The Power of Freedom
Tibor R. Machan
At this time when most people are clamoring, or at least hoping for, economic revival, the major debate centers around how it could be achieved. One side, mainly the current administration and its supporters in the academy, believe in some variety of stimulus initiated by the federal government--funneling funds (taken from taxes and borrowed from future generations and foreign governments) to the various state governments that are to use them to pay for public work projects, improving infrastructure, etc. The other side, mainly more or less consistent free market champions, believe that removing government regulations, heavy taxes, and government management or regimentation will more readily help the economy get back into shape.
To attach names here is a bit testy since few are always direct about their proposals but let’s just say Princeton University’s and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is among those urging the former approach, while George Mason University’s Professor Don Boudreaux among the latter. Both are public intellectuals and voice their views in various prominent forums, so one can easily check what they believe.
Let me explain why I believe the alternative promoted by Professor Boudreaux is fundamentally sound, while Krugman’s approach wrong. I do not imagine for a moment that Dr. Boudreaux fully agrees with my reasoning--his may be different. But here is what seems to me to give substantial support to those who advocate government getting out of the way, at least at the most fundamental level of analysis.
As best as I understand human nature, for people to live and live successfully, they need to have the opportunity to take the initiative in their lives, on every front but especially when it comes to aiming to prosper economically. In the fields of economics and business this is often referred to as the entrepreneurial spirit or attitude. Adult men and women make it through their lives more or less successfully depending on how intensely they face up to the challenge of coping and progressing in all their various tasks. Carpe diem, is one way to summarize the point--grab the day--although the sentiment didn’t initially pertain to taking the initiative but to focusing just on today! (That is not what makes the economy hum, not what gets one to prosper.)
What the anti-statists are confident about is that people will normally actively, consciously pay attention to the world and make the most of the opportunities it contains for advancing one’s lot. There is no guarantee that this will in fact always happen but those who have confidence in the power of freedom see it as the only option. For even those who advocate government programs as substitutes for the initiative and entrepreneurship of the citizenry admit, implicitly, that it all depends on at least some folks getting pro-active, moving things ahead. The pro-liberty people rely, implicitly at least, on this being the best general approach and a likely one because human beings are naturally self-starters. This is what makes them different in the world, their capacity to initiate the actions and institutions needed to flourish.
Those who are in favor of the governmental approach, via stimuli and such, basically believe, even if they don’t make this explicit, that most people cannot get going on their own, that we are like invalids or infants and need to be pushed around to get going. And once we are pushed around the push needs to be continued because otherwise inertia sets in. And in one limited respect they have a point--once the institutions of society have acclimated the citizenry to dependence on governmental boosts, they may form the bad habit of relying on it so as to make useful moves in their lives. The more this policy spreads, the more it is likely that fewer and fewer will take the initiative on their own.
At this point it is possible that for the entrepreneurial spirit to once again awaken, it will be necessary for the people to experience the cost of having abandoned it, of having it stymied by the entitlement mentality and the public policies which have encouraged it.
But there is an even more fundamental obstacle to a recovery, which is that the intellectual elite in many modern societies holds a view of human nature that denies human initiative and affirms, instead, the idea that we are all moving only when something moves us from the outside (or from some hard wiring in our make-up). This view of human nature, as essentially passive and not equipped to start moving ahead without prompters, invites the paradoxical approach to public policy of those who advocate the use of stimulus: only they have the capacity to get things moving, the rest of us do not!
Unless it is widely, prominently recognized that economic growth, including employment, investment, research, etc., must acknowledge that human beings are initiators and not passive, potted plants, the economy isn’t going to get going. Only if men and women are fully free will the power of freedom, namely, their own initiative, restart their engine of progress and prosperity.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Let’s Talk about Natural Rights
Tibor R. Machan
When various skeptics question the soundness of the American political system, one of their targets is the idea of human nature. After all, the founders took their political philosophy mainly from John Locke who thought human nature does exist and, based on what we know of it and a few other evident matters, we can reach the conclusion that all human beings have certain rights. This is what is meant by holding that there are natural rights and that they are pre-legal, not a creation of government.
This is the idea that is rejected today by one of President Obama’s top advisers and the man in charge of the federal government’s regulatory operations. Cass Sunstein, who is now a professor of law at Harvard but is on leave to work with the administration, rejects any notion of rights not fashioned by government. And one reason for this may well be, although I am not certain about it, that Professor Sunstein does not agree that human nature exists.
Certainly many prominent legal and political theorists share this skepticism. I recently read one of them who argued that because in some cultures there is no reference to human nature anywhere, let alone in the law, the idea of human nature cannot be right. As if consensus determined whether human nature exists; as if it were impossible that some folks could be entirely ignorant of what human nature is, so much so that they might even deny its existence.
When the idea emerged in philosophy that things have a nature--e.g., starting with Socrates and his pupil Plato--it was thought that the nature of something resembled geometrical objects by being perfect and timeless. So if there is a human nature, it must be something perfect and a-temporal. But because none of us is going to live to eternity, none of us can establish anything as timelessly true. If human nature has to be something like that, then skepticism about it would be warranted.
But human nature--and, indeed, the nature of anything else--need not be timeless. What makes us all human, our human nature, can be the most up to date, well-informed specification of attributes, capacities, or properties so far. Anything else would be unreasonable to ask for since, as I already said, none of us is going to be here till the end of time and can thus establish that what we understand as human nature will not need some modification or adjustment. The principles the American founders rested on human nature were understood as capable of being updated, which is why the U. S. Constitution has provisions for its amendment. This, however, does not justify fundamental doubt or skepticism about either human nature or the principles based on it, such as our natural rights.
So at least one source of skepticism about our basic rights, rights that do not depend upon government’s grating them (even if their protection is government’s main job), can be set aside. But there is more. We are all dependent upon knowing the nature of things so that we can organize our knowledge of the world. We know, for example, that there are fruits--a class of some kind of beings--and games--another class--and subatomic particles--yet another class--and so on and so forth. These classes or natures of things are not something separate from the things being classified but constitute their common features, ones without which they wouldn’t be what they are. Across the world, for example, apples and dogs and chicken and tomatoes and, yes, human beings are all recognized for what they are because we know their natures even when some cases are difficult to identify fully, completely, even when there are some oddities involved.
So there is good reason that governments do not create rights for us--we have them, instead, by virtue of our human nature. And this puts a limit on what governments may do, including do to us. They need to secure our rights and as they do so they must also respect them.
Tibor R. Machan
When various skeptics question the soundness of the American political system, one of their targets is the idea of human nature. After all, the founders took their political philosophy mainly from John Locke who thought human nature does exist and, based on what we know of it and a few other evident matters, we can reach the conclusion that all human beings have certain rights. This is what is meant by holding that there are natural rights and that they are pre-legal, not a creation of government.
This is the idea that is rejected today by one of President Obama’s top advisers and the man in charge of the federal government’s regulatory operations. Cass Sunstein, who is now a professor of law at Harvard but is on leave to work with the administration, rejects any notion of rights not fashioned by government. And one reason for this may well be, although I am not certain about it, that Professor Sunstein does not agree that human nature exists.
Certainly many prominent legal and political theorists share this skepticism. I recently read one of them who argued that because in some cultures there is no reference to human nature anywhere, let alone in the law, the idea of human nature cannot be right. As if consensus determined whether human nature exists; as if it were impossible that some folks could be entirely ignorant of what human nature is, so much so that they might even deny its existence.
When the idea emerged in philosophy that things have a nature--e.g., starting with Socrates and his pupil Plato--it was thought that the nature of something resembled geometrical objects by being perfect and timeless. So if there is a human nature, it must be something perfect and a-temporal. But because none of us is going to live to eternity, none of us can establish anything as timelessly true. If human nature has to be something like that, then skepticism about it would be warranted.
But human nature--and, indeed, the nature of anything else--need not be timeless. What makes us all human, our human nature, can be the most up to date, well-informed specification of attributes, capacities, or properties so far. Anything else would be unreasonable to ask for since, as I already said, none of us is going to be here till the end of time and can thus establish that what we understand as human nature will not need some modification or adjustment. The principles the American founders rested on human nature were understood as capable of being updated, which is why the U. S. Constitution has provisions for its amendment. This, however, does not justify fundamental doubt or skepticism about either human nature or the principles based on it, such as our natural rights.
So at least one source of skepticism about our basic rights, rights that do not depend upon government’s grating them (even if their protection is government’s main job), can be set aside. But there is more. We are all dependent upon knowing the nature of things so that we can organize our knowledge of the world. We know, for example, that there are fruits--a class of some kind of beings--and games--another class--and subatomic particles--yet another class--and so on and so forth. These classes or natures of things are not something separate from the things being classified but constitute their common features, ones without which they wouldn’t be what they are. Across the world, for example, apples and dogs and chicken and tomatoes and, yes, human beings are all recognized for what they are because we know their natures even when some cases are difficult to identify fully, completely, even when there are some oddities involved.
So there is good reason that governments do not create rights for us--we have them, instead, by virtue of our human nature. And this puts a limit on what governments may do, including do to us. They need to secure our rights and as they do so they must also respect them.
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
Here We Go Again
Tibor R. Machan
Innumerable arguments and research have been produced showing that government stimulus is useless. Despite what President Obama and his cheerleaders in the academy, like Princeton's Paul Krugman, seem to believe (or at least say), there is no evidence that government stimuli do anything to restore market activities. Such policies merely take funds from the right pocket and put it into the left while most often the transfer entails wasting a lot of resources so the net effect is widespread economic loss.
Just consider the current administration’s plan to funnel billions into public works projects--building roads, improving rail lines, beefing up public parks, etc., and so forth. The funds come from someplace, right? Even if they are borrowed from China and future generations of Americans, there will be a minus sign somewhere on the ledger.
So what then is happening to provide a net gain? Nothing. The multiplier effect is a myth--one just cannot make something from nothing however much one might wish to do so. Thus some enterprises that would have been funded by the monies spent as stimulus will be unfunded; customers will have fewer dollars to spend, banks fewer dollars to lend, firms fewer to borrow, all because the politicians have decided to divert it all to projects they deem worthy. But what about projects that those deem worthy who have to be coerced so as to pay for all this?
Whenever one has funds extorted so as to artificially pay for improving highways, etc., one will no longer have them available to spend down at the mall or grocery store or one’s brokerage. Where is the stimulus here instead of the mere forcible redirection, something that will mostly mean spending on what the taxpayers didn’t want to spend on? Why is what the politicians choose to do with one’s funds more stimulating than what one would do with them?
This seems to be no more than a shell game, at best, or out and out fraud. Making it appear that politicians are doing something about the dire straits a large number of citizens are experiencing. But it is a mirage, nothing real. Again, one cannot get something from nothing and to make it appear one can, the net effect is gross waste. You rob me to support something you want so I don’t get to support what I want; but then I need to make provisions to replace the stolen stuff and you had to exert energy on the theft instead of on something productive. Nothing about it is an economic plus.
Most of the truth of this is hidden behind a lot of talk of what “we” are doing. But there is no “we” involved, only you, I, and the others who get rooked by it all. The United States of America is not a firm but a country. When politicians treat it otherwise they must engage in malpractice. Their job is to provide a setting for us to do productive work, not to embark on various ventures as some kind of corporate giant that keeps borrowing and borrowing but has run out of collateral. Somehow this point is being missed all over the place and journalists who are supposed to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire are failing to get to it during all their Sunday interview programs.
Whenever people’s property rights are violated by all the taking and regulating and redistribution done by the politicians what is involved is removing the people from the position of being able to choose, to allocate their labors and resources, and substituting the politicians and the bureaucrats for this role. Just why these folks are believed to know better is a mystery, other then that perhaps most citizens are still in the grips of the governmental habit inherited from the times when kings, czars, pharaohs and other rulers were supposed to know it all, with everyone else just following orders.
Yet that is precisely the system that was overthrown by the American Revolution! So why do so many Americans still believe in it? Why do they want to imitate Europe and other parts of the globe that American said “no” to in the first place? Go figure.
Tibor R. Machan
Innumerable arguments and research have been produced showing that government stimulus is useless. Despite what President Obama and his cheerleaders in the academy, like Princeton's Paul Krugman, seem to believe (or at least say), there is no evidence that government stimuli do anything to restore market activities. Such policies merely take funds from the right pocket and put it into the left while most often the transfer entails wasting a lot of resources so the net effect is widespread economic loss.
Just consider the current administration’s plan to funnel billions into public works projects--building roads, improving rail lines, beefing up public parks, etc., and so forth. The funds come from someplace, right? Even if they are borrowed from China and future generations of Americans, there will be a minus sign somewhere on the ledger.
So what then is happening to provide a net gain? Nothing. The multiplier effect is a myth--one just cannot make something from nothing however much one might wish to do so. Thus some enterprises that would have been funded by the monies spent as stimulus will be unfunded; customers will have fewer dollars to spend, banks fewer dollars to lend, firms fewer to borrow, all because the politicians have decided to divert it all to projects they deem worthy. But what about projects that those deem worthy who have to be coerced so as to pay for all this?
Whenever one has funds extorted so as to artificially pay for improving highways, etc., one will no longer have them available to spend down at the mall or grocery store or one’s brokerage. Where is the stimulus here instead of the mere forcible redirection, something that will mostly mean spending on what the taxpayers didn’t want to spend on? Why is what the politicians choose to do with one’s funds more stimulating than what one would do with them?
This seems to be no more than a shell game, at best, or out and out fraud. Making it appear that politicians are doing something about the dire straits a large number of citizens are experiencing. But it is a mirage, nothing real. Again, one cannot get something from nothing and to make it appear one can, the net effect is gross waste. You rob me to support something you want so I don’t get to support what I want; but then I need to make provisions to replace the stolen stuff and you had to exert energy on the theft instead of on something productive. Nothing about it is an economic plus.
Most of the truth of this is hidden behind a lot of talk of what “we” are doing. But there is no “we” involved, only you, I, and the others who get rooked by it all. The United States of America is not a firm but a country. When politicians treat it otherwise they must engage in malpractice. Their job is to provide a setting for us to do productive work, not to embark on various ventures as some kind of corporate giant that keeps borrowing and borrowing but has run out of collateral. Somehow this point is being missed all over the place and journalists who are supposed to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire are failing to get to it during all their Sunday interview programs.
Whenever people’s property rights are violated by all the taking and regulating and redistribution done by the politicians what is involved is removing the people from the position of being able to choose, to allocate their labors and resources, and substituting the politicians and the bureaucrats for this role. Just why these folks are believed to know better is a mystery, other then that perhaps most citizens are still in the grips of the governmental habit inherited from the times when kings, czars, pharaohs and other rulers were supposed to know it all, with everyone else just following orders.
Yet that is precisely the system that was overthrown by the American Revolution! So why do so many Americans still believe in it? Why do they want to imitate Europe and other parts of the globe that American said “no” to in the first place? Go figure.
Thursday, September 02, 2010
Revisiting Wealth Redistribution
Tibor R. Machan
Statists often clamor for wealth redistribution, mostly implying that the wealth held by those who make or obtain it in the marketplace, without coercion, is in the wrong hands and must be transferred to other people or projects in dire need of it.
Sounds humane, kind, friendly, generous, compassionate and so on, doesn’t it? The wealth-redistributors can then brag about how they are the good guys and intimate that those who do not want them to do their taking and redistributing are just a callous, greedy lot.
Yet if you look more carefully at wealth redistribution you find that what the dispute is about isn’t really whether wealth should be redistributed. That’s because wealth is nearly always being redistributed. You may get a buck for mowing someone’s lawn but you will not be sitting on it but usually go to the mall or grocery store or movie and make use of it--indeed, hand it over to someone else who then is going to do the same and this process just keeps going on. Some of the stuff for which the wealth is distributed will be consumed but then the consumer will expand his or her time and energy to create some more wealth. It just keeps going round and round, wealth and its equivalent being endlessly redistributed unless the tax-takers disrupt the process.
So if we are all vigorously engaged in wealth redistribution, what’s up with the claim that it is only the tax-takers who do it? It is a lie, that’s what.
What really bugs the taxers is not that wealth isn’t being redistributed by those being taxed but that where the wealth is headed isn’t up to them but up to those who hold the wealth in the first place. The tax-takers don’t like us to have the choice about who will receive our wealth, to whom and for what it will be distributed and redistributed, that’s what’s at stake here. You and I aren’t a good enough wealth-redistributor, they are. Mr. Obama, who declared to Joe the Plumber, and Hilary Clinton who told that San Francisco gathering of well healed folks that their wealth will be redistributed, do not believe your and my choices as to where our resources should go are good ones but theirs must be.
Exactly what justifies this belief on the wealth-redistributors’ part is a mystery to me. Except it may just be the same as that of the bank robber, burglar, embezzler, and any other confiscator of other people’s wealth. They want it and will take it if they can get away with it. That they have absolutely no legitimate reason to believe that their choices of where the wealth should go, to whom it should be redistributed, makes no difference. At least bank-robbers and their ilk don’t insult their victims by making the incredible claim that they are taking what isn’t theirs because their use of it is superior to what their victims may have used the wealth for. Politicians and their cheerleaders, however, are bald faced liars about this and try to peddle the myth of their superior knowledge of what the funds should go for. And since it isn’t their funds--actually, their life and labors and inventiveness--but ours, they pay far less attention to whether it is wisely spend, whether the value of what they use the funds for is well calculated and whether the funds spent is done wisely and prudently. The funds they redistribute turn out to be mostly a waste or precious resources, including, don't make any mistake about this, other people’s lives shortened by the process.
This is in fact another instance of the tragedy of the commons, only here it is brought about not so much by way of tragedy but out and out villainy and obfuscation. The takers of our resources aren’t better qualified to spend them than we are. They don’t do wealth-redistribution right while we do it wrong. They just want to do it because they can, because perversities of the legal system make it possible.
It is time to bring this ruse to an end. Those people’s scam should be shut down. Their phony authority to take from everyone so they can use it as they see fit--in the name that they are the nice guys who redistribute wealth while we the greedy bunch intent on keeping it for ourselves--must be abolished. They should be sent off to join Bernie Madoff by now.
Tibor R. Machan
Statists often clamor for wealth redistribution, mostly implying that the wealth held by those who make or obtain it in the marketplace, without coercion, is in the wrong hands and must be transferred to other people or projects in dire need of it.
Sounds humane, kind, friendly, generous, compassionate and so on, doesn’t it? The wealth-redistributors can then brag about how they are the good guys and intimate that those who do not want them to do their taking and redistributing are just a callous, greedy lot.
Yet if you look more carefully at wealth redistribution you find that what the dispute is about isn’t really whether wealth should be redistributed. That’s because wealth is nearly always being redistributed. You may get a buck for mowing someone’s lawn but you will not be sitting on it but usually go to the mall or grocery store or movie and make use of it--indeed, hand it over to someone else who then is going to do the same and this process just keeps going on. Some of the stuff for which the wealth is distributed will be consumed but then the consumer will expand his or her time and energy to create some more wealth. It just keeps going round and round, wealth and its equivalent being endlessly redistributed unless the tax-takers disrupt the process.
So if we are all vigorously engaged in wealth redistribution, what’s up with the claim that it is only the tax-takers who do it? It is a lie, that’s what.
What really bugs the taxers is not that wealth isn’t being redistributed by those being taxed but that where the wealth is headed isn’t up to them but up to those who hold the wealth in the first place. The tax-takers don’t like us to have the choice about who will receive our wealth, to whom and for what it will be distributed and redistributed, that’s what’s at stake here. You and I aren’t a good enough wealth-redistributor, they are. Mr. Obama, who declared to Joe the Plumber, and Hilary Clinton who told that San Francisco gathering of well healed folks that their wealth will be redistributed, do not believe your and my choices as to where our resources should go are good ones but theirs must be.
Exactly what justifies this belief on the wealth-redistributors’ part is a mystery to me. Except it may just be the same as that of the bank robber, burglar, embezzler, and any other confiscator of other people’s wealth. They want it and will take it if they can get away with it. That they have absolutely no legitimate reason to believe that their choices of where the wealth should go, to whom it should be redistributed, makes no difference. At least bank-robbers and their ilk don’t insult their victims by making the incredible claim that they are taking what isn’t theirs because their use of it is superior to what their victims may have used the wealth for. Politicians and their cheerleaders, however, are bald faced liars about this and try to peddle the myth of their superior knowledge of what the funds should go for. And since it isn’t their funds--actually, their life and labors and inventiveness--but ours, they pay far less attention to whether it is wisely spend, whether the value of what they use the funds for is well calculated and whether the funds spent is done wisely and prudently. The funds they redistribute turn out to be mostly a waste or precious resources, including, don't make any mistake about this, other people’s lives shortened by the process.
This is in fact another instance of the tragedy of the commons, only here it is brought about not so much by way of tragedy but out and out villainy and obfuscation. The takers of our resources aren’t better qualified to spend them than we are. They don’t do wealth-redistribution right while we do it wrong. They just want to do it because they can, because perversities of the legal system make it possible.
It is time to bring this ruse to an end. Those people’s scam should be shut down. Their phony authority to take from everyone so they can use it as they see fit--in the name that they are the nice guys who redistribute wealth while we the greedy bunch intent on keeping it for ourselves--must be abolished. They should be sent off to join Bernie Madoff by now.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Tempted by One Size Fits All
Tibor R. Machan
For most of human history it used to be standard practice for parents to insist that their children not only live by principles the parents have found to be sound but also to adopt all sorts of practices of dress, play, work, taste and so forth that they approve of. Father was a barber so son, too, had to be; mother raised four children, so daughter, too, must bear the same number. Parents liked living by the sea, so the kids too must follow suite. Indeed, if a child had another idea, all hell tended to break loose. And those around the family who didn’t conform were deemed to be weird or inferior or just plain different in that sort of way that ‘s quite intolerant of such a thing.
In some cases this was a useful practice but more often it was a matter of habit, nothing much else. And since there are some matters concerning which one size does indeed fit all--such as certain ways of dealing with other people, certain ways to governing one’s life, and certain ways of setting up a human community, e.g., honestly, prudently, and justly, respectively--the idea has always been somewhat palatable. In nutrition, medicine, engineering, farming and so on some ways clearly are better than others no matter who is doing it.
Yet, it dawned on many folks in time that not everyone should act the same way, work in the same tasks, or wear the same kind of clothes or haircut, if for no other reason than because people faced significantly different situations in their lives. And, most evidently, they were themselves rather different, even unique. So a tall son would not fit well in the kind of clothes worn by a diminutive father. Hat and shoe and glove sizes aren’t the same for all. And once these and other differences got noticed and taken more and more seriously--as individuals were being paid more attention to as individuals--others managed to surface. In time the notion emerged that individuality is itself something important in our lives, that one isn’t replaceable by someone else except in special circumstances--say if one weighs the same as someone else where weight is what counts for most. So while in team sports substitutions are routine, they cannot easily be replicated elsewhere, such as in romantic love or friendship. Once it is clear that it isn’t just what one is but who one is that matters a lot, the one size fits all mentality comes under serious challenge.
But not everyone likes it and bad habits die hard. Even in markets it is very tempting to treat all potential customers as if the same goods and services were proper for them all. Thus we have mass marketing of stuff that really can only benefit some people--a certain type of exercise, a back ache cure, or a headache remedy. The more this is understood, the more the notion starts to make sense that one person’s way of life could well be perfectly well suited for that person without this being an offense to others for whom it is not suitable.
Yet the idea persists that everyone ought to worship alike or admire the same artists or fashion designer’s work. Here the temptation isn’t just a mistake but also a desperate hope since if one size does fit all, those who make that size will be able to cash in on this big time. Everyone should love Pepsi, Coca Cola, a Chevy, a Volkswagen, or a Bentley or take a vow of poverty or love the outdoors. Of course in some cases qualitative considerations do recommend conforming to what others prefer and do but more often what is best for Jerry could well not be best for Harry or, especially, for Sue.
Figuring out when one size does versus does not fit all--or most--isn’t that easy but it is usually worth the trouble, at least if it matters how happy one will be with what one pursues, has, or does in one’s life. For wearing the hat that doesn’t fit one is clearly uncomfortable, to say the least; and pursuing a career that will not be fulfilling can be a major hindrance to living happily.
Tibor R. Machan
For most of human history it used to be standard practice for parents to insist that their children not only live by principles the parents have found to be sound but also to adopt all sorts of practices of dress, play, work, taste and so forth that they approve of. Father was a barber so son, too, had to be; mother raised four children, so daughter, too, must bear the same number. Parents liked living by the sea, so the kids too must follow suite. Indeed, if a child had another idea, all hell tended to break loose. And those around the family who didn’t conform were deemed to be weird or inferior or just plain different in that sort of way that ‘s quite intolerant of such a thing.
In some cases this was a useful practice but more often it was a matter of habit, nothing much else. And since there are some matters concerning which one size does indeed fit all--such as certain ways of dealing with other people, certain ways to governing one’s life, and certain ways of setting up a human community, e.g., honestly, prudently, and justly, respectively--the idea has always been somewhat palatable. In nutrition, medicine, engineering, farming and so on some ways clearly are better than others no matter who is doing it.
Yet, it dawned on many folks in time that not everyone should act the same way, work in the same tasks, or wear the same kind of clothes or haircut, if for no other reason than because people faced significantly different situations in their lives. And, most evidently, they were themselves rather different, even unique. So a tall son would not fit well in the kind of clothes worn by a diminutive father. Hat and shoe and glove sizes aren’t the same for all. And once these and other differences got noticed and taken more and more seriously--as individuals were being paid more attention to as individuals--others managed to surface. In time the notion emerged that individuality is itself something important in our lives, that one isn’t replaceable by someone else except in special circumstances--say if one weighs the same as someone else where weight is what counts for most. So while in team sports substitutions are routine, they cannot easily be replicated elsewhere, such as in romantic love or friendship. Once it is clear that it isn’t just what one is but who one is that matters a lot, the one size fits all mentality comes under serious challenge.
But not everyone likes it and bad habits die hard. Even in markets it is very tempting to treat all potential customers as if the same goods and services were proper for them all. Thus we have mass marketing of stuff that really can only benefit some people--a certain type of exercise, a back ache cure, or a headache remedy. The more this is understood, the more the notion starts to make sense that one person’s way of life could well be perfectly well suited for that person without this being an offense to others for whom it is not suitable.
Yet the idea persists that everyone ought to worship alike or admire the same artists or fashion designer’s work. Here the temptation isn’t just a mistake but also a desperate hope since if one size does fit all, those who make that size will be able to cash in on this big time. Everyone should love Pepsi, Coca Cola, a Chevy, a Volkswagen, or a Bentley or take a vow of poverty or love the outdoors. Of course in some cases qualitative considerations do recommend conforming to what others prefer and do but more often what is best for Jerry could well not be best for Harry or, especially, for Sue.
Figuring out when one size does versus does not fit all--or most--isn’t that easy but it is usually worth the trouble, at least if it matters how happy one will be with what one pursues, has, or does in one’s life. For wearing the hat that doesn’t fit one is clearly uncomfortable, to say the least; and pursuing a career that will not be fulfilling can be a major hindrance to living happily.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Frank Rich’s Prejudice
Tibor R. Machan
Karl Marx was famous for, among other things, claiming that everyone always promotes his or her economic interest. This is something he actually had in common with non-Marxists classical economists.
Most economists, in fact, believe that we are all motivated by our economic interests, nothing else. Or, rather, everything else that might appear to motivate us really comes down to economics. Consider the following from a few very prominent non-Marxist economists. The late Milton Friedman, one of the modern age’s most famous and diligent students and defenders of the free-market system, said it most directly: “[E]very individual serves his own private interest... The great Saints of history have served their “private interest” just as the most money grubbing miser has served his interest. The private interest is whatever it is that drives an individual.” His colleague, the late George Stigler, another Nobel Prize winner, made the point only slightly differently: “Man is eternally a utility-maximizer—in his home, in his office (be it public or private), in his church, in his scientific work—in short, everywhere.” Finally Nobel laureate Professor Gary Becker, who also embrace this homo economicus viewpoint, underscores the idea as follows: “The combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach as I see it.” The bottom line: We are all driven by our desire to fare well economically, first and foremost.
Marx also held to this idea, at least so far as people in the capitalist phase of humanity’s development are concerned. We act to enrich ourselves and whatever else we might claim motivates us, it is really just self-enrichment.
Frank Rich, prominent columnist at The New York Times and a relentless foe of the free market, capitalist economic system, has just now latched on to the story of the brothers Koch of Wichita, Kansas, David and Charles--there is another who isn’t so directly involved in the Koch business enterprises--a story told extensively in The New Yorker recently, by Jane Mayer. Rich is very impressed by this story and interprets it in the way many economists would, namely, that everything done by the brothers Koch has to do with their desire to enhance their wealth. But the economists would say this about all of us, not the the brothers Koch.
Of course, Rich merely infers his claims from the story--he fails to give one solitary good quotation from either David or Charles Koch to substantiate his allegation that they are both interested solely in self-enrichment. No wonder, because it is not so.
I have had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of both of the Koch brothers, although we aren’t fast friends by any means. But way back when I was a graduate student in philosophy, Charles took an interest in my work on my doctoral dissertation and invited me to give a talk about it in Wichita. It had to do with human rights and whether we can know that there are such rights or do some of us simply have a strong feeling in favor of them. Later I served, briefly, on the board of the Reason Foundation (which grew out of Reason Enterprises, the tiny firm that published Reason magazine in its early incarnation) with David Koch. So I can attest without any reasonable doubt that what motivated and likely still motivates the brothers Koch is their firm commitment to the ideas and ideals of a fully free society, a la the Declaration of Independence.
Now it is often held by the likes of Frank Rich--such as Ralph Nader and Kevin Phillips--that those who favor a fully free society are only interested in promoting their own economic welfare. Is this credible?
No. Of course, true enough, a fully free society would also be economically free, just as it would favor religious liberty or freedom of the press or everyone’s right to, say, sing in the shower and marry whoever they want who would want them. Freedom for those of us who love it isn’t divided into economic, religious, journalistic, scientific and other parts. It is indivisible, a general proper condition for human community life, period. This is what the Koch brothers have always championed.
Now just like journalists who favor freedom of the press benefit from such freedom, the Koch’s naturally would benefit from freedom of commerce. But so would we all. Freedom, not surprisingly, is simply good for us all and this includes entrepreneurs such as the brothers Koch. Now do they--do we all who champion a fully free society--support liberty solely because it enhances our economic welfare? No, I am certain of that--I, who have hardly a dime to my name, certainly favor liberty in part because it enables me to earn a living with the support of those of my fellows who freely choose to pay me for my work. But is this the sole reason why I favor liberty? Is it the sole reason the brothers Koch do so? Wrong! Not by a long shot.
Just ask us. Don’t ask Frank Rich, who makes his claims based on his prior beliefs, independently of any evidence from the brothers themselves.
Tibor R. Machan
Karl Marx was famous for, among other things, claiming that everyone always promotes his or her economic interest. This is something he actually had in common with non-Marxists classical economists.
Most economists, in fact, believe that we are all motivated by our economic interests, nothing else. Or, rather, everything else that might appear to motivate us really comes down to economics. Consider the following from a few very prominent non-Marxist economists. The late Milton Friedman, one of the modern age’s most famous and diligent students and defenders of the free-market system, said it most directly: “[E]very individual serves his own private interest... The great Saints of history have served their “private interest” just as the most money grubbing miser has served his interest. The private interest is whatever it is that drives an individual.” His colleague, the late George Stigler, another Nobel Prize winner, made the point only slightly differently: “Man is eternally a utility-maximizer—in his home, in his office (be it public or private), in his church, in his scientific work—in short, everywhere.” Finally Nobel laureate Professor Gary Becker, who also embrace this homo economicus viewpoint, underscores the idea as follows: “The combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach as I see it.” The bottom line: We are all driven by our desire to fare well economically, first and foremost.
Marx also held to this idea, at least so far as people in the capitalist phase of humanity’s development are concerned. We act to enrich ourselves and whatever else we might claim motivates us, it is really just self-enrichment.
Frank Rich, prominent columnist at The New York Times and a relentless foe of the free market, capitalist economic system, has just now latched on to the story of the brothers Koch of Wichita, Kansas, David and Charles--there is another who isn’t so directly involved in the Koch business enterprises--a story told extensively in The New Yorker recently, by Jane Mayer. Rich is very impressed by this story and interprets it in the way many economists would, namely, that everything done by the brothers Koch has to do with their desire to enhance their wealth. But the economists would say this about all of us, not the the brothers Koch.
Of course, Rich merely infers his claims from the story--he fails to give one solitary good quotation from either David or Charles Koch to substantiate his allegation that they are both interested solely in self-enrichment. No wonder, because it is not so.
I have had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of both of the Koch brothers, although we aren’t fast friends by any means. But way back when I was a graduate student in philosophy, Charles took an interest in my work on my doctoral dissertation and invited me to give a talk about it in Wichita. It had to do with human rights and whether we can know that there are such rights or do some of us simply have a strong feeling in favor of them. Later I served, briefly, on the board of the Reason Foundation (which grew out of Reason Enterprises, the tiny firm that published Reason magazine in its early incarnation) with David Koch. So I can attest without any reasonable doubt that what motivated and likely still motivates the brothers Koch is their firm commitment to the ideas and ideals of a fully free society, a la the Declaration of Independence.
Now it is often held by the likes of Frank Rich--such as Ralph Nader and Kevin Phillips--that those who favor a fully free society are only interested in promoting their own economic welfare. Is this credible?
No. Of course, true enough, a fully free society would also be economically free, just as it would favor religious liberty or freedom of the press or everyone’s right to, say, sing in the shower and marry whoever they want who would want them. Freedom for those of us who love it isn’t divided into economic, religious, journalistic, scientific and other parts. It is indivisible, a general proper condition for human community life, period. This is what the Koch brothers have always championed.
Now just like journalists who favor freedom of the press benefit from such freedom, the Koch’s naturally would benefit from freedom of commerce. But so would we all. Freedom, not surprisingly, is simply good for us all and this includes entrepreneurs such as the brothers Koch. Now do they--do we all who champion a fully free society--support liberty solely because it enhances our economic welfare? No, I am certain of that--I, who have hardly a dime to my name, certainly favor liberty in part because it enables me to earn a living with the support of those of my fellows who freely choose to pay me for my work. But is this the sole reason why I favor liberty? Is it the sole reason the brothers Koch do so? Wrong! Not by a long shot.
Just ask us. Don’t ask Frank Rich, who makes his claims based on his prior beliefs, independently of any evidence from the brothers themselves.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Most Americans Just Don’t Get It
Tibor R. Machan
It bothers me to no end that millions of Americans simply don’t get just how dangerous this current administration’s views are, especially about the nature of our basic rights.
I suppose I should not be surprised, given the utterly perverted primary and secondary education most people receive now in their government run schools. After all, those very schools and everyone with a job in the system, depend upon the flat out rejection of the idea of our basic, natural rights spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. For if each of us does in fact have an unalienable right to our life, our liberty, our pursuit of our happiness and the rest, then those schools exists in direct contradiction to these rights. They are built with the loot the politicians and bureaucrats confiscate from the citizenry, loot that involves the violation of those basic rights the Declaration states every human being has!
So then in order to continue the confiscation of our resources with impunity at all levels of state, it is required that the confiscators deny those rights. And that is just what has transpired--in our era the White House and its legal team, lead by Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, insist that government creates our rights, that we have none based on our human nature. That we if one complains about these people extorting from us our life-times and our property, i.e., a chunk of our very lives, the politicians and bureaucrats can retort that these are not really ours at all, we have no rights apart from what they decide we have! (This is exactly what some of the stars of contemporary political theory preach!) That is what it means to claim that government creates our rights and we have none based on our humanity! That is what it means to claim that instead of governments being instituted so as to secure our basic natural, prelegal rights, governments just happen to exist and do with us as they please, like monarchs, tsars, dictators, pharaohs and Caesars used to, proclaiming that they have the divinely obtained authority to do so. When Thomas Hobbes strove to defend the unlimited authority of government without appealing to its divine appointment, he retained the core authoritarian idea that genuine rights are the product of the sovereign's will and that, therefore, no subject could have rights against the sovereign. The anti-authoritarian resistance to tyrannical government that was manifested in 17th and 18th century Ango-American political history was grounded in the idea that government itself is subject to moral constraints that it neither creates nor can abrogate.
This is why this utter distortion of the nature of government and our basic rights must be something to which American citizens should pay the utmost attention instead of dosing through the experience. They do appear to be in a semi coma about it, except for a few, like Judge Napolitano at Fox-TV. But the vast majority are clueless about just how dangerous is the current administration’s legal philosophy. Incredibly they behave like those sad peons of past centuries who tended to accept without much question that some human beings are mysteriously authorized to rule them and they have no justification to call this rule into question. All those ideas and ideals with which American had been associated, albeit even then not closely enough, about how when governments begin to act as tyrants they may be dismissed from their job, seem to have been forgotten. Instead the vast majority has come to accept their reactionary status as mere subjects to whom governments simply promise--though rarely deliver--various benefits in return for their silence and compliance.
Any protests, as put forth by some of the Tea Party people, are dismissed by the elite--writing in forums such as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, etc.--with the sneers and snootiness of an untouchable elite. (And even the few well positioned conservative skeptics tend to refuse to truly challenge all this, apparently because they, too, want not to reaffirm universal, unalienable individual rights but to wrest power and establish their Right wing version of coercive statism.)
Although in the long haul there is still cause for some optimism--after all, the American system of government, dedicated as it was supposed to be, to the protection of the individual rights of the citizenry, is a very radical notion and its principles require a great deal of ongoing vigilance to be fully realized--for the time being it does appear that the truly exceptional Americanism that distinguished the country from those around the globe (including, especially, the European top down systems the Founders and Framers wanted to disown) is under full assault.
The currently fashionable European system of democratic socialism--which, in practice, comes to nothing else but a type of fascism--is all the rage in Washington. And this country’s exceptional standing is now scoffed at by our political thinkers and leaders. It is time to wake up to this travesty and to do something decisive about it. And that must start in the hearts and minds of the citizenry.
Tibor R. Machan
It bothers me to no end that millions of Americans simply don’t get just how dangerous this current administration’s views are, especially about the nature of our basic rights.
I suppose I should not be surprised, given the utterly perverted primary and secondary education most people receive now in their government run schools. After all, those very schools and everyone with a job in the system, depend upon the flat out rejection of the idea of our basic, natural rights spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. For if each of us does in fact have an unalienable right to our life, our liberty, our pursuit of our happiness and the rest, then those schools exists in direct contradiction to these rights. They are built with the loot the politicians and bureaucrats confiscate from the citizenry, loot that involves the violation of those basic rights the Declaration states every human being has!
So then in order to continue the confiscation of our resources with impunity at all levels of state, it is required that the confiscators deny those rights. And that is just what has transpired--in our era the White House and its legal team, lead by Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, insist that government creates our rights, that we have none based on our human nature. That we if one complains about these people extorting from us our life-times and our property, i.e., a chunk of our very lives, the politicians and bureaucrats can retort that these are not really ours at all, we have no rights apart from what they decide we have! (This is exactly what some of the stars of contemporary political theory preach!) That is what it means to claim that government creates our rights and we have none based on our humanity! That is what it means to claim that instead of governments being instituted so as to secure our basic natural, prelegal rights, governments just happen to exist and do with us as they please, like monarchs, tsars, dictators, pharaohs and Caesars used to, proclaiming that they have the divinely obtained authority to do so. When Thomas Hobbes strove to defend the unlimited authority of government without appealing to its divine appointment, he retained the core authoritarian idea that genuine rights are the product of the sovereign's will and that, therefore, no subject could have rights against the sovereign. The anti-authoritarian resistance to tyrannical government that was manifested in 17th and 18th century Ango-American political history was grounded in the idea that government itself is subject to moral constraints that it neither creates nor can abrogate.
This is why this utter distortion of the nature of government and our basic rights must be something to which American citizens should pay the utmost attention instead of dosing through the experience. They do appear to be in a semi coma about it, except for a few, like Judge Napolitano at Fox-TV. But the vast majority are clueless about just how dangerous is the current administration’s legal philosophy. Incredibly they behave like those sad peons of past centuries who tended to accept without much question that some human beings are mysteriously authorized to rule them and they have no justification to call this rule into question. All those ideas and ideals with which American had been associated, albeit even then not closely enough, about how when governments begin to act as tyrants they may be dismissed from their job, seem to have been forgotten. Instead the vast majority has come to accept their reactionary status as mere subjects to whom governments simply promise--though rarely deliver--various benefits in return for their silence and compliance.
Any protests, as put forth by some of the Tea Party people, are dismissed by the elite--writing in forums such as The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, etc.--with the sneers and snootiness of an untouchable elite. (And even the few well positioned conservative skeptics tend to refuse to truly challenge all this, apparently because they, too, want not to reaffirm universal, unalienable individual rights but to wrest power and establish their Right wing version of coercive statism.)
Although in the long haul there is still cause for some optimism--after all, the American system of government, dedicated as it was supposed to be, to the protection of the individual rights of the citizenry, is a very radical notion and its principles require a great deal of ongoing vigilance to be fully realized--for the time being it does appear that the truly exceptional Americanism that distinguished the country from those around the globe (including, especially, the European top down systems the Founders and Framers wanted to disown) is under full assault.
The currently fashionable European system of democratic socialism--which, in practice, comes to nothing else but a type of fascism--is all the rage in Washington. And this country’s exceptional standing is now scoffed at by our political thinkers and leaders. It is time to wake up to this travesty and to do something decisive about it. And that must start in the hearts and minds of the citizenry.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Society’s Rules Don’t Create Wealth
Tibor R. Machan
In olden days people were forced to labor for the king and his minions in return for being allowed to live within the realm. This kind of extortion finally got tossed over and people’s basic right to their lives became acknowledged--in the political philosophy of John Locke and the Declaration of Independence, for example. You don’t belong to society, to other people. Your life is yours to live as you choose, although, admittedly, you could live it bad or well but not in terms set by others who claim a portion of it.
But this realization that each individual has the right to his or her life got a bit arrested when later thinkers, like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, argued that your property does belong to everyone else, not you. (In the case of Marx this didn’t quite fit his labor theory of value, but skip that for now.) Among some of today’s most prominently placed intellectuals, such as Professors Cass Sunstein of the Harvard Law School and Thomas Nagel of New York University, private property rights are taken to be nothing but a myth. (As one of Nagel’s co-authored book, The Myth of Ownership, announces, wealth is a collective phenomenon, never mind that some produce hardly any while others make gobs of it!)
Since one’s life is intimately dependent upon property--no way to live without some stuff, to be plain about it--if all property is owned by the public at large, collectively, that pretty much means one’s life is too. So the liberation from serfdom, one of the greatest achievements of classical liberal thinking, is to be undermined, reversed, by the idea that it is after all society that owns our resources, not we individually or corporately (in each others voluntary company). Taxes, then, amount not to a coercive taking but a rightful claim by the government that’s standing in for society as a whole (or so statists love to pretend). Taking private property for public use need not be very carefully justified as the fifth amendment to the U. S. Constitution insists, no. Such taking is really just government’s way of affirming its ownership of everything while generously leaving bits of it for the people to use.
But this is all nonsense and a ruse, to boot. For there is no society as such apart from the people who comprise it. Like my classes at the colleges where I teach--they do not exists as some kind of separate entity, only as a group of individual students with a common purpose. So then when it is argued that in fact society owns all the resources, the cash value of this is that some people who have laid claim to speaking for the rest of us own it all or at least get to use it as they see fit.
One retort to this is that without society’s rules and laws property could not exist. So society must, after all, own the stuff. But this is like claiming that because without the rules of tennis or football or any other game there could not be points scored or touchdowns run, it really isn’t the players who score the points or achieve the touchdowns but the referees! This is complete bunk. The referees, like governments, have a job, namely, to make sure the rules are observed as the people or players go about their tasks. They aren't’ the ones who carry out those tasks and may not lay a claim to the results, either.
There have always been those who were insistent on lording it over other people, including their lives and property. In ancient times they rationalized this by reference to some alleged special status among us--natural aristocracy, superior race or class, God’s assignments, etc. But then it was discovered and finally driven home in many places that no one has any claim to lording over others, not without their consent (as when members of an orchestra consent to the conductor’s role). But this doesn’t sit too well with those who wish to rule us all. So they are now inventing different reasons, such as their supposed role of speaking for society, which is used by them justify their rule. Let us not fall for this, please.
Tibor R. Machan
In olden days people were forced to labor for the king and his minions in return for being allowed to live within the realm. This kind of extortion finally got tossed over and people’s basic right to their lives became acknowledged--in the political philosophy of John Locke and the Declaration of Independence, for example. You don’t belong to society, to other people. Your life is yours to live as you choose, although, admittedly, you could live it bad or well but not in terms set by others who claim a portion of it.
But this realization that each individual has the right to his or her life got a bit arrested when later thinkers, like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx, argued that your property does belong to everyone else, not you. (In the case of Marx this didn’t quite fit his labor theory of value, but skip that for now.) Among some of today’s most prominently placed intellectuals, such as Professors Cass Sunstein of the Harvard Law School and Thomas Nagel of New York University, private property rights are taken to be nothing but a myth. (As one of Nagel’s co-authored book, The Myth of Ownership, announces, wealth is a collective phenomenon, never mind that some produce hardly any while others make gobs of it!)
Since one’s life is intimately dependent upon property--no way to live without some stuff, to be plain about it--if all property is owned by the public at large, collectively, that pretty much means one’s life is too. So the liberation from serfdom, one of the greatest achievements of classical liberal thinking, is to be undermined, reversed, by the idea that it is after all society that owns our resources, not we individually or corporately (in each others voluntary company). Taxes, then, amount not to a coercive taking but a rightful claim by the government that’s standing in for society as a whole (or so statists love to pretend). Taking private property for public use need not be very carefully justified as the fifth amendment to the U. S. Constitution insists, no. Such taking is really just government’s way of affirming its ownership of everything while generously leaving bits of it for the people to use.
But this is all nonsense and a ruse, to boot. For there is no society as such apart from the people who comprise it. Like my classes at the colleges where I teach--they do not exists as some kind of separate entity, only as a group of individual students with a common purpose. So then when it is argued that in fact society owns all the resources, the cash value of this is that some people who have laid claim to speaking for the rest of us own it all or at least get to use it as they see fit.
One retort to this is that without society’s rules and laws property could not exist. So society must, after all, own the stuff. But this is like claiming that because without the rules of tennis or football or any other game there could not be points scored or touchdowns run, it really isn’t the players who score the points or achieve the touchdowns but the referees! This is complete bunk. The referees, like governments, have a job, namely, to make sure the rules are observed as the people or players go about their tasks. They aren't’ the ones who carry out those tasks and may not lay a claim to the results, either.
There have always been those who were insistent on lording it over other people, including their lives and property. In ancient times they rationalized this by reference to some alleged special status among us--natural aristocracy, superior race or class, God’s assignments, etc. But then it was discovered and finally driven home in many places that no one has any claim to lording over others, not without their consent (as when members of an orchestra consent to the conductor’s role). But this doesn’t sit too well with those who wish to rule us all. So they are now inventing different reasons, such as their supposed role of speaking for society, which is used by them justify their rule. Let us not fall for this, please.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Stoning & The Times
Tibor R. Machan
Do I search for hypocrisies among my adversaries? Not especially, only when it is too obvious to miss. And what if anything is wrong with hypocrisy? So what if you are a liar but make a big deal about condemning lying in your neighbor? Why is that a problem?
In this era when major political figures denounce ideological--by which they of course have in mind principled--thinking, why should one be consistent, show integrity? Those are not the virtues of sophisticates. Those are pedestrian ideals. As our president pointed out--in the pedagogical, finger-wagging fashion he tends to employ--"the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...." So whether the government is a totalitarian tyranny or a dictatorship isn’t of concern--the only issue is, does it work, which leaves entirely unaddressed what it is supposed to work for!
Anyway my issue here is hypocrisy and my candidate for the hypocrite of the week is The New York Times, which in last Sunday’s Week in Review section ran an essay titled “Crime (Sex) and Punishment (Stoning).” Maybe I am overly suspicious but this piece struck me as bending over backwards not to be too harsh on those societies in which stoning people--especially women--for sex crimes is acceptable. But what makes me suspicious?
Well, consider just a few remarks from the piece. “Much of the outrage these [stoning] cases generated--apart from the sheer anachronism of stoning in the 21st century--seems to stem from the gulf between sexual attitudes in the West and parts of the Islamic world, where radical movements have turned to draconian punishments, and a vision of restoring a long-lost past, in their search for religious authenticity.” “Stoning is not practiced only among Muslims, nor did it begin with Islam.” “Stoning is a legal punishment in only a handful of Muslim countries--in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria, but it is very rarely put to use.” “But Islamic law requires very strict conditions for a stoning sentence....” “Some scholars even argue that the stoning penalty is meant more as a symbolic warning against misbehavior....” and “In any case, societies evolve....”
As I see it these bits tell a story of temptation, the temptation of reckless multiculturalism, of cultural and legal relativism. OK, but so what? Well, I was thinking as I was reading these sentences in the Old Gray Lady how would it go over if this is how some writer discussed, say, slavery, ethnic prejudice or the subjugation of women in the West? I doubt it would fly so well.
This bending over backwards so as to be understanding toward cultures in which stoning human beings is regarded as a proper form of punishment--right now in the 21st century--seems to me to show an ideological bias on the part of the editors of The Times. And that bias is that whenever flaws in American history, law, social practices, and such are being discussed, there is no mercy; Americans are held to far higher standards than are those in Muslim cultures, for example.
Not only is this objectionable because it is unjust toward America but also because it is insulting toward Muslims. Somehow the latter do not qualify to be judged by the standards of humanity applicable to Americans and Westerners, it appears. Are they not human enough for that? Is there something inferior about Muslims so when they act in brutal, barbaric ways what is important to mention is that societies evolve? Should this kind of tolerance be accepted vis-a-vis Muslims but not antebellum Southerners who felt, often most sincerely, that slavery was OK? What about all the male chauvinists who thought of women as too emotional for scientific and other kind of work? Are we to think of them all as simply part of “societies [that] evolve”?
I am not about to venture to try to solve the problem of cultural diversity concerning some important human practices and institutions but I thought it worth calling attention to the anti-Western, anti-American bias at The Times.
Tibor R. Machan
Do I search for hypocrisies among my adversaries? Not especially, only when it is too obvious to miss. And what if anything is wrong with hypocrisy? So what if you are a liar but make a big deal about condemning lying in your neighbor? Why is that a problem?
In this era when major political figures denounce ideological--by which they of course have in mind principled--thinking, why should one be consistent, show integrity? Those are not the virtues of sophisticates. Those are pedestrian ideals. As our president pointed out--in the pedagogical, finger-wagging fashion he tends to employ--"the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...." So whether the government is a totalitarian tyranny or a dictatorship isn’t of concern--the only issue is, does it work, which leaves entirely unaddressed what it is supposed to work for!
Anyway my issue here is hypocrisy and my candidate for the hypocrite of the week is The New York Times, which in last Sunday’s Week in Review section ran an essay titled “Crime (Sex) and Punishment (Stoning).” Maybe I am overly suspicious but this piece struck me as bending over backwards not to be too harsh on those societies in which stoning people--especially women--for sex crimes is acceptable. But what makes me suspicious?
Well, consider just a few remarks from the piece. “Much of the outrage these [stoning] cases generated--apart from the sheer anachronism of stoning in the 21st century--seems to stem from the gulf between sexual attitudes in the West and parts of the Islamic world, where radical movements have turned to draconian punishments, and a vision of restoring a long-lost past, in their search for religious authenticity.” “Stoning is not practiced only among Muslims, nor did it begin with Islam.” “Stoning is a legal punishment in only a handful of Muslim countries--in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria, but it is very rarely put to use.” “But Islamic law requires very strict conditions for a stoning sentence....” “Some scholars even argue that the stoning penalty is meant more as a symbolic warning against misbehavior....” and “In any case, societies evolve....”
As I see it these bits tell a story of temptation, the temptation of reckless multiculturalism, of cultural and legal relativism. OK, but so what? Well, I was thinking as I was reading these sentences in the Old Gray Lady how would it go over if this is how some writer discussed, say, slavery, ethnic prejudice or the subjugation of women in the West? I doubt it would fly so well.
This bending over backwards so as to be understanding toward cultures in which stoning human beings is regarded as a proper form of punishment--right now in the 21st century--seems to me to show an ideological bias on the part of the editors of The Times. And that bias is that whenever flaws in American history, law, social practices, and such are being discussed, there is no mercy; Americans are held to far higher standards than are those in Muslim cultures, for example.
Not only is this objectionable because it is unjust toward America but also because it is insulting toward Muslims. Somehow the latter do not qualify to be judged by the standards of humanity applicable to Americans and Westerners, it appears. Are they not human enough for that? Is there something inferior about Muslims so when they act in brutal, barbaric ways what is important to mention is that societies evolve? Should this kind of tolerance be accepted vis-a-vis Muslims but not antebellum Southerners who felt, often most sincerely, that slavery was OK? What about all the male chauvinists who thought of women as too emotional for scientific and other kind of work? Are we to think of them all as simply part of “societies [that] evolve”?
I am not about to venture to try to solve the problem of cultural diversity concerning some important human practices and institutions but I thought it worth calling attention to the anti-Western, anti-American bias at The Times.
Column on Principles vs. Pragmatism viz. the Mosque
Tibor R. Machan
It’s not my preference to beat a dead horse but this topic goes to the heart of certain features of our current political and legal climate.
When one is in some doubt about what to do--and there can be many situations that one isn’t well prepared for--a way to act is to consider one’s basic principles. Take someone married who is suddenly strongly attracted to someone other than a spouse. It happens but if those marriage vows matter at all, such a situation would be when they would come in most clearly. One is pulled toward breaching an oath but since it is an oath, presumably taken in earnest, one will refuse to yield to the temptation. Or if one is tempted to do a bit of shoplifting or prevaricating. This is when one’s principles come into play, however strongly one may feel like circumventing them.
If it is true that men and women in human communities ought not to intrude on their fellow citizens’ liberties, then that idea would come in full strength just when it is most tempting to butt in. So, given how strongly millions of Americans feel that those planning to build a Mosque near Ground Zero are misguided, the upright thing for them to do is to refuse to yield to such a feeling and go with the principle that everyone has a right to freedom of religion even when that religion leads one astray. Yes, it is difficult and very tempting to toss such a principle and ban the plan but so are numerous other principles very difficult to abide by. That’s just what makes them principles--they must not be treated lightly, they must apply even when one is really tempted to ignore them.
Now all this applies when one sees human beings guided by moral and political principles but not if one sees them as pragmatists for whom principles do not apply. As the joke goes with traffic lights, if they are only suggestions, not firm rules of the road, then by all means dodge them as you wish, if you can get away with doing so.
The famous American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James argued once that if breaching the truth gives one serious satisfaction, then one should breach it. As he put it in his famous essay, “The Meaning of Truth,” “The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal ‘objectivity,’ as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its ‘elegance,’ or its congruity with our residual beliefs” (p. 41). So it isn’t what’s objectively true that counts for us but what is subjectively useful. When it comes to dealing with such matters as whether to incarcerate Japanese Americans, regardless of whether they have been proven guilty of anything, or to ban a mosque near Ground Zero, never mind that no one has shown that anyone’s rights are being violated, the pragmatist can always go around the principle and say, but do it if it feels good.
I am not here going to attempt to show the superiority of the principled as distinct from the pragmatic approach to human conduct or public policies in a human community. What I want to call attention to is how addressing issues pragmatically differs from how someone with principles would address them. Pragmatists distrust principles, thinking them to be a result of loose, ideological, and dogmatic thinking, while those who stress principles insist that what they rely upon for guidance has gone through centuries of trial and error and by now deserve to be heeded even when they appear to be inconvenient.
Most of the American founders were convinced that certain well considered principles apply to how a human community must be governed, how citizens ought to deal with one another, no matter what. Many today seem to scoff at such an attitude. Of course they usually make exceptions, for example, when they oppose torture or rape or child molestation, and it is unclear how can they square these exceptions with their avowed pragmatism in other areas. But they do try. We are witnessing how this drama plays out about something many Americans feel strongly about.
Tibor R. Machan
It’s not my preference to beat a dead horse but this topic goes to the heart of certain features of our current political and legal climate.
When one is in some doubt about what to do--and there can be many situations that one isn’t well prepared for--a way to act is to consider one’s basic principles. Take someone married who is suddenly strongly attracted to someone other than a spouse. It happens but if those marriage vows matter at all, such a situation would be when they would come in most clearly. One is pulled toward breaching an oath but since it is an oath, presumably taken in earnest, one will refuse to yield to the temptation. Or if one is tempted to do a bit of shoplifting or prevaricating. This is when one’s principles come into play, however strongly one may feel like circumventing them.
If it is true that men and women in human communities ought not to intrude on their fellow citizens’ liberties, then that idea would come in full strength just when it is most tempting to butt in. So, given how strongly millions of Americans feel that those planning to build a Mosque near Ground Zero are misguided, the upright thing for them to do is to refuse to yield to such a feeling and go with the principle that everyone has a right to freedom of religion even when that religion leads one astray. Yes, it is difficult and very tempting to toss such a principle and ban the plan but so are numerous other principles very difficult to abide by. That’s just what makes them principles--they must not be treated lightly, they must apply even when one is really tempted to ignore them.
Now all this applies when one sees human beings guided by moral and political principles but not if one sees them as pragmatists for whom principles do not apply. As the joke goes with traffic lights, if they are only suggestions, not firm rules of the road, then by all means dodge them as you wish, if you can get away with doing so.
The famous American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James argued once that if breaching the truth gives one serious satisfaction, then one should breach it. As he put it in his famous essay, “The Meaning of Truth,” “The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of our formulas to another may not consist so much in its literal ‘objectivity,’ as in subjective qualities like its usefulness, its ‘elegance,’ or its congruity with our residual beliefs” (p. 41). So it isn’t what’s objectively true that counts for us but what is subjectively useful. When it comes to dealing with such matters as whether to incarcerate Japanese Americans, regardless of whether they have been proven guilty of anything, or to ban a mosque near Ground Zero, never mind that no one has shown that anyone’s rights are being violated, the pragmatist can always go around the principle and say, but do it if it feels good.
I am not here going to attempt to show the superiority of the principled as distinct from the pragmatic approach to human conduct or public policies in a human community. What I want to call attention to is how addressing issues pragmatically differs from how someone with principles would address them. Pragmatists distrust principles, thinking them to be a result of loose, ideological, and dogmatic thinking, while those who stress principles insist that what they rely upon for guidance has gone through centuries of trial and error and by now deserve to be heeded even when they appear to be inconvenient.
Most of the American founders were convinced that certain well considered principles apply to how a human community must be governed, how citizens ought to deal with one another, no matter what. Many today seem to scoff at such an attitude. Of course they usually make exceptions, for example, when they oppose torture or rape or child molestation, and it is unclear how can they square these exceptions with their avowed pragmatism in other areas. But they do try. We are witnessing how this drama plays out about something many Americans feel strongly about.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Revisiting Natural Rights
Tibor R. Machan
In response to an essay in which I discuss the difference between Amartya Sen’s and the late Peter Bauer’s recommendation for how countries can achieve economic development, one in which I touch on the topic of natural rights, someone sent the magazine where my essay had appeared the following communication. I believe that it will serve as a good beginning for some further considerations of natural rights.
The author of the letter, Stephen E. Silver (to Free Inquiry Magazine [August-September 2010]), wrote as follows:
I think the simple answer to Tibor Machan’s question (“Sen v. Bauer: On What Do Rights Stand?” Fl, June/July 2010) is that human rights do not stand on anything. These rights, when first promulgated several hundred years ago, were called “natural rights” or the “Rights of Man.” They were believed to be God-given; if there was no God, then there was no basis for these rights.
As deism gradually gave way to outright secularism, so “natural rights” (based on “natural religion”) gave way to “human rights.” But if they did not emanate from God, what was their origin?
Machan would like us to believe that such rights are based on an objective knowledge of human nature. There is, of course no such knowledge. Different cultures have different concepts of human living. There are many societies that, as Captain Cook learned, have little or no concept of private property or in which the personal ownership of land is inconceivable. Even within the same culture, there are many different concepts of human nature—should we accept that of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, or Nietzsche?
Additionally, he posits that such rights rest in the human capacity to reason about reality. In fact, as anyone watching Fox News will confirm, the human capacity to reason about reality is extremely limited and cannot be used to establish that we have or deserve to have human rights. This is a complete non sequitor.
In either case, Machan believes that certain rights actually exist. He calls them “pre-legal principles,” but this is simply a euphemism for “natural rights,” i.e., natural rights without God but which are nevertheless inviolable and not open to discussion.
There is absolutely no evidence that such abstract rights or pre-legal principles exist. And certainly, in practice, these so called inalienable rights may be abrogated or withdrawn. If we have a natural right to life, then why is there a death penalty? If there is a right to liberty, why is there incarceration? Our “freedom of speech” is limited by laws against libel, slander, and “hate speech.” Obviously these “inalienable” rights are, in fact, provisional.
Perhaps we should treat others as if they had human rights, and we should ourselves be treated as if we had human rights, but these rights do not really exist. We have made them up for ourselves. We have put them to good use, but we should admit that they are simply a figment of society’s imagination. Indeed, they may represent our best aspirations.
Let me start with the first point Mr. Silver raises, namely, that human rights used to be dubbed natural rights and were as such thought to be God-given. Yet, as the term “natural” clearly suggests, these rights were believed--for example by John Locke--to be based on an understanding of human nature. Human beings may have been regarded by some natural rights theorists as God-created but their basic rights were alleged to be derivable from their nature as free and independent moral agents. That is how John Locke saw it, rightly or wrongly. So what matters here is whether there are human beings as a class of living entities in the world and whether they have attributes that imply that they have certain rights once they find themselves in human communities. Locke and the American Founders held that they do. God had nothing much to do with this part of the theory.
Next, the reason for the switch to human rights from natural ones was not due to any theological considerations either but because the idea of “the nature of X” fell into disrepute at the hands of skeptics, like David Hume, who disputed that things had a firm, stable nature. Yet this is still a very open issue in philosophy, so it is widely argued that human nature exists and that certain rights may be derived from it. Even if widely disputed, it could well be right, which is what really matters.
As to whether there are many different conceptions of human nature throughout history and the globe, that’s irrelevant. There are many different conceptions of justice, fairness, equality, virtue, vice, etc., but that’s due to the simple fact that people don’t see things eye to eye. It does not imply for a moment that no human nature can be identified, only that they dispute about the matter just as they do about most other serious human concerns (even in the natural sciences). In my view, which is by no means idiosyncratic, human nature exists--it consist of those aspects of what human beings are that they share, in virtue of which we are classified as human beings rather than, say, bears or zebras (which also have a nature).
Also, the fact that a principle can be violated doesn’t disprove its existence--woman have the right to their sexual liberty yet rapists violate this principles all the time. Moral and political principles are of that sort.
Another point on which the letter’s author is mistaken is the defining capacity of human beings to reason. They are rational animals, as most thinkers have found since ancient times. This means they have the capacity to be rational, to reason carefully about the world. It does not mean that they do so all the time--on Fox TV or MS NBC, for that matter--or that all of them choose to do so.
The idea of natural rights is pretty well grounded--I wrote about this in my Individuals and Their Rights (1989)--and the existence of disagreement does not undermine it. There are thousands of racists who disagree about the moral equality of blacks and whites and they are entirely irrelevant when it comes to the truth of the issue.
As a side issue, this author’s case against natural rights, is exactly the same as that presented by the philosopher Kai Nielsen in his paper from 1965, “Skepticism and Human Rights,” in The Monist. The debate goes on but that doesn’t mean there is no truth about the matter. Today it is the president’s favorite attorney, Cass Sunstein, who voices the skepticism about natural rights, to morrow it will be someone else. That’s why eternal vigilance is needed.
Tibor R. Machan
In response to an essay in which I discuss the difference between Amartya Sen’s and the late Peter Bauer’s recommendation for how countries can achieve economic development, one in which I touch on the topic of natural rights, someone sent the magazine where my essay had appeared the following communication. I believe that it will serve as a good beginning for some further considerations of natural rights.
The author of the letter, Stephen E. Silver (to Free Inquiry Magazine [August-September 2010]), wrote as follows:
I think the simple answer to Tibor Machan’s question (“Sen v. Bauer: On What Do Rights Stand?” Fl, June/July 2010) is that human rights do not stand on anything. These rights, when first promulgated several hundred years ago, were called “natural rights” or the “Rights of Man.” They were believed to be God-given; if there was no God, then there was no basis for these rights.
As deism gradually gave way to outright secularism, so “natural rights” (based on “natural religion”) gave way to “human rights.” But if they did not emanate from God, what was their origin?
Machan would like us to believe that such rights are based on an objective knowledge of human nature. There is, of course no such knowledge. Different cultures have different concepts of human living. There are many societies that, as Captain Cook learned, have little or no concept of private property or in which the personal ownership of land is inconceivable. Even within the same culture, there are many different concepts of human nature—should we accept that of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, or Nietzsche?
Additionally, he posits that such rights rest in the human capacity to reason about reality. In fact, as anyone watching Fox News will confirm, the human capacity to reason about reality is extremely limited and cannot be used to establish that we have or deserve to have human rights. This is a complete non sequitor.
In either case, Machan believes that certain rights actually exist. He calls them “pre-legal principles,” but this is simply a euphemism for “natural rights,” i.e., natural rights without God but which are nevertheless inviolable and not open to discussion.
There is absolutely no evidence that such abstract rights or pre-legal principles exist. And certainly, in practice, these so called inalienable rights may be abrogated or withdrawn. If we have a natural right to life, then why is there a death penalty? If there is a right to liberty, why is there incarceration? Our “freedom of speech” is limited by laws against libel, slander, and “hate speech.” Obviously these “inalienable” rights are, in fact, provisional.
Perhaps we should treat others as if they had human rights, and we should ourselves be treated as if we had human rights, but these rights do not really exist. We have made them up for ourselves. We have put them to good use, but we should admit that they are simply a figment of society’s imagination. Indeed, they may represent our best aspirations.
Let me start with the first point Mr. Silver raises, namely, that human rights used to be dubbed natural rights and were as such thought to be God-given. Yet, as the term “natural” clearly suggests, these rights were believed--for example by John Locke--to be based on an understanding of human nature. Human beings may have been regarded by some natural rights theorists as God-created but their basic rights were alleged to be derivable from their nature as free and independent moral agents. That is how John Locke saw it, rightly or wrongly. So what matters here is whether there are human beings as a class of living entities in the world and whether they have attributes that imply that they have certain rights once they find themselves in human communities. Locke and the American Founders held that they do. God had nothing much to do with this part of the theory.
Next, the reason for the switch to human rights from natural ones was not due to any theological considerations either but because the idea of “the nature of X” fell into disrepute at the hands of skeptics, like David Hume, who disputed that things had a firm, stable nature. Yet this is still a very open issue in philosophy, so it is widely argued that human nature exists and that certain rights may be derived from it. Even if widely disputed, it could well be right, which is what really matters.
As to whether there are many different conceptions of human nature throughout history and the globe, that’s irrelevant. There are many different conceptions of justice, fairness, equality, virtue, vice, etc., but that’s due to the simple fact that people don’t see things eye to eye. It does not imply for a moment that no human nature can be identified, only that they dispute about the matter just as they do about most other serious human concerns (even in the natural sciences). In my view, which is by no means idiosyncratic, human nature exists--it consist of those aspects of what human beings are that they share, in virtue of which we are classified as human beings rather than, say, bears or zebras (which also have a nature).
Also, the fact that a principle can be violated doesn’t disprove its existence--woman have the right to their sexual liberty yet rapists violate this principles all the time. Moral and political principles are of that sort.
Another point on which the letter’s author is mistaken is the defining capacity of human beings to reason. They are rational animals, as most thinkers have found since ancient times. This means they have the capacity to be rational, to reason carefully about the world. It does not mean that they do so all the time--on Fox TV or MS NBC, for that matter--or that all of them choose to do so.
The idea of natural rights is pretty well grounded--I wrote about this in my Individuals and Their Rights (1989)--and the existence of disagreement does not undermine it. There are thousands of racists who disagree about the moral equality of blacks and whites and they are entirely irrelevant when it comes to the truth of the issue.
As a side issue, this author’s case against natural rights, is exactly the same as that presented by the philosopher Kai Nielsen in his paper from 1965, “Skepticism and Human Rights,” in The Monist. The debate goes on but that doesn’t mean there is no truth about the matter. Today it is the president’s favorite attorney, Cass Sunstein, who voices the skepticism about natural rights, to morrow it will be someone else. That’s why eternal vigilance is needed.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Revisiting Obama’s Selective Pragmatism
Tibor R. Machan
Some may remember that during the debate about federal government bailouts and stimuli the Obama regime made it very clear that no ideology will be allowed to sway the administration and that what is important is that the government stick to a pragmatic policy, meaning a policy of expediency, one concerned with what works not with what conforms to principles, such as the right to private property or limited governmental powers. As he is quoted to have said, "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them," Mr. Obama told Americans with what he regards as old-fashioned ideological beliefs, "that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...." That is indeed the calling card of the pragmatist--do whatever works! (In a recent movie by Woody Allen. Whatever Works, the protagonist follows this advice but it isn’t clear how well he comes off doing so!)
Ironically, pragmatism, the quintessentially unprincipled philosophical movement, was born in America, the one country in human history and around the globe most explicitly tied to certain basic principles of community life--e.g., the existence of unalienable, natural human rights, a tradition now widely mimicked (more or less, around the world, not least by many members of the United Nations). Such American thinkers as William James, C. I. Lewis, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Willard Van Orman Quine, Richard Rorty and, right near the current White House, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, all professed to be pragmatists. Although their specific positions are not identical, what they share most of all is that they reject the idea of foundations to human thought and action. Anti-foundationalism is a prominent stance they all share, meaning that what people think and do cannot be given some kind of basic grounding in reality or thought or God or anything. Whatever works is all that can be produced in support of what one thinks, does, supports as law and public policy. No principled support for--or opposition to--what we think and do is possible to find, so we need to abandon the myth of foundationalism! Let’s just settle for what pans out in practice.
As many critics of this position have pointed out, it is a non-starter; it cannot be practiced at all since what works is always related to some objective or goal that one aims to achieve and if there are no principles on which to rest such goals, they remain simply a wish list of powerful, influential people, quite arbitrary in the last analysis; most importantly, pragmatism is the foe of a society that aims to establish and maintain justice among its citizens since principles of justice are plainly unknowable so far as pragmatism goes. It is also blatantly offensive--no basic reason can be given for opposition to torture or rape or murder? Give me a break!
In the recent dispute over the building of a Muslim mosque near Ground Zero in New York City, however, President Obama elected to try to take a principled, totally anti-pragmatic, stand when he said that everyone has a right to practice his or her religion, never mind whether it is done wisely or not. As the president said, the right to religious liberty "includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.” He went on to say, "This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable."
So, suddenly Mr. Obama is one of those old fashioned principled Americans, right? Forgive me if I am skeptical. Pragmatists do not change their colors so easily. Once a pragmatist, pretty much always a pragmatist, so that whether in matters of economic policy, torture, or the right to religious liberty no pragmatist would cite an alleged basic principle in support of what he or she supports. No, what would matter is whether the policy being promoted works.
Accordingly, Mr. Obama must believe that insisting on the rights of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City and not commenting on the wisdom or propriety of their doing so is indeed what works! But what does it work for?
Well, that is the 64 thousand dollar question. My suggestion is that it works to keep Mr. Obama’s image reasonably respectable by way of its ultimate obscurity. Nothing like rolling out one’s credentials as a sophist, an obfuscator of ideas, so as to make one seem erudite and cool.
Tibor R. Machan
Some may remember that during the debate about federal government bailouts and stimuli the Obama regime made it very clear that no ideology will be allowed to sway the administration and that what is important is that the government stick to a pragmatic policy, meaning a policy of expediency, one concerned with what works not with what conforms to principles, such as the right to private property or limited governmental powers. As he is quoted to have said, "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them," Mr. Obama told Americans with what he regards as old-fashioned ideological beliefs, "that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...." That is indeed the calling card of the pragmatist--do whatever works! (In a recent movie by Woody Allen. Whatever Works, the protagonist follows this advice but it isn’t clear how well he comes off doing so!)
Ironically, pragmatism, the quintessentially unprincipled philosophical movement, was born in America, the one country in human history and around the globe most explicitly tied to certain basic principles of community life--e.g., the existence of unalienable, natural human rights, a tradition now widely mimicked (more or less, around the world, not least by many members of the United Nations). Such American thinkers as William James, C. I. Lewis, John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Willard Van Orman Quine, Richard Rorty and, right near the current White House, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, all professed to be pragmatists. Although their specific positions are not identical, what they share most of all is that they reject the idea of foundations to human thought and action. Anti-foundationalism is a prominent stance they all share, meaning that what people think and do cannot be given some kind of basic grounding in reality or thought or God or anything. Whatever works is all that can be produced in support of what one thinks, does, supports as law and public policy. No principled support for--or opposition to--what we think and do is possible to find, so we need to abandon the myth of foundationalism! Let’s just settle for what pans out in practice.
As many critics of this position have pointed out, it is a non-starter; it cannot be practiced at all since what works is always related to some objective or goal that one aims to achieve and if there are no principles on which to rest such goals, they remain simply a wish list of powerful, influential people, quite arbitrary in the last analysis; most importantly, pragmatism is the foe of a society that aims to establish and maintain justice among its citizens since principles of justice are plainly unknowable so far as pragmatism goes. It is also blatantly offensive--no basic reason can be given for opposition to torture or rape or murder? Give me a break!
In the recent dispute over the building of a Muslim mosque near Ground Zero in New York City, however, President Obama elected to try to take a principled, totally anti-pragmatic, stand when he said that everyone has a right to practice his or her religion, never mind whether it is done wisely or not. As the president said, the right to religious liberty "includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.” He went on to say, "This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable."
So, suddenly Mr. Obama is one of those old fashioned principled Americans, right? Forgive me if I am skeptical. Pragmatists do not change their colors so easily. Once a pragmatist, pretty much always a pragmatist, so that whether in matters of economic policy, torture, or the right to religious liberty no pragmatist would cite an alleged basic principle in support of what he or she supports. No, what would matter is whether the policy being promoted works.
Accordingly, Mr. Obama must believe that insisting on the rights of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City and not commenting on the wisdom or propriety of their doing so is indeed what works! But what does it work for?
Well, that is the 64 thousand dollar question. My suggestion is that it works to keep Mr. Obama’s image reasonably respectable by way of its ultimate obscurity. Nothing like rolling out one’s credentials as a sophist, an obfuscator of ideas, so as to make one seem erudite and cool.
Column on Infanticide & Instincts
Tibor R. Machan
As life rolls on for me, with many pluses and some minuses along the way, an issue that keeps propping up in my more academic studies is whether people have instincts like non-human animals supposedly do. Or are we born with what some refer to as a blank slate, tabula rasa? That is to say, is the human mind, before it receives the impressions gained from experience, totally or at least mostly uninformed or does it contain some information and guidance for action, various beliefs and so forth, from birth or even before?
Among many of my colleagues and associates, indeed quite a few of my good friends, this is a live topic and we tend to watch for events around us, as well as for books, papers, essays and so on, wherein it figures prominently. One of the major thinkers of the modern era, Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804), even believed that the human mind contains some very vital information as a matter of a birthright, as it were, so that, for example, we all arrive in the world already believing in such notions as causality or time or space, we do not need to be exposed to the facts of reality first in order to acquire them. They are innate.
Another very famous and influential thinker, the philosopher John Locke (1632 - 1704) who is credited with developing some of the most crucial principles the American founders held to be constitutive of justice itself--the idea of basic, natural, human individual rights (remember the Declaration of Independence where Thomas Jefferson and his fellow founders made prominent use of it)--held the view that the human mind is indeed a blank slate, lacking all knowledge and in need of acquiring it as people commence and continue living. Others, such as the French philosopher Rene Descartes--often dubbed the founder of modern philosophy and an influential mathematician as well--also advocated a view sort of like Kant’s, holding as he did that human beings had a few but vital innate ideas, such as the awareness of their own reality! (Such contemporary thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steve Pinker continue debating the issue.)
One point often stressed by supporters of the innate idea or instinctive knowledge position in defense of their view is that mothers, clearly, have an instinctive love for their children and know, innately, what they need to do for them so they would grow up flourishing rather than being neglected or even perishing. Yet this is just the evidence that I find highly dubious and just the other day it was seriously called into question once again, when a mother was found to have murdered two of her little sons. As CNN reported the story, “The mother of two boys,” the CNN report stated, “says she smothered them with her hands, strapped their bodies in car seats and submerged the car in a South Carolina river.” Purportedly she had experienced some serious setbacks in her life, including being unemployed, which may help account for what she did.
Now the matter that stood out for me, aside from the horror of it--anyone who knows a thing or two about being a parent would have to experience some such feeling upon running across this type of news, of which, sadly, there is aplenty--namely, where on earth were those alleged instincts in this mother, the innate knowledge of the wrongness of such a deed and therefore the instinctual disinclination to commit it, that people talk about when they defend the idea of instincts. And, of course, this instance of infanticide is but one among hundreds and thousands of others well known from history and around the globe.
It seems to me that the notion that we have instincts has some credibility only vis-a-vis very few kinds of human conduct, such as babies suckling instinctively. Clearly they would not have had any time to learn that that’s how they must sustain their lives so they must have something built in, as it were, that gets them to feed from their mothers’ breasts. And maybe there are some very few other (early) human behaviors that are instinctive but they are quickly extinguished and thereafter we indeed need to learn how to proceed unprepared apart from certain capacities, with the great variety of tasks in our lives. Unlike other animals, we need to set out to learn, often with deliberation and discipline--it doesn’t just happen. (Boy, is that driven home to anyone who is a professional teacher!).
This is a topic with a great deal of ink spent on it, in and out of the academy, and here I am barely touching the surface. But it does seem to me that the anti-instinct side of the debate is more credible. Lacking instincts may well be one of those features of human life that serves to distinguished us from other animals.
Tibor R. Machan
As life rolls on for me, with many pluses and some minuses along the way, an issue that keeps propping up in my more academic studies is whether people have instincts like non-human animals supposedly do. Or are we born with what some refer to as a blank slate, tabula rasa? That is to say, is the human mind, before it receives the impressions gained from experience, totally or at least mostly uninformed or does it contain some information and guidance for action, various beliefs and so forth, from birth or even before?
Among many of my colleagues and associates, indeed quite a few of my good friends, this is a live topic and we tend to watch for events around us, as well as for books, papers, essays and so on, wherein it figures prominently. One of the major thinkers of the modern era, Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804), even believed that the human mind contains some very vital information as a matter of a birthright, as it were, so that, for example, we all arrive in the world already believing in such notions as causality or time or space, we do not need to be exposed to the facts of reality first in order to acquire them. They are innate.
Another very famous and influential thinker, the philosopher John Locke (1632 - 1704) who is credited with developing some of the most crucial principles the American founders held to be constitutive of justice itself--the idea of basic, natural, human individual rights (remember the Declaration of Independence where Thomas Jefferson and his fellow founders made prominent use of it)--held the view that the human mind is indeed a blank slate, lacking all knowledge and in need of acquiring it as people commence and continue living. Others, such as the French philosopher Rene Descartes--often dubbed the founder of modern philosophy and an influential mathematician as well--also advocated a view sort of like Kant’s, holding as he did that human beings had a few but vital innate ideas, such as the awareness of their own reality! (Such contemporary thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steve Pinker continue debating the issue.)
One point often stressed by supporters of the innate idea or instinctive knowledge position in defense of their view is that mothers, clearly, have an instinctive love for their children and know, innately, what they need to do for them so they would grow up flourishing rather than being neglected or even perishing. Yet this is just the evidence that I find highly dubious and just the other day it was seriously called into question once again, when a mother was found to have murdered two of her little sons. As CNN reported the story, “The mother of two boys,” the CNN report stated, “says she smothered them with her hands, strapped their bodies in car seats and submerged the car in a South Carolina river.” Purportedly she had experienced some serious setbacks in her life, including being unemployed, which may help account for what she did.
Now the matter that stood out for me, aside from the horror of it--anyone who knows a thing or two about being a parent would have to experience some such feeling upon running across this type of news, of which, sadly, there is aplenty--namely, where on earth were those alleged instincts in this mother, the innate knowledge of the wrongness of such a deed and therefore the instinctual disinclination to commit it, that people talk about when they defend the idea of instincts. And, of course, this instance of infanticide is but one among hundreds and thousands of others well known from history and around the globe.
It seems to me that the notion that we have instincts has some credibility only vis-a-vis very few kinds of human conduct, such as babies suckling instinctively. Clearly they would not have had any time to learn that that’s how they must sustain their lives so they must have something built in, as it were, that gets them to feed from their mothers’ breasts. And maybe there are some very few other (early) human behaviors that are instinctive but they are quickly extinguished and thereafter we indeed need to learn how to proceed unprepared apart from certain capacities, with the great variety of tasks in our lives. Unlike other animals, we need to set out to learn, often with deliberation and discipline--it doesn’t just happen. (Boy, is that driven home to anyone who is a professional teacher!).
This is a topic with a great deal of ink spent on it, in and out of the academy, and here I am barely touching the surface. But it does seem to me that the anti-instinct side of the debate is more credible. Lacking instincts may well be one of those features of human life that serves to distinguished us from other animals.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The Mosque Fiasco
Tibor R. Machan
For once I agree with something that President Obama said, if I understood him right: Muslims do have the basic right, one that is legally protected in a free country, to build a mosque anywhere they choose if they own the land (or are leasing it with permission from the owner) to build there even though it is very possible that they should not build the mosque, that it is morally offensive, unwise, and imprudent for them to do so. That is indeed part of the meaning of freedom of religion.
If only Mr. Obama and his supporters had the integrity to apply this doctrine in other areas of social life, such as education, science, the arts, and economics. In all those spheres human beings have the right to do as they choose, provided they are not violating anyone’s rights; yet in these areas they do not enjoy the protection of the law in America and most other places around the globe (places, by the way, where the right to religious liberty enjoys no protection, such as in most countries where the official, government supported religion is Islam).
Interestingly, Mr. Obama never mentioned this last point, thus missing a fine opportunity to do a bit of peaceful proselytizing to the rest of the world. As if freedom of worship were some kind of culturally specific right just of American citizens, not a basic, universal human right at all! But it is just that, a basic human right and where it lacks protection, there is serious injustice afoot. And there is serious injustice afoot in America where only religion and journalism (and some adjacent activities) enjoy legal protection from those who would regulate and regiment other people’s peaceful--albeit possibly risky or offensive--conduct.
This is kind of like that famous modern liberal crusade in support of choice, the choice to get an abortion (at least up to when a human being emerges during pregnancy). OK, so arguably pregnant women have the right to choose--I will not explore this topic here any further. But why stop there? It is utterly perverse to believe that while pregnant women ought to be free to kill their fetuses, they should not be free to, say, smoke marijuana or open a hair salon without the “permission” of politicians and bureaucrats. How come the former but not the latter? What kind of a free country is it where such contradictions are rampant and upheld by the legal authorities (including the president)? Or where one is free to publish porn galore but must bow to local, state and/or federal authorities who want to regulate nearly everything else they might choose to? Why is one’s freedom to choose as one wants with one’s resources, one’s wealth (which also means one’s skills, time, property, etc.) not protected with the determination that one’s freedom to publish whatever one wants to publish is and to worship whatever one elects to worship?
Not only on the domestic front but around the globe America would have a far better reputation, for political integrity to start with, if it went on record, via, for example, its chief executive officer, declaring--once again--that individual human beings have fundamental rights, simply for being human, to do as they want to do provided what they elect to do is peaceful, non-invasive or non-aggressive.
There is a time to be righteous, yes, and when some truly despised organization such as those who have made the vile choice to built a mosque near ground zero of all places, then speaking up for their rights is arguably honorable and righteous. But it isn’t if those doing such speaking up forget about all the other rights human beings have that go neglected, unprotected, abused and violated throughout the land, not to mention the globe. It is fine for our president to defend the rights of misguided Muslims but not while he fails to mention that millions of others do not have their rights properly protected, in innumerable spheres of peaceful human activity. It may even suggest a bias on his part, one no official of a free country ought to harbor.
Tibor R. Machan
For once I agree with something that President Obama said, if I understood him right: Muslims do have the basic right, one that is legally protected in a free country, to build a mosque anywhere they choose if they own the land (or are leasing it with permission from the owner) to build there even though it is very possible that they should not build the mosque, that it is morally offensive, unwise, and imprudent for them to do so. That is indeed part of the meaning of freedom of religion.
If only Mr. Obama and his supporters had the integrity to apply this doctrine in other areas of social life, such as education, science, the arts, and economics. In all those spheres human beings have the right to do as they choose, provided they are not violating anyone’s rights; yet in these areas they do not enjoy the protection of the law in America and most other places around the globe (places, by the way, where the right to religious liberty enjoys no protection, such as in most countries where the official, government supported religion is Islam).
Interestingly, Mr. Obama never mentioned this last point, thus missing a fine opportunity to do a bit of peaceful proselytizing to the rest of the world. As if freedom of worship were some kind of culturally specific right just of American citizens, not a basic, universal human right at all! But it is just that, a basic human right and where it lacks protection, there is serious injustice afoot. And there is serious injustice afoot in America where only religion and journalism (and some adjacent activities) enjoy legal protection from those who would regulate and regiment other people’s peaceful--albeit possibly risky or offensive--conduct.
This is kind of like that famous modern liberal crusade in support of choice, the choice to get an abortion (at least up to when a human being emerges during pregnancy). OK, so arguably pregnant women have the right to choose--I will not explore this topic here any further. But why stop there? It is utterly perverse to believe that while pregnant women ought to be free to kill their fetuses, they should not be free to, say, smoke marijuana or open a hair salon without the “permission” of politicians and bureaucrats. How come the former but not the latter? What kind of a free country is it where such contradictions are rampant and upheld by the legal authorities (including the president)? Or where one is free to publish porn galore but must bow to local, state and/or federal authorities who want to regulate nearly everything else they might choose to? Why is one’s freedom to choose as one wants with one’s resources, one’s wealth (which also means one’s skills, time, property, etc.) not protected with the determination that one’s freedom to publish whatever one wants to publish is and to worship whatever one elects to worship?
Not only on the domestic front but around the globe America would have a far better reputation, for political integrity to start with, if it went on record, via, for example, its chief executive officer, declaring--once again--that individual human beings have fundamental rights, simply for being human, to do as they want to do provided what they elect to do is peaceful, non-invasive or non-aggressive.
There is a time to be righteous, yes, and when some truly despised organization such as those who have made the vile choice to built a mosque near ground zero of all places, then speaking up for their rights is arguably honorable and righteous. But it isn’t if those doing such speaking up forget about all the other rights human beings have that go neglected, unprotected, abused and violated throughout the land, not to mention the globe. It is fine for our president to defend the rights of misguided Muslims but not while he fails to mention that millions of others do not have their rights properly protected, in innumerable spheres of peaceful human activity. It may even suggest a bias on his part, one no official of a free country ought to harbor.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Mose, My Hero
Tibor R. Machan
Of course, I am just a fan of Mose Allison, he’s not really my main hero but now and then I get enthusiastic about his work and nearly idolize him.
Mose Allison is a jazz pianist, composer and perhaps the coolest cat on the jazz and blues scene. I’ve had the good fortune of witnessing him play on numerous occasions, from the days when I lived in Santa Barbara, at El Paseo Restaurant back in the 19070s, to Harry’s Bar in Century City, the MOMA and the Bakery Jazz club in Los Angeles, and most recently, on June 30, 2010, at Madison Square Park in New York City. Of course, I have virtually all of his music on my well- and eclectically populated iPod (7400 pieces of music of the greatest variety you can imagine, all uploaded from my CDs by me into my iTunes system on my Mac). Next to my all-time favorite pianist, Erroll Garner, Mose is the top for sure. (Not that I am narrow about this--Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers, among quite a few others, send me too, such as the Allman Brothers, Billy Holiday, Pete Fountain, Sidney Bechet, Ella Fitzgerald, Eric Clapton, Albert Collins, Mozart, Camille Saint-Saëns, Zoltan Kodaly and many many more.)
My current reason for deciding to celebrate Mose is a bit odd. He is one of the oldest jazz musicians still making the circuit regularly, having just recently returned from recording live two CDs in London, just as a sample. He is in his early 80s and sings and writes and plays the piano uniquely and superbly. (Is it just me who finds that pianists tend to play on and on into old age, like Horowitz and Rubinstein, for instance?)
What fascinates me is how Mose & Co. seem never to retire. And they flourish, it seems, although I don’t know their personal lives so well as to swear to this. But as far as doing what they do is concerned, they seem not to be in the retirement business. (Which reminds me of a remark attributed to, of all people, Bob Dylan, namely, “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” Not bad for a quip!) Of course, for some folks retirement is probably very appropriate, especially if much of what they do for a living taxes them physically. But I have trouble fathoming it--writers, too, seem to just go on and on, whether anyone wants them to do so. In Mose Allison’s case, which seems to be a life of musical multitasking par excellance, the determination not to quit is probably an artistic and medical imperative. It probably contributes significantly to his longevity and happiness.
Mose is a very inventive lyricist although both original and borrowed songs fill up his repertoire. “Your Mind is on Vacation,” “Seventh Son,” “Fool’s Paradise,” “They Call it Jogging,” “Getting There” (which contains the hilarious line “thirty years in show business and only had one wife”) and “Since I fell for you” are just a few of my favorites.
There is a lot of stuff going around the world that’s disgusting, sad, tragic even, but then there are the likes of Mose Allison who balance it out, almost, with the most entertaining and wonderful offerings, at least for the likes of me. Aside from family and some of the great places I have managed to visit around the globe, the music that surrounds me, as well as the novels and paintings, pretty much prove that even with all the bad business, life is quite a worthy trip. And it can go on and on for quite some time, especially, I assume, if one keeps one’s mind and body active and learns to follow the Seventh Day Adventists’ bumper sticker I ran across once in Atlanta: “Notice the good and praise it.”
Tibor R. Machan
Of course, I am just a fan of Mose Allison, he’s not really my main hero but now and then I get enthusiastic about his work and nearly idolize him.
Mose Allison is a jazz pianist, composer and perhaps the coolest cat on the jazz and blues scene. I’ve had the good fortune of witnessing him play on numerous occasions, from the days when I lived in Santa Barbara, at El Paseo Restaurant back in the 19070s, to Harry’s Bar in Century City, the MOMA and the Bakery Jazz club in Los Angeles, and most recently, on June 30, 2010, at Madison Square Park in New York City. Of course, I have virtually all of his music on my well- and eclectically populated iPod (7400 pieces of music of the greatest variety you can imagine, all uploaded from my CDs by me into my iTunes system on my Mac). Next to my all-time favorite pianist, Erroll Garner, Mose is the top for sure. (Not that I am narrow about this--Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers, among quite a few others, send me too, such as the Allman Brothers, Billy Holiday, Pete Fountain, Sidney Bechet, Ella Fitzgerald, Eric Clapton, Albert Collins, Mozart, Camille Saint-Saëns, Zoltan Kodaly and many many more.)
My current reason for deciding to celebrate Mose is a bit odd. He is one of the oldest jazz musicians still making the circuit regularly, having just recently returned from recording live two CDs in London, just as a sample. He is in his early 80s and sings and writes and plays the piano uniquely and superbly. (Is it just me who finds that pianists tend to play on and on into old age, like Horowitz and Rubinstein, for instance?)
What fascinates me is how Mose & Co. seem never to retire. And they flourish, it seems, although I don’t know their personal lives so well as to swear to this. But as far as doing what they do is concerned, they seem not to be in the retirement business. (Which reminds me of a remark attributed to, of all people, Bob Dylan, namely, “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” Not bad for a quip!) Of course, for some folks retirement is probably very appropriate, especially if much of what they do for a living taxes them physically. But I have trouble fathoming it--writers, too, seem to just go on and on, whether anyone wants them to do so. In Mose Allison’s case, which seems to be a life of musical multitasking par excellance, the determination not to quit is probably an artistic and medical imperative. It probably contributes significantly to his longevity and happiness.
Mose is a very inventive lyricist although both original and borrowed songs fill up his repertoire. “Your Mind is on Vacation,” “Seventh Son,” “Fool’s Paradise,” “They Call it Jogging,” “Getting There” (which contains the hilarious line “thirty years in show business and only had one wife”) and “Since I fell for you” are just a few of my favorites.
There is a lot of stuff going around the world that’s disgusting, sad, tragic even, but then there are the likes of Mose Allison who balance it out, almost, with the most entertaining and wonderful offerings, at least for the likes of me. Aside from family and some of the great places I have managed to visit around the globe, the music that surrounds me, as well as the novels and paintings, pretty much prove that even with all the bad business, life is quite a worthy trip. And it can go on and on for quite some time, especially, I assume, if one keeps one’s mind and body active and learns to follow the Seventh Day Adventists’ bumper sticker I ran across once in Atlanta: “Notice the good and praise it.”
Monday, August 09, 2010
Machan Archive: Does Radical Left Favor Radical Islam?
Tibor R. Machan
Recently I have been recalling when University of Michigan Professor of Law, Catherine McKinnon used to advocate censoring pornography because she believed it is an assault upon women. She lays out her case in her very prestigiously published slim and readable book, Only Words (Harvard University Press, 1993). She not only developed a case for censoring pornography but also went north to Canada to help guide their legal system to implement her ideas in their Constitution.
Paradoxically McKinnon had once defended some Muslim women against their Bosnian oppressors who had tried to restrain their all too Western activities, in K. v. Karadzic, 866 F. Supp. 734 (S.D.N.Y. 1994), 70 F. 3d 232 (2d cir. 1996), all in the name of feminism. Yet, she also gave expert testimony against white supremacists on harm of discriminatory symbols (swastika and cross burning) in support of human rights statue prohibiting them, before Board of Inquiry in Alberta and won the case. (See, Kane v. Church of Jesus Christ Christian—Aryan Nations, Board of Inquiry Decision [Edmonton, Alberta], Feb. 28, 1992.)
The reason these facts have been occupying my attention is that they call to mind for me a strain of thinking in the West that really isn’t at all different from that exhibited by radical Islamists. Remember the reaction in some Muslim communities to the exercise of the right to journalistic freedom when some Danish newspapers published pictures that were regarded as offensive to Muslims? And, of course, there is the fatwa—a contract for murdering someone—that has never been rescinded against novelist Selman Rushdie who was accused of insulting Islam in his book Satanic Verses. The deadly reaction, in which Danish embassies were attacked, had been justified on the grounds that insulting Islam must be punished with murder, nothing less.
Of course, Professor McKinnon did not advocate murdering those who insult woman by producing and publishing pornography but the principle underlying her case isn’t different from what's embraced by radical Islamists. Both believe that writing or speaking against something isn’t “only words” but amount to what should be legally actionable offenses, indeed actionable by the faithful whether the law concurs or not.
But we can take this even further, to policies embraced by many mainstream modern liberal thinkers—e.g., the notion that there should be hate crimes. Never mind that the evidence for the hate is hostile language and other non-aggressive, though admittedly insulting, offensive symbolism. The Southern Poverty Law Center, co-founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, actively promotes legal sanctions against those who have promoted ideas and ideals that could inspire some to act violently against innocent members of minorities. Again, the issue isn’t that there is nothing wrong with promoting such ideas and ideals but that Dees and Levin urge us to forcibly restrain those with them.
But even more nearly mainstream is the idea that if one discriminates against someone, one has infringed his or her human rights. Yet, such discrimination is often nothing more than the (quite possibly irrational) exercise of one’s right to freedom of association, as when someone refuses to sell goods or services to members of certain minorities or to hire them for a position one has available in one’s business. Not that there may not be some kind of legal objection against such policies, given that in numerous cases there is no disclosure of the discriminatory policy. Yet, the law often prohibits such policy, so it would be illegal to disclose it! Only in strictly personal relationships, like those pursued on dating Web Sites, is one free to practice discrimination that may well be irrational—e.g., wishing only to date blacks or whites or light skinned Indians.
All this violates the right of freedom of association and is often against the law. When radical Muslims advocate the more extreme versions of these public policy measures, wishing to herd everyone everywhere into the Islamic community and using whatever force they can get away with to bring this about, they could be regarded as taking these politically correct public policies to their logical conclusion.
It might be of interest to see what Professor McKinnon thinks about the policies advocated by radical Islamists. It might give us a clue as to just how many those in the West share the premises of those who wish to destroy it. (One web site does discuss McKinnon’s odd position—http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/364.)
Tibor R. Machan
Recently I have been recalling when University of Michigan Professor of Law, Catherine McKinnon used to advocate censoring pornography because she believed it is an assault upon women. She lays out her case in her very prestigiously published slim and readable book, Only Words (Harvard University Press, 1993). She not only developed a case for censoring pornography but also went north to Canada to help guide their legal system to implement her ideas in their Constitution.
Paradoxically McKinnon had once defended some Muslim women against their Bosnian oppressors who had tried to restrain their all too Western activities, in K. v. Karadzic, 866 F. Supp. 734 (S.D.N.Y. 1994), 70 F. 3d 232 (2d cir. 1996), all in the name of feminism. Yet, she also gave expert testimony against white supremacists on harm of discriminatory symbols (swastika and cross burning) in support of human rights statue prohibiting them, before Board of Inquiry in Alberta and won the case. (See, Kane v. Church of Jesus Christ Christian—Aryan Nations, Board of Inquiry Decision [Edmonton, Alberta], Feb. 28, 1992.)
The reason these facts have been occupying my attention is that they call to mind for me a strain of thinking in the West that really isn’t at all different from that exhibited by radical Islamists. Remember the reaction in some Muslim communities to the exercise of the right to journalistic freedom when some Danish newspapers published pictures that were regarded as offensive to Muslims? And, of course, there is the fatwa—a contract for murdering someone—that has never been rescinded against novelist Selman Rushdie who was accused of insulting Islam in his book Satanic Verses. The deadly reaction, in which Danish embassies were attacked, had been justified on the grounds that insulting Islam must be punished with murder, nothing less.
Of course, Professor McKinnon did not advocate murdering those who insult woman by producing and publishing pornography but the principle underlying her case isn’t different from what's embraced by radical Islamists. Both believe that writing or speaking against something isn’t “only words” but amount to what should be legally actionable offenses, indeed actionable by the faithful whether the law concurs or not.
But we can take this even further, to policies embraced by many mainstream modern liberal thinkers—e.g., the notion that there should be hate crimes. Never mind that the evidence for the hate is hostile language and other non-aggressive, though admittedly insulting, offensive symbolism. The Southern Poverty Law Center, co-founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, actively promotes legal sanctions against those who have promoted ideas and ideals that could inspire some to act violently against innocent members of minorities. Again, the issue isn’t that there is nothing wrong with promoting such ideas and ideals but that Dees and Levin urge us to forcibly restrain those with them.
But even more nearly mainstream is the idea that if one discriminates against someone, one has infringed his or her human rights. Yet, such discrimination is often nothing more than the (quite possibly irrational) exercise of one’s right to freedom of association, as when someone refuses to sell goods or services to members of certain minorities or to hire them for a position one has available in one’s business. Not that there may not be some kind of legal objection against such policies, given that in numerous cases there is no disclosure of the discriminatory policy. Yet, the law often prohibits such policy, so it would be illegal to disclose it! Only in strictly personal relationships, like those pursued on dating Web Sites, is one free to practice discrimination that may well be irrational—e.g., wishing only to date blacks or whites or light skinned Indians.
All this violates the right of freedom of association and is often against the law. When radical Muslims advocate the more extreme versions of these public policy measures, wishing to herd everyone everywhere into the Islamic community and using whatever force they can get away with to bring this about, they could be regarded as taking these politically correct public policies to their logical conclusion.
It might be of interest to see what Professor McKinnon thinks about the policies advocated by radical Islamists. It might give us a clue as to just how many those in the West share the premises of those who wish to destroy it. (One web site does discuss McKinnon’s odd position—http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/364.)
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Beautiful & Broke
Tibor R. Machan
My favorite place to live in America is California. But don’t get me wrong--one size does not fit all. And how wonderful that is, that people differ so much that they could be quite happy living in very different places, some in Miami, some in Houston, some in Cleveland, and some in the San Francisco Bay area. I love this since it helps to confirm my individualist position about human social life.
On a recent visit to Portugal, near Lisbon and right off the Atlantic Coast, I rediscovered that country after having been away from it for 40 years. And it comes across very different now from what it was back then. Most surprisingly it comes across to me like, well, California. Not only is its coastal weather relatively mild anddry but the place is teeming with attractive neighborhoods--not to mention notable history--of all kinds.
Most noticeably, for someone just there for a few days, is how polished is Portugal’s infrastructure. The roads are spic and span; everything is squeaky clean; trains run on time, more or less, and so forth and so on. All in all Portugal looked to me well cared for, again kind of like much of California. (To know what I mean, one needs to check out the hundreds of California junior and community colleges, most of which are built like architectural wonders.)
And, sadly, Portugal and California share something else that’s not to be lost sight of: they are utterly broke and in deep, deep debt. Children and grandchildren in both lands are at this point on the hook for billions to pay back or must ready themselves for defaulting on the debt and having their credit rating destroyed. Unless some angel shows up to rescue these admittedly attractive, appealing communities, their populations are knee deep in trouble. Businesses will flee and are already doing so in droves.
Countries, communities of all sorts, have gotten themselves into this mess by politicians promising the sky to everyone and making good on their promises by way of phantom resources. We know about this from many of our own experiences andthose of our friends and neighbors. (I am no exception at all, what with having refinanced my home several times so as to fulfill the dreams of some of the members of my family and then ending up “upside down,” so much so that the notion that I might retire some day simply cannot be entertained--I will have to die “in office.”)
In the past the dire predictions of sensible economists could be met by reminding them that people tend to edge up to the brink of economic disaster but then start to contain themselves radically enough so as to avoid plummeting to ruin. But while this holds reasonably surely in most people’s private lives, public finance follows different patterns. The tragedy of the commons kicks in and instead of seriously changing from irrational enthusiasm toward caution prudence, public officials--politicians, their cheerleaders, bureaucrats and the rest--get caught up in the spirit of the ponzi scheme, trying to escape the burden of intolerable debt by way of dumping it on someone else, some other institutions, hoping this will avoid having to face the music at any time.
But it seems this scheme just has run its course in most welfare states, and near andfar off future generations will have to suffer. I do not see a way out unless the citizenry of these countries and communities assumes, voluntarily, a hard line stance in favor of austerity. Is that likely? I do not sell people short and very often they do get it right in a pinch but it could also turn out that the financially failed states such as California and Portugal--and a whole lot of others--will have to undergo some very hard times and perhaps the rule of some dictator who will distribute the burdens according to his or her lights, never mind fairness or justice.
Tibor R. Machan
My favorite place to live in America is California. But don’t get me wrong--one size does not fit all. And how wonderful that is, that people differ so much that they could be quite happy living in very different places, some in Miami, some in Houston, some in Cleveland, and some in the San Francisco Bay area. I love this since it helps to confirm my individualist position about human social life.
On a recent visit to Portugal, near Lisbon and right off the Atlantic Coast, I rediscovered that country after having been away from it for 40 years. And it comes across very different now from what it was back then. Most surprisingly it comes across to me like, well, California. Not only is its coastal weather relatively mild anddry but the place is teeming with attractive neighborhoods--not to mention notable history--of all kinds.
Most noticeably, for someone just there for a few days, is how polished is Portugal’s infrastructure. The roads are spic and span; everything is squeaky clean; trains run on time, more or less, and so forth and so on. All in all Portugal looked to me well cared for, again kind of like much of California. (To know what I mean, one needs to check out the hundreds of California junior and community colleges, most of which are built like architectural wonders.)
And, sadly, Portugal and California share something else that’s not to be lost sight of: they are utterly broke and in deep, deep debt. Children and grandchildren in both lands are at this point on the hook for billions to pay back or must ready themselves for defaulting on the debt and having their credit rating destroyed. Unless some angel shows up to rescue these admittedly attractive, appealing communities, their populations are knee deep in trouble. Businesses will flee and are already doing so in droves.
Countries, communities of all sorts, have gotten themselves into this mess by politicians promising the sky to everyone and making good on their promises by way of phantom resources. We know about this from many of our own experiences andthose of our friends and neighbors. (I am no exception at all, what with having refinanced my home several times so as to fulfill the dreams of some of the members of my family and then ending up “upside down,” so much so that the notion that I might retire some day simply cannot be entertained--I will have to die “in office.”)
In the past the dire predictions of sensible economists could be met by reminding them that people tend to edge up to the brink of economic disaster but then start to contain themselves radically enough so as to avoid plummeting to ruin. But while this holds reasonably surely in most people’s private lives, public finance follows different patterns. The tragedy of the commons kicks in and instead of seriously changing from irrational enthusiasm toward caution prudence, public officials--politicians, their cheerleaders, bureaucrats and the rest--get caught up in the spirit of the ponzi scheme, trying to escape the burden of intolerable debt by way of dumping it on someone else, some other institutions, hoping this will avoid having to face the music at any time.
But it seems this scheme just has run its course in most welfare states, and near andfar off future generations will have to suffer. I do not see a way out unless the citizenry of these countries and communities assumes, voluntarily, a hard line stance in favor of austerity. Is that likely? I do not sell people short and very often they do get it right in a pinch but it could also turn out that the financially failed states such as California and Portugal--and a whole lot of others--will have to undergo some very hard times and perhaps the rule of some dictator who will distribute the burdens according to his or her lights, never mind fairness or justice.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
A Lopsided Warning
Tibor R. Machan
The president of the AAUP--American Association of University Professors--issued a lengthy declaration warning the membership against getting involved with BP, the giant oil company whose operations have gone awry in the Gulf of Mexico and whose management is suspected of numerous failures and malpractices that have lead to the disaster in the Gulf. Of course, this, like some other high visible corporate infelicities have provoked innumerable people, pundits, government officials, bureaucrats, and, of course, most of all the cheerleaders of extensive government regulation of business, to chime in with a chorus of condemnation not only of BP (way before any serious scrutiny of its conduct has been carried out) but of big business itself.
Gary Nelson, AAUP’s president, joined in with his lengthy dissertation imploring academicians--professors and researchers alike--to refuse any job offers from BP which contained contractual provisions that would keep research and scholarship about the GUlf disaster secret or the property of BP. Sounding the mantra of threatening academic freedom--which, strictly speaking, such contracts do not threaten at all--President Nelson paints BP in the worst possible light, which, incidentally, may very well turn out to be justified (although it is at this point too early to tell and anyone with the slightest respect for due process of law, or even morality, would probably best remain silent).
But that is not what is really the most disturbing part of what Craig Nelson has done here. The worst thing is the lopsided nature of his warning. The greatest and bona fide threat to academic freedom does not come from BP and other big corporations. It comes from governments that are knee deep involved in American higher education and university scientific and technological research across the country. The sums of moneys taxpayers are coerced to contribute to universities is staggering. All those costly experiments conducted by the astro- or high energy, particle physicists across the land are funded by the taxpayers, other than those that some big private businesses support voluntarily (!).
When and if Professor Nelson identifies the source of troubles in higher education as stemming from massive government involvement, including funding and regulation, his lamentations about big business may acquire some measure of credibility but before that he has no basis for all his righteous cautionary words about academics getting into bed with big corporations. The threat from government to academic freedom, scholarly impartiality, lack of bias and partisanship is far greater than that coming from associating with big business--one can always, even if with difficulty, withdraw from businesses and go to some that behave better, but there is but one (or a few different levels of) government and usually equipped with guns to get its tasks achieved.
Nor is there any justification in treating government officials as if they were all knowing and virtuous, while corporate managers are regarded as villains. They aren’t public servants any more than are the rest of us. The idea of their having special virtues that qualify them to regiment around professionals of all sorts, including people in business, is misguided or an out and out ruse. Or maybe it’s just rank prejudice, especially in light of the source of most of the world’s deadly wars having been and still being waged by governments. BP has its serious faults but the federal government of nearly every country is far worse.
The first task for academicians is to achieve genuine independence, which must include independence of government funding and its cherry picking of where support will be given and where it will be withheld. Once that theme is central to the message of AAUP president Nelson and others like him, they will have earned the warrant to engage in chiding professors who may chose to join big businesses in the capacity of apologists.
But we should not hold our breaths waiting for this. Consistency and integrity are far from the list of virtues of the likes of Professor Nelson, at least when it comes to this topic.
Tibor R. Machan
The president of the AAUP--American Association of University Professors--issued a lengthy declaration warning the membership against getting involved with BP, the giant oil company whose operations have gone awry in the Gulf of Mexico and whose management is suspected of numerous failures and malpractices that have lead to the disaster in the Gulf. Of course, this, like some other high visible corporate infelicities have provoked innumerable people, pundits, government officials, bureaucrats, and, of course, most of all the cheerleaders of extensive government regulation of business, to chime in with a chorus of condemnation not only of BP (way before any serious scrutiny of its conduct has been carried out) but of big business itself.
Gary Nelson, AAUP’s president, joined in with his lengthy dissertation imploring academicians--professors and researchers alike--to refuse any job offers from BP which contained contractual provisions that would keep research and scholarship about the GUlf disaster secret or the property of BP. Sounding the mantra of threatening academic freedom--which, strictly speaking, such contracts do not threaten at all--President Nelson paints BP in the worst possible light, which, incidentally, may very well turn out to be justified (although it is at this point too early to tell and anyone with the slightest respect for due process of law, or even morality, would probably best remain silent).
But that is not what is really the most disturbing part of what Craig Nelson has done here. The worst thing is the lopsided nature of his warning. The greatest and bona fide threat to academic freedom does not come from BP and other big corporations. It comes from governments that are knee deep involved in American higher education and university scientific and technological research across the country. The sums of moneys taxpayers are coerced to contribute to universities is staggering. All those costly experiments conducted by the astro- or high energy, particle physicists across the land are funded by the taxpayers, other than those that some big private businesses support voluntarily (!).
When and if Professor Nelson identifies the source of troubles in higher education as stemming from massive government involvement, including funding and regulation, his lamentations about big business may acquire some measure of credibility but before that he has no basis for all his righteous cautionary words about academics getting into bed with big corporations. The threat from government to academic freedom, scholarly impartiality, lack of bias and partisanship is far greater than that coming from associating with big business--one can always, even if with difficulty, withdraw from businesses and go to some that behave better, but there is but one (or a few different levels of) government and usually equipped with guns to get its tasks achieved.
Nor is there any justification in treating government officials as if they were all knowing and virtuous, while corporate managers are regarded as villains. They aren’t public servants any more than are the rest of us. The idea of their having special virtues that qualify them to regiment around professionals of all sorts, including people in business, is misguided or an out and out ruse. Or maybe it’s just rank prejudice, especially in light of the source of most of the world’s deadly wars having been and still being waged by governments. BP has its serious faults but the federal government of nearly every country is far worse.
The first task for academicians is to achieve genuine independence, which must include independence of government funding and its cherry picking of where support will be given and where it will be withheld. Once that theme is central to the message of AAUP president Nelson and others like him, they will have earned the warrant to engage in chiding professors who may chose to join big businesses in the capacity of apologists.
But we should not hold our breaths waiting for this. Consistency and integrity are far from the list of virtues of the likes of Professor Nelson, at least when it comes to this topic.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Hungary's Malaise:
(Introduction to A Brief On Business Ethics, Hungarian Edition)
by Tibor R. Machan
Shortly after Hungary set off the fall of Soviet-style socialism in 1989, when that country's rulers allowed visitors from what then was East Germany to leave without any hindrance for West Germany, my mother, who had lived there for all of her life before being allowed to leave in 1975, made some interesting predictions. The decision by the Hungarian rulers was the first step toward the dismantling of the Soviet Empire. But my mother thought it wouldn't necessarily lead to panacea.
Her idea came back to me during the last few days when Prime Minister Ference Gyurcsany, identified by some as "the golden boy" of Hungary's Socialist Party, got himself into serious trouble with many Hungarians for having admitted, in a leaked closed-door party conference speech, that during his two years term as Prime Minister and the Socialist (post-communist) Party leader for the 2006 election which he and his party won, he was lying about the country's economy "morning, evening and night." Given that this was said in a recording that captured his own voice, Gyurcsany could not and never did deny that he made that statement.
What my mother said to me back after the fall of the Soviet-style socialists was that unless all those who were part of the old, communist regime were put in jail, the country would eventually be retaken by the former bosses because there was no group of classical liberal leaders ready to lead the country away from its dismal socialist past. She was confident that without such a group of new leaders, with genuinely new ideas, Hungary would slowly return to its old socialist ways.
What my mother said seemed to me to echo the more scholarly reflections of Professor Janos Kornai, in his book Road to the Free Market Economy: Shifting from a Socialist System the Example of Hungary (Viking, 1990).
What Kornai focused on, in particular, is the temptation faced by the newly reconstituted but unreconstructed socialists -- who were welcomed by the post-Soviet regime to take part in Hungary's political affairs -- to produce a nominal free market system that is, in reality, merely a bit different from the old socialist economy. In short, they would attempt to forge a powerful welfare state, promising to provide all the impossible perks of the old regime, only without the accompanying totalitarian politics. Kornai warned that this is going to be impossible and will simply lead to economic collapse. As the saying goes, you cannot squeeze blood out of a turnip. A broken economy like that produced under Soviet-style socialism simply cannot sustain the burdens of a welfare state. Why?
Because where there is no wealth, one simply cannot steal much. While Kornai was too polite to put it just this way, the plain fact is that a welfare state depends on there being a sufficient number of wealthy enough people from whom the government can steal so as to provide the perks the politicians are always tempted to promise to the voters.
Hungarians are arguably experiencing the consequences of not heeding Kornai's advice, and of failing to come up with a genuine free market political leadership. Instead, for more than two decades, the country has been trying to make do with a hodge-podge post-Soviet regime that fails to actually give up the socialist dream. Most recently a new tax was voted in on banks, never mind that taxes are, as in most places, choking the country already and the credit crunch is killing economic growth.
While a country such as the United States of America can get away with such a hodge-podge system, since its basic infrastructure has for many decades provided reasonably firm protection to basic classical liberal institutions -- e.g., the right to private property, freedom of contract, civil liberties, etc. -- in Hungary there is no comparable history to fall back upon. So once the barrel has been scraped, there is nothing more left to steal. There are no rich companies, rich individuals, rich investors and so on who could be conscripted to come up with the funds to sustain the welfare state.
Given this reality, what else can a socialist do but lie, lie and lie some more? And once the citizens of the country discover this -- and that's one benefit of having left the Soviet-style system behind, namely, considerable openness about what politicians are doing -- the regime will meet with plenty of opposition. And this is why the PM was urged to resign. He was reluctant to do so but it is difficult to see where he could go after this. The jig is up, as the saying goes.
There is no socialist miracle. Unless the country generates some solid non-socialist leadership and these will persuade the citizenry to have some patience while the economy recovers, prospects for peace and prosperity are dim.
(Introduction to A Brief On Business Ethics, Hungarian Edition)
by Tibor R. Machan
Shortly after Hungary set off the fall of Soviet-style socialism in 1989, when that country's rulers allowed visitors from what then was East Germany to leave without any hindrance for West Germany, my mother, who had lived there for all of her life before being allowed to leave in 1975, made some interesting predictions. The decision by the Hungarian rulers was the first step toward the dismantling of the Soviet Empire. But my mother thought it wouldn't necessarily lead to panacea.
Her idea came back to me during the last few days when Prime Minister Ference Gyurcsany, identified by some as "the golden boy" of Hungary's Socialist Party, got himself into serious trouble with many Hungarians for having admitted, in a leaked closed-door party conference speech, that during his two years term as Prime Minister and the Socialist (post-communist) Party leader for the 2006 election which he and his party won, he was lying about the country's economy "morning, evening and night." Given that this was said in a recording that captured his own voice, Gyurcsany could not and never did deny that he made that statement.
What my mother said to me back after the fall of the Soviet-style socialists was that unless all those who were part of the old, communist regime were put in jail, the country would eventually be retaken by the former bosses because there was no group of classical liberal leaders ready to lead the country away from its dismal socialist past. She was confident that without such a group of new leaders, with genuinely new ideas, Hungary would slowly return to its old socialist ways.
What my mother said seemed to me to echo the more scholarly reflections of Professor Janos Kornai, in his book Road to the Free Market Economy: Shifting from a Socialist System the Example of Hungary (Viking, 1990).
What Kornai focused on, in particular, is the temptation faced by the newly reconstituted but unreconstructed socialists -- who were welcomed by the post-Soviet regime to take part in Hungary's political affairs -- to produce a nominal free market system that is, in reality, merely a bit different from the old socialist economy. In short, they would attempt to forge a powerful welfare state, promising to provide all the impossible perks of the old regime, only without the accompanying totalitarian politics. Kornai warned that this is going to be impossible and will simply lead to economic collapse. As the saying goes, you cannot squeeze blood out of a turnip. A broken economy like that produced under Soviet-style socialism simply cannot sustain the burdens of a welfare state. Why?
Because where there is no wealth, one simply cannot steal much. While Kornai was too polite to put it just this way, the plain fact is that a welfare state depends on there being a sufficient number of wealthy enough people from whom the government can steal so as to provide the perks the politicians are always tempted to promise to the voters.
Hungarians are arguably experiencing the consequences of not heeding Kornai's advice, and of failing to come up with a genuine free market political leadership. Instead, for more than two decades, the country has been trying to make do with a hodge-podge post-Soviet regime that fails to actually give up the socialist dream. Most recently a new tax was voted in on banks, never mind that taxes are, as in most places, choking the country already and the credit crunch is killing economic growth.
While a country such as the United States of America can get away with such a hodge-podge system, since its basic infrastructure has for many decades provided reasonably firm protection to basic classical liberal institutions -- e.g., the right to private property, freedom of contract, civil liberties, etc. -- in Hungary there is no comparable history to fall back upon. So once the barrel has been scraped, there is nothing more left to steal. There are no rich companies, rich individuals, rich investors and so on who could be conscripted to come up with the funds to sustain the welfare state.
Given this reality, what else can a socialist do but lie, lie and lie some more? And once the citizens of the country discover this -- and that's one benefit of having left the Soviet-style system behind, namely, considerable openness about what politicians are doing -- the regime will meet with plenty of opposition. And this is why the PM was urged to resign. He was reluctant to do so but it is difficult to see where he could go after this. The jig is up, as the saying goes.
There is no socialist miracle. Unless the country generates some solid non-socialist leadership and these will persuade the citizenry to have some patience while the economy recovers, prospects for peace and prosperity are dim.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Obama’s Professor Yoo
Tibor R. Machan
Don’t believe it for a moment. The American Left, as a whole, does not support civil liberties. All that protestation of about Bush and Cheney’s allegedly unconstitutional expansion of presidential powers was just a bunch of empty hand-waiving. The New York Times has made it abundantly clear now that the recent protests by the Left against Professor John Yoo’s efforts to help former president George W. Bush to garner extensive presidential powers had nothing to do with opposing expanding governmental power.
When Mr. Bush and his team wanted the power to deploy water-boarding techniques against suspected terrorists or those who could provide information about such people, those on the American Left were outraged. How dare this law professor offer advice to the Bush White House about what legal reasoning to use so as to make a convincing case for the powers the president and company believed they needed so as to fight the war on terrorism effectively and possibly successfully? Of course, Bush & Co. may very well have been grasping for what is constitutionally impossible but never mind that. If a legal whizz could make the case for such powers, so be it. Lawyers are supposed to pull rabbits out of the hat for their clients, never mind truth, logic and the U. S. Constitution.
Now it is evident that as so often before, the American Left was quite hypocritical about its outrage at the shenanigans of Bush & Co. There was nothing about this Republican Administration’s policies that the Obama Administration could consistently disapprove of. As The New York Times made clear in its Tuesday, July 20, 2010, editorial in support of Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, Professor Kagan did exactly what Professor Yoo was being accused of, namely, give advice to various parties in support of dubiously expanding the powers of the federal government.
In particular, Professor Kagan had urged that several proposed pieces of legislation that would help the government expand its powers over the American people be tied cleverly to the interstate commerce clause of the U. S. Constitution even though the substance of the position being advocate
had nothing at all to do with interstate commerce. But, as Professor Kagan made clear, it could be made to look like it did and therefore Congress could gain the power it sought so as to acquire the legal power to override the liberties of citizens who did not want to be regulated, ordered about, forced to comply with Congress’ wishes.
The New York Times, of course, hailed Professor Kagan’s efforts to rationalize Congress’ powers under the interstate commerce clause as a case of helping to promote various welfare statist and social democratic government measures, ones that a strict application of the philosophy of limited government, the sort the American Founders advocated, would not justify. Indeed, there is even a credible argument to the effect that the interstate commerce clause’s use of the term “regulate” had nothing to do with the kind of meddling in the free market that the American Left supports. (Instead, the Constitution meant only to promote the regularization of commerce between the new states of a united country!)
But however one ultimately comes down on that issue, one thing is for sure. The Obama Administration and its cheerleaders in the legal profession do not have anything against increasing the powers of government. That’s not what these folks dislike about efforts to justify water boarding. It is only that this particular power of government might be used for purposes, such as catching terrorists, they do not approve of. If the power is used to regiment people’s economic affairs, go for it!
Tibor R. Machan
Don’t believe it for a moment. The American Left, as a whole, does not support civil liberties. All that protestation of about Bush and Cheney’s allegedly unconstitutional expansion of presidential powers was just a bunch of empty hand-waiving. The New York Times has made it abundantly clear now that the recent protests by the Left against Professor John Yoo’s efforts to help former president George W. Bush to garner extensive presidential powers had nothing to do with opposing expanding governmental power.
When Mr. Bush and his team wanted the power to deploy water-boarding techniques against suspected terrorists or those who could provide information about such people, those on the American Left were outraged. How dare this law professor offer advice to the Bush White House about what legal reasoning to use so as to make a convincing case for the powers the president and company believed they needed so as to fight the war on terrorism effectively and possibly successfully? Of course, Bush & Co. may very well have been grasping for what is constitutionally impossible but never mind that. If a legal whizz could make the case for such powers, so be it. Lawyers are supposed to pull rabbits out of the hat for their clients, never mind truth, logic and the U. S. Constitution.
Now it is evident that as so often before, the American Left was quite hypocritical about its outrage at the shenanigans of Bush & Co. There was nothing about this Republican Administration’s policies that the Obama Administration could consistently disapprove of. As The New York Times made clear in its Tuesday, July 20, 2010, editorial in support of Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, Professor Kagan did exactly what Professor Yoo was being accused of, namely, give advice to various parties in support of dubiously expanding the powers of the federal government.
In particular, Professor Kagan had urged that several proposed pieces of legislation that would help the government expand its powers over the American people be tied cleverly to the interstate commerce clause of the U. S. Constitution even though the substance of the position being advocate
had nothing at all to do with interstate commerce. But, as Professor Kagan made clear, it could be made to look like it did and therefore Congress could gain the power it sought so as to acquire the legal power to override the liberties of citizens who did not want to be regulated, ordered about, forced to comply with Congress’ wishes.
The New York Times, of course, hailed Professor Kagan’s efforts to rationalize Congress’ powers under the interstate commerce clause as a case of helping to promote various welfare statist and social democratic government measures, ones that a strict application of the philosophy of limited government, the sort the American Founders advocated, would not justify. Indeed, there is even a credible argument to the effect that the interstate commerce clause’s use of the term “regulate” had nothing to do with the kind of meddling in the free market that the American Left supports. (Instead, the Constitution meant only to promote the regularization of commerce between the new states of a united country!)
But however one ultimately comes down on that issue, one thing is for sure. The Obama Administration and its cheerleaders in the legal profession do not have anything against increasing the powers of government. That’s not what these folks dislike about efforts to justify water boarding. It is only that this particular power of government might be used for purposes, such as catching terrorists, they do not approve of. If the power is used to regiment people’s economic affairs, go for it!
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