Chavez’s Vision: Latin America’s Coming Nightmare

Tibor R. Machan

In a recent Op Ed for The New York Times, Argentine novelist Luisa Valenzuela, who admits to having no special understanding of politics and is identified as a fiction writer in the "magical realist" tradition, gives a glowing send off to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as a great "pan-American hope." In the process Valenzuela engages in a good measure of wishful thinking and pays no attention to the nature of the political vision Chavez is peddling in Latin America. Perhaps a word of warning from someone who has experienced the reality of that vision would be in order.

To start with, Valenzuela does not bother at all to discuss Chavez’s out and out socialist agenda—such as the nationalization of oil companies (a polite word for theft or expropriation), abolition of private property rights, and silencing of philosophical and political opposition, etc. Here is, at some length, her way of embracing this demagogue’s role in the region:

"Unlike the homogenous rallies of Peronist times, the 30,000 people in this crowd [who greeted Chavez with enthusiasm] came from very diverse backgrounds. In Argentina, the economic crisis of December 2001 significantly altered not only our social dynamic but our semantics. We no longer talk about the "pueblo" — which means town or village as well as people. Now we talk about the "gente," which also means people, but with a different nuance, derived as it is from the Latin gens meaning race, clan or breed.

"The new vocabulary transcends distinctions of class: the middle classes have now merged with the poor to demand their rights. Hence many students and professionals were in attendance that day, not necessarily attracted by the figure of President Chávez himself so much as by the anti-imperialist opportunity he symbolized. We Argentines, who once imagined ourselves more sophisticated, or more European, than the citizens of neighboring states, were brought closer to the rest of the continent by our impoverishment, and we find ourselves more open to the idea of pan-Latin American solidarity."

Notice, right away, the characteristic approach whereby 30 thousand Argentines become "we Argentines." Forget about the other several million and never mind that of the 30 thousand a goodly number were arguably (a) fictional, with the numbers embellished by Chavez supporters, and (b) simply curious or out for a public bash, with no serious commitment to Chavez’s agenda. (Anyone who has Argentinean friends and acquaintances could confirm this.)

This approach to dealing with public affairs is significant because it reveals the central trouble with socialism and the vision of communism that is often used to excuse its currently necessary harsh measures: it is a collectivist political ideal, one that logically produces a dictatorship. Even the innocent sounding doctrine of democracy, when it isn’t limited by constitutional provisions for the protection of individual rights, runs this risk but with socialism—or its current American equivalent, communitarianism—the idea is impossible to disguise except for the wishful thinkers among us: people who talk of "we" this and "we" that ultimately mean, whether they admit it or not, "those who agree with me." The rest just has to accept, like it or not, that they are going to be forced into the tribe, the big "we."

Valenzuela is actually not far from being up front about this when she announces, "Now we talk about the ‘gente,’ which also means people, but with a different nuance, derived as it is from the Latin gens meaning race, clan or breed." This pretty much confesses to tribal thinking, whereby the clan is taken to be some homogenous albeit somewhat diverse whole in which individual identities and differences, however, are abolished in favor of what some powerful figures regard as group traits that are supposedly superior to anything an individual might have in mind.

It is, of course, quite silly for Valenzuela to speak of rights in her column, when she says "the middle classes have now merged with the poor to demand their rights." What rights? Demand them from whom? Indeed, the stress of classes, clans, breed, and such brings to mind the most destructive trends in human social thought, whereby human beings are divided into warring groups, the trends that have given us the age old Balkan and Middle Eastern wars.

Of course, while there is plenty of oil flowing, the tribes can get along to some degree—although judging by the Middle East, even that’s doubtful—since the tragedy of the commons can be disguised when free goods are available a plenty. But once the oil is gone, look out! The solidarity Valenzuela holds out for Latin-America under this socialist vision Chavez is peddling will come to a screeching and tragic end.

I wonder how much responsibility the likes of Valenzuela will take for the result. Will they admit to having produced a vision that amounts to no more than the dream Karl Marx has spawned around the world and which ultimately led to the death of over a 100 million human beings East and West?

Why Victimless Crimes are Wrong

Tibor R. Machan

When the courts refused to let Angel Raich—the California mother of two, suffering from scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, and some other maladies—take a doctor prescribed dosage of marijuana, I was outraged. I wrote this in a column which I submitted to, among other places, a web page, AmericanThinker.com. I received a rebuke from the editor for not producing an analysis of victimless crimes instead.

Well, a 700 word column just doesn’t suffice to provide a comprehensive analysis of what is wrong with victimless crimes but some words on it may be worth producing if only as a kind of mind-teaser that may prompt some further inquiry on the part of readers. But in response to what was done to Angel Raich, words of outrage were the order of the day!

A crime in a free country amounts to the violation of one’s basic and derivative rights. So that murder is a crime since murderers violate the right to life; and so is vehicular manslaughter, because such conduct, too, violates the right to life but in a less direct, straightforward fashion. The American founders had it right when they stated, in the Declaration of Independence, that “to secure [our] rights, governments are instituted among [us], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consent to such a government is granted, either explicitly or implicitly, by being part of a community that recognizes our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and where these rights are given legal protection.

In contrast, when someone advocates a disagreeable idea, no one’s rights are being violated; when someone engages in self-destructive conduct, once again the culprit isn’t violating any rights; when someone sells dope to a willing adult buyer, once again no rights are being violated. Consensual interaction can not be rights violating.

But what, you might ask, about vulnerable folks, with weak wills? Here is where the complications arise, which is why the matter isn’t amenable to being treated briefly. If ordinary citizens, human beings, do have free will, as morality and the criminal law assume, they are able, even if with some difficulty, to resist temptations and inducements from others to do what can hurt them. If they refuse to resist, if they decide to take up a bad habit—smoking dope, gambling excessively, hiring hookers—and even get addicted, this is their responsibility to handle. Others may be morally blameworthy for attempting to induce them, tempting them, promoting the bad behavior, but no one has violated their rights in doing this. I can influence others, perhaps, with fancy words, with charisma, and the like but none of this forcibly imposes anything on them, none of it amounts to violating their rights. Even if they are unusually vulnerable, they have the freedom to take measures to protect themselves from my bad influence—they can avoid me, form a support group to keep away from tempting literature I might send their way, and so forth.

Basically, rights violations are unavoidable physical intrusions on (or threats against) other people, so they are criminal—the victim has no choice but become a victim. But tempting people, influencing them, inducing them and such can all be resisted without much trouble except to summon some will power, some diligence, some resolve.

Of course, and here is the rub, the very idea that people have such freedom of will is in much dispute in our time and to make our the case that they do, if they do, is an elaborate task. Just recently The New York Times Magazine ran a long essay by law professor Jeffrey Rosen—“The Trials of Neurolaw”—in which readers learned that a widespread debate is afoot on whether the assumption of free will can be sustained and should be retained in the legal system (and, by implication, in ethics) in the light of current findings in neuroscience.

Nonetheless, within the framework of the American political and legal tradition, animated by the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence, victimless crimes simply are no proper crimes at all. The people “committing” them may be vicious, evil, acting immorally, and so forth but their doing so does not suffice, in a free society, to make them criminals.

Of course, this is quite moot when it comes to Angel Raich’s case whose consumption of marijuana would amount to taking medicine, not being a drug abuser. So demanding that one defend the rejection of victimless crimes in order to stand up in Raich’s defense is entirely beside the point. Still, on the more general matter of why victimless crimes are bad laws, the essential issue is what such crimes do not violate anyone’s individual rights.

Government Cruelty

Tibor R. Machan

Some of the malfeasance in the world comes not from deliberate malice—malice a forethought, as it’s put in the law—but from stupidity and negligence. Yes, these, too, are mental states riddled with culpability, the culpability of inattention, of obliviousness to what matters, of recklessness, and of oversight. But they are not the sort of evil that involves meanness and cruelty.

Governments throughout human history, however, have been the most guilty of both types of evil. The way those Roman emperors exercised their imperial powers, or feudal monarchs and lords taxed and pillaged the people over whom they ruled (unjustly in the first place), or the armies of various countries imposed brutal force on peasants and merchants who wouldn’t just disappear as they rampaged around the landscape—all this and much, much more has clearly established governments as the worst criminal groups in human history, far worse than the Mafia or any gang in Los Angeles.

Aside from their deliberate, mean-minded viciousness, governments also have perpetrated evils by way of oversight and negligence, as when they impose "public" policies that wreak havoc throughout the land as these rulers, legislatures, bureaucrats, and judges sit about wielding power in Washington and other comfortable centers, leaving the dirty work to the cops. Any even cursory check of what governments have done everywhere, with but the most minimal and negligible exceptions, can show one that this institution has been far more corrupt than helpful in human history.

Yes, the police do at times repel bona fide crime, but even this is marred grossly with how often they embark on harassing, on the orders of "law" makers, "criminals" who do no harm to anyone other than perhaps themselves—prostitutes, johns, gamblers, and, yes, drug offenders and those servicing them. Some actual criminals are convicted in the courts and sent to prison. But even in the so called leader of the free world, the United States of America, about 40 to 50 % of the prison population has no business being there! The injustice of it all is staggering!
When it comes to America’s war on drugs and all the legal paraphernalia surrounding it, we can see that despite some improvements over the last couple of centuries—elimination of slavery, abolition of conscription, institution of various due process provisions—the habits of governments have not gotten much better. This war on drugs is bad enough just in and of itself, of course. There should not be one, period. It is not government’s task in a free society to cope with people’s ill-chosen conduct, including commerce, however much it upsets the sensibilities of some and, indeed, the lives of others. People ought not to be saved from themselves except by the counsel of their family, friends, and neighbors.

But let us just overlook, for a painful moment, how vicious are the war on drugs and all its consequences and focus on the deliberate meanness the mentality that has spawned it inflicts on some people. In California, for example—and it really is just one of many such cases—a women who has been medically judged to require medical marijuana—her doctor reportedly says "marijuana is the only medicine keeping her alive"—has been declared by a federal appeals court "not immune from federal prosecution on drug charges." Angel Raich, a mother of two and suffering from scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, and some other maladies, had sued the feds so she could get relief but instead of making an exception for her, the U. S. Supreme Court and other courts have ruled against her.

I am not privy to all the legal technicalities and, frankly, could care less about them—what matters is that here is an individual in demonstrable danger for her life who could get the remedy she needs but the government stubbornly refuses to yield. Why? The three-judge appeals panel, in this latest round, said that the US hasn’t reached the point where "the right to use medical marijuana is ‘fundamental’ and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’."
Ordered liberty? What a bogus concept! Meaning no liberty but compliance with idiotic, paranoid orders by politicians who, in response to vicious voters without a sense of proportion, want their arbitrary will to be the law of the land.

And some people think government is serving the public interest. My foot.

Spoiling My Children

Tibor R. Machan

This idea of tough love, I am sick of it. When I was a kid I had plenty
of tough—actually brutal—love cast my way, prompting me to run from home once I got to be of age (couldn’t do it before because the cops would have dragged me back). So I decided a few things then and there.

For one, I wouldn’t have children until I myself grew up. My first was
born when I was 40. And good thing too—by then I had pretty much gotten rid off much of the pent up anger engendered by my own parents who—in their defense—tried to raise kids in the midst of communism, which was no picnic. Also, there was economics. As a first generation American, an immigrant, in other words, I thought it a bad idea to bring kids into the world without funds to support them. So I wanted to be solvent when they were born. Not only that. Because of that miserable system of socialism, still adored by too many people in the Western academic world, my family was poor, as were most people back in Hungary. So I started to work at 11, in a bakery, and haven’t stopped since. Not that it was such a bad thing. But then some of us turn things around pretty good and I learned not to let stuff get to me too much, lest I’d be unhappy all the time.

But I had no desire to put my kids through the hardships I experienced. Certainly, once I had the ability to provide for them and more, I did so. Even now, when they are young adults, I figure what else should I spend my spare change on besides helping them out, provided it’s reasonable. So I do.

Some of my friends warn me that this is bad for my kids. They should struggle for everything. I say, bunk. If I can, I will help out so they
can start with a pleasant life and that is how it has gone and still
goes, partly because I help out. I have tried suggesting to them, firmly,
that my help is temporary and they need to become self-sufficient; but is it necessary to acclimate them to this fact by not giving them goodies
they would like and I can provide? I don’t think so. That idea suggests
that kids need to be trained, not taught. I think they can be taught.

Indeed, I find it odd that so many people have come to believe that doing nice things for one’s kids is something of a liability. Clearly it’s
pleasant for me—I enjoy it when they can live pleasantly with my help. And it seems, too, that there is a time when young people need to be young people, not yet adults. And that’s when they ought to have an abundance of fun. If it can be had, so much the better.

All in all, my idea is that raising kids is done best by providing a good example for them—if you work hard, are responsible, keep your word, are creative, and so forth, as the adult who is most prominent in your kids’ lives they will most likely learn from that, plus a bit of wise counsel. (That's while the basic necessities are taken good care of, of course.) You don’t need to deploy behavior modification techniques, as if they were circus animals that need to be trained all the time.

Come to think of it, the point is that kids have minds and aren’t
passively reacting to the world around them. Sure, it may have been one unavoidable way to raise someone to put him through endless hoops and hurdles, all that tough love stuff. But I bet that if my parents—at least my mother—had not had to deal with the damned commissars and bureaucrats all the time, she, too, would rather have “spoiled” me instead of subject me to all those strictures I now recall somewhat bitterly.

So, I say, spoil the kids, if you can couple it with some decent advice and set an example you aren’t ashamed of. The rest is up to them.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Tibor R. Machan

Yes, I do have a blog but all it contains is copies of columns I send out to various newspapers, magazines and web sites, as well as a few book, movie, and TV recommendations. I do not get into lengthy exchanges on blogs and despite being asked to do so, I think I should stay away from blogs, for the most part. I have nothing against those who do all this blogging but it’s just not my cup of tea.

While columns are something I have done for over forty years, I much prefer longish papers, articles, and books, mainly because in such fare one is able to address the various controversial assumptions on which one’s more particular suggestions and recommendations rest.

For example, when I attack the institution of taxation in a column, all I can do there is engage in a bit of mind-teasing. I might prompt some readers to undertake their own investigation based on the little I can produce in such a brief discussion. In a longer piece, however, I can discuss how taxation was at home in a feudal system; why such a system appeared palatable to so many people and had a long history (which continues, still); how some of its elements linger on in constitutional democracies even though their foundations have disappeared, etc., and so forth.

Or I can consider how when one discusses what public officials should or ought to do, one is assuming that they have free will, otherwise chiding or praising them is groundless—if one cannot do other than what one did, all things being the same, then one isn’t free to do the right thing or the wrong, just what one must. In which case human conduct is no more praise- or blameworthy than is a tornado or earthquake. And this point requires considerable exposition and explanation, impossible to perform in a column, not, especially, with all the heavy hitters today in neuroscience and other technical fields lining up to ridicule free will. One just cannot handle such matters briefly.

Nor can one do much with these topics on blogs except to exchange points one by one, without the possibility to develop a general thesis that can be convincing. As a result, whenever I have yielded to the temptation to blog, I have noticed how quickly some folks lose their cool—including me, come to think of it. (Some people do post my columns on their blogs and the few times I have checked, many respondents have been insulting—there seems to be this widespread desire to inflict pain rather than to help reach some kind of reasoned conclusion.)

Now there are some matters that blogs are very good for. One that comes to mind is conveying rapidly developing information. When that’s of value, blogs are a great resource. They are like an instant newspaper, with unending stories coming at readers all the time. And that is of immense value when, for example, one needs to make accurate, up to date plans or decisions. Getting word about a fire or heavy traffic or the need for some information is achieved much more quickly these days than it used to be. Indeed, the Internet is of unsurpassed use to anyone who wants to communication such information to maximum effect.

Which brings to my mind how both too much good and too much evil is expect from cyberspace. Like all other human inventions, cyber-communication has its pluses and minuses. The minuses will surely bring out alarmists who will gleefully call for government regulation of the Internet—most often invoking helpless children to justify this, as if government has ever managed to be of much use to the vulnerable among us as opposed to using them to gain more power!

So, just because I will not blog, it doesn’t in the slightest follow that others, with different skills and temperaments, shouldn’t. But then this is yet another place where it becomes so very obvious that how people ought to act varies; there are very few universal ethical or practical principles or rules for people, and when some presume to know what others ought to do, let alone to gain power to make them do the right thing, we are all in trouble. The power is most likely to be used, very soon, to perpetrate far greater wrongs than it was meant to correct.

I Outsourced my Haircut

Tibor R. Machan

When I left the US Air Force back in the early 60s, one of the benefits I had to relinquish is the great flat top haircuts I used to be able to get there. The barbers were experts at providing me with those cuts. So what was I going to do?

For about 20 years afterwards I cut my own hair. I didn’t know it back then, but I was being a bad boy as far as many contemporary political pundits and even some economists are concerned, the likes of Ralph Nader, Patrick Buchanan, and Paul Krugman. I took jobs from some Americans and gave them to, well, me! The money that could have gone to the barbers in my neighborhood remained in my pocket for me to spend on something else. The barbers, in turn, had to drum up an extra haircut job, given that I took mine from them.

You might have thought I had reformed in the meantime, seeing all the objections raised against outsourcing throughout the last several years. But no. I am at it again.

Although for quite some time I have been going back to barbers—my hair is now difficult to manage, given how thin it has gotten and how little I care to do the acrobatics needed to cut it in the back—the price some of them charge takes me aback now. Having managed the do it yourself approach for such a long time, shelling out fifteen bucks for a plain cut, and the tip, still jars me. But I understand the principle of supply and demand, so I did not protest. I kept going back to these folks who seemed to me too expensive, given how I had managed the task for nothing but a few lost minutes.

Alas, despite living in one of the most expensive regions of the country, let alone the world, I discovered a barber shop on my way to work that charges only six dollars for the kind of cut I like. And now they are getting my business every three or four weeks, not the people who to my mind charge an arm and a leg.

Yes, I took the job of cutting my hair from some folks who depended on this source of revenue and gave it to some others who also do but charge much less for their work. I went and found some cheap labor from which to benefit! Not only that, the two out of the three barbers in this far less expensive shop are, you guessed it, "foreigners." Maybe even in America illegally! Well, no, I don’t know this for sure except they hardly speak any English at all, apart from such crucial terms as "a trim" and "taper." Still, they do a fine job, indeed mess things up far less frequently than did the more expensive experts in other shops around my neighborhood.
Why have I zero guilt about having outsourced my haircuts? Why don’t I see myself as a nasty, greedy person who is willing to deprive some good American barbers of their income just so he could save, well, almost fifty percent on his haircuts?

Here is why. In obtaining the goods and services of others in the market place, I am looking for the best deal I can find. Indeed, I take this to be a moral responsibility of mine, the practice of the moral virtue of prudence. I do not wish to waste my resources and when I can find something I want for a great price, I’ll jump at the chance. (My children sure appreciate this, seeing how such prudence makes it possible for me to provide them better than if I didn’t watch it with my spending.)
Yes, I care about my own purse and my children’s desires for what I can get for them more than I do for the economic well-being of the barbers who work around town. These barbers aren’t my relatives, or friends, or even close associates, so all I need them for is a good deal. I am sure they are relatives, friends, and associations of some persons who would deal with them differently from how I do. And I, too, have some relatives, friends, and associates around with whom I do not do business only but whom I also wish to help out. So I may not outsource my favorite butcher and restaurateur, given how I have developed a relationship with them that now goes beyond commerce.

The circle of those with whom I do business as well as consider friends is, however, small, quite necessarily so. I do not have time for very many friends. I do, however, have a great many partners in trade. Most of them I tend to treat professionally. So if my doctor moves away because she got a better offer someplace out of reach for me, I don’t think I have been betrayed. She ought to act prudently, too. And if the barbershop where I am getting such a good deal were to move out of range, that too would be quite OK. I may at times be willing to be my brother’s keeper, but not my barber’s keeper. Nor need all those firms that outsource some of their work for a better deal.

UN Shows Positive Rights are Bogus

Tibor R. Machan

Even though the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a confused mess, in its frequent reports on the state of human rights across the globe the United Nations is inadvertently rejecting the idea of positive rights (which sadly is a substantial portion of that list of supposed rights everyone has). In recent months the UN has reported on widespread human rights violations around the world but in most if not all cases, the violations involved abridgments of basic, negative rights. That is certainly the case in Darfur, where genocide is now rife, and in the various countries where women are oppressed, as another example.
The rights that the UN reports are being violated all over the place, even in the United States of America, are the bona fide, genuine individual rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence. They are distinct from the pseudo rights that amount to entitlements to the work and property of others who do not willingly provide these. Such entitlements include the "right" to a job, "right" to health care, "right" to decent housing, "right" to education and so forth.

The former, genuine rights require that people do not aggressively interfere with others—that no one murders or assaults or otherwise violently or by means of fraud intrudes on other people. Another label for these rights is "freedom" rights. When they are respected and protected, people enjoy freedom from, oppression, brutalization, servitude or slavery.

The so called positive rights, in turn, require that people perform involuntary servitude for others, including the government. For example, the so called right to health care coerces doctors and nurses to work for patients or it coerces some people to pay for the medical care of other people they have not volunteered to help. Such "rights" really are an abuse of the concept, which was originally—starting in the 12th century—a principle identified as involving people respecting each other's independence, each other's sovereignty, their unalienable rights to be free.

When the UN reports on rights violations across the globe, it mostly lists abridgment of negative or freedom rights. That makes sense since those rights can be respected virtually anywhere, any time. There can be no excuse for raping, murdering, assaulting, kidnapping people, no matter what.

In contrast, if someone's so called positive rights are violated—for example, if one didn't get medical care or education or a decent job or housing in a country—this could well be lamentable but it would not amount to violation of one's basic rights. It could even be argued that where such services are lacking for people, there is something amiss. Maybe the country is too poor, too undeveloped, too technologically and economically backward. But these do not have to involve the violation of anyone's rights and where rights are violated, they would be negative or freedom rights so that such violations prevent people from achieving a better life for themselves.

It is argued by some developmental economists and scholars that it is precisely the violation of negative or freedom rights that poses the greatest obstacle to people's well being. When such rights are respected and protected in law, the society can be free and in a free society there is a greater likelihood of advancement of all sorts than in an oppressed society.

But when so called positive rights are enforced—when entitlement programs are being imposed on a population—there is a great deal of curtailment of individual liberty. People are coerced to "help" others which then leads to resentment and rebellion instead of development and creativity.

Even the UN's reports appears to strongly confirm that the only genuine rights we have are negative or freedom rights, those that require others—including the government—to stop interfering with us. No one is entitled to be helped by others who do not volunteer for this. And it seems that recognition of this actually fosters well being.

Need We Condescend to Readers?

Tibor R. Machan

Since the fall of 1966 I have been writing columns for daily newspapers. Most of these were published by one newspaper group owned by a family now in its fifth generation but many have seen the light in various other national dailies from the East to the West Coast. Over the years some of these columns amounted to short essays, as lengthy as 1500 words, but most of them have been of the size one finds on the Op Ed pages of many newspapers, roughly 700 words long.

As such, the most one is able to touch upon is just a few salient points of a topic, rarely address anything in full detail. So I have come to think of these columns as mind teasers, maybe able to attract some readers’ attention and simply suggest how some topic might best to grappled with, at least as I understand it. And some have, frankly, been minor rants, when something in the culture is simply too upsetting not to speak up about.

Of course anyone who puts pen to paper has to have some gall. Why should his ideas merit attention? There have been and continue to be many, many individuals, sometimes of vast learning and brilliance, who chime in an the various topics of interest to people, so to think that one belongs among these is somewhat arrogant. Yet, even to be out there and forge a life for oneself involves a bit of pushiness, doesn't it?

By training I am an academic philosopher, with a Ph D in the field, who has taught university level philosophy courses and written scholarly books and papers on philosophical topics. Thus some of my columns aim to bring to newspaper readers, in an accessible form, what I take to be a valid approach to subjects that have been deemed important in my field. And here is where some editors consider it a bad idea to do this.

Quite often these editors consider what I write a bit highfalutin. They believe my topics—say on free will versus determinism, the nature of justice, or globalization—and my treatment of them are too heady, abstract, over the readers’ heads. And I completely disagree. Not that everyone will have an interest in tackling the topics I dwell on in the terms I find suitable. Of course not. But that’s not the same as to believe that readers are unable to handle these topics the way I present them.
Whenever one comes upon a new group of students in a college or university classroom, one finds that about 80 percent of them need to be brought in kicking and screaming; they are not that interested. Especially after twelve years of public education, where hardly anyone cares about what students want to know but treat them mostly as clay to be shaped, bottles to be filled with what the administrators and teachers insist everyone needs to learn, when these young people come to college, they tend to focus on other matters than academics. So not only must a teacher teach but also to market the subject, ever so gently.

So a skill of teaching has to be to bring topics to the attention of students in terms that are reasonably accessible and only slowly raise the bar, introduce more and more complicated concepts as the development of knowledge of a field requires.

Readers of newspapers aren’t one’s students, of course, but they, too, need some marketing for them to become interested in something that may not be on their minds just at the time when they run across one’s writing. But it isn’t at all that they are ill equipped to grasp what one is writing, or very rarely so. Sure, they may not wish to grapple with a topic, or with a certain way of looking at it. But that’s different. That isn’t as if they were too inept to understand, only not much involved and busy with other matters, probably.

All in all, I do not believe most people have a problem with the level of writing I and other columnists coming out of the academy produce. And of course now and then a columnist is going to make an effort not merely to cater to readers’ existing interests but to introduce topics he or she considers important. And that can easily misfire. Not, however, because readers lack the intelligence but mostly because they have their minds on other matters and don’t want to lend it to those the columnists wishes them to pay attention to.

My Brief Encounter with Arthur Schlesinger

Tibor R. Machan

Over the several decades during which I have championed the free society I have rarely been part of discussions that included prominent public intellectuals. One exception was the "Sidney Hook Reconsidered: A Centennial Celebration," held at the Graduate School and University of New York, back on October 25 & 26, 2002. I had known Professor Hook for quite a while, interviewed him for Reason magazine (May 1977), and even made a pilot for a proposed political philosophy TV series with him in 1986. So I was included in the group whose members reminisced about Hook, some of them very notable indeed. Nathan Glazer, Cornell West and Arthur Schlesinger took part and I ended up on the dais with Glazer and Schlesinger.

Of course, Schlesinger, who died on February 28, 2007, was a very famous pop historian, widely known for his several books on John F. Kennedy—a president he idolized so much that quite a few other historians criticized him for it. (Schlesinger reportedly welcomed this!) On this occasion Schlesinger, who had been something of a cohort of Sidney Hook in their earlier mutual efforts to disassociate the American Left from communism, set out to lambaste Hook, not to praise him. His presentation came just before mine.

In my own brief reminiscence, prepared before I had any knowledge of what Schlesinger would say, I praised Professor Hook for his rare early prescience vis-à-vis Soviet Communism, noting that he was one of the few on the American Left who saw through all the hullabaloo about the new promise land the USSR was supposed to be. (Anyone who wishes to encounter such a stance toward the Soviets can witness this in the movie, Reds [1981], starring Warren Beatty, about the journalist John Reed who fell hook line and sinker for the myth of the glorious new world the Soviet Union was building!)

When I got to the rostrum and began my talk, as soon as I got to the part about Hook’s perceptiveness about the Soviets Schlesinger stood up from the dais and walked off the elevated stage and, if I recall correctly, out of the auditorium where the conference was being held.

I cannot swear that the reason Schlesinger walked was that he heard me praise Hook. But given how in his own talk Schlesinger chided him severely for having become obsessed with anti-communism and with helping to bring about the McCarthy era, it's a fair assumption that he meant to protest my contrary view. As Schlesinger put it, Hook allowed “anti-communism consume his life to the point that, like Aaron’s rod, it swallowed up nearly everything else.” Yet, Schlesinger himself was among those on the Left who didn’t approve of the Soviet Union but, I guess, not so much that he favored forthright and vigorous anti-communism.

In any case the remarks I had prepared to say at the conference and that turned out to follow Arthur Schlesinger’s repudiated these anti-Hook sentiments from start to finish. As Professor Ronald Radosh observed about the conference in an article for The New York Post (December 12, 2002), “Schlesinger attack[ed] Hook for one of the proudest and most important events in his long career—his organization of serious intellectual opposition to the communist-sponsored Waldorf Conference in 1949” where Hook, a prominent Leftist in the U.S.A., was very pointedly excluded from participation and then, in turn, organized a counter conference. For this Schlesinger apparently couldn’t forgive the man although he himself was part of that counter conference. And since my own remarks praised Hook for his virtually lone, energetic, and ongoing anti-communism while remaining an intellectual on the Left, it appears they didn’t warrant the sanction of the great man that his continued presence might afford.

The episode is sadly of more widespread significance than simply having been an interesting event in my own history. It highlights just how much the most prominent intellectuals in 20th century America—not to mention other Western Countries—have been misguided about what political system to champion. Not only that—something of which even Professor Hook might be somewhat guilty—but a great many of them tolerated the most massive totalitarianism in human history because it was supposedly marching toward the secular promise land of communism.

Many people today wonder why it is that America’s original ideals have so few champions around the globe. Some of the blame should, of course, fall on America’s political leaders who have betrayed those ideals over the years and still do so in spades. But another reason is that the bulk of intellectual—academic, scholarly—energy in America has been and indeed continues to be misspent on pursuing the reckless dreams of various versions of socialism and communism instead of developing further the magnificent political theory of the American founders.

Free Markets & Harmful Provisions

by Tibor R. Machan

In a free society it is law and not the government bureaucracy thatadjudicates claims about people causing harm to others. In other words, ifsomeone believes another has caused harm to him or her, that's a claim tobe adjudicated. Government regulation, on the other hand, pre-empts allthis and thereby involves a kind of prior restraint, which is a grossviolation of due process.

You remember due process? It means that no one may be imposed upon withun-assumed burdens, fines, costs, etc., unless proven to have violatedanother's rights. This is one reason self-incriminatory testimony may notbe coerced out of a witness—the burden of showing that force may beinflicted upon someone lies with the prosecution, with those leveling acharge against someone. No one needs to prove his or her lack of guilt!

Government regulation violates this sterling principle of a free societyby pre-emptive intrusion on people's productive and other economicactivities. Yes, the law is contradictory—it both bans and permits suchpre-emptive intrusion. But that's not the point—the laws of countries areoften terrible and it takes examination and criticism to set them right.Blind faith in the law leads to tyranny.

Even when harmful products are sold to people, the only requirement thatcan reasonably be made is that the harm be noted up front. So, forexample, when cigarettes are sold, the seller needs to alert buyers thatordinary use of the product can produce maladies that no one reasonablywould want to experience. But even there, only after the fact may someonebe found guilty of having harmed someone—although if the punishment forinflicting the harm is efficient and prompt, this will send a message toproducers and pretty much eliminate the problem.

This means that, yes, a free society will welcome litigation but notgovernment regulation. (There are non-government regulations in freesocieties, of course, as when insurance companies make it a condition fortaking on a client that provision of goods and services avoid seriousrisks!)

Now why, if this is how a free country should deal with hazards in themarketplace, is there so much government meddling in market relationships?Plainly, because not enough people want to live in a free society—theywant government to run their lives. This is what some critics ofcapitalism have called "soft paternalism." Trouble is, softpaternalism is imposed on us all, not only on those who want it. I maysign up for someone caring for my health and fitness but I may not sign upsomeone else, who hasn't agreed to the arrangement.

So while it is quite OK to be pre-emptive with one's own risk—which is tosay, to foot one's own cost for precaution—it is wrong to involveunwilling others in such a scheme, ones who may well not wish to pay forthe arrangements. And it is no excuse to say, well, we have decided thisdemocratically. Democracy does not sanction rights violations—that wouldthe tyranny of the majority, not the properly limited democracy of a freesociety.

In any case, one reason these notions are strongly resisted, including bysome influential legal scholars, is that legal traditions in mostcountries, including America, have transmitted the old fashioned statismof the feudal era, when the king was deemed to be the keeper of the realm.Sure, we no longer have a king but unfortunately too many of the powers ofmonarchies are now held by the various governments of our putatively freesociety. In effect, the previous powers of the king are now those of thedemocratically elected government. That is why government regulation isstill with us—it is plainly a reactionary political economic device.

Bad habits linger on both in the lives of individuals and the legalsystems of societies. To be rid of them there needs to be constantvigilance, constant reminders that a just society must, first andforemost, be a free society.

The State versus Broadcasting

by Tibor R. Machan

In 1927 Congress nationalized the ether—now known as the electromagneticspectrum. This is the sphere where broadcast radio and television signalstravel. Instead of treating the realm as subject to homesteading and othermeans of allocation as private property—which is how it should have beendone in a bona fide free country—the politicians, led by a NebraskaSenator, just took the whole thing for the government—in the name of thatinsidious pseudo entity, "the public."

Like "the community" or "society" or "the people," "the public" is avirtually empty concept. Yes,there can be proper uses of it—such as when we say that protection ofindividual rights is a public good, meaning, it is really to everyone'sbenefit in a country. But this is very rare. Mostly "the public," as "thecommunity," is rolled out as a cover forvarious special interests.

So now when the two companies, XM and Sirius, propose merging into a $13billion satellite corporation, claiming that such consolidation providesthe only economically feasible means for saving radio, there are againvoices insisting that "the public interest" demands governmentinterference! And again, of course, it is a ruse.

In an Op Ed piece for The New York Times, sociology (1) professor EricKlinenberg who wrote the book Fighting for Air: The Battle to ControlAmerica's Media, puts in a plea thus:

"It's time for Congress and the F.C.C. to consider policy ideas intended toserve the public interest, like requiring broadcast radio stations to airoriginal programming on the new digital stations, or allowing satellitecompanies to run local news, talk and music. Mega-mergers are unlikely toprovide any real benefits to citizens and consumers. Why resort to evenmore consolidation when we already know it doesn't work?"

Notice how the interest of some people who like to listen to radio andwant it to broadcast "local news, talk and music," is used to asa justification for government requiring what a business must be requiredto do. No, let us not leave it to market forces, supply and demand—whichwould let the company sink or swim, as any other business based on itsperformance and management. Instead bring in the feds because, of course,government's running of broadcast firms, as any other kind, has proven tobe such a roaring success everywhere around the globe. And all sonecessary, given how it is in the public interest.

Here is Klinenberg's powerful case:

"Radio is our most intimate medium—it wakes us in the morning, follows usinto the shower, accompanies us during commutes and becomes a lifeline inemergencies. But radio is struggling to attract and retain an audience."

To start with, radio is not "our" medium. Listeners purchaseradio offerings just like they do other things, only in a slightly morecomplicated way; namely, through accepting advertising along with theprogramming, as it happens when we visit all those “free” web sites or paya token price for newspapers and magazines—far less, in any case, thanwhat they actually cost to produce.

Professor Klinenberg gives away his case by admitting that radio has beenhaving a problem attracting and retaining a sufficiently large audience tomake all those wishing to be in the business succeed. Which means it isclearly not a "public good," something for everyone, like policeprotection or the courts that are good candidates for what does serve agenuine public interest. In other words, millions and millions of us arequite happy living without "our" supposedly most intimatemedium. Instead of listening to radio, the members of the public oftenjust purchase CDs or buy programming from the Internet. Or, maybe, theydon't at all listen to what radio offers, not music, not talk shows, notnews, because they have different interests or sources.

But because one academic sociologist, along with maybe a pretty sizablespecial interest group, would like to have radio handed to it on the backsof the rest of us, with Congress and the FCC regimenting the industry totheir heart's content, government is supposed to treat radio servicedifferently, as if it were the legal system or the military standing indefense of everyone's rights.

I hope this isn't going to happen. Let the Republican administration atthe FCC resist this plea for the feds to get into it all again, as whenthey made that awful judgment back in 1927 to make the electromagneticspectrum "ours."

Europe's “Philosophical” Problem

by Tibor R. Machan

France, England, Holland, Germany and some other countries are reeling from it now. It is the controversy over young Muslim women wearing the veil in schools. But I do not agree with a recent reviewer, David A. Bell, in The New Republic, who exclaimed, "This is one of the strangest, most philosophically rattling, controversies in recent European memory ..." He said this after observing that "Jack Straw, the leader of the British House of Commons, recently attacked the wearing of veils as a 'visible statement of separation and of difference,' and requested that women remove them when visiting him."

The reason this is little more than hyperbole is that a philosophically rattling controversy would have to be far more basic, bear on far more fundamental issues, than does the one about wearing veils in public. For example, "Is there a God?" or "Are human beings free?" or "Can the human mind understand things as they really are?" Now those would be philosophical.

This isn't to say that the veil issue is insignificant. But there is a plain enough solution to it and in America that solution has been tried in some areas of our highly diverse culture. This is to significantly diminish the public square. If one keeps much of society—church, home, work, recreation, travel and the like—within the private sector, there can be an unexpected measure of diversity about how people comport themselves without this posing any kind of controversy. Yes, in America we also face the (by no means philosophically but otherwise) bothersome controversy of what to do with young people who are herded into public schools as a matter of the nearly one-size-fits-all public policy of coercive and publicly funded education. But that's kind of a relic and all the fuss about school choice and charter schools and independent schools testifies to this fact.

In a bona fide free country different groups of people with their different religious and philosophical convictions, habits, rituals and such have no trouble following their own ways. That is because of the institution of private property rights! Yes, Virginia, the right to private property accommodates all such peaceful differences among a citizenry. Only when people are drafted, conscripted into some sphere, such as primary and secondary schools, do troubles arise. (Just ask the Amish about all this; they’ll tell you a sorry story.)
Indeed, ever since the U. S. military has eliminated conscripting young citizens into the services, they, too, no longer face this problem of the impossible, uncomfortable, often offensive mix. American society, with its innumerable ethnic and religious and other culturally divers groups manages to do quite well provided people aren't coercively made to mingle. Of course, when you extort money from everyone, via taxes, so as to pay for various practices that some object to, such as stem cell or climate change research, abortion, publishing propaganda in support of (or against) sex education and so forth, then trouble is not far away. That's because peaceful mingling is, well, peaceful but coerced mingling produces considerable acrimony.

If so-called public resources or public spheres are utilized for some purposes but not others, those among the public not favoring the purpose that benefits from such resources or is provided space in such spheres will be upset. To use what is "ours" for goals that are not in fact ours at all is naturally going to be found objectionable. Why should Roman Catholics, whose religion rejects abortion, have to pay for abortion clinics? It places them into a morally unacceptable situation, namely, funding what they consider morally wrong. Why should a school that wants to make it possible for all students to learn without distraction have to admit and make room for a few who insist on displaying their faith for all to have to confront?

In a free country, however, these problems are solved by the institution of the right to private property—different groups can practice their ways without imposing them on others within their own borders. In the very few public places, such as, say, a court house, the rules of the public realm would apply to all equally! And that is hardly a source of major displeasure. But the same isn't true when it comes to such phony public places as a community swimming pool. There, if one is coerced into some uniform practice of, say, wearing a certain kind of bathing garb, members of some groups will object and justifiably feel put upon.

So, it turns out Europe's main philosophically troubling controversy is manageable along lines shown by much of American society—place borders around groups so they can exclude those who refuse to conform and subject only the very few public spaces adhere to uniform policies.

Is Free Will Incredible?

Tibor R. Machan

As someone who became convinced early in my life and even more so in my career as an academic philosopher that human beings normally possess free will, I have been fighting something of an uphill battle about the issue despite how ubiquitous the assumption is that we indeed do have this capacity. Anytime we hold people responsible, or urge that they alter their conduct, resist a temptation, battle some bad habit, and so forth, the free will idea lurks in the background. The criminal and even tort law, of course, assumes people could have done otherwise than they did, all things being equal. Politics, with all of its blaming and praising, is in the same situation, as is personal morality where none of its would make sense unless we had the capacity to choose how we act and thus can be faulted for failing to do what’s right. As the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, "ought" implies "can."

On the other hand, in most scientific disciplines, both natural and social, the idea of free will has gotten a very bad rep. Most social scientists want to find the factors or causes that explain how people behave and declare themselves value-free, free, that is, of any moral or ethical evaluation of our conduct. With the rise of the influence of genetics as a field wherein causes of human behavior, even attitudes, feelings, thoughts, ideas, and the rest are explored, the conviction has become virtually universal among scientists of all kids that everything about us is fully, unexceptionably caused by various innate, hard-wired biological attributes or properties or by prompters in the environment.

Most recently, for example, the notion that the habit of smoking is something fully physiological got a boost from findings about someone who had an injury to a part of his brain and suddenly had no inclination to smoke whatsoever. Similar findings have made the news about our intentions—they seem to researchers to be irrelevant to what we do. As the UK weekly, THE WEEK reported in its February 17, 2007, issue: “neuroscientists have, for the first time, used brain imaging techniques to work out people’s future intentions.” Specifically, “the research involved asking volunteers to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers they had not yet seen, before being given a brain scan using a technique called functional magnetic imaging resonance…[and] the researches were able to predict, with a 70% success rate, whether the volunteers would add or subtract the numbers when they were flashed up on screen.”

But it isn’t just some of this, still not fully interpreted, work that gives the determinists their confidence. From early on when the natural sciences got their big boost, around the time of Galileo, philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza inferred from the findings of physics and astronomy that free will must be a self-delusion. In the 20th century, with the emergence of quantum physics, some of this came under criticism but even with uncertainty as a feature of the world, most scientists, such as Stephen Hawking, simply said, well we may never be able to fully prove determinism but it is really the only game in town. Such philosophers as Daniel Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland followed suit and today there is widespread consensus among both the scientists and the philosophers that the determinism that says all of what we do has to happen as it does and our minds are not in control of our actions seem to carry the day.

Why, then, might one hold out in favor of free will? I am no mystic; I do not believe in “spooky” things, to use Dennett’s way of characterizing the idea of human agency, or self-determination. What then? Is it sheer stubbornness, the desperate need to believe that I am in control of things? Others can do without the idea and so could I if I didn't think determinism makes little sense. And the determinist's idea just doesn’t make sense, in the end.

As I write these lines, I observe that I am in control. Indeed, the very idea that some of these bright folks have a handle on how things are with human behavior couldn’t make sense if they were not free to check it out without prejudice, without having their minds already hard-wired to think in certain ways. And the evidence against free will also seems a bit odd—when one drives down the road and a car suddenly veers into one's lane and one quickly steers to avoid it, how is it that one's intention is predictable? No one knew of the veering of the car and what someone would do—indeed, many may have gotten into a crash at such a point. Too much in our lives is unpredictable quite apart from free will and how we will act in light of such events then could hardly be predicted.

Even that evidence about parts of the brain suggesting that our habits are innate is a bit fishy—all of that may well be a matter of correlation, not causation. Sure, ongoing practices leave traces in the brain, that’s to be expected, and these are likely to become factors in the development of habits. But the initial practices could well have been a matter of free choice.

There’s much more to the discussion. It is a vital one for many reasons. But certain features of our lives, especially those having to do with independent—indeed, scientific—thinking support that there is a central element of freedom in human existence that is impossible to deny.

Morality and Illiberal Democracy

by Tibor R. Machan

When the term "democracy" is used loosely, as in geopolitical discussions, it is used to mean that kind of political system in which everyone can have an input into decisions bearing on public affairs. What is left mostly unspecified is just what count as public affairs.

In a totalitarian state everything counts as the public realm; in a free country there are strict limits. In most existing countries today it's somewhere in between. Democratic decisions impact taxation, government regulation, international diplomacy, education and health policies, and whatever else the government is involved in. The idea of limiting the public realm has gone out of fashion and was never taken very seriously except by some few political theorists and even fewer politicians, let alone bureaucrats. Once in power, there is a very strong temptation to expand the reach of the power one has. People who get chummy with government tend not to like it when its powers are limited—they have agendas and such limitations could impede their efforts to carry them out.

And in democracies the politicians' constituency often urges government to expand its power so as to provide the voters with various benefits —ones, however, that have to be obtained by confiscating other people's resources, including their labor.

In short, democracy often tilts quite powerfully against morality. No, there is no consensus about what is the right morality for people to practice, but there are some general principles or virtues most of us support at least in the realm of private conduct. Few people champion robbing Peter so as to "help" out Paul—we usually believe that Peter needs to agree to the idea. Instead of confiscation, stealing, most would tend to endorse generosity and charity. The same is true about honesty—on the whole, other than in exceptional cases, most of us value straight talk and have contempt for liars. I think the same can be said about respecting the liberty of others—we hire them if we would like them to work for us and do not coerce them into doing such work. Millions of others do valuable labor but we tend to consider it wrong to conscript this labor for our benefit.

So while there are disagreements about various moral matters—abortion, assisted suicide, child-raising and so forth—there is a very large sphere of agreement, too. Yet when we look at the way democracy functions in most countries, it is in these areas of basic moral agreement where a serious discord is evident. Democratic decisions do, in fact, lead to robbing Peter so as to "help" out Paul. (I use the scare quotes because one can hardly call forcing people to part with their resources bone fide help given to anyone! This is why government cannot be compassionate!) Democratic decision making routinely endorses conscripting people's labor, limiting their liberty, making them act as they do not choose to even when they are not violating anyone's rights, and so forth. In short, illiberal, unlimited democracy is routinely in conflict with standards of morality or ethics.

In practical terms this means that most countries are replete with public policies that are out and out immoral ... yet widely accepted, too. Is it so curious, then, that young people in these countries get mixed messages about how they ought to conduct themselves? If it is OK for politicians and bureaucrats to make promises they not only will not but cannot keep, who is to communicate any objections to this in how young people comport themselves toward each other and their elders? Why should they not lie when governments do so all the time? If it is OK for democratically established public policies to violate strictures of ethics—let's take Peter's wealth (he has too much, he doesn't need it so much, she is using it badly, etc., and so forth) and transfer it to Paul (but take a good chunk on the way to pay for our diligent transfer efforts)—why should young people abstain from stealing? What if, especially, they get peer approval—isn't that like democracy, after all?

Throughout the schools in most Western countries democracy is hailed day in and day out but at the same time some of the worst kind of human conduct is carried out in democracy's name, with the democratic process's sanction. Does this not tell those students that, well, when there is wide consensus for breaching morality and ethics, it's just fine to perpetrate the breach? So go ahead and cheat, copy other's tests, plagiarize, bully some kids, steal from a few, and so on. I would think it does.

It seems clear to me that if one expects the younger generation to grow up to be decent people, illiberal democracy isn't helping to facilitate this.

Abortion Debate Redux

Tibor R. Machan

Sometimes a debate or discussion goes completely astray because concepts are used that are entirely confusing. The abortion debate is a case in point.

It begins with the cryptic terms used to classify the opposing sides: Pro-life versus pro-choice. While such labels should never be taken literally, in this case they tend to be. Those who are on the pro-life side seem really to think they are for life, while their opponents are against life. Yet, of course, pro-life advocates aren’t, for example, defenders of animal rights which they would have to be if they were pro life period. What they seem to be is pro human life. And here is the problem—while life may well begin at conception, it doesn’t not follow from this that what begins then is the life of a human being. A fetus is something that’s alive, as is a tooth or a strand of hair. But no one is concerned about pulling a tooth or cutting off of a strand of hair—it isn’t deemed to be murder. What is murder is the unjust killing of a human being. If, however, there is no human being around yet, only a fetus, a potential human being, then there can be no murder (although it could still be ethically objectionable).

So the real issue so called pro-lifers ought to be concerned about is when a human being comes into existence, not when life beings. Even sperm are alive, yet these are killed routinely without anyone suggesting that it constitutes murder. (Well, “anyone” may be an exaggeration!)

On the pro-choice side, in turn, the real issue isn’t choice. For one, many who believe in “the woman’s right to choose” confine this right to the choice to kill a fetus or, as pro-life folks (question-beggingly!) refer to it, “an unborn child.” Many who defend the right of women to have abortions do not believe in their right to choose not to pay taxes, to smoke dope, to refuse to sell a home to blacks, etc., etc. They aren’t really in favor of choices of which they disapprove, just as pro-lifers aren’t.

Indeed, a choice to murder someone is not one anyone ought to have a right to make. Whether “a woman’s right to choose” is worth defending depends on what the choice is about. If it is a choice to kill another human being—even if that human being is inside the woman (after all one’s child is inside one’s home and no one may commit infanticide there or anywhere, for that matter)—no one has a right to make it.

I suppose it is unrealistic to expect that most parties to this debate will get down to the business of trying to resolve it in fair and accurate terms. They are too committed either way. But there has to be a resolution—it should be either legally right or wrong to have (or to ban) abortions. What is an abortion in the majority of cases? The deliberate killing of a fetus before or around the 24th week of pregnancy. (We aren’t here talking about late term abortions, which are extreme cases and deserve separate treatment.) May a woman kill or have killed such a being? If yes, then abortions must remain legal, just as any other actions that do not violated the rights of anyone must (a point many pro-choice folks miss). If no, they must be banned, just as any murder must be.

To reiterate, pro-life people aren’t actually pro life, per se. The bulk of them have no problem with killing chicken or fish or even monkeys for purposes of medical testing. They are only against killing human beings and they believe abortion involves doing so. Most pro-choice folks, too, don’t much care about choices, only about the choice of a woman to terminate a pregnancy and they hold that this may not be prohibited because it does not involved murdering a human being.

So the real issues is when does a human being come into existence. Is it at conception? Is it when the fetus acquires some capacity to think—based on “man is a thinking animal”? Or is it when someone is born—we celebrate birthdays then, thus it's the beginning of someone’s human life?

With these questions before us, I am confident that more progress would be made in this highly divisive and acrimonious debate. It may even be lead to a rational resolution of it.

Defending Capitalism's Integrity

by Tibor R. Machan

For most of its history the capitalist economic system has been both admired and criticized. Its capacity for making productivity possible in human communities is unparalleled and hardly anyone can deny this. Even the late American Marxist, Robert Heilbroner, famous for his book The Worldly Philosophers, acknowledged this after the fall of the Soviet Union. He wrote in The New Yorker Magazine that "... Ludwig von Mises ... had written of the 'impossibility' of socialism, arguing that no Central Planning Board could ever gather the enormous amount of information needed to create a workable economic system. ... It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. ..." And Mises, of course, was one of the most consistent, uncompromising defender of pure, laissez-faire capitalism.

Yet, even after the demise of the Soviet system of socialism—the only type that ever aspired to be a fully consistent version of that kind of political economy, with full collective ownership of the means of production (including, as Heilbroner himself noted in his own book, Marxism, For and Against), human labor—many keep criticizing the fully free market system of capitalism. Libertarianism, which is the broader political equivalent of it, also gets this criticism, namely, that it has no room for a safety net for those in dire straits, those who are helpless, indigent, needy, unprepared to deal with market processes, etc. This is the usual mantra of the critics. More extreme versions of them, of course, don't like anything about capitalism and want some kind of dreamlike fully egalitarian system where the wealth is nearly evenly distributed, even if this means the complete destruction of productivity in such a human community. Better we are all equal and poor than we are unequal and most of us quite well off, with some even extraordinarily wealthy.

Never mind this last alternative—it's a loser for sure and only some dreamers who would attempt to remake human nature support it. But what about those who find fault with full, laissez-faire capitalism because of its refusal to allow government to provide for those in dire straits and such? Don't they have a point?

Yes, they do—but they make inferences from it that do not follow. It is possible in a fully capitalist system for some to remain left out. There can be innocent hard luck cases, there is no doubt about that. What doesn't follow is that government ought to do something about this. Instead, free men and women would have to muster the resolve to lend a hand where that's needed. And it's rank cynicism to deny that they would—after all, it is precisely in semi-capitalist systems that charity and philanthropy thrive today! Furthermore, to think that such help would not be forthcoming undermines the very idea that it is used to support, namely, that democratic governments can step in and do the job. That's because such governments are a reflection of the population, if they really are democratic. Which means if the people are mean and heartless, government would be so in spades.

But even beyond these replies to the critics, there is the problem that once the principles of a fully free society are compromised in the legal system, all hell breaks loose. Even if government might be effective in lending its hand to those in dire straits, as soon as it would do this nearly everyone in society would insist that their agenda deserves support, too. There is no way to hold back this logic—a legal system that allows favoritism for even the most extraordinarily needy will be unable to resist yielding to the pleas of all others, and all others would mount massive lobbying efforts to achieve this. All of it is all too evident in current welfare states across the globe and it produces financial crises and more poverty everywhere than what a fully capitalist system would likely produce.

The bottom line is that a fully free society is really the best idea for human community life and even the hard luck cases are more likely to benefit from it than they would from societies with government interference.

Health Care is a Value, not a Right

Tibor R. Machan

Health care is not a right—one cannot have a right to other people’s service. Those must be provided voluntarily. A better understanding of the relationships people have to health care is that the latter is a value that doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals would, if they were free men and women, provide to people they would choose as recipients, on terms they regard as acceptable.

These values are not owed to anyone unless first agreed to be provided. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals may not be placed into involuntary servitude to people needing their services. The relationships must be voluntary, no matter how vital the services in question are to the recipients.

The belief that people may justly be coerced so as to secure funds to pay medical professionals who then will service those who need their work is an error—or a ruse. In a free country adult men and women must treat each other as ends in themselves, not as unwilling tools, instruments, or means to each other’s ends. Just as someone may not go over to one’s neighbors’ homes to conscript them to come and mow one’s lawn or drive one to the hospital but must ask for this and await willingly given help, so any service such as medical care must be obtained without coercion.

Some people believe that once it has been democratically determined that people must pay for medical services to everyone, there is nothing wrong with collecting taxes for this purpose. This view is wrong because no group—or majority of a group—may take what belongs to others. It is no less unjust to do such a thing than it is to hang someone because the majority in some town decides it is acceptable to do so, without first following due process, namely demonstrating through a justice system that the hanging is deserved.
The myth of having a right to medical care, and all sorts of other services that need the work or resources of others, leads to the view that people can proceed with their lives without having to be responsible for producing—or obtaining via voluntary interaction—whatever living requires. There are all kinds of costs people must cover and be prepared to cover, alone or with the voluntary cooperation through trade, charity, generosity, or grant of loans of others. Imposing such costs on unwilling others is like dumping pollution on unwilling others, a natural crime.

Arnold Schwarzenegger should not be complicit in perpetrating the myth of health care rights. He should follow the lead of his late friend, Milton Friedman, and champion a truly free society, including a completely voluntary system of doctor-patient relationships. Anything else is bad for both parties, although it may appear otherwise—as most moral shortcuts do, initially. Securing health care by means of the police power of government is bad for us all.

I am probably whistling in the dark about this (and many other matters having to do with how people should relate to one another on a completely voluntary basis). Too many hope that when the government secures for them what others can do they will escape being victims of such coercion. Slavery, even the more moderate version involved in the universal health care scheme, gains its support mostly from folks who think they will never be the salves, only the masters.

Yet as history shows, this is a futile hope. When the policy of obtaining services form others through coercion gains widespread acceptance, in the end no one can escape becoming a victim. This is one reason the American founders opted for a country in which everyone has unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and no one may be coerced for any purpose at all—that’s what unalienable means! But their teaching was largely premature. Too many of us still suffer from the governmental habit, the worst habit of them all.

Revisiting Human Nature

Tibor R. Machan

False alternatives are often presented as if there is nothing else to choose—like, love me or hate me, or being kind or mean. But in most cases there are many other options.

Throughout the history of ideas there has been a false alternative that’s been paraded before us, that of human beings as either naturally, innately good or evil. In modern philosophy the two positions are represented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. For Rousseau we are all born good but then get corrupted by society. According to Hobbes we are all driven by dark motives, mostly fear of death, to seek power over nature and others.

In religion, too, there is the idea that basically human beings are sinful and need to be lifted out of this awful state; in some other religions, however, we are deemed to be good from the start. Before considering this idea that its either one or the other, it is worth considering that conservatives have championed the Hobbesian idea, as well as its religious version, namely, that we are all basically corrupt. The conservative believes, as David Brooks points out, “a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don’t understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other’s throats are valuable and are altered at great peril.” Idealists or utopians think people are essentially good (or might, at least, be reengineered to be so).

Yet, think about it: if we are really so bad at heart, why should anyone think those conventions and institutions that have evolved aren’t the fruits of our evil nature? Why trust them? Quite the opposite would follow—naturally evil beings spawn evil practices, customs, laws and so forth. Also, how come we are born good but somehow society—which is, after all, the lot of us—makes us bad? Seems a weird idea.

There is also the problem that “competitive” is mistaken for “combative.” People, very nice ones indeed, compete throughout the world without in the slightest being nasty. Also, if we don’t understand human nature, how come David Brooks and others with whom he aligns himself on this issue have so much to say about it? From ignorance nothing follows, so why are they not just silent about it all?

But by far the most important problem here is that we are presented with a significant false alternative. So, suppose Rousseau was mistaken. Does it follow that Hobbes is correct? The evidence does not bear this out at all.

No once can dispute that there is a lot that’s objectionable in what human beings have done but no one can reasonably deny that human beings have also achieved much that’s admirable. Even all the conservative laments about how we are all “slouching toward Gomorrah” (a book title by Robert Bork) is an exaggeration—those looking back to the good old days conveniently forget that at least America’s good old days were filled with slavery, conscription, male chauvinistic laws, censorship, a murderous war, and lots of awful public policies. But, yes, there were also glorious things in the past, like the rule of law, respect for private property rights, civility in discourse, and so forth and so on. In short, human history has been replete with good and with evil.

What does this suggest? Certainly not that people are naturally good. Nor that they are naturally evil. Indeed, what it does seem to support is that human beings are neither one or the other, at least at the outset of their lives—they are what even the Bible suggests, quite without good or evil but with the capacity to embrace either, more or less, over their lifetimes.

The idea that people possess free will supports this, as well. Yes, they have a human nature—maybe even a firmly fixed one—but this could well amount to the fact that they are capable of thinking and, in consequence, choosing how they will conduct themselves. Some will choose well, some badly, none has to do just one or the other.

There really is much more support for this view of human nature—one that understands us with the freedom to choose our character for good or for ill—than what the conservatives or the utopians present. If the conservatives were right, humanity would have been doomed from the start. If the utopian idealists, then we would have no problems and all would go well all of the time. And clearly neither of this is what the evidence shows.

It is interesting that the American legal tradition gives credibility to this view of human nature, when it treats those not convicted of a crime as “not guilty.” That’s how we should see ourselves.

Are We All Snitches Now?

by Tibor R. Machan

Periodically I go shopping, like many other people. And I have even hired some folks to do cleaning at my house. There is even a handyman in my neighborhood who does extensive work on my house.

Now in none of these cases have I ever asked the people with whom I engage in commerce for any kind of identification, proof of citizenship, nada. If they are well recommended, if I am convinced their track record is fine, I'll take my chances. And the last thing I would want is for the government to force me to check up on these folks.

It is bad enough that government forces employers to do the dirty work of extorting money from employees, by means of the withholding process—it kind of hides the nasty business and makes it look like government isn't really perpetrating the crime. But then to force businesses to do the government's job of crime control, that's quite over the top.

In the last several days I've been hearing how Bank of America, with which I do some little business—checking, savings, etc.—hasn't been insisting that its customers prove whether they are American citizens. So what? Unless these customers are doing something wrong, why should the bank butt in with such detective work? That's not what banks are supposed to do. They are supposed to make sure that they do business profitably—that's what they are on record doing for their owners and investors.

In a free country people are innocent unless proven guilty and that is how they are expected to treat one another in many endeavors. The people I may bowl with or with whom I may shoot baskets or play tennis or do all kinds of other things—worship, attend school, travel, and so forth—who haven't done anything untoward to me will be left in peace by me and I would expect the same treatment from merchants. Accordingly, when I take my clothes to the cleaners, or my car to the mechanic or purchase a phone at Circuit City I am not asked for an ID. So long as I pay up, do what I promise, I expect to be left in peace about who I am, where I come from, what my religion is, whom I date, etc., and so forth.

So I am baffled ... why all this hostility toward Bank of America when all the bank is doing is following the spirit of due process? Do not bother people unless there is some kind of case against them you are aware of.

Some argue, not surprisingly, that it is because bank deposits are backed by the FDIC—which is another body the government ought never to have established and funded from taxes—banks may be coerced to act as snitches. This is bunk; it is also yet another move toward the creeping police state—people are “given” another subsidy only to have it accompanied by all sorts of restrictions and demands.

So perhaps all this brouhaha about the bank isn't really about what they are doing wrong but rather about what doesn't please those who are eager to catch illegal aliens. OK, I am not in favor of illegal aliens but neither do I believe it is a bank's or anyone else's business outside of law enforcement to chase them down.

Maybe if our government didn't get involved in millions of other tasks, it could concentrate its energies on what it was instituted to do by America's founders, namely, secure our rights—protect us from criminal conduct. But no. It seems to be more and more farming out that job to private citizens and organizations, ones not trained in the proper methods of law enforcement.

But then the business of making employers collect taxes, social security and other monies the government extorts from us, has habituated too many of us into thinking that everyone is part of the government, everyone must act like a cop, like an enforcer of the laws. This reminds me of when back in communist Hungary we were all expected to report on everyone around us who didn't toe the government's line about innumerable matters. We were all snitches there. Maybe this is happening in America now, too.

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, following the initial cooling, 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. (The most up to date picture of this can be found at http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm and indicates a volatile history, with coolings as well as warmings throughout the last 500 millions years, with a huge span of cooling during the last 4 million, the renewed warming.)

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?

The Lives of Others is a riveting, poignant, factually and emotionally perfect movie about central European communism, in particular East Germany. It depicts this era in microcosm, not as Fateless or Schindler's List do the Nazi era. It is the particular lives of the characters that energize this movie. It has intellectual punch, but avoids outright didacticism. And it is an exciting story as well. Now it may have a bit more impact on me as someone who actually lived a part of my early life in exactly the circumstances recounted here but I think that isn't really what makes the movie excellent even for me. It is, also, perhaps the first time I heard the term "socialism" used as it should be, instead of all the romanticized, sentimental uses one encounters among too many contemporary political theorists and other intellectuals in the West. Don't walk, don't even just run, but sprint to see it.
Tibor

Unauthorized Government is Wrong

Tibor R. Machan

What was most horrible about the bulk of political history is that some people ruled others, often to the point of using them entirely against their will, even sending thousands and thousands of them to their death or using their lives for purposes they had no part in choosing. The big deal about the American revolution was the idea that one owns one’s life—the Lockean idea of the unalienable right to one’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This was so radical a notion—although here and there expressed by earlier thinkers but never really given official endorsement—that even now most folks just don’t get it. No one owns you—not your country, not your family, not your neighborhood, not your community, no one. You are the one who owns your life and properly gets to say what will be done with it. To reiterate what Lincoln so aptly said about this, “No one is good enough to govern another without that other’s consent.” And in some respects everyone has an inkling of this idea—it is entirely unacceptable for a doctor to operate without the patient’s consent, for an auto mechanic to work on your car without your giving permission, and so forth. Plain as anything can be!

Yet we are still in grips of public policies that directly contradict this idea and hark back to a time when government treated people as its resource, as its possession, as if only the ruling head and elites had the authority to set agendas with the rest of us having to tow the line. Day in and day out politicians and bureaucrats manage to make laws—in fact, the term law is all too honorific for most of their petty rules—by which the rest who have not consented must live their lives lest they be subject to fines or incarceration.

This distinctively American political idea has often been criticized—and today it is mostly denigrated by communitarians like Charles Taylor and Robert N. Bellah—for an alleged failure to stress the importance of community in human affairs, a lament that's entirely misguided. The founders had no prejudice against community, our social nature. What they did insist upon, however, is that human community life needs to be voluntary, un-coerced. They had a clear notion that unless a community is founded on the principle of voluntarism—unless each member of that community has his or her unalienable rights respected and protected—the result is not a genuine, bona fide human community but something akin to a bee hive or an ant colony. But because human beings are self-directed, because they have the freedom of the will to give meaning and direction to their lives—and only when they do so does it achieve full meaning—they realized that it is a condition of a human community that coercion is excluded from it. In other words—using the parlance of contemporary public policy—the public (human) good cannot involve the violation of basic rights. Those rights in fact serve to define what is the public good, namely, a society in which those basic rights are protected and promoted. That is what is meant by what the Declaration states, namely, that the just powers of government are derived from consent and such just powers have as their purpose to secure our basic rights.

None of this is against community but in favor of a community of free men and women. A community that rejects these criteria fails to be properly human, fit for proper human living.

But, because the propagation of the idea that some get to rule others is so entrenched, having for millennia served to rationalized the more or less arbitrary rule of some by others, even in America, let alone the rest of the world, it is still thought odd that one would oppose oppressive governments, including those which deploy the democratic method in achieving their oppression. Democracy that oppresses is no less oppressive than out and out dictatorship. It merely disperses the process of oppression so that it is somewhat disguised.

Those who appreciate the full impact of the words of the Declaration are few—even America’s founders only went a certain distance to fully realize them. Still, it is just the thing to realize if one is serious about aiming for establishing and maintaining a just human community.

Science and State

Tibor R. Machan

By now it has become predictable that each time a new president of the USA is elected, the letters sections of major newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, fill up with pleas from various professionals who believe that their services must not be left to the uncertain, volatile forces of the market place. Instead, they must be assured of funding by the government, via coercion, taxation.

If memory serves me right, the loudest bunch of folks who advance this plea are scientists of all stripes—natural, social, applied, you name them, they are in line with their hands reaching out, expecting to have the benefits of coerced funding because, well, what they are doing is so vital and so few people appreciate this that the money just cannot be expected to come voluntarily. Never mind that everyone can cook up this rationale for innumerable projects, personal, professional, political, philanthropic, whatever. Too many of us are convinced that on our agenda are gathered the most profound and urgent items, while other people’s priorities can certainly wait. Or so it would appear, given how the scientists line up to demand special treatment. It has become so bad that what might be deemed special is now indeed the norm—nearly everyone wants to escape having to convince the public of the merits of his or her projects, to go about raising support in a civilized, peaceful way. Instead nearly all seem to be convinced that support is due them automatically, that the allocation of funds based on the extortion that is taxation is what they are entitled to.

There are a few folks who have argued against funding sciences, let alone other endeavors, in this coercive fashion but they are by no means many. Terrence Kealey, in his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research (Macmillan, 1996) is one of the few and his efforts to defend a free market in funding of research and development quickly came under criticism from those who want to continue with the now well established practice of exempting the sciences from having to make their case without the benefit of political clout. (I edited a book not long ago, Liberty & Research and Development [Hoover Institution Press, 2002], in which this topic is debated by the various contributors.)

But here my focus is not so much whether it is just to have science—or, indeed, any other human endeavor—supported coercively. I am convinced that it is not except where science supports bona fide law enforcement and defense against foreign aggression. Just as in the criminal law, force may only be used defensively, not to achieve various goals that may not be popular with enough people for them to gain support. But another aspect of this matter has become evident to me, although I speak about it as an amateur. I have in mind whether all this funding of science by coercive means isn’t actually having a corrupting effect.

Over the last twenty years or so I have been an avid reader of the little weekly magazine, Science News, which carries many reports of recent and current work in most of the sciences. And what I have noticed is that a great deal of what is being done just has no plausible relevance to anything at all except that it interests the scientists doing the work. This is easy enough to appreciate when it comes to various obscure studies in astrophysics or paleontology, for example. Why are millions and millions of dollars taken from citizens and handed to these professionals to produce findings that, well, are little more than curiosity items? Yes, they might turn into something more and there is plenty of evidence in the history of science that the results of work motivated by nothing more than curiosity eventually turn out to be useful. Good, but that means at best that we have been lucky—it does not imply any kind of imperative for the coercive support of such curiosity, none, nor that the bulk of it bears fruit for all those who are coerced to fund them!

I am willing to bet that if some God’s eye perspective could be found—an impossible idea, I admit—a very great deal of what scientists spend money on could be used better if left for the taxpayers to spend on projects of their own. But because the idea is so foreign, it seems evident that the way the politicians and bureaucrats allocate the funds is best. But there really is no good reason to think so.