Is Classical Liberalism based on Skepticism?

Tibor R. Machan

There are quite a few champions of the free society who believe the best argument for it is skepticism, especially about moral truths. Some actually claim that the major proponents of the position—including, especially, its political philosophy of limited government—thought that the reason absolute or even considerable authority does not belong to the government is that no one can know what’s right and wrong. And if no one can know this, then no one can claim the authority to make others conform to their judgments of what is right.

Now this is a bad argument and actually few original classical liberals made it. It’s more the province of recent positivism-based classical liberalism, although followers of a certain (I would argued mistaken) interpretation of David Hume’s epistemology also toyed with it. (Hume, you may recall, is the famous advocate of the “is-ought gap,” the view that no judgment as to what anyone ought to do can be deduced from any factual knowledge. Notice, however, that Hume was careful to chide those who wanted to deduce the one from the other. He himself often made inferences from what is to what ought to be done.)

John Locke, perhaps the political thinker most responsible for the political philosophy sketched by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, was no skeptic. He thought we could know well enough that there are certain laws in the state of nature—certain ethical precepts before we even consider politics—that we ought to follow. And in order to make this possible in our communities, he identified certain natural rights that members of the community need to respect and its legal authority ought to protect.

This, I insist, is not a skeptical argument. It affirms that we can know the precepts of ethics and what rights everyone has. Pretty hefty stuff to know, I’d say.

Was Adam Smith a skeptic? In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, be it sound or not, he doesn’t appear to be one at all. All kinds of moral virtues are affirmed, quite confidently, in that, Smith’s favorite, book and there are passages about morality in The Wealth of Nations which show no less confidence in our ability to know a thing or two about right and wrong.

But why is the skeptical argument a bad one? Because if no one can know anything about right and wrong, then none could know, either, that it is wrong to impose one’s wishes or preferences on other people, to coerce them to live the way one happens to want them. Nor can anyone know that it is wrong to take it upon oneself to forge a polity that will regiment everyone (if it can muster sufficient power for that purpose)? The skeptical case for liberty is, in other words, hoisted on its own petard.

So those who champion the free society and want to do more than simply express their preference for it, never mind if it holds any argumentative merit—whether it can be shown to be superior to alternative regimes—need to find good arguments and not rely on the skeptical tactic. It simply will not work.

One reason skepticism is attractive to many intelligent and decent people is that in too many cases those who claimed to know had the delusion that this knowledge is eternal, timeless, perfect, incorrigible, and final. Now that kind of knowledge doesn’t exist and it is folly to think that human knowledge is like that. That kind of fantasy knowledge amounts, actually, to being what one knows, not knowing it. (Even then it’s too much to ask for—we do not even know ourselves in that way, perfectly.)

In the face of this idealistic conception of what it is to know the world, it made sense to turn to skepticism. But why accept that self-destructive view? Knowing is a normal, natural, human endeavor and like all such endeavors, the future can require one to make some modifications, alternations. The idealist’s knowledge is the knowledge of an omniscient being, not of a human one.

So the defense of the free society should not rest on skepticism but on a sensible conception of human knowledge. Such knowledge, as most classical liberals held, will show it to be the best system among all the live options.

Risky Argument for Liberty

Tibor R. Machan

Reason magazine’s science editor Ronald Bailey made some fine points in response to those who are forever painting doomsday pictures about genetic engineering. (He delivered his remarks in the November installment of Cato Audio, a CD service of the Cato Institute that I highly recommend to anyone interested in advances as well as setbacks in the struggle for genuine liberty in this country and around the globe.) In particular, Bailey focused upon the arguments advanced from the Left and the Right against this biotechnology, by all counts just around the corner in developed countries.

I was interested in his response to the Left’s claim that genetic engineering will usher into existence a “gene aristocracy,” namely, a class of very rich people who will get their hands on the biotechnological benefits way before anyone else does, helping, thus, to produce an even greater gap between rich and poor that exists today. The rich will become brighter, more beautiful, more healthy, more athletic—you name some possible advantage reaped from the new technology and the rich will benefit from it while the rest of us will lag behind. Nothing, of course, upsets intellectuals—even the brightest among them—on the Left than the prospect of some people being better off than others. In the typical strategy of those who are primarily motivated by envy and the drive to coercively create a fair society, these people would rather have no one benefit from biotechnology than have just the rich do so.

Of course, Bailey was dead on target to point out that even if the fairness issue were decisive, the only way to get the benefits of genetic engineering to the masses is to first get it off the ground by the rich. But he offered this as the central reason for rejecting the Left’s concerns and that simply will not work.

Even if in the future most people will benefit from the biotechnology, if the concern about fairness is left unchallenged, that will not refute the Left’s case. Those on the Left see fairness as a matter of justice. In other words, it is unjust to allow unfairness to exists right now, so offering the gradual decrease of unfairness in the future isn’t going to cut much ice for them. And if you do not demonstrate, as surely it is not very difficult to do, that fairness is not what’s crucial about justice, the Left’s case against genetic engineering remains basically intact.

Bailey appears to be among those defenders of the free society we may call “pragmatists” or “consequentialists,” or, again, “utilitarians.” Freedom is justified by all the goodies we get from it, never mind how they are apportioned or who has rightful claims to them. Many economists who champion the free society—or its free, capitalist market—share this approach to defending it. Look how much bread the market bakes—that is what counts for most.

But the Left has a point—if all these goodies go to just some folks, even for a while, there is something amiss. Why should those who are left out of the harvest support the system? Why should those who are afraid that they may be left out of it support it? Once you reason along these lines, few are left to have good reasons to support the free society and its market place.

So one needs to establish that those who have the resources—because they have a right, as anyone else, to seek and obtain them so long as they do not rob, steal or extort from others—have the corresponding right to the liberty to do with those resources as they see fit. This is their basic, natural right as human beings and if the exercise of this right leads to their enjoying certain advantages, so be it. Others simply have to moral—and should have no legal—authority to interfere.

The fact that this insistence on the basic rights of all, including the rich, to pursue their own goals—be they of public benefit or none—also tends to benefit most people is secondary, not primary. Unless the case for the free system can be made along lines that stress the justice of the it, those on the Left (and I haven’t even come to discussing those on the Right, with all their concerns) will make a better case with their equation of justice and fairness.

The abundance that the free system offers in the future isn’t sufficient to give it a solid moral defense. It must be shown, also, that it is supportive of justice rightly understood even if “unfairness”—that is to say, inequality in wealth—prevails.
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Machan is the author of, among other works, The Right to Private Property (Hoover Institution Press, 2002) available at [ http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/epp/109/109a.html ]http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/epp/109/109a.html, and Individuals and Their Rights (Open Court, 1989).

Nanocars and Other Nifty Feats

Tibor R. Machan

My full confidence in Ayn Rand’s judgment waned a bit when she got all gushy about a space shot she was invited by the White House to witness close up, if I recall right. Yes, as a technological feat the shot was a marvel all right. But so was Sputnik, yet I was not tempted at all to celebrate the Soviet’s achievement. Why? Because it was done at the point of a gun. And if anyone ought to know that “Morality ends at the point of a gun,” Ayn Rand should have since she is the one who made the best philosophical case for that very vital notion.

So when I was reading about how some folks have come up with actual, functioning nanocars, tiny as all get out—reportedly made from a single molecule—yet capable of being driven around on some kind of golden highway [THE WEEK, Nov. 5, 2005, p. 19], I was thinking to myself how cool this is, yet how its creation probably came at the expense of the resources of thousands of taxpayers who then had to go without.

Since the news item was very skimpy, giving only the most meager of information (that the research occurred at Rice University, in Houston, TX), I didn’t learn whether it was funded in part by a government grant. (See more at http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=12107.) That in itself is disconcerting—we cannot tell who to thank for such innovations because, as I argued in one of my first published papers in political philosophy, “Justice and the Welfare State” (reprinted in The Libertarian Alternative [1974], the first book I edited and had published), the connection between cause and effect in the area of production, creation and what is being produced or created is severed nearly completely, or at least severely distorted, in the welfare state. So while one would wish to give thanks to those who achieve such feats as flying out into space or making nanocars, because the funds needed to pay for the process that made it happen came from the point of the gun, it is nearly impossible to thank anyone. It is as if one were contemplating thanking the Mafia for making contributions to some museum or Renaissance art.

There are, of course, those who believe that taxes do not amount to the confiscation of anything—they are, the preposterous story goes, due being paid to government, dues justly owed. But this is crazy and most officials of the government know it since they are always criticizing one another for “misspending the taxpayers’ dollars.” If it belong to the government, then the taxpayer has no claim on it, not even to have it well spent. After all, if I pay my rent to someone I owe it to, and this person then blows all of it in Las Vegas, I have nothing to beef about. Maybe his or her spouse and children do, but I do not.

The fact that people complain about how “their” money is spend by the government that takes it in taxes suggests strongly whose the money really is. It belongs to the taxpayers but is extorted by the government which, nonetheless, needs to spend it properly because... well, because it doesn’t own it. One may suppose that even an out and out thief might be looked upon with some mercy if the stolen goods are directed to really important things, like feeding starving children or supporting important research projects. So what taxes—one of the remaining anomalies of a supposedly free society—amount to is money belonging to wage, salary, and other earners (as well as others with wealth come by peacefully). They are taken by government at gun point, though with the ever so slightly mitigating circumstance that it promises to spend it in some kind of praiseworthy fashion.

Of course, in our era few political thinkers will be able to complain about such confiscation of our resources since too many among these people are what is called consequentialists, people for whom any action can be justified so long as it produces more desirable results than would have been produced otherwise. (Just think of Kelo v. City of New London, CT.) Since hardly anyone can figure out what you and I and the rest of us would have done had the tax collectors not extorted it from us, and since politicians and bureaucrats always put on display their fabulous plans, of which some actually materialize in time, who can argue with taxation—it does some good, doesn’t it? In any case, prior to the completion of a project no one knows enough to figure whether the intended consequences will be produced and will create more benefit than the taking did harm. (Frederick Bastiat’s famous insight comes to mind here about the difficulty to accounting for something that isn’t seen!)

So, despite wishing to celebrate some of the technical feats achieved with extorted funds, I will not. Yes, I praise the scientists, the technological whizzes (I used to literally stroke my Volvo P1800 for being such a great engineering marvel). But given that they shouldn’t have had most of the funds that enabled them to achieve these feats, I decline the invitation to celebrate.

Bush’s Censorial Temptation

Tibor R. Machan

Does President Bush believe that by his announcing that critics of the Iraqi war dampen morale among the troops he will have managed to prevent such criticism? Does he believe his words will silence critics and heighten troop morale?

This, however, is America and if Americans share a common trait, it’s rebellion at those who wield power. Well, they used to, anyway—most of them. Because the country was born in revolution.

There is irritating stuff in some criticisms of this war. Too many critics have lost their credibility about chiding government for extending its brute powers. The Left likes big government and wants it to perform innumerable “precautionary” measures in every nook and carry of society. The Left, with its irrational enthusiasm for (even exuberance with) every government program aiming to right the wrongs of society, is hypocritical trying now to rein in government when it comes to this particular (foreign) extension.

Just like back during the Vietnam war, the Left kept complaining that we are all being taxed for something few support. Yet the same could be said about The New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society. These statists would retort, however, that it’s all good with government intervention, redistribution, expropriation, and regulation. OK, then what’s all the fuss about a little preemptory, precautionary war in Iraq?

Still, Bush should have stayed away from his censorial lament, aired previously by his first Attorney General, John Ashcroft. It wont fly—this is not the Soviet Union (yet). I myself have been laying off the war partly because being steeped in it, the US probably should get more solid, expert advice on how to extricate itself from it. The whole thing was ill conceived, ill commenced, and should at least be well concluded. Fretting now about why this is a botched operation isn’t too useful.

But now that Bush raised the matter so unwisely, let’s see why it is a good thing all around to keep up the critical scrutiny he wishes to discourage if not outright suppress. First, everyone needs to get a very clear idea that the military forces of the United States of America are hired to do the job of defending the country from those who would—or are highly likely about to—launch an attack upon its citizenry. The military (or at least the marines) are not, as one grossly misconceived bumper sticker I saw back in the early 1990s, “The 911 of the World.” It should only be the 911 of Americans and so resist the temptation to go gallivanting about the globe involving itself with nation-building and operation Iraqi or whatever disgusting country’s freedom.

Second, once committed to the war, every bit of brain power and moral fiber is required not to succumb to complacency about it, lest the country turn into the very thing those troops have been sent to reform, a suppliant dictatorship. This is a bad war and it is time those with the know-how put their minds to answering the question of how to undo the damage and leave without provoking further tragedy.

Third, history should benefit from the ill begotten war by being taught that it was far from inevitable, that had wiser counsels been considered it could have been avoided and other policies instituted to help those Iraqis—by no means even so many—who really want to live in a genuinely free country (as distinct from wanting to take hold of power and force everyone to live by one’s creed).

No, Mr. President, it is not a wise thing to tell us all to shut up to suit your likely embarrassment from being in the midst of an impossible situation from which you will not likely emerge with a swell presidential legacy. The troops, by the way, will do just fine. They may even be proud knowing that citizens back home haven’t gone to sleep on their citizenship jobs of taking government to task when that’s justified.

Corporate Self-Flagellation

Tibor R. Machan

It wasn’t but a few minutes into this movie—The Invisible Circus, produced by FineLine Features, An AOL TIME Warner Company, one of America’s biggest media companies—that the main character makes the following voiceover comment:

My father dreamed of being an artist. Instead he worked for a giant corporation. He hated it. He hated himself for working there. Faith [her sister] said that’s what made him sick [from which he died]....

The movie is based on a novel by Jennifer Egan and I have no idea whether the original work contained these lines. What I found utterly despicable here is that this giant American media corporation was releasing a movie in which nearly the first substantive idea that comes out of the mouth of the protagonist is how a nice daddy hated working for a giant corporation.

Just think about it: this movie would not have been made without a giant corporation footing the bill for its production, the payment to the author of the original novel, the director’s and actors’ salaries, and so forth. AOL TIME Warner Co., is, of course, owned by millions of stockholders, many of them with shares of which on and off they make a few (or quite a few) bucks. It employs thousands of people who are paid a pretty decent income from their work at this “giant corporation.” Then, also, I don’t know how many thousands and thousands of people make good use of AOL TIME Warner services and product and how many more enjoy subcontractor status, deriving side benefits from this giant corporation’s hateful existence.

My son keeps telling me I should relax, enjoy these entertainment fares, avoid getting ulcers or some other malady from becoming aggravated about all these shows paradoxically and viciously indicting the very foundation of their own existence. Sadly or happily—it varies for me from one day to the next—I am unwilling to forgetaboutit. It is one of the most infuriating things I experience on a nearly daily basis: businesses that are sponsoring total disrespect toward businesses.

Ayn Rand used to call this “the sanction of the victim,” suggesting that here are good people who are accepting bad things said about them. But I think they are not such good people, although, of course, in important ways they are. It is they, after all, who create all those valuable things I listed above—the products, services, employment, subcontracting, etc. But in one serious—indeed possibly fatal—respect they are being vicious. They are undermining their own very valuable existence by fueling the fires of anti-business sentiment in not only for a world-wide audience but in their very own psyche.

I experience this now and then when I teach my business ethics courses at my university’s school of business and economics. Students who are required to take this course—in which we examine some of the special ethical issues that people in commerce and business run across—often report that their parents who are business executives have a very cynical view of their own profession. Not because they actually witness wrongdoing, although that happens now and then, but because they believe that businesses have only a kind of raw, practical value in the world and may indeed encourage greed, which they equate with the desire to run a profitable enterprise. Why? Because from virtually every corner of the culture in which they live, too many people who mount podiums and rosters or write novels, essays, plays, even columns, or, especially, give commencement exercises—and, of course, write scripts for TV programs, have nothing but criticism to offer of corporate commerce. (Just take a look at David E. Kelley’s hit ABC-TV show, Boston Legal, and you will immediately know what I am talking about.)

Of course, this started a couple of thousand of years ago, when Plato declared the merchant as innately incapable of living a noble life and positioned at the lowest rung of society. Christianity didn’t help things much by having Jesus turn violent only one time, when he chased away money lenders from the temple (as if no other sins were worthy of the Prince of Peace’s ire).

In fact, however, all this is bunk. As Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, “Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.” So, yes, forgetaboutit, it being that derisive attitude and moral superiority toward people in the profession of wealth care.

When Government "Teaches"

Tibor R. Machan

At a recent seminar I was discussing whether liberty needs to be curtailed when disaster strikes and several of the participants were beginning to respond quite favorably to my own answer that, no, it does not. Of course, during a disaster often all hell breaks loose, whatever is the right thing to do. But there is no reason to think that institutions that secure our liberty need to be specially reoriented to circumstances involving any kind of natural disaster. As that wise old cliché has it, “Hard cases make bad law.”

Why, nonetheless, is it now nearly commonplace, albeit futile, to look to government during disasters? Simple, actually: because so many people look to government in any case, never mind disasters. When the sheriff becomes the barber, bar tender, dentist, dance instructor, teacher, and architect, all at once, none of these profession will long escape severe malpractice but all will seek the sheriff’s help for any purpose whatever. Seeking government aid will be the frustrating norm.

A startling piece of evidence showing the truth of this comes to us from Topeka, Kansas, where on November 8th the Board of Education for Kansas “approved new public-school science standards ... that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.” That schools that teach biology should not substitute a doctrine based on religious faith for a highly productive theory—nay, fact—that life emerged in the world over billions of years involving natural selection is right but not the issue here. (Intelligent Design, which is what the Kansas School Board considers a bona fide competitor, is not science since it assumes something that is impossible: that there is intelligence prior to a brain, with this pre-existing intelligence that also created the brain. That just cannot be, by any stretch of our biological evidence. Brains are an absolute prerequisite for intelligence, so they could not have been created by brainless intelligence.)

But never mind that—the issue is interesting and can be debated in the proper forums for such debates. What is really scary is that a political body is responsible for setting “science standards.” That’s not something politics may be involved in, never.

Imagine if politics set the standards for any, including religious, truth? Most people would clearly grasp that that is out of the question and the first amendment to the bill of rights partly recognizes this in mandating the separation of church and state. Why? Because religious truths, as any other purported or proposed truths, need the atmosphere of complete freedom of inquiry. Governments may guard that freedom but never demolish it with their inept political boards.

Sadly, however, in the eagerness to have children educated, Americans over the last two centuries haven’t recognized this elementary fact and allowed politicians to manage their children’s education. Not all of them, granted, but most. And this is completely out of line with the principles of a free society, even if some champions of such a society made the unpardonable mistake to cave in on the point. That is no different from governments elsewhere around the globe and throughout history having become promoters of religion, the arts, sciences, athletics and so forth, mainly because of the eagerness of many leaders to make sure that people are involved in all of this. All such objectives may be proper ones for some though not others, but they aren’t for politicians to pursue. Nor is education.

As the Declaration of Independence put it in its nifty, unambiguous phrasing, it is “to secure [our] rights” that “governments are instituted among [us].” That’s what cops are supposed to do, keep the peace, not become...well, please just look at the second paragraph above and you will get the point clear as a bell. Maybe it is time to reread that wonderful, earthshaking document and start taking it really seriously at last.

Please don’t get me wrong. As someone with a 40+ year career in education, I am fully supportive of schooling the young, not only because this gives me a fantastic job but because the young, including my own three children, require a solid education. But a solid education does not come from government and its school administrators. It comes from a free education system, free not of reality—which means costs, controversies and confusions, among other things—but free of government. Those experts, haven’t you heard, are supposedly to be good at using guns against criminals and foreign aggressors and thus must not be allowed near anything else lest they start invoking their deadly tools where they do not belong.

The Kansas School Board has shown us what happens when they do—imposing a one-size-fits-all theological-biological doctrine on all pupils. That’s what is wrong with what they did, never mind Intelligent Design, Darwin or whatever the exact content of what they impose.

But since they and every other government school board have been doing such imposing for decades on end, this new imposition should not be any great surprise. Still, it is wrong.

Rudy Giuliani vs. Civil Liberties

Tibor R. Machan

The November 2005 issue of Reason—a publication I helped launch but have no hand it at all now—did a stimulating write-up on former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, by way of a review of Fred Siegel’s The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life (Encounter, 2005), by the magazine’s online editor and a widely published contributors to prominent newspapers across the country, Tim Cavanaugh. While not a fawning piece about either the book or Giuliani’s mayoral tenure, the reviewer is clearly impressed with how Rudy has managed to tame what before he ascended to mayor amounted to a severely unruly, misgoverned place.

Economically and, for many even more importantly, in the department of civil affairs, the city had been a mess. I recall when I visited there routinely and stayed with the late Ernest van den Haag, a formidable conservative intellectual adversary who had grave doubts about libertarianism, civil or otherwise—although he was a firm supporter of nearly unfettered capitalism—I got many lectures on how Rudy was God’s gift to the city.

Van den Haag sounded very much like one provocative paragraph in Cavanaugh’s review:

Guiliani’s success, particularly his broad definition of ‘quality of life’ issues and offenses, poses a serious utilitarian challenge to civil libertarians.

Why? Well, because the mayor wasn’t all that concerned with whether his policies pleased or displease ACLU types. His measures, often deemed to be harsh—“campaign against squeegee men and his later efforts against turnstile jumpers, public urinators, and other petty lawbreakers”—pretty much discounted these offenders’ civil liberties and many people’s idea of due process of law. That’s at least what Cavanaugh seems to be saying with his worry above.

The idea is that with the widely perceived, indeed by all accounts objective benefits of Guiliani’s policies and methods, libertarians may have to concede that it is better to forego beefing about the basic rights of citizens than to live in an unruly New York City.

Of course this takes us back to a debate that’s bogged down classical liberals or libertarians for decades, even centuries. It was John Locke who put the classical case for natural individual rights on record, insisting that every human being has these in a community by virtue of being part of humanity; the only justification for using force against anyone, then, is if he or she violates the rights of others. Government, especially, is bound by this principle, suggested Locke. And so, too, insist more recent Lockeans in the classical liberal, libertarian movement.

Against these folks stood the likes of Jeremy Bentham who considered Lockean rights a myth, not unlike many of the critics of contemporary libertarianism, such as legal and political theorists Cass Sunstein, Liam Murphy, and Thomas Nagel do today. As the famous passage from Bentham’s Anarchical Fallacies goes,

Rights is the child of law; from real law come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from ‘law of nature,' come imaginary rights.... Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

That is to say, government grants rights, they aren’t ours independently or by virtue of our human nature. And, more specifically, those political theorist who follow Bentham’s lead dispute that there is any good argument for ascribing or granting rights to people apart from when it is useful to do so for obtaining a greater acknowledged benefit than otherwise.

In the case of the former mayor, Cavanaugh intimates that no good reason exists to be concerned with some supposed basic rights that New Yorkers have—what counts is that the policies of Guiliani accomplished what to all who cared to consider it yielded important benefits to the city. This is what makes Guiliani a utilitarian and this is why he poses a challenge to at least those classical liberals and libertarians who insist on protecting individual rights no matter what, given that we have them whether governments accept them or not.

Most of those who defend the free society see nearly perfect congruence between a utilitarian and rights based support for free institutions, thinking no matter how you come at it, freedom ought to trump whatever would violate it. But while utilitarians see some exceptions, Lockeans rarely if every do (only, perhaps, in circumstances Locke himself recognized when “politics is impossible,” say in the midst of a devastating natural catastrophe).

Since, however, principles of community life—the foundations of constitutional laws—are to guide policy makers in the long run, not momentarily—that’s not how laws operate in a human community—the utilitarian challenge does not come to much. Even if one were to grant that Guiliani succeeded despite violating basic civil liberties, “one swallow does not make a spring,” as that ancient Greek sage, Aristotle, had observed.

What is even more telling is that nearly all of the measures Guiliani took pertain to how people must behave in public spheres. These are severely reduced in size and scope in a libertarian polity. And private owners and operators of subways, parks, buildings, and streets may, according to Lockean libertarians, establish whatever rules they deem are required to managing these realms. Just as I may require you to go barefoot in my house because, well, it is my house, a significantly privatized New York City would have no trouble establishing and maintaining the sort of measures Guiliani favored without violating anyone’s civil liberties at all.

The real problem is reconciling civil liberties with the effective management of public realms. This is no challenge to Lockean libertarianism.

Welcome to Freer Markets

Tibor R. Machan

"According to a confidential memorandum, I.B.M. is cutting 13,000 jobs in the United States and in Europe and creating 14,000 jobs in India. From 2000 to 2015, an estimated three million American jobs will have been outsourced; one in 10 technology jobs will leave these shores by the end...." This was the beginning of an Op Ed piece title "A Passage to India" by Suketu Mehta back on July 12, 2005. The author shows us how far India has come into the contemporary world and that it is moving more and more toward a society with relatively free institutions, including a free market.

Some lament this fact but I, for one, am mystified why anyone would consider it bad news. It is great news, for Indians looking for decent jobs; it's good news, also, for IBM and other firms that can benefit from the skills and education of Indians, where in previous times they couldn't and those in India had to go hungry or take jobs with very low pay, and it is wonderful news to customers of IBM who now can spend their saved money elsewhere and thereby create more jobs.

About outsourcing, as we discussed it recently in my business ethics class: We all do it routinely, in disparate pockets of the market place, everywhere around the world. For example, for twenty years after I was discharged from the US Air Force I cut my own hair. I feared someone else touching it, lest they ruin my fabulous flat top. In time, however, I was weaned from this stupid notion and started getting haircuts at barbershops. But now and then I leave one barbershop and start up with another—outsourcing, once again. And about a year ago I stopped the services of one house cleaner and hired another. I also switched grocery stores a couple of months ago and have starting taking my laundry to a new cleaner. Then I switched from one gym to another. And on and on it goes with nearly all of us. I also gave up my small American SUV and purchased one of those small but tall little cars from somewhere on the Pacific Rim. Outsourcing again, with all the other happy outsourcers.

In short, we are all outsourcers big time, whether we admit this or not.

As Prof. Joe Cobb, an economist, explained to my class in his recent guest lecture, people who protest this are suffering from a major confusion. They think of markets as if friends and family members populated them. To those of course we do often owe special obligations. Or they imagine we have such special obligations toward strangers who might be~Americans or live nearby. But people who work for us are almost always strangers, not friends and family and we interact with them for a limited but mutually beneficial, namely commercial, purpose. That's mostly it; although one can come to befriend one's butcher or hairdresser or even auto-mechanic and in time even start to date one of them. These categories are not rigid or fixed. But in the main, commerce is carried out with personally unknown individuals and they and we ought all to be fully aware that in such relationships loyalty is very secondary. What counts for most is whether a good deal can be struck.

Of course Karl Marx and his pals thought this to be alienating but that's bunk. It isn't alienating because most of those with whom we do business never were our bosom bodies in the first place. They were strangers all along and at one time this meant they couldn't do any good for each other at all. But with the thriving of commerce around the world, the increase of freedom of trade and of capital and labor movement, the source of mutual benefit, as well as with occasional volatility, strangers have become important sources of well-being for most of us.

So let's give at least two, if not three cheers to outsourcing. It isn't all that new a phenomenon in any case and has been supported by intelligent economists for years, one of them being, of course, Adam Smith himself. His The Wealth of Nations could use a bit of study by the likes of those whom Suketu Mehta was trying to educate about the elementary economics of the situation. It might make them happier about this global development.

Friedman, the "Laissez Faire economist"

Tibor R. Machan
In a business ethics reader I just received from McGraw Hill Publishers for possible course adoption, there are about 45 contributors. Among them is Dr. Milton Freidman, Nobel Laureate in economic science, who was for years with the University of Chicago economics department and is now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. ~

Here is what caught my attention: In the description of all of the contributors, nearly everyone other than the non-academic Frederick Engels, Karl Marx's co-author of The Communist Manifesto, is identified by reference to his or her discipline and home institution. Even Karl Marx himself is described as "a student of philosophy and economics," not as the founder of scientific socialism.

The editors, however, decided to put readers on notice right away about Milton Friedman's orientation in the field of political economy; they describe him as “US laissez-faire economist, emeritus professor the University of Chicago." His discipline, economics, isn't even mentioned.

I have no idea what came over these editors, one of whom I know slightly. But it reeks a bit of the perhaps latent desire to belittle Friedman, identifying him not by reference to his very impressive credentials but the rather didactic term used for his ideology.

And folks wonder why the charge of liberal bias is so often repeated about mainstream academicians. Here is one reason—even without perhaps intending to, those who favor a government with extensive scope and power (and for reasons they earnestly believe are sound) tend to marginalize their intellectual adversaries. In this book there is a relatively fair representation of free market supporters. Nevertheless the editors seem to think of them as but ideologues, people who are irrationally wedded to some viewpoint.

Those they tend to like, on the other hand, are treated as respected scholars in their discipline, so much so that even old hotheaded Marx is not identified with his socialist or communist ideology but with his having gotten a doctorate in philosophy as well as with his hardly respected work in economics. Students who read this identification are more likely to see Marx for the sincere, hardworking scholar or researcher the editors may think he was, while seeing Milton Friedman, one of the most technically renown and innovative neo-classical economists, as primarily a laissez-faire advocate—which is to say, someone who is ideologically predisposed.

Maybe I am making too much of this. Still, I suspect I am on to something, something perhaps even the editors may find surprising about themselves. When they went through the list of contributors and gave a biographical sentence or two about them, all but Friedman were thought of as mainly scholars or researchers. Friedman, however, didn’t receive that sort of respect from them. That’s probably because the do not have much respect for scholars and researchers who have the political-economic views of Friedman.

And that is too bad. In a proper university course when controversies are evidently rife, whatever the professor’s position, he or she is supposed to give a respectful presentation of all sides. This day and age, however, it seems that, with the focus being on cultural, racial, gender and other relatively innocuous diversity, the one pertinent diversity universities ought to keep in mind, namely, diversity of seriously argued and held viewpoints, often gets neglected.

Exactly how this squares with the idea of a proper liberal arts education I have my doubts. Seems to me the fervor behind championing favored viewpoints has taken over the commitment to proper teaching. I do realize that resisting such a temptation requires constant vigilance, as does non-partisanship in most situations where one isn’t supposed to take sides groundlessly—e.g., in judging athletes at the Olympics or considering the guilt or innocence of a defendant at a trial or, again, reaching conclusions with data from social scientific studies. But that is exactly what all these types of cases require, vigilant adherence to objectivity and, in the class room and textbooks, to the impartial presentation of the various live options being discussed about some topic.

Of course, some positions are beyond the pale—no self-respecting editor will give equal time to a Nazi, racist or even ascetic about, say, business ethics. But once one has decided to include someone’s position, one owes that person respect and not any kind of intimation that he or she isn’t quite cutting it in the respectability department.

Every day a New Study

Tibor R. Machan

Over the decades I have been following, in an unsystematic but quite reliable fashion, the innumerable studies produced by research universities and think tanks. One result of my informal survey is that I am completely unsure about whether coffee is good or bad for people in general; whether one should take naps or sleep a full night; whether salt, sugar, milk or...well, you get the point...are for or against me in various quantities and frequencies.

Most recently I read of a study that claims that people who retire earlier tend to die sooner than those who retire later. Friends whom I informed of this immediately pointed out that early retirees could well be in worse health than those who stay at work. In short, the study isn’t worth much without excruciating details about it and science journalists simply don’t bother to include those.

First of all, it is worth keeping in mind that universities thrive on studies. Professors, especially in the natural and social sciences, are forever writing proposals appealing for funding of this, that, and another research project. Governments not only fund many of these but, along with the universities themselves, often give training courses to the potential researchers instructing them on how to prepare the proposals.

But, then, just consider: universities and colleges routinely remain in business—they are kept in existence, in other words—almost entirely regardless of whether they are wanted in the general society. They are mostly tax funded, as is all this research. Unlike big and small businesses, very few educational institutions go fatally bankrupt. Most professors take out time to lobby for keeping these places on the government and private dole—“Such endeavors as our higher education and research should never be subjected to market forces,” they plead, as do many artists, scientists, medical professionals and all others who believe that world owes their kind of work job security (while the rest—say, makers of shoes, bakers of bread, producers of cars, etc.—have, of course, no such thing).

Now in this atmosphere where people can keep jobs the free marketplace may well not support, there will clearly be a lot of make-work. Not only is it an article of faith in most university disciplines that original scholarship and research are marks of excellence; not only do degrees and promotions depend a great deal not on teaching students but on doing this kind of work; but a good portion of the funds for it all can be gotten without having to persuade the funding agents, taxpayers, of the merits of these projects. The people to be persuaded are mostly colleagues sitting on evaluation boards who, if I may be a little cynical, are often interested in spending down their budgets so they can ask for more for the next fiscal year or quarter rather than in thrift and results. (Indeed, in some disciplines talk about practical results is deemed pedestrian!)

So do not be terribly surprised when study after study pours out of these institutions—and it makes little difference whether they are privately or government owned and managed, they are all going to government for much of the funding of their research. All these corrupting factors, which are now entrenched in the whole educational and research culture, contribute to the production of endless streams of nearly incoherent information, one week advising some practice, the next discouraging it.

When people who champion the free society, with its free market place by way of which funds are to be allocated to various projects, but all of it on a voluntary basis, they are told often just how the market place is unreliable. People do not know what is important to do; they engage in impulse buying; they engage in trivial pursuits; they are hooked by advertising—you know the drill!

OK, so some of this is probably true. But it is rarely noted by the lobbyists for government subsidies how severely their pet system corrupts the institution that is supposed to provide education and wisdom to young people, as well as dependable research.

It’s time they are reminded of this.

On Discussing Hollywood Boycotts

Tibor R. Machan

Joe McCarthy was probably a bully and what he wanted to do with those who held communists views, especially inside the federal government, may at times have gone over the top. But as any good Monday-morning-quarterbacker must admit—what with the opening of all the files on the Soviets back in the days of blacklisting—old Joe had a lot of things right, especially about Reds among the Feds.

One this is sure—communists, including many of those in Hollywood who got blacklisted (boycotted) because of this, were far worse than McCarthy. For anyone today to depict Soviet communist sympathizers as victims either of blacklisting or McCarthyism, when they either foolishly or deliberately aided and abetted Soviet efforts to export communism and help overthrow the American government, is a gross mistake.

A recent panel discussion—with Richard Schickel (TIME film critic, noted film historian and author of the new Elia Kazan: A Biography), James Hirsen (best-selling author, Hollywood Nation), Ron Radosh (Red Star over Hollywood), Patrick Goldstein (LA Times film critic, columnist), Ed Rampell (author, Progressive Hollywood) and Jeff Britting of the Ayn Rand Institute (producer of the Oscar-nominated Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life)—put on by the Liberty Film Festival, dealt with the history of Hollywood blacklisting. Very early in the discussion Jeff Britting presented Ayn Rand’s ideas on blacklisting. The gist of it went that if one seriously disapproves of someone's views, one has every right (and often ought) to boycott them. Otherwise one is aiding and abetting someone who is working against one’s ideals. Accordingly, if one is pro-capitalist and they are procommunist, one has the right and maybe even the responsibility to boycott and, if possible, blacklist them.

This really is a simple idea: Jews who didn't wish to purchase German cars even way after WWII were engaging in such a justified boycott—refusing to give jobs to and enrich Germans who were very likely complicit in the horrors of Nazism. If one refuses to hire someone to clean one’s home or type one’s manuscripts or whatever, someone who is an avowed or secret but well enough known communist, one is doing the right thing. If one, a pro-choice advocate, refuses to do business with pro-life advocates, this makes perfectly good moral sense.

Generally, Rand held that one has every right to make a determination who one will freely do business with. She was not advocating any government action against the Hollywood folks. She did, however, think they were morally depraved for giving aid and comfort to Soviets and their American spies. So Hollywood had every right, even responsibility, to boycott or blacklist them.

Upon airing these views as Rand’s, Britting was told his ideas are ridiculous—by Schickle and some others. Even Ron Radosh, who is an ex-Communist but has long since recanted, made a special point of dismissing and deriding Rand’s viewpoint on this issue.

This is actually quite amazing in this day and age. The Left, after all, and many sympathetic toward the blacklisted group endorse all kinds of measures taken against those who are politically incorrect—just recall how Harvard president Larry Summers was derided for suggesting women may not be as fit for science as men (NOW wanted him to resign or be fired). And here they ridicule the very straightforward moral point that one has a right to refuse to associate with those who hold what one understands to be morally repugnant views. What if I refused to hire someone who is a racist—would those on the Left denounce me on the grounds, aired at this conference by some defenders of the blacklisted people, that racism is after all my private point of view and my membership in the KKK has nothing to do with my job as a screenwriter or director of Hollywood movies? This is incredible.

But there I was, watching these people make utter fools of themselves probably because they were engaged in self-censorship, namely, refusing to show be seen agreeing on any issue with Ayn Rand. Why? Well, because Ayn Rand is viewed with vehement hatred by the Left. But not only by the Left. Radosh, who is now mostly in cahoots with all those who saw Reds under every bed back in the McCarthy era, seems also unable to bring himself to grant Rand a simple point, that each of us has a right to freedom of association, be this in our personal or professional relationships.

I think Jeff Britter, with his Randian ideas, was treated shabbily and hypocritically. Those on the Left clearly believe in boycotting people with whom they disagree—racists, male chauvinists, advocates of capitalism. But that is just it. (Anyone remember Caesar Chavez?) They are so virulently anti-capitalist that if someone like Ayn Rand, who is very visibly and prominently on record as being pro-capitalist, says something that is obviously true, they will deny it simply because she said it and they want to show the world that they are never, never on her side.

No Choice, Only An Echo

Tibor R. Machan

Most of my reading consist of novels, books in physics, and magazines on politics and culture. In this latter category fall The New York Review of Books and The Claremont Review of Books.

No, I am not a masochist. However I do need to keep up to snuff on what the erudite folks are thinking on both the American Right and the Left. These two publications provide one with a pretty good sample, although one should dip into The New Republic, The Nation, National Review, Commentary, and some others as well to keep abreast of things—or, rather, what such folks think about things.

The reason I mention masochism above is that reading either the American Right or Left is often painful and scary. What they are completely united on is being hell bent on wanting to control other people. They differ only on what that control ought to accomplish.

With the Right we get what George Will once had as a part of the title of one of his books, namely, soul craft. With the Left we get the desperate wish for controlling people’s wealth, their productive efforts and what results of them. As Ayn Rand, the Russian born American novelist-philosopher once noted, it all depends on your metaphysics: If you think what’s crucial in the world is the operation of matter, that’s what you will want to control; if it is spirit you think makes the most difference, you will want to control it. In either case, the casualty is human individual liberty.

This is nearly completely right, judging by what the erudite folks on the American Right and Left put out. It comes out especially clearly when they review books, often by authors from the other side. One can nearly always predict that, no matter how nuanced and sophisticated a criticism is, the Right complains that there is not more regimentation of our souls, whereas the Left’s beef is that our bodies are not put into the service of the goals they favor.

It is quite amazing how little both sides trust human individuals when it comes to the issue of choosing the right course of conduct for themselves. Whatever that proper course is—and I agree that there is such a course, albeit not usually simple to figure out, especially from remote places like Washington, D.C.—what matters to the Right and the Left is that some bullies take up the job of coercing us all to do it.

Interestingly, in this regard these highly educated, often very skilled wordsmiths, aren’t all that different from the radical Islamists they both claim to dislike. For what the radical Islamists want is to force the world to march to just one drummer, theirs, never mind freedom of choice. George Will again, the conservative pundit, once made this clear when he spoke so derisively of choice! The Left is no less impressed with choice, except when it comes to the abortion debate, somewhat like the Right isn’t too worried about life (for example, loosing it in a completely bizarre war across the globe that has virtually nothing to do with freedom, as they pretend) other than when it comes to that of a human embryo.

This is all very sad. Of course, both sides want to reserve to themselves a monopoly on championing freedom. The Right doesn’t mind some economic freedom—it isn’t essential to the spiritual life, after all. And the Left doesn’t mind some freedom in, say, the arts, which is to many of them a mere epiphenomenona. They are also perfectly willing to call “freedom” what is in fact regimentation—positive freedom, that is, making some people provide others with what will enable them to do what they want and like.

What should be clear to all these highly educated, well read, sober people on both sides—all of whom have their own particular value-agendas, don’t make any mistake about that—is that adult human beings just do not get better when they are pushed around, however well-meaning are the pushers. They may comply, they may even invent a bit to make life easier under the gun, but ultimately all this regimentation impedes genuine improvement of the human condition. Freedom is the answer, the kind of freedom that recognizes and honors every adult person’s sovereignty and attempts to influence people only in the civilized way of persuasion, never coercion.

The Futility of Nonstop Relief

Tibor R. Machan

United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland was in conversation with Charlie Rose the other night, mostly discussing how little the developed countries of the world provide relief to underdeveloped countries that are hit by natural disasters or simply linger in dire poverty. The Pakistan earthquake devastated thousands of homes, leaving nearly a hundred thousand people destitute and almost as many dead because of collapsed buildings that were not earthquake proof. In Africa draughts are killing thousands.

Egeland and Rose both seemed to give the impression that the only solution is more government, tax funded aid from developed countries. Although Egeland admitted that when major natural disasters strike, private giving jumps considerably, he lamented—though not with the kind if finger wagging attitude we get from the likes of Peter Unger and Peter Singer—that once the disaster is out of mind, the private giving stops.

What made the discussion so interesting to me is what it was that these supposedly smart, well educated people never mentioned. This is that in most of these underdeveloped regions of the world the major obstacle to coping successfully with and recovering from any sort of natural or semi-natural disaster is the political-economic system in which people live. And this, too, is arguably the reason for the lack of massive support from developed nations, be that support governmental or private.

No one can accept the idea of trying to fill a bottomless hole—that people in these parts of the world will forever need to be taken care of, that they simply will never cope on their own. And this is quite rational—if someone requires emergency support, so as to be helped with getting back on his or her feet, after which a productive life will be resumed, helping makes sense. But if help simply goes to be consumed, after which more help is required, on and on and on, this is intolerable. At some point no matter how much is given, it will reach an end and, once again, thousands will perish.

But the idea that the political-legal infrastructure in these regions—where those whom Egeland kept referring to as “vulnerable people” live—has anything to do with the persistent hardship never came up during the entire discussion. Nor did either of these individuals think to mention that given the disincentives that are built into the political economies of the countries involved, there is not likely to be an end of the desperate neediness of the people. Nor are the bulk of the factors that make them vulnerable—bad housing, terrible school buildings, dysfunctional transportation, primitive medical facilities, etc., and so forth—likely to undergo serious improvement. Thus, those who might choose to help are very likely to become frustrated, seeing no end to the demands on them for charity.

This element of the situation was begging for some discussion, yet the main topic continued to be how little of their wealth those in developed countries were sending to help. The issue of how governments and the legal order in these regions prevent development was barely hinted at.

Both Rose and Egeland worried a great deal about the fact that although in absolute terms the USA sends more support than any other country, in terms of percentage of the wealth of the people it sends but an average, far less than the Scandinavians and other Europeans. Both of the discussants made much of this, appearing more bent on instilling guilt in viewers than on seeking working, long term solutions to the problem of poverty.

Why did they dance around the basic problem—namely, that in most of these undeveloped countries there so much poverty, so little productivity? Surely coordinating relief must include establishing a sound infrastructure. What I suspect is that raising the topic of political economy seriously, searchingly, is deemed to be too judgmental. If, say, the political system of Bangladesh, or Kashmir, or Ghana stymies development, this must remain unexamined because to make note of it is to criticize the regimes and many of the officials in those parts of the world. And with the currently very influential multicultural attitude—whereby there are no better or worse regimes, it is all relative—one is simply prevented from addressing the issue of the comparative merits of political economies.

It seems to me that such squeamishness renders these discussions largely unproductive. They amount to little more than hand-wringing and guilt mongering. And, frankly, sensible, prudent people will not fall for that after a while. It will seem to them, and rightly so, futile to even think about the topic after a while.

Precursor to Multiculturalism

Tibor R. Machan

Multiculturalism is the position that all cultures past and present are legitimate, valid ways to understand and cope with the world. Indeed, it is sometimes put that different cultures live in different worlds and in some circles there is speculation that this may be a very basic, even metaphysical and scientific (cosmological) fact, namely, that there is an infinite number of universes, not just one.

This last point is often put in terms that at least the logical possibility of infinite number of universes has to be admitted. Whether this means that those universes actually exist is left untreated for now. What is interesting is that the underlying rationale for the multi-universe/multi-culture idea had its origins in a philosophical movement that was spawned right here in the good old USA.

Now and then we hear that such strange ideas have come to us from Europe or the far East. Deconstruction and post-modernism are frequently said to have originated abroad but have seduced many American intellectuals and academics. But, in fact, the history is different from this.

In the late 1800s the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) made a big splash with his philosophy of pragmatism—or pragmaticism—which argues, in essence, that a belief is true if it works when one puts it into practice. Later William James (1842--1910), who is known for his important contributions to both psychology and philosophy, developed the pragmatic theory of truth. Applying it to, say, belief in God, he had maintained—putting it a bit simply—that if that belief worked our for someone, produced results in one’s life that were satisfactory, made one happy, then it counts as a true belief.

Now at first this appears odd but the pragmatists put forth these ideas once they became convinced that alternative views on how to tell if an idea is true didn’t succeed. Especially views such as those of the highly influential French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), which held that truth is a matter of deducing conclusions from undeniable, axiomatic first principles—“I think, so I exist”—could not be sustained.

Even logic was thought by some influential pragmatists to be unrelated to reality and thus didn’t serve as a starting point for knowledge. C. I. Lewis (1883-1964), another pragmatist, argued that we choose to enact logic as a device for thinking straight. It is not the world itself that requires logic from us but we impose it on the world. From this idea grew the view that there could be alternate logics and that even the law of non-contradiction—certainly its corollary, the law of the excluded middle (either A or not-A, not both)—is optional. Logic is a convention, was the claim, not a necessary tool for thinking straight.

Back in ancient Greek, when Aristotle developed the system we call logic, the view was that this system is required by reality itself. It isn’t just that people want to be logical but that reality makes being logical necessary for sound thinking. So over the centuries logic served as a basic critical device. Once a viewpoint or idea or theory was found illogical—as well as a witness’s testimony in court—it was immediately discredited.

There had always been some dissidents who thought there is too much emphasis on reason or logic, in the Western tradition. The dissidents tended to come from the humanities, not the sciences, but even in science there were some influential ones in the twentieth century—for example, Niels Bohr (1885-1962). In literature such people were more numerous and today we have Nobel Laureate in Literature, J. M. Coetzee, from South Africa (now living in Australia), author of the highly acclaimed novel Disgrace, who champions the idea that logic shouldn’t matter so much and that human reasoning doesn’t amount to much—feelings are far more significant.

But the most influential detractors from the view that logic is vital were the alternative logic advocates and those who held that logic is a mere convention, something we have accepted over centuries, a little like slowly adopting a language—we could have adopted quite another. By the latter part of the 20th century this notion spawned multiculturalism—no culture is superior to any other, no practices are worse then others, it’s all the same, however one conducts oneself, whatever regime a society has. Logic itself is seen by such people as merely what European culture bought into and it cannot serve as an arbiter of sound thinking and action. And truth, according to radical pragmatist Richard Rorty of Stanford University, is what one’s community determines. There is no objectivity at all, we all think from a point of view and no one can escape some point of view.

And you thought philosophers never bake any bread! Think again. They do but, sadly, quite often its stale and rancid.

Revisiting Predictability

Tibor R. Machan

When in the 15th century the sciences really took off and technology started to flourish, many intelligent people became convinced that understanding people and human affairs along the same lines of classical physics is just around the corner. Today that’s still the mainstream view—we will eventually figure out this complicated machine, the human organism, and then we can predict its behavior and, maybe, control it for the best.

This impulse, to apply the principles of the natural sciences to human affairs is not unreasonable since we are, after all, an aspect of the natural world. Surely what applies to the rest of it applies to us as well.

Trouble is that even the rest of it offers up a great variety of things and their principles—that’s one reason for having different scientific disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, biology, botany, zoology, psychology, economics, and all the subdivisions within these. While some think that in time all of it will be combined into a single science, such as physics, this has always been more of a hope than a rational expectation.

When it comes to people, there is plenty that can be understood along lines that understanding is attained about other things—after all, people have mass just as rocks do, breathe like dogs, digest and so on like the other living things in the world. But then other things aren’t all alike either—some swim, some fly, some sting, some scratch, and so on and so forth.

So when it comes to people, there is likely to be something unique about them, and one such thing is their self-determination—they have free will, they choose. Unique but not weird, it seems to me. The evidence is all around us and much of what interests us about people seems to imply just this, that we are choosing animals, we can think for ourselves and guide (or misguide) ourselves by how we do all kinds of routine, strange, and novel things.

One thing that encourages so many to seek for a science of human affairs which will yield predictions of the kind we find in astronomy is that when people do choose to take up tasks—make commitments, set out to do things, determine to pursue goals, etc.—the consequences of their conduct is predictable enough. Say, you go shopping for groceries, so you will be seen walking around picking stuff off shelves, checking prices, filling up the cart, etc., etc. Pretty much predictable. Only if a friend shows up, you will also stop and chat and abandon the commercial but take up the fraternal mode. Then, after a while, you will return to shopping. So a kind of “predictable you” is available for observation and study by, for example, economists. And when you think about large numbers, some pretty serious and reliable predictions can be made simply from knowing that people mostly want to live and flourish in their lives.

But instead if giving a distinctive account of this, too many social scientists will escape into the "Well, we never know quite enough to be certain of what people will do" way of thinking about us. As if the same problem faced them as does the weatherman! Yet consider, our ordinary way of thinking treats weather as an impersonal force, however difficult to predict, however chaotic at times; whereas when it comes to people, our thinking rests on the understanding that they make their own choices and can be held liable for bad ones or given credit for good ones. And with all the variety of kinds and types of human living evident in history and around the globe, this assumption seems quite warranted. (Moreover, without it, one has a hard time with criticizing others even for their faulty thinking about this very issue!)

So, for my money it makes more sense to see the social sciences as trying to understand something in the world that can make choices, that can take up tasks of its own free will, that can initiate some of its conduct. As I like to say to my economist friends, we have the following good enough approach to understanding people in their economic mode: "If one decides to go to market, one is likely to try to make a deal." And that's all the prediction we can get!

Welcoming Troubles in Washington

Tibor R. Machan

Now and then my pen dries up, as it were, and I rake my brain for something I should write. But actually the problem isn’t that. It's rather that columnists or pundits are mostly expected to chime in with complaints about public affairs and I am actually a bit satisfied just now.

I mean with things falling apart in and near the White House, I am hard put to be upset. Indeed, I find it a relief. After all, it confirms my long held view that making politics such a vital part of our lives is a very big mistake. Most of these people, after all, just aren’t that smart and these upheavals may remind them of it themselves.

I thought this when our former president, Bill Clinton, saw things falling apart around him in Washington in his second term. I didn’t even wish to learn who was right, who wrong—frankly it didn’t matter to me and I didn’t think it mattered for the country. What mattered is that so many people in the capitol were bogged down good and hard and this may well have slowed them down a bit in the most insidious thing they keep doing all of the time, namely, thinking about and embarking upon meddling in our lives without any good cause.

That is one reason I favor political gridlock—in Washington, Sacramento, or wherever it’s possible to bring it about. I am convinced that most politicians and bureaucrats are relentlessly bent on meddling. They see it as their job, even as their life calling. Yes, they believe it is a wonderful thing—it gives them a sense of achievement if they find yet another issue they can stick their fingers into.

Mind you, they aren’t all that different from everyone else except their “work” usually involves interfering with the peaceful conduct of other people. And they do not even consider this insidious. Instead they are proud of it. Like those insufferable schoolmarms when we I was young, who just had to hover and find something to complain and wag their fingers about! (And it didn’t need to be a schoolmarm, only it usually was since elementary and high schools were swarming with such ladies, at least in my days.)

The real difference is that in the private sector when people get antsy, they mostly do something productive. They become entrepreneurial. Although even there we can find many bureaucratic types whose jobs involve bothering other people and who feel satisfaction with this because they think they are being helpful, serving some good cause.

At all the universities where I have taught, I could put my fingers on this when I learned of yet another set of forms one had to fill out, or yet another committee that had been formed to consider something largely superfluous. In the private sector, however, there is often a disincentive by way of the extra cost this imposes on a firm or private individuals, so they tend to be on the lookout for what amounts only to make-work. And make-work in private industry is more readily identified as such, whereas in government it is mostly welcome—people take pride in coming up with it, mistaking it for something valuable.

I was lucky to learn about this early in my life, when I was a draftsman in the US Air Force, working at Andrews AFB near Washington, DC. Following each Christmas, we suddenly found ourselves working overtime and I could tell we had no objective reason for this. After asking around, I was told, without the slightest embarrassment, that the reason was to make up for Christmas spending. And given that this was a typical government organization, no one seemed to mind—the money was, after all, coming from taxes.
There was also that regular routine of make-work at the end of a fiscal period, just before the new budget had to be submitted. We had to make up costly projects so that nothing would be left in the budget and we could ask for more.

Again, while the temptation to do this—often with the utmost earnestness since people who like their jobs naturally like to think of more things to do in it—exists everywhere, it is greatest in government since money can be ordered up without having to earn it.

Well, see, I did find something to lament when, actually, I wanted simply to say that if I were expected to write about all the fine things in my life, I would have a lot more to say. That’s because I follow diligently the prescription of a Seventh Day Adventist bumper sticker I saw many years ago driving about in the Deep South: “Notice the good and praise it!”

Never Mind How Much Worse Things Could Get

Tibor R. Machan

Ever since F. A. Hayek wrote his deservedly famous book, The Road to Serfdom in 1944, there has been a not negligible difficulty with criticizing the welfare state. Hayek’s own famous teacher, Ludwig von Mises, articulated the same menace Hayek did early in the 20th Century as well as in a talk in 1950, now part of his book of essays, Planning for Freedom (1952). As von Mises put it,

The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments. Many people object. They stress the fact that most of the laws which aim at planning or at expropriation by means of progressive taxation have left some loopholes which offer to private enterprise a margin within which it can go on. That such loopholes still exist and that thanks to them this country is still a free country is certainly true. But this loopholes capitalism is not a lasting system. It is a respite. Powerful forces are at work to close these loopholes. From day to day the field in which private enterprise is free to operate is narrowed down. Of course, this outcome is not inevitable. The trend can be reversed as was the case with many other trends in history. ... What we need is neither anti-socialism nor anti-communism but an open positive endorsement of that system to which we owe all the wealth that distinguishes our age from the comparatively straitened conditions of ages gone by.

What could be wrong with saying this? It is largely true, in the sense that there is a greater likelihood of a country moving from a middle-of-the-road policy—which is what the welfare state is (or as contemporary Europeans often call it, The Third Way)—all the way to an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. So with the middle-of-the-road regime in place, it certainly is a shorter and simpler road to serfdom than if a country were a fully free, laissez-faire capitalist system.

Trouble is, this isn’t all or even the main thing that’s wrong with the welfare state. By fretting a bit too much about how such a state can lead to something worse, the evils of the welfare state itself tend to be overlooked or at least de-emphasized. Everyone is concerned about how bad it will be later, few people note that the welfare state is already a big enough mess, so we should stop it already, never mind how bad it can get later.

Welfare states are ones in which government is legally authorized—in the case of the USA largely because of perverse interpretations of the US Constitution by legislatures and courts—to administer selective coercion against the citizenry, in the name of innumerable worthy goals. But no big deal, it is tempting to think, that people in the various professions are subjected to relentless government regulation (a form of unjust prior restraint however you look at it) and innumerable other abuses. What matters most, it’s suggested, is how this can lead to far worse coercion.

Not true. If I slap you around a bit because I believe you don’t do what I want you to, although you haven’t raise a finger against me, this in itself is vicious enough, never mind that I could do worse by beating you with a baseball bat. Even if I contain myself all of the time and just keep on slapping you and others, it doesn’t make what I am doing justified simply because I am not taking matters farther.

Welfare states may never get worse, in fact, because too many people often tolerate some mistreatment but will not allow things to get worse. And welfare states admittedly do not use concentration camps, so if the only problem is how bad things can get because of what they may lead to, it can look like so long as the system is contained, no big problem exists. (Of course, for those in jail for victimless crimes, sometimes for 30 years on end, one would be hard put convincing them of this.) In a welfare state one usually has one’s right to freedom of expression protected and officials of the government are more restrained in how and to what degree of brutality they wield their powers. Civil liberties, such as the right to vote, to get a speedy trial, and so on get some protection, although often very unevenly. The ACLU, for example, goes to the aid of artists, political activists, educators and such but rarely lifts a finger when people in the business world are harassed, oppressed, and subjected to discriminatory treatment (such as piling on more and more regulations of the entire business community when a few bad apples are identified).

Sure, a problem with the less Draconian evils of the welfare state is partly that they could habituate people to accept coercion from governments, making the march toward a dictatorship more probable. However, that’s not the biggest problem. It is far more serious that the welfare state is a lingering political, moral, and economic malady already—it violates individual rights all over the place and people suffer from that plenty, never mind how much worse it all could get.

Pitfalls of Predictions

Tibor R. Machan

Many moons ago I listened to a lecture by an eminent economists who was predicting that with the unruly intrusiveness of the American federal and state governments, there would soon be a devastating economic downturn. The welfare state, he argued, can only last so long, after which there will definitely be a comeuppance.

That, actually, was also the teaching of one of the most famous free market economists of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises, the leader of the Austrian School of economics. But he wasn’t alone—quite a lot of others in the discipline fancied themselves to be seers, forecasters short and long range. Be they of the Austrian, Marxist or neo-classical schools, they usually hold to a certain understanding of human nature, containing with various built in tendencies or inclinations, as well as to laws of history or the economic system, so they believe they can, with sufficient data on their hands, tells us what’s about to happen both in the overall economic system and in some cases also with individual human agents.

Of course, all social scientists who contend that such predictions can be made hedge their bets. They do so by way of the undeniable fact that none of us has command over all of the necessary information that would enable one to make a certain prediction—a bit like the weatherman. The most the bulk of them claim they can offer is pretty good estimates or probabilities. To be certain, they would need to know all the relevant facts and no one is so positioned; ergo, one can always provide an excuse for a bad prediction.

Problem is that the initial assumption of such forecasting and predicting is highly dubious. People aren’t robots hard wired to behave in predictable ways within any kind of environment. Their economic decisions often vary from person to person. Indeed, even a given individual can carry on differently in completely similar circumstances—how he or she will act is more often up to the individual than to any kind of fixed factors on which the people in the social sciences can base their clairvoyance.

One consequence of this is that while the social scientists build fixed models of the micro and macro world on which they base what they expect to happen—given even a reasonably clear anticipation of the circumstances people will face—actual human beings come up with surprising decisions in the face of these circumstances. That’s probably because they vary in the degree of attention they pay to them. Perhaps, also, when after a slew of bad policies have lead an economic system to the brink of disaster, many people will finally perk up and take notice of this and change their conduct and policies. So the dire predictions won’t come true because people will often change their old ways to new ones. Moreover, the dire predictions themselves can have the result that people will alter their conduct, having sometimes learned finally what is likely to happen if they carry on as before.

All this isn’t so only when it comes to how the economy works. Back in the early 70s, Paul Ehrlich, the famous Stanford University biologist, wrote the book The Population Bomb (1971), in which he made the prediction that in five years or so the vegetation of the globe will have shrunk to intolerable levels. But it didn’t happen. (Later Ehrlich made a bet with the late Julian Simon about whether certain vital resources would disappear, a bet Simon won because the resources didn’t disappear.)

I am not sure why exactly Ehrlich’s expectations turned out to be wrong but I would bet it had at least a little bit to do with how people began to change their thinking and acting upon learning of the dire warnings. Not perhaps everything—quite possibly Ehrlich made some very bad calculations.

The same with the eminent economists who kept saying that the welfare state cannot but degenerate into a dictatorship. People are likely to carry on negligently, recklessly for a long time but then pull back and take the needed measures to forestall the disastrous results that have been so confidently predicted. Or not—for sometimes the logic of what they did in the past will simply yield consequences that they try to avoid too late in the game.

Still, I think it makes sense not to be too trusting of the social scientists' way of thinking about people, as if we were simply more complicated versions of some classical physical system that can be predicted if known well enough. People will probably keep surprising us, for better and for worse—that, in fact, is one way they are different from the rest of the stuff in the world.

Column on School Employment at Will

School Employment at Will

Tibor R. Machan

Arnold Schwarzenegger and his supporters have managed to get several
items on the November 8 California ballot, including the proposal to
extend the trial period for government primary and secondary education
teachers to five years rather than the current two before they receive
tenure. Well, actually, they do not receive ?tenure? in the sense of full
job security but after two years they can only be let go by meeting
various ?due process? requirements?e.g., showing they are incompetent or
have broken some laws.

Ordinary employment situations rarely involve tenure, even in this
restricted fashion. If you hire someone to mow your lawn, clean your home,
handle your tax returns, or flip hamburgers at your fast food restaurant,
you can simply discontinue the relationship if you want to. You need not
demonstrate good reasons for this, although you may get some resistance if
you don?t?complaints, a bad reputation as an employer, etc. Or you can
negotiate an employment agreement that spells out the conditions under
which you may be let go, even conditions under which you may leave. It all
depends on what the contract says.

The policy of tenure, to which a great many government educational
institutions?as well as quite a few private ones that need to follow suit
so as to be able to compete?involves getting substantial job security
after a probationary period. The tenure at universities and colleges
usually amounts to job security provided the entire institution is
experiencing an economic down turn. (In state universities and colleges,
of course, this is usually met with raising taxes, thus meeting the
economic pressure, although even that can come to an end eventually.) Only
if one commits a crime or grossly misbehaves will tenure provide no
protection of one?s teaching position. But it usually takes seven years to
achieve tenure.

The traditional argument for tenure, especially at state higher education
institutions, had been that it will protect professors with controversial
ideas from arbitrary treatment from the administration. At elementary and
high schools this traditional justification is virtually completely moot.
Here the reasoning tends to be that given the low pay of teachers, they
will at least receive job security and thus have a pretty good reason to
carry on properly, even excel, at their profession.

Problem is that there?s an imbalance involved in teachers receiving
tenure, even of the moderate sort that guarantees due process when and if
they are to be dismissed. Think about it for a moment?why must the school
provide due process when a teacher is let go but the teacher who wants to
leave can do so at will? If, in other words, schools are forced by law to
show cause for letting a teacher go, why isn?t a teacher required, by law,
to show cause for wanting to leave?

When I recently posed this question to some who support the existing
tenure system of California?s public elementary and high schools, the
question wasn?t even understood. Yet it is plain?if one side in the
employment relationship must show cause for discontinuing that
relationship, surely it is only fair that the other side should do so as
well. Otherwise we have a case of blatant unjust discrimination!

Of course, how the employment relationship should be structured should
actually be left to the agreement that employees and employers reach among
themselves. That is how adult men and women should comport themselves in a
free society. If, then, teachers can negotiate a tenure-like contract, as
well as being able to leave anytime they wish, so be it. If not, so be it
again.

You may think, well the bargaining situation is quite uneven. School
administrators have a lot more clout than teachers, so teachers cannot be
expected to negotiate a favorable employment agreement. But this is
completely wrong.

The institutional clout of school administrators is matched virtually
fully by the clout of school teachers?by means of their unions. These
unions enjoy even more clout than in justice they should have, given that
governments have rules that mandate from employers the very conditions
that should be left up to the bargaining process to settle. For example,
many unions are authorized, in law, to bargain for employees who are
non-members. Non-members of many unions, especially public service unions,
are required to pay dues. (This varies some from state to state!)

There is also the injustice that governments have largely eliminated the
choice educational customers have, the choice that customers of
department, grocery, or shoe stores take for granted. They are, instead,
virtual monopolies. So their unions have even more clout than those in the
private sector where if a firm is struck, customers can shop at another
firm. (Indeed, the whole notion of public service unionization is an
anomaly in a free society.)

Alas, in our day certain people have come to take their special, unjust
privileges for granted, so much so that even to bring up the issue of this
injustice strikes them as bizarre. But that is no excuse for intelligent
citizens to let the matter pass.

Column on Helping People in Dire Straits

Kids aren?t A Resource

Tibor R. Machan

At times I watch BBC World News because it covers more international
issues than even CNN. So the other night I was watching and there was a
report on the AIDS epidemic in Africa. The report gave some harrowing
information as well as quotations from people trying to raise funds to
combat AIDS.

At one point the announcer read a quote from one AIDS worker to the
effect that it is especially vital that the children be saved. The reason,
I heard her quoting the AIDS worker, is that ?children are the future of
Africa.?

I have heard similar remarks being made when people discuss helping
children in various ways, educational, medical, economic, etc. Children
seem to be of concern because without them, the future of some country or
region of the world, or some important project is in jeopardy.

I have children and over their lifetime I have had ample opportunity to
provide for them in many different ways. But I must admit that my reason
was never, ever that they are needed for the future of America, the world,
or the Western Hemisphere or, indeed, my own future. My idea has always
been that as children of mine, I have signed on freely to give them
support so they can flourish in their lives a bit more and better than
they would without my support. In short, I was concerned with them, not
with what they might be good for.

The kind of thinking that lies behind wanting to give aid and support to
children because they are needed for the future of a country or science or
the arts seems to me to get it completely backwards. That?s because human
beings, as some moral philosophers have made abundantly clear, are ends in
themselves. That means their lives are for them, not some resource for
some other purpose.

Human beings, indeed, should never be thought of as instruments for the
advancement of something else, not unless that something else is chosen by
them as their own goal. People are important not because they make
contributions to something apart from them?sciences, the arts, politics,
business, the environment or whatever. They are important in and of
themselves. They matter as the individual persons they are.

Of course people make contributions to many projects throughout their
lives and whoever values those projects will welcome and encourage this.
But what makes those people worth supporting and helping when they are in
special need is not that they make such contributions. It is that they are
human individuals, like us, with lives and goals of their own.

If one generously supports the effort to combat AIDS in Africa or
anywhere else, one has no justification for demanding that some special
goal be advanced by those being helped. Generosity, charity, or
philanthropy are not the same thing as business whereby one expects to
gain returns from one?s investments. And even in business the gains depend
upon what those with whom we deal choose to exchange for what we choose to
exchange. It must all be voluntary otherwise it is bad business. But in
generous, charitable or philanthropic acts the point isn?t to derive
benefits for oneself or for something one supports, say, a cause or a
project. Such acts have to do with benefiting the recipients. And they
need not come up with something in return. Otherwise it is not generosity
at all that?s involved.

To think that the reason to help those afflicted with AIDS or any other
malady is to further some goal for which they can be useful is to
dehumanize these individuals, think of them as tools or instruments for
something more important than they are. Not that there is anything wrong
with advancing certain causes by supporting those who can help in this
task. But that?s not the point of helping people, not when they are in
dire straits, not when they are experiencing some emergency they aren?t
able to handle on their own.

Children with AIDS need help as the individuals who they are, not as
means to some other ends. That is why one ought to give emergency support
to them, not to advance some geopolitical or cultural objective. Thinking
of them as means to various goals is to fail to fully appreciate their
humanity. People, to put it bluntly, aren?t our or anyone else?s resources
but their own.

Column on Prestige versus Excellence

Prestige versus Excellence

Tibor R. Machan

Not unlike most of us, I tend to take it for granted that the prestigious
institutions in our world are also those with the best people in them, be
this in the arts, sciences, business, education, think tanks, whatever.
For example, just to focus on my own specialty, Harvard University,
Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge and the rest?surely those who
teach and do research and scholarship there are the best in their fields.
That?s where the Noble Prizes go; that?s where all the political stars get
their training; that?s where all the endowment money goes, and so forth.
So who could doubt that this is also where excellence will be found?

Over the years, as I have done my tenure at various academic institutions
and scholarly think tanks, I have not really questioned the above
assumption. I figured I am small potatoes compared to those giants?or if
not, I was just not lucky enough, or held the wrong ideas on everything,
so I didn?t manage to gain entrance there. (In any case, I don?t much fret
my own positioning so long as I got to do what I wanted, write the books,
articles, and papers I want, teach reasonably good students and lecture to
interested audiences.)

Over the last several years, however, as I have been invited to give
talks to various organizations?think tanks, universities, colleges and so
forth?I have noticed that some of what goes on at these is much better
than what comes out of those very prestigious places. The papers are often
clearer and make more significant points than those written by the stars;
the talks are more enthusiastic, better delivered and the questions from
the audience tend to be really super. The same happens with journals and
other publications?those from highly reputed places do not compare very
favorably with those with lesser reputations.

So, at one point it occurred to me that perhaps I?ve been looking at this
all wrong. I simply took it for granted that whatever the prestige, it
must be the direct result of excellence but now I think there is reason to
doubt this.

Consider that the overall quality of our culture is not all that
outstanding. To start with, the voting population appears to be made up of
a great many chumps?people who arrive at their political convictions with
little serious thought, elect politicians to office who are really quite
pathetic and totally inept, stand for utterly confusing and out and out
vile public policies, and, on the whole, tend to be a very unprincipled,
morally dubious lot. There are scandals left and right in places where
what is wanted is responsible, creative conduct. World affairs are not in
good shape, so the diplomats and bureaucrats who handle it all cannot be
said to be doing a commendable job. The economy is teeter tottering all
the time, with little sustained confidence from those who tend to
understand such matters.

There is the world of the arts, too, where very little truly magnificent
work is in the offing at the prominent museums and concert halls. Not that
everything is bad?indeed, there is good stuff but not, for example, on the
best seller lists, interestingly enough, nor among the works selected for
review in the prestigious publications. Museums aren?t exactly filled with
riveting works, either, and the serious music coming our way tends to be
more very bizarre than very good. Poetry, the novel, you name it?there?s
little to be awed by in our highfalutin forums.

Now if the culture in which we live is generally in rather lamentable,
faltering shape, maybe these prestigious institutions are not really where
excellence is going to be located. Maybe, just maybe, some of the best
work is done in universities, think tanks, and other institutions that are
not on the star lists and the impacts of which aren?t allowed to be very
significant. (Maybe even the best acting isn?t done by the most renown
stars in Hollywood and Broadway but, instead, by unheralded ones at out of
the way theaters and studios.)

To check all this out one would need to do a very rigorous, elaborate and
expensive study, but, of course, only the prestigious institutions can
afford to do that. So, for the time being, I merely raise the possibility:
things may in fact be quite topsy-turvy in our world and what is held in
awe is really not what deserves it most. So I urge you to check this out
in your own world, where you know things best, and see if there is
something to what has occurred to me.