Doubting One’s Mind
Tibor R. Machan
A central topic of philosophy throughout the ages has been whether human beings can trust their minds, including their sensory awareness and thinking. Skepticism about this has been a major challenge and many from Socrates to such recent and current thinkers as Ayn Rand and John Searle have responded with more or less elaborate arguments defending our capacity to get things right about the world.
Just now a new source of skepticism has surfaced, from within the field of neuroscience. In a recent review essay of several books on the topic, “How the Mind Works: Revelations,” published in The New York Review of Books (6/26/08), Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff write, “In fact ‘external reality’ is a construction of the brain.” Several of the authors they discuss argue this point. As the review notes, “In general, every recollection refers not only to the remembered event or person or object but to the person who is remembering,” meaning that memory is not about an objective reality but of some mishmash of subjective experience and external influence.
In essence, then, what one understands about the world and oneself is really not what actually exists but what is constructed by one’s mind with the use of other cognitive tools. The problem with this is that it makes no sense in the end because what the researchers are telling us would also be covered by their claim and so it is also just some mental construction, which then is also some further mental construction, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. But that cannot be. At some point the researchers would have to accept that what they are telling us about the human mind is actually so, not also just a construct or invention.
In any case, why would there be so much interest in discrediting the human mind, of writing elaborate tomes that argue that our understanding of the world and ourselves is fabrication, not objectively true?
Some folks say that to a question like that one needs to answer by following the money--that is to say, checking who is gaining from these so called findings. I am not such a cynic. As far as I can tell, some of these scientists and the reporters who seem to be so gleeful about what this work produces may well be sincere. Yet I also suspect there is something fishy afoot here and my suspicion is that there is a tendency on the part of many of these experts to come up with findings that assign to them a special role in the world. They are, in effect, the only people who have a clear handle on how things go with human beings. They are the only reliable source of facts--as Rosenfield and Zinn say, “In fact. ‘external reality’ is a construction of the brain.” You and I are not up to snuff about the matter, we are deluded and misguidedly think that when we see a red coffee cup on the kitchen table, there really is such a cup there. But Rosenfield and Ziff and the scientists they are reviewing will inform us that “there are no colors in the world, only electromagnetic waves of many frequencies.”
But if you just think for a moment, this is nonsense. It is like saying there is no furniture in my living room, only chairs and tables and sofas. Well, but it is those chairs, tables, and sofas that are the furniture. It is, then, the electromagnetic waves doing certain work that are the colors, so colors do indeed exist in the world. Thus telling someone that there is a red cup on the kitchen table is exactly right! It may not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what is there but few people need to have that in order to cope quite well with the world around them.
The same problem faced some physicists who claimed that there is nothing that’s solid in the world because everything is composed of atoms and atoms, in turn, are mostly empty space with only very tiny bits of material substance swirling within them at enormous speeds. Ergo, solidity is an illusion. But this is to drop the context of discussions where the distinction between, say, solidity and liquidity comes up. It is misguided to make the leap from one context to another where the focus is quite different.
When we ordinary humans notice the world around us, learn to identify what it contains, begin to understand the forces at work in it, if we pay attention we can get it right for the purposes that we need this understanding. To try to undermine this confidence based on highly specialized research is misguided and perhaps ill conceived. It appears to assign to some people some special status even though, by their own accounts, no one ultimately can figure anything out.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Liberty and Hard Cases
Tibor R. Machan
One book I edited has the same title as this column and focuses mainly on how a free society would cope with disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. When the nature of a just society is discussed, those who defend big government solutions to problems tend to start with orphaned children and catastrophes, claiming that only by means of massive government intervention can a society cope. But then, of course, it becomes evident that big government advocates—actually, advocates of governments with extensive scope, way beyond the task of securing the rights of the citizenry—don’t stop with the dire cases. Instead they move on to advocate government intervention into every nook and cranny of people’s lives. The tendency is toward totalitarianism, with just a few exceptions such as freedom for the press and for people religious choices. Everything else, however, seems to require government meddling, just as was believed in the thousands of years when monarchies ruled virtually everywhere because the king was thought to be God’s representative on earth.
Starting with disasters has considerable emotional advantage for statists. People are rarely as frightened as when they contemplate the prospect of facing natural calamities. (The fire that came close to destroying the canyon in which I have my small house punctuated this for me.) Only diseases like cancer or sudden heart attacks scare most folks as much. And in a state of panic one is less likely to be rational, to assess things calmly, carefully, in a principled way. It was William Pitt who warned—in 1783—that “Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.”
So, even dire emergencies are no excuses for forcing people into service to one another. Their lives belong to them and no one may conscript them to provide involuntary service! Especially when the proper course to take so as to reduce the damage from natural calamities is so near at hand. This is private insurance and the related industries that would develop in the absence of the state’s promise of bailing people out. Yes, getting used to not depending on government, the Nanny State, Uncle Sam, and monarchs of all kinds may be difficult and even difficult to imagine for those who lack confidence in the capacity of human beings to abide by the rules of civilized society. Yet, as with all great goals that are difficult to achieve, it is worth aiming for.
Just as in time people learned to do without serfdom and slavery, they could similarly learn to do without subjugating their fellows in times of dire need, even severe emergencies. It may not be an idea whose time has been fully apprehended, gleaned, but it is one that is, nonetheless, imperative to aspire to for all human beings.
In most areas of human life we find people subverting principles of morality and justice but this is no excuse for giving up on those principles. In whenever those principles are subverted, excuses bubble up readily—from bank robbers and adulterers to child molesters and rapists. The strong urge to violate those principles is simply not excuse for failing to try to purge their violation from our lives.
All this needs to be considered when one approaches the issue of how people ought to cope with disasters, calamities, emergencies and other occasions that appear to necessitate the violation of unalienable human, individual rights. The idea of justice that requires respect for and protection of those rights may at times seem impossible to put into practice but that is merely a function of most people’s centuries old reliance on using other people against their will, without their consent.
A dedication to refusing to yield to such habits could very well bring to the fore a different era, one in which governments will be confined to their proper job, securing our rights, and we take up the various more or less trying tasks of coping with our lives, including in emergencies.
Tibor R. Machan
One book I edited has the same title as this column and focuses mainly on how a free society would cope with disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. When the nature of a just society is discussed, those who defend big government solutions to problems tend to start with orphaned children and catastrophes, claiming that only by means of massive government intervention can a society cope. But then, of course, it becomes evident that big government advocates—actually, advocates of governments with extensive scope, way beyond the task of securing the rights of the citizenry—don’t stop with the dire cases. Instead they move on to advocate government intervention into every nook and cranny of people’s lives. The tendency is toward totalitarianism, with just a few exceptions such as freedom for the press and for people religious choices. Everything else, however, seems to require government meddling, just as was believed in the thousands of years when monarchies ruled virtually everywhere because the king was thought to be God’s representative on earth.
Starting with disasters has considerable emotional advantage for statists. People are rarely as frightened as when they contemplate the prospect of facing natural calamities. (The fire that came close to destroying the canyon in which I have my small house punctuated this for me.) Only diseases like cancer or sudden heart attacks scare most folks as much. And in a state of panic one is less likely to be rational, to assess things calmly, carefully, in a principled way. It was William Pitt who warned—in 1783—that “Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.”
So, even dire emergencies are no excuses for forcing people into service to one another. Their lives belong to them and no one may conscript them to provide involuntary service! Especially when the proper course to take so as to reduce the damage from natural calamities is so near at hand. This is private insurance and the related industries that would develop in the absence of the state’s promise of bailing people out. Yes, getting used to not depending on government, the Nanny State, Uncle Sam, and monarchs of all kinds may be difficult and even difficult to imagine for those who lack confidence in the capacity of human beings to abide by the rules of civilized society. Yet, as with all great goals that are difficult to achieve, it is worth aiming for.
Just as in time people learned to do without serfdom and slavery, they could similarly learn to do without subjugating their fellows in times of dire need, even severe emergencies. It may not be an idea whose time has been fully apprehended, gleaned, but it is one that is, nonetheless, imperative to aspire to for all human beings.
In most areas of human life we find people subverting principles of morality and justice but this is no excuse for giving up on those principles. In whenever those principles are subverted, excuses bubble up readily—from bank robbers and adulterers to child molesters and rapists. The strong urge to violate those principles is simply not excuse for failing to try to purge their violation from our lives.
All this needs to be considered when one approaches the issue of how people ought to cope with disasters, calamities, emergencies and other occasions that appear to necessitate the violation of unalienable human, individual rights. The idea of justice that requires respect for and protection of those rights may at times seem impossible to put into practice but that is merely a function of most people’s centuries old reliance on using other people against their will, without their consent.
A dedication to refusing to yield to such habits could very well bring to the fore a different era, one in which governments will be confined to their proper job, securing our rights, and we take up the various more or less trying tasks of coping with our lives, including in emergencies.
Property Rights and the Very Badly Off
Tibor R. Machan
Is it reasonable to always demand respect for property rights? This is the question raised by some critics of the (Lockean) idea that human beings have the unalienable right to their lives, liberty and property which may never be subject to violation within the legal system of a free society. Some claim that it is unreasonable to demand this of those in dire straits, the extremely poor, who would only manage to survive and flourish by violating these rights of the well off. Thus, the argue, the welfare state in which laws are passed that permit taxing the well to do so as to provide for those in dire straits is just.
Of course, most of the welfare obtained via taxation doesn’t serve to benefit people in dire straits but owners of sizable business firms that seek support in times of economic downturns. The welfare state tends to support those afraid of competition from foreign industry and farmers, not unwed mothers who cannot find work by which to support their children. But some of the recipients of welfare are in dire straits, through no evident fault of their own. And, the argument goes, it would be unreasonable to demand of such people to refrain from taking from the well to do what they need.
As I have argued, since some of what those in dire need require would be the result of the labors of other people, this implies that it is unreasonable to demand of those in dire straits to abstain from coercing productive people to labor for them, to part with what they have produced, to even give up parts of their bodies if they can do without those parts. But that cannot be right—how could it be unreasonable to demand that people not be forced to labor for others? Does not forced labor violate the rights of those who are its victim? If one also adds that those in dire straits may very well have ample opportunity to obtain what they need by offering to work for the well off, to engage in innovation, enterprise and other efforts that can peacefully secure for them what they need to survive and flourish, the case that they may coerce others to work for them loses even the emotional appeal that at first inspection it possesses.
The most that this kind of reasoning advanced in support of the welfare state establishes, then, is that those who are well off ought to be generous toward the very needy, that in emergencies those who can should lend a hand to those who are genuinely helpless. Indeed, that is what the virtue of generosity amounts to: it inclines decent persons, ones of good character, to come to the aid of deserving but badly off people. That would be the civilized solution rather than one that resorts of coercive means and treats those well off as unwilling tools or instruments of the badly off, not as people who are ends in themselves and must give their consent whenever they are utilized by others, even the very hard up among us.
There can, of course, be circumstances so unruly, so desperate and catastrophic that reasonable conduct is impossible, something that Locke himself realized, referring to them as ones where “politics in not possible.” In such cases the world is so topsy-turvy that the principles of civilized behavior cannot reasonably be expected to be followed.
What does not follow from this is that the legal system of a society must be adjusted so as to accommodate emergencies, to require of well enough off citizens to be constant Good Samaritans. As the saying goes, “Hard cases make bad law.” One does not demand that a system of law change because of certain dire circumstances, especially since it would imply that some people get to place the rest under legal obligation to perform service that should come from good will, not at the point of a gun.
In a recent issue of Science News, the magazines that reports much of the path breaking scientific research around the globe, one short item noted that the degree of charity and philanthropy in societies with substantial free, unregimented markets is much greater than in top down planned societies. So not only it coercive welfare unjust but it seems to discourage good will among citizens. And it is mostly such good will that takes the best care of the truly needy among us!
Tibor R. Machan
Is it reasonable to always demand respect for property rights? This is the question raised by some critics of the (Lockean) idea that human beings have the unalienable right to their lives, liberty and property which may never be subject to violation within the legal system of a free society. Some claim that it is unreasonable to demand this of those in dire straits, the extremely poor, who would only manage to survive and flourish by violating these rights of the well off. Thus, the argue, the welfare state in which laws are passed that permit taxing the well to do so as to provide for those in dire straits is just.
Of course, most of the welfare obtained via taxation doesn’t serve to benefit people in dire straits but owners of sizable business firms that seek support in times of economic downturns. The welfare state tends to support those afraid of competition from foreign industry and farmers, not unwed mothers who cannot find work by which to support their children. But some of the recipients of welfare are in dire straits, through no evident fault of their own. And, the argument goes, it would be unreasonable to demand of such people to refrain from taking from the well to do what they need.
As I have argued, since some of what those in dire need require would be the result of the labors of other people, this implies that it is unreasonable to demand of those in dire straits to abstain from coercing productive people to labor for them, to part with what they have produced, to even give up parts of their bodies if they can do without those parts. But that cannot be right—how could it be unreasonable to demand that people not be forced to labor for others? Does not forced labor violate the rights of those who are its victim? If one also adds that those in dire straits may very well have ample opportunity to obtain what they need by offering to work for the well off, to engage in innovation, enterprise and other efforts that can peacefully secure for them what they need to survive and flourish, the case that they may coerce others to work for them loses even the emotional appeal that at first inspection it possesses.
The most that this kind of reasoning advanced in support of the welfare state establishes, then, is that those who are well off ought to be generous toward the very needy, that in emergencies those who can should lend a hand to those who are genuinely helpless. Indeed, that is what the virtue of generosity amounts to: it inclines decent persons, ones of good character, to come to the aid of deserving but badly off people. That would be the civilized solution rather than one that resorts of coercive means and treats those well off as unwilling tools or instruments of the badly off, not as people who are ends in themselves and must give their consent whenever they are utilized by others, even the very hard up among us.
There can, of course, be circumstances so unruly, so desperate and catastrophic that reasonable conduct is impossible, something that Locke himself realized, referring to them as ones where “politics in not possible.” In such cases the world is so topsy-turvy that the principles of civilized behavior cannot reasonably be expected to be followed.
What does not follow from this is that the legal system of a society must be adjusted so as to accommodate emergencies, to require of well enough off citizens to be constant Good Samaritans. As the saying goes, “Hard cases make bad law.” One does not demand that a system of law change because of certain dire circumstances, especially since it would imply that some people get to place the rest under legal obligation to perform service that should come from good will, not at the point of a gun.
In a recent issue of Science News, the magazines that reports much of the path breaking scientific research around the globe, one short item noted that the degree of charity and philanthropy in societies with substantial free, unregimented markets is much greater than in top down planned societies. So not only it coercive welfare unjust but it seems to discourage good will among citizens. And it is mostly such good will that takes the best care of the truly needy among us!
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Is traveling a human right?
Tibor R. Machan
Liberty first had to do with the freedom to travel. In time it came to amount to a condition in which no one forces one to submit to another’s will, a condition of not being prevented by others from doing what one chooses to do. So, for example, free enterprise means no one is authorized to stop others from producing and trading; free press means there may be no bans on one’s decision to write and publish what one decides to. Of course, one may not be able to do much that one is free to do—I am free to sing operas but I am not able to do so. No one is stopping me from betting big bucks in Las Vegas but, alas, I have no big bucks to bet. It is one thing to be free to act, another to be capable of doing so, a point lost on many political thinkers and public policy proponents.
The matter I wish to explore here, very briefly, is whether a person has a right to the freedom travel. In one sense, of course, yes—everyone has the right to be free to travel because normally no one is authorized to prohibit it for others. But travel involves the use of resources and it isn’t true that everyone has the right to the resources that are required for travel. If one does, others may not interfere but if one doesn’t, one will not be able to travel. And what kind of resources are at issue?
For one, to travel, one needs some area where a trip can take place. A trip from Los Angeles to Japan, for example, usually requires fuel, a vehicle, some open route that connects the two places, etc. None of these is a free good. So although one has the right to undertake the trip, one may not have the ability to do so. And even the right to undertake the trip is something akin to the right to the pursuit of happiness—the result is not a right. No one has the right to be happy! That is something one needs to achieve. But all have the right to pursue it.
Most people travel by car and plane, though many still use a bike, motorized or not, or even a horse. But most importantly, in order to travel, one must have some sphere wherein the trip takes place—a road, a railway, a waterway, or airway. And these are not free goods by any means. Moreover, in a fully free society, in which there are but very minimal public spheres—those needed to administer the legal system (meaning where a court house, military base and police station may be located)—no one could simply enter some sphere and use it to travel from one place to another. In such a society roads would be privately built and owned, as would homes or apartment houses. And just as one may only enter and make use of these latter if those who own them give one permission—or have reached mutually agreeable terms of exchange—the same would hold for all the spheres where travel can take place.
Now for quite a while no need for buying or renting spheres of travel may have appeared necessary—like air, they appeared to be free goods. Yet what had been a free good once may not remain so as more and more people make use of it and it becomes scarce. The air mass, for example, is barely a free good, as are water masses. Land hasn’t been a free good for centuries, at least not where most people would want to live and work. The upkeep of these valuable spheres isn’t cheap. Nor do they benefit everyone equally—some people can do without much use of land or water while others wish to make a great deal of use of them (e. g., folks who like boating want a lot of water available for them, while golfer would prefer large parcels of land).
The belief that travel and its major tool, roads, is something that must be available to everyone in equal proportions is folly. Clearly not everyone wants to travel a great deal but, also, not all who do are willing to take care of what they make use of or pay others do it for them. Which is of course exactly what we learn from the doctrine of the tragedy of the commons: public realms tend to get neglected, overused, and depleted, whereas private realms get reasonably well cared for.
Perhaps the concern that’s most directly addressed by these considerations is environmentalism. If the principle of private property rights had been respected and protected for all the time that spheres or travel became scarce, there would arguably have not developed as much environmental abuse as many who concern themselves with these matters contend. What appear to be free goods simply do not get well taken care of and by treating travel as some kind of God given right of everyone—so most people believe they may go anywhere anytime the mood strakes them—a great deal of trouble comes to face us all.
Tibor R. Machan
Liberty first had to do with the freedom to travel. In time it came to amount to a condition in which no one forces one to submit to another’s will, a condition of not being prevented by others from doing what one chooses to do. So, for example, free enterprise means no one is authorized to stop others from producing and trading; free press means there may be no bans on one’s decision to write and publish what one decides to. Of course, one may not be able to do much that one is free to do—I am free to sing operas but I am not able to do so. No one is stopping me from betting big bucks in Las Vegas but, alas, I have no big bucks to bet. It is one thing to be free to act, another to be capable of doing so, a point lost on many political thinkers and public policy proponents.
The matter I wish to explore here, very briefly, is whether a person has a right to the freedom travel. In one sense, of course, yes—everyone has the right to be free to travel because normally no one is authorized to prohibit it for others. But travel involves the use of resources and it isn’t true that everyone has the right to the resources that are required for travel. If one does, others may not interfere but if one doesn’t, one will not be able to travel. And what kind of resources are at issue?
For one, to travel, one needs some area where a trip can take place. A trip from Los Angeles to Japan, for example, usually requires fuel, a vehicle, some open route that connects the two places, etc. None of these is a free good. So although one has the right to undertake the trip, one may not have the ability to do so. And even the right to undertake the trip is something akin to the right to the pursuit of happiness—the result is not a right. No one has the right to be happy! That is something one needs to achieve. But all have the right to pursue it.
Most people travel by car and plane, though many still use a bike, motorized or not, or even a horse. But most importantly, in order to travel, one must have some sphere wherein the trip takes place—a road, a railway, a waterway, or airway. And these are not free goods by any means. Moreover, in a fully free society, in which there are but very minimal public spheres—those needed to administer the legal system (meaning where a court house, military base and police station may be located)—no one could simply enter some sphere and use it to travel from one place to another. In such a society roads would be privately built and owned, as would homes or apartment houses. And just as one may only enter and make use of these latter if those who own them give one permission—or have reached mutually agreeable terms of exchange—the same would hold for all the spheres where travel can take place.
Now for quite a while no need for buying or renting spheres of travel may have appeared necessary—like air, they appeared to be free goods. Yet what had been a free good once may not remain so as more and more people make use of it and it becomes scarce. The air mass, for example, is barely a free good, as are water masses. Land hasn’t been a free good for centuries, at least not where most people would want to live and work. The upkeep of these valuable spheres isn’t cheap. Nor do they benefit everyone equally—some people can do without much use of land or water while others wish to make a great deal of use of them (e. g., folks who like boating want a lot of water available for them, while golfer would prefer large parcels of land).
The belief that travel and its major tool, roads, is something that must be available to everyone in equal proportions is folly. Clearly not everyone wants to travel a great deal but, also, not all who do are willing to take care of what they make use of or pay others do it for them. Which is of course exactly what we learn from the doctrine of the tragedy of the commons: public realms tend to get neglected, overused, and depleted, whereas private realms get reasonably well cared for.
Perhaps the concern that’s most directly addressed by these considerations is environmentalism. If the principle of private property rights had been respected and protected for all the time that spheres or travel became scarce, there would arguably have not developed as much environmental abuse as many who concern themselves with these matters contend. What appear to be free goods simply do not get well taken care of and by treating travel as some kind of God given right of everyone—so most people believe they may go anywhere anytime the mood strakes them—a great deal of trouble comes to face us all.
Monday, June 09, 2008
The Liberty We Must Have
Tibor R. Machan
It is becoming more and more fashionable among political thinkers and even politicians to disparage the kind of individual liberty championed in the American political tradition. Several scholars—e. g., Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago—have argued that what really matters most is something called positive liberty. This is the notion that people have liberty only when others provide them with the resources that enable them to do what they would like to or should do. And there is a use of the idea “liberty” or “freedom” along these lines—you are free to fly to Paris only if you get funds to pay for the trip. But it used to be understood, maybe still is normally, that to get this kind of freedom or liberty one needs to earn the funds to pay instead of take it from other people by way, of say, taxation. But that is now challenged by the idea that what we lack but need or want is something we are entitled to from others and governments exist to serve us by obtaining it all from these others and they have no say in the matter.
This is the thinking of collectivists, people who believe we all belong to one large group and everyone must pull together to make everyone get what he or she needs or wants. Never mind consent! Individuals are a fiction, anyway, the story continues. Individual rights are nothing but periodic grants of the group to some members if there is public benefit from it. Even freedom of the press is defended this way by many political thinkers—people have it only because it advances the public interest! Indeed, by this view one’s rights come from the government instead of, as the American Founders held, the government serves us by securing the rights we have by virtue of our human nature.
Some thing is seriously amiss here. Notice, for example, that when people are convicted of a crime and are then incarcerated, it is not positive liberty that they lose but the (negative) liberty of not having others interfere with their lives. Why? Because such negative liberty is most important. It is only if one’s negative liberty—freedom from interference—is intact that one can embark upon survival and flourishing, including by means of free interaction with others (in, say, commerce, education, and other social affairs).
Now and then people may be in dire straits and come to rely on help from others and this is usually forthcoming from motives of generosity, compassion, kindness but not from some idea that they are entitled to support. That would place us all into involuntary servitude to the needy. And, normally, when such help of the needy is forthcoming, those who extend it are given thanks. But when others do not interfere with us, do not murder, assault or steal from us, no thinks are due! That’s because we have the right to live and be free and this freedom is not some gift from other people we need to be grateful for.
With the replacement of the American sense of individual liberty by the one imported from a very different (and, by the way, reactionary) tradition—namely, socialism and, now, communitarianism—there is, of course, more and more talk of forced public service. Politicians are advocating required community works and even the military draft is being mentioned as in need of reestablishment. That is the result of the idea that as individuals we do not exist and we are all just part of some larger entity—the state, nation, community, humanity—and must be made to pull together as such.
Of course, all this is proposed by, you guessed it, individuals, ones who take themselves to be special, not like the rest of us! Such ambitious folks would gladly take over the governance of the lives of other people and send everyone to do the job they believe must be done, never mind our puny individual agendas.
I can only hope that this ruse is in time grasped by more and more folks and the idea of the genuine freedom of the individual recovers its prominence in political thought.
Tibor R. Machan
It is becoming more and more fashionable among political thinkers and even politicians to disparage the kind of individual liberty championed in the American political tradition. Several scholars—e. g., Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago—have argued that what really matters most is something called positive liberty. This is the notion that people have liberty only when others provide them with the resources that enable them to do what they would like to or should do. And there is a use of the idea “liberty” or “freedom” along these lines—you are free to fly to Paris only if you get funds to pay for the trip. But it used to be understood, maybe still is normally, that to get this kind of freedom or liberty one needs to earn the funds to pay instead of take it from other people by way, of say, taxation. But that is now challenged by the idea that what we lack but need or want is something we are entitled to from others and governments exist to serve us by obtaining it all from these others and they have no say in the matter.
This is the thinking of collectivists, people who believe we all belong to one large group and everyone must pull together to make everyone get what he or she needs or wants. Never mind consent! Individuals are a fiction, anyway, the story continues. Individual rights are nothing but periodic grants of the group to some members if there is public benefit from it. Even freedom of the press is defended this way by many political thinkers—people have it only because it advances the public interest! Indeed, by this view one’s rights come from the government instead of, as the American Founders held, the government serves us by securing the rights we have by virtue of our human nature.
Some thing is seriously amiss here. Notice, for example, that when people are convicted of a crime and are then incarcerated, it is not positive liberty that they lose but the (negative) liberty of not having others interfere with their lives. Why? Because such negative liberty is most important. It is only if one’s negative liberty—freedom from interference—is intact that one can embark upon survival and flourishing, including by means of free interaction with others (in, say, commerce, education, and other social affairs).
Now and then people may be in dire straits and come to rely on help from others and this is usually forthcoming from motives of generosity, compassion, kindness but not from some idea that they are entitled to support. That would place us all into involuntary servitude to the needy. And, normally, when such help of the needy is forthcoming, those who extend it are given thanks. But when others do not interfere with us, do not murder, assault or steal from us, no thinks are due! That’s because we have the right to live and be free and this freedom is not some gift from other people we need to be grateful for.
With the replacement of the American sense of individual liberty by the one imported from a very different (and, by the way, reactionary) tradition—namely, socialism and, now, communitarianism—there is, of course, more and more talk of forced public service. Politicians are advocating required community works and even the military draft is being mentioned as in need of reestablishment. That is the result of the idea that as individuals we do not exist and we are all just part of some larger entity—the state, nation, community, humanity—and must be made to pull together as such.
Of course, all this is proposed by, you guessed it, individuals, ones who take themselves to be special, not like the rest of us! Such ambitious folks would gladly take over the governance of the lives of other people and send everyone to do the job they believe must be done, never mind our puny individual agendas.
I can only hope that this ruse is in time grasped by more and more folks and the idea of the genuine freedom of the individual recovers its prominence in political thought.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Blue Laws: Unjust and Unequal
Tibor R. Machan
Sometimes I will go out of my way to visit one of those outlet malls. Not only do they have some pretty good deals but often I can find clothing that actually fits me—a bit oversized sweaters or short sleeved shirts seem to get dumped there to be available for the likes of me.
I was driving up on I 85, all the way from the Florida panhandle to Gastonia, North Carolina, midday one recent Sunday, when I spotted what looked like a promising strip mall in South Carolina, with a bunch of these outlet shops visible from the road. I got off, gassed up my rental and headed to the stores—only to find that South Carolina blue laws coerce the stores not to open before 1:30 PM. Now this is just the kind of small but not inconsequential restraint of trade I really detest—politicians forcing people to stay away from stores so they will more likely attend church (or some such noble motivation driving them to intrude on other people, just as politicians are won’t to do, be it for the sake of religion, the environment, social justice, or whatever). Not that these measures are so onerous—they are more a nuisance than anything except, of course, for the merchants (who are losing portions of their livelihood in consequence of this paternalism) and certain customers (who may want something pronto). So while perhaps no great harm to most of us, these blue laws do amount to a potentially damaging intrusion for quite a few people.
This is the kind of measure people who defend them write off as a central feature of democracy but it just won’t wash. Why does a majority of some community get away with doing something that no individual citizen would, namely, forcibly come between a merchant and customers? Who are these people anyway that when they come together and form a group that’s larger than those who don’t share their agenda they get to impose on others their will, make them into subjects? What they prohibit is, of course, all peaceful stuff, nothing violent against any innocent third party. The arrogance, nay, viciousness of it!
But there is more. Of course, some folks manage to be exempt from these so called public policies—policies that turn out to bear only on some members of the public. The food court was open and doing fine business! And so were the adjacent gas stations as well as the several motels in the surrounding area. Why? How come these people may do brisk business all day Sunday, while those trying to do the very same thing—namely, make a living from commerce—are forbidden to do so?
It is clear enough from this relatively innocuous example that the bulk of such paternalistic, nanny state measures is deployed totally unfairly, completely in opposition to the spirit, even letter, of the idea—embodied in the 14th Amendment of the U. S. Constitution—that everyone must be treated by the authorities as “equal under the law.” Not however those making money off of gasoline sales or renting rooms in their establishments, for some bizarre reason.
Now for my money the more folks in South Carolina—or anywhere else, for that matter—can beat these insane “public” blue law measures, the better. I look upon it as I did draft dodging and still view tax dodging. I defend them as ways of escaping from various degrees of tyranny!
But aside from that, it should be an embarrassment for the policy makers in these regions to realize just how they violate the principle of impartiality. For that is what they do as they so cavalierly intrude upon the lives of citizens when what they ought to be doing is securing their unalienable individual rights to, among other things, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
It all goes to show you how far America is from having fully appreciated the meaning of the revolution that created the country. This revolution was about demoting government, removing it from the position as the sole sovereign in the land and assigning to individuals that sovereignty that had for centuries been accepted as belonging to the state. In some broad respects the revolution did have its impact and made things more just across the land, even the globe! But in many respects matters haven’t changed much. The insidious governmental habit is live and kicking and producing the messes it has always produced where it has been and continues to be in evidence.
South Carolina’s blue laws are just a tiny tip of the iceberg. What’s worse, of course, is that hardly any of America’s eager-beaver politicians running for office address these intrusive measures. Of course not—they are all eager to get in on the game and impose on us their own agenda as soon as they get into office.
Tibor R. Machan
Sometimes I will go out of my way to visit one of those outlet malls. Not only do they have some pretty good deals but often I can find clothing that actually fits me—a bit oversized sweaters or short sleeved shirts seem to get dumped there to be available for the likes of me.
I was driving up on I 85, all the way from the Florida panhandle to Gastonia, North Carolina, midday one recent Sunday, when I spotted what looked like a promising strip mall in South Carolina, with a bunch of these outlet shops visible from the road. I got off, gassed up my rental and headed to the stores—only to find that South Carolina blue laws coerce the stores not to open before 1:30 PM. Now this is just the kind of small but not inconsequential restraint of trade I really detest—politicians forcing people to stay away from stores so they will more likely attend church (or some such noble motivation driving them to intrude on other people, just as politicians are won’t to do, be it for the sake of religion, the environment, social justice, or whatever). Not that these measures are so onerous—they are more a nuisance than anything except, of course, for the merchants (who are losing portions of their livelihood in consequence of this paternalism) and certain customers (who may want something pronto). So while perhaps no great harm to most of us, these blue laws do amount to a potentially damaging intrusion for quite a few people.
This is the kind of measure people who defend them write off as a central feature of democracy but it just won’t wash. Why does a majority of some community get away with doing something that no individual citizen would, namely, forcibly come between a merchant and customers? Who are these people anyway that when they come together and form a group that’s larger than those who don’t share their agenda they get to impose on others their will, make them into subjects? What they prohibit is, of course, all peaceful stuff, nothing violent against any innocent third party. The arrogance, nay, viciousness of it!
But there is more. Of course, some folks manage to be exempt from these so called public policies—policies that turn out to bear only on some members of the public. The food court was open and doing fine business! And so were the adjacent gas stations as well as the several motels in the surrounding area. Why? How come these people may do brisk business all day Sunday, while those trying to do the very same thing—namely, make a living from commerce—are forbidden to do so?
It is clear enough from this relatively innocuous example that the bulk of such paternalistic, nanny state measures is deployed totally unfairly, completely in opposition to the spirit, even letter, of the idea—embodied in the 14th Amendment of the U. S. Constitution—that everyone must be treated by the authorities as “equal under the law.” Not however those making money off of gasoline sales or renting rooms in their establishments, for some bizarre reason.
Now for my money the more folks in South Carolina—or anywhere else, for that matter—can beat these insane “public” blue law measures, the better. I look upon it as I did draft dodging and still view tax dodging. I defend them as ways of escaping from various degrees of tyranny!
But aside from that, it should be an embarrassment for the policy makers in these regions to realize just how they violate the principle of impartiality. For that is what they do as they so cavalierly intrude upon the lives of citizens when what they ought to be doing is securing their unalienable individual rights to, among other things, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
It all goes to show you how far America is from having fully appreciated the meaning of the revolution that created the country. This revolution was about demoting government, removing it from the position as the sole sovereign in the land and assigning to individuals that sovereignty that had for centuries been accepted as belonging to the state. In some broad respects the revolution did have its impact and made things more just across the land, even the globe! But in many respects matters haven’t changed much. The insidious governmental habit is live and kicking and producing the messes it has always produced where it has been and continues to be in evidence.
South Carolina’s blue laws are just a tiny tip of the iceberg. What’s worse, of course, is that hardly any of America’s eager-beaver politicians running for office address these intrusive measures. Of course not—they are all eager to get in on the game and impose on us their own agenda as soon as they get into office.
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Is it Progress?
Tibor R. Machan
One of the very first novels, read in Hungarian translation back in Budapest when I was about 10 years old, was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer followed and then quite a few of Zane Grey’s, Max Brand’s and Earl Stanley Gardner’s works, all of which I read for entertainment as well as to get a whiff of American culture. This was shortly after WW II ended and there was a chance, and lots of hope, that the Americans, not the Soviets, would come to Hungary to run the post-war show. Alas, Yalta killed that.
Though Huck Finn was indeed a very entertaining novel, it also left a lasting impression about some of America’s troubles in its first century. But there was, also, much hope expressed in the book and by the time I managed to be smuggled out of the communist hell whole Hungary had become after 1948, my mistaken understanding was that there was no racial divide in the country. Once I arrived here, midyear 1956, just before Budapest exploded and the Soviet grip began to loosen a bit—only to harden soon again—I was quite surprised to learn that the country had still suffered from a racial crisis. The few months I spend going to American high school in Germany gave little hint of this because the school, including the track team and band I had joined, gave l no evidence of segregation and racism, quite the contrary. My best friend at the school was black and the band, too, was fully integrated so I didn’t have much of a clue how backward race relations were stateside.
My first American school was West Philly high where whites were in a small minority and my claim to fame was that I was asked to try out for the virtually completely black football team as the kicker! (I didn’t make it since I kicked like a soccer player.) And later, when I enlisted country in the US Air Force and lived with a very tall and intellectual black airman named, of all things, Ivan, the race issue once gain didn’t surface for me—Ivan was a great room mate.
In time, however, I became aware that no all was quiet in race relations in America but it mostly baffled me, as did much of the injustice I have witnessed in my personal life as well as in my new country. It was always a mixed bag, though, since most of what I encountered personally seemed quite peaceful and friendly between members of the two races and bad news came from the public sector, mostly. Still, it was sad, given the potential I saw in the country for the elimination of such acrimonious human relations. As I became more and more involved in political theory and focused more and more on social and economic affairs, I also grew restless about this and in time I learned that the whole issue of racism was an immense but unnecessary flaw in America. More and more I was looking for signs of improvement everywhere, especially on the personal front. So whenever I witnessed an interracial friendship, romance or marriage, I felt a strong pang of pleasure. So nice to notice sins that the cancer was abating! I often choked up from a feeling of hope and relief, brought on by the realization that people were breaking through the barriers, that it wasn’t all whites and blacks in America who took part in the acrimony that gave the free society its main low grade.
So you might think that I would be joining all those who are hailing Senator Barack Obama’s ascendance to the Democratic candidacy in this presidential election year. And, yes, to some extend it does bring a measure of satisfaction.
Unfortunately this satisfaction is overshadowed by the fact that Senator Obama is one of the major American politicians who stands against America’s founding principles of individualism, of everyone’s right to his or her life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Indeed, the leftist political economic public policies the Senator is hoping to press upon us all in this country nearly totally undermine the mostly symbolic victory his candidacy achieved on the racial front. If anything, what would have been true progress is had a black individual with full commitment to those principled risen to prominence on the political front. If someone, who embraced the principles of limited government, one devoted to securing our rights, made it to the front of the line that would have been progress and worth real celebration.
But what Senator Obama shows is that black or white, American political culture is in a thoroughly reactionary mood. It is embarking on embracing servitude, dependence not on private but public, official masters who promise to deliver to millions the impossible dream of full security from life by means of an ever expanding welfare state. Being so associated with the ancient regime, whereby government—be it king, emperor, tsar or the representatives of a majority of voters—takes over the realms and engages in widespread paternalistic care taking, Senator Obama does not represent progress, never mind what his race is.
Tibor R. Machan
One of the very first novels, read in Hungarian translation back in Budapest when I was about 10 years old, was Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer followed and then quite a few of Zane Grey’s, Max Brand’s and Earl Stanley Gardner’s works, all of which I read for entertainment as well as to get a whiff of American culture. This was shortly after WW II ended and there was a chance, and lots of hope, that the Americans, not the Soviets, would come to Hungary to run the post-war show. Alas, Yalta killed that.
Though Huck Finn was indeed a very entertaining novel, it also left a lasting impression about some of America’s troubles in its first century. But there was, also, much hope expressed in the book and by the time I managed to be smuggled out of the communist hell whole Hungary had become after 1948, my mistaken understanding was that there was no racial divide in the country. Once I arrived here, midyear 1956, just before Budapest exploded and the Soviet grip began to loosen a bit—only to harden soon again—I was quite surprised to learn that the country had still suffered from a racial crisis. The few months I spend going to American high school in Germany gave little hint of this because the school, including the track team and band I had joined, gave l no evidence of segregation and racism, quite the contrary. My best friend at the school was black and the band, too, was fully integrated so I didn’t have much of a clue how backward race relations were stateside.
My first American school was West Philly high where whites were in a small minority and my claim to fame was that I was asked to try out for the virtually completely black football team as the kicker! (I didn’t make it since I kicked like a soccer player.) And later, when I enlisted country in the US Air Force and lived with a very tall and intellectual black airman named, of all things, Ivan, the race issue once gain didn’t surface for me—Ivan was a great room mate.
In time, however, I became aware that no all was quiet in race relations in America but it mostly baffled me, as did much of the injustice I have witnessed in my personal life as well as in my new country. It was always a mixed bag, though, since most of what I encountered personally seemed quite peaceful and friendly between members of the two races and bad news came from the public sector, mostly. Still, it was sad, given the potential I saw in the country for the elimination of such acrimonious human relations. As I became more and more involved in political theory and focused more and more on social and economic affairs, I also grew restless about this and in time I learned that the whole issue of racism was an immense but unnecessary flaw in America. More and more I was looking for signs of improvement everywhere, especially on the personal front. So whenever I witnessed an interracial friendship, romance or marriage, I felt a strong pang of pleasure. So nice to notice sins that the cancer was abating! I often choked up from a feeling of hope and relief, brought on by the realization that people were breaking through the barriers, that it wasn’t all whites and blacks in America who took part in the acrimony that gave the free society its main low grade.
So you might think that I would be joining all those who are hailing Senator Barack Obama’s ascendance to the Democratic candidacy in this presidential election year. And, yes, to some extend it does bring a measure of satisfaction.
Unfortunately this satisfaction is overshadowed by the fact that Senator Obama is one of the major American politicians who stands against America’s founding principles of individualism, of everyone’s right to his or her life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Indeed, the leftist political economic public policies the Senator is hoping to press upon us all in this country nearly totally undermine the mostly symbolic victory his candidacy achieved on the racial front. If anything, what would have been true progress is had a black individual with full commitment to those principled risen to prominence on the political front. If someone, who embraced the principles of limited government, one devoted to securing our rights, made it to the front of the line that would have been progress and worth real celebration.
But what Senator Obama shows is that black or white, American political culture is in a thoroughly reactionary mood. It is embarking on embracing servitude, dependence not on private but public, official masters who promise to deliver to millions the impossible dream of full security from life by means of an ever expanding welfare state. Being so associated with the ancient regime, whereby government—be it king, emperor, tsar or the representatives of a majority of voters—takes over the realms and engages in widespread paternalistic care taking, Senator Obama does not represent progress, never mind what his race is.
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
No Foreign Music In America?
Tibor R. Machan
Since some people want to make Americans buy only American farm or other products, the question is why they don’t advocate keeping out of the country all those foreign musicians, opera singers, orchestras, bands, conductors, actors, directors, and all kinds of other non-natives who peddle their trade and wares on our shores. I recall that, for a while at least, Canadian universities had a policy of not hiring teachers from America because, well, there are far more American teachers qualified for the positions in that country and the graduates there would have had to compete in a demanding market. But that is just what is the case with many artists, as well as doctors and scientists--they are taking jobs that might be taken by Americans.
Of course the idea is obscene. Yet that is just what protectionism relating to farming or car making or any other profession or industry amounts to. Globalization means no trade restrictions between countries, none! The labor or professional market place as well as any other should be completely free of government interference except when it comes to explicit, avowed, declared enemies of the country. But don’t even suggest this to Senators Obama and Clinton!
Anyone who whines about cultural dilution is, of course, way too late--for centuries on end such dilution has been going on big time. Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University has made this abundantly evident in his great book, Creative Destruction (Princeton University Press, 2004). He showed that in no area does purity prevail, none, not in folk music, not in folk dance, not in cuisine, not anywhere. Indeed, the bulk of artistic creativity--or, indeed, fashion and style--consists of mixing traditions and then remixing them and on and on with the process so pervasive that no one can trace the result to any specific region of the globe, to any “people”.
Very sadly often the call for purity is but a disguised form of hateful prejudice. One of my close relatives who still lives in the country from which I hail used to whine about how foreign elements are destroying the country’s artistic and related heritage. Of course, this was but a disguise because what was really so offensive to this individual was that there were a good many Jewish professionals, artists, intellectuals, and educators in the country that some wished belonged to them alone!
Mind you, there is no harm in wanting to be within familiar surroundings now and then. I recall once my family took a brief trip to the German city of Augsburg while I was working in Lugano, Switzerland, and as we arrived in midtown we noticed how tall, like we were, people there are as compared with folks in Ticino, which is the Italian sector of Switzerland where Lugano is located. And one of us exclaimed that this was a welcome feeling, being among people who were tall like us. And why not? Unless one makes this into some kind of crusade against the not-so-tall, unless one punishes one’s children for falling in love or wishing to marry such a not-so-tall individual, there is no harm in the feeling of comfort among those similar to oneself.
Indeed, in personal relations people quite freely, unapologetically show preferences like this, based on features in people with which they are more comfortable than with others. So long as one’s reason and intelligence kick in and one refuses to extend such mere preferences into some kind of doctrine of specialness or purity, no harm, no foul.
People who come from Germany may well prefer German music, literature, or poetry, whereas ones from Poland or Italy or Syria may be drawn, at least quite often, toward what makes them feel at home. Doing this as a matter of principle is, of course, nuts--one shuts out a great deal of human creativity when one sticks one’s head in the sand along these lines. But settling into familiar surroundings can be a very pleasant experience for most of us.
And for some of us a more cosmopolitan taste feels better since we come from various places that are huge cultural, artistic, and architectural melting pots. Fact is, the world has room for all these varieties of preferences and likes and so long as they are pursued in a civilized, peaceful fashion and nothing deep is made of them so that hostilities strike root, that’s just as things should be.
Tibor R. Machan
Since some people want to make Americans buy only American farm or other products, the question is why they don’t advocate keeping out of the country all those foreign musicians, opera singers, orchestras, bands, conductors, actors, directors, and all kinds of other non-natives who peddle their trade and wares on our shores. I recall that, for a while at least, Canadian universities had a policy of not hiring teachers from America because, well, there are far more American teachers qualified for the positions in that country and the graduates there would have had to compete in a demanding market. But that is just what is the case with many artists, as well as doctors and scientists--they are taking jobs that might be taken by Americans.
Of course the idea is obscene. Yet that is just what protectionism relating to farming or car making or any other profession or industry amounts to. Globalization means no trade restrictions between countries, none! The labor or professional market place as well as any other should be completely free of government interference except when it comes to explicit, avowed, declared enemies of the country. But don’t even suggest this to Senators Obama and Clinton!
Anyone who whines about cultural dilution is, of course, way too late--for centuries on end such dilution has been going on big time. Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University has made this abundantly evident in his great book, Creative Destruction (Princeton University Press, 2004). He showed that in no area does purity prevail, none, not in folk music, not in folk dance, not in cuisine, not anywhere. Indeed, the bulk of artistic creativity--or, indeed, fashion and style--consists of mixing traditions and then remixing them and on and on with the process so pervasive that no one can trace the result to any specific region of the globe, to any “people”.
Very sadly often the call for purity is but a disguised form of hateful prejudice. One of my close relatives who still lives in the country from which I hail used to whine about how foreign elements are destroying the country’s artistic and related heritage. Of course, this was but a disguise because what was really so offensive to this individual was that there were a good many Jewish professionals, artists, intellectuals, and educators in the country that some wished belonged to them alone!
Mind you, there is no harm in wanting to be within familiar surroundings now and then. I recall once my family took a brief trip to the German city of Augsburg while I was working in Lugano, Switzerland, and as we arrived in midtown we noticed how tall, like we were, people there are as compared with folks in Ticino, which is the Italian sector of Switzerland where Lugano is located. And one of us exclaimed that this was a welcome feeling, being among people who were tall like us. And why not? Unless one makes this into some kind of crusade against the not-so-tall, unless one punishes one’s children for falling in love or wishing to marry such a not-so-tall individual, there is no harm in the feeling of comfort among those similar to oneself.
Indeed, in personal relations people quite freely, unapologetically show preferences like this, based on features in people with which they are more comfortable than with others. So long as one’s reason and intelligence kick in and one refuses to extend such mere preferences into some kind of doctrine of specialness or purity, no harm, no foul.
People who come from Germany may well prefer German music, literature, or poetry, whereas ones from Poland or Italy or Syria may be drawn, at least quite often, toward what makes them feel at home. Doing this as a matter of principle is, of course, nuts--one shuts out a great deal of human creativity when one sticks one’s head in the sand along these lines. But settling into familiar surroundings can be a very pleasant experience for most of us.
And for some of us a more cosmopolitan taste feels better since we come from various places that are huge cultural, artistic, and architectural melting pots. Fact is, the world has room for all these varieties of preferences and likes and so long as they are pursued in a civilized, peaceful fashion and nothing deep is made of them so that hostilities strike root, that’s just as things should be.
Harry Reid’s "Voluntary" Taxation
Tibor R. Machan
On the Web Site, FreeLiberal.com, to which someone guided me, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada defended the idea that taxation in America, especially the federal income tax, is voluntary. His basic argument was, believe it or not, that elsewhere in the world people lack the many loopholes we enjoy here. (These, by the way, are the loopholes Senator Reid and his fellows in the Senate are constantly promising to close!) So while the Senator’s case that taxation is voluntary rests on there being loopholes in the system, he is vehemently opposed to those loopholes. Which means that even in his own twisted terms, the Senator does not really believe in the voluntariness of taxation only in that it isn’t so bad here as elsewhere.
But let’s rewind a bit. Does the fact that taxation in American includes many loopholes make it voluntary? This is like claiming that when one is put in jail and there happen to be several escape routes from it through which a few prisoners can break out, the prisoners are there of their own free will! Well, Senator Reid & Co., a dysfunctional prison is still a prison and a tax system that isn’t as harsh as the worst is still a coercive system.
Some people used to defend slavery on the grounds that slaves were often treated well by their masters and that if they were not slaves, their lives would face many obstacles they do not face as slaves. But this does not justify slavery one bit. Life is often harsh for free men and women but this is no excuse for enslaving them even by relatively nice masters.
Voluntary payments are available only when not making them does not land one in trouble with the law. Maybe the trouble in which not paying taxes lands people in America isn’t as severe as in some other regions of the world. But that doesn’t make taxation voluntary. Voluntary means no adverse consequences are imposed by government on those who refuse or fail to pay, period.
What taxation resembles most closely is organized criminal extortion. And this is because that is exactly what taxation amounts to in its customary home, namely, a feudal system. In such a system the monarch or some minions of the monarch, who are all in fact criminals by civilized standards, collect payments from the people because they live and work in the realm that is deemed to belong to the monarch. Even in such systems the power of the monarch can be restricted somewhat and the extracted payment need not be onerous. Just as in our country people aren’t entirely incapacitated because of taxation, in feudal systems many people were and are willing to put up with what the monarch extorts from them, either in forced payment or in forced labor.
Furthermore most of us would rather live in America, with its extortionist tax policies, rather than on some desert island where no one is bothering to take away one’s resources. That’s because despite the vicious nature of taxation, clearly things could be worse. Just as in personal matters of violence there are degrees of severity, so with the violence done by governments. Where I used to live as a child, in communist Hungary, matters were far worse and for some far worse than for me even there. The place was still a tyranny!
None of this makes taxation a proper public policy, any more than some type of relatively mild slavery, such as serfdom, is morally acceptable. Human beings ought to be completely free from each other’s intrusiveness, even when that isn’t very likely to happen. Just as with fitness, the fitter the better, so with liberty, the freer the better.
What a truly free country ought to have is a system for funding law enforcement, maintenance, and administration paid for by way of voluntary fees, just as everything else in a free society is paid for. Of course, the fees one would pay could be imperative for most because law and order are so valuable. And as with, say, long term health or auto insurance, nearly everyone would very likely pay up! A contract fee, for example, a bit like a sales tax, could do the job, especially when one figures that we are here discussing funding the legal system of a genuinely free country, one the strictly limited government of which sticks to its task of securing the rights of the citizenry. But one could still opt out and just rely on a hand shake an so avoid the fee!
In any case, taxation is anything but voluntary, even if in different places it can be more or less unjustly intrusive. But, of course, Senator Harry Reid would not admit this and chooses, instead, to concoct an incoherent story to live with his complicity in the injustice of the institution.
Tibor R. Machan
On the Web Site, FreeLiberal.com, to which someone guided me, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada defended the idea that taxation in America, especially the federal income tax, is voluntary. His basic argument was, believe it or not, that elsewhere in the world people lack the many loopholes we enjoy here. (These, by the way, are the loopholes Senator Reid and his fellows in the Senate are constantly promising to close!) So while the Senator’s case that taxation is voluntary rests on there being loopholes in the system, he is vehemently opposed to those loopholes. Which means that even in his own twisted terms, the Senator does not really believe in the voluntariness of taxation only in that it isn’t so bad here as elsewhere.
But let’s rewind a bit. Does the fact that taxation in American includes many loopholes make it voluntary? This is like claiming that when one is put in jail and there happen to be several escape routes from it through which a few prisoners can break out, the prisoners are there of their own free will! Well, Senator Reid & Co., a dysfunctional prison is still a prison and a tax system that isn’t as harsh as the worst is still a coercive system.
Some people used to defend slavery on the grounds that slaves were often treated well by their masters and that if they were not slaves, their lives would face many obstacles they do not face as slaves. But this does not justify slavery one bit. Life is often harsh for free men and women but this is no excuse for enslaving them even by relatively nice masters.
Voluntary payments are available only when not making them does not land one in trouble with the law. Maybe the trouble in which not paying taxes lands people in America isn’t as severe as in some other regions of the world. But that doesn’t make taxation voluntary. Voluntary means no adverse consequences are imposed by government on those who refuse or fail to pay, period.
What taxation resembles most closely is organized criminal extortion. And this is because that is exactly what taxation amounts to in its customary home, namely, a feudal system. In such a system the monarch or some minions of the monarch, who are all in fact criminals by civilized standards, collect payments from the people because they live and work in the realm that is deemed to belong to the monarch. Even in such systems the power of the monarch can be restricted somewhat and the extracted payment need not be onerous. Just as in our country people aren’t entirely incapacitated because of taxation, in feudal systems many people were and are willing to put up with what the monarch extorts from them, either in forced payment or in forced labor.
Furthermore most of us would rather live in America, with its extortionist tax policies, rather than on some desert island where no one is bothering to take away one’s resources. That’s because despite the vicious nature of taxation, clearly things could be worse. Just as in personal matters of violence there are degrees of severity, so with the violence done by governments. Where I used to live as a child, in communist Hungary, matters were far worse and for some far worse than for me even there. The place was still a tyranny!
None of this makes taxation a proper public policy, any more than some type of relatively mild slavery, such as serfdom, is morally acceptable. Human beings ought to be completely free from each other’s intrusiveness, even when that isn’t very likely to happen. Just as with fitness, the fitter the better, so with liberty, the freer the better.
What a truly free country ought to have is a system for funding law enforcement, maintenance, and administration paid for by way of voluntary fees, just as everything else in a free society is paid for. Of course, the fees one would pay could be imperative for most because law and order are so valuable. And as with, say, long term health or auto insurance, nearly everyone would very likely pay up! A contract fee, for example, a bit like a sales tax, could do the job, especially when one figures that we are here discussing funding the legal system of a genuinely free country, one the strictly limited government of which sticks to its task of securing the rights of the citizenry. But one could still opt out and just rely on a hand shake an so avoid the fee!
In any case, taxation is anything but voluntary, even if in different places it can be more or less unjustly intrusive. But, of course, Senator Harry Reid would not admit this and chooses, instead, to concoct an incoherent story to live with his complicity in the injustice of the institution.
Monday, June 02, 2008
Hijacking Individual Rights
Tibor R. Machan
When John Locke identified, in serious and reasonable detailed ways, the nature of human political liberty--as a natural right of every human being--for a good bit political thinkers in the West were in awe. What a notion--it is not governments that are sovereign but individuals persons! Much of the political universe went topsy-turvy for a while. Law books were reworked, myths about inherited titles got busted. A revolution was spawned, with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in America as its most significant consequence.
But all this was, of course, a bit too good to be true. Very soon a bunch of prominent thinkers--apologists of the state--began to undermine Locke’s discovery. Jeremy Bentham, for example, ridiculed the idea of natural, unalienable--in his work Anarchical Fallacies he wrote that “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible [that is, unalienable] rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.” Bentham was an extreme empiricist and since natural rights is a normative idea, an idea about how we ought to related to each other, he scoffed at it, regarded it unfounded in observable fact.
Henceforth Locke’s natural rights, including the right to life or liberty, became less and less respected by political thinkers. One result was that instead of the original negative version, as Locke laid it out--a prohibition against invaders--various critics began to defend so called positive rights.
The Lockean idea of the right to liberty implied that no one may intrude upon anyone--it was supposed to be a “No trespass” sign. Only if invited are others admitted into one’s life and one’s property--“person and estate,” in Locke’s language. But with that idea becoming less and less well respected, all hell broke loose and nowadays rights are being peddled as entitlements to what others did or owned. This is the origin of today’s dominant doctrine of welfare rights--people believe that others may be forced to work for them, to pay for what they need and want, that they have a right to other’s lives and property. Ergo, the triumph of the welfare state, not of the fully free society sketched so well in the Declaration of Independence.
Of course there are many who accept what Locke discovered and reject the fiction of positive or welfare rights, unearned entitlements. Their view accords well with moral philosophy as well as common sense.
Why would others have any claim on one’s life and property if both of these belong to oneself? And why would they not belong to oneself? One’s life is certainly not anyone else’s and what comes from the productive activities of this life, namely, one’s property, doesn’t belong to anyone else either. The only legitimate way other people can come to share one’s life and property is if their owner willingly parts with them. I may choose to work for someone, as an act of generosity or in return for payment; I may choose to share my resources with others, again as a gift or in exchange for something they might be willing to do for me or give me.
But this excellent idea turned out to be radical and still seems quite unfamiliar, even odd, to millions across the globe. They hold on to the ancient fiction that people belong to some tribe, nation, ethnic group, clan, society, state, nation or some other band. The fact that such a position means really nothing more fancy than that some other people get to rule you, that not you but others own you, that you are a subject or even slave of others, doesn’t sink in for too many folks because there is always some kind of sophisticated story--narrative, in today’s language--provided to justify it. You belong to the community! We are together and you must subjugate yourself to the greater whole, and so forth and so on. That deceptive term “we” manages to hoodwink millions into letting a few self-anointed leaders run the show, take hold of people’s labor and resources and use these as they see fit. And if you don’t comply, even simply refuse to agree, you are dubbed some kind of anti-social cretin.
People have free will--despite what so many thinkers now want to claim, namely, that we are moved about by impersonal forces--and they can think up lots of pseudo-justifications to make us all into their peons. They can persuade themselves that when they think of something that appeals to them, they are authorized to coerce us all to support the idea, never mind about our plans, goals, hopes, and aspirations.
This is how a very good idea, the unalienable individual rights of everyone, got to be perverted and corrupted into the idea that your life and works don’t really belong to you at all but to “us,” meaning, the few who perpetrate the ruse.
Tibor R. Machan
When John Locke identified, in serious and reasonable detailed ways, the nature of human political liberty--as a natural right of every human being--for a good bit political thinkers in the West were in awe. What a notion--it is not governments that are sovereign but individuals persons! Much of the political universe went topsy-turvy for a while. Law books were reworked, myths about inherited titles got busted. A revolution was spawned, with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in America as its most significant consequence.
But all this was, of course, a bit too good to be true. Very soon a bunch of prominent thinkers--apologists of the state--began to undermine Locke’s discovery. Jeremy Bentham, for example, ridiculed the idea of natural, unalienable--in his work Anarchical Fallacies he wrote that “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible [that is, unalienable] rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.” Bentham was an extreme empiricist and since natural rights is a normative idea, an idea about how we ought to related to each other, he scoffed at it, regarded it unfounded in observable fact.
Henceforth Locke’s natural rights, including the right to life or liberty, became less and less respected by political thinkers. One result was that instead of the original negative version, as Locke laid it out--a prohibition against invaders--various critics began to defend so called positive rights.
The Lockean idea of the right to liberty implied that no one may intrude upon anyone--it was supposed to be a “No trespass” sign. Only if invited are others admitted into one’s life and one’s property--“person and estate,” in Locke’s language. But with that idea becoming less and less well respected, all hell broke loose and nowadays rights are being peddled as entitlements to what others did or owned. This is the origin of today’s dominant doctrine of welfare rights--people believe that others may be forced to work for them, to pay for what they need and want, that they have a right to other’s lives and property. Ergo, the triumph of the welfare state, not of the fully free society sketched so well in the Declaration of Independence.
Of course there are many who accept what Locke discovered and reject the fiction of positive or welfare rights, unearned entitlements. Their view accords well with moral philosophy as well as common sense.
Why would others have any claim on one’s life and property if both of these belong to oneself? And why would they not belong to oneself? One’s life is certainly not anyone else’s and what comes from the productive activities of this life, namely, one’s property, doesn’t belong to anyone else either. The only legitimate way other people can come to share one’s life and property is if their owner willingly parts with them. I may choose to work for someone, as an act of generosity or in return for payment; I may choose to share my resources with others, again as a gift or in exchange for something they might be willing to do for me or give me.
But this excellent idea turned out to be radical and still seems quite unfamiliar, even odd, to millions across the globe. They hold on to the ancient fiction that people belong to some tribe, nation, ethnic group, clan, society, state, nation or some other band. The fact that such a position means really nothing more fancy than that some other people get to rule you, that not you but others own you, that you are a subject or even slave of others, doesn’t sink in for too many folks because there is always some kind of sophisticated story--narrative, in today’s language--provided to justify it. You belong to the community! We are together and you must subjugate yourself to the greater whole, and so forth and so on. That deceptive term “we” manages to hoodwink millions into letting a few self-anointed leaders run the show, take hold of people’s labor and resources and use these as they see fit. And if you don’t comply, even simply refuse to agree, you are dubbed some kind of anti-social cretin.
People have free will--despite what so many thinkers now want to claim, namely, that we are moved about by impersonal forces--and they can think up lots of pseudo-justifications to make us all into their peons. They can persuade themselves that when they think of something that appeals to them, they are authorized to coerce us all to support the idea, never mind about our plans, goals, hopes, and aspirations.
This is how a very good idea, the unalienable individual rights of everyone, got to be perverted and corrupted into the idea that your life and works don’t really belong to you at all but to “us,” meaning, the few who perpetrate the ruse.
The Big Lie Again
Tibor R. Machan
Just to make it clear that association with prestigious institutions does not guarantee veracity, Professor Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has chimed in with yet another distortion of reality, one that several prominent folks have been perpetrating over the last few years. I am thinking, for example, of Paul Krugman, Princeton University economist and columnist for The New York Times.
Both of these folks have been repeating the claim that ideas favoring the free market are widely championed in America. Foner wrote this in The New York Times Sunday Book Review recently: “Arthur Schlesinger Jr., ‘The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936’ [is a book the presidential candidates ought to read] because it demonstrates how the marriage of engaged social movements and an activist government can promote the common good even in the most dire economic circumstances, and offers and alternative vision of the market fundamentalism that now dominates American politics.”
I have dealt extensively with the myth of government’s capacity to promote the “public” good and how that idea tends to mean the agenda of people who differ from what most others like to promote. In the American political tradition the public good comes to nothing less or more than securing everyone’s fundamental, unalienable individual rights!
What jumps out at a reader in the quote from Foner is the out and out myth he is peddling, namely, that “market fundamentalism dominates American politics.” If you doubt me, just listen to Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain and notice how little confidence each of these major contemporary political figures shows for the free market. The current Congress has no interest in free markets either. Instead it keeps supporting farm subsidies and numerous protectionist measures. Liberal Democrats, in turn, are openly hostile to free trade--notice how both Senators Obama and Clinton keep hammering away at NAFTA (which, by the way, Bill Clinton supported), a measure that gives at least lip service in favor of the free market. (Not that even NAFTA fully endorses economic freedom!)
Why on earth is it so necessary for Professor Foner and his ilk to peddle this big lie, namely, that the free market is favored in America these days? No one but Congressman Ron Paul treated it as a good thing and his vote totals did not come close to suggesting that the idea dominates American politics. So why the lie?
I believe that enemies of the free market are worried that any problems in the American or indeed world economy might be laid at the feet of the real culprit, the mixed economy or welfare state. Because it is welfare states that in fact dominate politics nearly everywhere, including in America. The mixed economy is an uneasy combination of extensive government economic intervention and pockets of free market activity.
American political opinion, pace Professor Foner, has been swinging back and forth between more or less extensive government interventionism. That is what has dominated American politics, what with all the regulatory agencies, minimum wage measures, eminent domain policies, subsidies, protection from foreign competition, etc., etc.
But if one can convince people that economic problems stem not from this mess of the mixed economy but from market fundamentalism, they may decide to try even more interventionism, more government regulation, more central planning exactly as advocated by Senators Obama and Clinton and not at all vigorously opposed by Senator McCain.
The Big Lie! It was once associated with Plato’s Republic, where the philosopher king was required, in the imaginary perfect state, to mislead the public for its very own good! Maybe Professor Foner shares this idea: Lie to the American public about what kind of economic philosophy is dominant so they will then accept the opposite idea, namely, socialism.
In fact, however, this lie is of no help to anyone, not even Professor Foner (since his reputation is seriously sullied from perpetrating it).
Tibor R. Machan
Just to make it clear that association with prestigious institutions does not guarantee veracity, Professor Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has chimed in with yet another distortion of reality, one that several prominent folks have been perpetrating over the last few years. I am thinking, for example, of Paul Krugman, Princeton University economist and columnist for The New York Times.
Both of these folks have been repeating the claim that ideas favoring the free market are widely championed in America. Foner wrote this in The New York Times Sunday Book Review recently: “Arthur Schlesinger Jr., ‘The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936’ [is a book the presidential candidates ought to read] because it demonstrates how the marriage of engaged social movements and an activist government can promote the common good even in the most dire economic circumstances, and offers and alternative vision of the market fundamentalism that now dominates American politics.”
I have dealt extensively with the myth of government’s capacity to promote the “public” good and how that idea tends to mean the agenda of people who differ from what most others like to promote. In the American political tradition the public good comes to nothing less or more than securing everyone’s fundamental, unalienable individual rights!
What jumps out at a reader in the quote from Foner is the out and out myth he is peddling, namely, that “market fundamentalism dominates American politics.” If you doubt me, just listen to Senators Obama, Clinton, and McCain and notice how little confidence each of these major contemporary political figures shows for the free market. The current Congress has no interest in free markets either. Instead it keeps supporting farm subsidies and numerous protectionist measures. Liberal Democrats, in turn, are openly hostile to free trade--notice how both Senators Obama and Clinton keep hammering away at NAFTA (which, by the way, Bill Clinton supported), a measure that gives at least lip service in favor of the free market. (Not that even NAFTA fully endorses economic freedom!)
Why on earth is it so necessary for Professor Foner and his ilk to peddle this big lie, namely, that the free market is favored in America these days? No one but Congressman Ron Paul treated it as a good thing and his vote totals did not come close to suggesting that the idea dominates American politics. So why the lie?
I believe that enemies of the free market are worried that any problems in the American or indeed world economy might be laid at the feet of the real culprit, the mixed economy or welfare state. Because it is welfare states that in fact dominate politics nearly everywhere, including in America. The mixed economy is an uneasy combination of extensive government economic intervention and pockets of free market activity.
American political opinion, pace Professor Foner, has been swinging back and forth between more or less extensive government interventionism. That is what has dominated American politics, what with all the regulatory agencies, minimum wage measures, eminent domain policies, subsidies, protection from foreign competition, etc., etc.
But if one can convince people that economic problems stem not from this mess of the mixed economy but from market fundamentalism, they may decide to try even more interventionism, more government regulation, more central planning exactly as advocated by Senators Obama and Clinton and not at all vigorously opposed by Senator McCain.
The Big Lie! It was once associated with Plato’s Republic, where the philosopher king was required, in the imaginary perfect state, to mislead the public for its very own good! Maybe Professor Foner shares this idea: Lie to the American public about what kind of economic philosophy is dominant so they will then accept the opposite idea, namely, socialism.
In fact, however, this lie is of no help to anyone, not even Professor Foner (since his reputation is seriously sullied from perpetrating it).
Sunday, June 01, 2008
“Supposed Universal Values”
Tibor R. Machan
Professor of history Sean Pollock at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, recently wrote about Senator John McCain’s foreign policy views in a letter to the Sunday New York Times Magazine. He asked, I think rhetorically, “Does McCain not see that by intervening militarily in foreign countries and by justifying such intervention in terms of supposed universal values, America stands in the tradition of imperial powers whose policies and practices have tended to engender the kinds of insurgent movements he fears?” I focus on this here because the question raises some important issues.
One is whether when people like Senator McCain support military intervention, do they in fact invoke “supposed universal values” in support of their position? I don’t know but if former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan--certainly familiar with the Bush administration--is to be believed, the war in Iraq has little to do with any such values. It has to do with oil. Or perhaps with some obscure UN resolution. Or maybe the support for McCain’s position comes from the United Nation’s covenant of “the responsibility of protect” against tyrants and/or natural disasters.
Certainly if there are universal values, ones all people ought to embrace and governments in any country should protect, it does not follow that foreign governments must intervene when they are being violated. These governments are, let’s remember, public servants of their own citizenry, not of the populations of foreign countries. Nothing at all about there being universal values requires intervention of any kind. If I believe that my neighbor ought to show tenderness toward his children and he doesn’t, I am not authorized to meddle in his family life. Perhaps I am justified in thinking badly of him, even of trying to encourage him in various civilized ways to change his ways. But no intervention is supported by such universal values.
Professor Pollock shows disdainfulness toward universal values, otherwise why did he say “supposed.” Maybe he wants to guard against the tendency he ascribes to Senator McCain by his skepticism. Yet, this tendency to intervene by someone who holds such universal values does not follow from holding such values. This is especially true of liberal democratic countries that are committed to the principle of freedom of choice. Unless another country is aggressing against its neighbors--or there is strong reason that it will do so imminently--no justification exists to intervene. Furthermore, not all intervention in support of such values, when justified on the grounds that apply--not merely that there are such universal values--amounts to imperialism. But I’ll leave that point aside here.
When, for example, a country is ruled by brutal thugs and the bulk of the citizenry is desirous of outside help intervention is not at all imperialistic. But even then the help must come only if the citizens of the country capable of giving it approve. Otherwise help must come from volunteers since the legal duty of a country’s government and military is to provide protection to its citizenry, not to citizens of other countries.
A liberal country’s foreign policy must not amount to aggression, not even to humanitarian intervention. Force must only be used in defense of the country itself, or of a friendly ally. That is what the government officials of a liberal country swear to when taking office, to protect the constitution of the country, meaning, to protect its integrity and citizenry from those who would attack or seriously threaten them.
None of this denies that there are some, perhaps just a few, essential, universal values every society should follow, ones that all governments should protect in their society. Senator McCain’s belief in military intervention need have nothing at all to do with his embrace of universal values such as human rights for all. As a senator in a free society he is sworn to secure rights for those who elected him not for people abroad. But this does not mean those people abroad do not possess those rights just as citizens at home do.
It is a logical fallacy, which has some very deleterious results when committed, to think that the existence of universal values implies that one must become the police that should provide the protection of those values. Something else is needed for this to happen, namely, to become properly authorized to give that protection.
Tibor R. Machan
Professor of history Sean Pollock at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, recently wrote about Senator John McCain’s foreign policy views in a letter to the Sunday New York Times Magazine. He asked, I think rhetorically, “Does McCain not see that by intervening militarily in foreign countries and by justifying such intervention in terms of supposed universal values, America stands in the tradition of imperial powers whose policies and practices have tended to engender the kinds of insurgent movements he fears?” I focus on this here because the question raises some important issues.
One is whether when people like Senator McCain support military intervention, do they in fact invoke “supposed universal values” in support of their position? I don’t know but if former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan--certainly familiar with the Bush administration--is to be believed, the war in Iraq has little to do with any such values. It has to do with oil. Or perhaps with some obscure UN resolution. Or maybe the support for McCain’s position comes from the United Nation’s covenant of “the responsibility of protect” against tyrants and/or natural disasters.
Certainly if there are universal values, ones all people ought to embrace and governments in any country should protect, it does not follow that foreign governments must intervene when they are being violated. These governments are, let’s remember, public servants of their own citizenry, not of the populations of foreign countries. Nothing at all about there being universal values requires intervention of any kind. If I believe that my neighbor ought to show tenderness toward his children and he doesn’t, I am not authorized to meddle in his family life. Perhaps I am justified in thinking badly of him, even of trying to encourage him in various civilized ways to change his ways. But no intervention is supported by such universal values.
Professor Pollock shows disdainfulness toward universal values, otherwise why did he say “supposed.” Maybe he wants to guard against the tendency he ascribes to Senator McCain by his skepticism. Yet, this tendency to intervene by someone who holds such universal values does not follow from holding such values. This is especially true of liberal democratic countries that are committed to the principle of freedom of choice. Unless another country is aggressing against its neighbors--or there is strong reason that it will do so imminently--no justification exists to intervene. Furthermore, not all intervention in support of such values, when justified on the grounds that apply--not merely that there are such universal values--amounts to imperialism. But I’ll leave that point aside here.
When, for example, a country is ruled by brutal thugs and the bulk of the citizenry is desirous of outside help intervention is not at all imperialistic. But even then the help must come only if the citizens of the country capable of giving it approve. Otherwise help must come from volunteers since the legal duty of a country’s government and military is to provide protection to its citizenry, not to citizens of other countries.
A liberal country’s foreign policy must not amount to aggression, not even to humanitarian intervention. Force must only be used in defense of the country itself, or of a friendly ally. That is what the government officials of a liberal country swear to when taking office, to protect the constitution of the country, meaning, to protect its integrity and citizenry from those who would attack or seriously threaten them.
None of this denies that there are some, perhaps just a few, essential, universal values every society should follow, ones that all governments should protect in their society. Senator McCain’s belief in military intervention need have nothing at all to do with his embrace of universal values such as human rights for all. As a senator in a free society he is sworn to secure rights for those who elected him not for people abroad. But this does not mean those people abroad do not possess those rights just as citizens at home do.
It is a logical fallacy, which has some very deleterious results when committed, to think that the existence of universal values implies that one must become the police that should provide the protection of those values. Something else is needed for this to happen, namely, to become properly authorized to give that protection.
Marx Was Partly Right
Tibor R. Machan
Most literate people know that first on the list in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels' Communist Manifesto of what needed changing to achieve socialism is the abolition of the right to private property. This follows, of course, from the very idea of socialism, which sees humanity or society as an organic body, akin to a termite colony. Individuals no longer exist in such a system, so privacy and private property must go, too.
Marx also made a prediction that in modern democracies there wouldn’t be a need for violent revolutions because the citizenry will get rid of the legal protection of private property through the electoral process. Too many people will get fed up with the volatility of freedom, including the free market place, and gradually achieve socialism by voting in politicians who will eliminate the obstacle of legally protected private property rights to central planning.
Marx thought that central planning would serve society well but he based this idea on his confidence that human nature will change. Instead of people wanting to achieve various goals of their own, they will in time come to aim only for the public good. He believed that once matured, “the human essence is the true collectivity of man.” The new man, then, will not be like you and me or anyone today.
This is an important element of socialism and central planning because only if it is true will the theory of public choice, which completely undermines confidence in central planning, be avoided. Public choice theory addresses human being as they are now, not as they would turn out to be in Marx’s vision of a socialist society. If Marx is wrong and human nature will not change, then public choice theory shows that central planners will make a mess of things, not help out at all. Central planners, being ordinary humans, will aim at fulfilling their own agendas, not some vague public purpose.
A unified, one-size-fits-all public purpose makes sense within the context of the Marxian idea of the new man, one who cares nothing for himself or herself, only for the whole society. This is like people in a team or orchestra who are not focused on their own private agendas but that of the group. It works fine in small organizations which human beings join voluntarily because they do in fact promise to fulfill their own goals, only with the aid of other people. But in Karl Marx’s picture no need for voluntary joining exists. People will be born as socialists, by their very nature.
Because the Marxian idea is a myth--history is not driving us toward socialism and the new man--the socialism aimed for by Marx and his followers has to be brought about coercively, by brute force--see Stalin or Hugo Chavez, as examples. This is even so when people elect politicians whom they entrust with public service because those people, of course, haven’t a clue how to achieve some mythical comprehensive public good. So even when elected by majorities, as Max thought they would be in democracies, promoters of socialism will be thoroughly stymied by their own unavoidable ignorance of what really benefits us. We are not all the same; indeed humanity as it actually is consists of a huge variety of individuals with an equally huge variety of different ways of attaining their best interests. No central planners can achieve this, ever.
But Marx did have it right that in their impatience and frustration with the free market, people will attempt the impossible. (Marx, of course, didn’t think socialism is impossible.) Consider, for example, environmental issues. Many are panicked about how well protected private property rights leave much of the environment uncared for--e. g., rain forests, the polar bear, etc., etc. So they then wish to entrust the care to politicians and planners. They envision some kind of supreme plan that will bring about a healthy ecosystem. But no one really knows what that is and planners are just as prone to mismanage it all as individuals, only the scope of their mismanagement is far greater, so the damage they do is huge. (In fact most of the current environmental mess is due to government central planners who built ridiculously huge projects using government's power to violate private property rights, as in the case of the TVA and the many humongous dams around the globe.)
Impatience is what produces all this. It is true that with a regime of legally protected private property rights no grand scheme is in the offing. Yet that impossible dream motivates too many people, however futile it is from the start. The only real prospect is the piecemeal, strict private property approach and that is what encourages--though it does not guarantee--the responsible use of the environment.
Just as the perfect is the enemy of the good, so the myth of guaranteed environmental health is the enemy of a reasonably healthy one. Too bad, but Marx did have a point about people’s impatience. Yet certainly it isn’t going to lead to any socialist utopia.
Tibor R. Machan
Most literate people know that first on the list in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels' Communist Manifesto of what needed changing to achieve socialism is the abolition of the right to private property. This follows, of course, from the very idea of socialism, which sees humanity or society as an organic body, akin to a termite colony. Individuals no longer exist in such a system, so privacy and private property must go, too.
Marx also made a prediction that in modern democracies there wouldn’t be a need for violent revolutions because the citizenry will get rid of the legal protection of private property through the electoral process. Too many people will get fed up with the volatility of freedom, including the free market place, and gradually achieve socialism by voting in politicians who will eliminate the obstacle of legally protected private property rights to central planning.
Marx thought that central planning would serve society well but he based this idea on his confidence that human nature will change. Instead of people wanting to achieve various goals of their own, they will in time come to aim only for the public good. He believed that once matured, “the human essence is the true collectivity of man.” The new man, then, will not be like you and me or anyone today.
This is an important element of socialism and central planning because only if it is true will the theory of public choice, which completely undermines confidence in central planning, be avoided. Public choice theory addresses human being as they are now, not as they would turn out to be in Marx’s vision of a socialist society. If Marx is wrong and human nature will not change, then public choice theory shows that central planners will make a mess of things, not help out at all. Central planners, being ordinary humans, will aim at fulfilling their own agendas, not some vague public purpose.
A unified, one-size-fits-all public purpose makes sense within the context of the Marxian idea of the new man, one who cares nothing for himself or herself, only for the whole society. This is like people in a team or orchestra who are not focused on their own private agendas but that of the group. It works fine in small organizations which human beings join voluntarily because they do in fact promise to fulfill their own goals, only with the aid of other people. But in Karl Marx’s picture no need for voluntary joining exists. People will be born as socialists, by their very nature.
Because the Marxian idea is a myth--history is not driving us toward socialism and the new man--the socialism aimed for by Marx and his followers has to be brought about coercively, by brute force--see Stalin or Hugo Chavez, as examples. This is even so when people elect politicians whom they entrust with public service because those people, of course, haven’t a clue how to achieve some mythical comprehensive public good. So even when elected by majorities, as Max thought they would be in democracies, promoters of socialism will be thoroughly stymied by their own unavoidable ignorance of what really benefits us. We are not all the same; indeed humanity as it actually is consists of a huge variety of individuals with an equally huge variety of different ways of attaining their best interests. No central planners can achieve this, ever.
But Marx did have it right that in their impatience and frustration with the free market, people will attempt the impossible. (Marx, of course, didn’t think socialism is impossible.) Consider, for example, environmental issues. Many are panicked about how well protected private property rights leave much of the environment uncared for--e. g., rain forests, the polar bear, etc., etc. So they then wish to entrust the care to politicians and planners. They envision some kind of supreme plan that will bring about a healthy ecosystem. But no one really knows what that is and planners are just as prone to mismanage it all as individuals, only the scope of their mismanagement is far greater, so the damage they do is huge. (In fact most of the current environmental mess is due to government central planners who built ridiculously huge projects using government's power to violate private property rights, as in the case of the TVA and the many humongous dams around the globe.)
Impatience is what produces all this. It is true that with a regime of legally protected private property rights no grand scheme is in the offing. Yet that impossible dream motivates too many people, however futile it is from the start. The only real prospect is the piecemeal, strict private property approach and that is what encourages--though it does not guarantee--the responsible use of the environment.
Just as the perfect is the enemy of the good, so the myth of guaranteed environmental health is the enemy of a reasonably healthy one. Too bad, but Marx did have a point about people’s impatience. Yet certainly it isn’t going to lead to any socialist utopia.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Elites, Good and Bad
Tibor R. Machan
Democrats are all bent out of shape about how to think about elites--the group in society that claims to be superior to the rest of us. Senator Obama is dubbed an elitist for saying that many turn to religion out of frustration. Senator Clinton is trying to flee her own elitist legacy, what with an education from various elite institutions. So what is so bad about being a member of the elite?
In many previous ages and even now in many regions of the globe certain people were deemed to be above the rest, as a matter of their birthright. They were and are considered to be part of the natural aristocracy--rulers by excellence! This means that they need accomplish nothing at all to rank high among human beings. The feudal system is rife with this notion, as are many other in which class warfare is afoot.
But there can be aristocrats who deserve their higher standing in society. This would arise from having achieved something worthwhile, such as a great scientific discovery, an engineering or some kind of artistic feat. Such accomplishments would ordinarily gain a person recognition and even standing in a community. And so one could join the aristocracy or elite without the fiction of having inherited it in some mysterious, mythical way.
Trouble is that when the semi-official philosophy in the land is egalitarianism, even this sort of elitism is frowned upon. No one is supposed to be regarded as having higher rank than anyone else--that is one thesis of egalitarianism. And among liberal democrats this philosophy is rampant--nearly everyone gives it lip service even when it is totally absurd (such as the folks do at National Public Radio, which is one of the snootiest organizations in the country).
Many trendy notions contribute to the mess--for example, relativism and subjectivism about values. If what makes something worthwhile is only a matter of a subjective feeling--some simply like it more than other things--there can hardly be any rational reason for attributing to it higher rank than to competing accomplishments. If it is all relative whether one deserves the Nobel Prize in economics or physics, then the idea that the achievements of these people are superior to that of others and the prize is deserved make no sense. Thus, egalitarianism must rule! Everything people do is of equal worth or, indeed, worthless. The very idea of “worth” becomes meaningless since no objective standards are supposed to exist by which to assess what we do in any realm at all.
Post-modernism, which is but a recent version of subjectivism and relativism, also produces this egalitarian outlook. It is all a matter of how you look at it, you see, so how could anything really be a more worthwhile achievement than something else?
Clearly the liberal democratic ethos embraces some of these ways of thinking about the world and about human conduct. For example, all of the poor are equally deserving, never mind how they got to be poor. All of the sick, too, are equally deserving of support, never mind how they got sick (say by accident or because they acted recklessly). No one is a failure in school or at work, only impaired somehow. No one is at fault in a divorce! And so forth and so on.
When these views dominate in a community, such as in the Democratic Party, any type of aristocracy or elitism is a liability and those who wish to flourish--to win votes for example--must reject any thought of earned merit by anyone. That is just what we now witness with Senators Obama and Clinton, a desperate effort to deny any kind of special achievement, even while they both contend, paradoxically, that they deserve to become president of the United States of America because of their superior judgment and character!
Elitism, however, is actually quite all right when it involves earning one’s high rank, in science, the arts, athletics, and in other spheres where human beings set out to triumph. But an ultimately condescending egalitarianism obscures this fact. The phony humility of such egalitarianism aims to deny something entirely unavoidable in human affairs, namely, that some do better than others and thus deserve more! Those will be the accomplished elite and no effort to deny this fact will manage to actually avoid it. Such denial will merely produce confusion and contradiction, neither of which reaps any benefit at all.
Tibor R. Machan
Democrats are all bent out of shape about how to think about elites--the group in society that claims to be superior to the rest of us. Senator Obama is dubbed an elitist for saying that many turn to religion out of frustration. Senator Clinton is trying to flee her own elitist legacy, what with an education from various elite institutions. So what is so bad about being a member of the elite?
In many previous ages and even now in many regions of the globe certain people were deemed to be above the rest, as a matter of their birthright. They were and are considered to be part of the natural aristocracy--rulers by excellence! This means that they need accomplish nothing at all to rank high among human beings. The feudal system is rife with this notion, as are many other in which class warfare is afoot.
But there can be aristocrats who deserve their higher standing in society. This would arise from having achieved something worthwhile, such as a great scientific discovery, an engineering or some kind of artistic feat. Such accomplishments would ordinarily gain a person recognition and even standing in a community. And so one could join the aristocracy or elite without the fiction of having inherited it in some mysterious, mythical way.
Trouble is that when the semi-official philosophy in the land is egalitarianism, even this sort of elitism is frowned upon. No one is supposed to be regarded as having higher rank than anyone else--that is one thesis of egalitarianism. And among liberal democrats this philosophy is rampant--nearly everyone gives it lip service even when it is totally absurd (such as the folks do at National Public Radio, which is one of the snootiest organizations in the country).
Many trendy notions contribute to the mess--for example, relativism and subjectivism about values. If what makes something worthwhile is only a matter of a subjective feeling--some simply like it more than other things--there can hardly be any rational reason for attributing to it higher rank than to competing accomplishments. If it is all relative whether one deserves the Nobel Prize in economics or physics, then the idea that the achievements of these people are superior to that of others and the prize is deserved make no sense. Thus, egalitarianism must rule! Everything people do is of equal worth or, indeed, worthless. The very idea of “worth” becomes meaningless since no objective standards are supposed to exist by which to assess what we do in any realm at all.
Post-modernism, which is but a recent version of subjectivism and relativism, also produces this egalitarian outlook. It is all a matter of how you look at it, you see, so how could anything really be a more worthwhile achievement than something else?
Clearly the liberal democratic ethos embraces some of these ways of thinking about the world and about human conduct. For example, all of the poor are equally deserving, never mind how they got to be poor. All of the sick, too, are equally deserving of support, never mind how they got sick (say by accident or because they acted recklessly). No one is a failure in school or at work, only impaired somehow. No one is at fault in a divorce! And so forth and so on.
When these views dominate in a community, such as in the Democratic Party, any type of aristocracy or elitism is a liability and those who wish to flourish--to win votes for example--must reject any thought of earned merit by anyone. That is just what we now witness with Senators Obama and Clinton, a desperate effort to deny any kind of special achievement, even while they both contend, paradoxically, that they deserve to become president of the United States of America because of their superior judgment and character!
Elitism, however, is actually quite all right when it involves earning one’s high rank, in science, the arts, athletics, and in other spheres where human beings set out to triumph. But an ultimately condescending egalitarianism obscures this fact. The phony humility of such egalitarianism aims to deny something entirely unavoidable in human affairs, namely, that some do better than others and thus deserve more! Those will be the accomplished elite and no effort to deny this fact will manage to actually avoid it. Such denial will merely produce confusion and contradiction, neither of which reaps any benefit at all.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
A Socialist America?
Tibor R. Machan
It is becoming increasingly likely that soon the United States of America, which supposedly won the Cold War against the socialist Soviet Union, will become a socialist society. A comparable country would be France, prior to the presidency of Szarkozy.
This is the conclusion to be drawn from what two of the presidential candidates who have a solid prospect to reach the White House have been saying over the last several months. Both, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama have indicated in no uncertain terms that they prefer an economic order in the United States that is regimented by the plans of some folks from above, not by the free choices of individuals from below. She has said that what America needs is “a commander in chief of the economy.” He has decried American capitalism and the profit motive that is its main economic engine. She has taken advice from neo-Marxists Michael Lerner of TIKKUN magazine, he has stated that the greatest influence on his thinking and values was his mother, an avowed socialist and communist sympathizer.
I am not using “socialist” and “communist” as scare terms, only as accurate descriptions of what the two potential nominees of the Democratic Party believe. They are not simply welfare statists, people who believe that along with a substantial free market the country needs to have supportive federal and state governments who provide people with last ditch economic security in the face of the vicissitudes of market forces. No, the two candidates appear to be impatient with such meager measures and want to take the reigns once they enter the White House and shape the country’s economic affairs according to a specific vision. They both believe in the planned economy (with just a bit of hesitation from Senator Obama who has indicated in a few of his speeches and interviews some skepticism about extensive government regulation).
Why are these people champions of socialism? Because, it seems, they believe that economic affairs in a society ought to be completely predictable and risk free. Only a system that guarantees success for everyone--never mind whether his or her work is in demand, whether luck is on his or her side, whether he or she is skilled and talented--would satisfy the criterion of a just socio-economic order for these candidates. And if the spontaneous processes of the free market fail to achieve this goal, then government must enter to regiment the country so that things turn out properly, as envisioned by those seeking such a system of guarantees.
This is what is called utopianism in the field of political economy. Most people know that it is an impossible dream, an ideal that can only be achieve in fantasy, not in reality. The world simply doesn’t work in a way that can provide everyone with economic and related success. To wish for this is comparable to wishing for a marathon race that everyone will win! Impossible. (George Orwell’s Animal Farm shows this nicely!) And to attempt it must then involve massive coercive force. That is just what happened in socialist bloc and why their system failed and left the countries where it was attempted a colossal economic mess form which recovery will take decades.
Unfortunately over the last several decades most Americans have been taught by teachers who pretty much share the two Senators’ economic philosophy. In elementary school students are indoctrinated about all kinds of topics, from sex to the environment, and how government must deal with problems therein. The idea of individual freedom is, turn, nearly completely neglected. In high schools there is very little economic literacy being taught and most students are educated to care about fairness and equality, not about initiative and risk. In colleges and universities there is now very little in the curriculum that reminds students of the most productive but also unsure economic system, namely, capitalism. Instead the dream world of the top down managed economic system is most widely championed.
In the American political arena there is hardly anyone who opposes these trends. Certainly the Republicans cannot be counted on to challenge the socialist vision since in the main they have their own similar moral authoritarian vision to offer. The ideas and ideals of the Founders are nearly cast to the side by all but the small group of libertarians who aren’t at this time a viable political alternative.
Maybe this is a temporary setback. I believe in the long run the free market alternative is going to be triumphant. But for the time being it is losing. So we need to prepare for some pretty awful times.
Tibor R. Machan
It is becoming increasingly likely that soon the United States of America, which supposedly won the Cold War against the socialist Soviet Union, will become a socialist society. A comparable country would be France, prior to the presidency of Szarkozy.
This is the conclusion to be drawn from what two of the presidential candidates who have a solid prospect to reach the White House have been saying over the last several months. Both, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama have indicated in no uncertain terms that they prefer an economic order in the United States that is regimented by the plans of some folks from above, not by the free choices of individuals from below. She has said that what America needs is “a commander in chief of the economy.” He has decried American capitalism and the profit motive that is its main economic engine. She has taken advice from neo-Marxists Michael Lerner of TIKKUN magazine, he has stated that the greatest influence on his thinking and values was his mother, an avowed socialist and communist sympathizer.
I am not using “socialist” and “communist” as scare terms, only as accurate descriptions of what the two potential nominees of the Democratic Party believe. They are not simply welfare statists, people who believe that along with a substantial free market the country needs to have supportive federal and state governments who provide people with last ditch economic security in the face of the vicissitudes of market forces. No, the two candidates appear to be impatient with such meager measures and want to take the reigns once they enter the White House and shape the country’s economic affairs according to a specific vision. They both believe in the planned economy (with just a bit of hesitation from Senator Obama who has indicated in a few of his speeches and interviews some skepticism about extensive government regulation).
Why are these people champions of socialism? Because, it seems, they believe that economic affairs in a society ought to be completely predictable and risk free. Only a system that guarantees success for everyone--never mind whether his or her work is in demand, whether luck is on his or her side, whether he or she is skilled and talented--would satisfy the criterion of a just socio-economic order for these candidates. And if the spontaneous processes of the free market fail to achieve this goal, then government must enter to regiment the country so that things turn out properly, as envisioned by those seeking such a system of guarantees.
This is what is called utopianism in the field of political economy. Most people know that it is an impossible dream, an ideal that can only be achieve in fantasy, not in reality. The world simply doesn’t work in a way that can provide everyone with economic and related success. To wish for this is comparable to wishing for a marathon race that everyone will win! Impossible. (George Orwell’s Animal Farm shows this nicely!) And to attempt it must then involve massive coercive force. That is just what happened in socialist bloc and why their system failed and left the countries where it was attempted a colossal economic mess form which recovery will take decades.
Unfortunately over the last several decades most Americans have been taught by teachers who pretty much share the two Senators’ economic philosophy. In elementary school students are indoctrinated about all kinds of topics, from sex to the environment, and how government must deal with problems therein. The idea of individual freedom is, turn, nearly completely neglected. In high schools there is very little economic literacy being taught and most students are educated to care about fairness and equality, not about initiative and risk. In colleges and universities there is now very little in the curriculum that reminds students of the most productive but also unsure economic system, namely, capitalism. Instead the dream world of the top down managed economic system is most widely championed.
In the American political arena there is hardly anyone who opposes these trends. Certainly the Republicans cannot be counted on to challenge the socialist vision since in the main they have their own similar moral authoritarian vision to offer. The ideas and ideals of the Founders are nearly cast to the side by all but the small group of libertarians who aren’t at this time a viable political alternative.
Maybe this is a temporary setback. I believe in the long run the free market alternative is going to be triumphant. But for the time being it is losing. So we need to prepare for some pretty awful times.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Libertarianism Isn’t Utopian
Tibor R. Machan
Although it is prudent to be skeptical about the entries found at Wikipedia, the on line encyclopedia offers a sound account of utopias: “Utopia is a term for an ideal society. It has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempted to create an ideal society, and fictional societies portrayed in literature. The term is sometimes used pejoratively, in reference to an unrealistic ideal that is impossible to achieve....”
At a recent conference I directed for Freedom Communications, Inc., the criticism that libertarianism is utopian took center stage. It was advanced by a respectful critic, one who was not disdainful but merely doubtful about the soundness of libertarianism as a viable approach to thinking about public affairs. The gist of the doubtful thesis amounted to the claim that libertarianism is altogether too negative about government, indeed, that libertarians tend to hate politics and all that’s associated with it.
I found myself inspired to reflect upon the critic’s charge, especially since just a few weeks ago I penned a column contending that contemporary politics has become thoroughly corrupt. It is now virtually routine for politicians to be panderers, people who seek to be elected to public office on the basis of offering voters benefits that they will deliver at the expense of others. For virtually every politician the first principle seems to be to promote wealth redistribution, taking from Peter and handing some of what was taken to Paul, while keeping a good bit for politicians and their employees, bureaucrats.
Is this evidence supporting the claim that libertarians hate politicians, consider government all bad? Not quite.
When one considers an institution or profession as having been corrupted, it is generally understood that there could be instances of it that are not corrupted. Corruption means having gone bad, having seriously deteriorated from the proper, legitimate sort. Like a bad apple or rotten tomato, corrupt politics assume that there could be a right sort of the thing.
Libertarianism is a political stance that is well sketched out in the Declaration of Independence, a document that the American Founders--mainly Thomas Jefferson--crafted and signed on July 4, 1776. Seeing that the anniversary of this date is the most significant American holiday being celebrated every year in America, and that’s about to happen this year, it may be useful to quote the few lines that lay out the conception it proposes as to the nature of a proper government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....”
The libertarian view of government is that this institution has as its purpose to secure the unalienable rights of the citizenry that’s to be served by the government via certain just powers. Government, in turn, becomes corrupt when this purpose is abandoned and others take its place. Politicians, who are supposed to run for offices that contribute to the proper purpose of government, become corrupt when they run for offices that do not contribute to this proper purpose but to others, including coercive wealth redistribution, coercive micromanagement of the lives of the citizenry, coercive regulation of commerce, science, health care and many other aspects of the lives of the citizenry.
Admittedly, this conception of government is not what has been most prominent throughout human history and, indeed, across the globe in our own time. Even in America, where the Declaration was penned and was supposed to guide the drafting of the constitution of the federal government (and even, in time, state governments), the idea is revolutionary. But that isn’t what is vital in this discussion.
What is vital is that for those who see the view sketched in the Declaration as sound, as do most libertarians, government can be understood in positive, benign terms and need by no means be “hated.” Only when governments become corrupted do they become objects of derision, even hatred, mainly because their powers are then utilized for unjust purposes, which is a grave dereliction of their duty.
Think of it like this: Medicine is a wonderful, positive profession but when medical professionals abandon their purpose and utilize their skills--powers--to perpetrate quackery, they have become corrupt and are deserving of criticism, even sanction. That is just what the libertarian thinks about most governments, now or in the past. But the libertarian isn’t deluded into thinking that even the best possible government will be a road to the solution of all social, let alone, personal problems people face in a country. Now that’s utopianism.
Tibor R. Machan
Although it is prudent to be skeptical about the entries found at Wikipedia, the on line encyclopedia offers a sound account of utopias: “Utopia is a term for an ideal society. It has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempted to create an ideal society, and fictional societies portrayed in literature. The term is sometimes used pejoratively, in reference to an unrealistic ideal that is impossible to achieve....”
At a recent conference I directed for Freedom Communications, Inc., the criticism that libertarianism is utopian took center stage. It was advanced by a respectful critic, one who was not disdainful but merely doubtful about the soundness of libertarianism as a viable approach to thinking about public affairs. The gist of the doubtful thesis amounted to the claim that libertarianism is altogether too negative about government, indeed, that libertarians tend to hate politics and all that’s associated with it.
I found myself inspired to reflect upon the critic’s charge, especially since just a few weeks ago I penned a column contending that contemporary politics has become thoroughly corrupt. It is now virtually routine for politicians to be panderers, people who seek to be elected to public office on the basis of offering voters benefits that they will deliver at the expense of others. For virtually every politician the first principle seems to be to promote wealth redistribution, taking from Peter and handing some of what was taken to Paul, while keeping a good bit for politicians and their employees, bureaucrats.
Is this evidence supporting the claim that libertarians hate politicians, consider government all bad? Not quite.
When one considers an institution or profession as having been corrupted, it is generally understood that there could be instances of it that are not corrupted. Corruption means having gone bad, having seriously deteriorated from the proper, legitimate sort. Like a bad apple or rotten tomato, corrupt politics assume that there could be a right sort of the thing.
Libertarianism is a political stance that is well sketched out in the Declaration of Independence, a document that the American Founders--mainly Thomas Jefferson--crafted and signed on July 4, 1776. Seeing that the anniversary of this date is the most significant American holiday being celebrated every year in America, and that’s about to happen this year, it may be useful to quote the few lines that lay out the conception it proposes as to the nature of a proper government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....”
The libertarian view of government is that this institution has as its purpose to secure the unalienable rights of the citizenry that’s to be served by the government via certain just powers. Government, in turn, becomes corrupt when this purpose is abandoned and others take its place. Politicians, who are supposed to run for offices that contribute to the proper purpose of government, become corrupt when they run for offices that do not contribute to this proper purpose but to others, including coercive wealth redistribution, coercive micromanagement of the lives of the citizenry, coercive regulation of commerce, science, health care and many other aspects of the lives of the citizenry.
Admittedly, this conception of government is not what has been most prominent throughout human history and, indeed, across the globe in our own time. Even in America, where the Declaration was penned and was supposed to guide the drafting of the constitution of the federal government (and even, in time, state governments), the idea is revolutionary. But that isn’t what is vital in this discussion.
What is vital is that for those who see the view sketched in the Declaration as sound, as do most libertarians, government can be understood in positive, benign terms and need by no means be “hated.” Only when governments become corrupted do they become objects of derision, even hatred, mainly because their powers are then utilized for unjust purposes, which is a grave dereliction of their duty.
Think of it like this: Medicine is a wonderful, positive profession but when medical professionals abandon their purpose and utilize their skills--powers--to perpetrate quackery, they have become corrupt and are deserving of criticism, even sanction. That is just what the libertarian thinks about most governments, now or in the past. But the libertarian isn’t deluded into thinking that even the best possible government will be a road to the solution of all social, let alone, personal problems people face in a country. Now that’s utopianism.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Pursuing your Happiness
Tibor R. Machan
When the Founders made happiness part of America’s political fabric they made clear that what each of us has a right to is the pursuit of it. As with all individual rights in this political tradition, the right to the pursuit of happiness is a right to take actions of certain sorts, ones that are aimed at achieving our happiness. Even the most basic right, to one’s life, is a right to take a great many actions. Life, after all, consists of being active! The right to private property, too, is a right to take actions that result in the acquisition of valued items.
Sadly, of course, while the Founders of America did give serious thought to the right to the pursuit of happiness, there was no consensus at all in the country, nor is there today, that pursuing happiness is a good thing, that it is something we all ought to do. Indeed, most moralists have tended to argue the opposite—it is renouncing one’s happiness that makes one a good person! Unselfishness is good, selfish pursuits such as wanting to be happy are bad.
OK, that debate is not going to get resolved here. I will just assume that happiness is something worth pursuing—it isn’t just the right to this pursuit that’s a good thing. But at this point one can ask another question, namely, how one can effectively pursue happiness. It is a big question but I will dodge this one too—almost. Instead I wish to explore just how any individual—almost—can improve his or her chances of being happy, of enriching his or her life in the broad sense of becoming better and better off as a human being. I want to focus on a small part of this kind of self-enhancement, of becoming happy.
One way that our happiness can be improved upon, of course, is technology. Indeed, the central point of technology is to help human beings to become happy or at least happier than they are. Gadgets are a clear, uncontroversial case in point. They reduce or even eliminate chores in our lives, helping us save a great deal of time which we then can spend on a great variety of rewarding activities. But some of the new high tech devices of our day do even more—they make possible some extra enjoyments, ones not available in the past.
Consider, for instance, that if one travels a good bit and has a laptop computer with Internet capability, one is now able to listen to innumerable radio stations from across the globe, including some that play nothing but a great variety of types of musical fare. You can be doing work in Europe or Asia but in the evening spend time not just reading a good book but also listening to your favorite classical, jazz or country music station. (One such Internet offering is called Luckyseven.com and has a dozen plus music stations with hardly any interruptions.) If music isn’t your fare, well there are newspapers and magazines to read “on line.” I personally have a pretty rich collection of photographs, including several dozen very appealing works of art which I can run as a slide show. I personally gain immense satisfaction from having photos of friends and family and places I have visited around the globe and a wide variety of paintings available too look at, all the while listening to my favorite music.
Not everyone will make use of the Internet for such purposes but I am willing to bet that most people can find it a rich source of pleasure that suits their tastes and preferences. There is also the Internet based phone system, such as Skype, that for but a few cents makes it possible to avoid the expense of hotel phones and reach friends and families from virtually anywhere.
Now as I see it if one is just a little bit computer savvy, one has a gold mine of resources for improving one’s life in small and not so small ways. One can keep up with important information, of course, but I am now referring to matters that make one’s life more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.
Indeed, it is arguable that if happiness—which consists of a variety of activities and endeavors—is something that human beings not only have a right to pursue but ought to seek, it is our responsibility to find out how new technology will help us be happier than we would be without it. There is much to be upset about as we go through our lives but there is also a great deal that is quite rewarding, if only we pay attention to the world and take advantage of what all it has to offer.
Tibor R. Machan
When the Founders made happiness part of America’s political fabric they made clear that what each of us has a right to is the pursuit of it. As with all individual rights in this political tradition, the right to the pursuit of happiness is a right to take actions of certain sorts, ones that are aimed at achieving our happiness. Even the most basic right, to one’s life, is a right to take a great many actions. Life, after all, consists of being active! The right to private property, too, is a right to take actions that result in the acquisition of valued items.
Sadly, of course, while the Founders of America did give serious thought to the right to the pursuit of happiness, there was no consensus at all in the country, nor is there today, that pursuing happiness is a good thing, that it is something we all ought to do. Indeed, most moralists have tended to argue the opposite—it is renouncing one’s happiness that makes one a good person! Unselfishness is good, selfish pursuits such as wanting to be happy are bad.
OK, that debate is not going to get resolved here. I will just assume that happiness is something worth pursuing—it isn’t just the right to this pursuit that’s a good thing. But at this point one can ask another question, namely, how one can effectively pursue happiness. It is a big question but I will dodge this one too—almost. Instead I wish to explore just how any individual—almost—can improve his or her chances of being happy, of enriching his or her life in the broad sense of becoming better and better off as a human being. I want to focus on a small part of this kind of self-enhancement, of becoming happy.
One way that our happiness can be improved upon, of course, is technology. Indeed, the central point of technology is to help human beings to become happy or at least happier than they are. Gadgets are a clear, uncontroversial case in point. They reduce or even eliminate chores in our lives, helping us save a great deal of time which we then can spend on a great variety of rewarding activities. But some of the new high tech devices of our day do even more—they make possible some extra enjoyments, ones not available in the past.
Consider, for instance, that if one travels a good bit and has a laptop computer with Internet capability, one is now able to listen to innumerable radio stations from across the globe, including some that play nothing but a great variety of types of musical fare. You can be doing work in Europe or Asia but in the evening spend time not just reading a good book but also listening to your favorite classical, jazz or country music station. (One such Internet offering is called Luckyseven.com and has a dozen plus music stations with hardly any interruptions.) If music isn’t your fare, well there are newspapers and magazines to read “on line.” I personally have a pretty rich collection of photographs, including several dozen very appealing works of art which I can run as a slide show. I personally gain immense satisfaction from having photos of friends and family and places I have visited around the globe and a wide variety of paintings available too look at, all the while listening to my favorite music.
Not everyone will make use of the Internet for such purposes but I am willing to bet that most people can find it a rich source of pleasure that suits their tastes and preferences. There is also the Internet based phone system, such as Skype, that for but a few cents makes it possible to avoid the expense of hotel phones and reach friends and families from virtually anywhere.
Now as I see it if one is just a little bit computer savvy, one has a gold mine of resources for improving one’s life in small and not so small ways. One can keep up with important information, of course, but I am now referring to matters that make one’s life more enjoyable than it otherwise would be.
Indeed, it is arguable that if happiness—which consists of a variety of activities and endeavors—is something that human beings not only have a right to pursue but ought to seek, it is our responsibility to find out how new technology will help us be happier than we would be without it. There is much to be upset about as we go through our lives but there is also a great deal that is quite rewarding, if only we pay attention to the world and take advantage of what all it has to offer.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The Way Bullies Think
Tibor R. Machan
It is nearly impossible these days to escape the bullies who are set to run everyone's life. I thought I would visit friends on the Central California Coast to get away from it all for a day but no such luck. No sooner did I settle in with my friends to drink a glass or two of some very fine wine from their and some other cellars, I encountered yet another horror story about the demise of private property rights in the United States of America.
This time it isn't the eminent domain bullies who have been popping up everywhere, insisting on misconstruing the Fifth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution as authorizing transfer of private property by government edict to preferred private concerns. (That is what the outrageous Supreme Court Ruling in 2005, Kelo v. City of New London Connecticut sanctioned.) This time the excuse is a legal fiction called "Smart Growth," whereby powerful politicians everywhere are forcibly imposing their vision of how people should live and use their own land.
In San Luis Obispo and Grover Beach two elected blokes, John Shoals and Bruce Gibson, actually laid out their ill conceived idea in an Op Ed piece for the local newspaper. In it they announce that "As elected representatives … we have spent countless hours considering and planning for the future of our communities."
We can just stop here before continuing with this because already the two politicians manage to show their dirty hands. In a free society it isn't elected representatives who plan for the future of any community. (It isn't, by the way, "their" community, although I guess that is how such bullies like to understand matters.) In a free society it is individual citizens, who have unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness--which includes private property rights--who make those plans, alone or in various voluntary associations. It is those who have honestly acquired land, for example, who decide what happens to the land, barring only such actions that violate others' rights. What gave America its unique character and reputation as a free country is just that politicians here are duty bound to "secure our rights," not to plan how we will exercise them.
Smart planners--which, of course, is a grossly question begging label to being with--do not want to acknowledge the fact that they are would be dictators who aren't concerned about the rights of members of the communities in which they serve as public officials. No, smart planners view the community as theirs to order about, as a playground for their own experiments, following their agenda instead of making it possible, as honest public servants in a free society should, for the citizenry to carry out its highly diverse peaceful objectives.
Misters Shoal and Gibson go on to demonstrate how ignorant they are about the principles of a free society when they say, "We believe that smart growth principles are not just fashionable ideas; they are essential values that we must implement to remain a vital and functional place to live [sic]." It isn't smart growth principles that are essential in a free society but the principles identified and laid out by the American Founders and Framers. Among these is the right to private property which, as the Fifth Amendment makes clear, prohibits the taking of land from individuals except if some bona fide public purpose is involved, such as building a court house or police station or military base.
Carving up other people's property so as to suit the vision of a few "elected representatives" is not among the tasks of politicians in a free society! It is decidedly not a public purposes but one imposed on the public by a few zealots who think they have some divine right to make others conform to their ideas and ideals.
Basically, those who have a vision pertaining to the way land should be used in a community have several peaceful, civilized options in a free country: They are free to buy the land themselves. They can form a corporation with others and purchase the land that way. They can persuade the owners of the land they are interested in fashioning after their own vision.
Of course, choosing any of these options will be more difficult than simply forcibly taking the land from others. But then all criminals think that way, don't they--earning what they are after is troublesome, so coercively taking it from those who own it is their easy path to achieving their objectives.
Sadly these days such legally perpetrated crimes are beginning to be a norm. But this is a vicious undermining of the principles--the true essential ones--of a country in which all citizens are supposed to have their rights safeguarded. And especially so when those sworn to do the safeguarding are the perpetrators of the crimes.
Tibor R. Machan
It is nearly impossible these days to escape the bullies who are set to run everyone's life. I thought I would visit friends on the Central California Coast to get away from it all for a day but no such luck. No sooner did I settle in with my friends to drink a glass or two of some very fine wine from their and some other cellars, I encountered yet another horror story about the demise of private property rights in the United States of America.
This time it isn't the eminent domain bullies who have been popping up everywhere, insisting on misconstruing the Fifth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution as authorizing transfer of private property by government edict to preferred private concerns. (That is what the outrageous Supreme Court Ruling in 2005, Kelo v. City of New London Connecticut sanctioned.) This time the excuse is a legal fiction called "Smart Growth," whereby powerful politicians everywhere are forcibly imposing their vision of how people should live and use their own land.
In San Luis Obispo and Grover Beach two elected blokes, John Shoals and Bruce Gibson, actually laid out their ill conceived idea in an Op Ed piece for the local newspaper. In it they announce that "As elected representatives … we have spent countless hours considering and planning for the future of our communities."
We can just stop here before continuing with this because already the two politicians manage to show their dirty hands. In a free society it isn't elected representatives who plan for the future of any community. (It isn't, by the way, "their" community, although I guess that is how such bullies like to understand matters.) In a free society it is individual citizens, who have unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness--which includes private property rights--who make those plans, alone or in various voluntary associations. It is those who have honestly acquired land, for example, who decide what happens to the land, barring only such actions that violate others' rights. What gave America its unique character and reputation as a free country is just that politicians here are duty bound to "secure our rights," not to plan how we will exercise them.
Smart planners--which, of course, is a grossly question begging label to being with--do not want to acknowledge the fact that they are would be dictators who aren't concerned about the rights of members of the communities in which they serve as public officials. No, smart planners view the community as theirs to order about, as a playground for their own experiments, following their agenda instead of making it possible, as honest public servants in a free society should, for the citizenry to carry out its highly diverse peaceful objectives.
Misters Shoal and Gibson go on to demonstrate how ignorant they are about the principles of a free society when they say, "We believe that smart growth principles are not just fashionable ideas; they are essential values that we must implement to remain a vital and functional place to live [sic]." It isn't smart growth principles that are essential in a free society but the principles identified and laid out by the American Founders and Framers. Among these is the right to private property which, as the Fifth Amendment makes clear, prohibits the taking of land from individuals except if some bona fide public purpose is involved, such as building a court house or police station or military base.
Carving up other people's property so as to suit the vision of a few "elected representatives" is not among the tasks of politicians in a free society! It is decidedly not a public purposes but one imposed on the public by a few zealots who think they have some divine right to make others conform to their ideas and ideals.
Basically, those who have a vision pertaining to the way land should be used in a community have several peaceful, civilized options in a free country: They are free to buy the land themselves. They can form a corporation with others and purchase the land that way. They can persuade the owners of the land they are interested in fashioning after their own vision.
Of course, choosing any of these options will be more difficult than simply forcibly taking the land from others. But then all criminals think that way, don't they--earning what they are after is troublesome, so coercively taking it from those who own it is their easy path to achieving their objectives.
Sadly these days such legally perpetrated crimes are beginning to be a norm. But this is a vicious undermining of the principles--the true essential ones--of a country in which all citizens are supposed to have their rights safeguarded. And especially so when those sworn to do the safeguarding are the perpetrators of the crimes.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
A Corrupt Profession
Tibor R. Machan
There are those who believe that business is inherently corrupt--communists would be among those, and socialists. The very idea of striving to make a profit is treated by these people as morally objectionable. Of course, some even think medicine fits the bill, or military service. And there are animal rights advocates who believe the entire meat industry is morally base.
For my money the one profession that has indeed become completely, utterly morally irredeemable is politics. Not that even this is necessarily the case--politics could be an upstanding profession in a genuinely free country where those practicing it did what the American Founders believed should be their task: to secure our rights, period. But that has never been the way most people in government viewed their job. Instead these days politicians are hired extortionists. They run for office by promising voters that they will successfully expropriate resources from others and hand it to voters if they only manage to be elected.
Voters, of course, are fully complicit in this--kind of like people who hire killers to do the murder they want done for them. Voters are mostly bent on sending those people to state and national capitols who promise them to use the power of the police to take the wealth of some and hand it to them. For this they will be paid and be able to wield power. Never mind that in the end the only winners are the politicians and bureaucrats because nearly all voters get their comeuppance by being at the losing end of the extortion process. But, just like all those folks who flock to Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, or other gambling centers, voters keep hoping that they will end up winners instead of the house!
In a free society politicians would be like the sheriff in those fictional Westerns who want the job so they can maintain peace and fight crime. They earn themselves a good resume or CV when they achieve this goal and not by being year-round Santa Clauses to the citizens of their towns. For this they receive payment which is collected from something like user fees, funds the citizens contribute by some sort of peaceful, voluntary fashion. That is how freedom works, namely, by systematically precluding all kinds of aggression--brutality, theft, extortion, coercion--from how society works. Taxation, a relic of feudal times, would be banned just as serfdom is, or slavery, however difficult it may be for a while to live without it. But such are the meaning and implication of taking individual rights seriously, seeing them as genuinely unalienable.
But that conception of politics is admittedly the best that's possible and doesn't resemble at all what politics has been throughout human history. Things have gotten a bit better, here and there, by the restraint outright thuggery on the part of rulers--the king or queen, Pharaohs, tsar, Caesar, Sheik or whatnot--and making it a matter, mostly, of the rule of the majority. Yet, of course, majorities can be just as ruthless as dictators. And in such democratic countries, ones in which the rule of law and individual rights haven't gained serious respect, representatives of majorities take what they want from disarmed minorities.
The usual excuse given is that, well, the wealthy or lucky need to help the rest but this is completely misguided because political largess isn't help but loot! When you extort other people's resource--which may have come from luck but more often from a life productively lived--and hand this over to others, that is the farthest thing from generosity or compassion. It is the using of some people, against their will, for the sake of others. And that is exactly what must not be done in a free and just human community. That's because people's lives belong to them, they and not others have a right to it unless they themselves chose to share it.
America's greatest holiday, the Fourth of July, will perhaps some day be celebrated with full understanding of what it stands for. Unfortunately it isn't now. All the pomp and noise surrounding the Fourth seems by now to have lost its point, which was to celebrate the revolutionary insight that politicians are supposed to protect the rights of the citizenry. Instead politicians work in a completely corrupted profession by hiring themselves out as thugs in nice garb. In comparison, people in the business world, even in a messy one which is infected with a lot of politics, are heroes.
Tibor R. Machan
There are those who believe that business is inherently corrupt--communists would be among those, and socialists. The very idea of striving to make a profit is treated by these people as morally objectionable. Of course, some even think medicine fits the bill, or military service. And there are animal rights advocates who believe the entire meat industry is morally base.
For my money the one profession that has indeed become completely, utterly morally irredeemable is politics. Not that even this is necessarily the case--politics could be an upstanding profession in a genuinely free country where those practicing it did what the American Founders believed should be their task: to secure our rights, period. But that has never been the way most people in government viewed their job. Instead these days politicians are hired extortionists. They run for office by promising voters that they will successfully expropriate resources from others and hand it to voters if they only manage to be elected.
Voters, of course, are fully complicit in this--kind of like people who hire killers to do the murder they want done for them. Voters are mostly bent on sending those people to state and national capitols who promise them to use the power of the police to take the wealth of some and hand it to them. For this they will be paid and be able to wield power. Never mind that in the end the only winners are the politicians and bureaucrats because nearly all voters get their comeuppance by being at the losing end of the extortion process. But, just like all those folks who flock to Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, or other gambling centers, voters keep hoping that they will end up winners instead of the house!
In a free society politicians would be like the sheriff in those fictional Westerns who want the job so they can maintain peace and fight crime. They earn themselves a good resume or CV when they achieve this goal and not by being year-round Santa Clauses to the citizens of their towns. For this they receive payment which is collected from something like user fees, funds the citizens contribute by some sort of peaceful, voluntary fashion. That is how freedom works, namely, by systematically precluding all kinds of aggression--brutality, theft, extortion, coercion--from how society works. Taxation, a relic of feudal times, would be banned just as serfdom is, or slavery, however difficult it may be for a while to live without it. But such are the meaning and implication of taking individual rights seriously, seeing them as genuinely unalienable.
But that conception of politics is admittedly the best that's possible and doesn't resemble at all what politics has been throughout human history. Things have gotten a bit better, here and there, by the restraint outright thuggery on the part of rulers--the king or queen, Pharaohs, tsar, Caesar, Sheik or whatnot--and making it a matter, mostly, of the rule of the majority. Yet, of course, majorities can be just as ruthless as dictators. And in such democratic countries, ones in which the rule of law and individual rights haven't gained serious respect, representatives of majorities take what they want from disarmed minorities.
The usual excuse given is that, well, the wealthy or lucky need to help the rest but this is completely misguided because political largess isn't help but loot! When you extort other people's resource--which may have come from luck but more often from a life productively lived--and hand this over to others, that is the farthest thing from generosity or compassion. It is the using of some people, against their will, for the sake of others. And that is exactly what must not be done in a free and just human community. That's because people's lives belong to them, they and not others have a right to it unless they themselves chose to share it.
America's greatest holiday, the Fourth of July, will perhaps some day be celebrated with full understanding of what it stands for. Unfortunately it isn't now. All the pomp and noise surrounding the Fourth seems by now to have lost its point, which was to celebrate the revolutionary insight that politicians are supposed to protect the rights of the citizenry. Instead politicians work in a completely corrupted profession by hiring themselves out as thugs in nice garb. In comparison, people in the business world, even in a messy one which is infected with a lot of politics, are heroes.
Ayn Rand's Anthem
Tibor R. Machan
In 2007 there were several celebrations focused on the 50th anniversary of
the publication of Ayn Rand's blockbuster novel, Atlas Shrugged. It is a
monumental work in which Rand shows, dramatically, how vital the active
human mind is for our survival and flourishing and how one crucial
precondition for this is political-economic liberty. A mind must be free
so it can explore and create and thus lead to a productive and happy life.
And in large measure America is evidence of this fact, both in its
achievements and its follies--the most evil thing about slavery is that
human beings are being used by others without their consent, without their
free choices recognized as necessary in their lives.
Another less well known work of Miss Rand, the novella Anthem, has
recently been rendered as a budding stage presentation. This gem
chronicles the life of a man in a totally egalitarian society where human
innovation and initiative are prohibited and everyone is regarded as part
of a huge collective without even a scintilla of personal identity. The
protagonist eventually comes across an abandoned dwelling containing books
and manuscripts from an earlier time which no one is allowed to mention,
let alone study. He summons the courage to check out his discovery and
comes to learn that a most important, fundamental absence is plaguing his
community, namely, the systematic, official denial of human individuality,
of the "I" or "self" or "ego." The climax
of the novella is the protagonist beautiful affirmation of the
"I"--it is a riveting hymn that Rand has forged that honors the
human self. (Later Ayn Rand's major student, Nathaniel Branden, wrote a
book developing this point, titled Honoring the Self.)
There was a showing the other day of this new staging of Anthem and I was
privileged to be among those in the audience. Although still in an early
phase of development, the staging does capture, with great power and
beauty, the theme of the novella and as I saw this unfold it occurred to
me that Anthem is perhaps one of the best celebration of the spirit of the
American Revolution. After all, what that revolution was all about is the
liberation of the human individual from the centuries of oppression by
monarchs and other rulers. That is the meaning of the Declaration of
Independence's focus on everyone's unalienable rights to life, liberty and
pursuit of happiness. Your life is no one else's but your own, the
Founders made clear, and only if you give others permission do they gain
the authority to intervene in it, as when a doctor or coach gains such
permission by a patient or team member, respectively.
Detractors have tried to derail the American Revolution by caricaturing it
as promoting an unrealistic "rugged" individualism, that is to
say, the silly idea that we are separate from everyone and can survive
entirely on our own, self-sufficiently. That is simply not what the
Founders nor Ayn Rand had in mind. Our social nature is granted but it
needs to be freely affirmed by each of us instead of imposed upon us by
various self-anointed thugs or even democratic majorities. Other
detractors are more sophisticated and have advanced the absurd idea that
we do not exist as individuals at all, that "I" is a
fabrication. In a recent issue of Science News--a supposedly scientific
publication--the editors saw fit to highlight in a special sidebar the
views of Douglas Hofstadter, author of I am a Strange Loop, arguing that
"The 'I' we create for each of us is a quintessential example of ...
a perceived or invented reality...." Others, in the field of
neuroscience, have been claiming that human beings have no free
will nor, indeed, a conscious mind. Instead, we function automatically and
only believe, ignorantly, that when we act we do so guided by our
thinking. Instead, they argue, we areentirely pre-programmed to act!
These attacks on the human self are only the latest in the history of
human reflection being put into the service of dictators and other rulers
who want us all to agree that we are inconsequential as individuals and
that only the collective matters, only the "we" is important in
human affairs. Even though a little reflection shows how transparently
misguided is this notion, many are not inclined or equipped to address
the idea and this makes it simpler for those who want to anoint themselves
as the representatives of "we" to lord it over the rest of us.
Because all such "we" talk is, in fact, nothing but the
"I" talk of those who want there to be just a few ruling egos.
One cannot emphasize enough how significant this dispute really is. After
centuries of oppression a larger and larger segment of humanity has
finally begun to realize that what is really important politically, even
ethically, is the human individual. The rest is not unimportant but its
importance is derivative, secondary. If this is denied, the result is that
just a few will rule the rest because there really is no
"society," a "we," other than a great many egos in one
another's company. Once this is acknowledged, those would be rulers will
have lost their phony rationale to rule. So clearly they are not going to
simply give up.
So as to give these points their dramatic impact one could do much worse
than read or reread Ayn Rand's Anthem. It is a riveting celebration of
the individual human spirit.
Tibor R. Machan
In 2007 there were several celebrations focused on the 50th anniversary of
the publication of Ayn Rand's blockbuster novel, Atlas Shrugged. It is a
monumental work in which Rand shows, dramatically, how vital the active
human mind is for our survival and flourishing and how one crucial
precondition for this is political-economic liberty. A mind must be free
so it can explore and create and thus lead to a productive and happy life.
And in large measure America is evidence of this fact, both in its
achievements and its follies--the most evil thing about slavery is that
human beings are being used by others without their consent, without their
free choices recognized as necessary in their lives.
Another less well known work of Miss Rand, the novella Anthem, has
recently been rendered as a budding stage presentation. This gem
chronicles the life of a man in a totally egalitarian society where human
innovation and initiative are prohibited and everyone is regarded as part
of a huge collective without even a scintilla of personal identity. The
protagonist eventually comes across an abandoned dwelling containing books
and manuscripts from an earlier time which no one is allowed to mention,
let alone study. He summons the courage to check out his discovery and
comes to learn that a most important, fundamental absence is plaguing his
community, namely, the systematic, official denial of human individuality,
of the "I" or "self" or "ego." The climax
of the novella is the protagonist beautiful affirmation of the
"I"--it is a riveting hymn that Rand has forged that honors the
human self. (Later Ayn Rand's major student, Nathaniel Branden, wrote a
book developing this point, titled Honoring the Self.)
There was a showing the other day of this new staging of Anthem and I was
privileged to be among those in the audience. Although still in an early
phase of development, the staging does capture, with great power and
beauty, the theme of the novella and as I saw this unfold it occurred to
me that Anthem is perhaps one of the best celebration of the spirit of the
American Revolution. After all, what that revolution was all about is the
liberation of the human individual from the centuries of oppression by
monarchs and other rulers. That is the meaning of the Declaration of
Independence's focus on everyone's unalienable rights to life, liberty and
pursuit of happiness. Your life is no one else's but your own, the
Founders made clear, and only if you give others permission do they gain
the authority to intervene in it, as when a doctor or coach gains such
permission by a patient or team member, respectively.
Detractors have tried to derail the American Revolution by caricaturing it
as promoting an unrealistic "rugged" individualism, that is to
say, the silly idea that we are separate from everyone and can survive
entirely on our own, self-sufficiently. That is simply not what the
Founders nor Ayn Rand had in mind. Our social nature is granted but it
needs to be freely affirmed by each of us instead of imposed upon us by
various self-anointed thugs or even democratic majorities. Other
detractors are more sophisticated and have advanced the absurd idea that
we do not exist as individuals at all, that "I" is a
fabrication. In a recent issue of Science News--a supposedly scientific
publication--the editors saw fit to highlight in a special sidebar the
views of Douglas Hofstadter, author of I am a Strange Loop, arguing that
"The 'I' we create for each of us is a quintessential example of ...
a perceived or invented reality...." Others, in the field of
neuroscience, have been claiming that human beings have no free
will nor, indeed, a conscious mind. Instead, we function automatically and
only believe, ignorantly, that when we act we do so guided by our
thinking. Instead, they argue, we areentirely pre-programmed to act!
These attacks on the human self are only the latest in the history of
human reflection being put into the service of dictators and other rulers
who want us all to agree that we are inconsequential as individuals and
that only the collective matters, only the "we" is important in
human affairs. Even though a little reflection shows how transparently
misguided is this notion, many are not inclined or equipped to address
the idea and this makes it simpler for those who want to anoint themselves
as the representatives of "we" to lord it over the rest of us.
Because all such "we" talk is, in fact, nothing but the
"I" talk of those who want there to be just a few ruling egos.
One cannot emphasize enough how significant this dispute really is. After
centuries of oppression a larger and larger segment of humanity has
finally begun to realize that what is really important politically, even
ethically, is the human individual. The rest is not unimportant but its
importance is derivative, secondary. If this is denied, the result is that
just a few will rule the rest because there really is no
"society," a "we," other than a great many egos in one
another's company. Once this is acknowledged, those would be rulers will
have lost their phony rationale to rule. So clearly they are not going to
simply give up.
So as to give these points their dramatic impact one could do much worse
than read or reread Ayn Rand's Anthem. It is a riveting celebration of
the individual human spirit.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Sentimental Reflections
Tibor R. Machan
My job in writing columns, as I see it, is to attempt to work out how the original American experiment could be extended and improved upon and made to serve the purpose of addressing various emerging political-economic problems. I do not confine myself to just this task but it is one of the more pressing ones for me. I guess one reason I took it on is that I experienced what I take to be the direct opposite way of social life when I was young, namely, Soviet style socialism. Having managed to escape it, I decided I would like to make sure there is no chance for it to reassert itself, especially in America.
Well, this task of mine is important and noble enough but there are times that I simply feel very, very sad about how few Americans find the ideas that distinguish their society from others appealing. Instead of championing and practicing initiative, inventiveness, ambition, adventure, enterprise, and the like, it now seems to me that most Americans have become belated dependents, people who care far more about what others should do for them, how the government should take care of them, how their problems should be solved by politicians and bureaucrats, than about maintaining a system of community life that supports human liberty, the kind of liberty that serves as a framework for personal and community initiative and rejects altogether the notion that people are owed a living by their fellows. And this is really a very sad situation.
For the first time in human history the American founders managed to establish a community the basic principles of which acknowledge individual sovereignty. They began rejecting, officially, the idea that inhabitants of human communities are subjects, subservient to the will of some special bunch of people with fancy titles. This was an extraordinary development and sadly by now most people have no appreciation for it. Instead some of the cleverest and most erudite people in America are hard at work to return the country to its former subservient position, whereby governments made all the decisions, whereby elected officials openly brag about wishing to rule, to run everything, and ordinary folks seem willingly to place themselves at the disposal of these would be rulers.
That really is a very sad thing. It doesn’t have to be but it seems very much the way most folks want it. Await for the state to figure out how one should live and provide various securities and guarantees instead of simply make sure our liberties aren’t trampled upon so we can proceed to help ourselves, alone or with the willing cooperation of others. No, this quintessentially American notion, however incompletely realized so far, is no longer even much of a notion. It is actively demeaned, ridiculed by the literati. Snide comments come from the well educated, and even the not so well educated like those in Hollywood, whenever such American ideas and ideals get some airing--as if what the American Founders began were some kind of silly joke instead of the most important and genuine human revolution in history.
It baffles me why this wonderful conception by the Founders and their followers is derided so much by the self-anointed fancy people--artists, professors, social scientists, and others--who see themselves as so superior to those infantile American Founders who thought every individual is a sovereign being, not beholden to anyone but his or her own conscience. Why is this notion so frightening to so many people so that they spend their lives writing books and essays knocking it? Why would such a wonderful thought become the target of so much sophist aced denigration?
This is a very big country and it has innumerable educated folks living off taxpayers in hundreds, even thousands of colleges and universities and instead of showing gratitude for being able to pursue careers they supposedly love, most of these people appear to be bitter, angry and nasty toward the very folks and system of ideas that provide their support. They never turn down a contribution to their institution from a successful entrepreneur and yet they hold these entrepreneurs in near total contempt!
I shall continue to attempt to inject a different idea into the culture, albeit in venues that are less than prominent. Still, I cannot desist, not while I realize that the American experiment is the most noble one in human social and political history. Perhaps I will be able to pave a bit of the way for a few among the next generation to not give up on the effort, to remain vigilant, so that in time the defeatists, the cynics will become the minority and will not rule the publishing houses, magazines, and higher education. It may happen.
Tibor R. Machan
My job in writing columns, as I see it, is to attempt to work out how the original American experiment could be extended and improved upon and made to serve the purpose of addressing various emerging political-economic problems. I do not confine myself to just this task but it is one of the more pressing ones for me. I guess one reason I took it on is that I experienced what I take to be the direct opposite way of social life when I was young, namely, Soviet style socialism. Having managed to escape it, I decided I would like to make sure there is no chance for it to reassert itself, especially in America.
Well, this task of mine is important and noble enough but there are times that I simply feel very, very sad about how few Americans find the ideas that distinguish their society from others appealing. Instead of championing and practicing initiative, inventiveness, ambition, adventure, enterprise, and the like, it now seems to me that most Americans have become belated dependents, people who care far more about what others should do for them, how the government should take care of them, how their problems should be solved by politicians and bureaucrats, than about maintaining a system of community life that supports human liberty, the kind of liberty that serves as a framework for personal and community initiative and rejects altogether the notion that people are owed a living by their fellows. And this is really a very sad situation.
For the first time in human history the American founders managed to establish a community the basic principles of which acknowledge individual sovereignty. They began rejecting, officially, the idea that inhabitants of human communities are subjects, subservient to the will of some special bunch of people with fancy titles. This was an extraordinary development and sadly by now most people have no appreciation for it. Instead some of the cleverest and most erudite people in America are hard at work to return the country to its former subservient position, whereby governments made all the decisions, whereby elected officials openly brag about wishing to rule, to run everything, and ordinary folks seem willingly to place themselves at the disposal of these would be rulers.
That really is a very sad thing. It doesn’t have to be but it seems very much the way most folks want it. Await for the state to figure out how one should live and provide various securities and guarantees instead of simply make sure our liberties aren’t trampled upon so we can proceed to help ourselves, alone or with the willing cooperation of others. No, this quintessentially American notion, however incompletely realized so far, is no longer even much of a notion. It is actively demeaned, ridiculed by the literati. Snide comments come from the well educated, and even the not so well educated like those in Hollywood, whenever such American ideas and ideals get some airing--as if what the American Founders began were some kind of silly joke instead of the most important and genuine human revolution in history.
It baffles me why this wonderful conception by the Founders and their followers is derided so much by the self-anointed fancy people--artists, professors, social scientists, and others--who see themselves as so superior to those infantile American Founders who thought every individual is a sovereign being, not beholden to anyone but his or her own conscience. Why is this notion so frightening to so many people so that they spend their lives writing books and essays knocking it? Why would such a wonderful thought become the target of so much sophist aced denigration?
This is a very big country and it has innumerable educated folks living off taxpayers in hundreds, even thousands of colleges and universities and instead of showing gratitude for being able to pursue careers they supposedly love, most of these people appear to be bitter, angry and nasty toward the very folks and system of ideas that provide their support. They never turn down a contribution to their institution from a successful entrepreneur and yet they hold these entrepreneurs in near total contempt!
I shall continue to attempt to inject a different idea into the culture, albeit in venues that are less than prominent. Still, I cannot desist, not while I realize that the American experiment is the most noble one in human social and political history. Perhaps I will be able to pave a bit of the way for a few among the next generation to not give up on the effort, to remain vigilant, so that in time the defeatists, the cynics will become the minority and will not rule the publishing houses, magazines, and higher education. It may happen.
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Soros' Follies Again
Tibor R. Machan
In the late 60s I was invited to listen to a fellow Hungarian refugee in Los Angeles discuss communism. I nearly walked out when he began with the refrain about how communism is such a wonderful ideal but, sadly, unattainable in practice. What wonderful ideal? The prospect of a worldwide intelligent ant colony, bound together completely with no individual initiative in play anywhere, all automatically serving humanity--is that some wonderful ideal? It is hell, so far as I can discern.
Well, I tell this story to give you a little idea how it strikes me whenever that famous financier George Soros, himself a Hungarian refugee from the Nazis and Communists, comes out with various political-economic pronouncements. He isn’t by any means someone deluded about the idealism of communism but he does, quite mistakenly, favor a widely regulated pseudo-capitalism.
Soros was interviewed recently in The New York Review of Books and presented his version of the late Karl Popper’s middle way politics, one that’s neither socialist nor capitalist. (Popper was a famous 20th century philosopher of science and political theorist.) As Soros put it,
“Now, we should not go back to a very highly regulated economy because the regulators are imperfect. They’re only human and what is worse, they are bureaucrats. So you have to find the right kind of balance between allowing the markets to do their work, while recognizing that they are imperfect. You need authorities that keep the market under scrutiny and some degree of control. That’s the message that I’m trying to get across.” (TNYRB, 5/15/08, p. 10).
This is a mess. First it tries to build some kind of coherent political-economic idea on the Popperian view that all our knowledge is imperfect, fallible, merely probable; nothing certain. OK but what follows from this? What justification is there for drawing any conclusion at all from such a position since that conclusion will itself only be uncertain, probable, iffy? Second, if the regulators, bureaucrats all of them, are especially imperfect--which is what public choice theory teaches, noting their institutional disorientation as persons-with-power-and-no-rational-restraints--why trust them at all? These “authorities” will only cause trouble and will not help at all with any mishaps in the market place where mishaps tend to be self-correcting, at least over time. (It’s no different in markets from what it is in life: freedom may not work the impossible dream of perfection but it enhances self-responsibility!) Third, of course, “markets” don’t do anything--they are but spheres of human activity, in this case mostly commercial, business or economic, and as such they are homes to innumerable forms of human conduct. No one can possibly control them except to cause them to experience distortions far worse than free men and women ever produce. Finally, how will this “right kind of balance between allowing the markets to do their work” and government regulation come about? Who will do this “allowing”--some king or other “authority” who is wiser than market agents? (This interview is replete with reference to this mythical “authority” that will fix things for us all!)
George Soros no doubt has a knack for global finance--he has proved it big time--although even that applies mainly to highly regulated state financial markets. He has never been tested in a fully free market of money and banking. But this knack gives absolutely no hint of wisdom concerning the broader sphere of political economy, of understanding how human beings think and act as citizens, as friends, as professionals, a vacationers, and as social and economic agents. For instance, while some of us are no doubt ill informed about some matters we ought to know better, it is silly to make a broad generalization that our knowledge is always imperfect. Well, some of if may be but in some other matters we are pretty knowledgeable and certainly this would not be improved upon by having a bunch of “authorities” barge in to mess with our decisions and actions wherever these “authorities” decide to do so.
One can, of course, read Soros’s mentor Karl Popper more generously to mean only that people know well enough but never in some final, timeless fashion. The world is constantly developing, changing, and knowledge will always need to be modified by new information. But nothing from this implies that we need authorities to regulate us--and, oddly, Soros himself seems to realize this when he sees the hazards of bureaucracy. Why he doesn’t draw the right conclusions form that beats me.
Tibor R. Machan
In the late 60s I was invited to listen to a fellow Hungarian refugee in Los Angeles discuss communism. I nearly walked out when he began with the refrain about how communism is such a wonderful ideal but, sadly, unattainable in practice. What wonderful ideal? The prospect of a worldwide intelligent ant colony, bound together completely with no individual initiative in play anywhere, all automatically serving humanity--is that some wonderful ideal? It is hell, so far as I can discern.
Well, I tell this story to give you a little idea how it strikes me whenever that famous financier George Soros, himself a Hungarian refugee from the Nazis and Communists, comes out with various political-economic pronouncements. He isn’t by any means someone deluded about the idealism of communism but he does, quite mistakenly, favor a widely regulated pseudo-capitalism.
Soros was interviewed recently in The New York Review of Books and presented his version of the late Karl Popper’s middle way politics, one that’s neither socialist nor capitalist. (Popper was a famous 20th century philosopher of science and political theorist.) As Soros put it,
“Now, we should not go back to a very highly regulated economy because the regulators are imperfect. They’re only human and what is worse, they are bureaucrats. So you have to find the right kind of balance between allowing the markets to do their work, while recognizing that they are imperfect. You need authorities that keep the market under scrutiny and some degree of control. That’s the message that I’m trying to get across.” (TNYRB, 5/15/08, p. 10).
This is a mess. First it tries to build some kind of coherent political-economic idea on the Popperian view that all our knowledge is imperfect, fallible, merely probable; nothing certain. OK but what follows from this? What justification is there for drawing any conclusion at all from such a position since that conclusion will itself only be uncertain, probable, iffy? Second, if the regulators, bureaucrats all of them, are especially imperfect--which is what public choice theory teaches, noting their institutional disorientation as persons-with-power-and-no-rational-restraints--why trust them at all? These “authorities” will only cause trouble and will not help at all with any mishaps in the market place where mishaps tend to be self-correcting, at least over time. (It’s no different in markets from what it is in life: freedom may not work the impossible dream of perfection but it enhances self-responsibility!) Third, of course, “markets” don’t do anything--they are but spheres of human activity, in this case mostly commercial, business or economic, and as such they are homes to innumerable forms of human conduct. No one can possibly control them except to cause them to experience distortions far worse than free men and women ever produce. Finally, how will this “right kind of balance between allowing the markets to do their work” and government regulation come about? Who will do this “allowing”--some king or other “authority” who is wiser than market agents? (This interview is replete with reference to this mythical “authority” that will fix things for us all!)
George Soros no doubt has a knack for global finance--he has proved it big time--although even that applies mainly to highly regulated state financial markets. He has never been tested in a fully free market of money and banking. But this knack gives absolutely no hint of wisdom concerning the broader sphere of political economy, of understanding how human beings think and act as citizens, as friends, as professionals, a vacationers, and as social and economic agents. For instance, while some of us are no doubt ill informed about some matters we ought to know better, it is silly to make a broad generalization that our knowledge is always imperfect. Well, some of if may be but in some other matters we are pretty knowledgeable and certainly this would not be improved upon by having a bunch of “authorities” barge in to mess with our decisions and actions wherever these “authorities” decide to do so.
One can, of course, read Soros’s mentor Karl Popper more generously to mean only that people know well enough but never in some final, timeless fashion. The world is constantly developing, changing, and knowledge will always need to be modified by new information. But nothing from this implies that we need authorities to regulate us--and, oddly, Soros himself seems to realize this when he sees the hazards of bureaucracy. Why he doesn’t draw the right conclusions form that beats me.
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