Fallacies of the Clunker Program

Tibor R. Machan

Most have no time to consider the big picture so when the clunker program comes their way, they think only of the immediate consequences. It all reminds me of those horrible failed urban renewal government plans to raze innumerable small city communities and built huge high rise apartments, plans that Robert Moses of New York City pushed on New Yorkers all the time, which the late Jane Jacobs, the brilliant theorist of city life, opposed most of her life. But when you present the artist conception of the new high rises it tends to look kind of cool and many people are seduced by them.

Same with the clunker trade in program--I will just toss my old jalopy and get me shiny new wheels. Never mind that the money you get from the government will eventually come out of your or, especially, your children's and grand children's pockets and the clunkers will end up in some junk yard that will cost millions and millions to clean up.

It appears that the recent build up of a housing bubble hasn't taught people anything at all. Much of it was due to easy credit, credit folks didn't really have coming to them based on their actual financial situation. To recover from this the bulk of the population would need to go on an austerity program at least until after they paid off the debt and got back into the financial saddle.

Instead of dealing with the matter with some patience and prudence, the instant fix-it Obama regime simply reintroduced various ways once more in which the country as a whole can go into massive debt, leaving the problem to be dealt with by members of a future--and now non-voting--citizenry. It is all still just as reckless as the many private accruals of credit had been but now it is more cleverly disguised because members of the current citizenry will not feel the pinch right away. It matters not at all to these people that they are imposing immense burdens on those who have no opportunity to accept or refuse them, not even by means of the democratic method. Once again the principle of "no taxation without representation" is flouted not only by violating it unabashedly but by not even acknowledging this fact and trying, however feebly, to argue against it.

The clunker program is especially cynical. Most of us have no chance of exploring the broader implications of current public policies--most of us just try to live with them, make the most of them for purposes of managing our current affairs. So if a politician engages in the massive violation of elementary principles of justice and fair play while handing his constituency resources confiscated from others--or "borrowed" from helpless future voters--most will just accept it and make the most of it, never mind how the process can progressively corrupt the system under which we live.

The clunker program will seem like manna from heaven to a great many people with old cars they wish they could trade in for newer ones on favorable terms. Never mind that the precedence set or continued with the program spells hardship for those who will be citizens in the future. They cannot protest and no politician, nor anyone in the major media, is going to bring up the matter since it is now and has been for decades quite routine and deemed acceptable. Republicans do it, Democrats do it, so no one on Meet the Press or the Op Ed pages of The New York Times or Washington Post is going to write in opposition to it since bringing the matter up for discussion will simply prompt one's opponents to say, "Hey but your party has been doing this for decades on end." Robbing Peter to subsidize Paul is what welfare state politics is all about and both the major parties are firmly committed to this system. All that is open for discussion is how deeply the country ought to sink into the morass the system creates.

I am not excusing ordinary folks for their eagerness to take advantage of a something-for-nothing federal program but I do wish to point out that such measures are by now so deeply entrenched in the country that one would need to do some very searching thinking about political economy to realize just how insidious it is. Few can devote the time needed to come to terms with this, so they just roll with the punches. And sadly the country lacks leadership in the mainstream that might remind folks of this fact.

Irrelevance of Ethnicity

Tibor R. Machan

CNN has just notified me by email that "Sonia Sotomayor [was] sworn in as U.S. Supreme Court justice; first Hispanic on high court." I signed up to receive notification of breaking news but the notification should not have made any mention of the lady's ethnicity. Or sex. Or race. Or height. Or indeed anything over which Justice Sotomayor has no control whatsoever unless it could be an impediment to her ability to serve in the new job she got.

I am, as some readers will recall, of Hungarian background. But this is not some achievement for which I should receive credit or blame or even be noticed, certainly not when it comes to my profession or how I am to be dealt with my the legal system. In personal matters it may have some significance. If I were to go on one of the cyber-dating web sites and I filled out a form about me, I might mention having been born in Budapest just in case some appealing potential partner had a yen for Hungarian food or music or something else associated with the country. But this is because in such matchmaking contexts one isn't mainly concerned with achievements or accomplishments but with tastes and preferences. And there is nothing wrong with having such a yen but everything with attaching some kind of moral or political importance to it. One might have a preference for a date or even mate who is tall or dark skinned or light, or one with a predilection for mountain climbing or bowling. Others who don't fit the bill will not be candidates. But to prefer someone with ethnic attributes of a certain kind for high office is political misjudgment. That Justice Sotomayor is a Hispanic should have absolutely nothing to do with her qualification for a place on the court, any more than my being of Hungarian extraction should have anything to do with whether I am qualified to vote in a political election.

This is why it disturbed me that CNN thought it important to mention Justice Sotomayor's ethnicity. I don't want to seem picky and, yes, there are times when where one comes from or where one has been raised as a child can be of some relevance to what kind of work one is doing. In my case, for example, since I do a good deal of writing in English, and given my origins I am not as fluent in English as my work might require me to be, it could be important to know that I will probably need some editing help with what I write, something that native speakers tend not to.When I was a young refugee here in the states and knew that I wanted to teach at the college level, I made sure that I had a great many chance practicing my new language, the third in my case. I always believed that it would be best not to obscure my message, in the classroom or elsewhere, by having too heavy an accent, so I used mimicking disc jockeys and learning the lyrics to popular as a way to prepare myself. (Yes, I never had the idea of receiving bilingual instructions in the various subjects I took--that was something that became a demand of later generations of immigrants.)

The idea that one should be color blind in one's interactions with people isn't something that applies universally, to all relations with others, either. Casting a movie about African slave revolts cannot be done without paying attention to color. Nor need one ignore color or ethnicity or other idiosyncratic attributes in others when it comes to one's personal aesthetic tastes. Some like the features of Asian or black or Mongolian potential mates. But when one has a clear job description to apply, these have no place in one's decision. Being a justice of the United States Supreme Court has nothing at all to do with what one's color or ethnic background happens to be and the fact that at one time it did is something very regrettable, the source of much injustice in history and should be completely erased in our selection procedures.

Of course, all that business of legally mandated affirmative action is what prolongs reaching this objective and does not in any way remedy the injustices of the past. Those injustices were perpetrated by and on people in the past. Those not being discriminated now have no business asking for remedies of such past injustices, any more than if some people in 1850 who robbed a house could have their ill gotten gains returned to their rightful owners by having their great grand kids pay compensation to the victim's great grand kids. If any such procedure would apply, it would have to be done with meticulous care, tracing the causal relationships from the event in the past to losses o harm claimed from them by those in the present. To try to skip this by some wave of the hand that says, "Well, we will just add to the benefits received by the grandchildren (or worse, people of similar race or skin color), never mind which individuals caused the harms to the grandparents" is a species of just the sort of racism that brought on all the problems and ought to be wiped out.

Democracy, When I Like the Outcome

Tibor R. Machan

Many moons ago California had a referendum, as only California can have them, promoted by the Democratic operative Bill Press, urging huge taxes on oil company incomes and profits, just about when the massive oil spill occurred in the Santa Barbara Channel. (I think it was immediately following the spill that Press imagined he could get the voters to lay in on Big Oil!) Alas, the voters went against Press's people and for Big Oil, but, of course, Mr. Press & Co., immediately cried foul. Clearly democracy was only a valid method for reaching public policy decisions when it favored what Mr. Press & Co., the Democrats, in other words, wanted. Anything else had to be corrupt, not bona fide democracy.

We are these days witnessing the same thing across the country. Mr. Obama & Co. want health care reform and they insist on doing it their way. As they spread across the land taking their plans to various communities, people are gathering to hear them and in lots of places they are not liking what they are hearing. So they protest, sometimes showing visible outrage with what they are hearing. And, yes, some of these meetings are attended by people who have been urged to show up by organizers who would like them to make it evident that they oppose the administration's plans.

Many of them probably took a leaf out of Mr. Obama's own book about how to organize communities to achieve exactly what these protesters and their own organizers have in mind. (Mr. Obama was famously involved in leading people in various communities to organize people so that they can more effectively promote their agendas.) But turn around is not fair play by any means, not if one listens to Mr. Obama's cheerleaders in the media, the likes of Paul Krugman, Gail Collins, and Charles M. Blow, all of them writing on the Op Ed page of The New York Times denouncing the protesters and whoever may or may not have had a hand in organizing them.

Why is it Democrats who finds it so intolerable when democracy doesn't go their way? Why can only those results that support their own "ideological agenda"--a term Mr. Obama & Co. like to deploy when they wish to besmirch the opposition--manage to be democratic, while when the vote or the meetings go against them, something must have undermined the democratic process? My guess is that many of these folks really do not want democracy at all. They have their plans, in which they have full confidence whether Americans across the country agree with them, and only when the majority likes those plans will majority rule--or even just minority participation--be something that's acceptable to them.

Mind you, it is not my point to insist on carte blanches for democracy, not by any means. I am in full accord with the implication of that famous example of misguided democracy provided by the lynch mob. However the majority might insist on hanging someone, if no due process was followed in convicting him, it's a no go. Democracy itself isn't sufficient. It must be guided by principles of justice, which is what due process brings to the table. Limited democracy, applied by restricting the process to matters open for a vote, is the ticket, not the bloated, illiberal sort so many enthusiasts want. An that is how democracy is supposed to work in a free country. Some rather few matters can be up for a vote, yes, but not everything. The Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution precisely in that spirit. No majority support for forcing people to worship in a given way can be legitimate; no majority support for shutting down disagreeable editorialists--and, by extension, community organizers--is legitimate. Not even majority support for taking people's property unless, again, due process has been in play.

Maybe Democrats should abide by the spirit that gave rise to the principles of their party. Even the Bush administration took it to heart not to roundly denounce the protesters of its policies by impugning their commitment to the democratic process.

Taxation Without Representation

Tibor R. Machan

Over the last year there has been an immense accumulation of national debt. Now in principle this is nothing new--the practice of funding projects with borrowed money is quite old but the scale has never been this huge. (Some may argue that war time debts were of greater percentage of the national budget but this is not war time.)

While Democrats are well known to be the routinely big spenders, Republicans aren't far behind, especially during the George W. Bush presidency. So my points have nothing to do with partisanship--plague on both your parties, I say. At this time, however, it is Republicans in Washington who are pointing fingers about the incredible national debt and how this will have to be paid for by our children, grandchildren, et al. But even the Republicans are silent about one of the colossal obscenities of all this, namely, that we have here a practice that runs smack up against one of the quintessential American principles, namely, "No taxation without representation."

I am not sure why hardly anyone is saying anything about this in the mainstream media but it is really quite gross: the people who will carry the burden of all this irrational spending aren't the ones who are voting for it or voting for the people in Congress who are voting for it all. No. The process of dumping all this debt on those who aren't even alive yet, not to mention cannot vote, is so out of line with the American political tradition that it simply baffles me that few commentators make mention of that fact.

For my money all taxation is extortion, a policy suitable to monarchies but not free societies. To pay for the job--a limited job at that--that government is supposed to perform, nothing coercive must be undertaken. No robbery, no burglary, no theft, no extortion, Nada. But this seems not to phase too many people, and certainly very few if anyone in the mainstream media. Yet the practice of extorting money from citizens is not consistent with the theory of rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence, nor indeed with the Bill of Rights (the 5th amendment, in particular). Yes, late in the day taxation was "authorized" by, well, those who wanted to do it. That's like bank robbers deciding that robbing banks is just fine. But it isn't of course. In the past it made some sense because the country "belonged to" the king or czar or some other despot. Because of this fiction, taxes could be levied on--rent could be collected from--those working within the ruler's realm.

But the country has changed from being ruled by a monarch to being governed by those who were selected by the citizens and this simply does not authorize anyone to expropriate a huge portion of our resources. Government must find a voluntary way to fund itself, no different from the dentist, shoe maker, golf pro or taxi driver. None of these people doing vital work have the authority to extort money. If they cannot find willing customers, they must find some work that people are willing to pay for. Anyone benefiting from the tax system is getting tainted funds.

Never mind this radical, albeit very true, doctrine of how to pay for legitimate public services. Assume that the way it was left by the American framers is kosher enough. Taxation is permissible provided those being taxed can vote on the policy. No taxation without representation, in short.

But this has now been totally subverted, so we are now moving back toward the time when governments owned the country and even us. And some of the major legal theorists advising the Obama administration, such as Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein, explicitly advocate just this viewpoint: Government owns everything and grants us the privilege of spending some of its money!

Well, maybe in time we will resume the more progressive public policy whereby government will promote the protection of individual rights instead of violating them.

Conspiracy Anyone?

Tibor R. Machan

Some questions about the release of two employees of Al Gore by the North Koreans and some other questions about the three persons who are still in custody in Iran.

First, what were these two ladies doing so near North Korea that they could be captured? Was this something innocent? Was their job to end up where they were captured and why so? No, these are not rhetorical questions on my part. I really don't understand and have heard no one address the issues. (Of course, there is also the question of just how much responsibility does a government have to rescue people who have negligently been exposed to such capture.)

Second, why would North Korea deal so readily, smoothly with Bill Clinton? And with Al Gore? Is there something afoot here we are nowhere near privy to? Maybe the objective is to give these American public figures something to brag about, somehow to endear themselves with the American public at a time when some of the current administration's plans are in trouble. Nothing like an emotionally pregnant event to get a lot of people to forget about public policy blunders. It is also possible, is it not, that North Korea finds the Clinton-Gore entourage more sympathetic to its socialist system than, say, some private, politically neutral party in America. I am sorry but I just will not accept that North Korea has suddenly become a friend of the United States of America and has nothing but good will up its sleeve. After all, why capture these people anyway? What have they done that deserved threatening them with 12 years of incarceration by officials of a system that has no conception of due process of law? And then why just let it all go?

Third, once out of reach of the North Koreans, why were the two women giving North Korea thanks? Have they been guilty of anything for which they have been generously forgiven? What's that? To all appearances they were being used criminally, in ways no human beings may be used by other human beings.

Fourth, I am always inclined to compare these kinds of events with what might have occurred at the time the Nazis ruled Germany. What if a similar thing had happened and Hitler "graciously" handed back some kidnapped journalists to some ex-president of the US? Would this have played out similarly? I doubt it. But then it seems like the current American government is giving a pass to North Korea for its totalitarian practices, for the famines its policies have produced and the deaths and misery they have caused. Or are we, perhaps, witnessing some cosiness between the Obama Administration and the glorious goals of a socialist government such as North Korea?

Then there is the not yet resolved Iranian fiasco, involving the three Americans who are said to have wandered into Iran from Iraq by accident. How does one do this? Why would one be so near that border and fail to realize that such carelessness could be deadly?

When back in 1974 I decided to visit communist Hungary, where I still had relatives, for the first time since I was smuggled out from there in 1953, I didn't simply take a sloppy walk and end up behind the Iron Curtain. No, I called the American embassy first and asked whether it would be safe to visit and was told they haven't lost an American there in 40 some years. So it seemed safe, even for an ex-Hungarian who, by that country's laws was still regarded a citizen and eligible for being drafted into the military there. Knowing this I made sure that some journalists in Vienna, the closest major Western city to Budapest, would be aware of my visit and start making hey if something happened to me. Even then I was hauled down to the police station and interrogated about my visit and my escape 20 years ago. I was in the hot seat for some three hours answering questions most of which I couldn't make sense of. But that was it, no further hassles.

The bottom line is, I don't see why these five Americans placed themselves in harms way. So I am tempted to consider some kind of conspiracy theory, especially seeing how the Iranians and North Koreans have been treated with kid gloves, not a harsh word, nothing. Go figure.

Dismissing Your Thoughts

Tibor R. Machan

When I entered college, after a four year stint in the US Air Force, I discovered that a great many intelligent people commit what is called the genetic fallacy. As the entry in Wikipedia puts it, this fallacy is committed when "a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context. This overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically transferring the positive or negative esteem from the earlier context."

Whenever I would voice any of my views about politics, economics, child rearing or whatever, these folks explained it away by my origins, my having been born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, then a Soviet (communist) satellite. Everything I thought and said was deemed to have been caused by my background.

This approach to understanding what people think and do has one very serious problem: the person's views who is doing the explaining would then also be subject to such an explanation; indeed, the explanation would have to be considered caused by that person's background. In the 20th century such a way of coming to understand people became very popular, mainly because how so many people were taken by Sigmund Freud's doctrine of unconscious motivation. By Freud's account, most of what we think and do is so motivated and our explicit convictions and claims to understanding can be pretty much dismissed. Notice how this undermines Freud's own views!

I always had personal misgivings about having my own ideas treated along these lines since they made my own thinking, reasoning, research and such all irrelevant--all that counts is where I was brought up and by whom. No one need actually come to terms even with any arguments I put forward since they have no impact on my thinking and conduct. (Karl Marx had a similar idea with his economic determinism according to which what people think is due to the economic circumstances in which they live! Once again, this would seem to undermine his own ideas but Marx was at least aware of this and tried hard to exempt himself by claiming that unlike all others, he had a proper methodology for figuring things out which made him immune to economic determinism.)

When I got to graduate school I read a wonderful book by Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (U. of Chicago, 1953), which fully supported my own rejection of any of the many uses of the genetic fallacy. Strauss found it very objectionable that so many historians of ideas would study Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes and most other major philosophers by attributing their views to the environmental influences on them. Sure, at times this is a valid point to make but it needs showing in each particular case, not simply assumed about everybody.

In 1962, before I entered college, I had a half hour meeting with the novelist philosopher Ayn Rand whose novels I encountered in the Air Force and liked a lot and I said to her something like, "Maybe the reason I like your books so much is that like you, I too escaped to the West from a communist country." Rand very politely objected saying, in effect, her novels and the ideas in them spring mainly from her mind and her careful reflections, not from her environment. She observed that her aim is to make points that hold for human beings, not just for her and others who escaped from tyrannies.

Over the last couple or so decades several biographies have appeared about Ayn Rand. The one that I think largely respects Rand's and Strauss's points about how to understand a thinker is Barbara Branden's The Passion of Ayn Rand (Doubleday, 1986). The other two, one by Dr. Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical (Penn State University Press, 1995), and the just completed Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Doubleday, 2009), by Anne C. Heller, both give an account of Rand's life and thinking mostly by reference to her history--her childhood circumstances and upbringing.

It seems, however, that these authors do not fully appreciate that if they deal with Ayn Rand this way, they, too, invite being so treated--what Sciabarra and Heller say can then be simply explained away as coming from their own upbringing. And that means the issue of whether what they say is true is moot.

I hope that someone outside her own circle of admirers would someday write a book about Ayn Rand that approaches her in her own terms--examining whether her ideas are sound, not what caused them.

Real Economic History

Tibor R. Machan

Although I am no historian, I do have an interest in what happened and why, especially involving big economic events of the past. One such event is the Great Depression. I just attended a superb week long conference, Cato University, where not only did I present a couple of lectures of my own, n the field of political philosophy but listened to quite a few others mainly about history.

Usually I am surrounded by writings and broadcasts that fawn over President Obama's policies and the philosophical and economic ideas surrounding them but this time I spend an entire week during which extremely knowledgeable people presented carefully reasoned analyses about some other periods of American history during which the American and indeed the world economy was going through various gyrations and people were, as usual, blaming it all on "greed" and freedom just as many mainstream, Obama supporting commentators do today.

I will not attempt to reproduced what I heard and learned but I do wish to recommend at least one piece of reading material that could, if paid close attention to, set the record straight about how America got into its various economic messes. I have in mind Professor Robert Higgs' path breaking Crisis and Leviathan (Oxford University Press, 1987). This book is a real gem. It shows with extensive research and analysis that those running governments repeatedly--and often deliberately--take advantage of economic troubles so as to amass power and once the troubles have subsided rarely return the power to their populations. Instead they hoard it.

Some of the lectures I heard included power point presentations and it was fascinating to see direct quotations and sometimes video and audio records of major government officials being openly gleeful about how the current economic fiasco provides them with the chance to grab power. They didn't even think of disguising their opinions but declared unabashedly that this is a great time to take advantage, for all those who like meddlesome government.

Something else that was clear from many of the lectures is that a great many people in American government, both at the time of the New Deal and now, reject completely the ideas and ideals of the major American Founders and believe, with the likes of Alexander Hamilton, that America should be a top down political system, a monarchy. Hamilton, you see, was disappointed when George Washington would not allow himself to be appointed king of this country, as were many who stood with Hamilton and wished that America simply took on the form of government of Great Britain. All this stuff about individual rights, based on a foundation of a mostly unchanging human nature, didn't set well with these folks back then, just as it doesn't sit well with Obama's team of legal theorists today (such as Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein). Such people denied then, and do now, that individuals have any rights except the privileges granted to them by administrators of governments (just as in the past such people believed that it is the king who hands out privileges, selects the favored in the population, with no regard to anything like natural, individual rights).

In one of my own lectures I laid out how the Lockean theory of individual rights presents us all with bulwarks against tyranny by requiring the limitation of governmental powers. Because of this revolutionary theory, based on Locke's excellent understanding of human nature--our nature as morally responsible beings, not mere puppets of the state--the U. S. Constitution laid out a very limited set of powers for government and recognized that it is citizens who have sovereignty, not states. Accordingly, government may only deal with certain tasks in a society, ones assigned to it by a process of the consent of the governed--mostly how to fend off criminals and foreign aggressors--and must leave all the other projects that are to benefit the people for the people themselves to handle in mutual peace, never coercively.

Just now, of course, this idea is not even given the slightest respect by Obama & Co. When, for example, Obama claimed that all economists agree with him about the need for a massive stimulus, some researchers at the Cato Institute produced a document with the names of about 250 respected professors of economics from universities and colleges around the country who disputed the wisdom of the stimulus. This flatly contradicted Mr. Obama's claim, yet he never acknowledged the existence of these scholars and kept repeating the lie about how there exists a consensus about the economic wisdom of his stimulus plans.

What was especially fascinating about the historical lectures at Cato University is that they showed that the same kind of preverications dominated previous episodes of economic crises even though in every case the cause of them was widely known to be earlier government malpractice. Despite this, the lies are now repeated by some of the most prestigious academic cheerleaders of Mr. Obama's policies!

I only wish everyone in this country could attend an event such as Cato University. It might contribute to the rescue of the country from the control exercised by people like Mr. Obama who are nearly certain to cause more mischief than produce anything sound and useful.

Sound Revolutions Rest on the Past

Tibor R. Machan

The idea may appear to be an oxymoron but it isn't. The seeds of a sound revolution do not come out of a vacuum. Although the American Founders did upend the previous practice of entrusting countries into the hands of monarchs, czars, and other potential despots, the roots of the individualism with which they achieved this were already in place.

It all came out of the idea of personal responsibility, something the ancient Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--as well as some less well know ones, such as Alcibiades--embraced and championed. There was, however, a disjoint afoot. Only ethics, the concern about how persons ought to act, was influenced significantly by the notion, not politics. At least not much of it. The morally virtuous life championed by these thinkers had been individualist--after all, to be morally virtuous had to be something that individuals had to choose. There is no ethical life without choice. Aristotle, who is often said to have been a kind of communitarian in his politics was, in fact, an individualist when it came to ethics. Moral virtues such as prudence, honesty, generosity, courage and even justice--more a political than an ethical virtue--depend for their practice on individuals thinking and acting right. Being forced to be virtuous is indeed an oxymoron--ethics presupposes free choice, a free will on the part of the agent.

But while this ethical individualism had been strongly suggested way back then, the corresponding political individualism lagged behind. One may assume this to have been one result of, among other things, a great deal of tribal thinking--people tended to worry mostly about their group's survival, which was the main if not only approach to personal survival. (In time this changed but habits die hard!) And the ethical demands placed on people were already substantially individualistic--they were responsible personally, as individuals ultimately, to do the right thing and blameworthy if they failed to do it.

However, this came into conflict with the demands of politics which often put citizens into a position of subservience. (Sparta was the quintessential case in point.) Nonetheless, this element of ethical individualism--so well discussed by the late David L. Norton, in his superb book, Personal Destinies, A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton University Press, 1976)--eventually bloomed into the social and political individualism that the American Founders laid down as the foundation of their new country. Yes, it was revolutionary but, no, it wasn't without earlier philosophical foundations.

The problem is, of course, that the political collectivism of the past keeps resurfacing whenever people turn to politics, especially in scary times like now. The teachings of the Founders haven’t managed to thoroughly sink in, so that many people still believe that politics cannot be individualistic especially in times of trouble, even if in fact only an individualist politics will help them out of their messes.

Many misguidedly think that in scary times solutions have to be socialist, communitarian, social democratic, or some other modern version of collectivist--and thus coercive—public policy, instead of the classical liberal idea of limited government that rests on a social, economic, legal and other form of individualism.

Still, over time the individualist, classical liberal political economy has shown (to anyone who pays close attention) that it really is the best way to handle problems of human community life. The public good is indeed what the American Founders believed, the protection of the basic rights of individuals. Yes, there is such a thing as the public good or interest but it is limited to providing everyone with the protection of his or her rights to life, liberty and property. Other problems can best be solved when this appropriately limited public good is secured and not when governments assume responsibility for everything.

The truth of individualism is not that nothing but individuals matter but that they matter the most. So whatever else matters must not interfere with the conditions that make their flourishing possible.

Affirmative Actions & Related Collectivisms

Tibor R. Machan

The Obama regime is not very difficult to figure out because Obama & Co. have a very straightforward collectivist outlook. For example, they are evidently determined to even the score between white and black Americans. Since back then the whites--or a lot of them--did blacks very wrong, it is time to do whites very wrong at the hands of blacks--or at least some blacks. Slavery and segregation weren't malpractices by certain, many, white individuals but by the white race. And now this race needs to pay. It is all very tribal, like virtually every other issue Obama & Co. deal with.

This is not simply a mistake on this or that score, like laying in on the police in Boston because one has done something in the Henry Louis Gates episode that Mr. Obama considers unjustifiable. Indeed, because a black person, an eminent one at that, had a confrontation with a white one, a police officer who believed he was doing his duty, the details don't matter. Even if Mr. Obama was ignorant of the details, as he admitted he was, what matters to his tribal mentality is just that one of the people was black, the other white. Or so it appears from everything known about the situation.

For collectivists individuals don't matter, groups do. For some it is the entire human race that is of sole concern, for others it is members of a given race or nation or ethnic or some other smaller group. Collectivists have an explicit doctrine about this, no one need to be guessing. Individuals are figments of our social imagination. They exist no more than do cells in our bodies exist as independent, sovereign entities. Sovereignty, the right of self-government, belongs only to the group. You and I and the rest of individuals are parts or elements, just as ants are in an ant colony or bees in a bee hive. The colony or the hive matters. This is why collectivists always fret about society or community. For them these are not what people individually choose to be part of, no way. These are what all "individuals" literally belong to.

Apart from Karl Marx and Auguste Comte of years gone by, in our own time the most powerful advocate of this point of view is Professor Charles Taylor, who teaches philosophy in Canada (last I knew he taught at McGill University). Among his followers, either explicitly or implicitly, are several of the more famous people on the Obama team such as the recently appointed regulation czar Cass Sunstein, a very prolific and inventive legal theorists who is now a professor at the Harvard Law School (probably on leave while working with Obama). Among his latest ideas is to restrict expression on the Internet because much of it amounts to rumors and derails the discussions he wants for us to have. His forthcoming book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, makes no bones about the need for supervision of the Web. Recently he and a co-author laid out the theory of nudging, whereby government is supposed to manage the citizenry via subtle, difficult to detect prompters that regulators would put in place in line with the purposes of the executive branch.

Collectivism is, of course, false--people are, in fact, individuals and when they are members of groups this is largely of their own doing. And they normally enjoy the exit option, unless constrained by other individuals. And these other, power hungry individuals always choose to represent themselves as speaking for the group. That is exactly the style of Obama & Co. That is why most of the time he speaks of public policies he insists on speaking as "we" and not as "I". But now and then the I does slip out, as when the president tells his audience that "I want health care [or insurance or whatever] reform by such and such a date." The dictatorial tone is unmistakable.

The individualist revolution that overthrew the earlier versions of collectivism (such as czarism and other forms of monarchy--which, oddly, were more honest than the current types) is still struggling to make its mark. And just now it is experiencing a serious setback. Only the proverbial eternal diligence will resuscitate it.

Analogies aren't Identities

Tibor R. Machan

When some senators during the hearings on Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the U. S. Supreme court compared judges to baseball umpires who call balls in or out, supporters of Judge Sotomayor were upset. They, such as Fred Kaplan of Slate, in his Op Ed column for the July 20, 2009, issue of The New York Times, noted that "laws are more complex than strike zones or foul lines, which is why the analogy between judges and umpires is so misleading."

The criticism Kaplan offers of the Senators misfires. When people use analogies, they are not maintaining either explicitly or implicitly that the analogous case is identical to the one they are attempting to explain. No one in his right mind thinks that referees are doing the very same work that's done by members of the United States Supreme Court--or indeed by members of other courts--as they rule on cases that come before them. What is true, however, is that there are elements to their ruling that are similar to the ruling made by umpires. In particular, when an umpire invokes the principle that balls that are outside the region prescribed by the game are unacceptable while those in are, a similar thing happens to when a justice invokes the U. S. Constitution to determine whether a position taken by a litigant before it fits within the principles of the U. S. Constitution (and other relevant documents, such as Supreme Court precedents).

So, of course, cases are far more complex than pitched balls. The point, however, is that just as in baseball the game's basic principles may not be ignored by umpires, so it is with the rulings of the judges and justices of courts. Otherwise the game and the law, respectively, become distorted. Since, however, some people do not like the principles of the U. S. Constitution, they are happy to distort them, consider them, as modern liberal legal theorists have said, part of a living document. By "living" they didn't mean to say it was some kind of biological organism--the Constitution is supposed to be, once again, analogous and not identical to living beings--but that it grows and changes and develops.

Unfortunately, for many such modern liberal legal theorists the U. S. Constitution is more like a cancerous than a living document--it can develop any which way, without rhyme or reason apart from what the judges and justices prefer (based on their own political, moral or pragmatic outlook). The Republican Senators who invoked the analogy of the baseball empire might have known that what they put forth would be jumped all over. This, after all, is a serious dispute. There are some serious people who believe that the principles of the U. S. Constitution are stable and lasting, while there are others who think they are now outmoded, even obsolete. Many conservatives and libertarians belong among the first group while modern liberals among the second.

One area where this is clear and indisputable is with regards to the Bill of Rights. For modern liberal legal theorists, in the main, the original Bill of Rights contains some but by no means all the rights they think human beings have. (Professor Cass Sunstein, the president's friend and strong ally, is one such theorist.) That is why they are so fond of Franklin Delaware Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights, one that FDR tried to get the U. S. Supreme Court to adopt by packing the court with justices who would agree with him politically.

The original Bill of Rights lists mainly what are called negative individual rights, rights that amount to prohibitions of interference with the liberty of individuals. FDR's Second Bill of Rights lists some of these but mixes in a bunch of new "rights," now called positive. These are what give rise to entitlements. If one has the right, for example, to health care or some other provision of the welfare state, that requires positive action by others, action that will produce the provisions (work, property, creativity, etc.). Negative rights only require that people refrain from doing certain things, like murder, assault, theft, fraud, etc. They don't require service from others to someone. Positive rights, however, do.

The living constitution that modern liberals talk about--the one I have dubbed cancerous--has stripped the idea of individual rights of its original function (e.g., in the thinking of the famous theorist of natural rights, the philosopher John Locke) to fend off government interference, to contain or limit government to certain specific powers. This is just what modern liberals don't want--consider the questioning during the hearings by the new Wisconsin Senator Al Franken who wanted to drive home the point that any powers Congress asserts for itself ought to be granted and not revoked by the U. S. Supreme Court.

So the analogy is a vital one but not because baseball umpires do exactly what judges and justices do--or vice versa--but because in both cases certain basic principles are supposed to guide judgment.

My American Dream

Tibor R. Machan

Now and then one hears or reads reference to "the American Dream," as if there was just one such thing. In fact, however, what is uniquely American is just that Americans are supposed to be free to dream their own dreams, pursue their own happiness as they understand it, instead of falling in line with what some elite or the government declares to be everyone's prime concern.

Very loosely the American dream refers to a certain measure of prosperity, including home and vehicle ownership, along with what makes this possible, namely, a decent line of work, a productive job. These are broadly enough definable so that they do not amount to a one-size-fits-all idea for one to have to buy into. Just like happiness, to the pursuit of which all human beings have a right (as per the Declaration of Independence), the American dream can vary enormously from person to person. It is, however, the American dream because of that very fact, while the dreams of citizens elsewhere tend to be forced or nudged into alignment with the dreams of their political or cultural leaders.

When I first came to the United States of America, I was 17 and a half years old and was very involved in learning about America. I did this even before arriving here, mostly by reading novels by the likes of Zane Gray, Erle Stanley Garner, Mark Twain, and others who were famous among the young even outside of the country. Thinking back on it, I cannot identify any one thing that the novels of these authors agreed on would qualify as the American dream. Certainly nothing specific, nothing concrete. At most they conveyed the notion that in America men and women prize their liberty and prefer taking on the job of governing their own lives as they see fit. Yes, if this is meant by the American dream, there was something like it in the air wherever one came across Americans and their stories, real or fictional. It seemed to me back then that Americans stood out by not concerning themselves with following the herd, with doing routinely what their neighbors did, with reaching some kind of standard of life considered to be the average or mean. They had their own standards of success, or at least they projected this as Americans. And that is one main reason I set my eyes on coming to live here. The envy-driven concern about equality just seemed absent here, while it dominated the countries under the thumb of the Soviets, for example.

Sadly much of this has changed. Now talk of the American dream tends to imply wanting everyone to be equally well of as everyone else is, the dream of egalitarianism. If some have it very good, well, then it's unjust that others don't. Never mind setting out on one's own path, as an artist, engineer, banker, architect, soldier or whatever, because one of those fulfills one's personal aspirations. That would be the old version of the American dream, at least as I understood it.

But truth be told I and others like me who came here from abroad, even from such hell holes as the communist countries were, didn't worry much about some American dream, not if it had anything to do with some one-size-fits-all blueprint to be implemented in one's life. No, it was mostly all about doing what one wants to do, pursuing one's personal dream, one's own, if you will, American dream. And respecting the rights of others do likewise.

Of course America didn't quite live up to this more sensible rendition of "the dream" since many were still disenfranchised, even oppressed, who lived here. But comparatively speaking America made plenty of room for the pursuit of one's dream and still does, judging by how many millions across the globe want to come here to live and work even in the mids of difficult economic times and how many want its institutions emulated. No doubt, there is ample dissent afoot about this, as well. And some would actually embark upon remaking America according to the dictates of certain religious books and leaders. Even while they see the value of economic opportunity in this country, they do not connect it with its basic political philosophy of individualism and individual rights.

For me living my own American dream will do just fine, even if others want to impose something quite different. I just hope my children and indeed all children will still find it possible to do this in the future.

Health Insurance and Collectivism

Tibor R. Machan

Anyone who grasps the political big picture must have figured out that President Obama and his team of so called liberal--but really, social--democrats are collectivists of the first order. For them society is a large bee hive or ant colony, and they are convinced that they have landed the job of the managers of this collective entity. It is a bit ironic, actually, since it is usually liberal democrats who, in America at least, champion "the right of privacy." That is the case when it comes to, say, abortion or sodomy which, of course, are arguably matters of private concern. (The difficulty with abortion is that there is no consensus in the country about when a human being comes into existence--whether, for example, a zygote or embryo or fetus is a human individual and thus has human rights.) Apart, though, from the right to privacy--say, a woman's right to choose whether to continue with her pregnancy or a couple's right to engage in any kind of peaceful sexual escapades--liberal democrats do not acknowledge the existence of individual rights. Most of all they are now nearly unanimous about denying that there are private property rights. (The exception is when it comes to publishing houses and the press. With reference to these they are willing to invoke property rights since that is the best way to ward off censorship!)

So when it comes to providing people with health insurance, liberal democrats dogmatically assume that "the wealth of the country" is for them to use and dispose of as they see proper. Individuals have no rights to their resources, income, or wealth, especially not those individuals who have plenty of these. Once you make more than $250K, say Obama & Co., the wealth is not yours but belongs to us all so society's managers may spend it as they see fit. Sure, there needs to be some decision process in Washington about how the spending will proceed. But the individual citizens who came by the resources, income or wealth--by hard work, good luck, or some other honest means--have no say. As the ailing Senator Teddy Kennedy put it in a recent communique from his sickbed, "Health care is a basic human right!"

Yet this only goes if health care were like liberty--all others need to do to respect one's right to liberty is, well, nothing. Their work would not need to be conscripted so as to ensure that others are not killed, assaulted, or robbed. Just leave them all be and make sure when you interact with them they give their consent. But this isn't how a right to health care or health insurance--and many similar so called entitlements of the welfare state--are secured. To provide people with health care doctors, nurses, hospital personnel, medical researchers, and drug manufacturers, among others, need to be at work and if they are to be compensated for this, the compensation must come from yet some other people's resources. Or, as the liberal democrats see it, from the common pool of the country's wealth. No one's wealth then is really confiscated because they don't own any wealth, only produce it for the commonwealth. Like a family or club or some other collective which is, however, usually held together by the voluntary agreement of all the members.

So for liberal democrats individuals have no property rights--not even rights to their liberty the exercise of which normally creates one's income, small or large. (This is why it is such an obscenity that liberal democrats have hijacked the term "liberal" which used to refer to individual freedom!) While they appear at times to care about rights--as noted above, the right to privacy is one they roll out in certain limited cases--this is by no means their general political stance. Instead, they seem to believe that we ourselves are the property of the country, even the government, which they may lay claim to whatever comes from us, be it work, thought, time, skills, or material resources. And if one insists that there is something awfully wrong with all this, they will insist that one is just being greedy!

When the novelist philosopher Ayn Rand was asked about whether it would be possible to form a political movement in support of a genuine free society her answer was, "It's earlier than you think." What she meant is that the people in this culture--not to mention others around the globe--aren't yet willing to embrace liberty. Too many people embrace, instead, the reactionary idea--not at all progressive, as the Left would like to have everyone believe--that we are all members of a tribe for which we owe unconditional allegiance. This despite the fact that America, of course, is just the country that was founded on the rejection of that outlook and built on the view that individuals are sovereign and everyone must accept this in a civilized country.

Is It All Luck?

Tibor R. Machan

Woody Allen has been peddling the idea that it's all a matter of luck (v. no luck). Several of his movies promote this idea--Match Point and Whatever Works are just two recent ones. Crimes and Misdeameanors is an early one.

Well, much may be luck or its absence but much also isn't. This is a case of what I called in one of my early books, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (1973), the blow up fallacy. It involves taking a picture--i. e., considering--some small portion of the world or life and seeing it quite clearly but then making the leap of applying it to everything.

The blow up fallacy, also known by other names (hasty generalization, for example), is very tempting and widely committed, especially by erudite people--a good many economists, sociologists, biologists, and others like them. These folks know a thing or two about some part of the world--their own discipline, usually--and then claim that what they know about it is actually something they know of the entire world.

In this instance of its application, one may find that quite a few things are a matter of luck. Indeed, most of us have lucked out big time in some cases, as when while we turned around and talked to someone in the back seat of the car, no one crossed the street and so we didn't smash into anyone. Or, as in my own case, when a huge brush fire engulfs one's neighborhood, one's house is "spared." And so on and so forth, luck, just as its absence, plays a part in one's life, no doubt about it.

But that surely isn't the whole story. Consider Mr. Allen himself. Although even in the few published and broadcast interviews he has given he insists that it's all luck, the fact that he gets it together quite competently, even at times superbly, whenever he sets out to make his movies belies the point of view he is peddling. And as the British psychologist Bannister remarked about those in his own field, “... [one] cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture.” Woody just cannot claim that it is all a matter of luck when, in point of fact, hardly anything about his own work fits the bill.

Why then make this assertion? I do not know Mr. Allen and haven't some way to accessing the content of his mind, let alone his motivations, yet I venture to guess the reason may well be that he finds it awkward to take credit, just as all those academy award recipients do who wave off the compliment implied by the award they received show--or feign--humility. "No, it is not me, it's my mother, brother, second grade teacher and, of course, all the others associated with the movie!" Or something to this effect.

This calls to mind what W. H. Auden said in another context, namely, "We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know." This can be paraphrased, "We are here never to accept compliments, only others may, but then why may they but not us?"

It is, I venture to suggest, mainly a matter of being badly taught about how things get accomplished in this world. The eggheads tend to tell us that we individual persons are nothing to brag about, that it is dangerous pride to take credit, that humility is the name of the game. Never mind that they, the eggheads, tend to have great pride in producing insights like this, or at least they are superbly confident that they get it right! But then they themselves must be taking credit for how well they have figured things out. And if they can take credit for that, why not others for different achievements, great or small?

No, it is only partly luck. And even the part of it that is luck needs to be made good use of before it can be of benefit.

Logic a la Obama

Tibor R. Machan

By now few who pay attention can have missed President Obama's enthusiastic embrace of pragmatism, especially when it comes to the administration's economic policies. Nor is it a secret that nothing much the the President is proposing seems to be working. (To which the answer given by the Obama team is "Things could be much worse." Pretty much an unprovable proposition.)

But if one understands pragmatism at its most essential level, this all is quite easy to grasp. Not only does pragmatism include the denial of any basic principles in politics, ethics, and public policy. It goes much further than that.

Although it was the late Professor Richard Rorty, dubbed by most who knew his work a radical pragmatist, who laid out the position's wildest elements--e.g., that there is no truth apart from what one's community considers to be true, that what matters is solidarity and not rationality--pragmatism was wild way back when it was first invented. Among its wildest elements was the doctrine that logic itself is a mere human invention having no necessary relationship to reality. We elect to use logic but we could just as well use something else entirely.

This position, worked out in considerable detail by the American pragmatist philosopher C. I. Lewis, had some initial impact that showed just how wild it is. For quite a while in the early 20th century there were serious attempts to come up with what was referred to as alternative logics. (The most famous of these efforts was made by a Polish logician by the name of Jan Łukasiewicz. In 1917 he made some provocative contributions to logical theory, including that of multivalued logic, a logic in which meaningful statements may be other than just true or false.)

But so far as general philosophy is concerned, it is mainly the pragmatists who spread the idea that no basic principles can be identified in any discipline so what needs to be realized that the best that can be done is to find some heuristic guidelines, to discover whatever works (which is also the philosophically pregnant name of a current Woody Allen movie!). But since what works is always related to some goal--one thing may work to achieve this goal but not that--this did not settle matters much at all. No rational consensus could come from this.

Now all this is important when one considers that our current president is a well educated man for whom being a pragmatist doesn't simply mean being someone who "plays it by ear," the way the term is used in everyday language. No, a serious pragmatist is one who rejects the idea of basic principles in any area, so that no one can hold him or her responsible to be loyal to principles, to fundamental ideas. And this extends all the way to the most basic criterion for theoretical adequacy, namely, to logic.

Normally if a system of thought, including a proposed public policy, is to pan out, it has to be at least logical, internally consistent and complete enough within the context of the concern to which it is address (e.g., economics, public policy, etc.). But with the pragmatic take on these matters this requirement is dispensed with. Policies need not be logical! No consistency is needed. Just see if it might pan out somehow, anyhow, perhaps.

Consider the Obama policy toward health care reform. On the one hand it is supposed to contain, even lower federal health care cost. That is the president's first promise! But then we have the director of the COngressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, saying that no reduction in federal health spending is possibly forthcoming from the President's plan. And then when this is pointed out to Obama point woman Kathleen Sebelius on Meet the Press by the program's host, she waved it aside. And so she should, as a member of the Obama administration's pragmatic team players. A little contradiction just means nothing since contradictions are human artifacts, inventions anyway; they do not point to serious problems with an idea or policy proposal.

Perhaps you are now thinking of that famous quip by Ralph Waldo Emerson about how consistencies are the hobgoblins of little minds! But what Emerson actually said had to do with "foolish" consistencies, not serious ones, so that will not help here. The bottom line is that the country is now being administered by powerful people who have no interest in any principles, be these matters of ethics, politics or even logic. This is how these folks can remain entirely immune to all criticism!

Sotomayor vs. Ricci

Tibor R. Machan

During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about whether Judge Sonia Sotomayor should be nominated to the U. S. Supreme Court, a nomination which if approved by the committee's majority would then go to the full Senate for a vote (that the Judge is assured to win), one of the most controversial issues discussed was the Judge's signing on to a very brief ruling affirming a lower court's decision to support a city government's invalidation of a test for firefighters which the majority—all of them "white" though one of Puerto Rican background—had passed. This group who passed the test sued the city for what it did after the test had been administered.

Now I am no expert at the laws governing these kinds of cases but I do give and have given tests to students over my 40 year career as a college professor. And from my experience, which has involved applying standards of fairness in the course of grading my students, it seems clear that there was something amiss about what the city did. Here is how Emily Bazelon of Slate described the background of the case in her May 26, 2009, article:

"In 2003, the city of New Haven, Conn., decided to base future promotions in its firefighting force—there were seven for captain and eight for lieutenant—primarily on a written test. The city paid an outside consultant to design the test so that it would be job-related. Firefighters studied for months. Of the 41 applicants who took the captain exam, eight were black; of the 77 who took the lieutenant exam, 19 were black. None of the African-American candidates scored high enough to be promoted. For both positions, only two of 29 Hispanics qualified for promotion." In consequences the city through out the results of the test. And this is what the fire fighters, lead by Ricci, protested in their lawsuit.

Suppose I announce at the start of my class that there will be two papers and a final given to determine what grade a student will receive. When I receive the papers and the test from them, I notice that all the male students who took them did badly, while all the female ones did well. So I decide to scrap these results and devise a new and different method for grading my students.

Those who passed the tests would be fully justified in protesting—unless the test contained some major infelicities, such as grossly incoherent questions—and what I would have done could by no stretch of the imagination be considered sound, valid, or justified.

The Ricci case, as far as I can grasp it, is no different. Maybe a future test could warrant modification but not the one for which the firefighters prepared and which they then took in good faith, believing that the tests will be instrumental in their quest for promotion.

I am puzzled, though, why anyone would find what the city officials of New Haven, Connecticut, and the panel of judges that included Sotomayor did
kosher. If there is any place for concern about fairness, surely it is when tests are administered in cases such as that involving the New Haven firefighters. If the test that was administered was, despite all efforts, flawed and treated the minority group among the firefighters wrongly, the approach that would be required is to revise the test for its future use. This seems to me plainly true and not very complicated.

But it seems that the eagerness to apply nearly any version of affirmative action policies has blinded a lot of folks to all this. Even if one accepts the policy of government mandated affirmative action—which is a highly debatable one for sure in a country that is set on eliminating racial and ethnic criteria from its public policies—the good faith effort shown in New Haven in designing a good test should suffice to have the test results be binding.

The reason this is a key issue in Judge Sotomayor's hearings is that what she did suggests that she may indeed fail to appreciate that the law needs to be color blind or neutral about people's background, ethnicity, and so forth—about matters, in other words, that are irrelevant to a candidate's suitability for a job. The rule of law means just this, namely, what rules is an impartial law, not any judge's preference.

The Left's Dismissal of Individual Rights

Tibor R. Machan

For those of us who have escaped Draconian tyrannies and reached America, for a long time it may be difficult to adjust to the fact that American Leftists are every bit the fascists that some claim they are. As Susan Sontag said, "Communism is successful fascism." A little inspection of modern American liberalism will also bring this to light--just consider that it was Woodrow Wilson and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who had no patience with opponents of various public policies governments forged during their time and sent those opposed to them to prison. (It was Warren Harding, that negligible right-winger, who eventually set these dissidents free!)

Today the Left's fascistic tendencies are still quite evident, although there is often a kind of sophistication about them (e. g., via the doctrine of Communitarianism). Anyone who reads The New York Review of Books can testify to this. No matter what public policy issues is being discussed in its pages, The Review always treats the wealth of the nation as collectively owned, rejecting that quintessentially American idea of the right to private property. No, everything belongs to us all and government is to allocate the resources in line with how the elite deems proper.

In a recent discussion of the Obama administration's so called reform of the health care system--a reform that's really a revolution in American terms since it involves the nationalization of the system--once again it is clear that the folks over there just think the government has the authority and power to conscript our labor and confiscate our resources in support of whatever scheme they believe we ought to swallow. This is pretty much what we get in Arnold Relman's essay, "The Health Reform We Need & Are Not Getting" (July 2, 2009).

Relman has retired from Harvard's Medical School and is very closely linked with Canada's system and I am not interested in the specifics of his recommendations. What is far more noteworthy is just how readily he treats all the problems with the system he alleges in a state-corporatist fashion. It is as if America were this huge organization and he were giving its managers advice on how to deal with health care issues. What is of no concern to him, as it is not to most of those in the Obama administration, is that the resources to be used in securing various "reforms" belong to people whose permission to use those resources are by all rights required. But never mind such trivia.

The way Relman disposes of such considerations is to say, at one point that "Many others with ideological objections to 'big government' pay lip service to reform, but will bulk at proposals that threaten private insurance...." When I read these lines, about those many others "with ideological objections to 'big government'," I thought of all those millions behind the Iron Curtain who had objections to big government, all those enslaved by The Third Reich, all those caught up in the fascists policies of war-time Italy, as well as all those throughout human history who have been used and abused by big governments and their apologists (who always have some glorious excuse for doing this). To most authors writing for The New York Review of Books, however, such objections come only from ideologues, mindless zombies who simply follow some set of banalities and whose views deserve no attention or consideration by refined folks like Mr. Relman.

No one who knows a bit about the Left's social philosophy can be surprised about the Relman position since for the Left there simply exist no human individuals with rights to their lives, liberty and property. For the Left we are all cells in the greater whole of society or humanity and we need to submit to the rule of those who have somehow managed to become the chiefs of this collective. What you might like to do with your life, with your resources, is all irrelevant since you are nothing but a limb of the society, with no genuine rights of your own any more than you fingers or ears have rights.

Matters of the citizenry's health care--or of anything else, actually--are all corporate matters, and you and the rest of the population are involuntary servants of this corporation guided by the snooty wisdom of the likes of Mr. Relman. He can just dismiss all of those who might fret about issues like big government--such as the small matter of the voiding of the consent of the governed or rights violations (perpetrated when our labor and wealth is taken from us for various glorious objectives without our permission). Because we don't matter to such folks--only society, humanity, the community and such collectives have a true reality for them.

Talk about ideology! That is the most insidious ideology that has ever been concocted by the human imagination to rationalize the rule of some people over others who have been cleverly silenced. Yes, the opposite viewpoint, one that credits individual human beings with unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness does not fit within this scheme, not at all. But it is a far more sensible one.

Should Americans be Humble?

Tibor R. Machan

After president Obama traveled abroad recently it became clear that he wanted to present himself and, indirectly, America as a nation, differently from how he believed President George W. Bush did this. In particular, Mr. Bush was generally seen by his critics as more of an "ugly American," following the character of the novel by that name, written half a century ago by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer (who exemplified the sort of American who tended to be insensitive to the rest of the world's population, their customs and languages, etc.). Mr. Obama seems to want to change this by appearing to be less arrogant, swagger less than Mr. Bush. Instead Mr. Obama wants to be friends with virtually everyone, even those who have no interest it being friends with America and Americans, including him. This comportment of "turn the other cheek" appears to be Mr. Obama's way of conducting America's foreign affairs. No hint that America might teach the world anything about anything--indeed, one Russian commentator on Fareed Zakaria's CNN program, "GPS, Global Public Square," when asked the difference between how Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama came across to Russians on his visit, said that while Mr. Bush gave advice to Russians about democracy, human rights, and so forth, Mr. Obama simply listened to the Russians he met.

Ordinarily, in a world of civilized regimes everywhere, this approach to foreign affairs would be quite right but sadly we are not living in such a world. From its inception the United States of America stood as a challenger to the rest of the world on certain key issues of public policy. The most radical position advanced as a country was laid out in both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights (the U. S. Constitution). This was the idea that governments don't rule; they aren't the sovereigns in a country but the citizens are.

Hardly anywhere else in the world and throughout human history has this stance been embraced officially by governments and their officials. To the contrary, while the American Founders held that you and I and the rest of us own our own lives and must be left free to govern it to ends we ourselves have the right to select, around the globe the idea has been that governments set the agendas to which the lives and labors of the population are to be conscripted. While here and there this notion began to be asserted less and less confidently, so that kings and czars and the like began to lose their absolute authority over the people, the basic idea never really changed. Governments are supreme, they rule the people, more or less brutally or gently, but they do rule. (In Dubai they actually call the head "the ruler.")

Now this fact has never endeared America and Americans to the elite of the world, those who felt that they do have the rightful authority to rule, to decide what goals people in their countries should pursue. The notion that these individuals have a right to the pursuit of their own happiness just seemed wrong, self-indulgent, and yes, arrogant. You need to consider this in light of the fact that for centuries and centuries ordinary human beings everywhere were deemed to be the unwilling or at times somewhat accommodating building blocks of grand and not so grand national projects. All those fabulous ruins of the past, such as Rome's Colosseum and Egypt's pyramids, were built not by using freely sold labor but, at least to a significant extent, from the work of slaves (some of whom were taken in battle, some the children of these, some convicts, but many simply people who could not resist the powers that be). Above these folks always stood the rulers, the class of human beings who managed to convince themselves that they had a God given right to rule others, and who were willing to impose this rule throughout the realm. And this went on for a very, very long time, so that in most places it is still regarded as the political norm.

In light of this picture it is no surprise that America's declaration to the world, even in its current watered down rendition, is offensive to all those who get to talk about these matters--who come on various prestigious forums and interview programs and appear in prominent journals and get invited to visit top ranked universities--except a very few who understand that the American message is actually right on.

No doubt some Americans, including some American presidents, embrace a rather crude, unsophisticated version of the American message and project this "ugly American" image but it needs to be noted that just by being normal Americans who are loyal to the spirit of the American founding they would be offensive to many of the elite abroad anyway. (The rest nearly all wish they lived here!)

So Mr. President, please don't bend over backwards to please everyone around the globe. Certainly many are not worthy of being appeased by you. Being civil to them all does not mean accepting the idea that America must become humble. Its creed is that of proud human beings, not of paeans.

As a footnote, the other evening I checked out the David Letterman show on CBS-TV and heard the announcer saying "From New York, the greatest city of the world" or something to that effect. And I imagined President Obama, given his attitude, writing to the producers saying they need to tone this down lest they offend the rest of the world's cities. Maybe I am paranoid but maybe this is just what we have to look forward to.

Lawyers Lawyers Everywhere?

Tibor R. Machan

Compared to, say TV GUide or Reader's Digest, The New Republic is a low circulation magazine. It is, however, this country's most prestigious and maybe most astute political-cultural publication. It carries articles on a wide ranging set of topics--from daily political affairs to reviews of the most esoteric philosophical books. It has had stars such as Michael Kinsley and Fred Barnes and Andrew . Its editorial views are not easily predicted. And it is very enjoyable to read, whatever your politics happens to be. As a co-founder of what has been aspiring to be a competing publication, Reason, I must admit that The New Republic is far and away the best read for those of us who care about public and cultural affairs.

Yet narrow-mindedness is not unfamiliar to its pages. Thus it recently unhesitatingly embraced the doctrine of nudging as Obama’s wise public policy vis-à-vis the business community, even though the Obama administration has been about as intrusive in the American economy as any administration since FDR’s.

Not very long ago, in a review of several fictional and non-fictional books of on the law, the author offers this unabashedly ignorant passage:

To an imagination of any scope," [Oliver Wendell] Holmes wrote, "the most far-reaching form of power is not money, it is the command of ideas." That now has the platitudinous ring of a commencement address to which the graduating class listens patiently, all the while believing, on the evidence of nearly everything that surrounds them, that money will always be a vastly more far-reaching form of power than the command of ideas. How else is it possible to explain the enormous growth of the legal profession in the last thirty years? In this country between 1965 and 1990, writes [Lincoln] Caplan, "the number of lawyers leaped .. from 296,000 to 800,000....

Aside from the fact that this passage supports if not confirms Holmes' observation--the belief in the power, not to mention in the corrosiveness, of money is itself a result of the command of a very ancient idea--the rhetorical question does not have the self-evident answer the reviewer believes it does. There is a very obvious alternative possibility.

Is it not just possible, indeed very likely, that the enormous growth of the legal profession is due to the enormous growth of laws, especially government regulations of the economy? We have since the 1960s increased the number of laws and regulations enormously. The federal government alone writes thousands of new laws every year. The states, counties and municipalities add their (unfair) share. And the people--all the way from the local barber to multinational corporations' CEOs--need to hire lawyers to help them navigate the resulting legal labyrinth. Just now they are all gearing up to defend themselves from the Obama administration’s highly probable meteoric increase of government regulator measures of America’s financial institutions.

The New Republic is, no doubt, a superb magazine. But it suffers from its own ideological blinders. The editors probably found this rhetorical question about lawyers perfectly sensible, given the command of the idea that money is something awful but very tempting and that the relentless manufacture of laws and regulations in this country is, well, the thing to be taken for granted. Had they but considered that maybe these laws and regulations are mostly superfluous, the product of politicians posturing as savers of humanity, they might have asked the reviewer to think again about that sentence, to consider that the entire drift of the review might need to be recast to reflect not a well entrenched prejudice about money but the reality of the enormous growth of statism in the United States of America. All they need to do to see this is to read reports such as that of former administrator of OIRA--Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs--in the Bush administration, "Lessons Learned, Challenges Ahead," in Regulation magazine, Summer 2009.

And Ms. Dudley isn't even a radical about government regulations, someone who considers all of it ultimately a violation of due process (bothering citizens, imposing burdens on them, restraining their actions, before they have been proven to deserve any such treatment. Even some of the friends of regulations can see that with their relentless proliferation, they must give rise to greater and greater demand for attorneys who might just lessen their vicious impact.

Trumping Culture

Tibor R. Machan

Several acquaintances of mine have a tendency to explain or even justify what they say and do by reference to culture. "In my culture we do this." So just hush about it already, even if by other, widely accepted standards the thinking and conduct are wrong.

For example, some people, hailing from certain parts of the globe, believe in corporeal punishment of their kids, good and hard. Even minor infractions are treated with what by certain standards would be considered brutality. But when this is protested, one often gets the response that, well, that is how things are done in the perpetrator's culture and who is to say who is right.

I can speak here from personal experience. My Hungarian father believed in beating me anytime he found what I said or did objectionable. No, it wasn't enough to try to persuade me of his stance, to defend his standards in the face of their being challenged. Nor was it sufficient to ground me or doc my allowance or something similarly mild. What he did is clench his fist and hit me in the face and wherever he thought it would hurt badly. One time he brought home a plastic rod from an industrial exhibition with the triumphant exclamation that now, finally, he has something with which to beat me without having to hurt his own fists.

There are stories like this in the histories of many families, of course, some more and some less severe. But it goes further than that. Many people today, at least in certain countries, consider various treatments of animals totally unacceptable. Bull fighting, which is so closely linked to Latin culture, is denounced as wantonly cruel, nothing less. Dog fighting, which has been in the news recently right here in America, is another case in point, or cock fighting just across the border many places in Mexico.

In my case I finally ran away, on my 18th birthday, and despite trying to force me to come home from the high school I was attending, my father was rebuffed by the authorities--I was now of age and could do as I chose in this country. And for me the abuse went so far as to make it worth embarking upon a life of my own, even in a brand new country where I was still quite a stranger. For others, however, the cost-benefit calculation is more problematic--they may not be abused so badly as to make it worth their while to simply bolt and set off on their own. It's too risky, scary, so they will often stick around and put up with the culturally justified treatment. Some battered wives know of this very well.

What elements of a culture are, as it were, optional, which are over the top, unacceptable? For animal rights activists bull fighting is over the top; for children's rights activists beating a kid just will not cut it, no way. What about vegetarianism? Is it optional? Some think so and would certainly restrain anyone who would try to force others not to kill and eat animals. Others have no tolerance for meat eating and would gladly force anyone to desist, never mind consent.

This isn't the place to try to resolve any particular cultural conflict. But it is possible to observe that the idea that something is justified by one's culture is quite problematic. Draconian measures of cruelty against women and dissidents are deployed in the name of this very dubious "justification" (or is it rationalization?). Moreover, even those who like to invoke culture to justify their own thinking and conduct often do not accept this from others whose thinking and conduct they find detestable.

The matter harks back all the way to ancient Greece where the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, among others, were deeply concerned about what are matters that are subject to diverse treatments--maybe customs or methods of educating the young--and what cannot be left subject to such diversity--homicide, lying, slavery, and so on. Their attempted solution was to find a common standards of human conduct in an understanding of human nature, something they held to be stable and thus transcending cultures.

The basic solution these thinkers--and many others throughout human history--proposed is that from an understanding that human beings are distinctive in the world by virtue of being able to reason, their conduct must conform to this fact, must be reasonable. That leaves room for a great deal of variety but it also precludes certain ways of acting. Mostly it precludes the use of physical force among people to reach agreement or pseudo-cooperation. Being civilized means using one's reasoning ability to persuade others--or to be persuaded--of what is right. The rest is barbaric.

Yes, Roger Federer is Human

Tibor R. Machan

Roger Federer--who is the most successful tennis player in the recorded history of the game and who won his 15th grand slam championship on Sunday, July 5th at Wimbledon--is, contrary to suspicions voiced by Roger Cohen, of The New York Times, in a column titled "Roger Federer Unbuttoned"--is a human being. Cohen's column is mildly funny but also a bit disturbing for its hint at what seems like a serious endorsement of misanthrope.

Cohen argues that Roger Federer is such a good tennis player that, well, he couldn't be human and must be some kind of cyborg. (He adduces as one piece of evidence that Federer's shirt button never came undone throughout his match with Andy Roddick (who gave his all and still lost in this marathon match--5 sets with the final one going to 16-14). So what? Maybe his shirt was well constructed--by human beings--and so it withstood all the twists and turns it was put through in the match!

That's what bugs me about Cohen's piece; it intimates that for someone to be as good a tennis player as Roger Federer is--so excellent at the game as well as comporting himself in nearly flawlessly civilized fashion over his adult career--one cannot be human. Of course it is a joke but it does suggest a sad perspective on human beings. It seems to reflect a dominant modern misanthropic idea, given ample exemplification in the arts where the anti-hero is pretty much the norm these days, at least so far as the connoisseurs would have it.

To their chagrin, it seems, Roger Federer and many other athletes--Michael Phelps, the Olympiad swimmer, and a host of basketball players come immediately to mind--just cannot be human. And so when they turn out to be, it has to be something bizarre. (Often promoters of this misanthropic outlook would seem to be just waiting for the greats to fall in some way or another, lest they undermine their grim philosophy!)

Excellence, by its very nature, is something rare. So are heroes and geniuses. But all of it is every bit as human as are the opposites. That's because human nature is not wired either for superiority or inferiority. People are born pretty much having the capacity to excel or to fail and most will very likely hover somewhere in between. A bell shape curve captures it well. Now and then this picture is upset either by the sudden emergence of incredible and widespread excellence or its opposite. History, I think, bears me out. In fact, for my money, there is probably evidence of a slight upward incline over the long haul, although judging by the 20th century I could be way off.

However this plays, it is wonderful to have, here and there, examples of superior human performance in many spheres of life, sometimes even in all of them at once. That, I believe, is the more accurate picture of the human situation instead of the notion that excellence must be something artificial, which is what Mr. Cohen seems to have suggested with his admittedly lighthearted essay. Because it was lighthearted I maybe making too much of it for the worse. Yet, for me the suggestion that human beings couldn't possibly manage greatness, even at tennis, is upsetting. With all of the challenges they face around them, often brought about by the hopefully temporary triumph of the worst among us, they need to be reminded of just the opposite, namely, that with focus, effort, and a bit of luck they can manage well--and maybe manage at times superbly--living their human lives.

No, there is no way to engineer human beings to be excellent. This is precisely what makes them so human--however they turn out is to a large measure their own doing, following their beliefs and choices. But encouragement from their fellows is no small part of the total picture here. So discouragement could be a serious impediment, one no one needs right now (or ever). (And, by the way, cyborgs are human artifacts--human-machine systems--and follow the law of garbage in, garbage out!)

Gratitude and Bailouts

Tibor R. Machan

Business Week reports--in the July 13 & 20, 2009, issue, on page 22--that Assistant Professor Randle Raggio of Louisiana State University has written, for the Harvard Business Review, a case study of "whether bailout recipients should say thanks." This kind of exercise is a puzzle.

Exactly how a case study can determine the answer to the question being posed is unclear. Perhaps expressing such "gratitude" is but a possible exercise in public relations for it has nothing to do with a genuine show of gratitude. So if by "should" is meant, "will be welcome by some taxpayers," I suppose the exercise makes some sense.

What does not make any sense at all is to consider the gesture a show of genuine gratitude since the taxpayers didn't dig into their own resources and provide the bailout of their own free will, not by a long shot. What most but not taxpayers did is to tolerate having taxes be used for this purpose. (Remember that many of them took part in "tea parties" to show their disapproval.)

Even if one were to believe the lie that taxes are something that citizens choose to pay, on the question of what ought to be done with the taxes they have very little say. At best they have a way of indicating, after the fact, whether what Congress and other political bodies do with the money they extort from citizens is spent in acceptable ways, without much protest. Sure, they can vote members of Congress out of office. But this doesn't happen a lot because those in Congress do a lot besides distribute the loot they collect from the citizenry--often they take other people's money and bring it home to their constituents. And much of what they do is far more visible than their activity of wealth redistribution tends to be. Voting for someone by no means implies agreement with how tax funds are being spent. It may mean merely that this candidate was the least offensive of those running. Or that those who found something wrong with the candidate's voting record just didn't have the time and energy to wage an effective campaign against the individual.

Even the idea that in a democracy legislators have the task to take the resources of the citizenry and spend it as they see fit is highly dubious. Yes, a lot of people think that democracy allows this but that is not a proper democracy at all. What democracy in a free society allows is to vote in those who will decide what laws need to be passed so as to advance the protection of the rights of the citizenry in novel situations--ones the framers could not anticipate. That is the proper scope of democracy in a free society. Anything else amounts to the usurpation of political power.

That said, even if one where to think that taxpayers had anything to do with the decision of how much bailout money ought to be handed out and who ought to receive it, showing them gratitude is disingenuous. Money not given by those who own it to those who want it cannot be given out of generosity. Such money is, plainly spoken, not given but taken. Thanking the taxpayer is like thanking a victim of mugging for the loot he or she taken in the mugging. No good is done that way. Those who received bailout money can only redeem themselves by returning it fast and with interest, but even that would amount not to gratitude but to an gesture of belated justice.

As to whether giving expression of "gratitude" for bailout money Congress handed out makes sense, at best members of Congress might be thanked, although that would be odd, too, since it isn't their money they gave! The bottom line is that the entire exercise of taking the citizenry's resources and handing it out at Congress' discretion ought to be illegitimate in a free society. But I guess such a message isn't going to see the light of day in the pages of the Harvard Business Review, certainly not be an assistant--very likely untenured--professor. By now such prominent publications around the country, let alone the globe, are fully in cahoots with the system that pays no attention whatsoever to the idea that other people's resources aren't Congress's to distribute but their own.

Rights and Animals Again

Tibor R. Machan

That people have rights is an idea that has been around a while--some argue that even Aristotle, who accepted a form of slavery for some, began to reflect on them back in ancient Greece. In time the notion got cleared up a good deal and with John Locke's help, in the 17th century, a full theory of individual human rights emerged.

As someone who was smuggled out of communist Hungary where rights were deemed to be no more than bourgeois prejudices, I have always had a deep concern about whether a country's legal order rests on such rights or on something far less solid and easily manipulated for the benefit of more or less Draconian tyrants. (In time I wrote two entire books, as well as a lot of papers and essays, on the topic.)

There have always been eager critics of individual human rights, for a variety of reasons, mainly because taking them seriously implies a severe reduction of the scope of governmental authority and power. That does not sit well with many people who want to achieve various goals without having to concern themselves about gaining the consent of those whose lives and labors they wish to use to help them do this. They wish to conscript people, not gain their consent, when they want their support and acknowledging individual rights renders this very difficult.

There are however those, too, who want to expand the coverage of individual human rights to include at least the "higher" animals, so that recently, for example, the government of Spain decided to "grant" rights to great apes. There is now a sizable movement, both popular and academic, insisting that animals other than human beings have the very same rights the American Founders mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. They deploy a variety of arguments in support of this idea and I have addressed several of them (in my book Putting Humans First [2004]).

One point I did not make in that work but one that should add a major obstacle efforts to ascribe rights to non-humans is worth laying out, especially now that one of our new president's favorite legal theorist, Professor Cass Sunstein of the Harvard Law School, is proposing the push for laws that would empower animal rights supporters to sue in court in behalf of the rights of animals just as this is possible to do now vis-a-vis human beings.

Not that there is nothing wrong with abusing animals, with wanton cruelty toward them, and not that this couldn't use a good deal of consideration from thoughtful persons, maybe even legal theorists. But the idea that animals have the rights we human beings do is completely misguided. That's because animals are not moral agents. (There are some indications that here and there some minimal moral awareness is evident in some very few species but these are marginal cases not warranting the ascription of rights! We aren't dealing with geometry here, so borders are sometimes hazy.)

In any event, a big problem with claiming that animals have a moral nature and rights, as human beings do, is that this would wreak havoc with the way animals are treated by us in the wilds. Putting it plainly, animals are not deemed guilty of anything when they kill, maim, devour and brutalize one another, as they do routinely on the high seas, in the desert, and up in the skies. One need but be minimally familiar with how millions of animals behave to appreciate that talk of their guilt or responsibility to be humane to one another, their need to be kind and considerate is utter nonsense. And if animals did have the rights human beings do, that is what would have to be true of them all--they would have to respect one another's rights.

Consider that human rights watchdog agencies around the globe aim to bring governments and legal systems in line with the fact that everyone has basic rights to, for example, life, liberty, property, due process of law, free expression, political participation, and so forth. It matters not where the violations occur because the fact of someone's humanity makes one a rights holder and indicts anyone who violates his or her rights.

If animals had these rights, too, then all of their tormentors in the wilds would have to be indicted, too. But this is nonsense because they aren't subject to moral or legal principles and demanding that they conform to them is entirely off base. Yet if they all had rights and were moral agents that animal rights advocates insist they are--the main advocate, Tom Regan, who wrote The Case for Animal Rights back in 1984, argued that no morally significant difference can be found between people and animals--they would be (a) required to respect the rights of their fellow animals and (b) it would be mandatory to enact legislation for the protection of the rights of animals, ones being violated as a matter of course by other animals. These rights violating animals would have to be treated just like we treat violent criminals--charging them, prosecuting them, and incarcerating them once found guilty.

This is what follows form the claim that animals are just like us only a little less so--sort of like juveniles--in having a moral nature and thus possessing basic rights.

There is much else that could be pointed out that renders animal rights talk highly dubious if not out and out nonsense. But this is a major implication worth being given serious thought.