Avoiding the Basics

Tibor R. Machan

Lately I have been finding myself in agreement with
controversial Stanley Fish, emeritus professor at Duke University and now
teaching at Florida International University. His recent Op Ed column
in The New York Times, defending Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion in
Morse v. Frederick that, in Fish's words, "it was alright to
discipline a high school student because he and some of his friends had
unfurled a banner reading 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus' at a school-sponsored
event," is a case in point.

Fish recounts the case as follows: "When the principal of the school,
Deborah Morse, asked the students to take the banner down, one of them,
Joseph Frederick, refused. He was suspended and his suspension was upheld
by the school superintendent, who cited a board policy prohibiting any
form of expression that 'advocates the use of substances that are illegal
to minors.' Mr. Frederick then filed suit, alleging that his first
amendment rights had been violated. A three-judge panel of the United
States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit agreed with him, but the
Supreme Court reversed by a 5-to-4 vote, and held for Principal
Morse."

Fish and with Thomas are correct here, about the "right to freedom of
speech" at schools. No such right exists any more than there is a
right to speak out in a church or at some office building. The issue isn't
about that, in fact. The real problem, one that Fish and many other
commentators simply fail to appreciate, is the near monopoly of government
schools, which leads to a one-size-fits-all approach to pedagogy,
including in higher education. It is here that the principal and
superintendent went astray in Morse v. Frederick. They have been put into
the position of managing schools for the government, which in turn has
practically monopolized schooling in America (unless one is able to afford
paying double) and thus stifled variety and experimentation in pedagogy.

Consider that if governments ran most of the country's magazines, there
would be a similar problem. Yet, as it is and fortunately, owners of the
great variety of this country's magazines all have the right to exercise
freedom speech even while within their editorial departments they can
impose their standards and preferences and publish what they want.
Magazine publishers do not need to open their pages to people they don't
want to support with space—in short, no one has the right of free speech
inside the magazine. Nor need they make room for editorial policies with
which they disagree. Similarly, no one has the right of free speech inside
a school either. But unlike magazines, schools are part of the public
square. As such they are part of the government near-monopoly over
education.

As the public square expands it will be a big problem whether
schools make the expression of diverse opinions, even odious ones,
possible; that's because government will be in charge of what happens
everywhere. The battle then will be between a permissive public policy
versus standards of proper conduct. The free speech issues will become
moot since it assumes a dominant private sector. It isn't censorship when
governments dictate school policy where they run schools; it is mere
school administration. So, I say, privatize education and then we can have
diversity, competition, and so forth, like we now have in the realm of
religion.

Clarence Thomas and Stanley Fish are correct about the "right
to freedom of speech" at schools. No such right exists any more than
there is a right to speak out in a church. But there is the problem of the
virtual monopoly of government schools, which leads to a one-size-fits-all
approach to pedagogy, even in much of higher education. If governments
ran most of the magazines, there would be a similar problem. As it is,
owners of magazines have the right to free speech but inside them the no
such rights exist for the writers, et al.

Protecting the authority of school administrators in a fully free,
open educational market place would be akin to protecting the full
authority of publishers and editors in the management of magazines and
newspapers or ministers in the administration of churches. Except we now
have nothing like a fully free, open education market place. And so the
diversity such a market place makes possible is now quite impossible, so
those who are excluded from the one-size-fits-all school policies can do little else
than fight for their place at the table, as it were, even if on the spurious
grounds that their right to freedom of speech has been violated by the
enforcement of school rules.

Is it altruism or simple decency?

Tibor R. Machan

Changing planes at Heathrow is a bit of a hassle since Terminal I (I think) where flights from the USA disembark is a very long walk to Terminal II, where you catch flights to all parts of Europe. On my way to a conference in Florence in May, I landed there and, in error, went to wait for my luggage which, however, had been checked through to Milan. I have a malady with my left thigh and so I sat watching the conveyor belt until I figured out my bag wasn’t going to come. I then got up and walked the tunnels to Terminal II.

When I got there to check in I realized I was missing my wallet. I had my passport but no wallet, no money, no credit cards, no driver’s license, nada. I checked with Virgin Airlines to make sure I hadn’t left it on the plane but to no avail—folks there weren’t too helpful, saying the plane had been cleaned already for its next flight and nothing turned up. I schlepped back to Terminal I to—well, I wasn’t sure to do what but I thought it might be thereabouts, somewhere. I went to every stop I made once I got off the plane and finally ended up at lost and found. They hadn’t seen hide or hair of my wallet.

Next to lost and found stood a currency exchange booth and I went there to see if I could finagle some kind of advance of money, based on my passport alone, but, of course, there was no deal. But just as I was about to walk away, a man, about 6 feet tall, black, in some kind of ordinary uniform I cannot now recall more about, walked by and turned to me with a huge grin, handed me my wallet and asked, “Is this what you are looking for?” Boy, was I! I couldn’t believe it. I thanked him profusely, reeling from the shock that I could be so lucky. When he left me standing there agape I finally collected myself and looked inside the wallet—everything I had there was still intact, nothing was missing. And I had about four hundred Euros and three hundred dollars! Nothing was missing!

Actually, I am still quite incredulous about this. I only wish I had my wits about me and asked the man if he would accept some sum as a token of my gratitude but he disappeared too fast and I was too stunned to think of it while he was still there. But later, of course, I thought about what happened here.

Now there is a prominent ethical theory, the opposite of what many economists hold, to the effect that there are a great many decent people who are altruists. What is that, you may ask? Well, my favorite source for identifying altruism is the philosopher W. G. Maclagan, who is his paper “Self and Others: A Defense of Altruism” (Philosophical Quarterly, 4 [1954]) tells us that “‘Altruism’ [is] assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows....Altruism is to ... maintain quite simply that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness as such when he is deciding what course of action to pursue (pp. 109-110).” And that is quite right. Altruism is a system of ethics, one of the several candidates for a general answer to the question, “How should one conduct oneself in life?” And it bodes ill for any conduct that aims to make oneself happy, fulfilled, or satisfied—none of that qualifies as ethical if altruism is right.

My benefactor, of course, didn’t tell me the ethics he practiced but I doubt he was an altruist. My take is that he was a decent person, period, who, probably in line with his other duties as an Heathrow air terminal personnel, picked up my wallet at the baggage area, where I had been sitting and where it evidently slipped out of my shallow jacket pocket, and did the right thing, acted generously, properly. He probably never even thought of digging into the thing to see how much money and how many credit cards it contained. He just did the right thing as a matter of his character, from second nature. An altruist isn’t like that. Such a person is totally, relentlessly devoted to serving others, not to doing what his professional ethics requires of him or her.

But what of the economist’s idea that nothing we do is benevolent, everything amounts to serving our interests?

Well, that too is off base. My benefactor clearly did something that mainly served my interest, although if it was his job, very likely his own, as well. Quite often folks do benevolent things, help others, even strangers, simply because that the sort of people they are, that is their moral character. Sure, over all it is to their interest—or, rather, of benefit to them as human beings—to act kindly, considerately. But they don’t do it by engaging in some kind of cost-benefit analysis, a calculus of sorts. It is, rather, second nature for them, for most of us, to be helpful when we can be.

At any rate, I have silently thanked the man at Heathrow Airport for really, really, saving me from a heap of trouble. Thanks again!

The Best Laid Plans…

Tibor R. Machan

Wimbledon is my favorite sporting event. I enjoy tennis very much and this particular tournament is the most exciting one for me. One reason tennis suits me so well is that it seems to me the most individualistic while least violent of sports. But never mind about that now.

This year Wimbledon has been plagued by relentless rain—several matches have run for days on end because of this, more so than ever before, we are told by those who keep track of such matters. And this is no small thing for many of the players and their entourage. After all, they will have to have spent a good deal of money on just staying around, whether they are winners or losers. The rain will have inconvenienced—no, burdened—nearly everyone involved.

But think: this is an event that is planned with the full cooperation of all the participants. Yet, a bad spell of weather can wreak havoc with the plans.

There may be another lesson here for all those who fantasize about planning a country’s economic and other affairs. Not only are the unforeseeable factors like weather an obstacle to such planning. But in the case of a country’s economy a great many who are part of the plan have little interest in cooperating with the planners, quite the contrary.

Government planning is coercive—it interferes with a great many of the people’s own plans, desires, wishes, wants, intentions. And it does so quite illegitimately—in the ethical, not legal sense of that idea. After all, government regulations, apart from some purely judicial matters, amounts to a form of prior restraint. People’s conduct is being commandeered without their having done anything wrong. (Only in journalism is this explicitly forbidden in America, at least, yet it ought to be in the case of the conduct of all professionals. Just think about professional licensing—which imposes heavy burdens on people who have not been proven to have done anything to deserve such burdens!)

As a result, the bulk of government planning is likely to be resisted by a great many in a country’s population. Such resistance will manifest itself by way of extensive efforts by people in all walks of life to dodge the will of the planners—in big business usually by way of extensive legal departments. (Note to Ralph Nader & Co.: Imposing government regulation helps support big business, since small business is ill equipped to cope with the expenses needed to cope with the regulators.)

So, not only does the world itself undermine the efforts of government planners and regulators, via all the unforeseeable obstacles that will stand in the way of the plans; there is also the fact that, unlike at Wimbledon and many other private sector events, most of those for whom the plans are concocted have no devotion to making it work out right.

But of course, fantasists aren’t bothered by such elementary realities. They, following the lead of an arguably crude interpretation of Plato’s Republic, imagine a perfect system, removed from time and space—those annoying obstacles to utopia—and proceed to seek the power to impose their vision on the rest. Too many intellectuals have tended to follow this lead in understanding politics until, at least, the classical liberals realized that a spontaneous order is the only one that’s rational to hope for. Any other “order” simply ushers in what the brilliant Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises dubbed “planned chaos.”

I am not a pessimist by nature, so I think there may in the long run be progress toward accepting the impossibility of regimenting human affairs from above. After all, history does bear out the observation that efforts to promote a more or less free society has been reasonably successful and fruitful—in a kind of two steps ahead, one step behind way. Still, the lessons indicating the merits of not trying to force plans on us all from centers of political power are not being learned rapidly enough and many will be victimized before they are widely and fully grasped!

Let’s Revisit Taxation

Tibor R. Machan

Nice thing about having one’s writing published is one receives criticism—which is also the bad thing about it. Some criticisms are thoughtful and report one’s position accurately, others are thoughtless rants and usually distort what one has written.

Around April 15th I usually write something about the nature of taxation. I remind readers that the institution had its home in feudalism in which the monarch owned the realm and collected taxes as payments of rent from those living and working within his or her dominion. Once, however, monarchy is abolished, as it should be everywhere, taxation no longer has any legitimacy. This is just how serfdom vanished once the system that legitimized it was overthrown, as it clearly should have been in light of the fact of an individual’s unalienable right to his or her life, liberty and property.

OK, I laid out this in a recent column and someone addressed it in a blog as follows:

“I read once again in Tibor Machan's column … that taxes are theft because they depend on the police power of the state to collect.

”Hogwash. I'm a citizen of my town and county and state and country.~ The taxes are the bill for the undertaking of those entities of which I am a member.~ One of the principles for which I have high regard is the injunction to be responsible.~ One sign of responsibility is that very paying of the bills I have accumulated, including those accumulated in my name by organizations of which I am a member.

”Thus the state's bills are my responsibility.~ I've always felt a certain pride as I've finished my tax returns and realized what my contribution was going to be for the country this year. Yes, I read the fine print and use Schedule A and narrow my taxes to no more than they should be.~ But that's why the~ laws are as they are.”

First, I do not regard, nor do I call, taxation “theft.” Rather I consider it extortion: “You may live and work here, provided you pay!” That is the Mafia’s way of obtaining resources! And government’s.

Second, a bill must be paid, in a free society, when all parties agree to the terms of exchange but not when one party unilaterally sets the terms and the others must comply, never mind their consent. If, for example, I deliver some very nice stuff to your home, leave it on your front porch, I have no right to demand payment for it. You need to have reached agreeable terms of trade with me before that may happen. And this is clearly not what government does. Instead, government provides citizens with services and goods whether or not they contracted for them and then sets the prices for these unilaterally—or quasi-democratically—and collects them at the point of a gun or its clear-cut threat.

The state’s bills are not my responsibility unless I freely, voluntarily incurred them, which most of us do not.

Of course this does leave us with a challenge: How are we to fund those services and goods that we do freely accept from those who administer the legal order? Whatever the correct answer to this, extortion—taxation—is not it. Some way must be found to eliminate taxation just as serfdom has been eliminated. Neither can be part of a bona fide free country.

One idea that makes good sense, suggested once by Ayn Rand –and elaborated by me in a longish paper in my edited book, The Libertarian Reader (1983)—is to charge fees for all contracts. These instruments are ubiquitous in a free country, with its more or less complex economic system. Yet they can be avoided, too, if the parties have full trust in each other. Because few would make the mistake of resting their transactions with the umpteen strangers with whom they do business on such trust, the contract fees that would be charged—so that the contracts can be backed by a proper legal order—would pay for the few proper services of a strictly limited government.

Unfortunately, this option is rarely explored in the hundreds of public finance departments at colleges and universities. That’s because of the prominence of the obsolete and immoral institution of taxation. But its prominence does not entail its propriety by a long shot.

What the Fourth of July means

Sunday, July 1, 2007

Since that first Independence Day, too many Americans have become ... dependent. Is it too late to reverse the trend?

TIBOR MACHAN

One way to appreciate the meaning of the Fourth of July is to reflect on what nearly every one of the Republican and Democratic presidential hopefuls focuses on in interviews and speeches. Apart from Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who is openly libertarian while running as a Republican, all the rest are embarking upon the standard Santa Claus theme of presidential politics.

In other words, they are promising to create more entitlements for us, telling us that if they become president, we will be getting more goodies from the federal government. Universal health care, higher minimum wages, subsidies for this industry and that, protection from foreign competitors and from immigrants – you name it, free goods and services, that's what they all promise us.

Sadly, they did not invent this Santa Claus ethos.

The bulk of the American public now appears to view politics primarily as a way to gain goodies at other people's expense. This is their hope, to elect someone who will favor the special interest group of which they are a member. Be one a farmer, small-business owner, member of a union, educator or entertainer, the hope is that whoever will take office once Bush departs will favor those like oneself with various precious benefits.

And since governments do not produce anything – the idea behind a proper government is that it stands guard against criminals and foreign invaders – the substance of this hope is that one can induce politicians to take from some citizens and hand over the loot to the favored ones. Since, of course, there is only so much looting that can be done without hitting the bottom of the barrel, it's all a crap shoot, in the end.

This is definitely the classic win-lose scenario, not the win-win kind we experience in the free marketplace. Yet, despite this evident truth, the politicians continue to overpromise, and most voters hope they will be the lucky ones who will get something for nothing. Moreover, they all shamelessly call the loot "the public interest." But, to quote novelist Mark Helprin, "You can always make a case for the public interest if you are willing to exclude from common equity those whose rights you seek to abridge."

The Fourth of July, instead, celebrates a drastically different kind of political idea. The crux of it is that government is instituted so as to secure everyone's basic rights – to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and whatever follows from these. The founders realized that that is the only true public interest.

The Declaration of Independence – the ideas and ideals of which are supposed to be the focus of the celebration on the Fourth of July – made no other promise to the people of the United States of America.

At the time, however, the promise the Declaration did make – namely, that the basic rights of all citizens will be secured, and government will stick to that task instead of meddling in people's lives like the former royal masters did – was very welcome. At the time most Americans remembered how rapacious and corrupt a government is that has nearly complete power over their lives.

Monarchies, of course, were just the kind of governments that presumed to be in charge of everything within their dominion, within their realm of official authority. So monarchies had to go.

Those who wrote the Declaration of Independence put the idea of monarchy to rest, buried it, in fact, because they realized it was based on a vicious misunderstanding of human nature. It rested on the notion that some people are good enough to govern others without their consent. This idea of innate elitism was supposed to be abandoned in America. Lincoln put the point in crystal-clear terms: "No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent."

Instead the notion emerged, based on some of the most revolutionary political thinking in human history, that each person has certain unalienable rights, and only by respecting those rights may others, including governments, interact with them.

This kind of human equality – not equal entitlements to other people's hard work but to being equally free from other people's intrusiveness – marked the distinctiveness of the American political revolution. And this idea had, for a good while, guided much of the thinking in the country, so much so that some pretty awful institutions, such as slavery, the subjugation of women, and, in time, even conscription, would be abolished.

Unfortunately, the old, reactionary notion resurfaced that government is not merely the guardian of human liberties but the nanny of us all – or even worse, our spiritual and economic tsar. Not enough Americans were vigilant enough in their loyalty to the ideals of the Declaration. Since there were compromises with those ideals from the start, instead of eradicating the older statist ideas that still lingered on, they built them up, so that by the time Franklin D. Roosevelt and his crew took the helm about 75 years ago, the entire system started to return to the old ways whereby government became ruler instead of guardian.

And today this is evident enough in how politicians approach their campaigns, namely, by promising to rule us and divvy up various privileges that the rulers have come to command. The idea of liberty is never even heard anymore. From Obama to Hillary, from Giuliani to McCain, all we get are schemes, plans and visions of how to provide us with goodies that we will not have to work for but can obtain by having government steal it from other people.

All this is no surprise, of course, if one considers that throughout most of human history a great deal of wealth was not created by those who held it but confiscated from those who created it, too often at the point of a sword or gun. Conquest was the way to abundance. The upper classes looted the lower classes, and one country's thugs conquered those of another and took what they could. That is how riches were achieved – the win-lose way.

Thousands of years saw little else but this kind of human relations, with the great majority of people living in poverty and a few living at their expense. This mindset is not easy to give up, so despite the fact that in a genuine free society wealth is created in the win-win fashion – with all earning and exchanging the results so everyone gets nearly exactly what he or she can bargain for – there is still this idea that we can all benefit by robbing a bunch of Peters and handing the loot over to a bunch of Pauls.

The Fourth of July is supposed to be celebrating the repudiation of this kind of social-economic life. It is supposed to celebrate the revolutionary – really, truly revolutionary – idea that peaceful exchange and interaction are the most efficient means to human flourishing. And for this the only job government needs to perform is to be a referee, to stand ready to adjudicate some of the expected misunderstandings, to resist the criminal inclinations that flare up, and to defend the citizenry from those abroad who refuse to play by the rules of peaceful commerce.

I am not optimistic for the near future, but it seems to me that the message of the Declaration of Independence is too good, too sound, too right on the money to be lost on us for long and that in time it will resurface as the dominant political message not only in this country but everywhere. And, indeed, it does seem to be finding a favorable reception in some parts of the globe where the ways of looting and corruption have produced misery all around.

Slowly but surely, it seems to me, the ideas and ideals of the Fourth of July will triumph again.

Guilt Mongering Galore

Tibor R. Machan

In my youth I got a substantial dose of guilt mongering, mostly through the religion in which I was brought up. No, I was not raised Jewish but Jews are by no means the only ones who are inundated with feelings of guilt from the outset of their lives.

Nor is it only religious upbringing that has stood firmly for the policy of making us all feel guilty for, well, nearly anything that we might enjoy in life. Today, for example, it tends to be the environmental movement that preaches the misanthropic doctrine of our fundamental corruption. In the past the doctrine of original sin was the main vehicle for the idea. Guilt mongering seems to be a borderless movement, given how culture after culture makes itself notable for decrying the human animal in large measure for our desire to enjoy our lives.

Somehow, paradoxically, it is all right to aim for eternal bliss but not for just a few decades of it here on earth. If it feels good, well it must be something bad, seems to be the basic point championed in so many circles, religious, secular, ethical, political, psychological—well, actually, perhaps in clinical psychology happiness is still being affirmed as something proper to desire, although even there the latest trend, judging by recent books on the topic, seems to be to demean our aspirations to be happy.

Another paradox is that even though the bulk of the intellectual community has tossed the idea of free will—not for good reasons but because of the widespread perpetration of the fallacy of unjustified extrapolation or, what I have dubbed “the blow up fallacy”—guilt hasn’t been under fire. Yet, without free will, how can there be guilt? Dumb animals, as they used to be called, feel no guilt because, well, they couldn’t have done better than they did, whereas people can choose badly and that can leave its mark.

But even with free will, is it really the case that we choose so badly, so often? Is our so called materialism really such a terrible thing about us or is it but a very natural desire to fare well in life? (And notice, it isn’t really materialism to desire fine or even useful stuff. None of it is just material but mostly imaginatively and usefully shaped matter.)

Maybe what I would like to place on record is an affirmation of enjoying life instead of promoting, endlessly and with such zeal, the feeling of guilt in our lives. This self-flagellation has gone on long enough. It is time to call a halt to it and to demote all those who are its cheerleaders. Why do those who preach our essential guilt get to hold the moral high ground? Why are they tolerated for the finger wagging, yet mostly arbitrary, accusers who they are?

The Al Gores and Jeremy Rifkins and Ralph Naders, with all their little helpers, just will not rest until we have all surrendered to them and gotten in line to renounce pleasure and joy, little and great, in human affairs. Their erudition, the learning that they have amassed seemingly so as to appear unanswerable when they accuse, works only because most folks are hard at work making an effort to live instead of finding reasons to affirm this effort and to defend it. But defend it we must, lest the misanthropes will triumph yet again.

A very nice aspect of modernity, something so many grave people despise about it, is that it can actually help people live a flourishing life on many fronts. Human beings are multifaceted, what with aesthetic, philosophic, economic, medical, culinary, familial, athletic, artistic, and many other dimensions to their lives. After, at last, the modern era ushered in the preconditions for serious creativity on all fronts—by way of the affirmation of individual rights, limited government, free markets, etc., and so forth, we can now actually strive to live long, well, and largely fulfilled.

But this objective must be defended because there are just too many people who are dead set on thwarting the aspirations, if only by attempting to make us feel guilty for having them in the first place. Please gather up the wherewithal to resist their efforts.

Pollution and Government

Tibor R. Machan

At a recent conference I attended one speaker made the point, now widely admitted, that air quality in America has markedly improved over the last several decades. (For a good treatment of this topic, see Joel Schwartz, “Blue Skies,” The American, May/June 2007.) Yet at the same time the speaker also argued for a free market in air quality management.

Some in the audience came up to me later—I had invited the speaker—and said, “How could he criticize government intervention in air quality control when his own data suggests that the improvements occurred because of stricter standards imposed by the government.” And this was a fair enough question—can one defend a free market in this area after it has been government that has helped to reform much of the country when it comes to pollution, ozone depletion and similar vices that have been responsible for so much dirt in the air and water around the country?

Actually, there is no contradiction here at all. The reason is that a free market does not by any means preclude law enforcement where crimes are concerned. Just for starters, a free market system requires steady and consistent identification and protection of private property rights. And it also requires respecting freely entered into contracts, something that very often involves the courts and police.

Indeed, the free market presupposes private property rights and enforcement of contracts, both ultimately in need of legal adjudication and law enforcement. This is just like the fact that a free country presupposes the protection of the rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of its citizens by the agency that is instituted to carry out that job, usually (but not only) the government.

Setting up and enforcing standards of air quality is not in principle different from this kind of law enforcement—the only kind that was identified by the American Founders as the just power of government, namely, “to secure our rights.” Yes, rights-protection involving pollution is a complicated matter—detection is tougher, borders are not easy to define, etc. But that is what a legal order is for, namely, to apply the basic principles of a free society to ever more complicated matters. Just consider how free speech rights need to be translated now to be properly applied to the Internet. The framers of the U. S. Constitution could not anticipate the details but the principles they identified are so general—they apply to human community life in all its incarnations—as to have implications for matters they couldn’t even imagine.

When pollution became a problem in America, it took a while to see how the law ought to deal with it. Many champions of government intervention wanted to do this by means of heavy government regulation, as if some Tsar at the top could manage it all. In fact, however, that option falls victim to numerous problems, including what public choice theory suggests, namely, that regulators tend to have their own agenda, influenced by various special interests.

In time, however, it became clear enough to many that the only sensible way to deal with pollution and similar problems is by applying the principles of property rights. What economists call negative externalities—bad side effects of production and transportation that injure non-consenting bystanders—need either to be internalized (firms need to handle them by assuming full cost for their containment) or banned (when the damage is significant enough).

As these legal devices became more and more sophisticated—and sometimes used by government regulators to impose certain standards that would indeed be helpful (although regulation wasn’t necessary to do so; adjudication would have handled it all)—the problems of pollution began to abate. And as Schwartz shows, despite massive expansion of industrialization, transportation, and population, America is now cleaner than it was been a long time. It wasn’t government meddling that brought this about but the proper deployment of governments legal powers to stop some people from dumping their waste products on innocent others.

David Brooks, Edmund Burke Wannabe

Tibor R. Machan

In America we have two kinds of conservatives: Those who basically insist that it's vital to preserve the basic precepts of the American political tradition, the ideals of the American founders. Two of them are the very visible William F. Buckley, Jr., and George F. Will, both highly educated pundits. These wish to conserve the central tenets of the Declaration of Independence, which are in fact radical ideas about basic unalienable individual rights, freedom, strictly limited government and so forth.

The second kind have a different purpose: To promote the idea that human beings are not up to the task of self-government. Individual sovereignty, for such conservatives, is trumped by group think, which includes people’s instincts or unconscious beliefs. Among these conservatives are David Brooks, the NYT pundit, and such earlier figures as Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind (1953), a book that contains endless intellectual assaults upon human reason and much support for the view that people are basically, well, corrupt. For these the proper approach to public policy, as well as social mores, is to defer to tradition, to the implicit, tacit judgments of the collective (meaning those who speak for them).

In the mid-20th century the two carried out a pretty open debate about which is on sound footing. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) had experienced serious upheavals, as a result. Frank S. Meyer, Frank Chodorov, and Buckley himself had ruminated extensively about how the two strains might be fused into one movement but no fusion ever materialized—Barry Goldwater came closest to achieving it, for example in his book Conscience of a Conservative (1960).

The two conservatisms are still represented in public discussions, mainly by Will, who has lately drifted more and more toward the individualist, American conservative camp, and by David Brooks, who is promoting the Burkean wing. His arguments are different, however.

Brooks has been laying out the same conclusions as Edmund Burke but now based on certain alleged scientific findings. Burke said, based on his understanding of history and community life, that,

“...Men have no right to risk the very existence of their nation and their civilization upon experiments in morals and politics; for each man's private capital of intelligence is petty; it is only when a man draws upon the bank and capital of the ages, the wisdom of our ancestors, that he can act wisely.…”

And he taught, also, that

“We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank of nations and of ages”

David Brooks, in turn, has been saying something pretty close to this but in modern jargon:

“There is no central executive zone in the brain where all information is gathered and decisions are made. There is no little homunculus up there watching reality on a screen and then deciding how to proceed. In fact, the mind is a series of parallel processes and loops, bidding for urgency.”

Furthermore, continues Brooks,

“We're not primarily deciders. We're primarily perceivers. The body receives huge amounts of information from the world, and what we primarily do is turn that data into a series of generalizations, stereotypes and theories that we can use to navigate our way through life. Once we've perceived a situation and construed it so that it fits one of the patterns we carry in our memory, we've pretty much rigged how we're going to react, even though we haven't consciously sat down to make a decision.”

Burkean conservatives, currently represented by Brooks, embrace a paradox. Their ideas are themselves thought up by individuals—e. g., before by Burke and now by Brooks. But though in less Draconian ways they embrace the philosophies of the Fascists, the Nazis, and the Communists, all of whom demean the capacities of individuals to decide about their lives. Human beings only take in ideas, by osmosis, and then implement them practically unconsciously.

So, then, not only in their conclusions but also in their premises Left and Right tend to be united against the freedom of the individual.

Normative versus Positive Statements

Tibor R. Machan

Professor Walter Williams is a very good economists but not so good at moral philosophy, as is demonstrated by his recent column (titled in my local paper, “Don’t Confuse what is with what should be”). In this piece he lays out what can fairly be said is now a widely discredited theory about whether moral judgments, like those in the various sciences, are subject to proof. He states that “Normative, or subjective statements deal with what’s good or bad, or what ought to be or should be” and adds, that “there are no facts whatsoever to which we can appeal to settle any disagreement.” He goes on: “One person’s opinion on [a normative] matter is just as good as another’s.”

It is true enough that this is one theory that has been influential especially in modern philosophy, ever since David Hume is said to have defended it (although there is doubt about that too), but it is by no means the only one. A reason for this is that the theory is self-defeating—it implies that normative statements should not be taken as seriously as scientific ones, yet that statement is itself a normative statement. Indeed, if Williams were correct, the suggestion that superstition is bad but scientific findings are good would be insupportable. All “ought” claims, including the one implicit in Williams’ view would just amount to babble.

Furthermore, his own views on politics, law, economic policy, and so forth would carry no more credence than do those of all the people he criticizes—which are numerous. Then, also, claiming that what deals with “what’s good or bad, or what ought to be or should be” is all subjective—completely up to the subjects who says so, is extremely controversial. After all, if so, then condemning terrorists or students who cheat or dishonest merchants amounts to nothing but arbitrary, unjustified venting. The response, “Well, that’s just what you think but nothing justifies it” could be perfectly adequate.

Those who have been studying the foundation of ethics—who have advanced various arguments on just why acting in certain ways is wrong and in others is right—have had to deal with skeptics like Walter Williams throughout history. Yet that is also true about those who have been studying the foundation of the sciences. There are many, many skeptics about scientific beliefs, those who hold that ultimately science rests on quicksand, that there is nothing concrete, solid supporting scientific findings and they are only true within certain frameworks. If one rejects those frameworks, the science no longer holds.

Skeptics and their critics have been around for a long time and their moves have been fascinating. Suffice it to say here—for this isn’t where such a controversial issues will be treated fully—that plenty of thinkers have proposed plausible views about the objectivity of ethics. (For one, check out my own book, Objectivity [Ashgate, 2006].) Great minds like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and many later ones have advanced ideas that are in direct opposition to Walter Williams’ position on this topic, though many, also, support him. (He himself more often then not writes as if he does not believe what he has said on the issue since he confidently and firmly debunks those who recommend policies and principles of conduct different form those he considers sound. If it’s only subjective, why all the confidence?)

It is true enough that when we come to how people ought to act, agreement is more difficult to reach than about, say, what causes a fire or some medical ailment. But the reason for this could be that people are more stubborn when they deal with what is right or wrong. Answers to that reflect directly upon our own character and self-image, so it is very tempting to feign confusion and skepticism.

Most of us know, however, in our common sense approach to the world that lying and cheating are most often wrong; that wanton torture is evil; that claiming credit for someone else’s academic artistic or indeed any other good work is despicable, and that neglecting to raise one’s children with proper values is malpractice. And the reason we do is that these normative notions have been well considered and found to be true—as true as they can be, which is true enough.

Does Radical Left Equal Radical Islam?

Tibor R. Machan

Increasingly I have been recalling when University of Michigan Professor of Law, Catherine McKinnon used to advocate censoring pornography because she believed it is an assault upon women. She lays out her case in her very prestigiously published slim and readable book, Only Words (Harvard University Press, 1993). She not only developed a case for censoring pornography but also went north to Canada to help guide their legal system to implement her ideas in their Constitution.

Paradoxically McKinnon had once defended some Muslim women against their Bosnian oppressors who had tried to restrain their all too Western activities, in K. v. Karadzic, 866 F. Supp. 734 (S.D.N.Y. 1994), 70 F. 3d 232 (2d cir. 1996), all in the name of feminism. Yet, she also gave expert testimony against white supremacists on harm of discriminatory symbols (swastika and cross burning) in support of human rights statue prohibiting them, before Board of Inquiry in Alberta and won the case. (See, Kane v. Church of Jesus Christ Christian—Aryan Nations, Board of Inquiry Decision [Edmonton, Alberta], Feb. 28, 1992.)

The reason these facts have been occupying my attention is that they call to mind for me a strain of thinking in the West that really isn’t at all different from that exhibited by radical Islamists. Remember the reaction in some Muslim communities to the exercise of the right to journalistic freedom when some Danish newspapers published pictures that were regarded as offensive to Islam? And, of course, there is the fatwa—a contract for murdering someone—that has never been rescinded against novelist Salman Rushdie who was accused of insulting Islam in his book Satanic Verses. The deadly reaction, in which Danish embassies were attacked, had been justified on the grounds that insulting Islam must be punished with murder, nothing less.

Of course, Professor McKinnon does not advocate murdering those who insult woman by producing and publishing pornography but the principles underlying her case isn’t different from the principles embraced by radical Islamists. Both believe that writing or speaking against something isn’t “only words” but amount to what should be legally actionable offenses.

But we can take this even further, to policies embraced by many mainstream modern liberal thinkers—e.g., the notion that there should be hate crimes. Never mind that the evidence for the hate is insulting language and other non-aggressive though admittedly insulting, offensive symbolism. The Southern Poverty Law Center, co-founded by Morris Dees and Joe Levin, actively promotes legal sanctions against those who have promoted ideas and ideals that could inspire some to act violently against innocent members of minorities. Again, the issue isn’t that there is nothing wrong with promoting such ideas and ideals but that Dees and Levin urge us to forcibly restrain those with them.

But even more nearly mainstream is the idea that if one discriminates against someone, one has infringed his or her human rights. Yet, such discrimination is often nothing more than the exercise of one’s right to freedom of association, as when someone refuses to sell goods or services to members of certain minorities or to hire them for a position one has available in one’s business. Not that there may not be some kind of legal objection against such policies, given that in numerous cases there is no disclosure of the discriminatory policy. Yet, the law often prohibits such policy, so it would be illegal to disclose it! Only in strictly personal relationships, like those pursued on dating Web Sites, is one free to practice discrimination that may well be irrational—e.g., wishing only to date blacks or whites or light skinned Indians.

All this violates the right of freedom of association and is often against the law. When radical Muslims advocate the more extreme versions of these public policy measures, wishing to herd everyone everywhere into the Islamic community and using whatever force they can get away with to bring this about, they could see regarded as taking these politically correct public policies to their logical conclusion.

It might be of interest to see what Professor McKinnon thinks about the policies advocated by radical Islamists. It could give us a clue as to just how many prominently published and positioned thinkers in the West share the premises of those who wish to destroy it. (One web site does discuss McKinnon’s odd position—http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/364.)

Compared to What?

Tibor R. Machan

In yet another so called book review in The New York Review of Books, the author unleashes some pretty vindictive remarks at capitalism, or what is left of it in America. James Lardner, a senior fellow at Demos, which is dubbed a center for public policy—for my money, read “partisan Leftist propaganda”—in New York City (and author of Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences), uses three books to advance his own poisonous views, The Disposable American, The Great American Jobs Scam, and The Battle of the Soul of Capitalism. As is not difficult to figure out, these are all attacks on the free market—never mind that no such thing even exists in America!

I am not going to go through the entire “review” but merely quote the final paragraph, which will suffice here as a vehicle for illustrating how writers like Lardner use any means to distort what free markets are about.

“Most Americans are troubled by the culture of dealmaking and financial engineering and insider self-enrichment that [one of the authors] deplores; by the callous treatment of communities and community institutions that [another] examines. Not very far below the political surface, most of us feel some version of the same vexed ambivalence toward corporate American—dazzled by the conveniences and comforts it delivers, yet resentful of the tradeoffs that it continually demands; few Americans would be anything but grateful if our corporations and financial institutions could develop some respect for our non-material and non-individualistic selves. It is hard to imagine such a fundamental transformation of these giant institutions. It is even harder to imagine a better world in which they remain essentially what they are.” (TNYR, 6/14/07, p. 65)

Where to begin? Let’s start with some problems of journalism—where is the data about Americans being “troubled by the culture of dealmaking”? Most Americans I know are diligent dealmakers themselves, as they shop in stores, on line, or when they purchase homes and look for apartments to rent. Very few consider themselves guilty for practicing the prudence involved in looking for good deals. So why would they begrudge others doing so, including the financial professionals who care for their wealth? Where is the beef, Mr. Lardner?

Are corporations callous toward their communities? I live in Orange County, California, where corporations fund universities, art centers, and museums, among other “community institutions,” to the tune of multiple millions of dollars. Day after day the local newspaper reports on these gifts, many of them anonymous! Where are all those Americans who are “resentful of the tradeoffs” that corporate America allegedly demands? Again, there is no data here, nothing, just a brazen allegation. Never mind that of all the developed countries in the world, America is the most generous when it comes to voluntary contributions to institutions that seek corporate and individual support.

So then what about corporations addressing “our non-material and non-individualistic selves”? Again, there is no clarification here—is the enrichment of stockholders who use their wealth to fund their children’s education, health care, and vacations something “material”? What on earth amounts to “material” stuff anyway, when even a simple wristwatch is practically a work of art these days? Where are all those Americans to are hooked a sheer matter instead of matter formed and shaped into artifacts that are infused, through and through, with aesthetic and utilitarian attributes? Very few of them are of this sort, by all reasonable observation of ourselves and our fellows.

What, also, is so glorious about our non-individualist selves? An individualist is someone who claims the right to make his or her own judgments as to what to do in life, whom to associate with, what goals to pursue, and so forth. An individualist is not some hermit in the wilderness pretending to be self-sufficient but someone who insist that he or she is better qualified to run his or her life than are politicians, bureaucrats, and their cheerleaders, such as Mr. Lardner! (It is not too farfetched to speculate that these folks desire us to give up our individualist selves mostly so they can step in and order us about as they would wish us to be, never mind our consent. Not very far, by the way, from the dreams of the Nazis, Fascists, and Communists, all of whom hated individualism!)

Finally, it is not at all that difficult to imagine “a fundamental transformation of these giant institutions” nor an allegedly “better world in which they remain essentially what they are.” The world has seen the attempts at grand transformations, thank you. What is needed is for things to change not in the direction of greater influence by the likes of Mr. Lardner but by F. A Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and a host of others who love liberty instead of top-down social engineering.

Hillary and Ideology

Tibor R. Machan

When President Bush vetoed the embryonic stem cell research bill, he did it, of course, for the wrong reasons. But that’s nothing new—he along with nearly all Republicans and Democrats believe that robbing Peter for the benefit of Paul is quite all right, so long as the goal itself is swell. The Democrats think the goal of doing such research is a good thing, while Bush and his cohorts think such research is a bad thing, at least when it involves human fetuses.

Now what would be really wonderful is if the two sides actually argued out the matter—why is it supposed to be a good thing versus a bad thing to do such research. Bush gave as his reason that at this time securing the stem cells involves the killing of human beings. The Democrats—or most of them—presumably do not believe this is the case.

So, let’s have a debate about this—what are the arguments pro and con and who is right? That is the real issue, apart from the one no one will touch upon now, namely, whether it is fine to take money from people to pay for benefits for other people.

Hillary Clinton had her chance to chime in with some serious points but instead engaged in the all too typical election year demagoguery. She accused Bush of favoring ideology rather than science. But that is sheer bunk. Bush’s views are not ideological—or, alternatively, so are Clinton’s. Both operate from certain premises they believe are true and derive conclusions they believe are supported by those premises, thus true as well. So Bush start by assuming that mere cells from an early fetus are the cells of a human being, thus taking those cells involves homicide. Clinton and her associates think that those early cells are not human beings but amount to some of the elements that will become parts of human beings. These are, roughly, the two scientific—or, more accurately, philosophical—positions and it would be a decent thing for both parties to admit it. Instead we get put downs—for calling Bush’s position an ideology is nothing better than dismissing it as some kind of self-serving delusion. Yet, what it is amounts to a position, drawing on science, philosophy, and religion that's different from Clinton’s on the issue of what constitutes a human being.

Honest politicians would debate the issue, like Lincoln debated Douglas about slavery, with facts, history, arguments, and so forth. But no. What we have is the casting aspersions, using loaded terms to demean the other’s viewpoint. This, sadly, is how the likely next president of the United States of American wants to discuss public policy matters—name calling, besmirching, demeaning.

As one philosopher, Daniel Dennett, said in a piece recently, there is nothing so painful to a person with integrity than having his or her views badly defended by some supposed ally. I am not at all convinced that Bush’s stance on the nature of stem cells is correct. Indeed, I disagree with it. But at least he is up front about why he champions it, namely, because his faith and his conception of the relevant science commits him to the idea that fetuses are human beings—indeed, infants whose destruction constitutes homicide. If Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that Bush is working with a different set of assumptions from hers, they could have a serious public debate. That is what democratic politics is supposed to be about, not name calling and the dismissal of one’s adversaries as ideologues.

Of course, such an approach to politics—demagoguery—isn’t new. But if I recall correctly, there used to be less of it when, say, Kennedy and Nixon went before the nation to debate, prior to the 1960 elections. Yes, even then the media focused too much on who looked better, how Nixon perspired while Kennedy was oh so spiffy. But there were many substantive issues, as well. And not a lot of name calling!

Alas, now we are in an era where the tone of political discourse is modeled on Michael Moore’s “documentaries” which focus not on policy but on motivation and personal psychology. But does it have to be this way? Maybe the voters are at fault. Maybe they do not encourage serious discussions but root for their candidate as fans root for their favorite team—it’s all blind loyalty!

Still, I wish to put in I a good word for civilized public debate, respectful of the decisions opponents make that differ from one’s own, not because those decisions are good ones but because a candidate for office has made them and we may have to live with that candidate for some time as the country’s leader, however much this might be distasteful to many of us.

What is Central About Humans?

Tibor R. Machan

The newspaper I read regularly carried a story on June 20th, 2007, from Cox News Service, under the byline of a Bill Hendrick, reporting on a finding at Emory University’s primate center that "the local customs that define human cultures also exist in the world of chimpanzees." The story goes on to say, "That means that humans aren't the only animals with culture, said Frans de Waal...." The evidence for this is that when a couple of chimps began to use a new method for mutual cleansing, in a while the entire group adopted the method but chimps outside the group kept to the old ways.

The first question is, is the report itself accurate—science writing among journalists is quite often sloppy and unreliable. This would not be the first time that a journalist’s account of what a scientist is doing and believes his or her work demonstrates differs considerably from the original. In this case, at least, my impression is that the reporter is trying to be provocative, although this may also be the case with Professor Frans de Waal.

Consider that while having cultures may be important about human beings, it is not the essential fact about them. Nor does it seem that “customs … define human cultures.” What is essential about intact human beings is that they think conceptually, with abstract ideas, theories, principles, long range, etc., and so forth. If chimps had the equivalent of human cultures, they would engage in such thought processes and generate from them a host of undertakings and institutions that they quite evidently do not. For example, if chimps were to have developed the sort of cultures human beings have, they would be, among other things, engaged in teaching graduate level primatology courses, doing primate research, and so forth.

Until some animals build universities, museums, court houses, publishing companies, concert halls, and the like, we may be sure that human beings are quite—indeed, fundamentally—different from all other known animals. The alleged findings reported about the chimps at Emory University’s primatology center really do not suffice to overturn this idea in the slightest.

Now remembering that journalists do not always give accurate reports about the work of scientists—at times because such work isn’t all that revolutionary or even exciting and journalists refuse to resist the temptation to embellish the actual science they have run across—what is so annoying about this report is its implicit misanthropy.

Most of us must have noticed the glee with which some contemporary commentators announce that human beings are nothing special and, if anything, quite a despicable part of nature. Environmentalist are full of this stuff, some even looking forward to the extinction of the human race. Artists in the early parts of the 20th century were in the habit of depicting people in very unflattering ways; even some renown composers preferred making music sound weird instead of beautiful, just to make the point, one may assume, that people often create God awful music and do not deserve much admiration for what they have done.

In other fields of human interest, too, many people have yielded to the misanthropic temptation. And some of that is understandable in light of certain entirely unrealistic claims that have been made in behalf of human beings—for example, in certain religions. Ancient and discredited cosmology has tended, also, to give humanity an unreasonably exalted position in the world. So some debunking certainly made sense, for a while at least. Indeed, old Aristotle led the way when he made the remark that “If there is anyone who holds that the study of the animal is an unworthy pursuit, he ought to go farther and hold the same opinion about the study of himself.”

Nevertheless, again following old Aristotle, it is best to be moderate here, as in many other areas: just because human beings are not gods, it doesn’t follow by a long shot that they aren’t what used to be called “the crown of creation.” Nothing even in Darwin denies this—indeed, the genius evolutionary theorist himself reflected on the matter at considerable length without becoming a misanthrope.

Finally, just because for the time being human beings are known to be nature’s favorite—what with their free will and incredibly powerful mentality rendering them capable of unlimited creativity—nothing guarantees either that everything they do is swell or that no species of living beings could be discovered that will displace them from their prominent position in the scheme of things.

Why Not Regulate Religion and Speech?

Tibor R. Machan

When I was in college ages ago the truth in advertising and lending and such measures were high on the agenda of modern liberals. Oddly, they were the same people, usually, who declared themselves to be loyal champions of free speech, defenders of an absolutist stance on the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But not when it came to commercial speech. You know those people in commerce—all chronic cheats and liars, of course. (The modern liberal’s hatred of commerce trumps their most cherished ideals!)

One time when this campaign against commercial speech was in progress, I walked by a church that featured a huge sign saying “Jesus Saves.” My mind immediately started to consider, well why not truth in religion? Why only commerce? Indeed, isn’t religion far more important to most people than mere business? If modern liberals insist that the task of good government is to be our nanny, to engage in paternalistic—what is now often dubbed “precautionary”—public policies, why don’t they all advocate strong federal regulation of religious speech? After all, nearly everyone believes that those who peddle religious ideas they do not share are charlatans, liars and cheats. And what they peddle, of course, is far more harmful than anything put into an advertisement, something most sensible people realize is filled with hype, gimmickry and not statements of purported truths. All those religious charlatans—I leave it to the reader to pick his or her own list—are misleading thousands, millions of human beings about what is by many people regarded of the utmost importance, namely, how to secure their everlasting salvation in the afterlife. If one is mislead about this, one won’t just purchase hazardous goods or services but lose forever one’s chance to attain the greatest prize of all! Surely this, more than anything else, requires some solid, conscientious federal, state, county, and similar government intervention.

But no. Entirely inconsistently, modern liberals—and, indeed, many folks of all ideological positions—insist that when it comes to this absolutely vital aspects of their lives—actually, their everlasting existence, here on earth and thereafter—people may be trusted to their own resources. They and their family and friends and fellow parishioners and such are entrusted fully with the job of taking care of all this, without introducing the state. Indeed, this last is deemed by most modern liberals—and, again, by many others—as completely anathema to what government’s role is in human community life. Other than outright attacks upon people, deliberately devious fraud and the like, government must stay away. It would be totally perverse to have government act in a precautionary fashion, as it is urged to do when it comes to innumerable other aspects of our lives (most notably, these days, how we related to the environment).

Yet this is totally absurd. And there is also the absurdity, when one considers the modern liberals case of government regulation and licensing and inspection and quality control—the stuff done, at the federal level, by OSHA and dozens and dozens of other agencies—that the profession of journalism ought to be exempt from precautionary public intervention. Just watch and read the news and commentaries—they are filled with malpractice! Journalists routinely rush into print with items they have only the faintest ideas about, for example, in various branches of the sciences. They report on matters of no importance at all and treat various people as if they deserved the attention of their customers, viewers and readers. Yet, modern liberals and other champions of government’s role as our protector against the possibility of malfeasance do not advocate the establishment of departments of journalism at the various levels of government.

I must be careful. Someone I knew once quite well, the Louisiana attorney and politician Louis “Woody” Jenkins tried to demonstrate the absurdity of government regulation to members of the state government by proposing, of all things, the regulation of water diviners. Lo and behold, too many of them didn’t get the point and nearly enacted the measure into law!

On “Insulting Islam”

Tibor R. Machan

Reuters reported that “Iran accused Britain on Sunday of insulting Islamic values by knighting Salman Rushdie, whose novel ‘The Satanic Verses’ prompted the late Iranian Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini to issue a fatwa death warrant against him.” I read on and there is more of this in the piece, faithfully laying out the rant of Iranian Foreign Minister spokesman Mohammad Ali Hossein. He is quoted as saying that “Honoring and commending an apostate and hated figure will definitely put the British officials in a position of confrontation with Islamic society.”

So I am reading this and thinking, who are these barbarians and why do they get such elaborate treatment from Reuters. Why not just ignore the bastards? Why give them the honor of reporting their ravings? Beats me for sure. After all, what did Rushdie do? He wrote a novel in which the fictional story involves ferreting out some parts of the Koran in ways that Muslims—or, rather, some of the self-appointed leaders of Islam—consider offensive. So what?

Nearly everything written in newspapers, broadcast on TV and radio, shown at the movies, etc., etc., offends my views daily. The stuff is infuriating—I consider much of it hazardous to the welfare of my fellow human beings, not to mention myself. Do I then call up my favorite cousin Guido and urge him to put out a contract against all these people who fail to take into consideration my sensitive nature? No.

I realize, as should all Muslims, including Minister Hossein, that we live in a world of human beings who are likely to be at odds with one another on innumerable topics, including on just what is true and false in the Koran. Civilized people acknowledge this fact and live with it and if they care enough, they write books, articles, letters to the editor and, perhaps, now and then join a march, so as to express their objections but always peacefully.

But no. The Iranian Minister is talking about confrontations. Growing out of an insult? Get real—the world would be bogged down in constant, unrelenting large and huge battles if an insult justified a confrontation. Who the hell are these people, the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini or the Iranian Foreign Minister spokesman Mohammad Ali Hossein, to issue death threats against people who speak or write against their views? Have they no shame? Acting like angry infants, throwing fits, issuing threats when all they have to deal with is ideas, words, gestures—that is, various peaceful ways of making a point.

To my mind this repeated outburst on the part of these Muslim leaders does little more than demonstrate just how infantile they are and how little confidence they have in their own doctrines. If a set of beliefs is well founded, sound, true, does it really require being enforced by a bunch of thugs? Well, come to think of it, some folks have thought this about their own views but then they were usually deluded about their views being well founded, sound and true. The Nazis, the Fascists, the Commies and many others have, of course, acted exactly like these barbarians in Iran are acting. And they were all peddling false ideas!

But then why does Reuters report on these maniacs as if they were civilized contributors to international dialogue? Why doesn’t Reuters interview some folks who could answer nonsense like this from the Iranian Minister: “Giving a badge to one of the most hated figures in Islamic society is .. an obvious example of fighting against Islam by high-ranking British officials.” Could they not find someone prominent who could be quoted saying, “The Minister is crazy—giving honors to people isn’t fighting! Fighting is sending in an army or, come to think of it, issuing a fatwa! That’s what amounts to fighting. What giving Rushdie a knighthood amounts to extending a peaceful gesture of admiration. Nothing more. No fighting. And others need not agree!”

But the failure to heed these and other distinctions in how people can behave toward one another seems to be endemic of the Muslim leadership, at least in Iran. This failure pretty much consigns them all to an age that the West is mostly left, in the spirit of that nice and widely known cliché, “Sticks and stones may hurt my bones but words I can always walk away from” (with my spin).

Who Champions Liberty?

Tibor R. Machan

In the May 31, 2007, issue of The New York Review of Books Professor Ronald Dworkin of New York and Oxford Universities quotes Justice Anthony Kennedy favorably (p. 21) championing what amounts to a libertarian position on the relationship between the majority's moral views and imposing these on the rest. As Kennedy stated in his majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas (the famous, or as some would have it, notorious ruling that rejected laws against sodomy in Texas),

It must be acknowledged, of course, that the Court in [an earlier] Bowers [case] was making the broader point that for centuries there have been powerful voices to condemn homosexual conduct as immoral. The condemnation has been shaped by religious beliefs, conceptions of right and acceptable behavior, and respect for the traditional family. For many persons these are not trivial concerns but profound and deep convictions accepted as ethical and moral principles to which they aspire and which thus determine the course of their lives. These considerations do not answer the question before us, however. The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce these views on the whole society through operations of the criminal law. (p. 21)

Kennedy was suggesting an arguably libertarian view concerning the relationship between moral principles that guide personal conduct and the government of a free society. But, as I recall, in many other areas both Justice Kennedy and Professor Dworkin do not share this libertarian approach. For example, in the matter of how people should dispose of their wealth and labor, whether they may consume dangerous drugs, or whether they may engage in consensual prostitution, all of which are also moral issues quite like the one about homosexuality and sodomy, they appear to be far from libertarian.

Certainly Professor Dworkin, a prominent voice championing widespread wealth-equalization by way of public policy, would have the government authorized to take form Peter to help out Paul, in quite Draconian ways, if we judge from his several books and essays, especially Sovereign Virtue (Harvard University Press, 2000). Indeed, Professor Dworkin’s selective resistance to the “tyranny of the majority” where it concerns coercing women to remain pregnant is quite widespread in the so called pro-choice community. Most in that community fully approve of freedom of choice only vis-a-vis remaining pregnant. On innumerable other fronts they share Professor Dworkin’s and Justice Kennedy’s (implicit) view that the government has full authority to make people follow the majority's—or what they take to be the correct—moral vision.

Quite apart from the issue of whether abortion should be banned—and that would depend on whether the ban applies when a woman is carrying a human being—what appears to make the pro-choice position as advocated by the likes of Professor Dworkin quite disingenuous is this highly selective view about the choices they believe people have a right to make without government interference. If anything, the abortion issue would be one where one could expect caution and a reluctance to accept the idea that the right to obtain abortion is unproblematic. It is far simpler to see that the right to smoke marijuana or engage in prostitution or do innumerable other things that are now banned by the government should be fully acknowledged and protected. The risk of drastic error does not exist there, whereas it is at least plausible to see such a risk with even the earliest of abortions.

Of course, so called pro-life advocates cannot brag about their own consistency. For example, many believe that an early fetus is a human being because it shows the capacity to feel pain and behaves in ways that are routine for infants. But this is equally true for many non-human animals whom pro-life advocates do not wish to protect (for example, against being used for scientific experimentation).

So it seems that both sides in the abortion debate tend to be pleading a lopsided, highly selective case and are not advancing a bona fide principles position. Until they change, their case will lack credibility in the eyes of a great many thinking people.

My Nemesis, RIP

Tibor R. Machan

The American radical pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty has died, on Friday June 8th and although his views where abhorrent to me, I am not pleased. Yes, he advocated ideas that became far more prominent and influential than they should have, certainly much more so that those I find convincing. But he was also a rather civilized adversary—not that he ever acknowledged my own criticism of his views (which appeared both in scholarly and semi-scholarly journals [The American Scholar and Metaphilosophy] and in a book, Objectivity]—who wrote clearly and whose arguments needed to be answered.

Richard Rorty gained his prominence at Princeton University, where he taught philosophy and even led the department of philosophy for many years. His own philosophical guide was John Dewey, most importantly remembered as the advocate of so called progressive education and one of the leaders of the only home grown American philosophical movement, pragmatism.

Pragmatism was fashioned by American thinkers, although it had very little to say about the political ideas of the American Founders, which were taken from the English philosopher John Locke and which actually went quite the opposite direction from those of the pragmatist leaders, such as Charles Peirce, C. I. Lewis, William James and Dewey. The latter held, to put it in a nutshell, that there are no basic truths, no foundations of knowledge; whereas Locke and the American Founders thought that some things are indeed basic and true—for example, our individual human rights. Rorty, especially, scoffed at this notion, thinking that these rights are made up and that truth itself is just what a given community takes to be true, while another community could take something quite the opposed to be the truth.

Indeed, talk about truth, which had concerned most philosophers since time immemorial, was viewed with great suspicion by the pragmatists, especially by Richard Rorty. Even our everyday language reflects this—someone is a pragmatist if he or she refuses to abide by any principles, refuses to take anything as basically true, but is concerned with what works or is expedient. Some have noted that this pragmatist outlook has its roots in the practical, down to earth, not very intellectual style of much of American culture. And there may be something to this, although a philosophy in the old fashioned sense is supposed to figure out what it the case, at least basically, not what is convenient or practical, base on style alone.

I met Rorty once, late in his career, at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, in the book exhibit, where he and I briefly talked about his most famous book, Philosophy as the Mirror of Nature. In this work Rorty was very critical of the aims of traditional philosophy—or rather of what he understood to be its aims, namely, to arrive at the ultimate, final, and perfect—some would claim impossible—Truth of things. (That had been the aim of some traditional philosophers but by no means all.) So I asked Rorty how come he keeps working in the philosophy department at Princeton. He just smiled at me as if I were a silly kid who doesn’t get it, although not long after he did resign from his position at Princeton ad left to become University Professor at the University of Virginia. (He ended his career and life teaching in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University!)

Rorty’s thinking came to a head for me in a review he wrote for the venerable magazine, The New Republic, in which he declared, not long before the final collapse of the Soviet bloc, that there is no objective difference between the politics of the Soviets and that of Western countries. As he put it, we “cannot say that democratic institutions reflect a moral reality and that tyrannical regimes do not reflect one, that tyrannies get something wrong that democratic societies get right.” That was too much for me, given my own direct experience with both tyrannies—in my home land, Hungary, during its early experiment with Soviet style “communism”—and democracies—in Germany, the United States and Switzerland, where I have lived for various periods of time. I had come to the reasonably firm conclusion that one can, indeed, say that the latter “reflect a moral reality” while the former a definite immoral one!

So I went to work on Rorty’s ideas. And now the man has died. And I am not cheering his death because from what I came to know of him, his bad ideas were not all there was to Rorty. He was also a friend, a husband, and many other decent things in his life and for those of us who do take individual human lives—and human rights—seriously, even the death of an adversary, especially a civilized and intelligent one, is a sad thing.

What’s the Difference?

Tibor R. Machan

When I was in college ages ago the truth in advertising and lending and such measures were high on the agenda of modern liberals. Oddly, they were the same people, usually, who declared themselves to be loyal champions of free speech, defenders of an absolutist stance on the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But not when it came to commercial speech. You know those people in commerce—all chronic cheats and liars, of course. (The modern liberal’s hatred of commerce trumps their most cherished ideals!)

One time when this campaign against commercial speech was in progress, I walked by a church that featured a huge sign saying “Jesus Saves.” My mind immediately started to consider, well why not truth in religion? Why only commerce? Indeed, isn’t religion far more important to most people than mere business? If modern liberals insist that the task of good government is to be our nanny, to engage in paternalistic—what is now often dubbed “precautionary”—public policies, why don’t they all advocate strong federal regulation of religious speech? After all, nearly everyone believes that those who peddle religious ideas they do not share are charlatans, liars and cheats. And what they peddle, of course, is far more harmful than anything put into an advertisement, something most sensible people realize is filled with hype, gimmickry and not statements of purported truths. All those religious charlatans—I leave it to the reader to pick his or her own list—are misleading thousands, millions of human beings about what is by many people regarded of the utmost importance, namely, how to secure their everlasting salvation in the afterlife. If one is mislead about this, one won’t just purchase hazardous goods or services but lose forever one’s chance to attain the greatest prize of all! Surely this, more than anything else, requires some solid, conscientious federal, state, county, and similar government intervention.

But no. Entirely inconsistently, modern liberals—and, indeed, many folks of all ideological positions—insist that when it comes to this absolutely vital aspects of their lives—actually, their everlasting existence, here on earth and thereafter—people may be trusted to their own resources. They and their family and friends and fellow parishioners and such are entrusted fully with the job of taking care of all this, without introducing the state. Indeed, this last is deemed by most modern liberals—and, again, by many others—as completely anathema to what government’s role is in human community life. Other than outright attacks upon people, deliberately devious fraud and the like, government must stay away. It would be totally perverse to have government act in a precautionary fashion, as it is urged to do when it comes to innumerable other aspects of our lives (most notably, these days, how we related to the environment).

Yet this is totally absurd. And there is also the absurdity, when one considers the modern liberals case of government regulation and licensing and inspection and quality control—the stuff done, at the federal level, by OSHA and dozens and dozens of other agencies—that the profession of journalism ought to be exempt from the precautionary public intervention. Just watch and read the news and commentaries—they are filled with malpractice! Journalists routinely rush into print with items they have only the faintest ideas about, for example, in various branches of the sciences. They report on matters of no importance at all and treat various people as if they deserved the attention of their customers, viewers and readers. Yet, modern liberals and other champions of government’s role as our protector against the possibility of malfeasance do not advocate the establishment of departments of journalism at the various levels of government.

I must be careful. Someone I knew once quite well, the Louisiana attorney and politician Louis “Woody” Jenkins tried to demonstrate the absurdity of government regulation to members of the state government by proposing, of all things, the regulation of water diviners. Lo and behold, too many of them didn’t get the point and nearly enacted the measure into law!

Fairness Is a Minor Virtue

Tibor R. Machan

Few ideas serve more wicked purposes as “fairness.” In public policy it is probably the most overused justification for increasing the power of some people over others, for meddling in others’ private lives, and for being guiltlessly resentful.

Yes, there is some virtue to fairness, as when teachers grade and parents divide the desert fairly. In short, fairness is a minor administrative virtue, handy once bigger issues have been dealt with properly, like justice, liberty, and merit.

Unfortunately the childish concern with whether one is being treated fairly by one’s superiors keeps preoccupying the minds of adults after they aren’t supposed to have superiors at all, after they are grown and reached the age of their own reason. At that stage, they are supposed to worry about how to direct their own lives, not whether others are being fair with it. So they keep saying things like “Life is unfair,” as if there were still some parents standing about assigning them tasks, distributing burdens and benefits. But the fact that some of us are too short for reaching the apples on trees is not unfair, anymore than that some are too large to become jockeys even if that is what we would really, really like to be. This is just life, nothing to do with fairness versus unfairness.

Yet by thinking that fairness has to do with such matters, there is a very powerful temptation to campaign for remedies—let’s get Congress, city hall, the welfare state and so on to equalize things out for us all (except, of course, where it comes to the power it takes to become an equalizer). So when some people are very pretty, much prettier—or richer or faster or more talented—than others, they are resented for this—especially for the benefits that may come their way in consequences—and much too much effort is spent on creating that mythical level playing field so many public philosophers demand.

Which, as noted already, produces a class of really unequal folks, unequal in the one matter in which equality should reign, namely, power over others. In that, you see, no one ought to have more or less than the rest because, in the end, no one has the right to rule others past the time of childhood.

Someone I know reasonably well, the philosopher Paul Kurtz—a major leader of the secular humanist movement—has recently made much of the fact that some people make a lot of money but are not taxed progressively enough. (“Progressive,” in taxation, means expropriating not the same percentage but a lot more from those who are wealthy!) He keeps insisting that despite the objection of his libertarian pals, such a policy is only fair. The rich have more, so taking a lot more from them is fair, he thinks.

There is, of course, no end of the ambiguity and vagueness attendant to discussions about fairness. Some rich folks may well have far more important tasks than some poorer ones and thus could use a lot more dough. But never mind—there is no sensible measure of such unhinged fairness, period.

But more important is the fact that when it comes to being the victims of taxation—which is a relic of feudal times and now amounts to plain old extortion—the more who can escape, the better. That is like it was with military conscription. (Come to think of it, quite a few who understood this about the draft just don’t get it when the issue of taxation comes up!) Evil, vicious policies need to be stopped and short of that they need to be escaped, dodged, evaded. So during the draft it was a good thing to “unfairly” escape it.

Yes, Virginia, successful draft dodgers were right and tax dodgers are, as well! The rest of us are just unfortunate victims who aren’t managing to get out from under. There is nothing fair about subjecting us all to equal measures of villainy! Yet that is exactly what Professor Kurtz is promoting: “Tax them all and those with more, tax even more!” That’s just bunk. Tax them none and if it cannot be stopped, applaud those who can skip out on this nasty scheme of extortion of some people by others, not condemn them.

Do They Understand Democracies?

Tibor R. Machan

Over the years of studying politics I have not been a fan of plain democracy. Just having most people prefer something holds out no hope of getting it right, nor even of giving a measure moral or political authority. And the famous lunch mob example testifies to shared sentiments about this among many of us.

Democrats, especially, on the American political scene do not appear to be all that fond of democracy because whenever the majority rejects their ideas or candidates, they consider the majority to be wrong, even corrupt. You cannot have it both ways, champion democracy but reject it when it goes against you.

On the international front there have been numerous instances when leaders of so called democratic regimes have shown that they care very little for democracy. A recent instance of this is German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s displeasure with the fact that she is not able to get a commitment from President Bush on various environmental measures, such as how much reduction of CO2 must there occur in the USA and by when. If Merkel had a clue about democracy, she would realize that in more or less democratic countries throughout the West political measures may not be shoved down people’s throats but need the approval of the majority of representatives and must go through various procedures of ratification before they can become law. Not that all that will make them good ideas, of course. But democracy means at least that the bulk of the politically active people must want something before it becomes public policy.

Already when the infamous Kyoto accord failed to gain Congressional and related American support, supporters of the accord abroad and here kept bellyaching about this. Don’t they understand that in democratic countries the leadership—like Al Gore who was VP then—have no authority to impose their policies? For leaders of other semi-democratic countries to fail to grasp this shows either colossal ignorance or serious mental disassociation.

Now of course the idea of gaining a commitment from some political leader as to what the population of a country will or will not do is very problematic. In a free society such commitments would have a very limited scope—mostly pertaining to military and diplomatic policies. The idea that George W. Bush can promise Angela Merkel that 300 million people will do this or that—stop using cars of a certain size and the like—is politically obscene. But to demand that even the democratic process be subverted is preposterous. Why is no one in the mainstream media calling Chancellor Merkel on this?

All this talk about committing the United States of America to this or that practice—using so much fuel, spending so much money on exploring alternative energy sources, etc., and so forth—is conceptually confused to start with. America doesn’t use fuel—people in this country do. The use of such language has to be seen as at most expedient—like saying that “the car hit the pedestrian.” Cars do not hit people, people do. And if folks keep in mind how words are used to take shortcuts in meaning, there is no great problem. But what kind of shortcut is to suggest that Bush commit 300 million Americans to using or even exploring alternative fuel? It’s like saying Bush can commit us all to get married or pursue a certain career or physical fitness program. Such commitments are necessarily made by individuals, not by some political leader, not at least in a free society.

Of course this is a problem of diplomacy and today that field is dominated by collectivist, even tribal, language. To try to revise the terms of discourse requires finesse and a dedication to the principles of a free country. In our day, howevere, virtually everyone in the American diplomatic corps shares the collectivist, tribal mindset.

For this reason the kind of demands issued by Chancellor Merkel must be challenged by as many rational folks as possible in the press and other forums, given that American diplomats tend to be chickenhearted about these matters, namely, on stressing the principles of sound discourse vis-à-vis public policy formation in free (or even just in democratic) countries.