Revisiting the Responsibility of Business Managers Tibor R. Machan People buy stocks, shares in a firm, mainly so as to delegate to the officers the job of securing for them economic prosperity. What else did all the folks who purchased the IPOs of Facebook want? (There is, of course, much more to living a successful human life than this but this is certainly not a negligible part of it–why all the fuss about poverty then?) Shareholders look to management for expertise with finances, etc. and those who take such a job promise shareholders this service. This isn’t so different from how people turn to other professionals, in medicine, education and such. When hired, these professionals have a responsibility to do their best to deliver on their promise. Once the shareholders gain wealth from this arrangement, they then are the ones who decide to what use the wealth should be put. They may spend it on their family, on some more or less important cause, on trivial pursuits, a nice vacation, or on a combination of many objectives. That is what property rights is mostly about, namely, to get clear on who is authorized to decide to what use the wealth created by management will be put. Freedom of choice! Just look at all the very wealthy who gain from such an arrangement and then proceed to make huge contributions to the arts, science, charities, etc. But as far as management is concerned they are responsible to produce wealth for the shareholders, just as doctors must care for the health of their patients (who then can devote themselves to all sorts of task in their healthful state). So then what is the problem with the stakeholder/corporate social responsibility view of the moral responsibility of business managers, the currently promulgated idea that business managers should not serve the owners or shareholders with their skills? Well, it plainly flies in the face of reality, which is that shareholders, investors, owners are the ones whom business managers are responsible to serve, just as patients are whom doctors ought to serve. (“Serve” may be a dubious notion here but the point is that the skilled service being provided ought to benefit clients and in the case of private (though publicly traded) companies, these are shareholders, investors, et al.) Those who aim to sneak in a contrary idea are attempting to violate the contractual agreement between clients and professionals. When challenged, the response is that since business firms benefit from various elements of the society in which they operate such as its infrastructure, national defense, police, the legal system, etc., they are not justified to claim that they are the ones who are owed the services of professional managers of the firm. Instead stakeholders are, that is to say anyone with an interest in the business such as employees, neighbors, subcontractors, unions, etc. Although somewhat plausible, unless the benefits were asked and paid for voluntarily, the relationship between firms and stakeholders is artificial and imposed without the consent of those involved. (Of course once the relationship has been imposed by politicians and judges, never mind the choices of the firm’s owners and managers, it is not easy to opt out! But there is no obligation owed to those who imposed the relationship. If I send you a cashier’s check for a thousand bucks, I have no claim on you to do anything for me that you didn’t freely agree to provide. It’s now mine free and clear.) More generally, the assault on private property rights, the rights the exercise of which creates business firms, secure for individuals their liberty to choose how they will make use of their own resources (“property”). That is what private property rights are ultimately about, securing one’s liberty to choose what to do with one’s resources, including one’s labor and time. The claim that because of benefits gained from operating in a society the rights may be violated is a non-sequitur. Moreover, the alternative to owners deciding the disposition of their resources is entirely arbitrary. Who if not the owners and why they? Some answer, that’s to be decided via the democratic method. Yet this begs the question of why others, members of the democratic assembly, are authorized to do so? Who delegated to them this authority? It is a ruse, when all is said. It is an attempt, sadly often successful, to grab unearned resources and the power over those who in fact own them.

Krugman’s Apologetic for Government Regulation Tibor R. Machan Paul Krugman, not unpredictably, once again (in The New York Times, Monday, May 14, 2012) went to bat to hit a home run for government regulation of, well, everyone (except the members of his own profession, namely, eggheads). His piece is titled “Why We Regulate?” but fails to address the most fundamental issue. This is “Who is the ‘we’ in his essay?” And why would "we" be wiser and more virtuous than those whom "we" regulate? Are there, as is implicit in Krugman’s thinking, two classes of human beings, the regulators who are superior, and the regulated who are prone to vice and stupidity? Somehow this issue never gets addressed by him and his allies. Nor do they seem to cope with the critique from public choice theorists such as Nobel Laureate Jim Buchanan, et al., who have pointed out that regulators and other government personnel are motivated pretty much as we all are, and will use their station to advance their preferred goals, not some vague notion of the public interest (which no one has ever managed to identify precisely enough). Since, however, they have political and often unchecked power as well as sovereign immunity--they cannot be sued since they are "us"--they are far more inclined to malpractice than are the regulated (who mostly make mistakes but are rarely out and out mendacious). I have studied government regulation of business for decades--even co-edited, with a fine economist, the late M. Bruce Johnson, the book Rights and Regulation (1983) which explores the topic from a great variety of perspectives, pro and con. Ok, never mind, I am and maybe so was Professor Johnson too low ranked to be worthy of Krugman’s attention. However, Professor James Buchanan and other public choice scholars are formidable within the terms that Krugman should take seriously. (Krugman got his Nobel for some technical work he did, which is rightly admired across the discipline, while Buchanan advanced a general theory in political economy and got the Nobel for that feat, something Krugman ought to recognize by dealing with his argument!) The ordinary issue to be addressed by champions of government regulation of business is, of course, “Who are these people to qualify as regulators--i.e., dictators--of millions of citizens engaged in business?” When the interstate commerce clause was included in the U. S. Federal Constitution by the framers, “to regulate” was widely taken to mean “to regularize.” This makes sense since the helter skelter economic policies among the several colonies had to be regularized once the colonies got united. A free market, more or less, was created without duties and tariffs and such. It is only some among the framers who took “regulation” to mean “manipulation” or “dictation.” But that is how the term got interpreted in the New Deal. But in a free society no such regulation, nor such regulators, make any sense, not when the citizens are all equally endowed by basic rights that no one may violate. Government intrusion in business does, however, violate those rights. Sadly, there hadn’t been sufficient influential protest against the changed usage of “regulate” and the ideological direction of the FDR era was inclined toward top down economic management. Yet, folks like Professor Krugman ought to take up the task of examining government regulation of commerce more fundamentally, more deeply, than simply to accept a highly ideology laden version of the term. I have no idea what reasoning might lie behind the fact that Krugman & Co. do not embark upon a serious examination of government intrusion in business, never ask just who are these people they wish to entrust with the power to order their fellow citizens about. I have my suspicions but I do not wish to deploy the ad hominem approach Krugman himself is so fond of when he deals with his intellectual adversaries.

From Machan's Archives: Business versus Business

From Machan's Archives: Business Versus Business One of Karl Marx's less notable mistakes was his belief that people in the world of business would promote their self-interest. If by self-interest we include, as I believe we ought to, the most rational social-political principles in support of a sound human institution's flourishing, then clearly people in business, not to mention the wealthy, often act in a self-destructive manner. They promote policies that hurt them economically. Examples of such self-destructive business conduct are not hard to identify. Consider Ted Turner, the multi-billionaire mogul, who went to Congress some years ago and asked the politicians in Washington to "shove down the throats of" broadcasters a TV violence rating system, unless the broadcasters adopt one pronto. Or consider how New York City's wonder financier, Donald Trump, wanted legal action take against native Americans who were running gambling establishments, just because they are not forced to pay the taxes he has to pay. Furthermore, consider a decision of the U. S. Supreme Court some years back, followed by some state supreme court rulings, to refuse to place a cap on the amounts of punitive damage money that juries may award to plaintiffs who succeed in proving that some service or product has injured them. (I won't even bother with anti-capitalists like Warren Buffet and George Soros!) In each of these cases it is people in the business community who are advocating getting the government involved in the operations of the market place or to cut some slack for them from the processes of our system of justice. (What is a fine that fits the crime anyway?) Turner's advocacy of government censorship of broadcasting is perhaps the most disgusting of the three examples. Ted Turner, who is rumored to have admired the ideas of Ayn Rand earlier in his career, was actually promoting government's intrusion on freedom of expression. He wanted the First Amendment to be voided when it comes to broadcasting. He should, instead, advocate the extension of First Amendment protection to the entire broadcast industry. He should advocate repeal of the federal law that has established the Federal Communications Commission--earlier the Federal Radio Commission--so that broadcasters and cable television operators could be enjoying the same freedom of communication as do the printed media. Instead, perhaps to appease the left wing liberals with whom he has been so socially chummy, he is asking the state to tell broadcasters how to run their business, what to do about its content, etc. Trump, et al ought to be advocating the reduction of taxation on every front, including when it hurts their immediate, short term business objectives, but instead they cry "unfair" and ask government to hit up the few people who have managed to escape its thievery. Trump ought to use the example of native Americans to point out that taxation is blatantly unjust and it would be best to recognize this fact not only regarding native Americans but all of us who live in this country. But the wunderkind of New York, Atlantic City and Las Vegas seems to lack the integrity and is proceeding in a truly short sighted fashion. Those people in business who want the government to limit the punitive sums juries may award to injured parties evade that such a limitation would be rather arbitrary. No doubt some juries are willing to indulge their collective prejudices against corporations by awarding larger than reasonable punitive sums to victims of corporate malpractice. But the remedy for this is not to subvert the jury system but to embark on a program of giving business a better press, demonstrating to the public that the business bashing attitudes so typical of the liberals are wholly unjust and injurious to our society. The source of jury's prejudices need to be addressed, but not by trying to subvert the jury system. The short cut method taken by too many prominent people in business ultimately undermines the system under which businesses can flourish in a human community. Such an approach--which includes advocacy of protectionist legislation, begging for subsidies, government backed loans, and bailouts, as well as protection of businesses against competition from new entrepreneurs at home and abroad--is surely sabotaging the entire business community, even while it may give a few particular enterprises a temporary leg-up. That business people do not realize how dear a price they are paying for the relief government gives them indicates that they are no less savvy concerning the relationship between politics and business than are academic left wingers who advocate out and out socialism. Marx was wrong--people in business are in fact insufficiently self-interested!

A Potpourri of Issues

A potpourri of Issues, Minor and not so much. Tibor R. Machan Justice Kennedy's observation that the mandate changes the relationship between government and the individual is doubtful since there really are quite a lot of actions that citizens are forced to take, like it or not. Jury duty, for one; sending one's kids to school, for another; submitting to TSA searches if one wants to utilize air traffic, for yet another. And, of course, there is a yearly visit to the USPS to mail off the funds the IRS extorts from the citizenry! Still, yet another step in this direction needs to be seriously resisted. Slippery slopes need not be succumbed to; freedom is too precious to lose because of a history of sloppy judicial reasoning. It's time to take a stand even if precedence makes it look unreasonable. “First priority” is redundant since priority means first “the reason is because/that” “different than/from” “lie versus lay down” “people that/who” “A neighborhood of working people” refers to what kind of neighborhood exactly? Some more language mangling: the use of "a couple..." not completed with "of"; Thus, I read: "...a couple examples..." This one is on the rise.

Revisiting a confusion about basic rights

Revisiting a Confusion about basic rights Tibor R. Machan In his book Basic Rights (Princeton, 1970), Henry Shue argued that there is no valid distinction between negative and positive rights; his argument has recently resurfaced among so called left libertarians (otherwise also known as bleeding heart libertarians), a neologism if there ever was one. (I am tempted to start an association of no-nonsense libertarians to oppose them!) The significance of the point needs to be stressed since if it were valid, it would pretty much consign everyone to the status of a serf or involuntary servant. If we are all by birth obligated to serve other people first and foremost--which is what the doctrine of positive rights or natural entitlements alleges--our sovereignty would be a myth. We would once again be viewed as belonging to others; maybe not the king or pharaoh or czar but to the majority of the people who are ruled by a few “at the top.” The point Shue made is that since negative rights would require being defended in a society for them to have any concrete significance and since providing a defense of them would be the delivery of a service, having the negative right to, say, liberty or life, implies having the positive right to the services of the police and a sundry legal authorities. And so the floodgates are opened: everyone must be made to pitch in to obtain this service, leaving it to some elite to administer such a system. But, not so then and not so now! First, having a negative right to liberty implies that others may not invade one, that a person may not be used against his or her will and not that the right must be defended. Of course, some will refuse to heed this fact and in the face of that it will be very useful to establish institutional protection of people’s natural rights to life, liberty, etc. But first one has to have the right, contrary to some contemporary sophistries about the matter (such as Cass Sunstein’s view that rights are granted by the government!). Then if violations are likely, predictable, etc., a means for protecting rights will most likely need to be found. For example, as the Declaration of Independence makes clear, governments are instituted to secure our rights but that may not be the only means available. (So if someone is powerful enough, no special agency would be required. One could just deter and fend off rights violators on one’s own or with members of one’s family, all, of course, in line with due process.) But more likely in an advanced civilized society some would be hired to provide rights protection. The ensuing obligation to provide the specifics would be a matter of compact or contract. So citizens would then have a contractual or constitutional right to have their basic rights protected. And how this would be realized is an open question, part of jurisprudence. The issue here is only that people have the rights and those rights are negative. Then when they hire those offering the service of providing protection, then they will have the (derivative, secondary, non-fundamental) right to be provided with the protection. It is not easy to know motivations for the obfuscation perpetrated by Shue and his current followers, including some who have the gall to call themselves libertarians; my guess is that once it looks like some basic positive rights--e.g., to be provided with rights protection--have been established, it is easy to move on to other positive rights, such as to health care, unemployment compensation, a good job, a nice home, and so on and so forth, the entire array of entitlements that welfare statists advocate and that impose involuntary servitude on those who are in the position to provide them. Thus what appears to be a case for a libertarian legal order has cleverly been turned upside down so as to support its opposite. It doesn’t wash, however.

Machan’s Archives: “Left Libertarianism: Oxymoron?” Left-Libertarianism—An Oxymoron? Tibor R. Machan, Chapman University 
 Let me state up front that I reject any division of libertarianism into left and right wings. To do so is nearly akin to dividing it into high and low, yellow and blue, or round and triangular versions. Yes, there are quite a few more or less enthusiastic supporters of the division; indeed, reading some of them suggests that they have a lot invested in this effort. However, I find what they are embarking upon, if not outright incoherent, then certainly confusing and a waste of good energy and time that could be devoted to more important elements of the task of advancing the cause of human liberty. Combining libertarianism with elements of the Right or the Left defeats the purpose of conceptual clarity about a certain broad political topic. Historically, neither the Right nor the Left has shown a sustained, uncompromising loyalty to individual human rights to life, liberty, and property, while classical liberalism and especially libertarianism is exactly about such unwavering loyalty, one that requires the proverbial eternal vigilance. By its nature libertarianism is about political liberty for all individuals to do whatever is peaceful or non-aggressive, including acquiring and holding property or valued items either found in nature or obtained through free trade and inheritance. Claiming that libertarianism can include more or less severe limits on the right to private property—imposed by public policy and law—as Left-libertarianism does, simply renders the view indistinguishable from what social democrats and welfare statists propose. It reminds one of market socialism, arguably another oxymoron. Of course, the rejection of this notion as an oxymoron hasn’t by any means been successful in countering various efforts to construct a coherent notion labeled “Left-libertarianism” from the current political philosophical dialogue. Books and articles can be found discussing the position, some of them published in prestigious publications. Several well-known philosophers whose politics is self-identified as libertarian would very likely dispute my claim that the label “Left-libertarianism” is oxymoronic, perhaps out of respect for those who employ it in much of their works. Nonetheless, strictly speaking, what is meant by “Left” in the discipline of political theory and by “libertarian” are conceptually incompatible if one accepts, as I would argue we must, that libertarianism is a theory that includes as one of its central features adherence to the more or less Lockean account of the right to private property. So upon close examination it emerges that Left-libertarianism belongs among efforts, like some others by some people on the Left and the Right, to appropriate a concept alien to its logical purpose. This includes such notions as positive rights, positive liberty, welfare rights, and social justice. Many invoke these notions, but quite arguably they are conceptual corruptions, however much one twists and turns to attempt to render them distinctly meaningful. (Of course, it is not possible to say this with finality, since, for example, tomorrow morning someone could well come up with a use of the idea that has merit.) These notions may not amount to an outright self-contradiction, such as “square circle,” but on analysis they come close. Thus while the Left aims to divorce people from their work, from their valued attributes, and from the products of their labor, libertarianism opposes this and sees one’s property as the extension of oneself into the world outside of oneself—indeed, as an indispensable social condition for a self-directed life. Suppose that someone is very good looking, though not by his or her own efforts. According to Left-libertarianism, the benefits the individual comes by in virtue of these looks are to be treated as not belonging to the agent and thus perhaps to be taxed or simply confiscated by other people. On the Left-libertarian view, one can do all of this without doing violence to individual rights. One of the ways that Left-libertarianism has been rendered palatable has been to associate it with John Locke’s oft-discussed and troublesome idea of “the Lockean Proviso,” according to which Locke says that although the right to private property is a fundamental, natural right of human individuals, if the protection of this basic right were to result in a monopoly of vital goods, it would not be justified to regard it as inviolable. As I have argued elsewhere, however, the Lockean Proviso is little more than a restatement of Locke’s concern that in certain dire circumstances or emergencies those rights are inapplicable. Only “where peace is possible” can there be respect and protection for basic individual rights. This makes sense once one realizes that such rights are what Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl call “metanormative” principles, that is, ones that provide a framework for peaceful conduct within societies rather than action-guiding principles such as those laid out in a system of ethics. Since such rights serve as the foundation of a just society or legal system, where no such society or system is possible, no such rights could be applicable. The Lockean Proviso, then, is mainly a warning that we not expect justice to be possible everywhere (say, in a back alley or in a region of the world where natural disasters are virtually constant). A central feature of Left-libertarianism is, of course, its challenge to an unqualified right to private property. That’s what makes it “Left,” since those on the Left generally want to control other people’s property; by denying that other people actually own their property, they achieve their goal. How do they propose to do this? They do this by rejecting, as already alluded to, the connection between oneself and one’s attributes and works. So if one has the attribute of being very good looking or healthy and incurs benefits from it, these benefits are now supposed to be available for confiscation even while outright conscription of the individual is rejected. Then why protect one’s right to one’s life, if the living of that life is subject to intervention? This is akin to the point sometimes made that while someone may be imprisoned, this only limits his or her body, not spirit, which remains free. More generally, the effort to distinguish between inalienable and alienable property—between oneself and one’s goods—is misguided. It is rights, not property itself, that is identified as inalienable in the libertarian (Lockean) position and this means not only that one’s right to one’s car or home or firm is not something anyone may violate, but also that it is no violation of one’s rights if one trades or gives away what one has a right to, for example, one’s house or hours of labor. A related matter might be worth considering. One may wonder whether those on the Left, including so called Left-libertarians, would apply their divorce of oneself from one’s works (or other valued attributes, say one’s good looks or health) to their own writings. Why, for example, should an author have full discretion as to what goes into one of his or her works—a book, a paper, an essay, etc.? These are not strictly speaking a feature of oneself, just as some argue that one’s home and car are not. So would these writers argue for limited censorship on the grounds that one has only a limited right to make use of one’s property, including the space in one’s written works? I would often like to have my writings featured in, say, The New Republic or The New York Review of Books or, especially, Philosophy and Public Affairs, but the publishers of these insist that they have an absolute right to determine who will appear in their publications’ pages. Would not Leftists and Left-libertarians consider this wrong and argue that publishers have no such absolute right at all, in the spirit of their objection to absolute private property rights? It appears clear that libertarianism is to be dealt with apart from dealing with the Left or the Right in political theory. The attempt to fuse the Left or the Right with libertarianism just produces confusion; to put it somewhat more formally, deploying the concepts Left and Right here fails to distinguish or differentiate anything of significance in the realm of political theory.* 1 My own involvement in this discussion is precipitated by some having classified those such as myself as “right-wing libertarians,” in virtue of, e.g., our defense of the business corporation as being compatible with libertarianism. I reject being so classified or construing the business corporation, as defended by Robert Hessen in his Defense of the Corporation (Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 1979), as anti-libertarian. For more, see http://www.enotes.com/topic/Right-libertarianism. 2 One of my books, a collection of some of my columns, is pointedly titled Neither Left nor Right (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2004). 3 For a very good discussion of the position, see Barbara H. Fried, “Left Libertarianism: A Review Essay,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32, no. 1 (Winter, 2004), pp. 66-92. 4 For example, see Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, eds. The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); and Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, eds., Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). See also Eric Mack, “Right-Wing Liberalism, Left-Wing Liberalism, and the Self-Ownership Proviso,” in Liberal Institutions, Economic Constitutional Rights, and the Role of Organizations, ed. Karl-Heinz Ladeur (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1997), pp. 9-29; and Eric Mack, “What Is Left of Left-Libertarianism?” (unpublished manuscript). Various websites on the Internet feature more or less serious discussions of the position, for example, by Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/leftlibertarian/. 5 See Tibor R. Machan, “Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 39, no. 1 (March 2009), pp. 93-98. I use “self-ownership” quite reluctantly, since I find it incoherent that one’s self could own one’s self. Who here is the owner and what is being owned? However, a generous look at the idea suggests perhaps no more than what Locke held, namely, that one has a natural right to one’s life (not to one’s self). 6 Quoted in H. L. A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” in A. I. Melden, ed., Human Rights (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1970), p. 61, n. 2: “In conditions of extreme scarcity this distinction between competition and coercion will not be worth drawing: natural rights are only of importance ‘where peace is possible’ (Locke) . . . .” 7 See Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). *What might be worthwhile is the establishment of a Global Association of No-Nonsense Libertarians!

A great letter by Donald Boudreaux

Programming Director, WTOP Radio Washington, DC Dear Sir or Madam: A listener called your Talk Back line during today's 7am hour to exclaim that "national elections are occasions" in which "candidates and the American people talk to each other about what's important." Please. Enough with these panegyrics about democratic elections. These "occasions" might help to keep political power less concentrated and less dangerous than it would be otherwise, but they hardly promote constructive conversation between candidates and the general public. Such conversation requires candor. But each candidate is interested in winning office rather than in exploring the verities. He would deny the truth of the Pythagorean theorem if he sniffed the slightest political advantage in doing so. And his bevy of lieutenants - ever-present on television and radio talk shows - are selected not for their objectivity but for their skills at chicanery and equivocation. What Adam Smith observed in 1759 remains true today: "A true party-man hates and despises candor; and in reality there is no vice which could so effectually disqualify him for the trade of a party-man as that single virtue."* Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux Professor of Economics George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 * Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1976 [1759]), p. 259.

The Face of Egalitarianism

The Face of Egalitarianism Tibor R. Machan A few weeks ago they ran the famous Oxford v. Cambridge rowing race on the Thames but a fanatical egalitarian, Mr. Trenton Oldfield from Australia, ruined it for everyone by jumping in the river and blocking the race in the name of resisting the elitism of rowing! He was dubbed in the UK the “anarchist swimmer” and has mounted some other guerrilla strikes to make his point. Among other things he is urging cabbies to take well to do passengers on long detours and cleaners not to place toilet paper where they are expected to serve rich folks. Now some might dismiss this as a mere childish prank by a nutcase but this guy is a London School of Economics graduate. He seems to be taking the goal of leveling very seriously, although his project is incoherent and mostly destructive. (Is someone with a degree from LSE not well to do?) Still, if you are exhorted by the likes of President Obama or by LSE professors--among them, I believe a little while ago, John N. Gray, a former classical liberal who has turned into a post-modernist/Leftist in his latest incarnation--to rip off the rich, who can tell what limits if any there are to this agenda? After all, there are innumerable activities that well-enough to do people undertake that may, along egalitarian lines, be sabotaged. Of course, polo games will have to be attacked; fencing, too, as well as bridge tournaments. And, of course, there are the regattas of all sorts that are the stuff of entertainment and sport for well off folks around the globe. Fine restaurants would have to be on the list, as well, not to mention stores and clubs and car dealerships. (I hesitate to list more since it may encourage one of these SOBs to take up the task!) Actually, any game is fair to such equalizers since whenever one is playing, one might be serving humanity or the poor or the sick, instead. Anything goes, just as that famous philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend used to advocate about how to do science (in his book Against Method, for example). I have a host of emotions welling up when these people take write this material or to the streets or implore us all from university podiums with their insanity. Sure, there is the problem, too, that a river in most places is a public good everyone may use to his or her heart’s content. A private lake would be easier to protect from such terrorists. But never mind that for now. Simple common sense and civility will lead most people to refrain from expressing their political dreams by way of ruining events like that Oxbridge rowing regatta. But what can one expect when the head of the most powerful government in the world advocates the egalitarian project, suggests tax policy based on its aspirations, bashes the rich at every turn? Not that there is anything revolutionary about this; after all, throughout human history there have been philosophers and others who have promoted evil and aggression as the proper objective for people to pursue (the most famous of these being the Marquis de Sade, of course). Still, it is rare that one runs across the likes of Mr. Oldfield in clear public view in a society such as the UK, one who comes right out and identifies the philosophical source of the destructiveness being perpetrated. Come to think of it, though, maybe that is just what is needed--for these maniacs to come out of hiding and show exactly what their warped thinking actually leads to.

Zimmerman's Apology?

Zimmerman’s Apology? Tibor R. Machan The shooter of Trayvon Martin is now said by many to have apologized. All over the media this is being reported, even on Fox TV news. Even though he did nothing of the sort. To apologize implies that one is taking responsibility for something bad. One cannot apologize for a rained out picnic but can for failing to provide umbrellas. What Mr. Zimmerman said in court on Friday April 20 is this: “I am sorry for the loss of your son.” And who wouldn’t be? Saying this doesn’t at all imply that Zimmerman, accused of murdering Mr. Martin, admitted guilt. He, like anyone who grasps the loss of Mr. Martin’s parents, expressed his sorrow. But by characterizing it as an apology, news reporters implicate Mr. Zimmerman in confessing to murder which he certainly didn’t do. I have no stake in this at all. I don’t know if Mr. Zimmerman is guilty of manslaughter, murder, negligent homicide, or killing someone in self defense. What I do know is that what he said in court on Friday does not amount to a confession. Let’s get this straight.* * I develop the thesis here more fully in “Should You Apologize?” a chapter of my book Libertarianism Defended (Ashgate, 2006)

Rich Bashing Is Unjust and Vicious

Tibor R. Machan

The casual manner in which President Obama proposes that various progressive tax measures be implemented against the so called rich--ones who earn more than two million a year--is indicative of just how deep seated and widespread is the prejudice against wealthy people in the United States of America.

This is the country that had been hailed as the leader of the free world, as substantially capitalist, as mostly enjoying a free market place, etc. It seems however that the team now in charge of administering the laws and public policies of the country hasn’t a clue as to what human freedom or liberty really means. Alternatively, this bunch of politicians and bureaucrats have a corrupt idea of such freedom, well illustrated by an outburst during the U. S. Supreme Court’s hearings of oral arguments concerning the constitutionality of President Obama’s signature policy achievement, generally referred to as Obamacare. The outburst came when someone made the point that it is a violation of a citizen’s right to freedom to mandate that health insurance be purchased by everyone. (I didn’t learn of the source despite looking for it for two weeks.) The substance of it was that those who are being coerced into purchasing health insurance by the individual mandate provision of Obamacare do not have their right to liberty violated; instead it is those who lack such insurance at others’ expense who are so victimized. This is the implication of the now relatively prominent doctrine of positive rights (or liberty).

At the beginning of the country the idea of the right to liberty meant what is now dubbed a negative right. That means that to acknowledge someone’s right to liberty requires that no one is authorized to make the person do anything against his or her own will. It means freedom of choice. One’s right to one’s own life is similarly a negative right, requiring of others only that they refrain from interfering with that life. Not killing, not assaulting, not robbing people is how these negative rights are respected and governments are supposed to be instituted so as to secure such rights in the face of threats or aggression by criminals. Of course, slavery was a rank violation of such rights.

Positive rights, so called, are actually provisions extracted from other people when one needs them. The welfare state is substantially built upon the doctrine of positive rights (or liberty). Because when a citizen does not have the means for achieving various objectives that are important, other citizens are legally required to supply them with such means (mostly fungible funds such as welfare payments or services). Instead of securing everyone the protection of one’s rights to fend for oneself and obtain what is needed for living and flourishing, it is others who are coerced into supplying such provisions. These are the famous “entitlements” that are bankrupting welfare state across the globe. The reason they can be dubbed “entitlements” is that they are legally enacted grants from the treasuries of governments, which are supplied by way of taxation and other sources of the public weal.

No one really pretends that one has a natural right to such provisions, that other people owe their lives and works to the recipients of entitlements as a matter of a legally enforceable right. No, they are created by the government. It used to be monarchs that would make these grants to citizens favored by them but in a more or less democratic system, which lacks firm limits on the power of government, they can be voted into existence. This is the aspect of democracy that such thinkers as Alexis de Tocqueville saw as being destructive. And they were, of course, proven right because all the current fiasco about debts are largely the result of such democratic establishment of entitlements and other expenditures.

The idea that those who are rich may be ripped off a lot more than others is merely a tortuous implication of welfare and warfare statist profligacy. It has nothing at all to do with any just powers of government. Quite the opposite. It is a bias against some citizens who do not deserve being picked on, no different from how placing blacks into involuntary servitude had been the result of such unjust bias.

What about those Hoodies?

Tibor R. Machan

Over the last couple of weeks I have been waiting for something to be mentioned about hoodies, something that I thought was staring us all in the face. This is that during the recent London riots, nearly everyone depicted by the TV cameras was wearing hoodies as they were caught vandalizing the stores in the neighborhood under siege.

At the time it immediately occurred to me that the reason for all those hoodies on the heads of the rioters was that they didn’t want their faces to be captured on film. This would make it very difficult for investigators to do any facial recognition of those filmed committing vandalism.

Actually, I didn’t encounter such an explanation at the time, nor since then, after the role the hoodie had in the Florida fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, the African American teen, a shooting that has unleashed much controversy about hoodies, starting with Fox star reporter Geraldo Rivera’s on air advice that people stop wearing them since doing so suggests to some people that they are embarking on some kind of criminal conduct. Rivera got a lot of flack for making this suggestion and that is when it occurred to me that someone prominent might recall the role of hoodies at the London riot which were covered on American television for nearly a week. After what we witnessed in London, it would not be ridiculous for people to be weary of young people who wear hoodies in certain situations.

To this day I haven’t heard anyone connect the two events, although some have mentioned that hoodies are perhaps used to send a message, namely that of defiance of public authority. And numerous celebrities followed the Rivera comments with donning hoodies, though I am not sure for what reason.

I am not suggesting that there is any simple causal relationship between criminal conduct and the wearing of hoodies. But there could be a customary relationship here, one on the basis of which ordinary people, even professionals, may make inferences about probabilities or likelihoods. If someone shows up on my classroom wearing the kind of sunglasses that disguise his or her eyes, make it impossible to tell which way the individual is looking, it is not unreasonable to suspect that he or she is hoping to remain at least partially incognito. Similarly, when hoodies are worn in neighborhoods that are infested with crime, it is not unreasonable to suspect that those doing this wish to remain at least partially unobserved beneath a cover.

Again, none of this proves, even strongly suggests, that young Mr. Martin intended to hide anything, let alone that he meant to carry out some kind of illegal conduct without being easily identified. But that this might be what he was trying to do is certainly reasonable to consider, especially in light of the experience of the London rioters who were quite evidently committing vandalism while making sure they couldn’t easily be identified doing so.

My point here is only that it would be journalistically appropriate to make note of these matters as the Florida shooting is being seriously discussed across the country. Maybe the reason no mention is being made of the resemblance isn’t a mere oversight. Perhaps it is because mentioning the similarity between Mr. Martin’s attire and that of the London rioters is something public figures do not want to risk doing lest they be accused of racial prejudice. But, of course, it need not be anything like that at all.

Fox TV versus The New York Times

Tibor R. Machan

My team of media researchers is on vacation just now, so I have to do this by myself, based on my non-scientific study of the journalistic lay of the land. What I have concluded from years of observation is that Fox-TV news is widely scoffed at by erudite folks, just the kind who routinely reads The New York Times. The alleged basis for the disdain is that Fox is obviously biased whereas the Old Gray Lady is impeccably objective.

But this is, I have concluded, a misimpression from the git go, at least as far as political and public policy coverage are concerned. Take just the design of The Times’ Op Ed page. Its regular columnists, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, et al., are nearly all echoing the editorial philosophy that’s guiding the paper. Sure, Brooks is less harshly mainstream liberal and on occasion will defend a conservative line but lately less and less so. Moreover, he is so ambivalent in his views that they offer no contrast to the rest of the Leftist claptrap produced as opinion and analysis by the paper.

Now there are some contributors to The Times who appear in its business section who don’t toe the line but this doesn’t count for much. The news analyses, so called, that the paper publishes in its “Sunday Week” section and in the Sunday magazine is uniformly statist, favoring big government and the extension of Washington’s killer deficit public finance philosophy. (The occasional exceptions deal with civil libertarian matters, excluding the civil rights of people in the business community.) The likes of Ron Paul, who champions free markets and free minds with equal intensity, rarely get a respectful treatment so that anyone who promotes fiscal responsibility is dismissed as hating the poor, etc. Those marching in protest in Greece against efforts to rein in state profligacy might well have gotten their orders from The Times’s editorials.

Of course, when it comes to basic rights for those in the business community, forget about it. Business corporations are made up of monsters and deserve no recognition of their rights, not even ones listed in the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. When the Supreme Court recently ruled that such organizations have free speech rights, The Times was all over them, never mind that when it went before the court, in the famous Sullivan v. New York Times case, the paper benefited from the court’s view that corporations are made up for human beings who have the same rights everyone else does.

Fox TV news is no doubt conservative in its political and economic outlook, although it’s by no means libertarian, even civil libertarian. John Stossel is constantly debating with Bill O’Reilly about civil libertarian issues such as the fascist drug laws of the country. Judge Andrew Napolitano, who no longer has his own libertarian program but is still referred to as Fox TV’s expert on legal matters, including the U. S. Constitution, has no patience with denying gays the right to marry or other right wing causes. The roundtable programs on Fox usually include an intelligent left of center voice, even on the Fox business channel.

Of course people like O’Reilly and Sean Hannity are no holds barred right wingers, at least as this is understood in American culture in our time (although critics who throw around the label usually make no distinction between a Right Wing outlook such as the latin American fascist sort now exhibited by the Venezuela’s leftist Hugo Chavez and that espoused by Mitt Romney, for example). Yet no one on Fox TV ever expressed the kind of brutal hatred toward ideological adversaries that one finds in Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns.

For Fox TV to match the left wing political economic slant of The New York Times with someone, it would have to feature champions of Benito Mussolini or General Pinochet and the like, not O’Reilly and Hannity! And it would have to stop featuring left of center spokespeople on its panels.

I am generally of the “plague on both your houses” outlook when it comes to the statism of the Left and the Right but because of what American conservatives are conserving, namely, a mixture of ideas that includes those laid out in the Declaration of Independence, I am often more sympathetic to the Right than the Left (except in matters of the American Right’s current imperialist foreign policy). What is most objectionable to me about the American Left is its constant and routine support for government meddling in the economy, its endless championing of government regulation of nearly everything under the sun. Not that the Right, such as David Brooks, rejects this but its call for it is less insistent than what we get from the Left night and day, rain or shine.

The Economic Tyranny of the Interstate Commerce Clause

Tibor R. Machan

Here is an instructive comment from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg during the recent oral arguments presented about Obamacare:

“People who don’t participate in this market are making it much more expensive for the people who do; that is, they will get, a good number of them will get services that they can’t afford at the point where they need them, and the result is that everybody else’s premiums get raised? It’s not your free choice just to do something for yourself. What you do is going to affect others, affect them in a major way.”

Ergo, we may infer from this, Congress is authorized to regulate--including coerce--commerce for us all in the United States of America.

First of all, when one applies this view to nearly anything people purchase, it would imply that everyone must act in concert with everyone else. If you don’t purchase something I do purchase, say an orange colored sweater which I want badly, or blood pressure medication, which I evidently need to stay alive (judging from what my doctor suggested when she prescribed it for me), my purchase will very likely cost me much more than it would if you purchased these items as well!

One central point of having a free and not a centrally planned market system is that different people are at liberty to make very different choices in it. If just a few people buy certain goods and services, this will, of course, drive the cost of these up (if one wishes to put it that way--”drive” suggests an impersonal process but that is misleading.) Elementary economics.

Justice Ginsburg does not appear to appreciate the point of having a free market, indeed, a free society. After all, suppose that The New York Times is losing consumers, just as other publications have been on and off over the decades. Now for the few who continue to want to purchase the paper it will be much more expensive to do so when this happens. Are we then supposed to tolerate a government that coerces us all to purchase copies of the paper? It is a vital product, as far as many people believe (and maybe they are right).

Still, they need to be persuaded instead of coerced! That is what freedom means, regardless of the economic consequences. If someone refuses to buy the kind of merchandise or service I choose to buy, it could well cost me much more to buy it but that is one of the inescapable consequences of liberty.

This is akin to how if when running a marathon race someone passes me, I will lose my position, indeed may lose the race altogether. Well, that’s how it goes with free competitions, in a marathon or in the market place. And it doesn’t matter that some runners really need to win very badly--indeed, when the Soviet Union sent competitors to international races, they did need to win very badly since their government was very displeased with anything else but a win.

Which calls to mind that famous quip by Justice Oliver Holmes Jr. (in his notorious, Lochner dissent) that the framers didn’t mean to include the economic philosophy of Herbert Spencer in the U. S. Constitution. But they in fact did, if not in those terms then in very similar ones--e.g., through the principle of private property rights.

Here, too, is where it becomes evident that most of the framers of the U. S. Constitution didn’t mean by “regulate” commerce what that term has been taken to mean by many justices and legal scholars since the New Deal, namely, “regiment.” They meant, most likely, “regularize” since the issue was to eliminate the irregular measures the governments of different colonies used so as to control commerce between them. But once the colonies became one country, this was no longer deemed sensible--the entire country became the market and trade within it needed to be rendered free, that is, regularized, conducted without disparate obstacles facing traders in different regions of the country.

Quite apart from the sophistries used by the Obama team and its champions on the U. S. Supreme Court, the debate about Obamacare should really be put in terms of a free market versus a government planned one. That would put all cards on the table, face up! It would demonstrate that we are indeed confronted by a very pivotal issues in our time, namely, whether the laws of our country will serve liberty or tyranny.

Altruism isn't Generosity

Tibor R. Machan

A big error has haunted humanity for centuries: it’s the equivocation between generosity and altruism.

The former is a virtue any decent human being will practice: it asks of one to reach out to deserving others in times of dire need. The latter is a policy of devoting oneself to benefiting others above all. The former is admirable, the latter is suicidal.

Sadly the two are often confused in the minds of many folks who have forgotten their college ethics courses in which these distinctions are usually discussed (when the professor isn’t using the course to advance an agenda in support of the confusion!).

Aristotle knew that among the virtues human beings should practice one of them is generosity (or liberality). Of course, for him the others include honesty, liberality, prudence, magnanimity, courage, etc. Since Aristotle identified the purposes of practicing the virtues as human happiness--a virtue of a good-making attribute of a person and for persons the highest good is happiness--so clearly he was not championing altruism, which, as the philosopher W. G. Maclagan makes clear, amounts to “assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows....Altruism is to...maintain quite simply that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he is deciding what course of action to pursue.” (“Self and Others: A Defense of Altruism,” Philosophical Quarterly 4 [1954]: 109-110.)

As presented, ordinarily by ministers, priests, philosophers or in fiction, altruism means ranking looking out for others first in one’s list of moral duties. Because for much of our modern era prudence has been thought to be something we practice automatically--”everyone is selfish or self-interested”--the virtue has gone pretty much neglected. And since self-interested conduct was taken by many over the last four centuries to be innate, altruism is the doctrine that needed to be defended and practiced. As if people really did pursue their own best interest as a matter of an innate drive.

Yet, what is in one’s self-interest--real self-interest, not just what one would prefer or like--is not simple to ascertain. It requires understanding oneself not only as a human being but as the particular individual who one is. What Plato said about this in the Phaedo (115b) is instructive:

“Crito, ‘When you are gone, Socrates, how can we best act to please you?’ Socrates: ‘Just follow my old recipe, my friend: do yourselves concern yourselves with your own true self-interest; then you will oblige me, and mine and yourself too’."

Indeed in Classical Greek ethics doing the right thing is what’s crucial, and that will be of benefit all around, helping oneself as well as others. But doing the right thing is something one must choose to do. It doesn’t happen automatically. In how ethics is viewed by a great many thinkers today, whatever the right thing is will be done automatically--we are hardwired to do it. Doctrines are proposed in various fields--including the latest fashion, namely, neuroscience--as to how people and other living things are programmed by biological imperatives to serve others (or not). Never mind that ethics is actually about what people ought to choose to do, not about what they are impelled to do by their biological constitution.

Wouldn’t it be advantageous if everyone instinctively did do what is right!? All would be just fine with the world then, at least as far as human affairs are concerned! But in fact there is a lot of mischief going around and it is often due to bad choices people make. What would bad choices look like? The ancient Greeks had a good clue--ones that thwart or undermine our human happiness. Even generosity was, for them, a virtue that enhances the life of the one who practices it.

Those who peddle altruism, often so as to instill guilt in most of us who are quite normally seeking to benefit ourselves first and foremost, are in fact misanthropes, like the extreme environmentalists, some of whom--e.g., David M. Graber--actually hope for the extinction of the human race. (Another is the radical environmentalist Bill McKibben who prides himself on no longer being a consumer. Perhaps he would like to explain the virtue of this in our time to all the unemployed among us.)

Machan's Archives: Instead of Zoning…What?

Tibor R. Machan

I have argued before why zoning laws are inconsistent with a free society’s principles, in particular with the principle of private property rights. Basically they amount to impositions by some people on others of conditions for using property that are the owner is authorized to determine. No one else has that right, however tempting and desirable it may appear to imagine otherwise.

But what about the perfectly honorable wish to have a nice neighborhood in which to live, work and play? How, besides by means of zoning ordinances, could people protect their neighborhoods?



Before answering this question it must be noted, quite emphatically, that zoning ordinances by no means achieve what their advocates claim justifies their use. Indeed, in many communities that have stringent zoning ordinances there are neighborhoods that are a mess, to put it mildly. Especially right where the zoning provisions change, say from commercial to residential use, the areas are usually in a deteriorating condition. That is where buildings are usually dilapidated, shabby. And it is usually those who lack political clout who must live there.



In more general terms, by no means is the institution of zoning laws a panacea. Just as with the welfare state in general, which simply shoves around the misery it aims to eliminate, zoning laws, too, are mostly an expression of special interest clout. A drive through any of the heavily zoned communities will demonstrate this right away.

In fact, the record of the institution of zoning as far as making areas of residential, commercial and recreational living orderly and pleasant for all is by no means a good one. Let us look at this briefly, without entering the ample scholarship that exists on that topic. (But anyone wishing to check for detailed studies can examine William A. Fishel’s works, The Economics of Zoning Laws : A Property Rights Approach to American Land Use Controls, Regulatory Takings : Law, Economics, and Politics, Do Growth Controls Matter? : A Review of Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness and Efficiency of Local Government Land Use Regulation, The Economics of Zoning Laws : A Property Rights Approach to American Land Use Controls, and Land Economics : Private Markets Public Decisions, as well as Bernard H. Siegan’s seminal book, Land Use Without Zoning.)

For one, there is a city in the USA that has enjoyed zoning freedom and has worked pretty well while it lasted. It is Houston, Texas. No disaster, no catastrophe, no mess, no property devaluation, nada. Just a city where what zoning was supposed to achieve had been achieved without it, more peacefully, more though cooperation than through coercion.

Second, a little imagination and history should suffice to teach us all that it is better all around to strive to achieve goals without forcing people to accept what they would freely reject. And this applies as much to education or military service as it does not keeping their neighborhoods in good shape. Free men and women simply do better, on the whole, than do those who are regimented by their fellows, made to act as they do not choose to.

Third, what zoning aims for can easily be achieved through voluntary agreements among members of neighborhoods. Restrictive covenants work to this end wonderfully, provided those concerned make the effort to establish them. As with all things, the free approach always appears at first cumbersome – talking someone into a course of conduct takes more time than doing this by beating up the person. But in the end the result is much more rewarding – all kinds of political hostilities, vested interest battles, and politicking in the worst sense of that term can be avoided if agreements are reached peacefully, through mutual effort.

Of course, in most communities this is at best an ideal, but more likely a political fantasy, along lines that abolishing prohibition had been at one time and substituting a private for a public education system is now. But that does not make it any less feasible and right! So in the current dispute about whether this or that kind of zoning ordinance is needed for a community, it is vital that some voices keep announcing what is the truly best solution, after all.

What is needed, once all the infighting has shown itself the fruitless effort it really is, is the abolition of zoning and the institution of market based, voluntary agreements among members of neighborhoods, commercial establishments and so forth to achieve what these members want to achieve. There will, of course, be limits to what is possible – one cannot live in Shangri-La if one isn’t financially equipped to do so; one cannot live far in the woods if one’s budget provides for only an apartment in the middle of town. But within the limits that one must live with in all realms of ordinary life, the solutions reached via voluntary negotiations and bargaining are far superior to those acrimonious ones that are reached via the political process.

Will this be done tomorrow morning at 9 AM? No. But should we stress its desirability and real availability for any community? Yes.

How Not to Treat Ideas

Tibor R. Machan

The philosophical school I consider most sensible sees ideas as the means by which human beings gain understanding of reality. Ideas are what helps us navigate reality so we can live successfully. Which is why so much effort has been spent on developing, criticizing and analyzing ideas throughout human history, especially in the academy, not just in the sciences but in matters of public concern.

But in the modern age a good many thinkers have come to believe that ideas are actually expressions of passions or interests, brought about so as to promote the satisfaction of desires. Or, in other words, that they are simply ideology.

This attitude appeared to be what lay behind a question some journalists on TV were asking about Ron Paul. On a round table television program I was watching recently, several of journalists were discussing results from the various primaries and caucuses, and some of them asked, “What is Ron Paul after? What does he want? What is driving him?” This in part because, well, he isn’t very likely to win. And the answer that Ron Paul is actually interested in figuring things out and then teaching people something--for example about the US Constitution, about the Federal Reserve system, about the nature of money--just kept being overlooked. No, Paul has to have an agenda of some sort, like wanting to be a vice-presidential candidate, like getting appointed to some federal department, etc. Just advancing and defending certain ideas so as to promote understanding on the part of the electorate seems to be unfathomable to these journalists. There has to be an angle!

Here is one main source of the widespread cynicism about American politics. People look at candidates and office holders as always being out for something--power, wealth, fame, and the like. Wanting to be correct about political matters seems not to matter. Getting it right about the Fed or the US Constitution--that is, truth--is passe. Why?

There is also that related way of dealing with people’s opinions and ideas, namely, by explaining them away as having been caused by one’s upbringing. The often heard question, “Where is he or she coming from?” indicates this approach. When you hold that economic stimulus is folly or helpful, it doesn’t matter whether the idea is true; just explain it either linking it to the person’s special interest or background. Concern yourself with what put the idea in the mind. (Which implies, of course, that the answer to that question will also be treated as having been caused by someone’s background, history, or upbringing, ad infinitum!)

All of this may indicate why so many people in public life don’t really argue about the merits of ideas or positions on various issues but focus, instead, on the motivations and character of those advancing the ideas. And to undermine those ideas, then, will not require better ideas, sound criticism and so forth but, instead, the calling into question of the motivations and character of whoever defends them. Never mind if an idea has merit, ask, instead, what explains that someone holds it and is the motivation benign. Besmirching the thinker is what works, not criticizing what he or she thinks! So as to impugn Ron Paul’s or Mitt Romney’s or Newt Gingrich’s position, link it to some kind of questionable motive. He holds his foreign policy views because he has loyalties to certain foreign countries since his parents or associates were born there! He opposes the Federal Reserve Bank because he hates bankers who help his adversaries, not because the ideas are right and those who oppose them are, well, wrong.

I received an unsolicited email the other day that questioned President Obama’s loyalty to the United States of America, claiming, instead, that he is working for Kenya! I couldn’t resist replying that it doesn’t matter to me if he came from the moon or Mars, what matters is whether he has good ideas on public affairs. Immediately I got a reply saying well it should matter to me if I care about where this country is going.

This kind of reasoning bothers me not only because it commits the informal genetic fallacy, which questions ideas not because of their flaws but because of their origins, but also because I have been subject to similar dismissal of my own thinking: “You come from Communist Hungary, right? So obviously you would think this or that.”

Wrong.

Prudence versus Greed

Tibor R. Machan

Most people mean by greed an “excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions.” As to prudence, it is the quality of being cautious with regard to practical matters and especially in regard for one's own economic interests, being careful in the management of resources, heeding economy and being frugal.

Why is this of any interest? Because the sense of “prudent” as used to mean being economical, frugal is now being distorted by confusing it with being greedy. When Gordon Gekko declares greed to be good in Oliver Stone’s notorious movie, Wall Street--notorious since it managed to exacerbate the already hostile attitude toward business that sadly prevails in much of the world--he doesn’t differentiate between excessive or rapacious desire for stuff and the prudent management of one’s resources. They are lumped together.

And sadly some professional economists tend to agree. When I took my first economics course in the mid-60s at Claremont Men’s (now McKenna) College, my econ prof was University of Chicago PhD Procter Thomson who did use to tell his classes that “greed is good.” But it was said with a mischievous look in his eyes--he didn’t really mean to say that greed as understood as a vice or sin is good, only that the pursuit of one’s self interest, as argued by Adam Smith the father of modern economic science, is useful, enhances economic productivity.

Critics of the free market system have been capitalizing on the casual identification of prudence and greed, the sort that Professor Thomson and quite a few other economists continue to indulge in. That identification has a complex history. In a nutshell, there was a time when prudence counted as one of the most important human virtues, even a moral principle, meaning living carefully, attending to one’s life in a way that will be of benefit to oneself, enhance one’s human excellence. When some girls used to be named “Prudence,” they certainly weren’t meant to be declared greedy. Even the name of that major financial company The Prudential, isn’t meant to convey that those working there are rapaciously bent on acquiring riches. No, the idea is that original one, namely, that being prudent is taking good, proper care of oneself and of one’s clients’ funds.

But then in the 16th century, mostly at the hands of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, prudence was used not to much as a term for being careful but for being ambitious, even power hungry. The drive to gain power, wealth and such was taken by Hobbes and his followers to be innate in us, the engine that moved us forward, no different from how other biological imperatives push us to behave as we do. Prudence was thus changed from a virtue to a drive or motive, from a character trait and virtue to an inborn psychological disposition.

This is where we get the idea so many of my students repeat, “Everyone is selfish.” They just cannot help it! And thus there can be no credit or blame ascribed for being prudent--it is how we simply must be, how we are, as it were, hard wired.

But the evolution of ideas is rarely smooth and seamless, so a mixture emerged in time where many, especially in the social sciences, saw prudence as both a drive and an attitude, except it stopped being a praiseworthy one. Being selfish as a prudent person would be got replaced with being selfish as an avaricious or greedy person would be. Since the latter is, of course, widely taken to be a bad trait, its association with economic ambition served the critics of the free market system very nicely: they could now link plain old, innocent economic prudence with a vice! But since the term “prudence” didn’t easily fit this idea, given its honorable original meaning--”greed” became the term which then was used to smear economic self-interest.

So nowadays even those on Wall Street and elsewhere who are trying conscientiously to increase their and their clients’ wealth are dubbed greedy, even as it’s becoming evident to most folks that without their good works the economic system is going to tank.

Just imagine all the brokers, money managers, company presidents and chief financial officers resigning their posts and joining a monastery. That would really boost employment, wouldn’t it?

Machan's Archives: Genuine Military Defense Anyone? (updated)

Tibor R. Machan

As much as one may object to Iran's government’s efforts to build atomic weapons, the American government isn’t supposed to be some kind of meta-police that embarks upon restraining such governments! Certainly spending American taxpayers’ funds on conducting military actions against Iran would be going way beyond the proper military role of the American government, which is to protect its citizen’s freedom from domestic and foreign criminals.

It bears remembering here that however off course the American government has gone in its role in the country, the real role it has is to be a government strictly limited to the functions laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, which is to stand ready to defend the country when it is attacked or when there is a demonstrably clear and present danger that it will be--not might be--attacked. So the criteria by which one must judge its conduct, both domestic and international, is whether it amounts to such defense.

Sadly, of course, most politicians and bureaucrats, as well as their cheerleaders in the academy and media, don’t give a hoot about restraining the power of government. After all, the same rationale that serves to justify its relentless intervention in our lives at home is what is used to rationalize it abroad. (Does it occur to folks that despite some of the rhetoric of restraint associated with the political thought of President Obama, it is modern liberalism’s interventionism that removes all principled restraint and leads to the imperialist policies of which this Libyan expedition is a case in point? Obama is, after all, a self-professed pragmatist and that means rejecting all principles as mere ideology!)

I am talking, of course, from the position of someone who has always agreed with President George Washington’s warnings about foreign entanglements, made in his farewell address and one implicit in the basic thrust of the American political tradition of limited government. The limitation is not all that tough to grasp: it is self-defense, just as in the case of when people are justified to use force against each other, namely, when they have been attacked, when they encounter an aggressor. This does not include being deprived of someone else’s productive work or resources, including Iran’s oil. If my neighbor refuses to sell me his produce or labor, I have no right to attack him and try to force him to hand these to me because I want them very badly, even need them desperately. And if he arms himself and his family to the teeth in anticipation, justified or not, of being attacked by local gangs, that too is not cause for me to attack him.

Such is the proper standard of international military policy for a bona fide free society and whether that goes contrary to domestics intellectuals, the community of nations, the UN or whoever else sounds off about it, it makes no difference. None of that is going to make it right and, furthermore, one rotten consequence of it is that all the rhetorical opposition to international banditry is certainly going to sound mighty hallow!

Once a country’s government abandons the stance by which its use of force is kept to national defense and nothing else (however tempting it is to breach it), it has lost its moral authority as it criticizes other aggressors around the globe, including that of the Iranian or Syrian government against “its own people”. Rogue regimes everywhere, with their rulers aspiring to impose their will upon everyone, will be able to point to the USA and declare, correctly: “Look at the leaders of the free world, see how they butt into all manner of misconduct by their fellow governments, so clearly it must be permissible for us to act likewise when we disapprove of what others do!”

Just as the philosophy that demands restraining government domestically is the most radical and sound political idea--just compare it to all the imperialism throughout human history embarked upon by hundreds of regimes--so this insistence that governments keep to their oath of protecting the rights of their citizens is radical, sound and sadly neglected.

Having to Fund Immoral Policies

Tibor R. Machan

At the outset I am talking about what someone considers immoral, not what is objectively immoral. Nonetheless, millions are coerced by governments, backed by other millions, to work and pay for what they consider morally wrong. Is that right? Is it avoidable in a democracy?

Back during the Vietnam war a great many opponents of that disastrous policy wanted to withhold their taxes, or the portion of it that went to fund the war. They were mostly from the Left but that doesn’t matter. The point is that such people argued that it is unjust to make them do this. And there is something to this: why would it be OK to require something to contribute resources he or she has produced and owns to a policy deemed to be morally wrong?

Granted requiring someone to make contributions to anything is objectionable but isn’t it more so if the policy is objected to by the victim of such coercion on moral grounds? Suppose the sources of the moral objection is one’s religion. Wouldn’t that contradict the idea of freedom of religion? You are supposed to be free to choose what faith you accept and practice but then you are forced to give up portions of your life for some other faith! Isn’t that inconsistent? You are both free to choose as well as not free to choose!

Doesn’t democracy amount to such this kind of confusion? Well, not if it’s property limited, as limited government champions have insisted it should be. All this stuff about funding or not funding contraceptives would be off the table, not up for the vote.

Today we have President Obama and his minions insisting that forcing Catholics, their churches and such, provide contraceptives and the like to people who want it from them is just fine. But Roman Catholics consider contraceptives an instrument for evil, like pacifists might guns. Would it be OK to demand that pacifists hand out lethal weapons to people who want it from them?

I proposed that this is no different from forcing people to fund a war in which they do not believe, which they regard unjust. I wrote this in a comment at The New York Times on line where one can contribute comments to columnists’ views and where these comments can be further commented on by others. Well, my comment received a bunch of bizarre follow-up comments claiming that there is a world of difference between wanting to withhold support for a war and wanting to do the same for government distributing contraceptives, a policy some consider unjust. But, in fact, the former is simply a different instance of the latter but it’s exactly the same kind of thing.

It reminds me of when people who often embrace democracy whole hog but then when the vote goes against them, cry foul! But if the democratic method is accepted as a valid approach to settling disputed issue, one has no business protesting the outcome. It is rank duplicity, even hypocrisy.

But here is the rub: Mr. Obama and his ideological cohorts are pragmatists and what is so convenient about pragmatism is that you can insist on some policy here, but reject it there, embrace it one hour and then denounce it the next. Because, you see, at least the type of pragmatism that Mr. Obama has often stated is his philosophy rejects principles from the git go. Yes, there are sophisticated pragmatists who defend their unprincipled viewpoint on grounds that principles are really impossible! Principled thinking is mere ideology, not based on reality, so they hold, since reality is too chaotic, too illogical to yield sound principles that can be used in guiding conduct and criticism. But Mr. Obama hasn’t bothered to provide a defense of his unprincipled stand on a great variety of issues, like undeclared wars, deficit spending, abortion, etc.

But then what is there if reason is passe? What would political campaigns be if candidates could not look for inconsistencies in their opponents? Well, then they would be what they have become, shouting matches, throwing dirt at one another, name calling, besmirching and such, that’s what. Because once logic is abandoned, once consistency is ruled out as a criterion of admissible thought and discourse as proposed by pragmatists, we are back just a step away from the jungle where reason has no place and force rules. As that famous painting of Goya says, “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.”

Machan’s Archives: Democracy versus Liberty

Tibor R. Machan

Over the last several decades of American political life the idea of liberty has taken a back seat to that of democracy. Liberty involves human beings governing themselves, being sovereign citizens, while democracy is a method by which decisions are reached within groups. In a just society it is liberty that’s primary; the entire point of law is to secure liberty for everyone, to make sure that the rights of individuals, to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness, are protected from any human agent bent on violating them.

Democracy at its best is but a byproduct of liberty. Because we are all supposed to be free to govern ourselves, whenever some issue of public policy faces the citizenry, all entitled to take part. Democratic government rests, in a free society, on the right of every individual to take whatever actions are needed to influence public policy. Because freedom or liberty is primary, the scope of public policy and, thus, democracy in a just society is strictly limited. The reason is that free men and women may not be intruded on even if a majority of their fellows would decide to do so. If someone is a free, which means a self-governing, person, then even the majority of one's fellows lack the authority to take over one's governance without one's consent. I cannot be otherwise unless there is prior agreement by all to accept such a process. The consent of the governed amounts to this and that is what the US Declaration of Independence means when it mentions that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

In a just society no one loses his or her authority for self-government without giving it up as a matter of choice. No one gets to perform an operation on you, no matter how wise and competent, without your giving your consent, and the same is true, in a just system, about imposing duties and obligations on people. They must agree to this. If they do not, they aren't to be ordered about at all. That would be involuntary servitude!

The only apparent exception is when it comes to laws that protect everyone’s rights. One may indeed be ordered not to kill, rob, rape, burglarize, or assault another person, even if one fails to consent to this. And when government does the job of protecting individual rights, government may order one to abstain from all such aggressive actions. But that doesn't actually involve intruding on people, only protecting everyone from intrusions.

It is along these lines that the idea of limited government arises: government may only act to protect rights, to impose the laws that achieve that goal, nothing more. Again, as the Declaration of Independence notes, it is to secure our rights that governments are instituted, not for any other purpose. Of course, this idea of limited government hardly figures into considerations of public policy in the USA or elsewhere.

We have never actually confined government to this clearly limited, just purpose. It has always gone beyond that and today its scope is nearly totalitarian, the very opposite of being limited. But there is no doubt that even though liberty has been nearly forgotten as an ideal of just government in America as well as elsewhere, democracy does remain something of an operational ideal. In this way liberty has been curtailed tremendously, mainly to the minor sphere of everyone having a right to take part in public decision-making.

Whereas the original idea was that we are free in all realms and democracy concerns mainly who will administer a system of laws that are required to protect our liberty, now the idea is that democracy addresses everything in our lives and the only liberty we have left is to take part in the decision-making about whatever is taken to be a so called “public” matter. One way this is clearly evident is how many of the top universities in the USA construe public administration to be a topic having to do primarily with the way democracy works. Indeed, after the demise of the Soviet Union, even though the major issue should have been the salvation of individual liberty, the experts in academe who write and teach the rest of the world about public administration are nearly all focused on democracy, not on liberty.

For example, the courses at America’s premier public administration graduate school, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, are mainly focused on problems of democracy. At this institution nearly 40 percent of the students attending come from 75 foreign countries, many of them from those that used to be under Soviet rule, and what they focus on in nearly all their courses is democracy, not liberty. Assignments in these courses tend all to raise problems about implementing democratic governance and leave the issue of how individual liberty should be secured as practically irrelevant. Or, to put it more precisely, the liberty or human right that is of interest in most of these courses is the liberty to take part in democratic decision-making. (“Human rights” has come to refer in most of these course and their texts mainly to the right to vote and to take part in the political process!) Yes, of course, that is a bit of genuine liberty that many of the people of the world have never enjoyed, so for them it is a significant matter, to be sure. But it is clearly not the liberty that the Declaration of Independence mentions when it affirms that all of us are equal in having unalienable rights to our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

The Declaration speaks of a very wide scope of individual liberty, while the premier public administration school of America teaches, at least by implication, that the only liberty of any importance is the liberty to take part in public policy determination. This, I submit, is a travesty. Once democracy is treated as the premier public value, with individual liberty cast to the side except as far as taking part in democratic decision-making, the scope of government is no longer limited in principle or practice.

Nearly anything can become a public policy issue, so long as some measure of democracy is involved in reaching decisions about it.

And that, in fact, turns out to be a serious threat to democracy itself. Because when democracy trumps liberty, democracy can destroy itself--the law could permit the democratically reached destruction of democracy itself! That is just what happened in the Weimar Republic, where a democratic election put Hitler in power and destroyed democracy. And check developments in our time in the Middle East!

If you ever wonder why it is that public forums, including the Sunday TV magazine programs, the Op Ed pages of most newspapers, the feature articles of most magazines do not discuss human liberty but fret mostly about democracy, this is the reason: the major educational institutions tend not to care about liberty at all and have substituted a very limited version of it, namely, democracy as their primary concern. Once that is accomplished, individual liberty becomes defenseless.

Indeed, democracy is just as capable of being totalitarian as is a dictatorship, only with democracy it seems less clearly unjust, given that this little bit of liberty is still in tact, namely, to take part in the vote.