Death Taxes are Wrong

Tibor R. Machan

The debate about death taxes has resurfaced. Oddly even some Democratic Senators, such as Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, have decried the estate tax as unfair. As she declared, "I, for one, intend to fight for these family businesses, fight for these communities, and fight for these jobs in rural country-America." To which the left of center New Republic commented, “It was all very moving. Especially if you stand to inherit an enormous fortune.”

Well, I do not “stand to inherit an enormous fortune,” nor do my children. I am millions of dollars from being a millionaire, that’s for sure. But it seems to me morally obscene to want to raid the wealth of those who mean to leave theirs to their families. It matters not a wit, from an ethical standpoint, that some of those who will get the money may not deserve it. This argument—reminiscent of the late Harvard political philosopher John Rawls’s beef that no one really deserves anything much since it is all determined to happen, whatever they “achieve”—is entirely specious, a blatant non-sequitur.

A great many of us do not deserve a great deal that we happen to have—our health, talents, good parents (if we are lucky to have them), nice neighbors, a decent country in which we have been born, our good looks, and on and on. Yes, how we assemble these assets or resources is often where our virtues make their appearance in our lives. But as far as fairness is concerned, which bothers so many who push for retaining and even increasing the estate—or death—tax, nothing in life is fair. (As I have argued before, fairness is a minor, administrative virtue, applicable only where a prior promise requires one to pay attention to members of some group, like a professor who is required to fairly distribute his or her pedagogical attention to all of his or her students!)

What is really at issue and is not discussed much is our unalienable private property rights. If I honestly make my millions and want them to go to my family, who has authorized all those politicians and bureaucrats to take it way to use as they want to? You think democracy has done that? No way.

One cannot do with any degree of moral justification in concert what one may not to do individually. And no one is authorized to take from people what they have either earned or simply happened to have come by through good fortune. They alone have the authority to assign who may use or will inherit their wealth. Even if those to whom they leave their wealth are ne’er-do-wells, it is nobody’s business other than the folks’ who have decided to bequeath their wealth as they saw fit. It makes no difference if inheritance sometimes leads to sloth. That is a private moral matter, not something for politicians and bureaucrats to fret about, just as they have no authority to mess with us because we are, say, wasting our talents or refusing to be productive or marry the wrong mate. In a free country such vices or failures will come back to haunt people who are guilty of them and certainly do not confer any authority upon aspiring paternalistic politicians and bureaucrats.

When human communities are formed, slowly or quickly, their purpose isn’t to have some members direct the lives of the rest of the members. Their purpose is to make it possible for all the individuals in the community to act as freely as possible and to take full responsibility for their actions. Politics, properly understood, is supposed to be about protecting, securing individual rights, just as the American Founders stated. Politics is not about treating members of human communities as if they belonged to some kind of “organic body” (Karl Marx’s term), as some kind of conscripted group guided by a special class of people who deem themselves more wise and virtuous then the rest of us.

In a genuinely free country laws don’t function as tools for regimenting people, imposing on them visions to which they have not given their consent. The vision that includes wealthy people distributing their wealth to “society” is deeply flawed. Not the least of its flaws is that “society” is actually just some other people who pretend to stand in for us all. That famous “we” are really just certain tricky folks pretending to know that’s to our good.

So I once again invoke a famous, apt saying of Abraham Lincoln, namely, "No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent." That includes no raiding the what the wealthy leave to their families.

Global Warming Ad Hominem

Tibor R. Machan

Someone I know in the community of academic philosophers who works mostly in environmental ethics recently labeled me a “global warming denier” because I am—along with quite a few lay and expert individuals interested in the topic—skeptical about the human contribution to global warming and related environmentalist contentions. Now this clearly isn’t how philosophers are supposed to conduct debates. It is more reminiscent of Thrasymacus than of Socrates, that’s for sure, the guy who crashes a serious discussion with his rude intrusions. Why?

Well, the term “denier” gained its prominence in recent decades from discussions about those who claim that the Holocaust never happened. Such folks do exist—in fact, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is among them, as well as a bunch of neo-Nazis and some—a few—Word War II revisionists I have actually met.

Now to deny that the Holocaust happened, that Hitler initiated and tried to carry out the final solution of ridding Germany, maybe even all of Europe, of Jews, is blatantly dishonest. It amounts to refusing to take account of innumerable historical records, photographic evidence, eye witness testimony, mass graves, etc., etc.

It is hard to imagine that this kind of denial is based on mere ignorance. Rather, much more likely, it comes from a hatred of Jews. It comes from the legacy of their vicious treatment throughout much of ancient and modern history, ending with the mass murder of millions of them in the 20th century.

In short, calling someone a denier is to morally indict the person, even to the point of charging him or her with complicity in such mass murder after the fact. Is this anything comparable to anthropogenic global warming skepticism? Clearly not.

Anthropogenic global warming skepticism involves serious doubts about whether the recent increase in atmospheric temperature has been dramatic and whether it is the result of human activities—mostly industrial as well as involving transportation and farming. Whatever the best understanding of global climate fluctuation may turn out to be, it is certainly not based on the kind of hard and fast evidence that we have of the Holocaust.

Most of the estimates about current and future climate change are based on complicated, often quite incomplete and relatively primitive records and on the computer models that utilize these records. While there is no serious debate about the usefulness of researching the issue with the aid of these records and the models that rely upon them, it is by no means ridiculous to regard the results less than conclusive. Indeed, even most environmentalist who share Al Gore’s perspective understand their concerns to be precautionary! That is to say, they are basically advising caution so as to guard against anything drastic happening in the future.

Let us suppose they are right. Could anyone reasonably compare having doubts about their advice to doubting that the Holocaust has happened? No way. Just the fact that we are talking about predictions of the future, which is always somewhat uncertain—except perhaps about such elementary matters that there will be a future—should make it clear that this isn’t a matter of denying anything since what will happen hasn’t yet happened and cannot actually be denied yet!

What the labeling of anthropogenic global warming skeptics as “deniers” does very strongly suggest is a good deal of desperation on the part of those who deploy that term. It suggests less than serious confidence in their own projections, needing instead of evidence the demagoguery of throwing around ad hominems, that is, insults.

Which would, it seems to me, add some more credibility to the skepticism that some people want so badly to silence. (Yes, Virginia, some American politicians have already tried to silence the skeptics by threatening those who fund their research with repercussions such as withdrawing whatever support they receive from government or excluding them from eligibility for government contracts in areas completely unrelated to climate change research!)

With the recent discovery of some serious errors in calculating the temperature of the earth—turns out the early 1990s were not the hottest years because there were hotter ones in the 1940s—the work of the skeptics is essential and to dismiss—indeed to morally deride—it is scandalous.

America and Libertarianism

Tibor R. Machan

Because America is still widely regarded as a pretty decent country, even while Left, Right and the rest find a lot of fault with it, the question of whether Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, Populists, or Libertarians are the most faithful to its central ideas and ideals is important to ask and answer.

The Left—or modern liberals—claim they are the true champions of American values because they stand up for the little guy and reject dominance by big business, just as some of the Founders did. The Right—or conservatives—believe they are the most faithful Americans because the country was founded by more or less avid Christians and has always embraced various important religious traditions, both social and political. Populists think they are the most American of them all because they claim they stand up for the power of the underdog, the people without much means but large in number.

Why does the libertarian think America is best understood in terms of libertarian ideas, principles, theories, and ideals? Because of what the Declaration of Independence states. Libertarians hold, with that venerable document, that everyone has an unalienable right to his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This means that others must secure one’s permission before utilizing one’s labor, time, works, resources for any purpose whatever. No one may intrude on another person without that person’s permission or consent.

The rights mentioned in the Declaration are unalienable, which means no one can lose his or her rights, they cannot be voted away, no one, government or neighbor, is authorized to violate them regardless of how important the purpose might be used to justify such violation. If one is concerned about the poor, others’ support must be obtained without coercion. If one is interested in converting someone to a different faith from the one he or she is practicing, this must be done by means of persuasion, by convincing people, not be forcing them to change their beliefs. If one disapproves of homosexuality, drug use, gambling, hunting, horseback riding or any other fundamentally non-coercive conduct by others, one must never resort to force to try to change their beliefs and behavior. If one wants to further space research or the fine arts, that too must be achieved without conscription anyone into these pursuits.

That is what having an unalienable right to one’s life and liberty and so forth means. No exceptions, even if there are complications and nuances involved in how these ideas and ideals are implemented.

It is interesting that Osama bin Laden’s latest lecture to those in the West urged them all to convert to Islam. Now urging them to do this is fully consistent with the principles of the Declaration. But terrorizing them if they refuse completely violates them. (One can ask Mr. bin Laden why one ought to convert to Islam but the answer cannot be because the Koran commands it, since that Koran has authority only over those who are Muslims, not over anyone else! But this holds also for anyone who urges another to convert to any faith at all—the reasons must be independent of the doctrine to which one is urged to convert.)

Many people in the West are not all that far from believing what Mr. bin Laden does, namely, that everyone ought to covert to their way of life, leave everything else behind. And it is only because of certain principles, the ones the Declaration lays out so succinctly, that most do not resort to coercion to try to get others to convert.

It used to be quite popular in the West, this coercive conversion idea. And in many ways it still is, as when people use the power of government—of physical force and its threat—to force others to give up their own resources, their own private property, so as to support some worthy cause. That is totally against what the Declaration identifies are our unalienable rights. Sure, most people in the West resort not to out and out terror but to more indirect force, via the legislative process, to pursue public policies that treat others as unwilling means to their ends. But the principle isn’t all that different from rank terror—the prospect of spending years in jail unless one pays up when the legislature insists one must for some cause or another is certainly terrifying to anyone.

The only contemporary political idea that really squares with the letter and spirit of the American founders is, then, libertarianism. Sure, they may not have gone so far as libertarians do to affirm the absolutely sovereignty of every adult individual. They may not have come up with substitutes for taxation, a system of extortion that violates the principle that one has an unalienable right to one’s life and liberty. But they laid the groundwork for advancing toward a truly free society. And it is libertarianism that most fully captures the implications of what they did declare to hold as being self-evidently true.

Revisiting Animal “Rights”

[Summary of talk given at the University of Heidelberg, 7/13/07]

Tibor R. Machan

Introduction
In the concern about how human beings treat animals, whether as pets, as prospective nourishment, or for medical research or ex-perimentation, one school, led by Professor Tom Regan, has proposed the idea that animals have rights like human beings do, while another school, under the leadership of Professor Peter Singer, has proposed that the well being of animals should be considered in a utilitarian as-sessment of how they ought to be treated. I aim to argue here that the concept of "rights" has not be shown to apply to animals in any-thing like the way it applies to human beings. Looking at the concep-tual foundation of basic rights, especially a la John Locke, rights are founded on the moral nature of human beings, specifically on their moral agency. They identify, as the late Robert Nozick put it, our moral space. Given that animals have not been shown to possess moral agency, the basis of ascribing to them rights of the sort human beings possess is lacking. As to the utilitarian case associated with Pe-ter Singer, I will only mention, briefly, that Singer's ultimate founda-tion for ethics does not support any kind of normative stance toward animals, given that he is fundamentally a non-cognitivist or conven-tionalist. I shall develop these ideas and consider some objections to my position.

Outlining the Case Against Animal Rights
Since 1985 I have addressed the question of whether animals have rights in the sense that human beings are said to have them, first in my papers “Some Doubts About Animal Rights,” and “Do Ani-mals Have Rights?” and later in my book Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite. Since then I added yet another paper to my examination of the topic, namely, “Rights, Liberation and Interests: Is there a Sound Case for Animal Rights or Liberation.”
In the presentation today I plan to offer an outline of my objec-tions to animal rights and consider some questions that arise in con-nection with these objections and have been raised both directly in criticism of my work and indirectly by supporters of the animal rights/liberation position. In particular, I wish to make clear that the reason I object to animal rights is that I hold that arguments for such rights commit what has been dubbed by some “the fallacy of the sto-len concept.” This fallacy is well exhibited by defenders of intelligent design when they make confident use of the concept “intelligence” but deny, in the same breath, that intelligence arises from a living human brain, in particular the frontal cortex. Affirming that intelligence ex-isted at one time while such a human brain did not is to commit the fallacy because the concept of intelligence requires the concept of the human brain as its foundation in reality.
In the same way, the concept of rights—as in the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and private property—presupposes something that such rights theorists as William of Ockham and John Locke affirmed, namely, human moral agency. In more recent times the natural rights advocates Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick both rested their conviction that human beings have basic rights on the fundamen-tal idea that human beings are by their nature moral agents. As Nozick argued, rights secure the moral space that human beings require in their communities, the breach or trespass of which space undermines their dignity or capacity for morally significant action. This kind of ac-tion requires choice—or, as Kant had it, “ought” implies “can,” mean-ing, the responsibility to do the right thing and avoid doing the wrong assumes that the agent can choose between the one and the other; either way of acting is open to the agent, all things being equal.
Given that non-human animals aren’t moral agents—not in the general and fundamental sense, certainly, that we take human beings to be—there is no conceptual basis for ascribing to them the kind of rights that human beings are said to possess. Some higher primates do exhibit sensibilities that some take to be characteristic of moral agents but they do not involve moral responsibilities, guilt or pride. So, then, to attempt to ascribe such rights to non-human animals as akin to attempting to build a third story in a building that has not got a basement and first story. It produces a mythical but not an actual right.
This is the gist of my skeptical argument about so called animal rights. Notice here that the point of my argument isn’t so much to es-tablish that animal rights do not exist—which would require proving a negative—but rather that the existence of such rights hasn’t been es-tablished. To put it somewhat differently, the burden of showing that animals have those rights human beings possess hasn’t been met.
If, however, it were to be argued that animal rights aren’t the sort that human beings are said to have, then we have something like the case of God’s existence that denies that God is omniscient, om-nipotent and omni-benevolent—it is not about the God that is of inter-est in philosophy and theology. Rights not founded on the moral agency of the rights holder are not the sort of rights that command re-spect and require protection in a just legal order; they aren’t the rights of interest in political and legal theory.



Some Criticisms of the Refutation
The Marginal Case Argument
There have been several efforts to discredit my argument and I wish now to turn to some of them. One maintains that the claim that human beings are moral agents is wrong since there are human be-ings, such as infants and some invalids, as well as all of us while asleep—who lack the capacity for moral agency, yet they are generally deemed to posses the basic rights ascribed to human beings. As Na-than Nobis and David Graham put the point:
...true, we might agree that only humans have this capacity for dis-cerning right and wrong, but only some humans, not all: it's not the case that all humans who, intuitively, should not be treated as ani-mals are treated have this "moral nature" that Machan describes: they don't make moral decisions and so are not moral agents. Thus, Machan's theory of rights seems to provide no protection for vulner-able humans—human babies, severely mentally challenged individu-als, and others (regrettably these humans are often called "marginal cases" or "marginal humans")—who are not moral agents and so lack the moral nature he describes. So, if such humans have rights, this shows that Machan's argument against animal rights is unsound because he has a mistaken view of what is necessary for having any moral rights.
There are several problems in this passage. First, I do not speak about moral rights anywhere in my argument against animal rights. I am talking about natural rights in the tradition of John Locke. It is these sort of rights that serve as the foundation for laws that secure for human beings their moral space. Graham and Nobis make a lot of my failure to discuss moral rights yet do not say why such a discussion is relevant. After all, moral rights are no what is at issue in the animal rights debate. What is at issue is the kind of rights that warrant legal protection.
Another problem with this response is that it demands an ac-count of a definition of the concept “human being” that is impossible to attain and because of this it cannot support any account of the kind of rights animal rights advocates are interested in ascribing to non-human animals. To complain that moral agency is lacking while some-one is in a coma or asleep is to misunderstand the point of a definition, a statement of the nature of something. Such a statement is not a necessary truth but a truth for “the most part.” Human beings are moral agents when they are intact, awake, healthy, and so forth, not, however, while asleep or seriously brain damaged or in a vegetative state. However, the definition of “human being” applies to them none-theless since it captures what best distinguishes them from other ani-mals.
It is unclear what kind of rights my critics want to ascribe to animals if they are dissatisfied with the rights associated with the natural rights tradition or rights talk. Yes, a conventionalist approach to rights may provide some very weak support for human and animal rights but not the kind that either human or animal rights advocates need in order to back up their demands for treating human beings or animals with the kind of respect that human beings receive in light of their possession of natural rights. In another words, if the rights in-volved are conventional—which is to say, they are not derived from something firm such as human nature but decided upon in some community—they then may be over-ridden by some alternative pref-erences of the majority in a human community that could abolish rights altogether.
The point of claiming that animals have rights, exactly as it is of claiming that human beings do in the Lockean tradition, is to convince those who make laws, perhaps the majority, perhaps its representa-tives, that animals really ought to be treated in certain ways, namely, left alone, free to do as they will. It is not sufficient for this to establish that some group, say the majority, could decide, willy-nilly, to claim rights for animals. Some group might not, just as easily, and if there can be no convincing objection to this, nothing of significance has been achieved by ascribing rights to non-human animals. This also holds for ascribing merely conventional rights to human beings—it carries to philosophical or moral weight at all.
The Moral Agency Argument
Another objection to my defense of skepticism about animal rights is that in our Darwinian era, in which the theory of evolution has become scientifically validated, there is no justification for regarding human beings as unique in being moral agents. As John Gray states,
The idea that morality is uniquely human has many variations, but all of them rest on the assumption that humans are in some funda-mental way exempt from the evolutionary laws that govern other animals.
Gray goes on to state that
Darwinian theories have no place for teleological explanations—that is to say, explanations that rely on ascribing purposes to evolution-ary processes.
Let us take a closer look at this objection. First of all, there are variations among Darwinians. Some of them argue that it is possible to find purposive or goal-directed behavior among living things, espe-cially when we come to humans who have evolved so as to be able to set their own goals, purposes or ends. Some believe that all of hu-man behavior consists of random events, without any purpose or end in sight for any of it and certainly with no free will anywhere to be found.
The most curious invocation of Darwin's views is found among environmentalists who tend to both accept it and then apply it in quite inconsistent ways. For example, many environmentalists insist that there is what we can identify as a healthy ecosystem. Supporters of endangered species legislation insist that there is an optimal balance in nature which is supposed to include a great variety of living species. And they believe in ethics, as well, urging us all to abide by certain standards of right conduct so that the environment is well cared for. Urging us to act this way certainly suggests that human beings have a moral nature.
Darwinian teleological explanations do not ascribe a goal to evo-lution—except in the sense that what results from natural selection needs to be successful, namely, survive. But there is no reason to deny the validity of teleological explanations to some aspects of life. Indeed, most biologists invoke just such explanations when they talk about the beak of a particular bird or the color of the fur of a certain type of rabbit and how these serve to promote the welfare of the ani-mals in question. Similarly, there is nothing anti-Darwinian about the claim that certain ways of choosing to act—e.g., those in conformity with the virtues—enhance the life of a human being.
Contrary to Gray’s claim, if human beings are moral agents it doesn’t follow that they are “exempt from the evolutionary laws that govern other animals.” The process of natural selection, Darwin’s most important discovery, does not imply that a species that emerges in nature cannot posses moral agency. The contrary is far more com-patible with Darwin’s theory.
The highly diverse natural living world can accommodate a kind of animal that has the capacity for moral responsibility and choice. Af-ter all, among all the living things on earth, among all the different species, there are enormous differences. A sea horse, for example, is very different from a puma. Yet both are subject to Darwinian evolu-tionary laws. Why then would it not be possible for human beings to have emerged from a process governed by those same general laws with attributes and capacities that are very different from those other animals possess? Their capacity for making original choices, for free will and moral responsibility, could be as much a part of the natural order as the male sea horse’s capacity to carry the young (unlike other animals, where it is the female that does this).
Moreover, environmentalists routinely talk of the health of the ecosystem, which is one reason they are concerned about, say, an-thropogenic global warming. Health is a concept that pertains to an organism's doing well at proceeding toward the goals of surviving and flourishing. It assumes that there exists such a goal, one that can be enhanced or thwarted as the organism carries out its life processes. If the goal is enhanced, it is a healthy specimen, if it is thwarted than it is unhealthy (either from some internal malaise or from external im-pediments).
The very idea of health contradicts the idea of mere random, mechanical development. If all development had to be purposeless, then none would be an enhancement or a thwarting of the life of something. It would be akin to how we see the movements of celestial entities—they just move, none of their movement is better or worse in and of itself. It makes no sense to construe the behavior of Mars or the sun as good or bad, healthy or sick. All of that is misapplied when it comes to behavior that has no goal, no end in sight.
So, now, if one accepts that Darwin rules out both purposive talk and endorses thoroughgoing determinism, applicable to all living things including humans, then talk about a healthy or sick ecosystem is completely out of order, as would of course be chiding human beings for failing to promote it. There can then be no sensible discussion without morality of how human beings should act as far as the envi-ronment or animals are concerned—they will do what they are deter-mined to do and they have no choice in the matter, nor is there some standard by which how they act can be evaluated since nothing is ei-ther good or bad for the ecology or the environment. It all just hap-pens, period.
So in terms of some of the most elementary features of envi-ronmentalist language certain moral concepts are quite explicit—we are all being urged to conduct ourselves responsibly toward the wilds, for example. And this sort of admonition is not addressed to non-human animals, suggesting very strongly that environmentalists ac-cept the moral nature of human beings.
So, a version of Darwinism clearly does not negate the moral na-ture of human beings. Although people are animals, they also differ from other animals—as indeed, other species of animals differ from one another—in that they are moral agents. And this is quite compati-ble with Darwinian biology.

Reply to Another Critic
In the title of his comment on my recent paper “Why Human Be-ings May Use Animals,” Professor John Hadley refers to non-human animals as “others,” as if they were akin to, say, one’s neighbors. (He also loads his title with the notion that using such others would be some kind of “abuse.”) So, then, even before reading his comment, one is already lured into sharing his conclusion, never mind that the argument is yet to come and may turn out to be unsuccessful.
But, of course, this is something many of us do—the title of my own original paper assumes that we may use non-human animals and proposes to justify this. Still, I shall henceforth resist such ploys whenever I am tempted to use them. Let me then get to why I do think Hadley’s case is unsound.
The form of his argument is of the reductio ad absurdum variety. He purports to accurately recast my own argument in such a way that (a) it is compatible with what I believe and say and (b) results in an “unpalatable conclusion.” What is that? That cognitively impaired hu-man beings maybe used by the non-impaired ones.
This not only conjures up the Nazis but Hadley explicitly states that “It was the Nazis who used cognitively impaired human animals as resources for the sorts of tasks that Machan claims are necessary for beings considered more important to ‘succeed in life’ or ‘flourish’ as in medical research.” The approach to arguing one’s position that charges one’s opponent with sharing the views and policies of the Na-zis is a pretty low blow but, again, not all that unusual. Let us now see how he justifies this rather drastic charge, namely, that my views are equivalent to those of the Nazis.
Hadley states that in my paper I am making only a generaliza-tion when I define human beings as animals capable of moral agency. This is because there are cases of what we would all regard as human beings who are “incapable of moral reasoning.” He puts it this way: “After all, if the value of an individual is commensurate with their [sic] capacity to engage in moral reasoning, then it is reasonable to suggest that human animals wholly incapable of moral reasoning will have value at least equal to, or even below, some nonhuman animals such as greater apes.”
Let me first note that Hadley changes my own wording quite sig-nificantly. He speaks of the “capacity of engage in moral reasoning,” whereas I speak of moral agency. He never justifies his rewording. Perhaps he has in mind the same thing, but those were not my terms. Quite a few human beings who are moral agents aren’t capable of en-gaging in moral reasoning at some point, say when asleep. And such reasoning, in any case, is something moral philosophers do, not ordi-nary folks who, for example, when they act negligently—say by driving recklessly—aren’t reasoning much, yet their moral agency is in no dispute. Is one necessarily capable of moral reasoning when one is blamed for this? I am not sure but it doesn’t sound right—moral rea-soning is more of an intellectual activity—it requires deliberation—whereas moral agency requires only that one is capable of intentional action or conduct, judgments that issue in behavior. Such judgments may well amount to no more than unexamined beliefs, ones someone has picked up without any “moral reasoning.”
But perhaps this is indeed minor for even such minimally intel-lectual performance could rest on the capacity to reason morally. The risk of such recasting of someone’s way of stating his or her argument is considerable, however. My own moral theory, for instance, makes reasoning itself a moral act, so those who do in fact reason correctly, carefully, are ipso facto morally praiseworthy. This is in the tradition of Aristotelian “right reason” ethics. I do not hold that there is some spe-cial intellectual activity called “moral reasoning.”
In any case, is Hadley correct to hold that because I define hu-man beings as “rational animals,” that is, “animals with the capacity to think abstractly,” and ascribe to them moral agency—being responsi-ble to act rightly and open to praise or blame depending upon whether they do so—I am committed to the view that I consider “rights inap-propriate for cognitively impaired human beings”? No.
When one defines a class of beings, one focuses on what they are normally, and in the case of living things, what they are at their state of maturity. So infants and those who are impaired will not (yet) fit the correct definition of the concept “human being” fully but it is clearly understood—in biology, botany, and other life sciences—that a certain definition is the most apt way to classify them.
A pheasant, to take another case, may be defined as “a large bird related to and resembling domestic poultry.” Now some pheas-ants, in fact, will lose their wings or experience some other temporary or even permanent impediments or alterations, yet this does not lead to their being something other than pheasants. No new classification will be required for such specimens of pheasants and whatever biologi-cal or zoological statements will be applicable to pheasants will be ap-plicable to such infant or impaired instances, with appropriate modifi-cations taking account of their special status.
This epistemological approach is routine. Furniture may be de-fined as “the movable items such as chairs, desks, or cabinets in an area such as a room or patio,” yet when some chairs are affixed per-manently to a floor or if one of them breaks and is no longer usable as a chair, or, again, if some piece of furniture from years gone by be-comes a fragile museum piece and would break upon being moved, it does not alter the fact that the most apt definition of furniture still ap-plies, provided the requisite modifications are made. “Model furniture,” “play furniture” or the like will clarify that, though these pieces are in-deed properly called “furniture,” they are exceptional for the specified reasons. No wholesale reclassification of them is required or would be rational.
When a person is asleep and does not evidence moral agency, he or she is still a moral agent and if moral agency is what justifies the ascription of rights to human beings, the sleeping person possesses the rights in question. Similarly with infants or children—which partly explains the substance of the debate about abortion rights: though no one disputes that zygotes, embryos, fetuses, or infants are unable to exercise moral agency as of yet, it makes perfectly good sense to in-quire as to whether they possess rights since normally they are on the way to becoming mature members of the class of beings who are nor-mally moral agents. When it comes to impaired people, again the pol-icy of classifying them with normal mature people for the sake of learning what sort of political principles need to be observed in order to treat them properly (say, in the field of medical ethics and law) is the most rational approach to take, provided certain modifications in the way they are to be treated are also spelled out. (Thus, children’s rights are not respected and protected exactly the way the rights of human adults are, nor are the rights of the invalid or senile.)
Hadley and some others who have addressed my discussion of the basis of natural rights —namely, the normal capacity for mature or adult human beings for moral agency (which is in gradual develop-ment from infancy and which is temporarily or permanently under-mined for impaired persons)—are making a case for a way to under-stand what it means to be a given kind of being via a definition that is useless for deriving any kind of policy conclusions, be these ethical or political. That is because these definitions are envisioned as having the attributes of logically necessary truths, not of definitions as they de-velop in such sciences as biology, botany, sociology, economics, and psychology. They confuse definitions in the formal disciplines like logic and geometry with those in these substantive disciplines (or spheres of knowledge). As such, they rob themselves of any possibility of defining substantive entities, as distinct from formal ones.
A theory of rights is by its very nature general, guiding law and public policy, and since human beings living in communities who are in need of such guidance aren’t formal entities, definable by statements that are necessary truths, there will naturally be some exceptional cases. (This, among other things, accounts for the familiar jurispru-dential idea that “hard cases make bad law,” as well as the doctrine of judicial discretion which authorizes legal authorities to make excep-tional rulings.)
Despite Hadley’s very confident language alleging that my ap-proach to assessing whether animals have the kind of rights human beings have (that would justify banning their use by human beings) fails, he has not shown such failure, nor, therefore, that my ideas lead to anything like the Nazi practices he claims I must endorse, nor, cer-tainly, that non-human animals have rights. They do not, whereas young and impaired human beings do, along, of course, with the rest of us (which makes good sense of why Amnesty International and various organizations monitoring governments and legal systems con-cerning whether they respect and protect rights are focusing on hu-man, not animals rights).
In his comment-review of my book in which a spend some time discussing so called animal rights (posted both on Amazon.com and his web site —Nathan Nobis says that my basic idea is that “a being has rights—it is wrong to harm it for pleasure or even serious bene-fits—only if it has a ‘moral nature,’ i.e., a ‘capacity’ to see the differ-ence between right and wrong and choose accordingly (pp. xv, 10).” This is roughly right but contains a serious misunderstanding.
This misunderstanding consists of a mischaracterizes having rights in a very important respect that really should be avoided.
Having rights does not mean it is wrong to harm someone for pleasure or even serious benefit, not if they consent (as in sports or scientific experiments). Having rights means it is wrong to invade someone’s person or property, as when I assault another person or rob him or trespass over his land. Harm is definitely not the issue since often invasive actions are not at all harmful, may even be quite help-ful. When someone is hospitalized against his will, this is invasive but it is not harmful—could, in fact, be helpful—but by rights theory it is also a violence against the person, against his human dignity. Or when someone is burglarized, this may not be harmful at all—the person may be so wealthy as not to suffer any harm from the burglary. If I trespass and take up residence on someone’s land, that may again not be at all harmful.
One clear way to appreciate this point is to contrast the benefi-cial nature of some paternalistic actions with their rights violating character. The whole point about rights is they spell out what Robert Nozick called the “moral space” surrounding moral agents, space re-quired for them to exercise meaningful moral choice (something non-human animals cannot do).
Indeed, in Putting Humans First I state that it may well be wrong to harm or hurt animals—I explicitly condemn wanton infliction of suf-fering—but that is not an issue of rights. For example, even in human relations, when one wrongs another person—say a friend or lover or kin—it is not even usually a matter of violating rights. It is more often, instead, not treating the person as he or she deserves or should be treated. Rights violations are only a small group of such untoward ac-tions toward others, mainly to serve as the basis of the rule of law in a free society.
Hadley goes on to add to his objection that “Machan says hu-mans are of that ‘kind’ [meaning moral agents] and animals are not and so concludes that humans have rights and animals have none. But these arguments are imprecise: true, only humans have this capacity, but only some humans, not all. Thus, his theory of rights seems to provide no protection for vulnerable humans who are not moral agents and so lack the moral nature he describes.”
The humans my critic says aren’t moral agents are, typically, in-fants and people in a coma and other marginal or borderline instances which are clearly enough known to be such (we could add people who happen to be asleep). A legal system that aims for the protection of human individual rights deals with some of these cases by making special provisions in light of their special attributes. To object to re-garding human beings in general as moral agents because of these marginal cases is akin to objecting to regarding, say, chairs as artifacts for sitting simply because, well, one cannot sit on museum chairs or broken ones.
The exceptional nature of these marginal cases is obvious but not relevant so long as they remain marginal. As the famous saying goes, “hard cases make bad law.” The point of rights is to spell out a broad framework for how to treat beings with a moral nature, not to address the special cases.
One should not develop theories about how the world should be understood based on marginal, exceptional cases, cases that, by the way, couldn’t even be identified as marginal or exceptional without first having a clear enough grasp of typical or normal ones an under-standing of which enables one to develop general principles, laws or rules. Where would medicine or engineering be if such exceptions could undercut the principles that guide our actions in these fields? In-deed, no one who embarks upon a systematic statement of ethical or legal principles, based on the most up to date substantive understand-ing of the world, is ever going to be able to produce the kind of geo-metrical framework these critics demand of me as I spell out a reason-able conception of human individual rights.

Summary of My Position
So what have I tried to do here? I outlined, very briefly, my skeptical argument about animal rights, claiming that the foundation for the sort of rights human beings are said to have does not obtain in the case of animals. I then responded to the charge that the rights I agree human beings have cannot be defended because human beings often fail to exhibit moral agency (when they are vulnerable, for ex-ample). And finally I replied to those who maintain that human beings lack moral agency altogether and any differentiation between human and animal rights based on this capacity must fail.
I should like to close with just one more important point. The fact that animals lack rights does not imply that no moral considera-tions apply to how human beings interact with them. Just as human beings may have moral responsibilities toward great works of art, none of which have rights, so they could also have moral responsibilities to-ward animals, or some animals, even though these animals have no rights. Rights talk pertains to human beings because of their capacity for moral agency. But even in the case of human beings, many other moral considerations apply to how they interact with one another and the world around them other than considerations of rights.
Endnotes:
1 Tom Regan, The Case of Animals Rights, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
2 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation , New York: New York Review of Books, 1975.
3 See, Peter Berkowitz, “Other People’s Mothers,” The New Republic, January 10, 2000. Berkowitz shows Singer to be a non-cognitivist and also makes note of the fact that despite Singer’s proclamation that the very old ought to be allowed to die and the resources to keep them alive ought to go to help those who suffer poverty and deprivation, Singer himself has spent extensive resources on helping his own elderly mother.
4 “Some Doubts About Animal Rights,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 19 (1985), 73-75.
5 Tibor R. Machan, “Do Animals Have Rights?” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 5 (April 1991), 163-173.
6 Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
7 Hon-Lam Li & Anthony Yeung, eds., New Essays in Applied Ethics: Animal Rights, Personhood, and the Ethics of Killing (New York: Palgrave & Macmillan, 2006.
8 Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963.
9 David Graham and Nathan Nobis, “Putting Humans First?” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Fall, 2006): 90-91.
10 John Gray, “Are We Born Moral?” The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2007, 26.
11 Ibid.
12 For more on this, see James G. Lennox, 'Teleology' in Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, eds. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth Lloyd, Cambridge MA , 1992, pp. 324-333, and 'Darwin was a Teleologist', Biology and Philosophy Vol. 8 (October 1993) pp. 408-421.
13 For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, “Environmentalism Humanized,” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 7 (April 1993), 131-147.
14 Tibor R. Machan, “Why Human Beings May Use Animals,” Journal of Value Inquiry 126 36(1) (2002).
15 See, John Hadley, “Using and Abusing Others: A Reply to Machan,” Journal of Value Inquiry xxx; 1-4, (2004)
16 Ibid., p. 2.
17 Indeed, that may well be the source of their negligence. For more on this point, see Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism (London, UK: Routledge, 1998), chapter 3, “Human Action and the Nature of Moral Evil.”
18 See, for example, Nathan Nobis at http://www. courses. rochester.edu/nobis/papers/review-of-machan.html.
19 This pretty much means they are unable to produce any kind of theory of rights or ethical conduct based on an understanding of what kind of beings might have such rights or require certain conduct. Perhaps this is why these philosophers seem to be more apt to engage in criticism than theory development, at skeptical reflections rather than at producing a workable understanding of something.
20 I develop some of these points in greater detail in Tibor R. Machan, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
21 Op. cit., Machan, Putting Humans First.
22 http://www.courses.rochester.edu/nobis/papers/review-of-machan.html.
23 It was the philosopher J. Roger Lee who made all this clear in a paper titled “Choice and Harms,” critical of another philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thomson. (The exchange is included in M. Bruce Johnson and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Rights & Regulations [San Francisco: Pacific Legal Foundation, 1983].)
24 Unfortunately, these critics do not bother to look at the work I have produced on natural rights theory so as to develop my position as fully as possible—Tibor R. Machan, Human Rights and Human Liberties (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975), and Individuals and Their Rights (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1989), work that paves the way for my discussion of so called animal rights.

On a Blog called Technoraty one entry goes like this: "The libertarian arguments against animal rights I’ve seen, most of which stem from the tradition of Rand and/or Rothbard, engage in twin, massive cheats...." What a wonderful way to set out to engage in a discussion, is it not? Rand and Rothbard and others who see things roughly their way "engage in twin, massive cheats..." In other words, they are liars, not wrong! Well, there is no reason to talk with people who consider you a liar--clearly there is no hope of any kind of fruitful exchange once such a ad hominem has been hurled at someone. This is one way I am not all that fond of Blogging--there are too many people involoved who lack even a modicum of civility.

Ideas in Conflict

Tibor R. Machan

Amartya Sen is a Harvard University, Nobel Prize winner in economics, who has been Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, where he also received much of his higher education. Sen has been a very active player in the field of political economic debates and although he is no champion of the fully free society, he has been closely associated with the ideas of human freedom as they relate to economic development in poor countries. He is widely respected and admired and was on excellent terms with both the late Robert Nozick, the Harvard libertarian political philosopher, and Peter Bauer, the late developmental economists who trusted classical ideas of liberty to serve as the best means to rescue the poor around the globe.

On of Sen’s most influential books is Development as Freedom (Knopf, 1999). At first glance the title suggests that Sen shares Bauer’s ideas but that would be wrong. Sen’s idea of what freedom means is very different from Bauer’s and other classical liberals and libertarians.

What Sen means by freedom is the ability—or capability—of people to take active part in politics whereby they can demand support for their various projects. We know this system as the democratic welfare state. But in Sen’s hands it has some nuances worth exploring.

For starters, Sen holds that the infrastructure or legal order of a country is something that is to be decided upon by way of the democratic process or national conversation. In other words, there are no principles such as the American Founder’s believed in, basic individual rights governments must secure. The principles, if we can even call them that, are conventional, decided upon in a kind of national dialogue. The idea of natural rights or natural laws that are supposed to be discovered and on which the law ought to rest is absent from Sen’s position. Everything is open for debate and discussion and only after the discussion has ended can we talk of constitutional principles, fundamental laws, justice and the like. As he puts it,

“Indeed, the connection between public reasoning and the formulation and use of human rights is extremely important to understand.~ Any general plausibility that these ethical claims, or their denials, have is dependent, on this theory, on their survival and flourishing when they encounter unobstructed discussion and scrutiny, along with adequately wide informational availability.” (“Elements of a Theory of Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32.4 [2004] p. 349.)

Contrary, then, to the American political tradition, which owes a great deal to John Locke’s idea of natural rights—meaning, rights derived from an understanding of an objectively ascertainable human nature—Sen’s idea of basic justice or right has no foundation in nature, only in widespread conversation.

Now this sounds like a coherent notion until one digs a bit into some of what is presupposed in Sen’s position. One thing, for example, that does not appear to rest on debate and discussion is the right of everyone to take part in the discussion! So it appears there is, after all, a natural base for Sen’s idea of freedom—everyone, because of his or her humanity, has the right to take part in political deliberations. Why? The one good answer to this is that by virtue of our human nature, we are entitle to have our political ideas aired in a human community. Being human, moral agents, is what this entitlement or right rests on, not on a discussion or debate.

Now if it is true that there is at least one principle that isn’t negotiable, namely, the principle of free political participation, there could be others. If it turns out that the same features of human nature that support this right to freedom also support other rights, they, too, would be morally and political immune to being discussed away.

One such right that is immediately evident is the right to private property. One’s labor and time, for example, couldn’t be up for public debate—no one has the right to decide that you or I may or may not make decisions respecting the disposition of our labor, our time, indeed, our lives!

Sen’s idea of freedom, however, strongly implies that participants in a democratic discussion and political debate could conclude with the idea that my or your or anyone’s life could be conscripted to serve various goals to which no consent has been given. But then the same could hold for the right of participation in political discussion—that right, too, could be debated away (and in some countries it has been and is, because the foundation of the right to take part in politics is not deemed to be natural but conventional).

A well integrated theory of freedom cannot accept that some of our rights are firmly grounded while others up for debate. These rights are all unalienable. Which means that democratic debate may not end with conclusions leading to the abrogation of these rights. And that is just the kind of freedom that the classical liberals, like Peter Bauer, believed is fundamental and not up for compromise. It is also the best avenue for development and emergence from poverty.

Professor Sen’s bifurcated theory of the right to freedom, whereby political participation is an absolute but property rights, for example, a mere conventional right, just will not hold up when fully scrutinized.

Some Little Good News

Tibor R. Machan

When you write columns, most of them turn out to be critical. This despite my beef about how mainstream news is routinely negative, so nothing much about new scientific advances, medical breakthroughs, great novels just finished, and so forth manages to be reported. But I don’t wish to fall in line with such negativism.

So here is a bit of good news. In her recent column, “Fooled by Winds of Reform,” in the International Herald Tribune (8/25-26/07), Camelia Entekhabifard wrote a line I must celebrate. She writes, “Iranian citizens who have sought to progressively influence the country’s youth....” The rest isn’t relevant to my point, so I’ll leave it be. But just notice: Entekhabifard uses “progressively” correctly, in contrast to nearly everyone else on the punditry circuit where the term “progressive” is mostly deployed to refer to some kind of statist measure by a government—more national health service, more wealth redistribution, more government regulation, etc., and so forth.

Now all these so called progressive measures are, of course, blatantly reactionary, the very opposite of progressive. “Progress” is supposed to be made when matters improve, when public policies become more adjusted the proper ideas and ideals of justice. These statist measures, in contrast, all entrust government with immense powers and they move the responsibility for solving problems from the voluntary to the coercive realms of society. All those who have this blind faith in government hold out hope that if only some problem is handed over to politicians and bureaucrats, matters will be just fine. (They really ought to learn more about public choice theory!) Yet that is the old idea of the top-down running of society, the idea that shored up monarchies for centuries, the idea that wasn’t given up by the so called revolutionaries like Karl Marx.

So what most call “progressive” is, in fact, regressive, reactionary, and, most importantly, fatally flawed. (As F. A. Hayek called the notion, “a fatal conceit.”) In historical terms the idea of progress should be attached to developments that free people from dependence on government. Given that for centuries on end problem-solving had been entrusted to pharaohs, tsars, monarchs, dictators, and politburos, why would continuing and enhancing such a system be construed as progress?

No. It is indeed, as the remark by Entekhabifard implies, when citizens take over the task of running their lives and governments are kept to the minimal job of keeping the peace that true progress is in evidence. So it would be progress if Iranian citizens gained the right to self-determination and take from their government the power to influence the country’s youth by means of various versions of coercion.

Come to think of it, this is so even in Western societies, where, sadly, the education of the young is entrusted to governments, as if that didn’t mean mostly indoctrination rather that teaching! (There should be a separation of education and the state just as firmly secured in law as there is of the separation of religion and the state! That way not only would there be greater justice but we could be truly critical of what is going on in so many near-totalitarian countries across the globe where education is firmly in the hands of governments.)

There should really be a groundswell campaign in support of taking back the concept “progressive” from those who try to hoodwink us all into believing that re-empowering governments around the globe is what progress consist of. It doesn’t. Even in terms of simple history, that is rank regress.

All in all, of course, there is no guarantee that matters will change—progress—as they ought to. That is a matter of human will and determination, not of impersonal historical forces. The only type of progress that people can hope for, at the broad public policy level, would involve making of government nothing but a body guard, not our secular or spiritual savior! If it were not for the strongly entrenched, age old governmental habit, this kind of progress may in time get off the ground.

Keep Talking of What You Know

Tibor R. Machan

As an avid fan of tennis as well as some features of the Sunday supplement magazine, Parade—my secret pleasure is to read Walter Scott’s inside front cover gossip column and Marilyn von Savant’s “Ask Marilyn”—I was looking forward to read the interview with Andre Agassi, former tennis megastar. I was looking forward to his views on tennis—the recent Wimbledon and U. S. Open tournaments, some of the current greats like Roger Federer, the Williams sisters, Maria Sharapova, et al.

You can imagine my dismay when what the piece offered up is Andre’s slip shod philosophy of life. Ditties like “It’s better to be lucky than good,” and “I’m a tortured soul in most things I do; I’ve succeeded at something that at times I’ve hated, and that’s relevant to the person who goes down to the auto repair shop and puts in his time.” Hardly a word about tennis!

So you may ask, who am I to complain. After all, I’ve kept writing columns, books, articles, scholarly papers, and giving lectures and seminars nearly nonstop for nearly 40 years. Surely I must be talking a lot about stuff I know little about.

Not really. Mostly I try hard to stick to the topics I have researched and studied all my life and leave ones I know little about untouched or at most for speculation and questioning. Why? Well, I’d want to be right about things, not just babble on about them.

Take that offensive bit about auto repair shop workers. Has Agassi done serious research about whether folks who work that job hate it? I actually check out such things and have managed to ascertain, though only informally, that a great many people who work at jobs others wouldn’t go near with a considerable measure of satisfaction. Take folks who collect trash. Some might think they just have to hate the work but it doesn’t look like it.

Indeed, when I hear about how long a vacation most Europeans take each summer—from five to ten weeks, the International Herald Tribune reported recently—while Americans tend to take only about two or three weeks, I suspect the reason is that Europeans on average treat work as a chore, while Americans tend to turn work into something rewarding if not out and out enjoyable.

I recall when I was working at a U.S. Army depot in my teens, the team of kids who took on the job of re-strapping a whole lot of oil boxes that have been badly strapped to start with, we managed to make the work into something of a contest and, thus, quite a lot of fun. When I drove a school bus during my graduate school days, I nearly always enjoyed it despite the early hours and screaming students. And back when I was a box cart loader I learned how to make loading up those freight wagons a challenge and, thus, not at all a pain. So, I suspect that most people who work in auto repair shops have chosen this line of work so as to suit their talents, inclinations, options, and such and aren’t moaning about how badly they have it in life.

Yes, tennis is enjoyable, but it is foolish to think it is the only enjoyable profession for people. The one-size-fits all attitude Agassi exhibits in his comment should remain a secret prejudice of the man, not a piece of supposedly worthy insight from which perhaps some of his fans will take a very bad lesson.

No less flawed is the idea that it is better to be lucky than good—to start with, those who aren’t good, tend to blow their luck on trivial pursuits. Moreover, luck is something we cannot do much about—it either comes or it doesn’t—whereas goodness is up to us and we can usually make a decent effort to bring it about in our lives.

Anyway, the point is not complicated: Folks do better talking about stuff they know about than when they just shoot off their mouths, perhaps with the illusion that having gotten good at one thing, they are now experts at everything.

Encourage Worldwide Economic Competition

Tibor R. Machan

Bob Herbert of The New York Times seems to want job protectionism in America. Why else would he send out a warning, in his September 1st column, to the effect that “American families are trying to make it in an environment in which employment is becoming increasingly subject to worldwide competition.” Yes, and so what? Is this supposed to be a bad thing?

In fact worldwide competition is the best answer to worldwide poverty. The more those who have been left out of reaping economic benefits from work get into the race, the better chance they have of catching up with those who have been enjoying freedom of entry for decades. And that is just what American workers have enjoyed far more than others around the globe, a free market in employment.

Now mind you, there is no fully, consistent free market anywhere and has never been. Some folks have always had certain government-granted advantages at the expense of others. Many of America’s farmers are a notorious example, managing as they do to purchase for themselves political influence that keeps farm goods away from American consumers and thus makes it more expensive for us all to live. It deprives all of us in the market place from the benefit of purchases that might have been made with resources that would have been saved by buying low cost foreign farm goods. And this scenario is widely repeated in other goods and services that gain government protection from competition.

What is wrong with such protection? It involve the coercive exclusion of some market agents from gaining a chance to offer their goods and services to prospective customers. It is like one store in your neighborhood managing to purchase the services of the local police for purposes of shutting down other, competing stores. This approach to commerce is unjust and also leads to people working with the illusion that they are entitled to special privileges. This is a serious source of corruption, like much of professional licensing and all non-competitive distribution of government contracts.

Why does Mr. Herbert seem to favor such a policy? Why does he suggest that the American government ought to put up barriers to entering the market for working people abroad?

Perhaps like some other champions of protectionism, Herbert is a nationalist who thinks that it is fine to impose burdens on non-Americans—as well as millions of American consumers—so as to prop up industry that isn’t cutting it in the world market. This “my country right or wrong” attitude is not only grossly unjust and violates the rights of innocent people abroad as well as domestic consumers but it encourages economic complacency which, in time, will leave American workers lagging behind in productivity and efficiency. Why should one work hard, be ingenious and inventive, if one can keep one’s business going by coercively keeping competitors out of the way?

That policy can only work for a while. In time competitors tend to find ways around the barriers by, for example, making deals with businesses in countries that aren’t being kept out for various reasons—they have favorite nation status or their work is seriously needed here. And by this roundabout method they will manage to undermine the protectionist policies Mr. Herbert and others appear to rely on so as to give a short term leg-up to domestic economic agents.

Sometimes it is useful to look at international sports to grasp the nature of competition. The recent track and field world championships were free of the kind of unjust favoritism Mr. Herbert and others like in the economic sphere. Superb athletes, many of them Americans by the way, were not excluded from competing in various events simply because their superior skill and training made it very likely that they would defeat others in the race. Any kind of protectionism like that would immediately be seen as having a corrupting influence on sports across the globe.

Why won’t Mr. Herbert and other protectionists recognize that the very same results from economic protectionism?

Besmirching Markets

Tibor R. Machan

As an avid reader of all kinds of fiction—part entertainment, part cultural anthropology—my attention is perked whenever I see authors get sneaky on us. This occurs often when they wish to make a political point but not to take responsibility for doing so. They are too lazy or ignorant to actually argue their case but will not resist laying in with a few nasty licks, probably in the hope of influencing their readers.

One author I have enjoyed reading is the Swedish crime novelist Henning Mankell whose protagonist, Inspector Wallander, is a rather reflective, often a bit moody, bloke with whom it is a pleasure to spend some time, at least for me. However, as narrator, Mankell sticks in some lulus that I’d love to debate with him.

In one of the latest I have read, The Man Who Smiled (1994), Wallander is dueling with a vicious—of course very rich—villain who is involved in murdering people for their healthy organs so he can then sell them to wealthy recipients. When he comments on this in a somewhat slip shod exchange with Wallander, he says, “I buy and sell. I am an actor on the stage governed by market forces. I never miss an opportunity, no matter how small and significant it is.…” Mankell, the narrator, then injects that “Human life is insignificant, then….” Presumably for entrepreneurs, for all those “actors on the stage governed by market forces.”

No character in the book, of course, disputes the villain’s slander of market forces. No one observes that selling organs you obtained my murdering people contradicts every principle of the free market which, after all, relies entirely on voluntary exchanges, including of donated or sold body parts, blood or whatever. Indeed, genuine free trade in such items may be upsetting to some but it contributes immensely to the well being of recipients as well as sellers.

It is elementary business ethics that trade must be freely consented to. It is not actually trade otherwise. All those who deal in stolen goods violate free market principles, let alone people who resort to murder and other bone fide crimes. One reason dealing with dictatorships is frowned upon from a free market, capitalist, perspective is that it risks involving people against their will. Even the welfare state isn’t clean, from a pure free market perspective, since it involves extensive wealth redistribution, subsidies, protectionism, the extortion known as taxation, etc. and so forth, all in violation of real free trade.

When Ayn Rand’s blockbuster novel Atlas Shrugged appeared in 1957, a good many snooty literati faulted it for being too didactic, lacking in subtlety, arguing points explicitly, indeed in lengthy dissertations by her protagonists. This was often deemed to be lacking in finesse, something contemporary novelists must deploy lest they be clearly understood.

No one I have read commenting to Henning Mankell’s well written and plotted crime novels has faulted him for injecting slip shod political economic comments into his works. Somehow doing didactic, not to mention primitive, political economy seems to be OK by novelists if they oppose full human freedom, if they champion the welfare state (which Swedish Inspector Wallander supports wholeheartedly and whose inefficiencies and other faults he tends to blame on various vague cultural influences).

Okay, most novelists aren’t all that bright and savvy when it comes to political economy. They work with their sloppy intuitions and sentiments rather than well educated reflections. So I figure it is not dirty pool for me to report on at least one favorite of one prominent genre who is trying to pull off some literary dirty tricks while entertaining us.

Oddly enough, in another of his pretty good books, The Dogs of Riga, Mankell appears to have grasped well enough some of the evils of socialism. The story unfolds just as Latvia is becoming free of Soviet domination and Mankell seems to know well enough what that glorious egalitarian system does to human community life.

But I suppose he like millions of others dreams of some kind of “third way,” between top down socialist rule and the fully free market. But it just will not wash and his way of sneaking in some nasty intimations about free markets is way off.

Tibor Machan's Books:

Single Author Books[31]:
The Georgia Lectures (f/c)
The Right Road to Radical Freedom (Imprint Academic, 2007 f/c)
The Morality of Business: A Profession of Wealthcare (New York:
Springer, 2007 f/c)
Libertarianism Defended (Ashgate, 2005; forthcoming)
Libertarianism, For and Against, w/C. Duncan (Rowman & Littlefield,
2005)
The Man Without a Hobby (Hamilton Books, 2004)
Objectivity: Recovering Determinate Reality (London, UK: Ashgate,
2004)
Neither Left nor Right, Selected Columns (Hoover Institution Press,
2004)
Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorites (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2004)
The Liberty Option (Imprint Academic, 2003)
The Passion for Liberty (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003)
The Right to Private Property (Hoover Institution Pres, 2002)
A Primer on Business Ethics w/J. Chesher (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)
Initiative: Human Agency and Society (Hoover Institution Press, 2000)
Ayn Rand (Peter Lang, 2000)
The Business of Commerce w/J. Chesher (Hoover Institution Press, 1999)
Classical Individualism (Routledge, 1998)
Generosity; Virtue in the Civil Society (Cato Institute, 1998)
Why Freedom Must be First (Hoover Institution Press, 1997)
A Primer on Ethics (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997)
Private Rights & Public Illusions (Transaction, 1995).
The Virtue of Liberty (Foundation for Economic Education, 1994).
Liberalisme, Ethique et Valuers Morales (Institut Euro 92, 1993).
Capitalism and Individualism: Reframing the Argument for the Free
Society
(St. Martin's Publ. Co. & Harvester Wheatsheaf Books, 1990).
A Dialogue Partly on Political Liberty [w/J. N. Nelson] (University
Press
of American, 1990)
Liberty and Culture: Essays on the Idea of a Free Society (Prometheus
Books, 1989).
Individuals and Their Rights (Open Court, 1989).
Marxism: A Bourgeois Critique (MCB University Press Limited, 1988).
The Moral Case for the Free Market Economy (The Edwin Mellen Press,
1989, rev. [English] version of Freedom Philosophy).
Freedom Philosophy (AB Timbro, 1987).
Introduction to Philosophical Inquiries (Allyn & Bacon, 1977;
University Press of America, 1985).
Human Rights and Human Liberties (Nelson-Hall, 1975).
The Pseudo-Science of B.F. Skinner (Arlington House, 1973; Hamilton
Books, 2006).

Edited Books[17]:
Anarchism/Minarchism (w/R. Long) (Ashgate, 2007 fc)
Ayn Rand at 100 (New Delhi, India: Pragun Publication, 2006)
Liberty & Justice (Hoover Institution Press, 2006)
Liberty and R&D (Hoover Institution Press, 2002)
Liberty & Equality (Hoover Institution Press, 2002)
Liberty & Democracy (Hoover Institution Press, 2002)
Liberty and Hard Cases (Hoover Institution Press, 2001)
Individual Rights Reconsidered (Hoover Institution Press, 2001)
The Commons: Its Tragedy and Other Follies (Hoover Institution Press, 2001)
Morality & Work (Hoover Institution Press, 2000)
Education in a Free Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000)
Business Ethics in the Global Market (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution
Press, 1999)
Political Philosophy: Essential Selections [w/A. Skoble] (Prentice Hall,
1998)
Liberty for the 21st Century [w/D. B. Rasmussen] (Rowman & Littlefield,
1995)
Commerce and Morality (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988).
The Main Debate: Communism vs. Capitalism (Random House, 1987).
Recent Work in Philosophy [w/K. G. Lucey] (Rowman & Allanheld, 1983).
Rights and Regulation [with M. Bruce Johnson] (Ballinger, 1983).
The Libertarian Reader (Rowman & Littlefield, 1982).
The Libertarian Alternative (Nelson-Hall, 1974)

Ethnicity and Related Nonsense

Tibor R. Machan

A young woman asked me the other day what I thought her ethnic background is. After declining to guess—mainly because I don’t care about such stuff and know even less—she kept pressing me and I said, “I guess you may be Turkish.” Whereupon she took major offense.

I didn’t even ask well, what is it? I just turned around and left her standing. I was in no mood to go into why I think taking offense at something like that is utter nonsense. But, yes, it is.

First of all, even if you think most of the Turks were scum throughout history, what does this have to do with Turks today? Not a thing. One is Turkish or Bulgarian or Armenian completely involuntarily and so cannot be held responsible or being one. Maybe if you emigrated to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union to become a citizen because you loved the official ideology there, that can be held against you. But having been born Turkish or Greek or Afghan simply hasn’t thing to do with you identity except accidentally, for better or worse.

In the case of human beings, as distinct from breeds of dogs, one’s ethnicity is irrelevant to who one is unless one makes it so. I was born in Budapest, Hungary, of German parents, actually, but I liked many aspects of Hungarian culture, so despite my being unusually tall for Hungarians, as well as blonde, I made it a point to absorb much of the Hungarian atmosphere around me—to a point. In time I discovered America, through novels and movies and eventually in person, and that is what I chose to become insofar that's possible. My identity wasn’t going to be determined by forces I couldn’t control. At least as far as those aspects of it one can do something about were concerned.

Later, in my academic career, this identity thing became a big deal, politically hot and such. I could never get behind it. What is the significance of such accidental stuff when there is so much of oneself that one has under one’s control? What about what you have done—your scholastic record, your friends, your taste in the arts, your religion or philosophy or politics? Those always seemed to me far more significant than the place from which one hails or the ethnic membership of one’s parents and so forth.

But maybe it is this bit about belonging that is at the bottom of ethnic, national, racial, and similar identities. Or perhaps it is about artificial self-esteem. People seem to need to have a decent estimate of themselves but so many of those who speak out about human affairs consider it selfish, hubris even, to think well of oneself. It is regarded to be conceited to have pride in one’s achievements—just watch how at the Academy Awards everyone is squirming when accepting an award. It is always others who have merited it, never the recipient. No one ever says, “Gee, finally, I got my reward, something I earned fair and square.” Humility is one of these terrible pseudo-virtues that tends to make liars of people, not to mention psychological wrecks.

If it were more encouraged for people to not just achieve things but to be proud of their accomplishments—which isn’t to say everyone ought to become a braggart—all this escaping into one’s group so as to steal some self-esteem could well diminish, even disappear. Of course, that assumes that people do in fact accomplish worthwhile feats.

Since not everyone can end up at the top of the heap, it is best to acknowledge that even small achievements matter. Over a lifetime of decent works and with a little bit of courage to take credit were credit is due, that should not be too difficult. And with recognition of one’s worth, one’s having been creative and productive in one’s life, reliance on ethnic or racial or national pride may in time become pointless. I certainly recommend it, given the mayhem that all this ethnicity and identity politics evidently wreaks across the globe.

Globalization Galore

Tibor R. Machan

Globalization is but the recognition that some elements of human life are universal. Multiculturalism recognizes, in contrast, that many elements of human life are diverse, even highly individual. There is no way to escape this, given human nature. We have much in common among us but we also differ in innumerable respects. There are also innumerable features shared by just some people, not others, such as members of ethnic groups, religions, practitioners of the various arts, and so forth.

The debate about globalization concern what it is that can reasonably be expected to be universalized, what cannot be subject to universalization. In particular, are certain economic principles such that human beings everywhere and at any time ought to be observant of them?

Those supporting economic globalization hold, as I do, that some principles of economics are appropriate for any human community simply because it is a human community. Thus, for example, any human community’s legal infrastructure needs to protect the right to private property, the right to free trade, the right to freedom of contract, etc. Which, in plain language, means that everywhere people ought to be free to obtain and hold valued items; they ought to be able to exchange these voluntarily among one another, and they ought to be free to come to terms of trade without being coerced to accept ones with which they disagree. The idea is, of course, that such economic principles are suitable or fitting for human community life because of human nature itself, never mind variations in culture, religion, art, and so forth.

Now this kind of universalization is well known in many other areas of human life. Medicine, science, fitness, dealing with emergencies, and judging athletic prowess all approximate a kind of globalization. There is no Pakistani medicine versus Indian medicine, even if some practices are more prevalent in one of the countries than in the other; there is no Afghan chemistry versus Canadian chemistry; at events such as Wimbledon or the Olympics the measure of success is universal, independent of the place from which an athlete hails, even if the uniforms and hair styles different among them. Cuisine is highly diverse, yet the need for balanced nourishment is universal. Fitness, too, tends to be something all people require, albeit they different how they will obtain it—through hiking, jogging, attending gym sessions or yoga.

Not that all this is agreed to by everyone, quite the contrary. Some people insist that different cultures may embrace different economic principles, even if these are in violation of the principles of a free market. Some think that Cuba is fine practicing socialism, as may be North Korea or Venezuela. The argument here is about whether such a system does or does not violate basic principles of human community life and, of course, defenders of what has come to be called economic globalization argue that such systems as socialism, communism, fascism and the like do in fact violate such basic principles. Actually, most socialists or communists, etc., also defend globalization of their own principles of economic organization. Only some claim that capitalism is sound for one human community, while socialism for another, except for strategic purposes.

I was traveling in places this summer where I could not say I was on familiar terrain. Indeed, the ways people dressed, played, sang, and ate were utterly different from what I am used to living in Southern California. Yet, when some emergency occurred in, say, Baku, Azerbaijan, or Tbilisi, Georgia, the common means of warning those nearby was, of course, the piercing siren! Once again, globalization is in evidence and no one could reasonably object.

In the area of economic globalization the problem isn’t really globalization as such but what are the principles of economic life that are to be global in the first place. For those of us who insist that freedom is a necessary condition of human community life, that coercion must be excluded from human relationships, the principles of the free market system are the natural candidates for globalization. We consider those who object to this advocates of coercive human relationships and find that to be seriously misguided. And, we think, for eminently good reasons.

Accidental Environmentalism

Tibor R. Machan

Environmentalists tend to believe that the best way to achieve their ends
is to empower governments to command us all to act as environmentalist
would want us to act. Stop using SUVs, save endangered species, preserve
wetlands, recycle, etc., and so forth.

But this is not a reliable way to deal with environmental problems. Yes,
at some particular time a government may make just the laws and issue the
regulations environmentalist want (although even at their most
conscientious this may fail since environmentalists are not exactly sure
what policies will do the environment the most good, what standards should
be deployed, how to prioritize, etc.). But governments, be they mostly
democratic or more dictatorial, tend to follow fashion. This year it may
be environmentalism but next it will be traffic gridlocks, the following
some health concern, and after that who knows what will take center stage. And all
along, of course, there are the innumerable special interest projects that drive
the politicians’ agenda.

If, however, individuals have something to gain from acting prudently in
their lives, from conserving, preserving, saving, being frugal, having
restraint and so forth, there could well be environmentalism afoot without
folks even knowing they are falling in line with the movement. Some of us
travel a lot, for example, and stay at hotels or motels where efforts are
being made to cut back on the use of amenities. Instead of replacing
towels each day, they are now often reused, with the establishment’s
urgings and with full consent of the guests who don’t mind very much using
the same sheets and pillow cases for several days, so long as in case of
special need they can be accommodated. I have noticed that hot water is
sometimes shut off in the wee hours of the morning, something that can
actually inconvenience certain guests—but then they can go elsewhere,
should it matter to them a lot.

When private property rights are strictly identified and protected, there
is actual economic value in being environmentally prudent. Just as one
may not dump one’s trash on the property of one’s neighbor, other kinds
of pollution, once clearly identified, can also be curtailed and the
overall affect is to make the environment more pristine, user friendly.

Of course such unintended environmentalism rests in large measure on the
belief that people are not intentionally reckless, at least not when the
cost has to be borne by them and if they try to escape it they will be
held accountable. This goes for small estates to massive industrial
firms. Yet, sadly, too many avid environmentalists work toward undermining
the system of private property rights, a system that could be their best
friend. One need but recall the conditions in the Soviet bloc
countries—and, indeed, notice those in some of the states that still
haven’t recovered from their Soviet era mismanagement—to learn how the
tragedy of the commons ruins the environment in many places around the
globe. What happened in most of these places is that some grand, national
plan to promote industrialization overshadowed even the slightest efforts
by citizens to care for their environment. They had no say over the
matter—it was all dealt with from above.

In the approximately free world, in contrast, two things have contributed
to relatively sound environmental policies: the greater respect and
protection afforded to private property rights and the greater wealth, by
far, of the citizenry that can afford to be picky about the environment.
Poor countries, the ones suffering from central government mismanagement,
fail to be heedful of this and their environment is, thus, in pretty lousy
shape.

One thing too many environmentalists don’t welcome about this lesson is
that it leaves matters to local control, all the way down to individual
citizens being free to decide how to deal with the environment. Like all
utopian dreamers, these environmentalists trust some superior agency. And
that is how they tend to defeat their very own professed objectives.

Armenian Impressions

Tibor R. Machan

Tsakhkadzor, Armenia. This winter sports complex has some of the most impressive terrain for winter athletics outside of New Zealand and Switzerland. Except that it is nearly in total tatters. Apart from some recently installed modern structures, this mountain city is merely a shadow of what it could be.

While giving my lectures to about 25 young people in this (for me) remote part of the globe, I had one recurring thought, albeit mostly a fantasy: Import as many Swiss here as there are Armenians living in the region, let them take over every aspect of social and economic life and see the place transformed into, well, a replica of Switzerland. Yes, the basic ingredients are all here. Stunning mountains and rapids cutting across them all; weather that has all the variety of what is available in Austria or Switzerland. But—and this is a really big “but”—there is no infrastructure and development whatsoever comparable to that you get in those European countries far to the west of the country.

I was driven to Tsekhkadzor by car—well, by two cars, actually; one took me to the border between Georgia and Armenia, the other to the sports town itself. That’s because taking a car across this border amounts to a bureaucratic nightmare. Even doing it as we had to—namely, walking across the bridge that connects the two countries—amounted to a truly annoying experience. The guards who stood about the shacks where passports and visas are being examined cared not a wit about facilitating the traffic. They were every bit like the border guards used to be in the old Communist countries—in the Soviet era Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary or Albania. They treated us all as if the last thing on earth they wanted to do is to have to provide the service they are officially there to provide, which is to enable folks to move between the two countries.

Of course, the roads on which one travels inside Armenia are a disaster. Potholes everywhere, the size of small craters; cattle and sheep blocking traffic throughout the journey, trash by the roadside, you name it. And there are virtually no facilities—no places to eat, to stop to rest, nothing except a few dilapidated buildings that threaten to collapse as one makes use of them.

Armenia was part of that wondrous experiment with Soviet socialism but even then it got to short end of the stick, judging by how it looks now. Its current wows are too complicated to even hint at here. Yet the countryside is often stunning, if only one ignores the parts human beings have added to it all.

And talk about pollution! If only some of our Western environmentalist could take a few lessons from how an essentially state managed country deals with waste and soot! They might start becoming more sensible about trusting government to solve environmental problems. The tragedy of the commons stares one in the face everywhere.

Yet, yet, the young people who sat around the conference room where we discussed elements of classical liberalism and libertarianism were bright and surprisingly interested in how a free system of law and public policy would approach the problems faced in human community life. Their questions, objections, speculations, and such were every bit if not more intelligent than those of their Western university mates.

For most of them, of course, the idea that individuals are sovereign, not the government or state, was radical; its implications even more so. But they understood, often from elementary personal examples, what it means to take charge of one’s life and to deal with other people with the full recognition that they, too, are in charge of theirs. They were initially incredulous about the classical liberal demythologization of states and governments but once they grasped that those were all but human being posing as superior to the rest, they got it pretty quickly.

Still, I left the region without being able to shake that fantasy, of importing a few million Swiss and letting them loose on Armenia. That would turn out to be some country!

Ron Paul isn’t being Censored

Tibor R. Machan

Some of the folks who are eager supporters of Representative Ron Paul as
the Republican presidential nominee are sadly misspeaking themselves these
days. On the Free Market News Network web site the question of whether
Paul is being censored by mainstream media has been posed, as one of the
site’s polls, and the overwhelming majority has answered “Yes”. But this
is very confused.

All that the mainstream media can do to Paul is to ignore him, maybe to
distort his views or perhaps fail to report on the level of his support
among American voters. But only the government can censor someone! Only
the government has the power to legally silence Ron Paul or anyone else.
Big media may have clout but it has no legalized use of weapons with which
to silence someone.

In the past this mistake has been made by many, both Left and Right. I
recall a while back when Harvard’s celebrity law professor Alan M.
Dershowitz was hired by the producers of the movie The Pope Must Die to
sue NBC, ABC, and CBS for these networks' refusals to run advertisements
for the movie that the networks supposedly considered inappropriate for television
broadcast. Prof. Derschewitz made some rather provocative claims in connection
with this suit in a television broadcast and at a news conference and, judging by these
claims, the title of an earlier book of his, Chutzpah, seems to be entirely justified.

In that case, Mr. Derschewitz construed the refusal of the three networks
to run the television ad for the movie The Pope Must Die as censorship.
And he got on television to say so. He claimed that censorship, “whether
public or private, endangers the marketplace of ideas.”

Now neither Dershowitz nor Paul has been censored, actually, because
neither has been forced by the government to desist from voicing an
opinion or stating some fact. Being rejected for coverage by the major
networks does not constitute censorship any more than does being ignored
by the major media.

Perhaps, however, there is value in such language for polemical purposes,
even if it is not strictly speaking accurate. Maybe both Derschewitz and
the supporters of Ron Paul are merely trying to stress the infelicity, the
unprofessional conduct of those they accuse of engaging in censorship.
Perhaps that is all that’s going on here.

In the case of Ron Paul, however, one must be very careful not to
undermine his credibility. Consistency and integrity are his central
widely recognizable virtues in the contest for nomination, something his
rivals all lack. On other matters he is unfortunately quite unpopular.
So, he should insist on these virtues even when they take away some of the
bite of his complaint against the mainstream media. If he lets go of them,
he will join the rest of the politicians who are willing to prevaricate in
order to gain favor with—or sympathy from—the public.

In brief, then, only governments censor, never private sector agents, no
matter how wrong they act otherwise. Refusing to report on Representative
Paul’s views and support is, indeed, journalistic malpractice. But it
isn’t censorship. For libertarians, who want no government interference in
peaceful conduct even when it is wrongheaded, this distinction must remain
vital even as they do battle with various forces in the culture who want
to silence them. They have to find some other means by which to indict
such forces not by falsely charging them with attempting to censor their
preferred candidate for U. S. president.

Now Ron Paul himself may never have indicted mainstream media for allegedly
censoring him—it is only his supporters who have made that charge. Then
they should realize that they are not being very helpful. And perhaps
Representative Paul could point this out to them and reign in their
misguided zeal. No one is responsible for the actions of those who support
him but one could do worse than help such folks get it right about just
what the mainstream media is doing wrong. It is not censoring Ron Paul but
failing to do its job right.

Freedom, Development & Fascism

Tibor R. Machan

Now and then I read that freedom—protection of the unalienable rights to private property, freedom trade, free speech, etc.—are not needed for economic development because in some countries, such as Singapore, there is ample and vigorous economic development under a substantially fascist regime, one that does not protect individual rights—especially the right to freedom of speech and press. And technically in some countries, even in the USA, plenty of economic growth can co-exist with serious government interventionism.

Does this not conflict with the libertarian notion that freedom is indivisible? If all kinds of good things can come from governmental tyrannies, petty or Draconian, why bother about freedom? Why not just worry about whether the government properly manages the economy?

It is true enough that in some countries a substantially tyrannical state has managed to generate good numbers in the economic realm. Yet is that the whole story? Isn’t it rather that where free markets are at least permitted to operate, there is likely to be economic development? Yes, that isn’t exactly what free markets are supposed to amount to—namely, conditions that governments permit to prevail. But as with parents who provide considerable room for their children’s personal responsibility to flourish, without fully letting go of their ultimate authority, so such countries do mimic freedom sufficiently to produce results that are close to what would occur within a fully free society.

Back when Chili was run by general Pinochet, it was the most successful economy in Latin America. No one could argue that the country was free, certainly not by libertarian standards. Yet when Pinochet consulted with the Chicago boys who advised him to stop interfering with the market, to allow trade to proceed unimpeded, the result was something close to a free market system and led, not unexpectedly, to healthy economic developments.

There is no doubt that the conditions of a fully free society can be approximated in countries that are ruled by people who recognize that micromanaging people is counterproductive. It was the philosopher Baruch Spinoza who started to speculate along these lines, insisting that a powerful government would do far better to ease up on dictating how the people should live. Recognizing what later became the essence of public choice theory—for which James Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in economics—Spinoza began to challenge the ideas of such thinkers as Thomas Hobbes who believed that a healthy country needs a hands on dictator. On the contrary, what works much better is when the people themselves are in substantial charge of their lives. (Spinoza, by the way, applied this notion to freedom of religion and speech, as well! But he hadn’t yet defended the Lockean notion that individual actually have the right to be free, only that letting them be free is sound public policy.)

So, then, what about the idea that dictatorship or substantial governmental intervention in the lives of citizens need not stymie economic growth and other desirable developments in a country? Sure, that’s right, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The policies of such a government must approximate those of a fully free country, especially as far as how the economy is governed.

It also needs to be noted in this connection that freedom is not a guarantee of all things turning out well in the world. Free men and women can go wrong on numerous fronts. The point of freedom isn’t merely to encourage success on various fronts in a society but to place governance into the hands in which it belongs, the sovereign individual in voluntary cooperation with his and her fellow individuals. In the long run, of course, this is far more likely to produce the good things we all tend to want from community life. But the issue is, first and foremost, that such community life be voluntary, not coerced.

As Abraham Lincoln noted about the American system, it ".....[h]as a philosophical cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwined itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle “Liberty for all”—the principle that clears the path to all—gives hope to all—and, by consequences, enterprise, and industry to all."