Family Leave Expanded in Massachusetts
Tibor R. Machan
TIME leads off its June 26, 2006, central story as follows: “Every new parent knows that having~a baby means weeks without sleep. Should it also mean weeks without a paycheck?” The suggestion is that TIME is in favor of forcing companies pay families whose members cannot show up for work, or at least considers it a palatable development in public affairs. Rush Limbaugh spent some time with the item one days but he missed the major problem.
It is well known that one of the serious impediments to entrepreneurship throughout Europe is that companies are bound by labor laws to provide employees with nearly cradle to grave security. In consequence of this, these countries are experiencing slow growth and minimal start-ups in business. No wonder. If by law, not by freely formed employment agreement (that could contain some kind of mutually accepted exit option and heed market conditions), employees must provide innumerable benefits to employees, those thinking of starting a business will hesitate and often desist. Their investment will have to be calculated accordingly and will turn out to be far greater than market conditions may justify. Ergo, no business. Ergo, no employment. Which accounts for double digit unemployment figures in France, German, Spain, and elsewhere.
In the quasi-free market, capitalist U. S. A., in contrast, there are no federal laws mandating the provision of extensive benefits to employees, at least not yet. The Massachusetts legislature will not rest easy with this and is, accordingly, mimicking the German labor laws.
Of course, this will appear to be all so “generous” (with others’ resources) to those who will take advantage of the extended family leave. However, such coercive imposition of benefits ignores market conditions and therefore isn’t likely to be economically sound.
It seems like the legislators in Massachusetts and others who are pushing for these sort of Draconian labor regulations have not learned anything from the collapse of Soviet socialism. The entire Soviet bloc was rife with these kinds of laws—many people in those societies destroyed by such laws still pine after them nostalgically, unaware or forgetful of the damage such a system did to millions of people. The dream of guaranteed welfare provisions, put on the backs of people in the business world, can appear to be very cool until one tries to live them for a while. Then shortages, low wages, unemployment, lousy services, and mounting abuse finally calls attention to how terrible it is to be guided by such dreams.
A country that leaves business to fend for itself—i.e., no subsidies but also no mandated benefits to employees—may not appear to be sweet and lovely until one checks out its history, its employment market, its overall productivity. There cannot be too many false promises in such a country. Thus many shortsighted folks will find it wanting: “I might lose my job,” “I may have to wait with having kids until I can really afford having them,” or “My family will have to save up for children and the care they require and not be able, legally, to dump the cost on others.” Yes, all this sounds awful.
Except that it is a far more realistic, and ultimately successful, approach to the employment situation. Massachusetts's politicians, of course, have been bathing in this dream world, what with Edward Kennedy & Co. in leadership positions there and the Boston university community awash with promoters of socialist public policies and methods.
Yet there is a chink in their armor, even apart from how bad their ideas are for the economy and from their very own point of view. These very same folks who dream of a socialist paradise here on earth are also strong advocates of population control and environmental precaution. Well, here is the news: promoting extended family leave and other mandated family benefits which help people avoid coming to grips with the full cost of parenthood is just the sort of policy that will increase child bearing. That, in turn, will be added burden to the environment, as well as to the public school system and all sort of related facilities the same parents who expect a free ride in these areas will expect in other areas of their lives.
At that point, look out. The prospects for a Soviet style meltdown will be approaching. In contrast to the anxieties associated with the free market capitalist system, that meltdown will be a true disaster all around.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Are We Making Progress?
Tibor R. Machan
Of all the studies that make the news, I’d like to read of one that measures whether there has been significant progress toward the free society. Yes, there are records kept on which country is more free (in the relevant sense, roughly, of enjoying respect for and protection of individual rights in the Lockean tradition, the tradition that spawned the Declaration of Independence). This includes elements of a legal infrastructure emphasizing due process, civil liberties, private property rights, freedom to enter and exist contracts, etc., and so forth.
Yet my own curiosity here focuses on the relative progress of classical liberal, libertarian ideas vis-à-vis all the varieties of statism that are being promulgated. Even though I’ve been focusing on the respective merits of the free society vis-à-vis more or less statists ones since 1961—when I started to read philosophy and then discovered Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, et al. (oddly, via first becoming aware of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review), I have never managed to get a confident grasp of whether the movement is gaining ground on its opponents.
When I started into this movement, there had been the Foundation for Economic Education, the Nathaniel Branden Institute, and a few other more or less consistent think tanks and advocacy organizations working on various aspects and problems of the free society. In time the Institute for Humane Studies, the Reason Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Mises Institute, the Independent Institute, The Pacific Research Institute, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Institute for Justice, the Heartland Institute, the International Society for Individual Liberty, Free Market News Network, and similar organizations (many with prominent web presence now) emerged so that today there are umpteen such outfits publishing books, journals, magazines, and pamphlets, producing Webcasts, organizing conferences and seminars, and generally making a very decent effort at getting competent, erudite, and civil presentations of the case for liberty within not just American but what may roughly be called Western culture and beyond. (There are free market think tanks in the UK, Hungary, Rumania, the Czech Republic, Poland, as well as Pakistan, Nigeria, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places. And I was recently contacted by someone from China who is starting such an institute!)
OK, but when compared to what statists are doing, is this anywhere sufficient to advance the cause of liberty? Is it only that the pie of intellectual activism is growing, with everyone having pretty much the same percentage of a slice of it as forty years ago or is the percentage of the slice with libertarian content growing compared to the rest?
I cannot begin to answer this question, although here and there some hopeful signs are in evidence. Take the growth of the media company for which I work half time, Freedom Communications, Inc., of Irvine, CA. It’s flagship newspaper, The Orange County Register, is in excellent shape, having managed to fend off numerous attempts by The Los Angeles Times to obliterate it. The company has some 30 daily papers across the country, as well as another 25 or so weeklies, some of them published in Spanish. The organization has grown but what about others pushing for the opposite trend, for expanding the entitlement or welfare state?
Not that my own vigilance would diminish at all were I to learn that the movement toward a fully free society is lagging or flourishing big time. Still, with the prospect for the latter improving, I would certainly be more hopeful about what kind of lives my own children will have, and the children of my friends, and, indeed, the children of millions and millions. So the issue is certainly not merely academic.
Yes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance but it is not unreasonable to hope for some genuine progress, to see some fruit to one’s labors. I think most of those who have devoted much of their energy to studying and defending the free society, in various areas of specialty or in the most general terms, would wish to know just how the movement is faring. I am sure those who are championing opposite ideas and ideals would also like to know how well they are doing in the war of ideas. I do know that some have reached great influence, for example, with the United Nations, The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and similar outfits. And they have no compunction about utilizing money extorted from the rest of us to promote their agenda. (Is that a great advantage they enjoy? Or is it, like most matters touched by the state, actually a liability?)
Maybe someday there will be a graduate student in political economy or some related discipline who will shed some light on this concern of mine. Maybe someone has already but I’ve missed it.
Tibor R. Machan
Of all the studies that make the news, I’d like to read of one that measures whether there has been significant progress toward the free society. Yes, there are records kept on which country is more free (in the relevant sense, roughly, of enjoying respect for and protection of individual rights in the Lockean tradition, the tradition that spawned the Declaration of Independence). This includes elements of a legal infrastructure emphasizing due process, civil liberties, private property rights, freedom to enter and exist contracts, etc., and so forth.
Yet my own curiosity here focuses on the relative progress of classical liberal, libertarian ideas vis-à-vis all the varieties of statism that are being promulgated. Even though I’ve been focusing on the respective merits of the free society vis-à-vis more or less statists ones since 1961—when I started to read philosophy and then discovered Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, et al. (oddly, via first becoming aware of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review), I have never managed to get a confident grasp of whether the movement is gaining ground on its opponents.
When I started into this movement, there had been the Foundation for Economic Education, the Nathaniel Branden Institute, and a few other more or less consistent think tanks and advocacy organizations working on various aspects and problems of the free society. In time the Institute for Humane Studies, the Reason Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Mises Institute, the Independent Institute, The Pacific Research Institute, the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Institute for Justice, the Heartland Institute, the International Society for Individual Liberty, Free Market News Network, and similar organizations (many with prominent web presence now) emerged so that today there are umpteen such outfits publishing books, journals, magazines, and pamphlets, producing Webcasts, organizing conferences and seminars, and generally making a very decent effort at getting competent, erudite, and civil presentations of the case for liberty within not just American but what may roughly be called Western culture and beyond. (There are free market think tanks in the UK, Hungary, Rumania, the Czech Republic, Poland, as well as Pakistan, Nigeria, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places. And I was recently contacted by someone from China who is starting such an institute!)
OK, but when compared to what statists are doing, is this anywhere sufficient to advance the cause of liberty? Is it only that the pie of intellectual activism is growing, with everyone having pretty much the same percentage of a slice of it as forty years ago or is the percentage of the slice with libertarian content growing compared to the rest?
I cannot begin to answer this question, although here and there some hopeful signs are in evidence. Take the growth of the media company for which I work half time, Freedom Communications, Inc., of Irvine, CA. It’s flagship newspaper, The Orange County Register, is in excellent shape, having managed to fend off numerous attempts by The Los Angeles Times to obliterate it. The company has some 30 daily papers across the country, as well as another 25 or so weeklies, some of them published in Spanish. The organization has grown but what about others pushing for the opposite trend, for expanding the entitlement or welfare state?
Not that my own vigilance would diminish at all were I to learn that the movement toward a fully free society is lagging or flourishing big time. Still, with the prospect for the latter improving, I would certainly be more hopeful about what kind of lives my own children will have, and the children of my friends, and, indeed, the children of millions and millions. So the issue is certainly not merely academic.
Yes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance but it is not unreasonable to hope for some genuine progress, to see some fruit to one’s labors. I think most of those who have devoted much of their energy to studying and defending the free society, in various areas of specialty or in the most general terms, would wish to know just how the movement is faring. I am sure those who are championing opposite ideas and ideals would also like to know how well they are doing in the war of ideas. I do know that some have reached great influence, for example, with the United Nations, The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and similar outfits. And they have no compunction about utilizing money extorted from the rest of us to promote their agenda. (Is that a great advantage they enjoy? Or is it, like most matters touched by the state, actually a liability?)
Maybe someday there will be a graduate student in political economy or some related discipline who will shed some light on this concern of mine. Maybe someone has already but I’ve missed it.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Coercion Addiction
Tibor R. Machan
In a recently published missive I had expressed skepticism about Al Gore’s story of global warming and climate change. So not surprising I received some harsh rebukes for this.
I am not a trained climatologist and so I rely in my understanding on those who make themselves clear to me and also embrace certain principles as they propose solutions to problems they identify. Now this means, very briefly, that the sort of call to arms found in Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” and similar offerings is unacceptable.
As an example of his predilection to go to government for solutions, Al Gore is most upset with George Bush for refusing to increase government regulation of whatever has an impact on the environment. Gore’s solutions, in other words, are exclusively coercive—give more power to the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (under his leadership, of course) and we will then be on our way to solving the problems he and his team of experts have identified.
What Gore & Co., ignore is not environmental but economic science and sound principles of political economy. Economist have successfully shown the inefficiency of government intervention for purposes of solving nearly any problem at all. For his work on this issue, James Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in 1986. He developed “public choice theory,” a set of principles he and his colleague Gordon Tullock laid out in their book, Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 1962). It shows beyond any reasonable doubt—certainly less doubt than what Al Gore gives us—that when one entrusts problem-solving to government agents, one can expect that there will be mismanagement because bureaucrats promote their own vested interest and agendas when they hold their positions, not the so called “public interest.” (Part of the problem is that in most cases what some group labels “the public interest” is actually the private or vested interest of that very group. Yes, even scientists working for government exhibit this behavior pattern—they are very interested in garnering government grants and subsidies whether the work these support has anything at all to do with the welfare of the citizenry.)
OK, now it follows from this that whatever problem is at issue, calling upon governments to solve it is very risky if not outright delusional. My own skepticism about Al Gore & Co. isn’t so much about the diagnosis but the cure, although even the diagnosis shows plenty of evidence of special pleading. (Nearly all the predictions are put in terms of what “may” happen, not what will.)
But most of all what is of very serious concern is how readily the likes of Al Gore will toss aside considerations of due process and civil liberties, not to mention private property rights, just so as to implement what they call “precautionary” policies, ones that do as much damage to the principles of a free society as any part of the Patriot Act. In another words, Al Gore & Co., are—and pardon my derivative language here—addicted to government.
Now there are those who will cavalierly dismiss my concerns as right wing, oil-interest-driven ideology that simply blinds the likes of me to what is imperative for humanity’s survival and welfare. Au contraire!
It is, instead, the folks lined up with Al Gore who show an unwavering, dogmatic commitment to handling all problems by means of coercion, the governmental way. (There is a wonderful book about this, Jonathan R. T. Hughes’ The governmental habit: Economic Controls from Colonial times to the Present [Basic Books, 1977; republished by Princeton University Press, 1991].) To test whether I am right about this, just ask anyone who joins Gore & Co., what their solutions involve. They involve state imposed restrictions, higher taxation, an environmental disaster czar, and similar measures that are not becoming of a free society but of a top down tyranny.
Until and unless those showing great concern for the environment demonstrate that they understand the public choice problems of reliance on government and they respect the rights of individual human beings as they approach the problem, they do not deserve respect. Some of what they produce may be diagnostically sound but as to their cure, forget about it.
--------------------
Machan is the R. C. Hoiles Professor of Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University's Argyros School of B&E and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, CA. He wrote Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
Tibor R. Machan
In a recently published missive I had expressed skepticism about Al Gore’s story of global warming and climate change. So not surprising I received some harsh rebukes for this.
I am not a trained climatologist and so I rely in my understanding on those who make themselves clear to me and also embrace certain principles as they propose solutions to problems they identify. Now this means, very briefly, that the sort of call to arms found in Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” and similar offerings is unacceptable.
As an example of his predilection to go to government for solutions, Al Gore is most upset with George Bush for refusing to increase government regulation of whatever has an impact on the environment. Gore’s solutions, in other words, are exclusively coercive—give more power to the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency (under his leadership, of course) and we will then be on our way to solving the problems he and his team of experts have identified.
What Gore & Co., ignore is not environmental but economic science and sound principles of political economy. Economist have successfully shown the inefficiency of government intervention for purposes of solving nearly any problem at all. For his work on this issue, James Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in 1986. He developed “public choice theory,” a set of principles he and his colleague Gordon Tullock laid out in their book, Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (University of Michigan Press, 1962). It shows beyond any reasonable doubt—certainly less doubt than what Al Gore gives us—that when one entrusts problem-solving to government agents, one can expect that there will be mismanagement because bureaucrats promote their own vested interest and agendas when they hold their positions, not the so called “public interest.” (Part of the problem is that in most cases what some group labels “the public interest” is actually the private or vested interest of that very group. Yes, even scientists working for government exhibit this behavior pattern—they are very interested in garnering government grants and subsidies whether the work these support has anything at all to do with the welfare of the citizenry.)
OK, now it follows from this that whatever problem is at issue, calling upon governments to solve it is very risky if not outright delusional. My own skepticism about Al Gore & Co. isn’t so much about the diagnosis but the cure, although even the diagnosis shows plenty of evidence of special pleading. (Nearly all the predictions are put in terms of what “may” happen, not what will.)
But most of all what is of very serious concern is how readily the likes of Al Gore will toss aside considerations of due process and civil liberties, not to mention private property rights, just so as to implement what they call “precautionary” policies, ones that do as much damage to the principles of a free society as any part of the Patriot Act. In another words, Al Gore & Co., are—and pardon my derivative language here—addicted to government.
Now there are those who will cavalierly dismiss my concerns as right wing, oil-interest-driven ideology that simply blinds the likes of me to what is imperative for humanity’s survival and welfare. Au contraire!
It is, instead, the folks lined up with Al Gore who show an unwavering, dogmatic commitment to handling all problems by means of coercion, the governmental way. (There is a wonderful book about this, Jonathan R. T. Hughes’ The governmental habit: Economic Controls from Colonial times to the Present [Basic Books, 1977; republished by Princeton University Press, 1991].) To test whether I am right about this, just ask anyone who joins Gore & Co., what their solutions involve. They involve state imposed restrictions, higher taxation, an environmental disaster czar, and similar measures that are not becoming of a free society but of a top down tyranny.
Until and unless those showing great concern for the environment demonstrate that they understand the public choice problems of reliance on government and they respect the rights of individual human beings as they approach the problem, they do not deserve respect. Some of what they produce may be diagnostically sound but as to their cure, forget about it.
--------------------
Machan is the R. C. Hoiles Professor of Business Ethics & Free Enterprise at Chapman University's Argyros School of B&E and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, CA. He wrote Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Iraqi War Blues
Tibor R. Machan
It is blues because it’s such a torment—to most Americans, to those who have died—and to a lot of families who have lost members—in this war, and to the supporters because they can’t advance a convincing reason to stay the course.
President George W. Bush may have wanted to hit Iraq even before 9/11 and his reason may well have been that he thought Saddam Hussein did hide some weapons of mass destruction. I have no idea whether Bush was honest but even if he was, it’s no excuse because believing that WMDs were hidden in Iraq doesn’t appear to have been justified. Believing something that’s unjustified to believe doesn’t count as a reason for acting on the belief. Say you irrationally believe your spouse is cheating on you and so you decided to meet out punishment. It’s no excuse to say, “But I believed you were cheating on me” even if you did but in fact had no reason to.
Did Bush have good reasons, compelling ones, to think Iraq had WMDs? There seems to be no support for this view anywhere now. So then attacking Iraq, while not anything most reasonable people could be too upset about so far as Saddam Hussein is concerned, doesn’t appear to have been justified.
How does this bear on the current debate as to whether the war in Iraq is “a war of choice”? Yes, this seems to be a big deal now—was the war necessary or did Bush decide to wage it as a matter of preference, something he didn’t need to do?
Some—for example Republican pundit Morton Kondracke of weekend TV news program “The Beltway Boys”—think since Bush believed there were WMDs in Iraq, the war was not one of choice but of necessity. But this is the kind of justification I sketched above for punishing one’s spouse because one honestly but irrationally thinks one has been betrayed. Even if Bush honestly thought Iraq had WMDs, if that belief was ill founded, as it evidently was, the war could be considered a war of choice. There was no objective necessity for it.
Mind you, most of Bush’s critics from among the liberal Democrats have no good case against him either. They haven’t ever objected to preemptive public policies that intrude on innocent people, let alone those under serious if mistaken suspicion. Just consider as a perfect current example how eagerly former VP Al Gore is urging his various precautionary measures—ones that would intrude on millions of us without any regard for civil liberties and due process—because he feels there are big risks we face from environmental hazards (global warming, climate change, what have you). Gore and his supporters who complain about Bush’s preemptive war policies because they were preemptive are hypocrites.
Only those who consistently uphold what we might dub the George Washington doctrine about getting America militarily entangled have a case against Bush & Co. These folks believe that free countries may only go to war when there is a justified and dependable belief that the country is under attack or about to be attacked. The emphasis here is on justified and dependable. Forcibly intervening in other people’s lives is only justifiable when these other people are mounting or about to mount an attack. A war is just, in other words, only when it is defensive.
George W. Bush’s war against Iraq was never defensive, not because he may not have believed the country needs defending from WMDs but because his and his administration’s beliefs about Iraq’s WMDs were unjustified, ill founded. Nothing in the meantime, since the war commenced, has changed this fact. Not that there was nothing at all murky about Saddam Hussein and WMDs. Yes there was, what with all that hide and seek involving the United Nations’ team of inspectors. But war is too big a deal, military and indeed any other kind of aggression is too big a deal, to start in a murky situation.
Bush, of course, is no consistent follower of the George Washington doctrine. Nor are most of his liberal Democratic critics. So their quarrel about the war in Iraq is mostly incoherent. The only part that has some bona fide relevance concerns the issue of how long to keep American troops in Iraq now that the American military is there.
Tibor R. Machan
It is blues because it’s such a torment—to most Americans, to those who have died—and to a lot of families who have lost members—in this war, and to the supporters because they can’t advance a convincing reason to stay the course.
President George W. Bush may have wanted to hit Iraq even before 9/11 and his reason may well have been that he thought Saddam Hussein did hide some weapons of mass destruction. I have no idea whether Bush was honest but even if he was, it’s no excuse because believing that WMDs were hidden in Iraq doesn’t appear to have been justified. Believing something that’s unjustified to believe doesn’t count as a reason for acting on the belief. Say you irrationally believe your spouse is cheating on you and so you decided to meet out punishment. It’s no excuse to say, “But I believed you were cheating on me” even if you did but in fact had no reason to.
Did Bush have good reasons, compelling ones, to think Iraq had WMDs? There seems to be no support for this view anywhere now. So then attacking Iraq, while not anything most reasonable people could be too upset about so far as Saddam Hussein is concerned, doesn’t appear to have been justified.
How does this bear on the current debate as to whether the war in Iraq is “a war of choice”? Yes, this seems to be a big deal now—was the war necessary or did Bush decide to wage it as a matter of preference, something he didn’t need to do?
Some—for example Republican pundit Morton Kondracke of weekend TV news program “The Beltway Boys”—think since Bush believed there were WMDs in Iraq, the war was not one of choice but of necessity. But this is the kind of justification I sketched above for punishing one’s spouse because one honestly but irrationally thinks one has been betrayed. Even if Bush honestly thought Iraq had WMDs, if that belief was ill founded, as it evidently was, the war could be considered a war of choice. There was no objective necessity for it.
Mind you, most of Bush’s critics from among the liberal Democrats have no good case against him either. They haven’t ever objected to preemptive public policies that intrude on innocent people, let alone those under serious if mistaken suspicion. Just consider as a perfect current example how eagerly former VP Al Gore is urging his various precautionary measures—ones that would intrude on millions of us without any regard for civil liberties and due process—because he feels there are big risks we face from environmental hazards (global warming, climate change, what have you). Gore and his supporters who complain about Bush’s preemptive war policies because they were preemptive are hypocrites.
Only those who consistently uphold what we might dub the George Washington doctrine about getting America militarily entangled have a case against Bush & Co. These folks believe that free countries may only go to war when there is a justified and dependable belief that the country is under attack or about to be attacked. The emphasis here is on justified and dependable. Forcibly intervening in other people’s lives is only justifiable when these other people are mounting or about to mount an attack. A war is just, in other words, only when it is defensive.
George W. Bush’s war against Iraq was never defensive, not because he may not have believed the country needs defending from WMDs but because his and his administration’s beliefs about Iraq’s WMDs were unjustified, ill founded. Nothing in the meantime, since the war commenced, has changed this fact. Not that there was nothing at all murky about Saddam Hussein and WMDs. Yes there was, what with all that hide and seek involving the United Nations’ team of inspectors. But war is too big a deal, military and indeed any other kind of aggression is too big a deal, to start in a murky situation.
Bush, of course, is no consistent follower of the George Washington doctrine. Nor are most of his liberal Democratic critics. So their quarrel about the war in Iraq is mostly incoherent. The only part that has some bona fide relevance concerns the issue of how long to keep American troops in Iraq now that the American military is there.
Report on PETA is Journalistic Malpractice
Tibor R. Machan
When recently Borders Bookstore refused to display the Danish cartoons that were deemed insulting to many Muslims who responded by going on a rampage, some people expressed the view that Borders was being cowardly. Borders management explained they properly didn’t chose to place members of their staff in harms way. So, Borders wasn’t being cowardly but justifiably prudent. It isn’t necessary for Borders to sacrifice some innocent employees for the sake of taking a stand. There could be better ways to show solidarity with champions of freedom of speech and artistic expression.
More recently some members of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) invaded a dinner where the pop star Beyonce Knowles was the host to various invited guests. PETA members “peppered the pop star with questions about her fur use,” reported the Associated Press. In the report AP gave a short characterization of PETA as “known for its untraditional methods of raising awareness about animal rights.”
Never mind for a moment about PETA’s agenda. Certainly, AP’s characterization of PETA’s way of bringing attention to it should not be described in the cowardly fashion of calling them “untraditional methods.” PETA has been guilty of assault, battery, trespass, and harassment against numerous famous individuals who refuse to accept PETA’s viewpoint. These are way beyond “untraditional methods.” They are frequently out and out criminal and AP is plainly mischaracterizing PETA when it refuses to say so. Unlike Muslim radicals, who are reasonably feared to go on a rampage and perpetrated violence against Borders’ employees, AP wasn’t in harms way from PETA. Its conduct is, therefore, pretty clearly cowardly.
But there is more. Using the expression “raising awareness about animal rights” is totally misleading, akin to writing about some group that they are invading people’s private parties in an effort of “raising awareness about ghosts.” There are no ghosts! There are no animal rights! AP might as well be writing its report as if the tooth fairy were something real.
Animals aren’t the type of living being that can have rights; AP and anyone else might as well come to terms with this fact. Rights are what human beings can and do have. That is because they are moral agents—living beings who after infancy begin to make choices in their lives, choices that can be morally commendable or blameworthy.
It is this fact that gives rise to the existence of rights in human community life. Choice brings on moral responsibility and rights provide the criteria by which people’s moral sphere of authority, their sovereignty, is spelled out and translated into law.
To say that animals have rights is like saying that animals have guilt, or moral and legal duties, or can engage in insult or commit murder; none of that makes any sense outside of imaginative fiction or fantasy (like that produced by Walt Disney and thousands of children’s book authors). At its best, talk of “animal rights” is moral hype. It involves claiming for animals something that is false so as to bring to light what could in fact be true, namely, that human beings often abuse them, treat them inhumanely. But it is utterly confusing to mistake the hype for truth.
When AP fails to put quotation marks around “animal rights,” it shows partisanship with PETA and is abandoning its journalistic position of the impartial reporter. In the incidence with Beyonce Knowles, AP did two things that demonstrate either carelessness of out and out bias. It downplayed PETA’s methods, perhaps because, as the AP report states, the organization “had previously attempted to reach Knowles through faxes, letters and rallies outside her concerts.” Ms. Knowles was clearly being victimized in ways that are reminiscent of the methods of the KKK and neo-Nazis, not of civilized advocacy groups and failing to indicate that involves biased, partisan reporting. PETA is a rogue group, frequently engaged in what comes very close to terrorism—attacks on innocent people with whom PETA disagrees and which disagreement is no justification for treating the likes of Ms. Knowles in their criminal fashion.
AP might have noted that by any standard of civilized conduct, PETA ought to straighten out its policies and confine itself to communicating via ”faxes, letters and [perhaps] rallies outside her concerts.” Invading a dinner to which no PETA members were invited and which PETA members attended on false pretenses should not garner this violent group favorable treatment from the Associated Press.
Tibor R. Machan
When recently Borders Bookstore refused to display the Danish cartoons that were deemed insulting to many Muslims who responded by going on a rampage, some people expressed the view that Borders was being cowardly. Borders management explained they properly didn’t chose to place members of their staff in harms way. So, Borders wasn’t being cowardly but justifiably prudent. It isn’t necessary for Borders to sacrifice some innocent employees for the sake of taking a stand. There could be better ways to show solidarity with champions of freedom of speech and artistic expression.
More recently some members of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) invaded a dinner where the pop star Beyonce Knowles was the host to various invited guests. PETA members “peppered the pop star with questions about her fur use,” reported the Associated Press. In the report AP gave a short characterization of PETA as “known for its untraditional methods of raising awareness about animal rights.”
Never mind for a moment about PETA’s agenda. Certainly, AP’s characterization of PETA’s way of bringing attention to it should not be described in the cowardly fashion of calling them “untraditional methods.” PETA has been guilty of assault, battery, trespass, and harassment against numerous famous individuals who refuse to accept PETA’s viewpoint. These are way beyond “untraditional methods.” They are frequently out and out criminal and AP is plainly mischaracterizing PETA when it refuses to say so. Unlike Muslim radicals, who are reasonably feared to go on a rampage and perpetrated violence against Borders’ employees, AP wasn’t in harms way from PETA. Its conduct is, therefore, pretty clearly cowardly.
But there is more. Using the expression “raising awareness about animal rights” is totally misleading, akin to writing about some group that they are invading people’s private parties in an effort of “raising awareness about ghosts.” There are no ghosts! There are no animal rights! AP might as well be writing its report as if the tooth fairy were something real.
Animals aren’t the type of living being that can have rights; AP and anyone else might as well come to terms with this fact. Rights are what human beings can and do have. That is because they are moral agents—living beings who after infancy begin to make choices in their lives, choices that can be morally commendable or blameworthy.
It is this fact that gives rise to the existence of rights in human community life. Choice brings on moral responsibility and rights provide the criteria by which people’s moral sphere of authority, their sovereignty, is spelled out and translated into law.
To say that animals have rights is like saying that animals have guilt, or moral and legal duties, or can engage in insult or commit murder; none of that makes any sense outside of imaginative fiction or fantasy (like that produced by Walt Disney and thousands of children’s book authors). At its best, talk of “animal rights” is moral hype. It involves claiming for animals something that is false so as to bring to light what could in fact be true, namely, that human beings often abuse them, treat them inhumanely. But it is utterly confusing to mistake the hype for truth.
When AP fails to put quotation marks around “animal rights,” it shows partisanship with PETA and is abandoning its journalistic position of the impartial reporter. In the incidence with Beyonce Knowles, AP did two things that demonstrate either carelessness of out and out bias. It downplayed PETA’s methods, perhaps because, as the AP report states, the organization “had previously attempted to reach Knowles through faxes, letters and rallies outside her concerts.” Ms. Knowles was clearly being victimized in ways that are reminiscent of the methods of the KKK and neo-Nazis, not of civilized advocacy groups and failing to indicate that involves biased, partisan reporting. PETA is a rogue group, frequently engaged in what comes very close to terrorism—attacks on innocent people with whom PETA disagrees and which disagreement is no justification for treating the likes of Ms. Knowles in their criminal fashion.
AP might have noted that by any standard of civilized conduct, PETA ought to straighten out its policies and confine itself to communicating via ”faxes, letters and [perhaps] rallies outside her concerts.” Invading a dinner to which no PETA members were invited and which PETA members attended on false pretenses should not garner this violent group favorable treatment from the Associated Press.
Friday, June 16, 2006
How to Go Green
Tibor R. Machan
Some influential, even powerful, public policy pundits, like former VP Al Gore and columnist Thomas L. Friedman (of The World is Flat fame), have gone on a crusade to champion what they vaguely call “green.” Among the measures they promote is high taxes on gasoline, so as to wean drivers from fossil fuel and encourage some alternatives like solar energy and wind.
Not that this is anything new—it’s been in the air for decades. Sadly, those pushing for it pretty much reject the best way to encourage switching from gasoline to various alternatives, some of them not yet invented. This is to promote privatization—to build up a legal infrastructure that emphasizes private property rights.
Though a bit late by now, perhaps, without the massive and decades long public subsidization of the gasoline fueled automobile and other vehicles, there would have developed a diversified production and use of fuels throughout the world. Indeed, it is nearly always the centralization of decision-making about such matters (as what kind of fuel people will have to use to move about) that brings and prolongs problems—waste, environmental destruction, over-dependence on a particular type of fuel, etc.
Yet once the world was steered toward reliance mostly on fossil fuels, along with the fact that vehicle movement began to be seen as a natural right, dependence on gasoline became a fact. Here and there small inroads have been made to come up with alternatives but for most of us these haven’t yet become cost-effective. So what do the champions of “green” promote? Higher fossil fuel taxes, that’s what. Yet another attempt to deploy top-down problem solving, which invites all the problems public choice theorists warn about and encourage the growth of bureaucratic tyranny and mismanagement.
For champions of “green” this is an especially counterproductive policy to pursue. And warnings of it have been aired all along. Just the other day news came of a huge cloud of nasty pollution emanating from China, the biggest of the few remaining official, centrally planned economies in the world. It is quite natural that it would be a country in which official legal acknowledgment of the right to private property is lacking where pollution is most severe. That’s because private citizens and groups there are legally ill equipped to fight what economists call negative externalities—the bad environmental side effects of various industrial and farming activities.
In relatively free societies if pollution gets severe enough, one need not wait for some remotely initiated central government to begin to defend against the impact of it. The fact that pollution moves from one individual’s—or, more likely, company’s—region into another’s makes it possible in a substantially private property based economy to contain it by private and local legal action. The government need not be involved much. And since moving a central government’s policies is akin to turning around an aircraft carrier—meaning it can take a very long time—problems such as air pollution must await decades to be addressed. This was evident throughout the rule of Soviet style socialism and is still very much with us in such places as Cuba, North Korea and China.
But the dirty secret is that the governmental habit is still the norm among all those who champion “green.” Al Gore & Co. just don’t get it and even when they do manage to identify problems, their suggested solution is Neanderthal. Always wait for government to step in and rescue us, never mind that that’s the most unreliable source for solving problems like air pollution, the world wide use of fossil fuels, and so forth.
It is better late than never! When it comes to dealing with macro political-economic problems, it is best to decentralize. Instead of having to rely on changes at the top and on some imaginary team of virtuous and wise “leaders,” a decentralized system can get down to business in people’s and various firms’ back yards.
Unfortunately, Al Gore, in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” or Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times columnist who is about to come out with his Discovery Channel movie, “Addicted to Oil,” seem to be oblivious to all the problems of entrusting governments with problem solving. They never learn from the malpractice perpetrated by FEMA and other central government agencies and keep putting their faith in the state.
If one is seriously interested in steering the world toward “green,” do not count on governments to help with the task.
Tibor R. Machan
Some influential, even powerful, public policy pundits, like former VP Al Gore and columnist Thomas L. Friedman (of The World is Flat fame), have gone on a crusade to champion what they vaguely call “green.” Among the measures they promote is high taxes on gasoline, so as to wean drivers from fossil fuel and encourage some alternatives like solar energy and wind.
Not that this is anything new—it’s been in the air for decades. Sadly, those pushing for it pretty much reject the best way to encourage switching from gasoline to various alternatives, some of them not yet invented. This is to promote privatization—to build up a legal infrastructure that emphasizes private property rights.
Though a bit late by now, perhaps, without the massive and decades long public subsidization of the gasoline fueled automobile and other vehicles, there would have developed a diversified production and use of fuels throughout the world. Indeed, it is nearly always the centralization of decision-making about such matters (as what kind of fuel people will have to use to move about) that brings and prolongs problems—waste, environmental destruction, over-dependence on a particular type of fuel, etc.
Yet once the world was steered toward reliance mostly on fossil fuels, along with the fact that vehicle movement began to be seen as a natural right, dependence on gasoline became a fact. Here and there small inroads have been made to come up with alternatives but for most of us these haven’t yet become cost-effective. So what do the champions of “green” promote? Higher fossil fuel taxes, that’s what. Yet another attempt to deploy top-down problem solving, which invites all the problems public choice theorists warn about and encourage the growth of bureaucratic tyranny and mismanagement.
For champions of “green” this is an especially counterproductive policy to pursue. And warnings of it have been aired all along. Just the other day news came of a huge cloud of nasty pollution emanating from China, the biggest of the few remaining official, centrally planned economies in the world. It is quite natural that it would be a country in which official legal acknowledgment of the right to private property is lacking where pollution is most severe. That’s because private citizens and groups there are legally ill equipped to fight what economists call negative externalities—the bad environmental side effects of various industrial and farming activities.
In relatively free societies if pollution gets severe enough, one need not wait for some remotely initiated central government to begin to defend against the impact of it. The fact that pollution moves from one individual’s—or, more likely, company’s—region into another’s makes it possible in a substantially private property based economy to contain it by private and local legal action. The government need not be involved much. And since moving a central government’s policies is akin to turning around an aircraft carrier—meaning it can take a very long time—problems such as air pollution must await decades to be addressed. This was evident throughout the rule of Soviet style socialism and is still very much with us in such places as Cuba, North Korea and China.
But the dirty secret is that the governmental habit is still the norm among all those who champion “green.” Al Gore & Co. just don’t get it and even when they do manage to identify problems, their suggested solution is Neanderthal. Always wait for government to step in and rescue us, never mind that that’s the most unreliable source for solving problems like air pollution, the world wide use of fossil fuels, and so forth.
It is better late than never! When it comes to dealing with macro political-economic problems, it is best to decentralize. Instead of having to rely on changes at the top and on some imaginary team of virtuous and wise “leaders,” a decentralized system can get down to business in people’s and various firms’ back yards.
Unfortunately, Al Gore, in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” or Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times columnist who is about to come out with his Discovery Channel movie, “Addicted to Oil,” seem to be oblivious to all the problems of entrusting governments with problem solving. They never learn from the malpractice perpetrated by FEMA and other central government agencies and keep putting their faith in the state.
If one is seriously interested in steering the world toward “green,” do not count on governments to help with the task.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Bill Gates, Shut up Already
Tibor R. Machan
No doubt he is a genius when it comes to software and innumerable gadgets and such; I am really pleased he got into computers big time. I certainly got a lot from that in my own line of work.
But Bill Gates really needs to shut about some other things he is confused about. Like his claim the other day, when he announced his impending retirement and turn to full time philanthropy, that he “needs to give back to the community.” Why? Did he steal something from people? Did they lend him something he needs to return? What on earth was he talking about?
People who get rich ordinarily aren’t stealing the wealth they obtain—they trade for it what they have to offer—what they have invented or invested in or created, produced, however one wants to put it. When Picasso painted his works and then sold them and made money from them, he wasn’t a thief. When Shakespeare and Arthur Miller wrote their plays and made money from this, they didn’t steal anything from anyone. And when Bill Gates invented all the things he could and then sold it all to people who were willing to buy it, he didn’t confiscate anyone’s wealth but earned it.
Doesn’t Bill Gates understand this elementary fact of commerce? That’s sad. He must have blindly, thoughtlessly picked up some of the nonsense being peddled by rich-bashing folks across the centuries without making the crucial distinction that many of the early rich did, in fact, steal their wealth from others—through military conquests, through out and out theft, through extortion and other violent means. But the wealthy today can easily go about making their wealth, not stealing it. Bill Gates, for example, made most of his wealth by doing what others wanted done for them for which they paid him and from which he became wealthy. He owes nothing “back” to anyone.
Which is not to say there is anything amiss with Gate’s wanting to be of help to millions of Third World poor and sick people. Indeed, his generosity is clearly evident and ought to be widely appreciated, not only by those who receive his largesse but also by others who are not able to give much and can rest easy that someone else is doing so.
None of this has anything to do with “giving something back” to society, the community, the world, to humanity or whatever. That idea is a relic of a perverse, reactionary theory that when someone gains in trade, someone else must lose. It was called “exploitation” by Karl Marx and has swept the world to such an extent that not only out and out enemies of capitalism but some major capitalists have bought into it. But it is completely wrong.
Exploitation has two senses. One means taking unfair advantage of someone—like if someone is inordinately sensitive to, say, cold weather and you are the only one with a blanket but in some special situation demand that you be paid for it way above the ordinary market price. There are undoubtedly such cases. But if I am at dinner time hungry and someone who owns a restaurant sells me food, thus exploiting the opportunity to feed me for pay, that kind of exploitation is not just innocent but out and out admirable. It’s entrepreneurship. Of if you love classical music and you pay an orchestra to perform some of it for you at a symphony hall, you are exploiting their skills in a most benevolent way, as they are exploiting your interests in their performance.
Bill Gates did exploit the fact that millions and millions of people found what he produced very helpful to them, as they all exploited the fact that he was very interested in his work. And there is absolutely nothing amiss with this, quite the contrary. It is admirable when people seek out a market for their skills and deliver to potential purchasers what they want and get rich in the process. Nothing needs to be given back—they have already done the “giving” in the exchange that has transpired. This is no different from what happens when we trade with basketball, tennis, baseball, or football players, entertainers of all kinds, doctors, dentists etc., and so forth to mutual benefit. No one is left with obligations to do any paying back.
Another thing that’s wrong with Bill Gate’s claim is that it makes it appear that generosity or philanthropy should be confined to the very wealthy. They made a lot and now they need to give some of it back, whereas the rest of us who made not so much have no business worrying about those who are in dire straits. But this is entirely wrong. Generosity is something we all should cultivate in us, be we rich or poor. Bill Gate’s claims about his unique obligation to “give back” could encourage some people to get a very warped idea about the nature of generosity.
Tibor R. Machan
No doubt he is a genius when it comes to software and innumerable gadgets and such; I am really pleased he got into computers big time. I certainly got a lot from that in my own line of work.
But Bill Gates really needs to shut about some other things he is confused about. Like his claim the other day, when he announced his impending retirement and turn to full time philanthropy, that he “needs to give back to the community.” Why? Did he steal something from people? Did they lend him something he needs to return? What on earth was he talking about?
People who get rich ordinarily aren’t stealing the wealth they obtain—they trade for it what they have to offer—what they have invented or invested in or created, produced, however one wants to put it. When Picasso painted his works and then sold them and made money from them, he wasn’t a thief. When Shakespeare and Arthur Miller wrote their plays and made money from this, they didn’t steal anything from anyone. And when Bill Gates invented all the things he could and then sold it all to people who were willing to buy it, he didn’t confiscate anyone’s wealth but earned it.
Doesn’t Bill Gates understand this elementary fact of commerce? That’s sad. He must have blindly, thoughtlessly picked up some of the nonsense being peddled by rich-bashing folks across the centuries without making the crucial distinction that many of the early rich did, in fact, steal their wealth from others—through military conquests, through out and out theft, through extortion and other violent means. But the wealthy today can easily go about making their wealth, not stealing it. Bill Gates, for example, made most of his wealth by doing what others wanted done for them for which they paid him and from which he became wealthy. He owes nothing “back” to anyone.
Which is not to say there is anything amiss with Gate’s wanting to be of help to millions of Third World poor and sick people. Indeed, his generosity is clearly evident and ought to be widely appreciated, not only by those who receive his largesse but also by others who are not able to give much and can rest easy that someone else is doing so.
None of this has anything to do with “giving something back” to society, the community, the world, to humanity or whatever. That idea is a relic of a perverse, reactionary theory that when someone gains in trade, someone else must lose. It was called “exploitation” by Karl Marx and has swept the world to such an extent that not only out and out enemies of capitalism but some major capitalists have bought into it. But it is completely wrong.
Exploitation has two senses. One means taking unfair advantage of someone—like if someone is inordinately sensitive to, say, cold weather and you are the only one with a blanket but in some special situation demand that you be paid for it way above the ordinary market price. There are undoubtedly such cases. But if I am at dinner time hungry and someone who owns a restaurant sells me food, thus exploiting the opportunity to feed me for pay, that kind of exploitation is not just innocent but out and out admirable. It’s entrepreneurship. Of if you love classical music and you pay an orchestra to perform some of it for you at a symphony hall, you are exploiting their skills in a most benevolent way, as they are exploiting your interests in their performance.
Bill Gates did exploit the fact that millions and millions of people found what he produced very helpful to them, as they all exploited the fact that he was very interested in his work. And there is absolutely nothing amiss with this, quite the contrary. It is admirable when people seek out a market for their skills and deliver to potential purchasers what they want and get rich in the process. Nothing needs to be given back—they have already done the “giving” in the exchange that has transpired. This is no different from what happens when we trade with basketball, tennis, baseball, or football players, entertainers of all kinds, doctors, dentists etc., and so forth to mutual benefit. No one is left with obligations to do any paying back.
Another thing that’s wrong with Bill Gate’s claim is that it makes it appear that generosity or philanthropy should be confined to the very wealthy. They made a lot and now they need to give some of it back, whereas the rest of us who made not so much have no business worrying about those who are in dire straits. But this is entirely wrong. Generosity is something we all should cultivate in us, be we rich or poor. Bill Gate’s claims about his unique obligation to “give back” could encourage some people to get a very warped idea about the nature of generosity.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Team Sports and Nationalism
Tibor R. Machan
Ever since I left my native country, Hungary, I have been a rebel about rooting for the home team. But I have to modify this in the light of my subsequent education. I do not mind rooting for club teams. I also find rooting for teams affiliated with private colleges and universities unproblematic. What really irks me is all those people who root for national teams. As you can imagine, I resisted rooting for Hungary’s teams in soccer or water polo or anything else. That’s because doing so seemed to me based on an irrational love of country.
What exactly is love of country anyway? Let me think—I do love Hungarian food and music and some of the landscape and the lay out of the city of Budapest. In fact, I think this last is awesome.
But does this have anything to do with their being Hungarian? I have no idea—Hungary is actually made up some many different ethnic, religions and national groups that it is nearly impossible to find anything specifically Hungarian other these more cultural than national elements. Yes, a gulyas soup is Hungarian. So is the csardas, which is a dance, although for all I know it may be danced in Rumania or Slovakia, too. I can say it rings my chimes when I hear music to which the csardas can be danced.
All in all I have had a very hard time watching sports that involve national competitions, like the World Cup. All this fussing over whether Germany or Italy or England or America is going to win, without much heed about who really is doing well at the sport other than for the sake of national victory. These are, as I see it, remnants of the rampant tribalism that has ruled the world from time immemorial.
Just how seriously even people in the most cosmopolitan regions of the globe embrace such tribalism can be appreciated from what is called the Cricket test, devised by one Norman Tebbit in 1990, a member of the Conservative political establishment in England. It is hypnotically administered to people from ethnic minorities in Britain to see if they have become British. Not until they supported an cricket team from England, in preference to the team from their native country.
Why on earth does one wish to test for such loyalties? What if some of the minorities are more familiar with members of teams from their native country and simply root for these teams for that reason, having nothing to do with politics, global or otherwise? What if I root for Hungarian fencers because my mother was a champion fencer back when I lived there, not because Hungary’s government or national history is swell?
Team sports encourage this nationalism, especially on the part of people who otherwise probably have little interest in politics. Root for the Americans, not because the country is superb to live in, certainly not because the team has earned respect for its skillful playing, but only because, well, its is the American team.
Maybe it is only a matter of taste. But I prefer tennis. There it is the individual for whom one can root, no matter where he or she hails from. If Andy Ruddick or Roger Federer plays the way you admire, you root for him regardless of where he is a citizen. Not that all of tennis avoids nationalism, of course. But it is simpler to ignore it. Of course, when an Australian plays in big tournament, there will always be a bunch of Australians in the stands waiving Australian flags. And so with other plays from other countries. But you need not take note of that at all. Even the players’ uniforms show you nothing about their countries, unlike so many of the uniforms of national teams.
I look forward to the time when all sports will be fully privatized and have nothing to do with politics at all.
Tibor R. Machan
Ever since I left my native country, Hungary, I have been a rebel about rooting for the home team. But I have to modify this in the light of my subsequent education. I do not mind rooting for club teams. I also find rooting for teams affiliated with private colleges and universities unproblematic. What really irks me is all those people who root for national teams. As you can imagine, I resisted rooting for Hungary’s teams in soccer or water polo or anything else. That’s because doing so seemed to me based on an irrational love of country.
What exactly is love of country anyway? Let me think—I do love Hungarian food and music and some of the landscape and the lay out of the city of Budapest. In fact, I think this last is awesome.
But does this have anything to do with their being Hungarian? I have no idea—Hungary is actually made up some many different ethnic, religions and national groups that it is nearly impossible to find anything specifically Hungarian other these more cultural than national elements. Yes, a gulyas soup is Hungarian. So is the csardas, which is a dance, although for all I know it may be danced in Rumania or Slovakia, too. I can say it rings my chimes when I hear music to which the csardas can be danced.
All in all I have had a very hard time watching sports that involve national competitions, like the World Cup. All this fussing over whether Germany or Italy or England or America is going to win, without much heed about who really is doing well at the sport other than for the sake of national victory. These are, as I see it, remnants of the rampant tribalism that has ruled the world from time immemorial.
Just how seriously even people in the most cosmopolitan regions of the globe embrace such tribalism can be appreciated from what is called the Cricket test, devised by one Norman Tebbit in 1990, a member of the Conservative political establishment in England. It is hypnotically administered to people from ethnic minorities in Britain to see if they have become British. Not until they supported an cricket team from England, in preference to the team from their native country.
Why on earth does one wish to test for such loyalties? What if some of the minorities are more familiar with members of teams from their native country and simply root for these teams for that reason, having nothing to do with politics, global or otherwise? What if I root for Hungarian fencers because my mother was a champion fencer back when I lived there, not because Hungary’s government or national history is swell?
Team sports encourage this nationalism, especially on the part of people who otherwise probably have little interest in politics. Root for the Americans, not because the country is superb to live in, certainly not because the team has earned respect for its skillful playing, but only because, well, its is the American team.
Maybe it is only a matter of taste. But I prefer tennis. There it is the individual for whom one can root, no matter where he or she hails from. If Andy Ruddick or Roger Federer plays the way you admire, you root for him regardless of where he is a citizen. Not that all of tennis avoids nationalism, of course. But it is simpler to ignore it. Of course, when an Australian plays in big tournament, there will always be a bunch of Australians in the stands waiving Australian flags. And so with other plays from other countries. But you need not take note of that at all. Even the players’ uniforms show you nothing about their countries, unlike so many of the uniforms of national teams.
I look forward to the time when all sports will be fully privatized and have nothing to do with politics at all.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The Growth of Green Hype
Tibor R. Machan
Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is but the most visible of “green” hypes these days, containing doom and gloom galore, the very predictions and prophesies that have been around for centuries and get repeatedly discredited by subsequent events. Gore is now being joined by the highly visible and widely respected New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, with his upcoming June 27th, 2006, Discovery Channel program, “Addicted to Oil.”
This is not the place to analyze the content of these programs. Gore’s film has been scrutinized and the conclusion of most careful commentators has been that while Gore assembles credible evidence for global climate change, he hasn’t proven by a long shot that such change is due to anything that human beings have done or have failed to do. Indeed, it seems that over the centuries there has been ample and oft repeated climate change, not unlike what is being experienced now, in both directions, the warming and cooling of the planet. The misanthropic spin is largely gratuitous, reminiscent of the more faith based doctrine of original sin, not based on scientific reasoning. But never mind that.
What can be noted here is how much hype surrounds offerings such as those by Gore and Friedman. Both of these men receive the most plentiful exposure on the media, yet they complain endlessly about how little attention they are receiving.
The other night I tuned into Charlie Rose, whose daily program I watch loyally enough to have a sense of what themes get treated and which are neglected. (Rose just came back from a hiatus because of an heart operation, which was the main topic of the program I saw on Monday, June 12th, the first day of his return. He seems quite fine. He had Bill Moyers on, one of my nemeses but whom Rose seems to cherish! Yvette Vega, his executive producer and friend, was with him too, so all in all the somewhat self-indulgent show turned out tolerable enough.)
The second half of this come back program featured Thomas Friedman, who has been on Rose’s show two dozen times or more. Friedman, who, as noted above, has what promises to be (based on the trailer) a doom and gloom program coming up on the Discovery Channel, spoke fairly reasonably about Iraq and Bush’s options there but when he started in on the topic of “green,” he went overboard by all reasonable measures.
To begin with, he complained a lot about how “green” isn’t being taken seriously enough in the media, how it is deemed to be “sissy, girly man, soft, too liberal,” what have you, and thus, allegedly, marginalized. Consider—here is a guy who has The New York Times practically all to himself with whatever message he wishes to get out; he gets to put on what promises to be a clone of Al Gore’s movie on the Discovery Channel, a hugely influential media outlet; he gets to peddle this program over and over again on venues such as “Charlie Rose” and Comedy Central’s immensely popular “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Yet he whines and whines about how little attention he is receiving, how the world isn’t giving him a proper hearing.
How do these folks get away with such deceptive hype? How do they manage to put out these endless, relentless prevarications?
If there is anything that has become an orthodoxy in our time it is that “green” is holy and anyone who doubts it is doing the devil’s work. Unless I have missed it, there has never been a global warming skeptic on “Charlie Rose” or on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” not even one who simply takes issue with the misanthropy that’s part of the “green” mantra. There is never a word of doubt about “green” in forums like The New York Times. (When I pointed this out to the editors of THE WEEK, a British magazine which now also has an American clone, they finally ran a short item giving some voice to the skeptics, but it took some prodding to get even this much accomplished.)
I suppose some would consider it fair to bellyache about how your viewpoint is neglected even while it is center stage on nearly all major media. The more the merrier, if it is important enough, never mind how much lying it takes to get the message out there. However, anytime such lying is perpetrated in the service of some idea, that idea immediately loses much of its credibility. That is just one of the many reasons I find the “green” message highly dubious.
Tibor R. Machan
Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” is but the most visible of “green” hypes these days, containing doom and gloom galore, the very predictions and prophesies that have been around for centuries and get repeatedly discredited by subsequent events. Gore is now being joined by the highly visible and widely respected New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, with his upcoming June 27th, 2006, Discovery Channel program, “Addicted to Oil.”
This is not the place to analyze the content of these programs. Gore’s film has been scrutinized and the conclusion of most careful commentators has been that while Gore assembles credible evidence for global climate change, he hasn’t proven by a long shot that such change is due to anything that human beings have done or have failed to do. Indeed, it seems that over the centuries there has been ample and oft repeated climate change, not unlike what is being experienced now, in both directions, the warming and cooling of the planet. The misanthropic spin is largely gratuitous, reminiscent of the more faith based doctrine of original sin, not based on scientific reasoning. But never mind that.
What can be noted here is how much hype surrounds offerings such as those by Gore and Friedman. Both of these men receive the most plentiful exposure on the media, yet they complain endlessly about how little attention they are receiving.
The other night I tuned into Charlie Rose, whose daily program I watch loyally enough to have a sense of what themes get treated and which are neglected. (Rose just came back from a hiatus because of an heart operation, which was the main topic of the program I saw on Monday, June 12th, the first day of his return. He seems quite fine. He had Bill Moyers on, one of my nemeses but whom Rose seems to cherish! Yvette Vega, his executive producer and friend, was with him too, so all in all the somewhat self-indulgent show turned out tolerable enough.)
The second half of this come back program featured Thomas Friedman, who has been on Rose’s show two dozen times or more. Friedman, who, as noted above, has what promises to be (based on the trailer) a doom and gloom program coming up on the Discovery Channel, spoke fairly reasonably about Iraq and Bush’s options there but when he started in on the topic of “green,” he went overboard by all reasonable measures.
To begin with, he complained a lot about how “green” isn’t being taken seriously enough in the media, how it is deemed to be “sissy, girly man, soft, too liberal,” what have you, and thus, allegedly, marginalized. Consider—here is a guy who has The New York Times practically all to himself with whatever message he wishes to get out; he gets to put on what promises to be a clone of Al Gore’s movie on the Discovery Channel, a hugely influential media outlet; he gets to peddle this program over and over again on venues such as “Charlie Rose” and Comedy Central’s immensely popular “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Yet he whines and whines about how little attention he is receiving, how the world isn’t giving him a proper hearing.
How do these folks get away with such deceptive hype? How do they manage to put out these endless, relentless prevarications?
If there is anything that has become an orthodoxy in our time it is that “green” is holy and anyone who doubts it is doing the devil’s work. Unless I have missed it, there has never been a global warming skeptic on “Charlie Rose” or on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” not even one who simply takes issue with the misanthropy that’s part of the “green” mantra. There is never a word of doubt about “green” in forums like The New York Times. (When I pointed this out to the editors of THE WEEK, a British magazine which now also has an American clone, they finally ran a short item giving some voice to the skeptics, but it took some prodding to get even this much accomplished.)
I suppose some would consider it fair to bellyache about how your viewpoint is neglected even while it is center stage on nearly all major media. The more the merrier, if it is important enough, never mind how much lying it takes to get the message out there. However, anytime such lying is perpetrated in the service of some idea, that idea immediately loses much of its credibility. That is just one of the many reasons I find the “green” message highly dubious.
Monday, June 12, 2006
The NY Times’ Crusade Against Internet Gambling
Tibor R. Machan
Each Sunday morning I bring in The NY Times and start reading it, eventually ending up looking through it’s magazine section, but not before checking the book reviews. Yes, it is a bit masochistic—very little in the paper pleases me. Most of it is slanted toward a Leftist agenda of more government regulation and America bashing. I can relate to some of this but not to the evident glee with which The Times shells it all out.
In this morning’s issue there was something especially disturbing. The New York Times is usually on the side of at least one element of the American founders’ political, legal philosophy, namely, freedom of speech. Alas, no more.
It looks like the editors became convinced that Internet gambling by college students is such a terrible thing—“Researchers say that Internet poker is addictive,” “Players say it’s addictive,” “The federal government says it’s illegal,” etc., and so forth they go—that it must be banned. “Administrators who would never consider letting Budweiser install taps in dorm rooms have made high-speed Internet access a standard amenity, putting every student with a credit card minutes away from 24-hour high-stakes gambling.” Such a horrible policy needs to be brought to a screeching halt.
It used to be conservatives who bellyached about how freedom of speech provisions in the U. S. Constitution made possible the degradation of society, via pornography and the like. Now it is The New York Times that peddles the idea with its sensationalism about serious gambling by college students. And they do it with a lousy analogy to boot.
The Internet isn’t like a Budweiser tap. It’s more like a telephone line. Budweiser taps would deliver one thing alone, namely beer. Of course, even that could well be something students should be trusted with—these are, after all, adults who have the civil right to vote, to drive, to travel wherever they choose. They aren’t children any longer. And if I recall correctly, it used to be a cause célèbre of modern liberals to free young college students from the traditional doctrine of in loco parentis at colleges and universities. But never mind that—never let a good scary story be ruined by principles, even if they are your very own.
What these folks at The New York Times magazine need to grasp once and for all is that a free society is risky—in contrast to, say, a concentration camp or the gulags. In a free society young men and women have the option to waste their money on gambling to invest it wisely for their old age security or purchase gifts to send to their parents, etc., etc. This is what comes with freedom.
Ah, but at this point of the discussion the modern liberal will chime in with the story about addiction. If one is addicted, well one isn’t really free to make choices.
But the addiction story is a phony. These folks like gambling, no less so than all those who flock to Vegas or Monte Carlo. Sure, some go overboard, just as some do so when it comes to mountain climbing or eating at fast food restaurants or whatever. We have that liberty, to overdo stuff, often stuff that when overdone becomes bad for us.
But the remedy isn’t to deploy coercive measures but to embark on localized assistance, including education and persuasion. Instead of recklessly writing off these students as addicts—who cannot make decisions for themselves—they need to be viewed as people with free will but unfortunately bad choices, perhaps.
This bit about all questionable conduct being a matter of addiction can backfired good and hard—will we consider voting for various political agendas a matter of addiction if we disagree with it, if we consider it bad judgment? Should voting booths be shut down because those going to them are too feeble-minded to vote right?
It looks like The Times in on board with these developments. Let’s resist as much as we can.
Tibor R. Machan
Each Sunday morning I bring in The NY Times and start reading it, eventually ending up looking through it’s magazine section, but not before checking the book reviews. Yes, it is a bit masochistic—very little in the paper pleases me. Most of it is slanted toward a Leftist agenda of more government regulation and America bashing. I can relate to some of this but not to the evident glee with which The Times shells it all out.
In this morning’s issue there was something especially disturbing. The New York Times is usually on the side of at least one element of the American founders’ political, legal philosophy, namely, freedom of speech. Alas, no more.
It looks like the editors became convinced that Internet gambling by college students is such a terrible thing—“Researchers say that Internet poker is addictive,” “Players say it’s addictive,” “The federal government says it’s illegal,” etc., and so forth they go—that it must be banned. “Administrators who would never consider letting Budweiser install taps in dorm rooms have made high-speed Internet access a standard amenity, putting every student with a credit card minutes away from 24-hour high-stakes gambling.” Such a horrible policy needs to be brought to a screeching halt.
It used to be conservatives who bellyached about how freedom of speech provisions in the U. S. Constitution made possible the degradation of society, via pornography and the like. Now it is The New York Times that peddles the idea with its sensationalism about serious gambling by college students. And they do it with a lousy analogy to boot.
The Internet isn’t like a Budweiser tap. It’s more like a telephone line. Budweiser taps would deliver one thing alone, namely beer. Of course, even that could well be something students should be trusted with—these are, after all, adults who have the civil right to vote, to drive, to travel wherever they choose. They aren’t children any longer. And if I recall correctly, it used to be a cause célèbre of modern liberals to free young college students from the traditional doctrine of in loco parentis at colleges and universities. But never mind that—never let a good scary story be ruined by principles, even if they are your very own.
What these folks at The New York Times magazine need to grasp once and for all is that a free society is risky—in contrast to, say, a concentration camp or the gulags. In a free society young men and women have the option to waste their money on gambling to invest it wisely for their old age security or purchase gifts to send to their parents, etc., etc. This is what comes with freedom.
Ah, but at this point of the discussion the modern liberal will chime in with the story about addiction. If one is addicted, well one isn’t really free to make choices.
But the addiction story is a phony. These folks like gambling, no less so than all those who flock to Vegas or Monte Carlo. Sure, some go overboard, just as some do so when it comes to mountain climbing or eating at fast food restaurants or whatever. We have that liberty, to overdo stuff, often stuff that when overdone becomes bad for us.
But the remedy isn’t to deploy coercive measures but to embark on localized assistance, including education and persuasion. Instead of recklessly writing off these students as addicts—who cannot make decisions for themselves—they need to be viewed as people with free will but unfortunately bad choices, perhaps.
This bit about all questionable conduct being a matter of addiction can backfired good and hard—will we consider voting for various political agendas a matter of addiction if we disagree with it, if we consider it bad judgment? Should voting booths be shut down because those going to them are too feeble-minded to vote right?
It looks like The Times in on board with these developments. Let’s resist as much as we can.
Hail to the Fourth
Tibor R. Machan
One reason I consider the Declaration of Independence such a marvelous document is that it states better than anything else the fundamental principles of a free society.
First, the Declaration makes clear that signers held the truths stated to be self-evident, which is different from considering them to be self-evident. That’s a subtle distinction most people miss, saying falsely that the signers believed the truths were in fact self evident. “Holding” them to be so for purposes of making a declaration and “believing” them to be so is not the same by a long shot.
Second, the signers made it clear that however human beings came to be—whether God or Nature created them—they have certain unalienable rights. And “unalienable” is a crucial term here—no one can lose those rights so long as he or she is a human being. Which means no government creates them and no government can take them, be it a monarchy or democracy or theocracy. If one’s rights are unalienable then one has them, no matter what.
Third, the rights we have are ours not as citizens but as human beings. Our citizenship makes a difference but not as to whether we have those rights but concerning their protection. Governments are instituted so as to secure the rights we have, so citizenship comes with the legal infrastructure that gets those rights secured. Other people have those rights, too, but not being citizens of a country in which they are properly secured makes a big difference—that’s why millions have kept flocking to these shores. Not because they would gain the rights when they get to America but because they were promised proper protection of their rights. (Of course, because the government has from the start gone way beyond its proper powers, becoming not a protector but violator of individual rights, those dreams are now in shambles.)
Fourth, contrary to what too many prominent scholars hold, the rights we have are prohibitions, not entitlements, because they forbid anyone from violating our sovereignty. The government comes in after this fact has been properly acknowledged, as an agency established or instituted to make sure those rights are given proper protection. Government is indeed established in line with these rights—we have the right to our lives, liberties, etc., and the corresponding right to secure them by means of a legal authority that is itself bound by those rights. Our only entitlement is to having our rights secured, nothing more. So, the rights we have are not only to be secured by the legal authorities but those very authorities may never violate those rights. This is very important and not awfully difficult to understand: a police officer, for example, has the job to protect us but that protection must not itself involve attacks upon us. Police officers must perform their job without violating the principles they are hired to defend.
Fifth, there are implications for foreign policy from our having the rights we have by virtue of our human nature. The main one is that no war of aggression can be justified since that would mean the government has lost its proper authority. That authority is confined to securing the rights of American citizens, not to violating anyone else’s. Sure, governments of free societies are duty bound to protect the rights of citizens but they are also duty bound not to violate the rights of anyone else. This follows from the Declaration’s recognition that all human beings have the basic rights it lists.
Sixth, and this is also nearly forgotten, the Declaration makes clear that if a government, like a police officer, systematically breaches the principles by which it is supposed to conduct itself, the citizens may abolish it, too. Indeed, it states they have the duty to do so. That’s like saying if our body guards have become corrupt and instead of protecting us, they are now bossing us around, we not only may but ought to fire them. Governments, like body guards, have limited authority and power and if they fail to act accordingly, they must be shown the door. It may be complicated to do this—and the Declaration acknowledges this too—but nonetheless, that’s what needs to be done.
A Declaration is not a full blow political philosophy. The declaration of the American founders makes clear, however, that individuals have certain basic rights they may hire government to secure for them and that government must keep to its job, period. That implies a free society with strictly limited government.
Too bad it is still only but a sound idea, far from a reality!
Tibor R. Machan
One reason I consider the Declaration of Independence such a marvelous document is that it states better than anything else the fundamental principles of a free society.
First, the Declaration makes clear that signers held the truths stated to be self-evident, which is different from considering them to be self-evident. That’s a subtle distinction most people miss, saying falsely that the signers believed the truths were in fact self evident. “Holding” them to be so for purposes of making a declaration and “believing” them to be so is not the same by a long shot.
Second, the signers made it clear that however human beings came to be—whether God or Nature created them—they have certain unalienable rights. And “unalienable” is a crucial term here—no one can lose those rights so long as he or she is a human being. Which means no government creates them and no government can take them, be it a monarchy or democracy or theocracy. If one’s rights are unalienable then one has them, no matter what.
Third, the rights we have are ours not as citizens but as human beings. Our citizenship makes a difference but not as to whether we have those rights but concerning their protection. Governments are instituted so as to secure the rights we have, so citizenship comes with the legal infrastructure that gets those rights secured. Other people have those rights, too, but not being citizens of a country in which they are properly secured makes a big difference—that’s why millions have kept flocking to these shores. Not because they would gain the rights when they get to America but because they were promised proper protection of their rights. (Of course, because the government has from the start gone way beyond its proper powers, becoming not a protector but violator of individual rights, those dreams are now in shambles.)
Fourth, contrary to what too many prominent scholars hold, the rights we have are prohibitions, not entitlements, because they forbid anyone from violating our sovereignty. The government comes in after this fact has been properly acknowledged, as an agency established or instituted to make sure those rights are given proper protection. Government is indeed established in line with these rights—we have the right to our lives, liberties, etc., and the corresponding right to secure them by means of a legal authority that is itself bound by those rights. Our only entitlement is to having our rights secured, nothing more. So, the rights we have are not only to be secured by the legal authorities but those very authorities may never violate those rights. This is very important and not awfully difficult to understand: a police officer, for example, has the job to protect us but that protection must not itself involve attacks upon us. Police officers must perform their job without violating the principles they are hired to defend.
Fifth, there are implications for foreign policy from our having the rights we have by virtue of our human nature. The main one is that no war of aggression can be justified since that would mean the government has lost its proper authority. That authority is confined to securing the rights of American citizens, not to violating anyone else’s. Sure, governments of free societies are duty bound to protect the rights of citizens but they are also duty bound not to violate the rights of anyone else. This follows from the Declaration’s recognition that all human beings have the basic rights it lists.
Sixth, and this is also nearly forgotten, the Declaration makes clear that if a government, like a police officer, systematically breaches the principles by which it is supposed to conduct itself, the citizens may abolish it, too. Indeed, it states they have the duty to do so. That’s like saying if our body guards have become corrupt and instead of protecting us, they are now bossing us around, we not only may but ought to fire them. Governments, like body guards, have limited authority and power and if they fail to act accordingly, they must be shown the door. It may be complicated to do this—and the Declaration acknowledges this too—but nonetheless, that’s what needs to be done.
A Declaration is not a full blow political philosophy. The declaration of the American founders makes clear, however, that individuals have certain basic rights they may hire government to secure for them and that government must keep to its job, period. That implies a free society with strictly limited government.
Too bad it is still only but a sound idea, far from a reality!
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Leo Strauss, Neo-Conservatism & U. S. Foreign Policy
Tibor R. Machan
One has been hearing much about how U. S. foreign policy is influenced by neo-conservatives, especially the ideas of the famous political scientist Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and many of his students. One book, by Anne Norton, is even titled, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2004), suggesting that Strauss’s ideas are quite directly responsible for policies that precipitated the war against Iraq.
Strauss, who left Germany before the Nazis took over and came to the U. S. A., is, first of all, largely responsible for having reintroduced a serious study of classical Greek political philosophy. He promoted a very close re-reading of Plato and Aristotle, among others, believing that modern political philosophy—starting with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677) and ending with the anti-politics of logical positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910–1989)—laid the foundation for value free politics. This amounted to the belief that moral and political ideals cannot be rationally defended since reason can only deal with sensory evidence, nothing else. Since what is right and wrong in any area goes way beyond such evidence, right and wrong must remain notions beyond reason.
Strauss and his students believed this wrongful idea was responsible for many of the modern age’s problems, especially liberal democracy’s inability to defend itself intellectually against totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies like Hitler’s Nazism and Stalin’s Communism. Today they tend to hold that the same applies when it comes to the West’s inability to respond intellectually, philosophically to Islamic radicalism. The West has been intellectually disarmed by modern philosophy, so it is necessary to recover its superior ancient heritage.
Not that Strauss and Co. had much to offer even from those venerable sources—their view tended to be that philosophy really doesn’t provide us with any firm ideas, only with a wonderful exploratory intellectual journey. Some of Strauss’s students even came to advocate nihilism as the only honest philosophy; others adhered to the view, which Strauss ascribed to the great philosophers and seems to have embraced, namely, that ordinary folks just cannot cope with what serious philosophy has to offer—the hard truth, for example, that nothing much is known for certain about anything. So the public may have to be deceived for its own good. (For example, Alan Bloom’s famous book, The Closing of the American Mind [1987], is arguably such a work of “big lies.”)
However, one thing Strauss and his followers did champion without reservation is that philosophical reflection, conversation, exploration, and so forth are all extremely important. Even though no results can be expected from these, our only hope lies in a society that makes philosophy possible. And the only regime that does that is liberal democracy, with its substantially free institutions, especially freedom of inquiry—the press, religion, writing and reading and research of all kinds.
What follows from this is that we owe it to ourselves to defend this regime from all the totalitarian and authoritarian enemies that would squash its institutions, including, of course, the radical Islamic terrorists. Exactly how to mount this defense was not spelled out by Strauss and even by most of his students. I believe Strauss would have been inclined to promote peaceful means—advocacy, exemplification, exhortation, diplomacy and so forth—rather than aggressive military action. But some of those who learned at Strauss’s feet believed otherwise and did, in fact, come to believe that we need to defeat the enemies of liberal democracy before they get us.
Neo-conservatives are not all followers of Strauss but they have picked up a good deal from Strausseans and are among this latter group. The likes of Irving Kristol, founding editor of The Public Interest, which was the flagship publication of neo-conservatism, and his son, William, editor of The Weekly Standard, lean in this direction, as does the architect of significant portions of America’s current foreign policy, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz.
Many on the Left criticize neo-conservatism and, especially, its aggressive foreign policy but the Left is intellectually undermined in this because in its domestic policies, including most recently, environmentalism, the Left is also aggressive (“precautionary”), caring little about individual rights, civil liberties and due process. So we have in the U. S. A. two sides arguing about how to conduct foreign affairs neither of which has a clear cut, principled argument in favor of confining military action to genuine, bona fide defense.
This is not what one would have expected in a country begun with the presidency of George Washington who in his farewell letter warned us all quite explicitly against foreign entanglements.
Tibor R. Machan
One has been hearing much about how U. S. foreign policy is influenced by neo-conservatives, especially the ideas of the famous political scientist Leo Strauss (1899-1973) and many of his students. One book, by Anne Norton, is even titled, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2004), suggesting that Strauss’s ideas are quite directly responsible for policies that precipitated the war against Iraq.
Strauss, who left Germany before the Nazis took over and came to the U. S. A., is, first of all, largely responsible for having reintroduced a serious study of classical Greek political philosophy. He promoted a very close re-reading of Plato and Aristotle, among others, believing that modern political philosophy—starting with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-1677) and ending with the anti-politics of logical positivists such as A. J. Ayer (1910–1989)—laid the foundation for value free politics. This amounted to the belief that moral and political ideals cannot be rationally defended since reason can only deal with sensory evidence, nothing else. Since what is right and wrong in any area goes way beyond such evidence, right and wrong must remain notions beyond reason.
Strauss and his students believed this wrongful idea was responsible for many of the modern age’s problems, especially liberal democracy’s inability to defend itself intellectually against totalitarian and authoritarian ideologies like Hitler’s Nazism and Stalin’s Communism. Today they tend to hold that the same applies when it comes to the West’s inability to respond intellectually, philosophically to Islamic radicalism. The West has been intellectually disarmed by modern philosophy, so it is necessary to recover its superior ancient heritage.
Not that Strauss and Co. had much to offer even from those venerable sources—their view tended to be that philosophy really doesn’t provide us with any firm ideas, only with a wonderful exploratory intellectual journey. Some of Strauss’s students even came to advocate nihilism as the only honest philosophy; others adhered to the view, which Strauss ascribed to the great philosophers and seems to have embraced, namely, that ordinary folks just cannot cope with what serious philosophy has to offer—the hard truth, for example, that nothing much is known for certain about anything. So the public may have to be deceived for its own good. (For example, Alan Bloom’s famous book, The Closing of the American Mind [1987], is arguably such a work of “big lies.”)
However, one thing Strauss and his followers did champion without reservation is that philosophical reflection, conversation, exploration, and so forth are all extremely important. Even though no results can be expected from these, our only hope lies in a society that makes philosophy possible. And the only regime that does that is liberal democracy, with its substantially free institutions, especially freedom of inquiry—the press, religion, writing and reading and research of all kinds.
What follows from this is that we owe it to ourselves to defend this regime from all the totalitarian and authoritarian enemies that would squash its institutions, including, of course, the radical Islamic terrorists. Exactly how to mount this defense was not spelled out by Strauss and even by most of his students. I believe Strauss would have been inclined to promote peaceful means—advocacy, exemplification, exhortation, diplomacy and so forth—rather than aggressive military action. But some of those who learned at Strauss’s feet believed otherwise and did, in fact, come to believe that we need to defeat the enemies of liberal democracy before they get us.
Neo-conservatives are not all followers of Strauss but they have picked up a good deal from Strausseans and are among this latter group. The likes of Irving Kristol, founding editor of The Public Interest, which was the flagship publication of neo-conservatism, and his son, William, editor of The Weekly Standard, lean in this direction, as does the architect of significant portions of America’s current foreign policy, former Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz.
Many on the Left criticize neo-conservatism and, especially, its aggressive foreign policy but the Left is intellectually undermined in this because in its domestic policies, including most recently, environmentalism, the Left is also aggressive (“precautionary”), caring little about individual rights, civil liberties and due process. So we have in the U. S. A. two sides arguing about how to conduct foreign affairs neither of which has a clear cut, principled argument in favor of confining military action to genuine, bona fide defense.
This is not what one would have expected in a country begun with the presidency of George Washington who in his farewell letter warned us all quite explicitly against foreign entanglements.
Altruism’s Bad Influence
Tibor R. Machan
Putting it plainly, altruism is very popular, at least as far as what people verbally champion. It’s not so popular in action because, well, it is impossible to practice consistently. As the poet W. H. Auden put it, “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.”
In fact, of course, what people much more reasonably support is benevolence, generosity and kindness, all in the right measure, not to a fault. It shows by what they do, not by what they say. Unselfishness may be advocated but it is hardly ever practiced much. That’s because unselfishness means devoting oneself first to other people—not just loved ones and in proper proportion but to all, and all of the time. Which is impossible.
Yet, because it is so popular to champion it as an ideal, despite being an impossible ideal it is promoted all over the place. Take, for example, business ethics, the discipline in which I do much work and which is teeming with theorists who preach the altruist line. They call it the “stakeholder theory.”
The idea, advocated by all sorts of business ethics professors who teach and write the subject across the world, is that when company officers make their decisions, they ought to keep in mind not shareholders—those for whom they work, the owners of the firm—but all those who have an interest in it, the stakeholders. Thus, instead of fostering the company’s bottom line, making it prosper, managers should give away the store to those who need help.
Take a company that may stay afloat and profitable only by moving from an expensive plant to one that is more affordable. Should they make the move? The shareholder theorists would agree—of course, move, since that will keep you solvent, may even bring in a profit. Stakeholder theorists, however, will argue—keep in mind all those in your neighborhood who depend on the presence of the firm, like the cleaner or the restaurant next door patronized by employees. If the plant is moved, they will suffer. So, don’t move.
Of course, one cannot run a business this way. My little gym I’ve been going to for two years just decided it had to move because the rent—driven, incidentally, by sudden higher tax assessments—increased beyond its means. So now it is moving, way out of my reach.
OK, but what about me? And what about the various establishments patronized around the corner by gym members who will lose their business? Stakeholder theorists, the altruists, advocate that the gym should think of these establishments and not leave them in a lurch. Never mind that the owners of the gym will be driven aground from such a decision.
The circumstances of my little gym are duplicated all over the place in the business world. Yet instead of urging managers to do the right thing and take their plant where the rent, etc., are affordable, they are being told by business ethicists—advocates of the social responsibility of corporations—that they have an obligation to take care of the stakeholders.
Nor is this an idea urged on managers as a matter of their free choice. No, the stakeholder theory is actually being promoted as the basis of public policy, of laws—for example, in various states so called hostile takeovers are legally prohibited, even though the takeovers would be friendly as all get out to the owners of the firms involved. Why? Because it is all so selfish for managers of companies to serve those who hired them instead of adjacent interested parties who have grown to expect the benefits they bring to the region.
Human beings in all walks of life ought to try to flourish. This includes being considerate, first of all, of their own well being and that of their intimates—family and friends. Then kindness and generosity to deserving strangers in need follow. Last come those we don’t know but who have been hit with some disaster—like a tsunami or hurricane.
The altruistic ideal that our lives must be devoted to others, first of all, is a good case of the “perfect” being the enemy of the good. This standard for proper human behavior—“[of] assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows....to ... maintain quite simply that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he is deciding what course of action to pursue,” to quote the philosopher W. G. Maclagan’s characterization of it—is very bad advice. But it sounds good and has been repeated by moralists mainly because it has the ring of sociability about it. Yet it undermines even that, since if one runs oneself to the ground, as in business, there will be no chance of serving anyone’s interest anymore.
--------------------
Machan is RC Hoiles Professor of business ethics & free enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He also advises Freedom Communications, Inc., on public policy issues.
Tibor R. Machan
Putting it plainly, altruism is very popular, at least as far as what people verbally champion. It’s not so popular in action because, well, it is impossible to practice consistently. As the poet W. H. Auden put it, “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.”
In fact, of course, what people much more reasonably support is benevolence, generosity and kindness, all in the right measure, not to a fault. It shows by what they do, not by what they say. Unselfishness may be advocated but it is hardly ever practiced much. That’s because unselfishness means devoting oneself first to other people—not just loved ones and in proper proportion but to all, and all of the time. Which is impossible.
Yet, because it is so popular to champion it as an ideal, despite being an impossible ideal it is promoted all over the place. Take, for example, business ethics, the discipline in which I do much work and which is teeming with theorists who preach the altruist line. They call it the “stakeholder theory.”
The idea, advocated by all sorts of business ethics professors who teach and write the subject across the world, is that when company officers make their decisions, they ought to keep in mind not shareholders—those for whom they work, the owners of the firm—but all those who have an interest in it, the stakeholders. Thus, instead of fostering the company’s bottom line, making it prosper, managers should give away the store to those who need help.
Take a company that may stay afloat and profitable only by moving from an expensive plant to one that is more affordable. Should they make the move? The shareholder theorists would agree—of course, move, since that will keep you solvent, may even bring in a profit. Stakeholder theorists, however, will argue—keep in mind all those in your neighborhood who depend on the presence of the firm, like the cleaner or the restaurant next door patronized by employees. If the plant is moved, they will suffer. So, don’t move.
Of course, one cannot run a business this way. My little gym I’ve been going to for two years just decided it had to move because the rent—driven, incidentally, by sudden higher tax assessments—increased beyond its means. So now it is moving, way out of my reach.
OK, but what about me? And what about the various establishments patronized around the corner by gym members who will lose their business? Stakeholder theorists, the altruists, advocate that the gym should think of these establishments and not leave them in a lurch. Never mind that the owners of the gym will be driven aground from such a decision.
The circumstances of my little gym are duplicated all over the place in the business world. Yet instead of urging managers to do the right thing and take their plant where the rent, etc., are affordable, they are being told by business ethicists—advocates of the social responsibility of corporations—that they have an obligation to take care of the stakeholders.
Nor is this an idea urged on managers as a matter of their free choice. No, the stakeholder theory is actually being promoted as the basis of public policy, of laws—for example, in various states so called hostile takeovers are legally prohibited, even though the takeovers would be friendly as all get out to the owners of the firms involved. Why? Because it is all so selfish for managers of companies to serve those who hired them instead of adjacent interested parties who have grown to expect the benefits they bring to the region.
Human beings in all walks of life ought to try to flourish. This includes being considerate, first of all, of their own well being and that of their intimates—family and friends. Then kindness and generosity to deserving strangers in need follow. Last come those we don’t know but who have been hit with some disaster—like a tsunami or hurricane.
The altruistic ideal that our lives must be devoted to others, first of all, is a good case of the “perfect” being the enemy of the good. This standard for proper human behavior—“[of] assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows....to ... maintain quite simply that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he is deciding what course of action to pursue,” to quote the philosopher W. G. Maclagan’s characterization of it—is very bad advice. But it sounds good and has been repeated by moralists mainly because it has the ring of sociability about it. Yet it undermines even that, since if one runs oneself to the ground, as in business, there will be no chance of serving anyone’s interest anymore.
--------------------
Machan is RC Hoiles Professor of business ethics & free enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He also advises Freedom Communications, Inc., on public policy issues.
Another Assault on Liberty
Tibor R. Machan
Back when Robert Nozick wrote his path breaking libertarian academic treatise, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a review essays highly critical of Nozick’s work. In an essay, “Libertarianism Without Foundations,” Nagel had a lot to say about how Nozick allegedly failed to provide adequate support for his libertarian position. But one point Nagel made quite apart from whether Nozick’s position had adequate foundations stood out for me. Here is the passage that stuck in my mind:
Most people are not generous when asked to give voluntarily, and it is unreasonable to ask that they should be. Admittedly there are cases in which a person should do something although it would not be right to force him to do it. But here I believe that the reverse is true. Sometimes it is proper to force people to do something even though it is not true that they should do it without being forced. It is acceptable to compel people to contribute to the support of the indigent by automatic taxation, but unreasonable to insist that in the absence of such a system they ought to contribute voluntarily.
Nowhere in his essay on Nozick, nor anywhere else, did Nagel every justify this very pessimistic view. But is it really very odd?
Notice that what this position endorses is outright involuntary servitude. As Nozick himself noted, “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor” I think it is actually more on par with extortion. In any case, it puts certain people—the king, the government, Thomas Nagel himself perhaps—in a position to coerce others into providing those in need with resources, including their labor. The funds we are taxed, of course, come from what most of us earn through our labor!
This is a view that is endorsed by most political philosophers today and it has been endorsed by them for decades on end, certainly ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt came up with his list of “the second bill of rights,” each of which places us into servitude to other people. But even before Roosevelt signed on to this notion that everyone is in bondage to other people who are in need, there have been the likes of the French father of sociology, Auguste Comte, who endorsed the idea. Here is what Comte had to say:
Everything we have belongs then to Humanity… We are born loaded with obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. Later they only grow or accumulate before we can return any service.... All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.
Even before Comte’s wrote those lines, at the beginning of the 19th century, there was the doctrine that not only our resources but we ourselves belong to the state. The theory of monarchy holds this view about human beings—the king owned us, or at least we are bound to the king’s land as serfs. We as individuals own nothing at all, everything is owned by the government. And that exact position was recently reiterated by Nagel and his co-author, Liam Murphy, in the book The Myth of Ownership (Oxford, 2004). Clearly the idea is not a progressive, forward looking one but reactionary as all get out.
All of these thinkers stand in the way of genuine progress toward a world in which individual human beings have a fundamental, natural right to their own lives, liberty and property. This is the revolutionary idea that libertarians champion and it is one that needs constant reiteration, re-visitation, and re-justification, since nearly all the major political theorists, inside and outside the academic world, line up against it.
Nagel’s idea, pressed against Nozick, is, of course, an insult to human beings everywhere. It contends that of their own free will they would fail to be generous and they must be coerced to give of themselves to those who are helpless. Paradoxically, if it were true, Nagel’s idea would certainly consign all those in need of help to perpetual helplessness for when human beings acquire power—when they join the government—the last thing they are interested in is helping others! As Lord Acton noted, “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”—the last thing it issues in is generosity.
Tibor R. Machan
Back when Robert Nozick wrote his path breaking libertarian academic treatise, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a review essays highly critical of Nozick’s work. In an essay, “Libertarianism Without Foundations,” Nagel had a lot to say about how Nozick allegedly failed to provide adequate support for his libertarian position. But one point Nagel made quite apart from whether Nozick’s position had adequate foundations stood out for me. Here is the passage that stuck in my mind:
Most people are not generous when asked to give voluntarily, and it is unreasonable to ask that they should be. Admittedly there are cases in which a person should do something although it would not be right to force him to do it. But here I believe that the reverse is true. Sometimes it is proper to force people to do something even though it is not true that they should do it without being forced. It is acceptable to compel people to contribute to the support of the indigent by automatic taxation, but unreasonable to insist that in the absence of such a system they ought to contribute voluntarily.
Nowhere in his essay on Nozick, nor anywhere else, did Nagel every justify this very pessimistic view. But is it really very odd?
Notice that what this position endorses is outright involuntary servitude. As Nozick himself noted, “taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor” I think it is actually more on par with extortion. In any case, it puts certain people—the king, the government, Thomas Nagel himself perhaps—in a position to coerce others into providing those in need with resources, including their labor. The funds we are taxed, of course, come from what most of us earn through our labor!
This is a view that is endorsed by most political philosophers today and it has been endorsed by them for decades on end, certainly ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt came up with his list of “the second bill of rights,” each of which places us into servitude to other people. But even before Roosevelt signed on to this notion that everyone is in bondage to other people who are in need, there have been the likes of the French father of sociology, Auguste Comte, who endorsed the idea. Here is what Comte had to say:
Everything we have belongs then to Humanity… We are born loaded with obligations of every kind, to our predecessors, to our successors, to our contemporaries. Later they only grow or accumulate before we can return any service.... All human rights then are as absurd as they are immoral. This ["to live for others"], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.
Even before Comte’s wrote those lines, at the beginning of the 19th century, there was the doctrine that not only our resources but we ourselves belong to the state. The theory of monarchy holds this view about human beings—the king owned us, or at least we are bound to the king’s land as serfs. We as individuals own nothing at all, everything is owned by the government. And that exact position was recently reiterated by Nagel and his co-author, Liam Murphy, in the book The Myth of Ownership (Oxford, 2004). Clearly the idea is not a progressive, forward looking one but reactionary as all get out.
All of these thinkers stand in the way of genuine progress toward a world in which individual human beings have a fundamental, natural right to their own lives, liberty and property. This is the revolutionary idea that libertarians champion and it is one that needs constant reiteration, re-visitation, and re-justification, since nearly all the major political theorists, inside and outside the academic world, line up against it.
Nagel’s idea, pressed against Nozick, is, of course, an insult to human beings everywhere. It contends that of their own free will they would fail to be generous and they must be coerced to give of themselves to those who are helpless. Paradoxically, if it were true, Nagel’s idea would certainly consign all those in need of help to perpetual helplessness for when human beings acquire power—when they join the government—the last thing they are interested in is helping others! As Lord Acton noted, “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”—the last thing it issues in is generosity.
Gay Marriage Ban Blues
Tibor R. Machan
The charge that George W. Bush is merely trying to kowtow to his base with his promotion of a constitutional ban on gay marriage sounds plausible enough but that’s really not the crucial issue. Never mind his motives. Is the idea sound is what counts. (Too many appear to have forgotten about what matters in these disputes—certainly not the varied, complicated, nearly undetectable motivations of the players!)
Should the U. S. Constitution be amended to ban gay marriages? Lets see why such a ban is supported. Bush says it has to do with upholding and supporting traditional marriages. Some others claim that the matter needs to be taken out of the hands of courts and placed into the hands of “the people.”
Sticking just to these points, is it really the business of the supreme law of the land to worry about upholding traditional marriages? Imagine if that were really the case. Wouldn’t Congress and the president have to start meddling in the lives of millions of couples throughout the country? Marriages are, after all, failing part everywhere—some 50% of the break up. So if it is the proper task of government to uphold and support traditional marriages, we would need a powerful marriage police.
In fact this isn’t the proper task of courts. Nor of “the people,” that is, the majority.
Conservatives especially, who supposedly champion what the American Founders had defended, should keep such meddlesome functions away from the government. Does a ban on gay marriage amount to securing our basic, unalienable human rights? No, it clearly does not. No one has a right to have others marry in a fashion one prefers. Quite the opposite is true—everyone has the right to marry as he or she, along with the partner, chooses. That is what the law would uphold in a free society, not what “the people” or their political representatives prefer.
Notice that none of this bears on the issue of whether gay marriages are a good idea. So what if they are or are not? The bulk of what people decide on in their lives, for better or for worse, is their own business and has nothing at all to do with the job the government has in a free country. What should I eat? How often should I exercise? What career should I choose? When should I take my vacation? Should I have yet another child? Should I add another chapter to the manuscript I plan to send to the publisher? Should I purchase a new car or house or pair of pants?
With regards to any of the matters and millions of others people can make good or bad choices. Whether they do is not the government’s concern. It may well be the concern of their friends, family, pals, neighbors, and others with whom they have civilized, peaceful relationships and who are welcome to attend to what choices they should make in life. Government isn’t part of this interested, concerned entourage, that’s for sure.
The government is at most about keeping the peace and in an atmosphere of peace there can be no official meddling in the institution of marriage. It is between the parties who would marry, that’s all. Except where matters of public health enter the situation, no governmental authority exists to order people about so far as whom they wish to marry is concerned.
So, let us assume for a moment that there is something amiss with gay marriage. The solution is for people to work it out with the advice of their intimates. Not unlike there being something amiss with someone’s career choice or religious preference. And do not tell me these aren’t sufficiently consequential matters in people’s lives. They definitely are, every bit as consequential as whom they choose to marry. Yet no government has any just authority to meddle in these matters.
But, sadly, these days everything has turned into a public affair—whom one chooses to marry, what kind of automobile one chooses to purchase, whether one chooses to smoke, whether one is going to use fossil fuel—you name it and it is the concern of the likes of Al Gore and George W. Bush. They only differ in their choice of what goes into the basket of personal, private concerns they want to make a province of public policy.
Gay marriage or no gay marriage—leave it to the actual concerned individuals, namely, those involved in the decision, not the rest of us.
Tibor R. Machan
The charge that George W. Bush is merely trying to kowtow to his base with his promotion of a constitutional ban on gay marriage sounds plausible enough but that’s really not the crucial issue. Never mind his motives. Is the idea sound is what counts. (Too many appear to have forgotten about what matters in these disputes—certainly not the varied, complicated, nearly undetectable motivations of the players!)
Should the U. S. Constitution be amended to ban gay marriages? Lets see why such a ban is supported. Bush says it has to do with upholding and supporting traditional marriages. Some others claim that the matter needs to be taken out of the hands of courts and placed into the hands of “the people.”
Sticking just to these points, is it really the business of the supreme law of the land to worry about upholding traditional marriages? Imagine if that were really the case. Wouldn’t Congress and the president have to start meddling in the lives of millions of couples throughout the country? Marriages are, after all, failing part everywhere—some 50% of the break up. So if it is the proper task of government to uphold and support traditional marriages, we would need a powerful marriage police.
In fact this isn’t the proper task of courts. Nor of “the people,” that is, the majority.
Conservatives especially, who supposedly champion what the American Founders had defended, should keep such meddlesome functions away from the government. Does a ban on gay marriage amount to securing our basic, unalienable human rights? No, it clearly does not. No one has a right to have others marry in a fashion one prefers. Quite the opposite is true—everyone has the right to marry as he or she, along with the partner, chooses. That is what the law would uphold in a free society, not what “the people” or their political representatives prefer.
Notice that none of this bears on the issue of whether gay marriages are a good idea. So what if they are or are not? The bulk of what people decide on in their lives, for better or for worse, is their own business and has nothing at all to do with the job the government has in a free country. What should I eat? How often should I exercise? What career should I choose? When should I take my vacation? Should I have yet another child? Should I add another chapter to the manuscript I plan to send to the publisher? Should I purchase a new car or house or pair of pants?
With regards to any of the matters and millions of others people can make good or bad choices. Whether they do is not the government’s concern. It may well be the concern of their friends, family, pals, neighbors, and others with whom they have civilized, peaceful relationships and who are welcome to attend to what choices they should make in life. Government isn’t part of this interested, concerned entourage, that’s for sure.
The government is at most about keeping the peace and in an atmosphere of peace there can be no official meddling in the institution of marriage. It is between the parties who would marry, that’s all. Except where matters of public health enter the situation, no governmental authority exists to order people about so far as whom they wish to marry is concerned.
So, let us assume for a moment that there is something amiss with gay marriage. The solution is for people to work it out with the advice of their intimates. Not unlike there being something amiss with someone’s career choice or religious preference. And do not tell me these aren’t sufficiently consequential matters in people’s lives. They definitely are, every bit as consequential as whom they choose to marry. Yet no government has any just authority to meddle in these matters.
But, sadly, these days everything has turned into a public affair—whom one chooses to marry, what kind of automobile one chooses to purchase, whether one chooses to smoke, whether one is going to use fossil fuel—you name it and it is the concern of the likes of Al Gore and George W. Bush. They only differ in their choice of what goes into the basket of personal, private concerns they want to make a province of public policy.
Gay marriage or no gay marriage—leave it to the actual concerned individuals, namely, those involved in the decision, not the rest of us.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
To Whom it May Concern:
About a year ago David Gordon put out a list of a hundred books on liberty he believed merited special attention. As an author of quite a few books on liberty, beginning with the edited work The Libertarian Alternative (1973) and more recently The Passion for Liberty (2003) and the co-authored Libertarianism, For and Against (2005), I sent him a post complaining that he didn't list even one of my books, not even ones I edited featuring a host of libertarian luminaries. (Another such book would be The Libertarian Reader [1982]; there is also the series I edited for the Hoover Institution Press, Philosophical Reflections on a Free Society, which include ten volumes featuring four excellent essays in each mostly by classical liberal and libertarian scholars.)
At a blog (see below) some took me to task for making my complaint. Among other things the person said is that I made an ass out of myself by sending it. (Much of it is reproduced in the blog, so I need not reiterate my points.)
What is odd is that my effort to promote my work would meet with such hostility from someone who supposedly admire the free society and the free market. What about advertising, what about promotion, what about marketing? My complaint was a species of advertising--I was hoping to encourage David Gordon to pay more attention to some very good work on liberty produced by me. Or did it upset the blogger that I consider some of my work very good? Give me a break--what else is one to expect from the producer, creator of products and services?
Tibor Machan
http://remarq.blogspot.com/2005/06/tibors-tantrum.html
About a year ago David Gordon put out a list of a hundred books on liberty he believed merited special attention. As an author of quite a few books on liberty, beginning with the edited work The Libertarian Alternative (1973) and more recently The Passion for Liberty (2003) and the co-authored Libertarianism, For and Against (2005), I sent him a post complaining that he didn't list even one of my books, not even ones I edited featuring a host of libertarian luminaries. (Another such book would be The Libertarian Reader [1982]; there is also the series I edited for the Hoover Institution Press, Philosophical Reflections on a Free Society, which include ten volumes featuring four excellent essays in each mostly by classical liberal and libertarian scholars.)
At a blog (see below) some took me to task for making my complaint. Among other things the person said is that I made an ass out of myself by sending it. (Much of it is reproduced in the blog, so I need not reiterate my points.)
What is odd is that my effort to promote my work would meet with such hostility from someone who supposedly admire the free society and the free market. What about advertising, what about promotion, what about marketing? My complaint was a species of advertising--I was hoping to encourage David Gordon to pay more attention to some very good work on liberty produced by me. Or did it upset the blogger that I consider some of my work very good? Give me a break--what else is one to expect from the producer, creator of products and services?
Tibor Machan
http://remarq.blogspot.com/2005/06/tibors-tantrum.html
Why I am a Fly Swatter
Tibor R. Machan
When the Russian born American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand decided to discontinue The Ayn Rand Letter—her publication in which she advanced nifty ideas about various aspects of the (mostly social) world—she explained her decision by quoting Frederick Nietzsche who said that “it is not your job to be a flyswatter.” Nietzsche preceded this advice by advising, “Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee to where a rough, strong breeze blows! ...No longer raise your arm against them! They are innumerable, and....
Alas, for great creative geniuses such as Ayn Rand and Frederick Nietzsche—and the superior human beings he was instructing in his famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra—the advice makes perfectly good sense. Occupying themselves with going after all the nonsense being put forth by thousands of people who sound of—and may, alas, have some influence in their culture—could be a waste; unless these flies produce deadly poison, that is. Mere irritants clearly do not warrant the attention of the geniuses among us—they would do much better thinking up grand ideas instead of responding to the zillions of silly ones being created in endless streams.
But it is not only geniuses who fight the good fight in most cultures. There are all the foot soldiers who also put pen to paper and with the emergence of all the means of communication and record keeping, some fly swatting seems to be very much in order for them.
I am, of course, just such a fly swatter. I have not had too many original ideas—one I can recall has to do with why nostalgia is so appealing, but it’s no great shucks, that one. Mostly I have found others, the geniuses, who have taught me a thing or two and after making sure they are sound ideas, I have set myself the task of applying them to various problems I see around me, including the problem of being “stung all over by the poisonous flies.”
Not only that but I also see that it is imperative that those good ideas I have learned from the geniuses must be reiterated many times over. As George Orwell is supposed to have opined, “Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.” Notice his careful choice of words—intelligent men isn’t the same thing as geniuses!
A few days ago I ran across a discussion of some of my works at a blog and found that there are people out there in cyberspace who find it really annoying that I repeat points in various forums—books, essays, articles, scholarly papers, conferences, lectures, seminars and so forth. These critics haven’t said why exactly it is a fault to repeat oneself, especially if the repetition is spread out over, say, forty years or writing and several dozens of books and hundreds of papers and thousands of columns. But never mind that. On its face it does appear that too much repetition is pointless and boring, does it not?
When I try to figure out why it doesn’t seem to me that this is true, I think of the guy who has fallen into a well and keeps yelling “help,” “help,” and “help,” over and over again. It would surely be idiotic to shout down to him to say, “Stop being so repetitious, you are boring us to tears.”
Fact is, some matters are important enough to be repeated a lot, especially when one is good at doing so and isn’t taking time from more important tasks, such as those one would have if one were a genius. I have admittedly repeated myself, though I hope in interesting enough and varied ways, about some crucial matters. Mostly I have been on alert to watch out for all those flies, with their poison, who would throw overboard the principles of human liberty in a jiffy and must be stopped from doing so, at least in the realm of punditry, of public discussion.
So unless I am found out to be a genius and learn that fabulous notions are being left undeveloped by me because I spend so much time crying “help, “help” as the enemies of liberty keep producing their poison, I shall continue despite my critics’ lament. I think it is not a wasteful thing for me to do this.
Tibor R. Machan
When the Russian born American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand decided to discontinue The Ayn Rand Letter—her publication in which she advanced nifty ideas about various aspects of the (mostly social) world—she explained her decision by quoting Frederick Nietzsche who said that “it is not your job to be a flyswatter.” Nietzsche preceded this advice by advising, “Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee to where a rough, strong breeze blows! ...No longer raise your arm against them! They are innumerable, and....
Alas, for great creative geniuses such as Ayn Rand and Frederick Nietzsche—and the superior human beings he was instructing in his famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra—the advice makes perfectly good sense. Occupying themselves with going after all the nonsense being put forth by thousands of people who sound of—and may, alas, have some influence in their culture—could be a waste; unless these flies produce deadly poison, that is. Mere irritants clearly do not warrant the attention of the geniuses among us—they would do much better thinking up grand ideas instead of responding to the zillions of silly ones being created in endless streams.
But it is not only geniuses who fight the good fight in most cultures. There are all the foot soldiers who also put pen to paper and with the emergence of all the means of communication and record keeping, some fly swatting seems to be very much in order for them.
I am, of course, just such a fly swatter. I have not had too many original ideas—one I can recall has to do with why nostalgia is so appealing, but it’s no great shucks, that one. Mostly I have found others, the geniuses, who have taught me a thing or two and after making sure they are sound ideas, I have set myself the task of applying them to various problems I see around me, including the problem of being “stung all over by the poisonous flies.”
Not only that but I also see that it is imperative that those good ideas I have learned from the geniuses must be reiterated many times over. As George Orwell is supposed to have opined, “Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.” Notice his careful choice of words—intelligent men isn’t the same thing as geniuses!
A few days ago I ran across a discussion of some of my works at a blog and found that there are people out there in cyberspace who find it really annoying that I repeat points in various forums—books, essays, articles, scholarly papers, conferences, lectures, seminars and so forth. These critics haven’t said why exactly it is a fault to repeat oneself, especially if the repetition is spread out over, say, forty years or writing and several dozens of books and hundreds of papers and thousands of columns. But never mind that. On its face it does appear that too much repetition is pointless and boring, does it not?
When I try to figure out why it doesn’t seem to me that this is true, I think of the guy who has fallen into a well and keeps yelling “help,” “help,” and “help,” over and over again. It would surely be idiotic to shout down to him to say, “Stop being so repetitious, you are boring us to tears.”
Fact is, some matters are important enough to be repeated a lot, especially when one is good at doing so and isn’t taking time from more important tasks, such as those one would have if one were a genius. I have admittedly repeated myself, though I hope in interesting enough and varied ways, about some crucial matters. Mostly I have been on alert to watch out for all those flies, with their poison, who would throw overboard the principles of human liberty in a jiffy and must be stopped from doing so, at least in the realm of punditry, of public discussion.
So unless I am found out to be a genius and learn that fabulous notions are being left undeveloped by me because I spend so much time crying “help, “help” as the enemies of liberty keep producing their poison, I shall continue despite my critics’ lament. I think it is not a wasteful thing for me to do this.
Gay Marriage Ban Blues
Tibor R. Machan
The charge that George W. Bush is merely trying to kowtow to his base with his promotion of a constitutional ban on gay marriage sounds plausible enough but that’s really not the crucial issue. Never mind his motives. Is the idea sound is what counts. (Too many appear to have forgotten about what matters in these disputes—certainly not the varied, complicated, nearly undetectable motivations of the players!)
Should the U. S. Constitution be amended to ban gay marriages? Lets see why such a ban is supported. Bush says it has to do with upholding and supporting traditional marriages. Some others claim that the matter needs to be taken out of the hands of courts and placed into the hands of “the people.”
Sticking just to these points, is it really the business of the supreme law of the land to worry about upholding traditional marriages? Imagine if that were really the case. Wouldn’t Congress and the president have to start meddling in the lives of millions of couples throughout the country? Marriages are, after all, failing part everywhere—some 50% of the break up. So if it is the proper task of government to uphold and support traditional marriages, we would need a powerful marriage police.
In fact this isn’t the proper task of courts. Nor of “the people,” that is, the majority.
Conservatives especially, who supposedly champion what the American Founders had defended, should keep such meddlesome functions away from the government. Does a ban on gay marriage amount to securing our basic, unalienable human rights? No, it clearly does not. No one has a right to have others marry in a fashion one prefers. Quite the opposite is true—everyone has the right to marry as he or she, along with the partner, chooses. That is what the law would uphold in a free society, not what “the people” or their political representatives prefer.
Notice that none of this bears on the issue of whether gay marriages are a good idea. So what if they are or are not? The bulk of what people decide on in their lives, for better or for worse, is their own business and has nothing at all to do with the job the government has in a free country. What should I eat? How often should I exercise? What career should I choose? When should I take my vacation? Should I have yet another child? Should I add another chapter to the manuscript I plan to send to the publisher? Should I purchase a new car or house or pair of pants?
With regards to any of the matters and millions of others people can make good or bad choices. Whether they do is not the government’s concern. It may well be the concern of their friends, family, pals, neighbors, and others with whom they have civilized, peaceful relationships and who are welcome to attend to what choices they should make in life. Government isn’t part of this interested, concerned entourage, that’s for sure.
The government is at most about keeping the peace and in an atmosphere of peace there can be no official meddling in the institution of marriage. It is between the parties who would marry, that’s all. Except where matters of public health enter the situation, no governmental authority exists to order people about so far as whom they wish to marry is concerned.
So, let us assume for a moment that there is something amiss with gay marriage. The solution is for people to work it out with the advice of their intimates. Not unlike there being something amiss with someone’s career choice or religious preference. And do not tell me these aren’t sufficiently consequential matters in people’s lives. They definitely are, every bit as consequential as whom they choose to marry. Yet no government has any just authority to meddle in these matters.
But, sadly, these days everything has turned into a public affair—whom one chooses to marry, what kind of automobile one chooses to purchase, whether one chooses to smoke, whether one is going to use fossil fuel—you name it and it is the concern of the likes of Al Gore and George W. Bush. They only differ in their choice of what goes into the basket of personal, private concerns they want to make a province of public policy.
Gay marriage or no gay marriage—leave it to the actual concerned individuals, namely, those involved in the decision, not the rest of us.
Tibor R. Machan
The charge that George W. Bush is merely trying to kowtow to his base with his promotion of a constitutional ban on gay marriage sounds plausible enough but that’s really not the crucial issue. Never mind his motives. Is the idea sound is what counts. (Too many appear to have forgotten about what matters in these disputes—certainly not the varied, complicated, nearly undetectable motivations of the players!)
Should the U. S. Constitution be amended to ban gay marriages? Lets see why such a ban is supported. Bush says it has to do with upholding and supporting traditional marriages. Some others claim that the matter needs to be taken out of the hands of courts and placed into the hands of “the people.”
Sticking just to these points, is it really the business of the supreme law of the land to worry about upholding traditional marriages? Imagine if that were really the case. Wouldn’t Congress and the president have to start meddling in the lives of millions of couples throughout the country? Marriages are, after all, failing part everywhere—some 50% of the break up. So if it is the proper task of government to uphold and support traditional marriages, we would need a powerful marriage police.
In fact this isn’t the proper task of courts. Nor of “the people,” that is, the majority.
Conservatives especially, who supposedly champion what the American Founders had defended, should keep such meddlesome functions away from the government. Does a ban on gay marriage amount to securing our basic, unalienable human rights? No, it clearly does not. No one has a right to have others marry in a fashion one prefers. Quite the opposite is true—everyone has the right to marry as he or she, along with the partner, chooses. That is what the law would uphold in a free society, not what “the people” or their political representatives prefer.
Notice that none of this bears on the issue of whether gay marriages are a good idea. So what if they are or are not? The bulk of what people decide on in their lives, for better or for worse, is their own business and has nothing at all to do with the job the government has in a free country. What should I eat? How often should I exercise? What career should I choose? When should I take my vacation? Should I have yet another child? Should I add another chapter to the manuscript I plan to send to the publisher? Should I purchase a new car or house or pair of pants?
With regards to any of the matters and millions of others people can make good or bad choices. Whether they do is not the government’s concern. It may well be the concern of their friends, family, pals, neighbors, and others with whom they have civilized, peaceful relationships and who are welcome to attend to what choices they should make in life. Government isn’t part of this interested, concerned entourage, that’s for sure.
The government is at most about keeping the peace and in an atmosphere of peace there can be no official meddling in the institution of marriage. It is between the parties who would marry, that’s all. Except where matters of public health enter the situation, no governmental authority exists to order people about so far as whom they wish to marry is concerned.
So, let us assume for a moment that there is something amiss with gay marriage. The solution is for people to work it out with the advice of their intimates. Not unlike there being something amiss with someone’s career choice or religious preference. And do not tell me these aren’t sufficiently consequential matters in people’s lives. They definitely are, every bit as consequential as whom they choose to marry. Yet no government has any just authority to meddle in these matters.
But, sadly, these days everything has turned into a public affair—whom one chooses to marry, what kind of automobile one chooses to purchase, whether one chooses to smoke, whether one is going to use fossil fuel—you name it and it is the concern of the likes of Al Gore and George W. Bush. They only differ in their choice of what goes into the basket of personal, private concerns they want to make a province of public policy.
Gay marriage or no gay marriage—leave it to the actual concerned individuals, namely, those involved in the decision, not the rest of us.
Monday, June 05, 2006
The Best Solution
Tibor R. Machan
Now and then champions of the fully free society are told they are being too simplistic for offering freedom as the best solution for all the problems that face us in the world. Of course, such champions quickly retort: But then the critics also offer just one solution for every problem, namely, government coercion. Tit for tat, I suppose.
Yet the issue is a substantive one—is freedom really, truly the best solution, or is coercion?
Most of us who comment on public affairs aren’t close enough to people’s problems to be able to tell what exactly will solve some problem, other than our own. So we are talking mostly about very general means for solving problems, never the details. And as such, the solution offered by champions of liberty would indeed have the most going for it. The reason is that it is based on the fact that human beings are, by their very nature, productive, creative, and innovative, not a species that’s guided by hard-wired instinct and drives. For us when problems need to be solved, unleashing our productive, creative, and innovative capacities is a prerequisite. If, however, we are caged up, regimented about, coerced into doing things, it is our unique human capacity that’s being thwarted. Under compulsion people simply don’t do very well.
Of course, they can come up with solutions even then. Just consider how many professions are under the gun to come up with solutions for this or that problem. Car makers come to mind immediately, given how often government regulators impose standards for how cars must be built and how readily the car makers manage to comply. Indeed, all government regulation involves coercing people to do things the way the government’s bureaucrats say they must be done. And things do get done, nonetheless. So doesn’t this prove that people can solve problems when a gun is being pointed at them?
Yes, to a limited extent this is true. Fear is a motivator. And so is the prospect of getting the bureaucrats off one’s back so one can get back to doing what one wants. This is explainable in part by what the famous Laffer curve demonstrates. Arthur Laffer showed that they have a threshold up to which they will work and even increase their efforts when they are thwarted. People will often put up with a good deal of hassle before they quit completely. And that’s because they are left with some measure of liberty to do what they want to. Even in a prison, people often will make due with the tiny measure of liberty their confinement makes possible so as to achieve some very limited personal goal.
Yet, the more liberty is curtailed, the less people engage in free thinking, in imaginative problem solving, over all. And they will focus a great deal on how to escape their rulers instead of seeking new problem solving horizons. Just consider the huge legal departments of so many enterprises, all devoted to fending off the government, to help the entrepreneurs navigate the maze of rules and regulations placed before them by governments.
So the general principle holds—most people work best when free of the intrusions of others they haven’t asked to get involved in their tasks. Both domestic and international economic development is going to flourish best when this principle is heeded. That is the very point of championing liberty everywhere—in freedom people function better than in bondage. So despite the fact that we cannot tell the details of how various problems may and will be solved, we can make the point that, first of all, they need to get free of intervention, regulation, regimentation, intrusion and other versions of coercion governments and criminals are so good at imposing on us all.
This principle isn’t ad hoc, made up out of thin air, but learned from the study all the branches of human history. The more a country upholds the right to individual liberty for all in its legal system and public policy, the more its population embarks upon the successful solution of the problems it faces. Abolishing serfdom, slavery, tyranny—and, yes, their less draconian cousins, such as government regulation and intervention—is the best road to handling the minor or major problems we face in the world. Taxing us, using extortion to separate us from our resources, and regulating us may seem to work but they are, in fact, obstacles to problem solving.
So champions of liberty should continue to get out the news, if indeed it is still news to some: freedom works best. Because it is the right and just policy to follow.
Tibor R. Machan
Now and then champions of the fully free society are told they are being too simplistic for offering freedom as the best solution for all the problems that face us in the world. Of course, such champions quickly retort: But then the critics also offer just one solution for every problem, namely, government coercion. Tit for tat, I suppose.
Yet the issue is a substantive one—is freedom really, truly the best solution, or is coercion?
Most of us who comment on public affairs aren’t close enough to people’s problems to be able to tell what exactly will solve some problem, other than our own. So we are talking mostly about very general means for solving problems, never the details. And as such, the solution offered by champions of liberty would indeed have the most going for it. The reason is that it is based on the fact that human beings are, by their very nature, productive, creative, and innovative, not a species that’s guided by hard-wired instinct and drives. For us when problems need to be solved, unleashing our productive, creative, and innovative capacities is a prerequisite. If, however, we are caged up, regimented about, coerced into doing things, it is our unique human capacity that’s being thwarted. Under compulsion people simply don’t do very well.
Of course, they can come up with solutions even then. Just consider how many professions are under the gun to come up with solutions for this or that problem. Car makers come to mind immediately, given how often government regulators impose standards for how cars must be built and how readily the car makers manage to comply. Indeed, all government regulation involves coercing people to do things the way the government’s bureaucrats say they must be done. And things do get done, nonetheless. So doesn’t this prove that people can solve problems when a gun is being pointed at them?
Yes, to a limited extent this is true. Fear is a motivator. And so is the prospect of getting the bureaucrats off one’s back so one can get back to doing what one wants. This is explainable in part by what the famous Laffer curve demonstrates. Arthur Laffer showed that they have a threshold up to which they will work and even increase their efforts when they are thwarted. People will often put up with a good deal of hassle before they quit completely. And that’s because they are left with some measure of liberty to do what they want to. Even in a prison, people often will make due with the tiny measure of liberty their confinement makes possible so as to achieve some very limited personal goal.
Yet, the more liberty is curtailed, the less people engage in free thinking, in imaginative problem solving, over all. And they will focus a great deal on how to escape their rulers instead of seeking new problem solving horizons. Just consider the huge legal departments of so many enterprises, all devoted to fending off the government, to help the entrepreneurs navigate the maze of rules and regulations placed before them by governments.
So the general principle holds—most people work best when free of the intrusions of others they haven’t asked to get involved in their tasks. Both domestic and international economic development is going to flourish best when this principle is heeded. That is the very point of championing liberty everywhere—in freedom people function better than in bondage. So despite the fact that we cannot tell the details of how various problems may and will be solved, we can make the point that, first of all, they need to get free of intervention, regulation, regimentation, intrusion and other versions of coercion governments and criminals are so good at imposing on us all.
This principle isn’t ad hoc, made up out of thin air, but learned from the study all the branches of human history. The more a country upholds the right to individual liberty for all in its legal system and public policy, the more its population embarks upon the successful solution of the problems it faces. Abolishing serfdom, slavery, tyranny—and, yes, their less draconian cousins, such as government regulation and intervention—is the best road to handling the minor or major problems we face in the world. Taxing us, using extortion to separate us from our resources, and regulating us may seem to work but they are, in fact, obstacles to problem solving.
So champions of liberty should continue to get out the news, if indeed it is still news to some: freedom works best. Because it is the right and just policy to follow.
Is Globalization for Everyone?
Tibor R. Machan
Mostly “globalization” is used to refer to the policy of extending the
principles of a free market, capitalist political economy beyond the
borders of countries where they have taken substantial root. These
principles then would have global scope, produce a global free market.
Opponents of the effort to globalize often suggest that they find it
wrongheaded to try to subject all countries to the same kind of economic
principles because, well, countries—people—are different. While it may be
fine for the U.S.A. or Great Britain to be governed mainly by principles
of free trade, the story goes, this will not work for much of Africa or
the Middle East. Cultures differ, as do individuals, so it isn’t true that
what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander.
The point has plausibility. Regarding innumerable matters it holds quite
true. People, for example, do not need the same type of shoes, shirts, or
gloves—it depends on various particulars what they ought to be wearing.
The same is true about what people should eat, what careers they should
train for, whether they should marry or not, etc., and so forth. Yet,
there are also matters wherein variety isn’t quite the ticket. And indeed
quite a few people who would not ordinarily be expected to advocate
globalization seem to agree.
I have been doing quite a lot of traveling around the globe over the last
few decades—most recently I visited South Africa to attend an ethics
conference, for example. And on several fronts it appears that
globalization is very eagerly embraced even by those who resist it when it
comes to political economy.
Take, for example, bans on smoking in public places. It seems that there
is a very fervent effort afoot to globalize bans on public smoking,
indeed—everywhere one goes to, especially in airports, airplanes and so
forth, bans on smoking are being put in place. Sure, many, many people
dislike these bans but to no avail. Why? Because those pushing for the
bans insist that subjecting people to cigarette smoke is wrong. And while
one might quibble about whether one really can universalize such a policy,
there seems to be some plausibility about it—after all, most people have
lungs and these would seem to be at risk for exposure to cigarette smoke.
And when the exposure is imposed on them without their consent, that would
seem to be especially objectionable.
Now I do not wish to take up the matter of secondhand smoking—I am, at
any rate, convinced that more is made of it than is justified by the
evidence. Still, certainly there are several practices people take up that
can be argued to be nearly universally harmful and the effort to
discourage them globally would appear to make sense.
Well, the same is true about going global with the principles of free
market, capitalist economics—free trade, to put it quite simply. These
principles are arguably right for us all, never mind in which corner of
the globe we live. Why? Because they give expression to something
universal about human beings, namely, their need to enjoy freedom from
interference from others.
That’s all there really is to free trade, namely, the removal of
impositions by governments on those who would engage in trade. It is no
different from advocating global removal of censorship or assault or
kidnapping. Who would wish to claim that while it may be OK to ban
censorship of literature, poetry, editorializing and so forth in the
U.S.A., doing so in China or North Korea would be misguided—those people
must have government tell them what to think and write?
Come to think of it, some folks may, in fact, try to sell us this idea
but they would be way off. That’s because it is a universal human need to
be free to think, say, and write what one chooses, not confined merely to
some of us, here and there, in this age or that. And globalization has to
do with the same thing: freedom for people anytime, anywhere to carry out
their commercial affairs without uninvited parties meddling in them.
Now it is true that when trade is free of such interference, some could
see benefiting a bit from certain restrictions on others. If I own a
coffee shop in a certain corner of the city in which I live, I might
benefit for a while from forbidding others to open one across the street
from mine. Protectionist measures like that—be they on the street where on
has a shop or in a large region of the world where one is doing
business—do hold out some promise of temporary benefits, though economists
have shown just how temporary they tend to be, given that what goes around
tends to come around.
There are many aspects of human life that should not be generalized—what
kind of food one is to have for breakfast, probably, what line of work one
should embark upon, what form of entertainment will be most satisfying,
what clothes one should wear, etc., and so forth. Even in medicine, where
some basic rules of good health can be generalized, the specifics can vary
a great deal from one person to another.
But just as those who champion discouraging everyone from polluting his
or her lungs via smoking, regardless of where in the world this might be
happening, it is also true, even more so, that freedom of trade is
something none ought to thwart. Globalization is a good thing, indeed,
provided it is properly understood to apply to basic principles of human
conduct, be this in matters of health or matters of economics.
Tibor R. Machan
Mostly “globalization” is used to refer to the policy of extending the
principles of a free market, capitalist political economy beyond the
borders of countries where they have taken substantial root. These
principles then would have global scope, produce a global free market.
Opponents of the effort to globalize often suggest that they find it
wrongheaded to try to subject all countries to the same kind of economic
principles because, well, countries—people—are different. While it may be
fine for the U.S.A. or Great Britain to be governed mainly by principles
of free trade, the story goes, this will not work for much of Africa or
the Middle East. Cultures differ, as do individuals, so it isn’t true that
what’s good for the goose is also good for the gander.
The point has plausibility. Regarding innumerable matters it holds quite
true. People, for example, do not need the same type of shoes, shirts, or
gloves—it depends on various particulars what they ought to be wearing.
The same is true about what people should eat, what careers they should
train for, whether they should marry or not, etc., and so forth. Yet,
there are also matters wherein variety isn’t quite the ticket. And indeed
quite a few people who would not ordinarily be expected to advocate
globalization seem to agree.
I have been doing quite a lot of traveling around the globe over the last
few decades—most recently I visited South Africa to attend an ethics
conference, for example. And on several fronts it appears that
globalization is very eagerly embraced even by those who resist it when it
comes to political economy.
Take, for example, bans on smoking in public places. It seems that there
is a very fervent effort afoot to globalize bans on public smoking,
indeed—everywhere one goes to, especially in airports, airplanes and so
forth, bans on smoking are being put in place. Sure, many, many people
dislike these bans but to no avail. Why? Because those pushing for the
bans insist that subjecting people to cigarette smoke is wrong. And while
one might quibble about whether one really can universalize such a policy,
there seems to be some plausibility about it—after all, most people have
lungs and these would seem to be at risk for exposure to cigarette smoke.
And when the exposure is imposed on them without their consent, that would
seem to be especially objectionable.
Now I do not wish to take up the matter of secondhand smoking—I am, at
any rate, convinced that more is made of it than is justified by the
evidence. Still, certainly there are several practices people take up that
can be argued to be nearly universally harmful and the effort to
discourage them globally would appear to make sense.
Well, the same is true about going global with the principles of free
market, capitalist economics—free trade, to put it quite simply. These
principles are arguably right for us all, never mind in which corner of
the globe we live. Why? Because they give expression to something
universal about human beings, namely, their need to enjoy freedom from
interference from others.
That’s all there really is to free trade, namely, the removal of
impositions by governments on those who would engage in trade. It is no
different from advocating global removal of censorship or assault or
kidnapping. Who would wish to claim that while it may be OK to ban
censorship of literature, poetry, editorializing and so forth in the
U.S.A., doing so in China or North Korea would be misguided—those people
must have government tell them what to think and write?
Come to think of it, some folks may, in fact, try to sell us this idea
but they would be way off. That’s because it is a universal human need to
be free to think, say, and write what one chooses, not confined merely to
some of us, here and there, in this age or that. And globalization has to
do with the same thing: freedom for people anytime, anywhere to carry out
their commercial affairs without uninvited parties meddling in them.
Now it is true that when trade is free of such interference, some could
see benefiting a bit from certain restrictions on others. If I own a
coffee shop in a certain corner of the city in which I live, I might
benefit for a while from forbidding others to open one across the street
from mine. Protectionist measures like that—be they on the street where on
has a shop or in a large region of the world where one is doing
business—do hold out some promise of temporary benefits, though economists
have shown just how temporary they tend to be, given that what goes around
tends to come around.
There are many aspects of human life that should not be generalized—what
kind of food one is to have for breakfast, probably, what line of work one
should embark upon, what form of entertainment will be most satisfying,
what clothes one should wear, etc., and so forth. Even in medicine, where
some basic rules of good health can be generalized, the specifics can vary
a great deal from one person to another.
But just as those who champion discouraging everyone from polluting his
or her lungs via smoking, regardless of where in the world this might be
happening, it is also true, even more so, that freedom of trade is
something none ought to thwart. Globalization is a good thing, indeed,
provided it is properly understood to apply to basic principles of human
conduct, be this in matters of health or matters of economics.
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