Even Astronauts are People

by Tibor R. Machan

No, I am not at all gleeful about Astronaut Lisa Nowak's indictment for attempted murder. But I do consider it instructive that someone from an elite group of men and women can apparently turn out to be quite vicious. It shouldn't need to be said but, sadly, it does. On one Los Angeles radio station, for example, a commentator intoned with great indignation about the event, lambasting Nowak not for what she is supposed to have done but for doing it while an Astronaut with NASA. How dare someone with such a prestigious outfit turn out to do bad things, maybe even end up a bad person?

I wish I could have replied to this ignorant exclamation right on the spot, just in case some listeners didn't appreciate its full implications. Are certain groups of human beings supposed to immune to evil, lack the freedom of will to do the wrong thing? Surely that is a hopelessly delusional idea, embrace by the likes of those who believe in the innate goodness of certain groups of people.

We have so many examples of the supposedly elite going bad; we have Aristotle teaching that the hypothetically best regime governed by the best among us will not work because the best rulers often turn into despots; and we have ourselves to check out so as to confirm that anyone is capable of going bad. Not that anyone must go bad—the idea of innate evil is as insidious as the idea of innate goodness. What makes the human species distinctive is precisely that anyone can become either good or bad or hover somewhere in between, in mediocrity.

Of course there is a long tradition of some folks managing to pull off the ruse that they are a special breed and those who aren't of their ilk, just aren't up to snuff. This has served thousands of those in the upper echelons of society very nicely for thousands of years. But it was and continues to be nothing more than a ruse. We are all capable of turning out to do things right or to do thing wrong or, as is often the case, do a bit of this and a bit of that throughout our lives.

The belief that suggests that NASA folks are a special breed and that Lisa Nowak is thus some freak lends credence to one of the most insidious aspects of social thought. It goes hand in hand with the many varieties of tribalism, whereby Germans are superior to Jews, Muslims to Christians, white folks to black ones, men to women—or vice versa, you name it. And it is responsible for a huge amount of the misery that we find throughout human history.

Instead, the best understanding of human nature suggests that keeping on the straight and narrow is a matter of constant vigilance, of shaping and keeping in good shape one's moral character, of never stopping the monitoring process whereby one conducts oneself virtuously instead of viciously. The temptation to become lax in this task can lead to disaster, and indeed most of the avoidable disasters in human history have been due to such negligence and the subsequent efforts to cover it up.

So the lesson from astronaut Nowak's story may well turn out to be important not only for her and some of the folks in her life but for all those who are tempted to believe that going into some line of work, some profession, or some calling will spare one the trouble of having to work at being a decent human being. There is no formula for achieving that apart from one's own relentless, full focus on what it takes to live one's individual life as best as one can. While there can be some practices that will make this come about at greater ease than without them, even then constant vigilance is unavoidable since the future can always pose unexpected challenges, temptations, obstacles and diversions.

Revisiting Taxation's Origins

by Tibor R. Machan

Come tax day each year it is important to recall just what gave rise to this practice of government extorting money from us. Not that the good people at the IRS confine their crimes to April 15 or thereabouts—the 17th in 2007. There are hundreds of hidden and not so hidden taxes involved in virtually all our commercial undertakings. (The exception I know of seems to involve horses—but don't tell anyone!)

First a little history: In feudal times, and even before, the monarch or whoever else pretended to be the "keeper of the realm" was deemed to have been granted ownership of a country, either with absolute title or with some constraints. (As the feudal era lost its dominance, the constraints became stricter and in time monarchies came to be mostly ceremonial—the still very expensive—as in the UK.) But the framework in all feudal systems involved statism—the government owned nearly everything. So if one lived in this realm and worked there, it collected rent, just as an apartment owner does form those renting in the building. The entire system rested on the firmly held assumption that the head of the state owned the country and could collect taxes from others who lived and worked there.

With the American revolution a new idea emerged, namely, that no head of state owned anything. Governments were now deemed to be instituted as a kind of service agency assigned the task of protecting the basic (and derivative) rights of all those who lived in the country. And it was these folks, not some king, tsar, pharaoh or some other keeper of the realm, who owned stuff. The right to private property had been identified as a proper instrument for deciding who owns what. John Locke, the grandfather of the American political tradition, claimed that people came to own stuff by mixing their labor with raw nature. While a challenging idea, it had the ring of truth about it far more than that story about the king owning it all!

With this new political notion the system of serfdom or involuntary servitude—whereby people were tied to the land that the king owned and needed the king's permission to act as they wanted to—had been consigned to the dustbin of history in most places in the West as well as a few others. But taxation remained in place because it hadn't been figured out how governments might be funded. However, severe limitations had been conceived so that all that taxes would do was fund a highly limited government.

Now as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men—well, taxation quickly got out of hand and we are now nearly back where we were with all those monarchs. Governments are claiming ownership of their countries' wealth—and some of their apologists are making sophisticated arguments defending the idea. (See Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership [Oxford UP, 2002].) To put the matter differently, the current system of taxation is a reactionary policy that conflicts with the idea of the right to private property and the right to one's life and liberty, as well.

But then how might the valid functions of a government be funded, if taxation is really but extortion? There are answers but no one at major, prestigious centers of learning is doing research on the details. In broad outline, the proper substitute is a contract fee. Most people take advantage of contracts and these need a legal order for them to function properly. But it is not necessary to do so—it's technically optional. (For more on this, see my "Dissolving the Problem of Public Goods, Financing Government Without Coercive Measures" in my edited volume, The Libertarian Reader [Rowman & Littlefield, 1982].)

Men and women have lived with many unjust institutions and policies but that isn't sufficient to construe them acceptable, morally and politically. Nor should taxation be taken as an exception. An alternative must be found that avoids its injustices.

Free Speech is Dead

Tibor R. Machan

When Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) wrote their bipartisan letter to demand that the giant oil corporation Exxon “end any further financial assistance [to those] whose public advocacy has contributed to the small but unfortunately effective climate change denial myth,” I recalled the following report about Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak: “There are freedoms, but they can’t contradict our traditions,” the president intoned some years ago as he opened a book fair in Egypt. “We must guarantee that freedom of expression agrees with our values.”

In a genuine free society there must be freedom of expression even about matters that are highly unpopular and perhaps conflict with received scientific truth, if that idea makes any sense at all in science. Scientists have been notorious throughout the ages for tilting against windmills, for being skeptics about mainstream thinking. And in our day mainstream thinking has it that human beings are a very significant contributing cause to global warming. There are dissidents regarding this view and maybe they are wrong—that isn’t the point here. What is the point is that Snowe and Rockefeller are in the wrong about whether Exxon has the right to support organizations such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Reportedly, Exxon made its decision to withdraw its support of CEI before this letter went out, so that, again, isn’t the issue. What is very disturbing is that the one remaining liberty in the United States of America, due to how the courts have read the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, is now being threatened by the very agency that is supposed to be making our rights secure. Governments are instituted among us for that purpose, according to the Declaration of Independence.

Of course, when this is noted, apologists will come forth and claim that the Exxon case is special. Richard Littlemore of the blog Desmog.com, for example, writes that “The problem is that this kind of speech [Exxon’s support of CEI] is not ‘free.’ In distracting us from addressing an issue that threatens the world in an unprecedented way, it is costing us all a price that we may never be able to pay.”

Notice how the concept “free” is being twisted around by Littlemore—from meaning that no one may interfere with someone else’s speaking out or funding other’s doing so to meaning that something doesn’t cost anything. Hardly related, if at all! Mubarak is far more honest when he states what Snowe and Rockefeller actually mean, namely, that “we must guarantee that freedom of expression agrees with our values.” But that’s Egypt, which is a virtual dictatorship, not the United States of America where politicians constantly stress how everyone is free, especially as far as thinking and saying what they will.

I happen to agree that there is a bit of confusion about what the freedom is that Snowe and Rockefeller are threatening, although there is a lot of expert debate about this. For example, in the campaign financing debate many who oppose caps consider it a violation of freedom of speech to impose them. I think it is more accurate to view this as a violation of the right to private property. However, since private property is now hardly protected in America, many have decided to attempt to defend our right to give support to causes and political candidates on the basis of the right to freedom of speech and expression. In any case, what is at issue is human freedom and those like Snowe, Rockefeller, Littlemore and Mubarak clearly care nothing about it.

It is no big surprise, of course. There is that famous quip from William Pitt who answered similar arguments by saying, “Necessity is the excuse for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of the tyrant and the creed of the slave.” From the Right it is national security or the dire necessity to spread democracy across the globe that serves to justify the abridgement of liberty. From the Left it is poverty, inequality, and, now, environmental precaution that serve to invalidate our rights and undermine the government’s duty to secure our rights.

I am still not fully despondent, though, mainly because the habit of crushing human liberty is a very old one and difficult to shake, like most bad habits are. But to quote another favorite philosopher of mine, the jazz pianist and song writer Mose Allison, “I am not downhearted, but I’m gettin’ there.”

Dinesh D’Souza Goes Bananas

Tibor R. Machan

D’Souza is a man to reckon with. He is no fool and many of his ideas have considerable merit. But in his latest book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, D’Souza has gone over the top big time. The theme of this work is that 9/11 is partly the responsibility of the American Left, which, as Publishers Weekly characterized the work, "roots the blame for the 9/11 attacks in the left wing's ‘aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family’."

The flaw in this is elementary and is contained in that famous saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones (but words will never hurt me)." The main point, a serious one, is that human beings can be unavoidably hurt only when physically attacked. Otherwise, when insulted or offended, they are free to turn and walk away from what doesn’t please them. There is, in short, nothing coercive about verbal assaults.

In turn, of course, the response to such "assaults" must be peaceful, non-aggressive. However much one may take exception to what someone else says, thinks, advocates, promotes, suggests, intimates, and so forth, none of it justifies responding with violence. Yes, there may some borderline cases, as with all things human. But those are few and far between—if someone is grieving for an intimate and you insult the person, the pain may be too difficult to bear and the response could be violent and excusable. Even in the criminal law in some countries crimes of passion are forgiven because, well, they are deemed to have been provoked. But that’s already too lenient, too willing to accept as an excuse one’s failure to act in a civilized fashion, namely, with proper restraint.

When the Danish newspapers ridiculed Mohammed, those were insults. A civilized response would not have gone beyond a verbal, if firm, protest. Instead many Muslims went out and burned down buildings and killed people. No insults warrant this.

So Mr. D’Souza is wrong to blame the American Left, with all of its moral relativism and support of decadence and licentiousness, for how Muslims acted, specifically when they assaulted and murdered innocent people in New York City on September 11, 2001. They should have confined themselves to criticizing those in the West, including, perhaps, those on the Left, for being wrong. Instead they acted like barbarians. And for this neither the Left nor anyone else besides the perpetrators are responsible.

Mr. D’Souza has a compatriot on the Left in this matter. Catherine MacKinnon, the University of Michigan law professor and author of the book, Only Words (Harvard University Press, 1993), argued against first amendment protection for pornographers because, well, their words, pictures, and films should be construed as being equivalent to physical weapons. But they aren’t. And when people who read or view pornography engage in violent conduct, it is not the pornography that’s responsible but they are. That is the meaning of human freedom of thought, namely, that the bulk of what we are offered without coercion is not assault by any stretch of the imagination. It may be offensive, insulting, annoying, irritating, blasphemous, and so forth; but it is no justification for violent reaction from any human being. If one’s culture taught one that being offended justifies violent response, one’s culture is misguided, wrongheaded, period.
The idea behind this is that human beings can read and view anything and freely accept or reject it—they have free will and aren’t coerced into doing what the material they read or view urges them to do. This is, indeed, the basis for the First Amendment’s protection of the right of freedom of speech and expression in the U. S. Constitution. It is the height of civilized law! The fact that many Muslims are unwilling to act accordingly cannot be blamed on those whose words and deeds offend them.

Mr. D’Souza, who has written some fine things about America and why it is such a free and essentially great country, seems to have forgotten his own ideas in this latest book.

Business and Money

Tibor R. Machan

On a recent trip to a college in Louisiana I was in a discussion with some academic philosophers one of whom advanced the idea that business isn’t guided by ethical principles since its purpose is to make money. A 1961 essay by the late Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate in economics, from The New York Times Magazine and reprinted in many business ethics readers, seems to give support to this idea. Friedman argued that the social responsibility of corporate managers is to earn a profit. And this does appear to mean that nothing other than making money hands over fist should motivate those in the profession of business.

Actually, Friedman made clear that while people in business ought to strive to make money, they need to do so while adhering to "the rules of the game," as it were. And these rules include the criminal law as well as basic ethical principles such as truthfulness, keeping promises, etc. Still, Friedman’s essay left the impression that all business is about is making money. And if this is so, one might ask—as the professor I spoke with did—why bother with any standards other than whether one’s professional decisions lead to making money.

But, of course, business isn’t just about making money, anymore than medicine is just about advancing health. A doctor who would attempt to advance the health of a patient by deceit—say, by failing to fully disclose what’s amiss to the patient—or by theft—say, of someone else’s vital organs—and so forth would not be carrying on professionally. Such a doctor would engage in malpractice. A manager of a firm who would produce shoddy goods so as to make a quick buck would be no different.

Indeed, properly understood, businesses are highly varied, some involved in producing products, some services, some investing in other firms—all aiming for prosperity, yes, but not at any price. Any profession could be corrupted by failing to heed the standards of producing what it is about. So an educator, for example, who seeks to impart knowledge by means of deception or taking advantage of the naiveté of students would be engaged in misconduct. It is not only when the teacher becomes a preacher that he or she misbehaves. And it is not only when someone in business fails to heed the bottom line that there’s malpractice.

Indeed, business is never just about making money—even when it seems to be so. For making money even while managing money requires adherence to certain standards of conduct based on the simple fact that one is a human being making money by dealing with other human beings. In the employment relationship, for instance, it is wrong to hire and promote on the basis of factors irrelevant to the business at hand. This is why racial or sexual discrimination, nepotism and such, are deemed violations of business ethics even though they do not directly involve neglecting the bottom line.

In any profession one can carry on badly while seeming to pursue the ends that define the profession. A journalist could obtain an interview on false pretenses, gain information dishonestly and even steal it, in which case the job of producing information for his or her clients would be mishandled.

One reason that my academic pal may have maintained the perverse thesis that nothing else matters in business but making a buck is that some economists actually advocate this idea, just as the late Milton Friedman appeared to (although, once fully understood, didn’t, in fact). Economists have for centuries argued that the best explanation of how people act in the market place is that they are driven by the profit motive. This wasn’t actually an idea that came from economists, originally, but from a 16th century philosopher, namely, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes held that we are all driven to behave as we do because we seek power, because we are afraid of death. For Hobbes right versus wrong conduct amounted to no more than doing what felt right versus what didn’t. And that itself could be explained by how we are made to feel good by improving our changes of survival.

This idea was derived form the more basic notion of Galilean physics that everything moves ineluctably until it is stopped by some force. It introduced mechanistic determinism as a way to understand human behavior. Economists tended to adept this to their efforts to make sense of how markets work. Morality was excluded from the picture, especially since so many moral theorists believe that self-interested conduct is unethical. Going the mechanical route avoided having to contend with these moralists. And it still does, to a large extent.

In fact, however, market conduct, as any other conduct, is governed by ethical principles. That includes, of course, the vigilant pursuit of profit—but not at any cost.

BBC Biased Environmental Correspondent

Tibor R. Machan

Reporting on a meeting at which various organizations came together to address the issue of global warming, climate change, and the possibility of having to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Richard Black, wrote how US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman declared that energy companies will reduce greenhouse gas emissions because, well, they cared about the environment. As Bodman reportedly put the point, "I believe that the people who run the private sector, who run these companies: they too have children, they too have grandchildren, they too live and breathe in the world. And they would like things dealt with effectively."

In response to this the reporter for the BBC offered this: “Call me cynical if you will, but my first thought was, so you mean, what, corporations like Enron? Or Arthur Andersen? Or WorldCom? And I was not alone. Mr Bodman had momentarily silenced an entire press corps.”
Now just consider the companies Mr. Black mentioned as he considered Mr. Bodman’s comment—Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom. All of these have recently committed some kind of corporate crime, or have been charged with criminal conduct, although one of them has recently been nearly completely exonerated from all criminal culpability. Now imagine another scenario. A representative of the Roman Catholic Church offers a declaration that the church cares about young people, their education, their upbringing, their future. Mr. Black, who is in the audience when this declaration is made, writes about this as follows: “Call me cynical if you will, but my first thought was, so you mean, what, the Roman Catholic clergy, like those in Boston and San Francisco and Los Angeles, care about children? And I was not alone. The Roman Catholic spokesman had momentarily silenced an entire press corps.” Or consider the following: At a conference of university medical systems a representative of university hospitals declares that these institutions are concerned about the health of the citizenry in their neighborhoods, whereupon Mr. Black reports, “Call me cynical if you will, but my first thought was, so you mean, what, hospitals like the one at UCLA or UC Irvine care about patients? And I was not alone. The university hospital spokesman had momentarily silenced an entire press corps.”

Now perhaps my own response to Mr. Black’s report will not be fully appreciated by most people, probably because they have not followed the scandals involving Roman Catholic priests who have molested children entrusted into their care or the scandals at university hospitals where body parts have been selling on the black market and other gross malpractice has occurred, for instance, involving obtaining livers to be used in transplants. This would be understandable. The mainstream media is far more eager to report malfeasance in the business community than in the Roman Catholic clergy or at university medical schools. Yes, at first the news did make headlines but it never became the grounds for widespread condemnation of either the clergy or university medical care as such. The scandals were treated, rightly, as exceptions to the rule.

If Mr. Black and his colleagues took a count, they would learn that among all the major corporations doing business throughout the globe, only a very, very small minority is involved in malfeasance. Therefore to indict the integrity of all of them, to be cynical as Mr. Black and his fellow journalists reportedly were, is irresponsible and unprofessional. Might it be something of an indictment of professional journalism, perhaps? But it is best to recall that those who go into environmental journalism are a minority and tend to be ideologically motivated and, frankly, largely anti-business, not fully representative of journalists.

As to whether Mr. Bodman and others in the business community are justified in being concerned over greenhouse gas emissions, that’s a different topic. Perhaps they, like millions of other people, are victims of a hoax or the exaggerations of environmentalist doom-sayers. Whatever the case, the idea, conveyed by BBC reporter Richard Black, that people in corporate commerce must all be like a certain few corporate villains is disgraceful. It is completely unbecoming of someone in his own profession!

Why Skepticism is Sound

Tibor R. Machan

In the global warming debate the big issues is whether what human beings do contributes significantly to global warming. That global warming is occurring is not much in dispute, although some scientists do make a good deal of the point that there have been warming periods in the past, some of them far greater than those being recorded in our time. There has of course been steady global warming, on average, since as the earth evolved it was at certain early times covered with ice and quite uninhabitable by anything alive. Warming was a precondition to the emergence of life. But the warming never increased steadily and there have been periods of both, warming and cooling all along. Even after serious warming had commenced, there were long periods during which cold spells reemerged.

At this time, however, there is discernible warming, although the actual records—as distinct from computer projections—show only very small increases in the temperature of the earth. And in some places no warming is occurring at all. However, the history of temperature rise is not what concerns many of the skeptics about climate change. Nearly everyone agrees that there has been a rise recently. What is in dispute is (a) how much of an increase is likely to occur in the future and (b) whether human activities have had, are having, and will have a significant impact on global warming.

As to (a), the evidence is mixed and the more dire predictions are all based on several computer models combined with other computer models. And as the saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out." Here is the first place where skepticism occurs. Are those doing the modeling doing it right and can they actually be trusted to do it right? Is the science and technology on which modeling is based itself—and the scientists themselves—reliable?

Given that global warming research now consists of a mostly government subsidized industry across the globe, including the United Nations, with millions of dollars in grants going to those doing work in the field, there is understandable concern about whether those involved are stacking the deck in favor of a Doomsday scenario. It is often noted by private industry research critics that profit can corrupt research but the same is hardly ever noted in mainstream circles about government subsidized research. Furthermore, skeptics well understand that without a scare, there are fewer funds forthcoming. Government funding requires, ultimately, political support and such support relies heavily on a concerned, even frightened constituency. No Doomsday scenario, no concerned citizenry, and no allocation of funds obtained via taxation.

But there is more. In my own community the rangers put warnings out each day about fire hazards, ranging from "moderate" to "extremely high." Interestingly, the "moderate" sign is displayed even if it is pouring rain. In the ten years I have lived here, there hasn’t been a fire. Yet the "extremely high" has been displayed (by my assessment) routinely roughly 70% of the year. It is a tendency of those assigned to be on the lookout to exaggerate hazards. Vigilance calls for it, as they see their jobs.

As to the human factor, here the skeptics are often concerned about what may be dubbed (following a book by that title by Jonathan R. T. Hughes) the governmental habit—if global warming were unrelated to human activity, there isn’t a lot that politicians and bureaucrats could promise to do about it. Or, alternatively, if the best approach to encouraging responsible human conduct would be to leave politicians out of the picture and simply deploy various measures banning or containing what economists call negative externalities—bad side effects from normal productive processes—that, too, would leave the politicians out of the picture. And then what would they do, how would they gain the power most of them hunger for? There is, then, a strong probability that Doomsday scenarios will be projected by government officials and all those who work for them—get financial support, appointments to prestigious committees, invited to plush conferences, etc., etc.

So when one puts together the lack of solid science and technology behind the claim that global warming is imminent and that human conduct significantly contributes to the probable global warming, the attitude of skepticism is most reasonable. Or, to put it differently, how reasonable is it to trust politicians about their need for increased powers over the rest of us?

Lexus Parallel Parking not For All

Tibor R. Machan

One of the annoying elements of advertising is that it often treats us all as if we were just one person. So, for example, because some people may befit from a product--say Lexus's new automatic parallel parking device—it appears to be suggested in the ad that this is something for us all. Of course, very few products or services being promoted to us are really for all of us. But back when advertising used to come mainly from the radio and TV industry, and both of these were oligopolies, ads were indeed usually addressed to millions of people all at once, with no differentiation among them possible. With diversified commercials now possible, targeting people in markets whose interests it is possible to anticipate, this apparent one-size-fits-all assumption in ads has subsided.

Nonetheless, the habit is still pervasive, so this Lexus ad makes it appear that we all require help with parallel parking. It is exactly this that the Op Ed piece By Calvin Trilling in The New York Times, Friday, January 26th, brought to my mind. I thought about how the Lexus ad, which I have seen several times, "suggests" that we all need the help that the new model provides.

But that would to be to misunderstand the function of advertising, which is not to make suggestions, not to give advice, not to inform us of anything but simply to effectively promote products and services. And in promotions one uses hype or other attention-getting means because all one aims for is to alert people to the availability of a produce or service. Once they are aware, they then can reject or accept—it's up to them.

The late Harvard celebrity economist, John Kenneth Galbraith argued against this because he believed that advertising destroys our ability to choose, to be sovereign consumers. He believed corporations produce ads so as to create desires in us which we will have to fulfill by purchasing what they are marketing. This demeaning view is not totally unreasonable—indeed many ordinary folks outside of Harvard University tend to think of others as very vulnerable to the lures of commercials. Many of us think other people are uncritical when they view or hear or read ads and therefore we are being lead unwillingly to go out and buy stuff. But being uncritical is a matter of choice!

F. A. Hayek, another economist and Nobel Laureate, penned a rebuttal to Galbraith in which he pointed out that while becoming aware of new products and services does indeed create desires—as do all innovations in art, science, entertainment, technology, etc.—human beings have the capacity to select which of their desires they will try to fulfill. Depending on their budgets and other constraints, as well as their priorities apart from commerce, they may or may not act so as to fulfill a desire that may have been prompted by means of advertising. Men and women in the market place are free agents and as such are also free to do dumb things, so they can and often do respond to advertising mindlessly, hastily, imprudently. But this doesn't mean they have to. Yet that’s is just what Galbraith thesis suggests—that we lack sovereignty means we cannot govern ourselves, be in charge of our own actions.

Now such thinking is quite rampant because many educated and well placed scholars, natural and socieal scientists and researchers—not to mention philosophers—hold that whatever we do, we must do. We have no choice. So when people go out to buy something after having encountered an ad for it, they had to do this and the immediate cause to explain their conduct seems to be, well, the ad itself. Not their considered judgment as to what to do, which may have involved weighing alternatives against this option, even if ever so rapidly and even un-self-consciously. So the Galbraithian thesis gains support form the widespread deterministic understanding of human behavior.

As with all such determinist notions, this, too, runs up against the fallacy of self-exclusion. If we are all just doing what we have to, then what the proponent of this idea is doing he or she must be doing, like rain that must fall or earthquakes that must erupt. In which case the issue of whether it is true is moot—the utterings of a parrot cannot qualify as a theory of anything.

Bush's Costly Fruitless Blind Faith

by Tibor R. Machan

President George W. Bush stood before Congress and the few million Americans and people across the globe to plead that they all give his new approach to the Iraq war a chance: "Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq—and I ask you to give it a chance to work," he intoned. "And I ask you to support our troops in the field—and those on their way."

I hope very much that his plea will meet with a resounding rejection from all concerned. First of all, the death of one more American soldier who signed up to defend the United States of America and the American Constitution from enemies must not be wasted on this miserable war, one for which very few are asking and hardly anyone is grateful, certainly few, it appears, in Iraq.

When Americans volunteer for the U. S. military—something I once did for four years—they do not mean this to be taken as carte blanche permission to be sent to do anything anywhere on the globe. The purpose of a government and its military arm in a free country is, as the political philosophy sketched in the Declaration of Independence states so clearly, "to secure [our] rights."

Second, even if one accepts that despite its misconceived commencement, this war now spawned expectations that the U. S. needs to take seriously, at most this means that as the military disengages from Iraq, it leaves as intact an Iraqi security force as is possible under the circumstances, not that it wait until who knows when for an ideal Iraqi security organization to come into existence. Do the best to assemble such a security force and leave ASAP. Anything else amounts to an indefinite commitment to "stay the course" which is, as noted, completely misconceived and puts thousands of Americans in harm's way—many of them did not enlist to do this kind of service but enlisted to defend America. (Perhaps some kind of operation, run by the CIA or whatever to abate terrorism abroad and by the FBI or some other organization to hold it at bay here at home can do the bit of legitimate work the military is expected to be doing in Iraq now.)

Third, by permitting Bush to start up a new approach to this ill-conceived, badly conducted military operation—not necessarily because the military is inept but because this is an impossible war for it to fight, like sending in a bulldozer to squelch heavy fog—the American government is simply going to consume extensive resources in a futile operation, bent then, inevitably, to do so for an indefinite period of time. Even if our security does require serious expense, this isn't were the investment needs to be made, not, if as we are told by Bush, the objective is to abate terrorism.

Fourth, generally government needs to be curtailed in its enormous growth and this policy sure as heck isn't going to help with that goal, one Bush at least claims he supports.

Obviously more could be remedied in this awful mess, but these are just some of the reasons the Bush approach is a bad one and needs to be nipped in the bud. The entire notion that America is to establish democracy around the globe is flawed; but that it must do this in Iraq and elsewhere in the most unstable regions is out and out suicidal—literally so for many American citizens. No one abroad is entitled to be protected against monsters by America's military, not unless a firm and well conceived, mutually advantageous military treaty has been drafted and approved for this purpose.

My plea, in response to President Bush's, is to end this utterly disgusting undertaking and to restore the legitimate function of the U. S. government and its military arms. It is utterly incomprehensible to me why this president is pursuing this war, why he has any confidence in such a demonstrably fruitless and unjustified undertaking. Let's end it ASAP instead of carrying on in what comes to be nothing but blind faith.

American Conservatism, RIP

by Tibor R. Machan

Back when I became actively political, meaning I started to pay attention to elections, candidates and so forth in the wake of the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates, you would have considered me a conservative in the American sense of that term. As someone who was smuggled out by a professional from Hungary in 1953, I had very strong anti-communist sentiments. And as someone who was raised for a while by a virulent anti-Semitic father and was surrounded by quite a few anti-Semites in my family and their friends, I also felt repulsed by Nazism. Perhaps there was also that personal attitude I have harbored for as long as I can remember, namely, wanting to figure things out for myself and resenting any attempt to group me or any other human beings with others because of birth, location, color of skin, or any other trait I might accidentally share with other people.

American conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr., and some of his own heroes like Frank S. Meyer and Frank Chodorov, made a great deal of hay with the ideas of the American founders. To my somewhat cursory observation, they favored individualism, civil and property rights—in short, the ideals sketched in the Declaration of Independence. They were committed, I thought, to preserving—conserving—those ideals as against all the collectivisms that Europe embraced, both Left and Right. I discovered Buckley while reading his article, "Why Don't We Complain?" in Esquire magazine, back in 1961 or so, and I felt I had a comrade in arms, even a leader, in him. I started to read National Review and felt quite comfortable with the spirit and letter of what it contained—up to a point.

The thing about American conservatism is that it is only so much American but also a bit too much conservative. The essence of conservatism is expressed poignantly by the 18th century leader of the movement, Edmund Burke. He made the observation that "... Men have no right to risk the very existence of their nation and their civilization upon experiments in morals and politics; for each man's private capital of intelligence is petty; it is only when a man draws upon the bank and capital of the ages, the wisdom of our ancestors, that he can act wisely."

Burke he also noted that "We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank of nations and of ages." The gist of this is that human individuals may not be entrusted with the wisdom and virtue to figure things out for themselves. The idea comes from the somewhat retrograde part of Christianity, contained in spades in Thomas a Kempis's disturbing book, Imitation of Christ. Kempis (1380-1471) taught that for a good Christian it was immoral to seek knowledge since doing so is an affront to God, the only one who can truly know. Of course, not all Christians believed or believe this but even today some Christian groups swear that Kempis's book is a wonderful piece of work, with the most valuable advice for human living.

The American element of the conservatism of this country eventually became overshadowed by the conservative element and in our time many conservatives are scornful of what the Founders believed, namely, that individuals have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They might not quarrel much with the right to life—although considering how some are now calling for the military draft, even that isn't universally true—but they do have serious problems with the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Conservative intellectuals like Russell Kirk were mercilessly harsh about these notions, believing, as show in Kirk's The Conservative Mind, that individual human beings are fundamentally corrupt or at least very, very easily corrupted, so for them happiness will mostly turn out to be short term pleasure and freedom nothing better than license.

Once the conservative began to overshadow the American for American conservatives, what they stood for became something dismal and pessimistic, namely, a kind of spiritual nanny state. Having no confidence in the fundamental innocence of human beings at birth, they focused on what we need so as to stop from descending into degradation, something we are all inclined to do.

In time I realized that the conservative mind was indeed an anti-American mind, in the last analysis, one the logic of which would return us to the European ideal of a strangling communitarianism, even tribalism. At this stage the conservative becomes indistinguishable, in his essence, from the Leftist collectivist—today mostly represented by communitarianism. Both detest individualism since it affirms the right—and implicitly the legitimacy—of everyone to govern his own life instead of entrusting this task to some elite or group.

American conservatism, in the main, isn't American anymore. Which is one reason libertarianism is needed to reinvigorate the American soul.

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A Primer on Progress

by Tibor R. Machan

In some realms, progress means the creation of more and more efficient means by which to achieve worthwhile objectives.  So we find that in the area of technology progress has been nearly undeniable (although some argue that with each improvement of the means to reach one worthy objective, the attainment of some other worthy objective has been impeded).  Elsewhere it means advancement toward a better and better state of being. In philosophy there have been some notable champions of the idea that not just humanity's journey in history but that of reality itself is taking a progressive course.  The future, on the whole, is always an improvement over the past, not just technologically but ethically, aesthetically, politically and so forth.  Hegel and Marx are obvious examples of progressivism but John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer are also likely candidates.

In contemporary science fiction the idea is commonplace that humanity is always lurching ahead, and that only through unnatural influences does it ever regress.  There are detractors even here, ones who hold that the future will be worse than the past has been. They produce the opposite of utopian fiction, namely, dystopian literature.

In particular there is a good deal of thinking that sees the future improved by means of genetic engineering and other "artificial" means, to the point that some envision human beings improved intellectually and even morally or, alternatively, the emergence of artificial intelligence suppressing what humans are capable of.  Arguably, however, such a picture challenges the idea that those who would embody such progress would still be human beings.  Moreover, one of the most well-entrenched conceptions of human nature is that we are all capable of both good and evil, regardless of our levels of intelligence.  So while progress may be possible in one or another special region of human life, the idea that humanity in its essence might somehow become upgraded is likely to be wrong. Evolution or God produced humanity and it is what it is. There may emerge something different from it but also much like it but that would no longer be humanity.

What is likely is that progress of the fundamental sort that motivates the works of optimistic science fiction writers can take place only in the course of an individual human being's life.  Someone may become a better and better person, although even there nothing is guaranteed.  Certainly one can improve one's skills and techniques, learn to play an instrument or a sport better and better up to a point.  We all may well reach a later stage of life at which we must face the end and this may be advantageous to some, while not so much to others--it depends on their character, ultimately. (Character is detiny, said Heraclitus wisely many moons ago!) Yet the inevitability of death and old age, as far as current mainstream understanding has it, seems to place a limit before everyone's progress.

When one is inclined, as have been Hegel and Marx, among others, to treat humanity (even reality) as a developing organism, the idea of holistic progress comes naturally to one's mind, since the organisms with which we are familiar, including ourselves, do undergo progress or development. But the extrapolation is probably mistaken.  Progress of the kind that would in the future remove the necessity for individual effort, for vigilance and tenacity, is not likely to be possible.

In general, the kind of progress that it's reasonable to strive for in human communities has to do with individual self-improvement, some measure of improvement on the system of laws, and the overall deployment of technologically improved means for doing what is important to people. None of this, however, can reasonably be guaranteed or expected and regress, stagnation, as well as progress, are always a possibility. Expectations that progress is inevitable are not reasonable when it comes to human beings, given their nature as self-directed, self-governing beings, each of whom individually needs to make the choice to advance in life. If that choice isn't made on a sustained, ongoing basis, progress will not be forthcoming.  Nor can the diligent, effortful life of one person carry over to his or her offspring.

Some Scientific Paradoxes

Tibor R. Machan

I recall when I was being educated at various colleges and universities the orthodoxy in vogue was that while scientists talk clearly and meaningfully because they were dealing only with facts, others were mostly uttering nonsense because they wanted to make value judgments. The value free approach was being hailed as superior, even by non-scientists, something that turned out to be rather paradoxical. After all, if value judgments are all meaningless, unsupportable by logic or research, how can it be known that the scientific approach is superior to others? Isn’t “superior” a term indicating value?

But for quite some time this paradox was dismissed and the idea that scientists get it right because they avoid value judgments was widely embraced. Up until environmentalism became a doctrine that scientists began to embrace!

Environmentalism is, of course, full of value judgments. So what are we to make of these value judgments—aren’t they just as meaningless as those made in, say, ethics, politics, or aesthetics? That is what would follow from the old idea that nothing can be true (or even false) aside of the value-free claims scientists offer us. How can we exempt the claims made about how we ought to—or should or must—conduct ourselves regarding environmental issues? Certainly these claims are value judgments, so how come they are passed off as true by the scientists who make them, while other value judgments are regarded as mere biases, prejudices, or subjective utterances?

Consider a recent book, Endangered: Wildlife on the Brink of Extinction (Firefly Books Ltd., 2006)~~by George C. McGavin, an Oxford University research lecturer, discussing species extinction. The author basically chronicles five great mass extinctions, all do to nonhuman causes, but then warns of a sixth caused by the fact that people have learned to change their environments to suit their needs and wants. He advances as fact some of the highly disputed contentions in science about how the Industrial Revolution, with its pollution, has helped produce climate change and its effects on animal species. Once he has gone through this story, McGavin gives the reader a bunch of suggestions as to what kind of actions people can take to stem all the destruction they have wrought.

First, why is the good researcher, consistent with the value-free approach, not satisfied with the possibility that human beings are part of nature and just like some elements of the rest of nature, they can destroy animal species galore. Why is their destruction not deemed to be simply a part of nature’s value-free unfolding? Especially with what so many scientists teach us, namely, that the course of evolution is inevitable, it is what had to happen, why is human evolution different?

But of course that would require scientists to accept some notions they tend mostly to reject, including the idea of freedom of choice. So not only do the likes of Mr. McGavin accept the idea now that value judgments, namely theirs, are well grounded and no at all subjective or arbitrary (as it was contended in the early 20th century about value judgments and why many scientists insisted on embracing a value-free point of view), they even embrace a stance that assumes something with which many scientists are very uncomfortable, namely, free will. Without free will it makes no sense to make any suggestions as to how people ought to conduct themselves, including as far as the environment is concerned. It is, once again, going to be Que sera, sera—what will be will be and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.

But if this is wrong, as all the advice and admonitions from environmentalists clearly suggest, then we can actually debate the issue of just what is the right course for people to take—should they continue to insist on having their way with the wilds, transform it to suit their needs and wants, or should they defer to some other values, say, preserving the wilds even if they must make serious sacrifices in the process? Or perhaps some other idea could be right?

And then it could also well be that human beings are different from other animals—maybe even superior to them--exactly in being free to choose how they conduct themselves. So all this talk about people being governed—driven—by their genes or DNA or, especially, the forces or laws of evolution would have to be given up since all those notions imply that how we behave is just how we must behave, including when we destroy various species of other animals.

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Machan is the author of Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

The Individual and the General in Our Lives

Tibor R. Machan

Often people who speak out on various issues will do so as if they knew what is true about all of us. This is the source of all the “we” talk in public discourse. “We have such and such rights,” “We need this or that vitamin or exercise or educational program.” Medical science certainly weighs in with such pronouncements all the time, claiming that coffee is or is not healthful, that cholesterol must be lowered or a certain ratio of age to height to weight is right for everyone.

At the same time there is much criticism about a one-size-fits-all approach to, say, education, exercise, weight loss, nutrition, or style of clothing. It is clear enough that in these and numerous other matters one person’s truth is not that of another, certainly not that of many, many others. It's a bit like shoes—we have our own size that fits while the rest don't. So the career path of one’s brother, father, mother, or friend may well not be the right one for oneself. This is important to realize, otherwise many people will pursue personal policies that do not fit them at all. A singing career may be right for some folks but not at all for others—as, for example, the show American Idol teaches viewers.

This lesson about individualism is perhaps most important to learn in relation to romance. Some of us appeal to some others, but not to all those who appeal to us. There is nothing amiss here at all, only the lack of a good match. Not understanding this can often lead people to get very angry at each other, thinking that they are owed being liked, even loved, when the mutual attraction is plainly missing. But instead of accepting this fact, many take it as a put down or criticism from those they would like to appeal to. It isn’t. It’s merely the announcement or declaration of lack of interest or appeal. And while those who wish to be appealing to someone will find it disappointing that they are not, they need to learn that such this is nothing against them. Again, one could think of it on analogy with liking a piece of clothing which simply doesn’t fit.

In human affairs, like in most matters, some things are true about us all, some about quite a few but not all, some about a few but not most, and sometimes a truth is only about one individual. We, human beings, are, yes, human, and that means some things will be true of all of us—as the Declaration of Independence states, we all are created with certain unalienable rights, for instance. But we are not all equally talented to sing, dance, or run a major corporation. Some of us are suited for parenthood, others may not be, given our other valid purposes and commitments, or our economic preparedness.

This matter is quite important because when folks fail to heed it, there is a strong tendency to promote public policies that will fit some but not others. Some people can live with trans-fatty foods, peanut butter, mountain climbing, and so forth, while others will be hurt by them. Some people can even safely smoke a few cigarettes a day or week without hurting themselves in the slightest, while others will be hurt due to their physiology and biology.

One size really does not fit all but the temptation to think so has spawned public policies that amount to nothing less than tyranny. Never mind for now that imposing even the right way to live is morally and politically wrong, intolerable. But when the wrong ways are being forced on people, that's even more vicious.

Throughout the globe there are many regimes that live by the one-size-fits-all approach and the worst dictatorships in history, ancient and modern, have be guided by such a fallacious political ideal. The regime of Sparta, no less than those of Nazi and Communist countries more recently were, was motivated in large part by this misguided outlook on how human beings should live in their communities.

Of course, thinking that there is nothing that humans have in common is also misguided. Yes, all people have basic rights and when regimes fail to acknowledge this, they can go very wrong along this opposite line of thinking. Some people, for example, think that the mere diversity of cultures around the globe and throughout human history means that everything is relative, there are no universal principles such as human rights or ethics. And there are common goals and purposes suited to some of us but not others—such as joining a bridge club or playing golf or watching football or tennis or, more seriously, becoming experts in disciplines such as physics, biology or economics. More or less large groups of people can share what is right for them to do, what is good for them in their lives, without everyone doing so.

Indeed, both the individualism that rejects one-size-fits-all policies and the communitarianism that tends to promote it need to be rethought. Both have a place in human affairs and it is best to get it right how they make themselves evident in our own lives.

Thomas Friedman's Love of FDR's Statism

by Tibor R. Machan

In a recent column I made the point that "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." And almost so as to bear out my prescience, Thomas Friedman, the well known author and columnist for The New York Times, produced an essay that explicitly champions drafting a list of "rights" in the spirit of FDR's "second Bill of Rights" or The New Deal. As Friedman would have it,

“The right rallying call is for a "Green New Deal." The New Deal was not built on a magic bullet, but on a broad range of programs and industrial projects to revitalize America. Ditto for an energy New Deal. If we are to turn the tide on climate change and end our oil addiction, we need more of everything: solar, wind, hydro, ethanol, biodiesel, clean coal and nuclear power—and conservation.” (The New York Times, 1-19-07)

And Friedman quite rightly tells us that "To spark a Green New Deal today requires getting two things right: government regulations and prices." Which is to say, he recommends that we become a planned society, with government doing the planning and the rest of us compelled to comply. This, oddly, at the same time as Friedman acknowledges that "Neither the White House nor the Democratic Party seems to grasp that the public and business community are miles ahead of them on this energy/environment issue." That pretty much admits that government is inept and bogged down in bureaucratic slow motion on matters that require intelligent planning, something evidently carried out with some success by the private sector.

This is especially important when it comes to environmental matters since the major obstacle to making adjustments here, as in so many other areas of social life, is the tragedy of the commons. When public spheres are involved—and they are increasing by leaps and bounds these days—there is no hope for prudent conduct from those who have an interest in the outcome. Instead, the various special interests that drive public policy decisions eagerly grab whatever advantage they can, via the political and bureaucratic process, with very little concern for how to deal with the long run.

Back in the days of the Soviet Empire what was so evident to anyone who visited that part of the globe was how ineptly the Soviet system dealt with environmental problems. Government planning simply will not deliver the desired results, in part because the knowledge needed to prepare for the future is lacking in centers of state power and because of the pressure to suit short-term interests.

The opposite is the case with the private sector. If property rights are clearly specified, those who own property will far more likely keep their eyes on the future, even promote their own precautionary measures so as to keep what they own productive and avoid destroying the property of their neighbors who could sue if this isn't done properly. Indeed, just the opposite of what Friedman is advocating is necessary so as to cope promptly and effectively with environmental hazards. What is needed is more vigilant privatization.

Placing responsibility for the care of the environment into the hands of private agents is the way a society best copes with the future. Unfortunately Friedman & Co. are so captive of the governmental habit that they cannot grasp this. In Friedman's case this is especially perplexing, since he has written on the merits of globalization—in his book, The World is Flat—as far as problem solving abroad is concerned.~ He ought to be first in line to reject government meddling—which is to say collective decision making and coercive planning—and urge turning to the private sector when it comes to how a free society ought to prepare for the future.

Instead Friedman, along with all the other statists in this country and elsewhere, see some problem and immediately turn to government for help. This is why they love FDR's New Deal and his Second Bill of Rights, since both of these are basically no more than the transference of the variety of private ways of coping with the future to the one-size-fits-all, guaranteed-to-fail public or collectivist approach.

My Monarchical Temptation

by Tibor R. Machan

As I watched The Queen, one of the best movies I've seen recently, I thought about just how much I detested monarchies. That's how it started. After all, what are monarchies but the subjugation of millions by one individual, a queen or king, sometimes with certain restraints built in, sometimes hardly any? Not all that different from a dictatorship, except kings and queens usually dress in fancier garb and live in far plusher abodes. But in principle monarchs are even more powerful than most dictators, seeing as they claim their earthly power to have been handed to them by God. And when a monarch reigns in consequence of having inherited his or her position, there is hardly any check on whether one of them is out-and-out nuts.

Yet throughout human history some monarchs have been other than sheer tyrants, sometimes even relatively benign and benevolent rulers. So what's better, being ruled by a mob that's supposedly the majority of the politically involved, or by someone who by tradition may in fact uphold certain standards of decency and prudence?

Of course, the Queen of England is but a ceremonial, if rather expensive, monarch today. How such a title can even survive in the 21st century beats me—calling someone "Her Royal Highness" has got to produce guffaws whenever it is said out loud, does it not? The whole enterprise has to resemble something on the order of a fairy tale or Disney story, with everyone knowing full well that there's nothing real to correspond to the funny language. Yet millions in the UK want to hang on to it all. But then people everywhere seem to have a penchant for living with myths in preference to reality!

Of course, when Helen Mirren plays your monarch, it may be very tempting to fall for all the sham. She is such a superb actress and when her persona is infused in the character of the Queen, it is a very promising illusion. Given how messy the alternatives to monarchy have managed to turn out nearly everywhere—just compare George W. Bush with Elizabeth II—this idea of Helen Mirren being in charge of things has something going for it. Especially as the movie depicts her.

The American founders wanted to get away from monarchy because they held that we were all endowed with unalienable rights and so none could justly claim to rule anyone else. As Abraham Lincoln spelled out the point, "No man is good enough to govern another without that other's consent." So all that talk about subjects is pure bunk. But the American founders offered up a genuine improvement to monarchy, namely, a constitutional republic that severely limits the scope and power of government. They did not, however, count on the insidious influence of the age-old governmental habit, which reasserted itself in America despite all those brilliant sentiments expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. What they spawned, sadly, turned out to be a pseudo-democratic empire, with mob rule and the reign of bureaucrats.

What with the resulting tyranny of a bunch of those petty bureaucrats and the politicians in whom people still have the ancient faith that they will fix everything for us, considering the old monarchy doesn't feel so bad, at least not when its embodiment turns out to be Helen Mirren. With her in real power, maybe someone like Tony Blair could be kept in line.

Alas, as things stand, the Queen is little more than a costly figurehead, so I doubt very much that the monarchist system would be an improvement on our depressing regime. For awhile, during the last couple of decades, there was at least the promise of improvement across the globe, in the direction of greater liberty; today, however, the venerable Freedom House is reporting that the regime of individual liberty is on the decline around the globe.

Yes, it was a desperate fantasy on my part, thinking that a monarchy might improve matters. But then Ms. Mirren can turn a man's head even at her current age!

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.