Column on Conflict of Interest the Other Way

Conflict of Interest the Other Way

Tibor R. Machan
A constant beef of critics of various regulatory panels is that their
members have financial ties to industry. For example, a recent piece in
The New York Times made much of the fact that the FDA panel that didn?t
demand that all anti-pain drugs be pulled off the market had 10 members
who had ?industry ties.? Written by Gardiner Harris and Alex Berenson, in
the February 25th issue of The Times, the article, ?10 Voters on Panel
Backing Pain Pills Had Industry Ties,? lamented the fact that not all the
members of the panel were completely independent of firms in the industry
they were asked to oversee. It is typical of the pro-regulation media to
keep insisting that anyone who has ever done any consulting for an
industry must be biased in favor of that industry. While there can be some
justified concern here, not unless there is evidence of bias is there
warrant for indicting these people for any malfeasance.
Of course, the FDA or any other regulatory agency is going to appoint
people to panels who know their stuff, and such people are bound to have
had some connection with the industry they know. Drug firms, for example,
need expert advice and they get such advice from university professors who
will also likely to be asked by government to oversee the regulatory
process. Does it follow necessarily that such people will blindly favor
the interest of those in the industry that has hired them in the past? Of
course not. But it is always tempting to impugn their integrity by such
association. If they have worked for the industry, they must be biased. It
doesn?t, however, follow by a long shot.
Now what is interesting is that the same media that is jumping all over
the people who have worked for various firms in a certain industry,
claiming these people are basically corrupt, does not ever consider those
in the academic world as being suspect of special interests. Yet, most
people in the academy work for government. Even the most prestigious
private universities, like Harvard or Princeton, get gobs of money from
the feds, to do research, produce papers on this or that topic of ?public
interest,? consult about public policy, etc. These folks are deeply
beholden to government. It is virtually their bread and butter?or at least
their considerable extra pocket change. Without the government
associations they would not be invited to innumerable conferences, asked
to publish in various journals, contribute to encyclopedias, write text
books, do peer reviews, sit on agency panels, and so forth.
In other words, the bulk of so called independent scholars aren?t
independent at all?they owe their soul to the company store, which is the
government of the United States of America or, in many cases, their state
governments. Yet few news organizations call these folks, with evident
links to governments, to task for their conflict of interest. Why?
This is the governmental habit that a few people have managed to write
about. Yet they have also managed to be ignored, to a large extent.
Jonathan R. T. Hughes penned his book, Governmental Habit Redux: Economic
Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (Princeton University Press,
1991), so as to call attention to this fact but, alas, grand media outlets
like The New York Times pay scant attention to their message.
The fact is that innumerable professors throughout the most prestigious
universities of this and many other countries are avid supporters of
government regulation, supervision of the private sector, regulation and
supervision, all of which require their very own professional
?assistance.? They write the scholarly studies that show the need for all
this regulation and supervision. They supply the apologetics for the
expansion of government control of the economy and all the professions,
all the high-sounding rationales about equality, for abating of poverty,
for reduction for injustice via government controls, involving the
expansion of government?s scope in our lives.
Yet where is the mainstream media pointing out this conflict of interest?
Nowhere, that?s where. One may, then, call into question all the
moralistic concern with conflict of interest when it comes to associations
between experts and the industry they are being asked to judge. After all,
government is the biggest of all industries, yet those who judge it,
nearly all of them recipients of government?s largesse, do not get their
integrity called into question by the same media that bellyaches about the
alleged corruption in the private sector.
I say, clean your own house, major media, before you start pointing
fingers.

Column on "Bogeyman" blabber

Was Communism a Bogeyman?

Tibor R. Machan

Forgive me for my memory but I remember clearly that communism wasn?t a
bogeyman, not in the sense that of an imaginary evil demon parents invoke
to scare kids into doing the right thing. Yet that is what some folks want
us to think about communism and the Soviet Union, the massive state that
promoted it. By viewing communism as a bogeyman, they can then divert
attention from its bona fide evil and focus their gaze on the far less
vicious excesses of some anti-communists, like Joe McCarthy and his pals.
This is just what critics of the late Sidney Hook tried to do and what
some defenders of the recently deceased playwright Arthur Miller?s
selective scolding of anti-communism peddle.

Look, there is no doubt that one can fight an evil in ways that are
themselves wrong. If someone insults me, I can respond in several ways and
some of these will be wrong. Even if someone attacks me physically, I can
respond badly, by, say, attacking his child or friends in turn. So, yes,
some of the ways people tried to repel communism were not admirable.

But they weren?t addressing some bogeyman either and to say so reveals a
moral blindness. It is akin to calling slavery a bogeyman with which
people tried to cope, against which they deployed various strategies, some
better than others. Or racism or other forms of injustice. But to justify
the worst ways of dealing with injustice it is quite wrong to dismiss the
injustice itself as some kind of bogeyman.

Now there is a related approach one can take to belittling the concerns
some of us have with evil. This is the post-modernist tactic of claiming
that there are multiple perspectives for viewing the world, some of which
will construe certain things as evil, but others will see them
differently. You know, ?Your freedom fighters are someone else?s
terrorists.? This is the idea of ?multiple narratives??varied ways of
telling a story about something. So, there is the ante-bellum narrative
about slavery, the white supremacists narrative, or the who cares about
black-and-white morality (pragmatic) narrative. By peddling the idea that
any narrative is as good as any other, one can then pretend that one?s own
dismissing of slavery as evil is just an equally valid narrative.

The very same technique can be deployed for discrediting those who saw
communism as a vile system of politics, or those who saw the Nazis as
racist totalitarians. Post-modernism has provided us with these
approaches to dealing with our adversaries. We do not need to argue with
anyone about the rights and wrongs?the blacks versus the whites, as some
people put the matter?of communism, slavery, Nazism, racism, and the like.
No, we can just say, well it all depends upon your point of view.

Of course, this backfires rather immediately. What about the black versus
white of dealing in black and whites? Is it all black?that is to say, is
it wrong?to invoke firm standards about what is right politically or
morally or is it all a matter of shades of gray? And how do we tell what
the proper shade is that we should focus upon, if there are no blacks and
whites?

Truth is those who denounce black vs. white thinking?those who consider
all political or ethical value judgments a matter of creating bogeymen by
which to scare children?are themselves quite wedded to certain blacks and
whites, only they don?t wish to discuss these, to defend their own
standards but merely hurl ad hominems at others to try to discredit their
version of black vs. white.

This ploy will perhaps work in the effort to secure oneself a reputation
of erudition, of being above the fray, of not fitting into a
category?liberal, conservative, libertarian, communist, fascist, and so
forth. But only for a bit.

After just a little more thought it becomes clear that such folks have
their own categories they fit quite well, namely, the category of people
who lack forthrightness and wish to win by rhetorical savvy rather than by
means of sound reasoning?obscurantists.

Communism is bad and those who saw it as such were right, even if not all
ways of dealing with it were sound, proper. Let?s admit that some ways of
organizing society are bad, very bad, and this is not something to be
obscured with post-modernist mumbo jumbo.

Column on Ownership, True and False

Ownership Society?True & False

Tibor R. Machan

President George W. Bush is about ownership like most defenders of
abortion rights are about choice, highly restrictive and selective. The
only choice these abortion rights activists prize is the choice to
terminate a pregnancy. Everything else they?I have in mind Planned
Parenthood and NOW type people?are eager for government to control,
regulate, or prohibit. So their support of choice is bogus and smacks of a
special agenda, having little to do with an individual?s right to liberty.

Mr. Bush, in turn, seems to believe in ownership of just a tiny portion of
the fruits of one?s work that everyone must hand over to the Social
Security Administration, and even there he doesn?t actually champion
ownership, plain and simple, but highly circumscribed, regulated
?ownership.? (He will not ?permit? anyone to take the money to Las Vegas,
for example. But what kind of ownership is it that the president controls
like that?)

Maybe Mr. Bush needs to have it explained just what ownership means. And I
have just the teacher for him, the famous 20th century philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Norman Malcolm, one of his students, tells the following
story about him in which ownership is spelled out very instructively:

When in very good spirits he would jest in a delightful manner. This took
the form of deliberately absurd or extravagant remarks uttered in a tone,
and with the mien, of affected seriousness. On one walk he 'gave' me each
tree that we passed, with the reservation that I was not to cut it down or
do anything to it, or prevent the previous owners from doing anything to
it: with those reservations they were henceforth mine. (Norman Malcolm,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, A Memoir [London: Van Nostrand Rinehold Co., 1070],
pp. 31-32.)

In short, when you cannot use or dispose of something as you judge fit and
as its nature allows, it isn?t yours?calling it yours is ?absurd or
extravagant.?

George W. Bush, then, isn?t talking about ownership at all. He has in
mind the sort of possession parents make possible for their kids when they
allow them to use the car or have a party at the house: they will remain
in full charge but the kids are allowed some leeway with the thing.

That is the kind of ?ownership? subjects had in feudal monarchies.
Monarchs gave them permission to use some of what they owned, maybe to
encourage them to work harder so they can then be taxed heavier.

True ownership is when one has the right to use and dispose of the owned
items as one sees fit. This is the theory of the right to private property
that John Locke, the grandfather of the American Revolution, spelled out
in his Second Treatise of Civil Government (1764). It is well summarized,
paradoxically enough?but with a misguided emphasis?by Karl Marx: ?the
right of man to property is the right to enjoy his possessions and dispose
of the same arbitrarily, without regard for other men, independently from
society, the right of selfishness.? (Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed.
David McLellan [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], p. 53.) Of course,
this right is not just a right of selfishness but also a right of
generosity, charity, gift giving, and free exchange or commerce.
(Aristotle was well aware, way before Marx and Locke, that to be generous,
one needs to own something to be generous with!)

True ownership only exists when one has the unalienable right to obtain,
hold, and allocate property in any way one chooses apart from violating
the equal right of others. This is just the kind of ownership that neither
Mr. Bush nor his adversaries want to acknowledge, let alone secure legal
recognition for. The parties in the current debate don?t want ownership at
all. They are only dickering about how much of the results of their work
will government allow people to control, with all the parties calmly
accepting government as having the role of being able to grant such
permission.

This, in fact, is the very idea of government that the American
revolution had been fought to overturn, one whereby it is the sovereign
and the people are its subjects. It is pretty sad that only two and a half
centuries after that vital turning point in human history, the leaders of
the country the revolution spawned completely ignore its essence, namely,
individual sovereignty and the unalienable right to govern one?s life,
labor, and its results without the permission of the king!

Column on New Republic Style Pragmatism

Another Liberal Duplicity

Tibor R. Machan

The New Republic, that venerable Left of center publication, just came
out (dated February 28th) with its 90th Anniversary Issue. Its general
theme is ?To Liberalism! Embattled And Essential.?

By ?liberal? is meant here not classical liberalism, which made the case
for limited government, individual rights and the free market. No, instead
we get the corrupted sense of ?liberalism? that means making government
the caretaker of society, empowering it to regiment us about, redistribute
the wealth people create and otherwise subvert nearly all of the
principles of the original liberalism.

There is too much in this issue to cover in a column but one piece in
particular is worth discussing. Senior Editor Jonathan Chait penned it and
it?s called ?Fact Finders.? It addresses the difference between so called
conservatives and modern liberals, especially as regards the issue of
which side is wiser about the nature of government.

Basically Chait is defending a pragmatic liberalism, which is an
unprincipled approach to governing a country, one that sees no limit?for
example, principles of individual rights to, say, private property?to what
the state may do to set things right. His prime example is that among
conservatives who support Social Security reform some, the libertarians,
actually want the system abolished, even if this has to happen slowly. And
he correctly observes that the reasoning behind this hasn't much to do
with the particular superior results of such reform (vis-à-vis the
national economy, individual retirement benefits, or GNP). It has to do
with the general idea that a free society?one without a bloated public
sector-that is, one with a government of strictly limited scope?is
superior overall to one wherein government meddles in everything.

The fault Chait finds with this isn?t so much that it?s wrongheaded but
that it is, as he dubs it, an a priori rather than pragmatic approach to
public policy matters. He is a follower of Jeremy Bentham, who argued that
?there is no right which, when the abolition of it is advantageous to
society, should not be abolished,? as if ?advantageous to society? where a
piece of cake to spell out.

Chait, sadly, caricatures the libertarian?s ?a priori? approach, making
it seem like a dumb-stubborn, mindless embrace of the free society. He
quotes Milton Friedman, quite out of context, saying that ?freedom in
economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood,
so economic freedom is an end in itself,? as if this meant ?Economic
freedom, come hell or high water.? In fact, Friedman and most libertarians
champion principles of freedom because history shows them that when upheld
in a society, they are, in the main, better for purposes of reaching
desirable goals than are the methods involving coercion.

Principles of political economy, not unlike principles in engineering and
medicine, are what one comes to learn to be general guidelines of action
based on extensive study, on empirical and/or thought experimentation, and
so forth, not any kind of blind commitments. But let that go for a moment.
Pragmatists don?t realize that pragmatism itself is a general approach and
relies on its soundness based on what we have learned from similar studies.

What is interesting in Chait's essay is that no mention is made of how
most modern liberals are themselves "a priori" supporters of various civil
libertarian ideas, such as freedom of speech, due process in the criminal
law, fairness in the administration of the law, etc. Here it is
conservatives who have been more pragmatic?if prior restraint works, let's
use it; if giving up habeas corpus for a while achieves greater security,
go for it; if censorship achieves some good, it's fine, etc. Modern
liberals, however, have, in the main, opposed this?that is, after all,
what the ACLU is all about.

I wonder why Chait fails to discuss this internal conflict within modern
liberalism and, indeed, within conservatism?why is pragmatism so good when
it comes to some policies but should be avoided when it comes to others?
At least libertarians tend to have a coherent approach?they see liberty as
a good idea across the board, whatever projects people embark upon. They
trust the lessons they discern from history and the study of human nature,
namely, that free men and women will deal with problems better than those
who are regimented about by others.

Chait hasn?t, nor have others in The New Republic, managed to challenge
this truly principled (?a priori?) approach in the slightest, and for good
reason?it is, after all, the stance of all of the practical sciences in
which general principles are relied upon to guide future actions, leaving
changes to be made only once the principles have been shown to require
reformulation.

Column on Science and Sense (sans Typo)

Science and Sense

Tibor R. Machan

These days sciences multiply like rabbits. And in each broad field there
are sub-fields by the dozens, even hundreds. It?s difficult to keep up
with them, even if you, like I, subscribe to a few magazines that report
the latest news from most of the disciplines. (I read Science News and
used to read The Sciences until recently it was discontinued.)~~I ran
across a report from England about the new scientific study of happiness
and that reminded me of a professor of psychology, David Lykken of the
University of Minnesota, who is working on how happiness ?really works.?
And then there is a scholarly publication, The International Journal of
Happiness Studies. Some of these folks are assuring us that being happy
doesn?t make you, well, very happy after all. This is what Professor Lord
Layard is telling us?what makes us happy, in fact, is to see that others
aren?t too much happier than we are. So another science is in the offing!

But I am suspicious about whether these fields really can claim to be
sciences, if by ?science? one means a rigorous, systematic study of some
aspect of reality, one that can be replicated and tested by any reasonable
person. And my suspicion was reinforced recently as I was in US World &
News, in the Health & Medicine department, a piece titled ?Mysteries of
the Mind.?

Here is the sentence that gave me pause, a quote from University of
Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan: "Most of what we do every minute of
every day is unconscious?.Life would be chaos if everything were on the
forefront of our consciousness." This is supposed to be a conclusion drawn
from a scientific study.

But just consider the claim for a moment. It is one that everyone can
double check since it is supposed to be true of us all and pertains to
something we can all do easily enough, check what goes on with our minds
and how it relates to what we do. Is it really true that ?most of what we
do every minute of every day is unconscious?? I made a survey of my own
doings and here is what I did just a few minutes ago. I got out of my car
and locked it up after getting out the mail from the passenger seat. I
walked up the front steps and unlocked my door, checked my answering
machine, put the mail on the dining room table, opened some of it and
threw the envelops from them into the trash. Then I came to my computer
and checked my email, answered a few posts, after which I wrote a letter
to someone and addressed an envelop to the person, made some copies of
some bills and stuffed it into the envelop with the letter, sealed it, put
a stamp and return address sticker on it and put it to take to the Post
Office next time I drive by it. Then I remembered reading the piece from
US World & News Report when I was on tread mill at the gym and looked it
up on the magazine?s web site and began writing this piece.

I think I am being fair and accurate at~recounting my doings within
several of the minutes during which most of what I am supposed to be doing
is being done unconsciously. But none of what I did was done
unconsciously, quite the opposite. And I even remember it all. So where
the beef here? Perhaps the good professor means by ?doing? something
different from what the word means in ordinary language. Or maybe he means
not ?unconscious? but ?unselfconscious.?

My breathing, of course, is going on unconsciously, as is the circulation
of my blood. Even some of the scratching I do when my head or ear itches
might accurately be considered a kind of unconscious doing, although if I
pay attention I can make note of it, so it can easily be called to
consciousness. I look around with my eyes a lot, from the keyboard to the
monitor of the computer, sometimes at the mountains outside my window
(which I can see now that the rains have subsided).~~I am not fully aware
of all these doings?or rather, I do not monitor myself and make note of
them, but they aren?t unconscious either. They are done unselfconsciously,
though, since I do not think about doing them.

Consider that when you drive much of what you do you pay scant attention
to, yet if you were to run into someone, you would be held responsible.
But why, if most of the stuff you do is done unconsciously? No one can be
held responsible for unconscious doings?they are not really doings,
actions or conduct at all but mere happenings.

OK, point made. This statement by a scientist just doesn?t pass muster,
however well educated the bloke may be. At least he spoke carelessly.
Perhaps he was even misquoted, but that would be a serious journalistic
faux pax, not to be expected from US World & News Report. Assuming then
that the report is good and neuroscientist Paul Whelan said what I read,
how come it is so far off?

I don?t know. Maybe he wanted to get quoted with something
outlandish?not all scientists are above being tempted by trying to get
publicity through overstatement?it can bring grants and issue in
promotions. But most of them would not, I assume, sacrifice their
integrity for the sake of this. So go figure.

In any case, it is best to be cautious, so whenever one can check out
for oneself whether a claim issued by a specialist like this fellow Whelan
is true, it pays, I think to do the test for oneself. In this case
Professor Whelan flunked.

Essay on Science & Sense

Science and Sense

Tibor R. Machan

These days sciences multiply like rabbits. And in each broad field there
are sub-fields by the dozens, even hundreds. It?s difficult to keep up
with them, even if you, like I, subscribe to a few magazines that report
the latest news from most of the disciplines. (I read Science News and
used to read The Sciences until recently it was discontinued.) I ran
across a report from England about the new scientific study of happiness
and that reminded me of a professor of psychology, David Lykken of the
University of Minnesota, who is working on how happiness ?really works.?
And then there is a scholarly publication, The International Journal of
Happiness Studies. Some of these folks are assuring us that being happy
doesn?t make you, well, very happy after all. This is what Professor Lord
Layard is telling us?what makes us happy, in fact, is to see that others
aren?t too much happier than we are. So another science is in the offing!

But I am suspicious about whether these fields really can claim to be
sciences, if by ?science? one means a rigorous, systematic study of some
aspect of reality, one that can be replicated and tested by any reasonable
person. And my suspicion was reinforced recently as I was in US World &
News, in the Health & Medicine department, a piece titled ?Mysteries of
the Mind.?

Here is the sentence that gave me pause, a quote from University of
Wisconsin neuroscientist Paul Whelan: "Most of what we do every minute of
every day is unconscious?.Life would be chaos if everything were on the
forefront of our consciousness." This is supposed to be a conclusion drawn
from a scientific study.

But just consider the claim for a moment. It is one that everyone can
double check since it is supposed to be true of us all and pertains to
something we can all do easily enough, check what goes on with our minds
and how it relates to what we do. Is it really true that ?most of what we
do every minute of every day is unconscious?? I made a survey of my own
doings and here is what I did just a few minutes ago. I got out of car and
locked it up after getting out the mail from the passenger seat. I walked
up the front steps and unlocked my door, checked my answering machine, put
the mail on the dining room table, opened some of it and threw the
envelops from them into the trash. Then I came to my computer and checked
my email, answered a few posts, after which I wrote a letter to someone
and addressed an envelop to the person, made some copies of some bills and
stuffed it into the envelop with the letter, sealed it, put a stamp and
return address sticker on it and put it to take to the Post Office next
time I drive by it. Then I remembered reading the piece from US World &
News Report when I was on tread mill at the gym and looked it up on the
magazine?s web site and began writing this piece.

I think I am being fair and accurate it recounting my doings within
several of the minutes during which most of what I am supposed to be doing
is being done unconsciously. But none of what I did was done
unconsciously, quite the opposite. And I even remember it all. So where
the beef here? Perhaps the good professor means by ?doing? something
different from what the word means in ordinary language. Or maybe he means
not ?unconscious? but ?unselfconscious.?

My breathing, of course, is going on unconsciously, as is the circulation
of my blood. Even some of the scratching I do when my head or ear itches
might accurately be considered a kind of unconscious doing, although if I
pay attention I can make note of it, so it can easily be called to
consciousness. I look around with my eyes a lot, from the keyboard to the
monitor of the computer, sometimes at the mountains outside my window
(which I can see now that the rains have subsided). I am not fully aware
of all these doings?or rather, I do not monitor myself and make note of
them, but they aren?t unconscious either. They are done unselfconsciously,
though, since I do not think about doing them.

Consider that when you drive much of what you do you pay scant attention
to, yet if you were to run into someone, you would be held responsible.
But why, if most of the stuff you do is done unconsciously? No one can be
held responsible for unconscious doings?they are not really doings,
actions or conduct at all but mere happenings.

OK, point made. This statement by a scientist just doesn?t pass muster,
however well educated the bloke may be. At least he spoke carelessly.
Perhaps he was even misquoted, but that would be a serious journalistic
faux pax, not to be expected from US World & News Report. Assuming then
that the report is good and neuroscientist Paul Whelan said what I read,
how come it is so far off?

I don?t know. Maybe he wanted to get quoted with something outlandish?not
all scientists are above being tempted by trying to get publicity through
overstatement?it can bring grants and issue in promotions. But most of
them would not, I assume, sacrifice their integrity for the sake of this.
So go figure.

In any case, it is best to be cautious, so whenever one can check out for
oneself whether a claim issued by a specialist like this fellow Whelan is
true, it pays, I think to do the test for oneself. In this case Professor
Whelan flunked.

-----------
Machan is R. C. Hoiles Professor of business ethics at Chapman University,
Orange, CA. He is research fellow at the Hoover Institution and advises
Freedom Communications, Inc., on libertarian issues.

Column on Ordinary Language & Truth

Ordinary Language & Big Truths

Tibor R. Machan

My graduate training occurred during the last years of the reign of
ordinary language philosophy. This was a school in the discipline that
held that whatever philosophical truths could be learned, they were
contained in the ways people spoke about everyday things. The idea was
that such talk had to be pretty much on the mark, otherwise we would go
astray a lot and we do not, actually, not in everyday matters. So if we
just pay close attention to how people talk about such things, follow the
implications, we could learn a good deal about basic things too.

I wasn?t fully convinced of the promise of this way of doing philosophy
but it did have some merit. I ran across an example of it recently that is
actually quite revealing.

When someone asks, ?How will I manage this?? and gets the answer, ?You
will manage somehow,? we see something rather profound going on: One
person is expressing confidence in another?s ingenuity, without having a
clue just exactly how that ingenuity will show itself. There is also the
suggestion in this exchange that people do manage to figure out how to
handle problems without having to be told what exactly they need to do.

I actually think this says a lot about why a free society makes
sense?namely, because human beings are capable of figuring out how to
solve problems and do not need the Nanny State to take care of them. Such
a big idea is hidden right there in how people understand one another in
life.

There is another pointed way of talking that packs a bit of philosophical
insight. When people mess up, often you will hear them say, ?Damn it, I
didn?t think.? Indeed. That seems to suggest that the source of much
mismanagement in life is the fact that people do not think about things,
they don?t pay attention enough. And they seem to know that it is their
fault when they don?t, otherwise you wouldn?t witness them slapping the
sides of the heads when they say this thing about not having thought about
something.

Yes, ?I wasn?t thinking? is often said with an attitude of
self-recrimination because it is evident that here is something we are all
free to but often fail to do, namely, think. It is mostly what goes wrong
in my class rooms, for example?my students just do not put their minds to
full use. Instead they are drifting, day dreaming or simply lull about
mentally, in a daze. And they could snap out of it if they just made that
determination. All my classroom razzmatazz, all my shenanigans will not do
this for them.

There are many other things we can learn from paying attention to how
people reflect out loud. I focus on the above instances because I find it
important to lend full credence to the fact that people can do things of
their own, that they aren?t puppets being moved by some puppet master?or
the stars or their genes or DNA and such. It is the fashionable official
doctrine of our time, advanced by lots of intellectuals, scientists,
pundits and such that what people do is always something they had to do.
There is no free will, in other words. Crimes are not the result of
culpable misconduct but of forces that compel us to act badly. We are in
the grips of biological or cultural evolution, so that none of us is free
to think for ourselves and thus need take no responsibility for doing
either well or badly at the task of making sense of the world.

This is an especially odd thing for professional intellectuals to
believe. After all, if all that they think and say just had to be thought
and said by them, why should we care? What credibility does such
parrot-like behavior carry? If what you say you had to say, then when
someone who disagrees says the opposite, the same applies, and the same
thing goes for those who judge all this to be right or wrong, ad
infinitum. No one?s judgment can then be relied upon to be independent,
unimpeded, unprejudiced. Then why pay attention? The whole thing is absurd.

Anyway, sometimes it pays to listen to how folks talk in their most
natural mode, when they aren?t driving home some big agenda but deal with
the day to day issues they face. If their talk on such occasions carries
some implications, these may be worth taking into serious consideration as
we try to make sense of the big picture.

Column on Duplicitous Drug Offender Prosecutor

Who Regulates the Regulators?

Tibor R. Machan

This is not some original question from me but I must ask it again. Did
you read about the ?zealous prosecutor of drug criminals? who has turned
out to be, you guessed it, a drug criminal himself? He is Richard James
Roach of the Texas Panhandle, a Republican district attorney, who is
reportedly notorious for his lambaste of drug offenders and his vigorous
pursuit of them in court. Alas, et tu Brute!

When Rush Limbaugh?the poor righteous soul, who had, despite his repeated
bashing of big government (well, big government when Liberals support it,
not so much when the Republicans do) backed the war on drugs?got caught
gobbling down pain killers to which he became ?addicted,? many made fun of
him for his hypocrisy. Perhaps he really couldn?t help himself?such things
have been known to happen to some people, even though this idea is mostly
a ploy by defense attorneys when nothing else works to get off their
clients. In any case, we have here a far more important case of hypocrisy.
On several levels, actually.

There is, first of all, the man himself, who seems to have carried out
his vendetta against drug offenders while doing exactly as they have been
doing. I must say, it baffles me how one brings this off. Maybe I am
naïve?after all, con men (or is it now con persons?) abound in history and
I have run into a few twofaced folks myself in my life. But still, just as
with vandalism?like scratching car doors or bending antennas?I just don?t
get it. Peculiar mentalities, these, I must say.

But in my book the more interesting hypocrisy is this: Unlike when Enron
executives perpetrated their criminal conduct and the liberal Left was
hollering for re-regulating various aspects of business that they claim
weren?t sufficiently regulated to prevent those guys from pulling off
their evil deeds (which, by the way, they were caught doing without the
extra regulation), in this case I have heard nothing about more vigorous
regulation of criminal prosecutors.

Oh, you say, this is just one case?there are many, many decent criminal
prosecutors, so one shouldn?t jump the gun. Yet that is exactly what holds
true about the Enron people?they were a bunch of individuals gone wrong
and nothing at all follows about needing to re-regulate the industry in
which they did their bad deeds. So why, then, the discrepancy?

Mainly because those who love regulation have a prejudice against
business. You can read it on Op Ed pages everywhere?especially The New
York Times. Commerce is bad?too many choices, people cannot handle them,
let?s, therefore, limit them. Commerce?it makes people treat one another
as objects (as commodities), so let?s restrict it. Commerce?it gives big
companies too much power, so people are duped into buying things they
don?t want or need just so this big corporations become rich. And the
refrain continues without end.

But when a criminal prosecutor?whose specialty is victimless crimes and
who has sent hundreds up people up the river for dozens and dozens of
years for hurting no one at all?gets caught breaking the same unjust laws
he so enthusiastically used to hurt people and clearly turns out to be
duplicitous, there is no cry to ?regulate? criminal prosecutors. Well, of
course, that?s because there is no one left to do the regulating?criminal
prosecutors are, after all, the end of the line of government regulation.

This is just what ought to teach folks a vital lesson: regulating
people?s lives to prevent their doing harm to themselves is futile. It
ought to be stopped. Let the law handle cases where someone violates
another?s rights, period. That?s not regulation?it is prohibition, based
on the fact that we all have unalienable rights none may violate and all
should get punished if they do violate them. The rest is not the law?s
business.

Ah, but this would put a big dent into the sacred faith that government?s
are the solution to all of our problems. And such a faith seems to have a
life of its own, whatever the facts show.

Column on being involved with the state

On Involvements with the State

Tibor R. Machan

In an article published in The New York Times back in August, 2003, one
of the previous owners of the company for which I work as Advisor on
Libertarian Issues was reported to have complained that the company had
strayed from its ideals. That?s because it owns and operates TV stations
which are federally regulated.

The founder of the company, R. C. Hoiles, had once divested his firm of a
radio station on the grounds that it was under federal government
regulation. Indeed, both TV and radio signals travel on government
confiscated property, the electromagnetic spectrum. (The confiscation
happened in 1927, on the floor of the United States Senate.) Did he do so
because he had a distaste for owning a heavily regulated business or
because he thought such ownership would violate his principles?

I do not know. The question raises a point that?s worth making over and
over again: It does not violate libertarian principles to do business in a
regulated industry. Owning and operating a business that's government
regulated does not, in fact, amount to betrayal or straying from the
principles libertarianism.

Consider, first, that given how newspapers use public roads to deliver
their products, or the US mails for sending and receiving mail, or for
receiving special deals from the US Postal Service, and given that these
all involve the company in dealing with government regulation and
ownership, the claim that a newspaper company is straying from its
principles by owning and operating radio or TV stations is curious. Such
a company could not even exist in our sadly heavily regulated society if
this were the case. (Nor could libertarian scholars work at government
universities and free market think tanks be affiliated with them.)

The bottom line is that so long as one is engaged in a business or
any activity that would be perfectly legal in a free society but, sadly,
has been invaded by the state, one is not straying from libertarian
principles (although needing to work this way may amount to a very
discouraging and displeasing development for anyone). If, however, the
owners and managers of a company or other organization make every
reasonable effort to decouple the state from that business (for example,
editorializing repeatedly and insistently in support of such decoupling),
they aren?t consenting to any betrayal of straying from libertarian
ideals.

These days nearly every profession?apart from journalism and the
ministry?is rather thoroughly invaded by the government in the US and most
other countries. So it is simply impossible to get away from the state
without discontinuing living in a modern country. For example, one is
forced to obtain business licenses to operate and one must comply with
innumerable HR regulations even in businesses and organizations that are
protected by the First Amendment. For media firms, for instance, one must
get permits of all kinds to keep in business. One must have building
permits to construct the offices where the company's work is done. This is
so even when churches are being built, despite the separation of church
and state!

So, should one be in business or work in any organization at all? Should
those committed to libertarianism leave the country? And exactly where
could they go so as to avoid this kind of ?straying from principles??

In the early 70s Robert LeFevre?who used to be the libertarian advisor at
the company for which I work in that capacity?and I had an instructive
correspondence on this very issue. I had been writing columns for the
flagship paper of the company as well as attending the graduate philosophy
program at UC Santa Barbara, a state owned and operated university. Mr.
LeFevre wrote to me at one point, saying I was violating libertarian
principles by attending UCSB. We exchanged several letters on this topic,
with me arguing that I was not betraying libertarianism and with him
claiming I was.

At one point we weren't getting anywhere any longer in our exchange and I
recall finally writing him to ask, somewhat in jest, why he is using the
US Postal Service to send me his letters?he could, after all, hire a
helicopter or use a private carrier. That, if I recall correctly, was the
end of the discussion, yet we remained friendly and he indeed continued to
publish my essays in Rampart Journal, which he edited, and my columns were
not removed from the paper?s Op Ed page.

It is complicated to live and work in a society that widely and
persistently violates the principles by which one ought to live, but so
long as one is living by and promoting these principles as much as that is
possible, one is not betraying them unless one takes advantage of and
supports the violation of those principles (e.g., advocates protectionism,
urges the Department of Justice to bring anti-trust action against one?s
competitors, or works for the IRS).

Column on Right Wing Conservatism

Neither Left nor Right Wing

Tibor R. Machan

For over 40 years I have written columns for our local newspaper and for
over that many years I have seen letters to the editor charging this paper
with being Right wing. The charge, however, is way off.

In the context of contemporary American politics, Right wing means
favoring the status quo, mainly, with heavy emphasis on using the power of
the government to regulate people?s morals and their thinking. Left wing,
in turn, tends to mean using government to regulate how we spend our
money, to take it fro us so the government can use it for what politicians
and bureaucrats judge it should be used for.

The line is not a clear cut one because in our time, for example, often
those on the Left do not hesitate to use government to dictate to us about
our use of language?that?s what political correctness is mostly about. And
the Right wing is now well into taking our money and spending it for
us?that?s what prescription drug programs and farm subsidies are about.
Still, the rough distinction is between those who want to control our
souls, namely, the Right wing, and those who want to control our bodies,
the Left wing. Neither is into promoting individual liberty, that?s for
sure.

Now, as a matter of proven record, the paper for which I do most of my
writing simply does not fit either of these characterizations. That is one
reason why, when I had a collection of my columns published in 2004, I
entitle the book Neither Left nor Right (Hoover Institution Press). But
still, just the other day a reader wrote about the alleged daily
?poisonous wails and barbs of the angry right wing in the Opinion
section.? What, I thought, must be going on? Whereof such complete
misunderstanding?

Well, one answer is that many people who have opinions about the paper do
not actually read it. I had this confirmed recently when I went for coffee
with someone who had a very firm view about the paper?s editorial stance
but hadn?t read a single issue, ever. She thought it was a Right wing
conservative editorial position. I asked her, ?Is opposing the war on
drugs a Right wing conservative position?? She said ?No.? I went on, ?Is
opposing the war in Iraq a right wing conservative position?? Once again
she said, ?No.? How about criticizing big corporations for urging cities
to use eminent domain measures against small businesses to gain entry into
markets? Once gain the answer was ?No.?

Well, then, where does this blind charge of ?poisonous wails and barbs of
the angry right wing in the Opinion section? come from? I guess I would
have to write much of it off as pure, unadulterated ignorance?the charge
emanates from folks who just don?t read the paper. Or it comes from some
who want to smear it with some simplistic label. But it could also come
from some who are just confused. The first two really cannot be helped
much. But the last might be.

In the United States of America ?Right wing? often means ?conservative,?
and what conservatism used to mean here, in part, is to preserve the
institutions and principles associated with the American founding. Mostly
this means principles in the Declaration of Independence and sometimes
those in the better parts of the original constitution.

So, unlike conservatives in other ports of the globe, American
conservatives are to some extent loyal to the principles of a fully free
society, one in which all citizens have their basic, unalienable rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness protected by their government,
a government that gains its just powers from the consent of those being
governed. However, over the two centuries plus of this country?s
existence, these principles have been both widely violated and pretty much
abandoned even as ideals to aspire to. And as that has occurred,
conservatives have changed their tune.

Today President George W. Bush?a big spending, big government Republican
who cares nothing for limiting the scope of government, who embraces the
Hamiltonian, not Jeffersonian, idea that ?The job of a president is to see
problems, confront problems and solve problems? (never mind where they
are, whose problems they are, or whether his job description includes the
task of solving them)?is regarded as a Right wing conservative.

Let me assure you, that is not the editorial philosophy that the paper
and other outlets for which I am permitted to write champion, not by a
long shot.

Essay on Libertarianism: Revisiting the Basics

Libertarianism: Revisiting the Basics

Tibor R. Machan

Libertarianism emerged from the classical liberal tradition, as a
purified or more consistent?or radical?version of its pedigree. Figures
such as John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill of the classical
period and Ayn Rand, Murray N. Rothbard, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek,
John Hospers, and Robert Nozick from recent times spring to mind as major
influences of the position as it is now understood and discussed. Others,
such as Douglas B. Rasmussen, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Anthony De Jasay, Jan
Narveson, Loren Lomasky, Eric Mack, Aeon Skoble, Roderick Long and myself
have been closely associated with discussions and defenses of this
political outlook.

The focus of libertarianism is on the political priority of individual
(negative) liberty (i.e., being free from others? intrusiveness,
invasiveness, aggression, trespass, and so forth). In the libertarian
view the basic rights of every (adult) individual to life, liberty and
property are the central normative claims underlying the political, legal,
economic and social system most suitable for human community life.
Libertarianism stresses the legal fundamentality of the right to private
property (where property includes land, inventions, poems, factories, or
herds of cattle) since it is by reference to what can be owned that
concrete borders?and thus spheres of authority or sovereignty?between
individuals can be clearly enough identified. Everyone has the right to
seek to obtain and hold, if obtained without rights violations, whatever
can be owned.

There are several strains of libertarianism but the differences concern
mainly the supporting philosophical argument. Two major versions have
emerged as prominent: a more or less positivist (or social scientific)
line of argument and one that involves mainly normative (or moral)
considerations.

Positivists focus on the common human objective of prosperity or wealth,
something preeminently likely in a society wherein private property rights
are respected and protected. Prosperity, along these lines, is identified
subjectively?that is, by reference to how citizens perceive themselves to
be satisfied, enriched, fulfilled, successful, etc.

The normative libertarian takes value judgments to be objective, albeit
most often agent-relative (i.e., depending upon many individual, social,
and other aspects of the individuals involved). Among these is the
central condition?to be secured for everyone within a community?of
individual self-determination, personal sovereignty or autonomy. This
value, as others, is established by reference to what and who an
individual is?in this case by reference to everyone?s essential moral
self-directedness.

Because the morally successful individual must take the initiative to do
the right thing?to act ethically?the condition of liberty (spelled out by
the set of basic individual rights) is indispensable for everyone?s moral
development. Private property is the concrete condition of moral autonomy
and political sovereignty making individual choice possible, for better or
worse.

Individualism?or either psychological or ethical egoism?is crucial in
libertarianism, as a step in the argument for it. Some version? not
necessarily that referred to (by critics) as atomistic?is closely linked
to libertarianism. Personal determination of and responsibility for one?s
own action?so that the individual person is decisively (though not
exclusively) involved in initiating judgment and shaping conduct?is vital.
Yet sociability as an essential component of human life?provided it is
not coercively imposed?is also compatible with the libertarian vision.

Whether arising from positivism or a normative approach, the concrete
socio-economic result in libertarianism is a polity stressing the supreme
significance of the right to individual liberty. Such notions as
?justice,? ?equality,? ?order,? ?welfare,? etc. also have a role in the
development of the libertarian?s basic legal framework or constitution,
albeit never superseding the right to individual liberty. Government is
thus limited, if it is admitted as proper at all.

Libertarian justice consists of a legal system?s primary focus upon the
standards of due process that bans involuntary servitude, regardless how
worthy the objective might be (e.g., fighting crime or terrorism,
defending the country, fostering the arts, sciences, health care,
education, recreation, etc.). Such objectives needn?t lack widespread
acceptance or even objective value. Yet, having to reach them without the
violation of individual rights (for example, without taxation, universal
conscription, state transfer or redistribution of wealth) is the central
prerequisite of justice. In a system of libertarian justice democracy has
limited scope, mainly involving the election of officers of the law,
legislators and such whose task is to administer the system in line with
the basic libertarian constitution.

Equality, too, is understood by reference to the mutual condition of
liberty that every citizen must enjoy?that is, everyone is equal in
respect of having the right to life, liberty and property, regardless of
whether equality prevails in natural assets, good fortune, health,
well-being, sexual appeal, etc. Thus libertarianism tolerates various
types of so called ?social? injustice?for example, personal betrayal,
economic exploitation, and racial discrimination?so long as no coercive
force or fraud is involved. Furthermore, while it is egalitarian at the
political and legal levels of community life, there is no insistence here
upon the political priority of equality in economic, educational,
athletic, or similar opportunities, let alone equality of conditions or
results, level playing fields, etc.

Libertarianism is concerned with political?not social or economic or
racial or ethnic?justice and equality. While the latter are not, by at
least some libertarian lights, incapable of being identified and sought
out, they must be pursued without recourse to the violation of individual
rights to life, liberty and property. Order, progress, cultural
diversity, ethnic, racial and gender harmony are similarly regarded as
possibly valid but never primary values for a good political community. As
F. A. Hayek put the point,

That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values?indeed
not merely one value among many but the source of all values?is almost
self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its
inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values,
to contribute to their further growth, and they earn moral merit.

There is no room here to consider the innumerable theoretical objections,
let alone aversions, expressed against libertarianism. Put simply,
libertarians take most of them to stem from utopian or idealistic
thinking?the hope that all the ills of human life can be dealt with via
politics, by government policies. Libertarians have address this on
innumerable fronts, including with theories of public choice, the
socialist calculation problem, the tragedy of the commons and similar
ideas showing the impotence of aggressive government policies for purposes
of rectifying personal and social problems.

Indeed, at the level of comparative political thinking the libertarian
may be distinguished by a lack of utopianism. (This is especially true of
the normative libertarian, who does not see human nature conducive to
perfectibility via politics or to any institutional guarantee against
immoral conduct?imprudence, dishonesty, stinginess, greed, sloth.)

Column on Commerce and Society

Commerce is Human

Tibor R. Machan

Sure, you say, what?s with this idea?doesn?t everyone know it already?
Well, actually in many academic institutions you will find professors of
this and that proclaiming just the opposite. They claim commerce is a
dehumanizing institution. It makes people treat one another as objects or,
at most, as means to various ends, not as full persons.

The doctrine is called ?commodification??making people into commodities,
things for nothing other than to be purchased. The charge is that in a
fully capitalist, free market society, the system would encourage everyone
to treat all others as a mere useful product, like one?s chair or
automotive tires. For this reason, the argument goes?and it had got its
biggest boost from Karl Marx, in the 19th Century when he took capitalism
to task very influentially for doing all kinds of nasty things to
people?the free market, with its capitalist economic system, is not really
good for human beings at all.

At first sight this may sound like a credible point to make against
capitalism. When you go to the grocery store, for example, you tend to
treat the cashier or the manager as no more than means to your ends of
walking out of the place with what you need at home. You don?t much
socialize with these people, not at least initially. They are just
functionaries to you. If they were machines and could do what you need
from them, that would be perfectly fine. Or so it can seem, from a
superficial examination of what happens in markets. Your broker, doctor,
auto-mechanic, shoe repairer and the rest, they aren?t your personal
friends. They are instruments used to satisfy important needs of yours but
they could easily be replaced with someone else or some tool. (Nowadays
you can even check out by using auto-scanners, with no need for a person
at all.)

Trouble is that to focus on this element of the market?that it is mostly
impersonal on a certain level?betrays a narrow vision. As if people would
leave it at that, except in the most unusual circumstances?for example,
when they are in a hurry and need to get done with shopping as fast as
possible. But normally that isn?t how it is at all.

As my friend and fellow philosophy professor Neera K. Badhwar argued in a
very well developed, complex paper on the topic, commerce is actually the
institution where much of our intimate social life gets its start. And
anyone can check this out easily enough.

Just consider that wherever you work, you have colleagues with whom you
have perfectly human relationships, good or bad or in between. In fact,
sometimes places of work become nearly homes away from home, where people
not only meet and talk and grow close (to enjoy or be annoyed by each
other), but get involved quite seriously in each other?s lives. Kids are
discussed, as are spouses. Close friendships, or at least palships,
develop frequently. Some colleagues become lovers, even marry in time.
(Contrast this with how it is like to go at the DMV!)

The myth that market transactions are impersonal is just that, a myth,
and it comes from shallow, superficial reflection on what goes on in
markets. It may be no accident that the idea is so popular in the academy,
where there is often a kind of isolation among faculty, with few becoming
close with one another, although there is enough exception to this that it
should raise doubts in the minds of those who spread the myth around about
the market.

Even down at the grocery store?or the pet shop or car dealer?customers
and vendors frequently depart from their initial reason for coming
together and start talking about sports, ethnic food, music or family
troubles. And from that now and then full blown, genuine friendships
emerge.

What the critics don?t appreciate is how well people can multitask in
life, that while they do business they can also do arts, sciences,
education, family affairs and the rest on the side. Karl Marx was
wrong?the free market is by no means only a cash nexus, where everyone
thinks only of the bottom line. That?s because it would be entirely
unnatural for human beings to be that way.

Column on Academic Freedom (sans typo)

Academic Freedom, True and False

Tibor R. Machan

It is nothing new?the controversy about what academic freedom amounts to.
At the University of Colorado a professor, Ward Churchill, wrote an essay
claiming the victims in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center were
little Eichmans, suggesting that WTC professionals were perpetrating
genocide?even if they didn?t overtly intend to do so?by being complicit in
activities that contribute to attacks on certain ethnic groups. I have no
idea which ethnic groups he had in mind, nor how WTC folks were supposed
to bring off this deed. The point is he made this outrageous claim.
University of Colorado officials are now reported to be bent out of shape
about what to do about this person.

In another case the University of New Mexico had to deal with Richard
Berthold, a former history professor, who had told students just after the
9/11 attacks: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote." The
university didn?t fire him as many had urged but conducted some kind of
review and in time issued a letter of reprimand after he had apologized.

We actually have different cases here. In the one involving Ward
Churchill, he wrote an essay, which clearly comes under academic
freedom?the well entrenched and officially proclaimed tradition at most
higher academic institutions in the USA of the liberty of university and
other teachers to produce works that develop and even promote various
ideas, however objectionable these may be. In the case of Richard
Berthold, however, we have someone who ?told students? his highly
contentious opinion and here something else comes to the fore: the ethics
pertaining to a teacher?s professional responsibilities.

There are gray areas, of course, in all human affairs, including academic
freedom vs. academic ethics, which is why we have faculty committees to
look into such cases now and then. One professor at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas, reportedly got into hot water with his administration
because he gave an example of a gay couple in a discussion of the
economics of savings. He observed that given that gays aren?t so likely to
have kids as heterosexuals, the probability of their saving as diligently
as heterosexuals do is significantly lower. For this observation some
student complained to the administration and he is now under
investigation, possibly getting reprimanded and docked a month of pay.
This professor was addressing his students in his professional capacity
but he wasn?t advocating anything but using an apt example to illustrate a
point in economics, one, however, that made a student uncomfortable.

Had he advocated something to his class about gays being bad people for
failing to save for the future, the matter would raise certain valid
questions: Is he abusing his position by advocating to a captive audience
that is not there to hear his own values, be these right or wrong? Is he
unqualified to judge whether not saving on the part of gays is something
objectionable? In both cases if the answer is in the affirmative, academic
freedom would not apply. However, if he published an essay promoting such
views, that would fall under academic freedom, regardless of how wrong
they may be.

Much of the problem with academic freedom is to distinguish advocacy from
coverage of the discipline?s various topics. One should be free in a
political theory course to explain the Nazi's position; however, one
should not be free to use one?s classroom as a platform for advocating
one?s own views, be it for or against Nazism. This is not a matter of
academic freedom but of professional competence and ethics.

Suppose one decided to tell jokes in class all day long?to take a bit of
an extreme case for illustrative purposes?instead of covering the topic
one is supposed to be teaching. Now if they fire such a person or issue a
reprimand, that's perfectly OK. The matter has nothing to do with academic
freedom. Now suppose one writes a book of jokes under one?s real name, one
that is quite offensive to some people. This an academician ought to be
free to do without any sanctions applied to by one?s academic employer.
That's academic freedom.

However, suppose one writes a book in the field of history and it gets
published and in it one claims that Abraham Lincoln was president of the
United States of America in 1984. This, is gross incompetence and one
should get one?s comeuppance for it?it has nothing to do with academic
freedom. And it need not be so gross, in fact?demonstrably bad historical
scholarship qualifies as incompetence in the field and isn?t protected by
academic freedom.

The biggest problem, of course, is that universities are funded with
money taken in taxes from all citizens, many of whom don?t believe in
granting academic freedom to people with what they regard as highly
objectionable viewpoints. So these victims of such taxation will agitate,
often vigorously, against defending the academic freedom of those
professors and scholars of whom they disapprove. And they are right?not
because academic freedom is a bad idea but because having them fund such
scholars against their will is a bad idea.

Essay from Think on Why Liberty is needed for Morality

Why Liberty is Necessary for Morality*

Tibor R. Machan

It is often taken to be a feature of a free society that it rests on the
belief that no one can tell what is morally right or wrong. That is
supposed to be why people are not imposed upon with strictures the
government forces them to follow. If, however, we could determine what is
right and wrong, then, the idea follows, government could just proceed to
force everyone to behave right.

A sad result of so explaining the merits of a free society is that it
begins to look like liberty is the enemy of morality. And it is just this
way that a good many people have understood the Western tradition of
liberalism. They have come to believe that if you accept the Western idea
of a free society, you must not care about morality at all. Indeed,
arguably a great many enemies of the West hold such a view. Love the
West, reject morality; love morality, reject the West.

Yet this is completely wrong. In point of fact precisely the opposite is
true. The reason the Western idea of a free society makes a great deal of
sense is that unless people make their moral choices and act on them
freely, there cannot be anything morally praiseworthy in what they do.

A person who does the right thing because it is commanded, forced upon
him, isn?t acting morally. Such a person is acting from fear, not the
conviction that what he is doing is morally right. Indeed, it is only in
substantially free societies that men and women can be morally good. If
one is regimented to praise Allah or God or give to the poor or defend
one?s country, there is absolutely nothing praiseworthy about that. One
is then being a mere puppet, certainly not a morally responsible human
agent.

Of course, there have been some who have defended the individual?s right
to liberty on the ground that no one can tell what is right or wrong.
Some very famous people have done this. Yet their defense of human
liberty is a weak, ineffectual one. That?s because if one cannot tell
what is right or wrong, one cannot tell whether violating someone?s right
to liberty is right or wrong. So, a moral skeptic simply has no
consistent reason to complain if the right to liberty is violated.

Those, however, who insist that they do know right from wrong have no
justification for opposing the free society. For adult men and women to
be morally praiseworthy ? or, alternatively, blameworthy ? for something
they do, they have to do it freely, of their own initiative, not because
they are coerced to do it.

No one is morally improved by being forced to be generous, just, kind,
courageous, prudent, honest, charitable, moderate, humble or the like.
The paternalistic motivations behind many governmental measures that
ostensibly aim to make people good are hopelessly misguided.

I would even question the motivation of those who promote coercive
governmental measures aimed to reduce vice and increase virtue ? since
coercion kills personal responsibility, and does this very obviously, it
is more likely that advocates of coercively getting people to be good are
power seekers, not promoters of morality at all. They merely use morality
as an excuse to rule other people. In the name of such allegedly good
intentions, they perpetrate the most dehumanizing deed toward people;
namely, they promote robbing them of their liberty to choose.

Of course, the laws of a free society cannot guaranteed that the
citizenry will choose the right way to act. That is something in the
hands of the citizens themselves and their fellow citizens, friends,
community leaders, teachers, writers, and others who urge us all to do
what?s right, not officers of the law whose task is to keep the peace, not
to make people good! But in a free society, where no one is authorized to
dump the results of his or her misdeeds on others' lives, people are more
encouraged to do the right thing than in societies where personal
responsibility is missing because of the lack of individual liberty. So,
critics of the free society who want more emphasis on morality than on
liberty would do better if they first stood up to defend liberty. From
that the prospects for genuine, freely chosen morality are far greater
than they are wherever men and women aren?t free.

*This essay appeared in the Royal Institute of Philosophy publication
Think (Spring 2005).

Column on Newspeak

Newspeak Anyone?

Tibor R. Machan

George Orwell was a brilliant political novelists?Animal Farm and 1984
are his classics?and, both in his fictional and non-fictional writings,
made keen note of the phenomenon of language corruption. In 1984 he even
introduced the fictional dictionary of Newspeak. Among other concepts that
were tortured to death in this book, produced by the ruling totalitarian
regime, were, of course, ?liberty? and ?freedom.? In Newspeak these
concepts meant exactly their opposites, slavery. And there were many other
cases of deliberate distortion which the fictional regime perpetrated so
as to keep the population confused and conceptually disarmed.

In fact, of course, the phenomenon of such corruption of language is by
no means only fictional, of which Orwell was well aware and to which he
meant to alert us all. But neither is such distortion mostly deliberate,
as it was in 1984. In many cases?as in the recent essay by Professor of
History David Hackett Fisher of Brandeis University, penned, you might
have guessed it, for The New York Times (February 7, 2005)?the corruption
of language is carried out nearly unselfconsciously. Professor Fisher
achieves his obfuscation of the concepts of ?liberty? and ?freedom? not by
insisting that they mean their very opposite but by conflating them with a
great variety of their different senses. And his motivation seems to be
the sentiment, ?Why don?t we all just get along?? Let me explain.

Concepts, of course, evolve. They are mental tools by which human beings
identify and navigate reality. They do not spring into full awareness at
once but must be formed, often slowly and sometimes over several
generations. Take the modern scientific concept ?atom.? It took centuries
to get it formed and shaped so it now has a pretty clear, unambiguous,
comprehensive, and useful (though never final) meaning in particle
physics.

Value laden?moral, ethical, political, aesthetic?concepts are especially
troublesome. They are always being contested. Once a concept with
implications for values succeeds and gains prominence, most people with
agendas in the areas of morality and politics want to conscript it to
their own purposes.

Classical liberals, over the last several centuries, have formulated
conceptions of liberty and freedom such that they have come to mean, in
their most consistent renditions, individual independence from the
oppression of others, including the government or state. Even the family
doesn?t own a person, not once he or she has reached maturity?everyone has
the right to liberty, period.

There are some other senses in which the concepts ?liberty? and ?freedom?
are used, of course, coming from different contexts and different
traditions. Being free of a headache for someone with such pain isn?t what
being free of a master is for a slave, although there is a similarity.
Being free from governmental or criminal intrusion isn?t the same as being
free to obtain food, to fly to Paris or to purchase a Rolls Royce. But,
again, there is a similarity.

In Western political history the big breakthrough came when classical
liberals identified the human individual as having the right to liberty.
This took centuries of development but with John Locke and other such
liberals it emerged as a solid, coherent idea. Every adult is sovereign,
self-ruling, not a subject of others? will, be these others neighbors,
family, bureaucrats, a monarch, the majority, or whoever.

Professor Fisher, however, wants to assimilate all these often mutually
exclusive ideas of liberty and freedom, so that every tradition?including
those actually quite antithetical to individual liberty?in which the words
have appeared is pacified. He insists on being inclusive and
multicultural.

By attempting this, however, he perpetrates the corruption of the
coherent classical liberal idea, the one that has in fact served to
liberate millions of people from the oppression of their fellows (whether
the oppression is tyrannical or paternalistic, whether from coercive
governments or authoritarian families).

There will simply never be any value laden concepts that will yield to
this effort of happy assimilation. Some will always find your or my or
someone else?s conception of liberty, freedom, justice, goodness, or
equality displeasing. There is no escaping having to take a stand. And the
stand that succeeds is the one that provides the most comprehensive,
consistent, clear, and unambiguous version of the relevant concept.

By trying to please everyone with his idea of liberty and freedom,
Professor Fisher, most likely inadvertently, undermines the work that
these concepts are supposed to do for human beings, namely, help identify
and cope with a vital aspect of human reality.

Column on Why Government isn't Superior

Why Governments are not Superior

Tibor R. Machan

In my unwavering efforts to place politics in proper perspective?arguing
that it has a limited scope in human life, just as does medicine,
athletics or entertainment and shouldn?t be construed as encompassing
everything we care about?I have prompted even more unwavering efforts to
rebuff my arguments. For various reason a great many quite intelligent and
articulate people insist upon viewing government is special. Its specialty
seems to them to be nearly God-like?governments are the best solution to
everything.

Most recently I had penned a short column lamenting the reliance upon
government in cases of disasters, from the relatively minor ones like
those of the mudslides in California?s La Conchita region in Ventura
County, to the cataclysmic ones such as the late December 2004 tsunami in
Southeast Asia. I had made it the point of my column to discourage people
from considering government the solution to these natural disasters and
chided them for depending on being bailed out by government when they take
the risk to tempt such disasters by living near regions where they are
likely to hit.

At this point in human history governments are still viewed as God-like
by too many people. They have inherited this perspective from the
thousands of years in which Caesars, Pharaohs, Tsars, kings, Khans and
similar violent persons and their entourage have ruled the globe (with the
rest regarded to be their subjects and not the sovereign citizens they
really ought to be). Such habits are extremely difficult to shake,
especially when vast vested interest groups are lobbying everywhere to
keep the myth going that these sorts of folks have it over us in nearly
every aspect of human life.

I received several responses to my missive, even though I made clear that
my own expectations are moderate: no one is going to give up government
interference just yet when disasters happen. I even compared how
governments in some regions of the world have done better at coping with
them than have others?for example, the in the Pacific Rim governments have
created fairly effective warning systems, while in the Indian Ocean none
exist.

Alas, without providing a blue print for how the private sector might
cope with such matters, I was chided good and hard. For it isn?t enough
for true believers in the superiority of men and women of government to
have confidence and trust in free men and women. No, you must produce the
exact formulae for how such free men and women will address problems,
otherwise only government, with its one distinctive tool of brute force
(for what is what the police and military deliver?and should?when real
criminal conduct or aggression from abroad need to be dealt with), can be
relied on to act right.

But this is the trouble, exactly. Not all problems are known in great
enough detail to produce blue prints for coping with them. What needs to
be understood and isn?t often enough is that free men and women can think
for themselves, even in times of crises (and maybe especially then), so
they can be relied upon to cope quite well. Because they aren?t the force
wielders in society, their solutions are likely to involve forging
agreements, dealing with others peacefully, using ingenuity instead of
what governments are likely to deploy, namely forcing citizens to behave
in various ways, and taking citizens? belongings and ?redistributing? them
as the men and women in government judge best.

It will take some time, maybe centuries, before this bad habit of
trusting government to do everything will abate, if it ever will. Sadly,
people often invoke the shortcut of suing coercion to solve even their
personal problems?just think of all the spouse beating, brutalizing of
children, fist fighting, and other violence they resort to?so it is
probably utopian to hope that they will reject the government
pseudo-solutions to problems. But it is worth fighting toward that goal,
nonetheless.

Column on Imperial Government

Imperial Government Foibles

Tibor R. Machan

As the Declaration of Independence points out, all human beings are
created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness (among others). This idea, it shouldn?t have to be
pointed out but often does, is held to be self-evident for purposes of the
Declaration, although it is clearly not self-evident because much ink
needs to be spilled to establish it. John Locke, for example, wrote a
famous book in 1690, Second Treatise of Civil Government, in which he does
just that and the Founders knew of this work well and good, so they had no
illusion about our rights needing no support. (It is mostly those who
scoff at the idea of basic rights who keep saying that the Founders
thought it was ?self-evident,? ripping the notion out of context so as to
proceed with their disdainful treatment of it.)

Recently some people have been putting forth the view that because every
human being has basic rights, the government of the United States of
America has no special obligation to its citizens but must extend its
services to all alike. Michael Ignatieff ?s book, The lesser Evil:
Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (Penguin, 2004), includes this claim,
which is why the title expresses its author?s frustration with how
terrorism ought to be fought by the American government. (Ignatieff is a
very prominent scholar at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University, mainly working in the discipline of human rights
studies.)

This position has some credibility, of course. If all persons have the
basic rights the American Founders made note of, that surely means that no
one may have these rights violated, never mind where they life, when they
live, or who they are. They are, as the United Nations Charter makes
clear, universal!

Yet something is amiss in this analysis. Merely because no one may
violate the rights of anyone to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, or indeed any other rights derived from these?as the US
Constitution makes clear in the Ninth Amendment?it does not follow that a
country?s government has the same obligations to all persons as it has to
the citizens of that country.

The reason for this is that properly understood a government is
instituted and maintained by the citizenry for the purpose of having the
rights protected for the citizenry, not for others. Consider a similar but
simpler way of seeing the matter. I have the right of self-defense, as you
do and does anyone else. But when I hire a body guard to carry out this
defense?when I delegate the exercise of this right to such a person?there
is no obligation for this person to defend everyone else?s right to life,
liberty, etc.

This is a pretty straightforward notion here, so why do people like
Ignatieff get it wrong? Because they have embraced a notion of rights
entirely alien to that of the American founders, namely, positive rights
or entitlements. Not violating those rights means not only not attacking
people but delivering to them various goods and services.

When you believe government must deliver to people various goods and
services, not simply the protection of individual rights?when the
government?s obligation isn?t constrained by the contract into which it
has entered with the citizenry?then government turns into the Welfare
State. It is seen, now, as a provider to the needy, to all who lack
something important in their lives. In such a picture, why should
governments be limited to protecting the rights of their citizens? After
all, other people around the globe are far more needy than American
citizens, on average, so if this kind of do-goodism is what governments
are all about, there are hundreds of millions around the world who can use
it better than American citizens.

Of course, simple economics comes in here right away, so government will
be limited by that. However, if it has this obligation to redistribute
wealth, then why confine it to ?our citizenry? instead of, say, the people
of Bangladesh or Burundi? No reason.

And while they are at regarding all those citizens as entitled to be fed,
clothed, and medically treated, why not throw in military defense
provisions as well? Out of that thinking grows the idea of the imperial
American government, obligated to protect not only its citizenry but give
welfare and defense to everyone else.

I am convinced that the Founders would find this quite absurd. Just read
the Declaration and check it out for yourself.

Column on Dissenting from Dissidents

A Dissident Dissents

Tibor R. Machan

I am a proud dissident about the Iraqi war. My view has been that
America?s military has no business being there since America wasn?t
attacked or even seriously threatened by Iraq?s government.

Nonetheless I am very annoyed by how so many opponents of this war keep
harping on how the American and the new Iraqi police conduct themselves.
As if Saddam?s bunch had been a flock of angels and as if the insurgents
were fighting for a noble cause.

On Saturday morning, February 5, The New York Times reported on how the
new Iraqi police has turned the tables on terrorists by showing videos of
some of them squirming with obvious cowardice when caught, along with
other video?s showing them brazenly brutalizing kidnapped victims, ready
to behead them.

No sooner does The Times?s reporter Christine Hauser, conclude with the
essentials of her report, she inserts the following passage:

The broadcast of such videos raises questions about whether they violate
legal or treaty obligations about the way opposing fighters are
interrogate and how their confessions are made public.

But she gives not a shred of evidence that such questions are being raised
by any sane person or that they have any legal basis at all. She just
sticks in this passage on her own, groundlessly.

One is perhaps not going far out on a limb to suspect that this passage
is a way for an opinionated journalist to once again indict not the
bastards who are beheading kidnapped victims?without a trial, without a
scintilla of due process?but the new Iraqi (American supported and
trained) police. Oh, give me a break.

And then there is this righteous outcry about Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis?s
comment that ?It?s fun to shoot some people,? made about the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, as well as the broadcast of complaints from various
leaders of special ethnic interest groups belly aching about it.

Well, actually, it is ?fun? to shoot some people?and all of us who have
ever waited through an hour and a half movie, or read some 300 pages of a
thriller, to the point when the bad guys finally get their comeuppance
know this perfectly well. Some people, the ones who ruthlessly sacrifice
the lives of completely innocent children and civilians so as to express
their anger about something?terrorists and other brutalizes?need to get
creamed and it probably is fun, meaning, satisfying, to do the shooting of
such folks.

How often have we witnessed at least the eventual fictional delivery of
just deserts from good guys aimed at vicious slaver holders, murderers,
Nazis, and a sundry villains? Why did we breath sighs of relief once they
got theirs good and hard? Why was it a pleasure to walk away from a movie
or close the covers of a book once this has happened to such people?

Because it is a matter of justice?of a form of moral relief?to have such
things happen, that is why. The people who do that to those who haven?t
deserved any such brutality, mostly venting their wild anger recklessly at
innocent folks, need to be blasted away now and then, when they keep
coming and coming and that is the only way to fend them off. And then
those who get to accomplish such a worthwhile feat may well feel some joy
in their hearts because it can indeed be ?fun? to contribute to the
ridding of the world of such scum.

The outrage at Lt. Gen. Mattis?s comment is outright paradoxical, as
well. On the one hand it suggests that there are no morally bad people at
all and thus no joy may be experienced when one has helped rid the world
of some of the worst such people, especially in the face of their
relentless violent onslaught. On the other hand the outrage suggests that
the likes of Lt. Gen. Mattis are evil people, deserving of scolding and
rebuff.

Well, you cannot have it both ways. Either there are evil folks and some
so evil as to deserve killing under certain circumstances, or there are
none, in which case those who have fun killing others simply need to be
cured?they too aren?t doing anything morally wrong.

Indeed, this lopsided moralizing betrays the practically obsessive
anti-Americanism of too many people. Only Americans ever do things
wrong?the rest need to be defended at all cost no matter how vicious them
are. Balderdash.

Column on American vs. simple conservatism

Conservative Relativism

Tibor R. Machan

Back in my undergraduate days our college was visited by William F.
Buckley Jr., the then rising erudite journalistic leader of the budding
post war conservative movement. His main theme on this occasion was the
importance of various fundamental truths, especially those of human
community life. He thought and argued that there really are some such
truths, among them those the American founders identified in the
Declaration of Independence.

Back then the operative word in ?American Conservatism? was ?American.?
Today it seems more and more to be ?Conservatism.? An American
conservative embraces certain truths and wishes to have these preserved in
public life, namely, politics?as well as private, namely, ethics. American
Conservatism was unique in that there wasn?t merely the imperative to look
back and learn from the past but to embrace a particularly unique past,
namely, one that laid out for us certain basic principles of community
life.

It is this American Conservatism that helped get rid of slavery by
recalling unashamedly that that institution violated America?s founding
principle, namely, that all of us are created equal, without exception.
When Abraham Lincoln wanted to find a principle on which to base his
emancipation proclamation, he didn?t have to look to Europe or Asia of
Africa?he could find it right here in America?s founding document. It was
a document of basic principles of community life and American
conservatives gladly embraced it and worked to preserve its substance.

Now things have changed. Conservatism has reverted in America to what it
used to be in pre-revolutionary times when a conservative would simply
embrace, rather incoherently, whatever had been around for a long time,
wherever it came from, and whatever substance it contained. This is the
conservatism of Europe and of old and today?s Russia, for example.
Conservatives of this stripe are those who champion only a method, never
mind substance. As their English guru Edmund Burke had taught them,
?...Men have no right to risk the very existence of their nation and their
civilization upon experiments in morals and politics; for each man's
private capital of intelligence is petty; it is only when a man draws upon
the bank and capital of the ages, the wisdom of our ancestors, that he can
act wisely.? This sentiment applies to us all, including the American
Founders, so an old fashioned, as opposed to American, conservative has no
use for the principles that those founders identified since their, like
everyone else?s, ?private capital of intelligence is petty.?

So how does this play out in our contemporary political world? George W.
Bush and his advisers may now and then make vague references for freedom
but they do not mean by it what the American Founders meant, namely,
making sure that all grown men and women get to govern their own lives,
enjoy sovereignty, with the government functioning as the protector of
this sovereignty. No, Mr. Bush?s conservatism is one in which whatever
happens to be in the past, whatever the ?bank and capital of the ages, the
wisdom of our ancestors? instructs, must be followed. And by now this
includes, mainly, the massive welfare state built for us by the likes of
Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

In this type of conservatism the wisdom of the American founders has lost
out to the far more traditional ?wisdom of our ancestors,? from a much
older history, the wisdom that trust nearly everything to the government
or ?the state,? as some political theorists call it. Your and my
?intelligence is petty,? so it must be sacrificed to those who rule, be it
the mob or some elite or a great leader, to the wisdom of those who
supposedly function rather blindly by following the ancients instead of
figuring things out for ourselves.

I must say William F. Buckley Jr.?s version of conservatism was a much
more healthy, principled one when compared to what conservatism has become
in our time?historical relativism (with each era muddling through with its
inherited, flexible ?truths?). It was informed by firm and lasting
principles that those ?arrogant? founding Americans dared to identify in
defiance of the ancient conservatism that is ruining too many countries
now and has ruined in the past.

Column on Iraq, democracy & the war (sans typo)

Word from an Anti-War Advocate

Tibor R. Machan

It would be cowardly, I think, not to chime in at this time for those who
opposed President George W. Bush?s war in Iraq, given the apparent success
of the Iraqi elections. So, as an opponent of this war from the outset,
let me chime away for a moment.

Why oppose the war? Because the idea that it amounted to what the
military of a free country should be doing, namely, protecting the rights
of the citizens?in other words, defending the country from
aggressors?simply wasn?t credible. As to the claim that the military of a
free country may invade countries with tyrannical governments, that is
simply not the case. The military has as its proper job to protect the
citizenry, not to embark upon rescue missions around the globe.

It isn?t that such rescue missions are in principle wrong, but they may
not be conducted by the military that already has its job specified. The
reason we have government, as the American founders made clear, is ?to
secure [our] rights,? not to answer the 911 calls of the world?s
oppressed. For that mission some other solution must be found?perhaps the
UN needs to do this job, or maybe various civilian militias need to be
established. But it is wrong to send a military to do this job which is
already employed and thus committed to do another.

Of course, one can do a wrong and yet something good can come of it.
Getting Iraq to be more democratic is undeniably some measure of progress,
even if the full impact cannot yet be evaluated. (A democratic Iraq could
yet also be a tyrannical Iraq, since the ruling majority could be pretty
nasty to the minority. It remains to be seen.)

It isn?t true, however, that this move toward democracy vindicates the
Bush administration that has sent over a thousand American soldiers to
their deaths and a lot more to become severely injured in a war that the
American government should not have undertaken. Volunteers in a free
country sign up so as to be ready to defend their fellow citizens, not to
become the police force of the globe. So these soldiers were treated
badly. (This isn?t altered by the fact that some of them were willing to
fight in Iraq.)

It is difficult to remain principled in the face of all kinds of pressure
and, especially, when one?s fellow contrarians can be a pretty unsavory
lot. Many opponents of this war have rested their opposition on grounds
that are entirely inconsistent with their very own political philosophy.
All the beef about the preemptive nature of Bush?s war from those who have
absolutely no hesitation about violating individual rights for various
?precautionary? purposes?e.g., in the area of environmental policy or
other types of government regulation?belies their supposed outrage with
how the Bush administration has acted vis-à-vis Iraq. Nearly everything I
read from such folks against the war in Iraq reeks of hypocrisy and
opportunism.

Never mind. The crucial issue is whether a champion of a fully free
society can back a war that does not involve national defense. And I do
not believe such a person can do so. And since I think such a person is
right?which is to say, such a person holds a reasonable, sensible view of
the proper function of government and, thus, the military?the unsavory
company he or she happens to keep in this particular instance is
irrelevant. (Consider that in defending the right to private property, one
is also defending the exercise of that right for such purposes as racial
discrimination. This does not undermine the justice of defending the right
to private property.)

Of course, the move in the direction of a free society in Iraq is to be
welcomed. That?s so even if it is the fruit of a wrongheaded foreign
policy. But it should not blind us to the fact that going to war in Iraq
was wrong. Liberty is indeed a worthy goal for the US government to
champion and pursue, but not by means that undermines that very goal,
namely, embarking on military aggression, even if it?s against a dictator
like Sadam Hussein.