Very Soft on Islamic Terrorism

Tibor R. Machan

The New York Times magazine has a feature called “QUESTIONS FOR,” and the other day it was “the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens,” now named Yusuf Islam (as of his conversion to Islam), who was being questioned by Deborah Solomon. Solomon is your typical left of center cultural and political egalitarian, favoring multiculturalism in most cases, but even she seemed to be a bit annoyed with Mr. Islam’s answers when she pressed him on Islamic terrorism.

Noting that “government officials in various countries have tried to link [Mr. Islam] to extremist groups, including Hamas,” Solomon asked him “What do you think of Hamas?” Wouldn’t you know it, Mr. Islam dodged the issue by asserting, “That’s an extremely loaded question.” Was it?

I dispute that and it seems even Ms. Solomon did because her comeback was, “Can you try to answer it?” At that point Mr. Islam said, “I have never supported a terrorist group or any group that did other than charity and good to humankind.” That, of course, was not an answer to Ms. Solomon’s question, which was, “What do you think of Hamas?” And, moreover, maybe Mr. Islam believes Hamas is a charity group and/or it does “good to humankind” so it should get a pass even if it perpetrates terrorism. We will never know because he dodged the question.

In a follow up exchange Solomon pressed even more: “So would you say you have contempt for a terrorist group like Hamas?” And Mr. Islam proceeded to evade the issue when he replied, “I wouldn’t put those words in my mouth. I wouldn’t say anything on that issue. I’m here to talk about peace. I’m a man who does want peace for this world, and I don’t think you will achieve that by putting people into corners and asking them very, very difficult questions about contentious issues.”

When this is our example of a moderate Muslim—and Mr. Islam tells us that if he isn’t “an example of that,” who else would be—then the chance of reaching some accord with Islam is very small indeed. Imagine a Roman Catholic who tried to whitewash the child molestation that has been perpetrated by many priests recently or who said he wouldn’t say anything on the issue of the Holy Inquisition, claiming that it is a very contentious issue. What is contentious about it? Where is the debate about its merits versus demerits? It’s pretty much a slam dunk. That’s the same with the Nazi’s Holocaust, the Communists’ gulags, or South African Apartheid. Anyone who considers these open to alternative contentions—as if the jury were still out about whether they were examples of the worst of human conduct imaginable—simply isn’t worth listening to, maybe even featuring in a prime spot in The New York Times Magazine.

Hamas is a terrorist group. No reasonable doubt about that. If Mr. Islam cannot bring himself to acknowledge and condemn this, his values are unquestionably perverse and if he is our prime example of a moderate Muslim living in the West, well we need to be very much more vigilant about the dangers of Islamic influences here than most people seem to realize.

The book I have been studying recently, the extremely well researched Islamic Imperialism by Efrim Karsh (Yale, 2006), makes no bones about identifying Islam itself, as interpreted by the “prophet” Mohammed, as an aggressive movement, bent on conquest and the coercive conversion of non-believers wherever these are possible to achieve. The fact that for many years we haven’t seen much of this side of Islam in the West only suggests that the opportunity to conquer and covert was missing. With the rise of oil-based riches and with some of the mistakes made by the West regarding Middle Eastern affairs, the situation has changed. The Islamic world has recovered its core aggressive character, with some Muslims going so far as to perpetrate and others to silently stand by relentless terrorism wherever they see a chance to do so.

I am no supporter of the war in Iraq and believe that, all things considered, it is probably not the place where an effective response to Islamic terrorism could be undertaken. Indeed, it was probably a highly counterproductive strategy to invade Iraq since it gave some tiny measure of legitimacy to Middle Eastern, mostly Islamic, anger against the USA, although of course that could not have been behind 9/11, which occurred way before the US invaded Iraq (as distinct from assisting Kuwait in the early 90s).

The bottom line, as I see it, is that a great many Muslims are either out and out bent on conquering the rest of the world or complacent about their extremist and currently dominant fellows who are bent on doing just that. It may then be wise and prudent for us all in the West to make every effort to resist an invasion on the part of such aggressive and complacent Muslims.

Maybe that is the lesson that comes out of Ms. Solomon’s disturbing interview of Mr. Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens.

So Bush Takes Responsibility

by Tibor R. Machan

In his most recent effort to make some sense of America's involvement in the messy war in Iraq, President George W. Bush asserted that "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me." So, what about it?

Ordinarily when someone makes a mistake and accepts responsibility for it, what follows is a sincere effort to make amends, to rectify what was done badly, to repair the damage, to compensate those who were harmed by the mistakes made, etc. Just think of your or my mistake of, say, driving our cars into someone else's. Even if this were really just a mistake—not necessarily negligence and certainly not intentional—we would be required to right the wrong we did. This is why we have insurance, although most of them come with a deductible and so the damage would have to be paid for by us. Or the rates would rise.

If we got into more severe jams, taking responsibility for them would amount to even more serious measures.~ Fines, even jail time, often accompany such assignments of responsibility—just think of what is likely to happen to the Enron executives convicted recently.

Is there anything along these lines involved in President Bush's claim that "the responsibility rests with me?" Or do these words have no concrete implications when used by our president? Is he going to resign? Is he going to pay damages to the families whose relatives perished in this insane war?

Maybe what the president's version of accepting responsibility teaches us is that political rhetoric is thoroughly corrupt. Politicians like Mr. Bush do not mean what they say, but rather use words and sentences to pretend to us that they, like the rest of us, are aware of the requirements of morality. But it is just a ruse—it is all pretense, nothing real.

That, in turn, has some vital implications for all of us citizens of the country where these politicians perpetrate their subterfuge: We need to learn not to trust them.

It is not just Mr. Bush, of course, who engages in this type of empty talk. All the Democrats who claim that they are helping out the working people in American by raising the federally mandated minimum wage are in the same boat. They are really not helping anyone at all. When wages are raised artificially, by government edict, the result includes rises in prices as well as loss of jobs for those whose labor isn't worth the mandated price. All of this is bad for workers, the opposite of what promoters of the minimum wage raise claim. But they make the claim because it sounds good, not because it is true. So, once again, trust must suffer and citizens must learn this. If they paid attention, they would. Unfortunately, most people are busy with their lives and haven't the time and skill to double-check all of what the politicians and their cheerleaders in various forums of discussion claim.

Consider, also, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's claims that spending huge sums on health insurance for everyone in California is a great idea, that it will improve health care for the citizenry and that it can be paid for without raising taxes. All of this is a ruse, presented not because it is true but because it sounds good. Something for nothing is always a nice fantasy but a fantasy, nonetheless.

In a corrupt political system, one that has departed systematically from the path of limited government—one dedicated to the single just cause governments may pursue, namely, the securing of our rights—politicians routinely engage in prevarication. They must mislead instead of communicate because what they are doing is fraudulent. And if we listen closely to what they say and watch what they do, this becomes evident enough.

President Bush said the responsibility for the mistakes in connection with the war in Iraq rests with him but he will do nothing that would be required if he really meant what he said. If a friend or colleague did this, he or she would earn contempt. It is time these politicians, too, earn the very same from us, namely, contempt.

What Makes Arnold Tick

Tibor R. Machan

Several years ago Arnold Schwarzenegger seemed to have embraced the libertarian thinking of the late Milton Friedman. He even contributed some work to Friedman’s famous TV program, Free To Choose, although I cannot recall exactly what that amounted to—an introduction to the DVD version or something.

I never had much hope for Arnie even back then because he never came right out and gave any clear statement of his political thinking. Moreover, although I am weary of reading people from afar, there were signs afoot suggesting that what Arnold Schwarzenegger is most interested in is being liked! Take, for example, the name he gave his famous restaurant in Santa Monica, “Schatzi.” In German it means “little treasure” and is used mainly as a term of endearment toward someone one likes very much—“Mein Schatzi” or “My little treasure.”

When someone is a political powerhouse but there is no real clue to what principles guide his or her conduct, it is difficult to tell what policies he or she is likely to support and oppose. That is when one is tempted to look to other factors to understand and explain the person, and this seems to be called for in the case of the current California governor. No one has a clue as to what he believes, what general ideas he adheres to, what his overall vision is. So then perhaps gaining a clue from his favorite German term is fair game.

But there is more. Consider that his massive spending plan, including the out and out socialist idea of universal health insurance to be paid for by the government, does not call for any rise in taxes. Instead he wants to pay for it by way of floating bonds, which is to say transferring the cost to members of future generations. What is noteworthy about this is that those members do not vote, they aren’t even alive yet, so they aren’t going to be angry at the gov much. And the current citizens of California will be able to continue the status of recipients of apparently free goods, delivered to them by their little treasure. He will, it seems, continue to be liked since the burden of his ill founded ideas will fall on people he will not have to face.

There used to be a famous slogan about taxation—there should be none without representation. Not quite what I would defend but better than how taxes were dealt with in the feudal past—more democratic, which is some progress. But now, as logic would suggest, politicians have become so habituated to promising and trying to deliver "free" goods they need not account for that they are willing to abandon the idea completely. Instead, "Let’s just charge it, so the voters will not have to experience the cost of their benefits."

I, as did the governor, came to America as a refugee, only not from Austria but communist Hungary where health care was provided to all—in dreadful shape, of course, as anything that costs nothing much must be. It was also peddled with the sentimentalist notion that everyone is owed it, which is a crock. Many people don’t want health insurance—I personally know quite a few such people. They’d rather save up for emergencies and do other things with money left over. And some simply haven’t managed to come to afford health insurance, just as they haven’t many other things they want and even need. None of this justifies having the likes of Arnold spread the cost on people who did make the needed effort to afford health insurance. And the idea that some are coerced to pay for the health care of others is criminal!

This dream of universal health insurance is no different from a dream of, say, universal fine dining or splendid vacationing or exquisite leather shoes. Health care workers need to be paid and the money doesn’t grow on trees, so if those who receive the benefits will not pay, someone else must either voluntarily help out or be made to do so. The last is exactly as the communist viewed the situation.

Maybe we ought to get a governor who really opposes tyranny, no matter what the excuse.

Are Workers Commodities?

Tibor R. Machan

In The Washington Monthly magazine, pundit Kevin Drum states—in response to George Will’s point that “The minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities’ prices”—that “This, in a nutshell, is the core problem with conservative economics: it views workers as commodities. Naturally it follows from this that we should be free to treat workers like commodities, rather than as human beings.”

For starters, what George Will was actually writing about is labor, not workers. Labor is a commodity, something that may be sold by free men and women on terms they can reach with prospective buyers. And it is workers or their representatives who treat their labor as a commodity—in the form of a service—which they want to trade for wages or salaries. Indeed, all professionals do this—doctors, teachers, athletes, scientists, artists and so forth. In order to make a decent living all of these folks attempt to sell their labor and skill so they can then go out and also buy goods and services—e. g., from dentists, teachers, pundits, dance instructors, attorneys, and the rest.

The marvel of the free market place is just this, namely, that we may seek out the best possible deals for what we have to offer, goods or services. The alternative would be akin to what the Soviets did, namely, have government decide who will do what work and for whom, with no consultation of the workers or anyone else, for that matter, all in the name of abolishing alienation! Such collective decisions are what really amount to the demeaning of workers, treating them as objects instead of men and women with a will of their own.

Free market trade in labor does not for a moment imply that the people who sell or rent their labor—skill, time, etc.—are commodities. No one is buying people in the market place. It is people’s skills and time that are being traded. And the way this is made utterly clear is that the buying has to occur on terms set by the people doing the selling, not on terms set unilaterally by those obtaining the service.

The ruse Mr. Drum is trying to perpetrate is to equate the free market place with slave auction but it will not wash. At a slave auction it is indeed a human being who is being sold by another human being. That is of course completely unjust—one’s life is one’s own, so other people may not—must not—sell it. Indeed, one cannot even sell one’s own life, only one’s skill and time—labor or service.

It is true that sometimes when people want to sell their labor they find it difficult to do so. There may not be any wish for what they have to offer—American Idol demonstrates this in spades! Most of us, also, usually would like higher wages or greater salaries paid for our services than what people in the market place are willing to offer, so we may be displeased with the deals available to us. Yet, many of us carry on with less than most desirable deals because without them we would not be well off at all—we wouldn’t be able to turn around and buy the services from those who offer them to us. And when we want to dramatize our dissatisfaction with the deals that we are able to make, we tend to engage in hyperbole and talk of not being treated like human beings but as commodities (e. g., a la Karl Marx). All the effort we put into developing our skills, making available our time does not appear to be well enough compensated and we are upset about this and besmirch the best economic system available to us all.

Fact is, however, no one has the authority unilaterally to set the terms of a deal—we must discover some mutually satisfactory terms. And while such terms may be satisfactory, they may also be disappointing, given our hopes and even expectations. But to insist that our terms rule the deal is itself unjust—it leaves those with whom we are attempting to strike deals out of the picture. And that really would mean treating them as less than human.

So the folks who belly ache about how people are being treated as commodities got it wrong. And, furthermore, they are the ones who are proposing to ignore the humanity—the basic human rights—of all those whose terms they would rather ignore.

Revisiting Libertarian Basics

by Tibor R. Machan

Libertarianism is the political position according to which every adult human individual is sovereign, self-governing, not a subject of government or king or society or even God unless he or she has freely chosen such a status.  The idea arose slowly in human history and was first known as classical liberalism, with such associated ideas as individualism, capitalism, limited government, individual rights to life, liberty and property, etc.  The American founders sketched an early but very influential version in the Declaration of Independence. Libertarianism is the contemporary, purified version of their political stance.

Why would one think that this idea is sound, that government should have minimal powers mostly to "secure" our rights and not to do various other tasks in society? Because adult human beings are responsible to live their lives morally and for this they must be free, un-coerced. In societies, however, other people could pose as adversaries, obstacles to this task, as well as companions, associates, even friends.  To reduce the risk of criminal interference in our lives, government administers the legal system guided by a basic constitution of rights—like the Bill of Rights—that spells out its limited powers. It is a bit like referees making sure competitive games are played by the rules while staying out of the game themselves.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of this position is that no one may be coercively forced to serve other people, even the most needy. Only voluntary associations are proper, none that involve any subjugation of some people by others, even by the majority, let alone some monarch (king, tsar, etc.) or dictator. No one has a right to other people's services no matter how much such services are needed—that would amount to involuntary servitude. People do not belong to others, even in dire circumstances, unless they have freely joined them in families, fraternities, corporations, partnerships, teams, and other associations.

Another very controversial aspect of libertarianism is the right to private property. Instead of wealth or resources being owned by the government or "the people" collectively, it is individuals who come to own and allocate it in societies. Wealth comes about by way of some luck and much effort. A beautiful woman may be wealthy because others enjoy her beauty and pay her to be in movies or on covers of magazines, but nonetheless the resulting wealth belongs to her, not others. Or someone could invent something people really want or sell the invention to an enterprising third party who will bring it to market and earn much wealth from it.  In all such cases it is those who freely embark on the enterprise, not the government, not their neighbors, not "society," that owns the wealth that arises.

The administrators of the law are elected or selected to be impartial protectors of individual rights, as well as, when need be, adjudicators of disputes; and sometimes to work to develop the basic legal system to meet the challenges of new circumstances. But they are not dictators of what goals people in societies must pursue. In a libertarian society goals are set by individuals and their voluntary associations, not by government—again akin to how in sports referees don't set the aims of the game but make sure those playing do not violate those rules.

Because human individuals are basically creative, innovative, cooperative agents—they have these basic capacities they must exercise to live flourishing lives—the basic laws must focus on protecting their rights domestically and from abroad.  Apart from this, they are free to go about their innumerable highly varied tasks so long as these are pursued peacefully. This, of course, creates the risk that they will not always do the right thing, but empowering government to dictate their aims creates far greater risks, since, as the famous classical liberal Lord Acton noted, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Libertarianism presents what its champions argue are the basics of the optimal human political order and as with all best alternatives, its chances are small.  Yet, as with other best alternatives—say, in their professions, marriages, etc.—it is the responsibility of human beings to make a sustained effort to realize it.

A Special New York Times Editorial

Tibor R. Machan

The following is a New York Times editorial that will never be written by the editors there:

“We here at The New York Times want to announce a new policy. This is that we will no longer criticize anyone, nor praise anyone. We will, in other words, hold no one responsible for his or her conduct.
“We institute this policy in light of the columns published recently in our pages arguing that human beings have no free will, that they cannot choose their own conduct. If this is so, as we believe it is—we haven’t published anyone arguing the opposite thesis, as you may have noticed—there can be no choice about what people do. Neither Saddam Hussein, nor George W. Bush, nor Nancy Pelosi nor indeed anyone at all has anything to do with his or her conduct or, as social scientists prefer to call it, behavior.

“It all just happens because it must. As one of the experts made clear whom we mentioned in the discussion we published, namely Mark Hallett—a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke—'Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.' As he added, 'The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it.' Which is to say, to be up front about it, free will does not exist at all—it’s an illusion, according Mr. Hallett.

“Accordingly, over the entire history of this newspaper the editors have quite mistakenly blamed many of America’s and indeed the world’s political figures for wrongs they thought have been committed, some of them rather grave ones, such as Hitler’s and Stalin’s—although we have been easier on the second than on the first and we have continued this bias with how we have singled out General Pinochet for criticism but have given other dictators, mostly on the Left, a virtual pass—others less severe, as when we criticized politicians or our own adversaries. And the praise we have heaped upon those we liked was also pointless—they just did as they had to. In every case of blaming or praising, we have been misguided. Of course, we could not be blamed for this either—we just did what we had to do. Everything is exactly as it must be—the world is but a daisy-chain of hard-wired, deterministic forces driving everything relentlessly to proceed as it will. All of our own reporting and analysis throughout the history of the newspaper has come about as a result of impersonal forces, so we cannot be held responsible for any errors that have found themselves into our pages. Nor for the so called achievements for which we have received prizes!

“The very idea of independent journalistic judgment must henceforth be rejected since journalists who have no free minds cannot be held responsible for what they produce, any more than scientists can be required to be objective rather than biased. Nor, of course, are racists ever to be blamed for their prejudices—they cannot help themselves either. Come to think of it, all those who consider what we believe wrong are also blameless—they, too, just think what the impersonal forces of nature force them to think.

“In short, it is really, as Doris Day used to sing, just 'Que sera, sera,' after all. As your columnist said professor Benjamin Libet reported back in the 1970s—although, again, he couldn’t help himself when he did this—when we act, we do so independently of our own minds, so what we do is all just happening to us. We actually do nothing.

“So, again come to think of it, we cannot really say what we will do in the future as we write our editorials—it’ll all just happen, as will everything else in the universe.

“Sad part of it is that even as we appear to write these lines, we aren’t doing it. It is all just unfolding as the impersonal forces of nature and we are but puppets in it all. Still, in so far as we might by some chance have any hand in things, we would like to make clear that in virtue of our conviction that human beings have no free will, we are going to try very hard to abstain from holding anyone responsible for anything, including ourselves.”

Another Crazy FDR “Right”

Tibor R. Machan

Over the last couple of years I have explored FDR’s Second Bill of Rights because recently some heavy hitters in politics and legal theory (e.g., Cass Sunstein) have made a point of championing these ultimately phony rights. With the Democrats back in power in Washington, it is not unreasonable to suppose that securing and expanding FDR’s list of rights—as distinct from those laid out by the American founders in the Declaration of Independence—will once again dominate the federal government’s agenda. Not that Republicans put up much of a fight against the Democrats but the Republicans' version of statism focuses less on wealth redistribution and more on soul craft.

FDR’s list included some lulus, I must say, but among them what’s worth discussion in our day are the so-called economic rights. Take, for example, “The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.” Notice immediately that to secure any such alleged right what would be required is for those who supposedly have them to gain the willing or unwilling services of other people.

Of course, virtually anyone who is getting old could have made the effort to provide for his or her “protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.” But that has nothing to do with rights. Rights are what others must respect and what governments are instituted to secure for us. So it is clear that what FDR’s list involves is involuntary servitude by others who are to provide for us, along with coercion of those not ready to be prudent as the government insists we must be.

FDR wasn’t urging people to make sure they take good care of themselves in their old age, far from it. That would have been an exercise is the sort of leadership that would be just right for Americans, leadership that would have been consistent with the individualism the American founders tried to promote with their list of genuine, bona fide individual rights.

The idea behind those rights is that in human communities what’s most important to gain from other people is their abstention from intrusive conduct, from aggression—assault, murder, kidnapping, robbery, trespass, and other more complicated sorts of invasion. Once the peaceful conditions obtain because no one violates our rights to our lives, liberties, and property, we can go about our various tasks, for better or for worse. We can form families, fraternities, communities, churches, corporations, and teams and by means of these voluntary associations live more or less flourishing lives. The government is merely there to make sure that no one does violence to another, not to take over the tasks that we need to perform.

But tyrannies have always pretended to be there so as to help us out—"We are from the government and we are here to help!" Only then they turn around and use their power to promote goals of their own. Because it is evident to most that their so called help causes more harm than good, those championing such interventionist governments insist they need more resources to get the job of helping us done. And this produces a spiraling of greater and greater power, more and more expansive government involvement. The resulting mess is incalculable but the official remedy is always, "We need more resources and more power."

The sorts of rights FDR and his followers promote are instruments of more or less Draconian tyranny. Because they are peddled as well intentioned efforts to do us good, resistance to them is difficult to articulate without seeming to be mean. But resistance to them is nonetheless imperative—it is a large measure of the vigilance that’s the price of liberty.

When you look at it this way, the prospects for a truly free society appear to be utterly hopeless. (That is just what follows from the famous public choice theory some economists have developed, showing that politicians and bureaucrats simply will not relinquish their power!) But against this pessimism one needs to keep in mind that the very idea that your life is yours, not the king’s or the tsar’s or the collective’s, is revolutionary. And revolutionary ideas, however sound and beneficial, are difficult to spread rapidly.

Assumptions of New Year's Resolutions

by Tibor R. Machan

So, often people think they are free of philosophical assumptions. Many think they are just practical people and look with some disparagement at the heavy thinkers, as if they were useless eggheads. Yet, all of us go around with various assumptions about the world which could use some exploration, analysis, and verification.

Take this business of making New Year's resolutions. It is at least widely held that we could do this, no problem. Of course, some of us think we need no change in our lives and some are too committed to our bad habits and it would be too much trouble to fight them. But most of us think we could, if we wanted to.

Now, behind this conviction lies one of the most controversial ideas in human affairs. This is that people are free to act as they will, that their will is free and not compelled by impersonal forces. In the modern era, especially, although by no means only then, it has been a widely promulgated notion that our actions are fully determined by such forces, some hard-wired in us, some surrounding us in our environments. The idea that we are fully determined to act as we do, to be as we are, is widely championed when people talk of alcoholism, drug or sexual addiction, inherited habits of thought and action, and similar matters that plague us. Genetics is studied often with the explicit goal of finding the genes that make us do this or that, have this or that trait, even produce this or that institutional setup in human affairs. Of course, genes are thought to be responsible for a great many maladies as well as advantageous attributes in people.

Now it is obvious, I think, that if we are fully determined to be and act as we do, talk of making New Year's resolutions, of changing some habit, of reforming ourselves some way is pointless. It's no more than a fairy tale, like ducks composing music or mice reciting poetry. Sure, it can occur to us, but it's all fantasy.

Some determinists have even advanced theories about why we entertain such fairy tales. Why do so many of us believe we have free will? Why are we clinging to such an irrational, unjustified notion—an illusion, actually? And they have produced theories to the effect that such thoughts have certain evolutionary functions, although it is a mystery, then, is it not, why we do not all share them? Just like those atheists who claim that belief in God must have some biological or psychological explanation, determinists think the same about the widespread view that human beings are free to direct their lives as they choose, that they are, in fact, a major cause of what they do.

Those not involved in the age-old debate about these matters, however, tend to assume that people are free to act as they will, that they are not compelled, and that they have a will of their own. Yes, some might consider it a bit strange—after all, most other things in the world happen because something else made them happen, so how is it that we, human beings, aren't simply subject to being pushed and shoved about? But despite these occasional puzzles, most of us are confident enough that individual, moral responsibility is part and parcel of the human condition.

It is not enough, however, to simply assume such a thing. There are too many formidable challenges to the idea—indeed, there have always been, since back when the ancient Greek atomists advocated determinism—and they can put a serious dent in one's confidence in self-determination. Parents, for example, often find attractive the idea that their children suffer from learning disabilities and aren't just lazy or inattentive. Others are told that their upbringing or cultural background has produced in them various feelings and propensities to act one way or another. Those accused of crimes are often defended by their attorneys on the grounds that they couldn't help themselves, have some mental dysfunction, etc., etc.

So I would suggest that even if it appears to be a daunting project, most of us need to consider the issue: are we free or not? Is the assumption that we can just up and resolve to do this or that, change a habit or acquire one, well supported?

It is a good idea, all around, to be grounded in truth rather than falsehood.

Anti-Individualism, Conservative Style

Tibor R. Machan

Just to keep matters in balance, let me point out that although it is mostly the Left that hates individualism—remember, socialism means that we, humanity, are all just one organism—the Right’s hostility toward it is no less virulent. Just recall that both Hitler and Stalin hated individualism, in any of its varieties. American individualism, one that stresses the independent judgment of human beings—not their alleged and, not surprisingly, ridiculous, fictional independent or self-sufficient existence—does not suit either the Left or the Right, including some fairly powerful voices among American conservatives. Just consider the blurb peddling one currently rising conservative’s recent book, Peter Augustine Lawler’s Stuck With Virtue, The American Individual and Our Biotechnological Future. “These insightful, provocative essays critique what the author sees as America’s ever-increasing individualistic habits and attitudes, centered on a view of the individual as self-sufficient and unencumbered.” As if that is what American individualism were about.

In fact, the caricature of individualism depicted in the above passage comes from just one, somewhat idiosyncratic, version of individualism that has an admittedly noticeable presence in the discipline of economics, both its neo-classical and Austrian varieties. But here this idea of the human individual functions as nothing more than a theoretical model that, as the late Milton Friedman made eminently clear, is self-consciously unrealistic. It is a bit like those artist depictions of a building about to be constructed in your neighborhood—nothing like what the building will actually be like, only an almost farcical version of it.

For Lawler and others on the Right to claim that this is the individualism that John Locke and the American founders left for us as our social-philosophical legacy is shameful. There are those on the Left, such as the communitarians—with their leaders such as Charles Taylor, Amitai Etzioni, and Thomas Spragens—who have hurled at us these distortions of American individualism and from them this is somewhat understandable. After all, the Left is philosophically committed to collectivism, the direct opposite of individualism. Here is one of their philosophical heroes, the French “father of sociology,” Auguste Comte about that topic: "Everything we have belongs then to Humanity…Positivism [the doctrine Comte developed] never admits anything but duties, of all to all. For its social point of view cannot tolerate the notion of right, constantly based on individualism. We are born loaded with obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries....”

In one premier conservative journal, ISI’s The Intercollegiate Review—essay after essay can be read attacking American individualism with the distorted depiction I reproduced above. Why would conservatives, who are supposed to be conserving, at least in America, the ideas and ideals of the American founders, make such a big deal of the alleged flaws in individualism?

It is the one-size-fits-all mentality, that’s what lies behind it. Individualism is notoriously eclectic in the sort of human lives it regards as perfectly legitimate, acceptable, capable of being lived properly, virtuously. But what do so many conservatives want? To get a clear view of this one need but read the non-fiction works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who would send us all back to live on the farms; or John Lukacs, who has become an environmentalist and is urging us all “to protect the landscape (and the cityscape) where [we] live.” A younger version of this is a former Reason magazine editor, Bill Kauffman, joining the reactionary chorus with his book, Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. Each of these advocates embraces just one of thousands of ways of living a good human life, favoring it above all the rest but for no discernible, rational reason one can identify. Indeed, judging by the approach these writers take against the rationalism of the Enlightenment—what with its insidious championing of a society that makes scientific and technological progress (including Darwin) possible—arguing for their model of the perfect human being is just not cool. Traditionalism, and of a highly selective kind, is how they go about supporting their one-size-fits-all conception of how all of us ought to live our lives.

I have nothing against those who prefer the farm life, or the life in the woods, or even deep in the halls of ivy. Let a million and more flowers bloom. That's individualism, not the silliness its enemies paint it.

The “War” on Christmas

Tibor R. Machan

Some polemics are useful. They help emphasize certain points. I use them myself in my writing, as when I call government regulations “petty tyrannies.” Maybe that is to overstate my point but on the other hand it’s not at all far from the truth—when government imposes burdens on people who have not been convicted of any crime, that is a kind of tyranny.

A local church, however, has gone a bit far when it titled an upcoming sermon “The War on Christmas.” Nothing original in it, of course, given how a great many pundits have been claiming that such a war is being waged, as part of America’s “culture wars,” another bit of polemic that’s over the top. Why?

Well, I don’t know about my readers, but I have actually experienced war first hand, back when I was a kid in Central Europe. I remember very well when I was only about 6, Budapest was under siege and it didn’t consist of people talking in provocative ways as in the "war" on Christmas. No, the war involved heavy bombing, thousands of deaths and injured, near complete destruction of a once beautiful European city, and all the other horrible real ingredients of a war. The so called war on Christmas involves nothing remotely close to this. Instead it is an attempt, at its worst, to undermine the way people think about Christmas.

In a pluralistic society like America, where there are by the last count I am aware of 4200 different religions—with several major ones vying for the faithful “to come in”—one certainly should expect what is perhaps best regarded a competition among various religions. Most belief systems have adherents who would wish those systems to tower over the others. After all, the faithful and their leaders take these systems to be true, the correct faiths, so it is not surprising they would want to spread them, not only in one country but across the globe.

But this is no war. Or it certainly need not be one. If I urge someone to accept my religion, to convert, mostly I would do this by persuasion, not coercion, or at worst by means of some tricky polemics. Which is to say peacefully. The same, after all, goes on in politics. We urge our fellow citizens to switch to our side and so long as this is done through argumentation, even perhaps some intimidation—say when we threaten people with hell fire unless they come aboard—that is entirely civilized and no one has reason to object. If the atheists want to insist that the days Christians call Christmas are, in fact, old pagan celebrations, so there is no need to use the Christian term for them, that’s something people can consider and either accept or reject. There is nothing war like in it at all. If Jews try to spread the idea that Hanukkah is a more accurate term for the season, that, too, is perfectly civilized, unobjectionable as a matter of religious partisanship.

But by labeling these efforts on anyone’s part—Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics, Moslems or whoever—something even remotely like a war, them’s fighting words, as one might put it. Why besmirch a peaceful effort to get people to adopt one’s point of view a war? I have to consider that this is a trick, a way to make one’s faith out to be some kind of victim of aggression by the dissidents and to solicit vigorous, even physical defense!

Back in the days of the Soviet Empire, when a dissident didn’t use the terminology approved of by the government of the USSR and its various puppet regimes, these dissidents were jailed, sent to labor camps, even murdered. For what? For what was on their minds, for what they believed, even though they did nothing war like at all about their dissent. Calling their views subversive, treasonous, or the like was a way to label them violent when, in fact, they were anything but.

Similarly, to label the efforts of members of competing belief systems to spread their ideas a war is deceitful. Some of the faithful may well accept the notion that if someone is attempting to covert us to their viewpoint, this amounts to aggression and should be met with forceful defense. This, yes, can even lead to church burnings, attacks on the dissidents even though they have done no violence to anyone.

It is interesting that those who are supposedly following the lead of the Prince of Peace would perpetrate such verbal slight of hand that can encourage violence.

Atheism’s Achilles’ Heel

Tibor R. Machan

I am referring to the prominent versions of atheism. There are different ones, actually. Strictly speaking there is no specific view that an atheist must accept. Instead, atheism is merely the rejection of theism. And nothing in particular follows from the absence of anything, including from the absence of belief in God.

But, of course, many associate atheism with one or another different belief about various matters, including morality. No, nothing about morality follows from atheism except that God couldn’t be the source of it. So what Sam Harris, author of two widely discussed recent books about atheism, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, claims about the relationship of atheism and morality is highly dubious. In The Los Angeles Times he wrote
"...We do not get our morality from religion. We decide what is good in our good books by recourse to moral intuitions that are (at some level) hard-wired in us and that have been refined by thousands of years of thinking about the causes and possibilities of human happiness.
"We have made considerable moral progress over the years, and we didn’t make this progress by reading the Bible or the Koran more closely. Both books condone the practice of slavery—and yet every civilized human being now recognizes that slavery is an abomination. Whatever is good in Scripture—like the golden rule—can be valued for its ethical wisdom without our believing that it was handed down to us by the creator of the universe." http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/10-myths-and-10-truths-about-atheism1/
Of course simply because there are morally intolerable ideas in the Bible and the Koran, it doesn’t mean all atheists reject those ideas. Some may very well embrace them and also be atheists. What is especially important to realize, however, is that no theory of the origin or basis of morality follows from atheism, certainly not the one Harris mentions, namely, that ethics is innate—“(at some level) hard-wired”—in us. Certain atheists hold this view but many others do not.
It is quite implausible that human beings are hard-wired with ethics since so much rank unethical conduct abounds in the world and hard-wiring would amount to our being automatically or instinctively ethical—the way animals are hard-wired to behave as they do. Indeed, if to be an atheist one needs to believe that we are hard-wired with ethics, atheism couldn't be right from the start. That’s because if from a supposed fact something false follows, than it cannot be a fact. But, of course, from atheism nothing follows about ethics being hard-wired. There can be atheists who do think that but also ones who do not, who believe that ethics needs to be learned and people have the freedom of will to accept or reject even the correct moral system.
Why is Harris’ version of atheism, from which a hard-wired ethics is supposed to follow, the Achilles’ heel of his position? Because if there is anything nearly everyone knows about ethics is that whether one is ethical or not is a matter of choice, the very opposite of being hard-wired in us. It is a central feature of the morally significant life, one in which ethics counts for a great deal, that people are not hard-wired about how they conduct themselves. It is a matter of their choice whether they do or do not do what's right. Some act properly, some nearly so, some not at all. It is essential about morality that people are free to do the right thing and are it is not their being hard-wired that makes them morally responsible. If you need to make no choice to act right, if you are hard-wired, then you can gain no credit or blame for what you do. And that’s the end of ethics or morality. If atheism is tied to this notion, that pretty much undermines atheism. If it rules out ethics, well then since ethics is so evidently part of human life, it cannot be right.
Actually, of course, atheism does not imply that we are hard-wired ethically. So maybe if some version of atheism is compatible with moral choice, then such an atheism could be true. Certainly there have been famous atheists for whom people are morally responsible and free to chose an ethical life versus an unethical one. So it would seem that merely because some versions of atheism do have the Achilles’ heel of lacking room for morality, it doesn’t mean all of them do.

Bad Arguments For—And Against—Liberty

by Tibor R. Machan

In his December 18th guest column for The New York Times, Orlando Patterson of Harvard University lays in on George W. Bush and his neo-conservative pals for misguidedly pushing Western style liberalism on Iraqis. The gist of his point is that Bush believes that liberty is "written in our hearts," something supposedly learned from John Locke, and that simply is false.

Now if anyone has any knowledge about the philosophy of John Locke, two vital elements of it certainly stand out above the rest: First, Locke did not believe that anything at all was written in our hearts! He opposed innate ideas, such as those Descartes, the famous French rationalist, believed in. Second, Locke did believe in every individual's right to life and property, a right that implies that everyone ought to be free from coercion by other people. But this is not the idea that freedom is written in our hearts but the idea that freedom is the right way for us to live in human communities. It is right but there is nothing at all automatic about it, as Patterson has Bush think of liberalism.

The difference is crucial. Innate ideas, those supposedly written in our hearts, do not need to be learned. Their importance and value are supposedly intuitive, known without having to learn about them. Some people have believed in this—among them many contemporary philosophers who are called intuitionists. These thinkers hold that within us all there are innate proclivities in support of and against various ways of living and organizing life and these need to be unleashed and then we will be well on our way to right conduct and laws. The most recent major political philosopher who saw a significant role for intuitions in human affairs, the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls, rested a goodly part of his case for the liberal welfare state on this idea. Professor Patterson, unfortunately, doesn't mention this. Instead he hangs the idea on John Locke, someone who is not usually invoked as a defender of the welfare state but of the free market, capitalist system of political economy, what with his strong support of the right to private property.

But Locke didn't defend his views by reference to intuitions. He realized that it is only if we "consult our reason"—if we think the matter through—will it become evident to us that individuals have a right to their lives and property and that this must be made part of a just human community. Nothing of this is intuitive; nothing is automatic; it is all hard work to figure out.

Assuming that George W. Bush's reference to freedom being written in our hearts is not just sloppy polemics but expresses his true belief, it doesn't come from John Locke. Saying it does makes a mockery of Locke's ideas and of the classical liberal tradition of political economy Locke helped get off the ground.

I do not know if Professor Patterson distorts Locke intentionally or through misunderstanding and ignorance but the distortion is significant and, if accepted, very damaging to the case for the free society. That case is an idea of justice, a normative position, one about how we ought to live within human communities. And there is nothing intuitive or automatic about that. Making it seem that such an idea rests on the quicksand of intuition is to belittle it, to besmirch it as a possibly sound notion about human community life.

As to the Iraqis and others in the Middle East, it may well be true that they would be much better off living in a fully free society, as would we all, but there can be a great deal that stands in the way of that happening. For one, they have contrary ideas of their own. And they have rulers and leaders who would very likely be opposed to freedom for all in that region of the world, so even if the bulk of the people would like to be free, those with power are not likely to let that happen. So, yes, George W. Bush & Co. are mistaken to believe that somehow all people, including those in the Middle East, intuitively embrace the free society. But they didn't pick up that error from John Locke!

A Stale Liberal Sophistry

by Tibor R. Machan

In a mildly interesting exchange in The New Republic, between Cato Institute scholar Brink Lindsay and one of the magazine's senior editors, Jonathan Chait, the idea of a possible alliance between modern liberals and libertarians was recently debated. No one, I think, really believed in a serious prospect for this alliance but it made, as I said, mildly interesting copy.

My own attention was piqued by a particular locution in Mr. Chait's missive, where he discussed the suggestion, voiced by Lindsay, that perhaps Social Security ought to be (somewhat) privatized and why this could appeal to younger liberals. (I must admit it always irritates me to call these folks "liberals" when they have no interest in human liberty whatsoever any longer!) In reply to the idea, Chait asks, "And why would we force retirees into the individual medical insurance market?" He adds, "After all, we've tried that system with the working-aged population, and it has produced 45 million uninsured."

Now first, this figure of 45 million uninsured is about as reliable as most other statistics bandied about by those who have immense faith in government. As if only if the state got into the mess would everything that's amiss go much improved. As if being insured the government way were some kind of panacea.

But the second point is more interesting. It has to do with how Chait characterizes even partial privatization, namely, as "forcing" retires into something. Whereas the truth of the matter is that the Social Security system has been notorious for perpetrating the extortion of millions and millions for decades now: "You are only going to work lawfully if you pay the government something some have decided you must pay and that the government will, somehow (but no one knows how and, anyway, don't even count on it), save up for you until you retire. Then government will decide how much of it you will get back." Talking about doing some forcing!

Modern liberals have for ages gotten away with this, claiming that if you do not submit to being coerced into providing the funds they want, you are forcing them or someone to do something. So if I don't want to be taxed—to help the war on drugs or the Social Security system or whatever else government decides the funds extorted via taxation should go to—then I am "forcing" someone to do something, like supporting drug abuse or going without insurance.

Notice immediately how insane this idea is: If I didn't exist at all, and the funds I might have produced but I didn't are not there for these various programs, somehow some nonexistent I would have forced the recipients to go without.~ Now, of course, if I do exist and have the legal right to keep my very own resources, I would not be forcing anyone to do or be anything at all. I certainly wouldn't be forcing retirees to go without insurance since I would not have stolen a thing from them, only refused to allow government to steal the funds on which they would gladly retire, given that they wouldn't invest in this themselves. Nor would I have forced anyone to stop saving up for me—everyone would be free to do this to their heart's content but only without coercing me into their scam.

For centuries enemies of human liberty have played this nasty game, stealing concepts that support freedom and putting them to use opposing it. Like the concept of individual rights, which used to concern securing our liberties but now, after years of sophistic conceptual gerrymandering, is used to refer to alleged entitlements from others—meaning, of course, others' lives and works, the very opposite of individual liberty—the exact reversal of the idea of individual rights as John Locke and the American founders understood them.

Chait has for years rolled out this kind of sophistry. Instead of admitting, plainly and honestly, that what he wants is to steal from those who work and take care of their own retirement and hand over this loot to those who don't (or not enough), he pretends that not stealing for this purposes amounts to forcing people into doing without old age insurance. Please, don't accept this kind of verbal trickery. See it for what it is, trying to win political arguments by subterfuge.

Peter Singer's Advocacy "Charity"

by Tibor R. Machan

Philosopher Peter Singer, of Princeton University just penned a piece for The Sunday New York Times Magazine titled "On Giving." The gist of it is that most of us ought to part with our wealth and send it to the poor of the world. There are some figures as to just how much those with various levels of income ought to send but these numbers are all fiction—Singer doesn't know us, not the very wealthy, not the somewhat wealthy, nor the rest of us. We all have different situations, some with several kids, some with ailing parents, some devoted to the arts, politics, scholarship, or science that consumes much of our spare wealth. So the number-crunching in the essay amounts to speculation, at best. The serious pitch is that whatever we have, large portions need to be given away.

Not surprisingly Singer's essay is very unclear on just what percentage we should give away of what we have. No wonder. It is impossible to say in any general terms how charitable and generous one ought to be. These are just the sort of decisions that free men and women must make based on their own circumstances and the situations they face around them. The reason, in fact, that our moral virtues, such as courage, honesty, generosity, prudence and the rest, are general guidelines is that they are indicators, not formulas, for doing the right thing. Neither Peter Singer nor any other philosopher, theologian, economist or political theorist is going to be able to answer how much I or you ought to give away of what we have. Only we can do that—it is, as some have put it, all a matter of local knowledge.

A good clue may be gleaned as to what Singer would like us to do from what one of his like-minded colleagues, Peter Unger, once wrote: "On pain of living a life that's seriously immoral, a typical well-off person, like you and me, must give away most of her financially valuable assets, and much of her income, directing the funds to lessen efficiently the serious suffering of others."

Is this true? Because it is such a broad generalization, it probably is not. It assumes, for example, that what most of us spend our money on is worthless and implies that those who gain employment from such spending ought to go jobless. It also assumes that giving money away is of greater help to others than investing money in various projects or saving it so it could be lent out to support productive work. Indeed, Singer's essay is seriously lacking by failing to compare the benefits to those who need money of investing versus giving money away. As with the late Mother Teresa, Singer, too, seems to think it is more important to merely tide someone over instead of helping them get on their own feet.

Singer is also goes astray for thinking that the world is a kind of huge zero-sum game where those who gain must make others lose. He supports this with some theories to the effect that in order for us to be well off, others must suffer but that is really quite silly—economists for centuries have shown that buying, selling, hiring, and all that good commercial stuff is just what creates wealth, not giving things away, something that should be saved for emergencies and only when it is effective.

Another fallacy in Singer's thinking is that he keeps hinting at the idea that no one quite earns all of the wealth he or she has, even if it came by without out and out thievery. Well, of course not. When a beautiful model or talented singer or ball player gains huge sums, those sums weren't always fully deserved (earned). This is especially so with those of us, hopefully quite a few, who enjoy our work and for whom it isn't some great hardship to be productive. And there are the out and out lucky, too, who have a good deal that is theirs not because of arduous labors and suffering.

Yet, the fact that something is come by through luck or pleasant work doesn't make it someone else's. Our health can be good and it is still our health and Singer and his friends aren't justified in taking it from us. Property rights aren't sound principles because all of us always earn our resources through painful labor. They're sound principles because they preserve our sovereignty and keep the likes of Singer at bay.

Indeed, the bottom line of property rights has to do with who will decide how resources should be spent—the people who own them or
others, like Professor Singer. Interestingly although much of what Singer says in his New York Times Magazine piece avoids the worst part of the story, namely, advocating confiscating what we own, there is a part that reveals the author's view on that. He says, at one point, that a cabby asked him if he "thought the U.S. should give foreign aid. When [Singer] answered affirmatively, he replied that the government shouldn't tax people in order to give their money to others." So what did Singer trot out in response? The stuff about how much of what we have we didn't come by from our hard work. But that is entirely beside the point—few if any of us came by our lungs or eyes or good looks because of hard work, yet it is not for Singer to decide what we may do with these things. Indeed, most of our wealth came about through extremely complex ways. Still it is our wealth.

Generosity is indeed a moral virtue: to give those who should have something given to them. But how much that should be, when it should be given, and under what if any conditions, is very much a matter of the context. When some advocate making up formulas the danger is that the power to disburse will be theirs and no longer belong to those with the resources. And that may be what lurks behind all of this "giving," actually, not genuine generosity!

Machines into Humans?

Tibor R. Machan

There’s been a pretty impressive movement afoot for over a century or even more championing the idea that human beings are but complicated machines, nothing special at all in the world. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) folks tend to hold this view—machines, in time at least, will do whatever people can, maybe even much better than we do it, like thinking, feeling guilt, empathizing, regretting, apologizing, and the whole gamut of stuff many think is unique to human life. No, say the AI folks, it’s just a matter of handling some of the technicalities and then, voila, we will have machines just like us. After all, aren’t machines already doing many of the tasks most if us had once thought only people could do? Sure.

I recall when I first ran across this topic, in a course what was called “Philosophical Psychology,” back at Pamona College, in Claremont, where I took some of my undergraduate philosophy courses—we studied, among others, Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein both of whom addressed aspects of the issue. I even recall one of our tests on which we were asked what Wittgenstein would have said to the idea that machines could think and my answer was, “Wait and see, it isn’t something to know about ahead of time.” My professor was rather impressed with this little part of my test, not much else. But I, too, would have said the same thing—who can tell ahead of time? Although I have doubts that non-living beings could ever come up with all of what people can do.

So I was discussing this with my best friend the other day, we both serious students of philosophy, and he noted that if the AI folks are correct, we should soon have a way to purge ourselves of false beliefs, as well as useless information. We will just take some kind of drug—well, may be a pill with who knows what in it—that will purge our system of falsehoods and trivia, plain and simple, just like today computers have programs that can purge them of unused desktop icons, cookies, and the like. We laughed about this some, since the notion that there could be some mechanical or even chemical way to get rid of false ideas or beliefs seemed absurd. But why? Don't we use drugs to get rid of viruses now?

Well, one reason is that to learn what is true versus false involves elaborate research, reasoning, checking and double-checking, with the ingredient of self-generated, initiated mental concentration, clear focus, keeping one’s attention, and recalling all sorts of information the coordination of which is needed to make sure of what’s what. No mechanical process is sufficient here, not at least when it comes to some of the deeper issues such as religion, politics, ethics, metaphysics, even biology and the rest of the disciplines the findings of which require extensive work of the sort that's unique to human beings, using their higher level thinking, reasoning for which they possess their very complicated brains and minds. To think some machine or mechanism or even chemical agent could accomplish the purging of falsehoods from our minds is to assume there are minds much like ours that will program whatever it is that’s supposed to do this purging business and use it to do the job. But there aren’t. Nothing in the known world does this kind of work other than people. At least not yet. It takes other people—or oneself, if one is really self-ware—to come up with criticisms and discarding of the bad ideas one holds. Sure, some tools can help—like a calculator, but who made those tools? Whoever could would be, well, pretty much people.

Yes, we can fantasize about a falsehood-purging-pill or such—that’s been done since time immemorial. Take all those Disney-like movies, right up close to our own time, in which everything and anything is routinely animated, with all those animated beings doing what we do and more, sometimes. Animals in this imaginary world do philosophy and math and literature, as do desks and chairs and cars and flowers and mountains—the human imagination is very fertile with such remote, counterfactual possibilities. But they are not to be confused with real prospects, not unless there is evidence instead of mere speculation.

So if you are waiting for the pill that will fix all your mistakes, do not hold your breath.

General Pinochet—Some Lessons

Tibor R. Machan

It is interesting just how real politics works. When the chips are down, we can often detect from little gestures and moves where people really stand on basic issues.

When General Pinochet died the other day, there was not a great deal of discussion about him and those that did appear tended to make a great deal of his having been supported by the American CIA when he overthrew the regime of Salvador Allende. Now for my money if it took the CIA to do this, it could well be to its credit, even though technically Chile was a so called sovereign country and Allende a sovereign leader (or ruler!). Of course, all this stuff about people being sovereign leaders or rulers of countries is nonsense, no less so than being kings or queens of countries. It fairy tale talk—there are no kings or queens, actually. There are only some men and women who dress up in fancy clothes as they impose their will on other men and women—“subjects.” And since Allende was about to take Chile into the Soviet bloc, joining Cuba as another Latin American country to be ruled by the Kremlin’s thugs, frankly I thought the CIA, never mind its technical malfeasance, did the right thing. I would have thought the same had it done this against the rulers of South Africa back then!

But all this bellyaching about Allende having been put down by the CIA instead of focusing on his allegiance with the Soviets and with Castro makes it clear that even after the fall of the Soviet Empire—a vicious Left wing, totalitarian dictatorship far worse then Pinochet’s petty military regime turned out to be—a great many intellectuals in the West are loyal to the fantasies of socialism and communism. If the brutality is done for the sake of the socialist or communist revolution, if a country is brought to its knees for that wonderful cause, well never mind the destruction and the sacrifice it takes. But if the goal is some other fantasy, say fascism, well then it is worth harping about it forever, never mind what the other choice happened to be. Never mind, also, that Pinochet voluntarily relinquished his rule in Chile after some years, ushering in a more or less democratic form of government, while no country under the rule of the likes of Stalin, Khrushchev, Cuba or North Korea ever managed to do this. Even Grobachov didn’t to this but merely toyed with some reforms hoping to keep the USSR a Soviet style social country, essentially. Yet he was hailed as some kind of savior of humanity and is still on the lecture circuit being widely welcome throughout the West. Pinochet, however, was hounded to the day he died. And by all accounts, he had committed serious crimes against many Chileans and there is little question that he should have been punished for this. But what about ex-KGB Gorbachov and Putin and the rest?

It seems that in the minds of too many on the Left what Pinochet did was only criminal because it was done for undesirable ends. The means, hell, they were routine among Leftist dictators and far more consequential. But just as after the fall of the Berlin Wall most of those on the Left kept silent—there were a few exceptions!—so when it comes to comparing fascist authoritarian brutal dictators to socialist totalitarian brutal dictators, the latter will routinely come off squeaky clean. The reason is mostly this loyalty to the fantasy of the revolution, although in some cases it is something else. That is the desire to pain the USA as dirty in all cases, as never having done the right thing, even comparatively speaking. When it was revealed that Radio Free Europe, where I did a short sting as a child actor back in the mid 1950s, and Encounter magazine, both got support from the CIA, the Left hollered from glee and some of my own libertarian pals were ecstatic—after all, the government once against did something bad and isn’t that wonderful for the cause of discrediting it. Hell with real politics, never mind what Allende would have done with Chile, never mind that those in Eastern Europe benefited a lot from RFE and that Encounter was a very fine magazine. Those goals aren’t worth it to these folks, and perhaps they aren’t. But to make these matters the focus of attention here shows how little people appreciate the evil of that evil empire!

Comparing Political Systems

Tibor R. Machan

Islam is not explicitly a political system but it has strong implications about political economy, as most religions do. Something will be forbidden in a human community if Islam dominates, something will be taken as acceptable by those in charge. This is so with Christianity, too, of course, as well as with any other religion. Some religions, however, do not aspire to rule everyone, not at least by coercive force. Islam, as it is understood by a great many Moslems, does consider the use of coercive force acceptable for certain vital purposes, notably the one of having people convert to Islam.

Now the real community value that we all, regardless of our faiths, ought to prize is people living a freely chosen moral life. But this is something impossible if coercive force is used in any realm of human affairs. Only in defense of liberty is the use of force justified—in that case it is not coercive but defensive force. Most Moslems do not share this priority of liberty over any other public good—they insist that the public good amounts to willing or unwilling service to Allah as understood from the Koran.

So the fight is over the importance of liberty. Those who deny its importance easily can reach the conclusion that killing innocent people, including children, is OK for certain, if rare, purposes, such as achieving religious dominance throughout the world. It is sad but acceptable, given the stakes.

This is wrong and however much those in the West may have failed at living by our own principles—some of us have been or supported coercive force ourselves—we are responsible to resist the attempt to make any religion, including Islam, dominate the world. We must defend human liberty.

Of course, a free country, one that does really honor liberty, can be either flawed or wonderful. There just is no guarantee. But such a country at least makes it possible for all of its citizens to aspire to their own best selves, their human excellence, however they conceive of this except for when the aspiration interferes with what other people choose to do peacefully in their lives. In short, a free country is open to many experiments with how the best life should be lived and even with what that best life is.

No, this isn’t utopia, a society with perfect lives lived in it, which is the political goal the imperialist religions pursue and plan to implement. (Here, by the way, is where Islam as understood by most of its current world leaders, resembles Communism as the Soviets understood it. No wonder the Left has taken its side recently.) It is however the kind of human community that is most likely to foster human excellence—everyone must decide how to live, which means those who decide correctly will have personally chosen the pursuit of their excellence. They will not merely have been coercively forced to behave right! This, ultimately, is why Western style liberal constitutional democracies are superior to what Islam and some other religions and ideologies would promote.

We can pretty much also judge a system of political ideas by considering how bad things can get while it is used to guide a country's legal order. Liberal constitutional democracies can be pretty bad; people can be pretty immoral--say, hedonistic, materialistic, or whatever other sort of malady the West is supposedly suffering from. But with all this, the West is not likely to glorify in violence, brutality, murder, cruelty, and so forth against innocent human beings. This really is a QED. When a religion’s or philosophy’s political implications can legally find such conduct acceptable, the system is has proven to be unacceptable, period.

Sure not all those who subscribe to Islam prefer—just as not all those who embraced Communism chose—to act violently, brutally, etc. There are moderate Moslems as there were moderate Communists, even Nazis. But those who went off the deep end had no systematic objection offered to their conduct from within their position, none. It is OK by their convictions to perpetrate murder, etc., no problem, even if not universally practiced.

Yes, there can be much amiss with the Western type liberal constitutional democratic idea and how it is practiced but at its very worst the position will not construe systematic violent sacrifice of children and innocent adults as acceptable in the pursuit of any goal whatsoever, not even the goal of self-defense (as evidenced by how many Westerners stand up for the rights of those who attack us). That is a very strong reason for its superiority!

Christmas, Holidays & Commerce

by Tibor R. Machan

There has been much fuss lately about some people referring to Christmas as "the Holidays" and it is a bit strange. After all, "holiday" has the term "holy" in it, so those using it may be said to acknowledge the holiness of these days, something one would not expect from heathens, atheists, or agnostics. For the latter nothing much qualifies as holy since that term signifies something otherworldly, supernatural.

But perhaps the insistence on using "Christmas" has a somewhat insidious, religiously intolerant source. It may be the effort of some Christians to lock up the holidays for themselves alone, a kind of imperialism we have been witnessing the last several years from people who are willing to go the great lengths of brutality and violence to lock up the entire world for their own religion. Christians, however, were supposed to have been guided by the philosophy of Jesus, who hadn't adopted the aggressive stance of Islam's prophet, Mohammed, so it is entirely unbecoming of Christians to lord their religion over others. Especially in America, which has for over two centuries been a country that has welcomed members of all kinds of faiths.

Despite the insistence of some, America wasn't established as a Christian country—its legal system does not invoke any religion in some official sense in which, say, even England does (being officially Anglican). As to the argument about the American founders, two recent books make it abundantly clear that among them they had no agreed-upon common religious allegiance other than belief in God. But belief in God is common among Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and many other faiths. So at most America can be regarded as a religious country, which using the term "holiday" by no stretch of the imagination disputes!

There is another bit of controversy, though, surrounding the holidays, namely, whether all the commercial activity during them somehow serves to demean them. One thing in favor of this idea is that Christmas ought to be a time when we are more concerned with spiritual than with earthly matters. So all the focus on gifts and such would appear to reject this notion.

Yet, especially for Christians, earth is just as important as will be the world beyond, assuming such exists, which, of course, Christianity does assume. Yet according to Christianity the earth is a creation of God and Jesus himself became a human being for a while, thus honoring the earthliness of the rest of us who will live here for a good bit before heading elsewhere. And while here on earth, we are also supposed to be generous, kind, charitable, and friendly, all of which involves, at least to some extent, looking out for our fellows' earthly needs, wants and desires.

It is a large measure of our goodness, according to Christian ethics, that we act accordingly and Christmas is especially suited for it, when we are supposed to think of what our relatives, friends and other associates might like from us. Being remembered, for example, via cards, invitations to parties, gifts and so forth is certainly part of the thoughtfulness we ought to exhibit this time of the year and going about looking for a finding gifts is certainly a part of what such consideration involves.

No doubt, one can overdo everything, including focusing so much on buying things for those we care for, although mostly people tend to be involved in finding just the right thing, which is what all the running around is about. (As a father of three grown children, it is becoming more and more difficult to tell just exactly what would make them most pleased, so I need to invest some time in shopping!)

The commerce that's done during the holidays is, in fact, all to the good—it usually brings joy to those receiving gifts, to those finding just the right gift to give, and to whose producing and selling what will become gifts so they, in turn, can go out and do all this as well. I see nothing but a win-win situation here, all around, so the complaints really have no basis so far as I can see.

Values and America

Tibor R. Machan

A theme that comes up often in commentaries about contemporary American culture is the absence of firmly grounded and widely embraced basic values among the people. While Americans have a coherent and stable enough legal tradition—albeit in the process of gradual erosion now and always a bit flawed—they seem to lack a basic ethics by which their lives might be guided, given some in depth meaning. It is for this reason, it is often said, that people require religion in their lives, whether it be Islam, Judaism, Christianity, or Hinduism.

And there is little doubt that human beings are just the kind of living creatures who cannot live without basic moral values. Even those who are totally skeptical about this do not manage to do without morals—they implicit embrace some ethical precepts, such as integrity or consistency or justice. For example, no skeptic accepts having his or her views distorted. No a-moralist believes it makes no difference how he or she is treated by critics. Total nihilism about values is impossible unless one is some kind of sociopath, seriously mentally deranged.

Why do we need values? Because we, humans, are just the sort of living beings that lack instincts. We are born with the instinct to suckle and that is about it—the rest is a matter of learning. And it isn't only the kind of learning that most higher animals need, namely, being trained in some skills. It is learning on one's own, to figure out ideas, to form principles about life and its innumerable facets. That is what all the fuss is about when we talk about the ethics of merchants, lawyers, doctors, politicians, parents, etc. And while some of this has become submerged in the discipline of psychology—so that for example such chintzy public forums as the Oprah show and The View will rarely talk about ethics and focus, instead, on psychological problems—it is still quite inescapable. Consider that however much we try to explain away ethical matters, even our psychologists are subject to moral criticism when they abuse their patients, for example.

So it seems clear enough that human beings cannot live by law alone. The law itself is open to be judged as ethical or unethical—just think how we treated the laws of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or South Africa. The same is true about the United States of America—its laws are open to moral scrutiny. We need, therefore, more than just laws for a coherent, civilized, and decent society.

But America is a highly pluralistic country—millions of people live here from extremely diverse cultures, traditions, religions, ethnic groups and the like. It seems, therefore, that just relying on these as sources of the common bond of ethics will not help. Instead, as elsewhere in the world, such sources often pit people against one another. Christians versus Jews or Moslems, Moslems against Infidels, agnostics against theists, atheists against agnostics, etc., etc.—there is no end of the varieties of conflict that can arise if we depend on these sources for moral guidance. Why? Because they lack a common base. They draw their principles of human behavior from diverse belief systems which are, themselves, not grounded in some common and accessible reality. When we depend upon the teachings of our culture we can be reasonably sure that some connection to reality must have infused what we believe. But a good deal of it is myth and fiction, made up by the human imagination and showing about as much diversity as that faculty can produce.

So what can Americans hope for in this matter of some set of common values? There is, first of all, no guarantee that we will come together on any possible answer as we search for a common ethics. That is because human beings are quite free to ignore even the best answers to questions they pose, say if they find it unpleasant, disturbing, scary, inconvenient or whatnot. But some answers probably offer a better chance at consensus than do others.

In ancient Greece it was Socrates, the first major Western philosopher, who proposed an answer to this question of how to come by an ethics that we can all agree on, even if we do not choose to. He proposed that reason must be employed to study human nature and when we learn what human nature is, we will also learn how to live right, how to live virtuously, justly. Because human nature is something we can all study. It is there before us every second of every minute of every hour of our lives. We have ample opportunity to examine what it is to be a human being. And this will give us a strong clue as to how to live a human life properly, ethically.

And the most important thing about human beings is that they are living creatures who must use their minds to navigate their lives. It is human intelligence, the activity of figuring things out and living accordingly, that seems to be the best guide to living well. As Socrates put it, "The unexamined life is not worth living." But only nature and, for our purposes, human nature, is available for common study and ultimate consensus.

In a diverse society such as America the people cannot hope to reach peace, harmony, and justice by finding principles from diverse traditions. That always runs the serious risk of conflict, since we interact among one another so frequently and pervasively. What we need to learn is to use, trust and be guided by our common reasoning capacity. There is a common world to be studied and our reasoning capacity is the best tool with which to study it. The results may get us what all else has failed to, namely, a set of ethical guidelines that will help us to come to agree on solutions to our problems.

There is no utopia in trusting reason. But as novelist Scott Turow put it in his best selling book, The Burden of Proof, "In human affairs, reason would never fully triumph; but there was no better cause to champion."

Another Virtue of Liberty

by Tibor R. Machan

When men and women are free to make mistakes or act from ignorance, they are also free to correct themselves promptly. This is one reason why involving government in such policies as banning trans fats or mandating the use of helmets by bicycle riders is a bad idea. The trans fats policy was just cast into stone in New York City—as of the summer of 2008, no eating establishment may cook with the stuff. And the ban on going without a helmet while riding bikes on public roads is nearly ubiquitous now in America and quite a few other countries.

The bureaucrats and politicians who run the nanny state are, of course, convinced that they are our saviors, even as many of the regulatory agencies are captured by the industries being regulated and serve, in consequence, to promote industry interests. But never mind that part of the problem. Another is that often the policy deemed to be so helpful—such as forcing us to wear seat belts or to use helmets—turns out to have very bad unintended consequences.

A traffic psychologist at the University of Bath, in the UK, Dr. Ian Walker, has conducted research on the impact of the bike helmet ban and found that "motorists passed, on average, three inches closer when he was wearing his helmet [during his experiments] than otherwise." As the English weekly THE WEEK reported in its September 23, 2006, issue, Dr. Walker "also found [vehicles] gave him more room when we wore a wig (to resemble a woman), and when he kept close to the kerb (undermining the normal advice that cyclists should drive in the middle of the road)." As Dr. Walker noted, "By leaving cyclists less room, drivers reduce the safety margin that cyclists need to deal with obstacles in the road, such as drain covers and potholes, as well as the margin for error in their own judgments."

Of course, people who research these matters can make mistakes whether they work with, or independently of, the government. However, once their advice is cast into law, abolishing the law is generally very difficult. Just ask yourself how often you hear about such laws being revoked? The most widely known example in the USA is prohibition and even that hasn't been completely overturned—some states still have various remnants of the ban that became a constitutional law back in 1920 and then was repealed in 1933. Although the ban of trans fats is for now confined to New York City, at least as far as I have been able to determine, the ban on going without helmets is much more widespread and there are numerous initiatives by politicians and bureaucrats to spread the other ban as well.

One need not dispute the wisdom of the advice to stop using trans fats or to use bike helmets, even if it is true that these measures may in time prove to be counterproductive. We are not required to be omniscient in order to take actions, to make policies. Human beings often need to act without perfect knowledge which is, in fact, an impossible ideal. Knowledge is always contextual, based on the currently available information and research. Demanding that governments be omniscient is also quite silly.

What is not silly, however, is to demand that government stay away from enacting laws about matters of safety and prudence since laws are usually left in place to kingdom come! Somehow there is a far greater proclivity to make than to repeals laws—Dr. Walker might give that topic a bit of study! Arguably, if there were no legal ban on bike helmets, the mistaken idea that they are a great help to bikers, that they are safer overall then going without them, at least in areas where there is a lot of vehicular traffic, adjustments could be made rapidly, with impunity. But given that there are all these legal bans on going without bike helmets, that there are bureaucracies that have a stake in continuing the bans, that jobs would be lost if the bans were discontinued, etc., it is very likely that the mistake will remain in force and who knows how many bikers will sustain serious injuries from doing what the law requires, namely, wearing protective helmets as they use the roads.

How to Learn English

by Tibor R. Machan

Yes, if you came to the US as an immigrant, to live your life here, it's quite likely that you could get by without learning English. Even back when I first landed here, in 1956, there were regions of America where people only spoke Hungarian. (I recall shops in Cleveland's Buckeye District with signs saying, "We also speak English!")

But all in all it's best to become proficient in English if one is going to live and work in the United States of America. But it isn't easy. Often people who come here live in households where the default language is the one spoken where they hail from. Hungarian, Polish, or Mexican immigrants will likely continue to speak their native tongue just because it is simpler—there's so much else to worry about that if one can get away without spending time on learning English, it looks advantageous ... for awhile! In time, however, not learning English turns into a big liability.

This is especially true for children who lack proficiency and thus undermine their chances in schools, colleges, and the work place. A friend of mine's five year old son, born in China but living in the States since he was 3, simply will not even try to speak English, apparently because his mother and other relatives and friends lack the fortitude to insist on speaking English with him. So he is doing very badly in his elementary school and his mother is even thinking of sending him back to his aunt in China.

Not that one swallow makes springtime, so my example may be moot as far as many other immigrants are concerned. Still, I have a few suggestions to those who come here and do wish to learn English even though they are surrounded by folks who don't much support this idea. When I arrived, I was quite old, 17 and a half, and although I already spoke the language a bit, having gone to an American high school in Germany for a few months so as to get a head start, I was very far from being fluent, which I did, eventually, become—so much so that few people detect even a trace of an accent now when I speak English. And I tried for this quite deliberately.

How?

For one, I learned a lot of American songs—my very first one was "Mr. Sandman." I listened and tried to imitate such singers as Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and a host of others. I learned a bunch of American songs, like "Ain't Misbehavin'," "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby," and many, many more, and sang them whenever I could, whenever I wouldn't drive others up the wall with my inept but educational crooning.

Of course, that is just the start. Going to the movies is another good way to acclimate oneself to a new language. Reading books, magazines, newspapers, or whatever else is at hand also helps, certainly with one's vocabulary and grammar. Indeed, I had very little formal instruction and only practiced the irregular verbs, mostly on my own initiative since learning them involves a lot of memorization. But use was my best instructor.

After living with a bunch of emigre Hungarians for about a year, I realized that that was an impediment. Since I had run away from my home anyway, I decided to leave Cleveland for someplace where no Hungarians could be found: New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. This was a great move for me since there I had no one to talk with unless I become pretty good with English. Being someone who likes to talk, to chat with people, to discuss ideas and so forth, being away from Hungarians made a big contribution to my becoming more and more proficient in English. It didn't hurt, either, that I joined the US Air Force where once again Hungarians were very scarce and where I simply had to speak English if I was to speak at all.

Of course, some people are more adapt at learning a new language than others, but I would surmise from my own and some other people's experiences that the old German saying, "Ubung, ubung macht den Meister"—"Practice, Practice makes the Master"—is true and if one wants to prepare for a productive, successful life in a new country, one ought to go to work on learning the language in ways similar to those that stood me in good stead.

Perils of State Soft Paternalism

Tibor R. Machan

Jim Holt discusses the recent debate about soft paternalism, in his essay in this Sunday's, New York Times Magazine. His “The New, Soft Paternalism” is a fair and pretty thorough account of the debate about whether people have multiple selves of which some may be wiser than others and it does a decent job of considering whether the wiser selves we have ought to get government support, as when states limit gambling or other easily abused activities by their citizens. Holt comes out in favor of the government’s lending a hand to our wiser selves in the end. Here is how he put his conclusion:

“But what if you are one of those people who rely on more mundane stratagems, like self-binding? The general problem you face (as put by the political theorist Jon Elster [a member of the analytical Marxist school, by the way]) is this: For a given uphill goal and a given strength of will, does there exist a path, however circuitous, that will get you to the top of the hill? By adding a new path here and there, state soft paternalism makes it more likely that the answer will be yes.”

A couple of preliminaries. Invoking David Hume’s idea of the totally—indeed, impossibly—fragmented human self is a non-starter here. For Hume the idea was to show that is no self but he advance the notion merely as a reductio absurdum argument against radical empiricism, to show that simply relying on our senses gets us nowhere in trying to understand anything, including ourselves. Of course we have different ideas and desires, with some of us remaining intact over time while others waffling about with no integrity at all. Yet even the worst of us, with the most discombobulated personalities and unhinged character, can have some good moments during which we try to set about straightening our who we will be henceforth--just think of all the New Year's resolutions here. And, yes, a bit of push from peers and institutions may help when such folks are ready to lapse once again.

Now it might be tempting to do what Jim Holt, on the advice of Jon Elster, is proposing, get the state involved here. State soft-paternalism has its greatest appeal not because of its successes and because good theory supports it, quite the contrary. It appeals because of the powerful governmental habit that has been powerfully cultivated in the human race from time immemorial. This is a bit akin to the root idea behind paternalism—"parents know best." And that’s right for most kids, of course; for adults, however, it is a disabling, inept approach to dealing with life and gives dangerous powers to governments.

The governments of most societies have, of course, sold themselves to the people as their parents—or uncles or nannies—who have nothing but the best interest of their children, the people, in mind. Kings notoriously justified themselves along these lines, as have dictators. What differentiates democratic governments is merely the fact that they work by a process of decisions-by-committee and there are numerous competing committees vying to dominate until in the end a decision is reached that supposedly has had the benefit of extensive discussion. Of course, the decision will be coercively imposed but, presumably, wiser then many private decisions would be.

Now this is the kind of view that began to be questioned with the writings of Baruch Spinoza. Thomas Hobbes, writing just a bit before Spinoza, made the mistake of trusting the democratically selected absolute monarch, arguing, like Holt and Elster, that people want themselves to be ruled and a king or government is just who should do the ruling. But as Spinoza began to suggest and, later, classical liberals like John Locke, Adam Smith, and a host of others began to warn us, governments aren’t made up of angels but people. People with the crucial added attribute that makes it easy to yield to bad temptations, namely, power over other people.

In the 20th century Jim Buchanan and Gordon Tullock finally put the idea into a fully developed theory called "Public Choice" which argued that politicians and bureaucrats will routinely pursue their own agendas, not those assigned to them by the people via the democratic process. Now this pretty much means that entrusting government to engage in benign soft paternalism is futile.

Yes, some people could benefit from this if it could be counted upon—although that alone doesn’t make it good public policy either—but counting upon government to administer soft paternalism without corruption, without abuse, is the big mistake embraced by the likes of Jim Holt, Jon Elster, and, sadly, millions of others across the globe.