering them about to act as the officials deem proper and desirable.

Another reason why it is a very bad idea to conceive of government as doing more than protecting the rights of citizens is that when government lends a hand, it does so mostly to advance the agenda of its agents and only rarely just the interest of the citizenry. Pro-active government policies involve "self-dealing" because this is what comes naturally, this is what is most easily achieved.

Helping others is a very difficult task since few know, especially in far away centers of power, what those in dire straits actually benefit from. It's no simple task to be the supporter of others, especially if one is using resources that aren't one's own. Just consider how skilled those in the helping professions must be, how much schooling they require and how often even they get it wrong about what actually helps their clients.

So in a free country support for those in special need, those in dire straits, must not come from government but from fellow citizens. They are the ones who can offer genuine help to the needy, on terms the needy accept freely. Otherwise the needy are demeaned, their human dignity is undermined--they become wards of the state, not people who are being offered and freely accept their fellows’ help.

It appears that politicians willfully evade this fact, especially during election campaigns. All we hear these days is how once elected, candidates will provide for those who need something, necessarily at the expense of others who have not volunteered to give help but are being forced to provide it. This is precisely what a free society cannot tolerate and the policy that leads to its demise. One need but reflect on the fact that throughout human history the tyrants, tsars, dictators, and nearly all others who took up the task of helping the people turned out to be vicious oppressors. The people lacked sovereignty and these “leaders” grabbed it all for themselves.

This bad habit, of conceiving of politicians and bureaucrats as embarking on helping out the needy, is still very much with us--it is that insidious governmental habit and it is far worse than any dependence on using debilitating drugs or engaging in other self-destructive practices. Yet because so much of human history involved not mutual respect among people but the conquest of some of them by others, the radical idea that we can live in peace and mutual respect for each other’s rights is taking a long time to become standard practice.

The American Founders began the radical reformation of government along these lines but they only gave it a start. Sadly, it seems that contemporary politicians do not really want to follow their lead and want to reinstitute the old regime whereby government was seen as the care taker, not rights protector, within the realm.

Ron Paul’s Middle East Foibles

Tibor R. Machan

At Saturday's (1/05/08) Republican presidential candidates debate nearly all the candidates ganged up on Ron Paul for his stance on the U. S. role in instigating 9/11 and other Middle Eastern terrorist activities. Although Dr. Paul has some valuable points to make concerning how U. S. foreign policy exacerbates the terrorist problem--namely, by providing terrorists with some valid reasons to criticize elements of that policy--he is also careless in blaming what the terrorists do primarily on U. S. Middle Eastern foreign policy.

As several of his rivals pointed out, radical Islamist hostility toward the West and, thus, its leading power, the U. S. A., is based on ancient hostilities. Terrorism against Western targets actually predates considerably even America's support of Israel, another supposed reason for the terrorists' anger and attacks.

For some reason, however, Dr. Paul will not relent in blaming it all on America. His moral equivalence thesis, invoking a hypothetical expansionist foreign policy by China, is way off the mark.~ Most of America's so called "imperialism" is economic, an element of global capitalism, whereas what China would be exporting is anything but capitalism and its free institutions but innumerable coercive ones. (There is in Dr. Paul's rhetoric an unfortunate relativism so that exporting free institutions is just as bad as exporting coercive ones.)

It is unfortunate that Dr. Paul refuses to finesse his views on this topic because on so many other fronts a great many Americans have no trouble supporting him. They will not yield, however, on the issue of whether, all things considered, America is a more just and decent country than are the Middle Eastern dictatorships--admittedly often supported by the American government--that support the terrorists who are bent on bringing it down. Now that it is evident that Mrs. Clinton’s politics and public policy ideas do not sit all that well even with many Democrats, Dr. Paul’s limited government, sound monetary policy philosophy, could take off but for his insistence that around the globe America is the criminal.

Among libertarians this is no novel dispute. Even during the Cold War there were some who insisted that it isn’t the Soviet Union but America that is aggressive, that is a greater threat to human liberty. These libertarians were--and some still are--of the “anarchist” persuasion, believing that government of any kind whatever is coercive, tyrannical, evil. And from this it tends to follow that whichever government is close is the worst, the greatest threat.

Actually, these libertarians are mistaken in calling their view “anarchist.” They believe in government but of a peculiar type, one that isn’t stationary but fluid, floating around from area to area providing its “clients”--citizens--with legal services. But they are, allegedly, not monopolistic.

Genuine anarchists, however, believe in no government at all, no law or legal authority, regarding all of that a source of mischief. Libertarian “anarchists,” however, disavow only governments that claim to be the sole representative of a group of people. So what seems to irk libertarian “anarchists” is that they cannot up and select some alternative representation right where they live, without having to move.

Now this is like complaining that Macys has a monopoly because in order to compete with it one must actually leave its premises and go to another store. But we often have just that kind of competition in a free market, so if a country did have a genuine free government--taking care only of protecting its citizens’ rights, and anyone could emigrate--there would be nothing libertarians could object about it.

Anyway, all this anti-American stuff coming from Dr. Paul is misconceived and self-destructive. It is too bad because otherwise Dr. Paul’s ideas are superior by a long shot to those of his rivals. And that would seem to be something he and his supporters could advocate with considerable success, especially to young people in the country who do prize America above most other countries around the globe, often for very good reasons.

“I’ll Think of Something!”

Tibor R. Machan

Often when some unexpected challenge faces a person, someone asks, “What are you going to do about this?” The answer, frequently delivered with casual confidence, tends to be: “I’ll think of something.”

No answer and attitude better characterizes how to think about problem solving in a free society. Unlike the attitude in the Nanny State, which requires massive bureaucracies to plan for endless and often completely unanticipated “solutions,” in a free society problem solving is left to citizens who individually or cooperatively volunteer to address the challenges, great or small, that face them. And this approach is most likely to bear better fruit than does the bureaucratic approach for a number of reasons, including the fact that local knowledge is often far more useful and important than what far away bureaucrats have at their disposal, with their loose, general theories as to what people in society need and want.

If one believes, however, that to meet these challenges, one requires a well established formula and the force of government to apply it, then confidence in “I’ll think of something” will tend to be lacking. Of course, history and familiarity of how governments work confirms that (a) state officials do not know or care enough to solve the problems they take on as if they were the only ones fit to address them, and (b) these officials have their own agendas and will attempt to provide solutions not to the problems their constituents face but to what they themselves think is important to deal with.

This is the gist of public choice theory, for which Professor James Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in economic science back in the mid 1980s. Public servants, so called, are anything but! Indeed, nearly all the problems these men and women are called upon--and promise--to solve amount to the particular problems of some select group of citizens (the special interests we hear so much about from political candidates, those terrible folks whom decent, upstanding candidates promise never to listen to once they get elected!).

There are very few problems shared by all members of the public! Instead, different individuals and groups have different problems, in different measures, with different levels of urgency, so the solutions cannot be the one-size-fits-all type, which is what governments usually propose.

It is not so much that the politicians and bureaucrats are a bunch of greedy officials, as some believe public choice theory claims! No, they just have their own agendas, very possibly motivated from concerns and good will but mostly thoroughly misdirected. So it is a bad idea to entrust problem solving to them.

Even when these men and women are dedicated, hard working individuals and do achieve some good, it is virtually always at great and avoidable cost and sacrifice. Devoting taxes to this project, deprives people of the chance to solve ones to which they would choose to contribute their resources. This is a plain fact that anyone can understand without needing the brain power of Nobel Prize winner. I am always impressed by the impact of the thought experiment in which a family with an old car would devote the money extorted from them in taxes to buy new tires for the jalopy but is deprived of that chance and then suffers a fatal blow-out; few think to blame taxation for this yet it could be just the thing that led to the disaster!

Of course when governments become accepted as the default problem solvers--people are urged to call their members of City Council or Congress when they see something needing attention--the “I’ll think of something” attitude can be seriously arrested. Bad money drives out good and bad habits also drive out good ones. Yet, in the end there really is no better source of problem solving in human life and communities than the personal initiative to think about what is the solution to one’s problems, problems that are most likely going to be best solved with just the knowledge that only those close to them possess.

The Return of Serfdom

Tibor R. Machan

The American Founders initiated a revolution by removing sovereignty from the government--kings and the like--and recognizing that it is individual human beings to whom sovereignty rightfully belongs. (Sovereignty means self governance, self rule.) By implementing the political philosophy of John Locke, who identified the natural rights of every human being to life, liberty, and property, the founders changed things radically, far more radically than did the communists later on who followed Karl Marx’s reactionary program of socialization.

But the American Founders did not eliminate one of the crucial features of the old order, namely, taxation. That is the system under which the government owns the wealth of a country and merely permits the people to live and work there, collecting a good chunk of their earnings as payment for the privilege. Serfdom, the other crucial feature of the old order, had however been overthrown in America. That was because individual rights are plainly incompatible with the government’s ownership of the people, which is what serfdom really amounts to. The serfs were supposed to belong to the king who gave them to the lords and other occupants of land, supposedly so they be taken good care of. In fact, of course, they were thoroughly exploited for the economic benefit of the ruling classes, including the royal court.

To remind ourselves that the elapse of time doesn’t always mean the improvement of circumstances, we should notice that in our day there is a slow, sometimes imperceptible return to the age of serfdom. The government now provides for millions of people, through various welfare programs for nearly every segment of society, supposedly to take good care of them. And all this is now being vigorously supported by some of the most prominent political theorists at America’s premier universities.

But so far the apologists for the massive and growing welfare state have only argued that the wealth of the country belongs to government instead of the citizens. (It is actually the corporate sector that is now the greatest recipient of welfare, of so called entitlements--via subsidies, protection against competition from abroad as well as domestic rivals.) They have openly, denied the right to private property in books such as The Myth of Ownership and The Cost of Rights, as well as various articles published in prominent magazines and journals. The idea is that individuals have no right to private property and government owns the country’s resources. The defense of this notion takes a variety of forms but the bottom line is the rejection of the Lockean individualist view in favor of a collectivist vision of society.

Few of these apologists have done so far as to claim that individual human beings belong to the government, although some, like the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, have argued that people’s lives belong to their communities, not to themselves. (Oddly, Taylor was a recent recipient of the substantial Templeton Prize! This despite the fact that John Templeton is reputed to be a defender of the free market, an institution that depends on the Lockean theory of individual rights!) In fact, however, with the growing number of citizens who demand entitlements from the government their claim that their lives are their own is unconvincing. When the government feeds you, houses you, provides you with medical care, with retirement benefits, and all the rest to which one is now entitled, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Americans are no longer citizens but have reverted to the status of subjects, if not outright serfs. Is your life really yours when you live off the state? No.

It is one thing to advocate a social order in which men and women freely help their needy fellows. That is what generosity recommends. It is an entirely different matter when men and women are coerced into involuntary servitude and the beneficiaries become beholden to them for nearly everything in their lives, starting from early childhood education all the way to old age pension.

Do not be surprised that very soon we will be hearing and reading explicit arguments for the claim that individuals do not own their lives--they have no right to it--but actually belong to the state; that they are actually serfs! And all this coming from the progressives among our political thinkers.

It’s deja vu All Over Again

Tibor R. Machan

Back in 1971 the late Harvard behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner published his popular best seller, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York, Knopf). The book followed several more technical works by Skinner arguing that the belief that human beings have free will and are morally responsible is all wrong, a pre-scientific prejudice that needs to be discarded and replaced with a technology of behavior.

This work prompted me to write my first book, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (Arlington House, 1973), in which I disputed Skinner’s claim to have come up with scientific reasons for rejecting free will and moral responsibility. I argued that he was actually subscribing to a certain school of philosophy that advanced the views he championed. His conclusions about free will and morality were not based on scientific findings at all.

It is now over 30 years since Skinner’s work appeared and behaviorism is no longer all the rage in the discipline of psychology. But the basic goal of discrediting free will and moral--including legal or criminal--responsibility is still very much on the agenda of some folks. Only the school of psychology that is supposed to be undermining the belief in human freedom and morality is no longer behaviorism. Now it is some people’s version of neuroscience.

The basic contention put forth by some of the champions of this new scientific approach to understanding human behavior is that our actions aren’t really ours at all. And, very interestingly, the idea has enormous financial support from no less than the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It has contributed $10 million to do research on the issues involved, with the work carried out at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Now I say that this money will go to do research but it looks very much like some of those involved do not think much research is needed because they write as if they had already reached their conclusions. As an article on the website of the project-- http://www.lawandneuroscienceproject.org/neurolaw%20fact%20sheet%20QandA.pdf--tells it,

"The U.S. legal system incorporates assumptions about behavior that, in some cases, are centuries old and based on common sense and culture. For example, it tends to assume that people make deliberate choices and that those choices determine what they do. However, recent breakthroughs in neuroscience research indicate that such choices may sometimes be based upon electrical impulses and neuron activity that are not a part of conscious behavior. These actions can include not only criminal activity, but also decisions made by police, prosecutors, and jurors to arrest, prosecute, convict, or mandate treatment."

In other words, as some of these scientists would have it, we are back to Skinner, although in slightly modified terms. As the new technologists of human behavior see the matter, it is not operant conditioning that drives human behavior but impersonal electrical firings in our brains. Human beings do not make conscious decisions, they do not deliberate but are being driven by “electrical impulses.” (I wouldn’t put much stock in the qualification “sometimes” since anyone familiar with the work of some of the enthusiasts behind these ideas can tell that theirs is actually a sweeping pronouncement about all human behavior!)

A column isn’t the place to attempt to rebut these ideas, merely to call attention to the eagerness with which some are promulgating them and to the enormous investment in the attempt to make them influential. But one thing can be said so as to put a bit of a break on all this enthusiasm about denying the efficacy of human conscious thought in directing human conduct. The British psychologist D. Bannister put the matter very poignantly over 30 years ago: “... the psychologist cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture.”

The point is that the champions of the relevant kind of neuroscience and its alleged findings are themselves making decisions, deliberating, and consciously deciding about what to do, day in and day out, including when they decide to make various claims about the implications of their work for the legal system they wish to discredit and take steps to convince the rest of us of how outmoded our thinking and institutions are. They cannot have it both ways--deny that people make decisions but then proceed to make all sorts of significant decisions themselves!

The plain fact is that there is something basic, undeniable about the role of our minds in our conduct, even in conduct that aims to discredit the human mind itself.

Fifth Estate Anyone?

Tibor R. Machan

It used to be thought that the press is the fourth estate, meaning a kind of shadow branch of government that keeps an eye on Washington and other centers of power to make sure politicians and bureaucrats are being watched. After all, government officials have a special advantage in gaining the ear of reporters with their news releases, declarations, and other proclamations of good will! So it is a helpful thing, one would hope, that an entire industry is devoted to challenging what they tell us.

Alas, now we seem to need a fifth estate, what with the press having become a sort of independent force that has its own agenda which tends to distort what is reported by it. This fifth estate is what the on line encyclopedia, Wikipedia describes, as the “media that sees itself in opposition to mainstream (Fourth Estate) media.” We might call it the meta-media!

One sign of how bad things have become in the fourth estate is to see all the journalists who are interviewing other journalists, not the actual players, when some vital or interesting event is “in the news.” Television news reports are especially notorious for this. Often instead of finding someone in the middle of a news story who should be interviewed, scrutinized, challenged or the like, what we are given is another reporter from the same or some other friendly “news” organization who becomes the subject of an interview. This kind of celebrity journalism seems to need some oversight.

One individual who seems to have taken an oath to do just this is the Chair of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, near Washington DC, Professor Donald J. Boudreaux. For quite some time now he has been reading a great many of the country’s prominent newspapers each morning (I assume) and sending off letters to the editor whenever he finds that the papers contains errors of fact or some other infelicities which need to be corrected so readers get the real scoop instead of some kind of spin the papers would like to be promulgating. He sends these not only to the papers but to a fairly long list of his friends and acquaintances who then can take whatever action they might deem warranted.

A good example of Professor Boudreaux’s tireless efforts is his frequent criticism of the New York Times columnist, fellow economist Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton University. With the kind of prestige Princeton enjoys, Krugman’s columns carry extra impact and if they contain errors, it is especially helpful to have these pointed out.

Not that Professor Boudreaux’s every letter gets published, far from it, Only a small percentage makes it into the letters sections of the various papers he keeps on eye on. But by sending them around to colleagues and friends, others can also chime in about the matter after they have been alerted to the problem and done some of their own research to verify Professor Boudreaux’s claims.

One of the letters came to me via email the other morning and it is an especially poignant instance of how important Professor Boudreaux’s pro bono work turns out to be. Here is the entire text of the letter he sent to The New York Times:

"Paul Krugman asserts that the steady decline in labor-union membership happened because "beginning in the 1970s, corporate America, which had previously had a largely cooperative relationship with unions, in effect declared war on organized labor" ("State of the Unions," December 24). Two facts cast doubt on this assertion.

"First, the decline in union membership began in the mid-1950s, not in the 1970s. Second, union membership in almost all of Europe and the rest of the industrialized world followed a similar trajectory to that in America."

When I received the letter and briefly checked the substance of the criticism, I decided this one needs to get the attention of the New York Times public editor, the person at The Times who is supposed to keep looking over the shoulders of reporters and editors so they don’t misbehave. So I sent a copy to this individual.

It will be interesting to see if Professor Boudreaux’s correction of Professor Krugman makes it into The Times. Do you want to bet whether it will?