Bin Laden is Still Wrong

Tibor R. Machan

Stubbornness is not a disease but mostly a moral problem. If in the face of reason someone keeps holding on to irrational ideas, it isn’t that he or she cannot change but that he or she will not change. It can, of course, be very difficult to reexamine one’s ideas; their foundations can be very deep seated and resistant to scrutiny. But for those who have chosen to be specialists about the veracity of belief systems there is a moral obligation to keep vigilant about getting it right.

Osama bin Laden seems unwilling to consider that his views on freedom of speech just don’t cut it. Once again, in response to the republication of insulting cartoons in some European newspapers, bin Laden seems to have unleashed physical threats, refusing to understand that in a country with any degree of justice in its legal system, it is not possible or desirable to officially censor the press however much some think its content is blasphemous or impolite.

Bin Laden is reported to have said that "The response [to the republished cartoons] will be what you see and not what you hear and let our mothers bereave us if we do not make victorious our messenger of God," amounting to a somewhat vague but still ominous warning. He continued by saying that "You went overboard in your unbelief and freed yourselves of the etiquettes of dispute and fighting and went to the extent of publishing these insulting drawings...." "This is the greatest misfortune and the most dangerous and the judgment for it will be stronger."

Consider, for a start, that bin Laden appears to be addressing all Europeans--specifically, governments and VIPs such as the Pope--when he says “You went overboard.” But in a free society these people have no authority to edit privately owned newspapers, no legitimate power to force editors to expunge what bin Laden thinks are unwise features in their papers. In such societies there are innumerable insulting drawings and columns that target various icons that are, in the opinions of others, sacred and holy. Comics routinely make fun of people’s most deeply held convictions. Cartoonists relentlessly hammer away at people and events that others insist must not be treated humorously.

In free societies the proper response to such offensive materials in the press and elsewhere must be confined to words and other peaceful protests and rebukes. No government official is permitted to shut down a newspaper for publishing even the most inconsiderate and ridiculing materials about what some people want to have left free of defilement.

Bin Laden seems to have no clue at all that any government that would be legally permitted to become censorious would then have the authority to expunge criticism of its own policies. Bin Laden doesn’t appear to understand that people in relatively free countries have no legitimate power over each other’s peaceful conduct and he fails to appreciate that drawings, words, symbols and such are not knives, bullets, bayonets, or swords. Bin Laden seems clueless about how free men and women have the right to speak out on anything they choose while others are free to turn away and not listen, look, or otherwise take notice.

No one can deny that many people in free countries can behave unwisely, disrespectfully, even without etiquette, with impunity. That is just the meaning of “free.” (Sadly, of course, even in most free societies this is lost sight of when people get upset with what others give expression to, as when they voice racist or sexist ideas, when they say what’s politically incorrect! But that inconsistency is a matter to be lamented at another time.)

Even in the parts of the globe that bin Laden criticizes and threatens there are many who regard him with some measure of respect, probably because of his posturing, his demeanor which mimics that of an educator and hides from immediate perception his true nature as a thug. Yet bin Laden does indeed appear--if the reports of his opinions are accurate--to be a vicious thug, not a lofty guru, as he appears to wish to be perceived. Only once he grasps that human beings must be free to say what they think, good or bad, can he expect to reach the level of civility that would earn him respectful attention.

Too Much Love for Royalty

Tibor R. Machan

Every time I encounter admiring references to royalty in America I cringe. Like when recently The New York Times Magazine ran a special advertising section for Dubai in which “the ruler of Dubai” was displayed in all his royal splendor. But that’s just the beginning.

What about all those hotels and other establishments that have names such as “crown,” “royal,” “queen,” “duke,” and the like? What is it with all of this apparent lingering adoration for monarchical titles in a country that lost thousands of lives in its fight to rid itself of the sham of the entrenched class system of feudal times?

Well, as I see it, too many people are still subconsciously attached to eras when the bulk of the people were being ruled by kings, queens, tsars, Caesars, pharaohs, sheiks, khans, dukes, and barons. They still appear to have some yearning for societies with a hierarchical structure where individuals are deemed to be in need of strong governmental leadership instead of mere skilled administrators. Even in the current election campaign there is a lot of talk about who will be the best leader, as if the country were populated with sheep in need of constant direction and supervision.

But the United States of America has citizens, not subjects, and the difference is considerable. Subjects are, strictly speaking, subservient to the will of some allegedly naturally higher authority than they are. Citizens recognize no such divisions in the population. Yes, there are people who have earned authority in, say, medicine, engineering, education, and so forth but the operative term is “earned.” Unlike in feudal systems where one’s title comes with the accidental good fortune of being born to parents who are members of an elite--ones who had no need to achieve anything other than to remain in power mainly through sheer force of arms--in a country where people are citizens no one is taken to be innately better than anyone else. Yes, some may be more fortunate than others but no official benefits are supposed to come with this.

The government in a country with citizens is also made up of citizens, not rulers. This helps to remind everyone that these people are not better born than others, have no special authority over others apart form what they are freely granted by other citizens (with appropriate limits attached even then), and that governments are by their nature no magical institution to be entrusted with superhuman wisdom and virtue.

When this is lost sight of, as it seems to be by altogether too many people in America, there would likely be an embrace of statism, the idea that government officials possess innate superiority over the rest and are thus destined to run things. And that is surely the very opposite idea to one so brilliantly laid out in the Declaration of Independence, the brief but very true philosophical summary of the American political system.

My inclination is to stand up and protest whenever I detect signs of lingering adoration for royalty, even while others chide me for being paranoid, for making a mountain out of a molehill. A recent book, Liberal Fascism, by Johan Goldberg (Doubleday, 2008), shares my concerns by showing that nearly all of what liberal democrats are supporting--including or especially in the current election campaign--turns out to be a step in the direction of a reactionary policy of micromanaging society, just as this was deemed proper under absolute monarchies in which king or queen had the duty to be keepers of the realm and under 20th century fascist regimes. Just what subjects can expect and citizens would reject. Reaction to this book--for example in The New York Times Book Review (December 30, 2007) by David Oshinsky--has been to chide it for paranoia, for worrying too much about the expansion of government power in America.

Unfortunately there is no paranoia--which is to say, exaggerated and irrational fear--involved in concerns about liberal fascism, no more so than there was about all the fiercely authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of the last century. They were all developed by calls for what their intellectual supporters deemed to be needed and moderate discipline and top down regimentation, only to graduate in time to Draconian dictatorships.

Americans should become more self conscious about elements in their culture that amount to nothing less than a reactionary nostalgia for statism. That is not what made the country special in the world, the beacon of human liberty.

Why don’t they get it?

Tibor R. Machan

No matter how many politicians proceed to act self-destructively, engage in corruption, violate elementary principles of civilized conduct as New York governor Eliot Spitzer had done, the idea that they can be elected to office to take care of us, to handle the bulk of our problems, may be trusted with our income to spend it wisely and virtuously remains nearly immune to criticism. They keep promising to handle everything we find troubling in our lives and the majority of Americans--not to mention others around the globe--continue with their governmental habit, as if they still lived in an absolute monarchy where the king or queen are taken to be God’s agents and are expected to be “keepers of the realm.” That famous legal doctrine of the police power is still part of our system, according to which government may impose its will on us for our own good, just as if the myth of its benevolence had not be disproved a thousand times over and over again.

What is it about people who for all appearances are reasonably competent in their private and professional lives lose their good sense when it comes to trusting the system? Yes, the system was to be one limited to certain minimal functions instead of allowed to become bloated in its scope, at least as the American founders conceived of it. But it is evident that their idea of the nature of government has by now been totally perverted, corrupted. It is as if the game were now not just refereed by those people in the striped shirts but those people did all the playing, consoling of the losers, celebrating the winners, healing the injured, educating the players’ children and so on. As if the referees became a totalitarian body instead of one with specific, limited task that its qualified to perform. No one would tolerate this happening in any field of competitive sports. And by all accounts there are very few scandals, too, involving sport referees, umpires, et al. Because with a specific, limited job to do, they can be easily watched.

The government, however, is now ubiquitous. I am reminded of this each time I travel by air, what with all those TSA people milling about issuing mostly rude orders, applying rules inconsistently from one airport to the other. The more power they get over travelers, the less civilized they become. (I questioned their decision to toss my toothpaste at one airport after three of them had no objection and one bully threatened to expel me from the airport, as if they were not working for me but I was their subject.)

How many more Spitzers do we need to experience, how many more members of Congress need to be caught hitting on their pages, how many more of them must defraud us, how many more judges need to be taken off the bench for misconduct before American voters learn that entrusting the government to handle their problems is a futile, pointless, fantastic venture and just leads to the piling of mistakes upon mistakes. Is it simply because there are so many utopian dreamers among us who fall pray to the notion that a sweet talking politician is all we really need to fix everything? Are most people so stupid? Or is it because for some twenty years most of us get taken care of by parents and then we transfer this to government, as if they were our parents--or Nannies?

But perhaps the real answer is the fairly common sense one. That is that it hasn’t been all that long that people were informed that their lives belong to them and they have the responsibility to care of it, with a little help from their friends and a good deal of it from people with whom they trade in the free, voluntary, self-correcting market place. For centuries on end, indeed for millennia, a few folks ruled the rest, making them believe that this was the natural order among people. Millions of people had no say about their lives at all. The intellectuals were busy producing rationalizations for this state of affairs for most of human history and only very, very recently did it surface that it was all a ruse, that there is no inherited aristocracy around in whom we can place our trust.

Maybe as Ayn Rand said, it really is much earlier than we think.

NAFTA Blues

Tibor R. Machan

Both Democratic contenders are NAFTA foes. And their complaints aren’t the valid ones, of which there are plenty--NAFTA is to free trade what mild arthritis is to good health. But NAFTA is a step in the right direction, which is to open all the borders and remove all tariffs and duties and other impediments to the free flow of commerce around the world.

So what’s the fuss all about? Mobility and foresight, that’s what. A free market requires some measure of willingness to move and to do this in several respects and one must also prepare oneself to move from profession to profession, job to job, vocation to vocation, place to place, etc., even when this is only a precaution. That is because a free purchasing public can choose different products and services, from one purchase to the next (although often people do remain loyal to some vendors, such as insurance providers, grocery stores, canned chicken soup producers, and so forth). But no one is required to stay with the same store, be it a barbershop, car dealer, spa, or drug store. The free market makes possible the greatest degree of freedom of association. Even in a less than free market this is mostly the case, especially for employees who are at liberty to change jobs if a better one comes their way. (Employers are now severely restricted in our mixed economy regarding whom they may divorce in the work force! This fact is a severe block to economic health in Europe and elsewhere.)

A free market, of course, does not guarantee job security--nothing can do that apart from a gun held to one that coerces one work (as in a labor camp) and that only for a little while. But because a free market constantly generates jobs--it promotes economic development which translates to more and better jobs--no jobs are lost; people do need to be flexible, adaptable, willing to change, just as they do when they act as customers in that same market place.

What the two Democratic candidates capitalize on is that a great many people want to have it both ways--they want their jobs to remain in place even while they go shopping and change their preferences all the time and thus cause job mobility. Change and permanence--most people want them both but at different locations in the market place. As buyers, change is what most people choose; as employees and even employers, they want permanence (except when innovations make things easier).

In Ohio, for just one example, there needs to be adjustments made to how people earn a living because other people, abroad, are now offering services and goods that compete with what Ohioans have been producing. This, of course, has also freed many people to create jobs in other parts of the economy because of their use of the moneys they saved through buying services and produces at lower prices than before. Even when they buy from producers abroad, they make jobs here because (a) those producers abroad buy and invest in the U. S. A. and (b) Americans spend savings on new products and services which are made in their own country.

Once again the ruse comes from what that genius 19th century French economists, Claude Frédéric Bastiat observed, namely that the market is teaming with both, what is seen and what is not seen. People tend mainly to react to what is seen and forget about the unseen, including when it comes to the impact of free trade and of the best elements of NAFTA.

And, of course, virtually all politicians, those interested mostly in obtaining power over other people, will capitalize on this fact. Instead of educating the citizens about the true nature of a free market, they take advantage of the misunderstanding about the free market that still pervades our culture, given how dismal economic education tends to be for nearly all high school and even college students.

Most members of the media aren’t helping either, since what they like to focus upon is people’s complaints, not on conveying the facts of economics. But, as the man said, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance!

Bill Buckley, RIP

Tibor R. Machan

William F. Buckley, Jr., has died, at age 82. I want to reflect a bit on him because he was the persons whose writing awoke in me my political passions.

In 1960 or 61 I was in the US Air Force, stationed at Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C., and among the many more or less serious reading materials I ran across an article by Mr. Buckley in Esquire magazine. It was titled, “Why Don’t We Complain.” Its thesis, advanced by means of a couple of anecdotes, was that when people fail to speak up about matters that amiss, they get all pent up and eventually lose their cool. Like when they tolerate fuzzy pictures at a theater instead of getting up to ask that they be repaired right away; or when a railroad car is overheated and no one complains but then when the conductor comes around he gets mobbed.

This was, of course, a fairly lightweight analysis of one of the sources of revolution. I found it right on the money. I read the piece while flying west and immediately penned a short note of congratulation and sent it to the offices of National Review. I also decided to subscribe to that magazine, although by then I knew I was not quite a conservative.

Buckley replied to my note and we began a correspondence that had lasted for many decades. When I once asked why he makes use of such erudite vocabulary in making his points, he said that the folks who need convincing are the erudite ones. We argued about God and about whether Ayn Rand had philosophical and literary merits. I was very annoyed with his repeated publication of an essay, in which he claimed that Rand’s first best seller, The Fountainhead, is popular because of the “fornicating bits,” which was quite silly as well as false.

In time I managed to get invited to appear on Firing Line, his long running interview program on PBS TV, where I was very well treated and pitted against one of Mr. Buckley’s favorite intellectuals, Ernest van den Haag, who became a friend until his death a few years ago at age 86.

At the time when I appeared on Firing Line, I also interviewed Buckley for Reason magazine, which had a short history of interviews with prominent men and women concerned about the free society—Nathaniel Branden, F. A. Hayek, Thomas Szasz, Edith Efron, Yale Brozen, Milton Friedman, Paul Craig Roberts and James Buchanan were some others whom I and others at Reason managed to interview for the magazine.

One of Buckley’s most impressive performances occurred at the Cambridge Union, in England, where he debated John Kenneth Galbraith, who was an old adversary as well as close friend of his. In this debate Buckley came off as a dedicated individualist (and trounced Galbraith good and hard). And that to me was more important than some of his more conservative notions, so despite the fact that I found a good deal of what he wrote difficult to take, I remained a fan.

Once when I visited Buckley at National Review’s offices, I noticed that while all dressed up in black tie, his fly was open, so I pulled him aside to let him know. He was very thankful and we had a nice laugh about it all. This was in line with his mainly gracious and jovial personality.

American conservatives are not like others who simply embrace a method of reasoning about public affairs, namely, to consult tradition and be guided by it. That is unprincipled. American conservatism is tied to the ideas of the Founders. Buckley was indeed an American conservative. He did, in my view, combine his loyalty to the Founders with some infelicitous convictions but he must be credited with fostering a long overdue post-New Deal awareness of what America is really about, namely, the rights and sovereignty of the individual human being. I will forever be grateful to him for that.

Unabashed Prejudice at The Times

Tibor R. Machan

These matters tend to show up without much fanfare but that’s exactly what makes them interesting and significant. When Eleanor Randolph of The New York Times wrote these lines [Sunday, 2/24/08], I am sure she was being quite unselfconscious. It was simple common sense to her to say, as she wrote about the program “Law & Order”--which she and I both seem to have watched from its inception--that these shows “elevate Sam Waterston to his ethical pedestal, even though he appears elsewhere pitching investments.”

Notice that as a fictional make-believe Assistant District Attorney--and now the DA himself--Waterston’s ethics are deemed impeccable. But as an actually pitchman for investment services provided by TD Waterhouse he is besmirched. “Even though” this is what he does both for part of his living and in service to millions who are seeking to place their money with a trusted outfit that will help them put it away for a rainy day! Why? What is morally, ethically not to applaud about Sam Waterston because he is making these pitches? What on earth is morally objectionable about advertising the services of TD Waterhouse or of any other legitimate enterprise?

Perhaps Ms. Randolph is upset with investment firms because they try to make people well off here in this world and she wants, like so many philosophers and theologians throughout human history, direct our attention to our spiritual selves and to the possibility of everlasting salvation earned through various measures of earthly asceticism. Nah, I don’t think so. Or perhaps she is just expressing a prevalent, unexamined prejudice in our culture in which, despite the concern about economic downturns, about poverty, about unemployment, the intelligentsia is scornful toward people in business. Kind of like the aristocracy had been about the nouveau riche because they dirtied their hands with productive work!

It is interesting that someone so closely linked to the liberal establishment in America would have no self awareness about her rank, irrational disdain for those who work in the financial community. This blindness, manifest here only as a casual throwaway line, has a serious impact on the health of the nation’s economy. For example, it fosters an atmosphere of disdain toward millions of young people who are considering entering the business professions. They are bombarded with the prejudice against their choice of career in TV programs, newspaper columns, movies, pulp fiction, popular music, and elsewhere and no righteous indignation is expressed by the mainstream moralizers in the country when it happens.

Apart from a few voices way outside the mainstream, politicians and others have no compunction about bashing business, denigrating people’s efforts to prosper, to make a profit in the market place, no. Attempting to thrive economically, while considered imperative for the country as a whole, is treated as a sin or some kind of lowly drive when exhibited by individuals.

Nevertheless, of course, most people, when they act on the basis of their personal common sense, show that prudence about their money is a decent, praiseworthy thing. They know well and good that seeking out good financial advice and acting on it are a wise course for them to take. They often stress such prudence as they raise their children. They frown upon recklessness in the market place by friends and neighbors.

Yet, somehow, they do not protest when pundits like Ms. Randolph and many, many others deride commerce and business. When a politician aligns himself or herself with those in the business world, if only to free up avenues for trade, he or she is derided for siding with “big business.” Never mind that it is such trade, carried out by those in the world of business that creates the jobs that keeps people off the unemployment lines, that makes it possible for them to provide for their needs and wants and dreams!

Isn’t it time that this kind of schizophrenia is abandoned, that the prejudice, the unjust discrimination against commerce and business is cast aside as nearly as insidious as racism and sexism?

Kosovo and Secession

Tibor R. Machan

Reportedly the Russian government opposes Kosovo’s secession from Serbia, as expected, because it fears the move would fuel Chechnya’s similar goals vis-à-vis Russia. Is Kosovo’s secessionist endeavor perhaps even similar to what those in the American South had attempted and over which some claim the Civil War had been fought?

Actually, there is only a little resemblance. Southerners who wanted to secede made a serious mistake, one that rendered their secessionist design unacceptable. They wanted to secede without freeing the slaves they held. In effect, they wanted to secede while kidnapping millions of people. This may not have been the reason their secession was opposed and why the war broke out--although clearly in contributed to it--but in point of fact it made their secession morally and mostly likely legally impossible to tolerate.

The population of Kosovo has no slaves and so the secession there isn’t plagued by such serious moral problems. Of course, when a region has had a diverse population, there isn’t likely to be universal consent to any kind of secession. Even if the majority agrees, there is likely to be many others who will be forced to go along with something they do not desire. Which suggests that the entire issue of secession could use some serious reflection.

Exactly what does legitimate secession involve? Unlike when individuals resign from a club or divorce, where a clean break is possible--although not all that simple, especially where children are involved--when large groups of people who hold property in a region wish to discontinue political association with others the dynamics can be expected to be very complicated. The complications may actually point to some basic problems with the entire notion of “a nation.”

Whenever nations are viewed analogously to clubs or corporations, the problem of making decisions for all those involved arises. Clubs and corporations are not very difficult to leave--the exit option, as economists refer to it, is or ought to be open (unless binding long term commitments have been forged). Clubs, corporations, churches, and similar human associations are usually freely, voluntarily joined, at least in regions where classical liberalism has been influential.

Nations are different since people are simply born into them and rarely make explicitly, nor even implicit decisions to be part of them. This despite the classical liberal idea of the consent of the governed. (Some would, of course, construe that idea in strictly individualist terms but, arguably, others who see it more along democratic lines, even as the American Founders understood it, have a case, too.)

So when nations are broken up by their citizens, matters can get very problematic. Much of a nation’s history, its institutions, buildings, monuments, ruins, relics, etc., are deemed to belong to all of the population. Tearing these apart is going to be upsetting, notably for people who think in collective, especially tribal terms. And millions of people do just that--they often see themselves as literally a part of some collective group rather than as individuals, along lines that ants are parts of an ant colony or a bee of a bee hive.

There has been some serious thought about all this in political theoretical circles but not enough and not recently, I believe, to have produced workable insights. Even in America, too many see themselves primarily as citizens of cities, counties, states and the nation instead of freely choosing, independent individuals. The history of thinking about one’s membership in political associations has tended to be collectivist--people too readily speak about what China did or does, what Kentucky has decided, what are England’s intentions, and so forth, even though strictly speaking China, Kentucky, or England isn’t some conscious entity doing, deciding, or intending anything at all. Some people in these places do, decide, or intend, and others are commonly simply swept along.

Kosovo is a region of the world where this topic is now a very live one but there are many others--Sri Lanka, Spain, Russia, are just a few among them. A sober exploration and dialogue of what is and should be involved in secession would be very desirable.

Employment Blues Revisited

Tibor R. Machan

Even though making lots of money is often derided by politicians, they do routinely champion employment security. Exactly why it is fine to want the latter but not the former is quite unclear to me. There are some theories about this, though.

Some believe that making lots of money suggests that it is important to be able to live well, while a job merely allows you to survive rather than making very much of this life, trying to enjoy it fully, to be happy and prosperous until it is over. Being rich, then, is thought to be crass, lowly, while barely surviving, near poverty, is deemed more noble because it's more modest. Others figure that rich bashing stems from having a misguided zero-sum view of economics: if I get rich, someone must get poor. So, profit-making always involves making some poor bloke worse off than before. As the French poet Charles Baudelair said, "Commerce is vile because it is the worse kind of egoism," which to him meant getting ahead at other people's expense.

The first of these ideas can only be dealt with by way of ethics: it is there that we consider whether flourishing in life is to be regarded as an honorable objective and, once accomplished, something to be proud of. The second is both a philosophical and an economic issue: does wealth creation involve making others worse off than they otherwise would be? One philosophical issue is whether creating wealth is even possible, or are we stuck with just taking from here and putting it there, the famous zero sum game. The economic question is how has it happened that as the population of the world increased, the greater portion of people have been living better, at least economically. The stuff we need and want has not been reduced by way of entrepreneurship and mass production--that is, by the increase of the free flow of commerce, of enrichment. Instead commerce has managed to improve everyone's economic well being, even if not at the same speed.

Unfortunately, since government is so heavily involved in economic matters, there can be little calm in the discussion of these topics. Politicians have too much of a stake in scaring us to death about our future so that we will vote them into office where they will then pretend to turn things the way they ought to be. A Pat Buchanan or Ralph Nader cannot produce a sensible, reasonable discussion of the matter. Neither can a Hillary Clinton, a John McCain, or even a Barack Obama. And the news organizations also benefit most from disseminating "news" that create panic in our hearts. Even in scholarly circles these days there is too much partisanship, ever since Marx has convinced many in that community that everything is political, it's all related to power.

To make a living requires work but if one believes that to have a job means for someone else to lose one, this can only lead to bad blood between people. Oddly enough, it is in business that such a view is not usually shared, whereas those who focus on governmental affairs tend to view matters more akin to combat. This is why from politicians the refrain doesn't focus on productivity but on fairness, sharing prosperity, as Mrs. Clinton says, not on making it.

In business the idea is that commerce enhances everyone's well being, with losses coming only to those who misjudge the marketplace. Since forcing people to share is going to discourage them from working hard, it is better not to stress sharing and fairness but wealth and profit. Not only does everyone have a basic right to seek riches but this actually tends to produce more wealth for everyone who will but make the effort to work for it.
Unfortunately, we are now at a point where too many folks really think that they are owed a job, especially job security, never mind that this logically entails forcing customers to keep purchasing what one produces whether or not they want it. It would be encouraging to see some prominent commentators on C-SPAN or CNN making the point and for a few articulate politicians to affirm the plain truth: what would give us the greatest shot at job security isn't taking from the rich and spreading it around but making more wealth, training ourselves to anticipate future market changes, not expecting people to be forced to patronize our goods and services whether they want what they are being provided.

Job security comes from sustained, unimpeded productivity, not from trying to guarantee employment on the backs of some mythical job-manufacturers forced into service by the government.

Might've Guessed: Grisham likes Hillary

Tibor R. Machan

Of the very few John Grisham legal thrillers I have read, the only one I liked was The Firm. It was also a pretty decent movie, made good mostly by Gene Hackman's character and acting.

What I didn't like about the few other Grisham books I tried to read was their relentless business bashing. The Pelican Brief comes to mind. And that while corporations are picked as targets by making them all seem vicious, governments and their policies get completely off the hook. So I have stopped reading him despite my almost fanatical devotion to court room dramas, of which I like the works of Steve Martini, Scott Thurow, J. F. Freedman, Lee Gruenfeld, John T. Lescroart, Lisa Scottoline and, especially, Philip Friedman. I grew up reading Hungarian translations of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason books and have never gotten tired of the drama that surrounds criminal trials.

What I find difficult to take is stereotyping in any fiction, but especially the court room variety. If lawyers are treated as if they were all really sleazy, or corporate managers as if they were all greedy, or professors depicted as if they were all saints, well this ruins a story for me from the start and I will stop reading it. I managed to start a couple of Grisham's books because, well, I didn't know about his anti-capitalist mentality.

My son tells me I should just put up with it since there is hardly any contemporary fiction, including TV drama and movies, that doesn't rely on such types. Well, I have managed to find some, so I remain hopeful. (I don't think the TV program Law & Order uses them much.)

My suspicion about Grisham has once again been confirmed. Reading the The New York Times Book Review I came upon an item reporting that John has endorsed Hillary for president, with all kinds of accolades: "she is a very warm, authentic person," and when you meet her, "you are taken with her warmth and humor and authenticity." Not a word, of course, about the fact that Grisham and Clinton share an anti-capitalist, anti-market ideology! But that is what I suspect makes him like her for the top political job. From up there she can exercise power and impose all her famous ideals and ideas that she so warmly and authentically believes we all must follow even if quite unwillingly.

You may not always be able to judge someone by the friends he or she keeps but in this instance there is good reason to think that the alliance between the famous court room novelist and the famous politician has to do with their shared political economic viewpoint. And this gives me yet another reason for thinking that if a Democrat must be the country's next president, Barack Obama is probably a safer bet than that fiercely Leftist ideologue, Hillary Clinton.

Mind you, I am not eager to throw around the label "ideologue." It suggests mindless, simplistic adherence to some set of ideas and is often used, say by Princeton economics professor Paul Kurgman in his columns for The New York Times, to besmirch people whose arguments one doesn't wish to address. But in the case of Mrs. Clinton the label seems to me to fit since her embrace of socialist public policies are never defended, never justified in her lectures to voters. She seems to have a faith in socialism, having gotten initiated by her mentor neo-Marxist Michael Lerner, the editor of TIKKUN magazine. (Once, very long time ago, Clinton was an admirer of Ayn Rand's novels and even supported Barry Goldwater for a while. Lerner appears to have been the person who led her to switch to the extreme Left.)

I am glad that Grisham's support of Clinton is out in the open. His unabashed opposition of capitalism should alert voters that when they vote for Clinton, they are voting for anything but a free economy.

It Isn’t Throwing it Away

Tibor R. Machan

Over the years, since when I voted for Barry Goldwater back in 1964, I have supported libertarian candidates and ballot measures, few of whom or which had any chance of winning. Often my more pragmatic, realistic friends tell me that I am throwing away my vote and I should stop this if I want to be serious about giving concrete support to my political convictions. They sometimes even suggest that it is irresponsible to keep up this practice of voting for hopeless candidates and measures.

I disagree. The reason is that political campaigns are very effective ways of taking certain topics to the media (and to other forums where remote possibilities) are being considered, ones that would otherwise be mostly ignored. Consider just recently how many stories were run about Ron Paul even though almost all of them admitted that Paul’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential candidate are nil!

So if there is a libertarian candidate or ballot measure, however little chance there is for their victory, libertarians and their critics will likely be asked to appear on radio, TV, and in other forums to discuss these ideas. Arguably, then, they will be able to keep the dim flame of liberty from being extinguished. They may even give the flame a bit of strength over time.

Moreover, it doesn’t appear to me to be a good idea to give additional credibility to the candidacies of people who really have no interest in furthering the cause of liberty. In the current race of the nomination there is no viable candidate who seems to care one tiny bit about whether this country is loyal to the ideas of the American Founders, to the effective protection of the unalienable individual rights of all. It just seems to be an act of betrayal to vote for a person with no interest in human liberty, one who has fully bought into the currently fashionable politics of special interests and entitlements.

The only sensible alternative, barring a full scale revolution, is to educate the electorate. And here is where a bit of optimism can also be justified. After all, it is no secret that the ideals and ideas of a fully free society are radical, novel, hardly explored by most people in the country and around the world. What John Locke and the American Founders proposed had only been considered by very few thinkers and most of them paid attention only to certain limited aspects of the political philosophy that the Founder’s sketched in the Declaration of Independence. Yes, there had been talk of limiting the power of government, of restraining absolutism, of abolishing serfdom and slavery, or of freeing the press and even markets. But very few influential thinkers came out in favor of a totally free society, one in which government exists only to secure the basic rights of citizens.

So it makes sense to suppose that one good way of giving this radical, novel political idea a good college try is to keep discussing it over and over again. As I have stressed many times, bad habits are not easy to get rid of even when one knows them to be bad. But in the case of statism--the belief in the omnipotence and omniscience of government--most people who embrace it are self-deceived into thinking that government really is the answer to most of our problems. Even in these United States it is nearly a knee jerk response to any problem that has been identified that some level or branch of government must be called upon in order to solve it. The self-deception is powerful enough to resist all the evidence staring us in the face that points to the futility of that belief.

All too many people also think in what can be called a fantastic fashion. They believe that if government might be of help, it will be of help. Of course, “might” is something for which no good argument is necessary, no history need support it. It need only be a matter of imagination, of speculation, of unsupported hypotheses. Then if you add to this the famous insight of the 19th century French economist, Claude Frédéric Bastiat--namely that what isn’t seen is often completely ignored in assessing the merits of policies--you can figure out pretty well how difficult it is to make progress on the path to liberty.

So to those who claim that supporting libertarian candidates or measures amounts to being totally ineffectual in the field of politics I answer that “Not in the long run.” Moreover, the career of the free society is more a matter of the future, actually, than of the past! So focusing on the constitution of that future would seem to me to make sense, at lest for some of us.

Naiveté at Business Week

Tibor R. Machan

Why do some reporters never manage to become educated in the areas they cover? Consider, for example, a recent piece in Business Week, “Food Fight over Calorie Counts” (2/11/08).

The fight is supposed to be between public health officials and the restaurant industry. As to the latter, the report, written by one Michael Orey, leaves little doubt about the reporter’s position: the industry is fighting to keep up its opportunity to sell us food without much health benefits, food that lacks nutrition, food that makes us fat. In contrast, for Mr. Orey all public health officials are “desperate to combat an epidemic of obesity.” In short, they are the heroes, even saints, in the story!

I don’t know how Mr. Orey knows what motivates public health officials but I do know a bit about public choice theory. This is the idea, rewarded with the Nobel Prize in economic science back in the mid 80s, that those in government are motivated no differently from those outside. They too want to advance their own agenda, including keeping and expanding the scope of their jobs.

One need not even turn to this somewhat technical field in economics to see Mr. Orey’s naiveté. Most people know about the way government bureaucrats, especially, try very hard to make themselves important, to become indispensable parts of all our lives. Everywhere government bureaucrats tend to be bent on creating obstacles to commerce, technology, and industry and their rationale--their professed motivation--is mostly a concern for the public interest.

In fact, however, the first concern of most government bureaucrats would be just exactly what the first concern of other human beings happens to be, namely, to make a decent living, to advance in their careers, to produce services that will be needed and well paid for. The difference is that government bureaucrats are paid from public funds and this liberates them from the need to reach a voluntary agreement with those for whom they provide their service. Instead, they mostly impose their service on us whether we want it or not.

In my neighborhood we had a good example of this recently. We had those horrible fires, followed by intermittent rains. The rains were feared by some because they could have, at their worst, produced mudslides. Because of this danger, county officials embarked upon what can only be considered fanatical alarmism--they sent out dozens of emails, daily, made phone calls to local residents, instituted voluntary and mandatory evacuations and did everything in their power to make themselves our saviors.

Needless to say, very little if anything happened that required all this panic. But the fact that there was just a chance that something could have happened sufficed for the county bureaucracy to go into action big time. At whose expense? Well, the taxpayers’. And taxpayers have no choice about whether they to receive this service--they get it whether they want it.

The government bureaucrat’s blessing is a vision of the worst case scenario--something really bad that might happen, never mind what is the probability of it happening. In my neighborhood, for example, only some of the residents are exposed to any real danger when the rains come, even after fires. The rest of us are far away from hills and slopes so there is very little chance of us suffering damage or harm. But when one does not have to worry about cost but mainly about possible public rebuke--being called to account for a failure to anticipate the worst--then alarmism triumphs.

Business Week’s reporters ought to know better than to assume that public health officials are all aiming to do nothing but “combat an epidemic of obesity,” especially when no such epidemic is in evidence and when, moreover, it really isn’t the proper task of a public official to reform the eating habits of the citizenry. Business Week’s writers might, at the least, mention that there is serious skepticism afoot about what really motivates government bureaucrats.

Instead while the restaurant industry is depicted mainly as intent upon cashing in on people’s culinary and nutritional imprudence, government bureaucrats are presented as saints. Come on, let’s get real.

The Scam of Shared Prosperity

Tibor R. Machan

When I was about 12 years old, I was taking a class in my Hungarian elementary school on Marxist economics. One day we were being told about Marx’s famous goal for the communist paradise he envisioned for us all: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

As most kids back in Budapest, I didn’t pay much attention to these lessons since they were nothing but pure propaganda for the ruling communists who ran the country. But I did happen to be listening to this particular presentation and once the “teacher” was done, I didn’t have the good sense to resist raising my hand to ask a question: “What if my pal here next to me and I both start the week with a fixed amount of money but he purchases some wood and builds a nice table while I buy some wine and drink myself under a table? Will he have to share with me whatever he can earn when he sells his product?”

As I recall, I was severely rebuked for my counterrevolutionary remark and shortly thereafter I was sent to a technical school where one would prepare for physical labor, not for entering a gymnasium where education is more theoretical, abstract. I was deemed too reactionary and a serious risk for infecting the intelligentsia with heresies. In time I managed to escape from the communist hellhole, of course, and land in America where I have been told freedom reigns and people’s property is not confiscated to be involuntarily and indiscriminately distributed among all.

Alas, this morning I was reminded once again that my hope of coming to a genuinely free country turned out to be more of a dream than a real prospect. One of the most prominent presidential hopefuls has penned an article for The Wall Street Journal, titled, “My Plan for Shared Prosperity.” Its author, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, makes no secret of her plan for massive wealth redistribution should she get the chance to implement her ideas. As she puts it, “My measure of economic success will never be a single, dry statistic. Rather, success means an economy that allows those at the bottom to work their way into the middle class, without pushing anyone out. It means leaving people better off when I finish than when I start. In short, success means an economy that shares its prosperity with all.”

Now a genuinely free economy “allows” those at the bottom to attempt to work their way up, to become economically better off, although there is no guarantee that this will happen. That’s because whether one’s work gains one wealth depends on whether enough people want to pay for it. In a free country no one has the authority to force others to purchase one’s wares or services. It is all done by means of voluntary exchange. And the result can well be unequal wealth across the society. And there is also the problem that some folks simply don’t want to do the work to gain much wealth.

Yet, when one compares the economic history of largely free market societies with those planned by bureaucrats and politicians, one finds, in the main, that there is far more prosperity and even equality in the former than the latter. More importantly, the opportunity to seek economic improvement is not squashed by rigid state planning or fixed socio-economic classification. No. Instead, as one can expect from the condition of freedom in all areas of life, there is a great deal of variety and volatility and mobility. The bottom line is that a free country will probably not be one with “an economy that shares its prosperity with all.”

Of course, Mrs. Clinton isn’t much interested in freedom, only in regimentation for the country to meet her standards of economic success. This is revealed in how she talks of “an economy that shares its prosperity.” She doesn’t appear to grasp that it is not economies that are prosperous, nor engage in sharing anything with anyone. That is what people are and do. And for Mrs. Clinton to get her way, she will have to order the level of prosperity that people will be allowed to attain and force people to share their resources with others, like it or not.

I suppose the idea of a free society is a hard sell, when too many folks like to live off the work of their fellows. But it would perhaps be of some value if our politicians, like Mrs. Clinton, read Orwell’s little fable, Animal Farm, and learned what happens when a country places forced equality ahead of liberty for its citizenry.

Why Altruism is Prominent

Tibor R. Machan

The most popular ethical viewpoint clearly seems to be altruism. What does altruism amount to? As one philosopher, W. G. Maclagan, put it in an article in The Philosophical Quarterly several years ago, “‘Altruism’ [is] assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows....Altruism is to ... maintain quite simply that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he is deciding what course of action to pursue.” Altruism means selflessness, unselfishness, and self-sacrifice.

In most novels, movies, sermons, or political speeches, altruism is treated as virtually the same thing as morality or ethics. To be ethical is, as many who talk about ethics or depict ethical people, identical to being altruistic.

On the other hand, people are rarely altruistic in their daily lives. Sure, off and on they lend a hand to others, even to total strangers. This is usually in some emergency, when others are in dire straits or just could use a leg up. But in their normal doings most people concern themselves with getting ahead in their lives, with trying to benefit themselves and their intimates in their careers, family affairs, neighborhoods, and so forth. To all appearances people act more like moderate egoists; they are mostly focused on what will further their best interests. As they carry on at work, on the road, in the grocery store, and in the broader economy, most of them are not altruistic at all.

Does this mean there is a lot of hypocrisy afoot? Not necessarily. When most of us think about how other people should act, most of us quite naturally praise them when they do what helps us. We want others to be altruistic, naturally, since this promotes their care for us, or so it may appear.

Of course, most of us do not want others to meddle in our lives even as we praise them if they intend to help us out. But many also know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so it is also popular to insist that people take care of themselves and only help others when special needs arise.

What seems to mislead us into thinking that altruism is the dominant, even the correct, ethical position is that most discussions of how people should act concerns what they do in their interactions with others. And in these interactions what seems to matter most to whoever discusses ethics is what people do for other people.

Yet, as the late W. D. Falk, a philosopher from the University of North Carolina, pointed out in several of his writings on ethics, by focusing on how people talk about ethics we are mislead about what really concerns and guides them in their conduct. (See W. D. Falk, “Morality, self, and others,” eds. Hector-Neri Castaneda and George Nakhnikian, eds., Morality and the Language of Conduct, Wayne State University. 1963). Falk shows that while most of us voice views that are altruistic, we actually act much more egoistically, much more involved with how best to live our lives, to succeed as the people who we are.

Altruism is, so to speak, the more noisily championed moral stance. It is given a great deal of lip service and quite naturally because of what so many people often focus on when they discuss ethics with other people and in public forums, namely, on how others should act. But in their private and even social lives, where they have much greater influence and impact than elsewhere, most people are not altruists at all.

So there is a decisive and perhaps understandable disconnect between the ethics most people practice and the ethics they propound. As in most cases, such a disconnect between practice and theory is unhealthy. Unfortunately those who discuss morality and ethics professionally, namely, most philosophers and theologians, are fully complicit in perpetuating the disconnect. They promote altruism without making it clear that this could very well be a mistake, that a proper ethics for human beings does not require self-sacrifice, selflessness and so forth but a sensible focus on one’s own success in life as a human being.

Elections Equal Theft Facilitation

Tibor R. Machan

Unless elections are confined to selecting administrators of a legal system, they are mostly about mutual theft facilitation. You elect someone to office so he or she will garner the resources of others and transfer them to you or your favorites in the community. And since there is never enough to go around and there is always more and more that people want, the process amounts to a mad dash to be first in line at the government’s treasury. And while there is never enough to go around, there is always the ploy of borrowing against the wealth of future generations, who aren’t around to protest much, needless to note. No taxation without representation in your dreams!

A clear case in point is my neighbor down the street. She works in one the local community district, I am told. For the last few weeks there has appeared on her fence facing out toward the street a sign endorsing a referendum that supports, you guessed right, added funds for community colleges. No other measure is given support on this neighbor’s fence but this one that serves a special interest, certainly not the public interest that defenders of the welfare state constantly invoke when they condemn those who are skeptical about their type of government.

This sign, that I see every time I leave my home or come back to it, is at least implicitly honest. My neighbor makes no bones about wanting the political process to advance her agenda. As to others, never mind that. “Let them take care of theirs, I’ll look out for mine” seems to be the operative motto here.

The underlying hope would seem to be that enough people will be fooled into thinking that supporting her agenda is a matter of the public interest, so she will come out on top and her institution will get the support, not others that are also using the political process to seek it.

In a recent letter responding to one of my columns I was chided for failing to consider the public interest, for being too much of an individualist instead of a citizens promoting the public good. This because I advocate that government ought to focus primarily if not exclusively on protecting the rights of individuals and not on handing out so called entitlements to members of various groups.

But what too many folks today consider the public interest really isn’t at all to the benefit of the public but mostly to special groups or even specific individuals. This war of innumerable groups of people against all the others¾one reminiscent of the war of all against all discussed by the English philosophy Thomas Hobbes as part of the state of nature (the state prior to the establishment of civil society)¾is the norm for contemporary politics. So when Barack Obama recently spoke in Kansas, he said outright that he will do right by the citizens of Kansas¾at the expense, of course, of all the rest of the citizens of America. Just like my neighbor hopes from her local government, Senator Obama was promising to deliver the bacon to those whose votes he was seeking at others’ expense.

The public interest my foot! The welfare state, which pretends to take care of all, is but a mad dash to promise and seem eager to deliver to everyone benefits for which others are going to pay. It is plainly fraudulent¾it cannot be done. But sadly millions of people, when elections roll around and when Congress and various state assemblies are in session, get their hopes up that they will be the winners in the effort to get others to pay for what they want.

Of course, the result is the tragedy of the commons: resources are depleted good and hard and the country goes into greater and greater debt and various groups of people are angry at the rest who prevented them from getting what they believe they are entitled to.

The idea of a free society is that one must rely on one’s works and good fortune and, now and then, on the kindness of friends and neighbors, in order to get on with one’s life, not on theft-facilitators. The idea of our society, in contrast, is for everyone to try, each election, to rip off everyone else.

An Elementary Fallacy!

Tibor R. Machan

Among the publications in which my columns sometimes make an appearance, Free Inquiry is a favorite. Although it is primarily a forum for discussions of secular humanism and connected issues, there is plenty of room there to bring up interesting topics and argue one's case, provided one's civil about it all.

I am in distinguished company, indeed, with Richard Dawkins, Nat Hantoff, Peter Singer and Christopher Hitchens, among others but I cannot recall that Paul Kurtz, the chair of the Center for Inquiry which publishes Free Inquiry magazine, ever replied to any of these other columnists in the very same issue in which their column appeared. Evidently I got to him. (My column argued that fairness is a minor virtue, in contrast to what post-Rawlsian defenders of the welfare state firmly maintain.)

But what is most interesting to me in this exchange is contained in the following sentence: "[Machan] escaped from communist Hungary; as a result, he has rebelled against taxation and believes fervently in the free market."

It needs to be kept in mind that Dr. Kurtz is a Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and in that discipline logic figures as a central method for reaching an understanding on all matters. Indeed, on of the messages of secular humanists is that people ought to deploy logic and reason, including science, not faith and mysticism as they go about trying to figure out how the world works.

Among the first lessons one learns in an elementary logic course is that there are various informal fallacies that too many people commit as they go about thinking things through. For example, the fallacy of begging the question or ad hominem or the genetic fallacy. One would not expect anyone in the discipline to commit any of these and similar fallacies. Yet Dr. Kurtz manages to do just that when he claims that I hold my views on taxation and the free market "as a result" of my having "escaped communist Hungary." It is where I come from, what happened to me, the circumstances of my early life that produced in me my views, not my careful reasoning, study, analysis, and such, all those methods that secular humanist advise we use when considering, for example, such issues as evolution, abortion, the existence of God, intelligent design and so forth. No. Dr. Kurtz chooses, instead, to treat my views as some kind of affliction that comes to people who escape from communist Hungary or similar tyrannies.

This is sad. I would have loved to see some argument against my views, not having the dismissed on such flimsy grounds. The entire episode reminds me of when back in my graduate school days someone invited me to a talk given in Los Angeles by a Hungarian refugee. I decided to go even though I put very little stock on shared cultural background when it comes to learning things from people. Those I regard as accidents, something one has no control over, whereas one's thinking, reasoning are something a person must choose to carry out. Focusing on evidence and steps in arguments is a free act but having come from Hungary is, well, an incidental aspect of one's history. Yes, it can supply one with experiences that can be useful in reaching conclusions about various matters but those experiences will not get one very far all by themselves, with careful research, comparisons with the experiences of others, etc.

Sure enough, the young man I went to hear spoke about Hungary's communist experience in ways totally alien to how I came to reflect on them. He advanced the view that communism is a wonderful ideal, a beautiful dream but, alas, it's too bad that it is unattainable in practice because human beings just aren't good enough to handle its demanding ethics and politics. I completely reject this notion, as my book Marxism Revisited, A Bourgeois Reconsideration (Hamilton Books, 2006) make abundantly clear. The point here is simply to note that background does not determined what one will think about anything.

My opposition to taxation rests on my ethics which rejects taking something from one person so as to support another, without the former's consent. Also, taxation is an institution, like serfdom, that belongs in feudal orders, not in free societies. But I have addressed these matter at great length in my various writings.

It is disappointing that Dr. Kurtz resorts to committing an elementary fallacy, explaining someone's ideas by reference to his or her history, instead of criticizing them on the basis of the argument advanced in their support. (Indeed, my arguments were scarcely addressed by Dr. Kurtz in his reply!)

Do the Clintons Deploy the Race Card?

Tibor R. Machan

Elections do not interest me a great deal. Not because they cannot ever be important but because my own focus is on political principles, not personalities or emotional hot buttons. Moreover, these days no one running for anything articulates truly sound ideas on political economy. Among the candidates for president only Ron Paul, whose chances of winning the Republican nomination are practically nil, shows interest in the principles of the free society and even his message has been recast so that now his ads on California radio stations, for example, make him sound like one of the Pat Buchanan nationalists who is concerned mainly with illegal aliens.)

The notion that one must vote for someone, anyone, just to vote, never mind that everyone running advocates bad ideas, bad policies, is completely off the wall. That really amounts to throwing away one’s vote--a kind of electoral littering. Better to wait for a time when perhaps some sensible people, with sensible ideas, become candidates.

Nonetheless, sometimes when a candidate has no concern for sound principles but only for winning elections, the lack of a political vision becomes significant. For example, one of my neighbors who works for a community college has a sign up advocating that we all vote for a measure that would deliver additional funds to the college district. There seems to be no other political agenda on this neighbor’s mind but one that amounts to ripping off others so as to gain benefits.

Anyway, lack of political principles can easily lead a candidate to stress other types of generalities, such as racial sentiments. Hillary and, especially, Bill Clinton appear to be in this fix now, trying to find some general issues apart from basic political ideas that will attract voters. Lacking any unifying idea of what this country is about--freedom, equality, order, spirituality, whatever--it seems like the Clintons are now putting their money on broad racial or sexual sentiments. Because Barack Obama is black, they can invoke, as Bill Clinton has done recently in South Carolina, the names of discredited or scary black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, thus linking the Senator with these men’s one-sided leadership, the kind that folks with racial bias will certainly be alarmed by.

Because of this the Clintons have recently become targets of the criticism of some liberal democrats who do not want their party to return to the era when it got all too comfortably in bed with racists. Even as a mere, pragmatic tactic this approach no longer carries any punch. The bulk of Americans, as Obama said after his South Carolina victory, just don’t much care now about the race of the candidates.

But then where else are the Clintons--who do not advance any kind of coherent system of ideas (perhaps because the one they may well have, namely Hillary’s “it takes a village” socialism, is too offensive to mention)--going to find common ground with enough voters, apart from forging a community with people who are prejudiced? Without an idea or vision of what kind of political system they are going to support when in office, the only thing they seem to be able to offer now, in a crunch, is that they, unlike their black opponent, will not favor only blacks. This even though Senator Obama has been rather careful to distance himself from any notion of black solidarity as his strategy for winning races.

One can unite voters on the basis of several common factors. One, the right sort, is a political vision. Another, an insidious one, is racial prejudice or apprehension. Another objectionable one is class hatred.

In South Carolina this last had no foundation at all. Indeed, class divisions are a phony device for separating Americans, even though many politicians give it a try. (What upsets people about class is when people are deemed to have been born into it, as a matter of a birthright. Merely being richer than others doesn’t cut it since riches can fast disappear and wealth can be earned and, in any case, most people want to become rich.)

I doubt, by the way, that too many in the Clinton camp are out and out racists. But I do think that out of desperation, and in the absence of a coherent political philosophy, many will at least be tempted to invoke the race card--subtly but still!

The Free Society & Democracy

Tibor R. Machan

Around the world democracy is often thought to be the system of liberty. A free country is often thought to be identical with a democratic one. And while this is wrong, the mistake is understandable. For too many millions of people progress toward liberty begins with gaining the vote, with managing to have some, however small, measure of influence on public policy as opposed to having public affairs dictated by some unelected chief of state or some unelected group of thugs. So to get at least a bit of influence—to gain the right to vote—is a step in the right direction toward becoming free.

But in a truly free society democracy has to be strictly limited. For starters, it cannot involved voting on how non-consenting citizens should act and use their labor and property. Democracy can involve no more than the selection of the administrators of the legal system and such as system must be strictly limited to the protection of everyone’s basic individual rights. In short, people may vote for who the sheriff will be but not on whether the sheriff may rob Peter to help out Paul. The sheriff may only act in the capacity of a peace officer, as a crime fighter, as the defender of the citizenry from domestic and foreign aggressors.

Now this shows very clearly and plainly that we do not live in a truly free society anywhere on the globe, not even in the United States of America. That’s not to say America is a full blow tyranny or that we do not enjoy far more liberty than do citizens—“subjects”—of most other nations around the globe. Just as is implicit in the way some organizations such as Freedom House rank countries, there are more or less free societies around the world. And compared to most eras in human history, there are societies these days that enjoy institutions and laws that come near to making them free, considering how brutal and Draconian tyrannies and despotisms had been in the past and were not all that long ago. Yet even today many societies are ruled top-down in more or less totalitarian fashion and things could get worse—there is no automatic progress toward freedom in the world.

The original statement of the way America was supposed to differ from other societies, laid out in the Declaration, made it abundantly plain that democracy may not trump individual rights. That is what is meant by calling the rights of all human beings unalienable—nothing and no one may strip individuals of these rights; nothing and no one may justifiably act to violate those rights.

Unfortunately the urgency involved in building a new country, despite all the good ideas most of the Founders had about how to devise it, made it very difficult to stick to the basic ideas of the Declaration. So the Constitution didn’t do justice to its principles, just as Lincoln explained when he invoked the Declaration’s ideals to try to remedy the Constitution. (Sadly, even Lincoln didn’t quite stick to those excellent ideas.)

For those who appreciate how vital liberty is to the maintenance of a just system of law, it is difficult in our day to tell just what one is to do, especially when the available selections during elections nearly all betray the principles of liberty. Will voting for a Hillary Clinton make American a freer society than it is now? How about voting for Rudy Giuliani? We don’t even have the kind of system, as many countries do, where many candidates can run for office in the final race so that citizens can at least register a sizable preference for other than the winner. It is certainly very frustrating to have to choose between two candidates who have no serious concern for what a free society requires.

But in some ways it may still be possible for some people to vote so as to guide the country in the direction of a truly free society. Just what that involves can vary a great deal from one region of the country to another, from what’s at stake in one election versus in another. Voters are intelligent enough to figure out what will get the country closer to a free society, although they do not often use their intelligence for that purpose. As it stands now, most often, sadly, they use it to figure how many goodies they can get at others’ expense by means of casting their votes. (That’s just what Alexis de Tocqueville warned us against in his famous Democracy in America!)

The original idea that what American should be is free, first and foremost, is getting hardly any attention in our democracy.

Revolutionaries and Reality

Tibor R. Machan

Those who are loyal to the political values of the American Founders are revolutionaries, far more so than any other type (like the Marxists or radical Muslims). This is because the American Founders identified something brand new and radical when they declared that individuals have unalienable rights to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

This idea overturned thousands of years of official doctrine according to which people belong to the government—the idea that they are subjects, not citizens. Such a notion is fundamentally alien to what the Founders proclaimed and believed is in fact the case, namely, that each intact adult human being is sovereign, a self-governor, and not someone’s slave, serf, or subject.

Sadly although the gist of the Founders’ idea has gained a good deal of influence in many cultures—legal systems and public policies certain give some lip service to it—there is still a great deal of habitual statism in vogue. Many politicians, intellectuals, educators, pundits, and such cling to the notion that you and I and the rest of us belong to some group—the race, nation, tribe, what have you—and so can be conscripted to do service to these never mind whether we consent. Both conservatives and liberals—and indeed nearly all the rest of the political factions—insist that your life isn’t really yours but you owe it to something or somebody else.

This was, of course, the essential teaching of socialists of all stripes, including Karl Marx. It is also the teaching of some of today’s leading political and social thinkers, such as Cass Sunstein, Charles Taylor, Thomas Nagel, Amitai Etzioni, and many others. They all deride individualism, the idea that you and the rest of us are sovereign and to gain our cooperation for any project we need to give our consent, we must be asked and only if we agree may such cooperation be obtained form us.

In the current election year this collectivist idea is especially prominent. It is taken for granted, not even argued for, by most liberal democrats and even by American conservatives, those in the country who claim to be conserving the ideas and ideals of the American Founders but have, in fact, become totally disloyal to them.

So what are the bona fide loyalists to do? What are those to do who insist that the original American position is sound and ought to be the governing set of ideas in this country and, indeed, in any civilized society? There is no one to vote for who embraces these notions except Ron Paul whose numbers aren’t very impressive, even if those who support him have made news with their enthusiasm and willingness to put their money behind their man. Even Dr. Paul isn’t quite the champion of the Founders’ ideas this country needs—someone who stands four squares by the Declaration of Independence rather than, as Paul does, by the much more ambiguous and constantly changing U. S. Constitution.

What the revolutionaries among us need to grasp is just how radical their position really is and how long it takes to make such radical ideas gain currency. Human beings can live by good judgment, their rational thought, but they also live, mostly, by habit. And many of the habits of the human race are flawed and tend to misguide people toward neglecting their sovereignty. Just as some women who have every right to insist on their independence in fact acquiesce to being subjugated by some men, so a great many people, even in America, are embracing the old, reactionary notion that people belong to the government, the king or whoever, not themselves. They do not protest at all when politicians make arbitrary, unjustified claims on their lives and labors, as if these didn’t belong to them at all but could be used and disposed of by the government.

John Locke made clear that “absolute monarchs are but men,” meaning, essentially, that government is simply other people and since no human being has rightful dominion over another—slavery is a vile institution, as is serfdom—the continued belief in government’s authority to expropriate what belongs to us, to conscript our labor against our will, is unjust. But, sadly, it is understandable because old habits are hard to overcome. (Just think of a habit you have which you have learned is destructive to, say, your health. It is often very hard for us to change it.)

So in this election year when our leaders want to continue to govern according to the tenets of the reactionary doctrine that government is our ruler, not our hired professional duty-bound to protect our rights, those who are loyal to the American revolution must continue vigilantly to promote their ideas however hopeless it seems to do so. That is a matter of integrity and in the long run it will also bear fruit.

Ethics and the Writers’ Strike

Tibor R. Machan

In the field of business ethics there is a very influential movement called stakeholder theory or, alternatively, corporate social responsibility. The gist of the idea is that when corporations are being managed, the managers have a fundamental obligation to serve those who have an interest in how the company is doing. So, in contrast to the idea that management ought to seek to advance the best interest of those who own or have invested in the company, this view holds that management ought to look out for the best interest of those who have a stake in the company, who could be helped by it, such as employees, customers, subcontractors, neighbors near plants and office buildings, and so on.

The target of this movement is the idea of the right to private property and that when one owns something, one may determine what should happen with it (within the limits of everyone’s rights). Shareholders own the company and together ought to be free to provide its direction. Instead, stakeholder theorists claim, it should be politicians, bureaucrats, pundits, preachers, and others in the population who should give company’s their direction, their purpose.

At the foundation of this movement lies the idea that people owe their lives, their labor, their property to others, first and foremost. This is the ethics of altruism, a favorite of many moralists but also an ethical doctrine that is ultimately impossible to practice consistently. As W. H. Auden so cleverly put the point, “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.”

The people who advocate this altruistic ethics, especially as it influences the way businesses are being managed, are those on the political Left. And the political Left in American includes, more than most professions, those who write the scripts for Hollywood movies and television dramas. If you check out the moral orientation of most Hollywood fare, it is plain to see that it promotes the idea that businesses shouldn’t seek to make profit but aim to help those in need.

The heroes in Hollywood aren’t the suits who bring in the dollars (and create the jobs), not by a long shot. The heroes are the actors and actresses who gallivant around the globe offering help to the needy and put down concern with the box office and commercial success. The fact is largely ignored that they couldn’t do their philanthropic work without the profits that the suits make possible for all these actors and actresses. As with Mother Teresa versus Bill Gates, never mind that the former could barely help a few people while the latter has created decent jobs for millions and useful tools for the rest of us. Looking good, in terms of the altruists, seems to trump actually doing real good!

Yet, there is a glitch here, as the writers’ strike reveals. Suddenly the fact that this strike has virtually crippled the entertainment industry cuts no ice. Never mind all the stakeholders who are losing work and cannot pay their bills because the writers are insisting on pursuing what they perceive to be their own economic interests. In short, where is the “social responsibility” of the writers, their unions, in this current strike? Why is it OK for them all to focus on their own economic well being, their economic future, on what benefits them and their loved ones? Why, if corporate managers are acting badly in advancing the economic interest of those who own and invest in their companies, aren’t the writers and their union leaders acting badly by trying, with this prolonged work stoppage, to advance their own economic interest?

Why are the writers and their union leaders not renouncing self-interest and profit and going back to work for the benefit of all the stakeholders? Is it, perhaps, that they aren’t actually very serious about their altruism? Is it perhaps that when it comes close to home they agree with W. H. Auden’s point that altruism is an impossible guide to human conduct. It is one thing to give lip service to it and to denounce those who seek to make a profit from their work; it is another thing entirely to walk the talk and abandon the pursuit of profit by, for example, stopping the writers’ strike.

Of course, the writers have every right to strike--although with the oddities of mandatory unionization their strike has a good many perverse elements. But it would be cool if they admitted that when it comes to their own economic well being, altruism isn’t their ethical guide and egoism is and they are doing exactly what those “greedy” suits are doing whom they are always putting down in their writings.

Empty Talk -- Blog Entry at ocregister.com/horserace08

http://epaper.ocregister.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=T3JhbmdlLzIwMDgvMDEvMjAjQXIxMjcwNA==&Mode=Gif&Locale=english-skin-ocr

Economic ups and downs

Tibor R. Machan

Those who study a country’s economic conditions, mostly macro-economists, track general trends--is inflation or unemployment, how about productivity, comparative strength of the currency, etc., and so forth. But the basics of all these are mostly local matters, all about what happens to you, me, our neighbors, all about what we decide to do with our income and other liquid assets.

At times I myself feel very much inclined to go shopping for stuff I would like, to replace some old things with newer ones, to take advantage of some innovative items I became aware of, or to simply stock up on things I like a lot, like novels to read, food to eat, and so on. Now and then I may go overboard with all the buying, get some big items as when I recently bought one of those mini-hot tubs I have been dreaming about to relax my aching back or a VCR to DVD converter to preserve some recordings for the future. And it was Christmas recently and I may have overdone it with gifts for my children and myself.

After I do some of this over the top shopping for a while I tend to get a scared and tighten my belt a bit, maybe even a lot. Instead of eating out I’ll just cook up something at home for several days; instead of taking trips to see friends up and down the coast of California, I decide to stick to those novels I bought and read and read and just read some more. And no more purchases of big items, nor home improvements for a while, certainly no new shoes or clothing. In short, I am inclined on such occasions to get out of the market except for services and goods that I need on a regular basis--but even these I may cut back so as to recover economically!

When last summer a large chunk of cash was stolen from me in Europe, as well as quite a lot of stuff I had carried with me because I was going to attend a wedding and bought gifts to bring home, I did experience some panic and stopped buying. I did replace the gifts but waiting a while before I got a new suit (when I was invited to another wedding). But to make the replacements less of a burden, I gave up other stuff. But I also went on a search for new sources of income--I lined up some speaking gigs and conferences I hadn’t planned to do beforehand. (This brought to mind the Laffer Curve! I assume if I were robbed weekly, I would just give up trying to recover.)

When I was robbed, I felt very nearly as I feel around April 15th every year. But that is a bit more predictable, within a certain amount of what will be extorted from me, so I can prepare for it better. But I usually react to having to come up with the funds (so as to avoid prison) by cutting back, saying no to purchases I’d normally make.

Now what if most people in the American, even the world, economy decide to cut back on their purchases? What if they all become terribly cautious about committing to spending? Millions of people stay away from the malls. Millions cut back on driving, going to movies, even visiting their dentist. What then? Well, I suspect this is when a recession is likely to commence. Add to this all the wasteful spending of the taxes extorted from us all, and the corresponding increases of our tax bills, hidden or overt, and this is likely to reduce economic activity and, therefore, income and savings.

To this, of course, politicians respond by promising to perform magic. They talk of stimulus packages--but where are the resources support to come from? Usually from printing more money, going into more government debt, or robbing Peter to make things a bit easier for a while for Paul. But, of course, one cannot get blood out of a turnip and none of this makes up for the reduced economic activity, the pause in consumption, and so forth.

Politicians have no bona fide magic--they only pretend to have it. So they will wave their hands about uselessly, maybe fooling a bunch of people with schemes of getting something from nothing. In the last analysis, however, the phenomenon of reduced economic activity is not something anyone can avoid. It happens. Most often it happens sporadically, not all at once across the country or the world, but at times the withdrawals tends to be nearly universal and then they will show up in the macro-economic statistics as somewhat sizable dips, a recession, even a depression at times. Trying to pretend that this cannot happen or can easily be avoided merely makes things worse.

Another Distortion at the Movies, etc.

Tibor R. Machan

American Rhapsody is a movie about a family that gets smuggled out of Hungary in the early 1960s and all the various complications this gives rise to. Since I went through this ordeal myself when I was 14, not with my family but several perfect strangers and a paid guide, I thought I’d check out the movie.

Expecting to see something familiar I’d witness, instead a very distorted picture of the escape emerged right from the start. And I have met up with this distortion before, when in 1981 TIME magazine carried a lengthy story about what TIME called flesh peddlers, the who people hired out their skills of leading people across the dangerous Iron Curtain. Just as TIME did, so American Rhapsody depicted the people smugglers not as heroes, not as folks doing an important piece of work for which hundreds of refugees would forever be grateful. No. Both TIME and American Rhapsody depicted the smugglers as rapacious, greedy, heartless brutes who had no concern for their clients at all, especially not the young children who accompanied them.

My experience was completely different. From the start, when my guide came to our apartment in Budapest and introduced himself to my mother and me, he was not only competent but very helpful. First he established his credentials so that we’d be at ease about the possibility that he might be some government agent setting a trap. This consisted of showing my mother letters I had written to my father, already in the West, ones only someone who had the trust of my father could have on him. Sure enough, this served its purpose--we relaxed and continued our preparations without nagging suspicions that very naturally infest such transactions.

I was allowed a day by the guide and my mother to decide whether this is something I wanted to undertake. It wasn’t a journey without serious risks, mind you. Several people we knew had tried to escape and were caught by vigilant border guards and immediately incarcerated and later sent to labor camps. (You see the communists were serious about the idea, one that attracts some Western communitarians, like the highly respected Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, that each of us belongs to our societies!)

Of course, I decided to make the trip--for me it was more of an adventure than a hazardous escape and I had always dreamt about coming West. (Young people probably do not fully appreciate the dangers of such undertakings so for them they tend to be exciting adventures, mostly.) My guide then helped me to get ready by instructing me to send my bicycle to the city, Gyor, where we would disembark from our bus and begin in earnest the more complicated portion of the trip during the night, on our bikes, sleeping during the day in hey stacks on the way toward the border, after which we would have to walk.

All of us, the four adults and I, were provided with phony documents that would at least temporarily fend of authorities who might ask what we are doing wandering about near the Austro-Hungarian border. Then we started our 20 miles or so walk, mostly at the edge of freshly tilled farmland. Our feet took a violent beating from this--I eventually had to toss all the stuff I brought along and even go barefoot for good spells.

All along our heartless flesh peddler gave us all the help he could, kept reminding us what reward lies ahead, once we crossed into Austria and reached the American sector there. At the border he skillfully cut the barbwires and made sure that we would not trip the hairline wires wrapped around it. We were also carefully led though the 25 feet soft dirt just before the barbwires since it was booby trapped and we would have been blown to smithereens without his guidance.

Once we successfully crossed into Austria, we still had some 10 kilometers to walk to reach the railway station where we were to catch the train to Vienna. And after some hassle we did, only to find the train filled with Russian soldiers. Fortunately they were all drunk and our strategy of going through the compartments talking loudly in German turned out the be quite superfluous.

But I have told this story elsewhere already--my memoir The Man Without A Hobby (2006). The only reason I tell it again here is to show how this supposedly rapacious, heartless smuggler was, in fact, a completely decent, as well as highly competent, individual whom Hollywood and TIME really should have represented more honestly.

Individualism, the Collectivists’ Nemesis

Tibor R. Machan

It is individualism that the American Founders elevated into political prominence and it is individualism that most politicians and governments, including America’s, find most annoying because it is the bulwark against arbitrary power.

If, as the Declaration of Independence states, individual human beings have unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, no one may violate these rights. Every adult individual is sovereign, a self-ruler and not subject to the rule of others. (This is why Americans are referred to as citizens, not as subjects, like so many around the globe.)

Karl Marx was among the many political theorists--like Hegel and Comte--who realized that if individualism becomes prominent, their dream of ruling others in the name of whatever “higher goal or power” is over and done with. So they worked tirelessly to discredit individualism, to establish that no one is sovereign and we all belong to some group--the nation, the tribe, the race, the class, the ethnic group, whatever.

Today some of America’s most powerful mainstream politicians have gone on record denouncing individualism and they are joined by a great many academicians, even some scientists in trying to besmirch the idea. Instead of each person having the free will to guide him or herself in life, each of us is said to be but a cell in the larger organism that is humanity. There have been many who laid out this idea in forceful ways--just read what the French “father of sociology” said about this: “All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.” Marx put it even more succinctly: “The Human essence is the true collectivity of Man,” and referred to human beings as “specie beings,” meaning they are part of the larger organism or body of humanity. The book, by Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell, defended the idea in the mid-20th century!

Most recently the highly honored Canadian philosopher, a recent recipient of the prestigious Templeton Prize, has argued for “a principle of belonging or obligation, that is a principle which states our obligation as men to belong to or sustain society, or society of a certain type, or to obey authority or an authority of a certain type” in contrast to John Locke’s idea, those laid out in the Declaration, that there are unalienable rights every individual possesses simply by virtue of his or her humanity. These rights are definitive claims against anyone who would intrude upon one’s life, who would rob one of one’s liberty and moral autonomy, who would deny one’s freedom to choose and to pursue happiness.

In our current political climate it is the philosophy of entitlement that undermines the Lockean idea, which is the philosophy of the Declaration, by insisting that people have a right to take from others what they need or badly want--be this health care, retirement funds, opportunities for purchasing goods and services at lower cost than what some favorite group wants, land on which to build important shops, etc. And the idea of such entitlements, namely, that they are to be legally mandated, enforced, is backed by the philosophy of communitarianism, one that takes us all to belong to society, belong to a larger and more important entity than ourselves.

Yet, of course, it is always some individuals who make these claims and insist that they be the ones to decide what everyone’s obligation is to others, to the country, the nation, or the racial group. It is these individuals, after all, who try to secure power for themselves with the phony claim that we all belong to society and thus must be made to pay up what they decide with our lives and labors.

This anti-individualism or communitarianism then comes to no more than the special privilege of certain individuals to run the lives of other individuals, to live off the lives of others who may very well have perfectly justified goals of their own that could be supported with their lives if they were left free to decide about such matters.

Whenever you hear or read attacks on individualism, these attacks are nothing more than efforts to wrest power from people so that only a few select individuals can legally enforce their will on the rest of us, the will of those with whom they disagree.

Communitarianism--or collectivism--is false. Individualism is true. And even communitarians know this perfectly well.